Black Flies

by Shannon Burke

  “Small caliber,” Rutkovsky murmured. Then, “Only one shot?”

  “I didn’t wait around for the second.”

  Rutkovsky and I both peered around the guy’s head. There was an exit wound coming directly from the guy’s right ear. You could see it perfectly—the entrance on the left and the exit on the right. It looked like the bullet must have gone through the center of his brain. Rutkovsky and I looked at each other.

  “So how you feel?” I asked the guy.

  “I have a headache,” he said.

  I looked at Rutkovsky, then turned back to the guy.

  “Normally I think our patients are complainers. But in your case, you say you got a headache.... Hey, I don’t blame you.”

  Rutkovsky burst out laughing, and later, in the ER, Rutkovsky told the other medics what I’d said. Normally I think our patients are complainers.... Marmol put an arm around my neck. LaFontaine slapped me on the shoulder and shook me around, grinning. “I knew I was starting to like you.” When I got back to the station that night I saw the grim reaper drawing was torn off my locker. It was never put back up.

  Dirty streets, rundown subway stops, overflowing trash cans, rats, vacant lots filled with rubble. That was Harlem in the early nineties. The most violent precincts in the city were the 32nd in West Harlem and the 34th in Washington Heights. That was exactly the area our unit covered and we were proud of this. It meant we were badasses, that we could handle anything. We were always understaffed so we learned how to do everything ourselves. We had out-of-date equipment that barely functioned, so we got really good at doing physical exams with just our hands, a flashlight, and a stethoscope. Half the time we were in abandoned, boarded-up buildings with no electricity or heat. The phrase war zone was used a lot. I got used to all of this. And, very quickly, without realizing it, my manner changed. I smiled less. I talked in a louder, more authoritative voice. I became accustomed to giving orders to the techs and the firemen and the cops. Every few weeks we’d save someone’s life, be talking casually with someone who would have been dead if we had not done some particular thing, in a particular way, and I was proud of this, though I never admitted it to the other medics. To tell any story about how you actually helped someone was considered bad form. We talked about the gruesome, darkly comic events, about how we mistreated or misdiagnosed, and just the endless display of fucked-up shit the city served up to us on a daily basis—a teenager giving birth in a hallway, a guy lighting himself on fire and jumping out a window, dozens of rotting bodies in various stages of decay. I’d grown up in the suburbs of Chicago. I’d gone to a swanky, expensive, private university. I was twenty-three years old and I was supposed to have been in medical school. That had been my plan. But I’d gotten a few too many wrong answers on my MCATs, a blown chemistry test my junior year in college, and suddenly I wasn’t in med school but on the streets of Harlem. And fuck it. I was proud to be a Harlem medic. I was forced to act boldly, decisively, to make quick decisions that had real consequences. And I was getting better at it. I knew I was. All through that spring it was like a part of me I never knew existed was awakening. I’d never felt more clearheaded or self-assured or engrossed in anything. I’d never felt more alive.

  “Nan,” Rutkovsky murmured. “That’s Nancy.”

  Early May, a warm day of blue sky and white clouds and a crisp breeze. Rutkovsky and I were walking toward the lot when a lanky, athletic woman stepped over and put her foot on the back grate of our ambulance. She had dark hair that fell around her shoulders, arching eyebrows, a thin, sharp-looking mouth, and a nervous, jittery way of moving. By the lighter strip of skin on her left wrist I could tell she’d been out in the sun recently in someplace other than New York. I had no idea who she was, but I thought she was pretty. Rutkovsky walked past her without saying a word and she spoke to his back as he lifted his drug bag into the side compartment.

  “You got it?” she asked.

  Rutkovsky ignored her.

  “You have it, don’t you?” she said.

  Rutkovsky said nothing, but after he adjusted the position of his bag he took a folded, paper-clipped wad of bills from his breast pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it. He looked across the street at a blue Ford station wagon with Jersey plates parked up on the sidewalk.

  “Where’s Sylvia?” Rutkovsky asked.

  “I sent her inside. I didn’t want you seeing her unless you paid the money.”

  Rutkovsky took a deep breath. He didn’t say anything. He turned abruptly and walked off to the hospital while this woman, Nancy, counted the bills, then folded them again and put them in her pocket. She looked up at me.

