Mortal Men

by Peter Canning

  “I was kidding.” She gave me a playful tap on the shoulder that thrilled me.

  And we sat there and talked, talked like old friends, chatting away about everything from work to the weather. I was sorry when after a half an hour, she had to leave.

  “I hate to interrupt the kids’ fun out there, but I need to be going. I have an early shift tomorrow morning. It’s been nice to see you out,” Kim said. “I guess you work so much, it’s hard for you.”

  “I’ve had a good time,” I said. “I probably should get out more.”

  “Yeah, me too. It’s hard with the kids. I get my sister to take them sometimes. That helps. Life can’t be all work.”

  “True,” I said.

  “You should come out with us to the Brickyard some night after work,” she said. “It’s a good place to unwind. Some people like me just pop in for a beer, some close the place down.”

  “Maybe I will some night.”

  “You’ll have a good time. I’ll look for you.”

  Suddenly there was a commotion by the pool.

  “My goodness,” Kim said. “He doesn’t have anything on.”

  There was Troy stark naked on the diving board. He stood completely still like an Olympic diver, then took a couple studied steps, bounced high once, then executed an Olympic one and a half, neatly ripping the landing. He came up, and people applauded and shouted “Ten. Ten.”

  Before a growing and enthusiastic crowd, he executed a number of dives and assorted cannonballs and jackknifes. But it was only when he sauntered through the house still in his birthday suit and stood dipping nachos in the cheese sauce muttering about being robbed by the Russian judges that Pat got him some orange juice. He made him eat a peanut butter sandwich and found some surgical scrubs for him to wear.

  Just before I left, Scott Dykema, one of our paramedics, and Scott Cummings, his EMT partner, took their bagpipes and played. Evidently they had been horrendous when they’d started a few years back, but they were actually very good. There was something ancient and soulful about the sound of the pipes, that may have been the reason everyone stopped their conversation and listened, and looked about at all who were there, as if the occasion were being marked and remembered for all time.

  Chapter 19

  It was dark. About three o’clock on a Saturday morning. I was coming home after getting off work when I saw a car pulled off the side of the wooded road. A woman stood outside the car holding a flashlight. I hit my hazards on and parked to protect the car. I got out and walked over. The air smelled of pine needles.

  “Lee?” she said.

  “Kim? What happened?"

  “I was driving and I just lost power. I saw the battery voltage meter start dropping and my lights got dim, and then the car just gave out.”

  “It’s probably your alternator. You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m just not thrilled about being broken down. I’ve been trying to call my brother, but he’s not home.”

  “You live far from here?”

  “Enfield. I was at a party at one of my girlfriends’ houses. My kids are with their father this weekend, so at least I don’t have to worry about keeping the sitter late. Still, I’m not too happy about this. I know I need a new car but I was hoping I could get another year on this one.”

  “If it’s your alternator, it shouldn’t be that much. Let me give it a try.” I tried to start it up, but with no luck.

  “Look, you’re in a safe spot here. Why don’t I just give you a ride home? In the morning, I can hit an auto parts store, and it probably won’t take me forty minutes to fix it.”

  “Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”

  “Not till noon. I just have a couple chores I have to do at the farm. I live just up the road, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “You need your sleep. I hate to have you drive all that way.”

  “It’s not a problem. Unless, of course, you want to bunk with me. I’ve got a pullout couch.”

  “Whatever is easiest for you. I appreciate any help you can give me.”

  “If you don’t mind, that probably would be.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s just get your car a little more off the road, and then we can be on our way.”

  She got behind the driver’s wheel, and I pushed it while she steered into a little turnabout just ahead.

  Chapter 20

  It was a cold morning a few days before Christmas. The six inches of snow we’d received the week before had been washed away by a steady cold rain. The only remnants were the now dirt-encrusted mounds on the roadside where the plows had piled the snow. Troy and I were covering the town of Newington when we got called to a street off Willard Avenue. They wouldn’t tell us what it was for. “No lights, no sirens. Report to PD on scene.”

