by S. J. Harris
JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS
S.J. HARRIS
1
I raced to my locker, grabbed my flight jacket, took the stairs two at a time to the roof.
Rotor wash blasted me with a miniature hurricane as I scurried aboard the BK117 air ambulance and took the seat next to Jim Higgins, the pilot. He switched off his map light, gave me a thumbs-up.
An old maxim popped into my head: There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots. I put on my helmet, talked to Jim through the two-way headset.
“You’re not really going to fly in this shit, are you?” I said.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re crazy, but it’s your call.”
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “The wind’s not that bad. A little rain never hurt anyone.”
Jim offered me a stick of gum, his remedy for my anxiety. I took it, peeled off the foil wrapper, folded the gum into my mouth.
“What about the lightning?” I asked. I hate lightning. I was holding out for a second stick of Juicy Fruit.
“Way off to the east. Where’s the paramedic?”
“Here he comes.”
Hercules Garcia boarded, raked his fingers through his wet black hair, donned his helmet and strapped himself in. “Let’s do it,” he said.
I tried to relax as Jim cranked the power. The weather conditions sucked, but I knew I was in competent hands. The best.
When we lifted off, I saw some hospital employees looking up at us from a lighted smoking shelter. For a minute I wished that I was one of the folks on the ground, that someone else was flying off to be the hero this time.
I shook it off.
This is what I do, I told myself. I love my job. It’s what I am. I love getting to people in need, and getting there fast. If I couldn’t be a flight nurse, I would be lost. “Let’s do it,” I echoed.
Jim gave me report en route:
“Elmer Barrow, fifty-four year old white male with severe chest pain, diaphoresis, shortness of breath. Initial EKG indicative of an acute MI. Nine-one-one was called, and the local EMS unit made it to the scene in fourteen minutes. They gave the guy sublingual nitro times three, morphine four milligrams and Phenergan twelve point five. They don’t think the guy’ll make ground transport to Louisville and the community hospital doesn’t have tPA on board, which might save him in the golden hour.”
Lightning flashed. In about five minutes we traveled a distance it would have taken a ground ambulance thirty.
Jim turned on his spotlight and circled the scene, searching for obstacles like trees and power lines that might present a hazard for landing. The lights from the EMS truck flashed red on the farmhouse and surrounding fields. Behind the house grew a garden of rusted farm machinery and disemboweled cars. The sky had started to clear, as if on cue, and I saw a few stars sparkling on the western horizon. Fast-moving clouds filtered the intermittent moonlight, making it seem as though time was racing by at hyper speed.
Jim landed the copter gently as a mother sets her baby in the crib. He stayed in his seat, kept the airship on simmer while Hercules and I grabbed some supplies and trotted toward the house.
A brown and white dog barked and followed us up the steps of the wooden porch and over the threshold.
“In the kitchen,” a baritone voice bellowed.
The dog took the lead through a living room littered with crumpled beer cans and empty potato chip bags. The room, dimly lighted, revealed its squalor to my olfactory nerve: unclean canine, dusty furniture, cigarette butts.
We walked into the U-shaped kitchen, momentarily blinded by the brilliance of a fluorescent ceiling fixture. The patient lay on a grimy tile floor that was supposed to resemble mortared bricks. Two guys, one white and one black, sat at the table. Their hats read MT. WASHINGTON VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPT. The black guy spoke up first:
“He’s stable. BP one-ten over sixty. Heart rate seventy-eight. Afebrile. We got his pain under control. The ER doc over at County General figures this guy needs an angiogram and one of those Mr. Plumber drugs that can burst the dam in a coronary. That’s why he wants to get him to Louisville stat.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I said.
Hercules and I unfolded the stretcher, and I noticed an egg-sized bulge at the patient’s IV site. The saline drip, started by the EMTs, had escaped its venous route, infiltrating the surrounding tissue. I instructed Hercules to get a new line going, an eighteen gauge or better.