  “So, you’re the new partner?”

  “Yep. I’m Cross.”

  My name made her smile. It was good-natured.

  “I’m the fourth wife,” she said. “The mother of his daughter.”

  “How many wives has he had?”

  “Four,” she said.

  She could see this was new information to me. Four wives!

  “He didn’t tell you,” she said matter-of-factly. “Doesn’t surprise me. Gene doesn’t tell anyone anything. If he talks, you might see a flaw,” she added sarcastically. She glanced over her shoulder. Rutkovsky had gone into the ER waiting room. “We’ve been separated six months. Of course he didn’t tell you that, either. But you must have seen his piece-of-shit studio?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We have a house in Sommerville. That’s where he lived before. He’s been thinking he’ll come back. He won’t. I just went to Miami with my boyfriend. Gene’s been freaking out about it. Like he has any say in what I do. Did he tell you that?”

  “Uhm. No.”

  “Of course not. He never tells anyone anything. Never opens his yap.”

  She saw my eyes drift over her shoulder. Rutkovsky was coming back.

  “He loves his daughter, though. I’ll give him that,” she said.

  Rutkovsky was carrying a six-year-old girl on his shoulders. She wore a pink summer dress with a blue fringe. The girl bounced the heels of her little black shoes on Rutkovsky’s chest. Rutkovsky was smiling. I realized I’d never seen him smile like that, with his mouth open. He looked like a different person. He looked happy.

  “Meet my partner,” Rutkovsky said, and his daughter reached down and shook my hand with her little hand.

  “You’re the rookie,” she said, which made us all laugh.

  “Lifesaver,” I said, and that made them laugh louder.

  “I told you,” Rutkovsky said to Nancy. “She hears everything.”

  Rutkovsky, his ex-wife, and his daughter went off to the station wagon, and though she’d just been bad-mouthing him a minute before, Nancy stood close to him, put a hand on his arm, and looked at him steadily, keeping herself from smiling by making sarcastic, derogatory comments. All three of them stood there talking for at least fifteen minutes. Then Rutkovsky took a kite out of the back of the station wagon and set it on the hood. His daughter sat up next to him as he threaded the string through the eyelet, as he tied it off. It was a windy day, and he let the kite fly up right there among the garbage and dirty bricks and abandoned buildings of 136th Street. I remember how Rutkovsky passed the kite to his daughter. I remember how he steadied her hand, how they held it together, and how his ex-wife watched them, half affectionate, half suspicious.

  After Nancy drove off, Rutkovsky wandered back to the ambulance and got inside and didn’t say anything about who Nancy was or why she came or what was going on with them. And though I wanted to ask, to say I knew they’d split up, that she had a new boyfriend, I didn’t say anything and I was right not to. Rutkovsky never wanted any of us to know what was going on with him. He was like a lot of guys at the station, a lot of the guys I met in EMS, and probably like me, too, or how I became, anyway. He could face any disaster calmly, but he couldn’t stand someone thinking there was anything wrong with him. Like Nancy said, he couldn’t stand anyone thinking he had a flaw.

 
“Aw, man, shut that,” Marmol said.

  “I can smell him from here,” LaFontaine said.

  Marmol, LaFontaine, Rutkovsky, and I were standing on the landing of a rundown brownstone. A few black flies had spiraled out from the open door and now buzzed lazily against the hallway windows.

  “So, who wants to make sure he’s dead?” Marmol asked.

  “The guy with the least seniority always does it,” LaFontaine said.

  “So, which one of us is that?” I said, and they all laughed. “I don’t care,” I said. “I want to go. I want to see it.”

  “I can’t believe it,” LaFontaine said. “This guy comes creeping in here those first weeks. Mister MCAT book. Now look at him. He wants to go in. He wants to see it.You’re a trip, Cross.”

  “Thanks, Laf. That means a lot coming from you.”

  Everyone burst out laughing. I reached for the door.

  “Hang on, cowboy,” LaFontaine said.

  He opened a bottle of Vicks and I wiped ointment under my nose, then put a mask over that. I put my hand on the knob again, and Marmol said, “Make sure he’s dead.”

