Population 485 (2 page)

Catholics, the Jabowskis. Seven girls, three boys. And for them, Stanislaw worked himself to a nub. They were smart kids, and one pail of milk at a time, Stanislaw fed them, clothed them, and earned every one of them a chance at college—and the Pope always got his cut. The economics are flabbergasting. The kids lent a hand, but Stanislaw didn’t encourage it. “If I was a lawyer or a doctor,” he’d say, “I wouldn’t expect my kids to work in my office.” It was a hardscrabble campaign, but Stanislaw had a secret weapon. He married Renata when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four. They tried for four years to have children, without success. So they arranged to adopt, and it was as if the decision released something, because almost immediately, Renata grew large with child, and others arrived regularly for over a decade. She washed mountains of clothes, cooked food in shifts, did some of the plowing, took outside work to supplement the milk check, and even found time to finish her social service degree and get elected to the school board. She was cheerful and fair, but she was fierce in the way only a mother can be. Aboard the Jabowski family ship, Stanislaw toiled belowdecks; Renata stood at the prow.

The youngest Jabowski boy, Hadrian, and I were the same age. We shared a classroom for thirteen years. As children, we played in his basement, wrapping potatoes in tinfoil and baking them to a cinder in the woodstove coals. During a game of hide-and-seek, I raced around behind the little white house and collided with a pipe thrust out of the ground at such a height that the full force of the impact registered directly on my maturing privates. I recall a blinding flash of pain, and little or no sympathy from Hadrian as I clutched myself and convulsed on the lawn.

The last Jabowski graduated from New Auburn High School in 1987. The cows are gone. The barnyard is thick with weeds. With property taxes going through the roof, the Jabowskis are selling off chunks of the homestead. Stanislaw, having had a head start on looking worn out, now looks a pretty good seventy-six. He still crosses the road to the barn once in a while. Last year I asked him why he built the house on the east side of the road, when everything else was on the west side. He looked at me. “Didn’t want the chickens in the yard!”

When Stanislaw was a child, a man walked up that road and asked for a tire pump. Stanislaw fetched one, and studied the man’s face as he patched the spare on his dusty four-door. There were other men in the car, and they didn’t say much. When he was finished, the man returned the pump and gave the boy fifty cents. Against the standard of the day, it was a princely sum. These were the Depression years. Al Capone was in jail, but gangsters still ran to the Wisconsin woods to hide, and to this day Stanislaw remembers that face, and reckons he’s the little boy who helped John Dillinger fix a flat.

It was always a worry, that road. To raise ten kids on a farm where the house is separated from the outbuildings by a county highway. Renata invented a rhyme, and taught her children to stop at the shoulder and recite: “Before you cross, count to seven; otherwise you go to Heaven.” There were some close calls, and once a dump truck rear-ended a pickup waiting behind the school bus, but truth be told, the real trouble always happened just downhill from the house, on the corner overlooking the Big Swamp. Over the years, the corner has claimed a litany of wayward vehicles. Sometimes the walking wounded wound up on Renata’s couch. Sometimes there were bodies in the corn. The corner is tricky. There’s something deceiving about the sweep and dip of it. People come in too fast, and confronted with the overshoot, either overcorrect or plunge headlong into the sheep pasture below. In the plat book, it is just another bend in County M, but around here, it’s known as Jabowski’s Corner, and it is infamous. Renata was at the dining room table when the girl crashed, and, hearing the noise of the tumbling vehicle, she went out to check. Someone else was already running up the road to call an ambulance.

My uncle Shotsy was a UPS driver. He used to tell me that you could take any corner at exactly twice its posted speed. The second time he rolled his big brown van, UPS let him go. I still think of him whenever I see a yellow curve sign and do the math. Uncle Shotsy was a victim of optimistic physics. They are not posted, but every corner in the county has its parameters. Exceed them, and you pay. Best-case scenario, you pay up in tire smoke and cold sweat. Worst-case scenario, you entwine your name with that corner for six or seven generations.

