Chapter 4: The Drag
Here is what I know about emergencies: they are mostly logistics. Somebody else can have the feelings about them later, in a warm room. In the ditch there was a man with a pinned, broken leg and cracked ribs โ he told me the ribs himself, clinically, like a man reading a parts list โ and a motorcycle acting as the world's heaviest tourniquet, and the job was to move the second thing without making the first thing worse.
"Don't lift it off," he said, when I unfolded the little jack from his tool roll. "Jack it up two inches, no more. The weight's doing a job down there. You take it off all at once, things โ " he searched for a word a diner girl could keep, "โ things get busy. Two inches. Then I drag. You pull. Clear?"
"Clear."
"The tarp. Under me first. Sliding's easier than lifting, and you're โ " he looked me over, "โ you're built like a fence rail, kid, no offense."
"None taken. You're built like a piano. It evens out."
That got a laugh out of him that cost him, and I liked him for it against my better judgment.
I worked the tarp under him handful by handful of snow at a time, digging and tucking, the way you make a bed around a sleeping person, and then I set the jack the way he told me โ against the frame, not the chrome, a distinction he cared about more than his leg, to hear him. Two inches took everything I had on the jack handle and some things I had been saving. The bike rose. He dragged. I pulled the tarp from the front with both arms and my whole weight leaned back into the slope, and between the three of us โ him, me, and gravity, which had finally picked a side โ we moved him four feet, out from under the machine, and the machine settled back into the snow with a sigh like a dropped anvil.
His coat I worked off him, and I put my own coat around his shoulders over it, and my diner sweater after that, because shock is just cold with ambition and I have read the poster in the Starlite break room. The blanket came out of the emergency kit in his other saddlebag, foil-thin and crackling, and I wrapped us both under the tarp's lee with it while the snow came down like the world being erased.
Thirty-one percent. Inside my shirt, against my stomach where the sandwiches had been, his phone warmed up and found one bar, and I made the call standing knee-deep in a ditch with my back to the wind, saying *mile marker one-one-four, Route 87, one male, sixty-one, pinned-motorcycle, extracted, leg and ribs* in the voice I use for the sheriff's deputies who come in for pie, calm as a grocery list. The dispatcher said the ambulance was staged at the fire hall and a plow would lead it, and the plow's word was forty minutes, weather permitting, and weather was not permitting anything, so we both understood each other.
Forty minutes is a shift. I know how to work a shift. I checked the foil and his breathing and the time on his phone, and lied to him about the minutes, rounding down. He caught me at it on the third check and called it management, and said Rita did the same thing with his blood-pressure readings, and that I would like Rita.
"You keep talking," I said, squatting back down in the snow beside him. "That's your job now. Tell me something with chapters."
"I got chapters." His teeth were going, so I talked first โ about Pearl, about the meatloaf treaty, about Gord's jump box โ and then he rallied and talked about a wife named Rita who was going to kill him for dying in a ditch, which he delivered as a serious scheduling concern. Then, in a gap in the wind, he said, quieter: "Your name again. The whole of it."
"Wren Halloway."
He went still under the foil blanket. Not asleep-still. Listening-to-something-far-away still.
"Halloway," he said. "Your daddy โ your daddy wouldn't be a man named Tom?"
My heart did something I do not permit it to do. Tom Halloway died when I was eleven, in a wreck I am not going to describe, and before that there are years in my memory with the labels worn off โ a house in Wyoming we lived in under some other name for reasons nobody explained to a kid, a kitchen with yellow curtains, then gone. My mother never talked about it. Dying didn't improve her on the subject.
"Why?" I said.
the plow's lights were cresting the hill, a wall of amber coming slow through the white, and whatever he had meant to say went down behind his eyes like a fish sounding.
"Later," Hammer said. "Kid, later. There's people coming."
Chapter 5: The Convoy