by Shawn Grady
But I would leave him – in a month’s time. “Hey, Dad.”
Tap water echoed in his glass. “How was the day?” He said the words as if they were lyrics to a song. I knew by then that he wasn’t inquiring so much as delivering a requisite greeting, like saying the pledge of allegiance.
I counted the stars in Orion’s Belt. The moonlight iced blue the peaks of Mount Rose.
I took a deep breath. “I got the call today. I made it. A full-ride scholarship to UNR Med School.”
Red lights from an airplane diminished as it ascended from the valley. The bare limbs of our oak shook with a sudden breeze.
I turned. The kitchen was empty. The flickers of my father’s television illuminated the hallway.
The thin façade of normalcy fell away, and the dark ocean of pain churned inside of me.
I grimaced and pushed my lips together.
“Good night, Dad.”
CHAPTER 05
I jolted awake with my alarm clock at 5:20 Saturday morning. I opened the blinds and stared at the sliver of dawn over the eastern hills. In the kitchen I flicked on my iPod at its docking station. Charlie Parker bebopped from the speakers as I brought the paper in from the front doorstep.
I used to be in the habit of reading a chapter from the Bible each morning. A “quiet time.” Silence, however, had become increasingly unpalatable, and subsequently, minutes that should have been spent conversing with God were now filled with distractions and noise, the modern panacea for a troubled soul.
I stared into the pantry. A box of Alpha-Bits remained the last cereal selection. Yeah, Alpha-Bits. Shopping when I was hungry was always a bad idea. I’d go to buy the staples and come home with Fruity Pebbles and beef jerky.
I sat with my bowl and glanced down the hallway. The door to my dad’s room hung ajar, his snoring rhythmic and hard to ignore. My head felt cloudy and unfocused. I was about to take a bite of cereal when a grouping of letters in the milk caught my attention.
REPA
I used my spoon to move the A to the front and guided an O to the end.
AREPO
“Arepo . . .”
“Arepo the Sower holds the wheels at work . . .”
I brought my hands away from the bowl, as though it had become a crystal ball. I took a glance at the ingredients on the side of the cereal box.
I need coffee.
After a quick shower, I changed into my medic uniform and threw a lunch into a collapsible cooler. I was out the door before six and arrived at the ambulance headquarters fifteen minutes before shift, meeting up with Bones in the ambulance bay.
Sitting in the back of Medic Two, he ran his fingers over medication vials bedded in foam inside a plastic drug container.
He looked up. “Greetings, visitor from planet Sleep. How goes your journey to the land of waking?”
I stowed my cooler in a front cabinet. “I think I want to return to my home planet.”
“Nonsense! You must check in with the system status authorities at once. Henceforth we will secure caffeinated beverages.”
He’d no doubt already had a couple cups. “It’s early, so let me translate. . . . Are you saying you want me to get the radios and drug keys?”
“Of course.”
I stepped out of the ambulance and walked down the hall that led to dispatch.
“That’s why you’re the best partner in the world, Jonathan. But don’t let that inflate your noggin.”
I started the engine and dropped the ambulance into gear.
Bones put us in service with dispatch. “Medic Two, McCoy and Trestle, oh-six-thirty to eighteen-thirty.”
“Copy,” dispatch said. “Post Rock Boulevard and Victorian Avenue.”
I looked over at Bones. “Starbucks?”
Bones, ever the connoisseur, said, “Never. No finer brew can be found than that which flows from the 7-Eleven.”
“How can you drink that stuff?”
“Nectar of the gods, Jonny-boy.”
“Try nectar of the broke.”
“And . . . that would be us.”
Morning poured into the valley, infusing color and warmth. Traffic grew heavier as the minutes passed. We parked at the post – a little hole-in-the-wall that Aprisa Ambulance leased with a couple couches and a TV. Bones strolled over to the convenience store. I unlocked the door, set my radio on the floor, and stretched out on a sofa. It smelled like dusty aged fabric. Bones walked in, laptop case strung over his shoulder, no plastic top for his coffee.
