Black Flies

by Shannon Burke

Rivett shrugged and motioned over the beans with the fork.

  “I shouldn’t let you, but you know the deal.We need medics.” He held keys out. I reached for them. He held them away a moment, eyeing me closely. “Cross,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t be doin anything stupid.”

  “I’m not. Other than coming back to work.”

  That made him laugh.

  “Just gimme the keys,” I said. “I can’t sit around the apartment. I want to work.”

  He held the keys back out. I took them and walked out to my unit.

  A jostling, simmering group of twenty or thirty bystanders grudgingly stepped aside to reveal a teenager sprawled on the pavement, thick blood coming from his head and nose and bubbling from his mouth. He wasn’t moving. Just breathing deeply and very slowly. A guy in the crowd yelled, “Ten fucking minutes it took em to get here!”

  “We just got out of the hospital,” I said. “There aren’t enough ambulances. That’s why it took us so long.”

  “Don’t be talking to me. Do your job, motherfucker.”

  My mind went blank. “Don’t call me a motherfucker!” I said and shoved the guy. He almost fell, then started for me, but Verdis got in between us.

  “Come on, Cross,” he said. “Jesus. Treat the patient.”

  Verdis turned to the guy I’d shoved.

  “Get back. He’s treating the patient. Stay back!”

  “Doesn’t look like he’s doing shit,” the guy said.

  I turned and bent to the shot kid and started to treat. I put a cervical collar around the kid’s neck, an oral airway in his mouth. I gave two breaths with the BVM. I could see blood pulsing from the hole behind his ear. I felt for a pulse. A faint, quick, thready beat. I cut off the kid’s shirt. I saw another gunshot wound in the kid’s elbow. It was hardly bleeding. He had no blood pressure. Verdis went away and came back wheeling the stretcher. He threw a longboard next to the kid. It clattered on the pavement. I gave two more breaths. I lined up the board. I took the kid’s head and Verdis got his torso and we rolled him to the side and slid the board under him and rolled him on the board. I gave two more breaths. All the time I could hear the crowd pressing in all around, murmuring to each other, saying how long it took us to get there, saying how we didn’t give a fuck. There was the sound of sirens in the distance.Another ambulance screeched up. Some of the crowd eased away. Others shouted. “Hurry up! Why don’t you hurry? They’re still fucking here!”

  “We’re doing our job!” I shouted. “Trying to save his fucking life! What’re you fucking doing?”

  “Easy,” Verdis whispered. “Forget them.”

  We lifted the kid onto the stretcher. I gave another breath.

  “Look how slow he’s going,” someone said behind me and I was pushed. I turned, but the kid who’d pushed me darted away. I almost went after him, but then I saw LaFontaine coming, waving his radio like a weapon.

  “Get the fuck back! I’ll kick your fucking ass!” he was shouting.

  “That kid pushed me,” I shouted, pointing the kid out in the crowd.

  Pastori walked up with his baton. The crowd reared. The kid, standing at a distance, gave the finger and ran.

  “Let’s go,” Verdis said.

  We lifted the guy into the ambulance. Verdis tossed his keys to Pastori’s partner, then jumped up and gave the kid two more breaths. I started to step up. A guy with a high-pitched voice, a skinny neck, and a protruding Adam’s apple gripped my shoulder and said, “That’s my cousin. I wanna ride with.”

  “Go up front,” I said.

  “I wanna go in the back with him.”

  “Not with a critical patient. You have to ride up front.”

  I tried to step up.

  “Please. He’s my cousin,” he said, and gripped my arm.

  I pushed his hand away. He held his hands up as if to say, Don’t go so crazy. I pushed him back harder so he fell in the crowd.

  “Get away! Get the fuck away!” I screamed.

  Everyone looked surprised, even LaFontaine. I jumped into the ambulance and slammed the door. Verdis banged the roof.

  “Let’s go!” he yelled up front.

  The ambulance lurched into gear. Out the back window I saw Pastori grab the cousin by the shirtfront, pull him up, throw him down, and bend to him with a cocked fist. Other cops raced in with batons raised.

  “Fucking asshole tried to grab me!” I screamed.

  “The patient,” Verdis said. “Forget all that. Jesus, Cross. Treat the patient.”

  I turned to the dying kid and cut off the rest of his clothes.