“You gonna poke me again?” Elmer Barrow said. “Uh uh. I can’t take no more goddamn needles.” He looked up at me with wide eyes and a furrowed brow.
“Try to relax, Mister Barrow. Hercules is really good. I promise he’ll only have to stick you once.”
Elmer seemed to calm down a little. Hercules tied a tourniquet and tapped his arm to raise a vein.
I pulled my walkie-talkie, padded to the chipped porcelain sink on the other side of the room and pushed TALK, intending to let Jim know we’d be a few minutes. I think the words that actually left my mouth were holy shit.
At the bottom of the sink, from an open can of dog food, sprouted what appeared to be a small human finger.
2
My next breath sounded like a plugged vacuum cleaner, a backwards scream. I had never seen anything so horrible. I hoped with all my heart that I was dreaming or that the mess before me was part of some sick joke. The room suddenly seemed void of oxygen. Acid rose in the back of my throat.
I lifted the can, slippery with fatty “gravy” that had spilled over the edges, to take a closer look. A split second after positively identifying the contents and getting an unintentional sour whiff of them, the yellow and red can of GIANT-PUP escaped my fingers and fell to the floor. Fido ran up, skidded to a stop, buried his snout in the open end of the can and proceeded to gobble with enthusiasm. I bent over, reached to retrieve the can, pulled back when he snarled and snapped.
“Did you guys see that?” I said, my heart hammering in my ears.
“Yeah. Son of a bitch was hungry, eh?” the white EMT said, not looking up from the assessment form he was filling out.
“No. I mean did you see what was inside that can?”
He shrugged, shook his head.
Hercules and the black EMT had been kneeling over the patient, searching for a good vein to start a new IV with, and had missed everything.
The patient. He could corroborate my discovery. He must have opened the can.
I scooted along the countertop, back to where he lay, keeping a prudent distance from the ravenous pooch.
I surmised that Elmer Barrow, hearty consumer of tobacco, alcohol, and Golden Tater Crackles, opened the can of GIANT-PUP, saw the amputated appendage floating on top of the goop, and had heart attack. I bent on one knee beside Hercules to ask Elmer some questions.
With no apparent prompt, the patient lurched, sat up and walloped Hercules with a forearm. Herc fell into me and we toppled like human dominoes.
“Can’t you see that I’m sick,” Elmer Barrow shouted.
I’ve seen a lot of things in my nursing career, many of which might cause even a seasoned homicide detective to retch. While the detective deals with an inert corpse, my daily challenges arise from living, breathing souls, and the living present complications and horrors beyond even the most grisly of the dead. What I saw happen to Elmer Barrow I hope to never see again. After swatting us, he made a gurgling sound and collapsed with his face flush against the fake brick floor. What came oozing from his mouth was no usual vomitus, but a thick greenish-brown paste with the putrid alkaline stench of intestinal contents that had backed up and found the path of least resistance. Maybe the man had had a heart attack too, but the immediate concern was bow
el obstruction. His face turned blue, his airway now occluded with the muck.
“He’s not breathing,” the black EMT said.
“No pulse,” said Hercules.
I got on the radio. “Hang tight, Jim. We’re going to have to code this guy right here.”
Hercules grabbed the ambu bag and attempted to force oxygen into Elmer’s lungs. The black guy started chest compressions. I instructed the other EMT to go out to the helicopter and get our portable suction unit.
I watched for a few seconds, saw that Elmer’s chest was not rising, that no oxygen was getting to his lungs.
“Stop CPR,” I said. I cranked up the suction unit and swept the patient’s mouth with the vacuum wand, which instantly became clotted with shit. I swabbed Elmer’s throat with Betadine, peeled open a scalpel and cut a cricothyrotomy, our last resort for opening an airway. But the poor guy had literally drowned in his own stool. I pronounced him at 23:27.
