It's a 4th Avenue Thang
Recovered: 03.05.2006
The dog was a Weimaraner, a young female, or as I dubbed her--a Grey Dog. She was penned into what was once the playground of a McDonald’s restaurant that was now, of course, a Hispanic Discothèque. I reached through the bars and coaxed her to me, and she eventually came over with her tail between her legs, or what was left of a tail anyway. It appeared to be crudely cut off about halfway up, but had healed well. She had a beautiful silvery sheen and good lines; her resemblance to a Lab is what got my attention at first, but the True Owners notice the difference in the clavicles and hips, and of course that missing spark of Personality that the Lab’s seem to alone possess.
It was cool outside, and there was a breeze blowing off the Interstate nearby under a cloudless sunny sky, and I checked to see what she had in the way of food and water available. The dishes were steel and in an expensive rack setup, but instead of water she had been given beer; there was still foam in it. I emptied it out and went to my trunk where I keep my bottled water—you never know when you need it or why, and if you need it enough you won’t mind if it’s hot, I’ve found—and filled her dish with two of them. She’d shied away again and I went back to the gate where I had showed her why Brown Dog so enjoyed her own ears being rubbed at thumb point, when I heard the squeal of tires behind me from the direction of the Projects. That was not uncommon, but the dog was, so I ignored it in her favor. It was the shrieking sounds of women and screams for ‘POLICE’ that got my attention.
I walked away from the gate where once landscaped shrubbery had turned into tangled jungle growth, and saw a crowd forming on 4th Avenue in front of the East Lake Courts. A vagrant known for repairing vacuum cleaners from parts gleaned in alleyways was shambling across a dusty parking lot towards me and was yelling something unintelligible about someone hitting a baby and ‘getting on the highway’. My pace quickened to a trot, and I got into my Lawmaster to close the distance of a few hundred feet. I pulled up and saw a crumpled yellow coat on the ground near the curb, and as I got out, my pace now quickened to a run, and I called for a ’20 and Fire. There was a kid under that coat.
He wasn’t moving. He was six years old and he was bleeding from the mouth and nose face down on the asphalt, and I could see the side of his head expanding from the fantastic pressure the heart puts on the brain when its protective shell is cracked. I was down on all fours, and the crowd was moving in; it’s a 4th Avenue Thang, but for the first time in a while I wasn’t worried about the crowd forming an umbrella over me in order to better pluck my gun from its holster to murder me with; instead, it was just out of curiosity. The only one not peeking in was a woman sitting next to him on the curb holding her jaw in her hands, neither breathing nor moving, so I surmised her to most likely be the mother. I asked her for his name and she could only slightly shake her head. She was gone, and I ignored her from there on out but without malice. The Clamps had simply come down.
I reached around his neck and with the assistance of the blood, slipped a finger to his carotid pulse and found it present, but labored from the fluid he was unable to cough out. He wasn’t moving or responding to the obvious injuries to his head, much less my voice, so I ordered the crowd back as best I could and sought his name; you don’t perform CPR on those breathing with a pulse. An Aunt came forward, and I relayed what she knew over my radio to the ambulance I’d called for and stayed with him, my leather grinding against the pavement as I sought comfort while comforting. I was curled around him because all children, when injured, become our own.
I heard the skidding of tires and thought briefly about possibly being struck myself—again, it’s a 4th Avenue Thang—and was relieved to see that it was the oncoming shift, fresh from line-up. Their mouths were open as they approached because besides seeing what I was protecting, they saw me lying on the street about as frequently as they heard me talk/yell while running on the air. Chaos was now coalescing into order as muscle memory set in, and the cops surrounded the scene, preserving it while making room for the ’20 that was due any minute/hour/day. Detectives were showing up also, because it was his kid as much as mine, as much as the Paramedics coming in, which they did after the usual eternity of waiting and began taking over, all calm but the apparent student that stopped in her tracks.
