by Lou Cadle
It was A.J. He carried a folded blue jumpsuit.
Chad shut off the water.
AJ looked him over and said, “Oh, man. You are in bad shape. Look at those bruises.”
“I did sort of trip around out there.”
A.J. made a spinning motion with his finger. Chad turned his back and stood there dripping. A.J. said, “Good God, son. How long were you out there?”
“Nine hours, off and on. In the mud for most of that.”
“You need a doctor. By the look of that arm, you need antibiotics. I’ll get a med kit and do some first aid on you right now. Dry off. Don’t get dressed yet. I’ll be back.”
Chad patted himself dry on a scratchy white towel from a stack on a wire shelf, wishing for a softer one. He wrapped the damp towel around his waist and sat on a bench. He crossed his bad leg over his good and prodded at the Achilles. Ouch. It was puffy and tender, even to the lightest touch. He’d be paying for this day for the next year. But he’d have the memory of the day forever, too, of helping a few people. Of saving that dog, even. Maybe that wasn’t a bad trade-off, a year of discomfort for helping the crazy man, the pinned woman, Francie, and someone’s pet. He tried not to think about the bodies they’d seen and the failure that represented.
A.J. banged back in with a first aid kit and set about cleaning and bandaging Chad’s cuts.
“Quit shaking your head like that,” said Chad. “You look like a mother. Next thing you’ll be making tsking sounds.”
“I am a father,” said A.J. “And if I were yours, I’d be damned proud of you.”
Chad’s throat tightened. “Thanks,” he managed.
“You need a doctor, at least for antibiotics. We’ve had someone making calls to international rescue teams for info, and it seems there’s bad infection rates with lahar mud. People stuck in it for more than 36 hours seldom even survive the infection.”
“That’s awful,” Chad said. “But I really can’t afford a grand to go to an ER. Do you know of a local doctor who’ll charge less?”
“I’ll call around,” said A.J. “We’ll get you a script for Cipro called in to start with. It’s the least we can do. Francie would have been in trouble without you.”
“I would have been in trouble without her. She really keeps her head in an emergency.”
“That’s good to hear,” A.J. said, “Put your feet up on the bench here.”
“I think those little cuts on my feet were the skin splitting from being wet for so long. Like when you wrinkle up from swimming all day?” He bit off a gasp as A.J.‘s hand grabbed his right heel.
“Sorry. What’s wrong?”
“Only my dang Achilles tendon. I hurt it last year and it flared up again yesterday.”
“I wouldn’t wonder. I’ll tape it for you. But you really should see a doc about that. You could need surgery if it’s hurt badly enough.”
What a laugh. Like he could afford surgery.
Finally, A.J. had him patched up and he was able to pull on the jumpsuit. As uncomfortable as promised. “I think I should trash my clothes,” he said, pointing to them.
“Definitely. I’ll take care of it.”
“I appreciate the help.”
“We appreciate yours, Chad. You’re going to make a great firefighter one day.”
“Thanks,” Chad said, but oddly, he didn’t feel much of a glow from hearing it. Two days ago, obsessing over being a pest here, he might have wept with gratitude over hearing such a thing. Today? No, but maybe he was just tired. A.J. shook his hand, grabbed the medical kit, and left him alone.
Chad picked up his filthy shoes, thought about washing them out, realized since he had to track back through the mud again to get to his car, there was little point to it. He didn’t want to get the bandages wet, though. Inspiration struck, and he went to the kitchen, found bright blue trash bags, took four, and went downstairs toward the storage room for duct tape. He’d tape a double layer of trash bags over his feet and calves and that’d protect him from the mud. If he didn’t have to go into that mess again, ever, after this one last walk, he’d be a happy man. While he was in the kitchen, he grabbed two energy bars and stuck them in his pocket.
In the storage room he found the tape and made himself long plastic socks of the trash bags, sealing them over his pant legs. He hoped no girls saw him looking like this, but it should suffice to keep his feet dry. He pulled on his shoes over them. Good enough. Time to get going.
On the way through the main bay, he shook hands with some more guys and was about to leave the firehouse when he heard his name. He turned to see Battalion Chief Rausch coming his way. Straightening his spine, Chad said, “Yes sir?”
“A.J. tells me you’re injured pretty badly.”
“Not too bad.”
“Your Achilles again?”
Chad nodded. He was surprised Rausch remembered about the injury.
“I’m going to look into how we can get you covered for treatment. There has to be something. No promises, but something can get worked out. Oh, and A.J. says, there’ll be a prescription waiting for you at the Vancouver Walmart pharmacy when they open at eight.”
“Thank you, Chief.” The pharmacy was on his way to the Portland hospital where Francie was, so he could swing by for it.
Rausch shook his hand. “Great job out there. We all appreciate it. Now get some rest. You deserve it.”
Pacific Hospital.
In the corner of the ER waiting room, Ellen and Ty sat together, heads almost touching, talking in low tones. Around them was noise and bustle as other victims of the volcano came in. Ash inhalation, mostly, asthmatics and the elderly. A few people were covered with dried mud.
