Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  From high in the scaffolding, brush hanging over the paint can, Dennis saw Michaela coming out of the family’s trailer. Something about the girl had changed over the winter, he thought. She’d always been pretty, but now Dennis couldn’t help but watch the woman as she headed for the office, unaware of his stare.

  Michaela was Reinhoudt’s only child. Reinhoudt told Dennis he had been hoping for a boy, and that they’d already had a name picked out: Michael. Never one to waste anything, Reinhoudt had added an a.

  Every summer, the Reinhoudts brought Michaela with them. She’d stay in the city with relatives until the school year was over, and then she’d appear at the park, filling different jobs: taking tickets, then working the canteen, her forearms specked with small scars from dropping the french-fry baskets into the hot grease. When she started taking commerce at university, she took over the big wooden desk in the office trailer, doing the accounts for the whole operation.

  The woman now in the office was a big change from the angry teenager who had sat in the front of The Thunder on one of Dennis’s late night test drives because they were sharing a smoke, the red coal at its tip bright from the wind, when Reinhoudt trundled into view below them. She’d muttered “Shit!” urgently under her breath, ducking down out of sight, and Dennis could still remember the heat of her breath that night, warm and damp against the outside of his elbow. She was angry a lot then, especially with her father, and Dennis used to keep her cigarettes for her and listen when she trashed her father for everything from his strict rules to his disdain for any boy who came to pick her up for a high school dance.

  Dennis could see the silver roof of the administration trailer from the scaffolding, and he imagined that he could look right through the flat metal. He knew the office well enough; he picked his pay up from Michaela every Thursday, and he even had a key to the trailer in the off-season, so that he could get into the filing cabinet for purchase orders when he needed spare parts. There was a slatted swivel chair in the office, and he could imagine Michaela in there, head down and looking at papers. He couldn’t decide whether her legs were stretched out under the desk and crossed at the ankles or if she sat with one leg drawn up underneath her. The thought nagged at him a little as he worked, as if he had a picture almost completely drawn up but some critical part was still smudged and unfinished. He could draw up everything else in his head: the big farming equipment calendar that Reinhoudt received every year—a mailing-list mistake, with a label that always read “McNally’s Farm,” but Reinhoudt wouldn’t return it because it was free; the piles of invoices; and a big oily pin that had sheared off the main linkage in the Ferris wheel, which Reinhoudt was trying to get the manufacturer to take responsibility for.

  But he could picture Michaela best of all.

  She had a narrow, thoughtful face, and it seemed to Dennis that it was always turned down, so that she seemed to be looking somewhere close to your right bicep—a slow, curving smile and dark, peaked eyebrows. Reinhoudt was florid and blond, with a wide, flat, expressive face. Often, Dennis couldn’t finish a sentence without knowing exactly what his boss’s response was going to be. Michaela’s mother’s name was Anna, but the woman was so mousy and quiet that Dennis could hardly imagine she had anything to do with her daughter’s features; it was as if even her genes had been too shy to contribute.

  He thought about Michaela a lot while he worked on the scaffolding. He thought about what her world must be like, about how soft her long dark hair must be. Sometimes, about how a towel must feel against her skin when she was getting out of the shower, but he always tried to shake that thought out of his head.

  It was cruel to bring a young woman like Michaela out here where she was stuck almost all by herself, Dennis thought, looking down at the Reinhoudts’ travel trailer. The trailer came out from Calgary at the end of April. Dennis heard they had a big house in one of the newer Calgary suburbs, one with a fancy name like Tuscany or The Hamptons. He’d never seen it. Hard to imagine giving that up to rough it in a travel trailer five months of the year, Dennis thought, and he’d said as much to Reinhoudt. Reinhoudt told him, “You don’t run a good business from fifty miles away.”

  The words had stopped Dennis in his tracks. He’d been halfway towards saying, “That’s not the only thing you don’t do from fifty miles away.” And for a moment he’d remembered his wife’s face, but then it was gone.

  Unlucky in love, that’s how Dennis started thinking about himself, remembering his last sexual encounter, a front-seat blow job on a dirt road near Regina from a hitchhiker he’d picked up as he raced across the flatlands, wondering when they would ever end. She’d briefly replaced the empty coffee cups in the front seat and was, he thought, someone who had picked him simply because there wasn’t anyone else in the truck to pick, and he wondered if that didn’t actually match the run of the rest of his life.

  The summer after Heather told him not to bother coming back, he spent a lot of time driving, often stopping to watch when a freight train came thumping along the rails next to the road, counting the cars and reading the different railroad names on their sides. Pulling over when he saw small hawks cutting shrinking circles in the sky. Eventually, what had seemed like home out east came to feel more like a healed fracture than anything else. Sometimes, when the weather changed, he would feel a deep, twinging pain for a little while. But there was always Aspirin in the cabinet in the bathroom and rye in the kitchen cabinet with the plates, and it didn’t take much to shove it all away, once he had dinner in front of him and the television on.

  Finally, the high first arc of The Thunder was completely painted, the scaffolding all moved to the next curve, and Dennis suddenly took Michaela in his arms as she came out the office. As he did, the lights all started coming on, and he could picture short, portly Reinhoudt at the heavy switches, bracing his feet and grunting, pushing up.

