Mortal Men

by Peter Canning

  “Okay eighty-two. Four sixty-three, can you take that call? One seventy Sisson for the swollen legs?”

  Still no partner.

  “Four eighty-two? Where are you so we can get a mechanic down there?”

  “Union Street. Down by the train station,” I said.

  “We’ll send him right down.”

  “Okay,” I said. I waited another five minutes, and then called dispatch back. “Four eighty-two, I’ve got it going now. Sorry. You can cancel the mechanic.”

  “Okay, just keep it running. Stay in Area ten.”

  I took off my company shirt, turned on my portable radio, and headed into Dooley’s.

  It was dark, the air was heavy with cigarette smoke. The Rolling Stones “Get Off Of My Cloud” blared on the jukebox. Troy sat on a stool with his back to the bar watching the action on the pool table. The bartender set a drink down beside his radio and empty glass. “Vodka and OJ,” he announced, more to me than to Troy.

  “We just passed a call,” I said.

  “Look at those two.”

  A slender Farrah Fawcett blonde in a white tank top and a pierced belly button intently lined up a shot, showing cleavage, while her friend, a giggly brunette, tried to coach her. The blonde hit the cue ball. It flew a foot in the air, bounced twice, and went right off the table.

  The blonde cursed while her friend couldn’t contain her laughter.

  The cue ball rolled toward us.

  “We really ought to get back in the truck,” I said.

  But Troy was already off his stool, scooping up the ball.

  “Who taught you who how to shoot pool?” He placed the ball back on the table. “That was terrible.”

  Two thick-necked young men with beer bottles in their hands stepped away from the wall.

  “Haven’t these guys taught you anything?” Troy said.

  “That’s all right, pal,” the one with the shaved head said. “We’re doing fine here. Let the girls play.”

  Troy turned and faced him. In his black T-shirt you could see Troy’s lean muscled strength.

  “Yeah,” the other young man said. “You want conversation, talk to the bartender.”

  “This is great. I love it,” Troy said. “Two on two.”

  The young men looked momentarily confused. “Your friend doesn’t look like he’s ready to join in,” the smaller one said.

  I had my hand on Troy’s shoulder, trying to ease him away.

  Troy held up his arm. “Oh, no, he’s just my cut man, but you can see I’m too pretty to ever need his services.” He grinned. “I’m talking about…” He slapped his biceps. “These bad boys.” He leaned into a boxer’s crouch, his fists up, his head bobbing.

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “Troy, please,” I said.

  “Allow me to introduce myself.” Fists still clenched, he raised both arms above his head. “I am the King of the World!” He stepped toward them and roared, “The King of the Woooorld!”

  Years later in a bar, I would tell coworkers how Troy Johnson gave them a serious beat-down, breaking pool cues, smashing chairs, even throwing one muscle man through the front plate-glass window. I would tell how, his foes vanquished, Troy calmly finished his drink. Then as I held the back door open, he strolled out with a woman on each arm.

  It was a story worthy of Troy’s legend, but not what happened. The truth was the guys looked into Troy’s eyes and saw what I did—that he was insane—and they stood down. It was as simple as that. The would-be bruisers left, while Troy ate the girls’ pizza and gave them lessons in the art of nine-ball. I handed his drink to the bartender and had him replace it with OJ and seltzer water. When I pulled Troy away to respond to a motor vehicle at Main and Church, he left the girls behind, though he did get both their phone numbers. The next week he spent parts of several afternoons at Mandy the blonde’s apartment on West Boulevard, his portable radio no doubt on the nightstand. I was parked outside in the ambulance, engine idling.

  Chapter 3

  “Four eighty-two, Respond to sixteen forty Main, second floor, for difficulty breathing on a one.”

  North on Main Street, the SANDS housing project dominated the vista, a ten-story eyesore, surrounded by several equally ugly three-story buildings. Any promise the project once held of a model life for its residents was gone. It was instead a drab graffiti-ridden concrete jungle run by drug dealers and gangs. We parked around back behind one of the smaller buildings, next to a panel truck with smashed windows.