  “Hey, Cross. Get over here,” LaFontaine called. It was past midnight, that same night, and LaFontaine and Pastori were standing in the parking lot where they hung out every night after work. LaFontaine held a bottle.

  “Saw you kick some ass today,” Pastori said as I walked up.

  “I pushed the patient’s cousin. Big deal.”

  “You did more than that.You knocked him down,” LaFontaine said.

  “He was bugging me.”

  “Well, that’s a start.” LaFontaine said.

  “Sorry about Rut,” Pastori said gruffly. “He was a good medic.”

  “A great medic,” I said.

  “That’s right, he was,” LaFontaine said, then, wiping the top of his bottle with his shirtsleeve, he offered it to me. I drank. I drank again. I handed it back.

  “Rut gave everything for the neighborhood,” LaFontaine said. “And what’d he get for it? People saying he was a skel. That he was a baby-killer. Doesn’t that piss you off?”

  “Yeah. It does,” I said.

  LaFontaine considered me for a moment, then, catching Pastori’s eye, motioned to a kid in a baseball cap who was walking by outside the fence.

  “Let’s give Cross a free sample,” LaFontaine said to Pastori, who looked like he didn’t understand. LaFontaine motioned to the kid again. “Steerer for the crack dealers. It’s people like him who fucked Rutkovsky. Wore him down.”

  Pastori turned abruptly and yelled to the kid, holding up his badge. “Get the fuck over here! I know where you live.” The kid hesitated, then walked over warily. He stopped five feet away, but Pastori reached over, gripped a fistful of the kid’s hair and jerked him across the lot. He practically lifted the kid off the ground and held him in front of me.

  “Take a shot at him,” Pastori said.

  I looked at the kid. He had a brown afro with a few tight curls of blondish hair mixed in. Light skinned. Freckles and high cheekbones. A lanky, bony kid. He watched me with wide, scared eyes.

  “He didn’t do anything,” I said.

  “Your fucking partner’s dead,” Pastori said. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you? This is the skel tax. It’s what he gets for being out here. Hit him.”

  I cocked with a fist like I’d really hit him, then just slapped the kid, not hard.

  “What?” Pastori said. “That’s it?”

  “That’s a start,” LaFontaine said, putting a hand on Pastori’s shoulder. “Coming attractions. That’s enough.”

  Pastori didn’t think so. He seemed annoyed.

  “Your lucky day,” Pastori said to the kid. He heaved the kid up, then pushed him away roughly, saying, “Stay outta trouble.” The kid stumbled, grabbed his hat, and walked on quickly, glancing over his shoulder. LaFontaine looked like he’d say something encouraging to me, but then he noticed a slender shape at the back of the lot near a hole in the fence—a woman in a halter top, a short skirt, and knee-high boots. She stood, waiting, and LaFontaine’s whole manner changed instantly. He nodded to Pastori.

  “You comin’?”

  “No.”

  “How about you, Cross? Five dollars. Best in the city.”

  I shook my head, and LaFontaine shrugged and started off toward an abandoned brownstone. “I love my job,” I heard LaFontaine yell into the night. I turned to Pastori as if to say, Typical LaFontaine, but Pastori got an indignant look
and glowered at me.

  “What’re you lookin’ at?” he said.

  It went on like that for a few weeks. About half the nights I’d just lose it at some point, shouting at patients, and freaking out on the street. I started drinking after work. I’d get loaded in the parking lot with LaFontaine and Pastori and Rivett and Marmol and I kept drinking when I went back downtown. Twice I passed out in bars near Penn Station. I was pretty much wasted or sleeping all the time I wasn’t working. But most of the time I was working. I put in over eighty hours a week that month after Rutkovsky’s death. I worked with Verdis during my regular tour, and with Marmol and LaFontaine during my extra tours. I found I liked working with LaFontaine the best. It was his apparent strength. His easy carefree nature. His fuck-you attitude. When I’d first started I’d thought of him as an abrasive goon, but after Rutkovsky died I was drawn to him. I liked the way nothing seemed to bother him, how he seemed to thrive on all the crazy shit that went on. He must have noticed I went out of my way to work with him. He never said anything about it, but I think he must have been pleased. I think he thought of himself as my mentor.

