Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,37

pair of blueberry eyes in a snowsuit. Something fragile bounced around his chest. The edgy, restless Sheila had returned. The Sheila who drank.

Webster backed out onto 42 and drove to the Giant Mart. With Rowan strapped against his chest, he searched the aisles for baby formula. He could figure out how to make up bottles. In the morning, he would tell Sheila to stop nursing. He thought she might agree if only for the freedom it would give her.

When he returned to the apartment, he put Rowan to sleep and searched for liquor bottles. He found nothing. Either she’d taken it with her or she was more cagey than he’d thought. The word squirrel popped into his head, and he made an ugly sound.

Sheila returned during the night. Webster didn’t ask her where she’d been.

In the morning, he made up four bottles of formula before he left for work.

The tones sounded, and the deadpan voice from Dispatch requested help. “Suspected cardiac, male, severe chest pain radiating through the jaw.” Webster asked for the address. Burrows said, Fuck. He continued swearing the entire way as the Bullet took a beating over the frozen ruts. Burrows was unusually attached to his rig.

“Where is this place, anyway?” Webster asked.

“Hell if I know,” Burrows said.

They reached a fishing cabin at the edge of a small frozen lake. Five trucks were parked outside. The enormous late-model vehicles looked ridiculous next to the tiny shack.

“Ice fishing,” Webster said.

“You ever see the movie Deliverance?” Burrows asked.

“No.”

“Never mind.”

Webster noticed that Burrows knocked on the front door instead of barging in as he usually did. Maybe he thought there might be a shotgun on the other side. A man yelled, “Come in,” and it didn’t sound like an ambush. Not that any medic Webster knew had ever run into an ambush, but he’d read about them happening in the cities.

Inside, there were four men standing, one lying on the floor. Five men, five trucks. Nobody offered anyone a ride?

The floor was made of gray indoor-outdoor carpet tiles, badly stained. With what, Webster didn’t want to know. The man down was crying and pressing his chest.

Webster and Burrows pushed their way through pizza boxes and beer cans.

When Webster knelt beside the patient, he was confused. The patient’s skin looked too pink to be cardiac-related, but the man was panting hard. Webster went through the basic assessment. The patient wasn’t sweating or short of breath, and he wasn’t nauseated. His blood pressure was high.

“What’s his name?” Webster asked.

“Sully,” a man over by the sink said.

“Sully,” Webster said. “Have you ever had this pain before?”

“Once,” the fisherman cried out. “At my niece’s wedding!” He spoke as if he were in agony. “They almost called the medics then.”

“Sully, on a scale of one to ten, how high is your pain?”

“Eight,” the man said. “Maybe nine! It’s terrible!”

“Can you show me where it hurts?” Burrows asked.

The man put his fingers just under his ears and ran them to the middle of his chest.

“Chest pain radiating to jaw,” Webster said.

“Call my wife!” the man yelled.

Webster stood and spoke to Burrows. “We got to take him in,” Webster said.

“Nice ride.”

“Long ride.”

Webster sat Sully up and asked if he could walk to the ambulance. Sully tried, and after several attempts was able to stand on his own. Webster heard the belch before they’d reached the front door. Sully said, as Webster had expected, “The pain is easing off a little. I’m feeling a little better. Let’s wait a second.”

“Let me check your vitals,” Webster said, as protocol demanded, though both he and Burrows knew exactly what they were dealing with. “Sit down right here.”

Webster cuffed the patient, then reached for a radial pulse. Before Webster could report, Sully stood again as if he’d had a tentative recovery from a near-death experience. After another minute, he had his arms in the air. “I’m saved!” he shouted.

The fisherman over by the sink sniggered. “Sully, I told you it was fucking heartburn.”

The five men tried to thank the medics with offers of fresh fish. Burrows turned them down. One of the men pointed out to Webster the tiny shack in the middle of the frozen pond. Inside, Webster knew, would be a stove and some chairs and a hole through which the men dropped their lines.

He also knew this: most of a medic’s calls were mundane.

“Rescue should send the asshole a bill for wear and tear on the rig,” Burrows said as Webster drove.

“Why did you pass on the fish?”