I. The Job
There was the sound. It’s always mistaken for something else—a backfiring car, Roman candles. When I hear gunfire, I think of those countries on television: crowds packing a two-tone bazaar, shawled women, kids waving at the camera. Somewhere, a machine gun rattles. A bomb goes off. No one flinches. But here in America, we want to hear gunfire. And what for? Thrills? To feel danger? For something to talk about? Someone to blame?
More shots came, sounding hollow and compressed. The sky was hazy, and I looked up at a crescent moon. In every direction, sirens rose, and the bay doors rattled up, the ambulance like a praying mantis crawling out of the dark.
This was the job.
We smoked at the picnic table, waiting for shots in the Homes.
I lived for nights like this.
“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em,” I said.
“It’s the O.K. Corral tonight,” Dale said.
“Six by my count,” Matthews now. “What about you, captain?”
“I never count,” I said. “And stop calling me captain.”
II. Hard Knocks
In college, I dated a girl whose grandfather was at Dachau. I met the old man on Thanksgiving. He rolled up his sleeve and stuck his arm out over the cranberry sauce. On his skin, there was the faint, black etching of a number.
One summer at their lake house, I sat watching the wake beat upon the retaining wall. The old man joined me. He held a sweating, half-empty Bloody Mary, and twisting a pickle, told me how the Jews put on comedy shows at Dachau. The Nazis didn’t mind. They watched. He swore that, in all his life, he never laughed so hard.
I told my girlfriend, my voice a bit too amused. We were drying ourselves in the laundry room, lake water dripping off our skin. She glared at me, cold and uncensored. We didn’t speak the rest of the day.
I get it. I like to hear the funny stories, not the bad ones. But looking back, I understand that old man. Completely.
III. Dale
I’d fallen asleep. On my desk, a report lay damp and stained. I looked up. Brown water dripped out of a ceiling panel, and a spider, as if taunting me, rappelled in a mad working.
The air smelled of hot rubber.
I yelled to the common area. “Is something burning?”
“We caught a call at the reservoir,” it was Dale in the kitchen. “Girl got hypothermia trying to scuba dive. What a fucking idiot. Scuba diving? Here?”
“His boots are wet,” said Marty Grandstaff, sitting in the recliner, a hand in a bag of chips. “They’re in the oven.”
Born in Santa Fe, Dale wasn’t like us. He liked rattlesnake hunting and astrology, the smell of creosote after a rain. Here in the Midwest, it didn’t translate.
“You corn people wouldn’t know New Mexico from Nigeria,” he said once, eyeing me behind his aviators.
He said these things to get a reaction.
If you ask me, he was homesick.
Not long after Dale joined up, we had a call at the Homes. Drive-by. Three down.
At the scene, a man was on the ground. They shot him while he was mowing the lawn. The sweet burn of cut grass still hung in the air, and on his hands, tiny green shards peppered the blood.
“I’m shot,” he said as I put my bag down.
“You are shot,” I said.
In the corner of my eye, Dale parked his ambulance. I applied Vaseline gauze to the wound. I looked back. The ambulance had disappeared, and Dale was sprinting down the street.
“Motherfucker!” he cried.
Full of adrenaline, he forgot to put the ambulance in park. He chased it for two blocks. It finally ran into a tree.
I had to cover that up for Dale. We told the chief a car hit us in a parking lot.
“A hit and run?” the chief said. “On an ambulance?”
“I know,” Dale said. “Is nothing sacred?”
Dale lived two hours away in this old farmhouse. To him, the countryside felt like home. The rest of us lived here, but that came with a price. When you went out—to get a case of beer, to pick your kid up at school—you passed a spot where somebody had died and you’d seen it. Maybe that’s why Dale lived so far away. But who knows? I never asked.
It happened on his way to work. I can see it. Dale angles the car down the highway. He’s probably smoking a joint. Up the road, it all goes wrong. A tire comes off a semi. It bounces once, twice, again. Dale sees it, a black aberration against the sky. When it falls through his windshield, it’s the last thing he ever knows.
“Dammit!” Dale yelled from the kitchen. He sauntered out, rum-colored aviators down his nose.
“There’s good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news? My boots are dry. The bad news? They shrank.”