“Why don’t you ever get a top for those? Aren’t you afraid it’ll spill if we get a call?”
“That’s just it. If I get a top, then we’re sure to get a call.”
“That’s the goofiest logic I’ve ever heard.”
He lay down on the other couch and picked up the television remote. An episode of the seventies show Emergency emerged on the tube. “Hey, look,” he said. “There we are.”
“Roy and Johnny?”
“No. No. There. The guys with the white coats and the converted hearse.” He sipped his coffee. “Burt and Ernie with the gurney.”
I brought out Simon Letell’s notepaper and unfolded it. The markings still looked nonsensical. I set it on my stomach and looked up. “You ever heard of Arepo the Sower?”
“Does he live on Fourth Street?”
“No. Well, at least I don’t think so.” I straightened a corner of the paper. “You know our last patient from yesterday?”
“Yeah?”
“He AMA’d himself out of CCU.”
Bones turned on his side. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
He stared at my hands. “You healed him. You are a miracle worker.”
“He died outside his motel room last night.”
“Oh.” He sat back. “You should have given him a piece of your garment.”
“A piece of my garment?”
“ ‘Surely then he would not have died.’ ”
“Would you shut up?” I folded up the note. “Forget it. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
He sipped his coffee. Roy Desoto cranked up the black phone to talk to Rampart. The show went to commercial.
Bones glanced at me. “So, how’d you find all that out?”
“Oh, now you want to hear about it.”
“You have two minutes before Emergency comes back on.”
I held up the paper. “I went back to Saint Mary’s to return this.”
“What does it say?”
“Nothing intelligible.”
“Arepo the Sower? Is that what he said on scene?”
“Yeah.”
“Wasn’t there more to it?”
“ ‘Arepo the Sower holds the wheels at work.’ ”
Bones stared at the floor. “I can’t think of anything related. Have you Googled it?”
“The thought hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Let’s do it.” He sat up, unzipped his bag, and pulled out a silver and black Dell.
“Can you get Internet here?”
“I’ve got a mobile card.” He powered up the computer. Roy and Johnny returned. I muted it. The Google search field popped up on the laptop screen.
Bones typed in the Arepo phrase. “Yahtzee.”
“What?”
“Everyone says Bingo.”
“What do you see?”
“Okay, one sec.” He clicked a link and scrolled downward. “It is a rough translation of the Latin words sator, arepo, tenet, opera, and rotas.”
“Latin?”
His eyes narrowed. “Check this out. They can be formed into a palindrome square.”
He turned the screen.
“Why would Simon say that to us?”
“He said it to you, not me.”
“Does it tell where the square comes from?”
He clicked to another page. His eyes tracked left to right. “Looks like there’s varying theories. The earliest finding is from a wall in Pompeii in 79 AD.” He scrolled down. “W
ow. If you take each of the letters in the square and use them once, you form the Latin words ‘Our Father’ in the shape of a cross with two A’s and O’s left over.”
“Alpha and Omega?”
“I guess so.”
We studied the cross formation.
I shook my head. “That’s a trip.”
“It looks like there’s a lot of debate, but this page is suggesting that the inscription is early Christian. Like a pass code.”
“To avoid persecution. Secretly meeting in catacombs.”
Bones sat up and sighed. “Catacombs . . . catechism . . .”
I rubbed an eyebrow.
The radio beeped. Dispatch followed. “Medic Two, respond priority one for an unconscious subject, possible diabetic problem.”
I clicked the radio. “Medic Two copy.”
Bones packed up his laptop. A minute later we wailed down Prater Boulevard into an older section of the City of Sparks.
Bones drove aggressively but safe, for the most part. He only made me nearly soil my pants on one occasion – when he swerved late to get off the freeway and hit a curb going about fifty when the car beside us failed to yield.
“So left or right off Prater?” Bones said.
