Mortal Men

by Peter Canning

  We could hear him snoring as we walked down the hall. He sat in an armchair with torn upholstery. He was cold and diaphoretic to the touch. I repositioned his head so his tongue wasn’t partially obstructing his airway, while Troy pulled out his IV kit. The man had one leg missing at the knee; half his other foot was gone. On the floor was a pair of thick-lensed glasses with tape around the frames. There were several Old Milwaukee beer cans scattered on the floor and TV tray. On an old TV set with a wire coat hanger attached to the antenna John Wayne’s battleship took heavy fire from the Japanese navy.

  I spiked a bag of Normal Saline and got out the glucometer. Troy handed me the needle in exchange for the IV line. I put a drop of blood from the needle on the glucometer strip, then handed Troy the Bristo jet of D50 after he’d taped down the IV. He already started pushing it when the reading came up. “Twenty-one,” I announced.

  “Oh, dear,” the wife said. “I should never have left. I knew this would happen.”

  “Do you think he did it on purpose?”

  “He just doesn’t care anymore,” she said. “I have to watch him.”

  The man opened his eyes and saw Troy. He looked disgusted.

  “Your sugar didn’t register,” Troy said. “You were barely breathing.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s six thirty,” his wife said. “I wasn’t going to come back till later tonight, but you wouldn’t answer the phone, so I came back early.”

  “You should have stayed away,” he said.

  He stared grimly at Troy’s hat. “A Yankees fan, huh? Wouldn’t you know it?”

  “You don’t like the Yankees?”

  “What are you, a comedian? You wouldn’t know the Red Sox score would you?”

  “They lost,” I said. “Five-four.”

  “And I’m not dead yet.”

  “You’re still here,” Troy said.

  “I thought for a moment I’d be spending my time with him.” He nodded grimly at Troy.

  “It’s not our time yet,” Troy said.

  The man laughed without humor. “Fucking Yankees.” He said to his wife again, “You should have stayed away. Let a man have his peace. This is no kind of life.”

  “You want us to take you to the hospital?” I asked.

  Troy gave me a glare.

  “No, I’ve been that route before,” the man said. “No thanks.”

  “Just sign here,” Troy said, producing a run form and drawing an X for the man’s signature on the refusal line.

  “You sure you don’t want to get looked at?” I said.

  “The man said no,” Troy said. “His sugar should be back to normal.”

  “Where do I sign?” the man asked. “I don’t see so well.”

  “I’ll make certain he eats,” his wife said to me. “And call if I have to. Thank you for coming.”

  As we wheeled the stretcher back to the rig, I said to Troy, “Maybe we should have had him committed. Don’t you think he needs a psychiatric evaluation?”

  “He’s not crazy,” Troy said.

  “You don’t think he was trying to kill himself?”

  “He’s just trying to live the way he wants. If he wants to die, fine. If I get there in time, I’ll save his life. If not, well then at least he’s at peace.”

  Annie Moore was thirty years old, but she looked forty. She was skinny with long stringing hair, lines around her eyes and mouth, and brown teeth, but her green eyes still could shine when she cracked a smile, when she was trying to get money out of you.

  We were parked outside Dunkin’ Donuts at Capitol and Broad. Annie came up to Troy’s side of the ambulance. “Got five bucks so I can buy a lottery ticket? I’m feeling lucky. I win, I’ll split it with you.”

  “Now, there’s a deal. What kind are you going to buy?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “The five-dollar kind.”

  Troy laughed. “Here’s a fiver. Put it on Old English.”

  “You’re all right,” she said. “You’re a generous man.”

  “Old English?” I said.

  She was gone before I could convince him to take it back.

  “You’re just enabling her,” I said.

  “To have a good time and enjoy herself before she kicks.”

