Willnot Page 6

  I pulled over, flipped the phone open, but didn’t get Maryanne as expected.

  “Sorry to bother you, Dr. Hale. This is Janet. I’m in charge today and in ER. There’s a woman here named Theodora Ogden. She asked that I call you. Says you know a Bobby or Brandon Lowndes—”

  “I do.”

  “He’s been shot.”

  I stepped through the door and saw the top of Chester Wilde’s bald head with the bright lights bouncing off it. Chet to friends, Doc Savage to others, Doc had retired a decade ago but every few weeks couldn’t stand it any longer, brought in coffee for the ER staff, and hung around. He’d been there when they rolled Bobby through the doors, set down his cup without a word, and stepped up. Doc’s a kind you don’t see anymore, who could do a clean resection or bypass with a steak knife and a couple of C-clamps.

  I’m forever amazed at how sloppy ER workers are—as though the presumed urgency of their ministrations gives them license. Same tools, much the same procedures as upstairs in OR. There, we place our packaging, detritus and bloody sponges in bins. Here, often as not, everything gets tossed on the floor. Guy comes in with a stab wound or sprained ankle, the place looks like a war zone by the time he ships out.

  From the doorway I nodded to the nurses. “Bent over your work again, eh, Doc?”

  “This back of mine, I’m bent over every gottdam thing. What are you waiting for—get over here.”

  “Nowadays we tend to wash our hands first.”

  “Youngsters and your newfangled ways. Go ahead, then, take your time. This boy ain’t gonna die anytime soon, with or without you.”

  He had the bleeding stopped, I saw when I drew up bedside. Fluids going in for volume. Cleaning the wound of debris. Swabbing. Probing. Vitals good.

  “That is one puny-looking GSW.”

  “Shooter thought he was after squirrel maybe,” Doc said.

  “Twenty-two?”

  “Low caliber anyway. Round’s over there.”

  “Who the hell shoots a man with a pea?”

  Doc straightened. As close to straight as he gets. Looked like his glasses hadn’t been wiped since about 2000. “Someone who’s real good, would be my guess.”

  Soon after, the OR crew showed up to transport, Gordie Blythe with them. Doc reported off, and I went out to where Agent Ogden waited, lavender blouse bright among dun-colored chairs and walls, head-to-head with her smartphone. She finished what she was about before closing the app and standing.

  “That conversation couldn’t have gone well,” I said.

  “It wasn’t much of a conversation. How is he?”

  I heard her phone buzzing softly in the pocket of her suit coat. I waited. She didn’t answer.

  “From what I saw in there, he’s been through a hell of a lot worse.”

  Just then the automatic doors swung open, X-ray attendants bringing a patient back to ER, masthead of IV bags, body mummy-wrapped, oxygen cylinder like a small missile alongside in the bed. We looked up, a response as automatic as the doors, and saw Joel Stern standing by the wall. He’d pulled a second, flannel shirt over the one he wore when we met out in the parking lot four days back. The shirt’s long tails made him look even taller and thinner. And it hadn’t been the parking-lot lights that gave his skin that yellow cast.

  “Sorry about the eavesdropping,” he said. “Professional habit.”

  From Joel Stern, who had been half a block away, closing in on Bobby after pinballing behind him all over town, I learned that the shot was barely audible, recollected only afterward upon seeing Bobby fall, a light pop or crack, Joel said, like a stick breaking underfoot. Joel had placed the 911 call and done what he could by way of first aid.

  From Andrew, whom I found in the cafeteria eating a slice of pie that overlapped its plate the way a fat man’s midriff overlaps his belt, I learned a little more.

  “Good pie, huh?”

  “Always.” He was using a spoon.

  “You brought in a gunshot a while back.”

  “The soldier? Uh-huh.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Heard talking.”

  “The ER crew?”

  “Uh-huh.” Another bite of pie went away.

  “Was he conscious?”

  “By the numbers he was. But he just looked at me. Like …”

  I waited.

  “Like he was flat. Somebody let the air out?”

  “What did the soldier have with him?”

