The memory is so faint that I am not sure it is even real. A little girl was laying in the roadway with a coat over her face and torso. She wasn’t moving. I was only in second grade. My school was just down the street from my house, so I walked to school every morning. There was only one street to cross and there was always a crossing guard there. But today was different.
The crossing guard was sitting on the curb crying. A frantic man was in the street not really knowing what to do. I walked up to cross the street and he motioned for me to stop.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Just don’t move. Don’t go anywhere. Just stop. Someone is getting help.”
* * *
I had just started work as an EMT. I had just been hired by a private ambulance company in Dallas. I was still in training and we were working as a three person crew. I was really uncomfortable during my training. I look back on that time in my life and wonder how I ever stuck with it. I would ride around in the back of the truck as we responded to calls all day. I was always left out of very hushed conversations between the two partners. I felt like an unwanted fifth wheel. When I held back I was told I was too timid. When I stepped up and jumped in, I was told that I was doing the wrong thing. I couldn’t find my stride. I couldn’t find my balance.
“Unit 122, start for the city of Plano non-emergency. Signal 27 coming to your pager,” squawked the radio.
“Oh, hot damn!” yelled Danno. “Our trainee gets to play with a dead body!”
“What?” I asked, “What’s a Signal 27?”
“That’s the radio code for ‘dead guy.’ We have the body tote contract for Collin County. So every time someone dies outside of a facility like a hospital or a nursing home, we have to go pick up the body and haul ‘em to the morgue.”
This really didn’t sound like fun. So far, most of what I had done on the private ambulance were things that weren’t even mentioned in EMT school. What I was trained to do and what I did were two very different things. It was becoming harder and harder to reconcile the two things in my head. And now I was going to pick up a dead body?
We arrived at the address to find a very nice house in a well-to-do suburb. The patient was a man in his 70’s. The house was packed with family, and from what I could gather from snippets of conversation the patient had a very volatile heart condition, but was not expected to die when he did.
We made our way through the crowd of family and paid our respects. The coroner had already come and gone. There was to be an autopsy and a police officer remained at the house to maintain the chain of custody over the body. The policeman looked very uncomfortable and asked if he could leave now that we had arrived. Danno saw no reason to keep him so he told him he could go.
A few of the family members wanted to view the body one last time. Danno and his partner allowed this while we stood by in the room. After they were satisfied, we walked them to the door and closed it behind them. For the first time since we arrived, we were alone without family present.
“Goddamnit, I hate this shit,” Danno mouthed the words as if he was yelling, but his voice was only a whisper so that his words wouldn’t carry outside the room.
His partner Joe started laughing. “Yeah, this is taking forever. We’ve been on scene for what, 30 minutes already?”
The patient looked as if he had died peacefully in bed. We pulled back the covers and found him in his pajamas. His arms and legs were all over the place though. He looked like one of those people who slept splayed out all over the bed.
“Well, at least he didn’t shit himself,” Danno said.
“Does that usually happen?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” answered Joe, “It’s rare that it doesn’t happen. If you are alive, you have control of your sphincters. If you are dead, you don’t. And when they relax, the poop and the pee will come out. But don’t let this fool you. We’re not out of the woods yet. The second we move him, he could unleash the nasty on us.”
“What I am worried about right now,” Danno paused for a second to tug at one of his arms, “is the rigor. Damnit, he is stiff as a freaking board.”
I wasn’t familiar with this so they filled me in. As I have said, the patient died with his arms and legs splayed out. Now the body had rigored. The implications were lost on me until Danno looked at me like I was an idiot and asked, “How are we going to fit him on the cot and get him through the door?”
And as Danno predicted, this was pretty damn difficult. What followed was a scene that could have come right out of a Three Stooges or Marx Bros. movie if the subject matter wasn’t so grim. The poor guy simply wouldn’t fold his arms and legs in. When we finally got him out of bed he looked like he died while doing jumping jacks and froze that way.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“We gotta work him loose,” said Danno.
He proceeded to grab an arm and started working it back and forth. He instructed me to do the same on the other side. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. It took a while but the limbs became a bit more pliable. When we got them close to the torso he called for Joe to spring into action.
“Joe, quick! Buckle him in!”
Joe fastened the stretcher strap around his chest and cinched it tight. There was a tense moment when he let go and we all backed away from the stretcher. We wondered if it would hold. After a few seconds we all breathed in a sigh of relief and started to work on the legs. This took a bit longer, but they too finally were secured.