  She’d been on the street for eight years, according to Troy. Capitol Ambulance picked her up nearly every day. We’d find her passed out behind the High Street Liquor Store, or in a doorway off Broad Street, or standing against a telephone pole on Capitol Ave. She wasn’t always drunk. Sometimes she was beat-up. Troy had to intubate her a couple times she was so unresponsive. Every now and then Troy said he’d run into her when she was sober after a long hospital stay, and she could be quite pleasant. She knew she had a disease and she knew it was going to kill her. That fact didn’t keep her from trying to go straight. It just helped her to savor being sober when she was. Sometimes I gave her food to eat, a package of crackers, half a sandwich. If she wanted money for coffee, I went in and bought her the coffee and a sometimes a doughnut too. Troy only gave her money.

  Some EMTs would yell at drunks and treat them roughly. They resented their stink, their vomit, their very existence that at times made the EMTs seem like human garbage men. When they were having a crappy day, it was easy to feel no compassion for someone who had brought their own troubles on themselves. Troy wasn’t like that. He seemed to have an affinity for those crushed by alcohol, or mental illness. He never lectured anyone on mending their ways. While others often quickly resorted to restraints to control troublesome patients, leave Troy alone with a psych or a drunk and more often than not, he could get them to come along peacefully. “He speaks their language,” David Nestor said. And maybe he did. He let them smoke before getting in the ambulance, and then again at the hospital outside the ER doors before taking them in to the psych ward. Same thing with drunks. What others might turn into a physical confrontation, Troy defused. With Troy it was like Troy and the patient were sitting next to each other on bar stools commiserating about women, work, and the weather. I’d drive to the hospital listening to Troy singing duets with them on country songs like “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” or “I Gotta Get Drunk.”

  The only thing Troy had a low tolerance for was bullshit, and working in the city, we saw plenty of it. In Hartford, as often as not, people used the ambulance as a taxi service. Difficulty breathing turned out to be a four-year-old with a runny nose for two weeks. Abdominal pain was just stomach cramps from too much beer and greasy chicken. Someone would go to the ER, get a prescription, and then call back the ambulance the next day because they still weren’t feeling better. You have to take the full seven-day course of medicine, we’d say. It doesn’t work after one pill. We’d go to motor vehicle accidents and find people claiming neck and back pain who hadn’t even been in the car. It tended to put a cynical edge on you.

  It was a busy day. We were flat-out nonstop, racing back and forth across the city, all for bullshit. We cleared Saint Fran after bringing in an earache and were sent priority one across town to Wethersfield Avenue for a woman passed out.

  “Oh, great,” Troy said as we pulled up to a funeral parlor. “An I-I-I.”

  “Maybe it will be legitimate.”

  “Dream on.”

  A line of mourners wound out the door and back through the parking lot. Denny Creer met us outside and said, “It’s BS. You know that kid who got shot on Spring Street two days ago. It’s his funeral. His girlfriend pulled a fainting fit. They’re all gathered around her, paying homage right now.” He led us to a parlor where the boy’s girlfriend and mother of one of his two children lay on a couch. Anxious family members surrounded the girl, who wore a black sundress. An older man held a wet towel on her forehead.

  “She saw the casket and she fainted. Now she can’t speak and her eyes roll back in her head,” the man said.

  Troy held her hand up over her head and let go. The hand moved and fell harmlessly to the side. He opened her eyelids,
and she rolled her eyes back. He felt her pulse. “This is bullshit,” he muttered.

  “What’s wrong?” the man said. I could see the veins in his neck fill with blood.

  “Nothing is wrong. She’s fine,” Troy said. He rubbed his knuckles into her chest. She moved against his hand, but kept her eyes closed. “See, she reacts.”

  “You’re hurting her,” the man said.

  “This is not a medical problem,” Troy said.

  I was cut off from Troy by several onlookers. I tried to get to him in time.

  “What do you mean? Can’t you do anything? Can you take her to the hospital?”

  “She’s faking. There is nothing wrong with her. She wants attention.”

  “Can’t you do anything? Look at her.”

  “She just needs a good slap.”

  “What?”

