Chapter Seventeen
THE CHILDREN CROWDED AROUND HIS BED. The hydrocephalic and the mute, and those with clawlike hands and others who stared at him with big fishy eyes that never blinked. It made him wince, thinking how close he’d come to being kin to these kids. Tandy Mae and her cousin had been damn busy out here in Waynescross, building their family.
Shad lay on a thick goose-feather mattress under heavy blankets. The warmth and comfort drove him down toward sleep. He tried to stay awake but kept fading, his mind tumbling, until a strong male voice he recognized came into the room.
There were three hypodermics first, two in his belly and one in his upper leg. An IV kept popping out of his arm until the fourth try. Then the sewing needle went in and out of his flesh, in and out, all over the place. First his side, then his chest, and now, hell, he was being turned over and they were sewing up his ass.
He felt the splashing of his own blood as it spattered in one direction then dribbled away in another. The stains would never come out of the sheets or the pillows but he knew they wouldn’t throw anything away.
Shad drifted forward and back, and the pain was bad but not nearly as bad as before. He was no longer consumed by despair. The tranquilizers helped. His nerves had tightened. His hands formed into fists and he drove them against the bruised meat of his legs.
He angled aside in bed and saw Doc Bollar sleeping in a chair beside him, his doctor’s bag and a pot of coffee on the floor, the ceiling light on but three of the four bulbs burned out.
Night had fallen and the shimmering sky lapped through the window and across the blankets. The pumpkin- headed kid walked past the open doorway, peeked in, and caught Shad’s eye. The boy eased open the tiny jaws beneath the behemoth skull, and said, “You should sleep.”
Shad did.
He woke with a heavy aching deep in his belly but was mostly numb everywhere else. He tried to move and managed to roll up on one shoulder about three inches. That was it. Craning his neck, he could look over the edge of the bed and see bloody towels and rags on the floor. Unstrung catgut and rubber gloves. Clots of dried mud and moss, shards of glass, thorns and wood splinters.
Doc Bollar had a couple days of white whiskers on his face, and his heavily seamed face was clenched with tension. He hung himself awkwardly in the ladder-back chair as if he was uncomfortable and had piles from sitting in the Lusk outhouse to do his business.
Shad had never seen the man where he didn’t look like he’d just woken up five minutes before and had dressed without a mirror. His thin hair ran into one wild tuft that flapped backwards off his skull like the lid of a silver creamer flipping open. Doc was small and getting smaller every year, hunched with excruciatingly sharp shoulder blades jabbing up at his shirt. Thin except for his feet, which were so large you kept waiting for him to take off his brown clown shoes and show you it was all a joke. It made you think that without those big feet he’d go spiraling out the window like a stuck balloon.
His eyes opened, spun for a second, then immediately focused into a glare. “You know where you are, Shad Jenkins?”
“Yes. How long’s it been?”
“Three days.”
You couldn’t get away from symbolism no matter what you did to yourself.
“Who else is here?” he asked.
“Just Tandy Mae and her kids. I don’t have to tell you about them, do I?”
“No. What about her husband?”
“He run off a few months back.” Doc let out a groan as he shifted in his seat, slumped forward but didn’t stand. “Stop asking fool questions. You need a hospital.”
“What’s the damage?”
“You want to tell me what the hell happened to you first?”
“No.”
It got the old man pissy, made him look around like he wanted to pick up a hammer and smack Shad in the head with it. Instead, he grabbed the cold coffee and let out an exasperated sigh. The smell of curdling milk made Shad wince, and he could feel the thread pull in different spots of his face.
“I stitched you up okay, but your wounds are bad. I can say that you’re probably the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen. By all rights you should be dead from the blood loss alone. Bullet passed through a lot of soft tissue, missed your vitals. He must’ve been a fair distance off, whoever done it.” He waited for Shad to respond, and after a minute went on. “Any closer and you’d have been disemboweled. I’m going to have you transferred to Poverhoe City General.”
“No, Doc.”
“I should inform the sheriff-”
“It’s been three days. Tandy Mae didn’t do it already?”
“Apparently you told her not to. You were adamant, slid out of bed and scared her pretty bad. She probably thinks you were running moon and got shot by the federal law.”
“Good.”
“That’s not what happened though?”
“No.”
“You have trouble with those snake people?”
No reason to lie about it at this point. “Yes.”
“They might come after you.”
“No, they won’t.”
Doc was a little startled, and now the worry entered his face. “Did you…?” Leaving a nice dramatic pause, like he was on a dinner theater stage practicing a scene out of
“What?”
“Did you kill them all?”
“Stop talking crazy, Doc. Why didn’t you call Increase Wintel when you first saw me?”
An expression of shame contorted Doc’s features. He jutted his clown feet out and stared down at them. “From what I can gather, you went up Gospel Trail Road. If it had been my sister, I might’ve done the same. I had no answers for your father when I examined Megan’s body. Neither did the sheriff. That rankles me. I was raised here in the hollow same as you. I know about them hills.”
Doc stopped as if that explained everything. Shad frowned but let it slide because it served his own purpose. This is what the advance of science and medicine had come to in this county?
Maybe Doc was cutting him a break because he felt guilty for botching Megan’s cause of death. Or maybe he was just sick of the hollow and of Shad and of the ill babies he kept bringing into the world.
“Now that you’ve… finished your business with that road, I have to report this, Shad Jenkins.”
“I’m not quite finished yet, Doc.”
“Son-”
When they wouldn’t listen to you when you were on your back, you reminded them of when they’d been in the same spot. “Do you remember when I’d come across you out cold on the lower banks with your feet in the water? I’d stop and pick you up and drive you home before you floated off. Your wife always tried to pay me forty dollars. I’m not sure how she arrived at that price.”
“It’s all the money she ever had at one time,” Doc said. “I kept her on a strict allowance ’cause she’d go all over the damn county looking for garage sales and bring home the most ugly piece of useless furniture you’ve ever seen. Wicker. All this goddamn wicker. Folks who make wicker seats are inhuman and ought to be torched at the stake.”
Doc had some issues. “Can’t say I blame you then.”
“You’re putting me in a bind.”
“Maybe three days ago you were in a bind. Now it’s more or less an afterthought.”
