Get back on that counter right now, or you are done. Bird didn't stop. Couldn't. He's not breathing. Call 911, Mr.
Fisk. Please call 911. He kept counting, kept driving, his voice jerking with the rhythm of the compressions. I said, "Get up. " And Fisk crossed the floor and grabbed a fistful of Bird's shirt at the back of the collar and hauled, wrenching him up and half off the man. And for one terrible second, the compressions stopped.
Bird felt the big chest go still and slack under his palms, felt the life sitting right there on the edge of leaving. And something in the boy that had spent two years going small and quiet and careful, folding himself down, never a reason, never a sound, stood all the way up instead. He tore his collar out of Fisk's fist so hard the seam ripped. He came up off his knees and shoved the man back a full step. A 140-lb kid shoving his own boss, the man who held the one nail his whole life hung from.
And then he dropped straight back down and got his hands on Del Rourke's chest and found the rhythm again and said, in a voice that had stopped shaking entirely flat and certain as a shut door, "Call 911 or get out of my way. " Fisk there, stunned, going red and then white. You put your hands on me, you're fired. You hear me? Fired. Off my property tonight, you and your little setup in the units, the whole thing, gone.
He knew about the storage unit and he reached for it like a weapon. And Bird heard every word of it land square on the scaffold of his whole careful life, the wages, the unit, the address, the plan, spring. And understood, kneeling there, exactly what continuing was going to cost him. The Bird kept doing compressions. He did them for 9 minutes.
9 minutes is a very long time to keep a man alive with nothing but your hands and your refusal to quit. A customer finally called 911 because Fisk wouldn't. Bird counted out loud to hold the pace and pushed. And when his arms failed, he pushed with his shoulders and his back and something underneath all of it. And twice the big chest fluttered and Bird pinched the nose and breathed two breaths into the man the way the nurse had shown him and went back to pushing.
The whole time Randy Fisk stood by his unmanned counter telling him he was fired, telling the customers he was sorry for the disruption. And Bird chose, over and over, a hundred times a minute for 9 minutes the stranger's life over his own only job. When the ambulance finally came screaming off the access road, the medics found a blue-lipped biker with a faint returning pulse and a shaking, soaked gray-faced kid still driving compressions into his chest. And one of them put a hand on Bird's shoulder to stop him and said the thing medics say only when they mean it, "Son, you can stop now. You did it. " Two more minutes without this and we'd have been calling it.
You kept this man alive. They loaded Del Rourke with a pulse and a chance and ran. Randy Fisk fired Bird Coleson in the parking lot, for real, out loud, in front of the customers, and told him to have his things out of the storage unit by morning, and then went back inside to reopen the second bay. The reality had already crashed down. It just took the evening to finish falling.
By dark, Bird had his $140 and his duffel bag and no job, and by the end of the week, no storage unit, either. Because 90 a month is impossible on zero a week, the plan for a room by spring was gone. The scaffold was down. He'd given up the one thing keeping him off the street to keep a stranger's heart beating for 9 minutes. And the arithmetic of it was exactly as brutal as he'd known it would be.
Kneeling on that floor, choosing anyway, he found a spot behind a shuttered feed store where the cinder block cut the worst of the wind, and he sat with his back to the wall and his duffel bag against his knees, and he did not cry because he'd learned a long time ago in a long line of other people's houses that crying was just noise nobody came for. He'd done the right thing. He was sure he'd done the right thing. He'd do it again tomorrow. It had cost him everything he had.
Both of those were true at once, and he sat with them in the dark, and neither one canceled the other out. "That was how it went," he told himself. That was how it had always gone. He'd known that kneeling on the floor, and he'd chosen it anyway, and now he'd pay for it the way you always paid, alone, with the wind. He didn't know that Del Rourke had lived.
He didn't know that Del Rourke was a 30-year member out of a Texas charter, or that when a man like that gets pulled back from the other side, the first thing he wants to know when he can talk is who. And that the answer, a homeless 17-year-old who did 9 minutes of CPR and got fired on the floor for not stopping, went out across Texas on the network that runs faster than any ambulance. He didn't know that the story it carried had a second half that put a cold fury into every charter that heard it. That the kid had chosen a stranger's life over his only paycheck and lost his job and his roof for it, and was out there somewhere in the Panhandle wind with a duffel bag and nothing else. That is not a story the club lets end in the wind.