Richie did that thing some guys did, where they buy Marlboro 100s and smoke them only halfway. He had two fresh packs that morning and he looked down into the second of his packs and watched something like six singles rattle silently.
He still had sleep eyes from the little bit of rest he took on the plastic bed and felt too tired to stand so he slid across the room in his desk chair to confront the mirror. Watched himself rub on his bald head and thought about when he last had hair. He had slept in his uniform, boots and all, thought about that, then deposited his fingers into the loops of the tactical scissors attached at the hip. His belly filled the bottom part of his Milford County Ambulance shirt and he wondered how long he had looked like this. Then he opened his phone to look at pictures of near naked and naked women on the naked women app.
He was unmoved by what he saw, got up from the chair, pocketed the phone, tacked a cigarette in his mouth, started slipping his Carhartt over his shoulders when Rodney popped his head in the room.
“Dispatch,” Rodney said. He was shaking his radio.
“Something real?”
“Out in Terry Township. Lady called, said her husband ain’t moving much.”
Out the building the wind bit their faces with cold teeth and the few flurries hustled around the air. Rodney never got his EMT-P so he drove the rig, threw the heat on full blast when he got in. He didn’t put the lights on, and Richie cracked the window so he could smoke half a 100.
“I got the heat going, Richie,” Rodney said. Richie took a rip from the cig and leaned against the cold to exhale into the crack at his forehead and left it open. Stop signs and dead yards went past his eyes, no one was out on the sidewalks and the grocery on Fifth had an empty parking lot save for three sedans that had been there long enough to become more fixtures in the concrete than signs of life.
“Terry Township,” Richie said finally. “Terry Township. You know anything about Terry?”
“Never been. Different?”
“It’s fucked up is what it is,” Richie said.
“What makes you say that?”
Richie slipped the unsmoked half of his cigarette out the window. The wind caught it and sent it to the sky, no embers glittered in the mirror.
“We got a wellness check out there one time from the postal service. Said this old guy wasn’t checking his mail. We got into the house and the smell itself nearly took my fuckin head off. I covered my mouth and hollered hello, and this voice come from the living room. Guy just says, yep, I’ll be there in a minute. Well a minute passed and I didn’t hear any feet moving, nothing. Me and my partner, it was Dan Mooney I believe, go back in the living room, and this little guy, 90 pounds probably, is lying near naked on the carpet and he’s got these red open sores all over the place.”
“Christ,” Rodney said.
“Gets worse.” Richie took another cigarette from the pack. “He'd been there long enough he soaked the carpet in piss and you could feel it on your boots. We got closer and those wounds were alive. There were maggots wriggling around in there. We told him we were gonna get him to the hospital and he goes, I’ll get up in a minute. I’m just tired is all.”
Rodney rubbed the fat-filled bridge of his nose, shook his head. “I think I knew Dan. He used to teach the class.”
“Yep.”
“Where he at now?”
“Geisinger. He jumped ship soon as they bought Memorial.”
Richie lofted smoke out his mouth, out the ambulance and into the world. They drove on past the school and took a winding road that gets up over the mountain and drops back down into little hamlets where a man can lay down on the carpet and disintegrate if he wants.
“Why ain’t you done that yet Richie?”
“What’s that?”
“Jumped ship.”
“Hell,” Richie said. He coughed and a cigarette ember dropped on his knee and he watched it go out and he did not dust off his pants. “I got the side gig with my brother, what I got to jump ship for.”
“Your brother runs the funeral home?”
“Nah,” Richie said. “He just digs the graves.”
“You help him dig?”
Richie shook his head. “I mow where he dug once it grows back.”
“I think I might jump ship if they start hiring EMTs again,” Rodney said. “Keep that between us.”
Who would care, Richie thought. He nodded. Rodney went on. “I seen they got these nice uniforms with the jackets. They’re bright yellow and shine in the light. We just got these T-shirts.”
“They look like fuckin bicycle cops, Rodney,” Richie said. It got a laugh out of Rodney and Richie caught the laugh bug with him. He deposited another half smoked cigarette over the window. “I like my shirt anyway.”
They arrived at the address and parked the ambulance out front on the road. The light on the porch was dull but it was on, and it cast a pitiful beam over a small two-step wooden staircase that had cracked and splintered. Grass and weeds grew from underneath through those cracks and stood somewhat tall considering the conditions.
“Stairs are gonna be a problem if we gotta wheel him out,” Rodney said.
***
The woman inside the house sat down in the sunken spot off center on the couch. The bottle was buried in the couch cushions halfway like a shell in the sand at the beach. She dug it out, pulled the stopper, had a slug, the little one screamed, and she threw the bottle toward the noise and the noise stopped.
“Fuckin rat fucker,” she said.
In the next room was a kitchen that had not held a warm fragrance in a long time. The dining table piled high with trash and stale food, moldy slices of bread. Unwashed plates stuck to each other like magnets and piled up to the sink from the floor. Where garbage ended and something edible began was unclear. A river rat the size of a premature baby scrapped its yellow teeth on a brown and crusted ceramic plate. In another room a teen girl slept.
