Chapter Thirty-two · Cutter
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CUTTER
*THIS IS TILLMAN OFF SIENNAS LIST. MULTIPLE CALLS COUNTY WIDE. IF YOU TOOK THE CLASS GET YOUR KIT AND GET TO A PHONE. DO NOT SELF DISPATCH. WAIT FOR AN ADDRESS.*
Eleven Copperheads got that text at the same second, along with a hundred and two other people in Blackthorn County.
I was at the clubhouse. So were nine of them, because it was a Saturday night and that is where men go on a Saturday night, and I have thought since about the ordinary luck of that.
Diesel had the room quiet in about four seconds.
“Nobody moves,” he said. “Nobody rides. We are not a rescue service and we are not going to be a photograph. Kits on the tables. Phones out. When Rae Tillman or that woman sends an address to a name on that list, that name goes and nobody else.” He looked around the room.
“Anybody here who did not take the class is going to sit down right now and be useful by not being in the way, and I mean it, and I’ll have the patch of the first man who freelances. ”
Scout said, “That’s it? We sit here?”
“That’s it. We sit here with our kits open and our phones on and we wait to be sent, like a man in a fire department, which is what she made us.
” Diesel pulled a chair out and sat down in it in the middle of that room, which was the most useful thing any president has ever done.
“Scout. In July you’d have been on that road in ninety seconds and you’d have been the eighth vehicle at a scene with two paramedics and a dozen bystanders, and somebody would have photographed you standing over a body. Sit down.”
Scout sat down.
Dutch Voyles took the stopwatch off his neck and put it on the table like a man setting a wrench where he can find it, and got his reading glasses out, and studied the screen of a phone he has never once been able to operate.
“Somebody’s going to have to read me mine,” he said.
At 9:52 my phone went off again and it was her.
*Cutter. 174 pull off. Car sitting wrong, male down outside vehicle, bystander started rescue breathing 3 min ago and has no naloxone. County unit 22 min out. You are 6. GO. Take Mater. Call me from the scene.*
Twenty-nine words. Not one wasted, in order, with the clinical picture, the bystander’s status, the county’s arrival time, and mine.
One of them was my name.
It took me until about four in the morning to notice that she had put it first, and that in five months of everything that has happened to us she had never once texted me anything that was not information, and that the first word of the first message she ever sent me in an emergency was Cutter.
I have turned over how to write this part a while, and the honest way is the plain way, so here it is.
We got there in six minutes. Mater drove because Mater is the calmest man and because a bike is no good with a kit and a passenger.
I called nothing in on the way. There was nothing to call. She had already done all of it.
There was a Corolla nosed into the gravel at 174 with the driver’s door open and the dome light on, and a man on the ground beside it on his back, and a woman kneeling over him doing rescue breathing with a t-shirt over his mouth, which is not what anybody teaches and is what a person does when they have decided not to let a stranger die and have nothing.
She had been at it three and a half minutes by herself in the dark, on the shoulder of Route 11, at a gravel pull-off that has landing gear marks in it, four hundred feet from where a boy I am responsible for was shot in July.
Her name is Kayla Pruett. She is twenty-six. She works at the dollar store in the Gap and she did not take the class, she saw it on the internet, and I mean to say that straight because everybody keeps leaving it out.
“How long,” I said, going down on my knees on the other side of him.
“Since nine forty-eight. He was purple when I got here, he ain’t purple now.”
“You’re doing it right. Don’t stop. I’m going to work around you.”
Mater had the kit open before I finished the sentence.
And here is what happened, and it is the reason of it I am able to write any of this down.
My hands did not shake.
Not once. Not one time. Twelve Thursdays in a barn and a fire hall, four rotations a night, a woman standing over me saying *again* while a stopwatch ran, and a man who had gone seventy-one seconds in July on a plastic arm in front of nine people did the thing on a real man in the gravel in the dark at 174 and his hands were as steady as a bench.
Airway first, because that is the order and the order is the entire thing.
Kayla kept breathing for him while I worked, and I told her twice that she was doing it right, because a person doing that in the dark needs to hear it and because a woman on a stage in a gravel lot taught me by example what it costs when nobody says it.
Nasal naloxone at 9:59. I said the time and Mater wrote it on his own forearm with a marker, because that is what she taught them and Mater does not deviate by one degree from anything he has been taught.
Nothing at 10:01.
Second dose at 10:03. I said the time again.
And at 10:04 that man came up off the gravel of the 174 pull-off swinging and sick and cussing, which is what they do, and Kayla Pruett sat back on her heels in the dirt and made a sound I am not going to try to describe.
Then I did the last thing, which is the thing that separates a person who took a class from a person who was there.
I stayed on my knees beside him for ten more minutes talking to him while he came apart, because the second dose is not the end of it and a man in that state will get up and walk into a road, and I had never had a harder job than keeping a stranger sitting down in the gravel at mile marker 174 by talking to him about nothing.
His name is Wesley. He is thirty-one. He has a daughter in Salem.
He asked me twice why I was there.
The first time I said because somebody called it in. The second time, about six minutes later, when he had come far enough back to be ashamed, he asked it different. He said, *why’d you come,* and he was looking at the patch on my chest when he said it.
And I sat in the gravel with him and told him the truth, which is that a woman spent five months teaching a hundred and thirteen people how to do a thing with their hands, and that I was one of them, and that he happened to go down on the one road in Virginia where that had already happened.
