Mortal Men

by Peter Canning

  “Yeah, an officer was just telling me. Joey Diaz’s sister.”

  “Denny Creer told me she pulled out a nine-millimeter in the courthouse. I don’t know how she smuggled the gun in through the detectors, unless someone else got it in for her.”

  “Yeah, I talked to dispatch. They said Melnick took one critical to Saint Fran.”

  “This stuff is out of hand.”

  “We’re killing ourselves off.”

  “I felt bad for the old man.”

  Victor just shook his head.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I feel bad for him too. Hey, I meant to tell you. You threw a mean punch there.”

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “I’m not complaining.” He patted me on the back. “You did a good job.”

  “You too, friend,” I said. “If anyone would have saved him, you would have. It’s good to have you back.”

  “I can’t do this much longer,” he said, and went back inside.

  A half-hour later I went in to find Victor. Dispatch was asking us to clear. Jean Rushen told me he was in the trauma room. I found him standing next to Hector and Papi. Papi sat in his wheelchair, holding his grandson’s hand. His head lay against his boy’s side. Hector stood behind him, his eyes steely and dead. I left them there.

  The police sent reinforcements to the ER to guard against the growing crowd that had migrated from the courthouse. People cried and screamed and beat their breasts.

  Chapter 39

  For weeks we’d heard rumors that Troy was coming back, but we never saw him walk in the door. There were other rumors too. The place was going bankrupt. We had been sold. Champion was going to take us over by court order. No, a national corporation was coming in. No, the fire department was going to take over the service. No one knew what was going on. The paper had stepped up its attacks on us. We were all on mandatory overtime. Working extra days—always being held over. If the men and women of Capitol Ambulance and its ambulances were a building, I wouldn’t have been surprised to walk in one morning and just find a pile of rubble. We were at the breaking point.

  “Why are we busting our butts for this stinking city,” Andrew Melnick said. “They don’t give a shit.”

  “It’s your rock to push,” Brian Sajack said. “Now get on the road.”

  “My rock to push? What the fuck does that mean?”

  “It means get your ass in the seat, and get out on the road and do your job!”

  “Why do I even bother getting up in the morning? What’s the point?”

  “Four fifty-three.” The dispatcher came over the radio. “I need you to sign on and take Martin and Capen for the MVA. On a one.”

  “I need a new life,” Melnick said.

  “Copy, Martin and Capen,” I answered. “Let’s get pushing,” I said to Melnick.

  If there was an order to the universe, the gods would have gone easy on us for a couple weeks, given us a chance to find our bearings again, time to absorb what had happened and deal with it. But hell is random, and it kept ringing our number.

  A tractor-trailer driver suffered a heart attack at the wheel, went out of control, and plowed into a minivan holding a family of seven. There were five fatalities. Audrey Davis crawled into the car and tried to comfort the mother, who was entrapped and crushed at the waist. Her husband was dead beside her. Her older daughter was also trapped and dead. A child in the back was taken out screaming. Blood had flowed from the mother’s forehead, blinding her vision. When Audrey had staunched it enough to let the mother see the carnage around her, she felt like she had done her no favors. I could hear her screams from twenty yards away as we waited for the fire department to extricate them. The mother died as soon as she was cut free. Only the four- and five-year-old survived. One was maimed physically. The other child hadn’t a scratch, but had been so covered in blood, the crew had rushed the child to the trauma room, terrified by the sight and the soundless child.

  A tenement caught on fire. Four small children were killed, each carried out of the fire by firemen, handed over to EMS, blackened by soot and lifeless. Each was taken to the hospital, worked on by the crews even though they were long dead.

  A disgruntled employee at an insurance company shot seven coworkers, killing five of them before shooting himself. As we worked our way through the maze of cubicles looking for victims, it seemed every phone in the building was ringing. I stood in one cubicle starring at a man who had been shot twice in the head and another three times in the chest. A radio on his desk broadcast early news of the shootings. I looked at the pictures of his smiling family. His phone rang and his answering machine picked up. I heard a woman’s voice say, “Bill, honey, call me, I’m worried about you. I’m watching the TV. Are you all right? Please call me. I love you, honey. I love you. Please call.”

