IT'S NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY

I WAS ON MY WAY to the liquor store when I passed him for the first time. An old man, fifty, maybe sixty, hard to tell exactly because his hair covered most of his face. He was lying asleep on the sidewalk outside the Happy Harbour, a bar where the lights were so dim it looked as if the people inside were underwater. He was right in front of the door, the way you sometimes see dogs outside a place, and drops of water from an air conditioner in a window overhead were falling onto his chest. He was wearing wool pants and two ski jackets, even though the day was so hot it felt like we were being sucked into the sun. And there was a little margarine container beside his hand, with some pieces of bread inside it.

The liquor store was at the end of the street. People lay in the passenger seats of the cars outside, eyes closed like they were unconscious. I spent the last of my money on two six-packs of the most expensive beer they had. Kennedy had called that afternoon to invite me to his wedding. He’d said that Rachel was going to be there. I thought she might call.

The man was still there when I came back from the liquor store, only now there was a woman with him. She was young, twenty or twenty-two, and she was wearing amber sunglasses and a Calvin Klein baseball cap. When I walked up, she was shaking him and saying, “Are you there? Are you there?” I tried to walk past, but she looked right at me. “I can’t wake him up,” she said.

I suddenly felt guilty, like it was my fault he was lying there, and I stopped. “He’s probably just drunk,” I told her. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“He shouldn’t be sleeping in the sun,” she said. She looked around and shook her head at the passing cars. “I can’t believe people just let him lie here.”

“I’m sure he’s all right,” I said. “Otherwise someone would have stopped by now.”

When she brushed the hair out of his face, though, it was clear he hadn’t been all right in some time. His face was a mask of broken blood vessels, and yellowish drool coated his chin. He looked as if he’d exploded inside. The woman stroked the side of his face, but he didn’t even twitch an eyelid. “Who knows how long he’s been lying here,” the woman said. “With people just walking past.”

“It looks like he’s breathing regular,” I said. “If he’s breathing regular, then he’s probably just sleeping.”

She looked up at me and squinted a little through her sunglasses, like she was concentrating. Then she stared back down at him. “We should call someone,” she said. “Paramedics or somebody like that. They’ll take him to a shelter. Someplace cool, where he can sleep and not have to worry about exposure.”

Her choice of words implied I was in this with her, so I put my beer down in the shade at the side of the building and squatted down on the other side of the man. I studied his chest for a moment. It didn’t move much, but when it did, it was regular. I thought about shaking him myself, but I didn’t really want to touch him.

“We should call someone,” the woman said again. When I looked at her, I saw her skin was all flushed and she was shaking a little. She kept biting her lower lip, like she was actually worried about this man.

I thought about Rachel calling, maybe right at this very moment. And then I thought about answering the phone and telling her how I’d saved the life of someone I didn’t even know.

THE AIR INSIDE the Happy Harbour was cool and wet. There were five or six men sitting around a table in the middle of the room, with maybe two dozen beer bottles occupying the spaces between them. I didn’t recognize any of the labels on the bottles. The men looked away from the television over the bar and at us as we entered, and their conversation drifted away, if there had been one in the first place. Then one of them, an old man with no front teeth, took off his John Deere cap and slapped the empty chair beside him with it. “Plenty of room here,” he said. He was looking directly at the woman. The others didn’t say anything, just looked at us with eyes that reminded me of dead fish.

We went over to the bar, where a Korean man wearing mirrored sunglasses was sitting on a stool, reading the paper.

“There’s an unconscious man in front of your bar,” I told him.

“Yeah, he’s been there for about half an hour,” he said. He didn’t look up from the paper.

“And you just left him there?” the woman asked.

Now he stared at her. She looked into his glasses for a moment, then at me, then down at the floor. But that look had put me in charge.

“He wasn’t drinking here,” the Korean guy said. “It’s not my …” He searched for the word. “Responsibility.”

“Maybe he just needs a kiss, darling,” the man in the John Deere cap said. “Like Prince Charming.” His laugh turned into a long series of coughs. No one else at the table made a sound. They stared at us like they were all mute. And they weren’t all old either. There was a man in a UPS uniform who looked like he was around my age, and there was another man in shorts and a T-shirt who looked like he couldn’t even have been legal drinking age yet. For some reason, he kept grinning at us.