  “This isn’t going to be pretty,” Troy said.

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s Nestor’s place.”

  Nestor hadn’t been to work for three days. He’d called in on Tuesday, saying he wasn’t feeling well. Wednesday he hadn’t answered his phone.

  The sky was gray. The roads were slippery with patches of black ice.

  Neither of us said anything as we drove there.

  Nestor hadn’t been doing well at all lately. He’d stopped hanging out in the crew room a couple months before, retiring to his cubicle in the billing department. Some mornings he had alcohol on his breath. He’d stopped joking with people. Even stopped wearing his uniform. It was like he didn’t even want to be seen.

  They led us though the house and down into the basement. The house looked like so many others we went into—dishes in the sink, piles of newspapers, empty liquor bottles, full ashtrays, curtains pulled against the light, a carpet that hadn’t been vacuumed for months. The basement steps were in need of repair. You wondered how they could have supported Nestor’s weight as he made his way down to the cellar.

  He lay on his side on the cement floor, the rifle still in his hands. A pool of caked, muddy blood formed a semicircle around the body; the back half of his head was gone. You could still see the look in his eyes like he’d seen something no man should face, a fear, a panic, a disbelief that it all had come to this.

  Troy’s looked down at the body. I saw no emotion in his eyes. He looked at his watch. “Two thirty-one P.M.,” he said, then walked out.

  Ben Atreus arrived in his Bronco. Troy was writing his paperwork against the hood of the ambulance. Ben glanced at him, but didn’t come over to talk. He nodded to the cops who let him in the house.

  He came out a few minutes later. He had put on sunglasses.

  A couple days later, when I was without a partner, and doing chores about the office, I brought a box of new training manuals up to Ben’s office. He was sitting with his feet up on his desk. He’d just gotten back from the funeral services. He seemed to be staring at a picture on the wall. I made a little cough so he’d know I was there. He invited me in.

  “How was the service?” I asked.

  “Good, good. A lot of people came out, not as many as he deserved, but a decent showing. Too bad we couldn’t have sent all the crews, but someone had to work. People said nice things about him, things that had been forgotten and needed to be said.”

  “He worked here for many years,” I said.

  “Yes, he did. He put in his time. No matter what he’d become in the end, he deserved the respect of a decent funeral. And he got that.”

  I looked at the picture. It appeared to be of a graduating class—young people in their twenties to early thirties.

  “First paramedic class in the city,” Ben said. He pointed to each photo. “Dan Turner—he’s a doctor now. He came up today all the way from New York City. Fred Capezzi, another suicide—about four years ago. Julio Ramos—he’s an East Hartford firefighter now. No longer works as a medic. He was there. You recognize Brian Sajack. That’s me—had a full head of hair then. Rob Matros, died in a car wreck. Mary Beth Fowler, a physician assistant in
Massachusetts. Thomas Gallimore, working out in New Mexico for Albuquerque EMS. Lenny Lown, a junkie, or was when I last heard from him, living down on the streets of Willimantic. And that—that’s Davey.”

  I looked at the picture. He couldn’t have been more than a hundred and seventy-five pounds, with a trimmed mustache and a ladykiller smile.

  “Being a paramedic was his life,” Ben said. “Brian and I were talking about how people used to always gather around to listen to him tell his stories. Too bad he never wrote his book.” He was quiet a moment. “He had a lot of good years, but it destroyed him in the end.” I saw Ben’s eyes look at the other pictures on his wall—Ben’s wife and his daughters. “He didn’t have anything else.”

  “A lesson for us all,” I said.

  “Amen.”

  Chapter 21

  Dispatch had a call holding for us when I saw Troy’s black pickup drive into the lot, twenty minutes late. “We’ve got to move,” I said, picking him up by his car, the ambulance lights already whirling

  Troy, wearing a black T-shirt, tossed his backpack and cooler into the front. “I had a flat,” he said. “What are we going for?”