  Chapter 40

  It was a Tuesday afternoon at three minutes past one. We were standing outside Hartford Hospital when we heard an explosion that sounded like a B-52 dropping a five-hundred-pound bomb. It rocked us where we stood.

  “What the f— was that?” Melnick said.

  Already black smoke was rising to the north. It came from downtown.

  We swore in unison, and then jumped in our truck and started in that direction.

  It was the Civic Center. The explosion had ripped through its south side. The force of the blast shattered glass and overturned cars. Melnick and I were the second car on the scene. The smoke was thick and black. Stunned bleeding and burned people stumbled onto the glass-strewn street. Flames leapt through the smoke.

  “Medic! Medic! We need a medic!” A man, his clothes torn, bleeding from the head, helped another half-naked man along who was burned, his skin peeling off his arms and chest.

  “Get the stretcher!” Andrew shouted at me. “Get me a burn sheet.”

  “Help, can’t you please help? He’s not breathing.” A woman knelt over an obese man who lay on the sidewalk. A hunk of concrete lay across his legs.

  Andrew grabbed the blue bag and ran to his side. I watched as he took out his intubation kit.

  “Do CPR!” he shouted at me.

  A huge cloud of black smoke blew at us. I lost sight of him for a moment. People running from the building jostled me.

  Andrew and I coughed heavily. He had the laryngoscope in his hands. I looked closer at the man.

  “He’s dead, Andrew. Leave him.”

  He looked up at me, his hands shaking.

  There was another explosion. A car burst into flames. I felt the heat on my back.

  “Over here, over here.”

  A mother carried her daughter in her arms. Their faces were blackened with soot. The girl’s leg dangled at a grotesque angle.

  “Everyone back!” a police officer shouted, while another cop grabbed my arm and tried to pull me forward. “There’s a guy over here who’s hurt real bad.”

  The smoke cloud again obscured our view.

  More units arrived, but we were lost. No one was in charge. There were patients all around us. Someone said it was a bomb, another said a transformer had blown, another a gas line. Voices shouted over each other on the radio. Andrew stood there dazed.

  I heard a shout. I turned and looked up the street and saw him. Troy—in full paramedic uniform. A car fire blazed behind him.

  “Tercelli, get these people out of here. Melnick, set up triage in the La-Z-Boy lot. Nelson, find the fire commander and tell him what we’re doing. Lee, come with me.” Troy barked orders into the radio, talking to dispatch, to Ben Atreus and to the C-MED dispatcher.

  A fireman came out of the building carrying a motionless, bloodied girl.

  Troy took her in his arms. He gave her two breaths and handed her to me. “Keep breathing for her and get her up there. You can do it.”

  I put my mouth on hers and breathed. My god, I thought, I can feel her move. She was moving.

  Troy nodded. “Get her up there and come on back. I’ll need you here with me.
”

  I walked fast with the girl in my arms, holding her up to my mouth, breathing for her. With each breath, I felt more movement. Come on, little girl. Come on, little sweetheart.

  I followed the flow of people down Asylum Street. People made way for us as if I were carrying the Olympic Torch. They steered me into the La-Z-Boy lot, where Andrew had already set up a small station.

  As I held the girl, Kim Dylan put an oxygen mask on her face, and listened to her lungs. Her partner brought over their stretcher.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Stay safe,” she said.

  “You too.”

  They loaded the girl and headed off to Saint Francis.

  Ambulances lined up on the far side of the lot. Andrew radioed for them to come over one at a time. Patients sat on the ground or leaned against cars in the lot. I saw other medics checking them out, sorting them into groups by urgency of their injuries.

  I turned and headed back up the street.

  Troy, his face now covered with soot, leaned over a motionless firefighter, surrounded by three of his fellows. Troy raised his fist up and smacked the firefighter in the chest.

