ONE

Dondi wiped blood from his arms as Paul Kelly smoked, impassive. “Bleeders,” Dondi muttered. “Christ, I fuckin’ hate ‘em.” Paul blew a smoke ring and said nothing, leaning on the back bumper of the rig as Dondi stripped off thin rubber surgical gloves and changed into a fresh shirt, his third of the night. The air was cold and clear, stars faintly visible through the backwash of urban illumination. They were parked butt-in to the ambulance bay of St. Anthony’s Medical Center, harsh glare of sodium vapor lamps casting sickly green shadows around them.

Tom and Joli were still inside, dragging ass under the guise of paperwork as they scoped the graveyard shift’s new booty count -- word was there was a new nurse on tour, a tight little Dominican named Liza, who could give rigor mortis a whole new meaning. If Paul was in a better mood, he’d be inclined to joke that the only sheets his two crewmates would ever share with her was the one she’d pull over their heads, should they ever even try.

Paul said nothing. The gloves went into the medical waste bin recessed into the rig’s inner wall. The discarded shirt was blotched and spattered, powder blue stained Rorsarch red courtesy of a multiple stab-wound off of the industrial crack-ho section of Elizabeth Street in Glendon.

“You know,” Dondi continued, “I don’t mind the hours, the stress, the bullshit, every damned thing. But this,” he pulled a fresh shirt out of his gear bag, his last. It was powder-blue, well-worn, with an embroidered patch emblazoned on the left sleeve and chest: GLENDON FIRE/RESCUE, in little red and gold letters. Dondi stashed the wadded ball of cloth in a baggie behind the driver’s seat and donned the clean shirt, then slipped on his dark blue nylon bomber, still bitching. “Man, Connie’s gonna shit,” he said. “Fuckin’ bleeders. They’re the worst.”

“What about floaters?” Paul spoke at last, blowing another blue ring of smoke and chilled air. His tone was soft, droll. “Last night you said floaters were the worst.”

“Them, too,” Dondi groused. “I swear to God, between the bleeders and the floaters, I don’t know what to tell ya. ‘Least he didn’t puke on me.” Dondi checked his arms for stray spillage; Paul glanced up off-handedly.

“You missed a spot,” he said.

“Where?” Dondi craned his neck, peering into the reflective surface of the wall. It was clean. “Very funny.” Dondi scrutinized his reflection, then pulled another pre-moistened antiseptic towelette from one of the recessed metal supply drawers and wiped himself down anyway. “Shit,” he grimaced, “Fucker probably gave me the AIDS.”

Paul shrugged as Dondi grunted and buttoned up. His grousing was as familiar as the claustrophobic confines of the wagon, a nightly ritual; mental kevlar, staving off emotional shrapnel. And gallows humor aside, Paul knew that it was a fair enough concern -- fully one-third of their street calls these days were HIV-positive, if not full-blown cases. Addicts, mostly – people who’d started out using a needle or a pipe, and ended merely used up, pinballing from lockup to detox to rehab and back again, their humanity evaporating into a greasy residue. But working fire/rescue was like that; you seldom saw the best people, or the ones you did at their best.

In Glendon these days, doubly so -- the blue-collar outlands west of the industrial wastebelt rimming the Big Apple were gradually sinking under a steadily rising tide of junkies, homeless, and third-generation working-class trash.

Paul thought back to this evening’s latest casualty: a lonely little thirty-seven year-old Russian immigrant named Eddie, who cruised the barren stretch of parking lots that ringed the Jersey transit station in the bottom-feeder section of downtown. Eddie made his rounds in a blue Suzuki Sidekick, offering rides and blowjobs to hapless commuters who failed to snag one of the smatterings of after-hours gypsy cabs that lurked at the base of the platform. He had even picked Paul up one sub-zero December night years ago, as Paul trudged home with an armload of Christmas presents for Julie and Kyra, over streets iced thick from storms until it lay like urethane. He’d mistaken Eddie for a gypsy cab, found out too late that Eddie had other destinations in mind. Eddie mumbled to his hopefuls with a thick, Slavic tongue and kicked-puppy eyes: "Eye-am lookeeng for sumvun." Paul had wished him luck and gotten off at the next corner. He’d seen him literally dozens of times since; a puttering sexual scavenger, slump-shouldered and leering, but harmless enough.

Thirty minutes ago they had found Eddie slumped in the driver’s seat, leaning against the horn, his little Japanese shitbox bleating out a cry for help into the late October air, his blood black and steaming on the dash and glass. Eddie had three stab wounds worth mentioning, including one perilously close to the carotid artery, which accounted for the shirt-destroying spray, and a half-dozen superficial lacerations of the face and hands. Defense wounds. Apparently, Eddie was still looking for love in all the wrong places.

Sadly, it was nothing new. There were a lot of psychos out there, and according to the cops Eddie’s was a squirrely little loon who thought he was Jesus; the pocket savior swore up and down that he was back from the dead, and he was pissed. Apparently, he didn’t much care for Eddie’s offer to eat of his flesh, either, and had expressed his righteous rage at his latest luckless supplicant with a steak knife. They’d probably sell the story rights, Paul thought, make it into a cheesy Z-grade slasher film. Paul could see the poster now -- INRI: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Morons.