I have only one recollection of Janis Bourne: My classmates and I are in Mrs. Carlson’s little music room, sitting cross-legged on the floor. We are grade-schoolers, looking up to Janis the high-schooler. She is sitting in a straight-backed chair, wearing dark blue corduroy bell-bottoms, accompanying herself on electric bass and singing the Barbara Fairchild hit:

I wish I was

a teddy bear

Not livin’ or lovin’

not goin’ nowhere…

I sang the song for weeks after that. The exact chronology is unclear, but some time later, Janis was killed when her car went straight on a curve just north of town. I heard about it in school. Someone said she went way out in the brush. For the past five years, I have driven through that curve at least twice a week. Every time, I think of Janis, and her big bass guitar, and that song. This summer, we were called to a hay fire in the middle of the night. I was driving a tanker, which meant I had nine tons of water at my back, and I hit that corner too fast. I knew it right before the centerline began to bend. It was too late to make adjustments. The variables were set, the physics were immutable. All I could do was hold the wheel and ride. The truck heaved and pitched leeward, the headlights sweeping across the brush as we pushed into the deep edge of the curve. I thought of Janis, like always. The headlights swept out of the brush, dipped at the ditch, and then locked on the centerline. The truck settled back on keel.

So, technically, I wasn’t going too fast. Whatever variables I fed into the baroque formula governing that truck and me, the answer came up “play again.” My heart was pounding. I felt the cold breath of Janis Bourne’s ghost at my temples. Somewhere, Uncle Shotsy is grinning like an outlaw.

Used to be, when I was driving my beat-up old pickup up from college to visit the home farm, I could drop the hammer at the edge of town, and by the time I hit the spot where Old Highway 53 peeled away to the northeast, I’d be wound out in high gear. I’d shoot straight at the split, roaring up Five Mile Road through the salty-sweet air of Keesey Swamp, headed for home. In one beautiful kinetic moment, the truck would leave the banked curve of the highway, dip down and to the right, and for just a second, everything would float. Then the wheels bounced back and I’d be rocketing northbound. When I hit the split, the air became familiar. The split was my portal to reentry, and to breach it at speed was magical.

Then one night the split was gone, replaced with a carefully reengineered ninety-degree turn to be entered at the apex of the curve. I had to downshift and motor sedately through the turn lane to Five Mile Road. The intersection is safer now, of course. More sensible. But lately I see that some truck-driving youths have been making the straight shot again. They’ve worn twin tracks in the weeds, right where the old road ran. I still have that old truck. It isn’t running, but I could work on it. Drop the hammer and do a little time traveling.

I don’t mean to intimate that New Auburn is located on the frontier. A major highway runs right past the village. The people we meet on fire and ambulance calls are a mix of townies, farmers, upper-crusters with lake property, and trailered recluses. It ain’t the frontier, and it ain’t the ghetto, but there is a seam of raggedness throughout. There are women here who put on their makeup like rust-proofing. Preschoolers toddle through the trailer park mud puddles, splashing and pimp-cussing. Teenage girls in sweat pants and ratty NASCAR T-shirts smoke over parked strollers, hips set at a permanent baby-propping cant. The afternoons oxidize like trailer tin. Still, there are boyfriends, and emotions worth screaming over, fistfuls of affections rained down behind closed doors. At the bar up the block, the closing-time domestics wind up on Main Street, playing out beneath the one streetlight, the fuck you/fuck
you
execrations concluding with a door slam and squealing tires, the roar of the engine pocked by a missing cylinder. You can call the cops, but since the local constable quit, the closest county deputy may be an hour away. Other areas are far more remote, but we have our pockets of darkness, and because trouble is a volunteer fire department’s summons, we’re often the first to discover them. First on the scene at a raging trailer house fire, my brother—also a volunteer fireman—is met by a man walking down the driveway toting a gas can. He asks my brother, “Is it against the law to burn your own house?”