  Andrew’s quirks kicked in. “Shirt, dark blue, size sixteen—we cut that off. Khaki pants, almost new, thirty-six waist, thirty-two length. New Balance walking shoes, elevens, maroon and gray. Cream-colored baseball cap, no writing.”

  “Was there anything else? A backpack? A weapon?”

  “He had a wallet with an Oregon driver’s license, a Visa card expiring in July, sixty-seven dollars. Fifty-eight cents in change in his left pocket. No belt.”

  “And did he say anything? Try to?”

  “Only at first, when he first looked up at me. Sounded like ‘Billygoat, that you?’”

  “‘Billygoat, that you?’”

  “Like that. Twice.”

  11

  Next morning we watched the parade as Sebastian Daiche’s pit team pulled out, vehicles shedding gravel and dirt as they trooped down Maple Street toward the interstate. Felt like when you’re a kid standing at the edge of town seeing the carnival leave. Bye-bye, mystery and magic. Hello, ordinary life.

  Not that it was.

  Gordie and I were sitting on one of the benches out front, drinking bad coffee as people came and went through the hospital’s front entrance.

  Strange how you can work alongside someone for years, have him as a friend, then one day suddenly understand—not simply know, but understand—that his beliefs are so unlike what you thought. That he lives in quite a different world from the one you had him in.

  Strange too how we’d failed to get the press attention we expected. Two skeleton news crews had straggled in, but for the most part interest in Willnot’s “shocking find” had been eclipsed first by the latest Washington scandal, then by eruption of new civil wars in another small part of this large, unwieldy world.

  My chief back during residency, Teddy Wu, kept telling us that life is just a long recovery before the fatal illness strikes. Bobby Lowndes lay inside in ICU recovering—from what, besides a bullet wound? I’d been brought up around people with a profound mistrust of received wisdom, appearance, surfaces. My father used to quote André Gide: “Fish die belly upward and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.” His old friend Ted Sturgeon said always ask the next question.

  And the next question here was who shot Bobby? And why?

  The same people who’d fostered in me such skepticism for received wisdom, for what we all know, steadfastly mistrusted the government. Talk of CIA assassinations, the coup in Chile, illegal wiretaps and entrapment flowed about me the way other children grew up hearing about the latest TV shows, hometown football team, or summer vacation. I didn’t hesitate to question whether Bobby’s own agency and bureaucracy might have acted against him.

  “You think much about government conspiracies?” I asked my benchmate, provoking two quick volleys of laughter that turned heads toward us.

  “You’re seriously asking this of someone who chooses to live in Willnot? Government is conspiracy. We all know that.”

  It wasn’t what he said so much as it was the pressure behind it. My old friend, staid, lightly comedic Gordie with his tailored suits and country-club membership up at the capital, had been flying under false colors all these years?

  He laughed again. “When I was twelve, a friend of my father who was a movie nut proudly brought over a print of Invaders from Mars and a projector to show it, real old-school. The boy in that movie saw something no one else did. That Others were here, picking us off one by one. People would be walking along and the ground would give way beneath them, swallow them up.”

  �
�Yeah, I thought.

  “And from that moment on—I even remember the taste of the lemon drops I was sucking on, and the bristly fabric of the couch—I’ve never been far from awareness that the depths are there, with the thinnest of membranes covering them. Any moment, the membrane can give.”

  “This from someone who puts people to sleep for a living.”

  “Most of them wake up.”

  He shifted on the bench as his pager went off. “Nothing is ever what it seems. A realist is someone who thinks the world is simple enough to be understood. It isn’t.” The beeper went off again as he was checking it. “In my head I was the kid, of course, right up there on the screen, in the movie. When I saw it again years later, I had to wonder if, consciously or not, the adults didn’t know the kid was right. That if they admitted it, the world would unravel around them.”

  Gordie stood. “And Bo Sanders may unravel if I don’t get up there. Wouldn’t put it past the new kid surgeon—the one that looks like, I don’t know, fourteen with a bullet? and so, so eager?—to start cutting on poor Bo without me.”

