Storymania - His Wife Could Eat No Lean by Mo Rogers

His Wife Could Eat No Lean
Mo Rogers

His Wife Could Eat No Lean

     Lilac clusters like grapes, sweet and purple on the branch, heated up to perfume by the midday sun, still pull me back thirty years to the little brick box house in Ballard that looked like every other home on the block.
     We maneuvered the residential streets of north Seattle, and sidled up to the curb without sirens. Our ladder truck was second in that day, on a request for additional manpower. As I jumped from the rig, eyes followed me, forming a chain of curious faces that lined a pathway to the front door. I struggled to force a smile through the anxiety of my first medical alarm.
     A small-framed gentleman in a plaid flannel shirt, with suspenders that gapped from his shoulders, led us into the living room. Soft soles shuffled us through oversized furniture and wall-to-wall clutter, past dining room mirrors that flashed a moment of brilliant sunlight. A gust of lilac greeted us through aluminum screened windows. It mingled with the peculiarity and the apprehension that was grinding inside of me. None of us were ready for what we were about to witness.
     “Back there,” the thin little man pointed ahead of himself towards a dark hallway. Ernie and Houston, the aid car crew, stood head to head in the shadows. Their mumbling hung outside a closed door. As we approached, they stared back at us with raised eyebrow, shoulder-shrugging disbelief.
     Curtis grunted past them and entered the bathroom while the silver-haired Lieutenant Jackson and I waited in silence for our cue. I stopped breathing long enough to hear the interstate traffic a mile away. The planked wooden floor creaked as I curled my toes inside steel-toed safety shoes and considered the universe beyond that door.
     Curtis returned to the hallway and waved his lanky flag pole body, gesturing for towels from the small man. A moment later he was beckoning us into the room.
     “You won’t be needing that, kid,” he added, pointing to the sixty-five pounds of first aid equipment on my arms. My heart dove into my stomach and floated face down as we entered the room.
     Our casualty was located against the wall, at the far end of the bathroom. Overflowing a large porcelain claw footed bathtub, a four hundred and fifty-pound woman, in multi-shades of flesh tone embarrassment, lay suctioned to the sides of the drained tub. Curt had covered all of her free floating privates with towels, and spoke in the elevated, soothing voice that he reserved for children and ladies in distress. He proceeded to reassure her with the syrupy drawl of his South Carolina gentleman’s roots.
     “Darlin’… we’re gonna take real good care of you. We’ll just keep you covered with these here towels. We don’t want these lecherous fellas gawkin’ at ya’ now do we?”
     He beamed a smile that cut right through the desperation; Curt won the grand prize for bedside manner. He had a way of saying things that most of us wouldn’t even consider.
         We were trained for emergency work, to think on our feet. Or maybe it was something you were born with? My mind sped through fierce drill school scenarios: the heart attack and choking victims, dangling from the end of a ten-story aerial ladder, diving into the frigid Puget Sound, rescues down long dark tunnels, and deep dirty holes with air so hot it melts your helmet. But this was unfathomable, completely remote territory.
      Rookie panic set in. It was the plunged-into-the-deep-end-of-the-pool sort of panic that I learned in time, to contain through everything from chemical explosions to ten car pile-ups. There was no time for emotional therapy. No time to talk down the fear. I was counting on the eighty years of experience riding with me, to keep me from drowning.
     The woman lay motionless and exhausted in the bathtub, gulping air while puddles of perspiration rose to the surface in little epidermal valleys. After several hours in this condition, she had given up the fight. It took every shred of energy she could muster to nod at our presence. Curt’s forthright approach and encouraging banter had immediately qualified him as project supervisor. We gratefully followed his lead, and left the room for a hallway conference.
     “If we break the suction, the five of us should be able to lift her out,” he suggested in the football huddle we formed in the hall.
     The wiry little husband, who had introduced himself as Henry, now paced the floor outside our team. His flustered voice raised in anger and despair. “Dot won’t listen to me…I’ve tried to stop her eating many times…I told her it was dangerous.”