After the ranch woman had brought them here, they had asked, first thing, about the pilot, telling a sympathetic-looking nurse their story. She had checked, and asked them not to repeat that she’d told them, as it was against regulations to give out the information, but he was in surgery and was expected to survive. They could see him, if all went well, tomorrow morning.
They had celebrated the news with cups of vending-machine hot chocolate and waited to be checked out at triage. The nurse there said, for the gas exposure and ash inhalation, they’d need treatment, but they were not the highest priority patients, as they weren’t in immediate distress. They’d need a neurological consult, too, because Ty had been unconscious, so if they could wait and be patient until the right specialists came down and a room opened up?
They could.
Ellen phoned her mother from Ty’s phone and left a message on her machine and asked her to tell Claire she was fine, too and post an update to Facebook. She put off mentioning how very close she’d been to the disaster. That conversation could wait.
She and Ty created a little cocoon of silence, as far as they could from the television showing endless coverage of the volcano. Ellen was exhausted but content to be safe. And to be here with Ty.
Ty said, “I can’t imagine anyone handling this last day any better than you have.”
Ellen said, “Everybody’s good in a crisis, right?”
“Not everyone. And it’s the hard times that matter, don’t you think? I know so much about you, now. I know you keep your sense of humor, for sure.”
She shook her head, shy at the praise.
“And you were great with the injured pilot.”
“No more so than you.” She had been impressed from the first with Ty’s calm, the way his mind had kept working so well from the initial blast and run to the cave, how he analyzed and planned where others might have panicked, how he was able to turn the tent into a signal and the sleeping bag into a stretcher. He’d be a good guy to have around in any crisis. And at times, life was one crisis after another, wasn’t it?
“I wish you’d stay.”
Ellen raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Stay with me, if you’re willing. If not, please, at least in Portland, at least for the summer. I want you here lon
ger, though.” He leaned in closer and his voice dropped. “I want you in my life. There’d be a hole in it if you left now.”
“What if it’s only the circumstances?” she asked, fighting to be logical, to listen to her head and not her heart. “People feel connected in a disaster. Maybe we won’t in a month. Maybe you’ll hate the way I criticize your favorite television show or you’ll drive me nuts with the toilet seat issue.”
“I can’t imagine either of us being so petty.” He took her hand. “Not after this.”
Ellen couldn’t disagree. What happened up there had tied them together. It also made clear what was important and what wasn’t. She realized all her stress this last year at work had been a waste of energy. If she didn’t like the situation, she could leave it. She was done with fake catastrophes now that she knew what a real one was like.
As for her and Ty? Maybe it was just the crisis that had made her feel close to him, but why should that be any less reasonable a start to a good relationship than a bland start or a drunken start or an accidental start?
To hell with logic. She said, “Yes, I’ll stay. In town, at least for the summer. And we’ll see about more.” But she thought she would want more, could look into her future and easily imagine typing a letter of resignation to her job back in Nebraska, where the problems now seemed silly. This was what mattered. Survival. Connection. Courage. Hope.
And passion. She still wanted a chance to make love with this man. She could imagine that easily, too. She could imagine more: moving in with him to a house with a bay window that looked out at the distant glaciers of the Cascades, growing old with him and having the mountains always there to remind her of how they met. She could see herself old and white-haired, a little stoop-shouldered, sitting at a scarred wooden kitchen table with their grandchildren asking her to tell them again about the day Mount Hood erupted and the story of how they survived it, how they had fallen in love in the midst of the eruption, had known then that they never wanted to be apart.
She smiled at her daydream. “I’ll stay.”
“Why are you smiling like that?”
“Oh, just naming the grandkids.”
“Good,” he said, smiling back. “Good.”
^ ^ ^
Jim lay in the hospital bed, obsessed with worry about his family. His mother was still in respiratory therapy, but that’s all he knew. Jim had a tube taped to his nose that fed him oxygen. The tape holding it in place itched. The burned patches on his arms and face were covered in gauze, and he was spacey from a pain pill they had given him.
The emergency doctor said she believed his mother had asthma, which is why she’d reacted so strongly to the ash, but that she’d be okay with treatment. Jim was confused: wouldn’t she have had asthma before yesterday, too? He didn’t wholly trust the doctors, but he was happy his family was all here in this hospital rather than in that trailer on the mountain. He had to stay in the hospital too, they said, for observation because he had inhaled a dangerous amount of ash. They wanted to test the ash on his clothes before they let him go, but he didn’t understand why that mattered.
Lying down, his chest felt a little heavy, but he could breathe without the oxygen. He wasn’t dizzy, and he wasn’t coughing. “You probably will be,” promised a doctor an hour ago, and Jim was still wondering what that meant. It hadn’t sounded like a diagnosis as much as a threat, and he imagined there was some uncomfortable treatment coming up for him. But he wasn’t worried for himself. He was worried for Mother and Lida.
Lida had gone off with his father to talk to a psychologist. Maybe that person could get her to talk normally. Or maybe time would accomplish that, time and distance from the volcano. He and his father were fine, would continue to be fine, as long as the women in the family got better too.
The old-fashioned phone by the hospital bed rang, startling Jim. It couldn’t be for him. But he reached for the receiver anyway.
