I shrugged. “I’ll take bathroom duty for a month.”
The guys all high-fived like this was their lucky day. All except the rookie, who had his arms crossed and was studying me like he suspected they were all getting played.
“Deal?” I confirmed.
“Deal.”
Of course, I knew I was going to beat Tiny. I’d been raised by a lonely, divorced basketball-coach father who had no idea how to talk about his feelings. Shooting hoops in the driveway was our only means of communication. For a while there, my ability to shoot hoops in our driveway was my dad’s only reason to live. Possibly mine, too.
I was fuckingfluentin basketball.
I dribbled for a second, which made the guys laugh.
Then I lifted the ball on my middle finger and made it spin, Globetrotter style, and watched them stop laughing.
Then I started shooting, and I just didn’t stop. Perfect arc after perfect arc.Five. Ten. Fifteen.
After a while, I shifted to using the backboard, aiming it smack in the middle of the faded square every time, and hitting the spot in a satisfying ka-swish, ka-swish, ka-swish.Twenty. Twenty-five.Then I busted out some tricks. I stood on one leg and shot. I shot with my left hand. I kneed the ball in. I head-butted it. I was at thirty-seven with no misses—not even near-misses—when the tones went off in the station for a call.
I turned around and threw my last shot backwards, and without even waiting to see if it made it, I walked back toward the station.
The rookie saw me coming and held the door open. As I closed the gap, he shook his head in admiration. “You’re my hero.”
“Did it go in?” I whispered as I passed.
“Nothing but net,” he said.
I high-fived him without even breaking stride, and I never looked back.
DESTASIO SHOULD HAVEridden with us to the call, but his back was giving him trouble, so the rookie came instead.
Firefighters don’t talk about “pain.” They don’t admit that things “hurt.” The most you’ll ever hear them admit to is “discomfort.” DeStasio had fallen during a roof collapse and been injured so badly that for a few days it was unclear if he would walk again. But he did walk again—part of his legend. Everybody knew he was in constant pain, but all anybody ever said was that his back was “giving him trouble.”
Basically, DeStasio suffered in silence every day, and the crew admired the hell out of him for it.
And on bad days, he got a pass and snoozed in the Barcalounger by the big-screen TV.
The fire call turned out to be for an “eight-year-old female, not breathing”—which sent us all into extra-high gear.
We were loaded up in forty seconds.
The rookie and I rode in the back as we ran full lights-and-sirens—pushing through intersections, veering around parked cars—to make it to the scene in under eight minutes.
Fast, but probably not fast enough.
Brain damage sets in after one minute without oxygen, and it’s irreversible at five. But “not breathing” could mean more things than you’d think, and with kids especially, you never give up hope until you have to.
Kids always break your heart.
There’s nothing anyone in the service wouldn’t do for a kid.
One of the first runs I’d ever made in Austin had been for a drowned girl about this same age, and I’d never forgotten her. We’d done CPR on her for thirty minutes—all the way from the scene to the hospital—without even thinking of giving up.
We never got her back, though.
With kids, it doesn’t matter. You try beyond hope, no matter what.
We entered the neighborhood and found the street. School was out for the day by now, and kids just home from school stopped on their front walks to watch us go by.
