“My name’s Ollie Cross.”
“Who?”
“Ollie Cross. I’m a paramedic. Get your grandmother.”
The door didn’t open. The sound of footsteps went away. A minute later slower footsteps returned.
“Who is it?”
“I’m a paramedic. I’m from the hospital.”
“We didn’t call for no ambulance.”
“It’s about the baby. Open up.”
A pause, and then the door cracked. A woman, fifty years old, stood in the doorway. Hair frizzed, copper-colored at the ends. She wore a white buttoned shirt, blue slacks, and bifocals hung from her neck by a wood bead cord.
“There a problem with the baby?”
“No. I was one of the medics on the scene when he was born.”
“You from Lenox Hill?” she asked.
“No. I’m from the city.”
“The first ambulance crew?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
With grim resentment, she let the door swing wide.
It was a narrow apartment and we walked down a long hallway toward light. The baby was in the kitchen in a low crib with low wood railings beneath windows shaded with white drapes. There was a white stove with black handles beneath cabinets, and a green refrigerator with magnets held a child’s pictures. A little girl with braided hair peered from around the corner, slipping away as I looked up. The baby lay on his back, much bigger than when I’d last seen him. Eyes shut, arms flexed, hands open. I stood over the crib, feeling awkward.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Lenox,” the grandmother said.
“He looks healthy.”
“He is healthy,” the grandmother said pointedly. “And’ll stay that way, too, God willing.”
“You know the story?”
“You left him to die on the bare floor. Cause he’s black.”
“It wasn’t because of that.”
“Don’t you lie.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I wanted to lie.”
“Maybe you wanted to bust in here and finish him off.”
“I wanted to come and tell you about it.”
She made a puffing noise, a derisive sound.
“I know everything ’bout it already. You tried to smother him. You and your partner. Where’s the other one? I heard there were two. He didn’t wanna come and see the bad thing he’d almost done?”
“No. He’s dead. He killed himself.”
I tried to say this straightforwardly. I didn’t go there for pity. But it was hard to say it without emotion. The grandmother rolled her lips and looked annoyed and tired.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?”
I sat along the window, the Harlem River and the South Bronx spread out to the east, and told her what had happened, at first briefly, then, when she seemed to really want to hear, I went on in as much detail as possible. I told her how I’d wanted to be a doctor, how I’d requested Harlem, how I’d gone up there to try to do good things for people who needed it most. I told her how a year before I’d been eager, ambitious, altruistic, but also careless and weak-willed. I told her how I worked all the time, seeing one horrible thing after another, sometimes being blamed for them, and how that changed me. I told her how the accumulation of each thing caused a deterioration inside. I told her how I had problems with Clara, how I started to think she couldn’t understand, and then, gradually, I felt no one could. I told her how I closed myself off, how Rutkovsky did and why, and how, at the worst possible moment for both me and for him, we found her daughter cutting the umbilical cord with a crack pipe. I told her how I felt a wave of uneasiness when I saw the baby’s face covered, but let that uneasiness pass. I told her what happened to Rutkovsky afterward. I told her what happened to me. I told her I had intended to be a good person, do good things, and had done the opposite. I told her that a year before I couldn’t even comprehend how an action like that was possible, but that it had happened, and that the only way I could describe it was to say that I thought that there was an evil in the world that enveloped and confused the exact people who wanted to do the most good, and that the desire to do good, to be altruistic, was maybe a kind of arrogance, and that it left you vulnerable to the darkest thoughts and impulses. I told her that I was not as strong or as good a person as I’d hoped, but that the only thing I could do now was to tell what had happened honestly, bluntly, and to try to be better in the future.
The whole thing seemed to make her tired; it was a hollow victory. When I finished talking she said, “And now you want forgiveness?”
“I wanted to tell you what happened, so you didn’t misunderstand, think it was something else. I wanted to see if it would help in some way.”
She was quiet a long time. Then she called her granddaughter into the room.
“I want you to meet this man. He drives an ambulance. Maybe someday he’ll come back here to help us.”
I understood that she was letting me go without humiliating me. That was about as much as she could give me. The little girl shook my hand, then stepped away, hiding behind her grandmother—and I started for the door.
A minute later I was hurrying down 147th Street. The buildings seemed set back with softer edges. A warm breeze blew off the Harlem River.
That was mid-March. LaFontaine came back a few days later. He seemed to recognize that there’d been a change in me since I’d last seen him. I had a worse temper. I was more definitive in my opinions. The edges in my personality had sharpened and I wasn’t as easy to be around. I would say most people liked me less after this transition. But I think LaFontaine thought this change meant I’d come around to his way of thinking. He never commented on this change. He never said much at all other than make jokes and good-natured jibes. But I could tell that he noticed the change. He treated me like a peer now. He kept his mouth shut, watched me, and bided his time.