  Dennis wrapped his arms around Michaela, reaching all the way around the slim woman’s back so that he could hold on to his own elbows behind her, just after the sun had swollen up huge and had bent down into the clouds on the horizon. Just a quick hug was all, he thought, and she was so thin and soft and quiet there in his arms. He’d had a few shots of rye up on the scaffold, and it had started to make sense in his head. He’d known her for years, and she’d always been nice to him, made him feel as if he actually belonged there. And now it was as if she belonged here, notched in against him, like they fit together. The quick, copper-mouthed daring of it, like taking a chance working alone on the top of the roller coaster’s first arc, no safety harness, only trust in balance.

  “We could go out,” he whispered into her hair. “We could go into Calgary, maybe dancing. Catch a movie in town. Maybe just drive around out here to where we could see the stars better.”

  But she broke out of his embrace, her face frantic, as if she was frightened. He felt suddenly guilty and looked at his hands as if they belonged to someone else, and he remembered how smooth the side of her face was against his own, how pale her skin was compared to his own burnt arms.

  Once she had pushed him away, she squared her shoulders and looked at him.

  “Look,” she said, and then stopped.

  And he knew she was Reinhoudt through and through after all. Her father had exactly the same way of throwing out single words as if they were meant to define everything—one word that set the scene and made the rules for everything that was to follow.

  “Look, Dennis. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I’ll tell you this.” And then her chin came up and her eyes were coal-black under the brightening arc lights staring down onto them from above. “You’ve worked for Da for a long time, so I’m not going to say anything to him about this. But I’m not going out with you—I’m not going to Calgary with you, not going in the truck with you. Not if you were the last guy on the planet. It’s just not going to happen.” While she was talking, she was stepping backwards, and sliding her hands one after the other down her arms towa
rds the opposite wrist, as if she were wiping off something unpleasant that had gathered on the fine hair of her forearms.

  At least, that was the way it seemed to Dennis—and even as she kept talking, he couldn’t shake the image from his mind. He knew she was still talking, but the words seemed to be missing his ears. Then she stopped and turned, striding away, leaving a brightly lit Dennis standing at the centre of the park.

  One of the big sodium lights blew then with a dull thump, throwing a circle of dark all around him, and in his head, Dennis was already going to get the big ladder and a spare bulb, wrapped in its nest of corrugated cardboard. You have to be careful with the big bulbs, he knew. A touch in the wrong place and you could immediately mark the new bulb for failure: the small whorls of oil from just one fingerprint could make the quartz glass heat unevenly and crack. It said so right on the box. One errant touch and you’d ruined everything, you’d have to start all over again. Dennis headed towards the shed where the ladder was kept, and he could hear Reinhoudt nearby, swearing loudly; although the big bulbs lasted for ages, they were, according to Reinhoudt, unreasonably expensive.

  Dennis looked up towards the horizon, towards the big, bright green arc of The Thunder, standing like some kind of rigid, unripened rainbow. He knew it didn’t matter how many times The Thunder was painted and repainted, every time he rode in one of the cars, he could tell by the sway how much more the cross-members sagged. It was drooping even faster this year, bolts stripping somewhere, the first turn bottoming out deeper than it should—and even fifty coats of paint couldn’t disguise that from him. He’d talked to Reinhoudt about getting someone to come in and look the ride over, someone who actually knew what they were doing, but he could tell right away that Reinhoudt wouldn’t do it. He’d gotten a dismissive wave. “It’ll be running fine after I’m dead and gone,” Reinhoudt said, almost shouting, “Nothin’ wrong with The Thunder. Nothin’ paint won’t cure.”

  The next morning, Dennis went back to painting, and thinking about Michaela.

  He put the brush down across the top of the paint can and looked at the palm of his hand, where the green paint had bled through the bristles and had run down the handle onto his skin.

  Funny how different it could look, he thought, just funny, the way the green paint made the hairs and pores and wrinkles stand out that much more when you looked close. He stretched his arms up above his head, and looked out across the flat of the prairie. You couldn’t see the new grass if you looked directly at the ground, he thought, but if you looked across the whole prairie and let your eyes go, you could see the green fuzz of spring coming.

  So high up, Dennis thought. So high up and so far down.

  911

  I F THE ROOF LIGHTS hadn’t been on, I might have gotten away with it.

  I might have been able to wiggle my way out of it somehow.

  I might have been able to explain that I was transporting a dead body because no one else was available, just trying to help, that the victim had run out of time. They might have listened to that.

  Because they would have been happy to take any explanation. They were waiting for one, for anything, so they could get out the old rubber stamp and close the file.

  The siren? Sure, lots of people might have heard it while I was going up the hill, but it really could have been anyone—a police car somewhere, or firemen late for dinner, heading back to the fire hall, slumped back in their seats and tired.

  But the lights: accident investigators know about lights.

