Black Flies

by Shannon Burke

  The day after we treated the asthmatic, as I made the turn at 136th Street and started walking the half block east toward the station, I saw a bunch of medics standing out front in the afternoon sunlight watching me walk up. It was Rutkovsky, LaFontaine, and a bunch of medics I didn’t know at the time. I wished I hadn’t tucked my shirt in. I wished I wasn’t carrying my MCAT book or wearing my Northwestern hat. They all shifted as I got close and looked away. I said hey and walked on and by the way they smiled as I passed I knew something was up. I went down to my locker and found a taped sketch of the grim reaper on my locker. I guess a joke had started up about how I’d tried to miss my tube with the asthmatic on purpose, how I wanted the guy to die, how I got off on dead patients. As I walked back up to the lobby LaFontaine asked if I was going to try to kill any more patients, if I enjoyed it, if I was interning at the morgue.

  For weeks people I didn’t even know called me “The Coroner.”

  Newborns are purple and shriveled, with deformed, pointy heads, and scrunched faces like prunes. Everything about a newborn is ugly, but the head is the ugliest part of all. In the hospital they put a little cap on before handing the baby to the mother. The cap covers the ugly, misshapen head, but also, and more importantly, keeps the newborn warm. Even in a heated room newborns can get hypothermic very easily, after only a few minutes. One of the responses to hypothermia: a slowing of respiration.

  A forty-year-old homeless guy with an orange backpack stuffed with blankets and canned food sat in front of Olivia’s Restaurant on Douglas. When he saw us coming he picked a grain of tobacco from his tongue and flicked it away and toasted us with a forty-ounce Budweiser.

  “So, what’d I do now?” he yelled out.

  “You’re unconscious,” Rutkovsky said.

  “Aw, fuck,” the guy said. “I mighta closed my eyes a minute. I didn’t pass out. Who cares if I did pass out?” he shouted. “What the fuck? They don’t like me sittin’ here so they call it in that I’m passed out. Fuck that. Free country.”

  Rutkovsky seemed tired.

  “You can come with us to the ER. Or find some other place to sit. But those are your choices. Can’t stay here.”

  “I ain’t movin’,” the guy said.

  Rutkovsky looked away.

  “Option three is I call PD. My buddy Pastori shows up. They arrest you for vagrancy, tool you up in the back of the squad car, and you spend three days in processing before you see the judge. I wouldn’t choose that option.”

  “It’s easier if you walk away,” I said.

  The homeless guy turned on me indignantly.

  “Thanks for spelling it out for me, smart guy. Look at that uniform. It’s still got the creases in it. Jesus. Welcome to Harlem.”

  Rutkovsky bit his lip. The guy uncapped his beer and took a long drink. He wedged the beer in his bag, shouldered the pack, and stood. He glanced at Rutkovsky, a dark look, and wandered off.

  “Another successful medical intervention,” Rutkovsky said.

  We started back for the ambulance. The door of the restaurant burst open and the manager yelled, “What? You just let him walk away?”

  “Do we look like cops?” Rutkovsky said. “He left.Whatta you care?”

  “He’ll just come back. Then I gotta call again. Don’t you guys do anything?”

  Rutkovsky didn’t answer. He just kept walking.

  We got back to the ambulance, set our equipment in the side compartment, and climbed inside. I pulled my chemistry textbook out. Rutkovsky had started reading his Daily News again when the homeless guy wandered by, holding his beer.

  “Assholes,” he shouted, and spit beer on Rutkovsky’s window.

  The beer slid down the glass. Rutkovsky sat very still for a moment. Then he reached out and adjusted the volume of the radio. He turned a page of the newspaper and went on reading. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t say anything.

