An Observation of Two Men Working to Save A Life
I once watched a man die in the parking lot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I watched from inside my car as two paramedics did all they could to save him. They worked hard to keep his heart beating.
It looked exhausting.
The two of them, there on their knees, one to each side of the man.
The man lying on the pavement beside his car, his arms and legs stretched out and spread wide like a dying cartoon.
The blue door of his nineteen-ninety-something Oldsmobile left wide open. A sixty-four ounce plastic soda cup left on the roof.
The paramedics. One was old, the other young. The young one was skinny and had pimples on his face. The old one was fat and had scars from pimples on his face.
I remember thinking, as I watched them sweat, that they worked well together. I thought the two of them made a good team.
The old one was throwing the whole of his weight into the mans chest with every compression. The young one sucking gallons of air into his own lungs before transferring it all into those of the dying man.
They made no eye contact. They said nothing. They worked tirelessly.
They shared something. Something more than the power to save lives. Or the desire to at least try. I didn’t know what they shared.
And then I thought maybe I did. I started to see these two as one person. Older and younger versions of each other. I was happy to think that one or the other had traveled back or forth through time to be here for his younger or older self. I wondered why one might have traveled through time to be here for the other. I wondered if either of them had a clue. Was this something they had discussed? While sitting in their rig waiting for work, maybe?
I noticed they had stopped doing anything.
They stretched their backs up straight. The old one let his tired arms fall to his sides, the young one put his on his head. The old one was panting like a dog. The young one took another deep breath, and with no one to breathe it into, let it out with a defeated sigh. For the first time since I had started watching them, they looked right at each other.
At the same time, as one, they both stood up. The old one first getting a foot under himself before pushing off his knee with both his hands. He leaned against the blue Oldsmobile with his hands again to his sides. Still panting, though slower. Catching his breath, now. His eyes went back to the body.
The young one rose to his feet without any trouble at all. He leaned against nothing. His breathing was stable. He put his hands in his pockets and looked to his tired old partner, shaking his head at his future self.
Copyright © June 2009 Chris La Cour
The Sacrifice : Three Short Stories
God’s Call
She talks to the cool air that blankets and rides the waves and swells. Her feet, white as porcelain, slowly turning purple, and as wrinkled as a bathing child’s fingertips, struggle to keep their grip on the polished rocks. Her dress is pressed flat to her thighs, stomach and breasts by the wind coming off the water, it shows an orange aura, the glow of the sun setting behind her. Her arms hang at her sides, in each fist she holds a tight bunch of the black silk dress.
“I’m sorry.” she says.
“I did love him, really.” she tells the water. She tells the air.
Her words turn to white smoke.
He had that tattoo on his chest, Clara. She would lay on her side, next to him in bed, the both of them naked, and she would trace the lines with her finger. He would pull a lungs worth of smoke from his cigarette before twisting his arm around to offer her a drag. Distracted by the black letters, tracing the filigree flowing off the top of the letter C, framing the other letters, tracing the letters a, l, a; every time, she would nearly forget that it was poisoned. “No, thank you.” she would whisper as she flicked her finger away from the tail of that last letter a.
Steam boiled out from her lungs as she sobbed.
A raven at the rivers edge picks at something, some garbage in the mud. His head twitches and jerks. She recalls the seizures. The birds black feathers, this is the color of the blood in his urine, towards the end. The birds black eyes, the color of his veins, the day she came home and finally found him dead. In the birds shadow she saw the bruises, the ones he would get just from sitting on something that wasn’t soft enough, the black and green bruises he got from resting his elbows on the table. The birds dirty, yellow, claw feet are the same color that he wore under his eyes and around his mouth. The same yellow color that the mortician couldn’t hide, no matter how much foundation he caked on.
He looks good, they would say, as they hugged her, standing next to his casket or as they held both of her hands at her waist, in both of theirs.
“It’s for the better.” his aunt had told her.
“It was Gods call.” the pastor told her.
“No, it wasn’t.” she told herself. She told the water. The air. The raven.
The raven stretched his wings from his side and smacked at the air, furiously taking flight. It was the loudest thing.
Clara
This isn’t yet where you’re supposed to apologize.
Not yet.
This is in her car.
The two of us.
And I’m telling her, it’s ok, people do this kind of thing all the time.
She’s stopped talking.
Stopped apologizing.
But I still hear her.
She’s spinning those words through her head.
Around and around.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
This is our second time meeting like this.
This is behind the backs of everyone we know.
And I’m telling her, it’s ok.
I’m telling her, we won’t get caught.
I tell her to go slow.
To take it easy.
Not to rush things, I say.
I tell her that’s how people do get caught.
They get too excited.
They get careless, I say.
Sloppy.
And they get caught.
I tell her, just one drop at a time.
In his coffee.
His cigarette.
In his breakfast, his eggs or on his toast.
Wherever.
But just one at a time, I say.
Let the poison do it’s work.
Slowly.
The Sacrifice
If only I could bottle her tears. If I could somehow drink them down and make them my own. I would.
But she doesn’t know this. I love her and she doesn’t know it.
In fact, she’s killing me. For all the wrong reasons, she’s killing me.
I tell her so, that I love her, but she doesn’t hear me.
She doesn’t listen. Not anymore.
I don’t know where she’s getting it, but I know what it is. I know what she’s doing.
And I know how she’s doing it. I can taste it.
Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner.
I don’t taste it in my cigarettes, but she doesn’t share them with me anymore, so I suspect I’m smoking it too.
It causes me so much pain. The poison.