  I went in for one last graze before heading officeward. Bobby remained sedated, but vitals were good and the lab work, given the circumstances, was well within bounds, no cause for concern.

  Sheriff Hobbes sat outside the room, covering for a deputy who was seeing to a traffic accident. He stood to poke at the cushion on the chair as I approached. “Damn thing’s got Sam’s buttprint stamped in here for good.” He told me that Agent Ogden had taken herself off to the crime scene (meaningful pause here) again. I called Maryanne to say I’d be in soon and swung over to that side of town.

  I knew the house. Seth Addison was likely the oldest person in these parts, around when the town started up. After he died, the house went empty save for frequent break-ins inspired by rural legend that Seth never had any use for banks, that all the money he’d made in his ninety-plus years on earth was hidden there.

  Overgrown railroad tracks lead you to a patch of rusted, ancient farm machinery and from there up a rut-bedeviled hill to what’s left of the house, sheets of plywood bowing away from doors and windows over which they had been nailed. Along one side are scars where decades ago a balcony got torn away. One side droops as though the house suffered a stroke.

  Theodora Ogden sat at a thirty-degree tilt on the lowest porch step picking splinters out of her butt.

  “Old wood,” I said. “Musician friends tell me it’s the best.”

  “Sure they do.”

  “If that’s evidence …”

  “Only of my stupidity. I hope you’re not here because—”

  “Bobby’s fine. Should be awake and vocal by early afternoon. What are you looking for? Surely the scene’s been gone over.”

  “Inspiration, maybe.”

  “And all you found was rotting wood.”

  “Well, it is quiet out here.”

  “Quiet’s a thing we’ve got our share of.”

  “I turned the cell phone off, drove out. No real agenda, and I didn’t think there’d be anything to see. Maybe just needed quiet.”

  “Or to be alone.”

  “Alone is good.”

  “I could leave …”

  She motioned to the step beside her and I sat, saying that chances were good we’d have to desplinter one another when we were done, but I was a doctor, after all, so she needn’t be shy.

  “Alone scares people,” I said. “A lot of them.”

  “My mother always had the TV on, early morning, late at night, during meals. Rarely looked at it, couldn’t have told you what show was on, but there it was, this visitor that never left.”

  “People need the space around them filled. It’s the pressure.” A cat came from under the house, looked at us without curiosity, and went on its way. “You know what my father did.”

  “Of course.”

  “I can’t tell you how many scenes I read as a kid where some guy ruptures his spacesuit or his ship and gets sucked out, horribly but at considerable length and with excellent description, into the vacuum. It’s like that—your mother’s TV, sounds, possessions, the press of others.”

  The cat sat at yard’s edge watching us. Maybe we were prospective buyers and soon there’d be companionship, comforting sounds above. Food.

  “No one saw the shooter. The round had some distance to it. That and the caliber rule out an amateur. Yet except for blood loss, Sergeant Lowndes is all right. And who around here has any reason to shoot him?”

  “Why does the shooter have to be from around here? Though, mind you, pretty much everybody who is, knows guns.”

  She stood. “None of it makes any sense.”

  “Does it have to?”

  “Things usually do.”

  “Only if you’re an accountant.” Or paranoid—in which case everything connects. “How are you doing with those splinters?”

  “I think I can manage.”

  “Then I should be getting back to the office.”

  Clouds were gathering as I drove—gathering surreptitiously. Sky would be clear above a stand of trees, I’d look back and clouds had claimed squatter’s rights.

  Her mother’s TV, the visitor who never leaves, and loneliness …

  Later in life my hardcore-SF father turned to fantasy. His last novel was Dying with Grace, Grace being a two-foot-tall giraffe who wandered up to the protagonist’s side one day on the streets of Brooklyn and never left. From that day he was never alone, even in his final moments. The last thing he saw was Grace’s face bending over him. She had to stand in a chair to do so.

  12

  I lost a patient that afternoon. I’d barely got back to the office and was looking over the first chart when Maryanne came into the examining room to tell me they needed me at the hospital. I arrived to find Gordie, two nurses and his teenage surgeon bent over a gurney like birds at a watering hole. When one straightened and stepped away for a moment, I saw who the patient was. Burt Feldman.

