Into the Inferno (3 page)

The report for our alarm came in as “man choking.”

5. EVERYBODY KNOWS BRAIN DEATH FROM LACK OF OXYGEN OCCURS IN FOUR TO SIX MINUTES

Chief Newcastle’s oft-repeated dictum on response speed through town was clear: “There’s no point in killing a carful of kids on your way to a Dumpster fire.” Everybody followed the precept except Click and Clack, who were usually too wired on caffeine, adrenaline, and do-goodism to slow down.

Siren whirring, we lumbered through traffic as we headed for a small subdivision just east of town on property that, until ten years ago, had been a golf course. Bulldoze the flora and fauna and slap up houses, bring in new citizens by the busload, sell them a car and two trucks apiece, and pave any greenery that’s left. It was the standard urban recipe. No planning. Just cram us rats in until we’re all giving each other the bird at every four-way stop in town.

As soon as the house number came across the radio from the dispatcher, I said, “Joel McCain lives in that cul-de-sac.”

Karrie looked at me. “That his house number?”

“Couldn’t tell you.”

Karrie was a tall, slender young woman who had decided to become a firefighter when she was six years old, after taking a school field trip into downtown Seattle, where she’d spotted a woman riding a fire rig.

“You realize your girlfriend is following us,” Karrie said.

“What girlfriend?”

“How many girlfriends do you have chasing you around town?” I glanced into the tall rearview mirrors on either side of the cab but couldn’t see beyond the boxy aid car behind us. “She’s back there.”

“Don’t worry. She’ll go away.”

“How much do you want to bet?”

Watching the town slide past, I tried to let it go. What the heck did Holly want now? I decided she either was pregnant or had a bug. Not from me, though. Not a sexually transmitted disease, at any rate. I was clean on that score. However, it was just possible she was pregnant. On top of all my other bills, all I needed was a child support payment. Christ, maybe she’d come to tell me
she
had given
me
a bug.

To my way of thinking, North Bend was one of the ugliest little towns in the state, a prime example of what happens in a municipality when what little vision there is becomes polluted with second and third and fourth opinions bought and paid for by developers working duplicitous schemes they’d already honed to perfection on other communities, schemes designed to pull the wool over the eyes of planning boards and all those small-town politicians willing to dabble with the devil to expand their tax base. Controlled growth, they called it. Nobody ever had the nerve or the brains to ask for or think about zero growth. Developers knew they could wear down the protest groups with endless “dialogues.” Talk was good. Keep ’em talking. Eventually each new project broke ground before we all realized we’d lost another battle.

Along with the fairly recent blight of suburban sprawl, our town was pockmarked with oases of backwardness from the days when everyone was a logger or the offspring of a logger and locals felt their birthright was to park on their front lawns, burn unseasoned wood in their woodstoves until the town was murky with the stink, and shoot their neighbor’s dog with .22 shorts if he barked too much.

In the piecemeal central business area, we had a Bavarian motif on a Chinese restaurant and across from that a condemned building. We had a gas station converted into a coffeehouse across from a car dealership on the main drag. There was a minimart service station proudly displaying a hundred feet of blank wall to the main street, even more proudly approved by the planning board. We had planters in the middle of North Bend Way, designed years ago, but not built until traffic was already so bad the loss of the center lane jammed all the intersections.

Half a mile away on the floodplain of the South Fork was the Nintendo factory and the South Fork interchange with an outlet factory mall, McDonald’s, Taco Time, Arby’s, gas stations, and minimarts sucking in skiers, hikers, and rock climbers off the freeway. The outlet mall brought ten thousand cars a day. Busloads of old gummers showed up every day at eleven to shop for bargains. Local burglaries and car break-ins had skyrocketed.

“It’s Joel’s house, all right,” Karrie said as we pulled up.

We’d been here before. It was a house Joel could ill afford on a firefighter’s salary, though he managed with the extra money from his wife’s job as a legal secretary in Seattle. More money came in from his wife’s retired mother, who had moved in with them after her husband died. I knew this house. At the fire station Christmas party this past year, Karrie and I spent an hour downstairs on the couch in the dark, an episode we were both trying to forget. I never knew why I did things like that.