  I opened the door. Everyone groaned, but I couldn’t smell a thing except the Vicks. I stepped into a long, wood-floored hallway. Marmol kicked the door shut behind me and it was suddenly dim in there, shadowy, quiet. At the end of the hallway I could see yellowed light through dirty windows and frayed curtains. I stepped down the hallway past family photos, past a towel in the doorway of the bathroom, past a coffee cup left out. I reached the bedroom door. I pushed it open to see an obese naked man sprawled out on the bed. He’d been dead a long time and was discolored, bloated, rotting. At first I thought I was having trouble focusing until I realized there was a mass of gray maggots over him. His body seemed to breathe as the maggots coursed in and out of the creases where the chest had cracked. Putrid brown juice seeped from his mouth and nose and ears. His eyes bulged wide and were yellowed and soft. Porno magazines were scattered across the bed and there were little yellowish worms squirming across the magazine covers. A cartoon flickered monotonously in the corner. There were cockroaches climbing over the dead guy’s stomach, his genitals, over his face, and in his mouth. There were hundreds of black flies crawling on the walls and on the windows and buzzing lazily around his face and chest and legs. Faintly, I could hear LaFontaine calling, “What’re you doin, Cross? You save him yet?” I looked for a long time—at the porno magazines, the rotting food, the flickering tv, the bulging head, the cockroaches, the maggots and flies. The excited, joking feeling drained away and was replaced with something nervous, ugly, jittery. I just stood there, looking at the guy, at his room, taking it all in.

  Newborns are purple when they come out and are said to “pink up” once they start breathing on their own. This pinking up can take as long as five minutes. If the newborn does not pink up it needs oxygen, suctioning, or a tube down the throat. These difficult babies are called blue or dusky. One new mother, after giving birth, in the haze of sedation, heard the nurses and doctors crying, “He’s dusky! He’s blue! He’s dusky! He’s blue!” and afterward, remembering this moment, and misunderstanding their urgent calls, named the baby Dusty-Blue Wilson.

  A mild dusk in mid-May, the first job of the night, and a well-dressed, nasal-voiced woman stood in front of a shut glass door at the back of a living room.

  “Does he have a weapon? A gun? A knife? A rope?”

  “I tried to check,” the woman said. She was the guy’s mother. “Soon as I opened the door he started screaming. Saying he’d do something. To himself. So I just left him in there and called you.”

  The double doors were flimsy, mostly glass. I could see they didn’t even lock.

  “What’s his name?” I asked, and the guy’s mother said, “Henry.” I started for the door. His mother said, “But he won’t talk to you.”

  “I’ll just peek in.”

  Rutkovsky raised his shoulders. He looked at LaFontaine, then back at me.

  “Doesn’t sound medical, Cross. I’d wait for PD.”

  “He wants to be a hero,” LaFontaine said to Rutkovsky.

  “So what? So do I,” Rutkovsky said.

  That made LaFontaine laugh.

  I started for the door. Rutkovsky and LaFontaine shrugged and followed me in. The glass door opened inward to reveal a small room with a wooden bed to the left, a bookshelf to the right, and a desk in front. A skinny man of thirty stood there in his boxer shorts and socks, tapping the ends of his fingers together, looking at the ceiling. There was a handgun on the little wooden desk. As I came in he reached for the gun. LaFontaine ducked behind me, pushing me forward, but Rutkovsky stepped up just as the guy gripped the gun. He raised the gun and Rutkovsky swung with an open hand and broke the guy’s nose. I heard the ugly crunch of bones. The gun went flying and slid beneath a dresser. LaFontaine dove for the gun. Rutkovsky whacked the guy’s head against the floor, gripped his hair, got an arm crooked around his neck, and lifted him up from behind so his toes were off the floor. The police rushed in, including Pastori, who grabbed the guy from Rutkovsky, threw him back down, and pushed his face into the floor, whacking the guy’s head over and over, while his mother stood above her son, and in an airy tone, said, “That’s what you get, Henry, that’s what you get.”

  Ten minutes later we were all standing at the back of the ambulance.