IV. Chicken Dinner
I shuffled up to the station. Breath leaked out of my face. It was cold. The new guy stood in the parking lot, thousands of packing peanuts pouring from his car. He clawed at them, but no matter how fast he went, another landslide came to bury his efforts.
“Captain,” he spun around. “Look what they did to my fucking car. It’s freezing.”
“Check the trunk,” I said, unlocking the station door.
He threw it open. As if loaded with a spring, more shot out over his head.
“Goddammit!” he cried.
The job could be boring—as shit. That’s where the pranks came in. With a good one, a man could distinguish himself. Gluing boots on the floor. Putting car keys in a bowl of water and freezing it. The more elaborate, the better.
When Dale was still alive, we made Matthews think he had permanent BO. When he walked in the room, we complained of an awful smell. Patients were our best collaborators. On a call, Dale told this old woman about it. All the way to the hospital, she bitched at Matthews how it smelled like something had died in the ambulance.
Around this time, the city had a campaign to save the old Carnegie library. Billboards went up. Pins were made. We wore them on the job. It was a civic dogma, leaking windows, rotting limestone, the restoration of copper domes. To raise money, the mayor had a fundraiser. Fancy gowns. Chicken dinner. Valet teenagers, zipping off in the Cadillacs of men they’d soon replace. The first responders always got invited. We were basically showdogs in rented tuxedos. To be honest, that library never got renovated. We could see it from the station.
Before the mayor’s speech, I passed his wife backstage. She held her drink out to me. She thought I was a waiter. I refreshed her Tom Collins anyway, and we talked. She was an old cheerleader, still had the look—heels, red lipstick, beauty parlor flips. She complained how these events were never fun. I told her about the Matthews prank, and she laughed.
“I have a question,” she said. “Your job must be so interesting.”
“I think that’s the fifth time I’ve heard that tonight,” I said.
“You must be used to it, though. People being voyeuristic. It’s only natural.”
I sipped my drink. “I have a question for you. We go to these functions all the time, and I’ve never seen someone write a check. Not a single one.”
She smiled and adjusted my bow tie. “So that’s what we pay you for.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s nothing. So who’s the stinky one?”
I pointed at Matthews. “Him.”
A few drinks later, we bounded up the stage. My eyes adjusted to the lights. Beyond them, the audience appeared as a mirage I could reach for but never touch. The guys lined up, Matthews next to the mayor’s wife.
During the speech, her nose began to wrinkle. She sniffed at the air, giving it lots of melodrama. She sold it. A class act.
She whipped her head down the row of people.
“What is that smell?” she said.
“You assholes!” Matthews cried, stomping off the stage.
We lost it. Dale hid his face on my shoulder, and water flooded my eyes. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. Chatter rose from the crowd, but the mayor spoke on. We didn’t care what they saw, what they thought. We were their janitors. They owed us a laugh.
V. War
There was the job before crack and after.
Before crack, the only drug I saw was heroin. By the old cemetery, there was a trailer park full of Vietnam vets. Once a year, they’d find one dead, a needle up his arm.
After crack, drug addicts were everywhere, living in hallways of peeling wallpaper, the window dark of stationary cars.
Before, the cops acted like my dad when he was a cop. If a man gets out of line, punch him in the face and help him back up. Why arrest him?
After, the cops had M-16s and tanks.
The mayor didn’t cut ribbons at car dealerships anymore. He had press conferences about drugs. Cops at his flank, he waved a hand over the day’s bounty: TEC-9s, gallon bags of crack, posterboard mugshots, a row of black faces.
“Those arrested today will be replaced,” he said. “Gentlemen, this won’t happen months from now, but within days, hours.”
At a distance, Dale and I sat watching on the bumper of a truck. A cop went by, pushing a gun safe on a dolly.
“Like pissing in the wind, huh?” I said through my cigarette filter.
“You better watch your fucking mouth, captain,” the cop said.
The summer after Dale died, the cops raided every crack house in town. During a raid in the Homes, I sat in the truck, watching the SWAT team inch up a yard, rifles low. Along piss-toned siding, clawed-out window mesh, they spread out like chess pieces.
A hand counted down.
Three.
Two.
One.
Inside the house there was a glare, sudden, as if the sun was out for only a second.
After SWAT cleared the scene, they called me in. A pregnant girl was smoothed out on the floor. The flashbang had blown up at her feet.