“We need to call the police,” I told the Korean guy. “Otherwise he could die or something. Because of the heat and all.”

“He wasn’t drinking here,” the Korean guy said again and returned to the paper.

I looked at the woman. I was hoping that she’d tell me to forget it, that she’d walk outside and down the street without once looking back. We’d tried, at least. But she kept on staring at the floor.

We went over to the pay phone in the corner and I dropped in a quarter, dialed 911. We both watched the traffic outside as I waited for someone to pick up. A postman walked past the man outside without even glancing down at him. A woman answered after the third ring. “911,” she said. She was laughing about something. “Do you need the police, ambulance or fire department?”

“I need somebody to take away an unconscious man,” I said.

“One moment please.” I waited through three more rings. A couple of the men at the table — the young guy and an old black guy who looked as if he’d been a weightlifter once but now seemed to be the victim of some sort of slow, flesh-eating disease — were still watching us. They were whispering back and forth and nodding at each other.

“Ambulance services,” another woman said in my ear. “How can I help you?”

“There’s an unconscious man on the sidewalk,” I said. “I tried to wake him up, but he’s out cold. He’s been there for hours.”

“How old is he?”

“Oh, he’s old, maybe fifty or sixty.”

The woman on the other end laughed. “You call that old?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” she said. “Just give me the location.”

I told her the address and then hung up. “Okay, help is on the way,” I said. We went outside again and waited by the old man. The people driving past looked at us, looked at him lying there, but no one stopped.

After a while, the black man came out of the bar and stretched. I could hear his joints popping. Then he gently took hold of the old man’s arms and dragged him a few feet to the side of the doorway, up against the wall of the neighbouring convenience store. “Gus doesn’t want him on the property,” he explained to us with a shy smile, before going back inside.

“He shouldn’t have moved him,” the woman said. “You’re not supposed to move people when you don’t know what’s wrong with them.”

“I think that’s only for people with broken backs and stuff like that,” I said. “I think this guy’s problems are far different from that.”

I heard sirens in the distance around the same time the young man came outside and lit a cigarette. Up close, I could see his white shirt had been washed so many times that it was now turning grey. He looked up and down the street, but his eyes kept coming back to the woman. I stood in between them, and he smiled, pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. They looked like the kind of sunglasses you’d buy at a gas station.

“Here they come,” the woman said needlessly when the ambulance came around the corner.

I started to lift my hand, but the young guy stepped in front of me and pointed to the old man with both arms, like one of those guys at the airport directing planes. The ambulance drove up onto the sidewalk beside us, almost hitting the woman. At the same time, a fire truck came around the corner from the other direction. Now the people driving past slowed their cars to watch us, and a few people standing at the traffic lights down the street began walking our way.

The paramedics came out of the ambulance fast but slowed down when they saw the old man. Both wore latex gloves and belt holsters carrying scissors. The one who opened the back doors of the ambulance had a grey beard even though his hair was brown. The other one walked in between us to kneel beside the old man. He was wearing knee pads the same colour as his uniform.

“He’s been like this for half an hour,” the woman told him.

“I tried to wake him up,” the young guy said.

“No, I tried,” I said, but the paramedic didn’t pay attention to any of us. He held the old man’s wrist loosely between his fingers, like he didn’t want to touch him either, and looked at his watch for a while.

Gus came out and squinted at the fire truck as it pulled up in front of the bar. “There’s no fire here,” he said to me. “Why’d you call them?”

“I didn’t call them,” I said, but he just shook his head and went back inside, closing the door behind him.

Both paramedics were kneeling on the ground now, and the bearded one was shaking the old man by the shoulder. “I hate these calls,” he said. I wasn’t sure who he was talking to, though, because the first paramedic didn’t pay him any attention either.

Two firemen climbed down off the fire truck and came over. They were wearing those fire-resistant pants and boots but no jackets, only T-shirts. All these people to help one man. I almost couldn’t believe it.

“It’s all right,” I told them. “We’ve got it under control.”

They glanced at me and then looked down at the old man. They didn’t say anything.

“You live around here?” I heard the young guy ask the woman.

“He’s probably just heat-stroked,” I said to the watching crowd, which now numbered six or seven people. “He just needs to sleep it off.”