  Stern, sullen, misanthropic, Rutkovsky had a crew cut, dark brown eyes, and a mouth shut perpetually in a tight slit. He had a stiff, precise way of moving that showed he’d been in the military. As far as I could tell he never talked to anyone about anything and the only time he mentioned jobs or patients was to make jokes about them. He was never surprised or rattled by any of the messed-up shit we saw on the job. There was a story about a guy who ran up and sliced his own throat in the headlights of the ambulance and from what his partner said, Rutkovsky took a last bite of his sandwich before he got out to treat him. I knew Rutkovsky had been a medic in Vietnam. I knew he’d been working in Harlem for almost twenty years. But that’s all I knew about him. Rutkovsky never talked about where he was from or why he’d become a medic or even what he thought of the job. But I could already tell he didn’t think much of the EMS brass or the lieutenants and captains at the station and he definitely did not seem proud or impressed by what we did. Other medics wore colored bars that hung beneath the badge—there was the yellow and red save bar, the pink baby bar for a delivery, or the gold star with the white background that was the medal of honor. By the end of those first weeks, I knew that Rutkovsky must have been awarded every bar imaginable, including the medal of honor, but he only displayed a single black bar over his badge. I didn’t ask about the black bar at first. I figured he’d just glower or turn away or say, “Gimme a break, Cross.” But on the last day of the second week, after the homeless guy spit on our glass and we were just sitting there in the ambulance, I couldn’t help myself. I said, “So what’s the deal with the black bar, Rutkovsky?”

  “It’s the thing I’m most proud of,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “From when I was in the war. It’s a kill bar. For a confirmed kill.”

  I had a bed along the north wall and a desk beneath the window and my clothes hung in the open on a wooden bar wedged between the doorway and the south wall. On the desk there was a calculator, a kitchen timer, and three sharpened number-two pencils. It was late at night, after work, and I was sitting at the desk scribbling out chemistry formulas, physics equations, while Clara lay on the bed paging through a biochemistry textbook.An hour passed in complete silence and then the timer dinged and Clara turned a page and went on reading as I checked my answers against the answer key. When I was finished I shut the practice test and got up and went to the bathroom and while I was inside I heard Clara get off the bed and I thought I heard the ruffle of papers: Clara checking my answers. I was supposed to be studying in the ambulance, raising my scores. She wanted to see what I’d gotten on the practice test.When I came back in she was lying on the bed, as if she’d never moved.

  “How’d you do?” she asked, motioning to the desk.

  “Better,” I said.

  I’m pretty sure she knew I was lying.

  “Whatta you got?” Rutkovsky asked.

  “Nothin’,” LaFontaine bellowed. “You don’t know and you don’t wanna know ...And you definitely don’t wanna know,” he said to me.

  It was the beginning of my third week. We were in the litter-strewn lot behind Station 18. Dirty longboards and old medical debris scattered everywhere. LaFontaine carried a plastic bag in two hands. Rutkovsky looked at the lump in the bag, looked at LaFontaine, and said, “You’re right. I don’t wanna know,” and Rutkovsky and I went on to the station.

  Inside, in the squalid, tile-floored lounge area, a medic named Verdis paced back and forth muttering to himself.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Nothin’ happened,” Rivett said. “What makes you think something happened? Shut up, Coroner. Don’t worry about it.”

  Rivett, the lieutenant on tour three—the 4:00 PM-to-midnight shift—was a skinny white guy who’d worked in the South Bronx for ten years before coming to Harlem. He was a smoker with yellowish skin and a hunched, leering quality. He stood in the doorway of his office and watched as Verdis paced and another medic named Marmol argued with him about something I didn’t catch. After a moment LaFontaine burst in and everyone looked up. LaFontaine wa
lked to the mailboxes and curled a sheet of paper and slid it in the slot, then fell back on one of the plastic couches and said loudly, “Put a fork in’m, he’s done.”

  Rivett tilted his head, looked away.

  “He goes out and gets loaded. Fucks his wife. Comes back tomorrow and it’s another day. He’s a tough kid.”

  “Ha!” LaFontaine crowed.

  “He is. I think so anyway,” Rivett said.

  LaFontaine laughed again.

  I eased over to the mailboxes and saw that LaFontaine had put a form requesting a transfer to an administrative position in Donny Phelps’s slot. That was the sort of thing they did at Station 18 if they didn’t like you—they left a transfer form in your mailbox.There were other more direct methods, but the transfer form was the first step.