  “I know what kind of place you grew up in,” LaFontaine said to me. “Trees. Grass. Open space. Good schools. No crime. Among civilized people. You can do that sort of thing out there. Walk into a room where the guy has a gun. Try to be the good guy. Try to be the hero. But not here. These people are animals. Give em a chance and they’ll tear your head off.”

  Rutkovsky rolled his eyes, but didn’t contradict him. He said, “You can’t walk into a place where they say a guy might have a weapon, like you’re immune because you’re there to help. Even Verdis wouldn’t do that.”

  “And you don’t wanna be acting like Verdis,” LaFontaine said.

  “You can’t just be walking into any room.You gotta pay attention,” Rutkovsky said, though he didn’t need to. I’d just had a gun pointed at me. I wasn’t going to forget that. “If someone has a gun, either get the fuck out. Or confront the guy. Don’t stand there.”

  “Unless you’re standing in front of me,” LaFontaine said.

  The cop Pastori was listening with his arms crossed.

  “Lucky you’re with Rut,” Pastori said. “If you were with me, I’d’ve let him shoot you. Teach you a lesson.”

  I looked up, smiling. He didn’t smile back.

  Thick black mustache, balding, buck teeth that rested on his lower lip, paunchy, with a loud, flat voice and aggressive demeanor, Pastori was a plainclothes cop from the 32nd Precinct who worked tour three, like us. We saw him on jobs all the time and sometimes his prisoners became our patients. Pastori had never liked me. He’d look me up and down and say, “How ya doin, Coroner? You kill anyone yet today?” With my MCAT book, my educated tone, something inherently withdrawing and shy in my demeanor, Pastori never thought I was one of the boys. He thought I was too hesitant for the job and he was always trying to show how unsuited I was for working as a city medic, particularly for working in Harlem. It grated on him that I was out there, that he had to see me, and that Rutkovsky accepted me as his partner.

  One afternoon a few days after the job with Henry the suicidal guy, Rutkovsky and I ran into Pastori at Charlie’s Southern Kitchen, a take-out restaurant on 152nd and Douglass. The three of us got our food and drove out to Jackie Robinson Park and were eating on a bench, the Styrofoam containers on our laps, when a lanky teenage kid hanging out across the street looked at the ambulance and the unmarked cop car parked near his stoop, glanced away, spit on the ground, and walked on. Pastori jumped up.

  “You see that? The kid spit at us.” Pastori held his badge up. He waved at the kid. “Hey! Hey you! Get over here!”

  The kid didn’t move at first. Pastori sta
rted across the street, waving his badge.

  “Get over here! Get the fuck over here!”

  The kid glanced up at a window, as if to catch the attention of someone up there, then turned and started across the street slowly, taking his time. Pastori’s partner was in the unmarked car, listening to the Division Six radio, and reading the paper. He saw what was going on and went back to the paper. Whatever happened, he didn’t want anything to do with it. He held the paper over his eyes so he couldn’t see anything.

  The kid crossed the street with a sullen reluctance. He was slender, in his late teens, wearing one of those multicolored knit berets. He had a scraggly beard and long, thin, delicate-looking hands. He stopped five or six feet away from Pastori, who glanced back at us, as if to say, Watch this. He turned to the kid.

  “You spit at us.”

  “I didn’t do nothin’.”

  “Am I wrong, guys? This kid spit at us.”

  “Yeah, right in our face,” I said.

  Pastori gave me a hard look. Rutkovsky went on eating.

  “Spit on the ground,” the kid said almost inaudibly.

  “You looked at us and you spit. Looked. Spit. That’s disrespect.”

  The kid’s eyes dropped to Pastori’s hands, which had closed into fists. Behind him, another guy was coming out of the brownstone. He was a little older than the kid. Maybe nineteen or twenty. His hair was cut short and he was wearing a polo shirt and khakis. He looked like some college student, but when he smiled we saw that all his teeth were silver-plated. Pastori nodded to Silver Teeth and said to us, “His boss.”

  Silver Teeth walked up and looked at the kid with the beret, then said to Pastori. “What’s up?”

  He had a really deep voice.

  “Your boy disrespected us is the problem,” Pastori said. “We’re eating our dinner. Trying to have a moment of peace. And he spits at us.”