Carry Me Home (28 page)

Then came shouts. Nothing serious. Kids—13, 14, 15 years old. Tony’s tension skyrocketed, his heart pounded, driving pulsing throbs down his chest to his thighs. He stood. The kids were shouting, cursing, banging a board on the wrought-iron railings of the stairs three stories below. Tony moved to the front wall, edged to the French doors. He shook. He peered out without moving. He wanted to open the door, yell at them, scream, “Get outa here!” but he couldn’t move. He saw two run across the street, rake the board up and down a railing there, shout obscenities at the darkened facade.

Night after night, after the first awkward nights of May, Tony’s night ritual evolved. After work, study, party, love, sleep, he rose, tense, watched Linda sleep, then walked quietly, vigilantly, protecting, hovering until first light. Through job search and hiring, furniture shopping, opening checking and savings accounts, through school enrollment and life planning—degrees, marriage, maybe a house, maybe a small farm—the evolution continued. Despite breaks when they borrowed a friend’s motorcycle and rode to the bird refuge on Plum Island 40 miles north of Boston, despite the terror and thrill of notifying parents of wedding plans still unresolved—wait until Linda’s graduation, elope now, a church, a hall, here, in Mill Creek Falls, where?—despite it all Tony’s night ritual persisted, evolved through June into July and August.

A few times Linda too had gotten up. He’d feigned flashes of inspiration, or pulled out VA pamphlets listing entitlements, duration of eligibility, restrictions, or flipped open his study habits journal. But she’d seen through the scam, sensed his discomfort, knew because of the stories he’d told her that he’d been dreaming about the tunnel or Dai Do or Manny, dreaming something terrible she could not take from him because she could not study and work and love him and be his emotional self. For his part he did not want to tell her any more, did not trust Linda to hear more, afraid she, who’d been so awestruck by his being a sergeant in the Marine Corps, who was so loving, and supportive, would be horrified by his recurrent dreams, would withdraw.

Ceasing to talk locked a part of him in a cell, froze that part like a butterfly encased in a transparent plastic cube, left him to fit his new role, his new self-image—no longer the dago hick from the Endless Mountains or the Marine Corps sergeant Viet Nam returnee. He had to project a countenance required of the big city with all its blue-jeaned, long-haired male students his age, to project an identity he did not possess.

At times Tony and Linda did talk, yet he barely made sense anymore even to himself because he no longer remembered his dreams. And Linda, stretched to the very limit, found it easier to make love to him than to try to be his therapist.

The sky softened. City lights lost their gleam. Tony turned on the television but kept the volume low. For a moment he watched soundless broadcasters—the silent talking heads—but quickly he turned his attention to his study-habits workbook, practicing the concentration technique prescribed, easily answering the few general questions about the “article” he’d chosen to read—a section from his emergency medical technician’s course. He smoked, rose, showered, dressed in the uniform of AmbuStar Ambulance Service, Inc. He brewed coffee, drank a quick cup, woke Linda with a kiss and left for work.

“Pisano.”

“Yo.”

“You work a double today?”

Tony glanced around the small AmbuStar office. He was the most junior of the drivers. “Yes Sir.”

“Good. Fill in for Carlucci. You know the streets now. Lewis’ll be with you first shift. And ah—” the dispatcher-owner, Ken Charnowski, checked his clipboard, “I’ll put Pomeroy with you on second.”

“Those are emergency routes, aren’t they, Sir?”

“Yep.”

“Ah, I’ve been doing only, you know, critical care transport, oxygen therapy ...”

Lewis came over. He was a thin black man, about thirty, Tony’s height. “Pay’s better,” he said quietly. “Help you pay for that engagement ring.”

“You’re doing the EMT course, aren’t you?” Charnowski was gruff.

“Yes Sir, but—”

“Hey, no big thing. Lewis and Pomeroy are qualified. I need a driver. I’ve got two on vacation and Carlucci called in sick. Work his double.”

“Yes Sir.”

At nine they answered their first call—a young boy had fallen from a tree and broken his leg. Alvin Lewis gently applied a splint and they drove the boy and his mother across the bridge to Beth Israel Hospital. All routine. At ten thirty they answered their second, a chaotic mess in Tony’s own neighborhood—where Commonwealth Ave. bends from west to south and Brighton Ave. meets the intersection. There, a visiting Taiwanese businessman had misunderstood the lights and T-boned an MTA railcar injuring himself, his two passengers and twenty T riders. Traffic immediately clogged the access. Police, fire and other ambulances had all been dispatched and all fought to get to the scene. Treatment and evacuation took over two hours.