It helps to imagine the pain as hers, now mine. Because I do love her. And, well, if I can take her pain and somehow bottle it and drink it down and make it my own, I will.
Copyright © February 2009 Chris La Cour
One Way
When the bus starts, that sound, that mechanical, combustible mash up, that noise, it makes her smile.
It’s a gentle smile.
With her eyes closed and her head laid back against the seat, she’s grinning.
For a change, she’s happy.
Copyright © August 2008 Chris la Cour
Elephants
On their way home, she asked him which of the animals were his favorite.
“The elephants,” he said.
“why?”
“I don’t know why, they just are.”
“Did you see how big they were?”
“I did,” he said.
“Did you like how they were doing tricks, so the trainers would throw them those heads of lettuce?”
“I did,” he said, “it was cool.”
“Is that why you like them so much, honey? Because they’re big and they do tricks for lettuce?”
“I guess so.”
“Where did they come from again?”
“Africa,” she said.
“Oh yeah. How far away is Africa?”
“Very, very far away, honey.”
“Mom, what else was from Africa?”
“Well, the lions are from Africa, the zebras too, and those wildebeests, remember them?”
“Yeah,” he said, “those ugly horse-cow things.”
The next morning, when his mother called him into the kitchen and told him what she had just heard on the radio, he immediately thought of the elephants.
“Did the elephants escape too?”
“I don’t know dear, they didn’t say.”
“Damnit.”
“Hey,” she said, “watch your mouth!”
“We just missed it,” he said, “by one day.”
He poured his cereal and then his milk. He spooned crunchy flakes into his mouth. Milk dripped from his chin. He ate his breakfast while staring at the radio like it were the TV.
“Maybe they’ll trample the school.”
“Don’t count on it,” she said, “you’re going to school.”
A man came on the radio and started talking about the escape. He said that they were going to go to the air and see how all of this was affecting the morning commute.
Another man started to talk over the sounds of a helicopter.
He was saying that it was a mess down there. He said that the animals looked frightened. They were running all over the place. They looked confused.
He said they were tying up traffic all over the city.
Lions were in the park. Giraffes were downtown. Monkeys too.
He said that some police had a gorilla surrounded outside of the theater. The gorilla had begun climbing the theaters marquee.
The man said that they were going to fly across town. They had just gotten a report that there are some elephants on the freeway.
“Elephants, mom, you hear that? Elephants!”
“I heard.”
“Elephants, elephants! Maybe they’re heading for the school!”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Mom?”
“What, honey?”
“Do we have any lettuce heads?”
Copyright © July 2008 Chris La Cour
Step on a Crack…
There are one hundred and ten cracks in the hall floor that leads from my room to hers.
Give or take.
I’m guessing.
I’ve never even come close to being right with any of those – guess how many of this or of that are in the jar – games.
I’m no good at guessing anything.
Guess what?
What?
Really, just tell me, because if I have to guess, if I really have to, well, then we’re going to be here a while.
So, the number of cracks in that hall, could be half my guess, could be more.
And you know what? I finally don’t care.
It starts as a childhood game. Step on a crack and break your mothers back.
You don’t want to break dear old mom’s back, do you? Who wants a paraplegic mother? Who’ll do the cooking? Dad? Who’ll do the cleaning? Dad? Who wants a paraplegic wife?
Why couldn’t we have just walked to school or to the park without forcing upon ourselves all of this stress? Our eyes concentrated on the sidewalk, looking out for cracks, looking out for mom, for dad and for ourselves.
This is where compulsions come from. This kind of stupid shit. It’s what makes us crazy.
First it’s cracks in the sidewalk. Then, before you know it, your tip-toeing your way through your high schools halls. Carefully moving from tile to tile, careful not to step on any seams, because by now, seams count as cracks. Twelve inches at a time, you wouldn’t dare skip a tile for fear of losing your balance and dropping your foot on a seam.
The kids in school, they call you tip-toes. They mimic you. They exaggerate, moving very slowly, deliberately stepping too high, like stepping over something big but invisible.
Only they’re not exaggerating.
This went on for years, even after high school. No medications had yet been able to suppress it. This compulsive avoidance of cracks.
My first apartment had to have wall to wall carpet. Could you imagine hardwood floors? I would have gone completely nuts.
Later, well into my twenties, I bought a house. Again, wall to wall carpet throughout.
Then, one day, I got a phone call. And I ripped out every bit of that carpeting. Flooding my house with a sea of inescapable seams. The cracks that I have been avoiding all my life. Now, completely unavoidable.
I figured, what the hell? Why not? Given what had happened and all.
It was my father who had called.
I had always wondered how it would happen. Like voodoo? Wherever she stood, just collapsed, snapped in half, the fault of her own clumsy son.
She was driving home from work, he said.
I stood with my foot still weighting the crack. Pausing like I had just heard the click of a land mine underfoot. Like the soldier in a movie. Click. The click of a snapping vertebra. When I lift my foot her spine will explode. Shit. Poor mom. Stupid me. Stupid, stupid me. Poor mom.
It was a dump truck, rear ended her at a stop light, he said.
The guy never even touched the brakes, he said.
I was too afraid to call.
I knew that, had mom buckled over with a snap, in the grocery store or at the salon or wherever, dad would call.
And he did. And of course, she broke her back.
Full paralysis.
Dad lasted just over a year. Then he left. No excuse. No apology. No forwarding address.
I later found out that he left mom for some young blond thing. Considering that, I figure he tired of making love to a rag doll with a talking head.
After dad left her, I moved her in with me. It was the least I could do, after all, I did break my mothers back.
Copyright © July 2008 Chris LaCour