I glanced at the map book in my lap. “Left.”
We pulled up to the curb of a fifty-year-old single-story house. A plywood ramp had been constructed over the porch steps. We rolled the gurney to the front door, where an elderly woman holding a thick, avocado-colored cordless phone pointed with a trembling finger down the inner hall.
Bones unlatched the gurney seat belt that secured the airway bag and defibrillator. I did the same with the larger first-out bag.
A small black terrier appeared from behind a recliner, demonstrating its disapproval with snarling incisors. We made our way to the back room. A man in his eighties lay on the bed with foam at the corners of his mouth and slow, snoring respirations.
Bones rubbed the patient’s sternum with his knuckles. “Sir? Sir?”
No change. His skin was dusky.
“Jonathan, you got airway?”
“Sure thing.” I pulled a pinky-sized, trumpet-shaped green tube from the airway bag. I lubed it up and slid it in the patient’s nostril to make sure his tongue didn’t block air from getting into his lungs. “NPA’s in. You want me to bag him up a little?”
“Yeah, let’s get his color better.” Bones prepped the man’s arm for an IV.
I pulled out the bag mask to supplement his breathing. The fire department crew walked in, and the room grew smaller with the six of us, not counting the patient or his wife. Bones asked them to get a set of vitals and to assist ventilations. I handed the bag mask to a fireman.
Bones pulled the needle from the patient’s arm and handed it to me. I plunged a drop of blood from it onto the glucometer to check his blood sugar. The number 34 appeared on the digital display. Hence the reason he was unconscious.
I pulled the Dextrose 50% from the first-out bag and handed it to Bones. It was like clear syrup in a syringe.
He held up the medication cylinder and the needle attachment in separate fists. “Check it out – just like Roy and Johnny.” He popped the caps off with his thumbs and posed.
I shook my head. “I thought you said we were Burt and – ”
“One hundred over sixty.” A firefighter unstrapped the blood-pressure cuff.
Bones noted it on his glove.
He connected the dextrose syringe to the IV line and spoke as he pushed it in. “Okay, Jonathan, I want you to stand with the light at your back so your shadow casts over our patient here.”
I ignored him, as was often the best strategy, and gathered up plastic trash from the floor.
A bright light shone from behind me, throwing my silhouette over the patient’s legs.
The fire captain held his flashlight and winked. “How’s that, McCoy?”
Bones snickered. “Perfect. I have no doubt this man will be healed.”
The patient drew a sudden deep breath and lifted his head. His eyes darted around the room in confusion.
Bones put a hand on his shoulder. “Hello, sir. I’m Paramedic McCoy with Aprisa Ambulance. We’re here because your wife called us. Your blood sugar was very low.”
The man scratched at the IV in his arm.
“Ooh,” Bones said. “Don’t pull that just yet. Let’s get your head cleared up first.”
I pulled the rubber nasal trumpet out of his nose and placed a clear, two-pronged cannula in his nostrils, hooking the tubing around his ears and cinching it under his chin. “There you go. Take some slow, deep breaths through your nose and let that oxygen work for you.”
His skin color improved.
Bones nodded at the fire captain. “I think we’re good from here. Thanks, guys.”
The captain waved and his crew filed out.
We hung out with our patient for another fifteen minutes. He progressively became more alert and oriented and, after conversing with his wife, opted to refuse transport.
Non-transports didn’t make any money for the company. But Bones didn’t care about that. He cared about taking care of people and doing what was best for them.
That’s part of why I liked him. It’s why I knew I could trust him.
CHAPTER 06
North Post smelled like Orville Redenbacher popcorn. Stray unpopped kernels littered the corners of the microwave. Sitting there only provided more time to ruminate about Letell and everything that didn’t make sense. Maybe I was just letting myself get too wrapped up in it. Things were looking up in my life. I was going from making a meager hourly wage to a full-ride scholarship to med school. I was going to be a doctor.
Emergency was on the TV again. “Are they having a marathon?”
