Mortal Men

by Peter Canning

  “He was giving me Vitamin B-twelve,” Troy said. “It’s an experimental treatment. It has to be administered regularly like clockwork. I have a very active extracurricular life. My energy wanes, but this Vitamin twelve, woo. You ought to try it.”

  “This is a serious matter,” Bruce said.

  “Okay, slap his hand. Slap mine. It won’t happen again. Let us go back to work.”

  “It’s not that simple. I could fire both of you right now based on this complaint. Mr. Jones for giving an injection he is not certified to give and you for not reporting an illness on duty. You’re lucky the woman brought her complaint to us and not the state.”

  “The state? This is bullshit,” Troy said. “This is bullshit!”

  “Watch yourself.”

  Troy was already out of his chair and leaning over Bruce’s desk. Bruce’s chair hit the wall as Bruce tried to escape. Ben and I grabbed Troy by the arms. He flung us back. “We’re the best crew you have, you sorry son of a bitch. You don’t know shit anymore about what goes on.”

  “Get the officers in here,” Bruce shouted to his secretary.

  “The officers?” Troy said, “Why you little sissy punk.” But instead of going for Bruce, he turned and faced the policemen who entered the room. “In case you don’t know who I am,” he said, “Allow me to introduce myself.” Ben and I grabbed him again. I saw an officer reach for his baton. Troy stepped toward him. I stuck my foot out and tripped Troy. He fell forward and the officers and I were on him in a moment.

  “It’s his sugar, it’s his sugar,” I said.

  “It’s not my fucking sugar,” Troy shouted. He broke his arm free, punched one of the cops in the face, knocking his head back. “I’m the king of the world!” he shouted. “The king of the world!”

  There was a brawl with Troy getting the worst of it. I got in the way of the officer’s counterpunches, and held myself over Troy between them. “I know him. It’s his sugar. We all know that. Let me at least test it. He’s out of his mind right now. I can prove it.”

  The tension went out of Troy’s struggle. He eyed me.

  “It’s his sugar,” I said, again. “He’d never hit you if his sugar was right.”

  Ben brought a medic bag in. While the cops continued to hold a temporarily subdued Troy down, Ben poked Troy’s finger with a lancet. I held the glucometer.

  As soon as I had a drop of blood on the strip, I stepped back. “Twenty seconds,” I said. “It’s reading it.”

  They all watched me.

  The number came up. Three digits. “Forty!” I announced holding the glucometer above everyone’s eye level. “I was right.”

  Ben nodded for me to show him, but I clicked the machine off. “He was going to eat when you called us in. We just did a code. A save. He did a fine job. It must have sucked his sugar down. Look at him, he’s sweating. He just needs to eat. He’s got to eat.”

  Troy, even though he was pissed, looked at me with wonder. I saw him try to hold back a smile. He only offered mild resistance when Ben put the IV in his arm. Ben gave him the sugar, but only half an amp. As he pushed it I saw Ben studying me, knowing now where my loyalty lay.

  “This is why we can’t have him on the road,” Bruce said.

  Chapter 23

  I may have saved Troy an arrest, but I couldn’t get him back on the road. The company told Troy he could only come back if he brought in a doctor’s note certifying that he had his diabetes under control and that he would suffer no further relapses. No legitimate doctor would sign that any time soon. Still, the next day, Troy put his boots on and tried to go to work like nothing had happened.

  “What are you doing here?” Brian Sajack asked.

  “Coming to work. You have the keys for four eighty-two?”

  “Hold on a moment.” He picked up the phone and called Ben. “Ben, Troy’s here.”

  “Just a moment,” he said. “You and Ben can work this out.”

  Troy waited patiently until Ben appeared.

  “You were suspended, pending medical clearance,” Ben said. “I thought we were clear on that.”

  I looked out the door and saw a police car pull up. Two officers stepped out. I recognized the taller one as the officer Troy had punched the day before.