I held his cervical spine in all of one hand; he had begun to move, but it was an involuntary curling-in and jerking associated with serious trauma, and not that of an injured boy. His eyes were rolled back. I straddled him as they put a spinal board on the ground beside him, and we moved him onto it in one motion, and I coo’d his name in his ears as I’d done from the start. His eyes were slightly open now and looking into the sky, but the sunlight did not affect the iris’s and my heart sank while my voice held. I stepped back and got into the Lawmaster again, and made efforts to start having other cars start blocking intersections. When under stress and in large numbers, you find work for others to do—including yourself. It worked like a charm, and the boy was in the emergency room before I registered what I’d pumped into the radio from street to street, our City at a halt for the boy inside the box behind me, and I was there in the E.R. listening to his life being dictated in terms of minutes instead of years. They were bagging him now, and double doors throughout the E.R. were being thrust aside straight out of a television show. The firemen gathered in one corner, the cops in another, myself closest to the ICU to hear the status. A hand on my shoulder and a voice in my ear indicated the parents had arrived, and I was off. I would want to hear from me, were I them.
We spoke. It was not quickly. It was personal.
I left their sterile room, and wandered a hall…and found sunlight. A cop was outside waiting by his own Lawmaster, his fledgling in tow, and he asked me if I was alright; he said he’d never seen me ‘that bad’ on the scene, and I remembered him being the first one there when I looked up from my prone position above the kid on the street, and I reassured him I was in fact ‘cool’, and that I appreciated him coming here also. We were quiet, leaning against the fenders of the Prowlers for a moment and said all we needed to in silence, until we parted ways off to home and side jobs. On the way I tried to call my ex-wife to find my own son and found that there was blood on my sleeve still, and as the answering machine picked up I began to wipe that sleeve on my right midriff absently with phone in hand, admiring the setting sun. It was time to go home, and the Boy finally answered. We spoke of Star Wars Episode II and Age of Empires games until he no longer could stand it, and parted ways, but with myself no longer shaking.
I grabbed my log sheet and noted the time and addresses, and an arrow was placed beneath the code for ‘Pedestrian Struck’ after my last entry; it was, after all, a 4th Avenue Thang.
Time for the next shift.
Selah.
The dog was a Weimaraner, a young female, or as I dubbed her--a Grey Dog. She was penned into what was once the playground of a McDonald’s restaurant that was now, of course, a Hispanic Discothèque. I reached through the bars and coaxed her to me, and she eventually came over with her tail between her legs, or what was left of a tail anyway. It appeared to be crudely cut off about halfway up, but had healed well. She had a beautiful silvery sheen and good lines; her resemblance to a Lab is what got my attention at first, but the True Owners notice the difference in the clavicles and hips, and of course that missing spark of Personality that the Lab’s seem to alone possess.
It was cool outside, and there was a breeze blowing off the Interstate nearby under a cloudless sunny sky, and I checked to see what she had in the way of food and water available. The dishes were steel and in an expensive rack setup, but instead of water she had been given beer; there was still foam in it. I emptied it out and went to my trunk where I keep my bottled water—you never know when you need it or why, and if you need it enough you won’t mind if it’s hot, I’ve found—and filled her dish with two of them. She’d shied away again and I went back to the gate where I had showed her why Brown Dog so enjoyed her own ears being rubbed at thumb point, when I heard the squeal of tires behind me from the direction of the Projects. That was not uncommon, but the dog was, so I ignored it in her favor. It was the shrieking sounds of women and screams for ‘POLICE’ that got my attention.
I walked away from the gate where once landscaped shrubbery had turned into tangled jungle growth, and saw a crowd forming on 4th Avenue in front of the East Lake Courts. A vagrant known for repairing vacuum cleaners from parts gleaned in alleyways was shambling across a dusty parking lot towards me and was yelling something unintelligible about someone hitting a baby and ‘getting on the highway’. My pace quickened to a trot, and I got into my Lawmaster to close the distance of a few hundred feet. I pulled up and saw a crumpled yellow coat on the ground near the curb, and as I got out, my pace now quickened to a run, and I called for a ’20 and Fire. There was a kid under that coat.