I put down my bag. The skin of her legs was ripped off. Only a pulp of hypodermis, raw and glistening, remained. I tried to wake her with smelling salts. She stirred. It wasn’t my call, but I knew the baby was lost.
The cops, laughing, brought in three black men and put them belly down on the floor. They groaned as the knee pads cut into their backs. The cops smiled, and a camera pulse filled the room. I turned away.
“I’ve got to take her to the hospital,” I said to a cop.
“Why?”
“You blew up a pregnant girl.”
“She’s under arrest.”
“Clearly,” I said. “She’s still going to the hospital.”
“Well, she needs an escort.”
I rode in the back with the cop and the girl. I’d put her neck in a brace. Through her teeth and spit, she tried to murmur something.
“Can you hear me?” I said. “Don’t try to move your legs.”
I glanced at the cop. His rifle hung between his knees, and he had the no-thought look of waiting in traffic.
“What are you going to write?” the cop said.
“In the report?” I said.
“No, your diary.”
I said his last name, squinting at his chest.
“It doesn’t matter what you do,” the cop said, checking the sight of his gun. “It matters what you write.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“Fucking crackheads.”
I thought of history class, the cold shell of a textbook. History is nothing but killing. Guillotines. Firing squads. Burning heretics at the stake. When I think of those pictures of death, I think of this: the crowds—chanters in the coliseum, spectators at the gallows, women straining up for the head of the king.
VI. Pandemonium
A reservoir, big and still. I’m on the shore. Bodies float in the waves, swollen and bursting with fluid and gas.
Beside me, my grandfather nestles into a rocking chair, scratching his belly. He’d been a sharecropper in Arkansas, then a sailor at Normandy. After the taking of the French coast, his division dragged the corpses out of the surf. They used hooks and fishing nets. In my only photo of him, he’s in the Caribbean, some island port of call. His Navy whites are wet with beer, and his arm hangs around a black woman dressed as a nurse, coconut oil slicking back her hair.
“Act like you’re at home,” my grandfather says from the rocking chair. “That’s where you ought to be.”
Down the water line, a man runs. His feet sink in the mud, every stride kicking a black spray. As he splashes into the cold water, I hear his breathing. It gives me a feeling—one which finds me in the bunk, the ambulance after a bad call, when I’m drunk at home, no clue what time it is—death will come for me.
He turns. I observe a bullet hole, clean and ring-shaped, in his forehead. Through it, the far trees roll. They shimmer. Beyond, a charcoal sky has no limit, like the farthest bluff, the total end of a squalid, lonely planet.
VII. Physics
The door whined as I opened it. Harsh lighting spread through the room, dissolving into folds of yellow near the ceiling. The chief sat at a green metal desk, staring into a television. He did not look at me. Photographs ringed his office, hung with no order in mind. In every one, he shakes hands with a politician: Dukakis, Bayh, Hamilton, Lugar. Men of importance—and you had to squint to see who they were.
“Sit down, captain,” the chief said.
I did not.
He spun his chair. He had a birdlike face and oval glasses. With his fingertips, he brushed at his thinning hair.
“Last week, you were support during a SWAT raid in the Homes,” he said.
“I recall that,” I said.
“What happened?”
“Did you see my report?”
“Did you see this?”
On the television, it was the girl from the raid. She sobbed in a hospital bed, her neck still in a brace. Microphones floated at her mouth, picking up this sad story so we could know it, believe it.
The screen told us more.
“Woman, 22, says unborn baby killed in police raid.”
The chief held a piece of paper to his face. “In your report, you wrote that you transported a pregnant girl because she was having chest pain.”
I shrugged. “I have no response.”
The chief held up his fists, then flattened them, a gesture of restraint.
“The mayor woke up to calls from national media outlets. National. He had no idea what they were talking about. He wants your dick in a jar, captain. I had to talk him down from making you a gong farmer in the sanitation district.”
Those SWAT guys, I thought. I should have felt them sizing me up.
“Listen,” the chief said. “You know this as well as anyone. The lying doesn’t matter. It’s the fact that you didn’t tell me.”
His eyes drifted to the photos. In his gaze, I tried to spy out if they made him feel exposed or protected.
“You could have sat in this chair one day,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”
“C’mon.”