  “I’m scheduled to work ten A.M. to midnight. I always work this shift. Ask Lee. He’s my partner.”

  “The book says Lee is working with Tim Vijay today. You are on the suspended list until you bring a note from your physician saying your diabetes is under control and you are no longer at risk. You know that.”

  The two officers came in the door and made eye contact with Ben. I could still see the black eye on the one officer who’d been there the day before. He didn’t look happy.

  Troy smiled broadly. “Howdy guys,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet, which he unfolded and presented to Ben. “I think you’ll find that’s in order.”

  Ben stared at the sheet a long moment. He looked back at Troy, almost incredulously. “This is your note?”

  “That’s right. Signed by a physician.”

  “To whom it may concern,” Ben read aloud. “I give my blessing to Troy Johnson to return to work today. Sincerely, Marcus Welby, M.D.”

  Troy smiled, his eyes gleaming. It was then I realized he was insane.

  “Marcus Welby, M.D? He doesn’t practice anymore. He’s been off the air for years.” Ben gave a half guffaw. “You’ll have to do better.”

  “I’m disappointed,” Troy said. “These obstacles you are putting in my path.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Ben said. “The officers here will escort you back to your car.”

  “Very well.” Troy took the note back and put it in his pocket. “But I am not through with this, not by a long shot.” He cocked his head slightly, and then in a voice intended perhaps to sound like Douglas MacArthur, he said slowly and with great dramatic gravity, “I shall return.”

  “You come back without a legitimate note, you’re not getting in an ambulance.”

  “Good day,” Troy said.

  On his way out Troy nodded to the officers. He stopped and looked at the bruise under the eye of the tall one. “What did the other guy look like?” he said, then laughed to himself and walked out.

  Troy was back the next day with a note from Dr. Mark Greene of ER. Ben shook his head. “A real doctor, not a TV doctor.”

  I don’t know what he was trying to prove—that his suspension was a joke and should be treated as such or maybe he was just plain crazy.

  The next time the note was from Dr. J.

  He didn’t come after that. A joke only went so far until it was pathetic, and Troy wasn’t the pathetic type. Or maybe it was just because he’d heard the Atreuses were going to have him arrested for trespassing if he showed up again.

  Chapter 24

  Troy took a job managing one of his uncle’s hardware stores down by the shore. Without Troy as my partner, the job wasn’t nearly as interesting. While I still worked with Victor three days a week, on the other four they usually put me with new EMTs, which despite the closest-car-goes policy, usually turned out to be all-day transfer duty.

  We ferried sick old people back and forth to dialysis, between radiation treatments, into the ER for debridement of bedsores and replacement of pulled feeding tubes and Foley catheters. Some people left EMS after burning out from seeing too much trauma—too many young people dying—but to many of us the worst was not the young, but the continual contact with the dying and the forgotten. Life decaying before the grave. It was like giving yourself a picture of what your own future held. It was grim and inescapable.

  I saw myself alone in a dim room. A tube stuck out of my stomach hooked up to a bottle of brown, thick liquid. A catheter stuck out of my penis, hooked to a bag that collected my dark urine. There was a hole cut in my throat. I struggled to breathe through the thick mucus that continually clogged it. Bedsores festered on my back and buttocks.
My diaper needed changing. I listened to the endless howling of my roommate as I waited for the reaper to come through my door and take me to another hell.

  In the nursing homes, people had no identity. There might be a few cheery photos of children, crayon drawings saying “we love grandpa,” but we never saw the children there. We rarely saw any visitors at all. We made our way down the halls past the gauntlet of forgotten vacant souls, sitting in their wheelchairs, heads down, mouths open, waiting for their hearts to stop beating. You couldn’t tell who had been football stars, who the captains of industry, who had won all the girls, who had dazzled the boys, who had built skyscrapers, won justice in courtrooms, medals on the field of battle. They were all lumped together now, warehoused in halls that smelled like shit lightly dusted with baby powder. If they were lucky they’d die after the nurse checked them at shift change so when the next shift occurred they’d be too far gone to be saved—saved to continue their life in earth’s version of Hades.