  “You should see this place on a hot summer evening,” Victor Sanchez said as we got out. “Everyone outside in the heat, drinking their forties, music blaring, dealing drugs.”

  We left the stretcher at the base of the outside stairs. I took the oxygen tank. Victor carried the house bag and the heart monitor. Victor was a short bull-chested young man who’d been with the company almost ten years, working his way up from a handicapped-van driver to paramedic.

  “It’s probably BS,” he said, as we climbed the cement stairwell. “Most calls around here are. You never know. I carry everything.”

  On the third floor, a young woman wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey that went down to her knees answered the door. “You here already? I wasn’t expecting you so soon. Gimme a few minutes to get dressed and for my sister to come over.”

  “Is there a child here having difficulty breathing?” Victor asked.

  “My boy been stuffed up for two weeks and the medicine the doctor give him yesterday not helping. I want to take him back and show him he still sick.”

  As she let us in the apartment, I could see a child sitting on the couch watching Wile E. Coyote chase the Road Runner on a big-screen TV.

  “The paper said you always late,” the woman said, rooting in the closet and coming up with a gray pair of sweatpants. “When I called yesterday it took ten minutes. Today I hardly put down the phone and you there beating down my door. All the complaining having an effect, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Victor said, “They don’t let us stop for doughnuts anymore.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded that. I haven’t had breakfast yet. My sister should be here soon. Let me just put these on and get my shoes.”

  “Don’t let us rush you,” Victor said.

  I carried the equipment down to the ambulance.

  After we’d taken the boy to the hospital, where he and his mom were put out into the crowded waiting room, I stood with Victor in the EMS room and listened to people bitch about how the paper was on everybody about response times. Victor tried to fill me in.

  “A couple weeks ago there was another gang shooting at an apartment on Wethersfield Avenue,” he said. “The paper said it took the ambulance twenty minutes to get there. The TV news picked it up and we’ve been getting dissed hard. They had an editorial cartoon that showed a giant turtle labeled ‘Capitol Ambulance’ with an EMT sitting on it holding the reins. A shot guy cried for help in the middle of the road while a guy in a black hood was already digging his grave.”

  “Were we twenty minutes late?”

  “No. Maybe ten. The problem was the PD wouldn’t let the crew in. They said the scene wasn’t safe. Of course, when Troy gets there he charges through the police tape. The guy is shot eleven times, and Troy starts working him. Pissed the cops off. Trashed their crime scene and nearly started a riot. The home crowd thinking the cops had let him die.”

  “The guy didn’t make it, did he?”

  “No, he was shot eleven times. Troy will work anybody that isn’t stiff.”

  “I heard about your guy yesterday,” Joel Morris, one of our medics, said to me. “Dr. Singer told me the guy had no face. It was all hamburger. Ben was pissed off, huh?”

  “He seemed a little upset.”

  “Ben and Troy are always butting heads.”

  “I thought there was some history there.”

  “Ben thinks younger medics should defer to his experience,” Victor said, “but Troy doesn’t defer to anyone. Whe
n Troy was a new medic, Ben was in the crew room talking with some of the older medics about the state exam. Medics have to test every two years. Every time it’s the same test. Ben always gets a ninety-eight—the best score in the company. He can’t figure out what two questions he gets wrong. The test has to be fixed. He thinks there are two deliberately wrong questions. The state doesn’t want anyone getting a perfect score and thinking they know everything. Troy takes a piece of paper out of his wallet, goes over to the Xerox machine, runs off five copies and hands them to each of the medics. It’s his test results. One hundred in each category. The other medics laugh, but it steams Ben up. To Ben you are a new medic, you don’t say a word till you’ve been there two years. You have to prove yourself. Troy was cocky the day his mother popped him out.

  “The real rivalry between Troy and Ben started the day Sidney coded,” Joel said. “Sidney Seuss—he’s the guy in the portrait in the front office. He founded the place. A real old-time ambulance man. He’d just finished his dialysis treatment—he had his own machine in his office—when he crumpled to the ground. His secretary screams. When Ben gets there, he sees Sidney lying on the carpet. He’s blue. No breathing, no pulse. Ben rips Sidney’s shirt open, puts the paddles on his chest. He’s in v-fib. He shocks him. Two hundred joules. No change. Shocks him again. Three hundred joules. Nothing. Three sixty. Nothing.