  I knew Phelps. He was a trim, energetic guy from rural Tennessee. He’d been nicer than the others in the first weeks, probably because everyone else was sticking it to him and he was looking for an ally. He’d moved to the city for the excitement and had been working at the station for eight months, but he’d never really fit in. The other medics thought he talked too much. They said he got excited on jobs and they hated that. They said that he was a danger to patients. But I thought the real problem was that he was a good old boy from the South, which pissed everyone off in Harlem. Basically, they thought he didn’t belong. In those first days I’d heard them all talking about Phelps, and I heard Marmol, his easygoing partner, sticking up for him. But slowly Marmol had fallen silent, looked away, shrugged, and said, “Do what you want.” So now LaFontaine had stuck a transfer form in Phelps’s mailbox and everyone was hanging around, arguing about whether it was the right thing, waiting for Phelps to show up and to see how he’d react.

  LaFontaine saw me looking at the form, and said, “You want us to give you one, too, Coroner? Get away from there.You’ll ruin the surprise.” Then to Rutkovsky, “We had an MVA on the Triboro. Phelps was just wandering around, not doing shit, kept saying, ‘Head like a crushed melon.’ Not even helpin’ with the patients.”

  “You could be cool about it,” Verdis said.

  Verdis was a lanky, middle-aged black guy, the nicest guy at the station. He never criticized anyone and always went around and shook each person’s hand in the room when he walked in. He hated when rookies got hazed and he looked like he might get up and take the form from the mailbox, but LaFontaine shouted, “Not my fucking fault he’s freakin’. Leave the fucking form!”

  Verdis sat back down.

  Through all this a bookish medic named Hatsuru sat in the corner reading a biochemistry textbook, pretending not to notice. That’s what Hatsuru always did—read a textbook, kept to himself, and pretended not to be involved with anything that went on at the station, but he was always watching. You knew he took it all in.

  “He’ll tough it out,” Rivett was saying to LaFontaine.

  “Twenty bucks,” LaFontaine said.

  Rivett and LaFontaine slapped hands just as Phelps walked in, glassy-eyed, dazed. There were bloodstains all up and down the front of his uniform.

  “We just had this job,” he muttered, not really to anyone. “Four-year-old kid. Ejected from the car. Run over on the Triboro. Head like a crushed melon.”

  LaFontaine grinned at Rutkovsky, as if to say, What’d I tell you?

  “You could see his brains seeping out. Just like a crushed melon.”

  Phelps noticed the form in his mail slot. He walked over. He snatched the form, read it, then crumpled it and threw it on the floor. No one said anything. Phelps looked around the room, at Rivett, at Verdis, at Marmol, at Rutkovsky, at LaFontaine, at Hatsuru. They were all looking back at him silently. Finally, Phelps turned to me.

  “What’re you looking at, rookie?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “His name’s The Coroner,” LaFontaine said, and everyone burst out laughing, except Phelps, who turned and walked out. Verdis started after Phelps, but LaFontaine said, “Gimme a break, Verdis. What’re you, his mother? Let’ im work it out himself.” Then, to me, “Which way’s he headed, Coroner?”

  “To the parking lot,” I said.

  Rutkovsky hadn’t said a word. He’d just stood at the door, smoking silently, pretending not to care what happened. But a moment after Phelps walked off Rutkovsky leaned off the door frame and walked after him. Rivett followed Rutkovsky. I walked out, too. The three of us, Rutkovsky, Rivett, and I, all went on toward the parking lot where we saw Phelps arriving at his car.

  From about fifty yards away I saw Phelps tear the door open, then slam it shut. I saw him kick the side of the car and put his head on the door, covering his eyes. I realized the sunroof of the car had been smashed in with a brick and there was glass everywhere and I saw that there was something propped up in the driver’s seat. I stepped closer. It was a dead dog. LaFontaine had used some sort of wire to attach the paws to the steering wheel so it was like the dog was driving the car. There were maggots all over the front seat. Phelps just stood there with his head on the car. He’d come up from Tennessee to be a medic in the city. They’d sent him to Harlem, the station for fuckups and green rookies. And now he’d gotten the Harlem blackball—a maggot-covered dead dog propped in his driver’s seat. I could see his back shaking. He couldn’t stop. It went on for ten minutes. It was a nice night for early spring, almost fifty degrees. Two kids in T-shirts were flying paper airplanes from the third story of a rundown brownstone, the white airplanes, one after the other, slowly spiraling down in the dim light. Phelps finally stopped bawling. He wiped between his eyes with his thumb and forefinger and turned back toward the station, walking in long strides, head down. He went right by us without turning his head. Rivett looked at his back, then at me. He grinned.