He wasn’t moving. He was six years old and he was bleeding from the mouth and nose face down on the asphalt, and I could see the side of his head expanding from the fantastic pressure the heart puts on the brain when its protective shell is cracked. I was down on all fours, and the crowd was moving in; it’s a 4th Avenue Thang, but for the first time in a while I wasn’t worried about the crowd forming an umbrella over me in order to better pluck my gun from its holster to murder me with; instead, it was just out of curiosity. The only one not peeking in was a woman sitting next to him on the curb holding her jaw in her hands, neither breathing nor moving, so I surmised her to most likely be the mother. I asked her for his name and she could only slightly shake her head. She was gone, and I ignored her from there on out but without malice. The Clamps had simply come down.
I reached around his neck and with the assistance of the blood, slipped a finger to his carotid pulse and found it present, but labored from the fluid he was unable to cough out. He wasn’t moving or responding to the obvious injuries to his head, much less my voice, so I ordered the crowd back as best I could and sought his name; you don’t perform CPR on those breathing with a pulse. An Aunt came forward, and I relayed what she knew over my radio to the ambulance I’d called for and stayed with him, my leather grinding against the pavement as I sought comfort while comforting. I was curled around him because all children, when injured, become our own.
I heard the skidding of tires and thought briefly about possibly being struck myself—again, it’s a 4th Avenue Thang—and was relieved to see that it was the oncoming shift, fresh from line-up. Their mouths were open as they approached because besides seeing what I was protecting, they saw me lying on the street about as frequently as they heard me talk/yell while running on the air. Chaos was now coalescing into order as muscle memory set in, and the cops surrounded the scene, preserving it while making room for the ’20 that was due any minute/hour/day. Detectives were showing up also, because it was his kid as much as mine, as much as the Paramedics coming in, which they did after the usual eternity of waiting and began taking over, all calm but the apparent student that stopped in her tracks.
I held his cervical spine in all of one hand; he had begun to move, but it was an involuntary curling-in and jerking associated with serious trauma, and not that of an injured boy. His eyes were rolled back. I straddled him as they put a spinal board on the ground beside him, and we moved him onto it in one motion, and I coo’d his name in his ears as I’d done from the start. His eyes were slightly open now and looking into the sky, but the sunlight did not affect the iris’s and my heart sank while my voice held. I stepped back and got into the Lawmaster again, and made efforts to start having other cars start blocking intersections. When under stress and in large numbers, you find work for others to do—including yourself. It worked like a charm, and the boy was in the emergency room before I registered what I’d pumped into the radio from street to street, our City at a halt for the boy inside the box behind me, and I was there in the E.R. listening to his life being dictated in terms of minutes instead of years. They were bagging him now, and double doors throughout the E.R. were being thrust aside straight out of a television show. The firemen gathered in one corner, the cops in another, myself closest to the ICU to hear the status. A hand on my shoulder and a voice in my ear indicated the parents had arrived, and I was off. I would want to hear from me, were I them.
We spoke. It was not quickly. It was personal.
I left their sterile room, and wandered a hall…and found sunlight. A cop was outside waiting by his own Lawmaster, his fledgling in tow, and he asked me if I was alright; he said he’d never seen me ‘that bad’ on the scene, and I remembered him being the first one there when I looked up from my prone position above the kid on the street, and I reassured him I was in fact ‘cool’, and that I appreciated him coming here also. We were quiet, leaning against the fenders of the Prowlers for a moment and said all we needed to in silence, until we parted ways off to home and side jobs. On the way I tried to call my ex-wife to find my own son and found that there was blood on my sleeve still, and as the answering machine picked up I began to wipe that sleeve on my right midriff absently with phone in hand, admiring the setting sun. It was time to go home, and the Boy finally answered. We spoke of Star Wars Episode II and Age of Empires games until he no longer could stand it, and parted ways, but with myself no longer shaking.
I grabbed my log sheet and noted the time and addresses, and an arrow was placed beneath the code for ‘Pedestrian Struck’ after my last entry; it was, after all, a 4th Avenue Thang.
Time for the next shift.
Selah.
posted by Longshot! [Sane] at 7:23 AM
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