Back at the station Nan and I watched an Ultimate Fighting Championship match while we ate some popcorn we mixed with almonds, because we’re both trying to get more protein. I wished for a joint; my second week on the job and I was already thinking I needed one where I can smoke without the specter of the piss test hanging over me all the damn time.
I’d always thought UFC was for meatheads, but since I started work Nan had talked me through the rules; and now I can see how much there is too it, dude. So many different kinds of martial arts—-aidkido, jujitsu, tae kwan do—-of course there’s boxing, too. And there’s beauty to how, when a guy is in a chokehold, he taps out when he’s ready to be released. Just gives a light little tap on the beasty forearm of the fucker who’s got ahold of him. And that’s it: the guy lets him go.
In UFC, the guy in the chokehold always gets to say when he’s had enough. And that’s civilized, dude, in a way real life is not.
But as we’re sitting there watching this big blonde guy with a mullet pull a chokehold on a smaller, wiry Puerto Rican fucker, the Puerto Rican doesn’t tap out and all of a sudden his eyes roll back in his head and he’s out. That doesn’t happen too often. There aren’t too many Cool Hand Luke’s, not even in Ultimate Fighting. Most guys, you take away their air and they’re gonna want to breath.
So the Puerto Rican goes limp and the big guy with the mullet lets him down onto the mat right as dispatch comes over the radio with a call for us, a three car pile up on I-35 and we’re on the truck and rolling. We couldn’t see the wreck for the backed up traffic on the road, but we made decent time on the shoulder lane.
As I climbed out of the box with my jump bag, a guy from Fire came up to us to give a report. He had a giant gut that said he’ll for sure drop dead two years after he retires. “We got someone here in the Nissan with a broken leg,” he says, “someone over there who’s okay, we got a guy pissing and moaning who wasn’t even in the wreck. And we got a woman who—” But I was already hustling towards her.
The front of the car was accordioned to hell, but two more guys from Fire had the door open, no airbag and they’d already pulled her out and had her on the asphalt. And as soon as they saw me coming, both of the firefighters looked up at me like they were relieved: Someone else to be in charge of this one.
Her head was completely crushed in on the right side. Crushed in like nobody lives through, not even as a vegetable. She would be dead in five.
I knelt down beside her. Even though her brains were out, I could see that she had the thickest, shiniest chestnut colored hair.
The woman’s stomach rose like a giant frilly purple hilltop as she lay there on her back. The blouse low cut and her breasts spilling back towards her throat.
It could’ve been a labor pain that sent her shooting across three lanes of traffic and into an oncoming car.
Her mouth hung open and she sucked in one of the slow gasps that comes just before dying. Once you see agonal breathing a few times, you know it.
I pulled out my intubation tube as I knelt behind her head to adjust her airway. My face up close to her brains and the smell powerful. She took one more agonal breath. The last dying gasp of this ripe, beautiful woman, it would be with me forever. You can’t unring a bell, that’s what my grandma would say.
I slid the intubation blade down her throat.
You always work a pregnant woman, no matter how dead.
Nan’s standing over me, but I can tell this one’s hard for him. His wife, she just found out she’s pregnant with their second.
Stay tuned for Part Three of AMBULANCE.