Fido had driven the can of GIANT-PUP against a baseboard and had his snout concealed deep in the tin, desperately licking it clean. He finally abandoned it and went snorting and sneezing crabwise out of the kitchen.
I dropped the can into a red plastic biohazard bag and tied a knot in the open end. Someone’s finger had ended up as dog food, and the police needed to know about it.
“Kim. You’re bleeding,” Hercules said.
I looked down, saw a dark red spot on my flight suit just below my left breast, saw an IV catheter dangling from the center of the red spot. I must have been impaled when Elmer rose and clobbered us.
“Was this a clean needle?” Does Elmer Barrow have AIDS, hepatitis, any number of other blood-borne pathogens?
“It was still sterile,” Hercules said. “I hadn’t stuck him yet.”
I exhaled a breath of relief, unzipped my flight suit, swabbed the area with alcohol and put on a band-aid.
The volunteer fire guys agreed to stay and wait for the coroner. Herc and I packed up the gear and headed back to the helicopter. The dog was nowhere in sight.
“Why are you bringing that?” Hercules pointed to the red bag I had stuffed into one of my flight suit pockets.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said.
***
When we got back to University Medical Center I put on a clean uniform and went to the staff lounge for my one A.M. “lunch” break.
I opened the freezer, took out the little tub of eggplant parmesan I’d brought and microwaved it according to the directions on the box. I scanned the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper while my food cooked.
I had taken the thirteen week assignment in Louisville because I’d always wanted to see the Kentucky Derby. I’m not much of a gambler, not with money anyway, but I like to see the biggest and best of everything. I made sure I was off that first Saturday in May and I wore a dress and a big hat and drank mint juleps and enjoyed the hell out of myself.
And the Derby wasn’t the only attraction in Louisville. I’d heard that Jim Higgins had transferred to University Medical Center there. I like to work with pilots I know. The fact that Jim could have been a Chippendale dancer had nothing to do with it.
Hercules entered the lounge about the time the microwave beeped. Herc stands pretty tall for a Filipino, almost six feet. His English is good, although he hasn’t quite mastered American slang. He said something about a doctor “raising his cane.” I corrected him, let him know the expression is raising cain. His olive cheeks turned pink.
“Smells good,” he said. “What you got?”
“Eggplant. You?”
“I brought some leftover pancit my wife cooked. You want some? It has pork in it.”
“I’m a vegetarian, Herc. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah.”
I took a bite of eggplant and turned my attention back to The Courier-Journal, Louisville’s daily newspaper. A Florida man named Ronald Kuhlman had been missing since April, almost three months now. The story had been front-page news for awhile, but the update in front of me had been relegated to a couple of paragraphs on A7, under an ad for computers. I figured the guy’s wife probably did him in, but so far no charges had been filed. I guess it’s hard to charge someone with murder when the main piece of evidence, the body, is nowhere to be found.
Hercules heated his food and sat down across the small table from me. I folded the paper to give him room. The aroma from his roasted pork wafted across the table, tempting me.
“So why did you bring that empty can of dog food back with you?” he asked.
I swallowed my food, took a drink of bottled spring water. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Sure I can.”
“Really? Can you? Something horrible was in that can and if it gets around...I just don’t want to have to explain it to a million people, you know?” Rumor and scuttlebutt can spread through a hospital like a viral infection. Media coverage would be sure to follow, and I didn’t want that. Not right now. I wanted to handle it in my own way.
“Your secret’s safe with me, Kim.”
“There was part of a human finger in that can. I got a good look at it before the dog gobbled it up. It was small, the end of a woman’s pinky, probably. Or, God forbid, a little girl’s.”
Hercules’s jaw dropped. A piece of pork fell from his mouth and landed back on his plate. He pushed his food aside and frowned.
I didn’t mean to spoil his appetite. It’s not easy to gross-out someone in the medical field. I’ve seen a respiratory therapist take a bite of a Snickers bar, go to a room and deep-suction a sputum sample from a pneumonia patient, come back out and finish her candy. I guess I tapped a nerve with old Herc.
