Ambulance Masters

by Raymund Hensley

SMEARING a small amount of dog feces on an insect bite will relieve the itching and swelling. Was it normal for an ambulance to have such dung? Cakers gave the Russian woman CPR, pushing down on her chest quick and hard, at one point even punching it. City lights filled the ambulance—blue, red, blue, red, blue, so forth and so forth. We were speeding and rocking. Cakers put the cardio-pump over the patient’s face and worked it. He yelled at Tranzam to drive—

  “Faster! Faster! Faster!”

  Cakers stared at the plastic pump.

  “Holes? This old thang is useless now!” He growled and threw it against a wall and looked around.

  “Get over here,” he said to me. “I have to find something important. Take over.”

  He grabbed my hands. I pulled away.

  “No!” I yelled through the roaring engine. “I’m scared! Look at my eyes! They’re shaking so much!”

  He laughed.

  “You want this woman to die?”

  “I do not!” I threw my clammy hands out. “Here. Take them and do what you must.”

  He put my hands on the woman’s chest. I pumped.

  I’m a hero! I thought. I can save this woman’s life and be a hero.

  Something in her chest cracked. I jumped back, gagging. Cakers pushed me away and took over and pumped and pumped, grunting and grunting, his eyes darting from me to the woman. The look of worry on his face chilled me, and I couldn’t stop shaking. I pulled at my hair and shook my wet head and opened my mouth.

  “I’m in deep! I wanna go home! Gadzooks, man!”

  “How very,” Cakers said, rolling his eyes. I imagined them going all the way up his head and back again. This really happened, for all I knew. Here was a man capable of anything.

  Tranzam stepped on the gas. I fell back in mighty pain, barking and inarticulate, my legs quivering in trepidation. Was I in shock? Was this how it felt? I went with the flow and shrugged and gave my legs permission to thrash about to-and-fro as Cakers didn’t even try to understand.

  I was going to die. Just accept it. We were going to crash into something hard. I was going to go sailing through the windshield at such a high speed, my face would turn to ice and hit a fire hydrant and shatter; stray dogs and stray bums would eat the bits and smile. Those bastards! And what would my tombstone say? I had it all planned out: To install the latest version, click HERE.

  It was a metaphor.

  The ambulance swerved past a little girl on a pogo stick and zoomed down Hotel Street as saggy prostitutes gazed out from smoky bars, spitting blood through holes in their teeth. One of the beasts shook a fist at us.

  “Slow down, sucka! What’s all the hullabaloo?!”

  Tranzam rolled down her window and roared, “Prepare, peasant, for your comeuppance!” then rolled it back up and focused on the road. The ambulance turned hard into the business district of Honolulu where the skyscrapers of law and magazine offices were dark. Cakers covered his head and cried out “Waaaaaaah!” as open bags of needles spilt over his head. A defibrillator thudded onto the patient’s nude, aged breasts that jiggled.

  CAKERS found the injured in a ratty apartment in China Town—an 80-year-old Russian woman on the bathroom floor, unconscious, face twitching, body covered in mosquito bites. Cakers said when he grabbed the Russian’s arm, it felt like worms were moving under her skin. The jumpy Chinese woman in room 11-F, petting a fat rainbow-colored cat, said that Mrs. Yuen had been collecting the mosquitoes for a science experiment she was preparing to teach her class at Kapiolani Community College. She grew the mosquitoes in a large fish tank in her bathroom, on dead kittens she recently found in the girl’s bathroom at KCC.

  Long story short, I was thoroughly perturbed.

  Cakers ran to the old woman and batted the bugs away. “Mush! Mush! Mush!” He could tell by the deep gash on the crown of her head and the wet floor that she had slipped violently and flew head-first into a sharp end of the aquarium. He looked at the Chinese woman.

  “Please tell me you tried to give her CPR.”

  “What’s CPR? Do I eat it?”

  Cakers shook his head.

  “Are you an ostrich? Are your eyes bigger than your brain?”

  The ambulance cut through a sudden rage of rain that punched the windshield.

  The old woman wobbled on the stretcher.

  “Let’s have a squint at this dame,” Cakers said. He covered the hole in her head with his plastic-covered hands. Black things glooped out between his fingers, and he was mumbling something about saving her…saving her. A boom box blared opera as I put the dark, drippy contents in a Ziploc bag with my pinkies in the air.

  My hands were quivering. But not much.

  I was getting used to this.

  “Smashing!” I said. “I’m getting used to this.”

  “That’s what my ex-wife said.”

  Marriage. I could say to your face that I didn’t need it, and I’d be fibbing, fibbing, fiiiibbinnnng. Sorry. It’s bad, but how does a man admit that he needs someone else to help him through the aging process. It would be seen as weak, no? Yes?? The hard side of me told me to sit down and shut up. Man up. Make fists. Don’t smile. Don’t cry. Love is for pansies.

  The soft side of me wanted a woman to touch me in all those secret, greasy places. It had been too long! And she would have to be smart. Someone I could talk to. Not just someone with nice bone structure in the face. Someone I could trust. Someone I could feed. Who else would be willing to go to the store and buy those bare minerals? Those condoms? Those facial creams? Who better to trust than your lover?

  ROAD BUMP.

  The old woman’s hand landed on my lap. I grabbed it by the wrist—her mosquito bites popping under my palm—and flung it onto her jiggle-belly.

  The ambulance jumped again, and the hand was on me again.

  “Ewwwwwwwaaaahhhhhh! Cakers, get this twit off me!”

  Eyes still closed for business, the Russian woman’s mouth yawned. Things were moving inside.

  “Jesus! Cakers, do you think she ate those mosquitoes?”

  “That’s what my 1st wife always did as she gobbled her daily vitamins. Maybe that’s what killed her. Mosquitoes burst with diseases. God rest her stink soul. So what, who cares?”

  The body moaned: “Mooooooannn…”

  Mosquitoes flew out of her mouth.

  “Ack! I knew it!” I swatted away the tiny, buzzing fiends.

  Cakers bolted to the front of the ambulance and gripped Tranzam’s shoulders and stared through the windshield. Headlights blinded me. Another ambulance. We were going to crash.

  “Here it comes, mate!” Cakers said. “Hold on! This is the bee’s knees! MUSH! MUSH!”

  Every ambulance has a moniker.

  Cakers named his Atom.

  Always on the move.

  ONE