  Andrew Melnick and I took a brain-injured patient down to a special rehabilitation facility near the mouth of the Connecticut River. He’d been up at Hartford Hospital for an operation to relieve pressure on his brain. He was twenty-six years old. He’d been in a drunk-driving senior prom accident when he was eighteen and had been unfortunate enough to survive. He’d lost his right leg at the hip, and could not speak. He moved his arms only with great difficulty. They fed him with a tube into his stomach. He had a stoma in his neck from which yellow phlegm had to be suctioned regularly. You could tell he’d once had massive arms, but the tattoo of a wildcat now appeared grossly misshapen on his right arm, more like a starving kitten with a big head. The facility looked nice from the outside—it had a spectacular view of the river and Long Island Sound. We brought the man into a room without windows that he shared with three other men in similar condition. The place smelled like baby powder on shit.

  Normally we tried to joke in the nursing homes, saying hello to the procession of gray-haired ladies sitting in their wheelchairs lining the halls, engaging them in conversation, but this place was like the house of horrors. Everyone was young, crippled in body and mind. It was too close to home. One man sat in his wheelchair, pounding his fist—the only arm he could move—against the armrest. Though he couldn’t have been thirty, his hair was already thinning. He had dandruff on his shoulders. There was food on his mustache and on his green army jacket. Somewhere down the hall, a man howled. It would stop suddenly, and then start again.

  We got our patient into his special wheelchair. While we waited for the nurse to come down and get our report and sign our paperwork acknowledging that we’d successfully delivered him, I read the faded news clippings taped to his wall. “Wheeler Leads Wildcats to Championship, Throws 3 TD Passes.” There was a picture of him in his uniform, being carried on the shoulders of his teammates.

  “Another football hero,” I said.

  The man grunted and jerked his head. He seemed to motion with his hand.

  “I think he wants to show us something,” Andrew said. “Bring him the article.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, he does,” Andrew said. Then to the man, “You were QB? The Seymour Wildcats. That’s good football.”

  Andrew took the clipping from me and put it in the man’s shaking hand. We watched as the man slowly brought his other hand over to the clipping, then in one quick jerky movement, he ripped the article, and crumbled it in his hand.

  “Hey!” Andrew said, “What’d you do that for?”

  The man just looked at him coldly, his arms and hands shaking.

  “I didn’t know he was going to rip it up,” Andrew said on the drive back. “How would you figure that?”

  I didn’t say anything. I had no answer for him that would soothe him.

  Chapter 25

  In the spring, Kim and I took a weekend off and went to Cape Cod, where we stayed in a small cottage on the water in Truro, just south of Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod. While we had seen increasingly more of each other during the winter—drinking with coworkers on Friday nights, occasionally going out to dinner, and spending nights at my place when her children were with their father—this was our first trip together. I liked her quite a bit, and enjoyed her company. She fit my moods well, drinking beer and chatting when I felt garrulous, and not minding my occasional moody periods, when I dwelled in silence.

  She’d gone to Cape Cod often as a child, and had continued to bring her children there for a week each summer. “Maybe you’ll come with us this year,” she said. “It’d do you good to get away, and the Cape in the summer is great. Spend the day on the beach, drink beer and eat lobster at night—speaking of which, that’s where we’re going to tonight. I’m taking you to the Lobster Pound in Provincetown. You can pick your own lobster out of the tank.”

  “It all sounds great,” I said.

  That night at dinner, she saw me smiling at her as she showed me how to crack open a lobster. “What are you laughing at?” she said.

  “I’m from Maine,” I said.

  “Oh, d’oh. You’ve had lobster before, obviously.”

  I laughed. “You could say I’ve had my share.”

  “Well, I’m glad I’m here with you.”

  After dinner, we went out and walked along the docks and looked at the fishing boats. This was the first I had seen the Atlantic in over a decade. The salt air, the fullness in your lungs when you breathed, the wind on your face—I missed it.