  Two kids shot on 140th Street. It was six weeks after Rutkovsky’s funeral, and Verdis went on one ambulance with the EMTs and I joined LaFontaine on his ambulance, which was blocked in by fire trucks. Our patient was a twenty-year-old kid shot three times in the chest and once in the abdomen. We could see his belly bloating beneath the trauma dressing and hear the blood crackling in his lungs with each breath. When we cut his clothes off we found little bags of heroin in his waistband and a holster inside his shirt. LaFontaine said, “This motherfucker hit a girl, eight years old, in the fucking knee. She’ll never jump rope again. And we’re fucking treating him. Bullshit. We should be strangling him ...” LaFontaine reached over and turned one IV off and then the other. That was the only thing keeping the kid’s blood pressure up and as soon as he turned them off you could see the kid’s skin start to turn gray, get slick with sweat. LaFontaine gave me a quick, searching look, then jumped out and ran up front to drive. I looked down at the kid. I watched his lips moving silently. I looked at the scattered bags of heroin lying in puddles of blood on the floor. Fuck this kid, I thought. Whatever happens, who cares? It was a relief, really, to not care what happened to him, to even root for his death. It was much easier than feeling guilty if he died.

  I watched the kid’s skin turning grayer and grayer. I didn’t turn the lines back on until we pulled into the ER and I saw Verdis and Marmol waiting in the ER bay. I knew they’d see the stopped lines. So I turned them back on. LaFontaine jumped out and when he saw the lines flowing again he thought I’d done it to save the kid, and he said, “Way to go, Cross.You’re a lifesaver. Now he can go on to kill someone else.”

  Minutes later, as we cleaned up the back of the ambulance, LaFontaine said, “The thing about this job, Cross, is no one sees what we do. The inside of the ambulance—that’s our kingdom. That’s where we rule. We can do what we want back there. We can give superior treatment or inferior treatment. And you gotta ask yourself, some skel fike that, does he deserve superior treatment?”

  I didn’t answer, but I knew what I thought.

  “It’s not wrong to see it clearly,” he went on. “Rutkovsky saw it in the end. And you’re starting to see it, too. Skels like that make this city unlivable. And we’re in a position to do something about it. People talk about Verdis being the good guy. I’m the real altruist. A kid like we just had, he’s a negative in this world.You have to ask yourself if you have the strength to do the right thing. To be even better than Rutkovsky was. To be one of the guys who make a real difference.”

  That was the way he put it. The guys who make a real difference.

  “One student asked me, ‘You talk about burnout, but what does that mean, what should I look for?’ I could have said, Depression, bursts of rage, a disconnect ... But really, the truth is, if we’re talking about your partner, someone you’re close to. You’ll know. You’ll see what’s happening with him. Just Look at him. You’ll know.”

  “Hey, Cross. Get over here.”

  It was Marmol calling from behind the station. He’d seen me walking around like a zombie for weeks. He’d heard I’d punched a bystander on 125th Street. I think he might have even seen me turn the lines back on as we pulled into the ER with the shot kid. Marmol stood near Verdis’s garden looking over a landscape of rubble, rusting fifty-five-gallon drums, and half-boarded-brownstones. He said, “You’ve had crazy trouble this fall. Don’t be making it worse by jumping on the ambulance with LaFontaine. The guy’s a fucking nut.”

  “He’s all right,” I said, and Marmol said, “No, he’s not. I worked with him for three years. I know what he’s like. He can be a good medic when he wants to be. And he might seem like he’s all right some of the time. But he’s not all right. There’s something totally fucked up with him. You know that yourself.”

  I didn’t say anything. Marmol studied me a moment.

  “There are two kinds of medics out here, Cross. The ones who want to help people. And that’s most of us. We might be a little weird and freaky, but we do our best. And then there are the few bad medics who like being around sick people. Who like the power it gives them, who get off on other people’s misfortune. Who hide behind some philosophical bullshit but are just fucked up individuals. LaFontaine’s like that.”

  I stood there. I was quiet.

  “You’re a good guy, Cross. We all see that. You came in here, Doogie Howser and all that shit, wanting to prove something to everyone else, wanting to treat every patient. And I get it. That’s who you are. That’s the real you. We were all like that at some point. Even LaFontaine. But you’ve had a hard year, and you can get on the wrong path pretty easily up here. I’ve seen it happen before. I’ve seen it happen with guys like you, from the suburbs, who’ve never really been tested. Look at LaFontaine. What do you think he was like when he first came out? Mister Lifesaver. That’s what he was like. He was just like you. But you start working with the wrong guy. You do a few things you regret. That’s going to change who you are.”