“Hey,” Alvin Lewis said to Tony after they’d treated several of the passengers, broken out of the clog and delivered two to emergency rooms, “you’re pretty good. You act like you’ve been doing this for years.”

“Naw,” Tony said. “But thanks.”

“Really Man. I seen you with the Chinawoman. She was hysterical and in like one second you had it all sorted out and calmed her down. You must of done this someplace—the way you take charge.”

“Naw,” Tony smiled. “Not this. But, you know ... I was a sergeant in the Corps.”

“What corps?”

“In the Marine Corps.”

“Oh! You mean ...” Lewis waved his hand back and forth pointing out Tony’s window.

“Yeah. This is pretty tame.”

“Yeah,” Alvin said. “I bet so.” He became quiet and Tony said nothing more.

In the high heat and humidity of midafternoon Tony and Alvin answered more calls in South End: two heat prostration cases and one old black man who’d had a heart attack climbing his tenement stairs and who died on the stretcher in the back of the ambulance as Tony drove and Alvin held an oxygen mask over the man’s face.

At four Lewis left. Tony gassed up, checked the oil and medical supplies, and picked up Quentin Pomeroy, a chubby young man with beautiful shoulder-length blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Through the late afternoon and early evening they were on the road, minor accidents and minor heat-related trauma, and one puncture wound of a young man’s shoulder, which bystanders swore was a stabbing by another young man, a fight over a girl, but which both young men insisted to the investigating officer was an accident. As a favor, Tony took and concealed the switchblade, dropping the evidence as he turned from Tremont Street onto Mass. Ave. heading down toward City Hospital.

Tony was sleepy. He’d grabbed four Styrofoam cups before they’d left City, filled them with coffee, and stowed them on the shelf above the dashboard. By the time Pomeroy returned with the paperwork Tony had drunk two, discarded them, was drinking one he’d gotten for Quentin. He started the engine, wiped a hand over his face. “Hey, got ya a cup of coffee.”

“Oh. Thanks, guy,” Pomeroy said. “That’s really white of ya.”

“Don’t mention it.” Tony chuckled.

It was near eleven. Tony’d been in and out of the vehicle for fifteen hours, up since four on less than two hours of sleep. Pomeroy too was nodding. Tony aimed northwest toward Symphony Hall, driving sleepily, thinking about nothing in particular other than getting off duty and going home to Linda, thinking fuzzily that he wouldn’t be able to pull doubles when he started school full-time, thinking how he hated it when Linda had doubles. The night dispatcher radioed.

Pomeroy jolted up.

In seconds they were wailing up Mass. Ave., lights flashing, speeding to a head-on on Storrow Drive—Storrow, a four-lane limited-access disaster of a highway with nothing but a guardrail between the on-coming lanes, built at a time when cars were rare and forty-five was an average speed.

The air was still, warm, muggy—air that refracts light, holds it, forms a halo around on-coming headlights, around the harsh blipping bubbletop red, blue, white from the police cruisers. It was as if no time had passed from the moment of the call to the moment he was there, outside the ambulance, hearing the horns, the curses, the wailing of an infant—as if he, they, were slides clicked to a new frame, from sleepy to the hectic horror of the Storrow Drive accident scene.

More horns. Behind them the eastbound lanes backed up, the cumulative headlights glinted from every shard of tempered windshield, every torn fragment of sheet metal, every pavement smear wet with fluid. There were two cars, both inverted. A Volvo had come from the westbound speed lane, slid, caught the center guardrail and flipped into the east-bound lanes, smashed head-on into a second, spinning both vehicles out, the eastbound Plymouth rolling like a punted football, finally crashing against the outer guardrail and stopping. The westbound vehicle—driver drunk, sleepy, just distracted changing tapes or flipping buttons looking for a different song—had spun on its roof, crashed backward into the center rail.

