Eleven Open Lines
Episode 1 of 3 of Four Minutes Ten by Marcy Loeb
“Carroway County Nine One One, what is the address of your emergency?”
Nothing came back. The line was open. There is a particular sound a landline makes when a handset is off the hook in a room where nothing is happening, a kind of soft weather, and under it that night I could hear a screen door knocking in its frame.
“This is Nine One One. I can hear the line. If you cannot speak, press any button on the phone.”
I waited. The screen door knocked twice more.
I have worked the overnight console in Carroway County for nine years. Eleven at night to seven in the morning, four on and three off. There is one dispatcher on that shift and there has only ever been one. I cover the sheriff’s office, two volunteer fire departments, one ambulance out of the Sedalia Road barn, and six hundred and eleven square miles of Missouri that mostly consists of people being asleep.
The screen on my left gave me what the phone company gives me. A 660 number, a landline, subscriber name blank. And the address, which is the part that matters, because a landline hands you the address whether or not anybody ever says a word.
4114 Egypt Hollow Road.
Under it, in the red type our system puts on a premise with history, somebody had left a note for whoever came after.
STRUCTURE FIRE 04/2022. NO STRUCTURE. OPEN LINE HX, VERIFY BEFORE DISPATCH.
I let it run anyway. You never break the connection on an open line, because the one time you do is the time it was a woman under a porch with a broken hip. So I sat there with my headset on and listened to a screen door at a house that had not had a screen door in four years, and at four minutes and ten seconds the line went dead.
I typed it up. Call type OPEN LINE. Disposition CLEARED, NO SERVICE REQUIRED. Duration, four ten.
It was the eleventh one.
“You are going to give yourself something,” Marilyn said.
She came on at seven and had been coming on at seven since before I was hired, and she read my log over my shoulder while she took her coat off, which I had stopped minding around year three.
“Eleven,” I said.
“Eleven is not a number. Eleven over four months is a stuck pair on a pole, and you know what a stuck pair is.”
“I know what a stuck pair is.”
“Then go home, Jo.”
The county had verified it, for the record. A deputy drove out on the second call and again on the third and found a slab with a chimney standing on it and no wire anywhere he could see. After that it went in the book as a known pair and stayed there.
Everybody in a dispatch center knows about phantom calls. The copper out in a county like ours is older than the people using it. Water gets into a splice, two wires touch, and the network reads that as somebody lifting a handset. It happens often enough that there is a line item for it on the form. We had a pair on Route B call us nine times in one January, and when the phone company finally sent a man out, the man found a squirrel.
So I had a good reason to leave it alone, and I did leave it alone, eleven times. I want to be honest that I left it alone because the reason was good and not because I believed it.
What I did instead was keep my own log, in a spiral notebook in the drawer under the console with the cough drops. Date, time, duration. Nobody asked me to. The county purges call detail at ninety days and I did not want to be the person who noticed something on day ninety one.
The Tuesday after the eleventh call was slow. I took a cardiac arrest at one forty that turned out to be a panic attack, and a deer on 71 that somebody had already dragged clear, and then I had five hours of nothing.
I got the notebook out.
The dates made no pattern. Two of them fell four days apart and one was a Sunday. The times made no pattern either, all between midnight and half past three, which only tells you it happened on my shift, and everything happens on my shift.
I ran my finger down the last column instead.
Four ten. Four ten. Four ten. Four eleven. Four ten. Four ten. Four ten. Four nine. Four ten. Four ten. Four ten.
I sat there with my hand flat on the paper.
A stuck pair does not hang up. It sits there until somebody dries it out. A person hangs up, and a person hangs up when he is finished, and being finished takes a different amount of time every time, because people are not machines. Eleven calls inside two seconds of each other is not a man giving up.
For four months I had been writing down the end of those calls and reading it as the caller quitting.
Nobody had ever hung up.