  “Not too hard. You don’t want to hurt her—just bring her back to reality.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, stepping between them. “That’s enough, Troy.” I shoved a candy bar in his hand. “Go back to the car.” I pushed him backwards.

  “No, Lee, this is bullshit. People have to learn.” He shouted at the woman. “Get up! Nap time is over!”

  “Get out of here. Go sit in the car.”

  “Easy, Troy,” Denny Creer said, grasping his arm.

  “Fine, you deal with it,” Troy said angrily. “It’s BS and you know it.”

  “Go,” I said.

  “What do you say we get you something to eat?” Denny said, walking Troy away.

  “I’m not hungry. I’m just pissed.”

  I turned to the man. “I’m sorry, sir. He means well,” I said, and then using a phrase I had come to rely on said, “He’s having a bad day.”

  “Bad day. He shouldn’t be doing this job.”

  “He just lost his best friend in a car accident. He’s out of his mind, but we can’t get him to take time off. I apologize profusely.”

  I got him to sign a refusal, then went back down to the car, praying that Creer had taken care of Troy, that I wouldn’t find Troy passed out, beat-up, or running around naked in the garden.

  He sat in the passenger seat reading the paper, eating the candy bar. He said nothing to me when I got in.

  “You didn’t have to go at her like that,” I said as we drove away. “That was pretty rude. You’re lucky her brothers didn’t beat the crap out of you.”

  “Like you wouldn’t have helped me.”

  “You know your sugar isn’t an excuse for treating people that way.”

  “Your Red Sox lost again,” he said.

  “Thanks for the reminder.”

  “Yankees up by seven.”

  “Remind me to get a new partner.”

  “Four eighty-two, take twenty-three Dorothy Drive in Bloomfield, Apartment G, for the unconscious diabetic. Visiting nurse on scene.”

  “Shapiro,” Troy said. “Great.”

  Alan Shapiro was a bloated fifty-year-old diabetic with pasty white skin. He’d gotten gangrene from an infection on his foot, and had slowly lost half the leg to progressive amputation. He never wore more than his boxers and a white sleeveless T-shirt. He never left his apartment.

  “Same old story,” the visiting nurse said when we arrived. “You’ve been here before.”

  We found him in the bedroom, sprawled across his bed. The room was dusty and cluttered with girlie magazines and adult videos. As Troy made a half-hearted look for a vein, I opened up his med kit and took out a vial of glucagon powder, a vial of sterile water and a syringe. Shapiro was a bitch to get an IV into; his veins were all used up. The three previous times we’d been there Troy had to give him intramuscular glucagon instead. An injection of glucagon right into the muscle enabled the body to convert the glycogen stores in the liver into a temporary sugar supply. It took a little longer to work—sometimes up to twenty minutes—and was always a second choice because if you used glucagon one day it would be several more before the body could build back up the body’s supply of glycogen so it limited your choices if his sugar were to drop again. Troy unsnapped the tourniquet from the man’s arm, and picked up the syringe and vials I’d laid out next to him. He stuck the syringe in the sterile water vial and pulled back, loading the syringe. He then injected the fluid into the vial with the powder, shook it up, and then again, pulled back on the plunger, loading the now reconstituted drug. He wiped Shapiro’s thigh with an alcohol wipe, then stuck in the syringe and injected the glucagon.

  While we waited for Shapiro to come around, I looked at the photos on the wall. A young man with a crew cut stood bare-chested in army fatigue pants in front of a bunker, dog tags around his neck. With long hair and mustache, dressed in a seventies suit, he looked sheepish as a girl with glasses kissed his cheek in front of a wedding cake. He stood with the same woman and two young girls in Mickey Mouse shirts, the Magic Kingdom in the background. There were no pictures more recent. He complained to us once bitterly about his wife’s lawyer.

  “Check this out,” Troy said, holding up a prescription bottle he’d found by the bedside. “Viagra.”

  Troy stared at the label. I wondered if maybe he wasn’t having a vision of himself sitting there thirty years from now with his own bottle and girlie magazines. He set the bottle back down without saying anything more to me. He looked glum.