“Jim, bro,” said a voice on the phone, “Is that you?”
“Tommy?” Jim said. “How’d you find me here?”
“Man, you’re famous. It’s so cool. You’re on the television and everything.”
“Ah.” It made him uncomfortable to think that strangers had watched any part of his experience, but it could only be video taken from the helicopter finding the car, or maybe landing on the hospital roof. He’d rather nobody had nosed in on those moments, but it had to be only brief snatches, and since he didn’t remember seeing anyone shooting video of them, it must have been from a distance.
Tommy was bubbling over with excitement. “Too bad it isn’t still May. You’d get mucho female attention over this.”
What an odd thing to think about.
“Tell me about it, man. What was the helicopter like? Were you close to the volcano? It’s been plastered on the TV every second.”
Jim felt a million miles distant from the voice on the phone. All that excitement Tommy felt, like it was fun, when the real experience had been one of dread and trying to figure stuff out with too little information, like a math problem plus terror, not like some stupid game. In less than twenty-four hours, Jim had experienced the most fear, the most relief, the most guilt he had ever felt in his life. He had had to dig into himself and find strengths he hadn’t known he had. There was no way to communicate all that, and as he listened to Tommy babble more questions without pausing for answers, he knew he didn’t even want to try.
The volcano had changed Jim. He wasn’t entirely sure how, but he could see that what he had gone through had erected a new wall between him and Tommy, between him and maybe all the kids he hung out with. How could he ever talk about the blinding ash and the moments on the roof in the dark to anyone who hadn’t lived it? How could he ever dismiss his parents’ concerns again when he had come so close to losing them?
Trying to explain would be like trying to describe the color red to a blind man.
On the phone, Tommy had run out of questions, and Jim only said, “Thanks for calling, but they’re bringing my Mom out of treatment soon and I gotta go.” He hung up the phone. Where was his mother, anyway? He pulled the oxygen tube out of his nose and marched out into the hallway.
A female nurse intercepted him. “What are you doing, young man?” Her expression was stern.
“I want to find out about my mother.”
Her face softened. “Sure, I understand. You’re worried. And she’s as worried about you, I don’t doubt. Soon your family will be together again. And I’ll call down to respiratory for you to see how she’s doing. Right now, if you get back in bed.”
“You promise? You’ll tell me right away?”
“I will. Now let’s get you back into your room.”
She herded him back into his room and set up the oxygen tube in his nose again. When she left, he feared she’d forget about her promise, but ten minutes later, she came in and told him, “You mother is fine. They said she’s not coughing any more, but they’re keeping her there for a bit longer to run another test.”
“Can’t I go and be with her?”
“She’ll be up soon. We’ll put you both in the same room so you both aren’t wandering the halls checking up on each other. And your other family will be here too. It’s okay, really. The worst is over. Just rest.”
Jim wouldn’t really rest until the four of them were in the same place again and he could see with his own eyes that they were all fine, that his sister was talking again, his mother breathing again, and that his father didn’t look so haunted.
In a flash of inspiration, he knew what he could do to help. He could phone the shaman in Sacramento and get him up here to his mother’s hospital room. It’s not that he suddenly believed it would do anything real—nothing scientific to bring about a cure. But it might help in other ways. His father would need that reassurance, and Jim could do this one thing for him today.
He got busy dialing.
^ ^ ^
Chad sat at the side of Francie’s bed at Pacific. A
second bed in the room was empty. Something dripped into her right arm from an IV bottle on a stand. He pointed at it and raised his brows.
“Antibiotics,” she explained. “I’m so sorry about your foot. It’ll probably be six more months before you can take the physical part of the firefighters’ test again.”
He shrugged. “Or a year. But that’s okay. I’m not even sure that’s what I’ll do. I may not want this career.”
“But you’d be so good at it.”
“Thank you.” It was nice to hear, but— “I don’t know that I’m cut out for it. This last twenty-four hours, it’s been nothing like I imagined. The tedium, the crazy guy, the two of us walking the streets, being able to do so little.” He made a helpless gesture. “I mean, you were with me, and that’s great, but I had always thought of a big team of us fighting a fire together. A limited, spectacular problem, solved in a few hours. Heck, I don’t know what I mean. But I’m glad I have some time off with an injury to think it through.”
“You aren’t upset about anything else? I heard Kane giving you grief.”
“Naw. I mean, yeah, he did, but it’s nothing.” He was surprised to realize it really didn’t mean a thing to him. Two days ago, it kept him up at night. Funny. “Though I’m not sure I like people in general as much as I did before yesterday.”
She adjusted herself in the bed, yanking at her flowered gown and wincing in pain as she shifted herself to get more comfortable. “Look, Chad, some people are troubled, and they’ll hurt you accidentally, flailing about. Some people are nice. And some people are asshats. You must know that from working at the store or the theater. Or you know it now because of Kane. Now there’s a king asshat.”
“Yeah?” said Chad.
“Yeah. He wasn’t always, they say. But he has been since I came on. He’s not much liked in the department. He said something to a heart attack victim so offensive last year that he’s been taken off the streets. He’s on mandatory counseling, too. We need fewer like him and more like you.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”