Final Sky

Chapter 5

While Amy did CPR, Ron studied the monitor: no good data showed on the green screen. Heart rate twenty—maybe. Useless cardiac rhythm. No spontaneous respirs. Pupils fixed and dilated. No bowel sounds.

         Cal keyed the mike. “Hurry, or take my time?” 

         “Old as he’s gonna get, I believe,” Ron said. “Young for such a big-time MI, though. Too bad.”

         “Probably snorting his own stuff.”

         Amy studied him. “Maybe stress from an ex wife breathing down his neck?”

         “Or a foreclosure?” Ron added. “Maybe job burnout on top of it?”

         “Shut up you two. I’ll get out from under it somehow. I happen to love my job, by the way.”

         Ron looked at Amy. Neither said a word. Then Ron unbuckled. “Time for an assessment.” Grunting forward in the cabin he checked the abdomen, listened for bowel sounds, eyed the monitor, adjusted the IV.

         Cal stared at the guy’s tattoos, his six-dollar Wal-Mart jeans, Dale Earnhardt T-shirt and shiny, richly-detailed Dingo boots. The guy reeked of tobacco smoke. An oxygen cannula jammed his nose, its tape peeling away from his three-day growth of beard. The image floated by again, Cal’s dad and his wheeled oxygen bottle, like a faithful silver puppy trailing him, competing for attention with a pet Camel, the old man’s two-pack-a-day habit. Cal saw the crumpled cans of Becks littering the yard, and the old man’s bottle of seven-dollar vodka always within easy reach from his wheelchair.

         Ron leaned over, assessing the patient. His stethoscope swung free, and sweat dripped off his forehead, dotting the sheet. He stared at the monitor, ran a rhythm strip, ripped it off and frowned. To palpate lower leg pulses Ron removed the man’s boots. When he took the right one off, and turned it upside down, a single hundred-dollar bill fluttered out. “Whoa, what do we have here?” Ron’s eyes beamed like headlamps.

         When Cal turned to look, three more hundreds drifted to the floor. Then a wad of them. He stared at Ron.

         Ron stared back.

         Amy stopped CPR. “Holy shit.” 

         Ron grabbled the man’s other boot off, looked at Amy and Cal, and then upended it. In one decisive plop a brick of bills fell out like loot from a teller’s drawer. All hundreds. Perhaps thirty in all, from one black Dingo with tacky silver chains. The other boot had at least as many. “Christ on a crutch,” Ron said. “Must be seven grand here.”

         Cal stared at Amy. “Questions?”

         She started a half-hearted CPR again.

They flew along in silence, the dirty money glowing on the cabin floor, radioactive. Cal thought of his pending foreclosure, and the divorce. Angela had bragged that she’d take everything he ever owned from third grade on if she could. “You won’t have a pot to piss in, or a window to toss it out of,” she’d said. Then she’d smacked him when he mentioned all her worn out clichés.’

          Amy stared at the filthy cash. She was off on a Hawaiian vacation in a week. Ron’s daughter had been accepted at Grinnell College at forty-grand a year. They stared at the stack of bills like it might burn a hole through the bottom of the aircraft, fall out and shower money over the interstate below like so much crazy rain, people wrecking their cars, their lives, to snatch it up.

         Amy opened her mike. “We have to give it back.” 

         “Why?”

         “She’s right, Palmer,” Ron said. “What if he lives? We are trying to save his life, after all, in case you hadn’t noticed what we do back here while you’re flying.” 

          “He ain’t gonna live,” Cal sneered, pointing at the monitor’s green screen with its senseless, jagged line. “He’s toast.”

         The hospital loomed five miles away. The off-load crew would be waiting there for them, waiting to take the man to the ER where he’d likely be pronounced dead. 

         Ron fanned the crumpled bills like a deck of cards. More sweat trickled off his forehead. His hands shaking, he held one pad in front of Amy. She looked at him, then at Cal, then out the side window. She closed her eyes, as if imagining a long, empty beach, and two weeks away from dying patients—and asshole pilots. Then she shook her head no, and started pumping the man’s chest again.

         “Come on, Amy,” Cal said, “who’s gonna know?”

         “I just can’t.”

