5. Jonah
JONAH
There’s a standard intake for diagnosing an insomniac, and I’d score a perfect card, and that’s the joke I don’t tell anybody. The best medic on this mountain is also its worst patient. Physician, heal thyself; physician declines, physician is busy counting gauze.
The small hours belong to me as the perimeter belongs to Wade.
Everybody thinks I sit up because I can’t sleep, which has the order of operations backward.
I can’t sleep because I sit up, and I sit up because somewhere in the dark there’s a kit that might be one chest seal short, and a man can fix a kit.
A kit is finite. You break it down to bare canvas, you count it back in, and for about an hour, the whole world is present, accounted for, and zipped into the correct pocket. Some men have church; I have inventory.
Eleven schools growing up, if you want the file.
Army family, new town every time the boxes got soft.
You learn to pack a life so it rides well, and you learn what to leave loose, which is everything you can’t carry at a jog.
This town is my longest posting ever. I know that number exactly, and I don’t say it out loud, because saying a streak out loud is how you end one.
The tones drop mid-afternoon, which is a mercy, because a callout is the one appointment my body never declines.
Day hiker, down off the switchback trail, lower section, ankle.
Third-party report from her hiking partner, who had one bar of signal and the good sense to stay put.
Wade’s voice comes over the radio as it always does, like the weather report if the weather report loved you.
Assignments, approach, the reminder about the wet rock, nobody hurries, everybody arrives.
Theo’s driving, and my kit’s on my back where it lives.
She’s maybe a half mile in, sitting against a log with her boot already swelling against the laces, one of those leaf-season visitors in a jacket the color of a traffic cone, and she starts apologizing before I’ve got my knees in the dirt.
“I’m so sorry, this is so embarrassing, you probably have real emergencies…”
“Ma’am, can you wiggle your toes for me?”
“I just stepped wrong, it’s probably nothing, my sister is going to laugh at me.”
“There they go, beautiful toes. Any numbness, tingling?”
“We were just trying to see the overlook before the color went…”
“Totally worth it, the color’s peaking. On a scale of one to ten, where’s the pain sitting?”
She stops apologizing long enough to think about it, which is half the reason we ask. “Seven?”
“Seven I can work with.”
I get the boot stabilized, run the checks. Pulse strong at the ankle, refill quick at the toes, skin closed, nothing pointing anywhere nature didn’t intend, and the joint already doing its best impression of a grapefruit. The whole picture is clean and cooperative, textbook.
“Okay. Good news. This is the best ankle break I’ve seen all season. Bad news. I grade on a curve.”
She laughs, which does more for her vitals than anything in my pack.
That’s the trade secret. Splints stabilize the leg.
Jokes stabilize the patient. I package the ankle as you wrap a thing you intend to get where it’s going in the same condition it left, and above us Theo’s already got the litter rigged for the steep pitch by the creek crossing, lines dressed, angles right, humming to himself, because the kid on rope is the one place the kid doesn’t second-guess a thing.
“You’re all so calm,” she says, riding the litter like a parade float, clutching the rail with the enthusiasm of a first-timer. “Is it always this calm?”
“Ma’am, you’re our whole season,” I tell her. “We’re going to talk about you at the base for a month. The overlook thing? Instant classic.”
We hand her off at the trailhead to the ambulance crew, ankle packaged, spirits frankly excellent, her sister already laughing on the phone, and Wade runs the debrief in eleven words and Theo re-coils every line we used plus two we didn’t.
The cold’s settling in for the season, and my own ankle files its usual weather report from the old country.
That story’s not for tonight. That story’s not for most nights.
Here’s the thing about a callout, though, and it’s the part they don’t put in the recruiting pamphlet.
It winds you up like a stopped clock and then hands you back to your evening.
By full dark, the base is quiet, the kit’s counted twice, don’t start.
Theo’s sanding a lopsided spoon, Wade’s doing paperwork he could delegate and won’t, and I am officially, clinically, spectacularly awake.
So I take the truck down the mountain for supplies.
We do not need supplies, and I know it before I’m out of the yard.
The base has supplies in depth, because I inventory them, because that’s the whole personality.
But the road down is dark and quiet, a quiet drive that unwinds a man, and it happens to run along Main.
Along Main there’s exactly one light on at that hour, gold, steady, two doors up from the bakery’s dark windows.
I’d like to say I discovered it by accident, but a medic who lies about his own chart is beyond help.
The diner light is always on. Not the Open sign. The kitchen light, the back one, the one that means she’s in there alone doing prep before the town wakes up wanting things from her.
She lets me in when I knock on the glass, is the thing.
Doesn’t ask why a grown man needs coffee in the small hours.
Just flips the lock like it’s standard operating procedure, says, “Sit, honey, the good pot’s fresh.
” She goes back to her biscuits, and lets me park at the counter in the warm while the night sorts itself out.
The first time, I brought a story about needing eggs for the base.
She sold me the eggs. We both knew about the eggs.
And because I can’t sleep, I do what I do instead, which is read.
Here’s her chart, compiled over a handful of small-hours visits and one rotation camp, patient uncooperative, history incomplete.
She feeds everybody. Not a metaphor. I have personally received four separate items I didn’t order, each one somehow the exact thing a man wanted.
She eats her own meals standing over the sink, in stolen units, a bite here, a half biscuit there, as overnight nurses eat, as you eat when you’ve decided your own tray is the one that can wait.
She was up before I arrived and she’ll be up after I leave.
And when I got behind the counter once, one time, to save her a trip while her hands were in dough, to pour her a cup of coffee and set it by her elbow, she flinched.
The flinch was small, covered fast, with a joke about health codes and civilians behind her counter.
But I read pulses for a living, not faces, and her hand hovered over that cup like it was somebody else’s order she’d have to re-ring.
She feeds everybody and eats standing over the sink. She flinches when someone pours her coffee.
In my line of work, we call that a patient presenting.
In my line of work, we also call it none of your damn business, Brooks, drink your coffee.
Because I know the next line of this protocol cold, I invented my personal edition of it.
You keep people breathing, you hand them off, you re-count the kit, you don’t get attached to the ones you can’t treat.
She’s got a town on her back, and I’ve got a moving van somewhere in my future, same as always, same as every posting, and a smart man doesn’t unpack for a maybe.
The coffee’s very good, though. The light’s very gold. And the base, it turns out, can always use more eggs.
I’m starting to worry about how much I know about eggs.