“You think it’s Joel?” Karrie asked. “The radio report said man choking.”

“Gotta be somebody else. Joel likes to chew his food.”

Joel’s mother-in-law, a slightly more rickety version of his slender wife, answered the door in a faded housedress and sturdy black shoes with thick soles of the type I hadn’t seen since the last time I was in Sunday school. Wringing her hands, she led us under high ceilings and past an open staircase that led up to the second story. The McCains didn’t have children, so the furniture was clean, not a stick out of place, three lazy cats lounging about.

The old woman’s hands fluttered about her head as she spoke. “All I did was give him a little slice of apple. A Braeburn. When I came back in the room, he was like this. I thought he would like the taste. They’re from New Zealand.”

Our old compadre was in a motorized hospital bed, the section under his knees and back elevated, though he looked a whole lot less than comfortable. He was thinner than the last time I’d seen him, his face a blue-black color, mottled with beard growth, eyes bulging, neck veins distended. His jaw was open and he was gasping for air. When I shone a light down his throat, I could just make out a foreign object next to his tonsils.

He was barely getting enough air to support life.

I put my finger down his throat and did a finger sweep the way we’d been taught. “He was okay before you gave him the apple?” I asked over my shoulder.

“Fine. I was reading to him from the Scientific Statement of Being.”

A finger sweep wasn’t going to work.

Stan and I hauled McCain off the bed, and Stan turned him around, gripped him from behind, pressed his fists together under his sternum, and compressed violently three times. On the last compression an object flew out of McCain’s mouth past my shoulder and skidded across the floor like a hockey puck. A slice of Braeburn. From New Zealand. Sweet and tangy at the same time. Eager to conceal incriminating evidence, the old woman knelt quickly and put it in the pocket of her housedress.

It was about the size you would feed a plow horse.

Now, slumped in Beebe’s thick arms, Joel was gasping for air as if he would never get enough. When it became clear that he wasn’t physically capable of getting his feet beneath him, Beebe, Karrie, and I laid him back on the bed. We tugged his pajama bottoms back up and put a nasal cannula on his face and administered 0
₂
. The pajama bottoms bothered all three of us; what bothered us even more was that he was wearing an adult diaper under them. He hadn’t moved a limb on his own since we got there, hadn’t twitched a finger, hadn’t said squat. He hadn’t stopped drooling, and the damp bib tied around his neck told us he wasn’t going to. Karrie straightened it and patted some of his hair into place, as if she might mother him into normalcy.

“Hey, Joel,” I said amiably. “What the hell? You’re not supposed to swallow the whole thing. Just a bite at a time. How you doin’, buddy?”

No answer. No eye contact.

The setup was Spartan, to say the least. The hospital bed was in the center of the living room and had a rack over it with bars for the patient to use when repositioning himself, though I gotta tell you I couldn’t see any evidence that Joel had the capacity to use them. Beside the bed was a single straight-backed chair and, alongside that, a small table. No phone, radio, television, or magazines. No flowers, nothing to indicate it was a sickroom except the hospital bed, the lack of furniture, and, of course, the goggle-eyed patient.

There was a single item on the table next to the chair, a small book with a leather cover,
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
by Mary Baker Eddy. The book was open, a purple ribbon marking the page, several paragraphs limned with blue chalk, as if they’d been read repeatedly.

“Let’s get a BP and a rate,” I said. I called for a medic unit on our portable radio. The dispatcher confirmed my request and stated the medics would be responding from Bellevue. Normally a choking victim came around as soon as the obstruction was removed, but there was something wrong here.

Brain death from lack of oxygen occurs in four to six minutes. We all knew that. It had taken us four minutes to get here.

“How long was he choking before you called?” I asked.

Joel’s mother-in-law wrung her hands and stared at me. “I don’t know.” She’d been making a point of not looking at Joel, as if not looking at him would make things better. “We’d been praying together, and I thought I saw an improvement, so I went into the kitchen and peeled that apple. I gave him a bite, and then the phone rang and I went back to the kitchen to answer it. When I came back, he was like you saw.”

“And you called us right away?”

“I prayed first.”

“How long did that take?”

“We said the Scientific Statement of Being a couple of times.”

“How long did that take?”