Glendon PD might have the big J doing communion with Velveeta sandwiches and Thorazine-laced Kool-Aid up at Haverford by morning, but for the moment all Rescue could do was to bring Eddie in viable and hope for the best. Anything more was left to the wheels of justice, and the tender mercies of the greater New Jersey health care system. If God had anything to say on the matter, He kept it to Himself.

Oh, well. Eddie would live. Until next time, anyway.

Which was more than Paul could say for their prior run: a six-year old Hispanic girl, three inches to the left of DOA before they ever wheeled her through the ER’s big double doors. Father AWOL, mother strung out on whatever latest chemical enslavement aid was currently making the rounds on Hurley Street, near the piers, where the distant sprawl of Manhattan shimmered across the fetid Hudson.

Apparently she’d been a bad girl, spilled some bathwater one too many times today, or some other capital crime. And Momma’s latest live-in hump had decided that the best way to assert his parental proxy was by making her squat in a scalding tub and keeping her down by whacking her with a clothes hanger. Her baby brother got to watch, absorbing important life lessons on obedience at the ripe old age of two.

By the time Rescue rolled in, a heartbeat after the cops, boyfriend was cuffed and cursing. Momma stumbled home in the middle of the melee, and they busted her, too. But the girl was unconscious and adrift, a bruised and blistered rag doll. Multiple contusions and second degree burns covered three-quarters of her slight, spare body. As Social Services arrived her sibling just stared with eyes dark and dead, the nightmare forever burned into his impressionable brain. Outside, TV crews shuffled and craned for a better angle, hovering over the promise of slow news-night filler.

She seized up and arrested on the way in; Paul did everything he could, intubating her and hitting her up with as many cc’s. of epinephrine as he dared as Tom and Joli played backup and Dondi hit the siren and howled down the cramped boulevards, running red lights, racing death. But by the time they turned her over to the ER orderlies who wheeled her into trauma she’d already gone cyanotic, and the last Paul saw of her was a little blue-faced angel, arm flopping loose and limp from the edge of the cold metal cart, waving bye-bye. She didn’t make it.

Score: Russian perverts, one. Children, zero.

And it was only eleven-thirty.

Paul entered through the rear, hunching to miss the five-foot clearance of the wagon’s stainless steel interior, tossing the butt just before the doors slammed shut. The cigarette sparked and winked out on the macadam behind him, lost in the darkness. He wasn’t supposed to smoke on board, but at the moment he just didn’t give a damn.

So far, things were shaping up to be just another night in Jersey. They weren’t even supposed to deal with half the shit that had flown into their fans tonight -- they weren’t equipped for much beyond basic triage and stabilization. Big stuff was traditionally reserved for the ambos, the ambulance crews, but tonight had just been too goddamned busy.

To compound the festivities, it was unseasonably cold: bitter, biting and heartless. The kind of weather that froze vagrants in their sleep -- limbs curled and brittle, faces frosted with snot-cicles. Popular wisdom held that cold snaps were low on assaults but high on domestics, DUIs, and the homeless; anything below the freezing point tended to not excite the criminal element, but the resulting move into bars and bedrooms only brought the headaches home. And the homeless... well, the homeless were eternal.

Since coming on this morning they’d already responded to some two dozen calls, including six false alarms, two drunk driving crack-ups -- the latter with the driver pinned behind the steering column of his compacted LTD, a Jaws-of-Life endorsee if ever there was one -- a trash fire in an abandoned building, a John Doe floater fished out near the docks, and a heart attack.

The floater was a suicide, a jumper, maybe three days dead. There was no note, and by the time they fished him out there were no extremities or facial features, either. Rats. They bagged him and let the county coroner’s office do the rest. With luck, they’d I.D. him from dental records. If not, well... one more faceless stiff wasn’t going to make or break anybody.

The heart attack was a three hundred-pound retiree who blew a hose during an after-dinner argument with the wife. Rescue found him laid out on the kitchen tile, deep in the grip of a V-fib -- multiple points in the heart beating like a coronary conga line dancing out of synch and into oblivion. Paul and Dondi had moved with practiced economy, wasting no time as Tom and Joli brought the back board and straps. They shocked him twice and bagged him, performed CPR and hit him up with Lidocaine to stave off any premature ventricular contractions that might pitch him back into V-fib before he got his rhythm up. By the time they rolled into St. Anthony’s he was breathing regularly, good beat on the monitor, even bitching about his IVs. Score one more, for cranky old fat guys.

His wife was an irascible immigrant dumpling with a bad perm and ten-dollar housedress. She was blubbering but grateful as they left; apparently she hated her hubby enough to wish him dead but loved him too much to actually want him so. She blessed them profusely, which was both unexpected and appreciated. It was rare to be thanked, and it felt good.

But Paul was still creeped about the kid.

