I was supposed to see Carrie that night, but instead I left her a message saying I couldn’t make it. I knew if I saw her, I wouldn’t be able to carry it off like I knew nothing, and I would wonder how she could look at me with what I had thought had been love. Stupid me. And now of course I had all that money and needed to figure out how to spend it. If I had been a bold man I would have quit my job, packed my belongings and showed everyone by going west. California. But I was not a bold man. I was small-time.
They dispatched us to a home on Magnolia Street in the North End for a lift assist. Eighty-eight-year-old woman lives alone with her retarded sixty-nine-year-old daughter; the daughter has Parkinson’s in addition to her retardation. She has fallen and the woman cannot pick her up. She hates to bother us, but she doesn’t know what else to do. The apartment is bare. There is a picture of Jesus on the wall next to one of John Kennedy and one of Martin Luther King. We help pick her daughter up and she is blessing us, and thanking us, and I am looking at Jesus and Martin Luther and JFK and at the poor surroundings, and it’s like all of a sudden I think I am not worthy, not worthy of her thanks and her bless yous. Just then I noticed the three of them are not just pictures, but real dudes looking at me and talking among themselves.
“Okay, boys,” Jesus says, “we got work to do with this one.”
I just tried to ignore the vision as just another one of my hallucinations. I knew I was not worthy of these men, her heroes who looked on at us. While Tom was getting her to sign the refusal of transport form, and I was getting the med list off the refrigerator door, where it was held by a magnet, so I could write it on the paperwork as required, a weird warm feeling came over me.
“You know what to do,” Jesus said. “Go on now.”
“Ask now what you do for yourself,” JFK said.
“Free yourself,” Martin said, “from the chains of your own slavery.”
When I put the med list back up, I took a hundred off my roll and stuck it under the magnet and tacked it up there on the refrigerator.
“Cross yourself now,” Jesus said.
And I did. I crossed myself as I had not done since I was last in church as a small boy when my mother and father still lived together and my mother believed in the church. I crossed myself.
“Go forth,” JFK said.
“It’s a long climb,” Martin said, “but you can reach that top. We believe in you, son.”
“What the fuck are you doing with that crossing yourself business?” Tom asked.
“Such language.”
“You are getting weirder by the day.”
“Life is full of surprises,” I said.
“Amen,” the three voices said.
I left another hundred on the bedside table of an elderly diabetic on Enfield Street. At their behest, I slipped twenty dollars to a homeless man who’d had a seizure, but refused transport to the hospital. All he needed, he said, was a drink to get himself under control. Jesus made me give him another twenty.
I’m not saying I was a saint, but when they say better to give than to receive, I saw some of their point. I felt a glow, an aura around me, accompanied by a grooving soul soundtrack
I strutted down the street, and I felt like a new man with Jesus, Martin and JFK stepping along behind me like the Pips, dancing in time. I learned not to fight or question my strange visions.
I felt that each time I gave, I grew as a person. A little of the weak me left and, slowly, a stronger foundation was built. I walked a little taller. I told no one about the gifts, never let Tom see my generosity. I probably shouldn’t say generosity because, after all, the money was stolen in the first place. Still, finders keepers, possession is 99% of the law. The money was mine now, and I didn’t have to give it, but I did.
I gave a hundred to a mother with an asthmatic child, a fifty to an elderly woman in a nursing home. They were taking donations at work for a fellow EMT whose husband was dying of cancer. I put two hundred in a blank envelope and dropped it in the contribution box. “Hallelujah!” Martin exclaimed from the pulpit. I never told anyone. We transported a baby who needed a heart transplant to Boston, along with his young parents, and while the three apparitions had stayed back in Hartford, I still put a hundred in the mother’s Bible when she set it down to sign the transport form for Tom. I imagined JFK and Jesus watching me on TV in a bar and high-fiving each other.
One day we did a call on Martin Street where some volunteers called Habitat for Humanity were building a house. One of the volunteers—a pretty twenty-six year old—smashed her thumb using a hammer. We took her to Saint Francis. All the way there I asked her about the project and she said it was a volunteer thing. It was about helping people afford their own homes. She told me how I could volunteer. When I asked her for her number as I filled out my run form, she looked at me a little funny like I was asking her out. “It’s just for the billing department,” I said. “You don’t have to give it to me.” She smiled and gave it to me. JFK told me I should call her later to see how she made out at the hospital, but Jesus rebuked JFK and said that wasn’t their mission for me. I considered it anyway, but decided it was too forward.
“She was a fox, huh?” Tom said. “I was feeling sorry for you. That was the only reason I let you tech it.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
“You going to call her? Because if you don’t, I will.”
“I don’t think so.”
“All right, don’t say I didn’t give you a shot.”
I didn’t call her, but I did take a day off and went down to Martin Street to volunteer to hammer nails for a day. I was hoping she’d be there and we could strike up a conversation again, and then I could ask her out in a better way, but she wasn’t there. I ended up spending most of the time talking to an old retired guy who told me about his sick daughter. I ended up putting two twenties in his jacket pocket.
Later that week, we were given a transfer—a patient with a festering bedsore that needed debriding. I couldn’t believe it when I entered the room and looked at the patient and then looked at the W10 the nurse had handed me. Joe Thompson—my stinking neighbor—the man who poisoned my dog. He looked up at me, though he could not move his skull. I felt his heart rate go up. He had a feeding tube in his stomach and a Foley catheter in his penis, and he stunk of infection. And he was looking up at me and he knew who I was. I had him where he didn’t want to be.
I thought for a minute that this was my dream come true. I could empty his Foley catheter and slowly drip urine into his open mouth. Or I could put a cockroach in his ear, and then block it in with cotton, and sit there and watch as the cockroach walked through his head and peered out through his eyes. I loved my dog, and I knew if he was looking down from doggie heaven he would be woofing with delight, urging me to take my vengeance, but I couldn’t do it. This wasn’t the same man who had stuffed poison inside hamburger meat and lobbed it over the fence. He wasn’t the same man who insisted I pay him back for his burned-down garage even though he had no proof that I had done it. I can still feel his spit on my face as he threatened to take my mom’s house away from her and get his cop buddies to see I did time and that I got fucked up while I did it.
But he wasn’t even a man anymore. He was just a poor scared soul trapped in his own dying carcass. I was gentle with him when we moved him over to our stretcher. I pulled the blanket up to his neck and wrapped a towel over his head against the afternoon rain. I talked to him, telling him what I was doing when I took his blood pressure or felt his pulse. I made no mention of the past. I was alive and he was dying. I had no need for revenge. Washing hands after the call, I looked in the mirror and there was Jesus offering me a fist bump.
That Sunday I went to church for the first time in nearly fifteen years. I put another fifty in the collection plate. And when we all stood and sang, I sang along as best I could. If my notes were off, Martin, Jesus and JFK covered for me with their sweet harmonies. And that was the last I saw of them.