  I know too, because I took the courses, back when I thought I might want to do something else—back before I knew that this was the only thing I’d ever want to do. Break a light when it’s lit and tiny beads of glass will form on the filament, glass dust melting on superheated wire right before the filaments fail. Or something like that. The point is, the filament is different if the light breaks while it’s lit, different from what it would be if the light was turned off. And you can see it as clear as a bell under a microscope, if you’re looking. And they’d be looking—too many different stories to ignore impartial evidence.

  I knew they’d have me with the lights, and it was only a matter of time. Besides, the police had to already know I’d been going fast from the way the rig was wrecked. You don’t do that kind of damage tooling back to the hospital at fifty kilometres an hour.

  But waiting for the reports gave me a window of opportunity. More to the point, it gave them a window of opportunity. When something goes really wrong, you always have that window. It was the window for me to quit or resign, to take away the need for them to do anything, so they could wash their hands of me before they even had to talk about the “organization’s reputation” being damaged.

  Problem is, I don’t give a damn about the organization, about the hospital or anything. I just care about the job, and they know it.

  I remember the thistles. That’s the last clean, clear thing I do remember. I remember seeing them, and thinking I was in big trouble. They were on the side of the road on White Mountain. The ambulance was going wide open, and the headlights caught the thistles on the shoulder all at once, lighting them up flat so they only existed in two dimensions. Big and tall and completely covered in thorns, their flowers a sharp purple on their bulbous green tops. I saw them clearly, before I drove straight through into the big nothing behind them.

  So that was me: Tim McCann, already suspended but still driving an ambulance at top speed right over the ditch and into an embankment on the other side. It was the kind of thing the media would feast on if they found out.

  It was a big old TopKick ambulance, the kind that looks like a van with an extra foot of roof stacked on top. That’s the extra headroom, so you can stand up and work back there. But they’re pigs on the road—too high, the wheelbases too narrow, and especially tippy when it’s slippery. They’re like some kind of curious hybrid—made for a different job, made to make do. Underpowered, too, compared to the new box-backs.

  There are always supposed to be two of you, two on every call—two to get the gurney back into the ambulance with the patient strapped down; one to stay with the patient, one to drive. You’re not supposed to try to do it all alone. But I thought even me alone had to be better than no one at all.

  See, I waited, listening to the radio, and no one was kicking out of any of the stations when they called.

  There’s a big round clock in the ready room at the ambulance station, up by the wall-mounted television. The ready room is full of battered institutional furniture, the kind you get when everyone sits on it and no one really gives a damn about coffee-cup circles or creases in the vinyl from too many asses for too many hours. The clock has black hands for hours and minutes and a slender red whisker for the seconds, and that red hand just went round and round, and the dispatcher kept calling different units, but there was no one answering. I wasn’t even in uniform, no black pants or white shirt, but I was wearing the blue polyester zip-up jacket we all had, the kind of jacket that might get you a minute’s attention from the girls behind the counter while you’re belting back coffee and doughnuts in the middle of a quiet afternoon.

  I was picking up the personal stuff from my locker that I wanted to hold on to until the suspension was over: five days, no pay, in trouble again because of my mouth, because I told an administrator, Pat Riley, that I didn’t give a fuck about forms. Riley snapped back, “I’m trying to keep you from getting sued,” and smart-mouth me, I’d said, “Hope you like your job. Mine is saving lives.”

  Too damn self-righteous for my own good—and it got right up his nose, too.

  So I got five unexpected, unpaid days off, a case the union didn’t even want to fight, and because of that, I was in the ready room stuffing a bag with dirty laundry when the radio started chirping.

  We were already down a full crew—early vacation that someone had approved, probably Riley—and all hell was breaking loose on the radio.

  It was the sort of thing that nobody want
s to plan for. In Kentville, the ambulance was tied up with a car wreck. I’d heard them roll with the fire department when I got in, and they were probably struggling with big tools and heavy bleeding. New Minas was transporting a heart patient into Halifax—a bad call when we were already short—and to top it off, I knew the alternator had gone on the rig in Canning, and they couldn’t get a gig out of it, couldn’t even get it to turn over. They’d been complaining about that rig for weeks, and now it wasn’t going to move.

  The dispatcher was marching farther and farther away down the valley, looking for a free vehicle. She was as far away as Berwick before I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take it anymore because there was no one to roll, and up on White Mountain, someone had dropped the phone after calling for an ambulance, and the dispatcher could hear the ruckus in the background, someone screaming, “Bill, Bill, talk to me, Bill!” and there were snatches of the dispatcher trying to get someone to pick up the phone, little bits of that being broadcast over the radio too, whenever the dispatcher keyed up the microphone.

  The ambulances all have numbers on the back, and we had the very first ones, so the numbers started at 001 and went up from there. We joked about it being James Bond’s EMS, “double-oh-seven, licensed to kill.” EMS, that’s Emergency Medical Service, like an ambulance, except we’re allowed to do something to help instead of just loading you up and driving as fast as we can go.

  I didn’t do the radio call-out, didn’t let the dispatcher even know I was on the road. I turned the key, and when 003 started, I took it. We hadn’t stripped it yet, so it had gear, but it had been taken out of service, parked and waiting for a brand new replacement box-back diesel ambulance that was going to be the new 003—a bigger engine in a heavier rig with more room to work in the back.