Wesley thought about that for a while.
“That’s a hell of a thing,” he said.
“It is.”
“I ain’t got nothing to give nobody.”
“Nobody asked you for anything,” I said. “Sit still.”
The county unit got there at 10:22, exactly as advertised, and it was Amos Boyle, alone, with a Botetourt EMT riding third, and Amos took one look at the arm with the times on it and said, “Who dosed him?”
“I did. Nine fifty-nine and ten-oh-three.”
“You Reeves?”
“Yeah.”
“She said you’d have the times,” Amos said, and went to work.
What happened, happened between 9:14 in the evening and 2:40 in the morning on the night of the twenty-second and twenty-third of November.
Nineteen calls.
Twenty-two people down, because three of the calls were doubles.
Two rigs, one mutual aid unit out of Wythe, one paramedic in a fire bay running the whole of it on two phones and a radio, and a hundred and thirteen people on a list.
Thirty-one civilians administered naloxone that night. Thirty-one. In this county. Where in June there were nine people total who could do it and every one of them had a license.
Renata Sowder did it in the parking lot of the Gap store on a nineteen-year-old boy she has known since he was born, and then wrote the time on the back of a scale ticket, because that is what that woman does with a time.
Charlene did it in her own stockroom and then went back out front and worked the register until eleven because there was nobody to cover.
Tammy Prine did it twice in one kitchen and talked dispatch through the address while she did the second one.
The man from Ammons Creek who wrote to the newspaper about us in 2019 did it twice in the same house, ten minutes apart, on two different people, and then sat on that porch with his kit in his lap until somebody came, and would not leave, and was still sitting there when the second unit cleared.
Charity Teague did it on a woman on the floor of a laundromat in Fincastle, which is not even, ten weeks and a day after she buried her father.
A school bus driver did it. A sixteen-year-old boy who came to that class with his grandmother did it, on his own cousin, in a driveway, and got him breathing, and then went and sat in his truck and had to be talked out of it by his grandmother at one in the morning, and he is going to be all right and it is going to take a while.
Twenty-two people went down in Blackthorn County, Virginia, that night.
Twenty-one of them are alive.
The one is a forty-four-year-old man named Curtis Amburgey who went down alone in a house at the top of a hollow with no neighbor inside a half mile, and nobody found him until Sunday afternoon.
I want him written down. Everybody wants the number and the number is twenty-one out of twenty-two and it is a miracle and it is going to be in a state report, and there is a man named Curtis at the top of a hollow who is not in the miracle.
Sienna made me put him first when she read this. She said: *You do not get to have that number without saying his name, ever, in any room, for the rest of your life.*
I got to the fire hall at twenty till three in the morning.
There were about forty people in that bay.
Not one of them was supposed to be there.
They had come in ones and twos as their part of the night ended, still with their kits in their hands, and Bobby Sowder had made coffee in a fifty-cup urn and had put out every folding chair the church next door owned.
Nobody was talking much. This is the thing about a room like that which nobody who has not been in one ever gets right.
It was not a celebration and there was nothing in the air you could call joy.
It was about forty people sitting very still in a cold bay at three in the morning finding out what they had in them.
Some of them were shaking. A woman from the plant sat on the bumper of Engine 2 with a blanket around her shoulders and her boots off and her hands around a cup she was not drinking.
Tammy Prine was on the phone to somebody, saying the same four sentences over and over.
Kayla Pruett from the dollar store had come in behind us and was standing by the door like she thought she might not be allowed, and Bobby Sowder had put a chair under her inside of ten seconds.
Amos was asleep sitting up with his head against a locker door.
Rae was working the room. Not talking. Just going person to person with the urn, putting her hand on a shoulder here and there, saying two words and moving on, which is a skill and takes twenty-two years.
And Sienna Garrett was standing at the whiteboard at the front of that bay with a marker in her hand, writing the times up.
All nineteen calls, in order, with the location and the caller and the dose times and who administered, in her handwriting, on a whiteboard in a volunteer fire department at three in the morning.
Because there was going to be a state report.
Because in about four days somebody in Richmond was going to want to know what happened in Blackthorn County on the twenty-second of November, and because that woman has known since she was twenty-four years old that the only thing that survives a night like that is what somebody wrote down while it was still exact.
She had been on her feet for eighteen hours. She had run this entire county off two phones and a radio out of a fire bay, alone, without a rig, without a station, under a gag, ninety days into a thirty-day liability review.
And every ninety seconds somebody in that room looked up at her to see if she was still standing there.
That is the job. Nobody tells you that is the job.
I stood at the back by the coat rack for a while and just looked at her.
Then she turned around and saw me and put the marker down in the tray, and the whole bay saw her do it, and she walked the length of that fire hall through forty people and stopped in front of me at about a foot and a half.
“Rule six,” she said.
“I know it.”
“I’m suspending it,” she said, “permanently, in front of everybody,” and she put both arms around my neck in a lit fire bay in Wilkes Ford, Virginia, at twenty till three in the morning, in front of forty exhausted citizens of Blackthorn County.
She smelled like a fire hall and eighteen hours and marker fumes, and her hands were freezing, and she said, into my collar, so nobody else in that bay could hear it, “Twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one,” I said.
“Say the other one.”
“Curtis Amburgey,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Don’t ever let me forget him.”
Somebody in the back of that bay started clapping. I think it was Dutch Voyles.
Dutch says it was not.