The old man chose that moment to wake up. He half sat and looked around at all of us, then pulled the margarine container of bread to his chest with both hands.

“You see?” the bearded paramedic said to his partner, but I didn’t know what that meant.

“How are you feeling?” the other one asked. The old man didn’t answer. He kept staring at the gloves on their hands.

The bearded paramedic sighed and went over to the ambulance, closed its back doors.

“Aren’t you taking him to the hospital?” I asked.

One of the firemen — a short, squat man with a sunburned face and a lazy eye — came over to me. “You the one that called this in?” he asked.

I glanced around. Everyone was watching me. “That’s right,” I said.

“And you couldn’t wake him up?” The lazy eye drifted away from me, staring somewhere over my shoulder.

“Well, we tried.”

“Well, he appears to be awake now.” He walked back to the fire truck, his partner following along behind him. They climbed up into the cab but then didn’t move, just sat there like they were waiting for another call.

The bearded paramedic had put on a pair of Ray-Bans now and was leaning against the side of the ambulance, his arms folded across his chest. His partner was still talking to the old man.

“You been drinking?”

The old man shook his head and smiled, then swiped one hand slowly over his face, the way a cat does when it cleans itself.

“You been taking any drugs? Methadone?”

The old man shook his head and smiled again, did the same thing with his hand.

“You got a place to stay? Relatives? Shelter?”

The old man took a piece of bread out of his container and nibbled it, looked around.

“You’re going to take him somewhere, aren’t you?” the woman asked the paramedic. “Where he can recover?”

The paramedic looked at her. “Recover from what?” he asked.

The old man pulled himself up the wall to his feet, hid the bread somewhere inside one of his jackets. He smiled even wider now. He seemed to be missing every second tooth.

The black man and the one wearing the John Deere cap had come outside sometime during all of this. They were still holding their beer bottles in their hands. “What’s all the commotion?” the one in the cap demanded of the paramedics. “We have a police state now? Man can’t even take a nap when he feels the need?”

“That’s not what’s going on here,” I said, but he just waved his bottle in my direction and went on talking. “You cops,” he said. “You just won’t leave a man alone, will you?”

“Let’s get out of here,” the bearded paramedic said, and his partner finally nodded. He put on a pair of Ray-Bans himself, and the two of them got into the ambulance. I wondered if the city supplied their sunglasses, if it had some sort of contract with Ray-Ban, or if they had simply decided to buy matching pairs.

When I turned around again, the woman was gone, and the other members of the crowd were wandering off, back in the direction of the traffic lights. “Someone could have been dying somewhere,” the black man said to me, and then he and the others from the bar went back inside. It was just me and the old man now.

He watched the ambulance drive down the street and, when it turned the corner, he sat down again. He didn’t look at me, just squinted up at the sun and yawned. Started humming and swaying a little.

I stepped around the side of the building to get my beer. It was gone. I looked over at the fire truck, but none of the firemen looked my way as it pulled into the traffic.

“Did you see who took my beer?” I asked the old man, but he just shook his head and closed his eyes.

I went inside the Happy Harbour. Everyone was sitting around the table again, and the man in the John Deere cap was telling some story about the time he’d gotten into the back of a police car because he thought it was a cab. He stopped when I walked in, though, and they all turned to look at me.

“Someone took my beer,” I said.

“You didn’t order a beer,” Gus said from behind the counter.

“That’s right,” the man in the cap said. “You just came in to use the phone. Remember?”

“Someone took the beer I put down outside,” I said. “Two six-packs. I put them down in the shade and someone walked off with them.” I kept watching the young guy. He wouldn’t stop smiling at me.

“I bet it was that drunk outside,” the man in the cap said. “He probably needed a drink to get back to sleep.”

“You try and help a man out,” I said, “and this is the way society treats you.”

“Take it somewhere else,” Gus said from behind the bar.

“You should grow up,” I told the young guy. “And you should do it fast.”

His smile pulled back to show all his teeth, “What are you saying, man?” he asked. He got to his feet. “What are you saying?”

“Hey hey hey,” Gus said. “You get out of here,” he told me.

“Maybe I should call the cops,” I said.

“You get out of here now,” Gus told me, “or I’ll call the cops on you.”

© Peter Darbyshire

 
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