“You’re no longer a captain. Try and fight it at the merit board. I don’t give a shit.”
Stunned, I held my face rigid. The nerves of my body were hot, as if picked at by a thousand decrepit birds.
“Anything to say?” the chief said.
“No, it’s funny. You don’t seem like someone who’d give in to pressure. Political pressure, that is.”
He smiled and brushed at his hair. “That’s very good.”
I gathered up my bag and pressed for the door. I had a great thirst for the outside world. I thought of Dale. When he passed, his family spread his ashes in the badlands outside Santa Fe. What should I do? What are my wishes? Here they are. Get a plane, fly it over Alaska and dump my ashes out. Mix me gone forever with glaciers, cobalt lakes, places I’ll never see.
The chief called after me.
“One last thing,” he said. “Vote for Clinton.”
VIII. Old Man
In twenty years I’ll be fifty. In this job, being an old man doesn’t change a thing. I’ll still have to carry the dead and the sick down five flights of stairs, freeze my nuts off in the cold at a car crash. How ridiculous.
At fifty, is the job carved to its most basic? Does the filth ever make sense? A man’s on his couch. He’s been shot in the chest. He called us. My partner and I walk in. The dying man’s eyes are open. He sees us. We see him. He grabs at the air but he can’t speak. His lung has collapsed.
“He’s fucking dead,” I say.
“Well, not yet,” my partner now.
“I can see that, dummy.”
“You said he’s dead. He’s not technically dead yet. What am I supposed to say in the report? That he was dead when we got here? It’s less paperwork.”
“What a fucking dump.”
“I’m going to write that he was dead.”
And that’s the last thing the guy ever knows.
IX. The Purpose of a System
Gunshots. We grumbled at the picnic table. The city had been at peace. No shootings. No stabbings. Debate filled the station over whether the gods of violence were bored. I was agnostic on the question.
“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em,” Matthews said.
“What’s your count?” said Grandstaff, our new captain.
“I was lighting my cigarette. I forgot to count.”
“You never forget.”
“Enough to ruin our night,” I said.
The bay doors rose up, the trucks shining like stock cars. Ever since my demotion, I’d been cleaning them. It gave me a convert-like purpose. In this job, our most important relationship was with the truck. After a bad call, washing the blood out with a hose, it felt like someone you loved had been through something terrible, and only you, no one else, could make it right.
Matthews and I got in. We drove off. As we went, the hills and valleys of the siren tore at my ears. I’ve caught myself sitting at table corners. It’s the only way I can hear what’s being said.
“Additional shots fired at the scene,” the radio said.
“We’re almost there,” I said. “How many down?”
“Seven.”
Matthews and I shared a look.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“Have you ever had seven down?” Matthews asked.
“Only at a car crash.”
“That had to have been bad.”
“It was.”
Lights bearing down, engine spinning under my boot, the truck arrived to the street but there was nothing. I hung my head out the window. Sirens droned all around us, red and blue pulsing at the treetops.
I turned to Matthews and laughed. “I drove to the wrong address. I can’t fucking believe it. I’ve never done that.”
There was the sound. Gunfire. I didn’t know from where, but it was close. More shots came, and Matthews and I threw our heads behind the dash. He asked if they were shooting at us. I said I didn’t know.
Rain had started to fall, silent and pinpointed. There were no more shots, and my eye crawled over the dash. In the headlights, a shape appeared. It grew larger, more in focus, a groaning and trembling force that was real.
A man was running down the street.
Blood covered his white muscle shirt. He’d been shot through the heart, and he ran by the truck as if we didn’t exist.
I lunged out the door.
“Fucking stop!” I cried, chasing after him.
The rain fell hard. In the curtain of water, I struggled to see him. As I passed the intersection, sirens and lights filled the next block, and I rolled my ankle. It threw me to the ground. My mind splintered—twisted metal, desert hoodoos, an opal of crack burning in the mouth of a young woman.
I ran on. I knew I couldn’t save him. Nothing will save a man shot through the heart. No. I wanted to catch him. In his last seconds on earth, marooned in the no-man’s land of death, I had to know what it was like. What story did he have to tell?
Lucas T. Robinson is a writer and journalist. An Indiana native, his fiction has previously appeared in ANMLY. He lives in San Diego, California.