  Chapter 10

  “There he is against the telephone pole,” Victor said.

  We’d been sent for an ETOH—a drunk on the corner of Park and Hungerford in front of the Immaculate Conception Church. The man wearing a Boston Celtics jacket lay on the ground, his back against the pole, snoring.

  Victor gave him a gentle nudge in the side.

  The man opened his eyes and smiled at Victor like he knew him.

  “Hey dude, whass up?” he said to Victor.

  “What hospital, Henry?”

  “I don’t wanna to go to the hospital? I wanna go to ADRC,” he said. “I need rehab.”

  “But you’re on the banned list,” Victor said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Remember you called yesterday and we tried to take you. They said you were banned. Every time you go there, you go AWOL on them.”

  “They won’t take me?”

  “Not today, they won’t.”

  “Forget it then.”

  “We can take you to one of the hospitals.”

  “No, they’ll just tie me up. Leave me here. Is a nice day.”

  “You don’t want to go, you have to get up and walk away.”

  “Can’t I stay here?”

  “No, because they’ll keep calling us. This is a busy street. People don’t want to be stepping over you. You have to move on.”

  “Help me up.”

  Victor gave him a hand to his feet.

  “You got a dollar?”

  Victor shook his head.

  “I served my country.”

  “I respect you for that.”

  “Can’t hurt to ask.” He looked at me now. “How about you, big man? For a brother?”

  “You want a sandwich?”

  He shook his head. “No, I wanna a drink. I want to get shit-faced. You understand?”

  “Sure do.”

  “You want to lie down,” Victor said. “Just don’t lie where people can see you. You don’t move on, the cops’ll be next.”

  “All right.” He held his arm up to me and I helped lift him to his feet.

  We watched him wander off down Hungerford.

  Victor spoke into the radio. “Four sixty-three clear L-Lima.”

  “Okay sixty-three, got you clear.”

  We sat in the ambulance while Victor wrote up the paperwork.

  Just up the street I could see a short man in a pinstripe suit in front of the El Mercado, shaking hands with passersby, while two young men in blue blazers and ties handed out flyers. A cameraman filmed as the diminutive man clasped his hand over an old woman’s. As she spoke, he nodded.

  “That’
s Senator Lamb,” Victor said.

  “I’ve heard of him,” I said. I’d seen him when I was out in California. He was giving a speech at a hotel I worked at briefly.”

  “Yeah, he wants to run for president someday. See the man and woman standing with him,” Victor said. A Hispanic man in a suit and sunglasses and a tall, extremely attractive Hispanic woman tried to steer people the senator’s way. “The man is Perry Santiago. He is a city councilman—big in the Democratic Party. His brother’s a lawyer for Champion Ambulance. The woman is Helen Atreus. Sidney Seuss’s daughter Bruce Atreus’s ex-wife.

  “She’s quite a story. She’s adopted. When Sidney and his wife started the business they were a one-family ambulance service. One night they got called for an unknown behind one of the buildings in Rice Heights. It was a baby, not three hours old. No one claimed the baby. The Seusses adopted her. Nice girl—Sidney spoiled her, particularly after his wife died. They brought her up in private schools, country clubs. Now she’s trying to hook up with the Hispanic community.”

  “So they’re together?”

  “For now. Santiago, like Bruce Atreus, is a ladies’ man, as you can see. He likes to wear the nice suits and go to the parties and get his name in the paper. Helen works for the literacy program. She is a nice woman, but very high maintenance. With Bruce working so hard, and with his roving eye, their marriage went kaput. Even though Bruce gets plenty on his own, he’d take her back in a minute.”

  Even from the distance of fifty yards I could see just how great her beauty was. She was tall with light brown skin and long raven hair.

  “Bruce can’t stand Santiago,” Victor said. “Aside from taking his wife, Santiago keeps trying to get the city to give our territory to Champion.”