Bones plopped on the couch. “Can you ever really get enough of it?”
The L.A. County electronic tones went off for Squad Fifty-One. The boys hopped in the truck to respond to a car over an embankment. Music accompanied their red pickup as it pulled out of the firehouse at twice normal film speed.
My radio beeped. “Medic Two, traffic. Priority one, 395 northbound for a multiple-vehicle accident. Subjects trapped.”
Bones chuckled. “Say, ‘Squad Fifty-One en route.’ Say it.”
I shook my head. “Medic Two copies, en route.”
I hopped behind the wheel this time. Bones didn’t bother with the map book. We knew where we were going. We screamed down Parr Boulevard and swung north on the freeway. Early afternoon traffic wasn’t too bad. I shut down the lights and siren until I merged us into the fast lane, then lit it back up.
About half a mile beyond the Stead exit a fire engine’s lights flashed. Traffic seemed at a standstill at the base of Anderson Hill leading into Cold Springs, cars stopped at odd angles on the freeway. I pulled up on scene next to the fire engine. Highway patrol wasn’t too far behind us.
I fought the urge to jump out of the cab. I forced myself to see the scene, to look at the broad picture of it.
One car lay on its roof in the center median, white smoke trailing from its underbelly. A person dangled from a seat belt inside.
Again the urge to go right to the patient. Get them out of the car. Care for their injuries.
I resisted the tightening tunnel on my vision and forced myself to look at the rest of it. Two other vehicles with major damage angled next to each other over two lanes. Looked like a driver in each. No visible passengers. A fourth car, with no damage and no occupants, sat parked on the shoulder.
Bones reported a size-up to dispatch and requested the medical helicopter, AprisEvac.
I stepped out of the ambulance and snatched the first-out bag from the gurney. “I’ll take these two. You got the rollover?”
“Yeah.” Bones strode off, holding a handheld radio by his ear.
Debris littered the scene. I reminded myself to walk.
Tires screeched. A horn blared. I whipped around to see a highway patrol officer yelling at a d
river who’d nearly crashed into his patrol car.
I turned back toward the accident scene, and from a short distance away the first car looked like some kind of convertible sedan. The driver’s seat was reclined back, and a man lay in it motionless. I threw a glance at the second car – a black sedan with heavy front-end damage, a busted windshield, and an awake driver who looked like he might be trapped by a collapsed dashboard. One firefighter leaned in a window, talking to the man inside, another pulled a hose line between the three damaged vehicles. I came upon the driver’s door of the first car, and my heart sank into my stomach.
This hadn’t been a convertible.
The driver lay with the top of his skull missing, along with his brain – his life shanked in one transecting moment. He was someone’s son, someone’s friend.
But I couldn’t see victims. I had to see patients. Problems to fix.
And this one made rapid triage easy.
Gone.
On to the next.
A fire department ladder truck and a light rescue unit arrived. I came to the driver’s side window of the black sedan.
A fireman was in the back seat holding the man’s head in line with his neck. “This is Jeff. He’s forty years old, complaining of pain in his neck, his side, and his legs.”
Jeff’s face looked pallid.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions, Jeff. Try not to move your neck, okay?”
He winced. “Okay.”
“Can you feel your hands and feet?”
“Yes.”
“Were you knocked out?”
“No.”
The door had folded over a foot against him. I reached for his wrist. Strong radial pulse, rapid. Skin felt cool and clammy. His body was compensating against shock, but time was short. We needed to get him out quick.
“Hang in there. We’re going to remove the car from you instead of the other way around.”
I heard the helicopter approaching.
Fire crews stretched hydraulic lines from the bumper of the ladder truck with steel spreaders and cutters in hand. The Jaws of Life. A tall truck captain walked toward me, his red helmet at an angle.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Code fifty in the first car. This one in the black sedan needs rapid extrication. I’ll tie in with my partner at the rollover and let you know what we’ve got there.”