Callan Wink: Dog Run Moon

“I volunteer to be your practice dummy. Maybe you could reconsider that happy ending policy.”

She laughed and swatted at him.

The aloe was tingling on his cheeks. Jeannette had her head back on his shoulder. He could feel her heat through the thin material of her sundress. She was a small woman. Small breasts, small waist, delicate feet, good thick heavy dark hair. She had an aversion to undergarments that he found attractive. This year she’d lost her father to cancer, turned forty-three, and watched as her husband was led away in handcuffs.

She sat on Dale’s lap, wriggling a little, as if she was just trying to get comfortable. She sighed. “What a great day,” she said. “That was the best day I can remember having in quite some time. The boys had fun. They really like you. They tell me that, I’m not just assuming.”

“I always kind of wished I had younger brothers,” Dale said, realizing immediately that it was probably not the right thing. Jeannette gave a soft laugh and sipped her wine. “How old would your mother have been?” she said.

“Much older than you.”

“How much?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re beautiful.”

“I guess I’m not quite a hag yet.”

Dale had recently turned twenty-five. He hadn’t managed to finish college. He was almost done with his EMT certification but for the past few months he’d been living in his father’s basement. He considered meeting Jeannette to be the single best stroke of luck that had ever befallen him. Before Jeannette, he’d been dating a girl for almost a year. A bank teller. She called him every day for a week before she gave up.

Occasionally, he thought about Jeannette’s husband, but only occasionally. The last thing she had told Dale about him was that he was in a halfway house in Billings. The boys wanted to see him but she hadn’t decided yet. She thought maybe it was too soon. For the most part she didn’t talk about him, and Dale didn’t ask.

They sat on the porch in the slow solstice twilight. The lilacs had opened and the air was musky with them. Dale was rubbing the back of her neck with his thumb, listening to the sound of the creek, hearing in its dull murmur something like a gathering crowd, just beginning to voice its displeasure.

—

Dale ran in the mornings. It was a habit he’d picked up recently, part of some more general desire to straighten himself out. He’d tried meditating. That had never really worked. Running, though, was good. He laced up his shoes in the dark of his childhood bedroom, took the stairs two at a time, and did a five-mile loop. Across the tracks that bisected town, the gravel of the railway crunching under his shoes, down the hill to the river.

His dad would have considered all of it — meditation, breathing exercises, even running — nothing but hippie bullshit. Dale would have agreed, not too long ago. But then he went on his first ride-along with the Park County EMT crew and he’d seen a girl, a few years younger than himself, bleed out on the side of the highway while her drunk boyfriend got handcuffed and pushed into the police car. The boyfriend’s pickup was upside down in the barrow pit, the headlights still on, shooting off into the trees at a crazy angle. The girl was coughing, blood coming up. She’d been thrown from the truck and impaled on a jagged limb of a fallen pine tree.

He asked the other EMTs how they did it, coped with the constant trauma. Margie suggested meditating. That hadn’t worked. Tim said that he ran every day, no matter what. Dale tried this, and was surprised that it seemed to settle him in some way. Everyone said you became numb to it, or if not numb then just more able to break it down into a series of responses you needed to make to perform your job. Every situation, no matter how horrific, had a starting point, a place you could insert yourself to go to work.

He had to do something. He knew that. He’d floundered for three years at the university in Missoula, changed majors four times, finally just decided to not return for what should have been his senior year.

He’d been in the bar, drinking with some friends, half-watching a football game, when an old guy a few stools down keeled over and hit the floor, his back in a reverse arc, the cords of his neck straining, lips going blue. Dale stood up, looking around. Someone had his phone out, making the call. A guy that had been sitting at a table with a woman — maybe they were on a date, they were both kind of dressed up — came hustling over. He got down next to the old man, turned him on his side. He’d taken his jacket off and rolled it up under the old man’s head. He was holding his arm, saying things to him that Dale couldn’t hear. Aaron Edgerly, one of Dale’s friends, walked over, started saying something about jamming his wallet in the old guy’s mouth so he wouldn’t choke on his tongue, but the man waved him off.

“Just stand back,” he said. “If you want to do something, clear these barstools away. They’re going to need to get in here with a stretcher.”

Aaron grumbled a little. But he put his wallet away, started moving stools. There was something in the man’s voice, ex-military probably. He was calm when everyone else was freaked out. Eventually the ambulance showed up. The paramedics carted the old guy off and the man went back to his date and Dale had spent the whole night thinking about how it would feel to be the guy who knew what to do in a situation like that, the one who people listened to when things got heavy.

Dale signed up for the EMT course the next day. He hadn’t told his dad. He wanted to wait until he had something, a certificate or diploma or whatever you got when you passed the exam.

Not long after he’d quit school and moved back home he’d overheard his dad talking to his uncle Jerry. They were sitting out on the porch listening to a baseball game on the radio. The kitchen window was open, and Dale was pouring himself a glass of milk.

“He’s a good kid,” his dad was saying.

“He is,” Jerry said. “A great kid, always was.”

“He’s just kind of a beta dog. You don’t like to say that about your only son but it’s true. He’s willing to be led, is what I’m saying. I love him to death.”

“Of course you do.”

“There’s alphas and betas. It’s how it has to be, but you just want the most for your kid. You know?”

“He’s young. I bet he gets it together.”

“I’d started my own business by the time I was his age. Bought a house.”

“Everyone’s different, man. He’s a good kid.”

“I know. That’s what everyone says.”

Dale went back down to his room at this point.

—

Though Dale’s first ride-along was forever burned into his memory — months later and the sight of the girl run through with a pine stob was still freshly horrible — his second was oddly pleasant, fortuitous even. It was a quiet evening in town, they’d only had a couple calls. One older guy who thought he might be having a heart attack but was just suffering from indigestion. A minor fender bender, a passenger complaining of whiplash. And then, a call from a residential neighborhood not too far from Dale’s father’s house, a child with a possibly broken arm. They got to the scene, and there were bikes on the sidewalk. A boy of about ten writhing on the grass, a woman kneeling next to him, trying to keep him still, smoothing his hair. Dale helped the EMT on duty check the boy over and apply a splint. He stole glances at the mother, cutoff shorts and a tank top, hands dirty like she’d been working in the garden.

In the ambulance the boy’s wailing slowed, and the woman caught Dale looking at her. She smiled.

Later that week he went for a walk and passed her house. She was out in the front yard carting a wheelbarrow load of mulch to spread under the rhododendrons that lined her driveway. The boys were playing basketball, the one in the cast making awkward one-handed shots. Dale was just going to walk by, but then she saw him and waved him over.