Out Of The Slammer And Into The Fire- Part 9

My first reaction was to hop off the fence rail and run toward the girl. For some reason- in a single terrifying instant- I had turned, and was running away as fast as I could possibly run. I was now running toward the house, sprinting at my top speed. I ran passed confused crowds yelling “A little girl was hit by a van!” and leaped the stairs into the kitchen and turned the corner and found the phone and dialed 911.

“This is 911. What is your emergency?”

“A little girl has been run over by a van. We need an ambulance immediately. It’s on Wooly Lane. Yes. Just tell them to drive until they see the crowds. Serious? YES! IT IS SERIOUS!”

The 911 operator could be heard to be getting several calls at once. She told me to hold the line while she dispatched the ambulance. I handed the phone to somebody standing there and ran back outside.

I could see the few people who had cell phones with their phones to their ears, their faces all worried/angry as if 911 were letting them down.

I yelled out to everybody. “I CALLED 911 PEOPLE!”

I started running.

As I got back into the street, there were thirty or so people gathered at a respectable distance from the girl. The mother of the little girl was just getting the hint that it was her child. When she first heard about the accident, her first instinct had been to locate her three children. She found two of them, up by the house. Her little girl was missing, and instead of heading straight out into the street to see if that was her little girl on the road, she had gone on a search of the house and party area.

My silly friend Timmy with the big twitchy mustache and the brunt of lots of funny Timmy jokes, was kneeling over the tiny child and administering CPR. Her heart was stopped and she was not breathing, and I saw that Timmy had his volunteer fireman’s radio on the ground near him. It was squeaking and squelching because it had been turned on, and there was someone on the other end of it, talking to someone else.

Mitch was as beet-red as a man of Irish heritage could concievably be, and was basically walking around in distorted figure eights at the foot of his driveway. It was as if those deals he had made and then broken with the universe had come back to throw a hand around his throat and squeeze him into dreadful sorrow.

His best friend Marvin from his college days- the man who owned the house that contained the garage that I had converted into a one room apartment for Mitch when he first got out of prison- was there for Mitch again. He was trying to catch Mitch by trying to stand in front of him. He was trying to interrupt Mitch’s frenetic fretting by cutting him off and giving him a hug.

His girlfriend of the last four or so months approached him and screamed “Have you seen Kelly? I CAN’T FIND KELLY!”

Marvin’s face went white and he turned and ran. He hadn’t even thought about the child being one of his new clan before. It was Kelly. His girlfriend Kim’s little Kelly. The one that rode on his shoulders and thought nothing of calling Marvin “My new daddy.”

Kim sort of skipped and trotted after Marvin. She was running against herself, not wanting to see but not wanting to not see. The scream that came out of her was the scariest thing I have ever heard in my life. It was the scream of flesh tearing inside of a person. It was a mother’s scream and it silenced three hundred people.

The next two minutes were all about witnessing the violent grief ripping apart a mother who had a child laying still in the road, seemingly dead. Marvin kept trying to hug his girlfriend now, and struggled to keep her away from Timmy, who was still administering CPR with the help of somebody I did not know.

Time turned into pain and I could do nothing now but return to the fence railing with my head hung down and the weight of the universe back on my shoulders. The sadness was so palpable, you could hear it singing in the breeze.

A helicopter medical unit came in and landed in the horse pasture next to all of us. Men ran out with a stretcher and some boxes, grabbed the girl, and whisked her away.

As the helicopter tittered quietly off in the distance, the sound of a mother sobbing took over the minds of everybody there.

I walked up and put my hand on Timmy’s shoulder and squeezed. He turned to see me standing there.

His eyes were red-rimmed and glassy, and there was snot in his mustache.

“She’s dead, you know,” he said to me quietly.

“You did good, Timmy,” I said. “You did real good.”

(to be continued)