“Cut me some slacks,” he said. “How can you be sure? I mean, how do you know the finger was human? Human female?”
“The fingernail was painted,” I said. “Glittery purple fingernail polish.”
“So what are you going to do with the can? The finger’s gone now for sure.” Hercules laced his fingers together and looked me straight in the eyes. It seemed like he was daring me to say the wrong thing.
“I don’t know. I guess I should take it to the police. At the very least, I should notify the dog food company. What do you think?”
“I think you should forget about it. Maybe you only thought you saw a girl’s finger.”
“I know what I saw,” I said. I hadn’t meant to sound annoyed, but Hercules reacted as if I’d told him to get out of the country.
He got up, took his plate to the trash can by the door and scraped away the remainder of his lunch. He rinsed the plate in the sink.
“I gotta get back to work,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“See ya, Herc.”
I knew he was right. The police weren’t going to investigate now that the evidence was gone. But it wasn’t really gone, was it? It was somewhere in the digestive system of that flea-bitten cur. What could I do? Anesthetize him, cut him open and hope the finger was not completely digested? Or catch him and analyze his stools?
I had to do something. I had to do something because sixteen years ago, when I was eleven, my little sister disappeared without a trace. I was watching her one Saturday afternoon while Mom and Dad were out shopping and she went outside because she heard the ice cream man coming and, Jesus, she just wanted an ice cream but a few minutes later when I went out to check on her she was gone. Jenny was only five. My parents and the counselors told me a million times it wasn’t my fault, but how could I not feel responsible? I was in charge of taking care of her that day and I blew it. I still have tremors when I go near ice cream.
I carry computer-generated photographs of what Jenny would look like at twenty-one. I take these traveling assignments and post the photos anywhere I can. Someday I’ll bring her home. I knew it wasn’t Jenny’s finger in that can of GIANT-PUP. Jenny is still alive. I feel it in my soul. But, if I could find out who that finger belonged to and, if foul play was involved, help bring closure and justice to some other brokenhearted famil
y, then I was determined to do so.
I took out my cell phone, called information and got the number for the Mt. Washington Volunteer Fire Department.
My heart started beating a little faster, for no other reason than that Jim Higgins walked into the lounge. I’m all business when we’re flying, but his presence in a closed room on the ground does something to me. He said, “Hi, Kim,” fed some coins into the soda machine, popped the top on a Mountain Dew and walked back out.
“What’s a girl have to do to get a date in this town,” I said to myself. I don’t know what it was about Jim Higgins, but I felt a major attraction when we first met two years ago. He was quiet and hardly ever talked about his personal life, so it’s not like I even knew him very well. Still, when he was around, my body felt like an electrical wire juiced with a strong current.
Jim opened the door and peeked in.
“Maybe all you have to do is ask,” he said.
My face heated up. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”
“Well?” Jim leaned against the doorjamb, grinning between sips of soda. His flight suit accentuated his lean waist and broad shoulders. His eyes glowed almost turquoise, illuminated by the light of the Mountain Dew machine. I tried to imagine him with his shirt off.
“Well, maybe I’m a little old-fashioned,” I said. “Maybe I think the man should do the asking.”
“You off tomorrow night?”
“Yeah.”
“Pick you up at eight.”
And that was that. I’d been in Louisville for three months and, now that it was almost time to move on to another assignment, he finally asked me out. I suddenly had bizarre thoughts, thoughts of what our child together might look like. In my mind, our child was a girl. She had Jim’s crystal blue eyes and my light brown hair. She had my full lips and rosy cheeks, Jim’s dazzling smile. She would be taller than average and athletic, but nonetheless feminine. She would be smart and graceful and a little stubborn and would light up every room she entered.
I wiped away tears, realizing the image I had created was that of my sweet little sister.