  Fifty-three years old, at least forty of those years given over to fighting or, more correctly, surrendering to diabetes. He’d gone blind long ago, had such severe neuropathy that he hadn’t walked more than a dozen steps at a time in a decade, his legs were half-and-half sores and necrotic tissue.

  And now, from all appearances, he was in DIC, covered with bruises and hemorrhaging from mouth, nose, ears, eyes.

  “Sepsis, we figure,” Gordie said without looking up. He had Burt on a vent, had his jaw pulled down peering into his mouth. “Clots everywhere. Lucky I was able to get the tube in. Looks like black granola in here.”

  “Kidneys are gone,” the surgeon said.

  Janet, one of the new nurses, looked up from the chart. “There’s no DNR.”

  “He’s Doctor Hale’s patient,” Gordie said.

  “Sorry. Didn’t know.”

  “How long?”

  Janet glanced at the clock. “Forty-six minutes. A deliveryman saw him lying in his front yard, called it in. Unconscious and unresponsive to pain but still breathing when he got there, Andrew says.”

  I looked up at the skittery, slowing EKG.

  “Mostly just the drugs,” Gordie said.

  “Is there anyone we should notify?” Janet asked.

  “He doesn’t have family.” I looked down at the bruised chest, taped lines, distended stomach. “If it’s okay with everyone, I’m going to ask that we leave Burt in peace now. I’ll sit here with him.”

  They filed out, pulling the curtain around us for privacy.

  It didn’t take long. Twelve minutes maybe. Holding his hand, purposefully not watching the monitors whose alarms I had shut off, I could feel when the moment came. I remembered how much Burt loved Gunsmoke, and I was talking to him about that, trying to recall bits and pieces I’d seen of the show over the years, when he died.

  Upstairs, Bobby was adamantly stable, his room museum-quiet, though anesthesia and sedation had to have been flushed from his system hours before. Clayton was there chang
ing a dressing and hanging a fresh IV. A Gulf War vet, Clay stands five feet six inches and weighs in at 160, the bulk of it hard flesh and muscle. A trucker in ER once made some smart-ass comment about male nurses and suddenly found one’s face looming like a thundercloud four inches above his own.

  Clay looked up as I came in. “Man’s been in country.”

  “More than a few times, from what I hear.”

  “So he comes home and gets shot here in Willnot? That’s not even irony, that’s some other kind of horse entirely.”

  I nodded.

  “We had this platoon leader back on the sand who was always telling us the cards get dealt facedown, you don’t ever know what they are till you turn them over. He said that again right before he got shot clean through the head from damn near two thousand yards by a sniper. I’m done here, Doc. You need anything?”

  “Just dropped by to check on Bobby.”

  “I heard you took care of him when he was a kid.”

  “That was a long time back. Different lives now.”

  “For all of us.”

  Clay left and I stood by Bobby. Where was he? Dreaming of rice fields, acres of sand, bright tropical birds shifting on their perches, the smell of hot metal, the burn of mescal on his tongue? I took a last look at the monitors and started out, hearing behind me:

  “It appears I’ve been sleeping again.”

  As I turned back, Bobby sat up. Heart rate and blood pressure rose when he did so. For moments then he was quiet, breathing slowly, deeply. I watched heart rate and BP fall on the monitors.

  “You’ve been awake.”

  “A while.” He blinked. “Vision’s blurry.”

  “And?”

  “Back on familiar ground. Getting shot, losing a chunk of time. Kind of where I live.”

  He swung his legs experimentally off the side of the bed.

  “Need help?”

  He shook his head. “Wanted to tell you. I read one of your old man’s books. In Iraq, maybe Afghanistan. Cities, towns, America—everything we knew—couldn’t have been farther away. Like we’d been set down on another world and would never get back there, or maybe there was gone. Your father’s book was about a planet of sand and phantoms. He was writing about someplace else exactly the way we were living it. That book got passed from hand to hand till it fell apart. And then it got taped back together.