     We reentered the bathroom, and surrounded the tub on three sides. “We’re going to place these towels underneath you, and lift you out, mam’… now just relax.”
     Fifty rough fingers, hardened from tougher work, began pushing fabric down between the slippery skin and porcelain. Vast layers of pinkish fat rushed to fill every crevice as it formed. We poured the remnants of a bottle of baby oil around the edges to lubricate the human seal. All of our attempts failed miserably.
     “Not a damn thing would budge. It was like trying to pull a greased hog out of a mud hole.” Curtis embellished the story, southern style, for years afterward, over dinner or a smoke break in the beanery or late at night when we lay in our bunks. At the time we were stymied.
      The voices at our second meeting in the hallway raised an octave. “Listen to her breathing…we gott’a get her the hell out of there, men.” Lieutenant Jackson savored the taste of his announcement, a morsel of urgency meant to keep us on track. We deliberated while our victim rested.
     It was time to delve into subterranean pockets, tap the wellspring, charm the demons. Time to go beyond the visceral adeptness of our profession. To grab hold of the involuntary reflex, potent enough to pull an infant from a blazing furnace or a drunken teenager from an emaciated Volkswagen flung across a highway median.
      Lieutenant Jackson radioed for one more back up Engine Company, while Curtis and I fanned out to search the house for inspiration. Henry directed Houston to the basement where he turned off the water supply. We popped the hinges on the doors with a service axe to squeeze every inch of passage. With wrenches and crowbars, we pried up the bathtub, anchored for decades, to the blistering blue linoleum.
     The stretcher on the aid car was neither strong enough, nor large enough, for the weight of our victim. As an alternative, Ernie and the Lieutenant found a sheet of thick plywood on the open-air back porch, and using a rescue saw, they fashioned a heavy-duty backboard stretcher, measured to cram through the doorway.
     It took six men to roll the tub on its side and let gravity do the rest. Out of its container, the human female form expanded to a flaccid dimpled mass across the board. Two additional men were required to mobilize the handmade stretcher. Blood drained from our grip as we hauled the cargo in slow motion through the bathroom doorway, shifting brute manpower from one end to the other by ducking underneath the load.
     “One more doorway, honey…you’re doin’ just fine. There’s a thousand men in this department, and you’ve got yourself the finest eight right here.” Even in the worst situation, Curt could stroke your ego and the hand of the patient at the same time, in a way that made you believe him.
     A ten-minute lifetime passed before we were positioned to incline the board and slide Dot onto the queen-sized bed that filled the tiny adjacent bedroom. We left her there, spent and heaving with every painful breath.
     The tub was relocated and reconnected before we left the surreal scene at the little house in Ballard. Henry was pleased to be part of our team, scurrying to bring us household tools and assistance. He sensed our camaraderie, and appreciated our efforts. “I can’t thank you boys enough.” He wrung his hands. “ I don’t know what anyone can do for Dot now…she’s let herself go too far this time.”
     Our words were few and carefully chosen. “Call the doctor, get things checked out…this was quite an ordeal.”
     The woman lay motionless in her chamber, stripped of dignity. A rhythmic cycle of breathing had returned. Lilac air breezed through filigree curtains. It was caught and whirled by the slow speed table fan, and played delicately with the corner of the thin white sheet that covered her. It refreshed the pungent sweat and stillness in the room. Dot had yielded to the soft dressing, the floral lacings of her queen-sized little sanctuary and made her own choice that day. She eluded the grueling trek to the hospital in the back of the aid car.
      Curtis made one last visit to her bedside. Like the student taking lessons, I was privileged to watch his smooth moves one more time. He cradled a small portion of her pulpy forearm with both hands and spoke tenderly. “You take care of yourself, good lookin’. Next time I see you, it better be down at the center, at the Ballard Moonlight Dance.”
     I was riding the aid car a year later, the day we responded for the final alarm to the brick home in Ballard. The heady lilac was in bloom again. The neighbors gawked and a small man smiled in recognition through tears as we carried Dot out the front door on the familiar plywood stretcher. She had no choice in the journey that day.