“Okay, let’s cover him up and get the hell out of here.”
We took a sheet and carefully covered him up, taking pains to make the sheet nice and neat. Little would the family know that if the button on the buckle was pushed the patient would explode like a jack in the box. We opened the door and started to wheel him into the hall.
There was a tense moment as the wife wanted to pull down the cover and see him one more time. Danno allowed it, but we were all sweating bullets. She just gave him a little peck on the cheek and sent us on our way. When it came time for transport I of course had to ride in the back.
“How in the hell do you do the paperwork for something like this?” I asked.
“We’ll let you figure that out rookie. I’ll give you a hint though, you don’t have to take his blood pressure.”
* * *
I froze on my side of the street, unable to cross. My second grade mind was scared. I thought I had done something wrong. The back of my neck was hot. My palms were sweaty. I wanted to cross and run into my classroom. I wanted to do anything but stay here staring at the little girl under the coat not moving.
An ambulance finally pulled up. It was the 70’s so not much was done. They just scooped her limp body up and set it inside on the cot. One of the EMT’s walked over to the frantic man and asked a couple of questions. Then he got in the driver’s seat and they sped away.
I was scared. The crossing guard was still crying. I just wanted to leave.
* * *
We pulled into the coroner’s office and wheeled our patient into the bay. The medical examiner was waiting for us and wanted to have a look at the body before we put him in the cooler.
“Hey Doc,” Danno seemed to be familiar with him, “here’s your guy. Be careful though, we barely got him on the cot. He rigored up in a hell of a position. We liked to never got him out of the house.”
“Really?” he said chuckling a little bit, “Let’s see.”
“Okay,” said Joe, “you asked for it.”
Joe moved to the head of the stretcher. He pulled the sheet off the cot and dropped it to the floor. Then he carefully reached over the patients head and pushed the button on the upper strap with one finger. The arms of the patient violently sprang out to the spread eagle position. The doctor started laughing. Softly at first, but then he completely lost it when Danno undid the legs from the other side.
“That’s priceless,” said the doctor, “you didn’t break anything squashing him in like that?”
“No, we did it slow. We worked him into it. It took a while though, and we were scared shitless he was going to come undone in front of the family. You want him in the cooler?”
The medical examiner waved us on, still laughing. We made our way to a dingy little room that was full of steel tables. About half of them already had dead bodies on them. We moved ours over to one of the empty tables.
“Hey,” I said, “this is the first time I have really seen a dead body. It’s kind of fascinating. Do you mind if I have a better look?”
“This is your first time?” Joe asked. “Yeah sure, get it out of your system. This won’t be the last though. It is kinda interesting, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but you know, I think I have seen a dead body before. I was just a little kid and it was so long ago. She was laying in the street when I was on my way to school. It was creepy. But I never really saw her. Not like this.”
So Joe and Danno made it a training opportunity. They showed me what dependant lividity was. They talked about rigor mortis and how it can be ‘broken out’ like we had just done. Joe pushed down on the belly to show how you can evacuate air from the stomach. There was more to dead bodies than I had ever considered.
“See,” Joe said with a flourish, “nothing weird about this. Death is a part of life, and a part of this job.” He tapped a few times on the patient’s chest.
“But you can’t help but think some of them are just going to get up and wink at you,” said Danno. He had been in the business for 20 years, but you could tell he was more uncomfortable with it than Joe.”
I walked over to the patient’s head. “Do you like being dead?” I asked the patient. Then I grabbed his cheeks and squeezed them to make the patient move his lips. “No way!” said the dead patient.
Joe thought this was the funniest thing he had ever seen and was laughing uncontrollably. Danno rolled his eyes and said something to the effect that rookies shouldn’t be playing with dead folks. We turned off the lights and left. As I was closing the door I noticed that the only light in the room was the soft blue glow of a bug zapper hanging from the ceiling.
* * *
When I was older I asked my parents about the little girl in the road. They had never heard of the incident and questioned whether or not I was remembering it correctly. To be honest I really don’t know. It was so long ago that I can only remember flashes of it, a few seconds at a time. It may have been a dream for all I know. But I remember how I felt. I felt queasy, hot, nervous, and jittery. The memory is so obvious, so real, and so strong.
I finally got across the street and made it to class. I hadn’t thought about it in years until I saw the eery blue glow of the bug zapper in the morgue as I closed the door.
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