step out and walk faster. He wondered, should he go back and learn how Roebuck had fared. Maybe the man needed help. He could work up no enthusiasm for this idea, however. He really should get his arm back inside the car, he thought. Wonder how bunged it was, bad as it looked? To be safe he had better stop the car. He did so, but did not pull over on the shoulder because of the snow. There was no traffic in view anyway. He reached over, gritted his teeth, took hold of his left arm with his right hand. Oh God! He almost passed out. Then he was sick and his arm hurt so he could not put his head out of the window, resulting in his making a mess inside his car.
Presently he felt some better, and wiped the tears out of his eyes. Better get the damn arm in, give it one big jerk if no other way. Suddenly he seized the mangled arm and yanked it back into the car. Then his head bent back and he screamed several times. He couldn’t help it.
Well, the arm was in the car, and now he should get to a hospital probably. That was the ticket, a hospital. He shoved the gear shift into forward drive and fed the gas slowly so as not to jerk the car and hurt his arm. The machine rolled quietly, and driving was not as much work as he had feared. Damn car, he thought, runs like a baby now. Turned into an old man when it mattered. Trade the son of a bitch off, he thought, first chance I get. Swap it for a mule, if he had to. He looked down at his lap and saw a pool of blood from his arm. This scared him, for he had heard a man could bleed to death and never know it. He watched the arm closely, between keeping his eyes on the road, but the blood pool did not seem to be growing. He was going to make it, he decided.
He crossed a bridge over a small river and saw a series of billboards, which meant a town. He would keep his eye open for some building that looked like a hospital. He could not see any buildings extending above treetop level. A hospital worthy of the name would be higher than the treetops, he felt, and he began to suspect this was a jerk town that didn’t have a decent hospital. Another thing: The way Roebuck’s car had gone end over end, he felt Roebuck had been killed for sure. What if someone had seen his car give D. C. Roebuck’s car the nudge that sent it stem-winding into the bean field? Had anyone been watching? He tried to remember. He decided that as fast as he had been traveling and the rest of it, he wouldn’t have noticed the U.S. Marine Corps if they had been lined up in dress parade along the highway.
So he did not turn off the highway as he had planned. There was no stop sign, only a SLOW, which he observed carefully, then drove on. He could make it somewhere. Make it, hell, he thought, he could drive a hundred miles if he had to. Maybe a couple hundred would be better.
Presently he decided he could use a smoke. He felt out the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket and pulled forth one cigarette. He had to bend forward to reach the lighter on the dash and when he did, his left arm slid off his lap down into the narrow space between the left side of the seat and the car door. The pain pried his mouth open as if invisible hands had wrenched at his jaw.
As he had reached for the lighter, in the moment before pain paralyzed him, he noticed blood on the carpet. He looked down again. The cigarette had fallen from his lips, was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He stretched out his left leg and saw the cloth was soaked with red. The arm, unknown to him, had been bleeding down the trouser leg. He became frightened again. What if he passed out and the car went off the road? That would fix him, wouldn’t it?
It was late afternoon when Walter Harsh’s car turned into a service station across from a chicken hatchery in a small water tower town in northeast Missouri. A bell gave a
“Tell me, Jack, you got a good doctor in this town?” Harsh was not completely sure that the car had stopped moving. Pain made everything look as if it had a short red fuzz growing on it.
The attendant misunderstood. “How many gallons was that?” He rubbed at the windshield. His neck stiffened a little. He had smelled the vomit inside the car.
Harsh was completely confused by receiving a question in answer to what he recalled was a question the way he asked it. What had he asked the bird anyway? Ain’t in no shape to figure something out, he thought. But he was very scared inside, and being scared caused him to wish to be agreeable, so he smiled. It felt as if a hook had fastened under his upper lip and was dragging it up against his nose.
“How many you say, sir?”
Harsh could not think what he was doing here. Something to do with a damn building that would not stick up above the trees.
The attendant finished the passenger side of the windshield and walked around to the other. He saw blood on the side of the car, and there was a faint whistling sound as his breath left him.
“Holy Moses, Mister. What’s this stuff all over the side of your car?” The attendant bent down and peered, put the end of a finger in the blood, which was coagulated and about like gravy. “Holy Moses!” He ran into the service station and seized the telephone. “Flo, this is Jiggs. Get Doc over here in a hurry. Got a man here bled near to death.” The attendant now had a high thin voice. The telephone fell to the floor when he tried to put it back on the desk. He let it lie. He ran out for another look at the man in the car. “Harold! Harold!” He ran across the street to the chicken hatchery. Soon he came back with Harold, a stocky alert-eyed man. Harold said not to move the victim, never move an accident victim, and was Doc coming?
Harsh did not bother to comment. Lot of silly rummies, running around hollering, like chickens that had jumped out of that place across the street.
He closed his eyes, didn’t open them again till he heard another car squeal to a stop ten feet away, then a man’s voice. “What have you here, Jiggs?”
“Doc, I think he was shot. I didn’t touch him.”
Doc had the gaunt frame of an Abe Lincoln and the lazy movements and drawl of a cane-pole fisherman. “Jiggs, you better call Kenny Wilson for his ambulance.”
“Sure, Doc.”
A hypodermic needle was waved near Harsh’s face. “This won’t hurt. And you are going to be all right.”
Sure he was all right, Harsh thought, he was fine, they could fart around all day.
He was on a cart. A fat man in a white suit pushed him along between white walls under a beige ceiling. A nurse walked alongside, wiping the sweat off his forehead and from around his eyes. He was pushed into a room and the attendant left but the nurse stayed. Presently the doctor came in and stood looking at him.
“Feeling fine, eh?”
“You want the truth, Doc, I feel like I ain’t all here.”
The doctor got out a stethoscope, stuck the prongs in his ears and listened to Harsh’s chest. “You have a heart like a horse.”
“A galloping horse, maybe. What’s the matter with it?”
“It’s okay. How does your arm feel?”
“Feel? I don’t feel nothing.” They had cut off his arm, he decided. He was afraid to feel or even look to make sure, yet he wanted very much to know.
The doctor smoked a cigarette. He put his foot on a chair and knocked the cigarette ash into his trouser cuff. The room was soundless, but there was plenty of noise in the hallways. The bed smelled faintly of stuff they had put in the sheets to sterilize them.
“Tell me, Doc.”
“Yes?”
“My left arm, where did you cut it off?”
The doctor laughed as if someone had cracked a huge joke. “My lord, man. Your arm is full of medication, is all. You’re not going to lose the arm.”
“Oh. It didn’t feel as if it was there.” He felt good about the arm, and asked the doctor for a cigarette. The first puff made him sick and he tried to heave and his left arm hurt as though lightning had struck it. “Jesus God! What did you do to it?”
“Set it.” The doctor waited for the attack of pain to subside. “The arm was badly broken. But listen, the arm’s