The woman on the couch heard the knock and her eyes got wide. She went over the rules in her head, remembered the lock and the thing about a warrant. She pulled what was left of herself together and stepped over the still quietly sobbing child on the floor near the window. She looked outside and saw different shades of gray. Gray trees. Gray yard. Gray sky and gray pavement. The moon was up and it too was gray. Its peck marks like the cratered face of the man who sunk into his chair silently.
“What you want?” she asked through the door.
“Ambulance,” a voice said. “Someone’s hurt in there?”
She remembered the call, breathed loosely, looked at the sleeping man. “Hold on,” she said.
Richie and Rodney stepped in with their loose outfits and holstered scissors and she eyed them with doubt. Rodney caught her eyes and thought she looked at him as though he were a liar, a distrust that could be fixed with better uniforms, reflective jackets.
“Is that him there?”
“That’s him,” she said.
Richie stepped over a wad of fast food bags and looked at the child on the floor and walked around a pet carrier that may have had a pet in it or a stuffed animal since it did not seem to be moving. “Hello sir,” he said to the man in the chair.
The man in the chair said nothing. He did not move or glance his way or even shrug. He took no offense to his presence and showed no sign of relief.
“He just been like that,” the woman said. “Sleeping with the lights on.”
Richie closed in on the old man, went through the routine in his head, reciting to himself the DCAP-BTLS model of initial contact (deformities, contusions, abrasions, penetrations/punctures, bruises, tenderness, lacerations, swelling) in that sort of sing-songy way he always has. Rodney clung to the doorway like a bug. He saw movement on the kitchen floor and then he looked at the child who was now rubbing its eyes trying to stay awake. The woman lit a cigarette.
Richie put two fingers to the man’s neck, then stood back a minute. Then he checked again. He asked the woman how long the man had been dead.
“He ain’t fuckin dead,” she said. Smoke left her mouth in thin streams between the words. Her saliva and dead lip skin created a mortar that held the cigarette in place on her bottom lip.
“Ma’am, your husband is dead.”
“That old mother fucker ain’t dead yet,” she said. “He’s warm. I checked.”
Richie turned back to the man, cocked his head to the side and noticed it underneath the silent corpse. He pulled the man’s head forward and felt the chair.
“He’s on a heating pad, he’s dead. Been dead,” he said. “He’s as dead as they get.”
The woman looked around the floor near the child for the bottle and she found it and picked it up and pulled the stopper and took a slug from it.
“He is a dead rat fucker then,” she said.
By then the child had stopped crying. It was looking around the faces in the room, looking at Richie, laughing and cooing a little and enjoying the commotion of a full house.
***
After the coroner took over they got back into the ambulance and Richie cracked the window and they went back the way from which they came. All the same – low fields cut into the hills and when they dropped back down the other side into town the concrete was naked like it was before but now it was bathed only in moonlight, a different hue.
“Stop at the first gas station,” Richie said. “Need smokes.”
Rodney kept his eyes out the window, one hand on the wheel and the other in his mouth while he clipped his fingernails with his teeth.
“Coroner seems like a worse job,” Rodney said, spitting the words between nail trimmings.
“Yeah,” Richie sighed. “Maybe.”
“It's all dead people. You don’t even get to think you have the chance to save someone.”
“Might be kind of nice. You know exactly what the outcome is gonna be every time your phone rings. Always gonna be a dead person.”
“Would you want to do it?”
“Gotta get elected. I can’t do that.”
Rodney nodded as if he understood and went back to pulling new growth cuticles and skin from around his nails with his teeth. “You ever think about just finding some other line of work?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Shit I don’t know. Anything. Could you go full time with your brother?”
“Why you asking?”
“I was just thinking about it.”
The last of Richie’s smokes went out the window and he knocked his head against the cold glass. He was thinking about the baby, thinking about that old man getting it up and putting that baby in the woman. A life in, a life out. And some day that baby is gonna grow up and get old and someone in a uniform is gonna be the one to go find it dead or dying in Terry Township. Someone is going to dig the grave, someone is gonna mow it.
“My brother said something funny to me one time,” Richie’s voice surprised even himself as he turned the words loose. “He goes, you know, you and I are kinda tied together, with our work. He says if you was any better at your job, there wouldn’t be enough work for me to do. And if you get too bad at your job, I ain’t ever gonna get a day off.”
Rodney thought for a while. He pulled his fingers from his mouth and gripped the steering wheel. “I never thought about it that way,” he said.
“Just a funny way to look at it,” Richie said.
They drove on in silence and Rodney thought about turning on the radio but decided he preferred his free hand back in his mouth. Richie looked out the window and nodded his head in a musicless rhythm. He wished he had a cigarette.
They passed a gas station with a dark storefront, Richie leering out his window looking for signs of life inside. “That guy was dead long before we got there, Richie,” Rodney said. Richie nodded, rubbing his bald head on the cold window. He was thinking about asking Rodney to stop, that there might be a man at the register waiting to sell him smokes in the dark. Instead he figured there would be another gas station somewhere, one with the lights on and the guesswork taken out of it, and he would not have to say anything more about it.
-- Chuck Strange writes stories that take place in the Northeast, where he lives with his wife and daughter. He's happy to be here.