I. Rescue Eight

By the time they got to where I had fallen, I was pretty sure it was too late. All the things dying people describe in books – their hands getting cold, vision fading to black, peaceful sensation – I had felt each one. Oh, it was my end, all right.

Then I saw that kid with the giant teeth from the fire hall and I realized I was probably going to be saved. I never even thought about the fact that those kids with the mullets and the “Rescue 8” t-shirts from high school actually rescue people. I never connected those people with the tangible, critical act of saving lives, pulling people out of wrecked cars, or extricating them from a tangle of thatches and tree branches, immobilizing their necks and hauling them halfway up the hill behind the old high school.

But that’s what they were doing to me right then. I was cut and bleeding all over, and somehow my coat sleeve had become caught as I was coming down and nearly pulled my arm out of the socket. It hurt something fierce, and was the main reason I just hung out in the bramble expecting to die with an obstructed view of the twinkling lights of the Conrail repair facility below.

The Rescue 8 guys were very professional about everything, moving me around carefully but talking as if I were an awkward piece of furniture they were moving down a staircase lined with family photos. They were all “easy” and “put ‘im down gently” and “careful with the leg” and they really were careful. I’m sure I was a sight to see, with piss in my pants, blood all over my shirt, a crazy cracked up arm and one missing shoe. I don’t remember the ambulance ride much except for the beginning. I remember thinking about the sound of the cobblestones of the street under the chained wheels of the ambulance. It sounded like sudden water rushing over loose pebbles, or your dresser-top box of quarters when your sister throws them down the stairs.

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The doctor was neither stereotypically Asian or anachronistically upbeat. He was dour and white and older than you thought a doctor in an emergency room in the middle of a February night should be. He was wearing ugly scrubs with an unrecognizable hospital logo repeated all over them, possibly to discourage physicians from stockpiling free clothing at home. “We didn’t know where to start with you. The arm was bad, but the bleeding was a bigger concern, because we couldn’t figure out all the different places it was coming from.” This is the first thing the doctor says. I didn’t catch his name, but immediately decided that was okay, because I wouldn’t be seeking him out for any future treatment.

After his initially upbeat assessment, things leveled off. My arm had been dislocated but was slipped back into place in a scene I don’t recall but I’m sure was really, really painful. It would hurt for a long time, and there were stitches inside my shoulder underneath other stitches, all of which would dissolve while causing plenty of itching and being drowned in ointment. I was covered with cuts and bruises – the doctor called them contusions, which sounded vaguely made-up because I’ve only heard it on crime or hospital dramas – but most would heal after some time.

Apparently I was in something like an intensive care unit, though they called it something different, like critical care center or crucial care corral. My room was really like a stall, and from where I lay I could look out the door and window past the foot of my bed. Through the glass nurses and slouchy-looking other folks (orderlies?) hustled around, creating a reassuring murmur of activity. I had stopped listening to the doctor, but it’s possible he had stopped talking. I heard him ask me my name.

It seemed weird to me that he had put stitches in the cartilage in my shoulder but didn’t know my name. I said my name was U___________, which was really my middle name. I don’t recall if I was intentionally being evasive, but he seemed to think so. Honestly, I was getting morphine or something in my good arm so I could have said my name was Angelo Bruno and I wouldn’t have known the difference. He turned to go and said that someone from billing would come to get all my information and figure out who to call to check on me. My eyelids felt heavy and unbalanced, and I felt one droop closed as the doctor stood in my doorway with his back to me. He had set my chart down somewhere, and he pushed his empty hands into his pockets. My other eye closed and I heard his voice in the hall, but he wasn’t talking to me.

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When I was a kid, I visited what was once called Elgin High School only a few times. For the last fifty years of its life, Elgin High was called just called “Fourth Street” by pretty much everyone. The school district of the bedroom community that had grown up around Elgin had eventually absorbed the little town’s half-dozen school buildings, and the high school had become a weird stopgap middle school between elementary and junior high. Everyone spent a year at Fourth Street before going on to one of the two junior highs known only as “North” and “South.” Both sucked, but North was close to the high school and therefore enjoyed an undeserved sense of superiority. Townies from Elgin went to South.

Having my academic life artfully split between a Catholic school in bad decline and the public school system when the cash ran out, I never attended the churning sausage-grinder of Fourth Street. The Catholic school’s disastrous basketball team periodically practiced in the Fourth Street gym, whose floorboards creaked like a back porch or an unfinished attic, but were finished like the dark-wood gyms of the Midwest. The ceiling felt claustrophobically low. I was tall and thin, and completely lacking in the coordination necessary to play basketball or any other sport. I remember an errant pass hitting the ceiling of Fourth Street and a chunk of plaster or tile or asbestos splintering off and spiraling to the ground over a fleeing center. He put both hands up to protect his head and ran toward jittery bleachers in a maneuver I don’t doubt he perfected after years of being menaced by garden-variety bullies.

Otherwise, Fourth Street was a mystery. Elgin was a small downtown set on an unnamed creek and weakly climbing the hill away from the water all the way to a highway that predates the Freeway. The creek winds around the town and carves a deep gash traced by a windy two-lane and a pair of railroad tracks. As the hill climbs out of town, the place feels two-dimensional to newcomers. “What’s back there?” I remember my first girlfriend asking once on a car-tour of Elgin. Fourth Street was still standing back then. It seemed like a strange question to me. “Back there? Nothing.”

Because back there was a steep, shaggy drop of unmanageable trees, bushes, vines and ivy, maybe half a ton of trash deposited by sixth-graders and the reason I ended up in the hospital.