  The man coughed and began to breathe. He said “Huh?”

  The other firefighters looked to Troy, but he was already leaving. The firefighter wanted to get up and get his hose.

  “No, he’s got to come with me,” I said. “He has to go to the hospital.”

  “No way. I’m fine.”

  “You have to understand,” I said.

  “Come on Frankie,” his fellows said. “Listen to the man. I saw it. He’s telling the truth. You scared the shit out of me. You weren’t breathing.”

  They helped me load him on the stretcher, and take him down to the triage area.

  Kim, who was already back from Saint Francis after taking the girl, who she said was doing much better, took the firefighter. I manned a stretcher and headed back toward the smoke where Troy and others raged against the chaos.

  By three o’clock we had treated over two hundred patients. The day went by in a blur. There were fourteen fatalities. Seven criticals. There could well have been more but for the efforts of the firemen and police and EMS.

  Later, I saw Troy at the hospital. He sat on the bench in the back of his ambulance. His pale face was still covered with soot.

  We hadn’t had time to talk. “Howdy, stranger,” I said. “You came back.”

  “Yeah, I was bored.” He rechecked a laryngoscope blade.

  “You were the best out there.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You look wiped out.”

  His eyes were drawn; his hands shook slightly.

  “I’m okay.” He started to speak, but had no words.

  We took stock of each other.

  “Let me get you an orange juice,” I said. “I’m buying.”

  “Okay.”

  When I got back with the orange juice he was out cold. I thought about trying to find a medic, but I didn’t. On this night, after all he had done, I didn’t want anyone to see that he was mortal. I closed the doors, strapped the tourniquet on his arm. I was about to stick the catheter in his vein when Ben opened the side door.

  “He’s out,” I said.

  Ben nodded. He reached over and felt Troy’s cold, wet forehead. “Give me that,” he said.

  I handed him the catheter. He hit Troy’s vein, and attached the IV line. I handed him the D50. He screwed the amp into the Bristo jet, pushed out the air, and then stopped. Maybe it was because of all that happened with Pat, or what had happened that day or maybe it was just that he realized that what mattered was not all the bullshit, but actually doing the job—whatever—he clearly had a change of heart. He handed the D50 back to me. “Go ahead, you know what to do.”

  I nodded my thanks. I know Troy wouldn’t have wanted to awaken with Ben standing over him.

  Just as he was about to go out the door, I said, “One thing?”

  “What?”

  “How’d he get back to work?”

  “He showed up with his note.”

  “Marcus Welby?”

  He smiled. “Who am I to say he’s not a real doctor somewhere? Now all I have to do is tell my brother about it.” He looked at Troy a long moment. “When he comes to, get him something to eat.”

  Chapter 41

  Troy worked like a whirlwind, seven days a week, no rest. I used to always beat him into work. Now I always saw his gray pickup in the lot when I drove in. I’d find him sitting in the passenger seat in 482, reading the sports page, the engine running, the car gassed and washed.

  “You check out the gear?”

  “ALS and BLS lists,” he’d answer. “Oh-two’s good, we’ve got two boards and plenty of clean laundry. I’m just waiting for your tired ass to get behind the wheel so we can go out and do some good.”

  We were supposed to get off at two, but Troy volunteered us to stay till four every night. I was getting so rundown, after midnight I’d climb in the back and nap between calls.

  One night I was vaguely aware of Troy driving while I slept. When I finally awoke, Troy said, “You owe me twelve bucks.”

  “Twelve bucks?”

  When I still looked puzzled, he handed me a completed run form. Capitol and Broad to ADRC for detox. “For doing your job,” he said.

  I checked the date and times. The call had been done in the last hour. “You did this while I was sleeping?”

  “Yeah, I thought you needed your beddy time. I had the guy ride in the front.”

  “You amaze me. How about I just get you a cup of coffee?”

  “You can drink mine. You’re such an old man these days.”

