around. Neither of the paramedics who rode with them were in sight.
“Where are they?” George asked.
“Who? The fuckin Bobbsey Twins? Where do you think they are? Chasin Minnesota
poontang down in the Village. Any idea if she’ll pull through?”
“Don’t know.”
He tried to sound sage and knowing about the unknown, but the fact was that first the
resident on duty and then a pair of surgeons had taken the black woman away from him
almost faster than you could say hail Mary fulla grace (which had actually been on his lips to say—the black lady really hadn’t looked as if she was going to last very long).
“She lost a hell of a lot of blood.”
“No shit.”
George was one of sixteen interns at Sisters of Mercy, and one of eight assigned to a new
program called Emergency Ride. The theory was that an intern riding with a couple of
paramedics could sometimes make the difference between life and death in an emergency
situation. George knew that most drivers and paras thought that wet-behind-the-ears
interns were as likely to kill red-blankets as save them, but George thought maybe it
worked.
Sometimes.
Either way it made great PR for the hospital, and although the interns in the program liked
to bitch about the extra eight hours (without pay) it entailed each week, George Shavers
sort of thought most of them felt the way he did himself—proud, tough, able to take
whatever they threw his way.
Then had come the night the T.W.A. Tri-Star crashed at Idlewild. Sixty-five people on
board, sixty of them what Julio Estevez referred to as D.R.T.—Dead Right There—and
three of the remaining five looking like the sort of thing you might scrape out of the bottom
of a coal-furnace. . . except what you scraped out of the bottom of a coal furnace didn’t
moan and shriek and beg for someone to give them morphine or kill them, did they? Ifyou
can take this, he thought afterward, remembering the severed limbs lying amid the remains of aluminum flaps and seat-cushions and a ragged chunk of tail with the numbers 17 and a
big red letter T and part of a W on it, remembering the eyeball he had seen resting on top of
a charred Samsonite suitcase, remembering a child’s teddybear with staring shoe-button
eyes lying beside a small red sneaker with a child’s foot still in it, if you can take this, baby, you can take anything. And he had been taking it just fine. He went right on taking it just fine all the way home. He went on taking it just fine through a late supper that consisted of
a Swanson’s turkey TV dinner. He went to sleep with no prob- lem at all, which proved
beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was taking it just fine. Then, in some dead dark hour of the morning he had awakened from a hellish nightmare in which the thing resting on top of
the charred Samsonite suitcase had not been a teddybear but his mother’s head, and her eyes had opened, and they had been charred; they were the staring expressionless shoebutton
eyes of the teddy-bear, and her mouth had opened, revealing the broken fangs which had
been her dentures up until the T.W.A. Tri-Star was struck by lightning on its final approach,
and she had whispered You couldn’t save me, George, we scrimped for you, we saved for
you, we went without for you, your dad fixed up the scrape you got into with that girl and
you STILL COULDN’T SAVE ME GOD DAMN YOU, and he had awakened screaming,
and he was vaguely aware of someone pounding on the wall, but by then he was already
pelting into the bathroom, and he barely made it to the kneeling penitential position before
the porcelain altar before dinner came up the express elevator. It came special delivery, hot
and steaming and still smelling like processed turkey. He knelt there and looked into the
bowl, at the chunks of half-digested turkey and the carrots which had lost none of their
original flourescent brightness, and this word flashed across his mind in large red letters:
ENOUGH
Correct.
It was:
ENOUGH.
He was going to get out of the sawbones business. He was going to get out because:
ENOUGH WAS ENOUGH.
He was going to get out because Popeye’s motto was That’s all I can stands and I can’t
stand nummore, and Popeye was as right as rain.
He had flushed the toilet and gone back to bed and fell asleep almost instantly and awoke
to discover he still wanted to be a doctor, and that was a goddam good thing to know for
sure, maybe worth the whole program, whether you called it Emergency Ride or Bucket of
Blood or Name That Tune.
He still wanted to be a doctor.
He knew a lady who did needlework. He paid her ten dollars he couldn’t afford to make
him a small, old-fashioned-looking sampler. It said:
IF YOU CAN TAKE THIS, YOU CAN TAKE ANYTHING.
Yes. Correct.
The messy business in the subway happened four weeks later.
2
“That lady was some fuckin weird, you know it?” Julio said.
George breathed an interior sigh of relief. If Julio hadn’t opened the subject, George
supposed he wouldn’t have had the sack. He was an intern, and someday he was going to be
a full-fledged doc, he really believed that now, but Julio was a vet, and you didn’t want to say something stupid in front of a vet. He would only laugh and say Hell, I seen that shit a thousand times, kid. Get y’selfa towel and wipe off whatever it is behind your ears, cause
it’s wet and drippin down the sides of your face.
But apparently Julio hadn’t seen it a thousand times, and that was good, because
George wanted to talk about it.
“She was weird, all right. It was like she was two people.”
He was amazed to see that now Julio was the one who looked relieved, and he was struck
with sudden shame. Julio Estavez, who was going to do no more than pilot a limo with a
couple of pulsing red lights on top for the rest of his life, had just shown more courage than
he had been able to show.
“You got it, doc. Hunnert per cent.” He pulled out a pack of Chesterfields and stuck one in the corner of his mouth.
“Those things are gonna kill you, my man,” George said.
Julio nodded and offered the pack.
They smoked in silence for awhile. The paras were maybe chasing tail like Julio had said …
or maybe they’d just had enough. George had been scared, all right, no joke about that. But he also knew he had been the one who saved the woman, not the paras, and he knew Julio
knew it too. Maybe that was really why Julio had waited. The old black woman had helped,
and the white kid who had dialed the cops while everyone else (except the old black
woman) had just stood around watching like it was some goddam movie or TV show or
something, part of a Peter Gunn episode, maybe, but in the end it had all come down to
George Shavers, one scared cat doing his duty the best way he could.
The woman had been waiting for the train Duke Ellington held in such high regard—that
fabled A-train. Just been a pretty young black woman in jeans and a khaki shirt waiting for
the fabled A-Train so she could go uptown someplace.
Someone had pushed her.
George Shavers didn’t have the slightest idea if the police had caught the slug who had done it—that wasn’t his busi- ness. His business was the woman who had tumbled
scream- ing into the tube of the tunnel in front of that fabled A-train. It had been a miracle
that she had missed the third rail; the fabled third rail that would have done to her what the
State of New York did to the bad guys up at Sing-Sing who got a free ride on that fabled
A-train the cons called Old Sparky.
Oboy, the miracles of electricity.
She tried to crawl out of the way but there hadn’t been quite enough time and that fabled
A-train had come into the station screeching and squalling and puking up sparks because
the motorman had seen her but it was too late, too late for him and too late for her. The steel
wheels of that fabled A-train had cut the living legs off her from just above the knees down.
And while everyone else (except for the white kid who had dialed the cops) had only stood
there pulling their puds (or pushing their pudenda, George supposed), the elderly black
woman had jumped down, dislocating one hip in the process (she would later be given a
Medal of Bravery by the Mayor), and had used the doorag on her head to cinch a tourniquet