A week later Verdis had the day off and I was working with LaFontaine when we found a skinny Haitian guy with a thin black beard lying in the sloping no-man’s-land above the East River Parkway. It was a cold day, around freezing, and the guy was lying there with his jacket open, inert, pale, breathing two times a minute. A needle lay in the dirt nearby. LaFontaine bent to him, took the vitals, started an IV, and over his shoulder, said, “Get the scoop.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know how else we’ll carry him,” LaFontaine said with particular earnestness. “You get the scoop. I’ll stay and treat.”
I started back up the hill for the ambulance, leaving LaFontaine alone with the patient. We were out in the middle of nowhere. There were rocks and trees all around. It was a hidden spot. We were lucky to have found the guy at all. There was nobody out there to see what LaFontaine did. I knew it would take me seven or eight minutes to get the stretcher and make it back. I thought how LaFontaine had asked me to go for the stretcher, like he wanted to be left alone. I hesitated, stood there breathing quietly in the dusk. Flakes of snow falling here and there. I thought about it. I turned back, slowly at first, then more quickly. I ran into the clearing to find the junkie still lying on the cold ground with his jacket open. He breathed once, very shallowly, then wasn’t breathing at all. LaFontaine, who was supposed to be treating him, was leaning against a rock smoking a cigarette. He stood when he saw me.
“What the fuck happened?”
“Why carry him when we can wake him up?” I said.
I gave the guy a few breaths with the BVM. Then I got the Narcan and put it through the IV In two minutes the guy woke up, thrashed about a bit, and started shaking violently. He tried to sit up, but LaFontaine put his muddy boot on the guy’s chest.
“You, my friend, are one lucky motherfucker,” he said.
I stepped up and pushed LaFontaine so his boot came off the guy’s chest. LaFontaine stepped back up. He started to put his boot back on the guy’s chest, but I stepped up, too. We were very close and for a moment LaFontaine was afraid. I saw it. He was afr
aid. He lowered his foot and stepped back and smiled, as if it were all a joke. “Lifesaver,” he said ironically. A minute later we were in the ambulance. I cranked the heat in the back. The guy was hypothermic. He was shaking uncontrollably. He was going through withdrawal at the same time. But he was alive.
In the ER I heard LaFontaine laughing with Pastori. “I’d have fucking left him, but Mother Teresa decided he ought to live to OD another day.”
I didn’t hear the rest.
If a newborn doesn’t breathe with stimulation, you suction the airway, then begin breathing for the child with a bag-valve mask, or if nothing is at hand, with your mouth. A few deep respirations should clear the lungs, shut the foramen ovale, and trigger the breathing impulse. Those first breaths from you to the newborn, are, in essence, the breath of life. It is a simple, but essential act. Everything else follows from that.
We clambered down the stairs as the water from the hoses hit the third floor and began pouring down in a dark stream. Flickering red and blue light filtered in through the high basement windows. It was May, two months after that day I’d worked with LaFontaine, a month after I’d heard I’d gotten into Stony Brook Medical School. I’d taken the MCATs again in early April. I sent my revised scores in immediately. Later in the month I got in off the waiting list. My first response was that I wasn’t ready and did not deserve to go and for a while I even considered not accepting, but by that day in early May as we splashed down the basement stairs with the water pouring down in a stream, I knew I’d go. I knew it was my last month as a medic.
Verdis and I could hear the hiss of the fire hoses above the roar of the fire. Verdis hurried on down a dark hallway, the beam of his flashlight darting. I took another passageway and went into the laundry room where I found a twelve-year-old girl lying in a pool of water, a sodden pile of laundry next to her. Impossibly pale skin, mouth open, eyes staring blankly in the dim, flickering light—she was dead. I shouted for Verdis, saying I’d found our patient, but with the hoses blasting he couldn’t hear me. I bent for the girl, then stopped. She was lying in water. I was pretty sure she’d been electrocuted. If I touched her I could be electrocuted, too. I knew that. I stood looking at her. I draped a wet shirt over her, letting an arm of the shirt touch her. I felt nothing, no pulse of current in my forearm or foot. I hesitated, then thought, Fuck it. I reached down and grabbed her. Nothing happened. The power had been turned off. I pulled the girl to a dry spot and called for Verdis again, but he did not answer. I set the flashlight on the floor, facing it up at the ceiling, reflecting light. I cut off her shirt and put the four monitor leads on her smooth gray skin and saw the green light of her heart bouncing and quivering crazily on the monitor. I charged the paddles. I put them to her thin, bare chest. I shocked. Her arms and legs flapped with the shock and then lay still. Her rhythm went flat. Then the green line began to quiver. I charged the paddles up again and held them to her chest. I shocked again. Her body contracted, arms flapped. On the monitor her rhythm went flat for an even longer time, then bounced up with a heartbeat. Then another. Then another. I felt for a pulse with one hand and with the other raised the flashlight and shone it in her face and saw something unbelievable, something I’d never seen before. With my one hand I felt a pulse in her neck—a pulse that quickened rapidly and grew stronger—and with the light on her I watched as her dead, gray face flushed over with life. There was a sudden heaving in her chest and a rattling sound in her throat. It was the most eerie, unnatural thing I’d ever witnessed. I watched death recede from her. Her chest heaved again and she started breathing. I pulled the tube kit out, but she gagged when I put the scope in her mouth. That meant she was responsive to pain and still had higher brain function. I watched her pupils contract, begin to react to light. I pinched her arm and she retracted. I called to Verdis again, and this time he came bounding in, splashing through the water. He bent to the girl, looked at the strip on the monitor, and said, “Fuckin’a, Cross, looks like you got your save.” A minute later we were in the back of the ambulance. The chief heard Verdis make the notification on the radio. He walked over to the ER and checked the girl himself, and after we’d brought her in, he found me near the back of the ambulance, cleaning up. He held his hand out, I thought to shake my hand, but when I reached out he grabbed me and put his arms around and shook me. He seemed as happy as if he’d done it himself. “Well, you’ll get your bar,” he said. “Good for you, Cross. You got your save.” Hatsuru was sitting in the driver’s seat of his ambulance, reading his textbook. He must have heard what was going on like he always heard everything. I thought he wouldn’t bother looking up, but as I passed he put a finger in the book, and said, “Good job, Cross,” and I held a hand up and walked on past him. I changed the oxygen tank and saved a copy of the EKG strip and fifteen minutes later I walked back into the ER and saw the girl sitting up in bed, looking at the IV in her arm.