  “Woman down in Newington near the Berlin line.”

  “Can’t they even give me time to eat?”

  “They are at status zero. This call’s been holding ten minutes.”

  I drove while Troy put on his uniform shirt and laced his boots.

  “Nine twenty-eight, what’s your ETA?”

  “Doing our best. Maybe seven out. Do you have an update on the condition?”

  “No, the PD’s just asking.”

  “Doing our best.”

  It was raining and the traffic wasn’t behaving. People talked on cell phones as they drove, oblivious to our charging ambulance. Cars stopped in the middle of the road. Others tried to beat us through intersections.

  Suddenly I heard machine gun fire. I looked at Troy. He held a small novelty gadget that made sounds of machine guns, bombs, and mortars against the PA mike.

  “Fire in the hole!” he shouted into the mike, then pressed a button and I heard an explosion.

  He laughed manically. “Didn’t mean to give you flashbacks,” he said. “Just trying to clear traffic. Incoming!” There was the sound of a mortar lobbed through the air, and then exploding as it hit its target.

  Ahead the cars seem to part. We raced through.

  “What would you do without me?” he said.

  “You’re a lunatic,” I said.

  He just laughed, and fired off more machine gun noise.

  I hit the lights off as I turned into the residential street. Two cops stood outside, small-talking. “Can’t be much,” I said. Often, as turned out to be the case here, the first responders didn’t bother to slow us down if the call turned out to be non–life threatening. “She fell and twisted her ankle,” an officer said. “She’s going to Hartford.”

  In the house we found an eighty-year-old woman lying on the couch with a bag of ice wrapped around her ankle. While Troy seemed more interested in chatting with an attractive blonde and her little boy, I introduced myself to the woman and examined her bruised and swollen ankle. “I’m Lee,” I said, “What happened? Did you hit you hit your head at all? Do you have any neck or back pain?”

  “No, just my ankle.”

  “She tripped on the rug. I’m her daughter,” the gray-haired woman standing next to her said. “She is on Coumadin. I used to be a nurse at Hartford. I’d like her to go there.”

  “Fine. We can do that. How bad is your pain?”

  “Not bad at all. The ice helps.”

  I glanced back at Troy. He had the little boy hung upside down from his ankles and was walking him across the ceiling. “What are you doing up there? Come down from there! Don’t you know you’re not supposed to walk on the ceiling? Didn’t your mother tell you not to walk on the ceiling?”

  The little boy giggled wildly and I could see the mother checking out Troy.

  “We’ll bring the stretcher in,” I said, “and give you a nice easy ride into the hospital.”

  Troy was too preoccupied so I dragged the stretcher in myself, lowered it, and helped the woman stand and pivot onto it. “A little hand here,” I said to Troy, and he broke away to help me lift the stretcher up.

  “Can I ride with her?” the daughter asked.

  “Absolutely. “You ride up front and your granddaughter can follow. We won’t be going lights and sirens. Just a nice, easy ride up to Hartford.”

  Troy drove, while I attended the woman. Our route was right up the Berlin Turnpike, a long straight road lined by shopping plazas, gas stations, fast food restaurants and motels. Troy seemed to be driving a little fast and stopping a little sudden. I tried to make eye contact with him, but he had put on a pair of sunglasses. I didn’t want to yell at him in front of the woman. He had the radio on a head-banging rock station. At least he hadn’t turned on the back speakers, which he sometimes did when he heard a song he liked and wanted to share with me and whoever the patient was.

  I heard honking behind us, and looked out and saw the granddaughter and great-grandson waving at us. “Hey, they’re waving,” I said. The great-grandmother and I waved back.

  It seemed all the way into Hartford they were honking and waving, and we waved back.

  Then I looked out the window and saw Troy had gone past the Retreat Avenue turn to the back entrance of the hospital. Then he didn’t turn into the side entrance. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  Ahead the traffic moved. Troy stayed stopped. I went up through the break between the driver’s compartment and passenger compartment. I looked at Troy, he seemed immobile. Cars were honking at us from behind. “Troy! Troy!” I shook his arm. He didn’t move. I looked at his forehead it was beaded with cold sweat. He was out in the driver’s seat. Out cold.