Dondi picked up on it as Paul squeezed into the shotgun seat and hunkered down beside him, one foot propped on the dash, eyes gazing out at the harsh-lit bay. They were a team-within-the-team, as different from Tom and Joli, or even each other, as two men could be. Dondi’s swarthy mass, smartass smile and wiry nest of oil-black hair was as much a genetic one-eighty from Paul’s lean frame and fair, fiery Irish good looks as his wisecracking demeanor was to Paul’s dry, brooding moodiness. Tommy DeAngelo and Joli Pelligrisi were younger, twenty-six and twenty-eight respectively, and both seemingly sprung from the same beefy, Italian-stallion gene pool: all cropped hair and barely-contained testosterone. When not on runs, they pumped iron in the station house basement until their seams burst.

But time and experience had fused them all into a symbiotic unit: seasoned professionals whose cumulative skills, knowledge, courage and expertise would easily have commanded twice the salary and three times the social standing were they working in any field where the collars were white and not sweat-stained blue. They were pals, and bros, and family, and they were tight.

Firefighters were like that. They were an odd breed: mythological anachronisms, archetypal unsung working-class heroes. They routinely went where no one in their right mind would go to do a job no one in their right mind would want to do, risking life and limb to protect a public that ignored as much as it relied upon them. Joe and Jane Civilian would vote down referendums for better equipment if it hiked their property taxes a dime, park in front of hydrants to buy milk or bitch when they pulled over to let a rig or an ambulance go screaming past, all because it inconvenienced them in some way, stole a dollar or a moment from their busy, busy lives. They complained when sirens woke them up at night or a two-alarm tangle made them go around the block, unless of course it was their block, their house, their life or loved ones facing the flames. They saw firemen as ciphers when they saw them at all, faceless functionaries in clunky gear and funny hats. They just didn’t get it.

But for men like Paul and his crew it was different; exactly the opposite, in fact. Wearing the shield was more than just a steady job with a pension at the end, more than simply a means of escaping the grueling monotony of factory work or the stultifying hive-mind of the corporate yuppie warrens. To be a firefighter was to live a life that was never boring. It was a chance to make a difference in an indifferent world. Being a firefighter mattered.

Paul and Dondi had grown up together, taken their department entrance exams together, graduated from the Academy together, and saved each other’s butts more times than either could count if they ever tried, which neither ever did. They loved and sometimes hated each other, as only the closest of friends could. But for all Dondi’s annoying personal habits, which were legion, he possessed one sterling trait that Paul valued above all others: he knew when to shut up.

This he now did, as they sat in the silent confines of the big red rolling meat wagon that was Rescue One. Outside, the managed panic of St. Anthony’s raged on, distant, oblivious. A muted voice squawked urgently over the intercom; heads and blue scrubs bobbed on the far side of the gritty safety glass, and were gone. Paul let out a long sigh, as the knot unbound inside him.

“I dunno,” Paul said at last. “I just hate it when it happens to the kids.”

Dondi nodded -- so that’s what the silent treatment was about. “At least we got the other one out,” he offered. It sank as fast as he said it. Dondi shrugged. “Anyway, Social Services got ‘im, and with any luck mom and her hump’ll do some serious time.”

“Great, three more wards of the state,” Paul replied. He gave a short husky huff that Dondi knew was Paul’s characteristic weight-of-the-world warm-up. “I mean, doesn’t it ever get to you that we follow these people practically from cradle to grave, mopping up after them? Jesus. It’s like this big dysfunctional machine, churning out assholes like snack chips. They ruin their lives, they ruin everyone else’s lives, and we get to clean up the mess.”

Paul stopped. Dondi watched, concerned; it was the longest speech he’d made all day. Something else was eating at him, simmering just beneath the surface. What it was, Dondi couldn’t say, and he knew better than to ask. He shrugged again.

“Hey, we did what we could, you know? You can’t save everybody. Last time I checked, you didn’t have a big red P on your chest.” He looked at Paul, deadly serious.

“But if it’ll make you feel better,” he added, “I’ll pee on your chest.”

Paul smiled at that one, and Dondi winked. Just then Tom and Joli pushed through the ambo bay doors, snickering and zipping up against the cold. From their posturing it was clear that they’d failed miserably in the pickup department, and didn’t mind a bit. They climbed aboard, took their customary positions in the rig’s rear jump seats. Joli leered at Paul and Dondi.

“She wants me,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” Tom scoffed, then explained. “She invited him to self-administer an enema, bag first.”

“Hey, at least she talked to me,” Joli punched Tom on the bicep; the two started mock-sparring across the aisles. Dondi rolled his eyes.

“Girls, girls,” Dondi admonished. “Recess over. Duty calls.”

The two calmed down marginally. Business as usual was restored for the moment. Dondi keyed the ignition. The big Mack diesel rumbled to life. Dondi leaned toward Paul, who still looked miserable. “Buck up, binky,” he said. “The night is young.”

Just then a harsh crackle blasted on the radio, as another call came in.

And it got a little older.

To Bury The Dead © 2000 Craig Spector. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.


daysleeper