Tony smelled gas. Officers closed the eastbound lanes behind them. Others whipped orange-gloved-hands at westbound cars, demanding they maintain the flow, demanding that drivers, passengers, not slow down to gawk. Tony sprinted to the Plymouth, knelt, crawled. There was wailing coming from inside. Pomeroy shouted at one of the cops. Passersby began to crowd near. Tony heard nothing but the wail. He did not search for a source. Instead: Ignition! Ignition key. On the passenger side the roof was flattened to the base of the windows. He rolled, low-crawled, scampered to the driver’s window. There was blood on the door. Tony lay on his back, his legs kicked up as he forced his right arm in, feeling for the steering column, the key.

“Get back! Get back!” The cop’s voice was nasty. The growing crowd shifted, milled. Tony felt dripping—warm, wet—then the chain, the key. He turned the key. Now he began to assess the situation. There was still the wailing but the interior was dark—the bright lights from the cruisers, from his own ambulance, from the fire truck that had arrived on a parallel side road, made it impossible to see into the car. A firefighter began dumping bags of Absorb-all about the car. Another firefighter, with a flashlight, bent with Tony, tried to see inside, saw wet shreds on the inverted driver’s door above Tony as Tony too saw them; saw the neck, the hair, the piece of skull—realized immediately the driver’s head had been caught outside during the last rollover, had been trapped between road and car and scraped away. Still there was the wailing. More firemen came, worked the car with bars.

“Back there. Point it back there.” Tony glanced at the man with the flashlight. He too was young, clean-cut.

“Christ!” The man aimed the light. Both peered, searched. “What a fuckin mess. You with Dust-Off?”

“AmbuStar,” Tony answered. They could see the car was full of children, saw the cocked head and glassy eyes of one who was dead, but they could not tell about the others, could not be certain, could not even determine how many.

“Let us open it up, Man,” the man with the flashlight said. “Then you can do your thing.”

Now Tony stood with Quentin Pomeroy, watched. A metropolitan ambulance had taken the driver of the first car; a wrecker had flipped the car and was towing it. One eastbound lane opened. People gawked, drove by very slowly, then accelerated away.

For forty minutes the firefighters worked—finally cutting holes through the floor and removing first one dead child, then a second and a third. Then they found the infant, and Tony and Quentin took over and strapped the small body to a backboard and applied tourniquets to one leg that had been severely lacerated and crushed and to one arm with an amputated hand, neither of which had bled the baby to death because both the amputation and the lacerations were beyond the crush points.

Linda heard the keys in the dead bolts. She glanced at the desk clock. Two twenty. She pursed her lips, thought to get up and release the locks but didn’t move, feeling peeved, suspecting Tony had gone for a drink with his coworkers. She had been anxious every night since the accident, had been doodling instead of studying, sketching big plump flowers on her notebook’s inner cover, circling her pen over and over the petals, adding weight and refining details. Now she covered the sketch, hunched down over the text,
Medical Care of the Surgical Patient
, highlighting normal hemoglobin and hematocrit value. Time had seemed to both accelerate and stand still. They were doing a thousand things, yet nothing seemed near completion. Two weeks after the fatal accident on Storrow Drive Tony had notified AmbuStar he’d be starting full-time at BU and could only work part-time. To them he’d proved himself and Charnowski wanted him full-time, but Alvin Lewis and Quentin Pomeroy had convinced Charnowski that a guy like Tony Pisano was too good to hold back—that he’d only stick around if Ken backed off. Linda too had had a major change, an unofficial graduation to the equivalent of RN, which allowed her more responsibility at work, but in her Family Nurse Practice program there would be no real graduation, no certificate, no degree, until the program was completed eighteen months hence. And Tony and Linda still had not decided on a date, a church, a hall, or even a city for their wedding. “That you, Babe?” Linda called.

The door was shut, rebolted. “Naw, not me. It’s the boogie man.” Linda stifled her anger. “Did you and Quentin go up to Mondo’s?” “Naw. I don’t like that place. Too many kids. All the kids are coming back. Shee-it! I don’t know how I’m goina be a freshman with these ... teenyboppers.”

“You won’t see them so much when classes start. Want to quiz me?”

“Sure.” Tony leaned on the door jamb, stared at Linda, flashed a lecherous grin.

“No way!” Linda snapped. “I’ve got to finish this.”

“Finish what?”

“Thrombocytes and hemostasis. Ask me what needs to be excluded by diagnosis before a thrombocytopenic patient can be operated upon.”

“Okay. What needs to be excluded before the thrombocyto ... before a trombone can be tooted?”

“Thrombo ... never mind. Leukemia.”