David Means - Assorted Fire Events - Stories

When he woke it was night, pale green light from the screen overhead and hard orange parking-ramp lights in the window. From the hallway came a pure, downy, neon brilliance. Father Bill had vanished, his chair empty where he left it near the door. The light throb of the pump going; the faint pulse of the device in his chest cavity opening up with air and deflating next to his heart like a little bird nesting between his ribs.

How long he lay he didn’t know; hours, minutes. Just the machine and a few cries in the hall — Arabic or something, some little kid making wailing noises, the family still gathered out there but kind of quiet and silent now, maybe it was too late, asleep the lot of them out in the lounge with the others. There had to be plenty; a big hospital, overcrowded, lots of dying going on in the ICU and the CCI.

One of the docs came in looking over the charts and poking around and not talking much because he knew better, knew this old codger who’d been dragged in off the highway had a nasty temperament and didn’t care much for small talk. A few pokes and probes, a check of the data on the screen.

“We’re going to remove the balloon pump,” he said. “We’ve gone long enough now and it’s a pretty pricey hunk of machinery, and there’s a patient just coming out of emergency surgery who’s going to need it right off. The police might drive another one over from Newark, but I think you’re stabilized enough now.”

Strapped beneath his leg was a long plank to keep things flat and even, and in his leg, up near his crotch, was a hole about the size of a dime but feeling more like a quarter to him, a hole leading into the femoral artery. A hole in his frickin’ leg, he’d thought a few dozen times, and not a bullet hole. He’d thought that if he ever had a real hole in his leg — a genuine hole — it would’ve been from a bullet from one of the skags at the crappy bars he frequented en route from CA to NY. The nurses came in — a Hispanic girl, a bit on the plump side, but he’d take her anyhow if he had the heart — hardy har, har — and a large older women with blue-gray hair, and then a male nurse; all three held on to him, gripping different parts of him while the doc slowly drew the balloon out from against his heart, pulling the wire through the dime-sized hole, drawing it down his femoral artery where it shouldn’t have been and sure as fuck couldn’t fit because the pain was red-hot, explosive, convulsive, and he screwed up his face — all jawbone and sun-weathered crags — and screamed like a stuck pig: “Give me some fricking painkillers, you morons, you mooorrrrons,” while the doc jammed something that looked like a wine bottle opener over the hole and gave one last little tug and got it out, not a word, working silently except for a little murmur of directions to one of the nurses.

“Sorry.” The doc shrugged.

“I’ll bet you are.” He could barely speak. The pain was making bursts of sparks on the inside of his eyelids.

The nurses and doc exchanged glances, as if to say: This one’s a real nasty bastard, keep your distance; if we could we’d put a muzzle on him, costing the hospital money and the government money and the whole world bits of spirit ; but the doc put his hand on the guy’s forehead and rubbed it there a little bit. He kept his hand there way too long to be any kind of test for fever or a thump to listen to something.

“What happened to preacher man?” he said.

“Excuse me,” Doc said.

“The pastor, the Bible-thumper, what happened to him?”

“Can’t help you there.”

Then they left him alone with the hard throb of the pain, or the remains of the pain, because that’s how it was, like a swish of chalk on a board or an imprint or something — a feeling all the way up his leg and into his empty chest, now without the little nesting bird, nothing but frickin’ air and his own heart bobbing away in there — a feeling of the pain of that thing being yanked down the inside of his leg by the moron doctor. A soft, faint beep from the machine indicating his pulse and him alone and the noise in the hall kind of getting louder with the babble and all that, more voices, the soft squeak of tennis sneakers on the waxed floor; another set of steps, more, and more.

In the hall, before he came out and placed his ghostly visage before them, hanging with tubes and in his flimsy gown, gasping for air, the family was bunched up to the side, praying, talking, crying — two little kids allowed on the unit only because it was the last few hours, if not minutes, of Tara’s life. A few days ago the doctors put her chances at slim to none — or they laid it out in some numbers, most likely, trying to keep it mathematical, the odds, because whenever you were talking about lost youth — death at an early age — you had to couch things as much as you could in figures. Tara’s father was wearing, and had been for two days, a dark brown tweed sports coat, penny loafers, a pair of Docker khakis, and had his head buried in his hands. He was slouched down against the wall, talking to himself, jouncing his heels against the floor. Next to him, seated on the floor listening, was Stanley, his brother, who, upon getting the news, had flown in directly from Israel; he was jet lagged and exhausted and felt himself floating in a bedazzling clean space of the hallway; he’d been there all afternoon, trying to soothe the soul of his poor brother, from whom he’d been estranged. All because of what? A bad shipment of goods he’d sent over, or lined up; nothing really his fault at all — he’d been nothing but the usual middleman, but the deal somehow wedged in between the men and, after a while, except for enough small pleasantries meant to keep at least an outward semblance of civility (mainly, it had to be admitted, for the women), the two rarely spoke; the bad deal became large over time — the sum of money lost debated — until everything else that had happened before that, all the way back to petty squabbles over marble games on the dirt tarmac outside their apartment in Israel, each tense moment, seemed prophetic. Flying out, for Stanley, who was fearful of elevators and tall buildings, had been a grand gesture, a great flourishing of his arms outward over the skies of Tel Aviv (as he saw it); a token of his true, deep love, a love that went beyond that bad deal (five thousand pipe wrenches; all of them forged with a wobbling claw); but of course what did one expect from a deeply grieving brother except this — this wagging of the body to the song of sorrow? this sniffing and depleted man at a loss as to what might, what can, what should be done? So all Stanley did was sit with his brother, listen, nod, murmur agreements, add a few comments now and then in Hebrew (presuming — perhaps wrongly — that it would help Howard just to hear the mother tongue). Behind them, in the room with Tara, the women were around the bed, resting the tips of their fingers on the bedding, brushing the hair back from her forehead. A car had gone through a stop sign in Hackensack — a Saturday afternoon, light traffic for that corner, an elderly man driving a pale green Buick Skylark with his blood level four times above the legal limit sped right through and broadsided her Toyota at seventy-five miles an hour.

When she got close to the end — and they could tell, or rather the nurses indicated it silently by nods of the head and slight eye movements — there was a quieting. Calls went out from the pay phone in the lounge, where people limp in their anxiety lay sprawled over huge, square-cut maroon chairs. To speak the words that he had to speak — not that she was dead but that she was, as they said (although he thought it was kind of a phony phrase) near death (as if death were an island, a vacation resort), Stanley found himself listening to his own voice: he was a dummy; some other guy was holding him, composed and serene and bearing terrible news, the ventriloquist, as he spoke he heard his own voice quiver — dry and husky from the long flight — beneath the weight of the news he had to offer up; at the same time, he was thinking of the old radio show routines he and Howard had loved so much as a kid.