  “How’s his sugar?” Ben asked when he and Linda saw me changing the O2 M tank in the garage, while Troy had gone into the stockroom to resupply after we’d run through the drug box on a v-fib cardiac arrest.

  “He’s all right,” I said. “He’s keeping it higher than he used to. No problems.” He was eating more than normal. When he checked his sugar, I saw his numbers were up. One twenty to one sixty, one eighty. He was giving himself a buffer.

  People watched him, waiting for something to give.

  “He’s all right?” Linda asked. Her eyes fixed on me like a wife waiting to hear about a sick husband.

  “Yeah, he’s holding up all right. We’ve had no problems.”

  “You’d tell us?”

  “He’s keeping it higher. It’s not going to happen.”

  “Keep us informed,” Ben said. “It won’t go anywhere else.”

  “I will,” I said.

  One rainy morning on the way into work, I saw Allison at Marty’s Mobil in Bloomfield. She was buying a coffee when I went in to pay for my gas. She’d cut her hair short. I almost didn’t recognize her. The luster was gone from her smile. I could see the lines in her forehead and the corners of her eyes. She’d left the ED and was working now as a nurse in a doctor’s office down the street on Cottage Grove Road. “How’s Troy?” she asked. “I heard he was back to work.”

  “He’s losing himself in his work,” I said. “I think he’s trying to do the job of two people.”

  Her eyes watered. “Tell him I said hi,” she said.

  “Take care of yourself,” I said.

  She nodded and gave me a forced smile before she headed back out into the gray day.

  Chapter 42

  We responded for an unknown on Manchester Street in the Blue Hills neighborhood. “He was just right here talking, then he fell out,” the woman said. The man wearing a grease-stained mechanic’s uniform looked to be in his late sixties. He sat on the steel garbage can by the side of a one-car garage as the woman and her husband held him up. He was unconscious. His breathing was irregular, his entire left side limp. Troy looked at his pupils. “Right pupil’s dilated.” To the people, “What kind of medical history does he have?”

  “He just a friend. He was in the hospital a year ago, I know.”

&nb
sp; “What’s he normally like? How did he get here?”

  “He drove that car.” She pointed to an old Pontiac at the curb.

  “Let’s get him to Saint Fran,” Troy said to me.

  We rushed him to the hospital. Troy had me patch in a stroke alert. As I drove I watched him work with a flurry in the rearview mirror. He nasally intubated the man and put in two IVs. But as we neared the hospital, I could hear Troy talking to the man. When I came around back to pull the stretcher I saw Troy extubating him. The man coughed, and then Troy pulled the tube. The man looked at me and smiled.

  “He’s healed,” Troy said.

  His grip strengths were equal, his pupils back to normal. He’d had a massive TIA, a transient ischemic attack—a stroke that resolves itself. It wasn’t impossible, but I had never seen such a quick recovery from such total unconsciousness. I know it was crazy, but I had to believe it was Troy’s touch. While he had always been an exceptional paramedic, since he had come back, it was like he could do no wrong. In a space of a week we had three cardiac arrest saves. He had an aura about him now that made me feel he could save anyone by will alone.

  Then we had a two-week lull like one no one had ever seen. There were no car wrecks, no shootings and no cardiac arrests, at least none when Troy was on the clock. In those two weeks Troy delivered five babies—four Patricks and one Patricia. The day the baby girl was born he bought a box of cigars and passed them out to all the crews on the road. He even passed out a box to the drunks in front of the Laundromat on Vine Street.

  But Troy, who seemed to be trying almost too hard to make up for Pat’s loss, occasionally suffered from unpredictable mood swings that bordered on manic. I didn’t know if it was just stress from all that had happened or if he was on the verge of a true crisis. I watched him carefully.

  He was pale, his eyes dark. He seemed very irritable. People would just ask him questions, like “How about the game last night?” and he’d snap at them in a tone that said “leave me alone. I don’t care to be talked to by you.” “What’s eating him?” they’d ask me. I’d just shrug, and say, “That’s Troy these days.”