“You know that guy?”
“Nah.”
“This gonna be a problem, you doing a route through here?” Carl asked. Gave me one of his hard looks, one of his dad looks.
“Let’s just drive,” is all I said. “We’re losing time.”
* * *
ASK ME HOW IT HAPPENED.
How do you have the world by the nuts and then let go.
Shit is so simple anyone that’s not as dumb as me would’ve seen ’um coming. That sophomore season when I took over, our team went late in the tournament, made it all the way to the Final Four, with me leading in scoring and third on assists, double-double as easy as pissing in the shower. After a season like that, how could I not recognize what I was?
Howbout the party in me started small and got bigger, just a little here and there and then epic, all the time epic, blackout epic. Howbout reggae, howbout pass the dutchie, howbout freshman girl hips and my hips and everyone in the living room when the bass drops. Howbout those days I was missing the beach bad and wanted to bring all the aloha back. Howbout if you try hard enough you can make the beach show up anywhere, even Spokane in the off-season, a little beer a lot of beer couple other brown boys and good beats, girls down to their hot pants and scooped-out necklines and we go. My grades was barely enough through spring semester and summer. Howbout I can see now, can’t nobody do it that way, not for long. Howbout I remember when I should have started for pay attention, when summer league started and I tried for all my mongoosing on the court, dipping into the flow, and something felt syrupy slow and numb. But I was only twenty, how could that be? Howbout island love can only do so much, at least for me, since there was arguments at practice with Coach, always telling me what to do and I swear half the time he was wrong, even Rone and Grant and DeShawn, I dunno what happened but soon wasn’t none of ’um talking to me, and me right back at ’um. Get your shit together, you’re getting sloppy, you’re getting slow, you’re getting fat. Used to be I was a razor, sharp and flashy bright, till I went and dulled myself.
* * *
NOW IT’S JUST DELIVERIES. Whole string of 6:00 a.m.’s go, me with more ride-alongs. Boss is saying maybe I get to start on my own. Don’t even have to help the loaders, maybe just a little bit, stacking everything the way I like it in the back of the truck, which I get all kapakahi the first few weeks, like putting the big boxes for the closer addresses too far back in the truck, stacking all the crates wrong so that I’m always reaching bent over, like that. But I learn. I bet no one thinks I can, but I do. And Carl must have said something to someone for real about the university because I never gotta go that way again. I guess that’s his route anyway.
There’s the fuzz of the cardboard boxes, when I hold one I can feel ’um in my fingers like little hairs on some pet I gotta take care of. There’s the flex and whank sound when I step up into the back of my delivery truck, then all the angles and edges and the silver shine of the walls inside when the sun’s coming up and I’m delivering. I’m delivering.
Plenty times after work, me and Eddie and Kirk-guys all met in the back of the parking lot to tailgate, like we were headed to a ball game or something, but it’s just all us getting off our shift and chilling, just for a minute. Before some of the guys gotta run home to the edge of town in whatever small little house they’re all crammed into we stand around the back of Eddie’s car, far side of the parking lot, cracking beers from the trunk.
“Anybody going to the game tonight?” Eddie asked.
It gets all quiet.
“Right,” Eddie said, not looking at me. “Sorry.” His shitty little child-molester-looking mustache and squirrel cheeks, raising his can, everyone else did the same. Guys is slamming their beers since they gotta get home to their families, except a few guys that chilled and drank slow, like we was at a bar and trying for make it last so we don’t gotta order another, just stay and listen to the music.
11
NAINOA, 2008
Portland
A seventeen-year-old girl with A collapsed lung was breathing no oxygen but death, I kept her alive. A construction worker with a severe incision of his left forearm, dropping into hypovolemic shock, I held him together. Parks in the ceaseless damp of a late cold spring and their gray alcoholics, stripping their clothes in a fever of hypothermia, so drunk and cold they were delirious, how desperate their heart thumps were, body cores falling below ninety degrees as they grew waxy, fetaled underneath benches, I kept even the coldest ones alive. We got the hemorrhoid calls and the imagined myocardial-infarction calls and the stomach-flu calls, yes, the street-corner raving lunatics and juvenile fistfight losers, we got their ambulance calls again and again, every day and all the time, the dull act of standing on stoops with supposed patients while we ran through the symptom list of everything this mild illness, that tickle of the chest, this I don’t feel right might be, but when the significant ones came, the ones me and Erin wanted but never confessed we wanted, the way our lungs and hearts and skulls were roaring with adrenaline when we arrived to another bloody, screaming scene, when those came I was getting better every time, pushing further and further into the borders of death’s country.
I poured myself into work. Inside the rig, the rush and struggle and the essences crowding inside me were like a habit now, always rubbing me for attention, saying, Just a little bit, just give me a little bit, every day, so that soon visiting Khadeja and Rika and helping with elementary-school projects, opening bills and taking out the garbage at my apartment, groceries and laundry, is it movie night at Khadeja’s or gym night by myself, all were just footnotes to the next time an ambulance could catapult me to a dying body.
Weeks and weeks passed as this. The chaos of being on shift, long stretches of meaningless work, easy calls we didn’t need to be at, then the harder calls with true accidents, fingers lost in a meat slicer in the back of a bright white supermarket deli, a pathologic humerus fracture from a domestic ladder tumble of a cancer patient, low-speed bicycle/car interactions …
As I began to understand myself, to learn what I was capable of, these basic traumas became things I could repair, even as I was masking the repair, so that by the time the patients had made it to the hospital in our ambulance, their bodies were set on a trajectory to be fully healed, but not so quickly as to be a miracle. I can only imagine the number of ER doctors that pulled back bloody dressings only to find the wound underneath far less severe than had been described in the paperwork.
For a time Erin said nothing, but eventually she stopped me outside the front of the station at the end of one of our shifts.
“You have to tell someone,” she said. I smelled her cola-sweetened breath and our compost-heap body odors from another long shift.
“Tell someone what?” I asked.
“Don’t insult me,” she said. “We can’t just keep on like this.”
“We?” I asked.
That flex in her jaw. “You,” she said.
“Describe it,” I said. “What this thing is we should be telling people about.” I watched the station cleaners chuck giant popcorn-ball-shaped garbage bags of medical waste into transfer bins.