Long Arm of Not the Law, Chapter 5

Here is chapter 5 from the book I am writing, called Long Arm of Not the Law. It's long enough now that I can't read through the whole manuscript before I start working on a new chapter. Please excuse this detour from book reviews. Long Arm is about a series of deaths that are considered to be accidents. However, a pattern begins to emerge. Maybe the deaths are not accidents.


CHAPTER 5 THE EMT


This is a book of funerals mainly because of a group of particular deaths—deaths by accident, injury, illness, deaths by surprise. Sometimes you look at the daily details of things and you can’t see patterns. But if you pull way, way back, something interesting may emerge. When you stand by a river, you see width and depth, but when you look at images from a satellite, you can see that your spot on the river is part of an extensive network of related and linked creeks and streams and rivers. Betty Brand was the type of person who would pull way back, would turn off emotional and social filters and just see what’s there. Betty Brand started to see a pattern, started to collect deaths. This book is the story of the deaths she collected and how she made sense of them.


The next death in Betty’s collection was emergency medical technician (EMT) Julia Berne. Julia was rumored to be a lesbian, but because her mom had been so respected in the community in the 1970s, and because she was exceedingly discreet, no one ever said anything out loud about it. Julia’s mother Audrey Willard Berne had been inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame for her work on local history, her book on the history of public health in Ohio, and her Statistical Manual of Outbreaks of Head Lice, which became a standard in health departments throughout the Midwest.


Maybe her mom’s quest to eradicate head lice gave Julia a “head” start in lesbianism, because it meant that her hair, although always nicely styled, was always also short, coiffed, never longer than about two inches, never hitting her shoulders in her whole childhood. Anyway, the haircuts probably didn’t contribute to Julia’s homosexuality, but made it easier to fly under the radar. Yes, I think you can be under the radar but also out of the closet. Actually, most straight people are under the radar. They don’t go around talking about sexual predilections and neither did Julia. As far as the community liked to believe, Julia was totally celibate.


Julia worked regular shifts on the Emergency Medical Squad. She reported to the EMS building at 6:00 every evening and worked till 2:00 a.m. Most nights, after she checked the “truck,” making sure it was well stocked, clean, and gassed up, she dozed or watched cable TV. Usually at least once per evening, she would have a walk-in. Bartie Immel’s common law wife brought him in every few weeks for a blood pressure check, sometimes because his fuse was too short, sometimes because he was so flat as to seem almost dead.


“Everything checks out OK, Bartie,” Julia said, wrapping the blood pressure tubing around the cuff. “One twenty-two over eighty-five. Like always.” She grasped his wrist and felt for his pulse.


“Like always, Lois,” Bartie said. “I tell you every time.” Lois rolled her eyes. “It was just that one time it was high, when I didn’t know what I was drinking. I thought it was beer.” It had been Red Bull.


Julia shushed him, watching the sweep second hand of her Bulova.


Every now and then, Bartie brought in Lois, usually for “sugar.”


“She don’t seem right,” he told Julia. “I think it’s her sugar.”


Lois did a good job managing her “sugar,” but Bartie was easily alarmed. Julia rubbed down Lois’s finger with an alcohol wipe and pricked her with a test strip from the diabetes kit Lois had brought along. Her level was usually close to normal. However, adult onset (type II) diabetes was a scourge in Gerry County. Bartie’s dad lost his leg and then his life to the disease. Lois’s mom, too, had suffered from it, dying from congestive heart failure exacerbated by obesity. No wonder Bartie was nervous.

The carb-heavy diet of the poor was hypothesized to be a contributor to the high prevalence of diabetes—pizza, bread, potatoes, hamburger, bacon—cheap calories, but also deadly.  Fresh vegetables were probably the least-eaten food group in Maple Hills. When she first moved to Gerry County, Elaine Dixon had been amazed at the prevalence of what she called the “yellow-white” meal—chicken and noodles ladled over mashed potatoes, side of canned corn, yeast roll, and butter. Washing it all down with a glass of whole milk made the experience complete. Another version of yellow-white was pounded and breaded pork tenderloin (called “Gerry County Veal”) on a white bun with mayo and pickles and with French fries on the side, often glopped with melty yellowy cheese. This delectation was often consumed at the Eat-n-Time Dairy Bar, and accompanied with white (of course) ice cream.


Julia could gather the data, but she could not treat. All she could do was offer to transport if the data indicated a serious problem. She also changed dressings and checked bee stings (if the person who was stung made it all the way to the EMS building, that alone indicated a lack of anaphylactic shock). But every few nights, there was a transport, a car wreck, someone with chest pains, a bad fall with a broken bone, or, worst of all, a beating or gunshot wound. Julia and her shift partner received a page similar to the one Cody Miller got, swung their gear into the cab of the ambulance (or “squad” as it was more commonly referred to) and took off with the siren blaring and the lights flashing. Julia had trained herself not to react. Just don’t react, she repeated over and over through the years until it became a part of her, something she took to every injury scene.


One evening, on Route 17 North not far from where Police Chief Duncan Smith had crashed, Julia and her partner pulled up to a grisly scene. A Ford Explorer was off the road—far enough off that it had probably rolled a few times. One tire was blown. Julia could see a body out among the broken corn stalks; she could see that it was not in a normal posture for a living human. It was her job to walk on out there, through the stubble of this season’s harvest, keeping between the rows, watching the shiny black tops of her steel-toed boots, seeing the boots advance, seeing her medical box lower onto the soil. Just don’t react, she said to herself.


It was a white female, or had been. Julia bent over the still warm form, placed her fingers on the neck, on the carotid, the former carotid. Nothing. She gently turned the shoulders to lift the body. She unsnapped the lid of the med box, extracted the stethoscope. Cradling the woman’s chest against her own, she pulled up the shirt to put the stethoscope against the flesh of the back. No breath sounds. Nothing. She moved the woman onto her back. The head fell loosely to the side. Just don’t react. In the Explorer, children were screaming. Just don’t react. She closed the eyes and shook out a folded up yellow poncho from its tiny carry bag. She placed the poncho over the body. It was just a body now. She knew the woman though. She had recognized the Explorer right from the start.


A few months later, Bartie brought Lois in, toting along her insulin kit as usual. Julia looked for a long time at the insulin. “This stuff is expired, Lois. I’m going to confiscate it.”


In the morning, Julia was found dead, a syringe in her hand, an empty vial of insulin at her side. It was the accident, that’s what the EMS director said. It was all the accidents. She never cried. She should have cried.


Carl Wallingford was sympathetic, introducing many Maple Hills residents to the illness called post-traumatic stress disorder. He could discuss its signs and symptoms in detail. He knew Julia. She had transported him once after a storm when he had fallen and broken his leg trying to move a downed tree in the street next to his house. He hadn’t seen and wasn’t injured by the live power line under the tree, but that was all Julia could talk about as the ambulance hurtled toward the hospital. Accidental death.


And now she was dead. Her funeral was not ritualized—an EMT didn’t rank with a police chief or a young fire fighter—and Julia had always been private. Still, the uniformed members of the squad kept guard over Julia’s body, rotating every two hours. The visiting hours and services were held at the local funeral home, where Julia’s mom and dad received mourners, hugs, tears, shared memories. During the services, conducted by a woman minister from the city, a stranger sat with Julia’s mother, a stocky woman who kept her head down. Tears dropped into her lap. She was listed in the obituary as a “special friend.” She would miss Julia in a way none of the others would ever understand.