Whirl Away (6 page)

Because they would have been happy to take any explanation. They were waiting for one, for anything, so they could get out the old rubber stamp and close the file.

The siren? Sure, lots of people might have heard it while I was going up the hill, but it really could have been anyone—a police car somewhere, or firemen late for dinner, heading back to the fire hall, slumped back in their seats and tired.

But the lights: accident investigators know about lights.

I know too, because I took the courses, back when I thought I might want to do something else—back before I
knew that this was the only thing I'd ever want to do. Break a light when it's lit and tiny beads of glass will form on the filament, glass dust melting on superheated wire right before the filaments fail. Or something like that. The point is, the filament is different if the light breaks while it's lit, different from what it would be if the light was turned off. And you can see it as clear as a bell under a microscope, if you're looking. And they'd be looking—too many different stories to ignore impartial evidence.

I knew they'd have me with the lights, and it was only a matter of time. Besides, the police had to already know I'd been going fast from the way the rig was wrecked. You don't do that kind of damage tooling back to the hospital at fifty kilometres an hour.

But waiting for the reports gave me a window of opportunity. More to the point, it gave them a window of opportunity. When something goes really wrong, you always have that window. It was the window for me to quit or resign, to take away the need for them to do anything, so they could wash their hands of me before they even had to talk about the “organization's reputation” being damaged.

Problem is, I don't give a damn about the organization, about the hospital or anything. I just care about the job, and they know it.

I remember the thistles. That's the last clean, clear thing I do remember. I remember seeing them, and thinking I was in big trouble. They were on the side of the road on White Mountain. The ambulance was going wide open, and the headlights caught the thistles on the shoulder all at once,
lighting them up flat so they only existed in two dimensions. Big and tall and completely covered in thorns, their flowers a sharp purple on their bulbous green tops. I saw them clearly, before I drove straight through into the big nothing behind them.

So that was me: Tim McCann, already suspended but still driving an ambulance at top speed right over the ditch and into an embankment on the other side. It was the kind of thing the media would feast on if they found out.

It was a big old TopKick ambulance, the kind that looks like a van with an extra foot of roof stacked on top. That's the extra headroom, so you can stand up and work back there. But they're pigs on the road—too high, the wheelbases too narrow, and especially tippy when it's slippery. They're like some kind of curious hybrid—made for a different job, made to make do. Underpowered, too, compared to the new box-backs.

There are always supposed to be two of you, two on every call—two to get the gurney back into the ambulance with the patient strapped down; one to stay with the patient, one to drive. You're not supposed to try to do it all alone. But I thought even me alone had to be better than no one at all.

See, I waited, listening to the radio, and no one was kicking out of any of the stations when they called.

There's a big round clock in the ready room at the ambulance station, up by the wall-mounted television. The ready room is full of battered institutional furniture, the kind you get when everyone sits on it and no one really gives a damn about
coffee-cup circles or creases in the vinyl from too many asses for too many hours. The clock has black hands for hours and minutes and a slender red whisker for the seconds, and that red hand just went round and round, and the dispatcher kept calling different units, but there was no one answering. I wasn't even in uniform, no black pants or white shirt, but I was wearing the blue polyester zip-up jacket we all had, the kind of jacket that might get you a minute's attention from the girls behind the counter while you're belting back coffee and doughnuts in the middle of a quiet afternoon.

I was picking up the personal stuff from my locker that I wanted to hold on to until the suspension was over: five days, no pay, in trouble again because of my mouth, because I told an administrator, Pat Riley, that I didn't give a fuck about forms. Riley snapped back, “I'm trying to keep you from getting sued,” and smart-mouth me, I'd said, “Hope you like your job. Mine is saving lives.”

Too damn self-righteous for my own good—and it got right up his nose, too.

So I got five unexpected, unpaid days off, a case the union didn't even want to fight, and because of that, I was in the ready room stuffing a bag with dirty laundry when the radio started chirping.

We were already down a full crew—early vacation that someone had approved, probably Riley—and all hell was breaking loose on the radio.

It was the sort of thing that nobody wants to plan for. In Kentville, the ambulance was tied up with a car wreck. I'd
heard them roll with the fire department when I got in, and they were probably struggling with big tools and heavy bleeding. New Minas was transporting a heart patient into Halifax—a bad call when we were already short—and to top it off, I knew the alternator had gone on the rig in Canning, and they couldn't get a gig out of it, couldn't even get it to turn over. They'd been complaining about that rig for weeks, and now it wasn't going to move.

The dispatcher was marching farther and farther away down the valley, looking for a free vehicle. She was as far away as Berwick before I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't take it anymore because there was no one to roll, and up on White Mountain, someone had dropped the phone after calling for an ambulance, and the dispatcher could hear the ruckus in the background, someone screaming, “Bill, Bill, talk to me, Bill!” and there were snatches of the dispatcher trying to get someone to pick up the phone, little bits of that being broadcast over the radio too, whenever the dispatcher keyed up the microphone.

The ambulances all have numbers on the back, and we had the very first ones, so the numbers started at 001 and went up from there. We joked about it being James Bond's EMS, “double-oh-seven, licensed to kill.” EMS, that's Emergency Medical Service, like an ambulance, except we're allowed to do something to help instead of just loading you up and driving as fast as we can go.

I didn't do the radio call-out, didn't let the dispatcher even know I was on the road. I turned the key, and when 003 started, I took it. We hadn't stripped it yet, so it had gear,
but it had been taken out of service, parked and waiting for a brand new replacement box-back diesel ambulance that was going to be the new 003—a bigger engine in a heavier rig with more room to work in the back.

003 would have been my rig anyway, if I wasn't suspended and John, my regular partner, wasn't home burning off overtime because he didn't have anyone to roll with. We're not that deep. There aren't a bunch of call-ins with paramedic training sitting around waiting for me to get suspended, so when I got five days without pay, John got five with.

