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moving.
Ceepak and I step back, gaze up.
From underneath the latticework of planks, we can see the first train rumbling forward, clicking and clacking on the steel tracks.
“We’re on our way,” Cliff commentates. “Here comes the first hill! It’s a big one!”
Now comes the clatter of the chain running down the center of the track as it grabs hold of the coaster cars and hauls them skyward. This is the part of a roller coaster ride that always scares me the most. The anticipation of what’s to come when you finally reach the top. The thought that you could so easily climb out, walk back down, call it quits. And, near the top, it always sounds as if the chain is getting tired, that it’s stuttering, that it may not be able to hoist the train all … the … way … up.
But, of course, it always does.
The clacking stops. The first car has reached the summit.
“This is it!” booms Cliff. “Here we go!”
There is no sound for a long empty second.
And then the screams start.
“Oh my gawd!” cries Cliff, momentarily forgetting that he is on the air. “Whoo-hoo! Yeaaaaaah! Whoo-hoo!”
The train rattles down that first hill in a flash.
Now everyone is screaming. The mayor, the O’Malley family, the chamber of commerce, Cliff the D.J.-plus all the people on the ground waiting for their turn to scare themselves to death. It’s a screechfest.
They’re rolling through the first banked curve. The initial screams subside-just long enough for everyone to catch their breath for the second hill-not as steep but just as exciting.
“Whoo-hoo!” Cliff has 86’d any scripted commentary. He’s barely using words anymore. “Boo-yeaaaaaah!”
The train rattles up and down a series of knolls, shoots into a wooden tunnel, zooms out the other side.
“Oh my God!” somebody shouts. “Stop the train!”
“Huh?” Cliff. Confused.
“Stop the train!” It sounds like Skippy. “Stop it!”
Some kind of alarm buzzer goes off.
“Stop it!” That was Skip’s dad. Big Paddy. “Stop the damn train!”
In the distance I hear the screech of brakes. Steel wheels scraping against steel rails. Cars bumpering into each other.
Then an awful quiet.
“Oh my god!” Mr. O’Malley again. “Hang on, honey. Oh my god! It’s her heart!”
2
“We need someone to call nine-one-one! Now! Omigod! She’s in bad shape! I think she’s having a heart attack! Call nine-one-one. We need an ambulance!” Cliff Skeete sounds panicky. His remote roller coaster broadcast has suddenly turned into a breaking news bulletin. “Go to music! Go to music!” Bruce Springsteen’s “Lucky Town” starts rocking out of the giant loudspeakers. Not the best choice. “Danny?” Ceepak hops up and over the metal railings penning in the crowd. I hop over after him. We’re in full uniform-radios, batons, guns, handcuffs rattling on our utility belts. People scoot out of our way. “Ticket booth,” Ceepak shouts. “AED?” I shout back. “Roger that.” Ceepak’s hoping Big Paddy was smart enough to equip his thrill ride with an Automated External Defibrillator, a portable electronic device that can revive cardiac-arrest victims-if you jolt them soon enough. Ceepak barrels over the final barricade, scopes out the small hut where the ticket seller sits. “AED!” he shouts to the girl sitting stunned behind the window. She doesn’t flinch so Ceepak shouts again: “AED!” Meanwhile, on WAVY, Bruce is singing, “When it comes to luck you make your own.” Springsteen. The soundtrack of my life. “On the wall!” I shout. I have a lucky angle and can see the bulldozer-yellow box mounted on the wall behind the petrified teenage ticket taker. Ceepak dashes in, yanks the defibrillator off the wall, then darts out of the booth, AED in one hand, radio unit in the other. “This is Ceepak,” he barks as he dashes up the empty exit ramp. I dash after him. “Request ambulance. Pier Four. Possible cardiac arrest. Alert fire department. Potential roller coaster rescue scenario.” “Ten-four” squawks out of his radio as he clips it back to his belt. “Danny? You know the family?” “Yeah.” I guess I know just about everybody in Sea Haven. I grew up here. Ceepak? He grew up in Ohio, where they don’t build roller coasters jutting out over the Atlantic Ocean. He only came to Jersey after slogging through the first wave of hellfire over in Iraq as an MP with the 101st Airborne. Saw and did some pretty ugly stuff. Then an old army buddy offered him a job down the Jersey shore in “sunny, funderful Sea Haven,” where nothing bad ever happens. Yeah, right. Tell it to whoever’s having the heart attack. “When we reach the roller coaster cars, keep everybody calm and seated,” Ceepak shouts over his shoulder as we race up the steep ramp. “I’ll administer CPR. Wire up the AED. Time is of the essence.” “Okay,” I say. We reach the unloading platform, between the control room and the train tracks. Ceepak scans the horizon. “There!” He spots the stranded roller coaster train-on top of a curved hill about a quarter mile up the track. He hops off the platform. “Keep to the walkboard!” There’s a wooden plank paralleling the train tracks. A handrail, too. This must be how the maintenance workers inspect the tracks every morning. “Use the cleats, Danny.” I notice wood slats secured to the walkboard. “They act as a nonslip device.” Good. Nonslipping off a giant wooden scaffold eighty feet above the ocean is an excellent idea. “Short, choppy steps, Danny. Short, choppy steps.” Ceepak takes off, looking like a linebacker doing the tire drill at training camp. I hop down to the narrow walkway plank and, like always, try to do what Ceepak is doing. Except, I grab the handrail, too. We’re going to have to run down a slight hill, the straightaway where the roller coaster slows down before coming to its final, complete stop in the loading shed. After that comes an uphill bump and a downhill run to a steeply banked inclined turn sloping up to the crest of another much higher hill where the roller coaster train is stuck. “They should’ve brought the car down to the finish,” I shout, the words coming out in huffs and puffs as I chug up what is basically a 2-by-12 board. “Roger that,” says Ceepak. “I suspect they panicked.” He’s not even winded. Cool and calm as a cucumber on Xanax. I’m not surprised. When he was over in Iraq, Ceepak won all sorts of medals for bravery, valor, heroism-all those things I only know from movies. Of course, Ceepak never brags about the brave things he’s done. I guess the really brave people never do. In fact, I only learned about the Distinguished Service Cross he won for “displaying extraordinary courage” last summer when Ceepak, his wife, Rita, Samantha Starky, and I went swimming at our friend Becca’s motel pool. In his swim trunks, I could see that Ceepak has a huge honking scar on the back of each of his legs-just below his butt cheeks. “I took a few rounds,” was all he said. Then I went online, looked up his citation. It happened during the evacuation of casualties from a home in Mosul “under intense enemy fire.” Although shot in the leg, “Lieutenant John Ceepak continued to engage the enemy while escorting wounded soldiers from the house.” When the last soldier leaving the house was nailed in the neck, Ceepak began performing CPR. That’s when the “insurgents” shot him in the other leg, gave him his matching set of butt wounds. Didn’t stop him. According to the official report, he kept working on the wounded man’s chest with one hand while returning enemy fire with the other. He brought the guy back-even though he was “nearly incapacitated by his own loss of blood.” Yeah. The O’Malleys don’t know how lucky they are John Ceepak was on roller coaster duty today.3
We’re almost to the stranded train. A forest of wooden trestles and trusses rises around us: a maze of slashing horizontal, vertical, and diagonal pine lines. “Ceepak!” It’s Skippy. “Help!” “Who’s in cardiac arrest?” Ceepak asks as he crests the hill. I’m twenty paces behind him. “My wife!” shouts Mr. O’Malley from the- 1
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