  In the morning we went into town for coffee and doughnuts. She held me close as we walked the streets. She saw a sign advertising a whale watch with guaranteed sightings, and joked “A whale watch? How do you know they are not going to go, ‘Look that way, it’s a whale! Oh, too bad, you missed it,’” she said.

  “No, there are whales out there,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ll take you if you want. My treat you.” I knew it would be something she would marvel at when we’d get out there on the fishing grounds. “They are out there.”

  With Kim at my side, and the water all around us, the sun rose bright, cutting through the fog. And then on the feeding grounds, the humpback whales came out. They breached and flapped their tails, and splashed us.

  “This is like being in another world,” Kim said. “Or at the edge of our own. Thank you for bringing me here.” She kissed me, and then turned again to point at the whales like I was the one who had conjured them up for her.

  The whales led us north. No one objected when the captain asked if we wanted to stay out longer to follow them. Evening finally fell and we turned back. I looked out at the lights of the land to our west, and Kim knew at once that something had changed. “What is it? Are you okay?”

  There to the west were the lights on the coast. I knew the houses of each light. I’d lived in that coastal town for the first twenty-five years of my life. It was like my past had come out to touch me with the cold evening wind. I wondered if anyone there even noticed the tourist boat out at sea. Kim leaned against me.

  Chapter 26

  I didn’t see or hear from Troy for months. I finally took a day off and drove down to the shore. Johnson Hardware was located in a large standalone building that shared a parking lot with a cleaners, a Chinese restaurant and a bike shop. Out front was a display of new power mowers and bags of peat moss piled high.

  I went right to the service desk. A middle-aged woman had her back to me while she talked on the telephone. “I demand to see the manager.” I pounded the counter. “Get me the manager.”

  Without even looking at me, she spoke into the microphone and I heard the overhead page. “Mr. Johnson to the service desk. Mr. Johnson to the service desk.”

  He came around the corner in his white shirt and tie and when he saw me his phony smile broke into the biggest grin. “Lee,” he said. “How the hell are you?”

  We embraced fiercely.

  “I’ve come to bust you out. We’re going to lun
ch.”

  “But Mr. Johnson,” the woman said, as she hung up the phone. “Mr. Hamlish from the Stanley Tools is supposed to be in to meet with you in a half-hour.”

  “Tell him I’m out drinking.”

  She looked unshocked, like she was used to those comments.

  “You’ll think of something,” he said. “Tell him I had a meeting with Lee Jones. Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Lee Jones?” she said.

  “The legend himself.” He winked at me.

  We talked for two hours over steak at the Ship’s Pub. Troy said he was making twice the salary he made on the street, but I could tell he missed the life. Counting widgets and reordering paint wasn’t the same adrenaline rush. His health was good, though, and he was seeing a girl steady now, thinking about marriage. He showed me a picture of her—I was jealous—she was like someone out of a magazine—Clairol-blond hair, wide blue eyes, full lips, perfect complexion.

  “Life is good,” he said, “I’ve got a little garden in the backyard. I’m growing beets, carrots, celery, radishes. Next year I might grow corn. I’m a damn good weeder. I get all my tools for free. Salesman samples. Can’t beat that. They want me back up in the city, they’re going to have to raise their pay scales, and even then I don’t think I’ll go back. Fuck them.”

  “That’s telling them,” I said. But I didn’t believe him.

  I saw his eyes move and he signaled to a man who had just come in the door. “Hey, there’s someone I want you to meet. Yo, Dad.” To me, “It’s my dad.”

  A tall, broad-shouldered man approached. He wore construction boots, denim overalls, and a cap that said Johnson Electric.

  It took him awhile to get to us. Other diners hailed him, shook his hand, and cracked comments his way. There wasn’t an eye in the room that wasn’t on him.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Lee,” he said after Troy had introduced us. “I’ve heard a lot about you. You still working up in the city?”