“I hope you feel better,” I said.
“I feel fine now.”
I checked her vitals. I looked at her EKG. I watched her breathe. I saw she’d be OK. I turned and started away and she called me back.
“Are you the paramedic who found me?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Thanks for saving my life.”
I walked on quickly, passing the chief, who patted my back. I took a last look at the girl from across the Emergency Room, then walked on through the hallway and turned the corner and stood there against the wall, taking deep breaths, letting it settle inside. Then I went on back to the ambulance. I got ready for the next job.
The New York Daily News
May 28, 1994
Girl Rescued From Harlem Blaze
Harlem paramedics braved thick smoke, heavy flames, and possible electrocution to pluck a teenager from a burning building early yesterday.
Responding to pleasfrom the girl’s mother, paramedics Oliver Cross and Reginald Verdis broke through a back door of a burning building and plunged into the darkened basement where they found the victim.
The thirteen-year-old girl, whose name has not been released, was found unresponsive in a pool of water, having received an electrical shock when an improperly installed sprinkler system doused the laundry room, officials say.
Paramedics found the victim with no heartbeat.
“My partner found her,” said paramedic Verdis. “He put the pads on her, saw she was in ventricular fibrillation (rapid contractions of the heart), so he shocked her. That did the trick.”
The revived thirteen-year-old was taken to Harlem
Hospital, where she was listed in stable condition.
“I want to thank EMS, and thank God, many blessings,” said the girl’s mother.
Paramedic Cross, who is credited with the save, refused to be interviewed.
“Everyone in this class thinks they’re here to do good. Look around. Most of you will inadvertently kill someone in the next year. Some of you will be subtle murderers who neglect patients out of indifference and laziness. All of you will watch people die. It will be a hard thing to see, and it will teach you something about what’s inside yourself. And not everything will be good. Not all of it will be pleasant. But if you make it through this year you’ll come out with the skills and the opportunity to make a real difference in a few people’s lives. And that’s what it’s all about—doing a good thing for a few people. That’s about as much as you can hope for. That’s the essence of being a real paramedic.”
As I walked in the next day I saw LaFontaine hanging out in front of the station. He’d heard about the girl. He had the expected reaction.
“Hey, you got a save. About time, rookie. Get over here!”
At the same moment Verdis called to me from the back of the ambulance. I wavered between the two of them, then started toward Verdis. Behind me, I heard LaFontaine shout, “Yeah, keep walking, Mother Teresa.” I looked back to see him standing in the spot where he’d always be, a swaggering silhouette against the city squalor
, trying to cajole anyone who’d listen over to his side: tossing coins, blowing smoke, gesturing dismissively, shadowed by the station.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank Susan Falls for her early help and her early enthusiasm. I’d like to thank Jay Huber, Tom Garrigus, Steve Gaghan, Alex Kelly, Steve Sparks, Michael Knight, Chris Johnson, and Mike Billone for careful reads. Each gave suggestions that made the book better. I’d like to thank Mom, Dad, Mike, Ian, and Erin for encouraging me to go on when I’d lost my way with this story. I’d like to thank Dave Maher for reading it closely and critically in a way that only another paramedic could. I’d like to thank my agent David McCormick for persevering and Richard Nash my editor for his good nature and careful judgment. I’d like to thank my wife Amy for her irreplaceable editing and her steady optimism. And lastly, to all the medics at the old Station 18, I wish you well, particularly my partners Tony and Granger.
Copyright © 2008 by Shannon Burke.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burke, Shannon.
Black flies / by Shannon Burke.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-593-76254-4
Black Flies Page 16