         Cal stared ahead, mind racing, knowing what Ron was about to do. Sure enough the flight nurse’s hand came forward, dirty bills so close that Cal smelled their coppery stink. He imagined taking the money, cramming it into the map case. Imagined bringing the mortgage back to level to close the house without it costing him, paying off the Acura, getting Angela off his back. For an instant he wondered how he’d keep her from finding out about it. He looked at the patient, the naked chest rising and falling, electrodes snaked across him, oxygen cannula up his nose. Toast, he thought. No way this dude will… “Put it back in the boot, I’ll take care of it.”

         Ron’s voice. “Put it back..?”   

         “You don’t trust me?”

         “Of course, I just thought...”

         “Take care of your patient and leave the flying to me.”

         Amy snapped her mike open. “Is this the real Cal we’re seeing?”

         “Do your job, rookie.”

Cal powered down and eased the helicopter onto the pad with a bump. He stopped the blades, snapped off the battery and helped the crew remove the man. Before he could stop her, Amy hefted the personal affects bag across her shoulder and raced toward the elevator. The boots jiggled inside the bag, pointed toes bulging its white plastic sides. 

         As the team rushed into the ER Cal held the bag of IV fluid up, its contents nearly gone. He had paperwork to do from the flight, and a boot full of filthy money to retrieve, somehow. The contents would cover his divorce attorney fees, and the first month’s rent on the apartment he’d found when Angela kicked him out. Naive Amy and dutiful Ron would never know, and wouldn’t ask, he hoped.

         Headed back to the helipad, he turned past the waiting room. 

         The patient’s girlfriend stepped into the hall, eyes bloodshot, fingernails yellow from scores of Salem menthols. Her Wal-Mart uniform had a shiny stain at waist level, from a cash drawer, Cal assumed. Grasping a tattered tissue she grabbed his shirt. “Is he gonna make it?” 

         “Sorry, I’m not allowed to...”

         “Christ sakes, can’t nobody tell me nothin’ ‘round here?”

         “I don’t expect he will,” Cal said, more than he was authorized to tell her, a lot more, but it was likely true . He fought back an urge to hope he was right. “They don’t just recover like on TV.”

         “Well, shit, at least somebody’s tellin’ the truth fer once.”

         “I’m sorry.”

         “Never mind. Can I see him? Them doctors won’t let me in there, an’ I gotta get to work.”

         Cal thought of the black Dingos with their silver chains, and the cash hidden inside them. The girlfriend hadn’t mentioned it. He wondered if she knew? Maybe she doesn’t want to know how he got it, Cal thought. By taking it, he’d be protecting her from its evil source, like an inoculation, or a preventive intervention, he thought. He might be saving her life. That is my job after all, he thought, saving lives, even if people act like they don’t want to be saved.

         He saw the old man’s yellow fingernails as he tore open another bogus contest envelope. Smoke curling through his old man’s ratty hair, his squinty eyes scanning another form letter from some grand prize announcement, or clearinghouse award: Act Now! Limited number of entries! Your name was chosen from among thousands! Cal watches his father curse, then ball the worthless letter up, another twenty bucks down the rat hole, unread magazines stacked twenty-deep against the refrigerator and under the card table. His old man sucks his Camel till the stub end glows, ashes littering the tile. Cal sees the look of anguish on the old man’s face when the Greyhound bus door shuts, his feeble wave as he stands in the rain, exhaust smoke enveloping him. He tastes the acrid glue when he licks the envelope to send cash home from basic at Leonard Wood, knowing the old man will use it for booze and smokes, killing himself, just doing it in slow motion.    

         Cal went to the ER, the girlfriend in tow. The man was hidden under a sheet. His filthy bus driver socks stuck out, holes in the toes, green stains redolent.

         Ron stopped writing his report. He stood, and lifted the sheet.

         The girlfriend bent over the body. She stroked the fellow’s hair, kissed his cheek. She whispered something, then fell on him and moaned, a wrenching sound of grief so pure and clean it caused Ron, Cal and Amy to stare at the floor. The woman dabbed at her eyes and stepped away from the body. She turned to leave, then saw the clothes bag in the corner, the shiny black tops of the Dingos sticking out. “Can I take that stuff? He’d want me to have them boots.”

         Ron nodded. “Uh, I guess…are you immediate..?”

         “I’ll take care of it,” Cal said. He caught Ron’s attention, held it, and the nurse returned to his notes.

         Cal hefted the bag with its smoke-sodden flannel shirt, the cheap jeans and the boots into the woman’s outstretched arms. “Sorry for your loss.”