The girl is still lying there, trapped but alive and conscious, two miles outside of town, when the siren on the water tower goes off, rising and falling three times. Help is still a ways off. There is no ambulance in New Auburn. Depending on the location of the telephone pole you clip, an ambulance will be dispatched from a town nine miles to the north or nine miles to the south of our village. Today the ambulance will be coming from the south, from Bloomer. From the time the call comes in until the ambulance arrives, fifteen minutes will pass. In the meantime, we’ll respond with two fire trucks and a rescue van. A few of us on the department are EMTs and first responders—we arrive with a pack of rudimentary medical supplies and do our best to stabilize the situation until more definitive help arrives. Sometimes that means crawling into a tangled car in an attempt to keep an unconscious victim breathing. Sometimes it means simply holding the hand of a sickly grandmother or a suicidal farmer.

Today, the pumper will drive to the vehicle in case a fire should break out, or a gasoline spill needs to be contained and controlled. The van and the tanker will be used to control traffic. Securing the scene, it’s called. Shutting traffic down makes a lot of people cranky, but it is vital for the safety of the victims and those helping the victims.

And so the girl waits. But we are on our way now, coming from all sides of town, converging on the little white fire hall. Inside, the light is dim and the brick walls are cool. The coats and boots wait in their rows, the trucks are still.

It was never my dream to be a firefighter, or to scream around the country in an ambulance. It all began when I graduated from nursing school and found myself frustrated by the fact that here I was, freshly armed with a bachelor’s degree in the caring arts, steeped in holism and paradigms and able, if need be, to catheterize you in a trice, but I knew nothing of how to extricate someone safely from a pancaked Yugo, or splint a dislocated elbow. My first nursing job was for a surgeon in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. After moving to Rice Lake, I enrolled in a 115-hour emergency medical technician class through the regional technical school and subsequently passed the National Registry exam. When a new nursing job took me to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I hired on part-time with a private ambulance service in that town. We served a large metropolitan and rural area, as well as a long stretch of I-94. When I reported for my first day of work, the first-out rig was gone to a nasty accident on the interstate. A van had driven full speed into the back of a parked semi. When the rig finally returned, the lead EMT looked me over, fresh in my new uniform. “We were out scraping up an
ohsh
,” he said. Long
o
, short
sh
.

“An
ohsh
?”

“An
ohsh
,” he repeated. “Guy in the van only left six feet of skid marks.”

I still didn’t get it. The veteran EMT chuckled. “An
ohsh
is when you look up at the last second, see the rear end of that semi, scream,
‘Oh, shit!,’
but only make it to
‘Oh, sh…!’
”

Within a year, I’d been on more than two hundred calls. I could drop the
ohsh
thing on newbies. I stayed on as a part-timer for more than five years, and when I moved back to New Auburn, it just seemed natural to continue some association with emergency services. But I have long since lost the ability to be flip about things like the
ohsh
.

Today, when I see the girl there on the blacktop, all that seasoned veteran hoo-hah will go right out the window, because she is delicate and frightened and conscious, and most of all, she is one of us. When we gather around her we are firefighters and first responders and EMTs, but we are also neighbors, classmates, family. If she doesn’t make it, I’m going to see her parents around town. It happens. Last year we had a heart attack call, found the woman too far gone, with signs she’d been dead awhile. Not long, but too long. The woman’s teenage daughter was there, teary and expectant, but there was nothing we could do. The following weekend, I was sitting at a folding table in front of the gas station selling raffle tickets for our fire department fund-raiser when the girl drove in with a friend. I had to look her in the eye, ask her how it was going. Me, worthless in her mother’s hour of death, now selling two-dollar chances to win a trip to Orlando, a beer cooler, a deer rifle, a four-pack of insulated Packer mugs. We do this whole pitch. How each ticket sold helps us raise money for critical equipment, equipment that helps us improve our service to the community. The spiel takes on a whole different significance when you’re speaking to the daughter of someone you were utterly unable to help. Another time, my brother and I drove the ambulance up a long back road where a woman was having a stroke. Her adult granddaughter rode with us to the hospital. Three days later, in the grocery store, I exited the fruit-juice aisle and came face-to-face with the granddaughter, all made up and wearing a discreet black dress.