  “The secretary starts CPR while Ben goes for the airway. Sidney’s a big broad guy with no neck. A difficult tube. Ben’s looking down into his throat, trying to move his tongue out of the way. He sees the cords for a moment, passes the tube. Puke comes up. He’s in the esophagus.

  “That’s when Troy and I come in,” Victor said. “We’d been in the office resupplying. Troy sidesteps the puke, and while Ben tries again, Troy slams an IV in Sidney’s arm. Ben’s still struggling with the tube, Troy says, ‘Let me try.’ He takes the scope from him. Then like that—‘I’m in,’ he says. Ben pushes epi and lidocaine into the IV line. They shock him again three hundred and sixty joules. No change.

  “‘Calcium,’ Troy says.

  “‘Calcium?’ Ben says. We carry it, but it’s not in the routine protocol.

  “‘Calcium. His kidneys suck.’

  “Ben goes ahead and gives it to him. They shock him again.

  “Ben looks at the monitor—sees a rhythm. You don’t have to feel a pulse. You can just look at his neck and see it pounding.

  “Then Sidney opens his eyes and he’s looking right up at Troy. He looks a little confused like maybe he was expecting to see Satan or Saint Peter. Instead Troy Johnson is the one grinning at him.

  “‘Afternoon, boss,’ Troy says. ‘I see I’m not the only slacker around this place likes to get in a good snooze.’

  “Troy was the golden boy after that. Sidney gave Troy his own dedicated ambulance, his own shift whatever hours he wanted to work, and let him pick whatever partner he wanted. Told the dispatchers no transfers for Troy. They have to leave him free for the big bad ones. The deputy mayor coded. Troy saved him. One of the high-ranking police brass coded. Troy brought him back to life. Head of the chamber of commerce choked on a piece of meat the size of his fist; Troy yanked it out with a pair of McGill’s. The guy was well enough to give the after-dinner speech.

  “Every save Troy got, Sidney made a show of visiting the patient in the hospital, and bringing a photographer along. Ben wasn’t happy about it—that and the fact every time Sidney saw Ben and Troy together he ribbed Ben about it. ‘Good, I got my bodyguard here to keep my chief paramedic from killing me.’ The truth is we got some good publicity in those days. We were miracle workers. The pride of the city. Paramedics. We were all like Johnny and Roy on that old Emergency show. You could walk tall.”

  “Not any more?”

  “No, that’s the past. Sidney’s dead. Things are changing for the worse. They don’t get better, we could be out of business. We could all be looking for jobs. So you can understand why no one’s happy.”

  Chapter 4

  “Four fifty-six, Chest pain eighty-five Vine, on a one. Four fifty-four, rollover Whitehead Highway. Person ejected.”

  Troy and I were on the second floor of Saint Francis Hospital waiting in the hallway while a nursing home patient we’d brought in from Mediplex of Greater Hartford had an X-ray on his hip. Troy’s first day back at work from his hunting trip and here he was working with me again, and all they’d given us were basic transfers.

  “We should be out there,” Troy said.

  “Why don’t you turn the radio off?”

  “I’ve humped more basic transfers today than I’ve humped in the last three years. The least they could do is give us time to get a meal. Fucking Atreus brothers, the both of them. They’re probably sitting back in the office cackling every time dispatch calls our number. Thinking about how good they’re boning me. ‘Four eighty-two, CB-six, going to Glastonbury Health Care.’ ‘Four eighty-two, pickup up Steady at Saint Fran Dialysis, then grab Edith next.’ ‘Four eighty-two, Alexandria Manor going to the Cancer Center, wait and return.’ I can’t take it.”

  I’d worked enough to know when a dispatcher had it in for you, or when they were told to stick it to you, and clearly that was the order of the day for us. “The more you complain, the more you let them see they’re getting to you, the more they are going to mess with you.”