It was summertime, so he and Kate had probably spent the day at home filling the kiddie pool with water for the youngster or something. And now, with no duty in sight, he was probably kicked back with a beer. John talked about his family so much, I felt like I knew them. Kate didn't like the hours, the rotating shifts, the job itself; John didn't like the complaining. They were made for each other. I wondered which would end first, the job or the marriage. I was betting on the marriage, but then again, I'm not impartial. It's hard to find a partner you click with.

I had to come into the ready room late enough to avoid running into anyone I knew. When I was out the door and the automatic door opener was closing it behind me, my ambulance was an invisible rig.

Driving, I heard the dispatcher, still trying to find a crew. She sounded patient, but also a little frayed. It sounded like Anna, the new, pretty one with the small, careful mouth and straight blond hair. We'd gone on exactly one date, she and I,
and from then on she was busy every single time I called her to ask for a repeat.

She was still looking for a rig. Berwick was out somewhere and they couldn't roll—and it was too damned far anyway.

Might as well send an ambulance from Mars.

I reached behind the gearshift and flicked the lights and siren on when the dispatcher finally found an ambulance in Waterville, because she gave the crew the address and I picked it right out of the air—“Code Four Medical, 1027 White Mountain Road”—and I'd be in there and gone before they even got off the highway.

I put the pedal down and ran straight up the hill, up past Prospect Street and the new row of subdivision houses, up towards the hilltop park and a wide, shaky turn to the left on loose gravel.

If it had been daytime, I can tell you that you'd have to agree it was beautiful country: big patches of open ground, fenced for livestock or blocked with crops, and it just gives you the feeling that the soil's so rich you could grow anything at all, even shoes or fridges if you had the right kind of seeds. But if you were riding with me, you probably would have been more taken with the big rectangular wing mirror, watching the rooster tail of dust fling up into the sky behind us. Or else, like John, you'd be watching the road in front, hoping like hell a cow or a deer didn't stroll onto the road, holding on to the dashboard for dear life the way he does almost every time.

I like to drive fast, and I'm good. I got to White Mountain faster than any other driver would have.

When you see a house with the front door wide open, it often tells you that you've found the right place.

I slung the ambulance around and put it right up next to the house, reversing up the driveway and nipping in across the grass because it would make it easier for me to load the victim if I couldn't get any help. Put the back doors almost to the steps, feeling the heavy ambulance settling down into the grass and soil.

Inside, it was absolute pandemonium.

I had hardly gotten in through the door when a guy grabbed me by the shirt and hauled me the rest of the way through, yelling, “What the fuck took you so long?” and I could feel spit spattering across my face in a fine spray. I had the trauma kit, and I sort of shrugged by the guy, pulling back away from him while moving forwards against the side of the hall. Angles are important for emergency work, like they are for a boxer. You give them an edge of you, like a bullfighter feinting, so they don't get a good grip and you can get by, like you were greased or something, because they get revved up and they're hanging on to you, not seeing how they're getting in the way.

There was a couple next to the sofa, and the television was on, and God help me, there was popcorn all over the place, all over the floor and the sofa and the chairs, like Orville Redenbacher had fucking exploded and the guy on the ground had been caught in the crossfire somehow.

He had it all going on. He was coding, his heart stopped, and I was cutting his shirt off and yelling “What's his name, what's his name?” because sometimes, if nothing else, that shuts everyone up.

The woman rocked back on her heels away from him, that kind of “I-can't-watch-but-I-have-to” thing, before saying, “It's Bill. It's my husband. His name is Bill.”

Big bare-bellied Bill, pleased to meet you, I thought, and I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever get a call where someone having a heart attack wasn't just plain huge. They say people are getting bigger, bad diet and a lack of exercise, and I believe it. Often, we end up calling for another crew if we have time, because we don't want to end up injured too. Load some dying monster on a backboard and tear up your own back trying to lift him? No thanks. People make their own beds; sometimes they die in them.

This looked like the rush didn't matter. Bill was bluish on the sides of his face, lips like blackberry juice, and I figured I'd be going through the motions, more for everyone else's benefit than his. And fuck me if I didn't stick the HeartStart defibrillator patches on his big naked chest and give him one quick jolt, and damned if the thing didn't actually start him right back up again.

What a moment that is. I'm not religious, not a bit, but I swear, it's just like having God right there in the room when they go from nothing to a heartbeat. It's not something you get to see very often: zap a slab of already-dead meat and then see it open its eyes and blink at you, like it was a guy
asleep in bed and you'd woken him up with a whopping great electric alarm clock or something. Especially when it's been forever since you hit the road in the first place, and by all rights he should be stone cold dead by now. The only thing I could think was that he'd collapsed, but his heart must have kept ticking until just before I got there. Because sure as anything, that heart was stopped; it doesn't matter how big you are, if you've got a pulse, I'll find it.

That changed everything. Now, instead of transporting what I was sure was going to be a body, I had to get Bill to the hospital. And quick.

I yelled at the guy who'd grabbed me coming in, got him to go out and wrestle the stretcher out of the ambulance, and we rolled Bill up on one side and down onto it and cinched the straps down.

“Aren't there supposed to be two of you?” the man asked after we got Bill into the back of the rig. I deliberately ignored the question.

“Tell his wife I'll meet you guys there, Eastern Kings Memorial,” I said, because Bill needed to be stabilized at the closest hospital before anything else, and I slammed the double doors on him, my last look inside the ambulance seeing Bill's big tented feet under the sheets.

I ripped the rig out and down the driveway, cutting the wheels hard and feeling the back tires tearing up the grass. I put the siren back on again, and the lights.