“A couple of minutes.”

“We? You said
we
were praying?”

“Joel and I.”

“He was able to pray with you?” Karrie asked.

“It was a silent prayer.” She was a diminutive woman, maybe a hundred fifteen pounds.

She burst into tears when Beebe said, “What’d you do, push it down his throat with a broom handle?”

“It’s all right.” I put my arm around her heaving shoulders and shot Stan a look. “What we need to know is how long from the time he started choking until you called us.”

“I don’t know. It might have been five minutes.”

Five minutes added to our four-minute response time was enough for some serious brain damage. But then, he’d been getting some air all along or he wouldn’t have been conscious when we arrived, although what we’d seen when we got here and were seeing now was a pretty relaxed definition of conscious.

“What’s the history here?” I asked. “He on any medication?”

“No. Of course not. Joel doesn’t take medicine. We don’t believe in it.”

“So why’s he in bed? Why were you feeding him?”

“He can’t eat by himself.”

“From falling off the roof?”

“I guess.”

“He has a head injury?”

“The doctors don’t know what he’s got. Doesn’t that tell you something about material medicine? Even the doctors can’t do anything.”

“We heard he got banged up pretty good from the fall.”

“No. He only had a few scratches.”

“So why’s he wearing a diaper?”

“Mary likes it on him. It’s easier to clean up.”

“So he’s incontinent?”

“It’s been a difficult demonstration. We thought he would have a healing before this.”

“He’s been this way for a month?” I asked, picking up Joel’s right arm. It fell limply when I dropped it.

She nodded.

“Jesus,” I said.

Stan Beebe was taking Joel’s blood pressure on his other arm. “What’d the doctors say was wrong with him?” Beebe asked.

“As I said before, they didn’t tell us.”

“Could have been an ischemic attack,” I said. “Could have been a lot of things. Head injury? Spinal column? They must have said something. They weren’t keeping him in the hospital just to jack up the bill. These days they release patients as soon as they can.”

“The doctors told us we’d have to wait to find out what was wrong. That was when Mary and I decided to bring him home and rely on Christian Science.”

“He’s been like this for a month?” Karrie said. “Why didn’t you tell somebody?”

The old woman, who was crying again, didn’t reply.

I got on the radio and advised the medic unit what we had. Near as I could tell, Joel was brain-dead. Had been for a month. The doctors couldn’t fix him, and the Christian Scientists were feeding him apples.

The old woman told us they’d hired a nurse but that she’d been called away and this was her first time alone with him. “Mary told me nothing but juice, but I was just so sure he was better, I guess I pushed things. That apple was just mortal mind trying to stop the healing. It was never part of the real Joel. It was the Adam apple.”

“Didn’t come out of there like the Adam apple,” Beebe said. “Came out of there like a cannonball. We should have worn eye protection.”

“The real Joel is the perfect son of God. Always has been and always will be.”

Beebe was hovering over Joel now, begging him to move his hand, a leg, anything. Mary was the godmother of Stan’s youngest child. Stan and Joel were both adherents of minority religions, Joel a Christian Scientist, Stan a Seventh-Day Adventist. I’d kept out of their frequent dialogues on religion, although there was plenty I might have brought to the table.

Beebe couldn’t get a blood pressure, tried twice more, and handed the ears to Karrie. It wasn’t like Stan to fumble a blood pressure, and I could tell he felt bad about it. Tears jeweled the corners of his dark eyes when he handed Karrie the stethoscope.

“Look at his hands,” said Beebe, presenting his own for comparison. Joel’s looked as if they’d been dipped in wax. Beebe’s looked similar, though because of his dark skin, they were a slightly different hue.

“Chapped?” I asked.

“Guess again,” Beebe said.

The medics showed up, looked Joel over, phoned his doctor, and agreed with what we’d already concluded. Joel wasn’t any different this afternoon than he had been yesterday afternoon.

The medics had just driven away and we were putting our aid kits away when the red Pontiac pulled up in the cul-de-sac.

The driver of the Pontiac got out and stalked around the front of the car, her movements looking so much like those of an assassin, I actually caught myself checking to see if she had a gun. When somebody walks toward you that deliberately, you’re usually in some sort of trouble.