  “There’re messing with me plenty. Bruce’s already asked Linda and her kids out on his boat. I saw that coming a mile away.”

  “Is there a problem with that?”

  “Linda is free to do what she wants. Her kids love his boat.”

  “You two were never a couple?”

  “We were just partners. We had fun. We understood each other.”

  Sanchez had told me when Troy and Linda worked together, they often drove down behind the college at night and parked in the empty lot by the river. People knew enough to leave them alone.

  “Four seventy-one, shooting to the head, Park and Zion. On a one.”

  Troy swore. I noticed his hands were shaking. He looked pale.

  “You all right?”

  “Give me fifty cents,” he said.

  I dug into my pocket and gave it to him.

  He came back with a Baby Ruth bar.

  “It’s not right,” he said. “Paramedics doing basic transfers.”

  “I’ll do anything they tell me to do,” I said, “as long as they sign my paycheck at the end of the week.”

  “If it was about money, I wouldn’t be here.” He unwrapped his candy bar and took a big bite. “All I ask is a chance to use my skills.”

  “Careful what you wish for.”

  “I wish no harm on anyone,” he said. “But if harm shows up, call my number. Let me be the cavalry.”

  Not an hour later, he got his wish. We’d cleared a transfer at Brittany Farms and were headed on New Britain Avenue toward Avery Heights for a dialysis run when dispatch called. “Four eighty-two, disregard that transfer. I need you to back up four sixty-three on Overbrook. Their radio’s breaking up, but it sounds like they need help.”

  “Overbrook,” I repeated. “What’s the nature?”

  “Came in as a child with abdominal pain.”

  Overbrook was in the Charter Oak public housing complex just a few blocks away from our location. Two-story brick buildings built during World War II were laid out around several oval roads. The buildings looked in disrepair, the grass was burned. Shirtless children shouted and waved at us as we approached. Ahead we saw a parked police car and four sixty-three, its lights on and back door open.

  The stretcher was outside the building in low position with the straps undone and the sheet spread out.

  “They upstairs,” a young boy said. “Davey’s sister sick. She got the shakes.”

  I followed Troy up the narrow staircase to the second floor. He took the steps three at a time, easy as walking.

  We entered the apartment that smelled of rancid hamburger.

  “Let th
em do their jobs!” I heard someone bark.

  A man and woman were yelling at a police officer in the room at the end of the hall.

  “Just take her to the hospital!” the man shouted.

  “Calm down or I’m going to have to arrest you,” the officer said.

  “That’s my daughter!” the man said.

  “She’s sick! Lord, she’s sick!” the woman cried.

  We pushed into the room. “Coming through,” Troy said.

  A young woman lay on the bed convulsing, arms and legs jerking together. She had an oxygen mask on her face. She had to be two hundred twenty pounds. On the wall was a shelf of teddy bears and a poster from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

  Andrew Melnick, a short, skinny paramedic, just twenty years old, was trying to tape an IV down on the woman’s jerking arm. Blood backed up in the IV line. Melnick’s hands shook.

  “What do you have?” Troy asked.

  “Lord, help my baby!” The woman cried.

  “Take her to the hospital!” the man shouted. His breath reeked of alcohol. The police officer pushed him back. “Calm down or you’re out of the room.”

  “Everyone quiet!” Troy said.

  “She said she had belly pain,” Andrew said. “Then all of a sudden she started seizing. I just got a line and gave her five of Valium, but it’s not working.”

  “Did you get a pressure before she started?”

  “Two thirty over one thirty.”

  “Is she pregnant?”

  “Pregnant? My daughter not pregnant,” the man said.

  “She’s a good girl!” the mother shouted. “A church girl!”

  “Take her to the hospital before she dies!”

  “That’s it, you’re out of here.” The officer grabbed the man by the arm.

  The IV line was knocked loose. Blood squirted in the air.

  “Lee, hold her shoulder,” Troy said. “Get some tape on that. Andrew, get me an eighteen.” He knelt on the woman’s forearm to hold it steady and took the IV catheter Andrew handed him. “She’s got to be eclamptic.”