Wrath White - Hero

The nurse stood above the young boy watching his heart beat and his lungs expand and contract through a large surgical incision that went from his upper chest to his abdomen. All the critical veins and arteries had already been cauterized, stapled and sutured. The surgeon had left just minutes after finishing his last cut to attend to other patients, leaving her to close the incision.

There had been a drive-by shooting on Columbia Avenue. Five teenagers had been shot not including her patient. Two of them were already in the morgue. DOA. The other three were in the adjoining operating rooms. She could hear them screaming. There had been seven other shootings that night. A typical Saturday night. She’d barely had time to wash the blood of one victim from her hands before the next was wheeled in. It was like being a battlefield nurse. West Philadelphia, like South Philly, and North Philly, had become a warzone.

Only when the ER was busy like this did the doctors leave the nurses to close up their patients for them. Plus, they trusted her. She was one of the best ER nurses on the staff, next in line to be head nurse. She had never lost her cool, never been overwhelmed by all the blood and death and gotten emotional like some of the other nurses. She had always remained in control, professional, calm and efficient, if somewhat aloof.

She stood above the boy holding the needle, the cat gut and surgical staples. The anesthesiologist had already packed up and left as well. There was only one other nurse in the room, counting sponges and towels to make sure that none of them had been left inside the patient.

The boy could not have been much older than sixteen. Already he had gang tattoos covering much of his upper torso like a Yakuza body suit. Only these were not of ornate dragons, samurais, or koi, these were a confusion of tombstones, guns, biblical passages, crucifixes, quotes from hip hop songs, and names and pictures of dead friends and past lovers. He was a walking billboard for the thug lifestyle.

Interspersed between the tattoos or directly in the center of some crudely drawn skin art, were bullet and knife wounds, and surgical scars, some weeks old, some years old, and three that were brand new, newly stitched, along with the latest incision still gaping wide where the surgeon had gone in to remove several bullets and stitch his intestines back together.

The boy’s arm was in a cast from where a bullet had shattered both the radius and ulna in his forearm. The nurse had seen him before. She had helped put the plate in his arm that was now holding his shattered bones together as they healed. She could even recognize her own stitches among his many surgical scars. He was a frequent flyer, a regular customer.

Just weeks ago he’d been on this exact same table, the victim of a drive-by shooting. She’d done her duty then and helped put him back together. Now he was back. Only this time, he was the shooter. He’d been shot by the police as he’d tried to flee the scene. The other teenaged criminals and innocent bystanders she could hear crying out in pain from the next room and those who had ceased their crying and now lay cooling to room temperature in the post mortem room, were all his victims. She had helped give him life so that he could take the lives of others.

The nurse picked up a scalpel from the tray beside the table. She looked to see where the other nurse was… back turned, still counting sponges… then she dropped the scalpel into the open incision. She began to hum as she slowly stitched the wound closed, wondering how long it would take before the scalpel in the boy’s gut cut him open again. All it would take was for him to move the wrong way and he could puncture or lacerate some internal organ or artery. She wondered how long it would take him to die from internal bleeding. Or whether he would die of infection first. She hoped it would happen far from the hospital. She hoped it would happen before he could pick up a gun again.

The nurse finished stitching up her patient. She turned to the other nurse who had now completed her inventory and was mopping blood from the floor and throwing away all the bloody gauze.

“He’s all done now. You can take him to his room.”

She walked out of the room and into the hallway.

“Nurse! Nurse! We need you over here! We’ve got a hemo pneumo. He’s drowning in his own blood!”

The nurse turned to look at the patient, another gangbanger as heavily tattooed as her last patient, same cornrowed braids, same gold teeth, no older than seventeen; they could have been brothers. He was convulsing on the gurney as two EMTs attempted, unsuccessfully, to apply pressure to the wound in his chest and staunch the flow of blood. She could hear the boy’s lungs sucking air into his thoracic cavity. She could hear the bubbling sound as his chest cavity filled with blood and air, slowly collapsing the lungs. She turned and walked away.

“Nurse! Where are you going? He’s dying!”

She turned and smiled at the two EMTs.

“Good. One less to worry about. I quit.”

Adelle Smith watched quietly as North Philadelphia whizzed by the limousine window as if her life were flashing by. These were the same streets she was born on, the same streets where she’d lived her entire life. She watched the landscape morph from one of emaciated crackwhores and teenaged murderers and drug pushers strutting brazenly along the sidewalk, glaring defiantly into her window, to one of quaint shops and cafes and businessmen and women in wrinkled suits scurrying home after a long day at the office. Young couples dressed up for an early dinner and a night on the town. Many of the professionals dashing about in suits and ties were the same age and color as the ones she’d passed further up Broad Street in sagging jeans with pistols in their waistbands. The world had changed so much since she was young.

Even the couples walking arm and arm with ear to ear smiles and love sparkling in their eyes were a mixed bag of White, Black, Asian, and Puerto Rican, in various combinations. She saw as many Black men, young and old, with White women on their arms as she did with their own kind, and that was certainly a change. In her day a mixed couple couldn’t go anywhere without being harassed by both Blacks and Whites. Lynchings may have been before her time, but beatings, stabbings, and even shootings were still pretty common. No one would have said a thing about killing a Black man for corrupting the virtues of a young White girl. She’d seen many brothers killed for less. A Black man’s life wasn’t worth an ounce of spit back when she was a young girl.

A Black police officer drove by laughing out loud with his Italian partner. Adelle smiled.

I guess this is progress, she thought.

There were Black police officers here and there back when she was young too. But only in the ghettoes, and they were never that comfortable with their White partners. They were most often quicker to crack a Black skull to impress their buddies in blue than the White cops were. They overdid it trying to fit in, which made them an even bigger menace.

She watched a mixed couple cross the street, the overweight White girl dressed as if she’d stepped right out of one of those hip-hop videos, cornrows, baggy jeans, FUBU shirt and all, with her African American boyfriend clinging to her as if he were afraid someone would try to steal her from him.

“I guess.” She sighed, shaking her head. She wasn’t sure this was exactly what Dr. King had in mind. Then again, she was never a huge fan of King. She always thought he was too soft. She preferred Malcolm X and, later, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Stokely Carmicheal, men who didn’t wait around begging for their freedom and equality but were prepared to take it at any cost. There weren’t any men like that around any more. Even Farrakhan was soft in her opinion. A whole lot of talk, but not one bill passed or law ratified by anything he’d done or inspired. In her day they made changes. They made laws and changed laws. There weren’t any Black leaders like that nowadays.