  “I know who I am.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Marmol said. “You can get lost up here. This may not be the life you wanted, but here you are, and you’re right on the edge of something. We all see it. Who you wanna be, Cross?”

  I didn’t answer. It pissed me off that he assumed he knew what was going on with me. It pissed me off that he tried to talk to me. I walked on into the station. I let the door slam shut.

  That night, at home, I went through my papers, my old tests, letters, photographs, notes I’d made about the job, a message on the answering machine from my parents that I’d never answered. I reached for the phone and thought of calling my parents, but so much had happened that I’d not told them about that it seemed too late to tell them anything at that point. I thought of calling Clara, but I knew that it was completely over with her. There was nothing she could say to me. The few friends I’d had in the city had drifted away. I sat there on the floor among the old scattered letters and photos and after about an hour I gathered them all up in my arms and brought them down to the trash. I thought it would make me feel like I’d made a clean break and could now make a fresh start. It didn’t. The apartment felt empty and foreign and sterile afterward, and I had an uneasy, hollow feeling inside.

  A day later, the first real cold spell of the year, twenty degrees out, and LaFontaine and I found a woman passed out in her car, track marks on her arms, a needle and syringe resting on the dashboard in front of her. She was slumped in the seat, her face frozen to the side window. LaFontaine pried her face from the glass and I heard a tearing sound and there was a piece of skin still stuck to the glass afterward. The woman didn’t even stir. She was totally out. The side of her face stayed flat afterward. LaFontaine tapped her frozen cheek with his finger and it thunked like wood: “Dumb fucking junkie bitch,” he said. “Fell asleep in her car and now we got her. To
o bad for her.”

  We loaded her on to the stretcher and when we got her in the ambulance LaFontaine studied me a moment, judging how I’d react, then said,“Watch this,” and lined up the biggest needles we had.The needles were way bigger than she needed. They were for trauma patients or doing an emergency crichothyrotomy. LaFontaine took the biggest needle, a number-ten gauge, and gouged it straight into her arm. “Oh, jeez,” he said. “I think I missed.” Thick blood oozed out. He went in again with the huge needle, straight down. “Fuck. I think I hit bone,” he said. “Well, you skel junkie, that’s what you get.This’ll teach you not to OD in my area.” He gouged again with the needle. I didn’t try to stop him. I just sat there watching.

  It went on like that all month. Every time I worked with LaFontaine he’d do some fucked-up thing to the unconscious or the helpless patients. It was like he wanted me to see and was waiting for me to join him. I didn’t join him, but I didn’t stop him, either. Truthfully, I didn’t really care. I thought I already felt completely vacant inside. Really, without knowing it, I was getting worse.

  My tour started at five, and so waiting for the train around four-thirty at Penn Station, I caught the beginning of the rush hour. To avoid the crowds I’d walk to the south end of the platform. From there you could look into the dark hole and see the lights of the express train coming up from 14th Street. Every day I’d stand and watch the train and on this day in February two and a half months after Rutkovsky had died, I stood at the edge of the train platform thinking about Rutkovsky and about jobs we’d had together and how he’d saved that asthmatic on our first week of work. I could see the cigarette butts and old soda cans and dark nameless sludge between the rails, the crowds jostling each other on the platform. I felt like I hated everyone around me, all those stupid people who never realized that we were only a mess of blood and tubes and shit and bile, who went on blindly with their idiotic lives. I decided it wouldn’t matter if I never saw any of them again. I heard the ruffle of paper and turned to see a guy in a suit fold his Times and then fold it again. A little girl in a red jacket with a hood stood at the edge of the platform, waved her hand to warn a rat near the rails, and was then pulled away. The two eyes of the train glowed silently, approaching. I could hear the soft rumble. I stepped to the edge of the platform and saw a dark pool between the rails dimpled with the sound of the train. The lights were closer now. My feet were on the wrong side of the yellow danger line. I could see the conductor in his little window. At first he thought I was some kid messing with him. He didn’t honk. And then, at the last minute, he did, the train horn blaring across the platform. I was stepping off the platform. The roar of the train bellowing. I swung my leg around just as the train passed. It whisked the edge of my jacket so a button fell off.