  “Hold on a moment,” I said to the woman. “I apologize.”

  I quickly opened up the medic kit, and took out a vial of glucagon, which I quickly mixed with sterile water, and drew up into a syringe. “He’s a diabetic,” I said to the woman. “His sugar sometimes drops quickly.” I jabbed him in the arm. He roused slightly at the pain. “Don’t move,” I said.

  I got out the back and walked around to the front, as cars continued to honk. We were blocking the west entrance to the hospital. I took Troy by the shoulder, and helped him step out, and then sleepwalked him around to the back, helped him up, and had him sit on the bench. He was still out of it. “Don’t move,” I said. “Stay here.”

  I went back and got in the driver’s seat. “Again, my apologies,” I said to the woman.

  “Is he going to be all right?”

  “The medicine I gave him takes about fifteen minutes to work. He’ll be all right.”

  “This has happened before?”

  “Not quite like this.”

  “He shouldn’t be driving.”

  “He’s an excellent paramedic. I’m sorry. Excuse me.” I picked up the radio. “Four fifty-one out at Hartford. If there are any crews, we could use a hand with our patient.”

  Victor came out of the ER as I backed in. “You got a heifer,” he said.

  “No, it’s Troy. I just gave him some glucagon, but he’s still out of it. And I need a hand getting the patient in.”

  He nodded. His partner helped me with the stretcher, and Victor took care of Troy.

  When I came out of the hospital, Troy as usual, was sitting on the cement wall outside the ER, eating the sandwich from his lunchbox, and talking with other EMTs like nothing had happened. I had apologized over and over to the woman, and her daughter, who said she’d been honking because Troy had run several red lights. I hoped I’d been able to assuage them, but for all I knew they were calling the company right then.

  Chapter 22

  “Four eighty-two, report to Operations,” the dispatcher said when Troy and I cleared the hospital after a cardiac arrest.

  “What do you think that’s about?”
I asked. “I hope that family didn’t complain.”

  “What family?” he said, and gave me one of his maniacal grins.

  I just shook my head. “It can’t be good.

  A West Hartford police car was parked outside the office. That wasn’t usual. We found the two officers in the crew room having coffee with Bruce Atreus. They stopped laughing when we walked in. When Atreus saw us, his smile also abruptly ended. “In my office,” he said to us. To the cops, he said, “Excuse me.”

  Then I saw Linda standing by the copier, and the look of worry in her eyes further unsettled me. It was a look that said she had tried to forestall this, but hadn’t been successful. Troy hadn’t picked up on her alarm. He sauntered into Atreus’s paneled office, and poured himself a Scotch from the liquor on the bar. “What’s everybody drinking?” he asked.

  I stood stiffly by the door. Keith Bodin, the company risk manager, was there, along with Ben Atreus. They stared at Troy.

  Bruce took the glass from Troy’s hand and poured it in the sink. “Sit down, the both of you,” he said. He walked around his desk, and sat in his high-backed leather chair.

  I looked at Troy uneasily. I knew we were in trouble, and I thought I knew why.

  “Ben, you want to start this off,” Bruce said.

  Ben nodded. He looked directly at Troy. “A woman complained to us that earlier today while you were on your way to Hartford Hospital with her mother, Mr. Johnson driving, Mr. Jones attending the patient, that Mr. Johnson, after running several red lights, appeared to go comatose at the wheel. And that you, Mr. Jones, then gave Mr. Johnson a shot with a syringe. And then after helping Mr. Johnson into the back, you took over driving the rest of the way, leaving the patient alone with a semiconscious technician. Before you answer, I will tell you the woman is a retired ER nurse and was very upset about it.”

  “Did she complain about the care her mother received?” I said.

  “Are you certified to give IM injections?”