  “Pay attention, Coroner. You’re next.”

  I could just imagine Clara’s reaction if I not only fucked up my MCATs but also couldn’t keep my job at EMS.

  “Not happening,” I said, trying to sound confident. “I’m not transferring.”

  Rivett turned to Rutkovsky.

  “What do you think, Rut?”

  “We’ll see,” he said. Then, as if he wanted to change the subject. “Come on.”

  We all went back to the station, and by the time we arrived Phelps had signed the form, left it on Rivett’s desk, and walked out the back door. LaFontaine sat on the couch with his feet propped up, arms crossed, pleased with himself. He saw it as culling the herd, a necessary selection process. Rivett crumpled a twenty-dollar bill and tossed it at LaFontaine.

  “Where’d you get that fucking dog?” he said.

  Before delivery the baby drops to the lateral part of the uterus, sometimes in the breech position with the feet up near the head; other times a leg is foremost or even an arm, but the most common position is head downward, face to the back, crown pressed firmly against the pelvis. Two or three weeks or even a month may pass with the baby in this position. Forthewoman’s body this is a period of preparation, a gathering of forces before the first contractions begin and the baby is pushed downward through the pelvis, into the birthing canal, and out into the world.

  The softball fields on the great lawn, a day of alternating sun and clouds. A duffed ball went foul and I retrieved it in pine trees. Cool back there among the pines. The sound of wind in needles. I tossed the ball back to the field, then wandered to a white pine and sat against the trunk and waved to the others. I lay back, using my mitt as a pillow. The rocking, wavering branches overhead, the clouds going by, the sun looking bright and the shadows seeming very dark and solid. A silhouette of Clara at second base wearing her Northwestern hat, hands on her knees, the only person out there from the med student softball team taking it at all seriously. That was Clara—she even took softball seriously. Twenty minutes passed and then Clara jogged over to where I lay against the trunk. She tossed her mitt in the needles and we didn’t say anything at first and after a while she said, “You remember Callahan, our chemistry teacher. What�
��d he think of you first semester?”

  “He thought I’d fail. He told me that later.”

  “And what’d you get?”

  “An A.”

  “Right. You got an A. But in that first semester he gave you a hard time. Tried to get you to drop the class. Why’d he do that, Ollie?”

  “Because he was an asshole.”

  “Because he thought you weren’t paying attention. Because you get that dreamy look. Because you’re a nice guy—you’re too nice—and he thought that meant you weren’t tough. Our grades weren’t that different. Why did I get into medical school?”

  “Because you got higher MCATs. And you never fail, Clara.”

  She gave me a look.

  “I got in because at the interview I looked the guy in the eye. I told him I wasn’t quitting. That I would be a doctor no matter what. You were nervous. You told me you kept looking down. You didn’t inspire confidence.”

  “Well, if I didn’t before, I definitely don’t now.”

  She took a deep breath and leaned back on her elbows.

  “You’re going to be a good doctor, Ollie. Way better than most of these guys out here. Probably better than me. But right now what you could be, what you will be ... that doesn’t mean shit. You’ll have to survive up there. You’ll have to be accepted by the other medics.You’ll have to convince them you can survive.”

  “How?”

  “Make them think you’re one of them,” she said.

  Rutkovsky, LaFontaine,Verdis, and I heard the shouting out on the street and we all walked out and turned the corner at Lenox to see a ten-year-old boy with blood dripping down his right hand weaving down the sidewalk, leaving a trail. A rottweiler padded behind the kid, snapping at pedestrians. I stood back, not wanting to get too close. I’d been bitten as a kid. I hated big dogs. I was always afraid of them.