His thoughts were already blurred. Even if he could use the broken radio, it probably wouldn’t help. He was close to shock now. Losing too much blood. They hadn’t shared that steak and wine and made love tonight. And now they never would.
While he was thinking of Joyce, resigned to never knowing her beauty and grace again, he heard a single word, an urgent whisper against the dark silence. One word.
“Bullet!”
For an instant, Rusty Boyle didn’t believe it. Then, relief choking his voice, he gave the countersign to Luther Boyd. Again one word.
“Trigger.”
Triage, from the French, is a word defining the process of grading marketable produce. The word is also used on the battlefield and defines a similar process, except it involves the grading of wounds inflicted on human beings rather than foodstuffs destined for the marketplace. Thus, the dead are ignored as dysfunctional; the grievously wounded receive a low priority; terminally wounded soldiers are given the lowest rating of all; those with superficial wounds are treated first because they can be swiftly returned to their units or to battlefronts.
Thus, when Luther Boyd hurried through the trees toward Sergeant Boyle, he noted Ransom’s body but dismissed it with that single, disinterested glance. The man was dead, but Sergeant Boyle was alive, and in the process of triage that earned him a top priority.
“Where are you hit?” Boyd asked as he knelt beside the big sergeant.
“Left leg, up high.”
Boyd cradled the sergeant in his arms and gently stretched him full length on the ground. Then he unsnapped the small leather medical kit from his belt, removed a slender pair of scissors, and cut the blood-soaked fabric of Boyle’s trousers away from the gaping wound. Breaking open the plastic cover of a surgical bandage, he placed the thick antiseptic wad on the bullet hole in Boyle’s thigh, fixing it in place with adhesive tape. Boyd took off his belt and buckled it loosely around the sergeant’s thigh above the wound. He found a fallen tree limb from which he broke off a foot-long branch to use as a lever for the tourniquet.
“Hang on now,” he said while he eased the thick piece of wood beneath the belt circling the sergeant’s leg.
Boyd twisted the wood in a circular motion until Boyle said, softly, “That’s about it, Mr. Boyd.” Boyd took the sergeant’s hands and placed them on the piece of wood that had driven the belt deep into the muscles of Boyle’s thigh.
“Can you hold onto it? Maintain the pressure?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
Boyd searched gently through the sergeant’s pockets and found the smashed two-way radio and realized there was no way he could report the sergeant’s condition and position to the CP.
“I’ll try to get aid to you,” he said.
“Listen. I just saw him, not your daughter. And unless he’s got another gun, he’s out of ammo. Don’t worry about me. Go get the bastard.”
Luther Boyd gave the sergeant a soft pat on the shoulder and then sprang to his feet and ran swiftly into the shadows of the trees beside the massive wall of rock.
Chapter 21
They traveled south on Central Park West in the long green Cadillac, Samantha and Coke Roosevelt in a leather cocoon of luxury in the rear seat with Samantha’s chauffeur, Doc Logan, at the wheel.
Samantha put her head back and closed her eyes and rested her legs on one of the jump seats. She wore purple suede boots, a darker purple suede pants suit, with a jacket which flared at the hips and whose color was in brilliant contrast with her flaming red cashmere sweater.
Coke put a hand on the back of her shoulders and neck and began to massage her muscles, which under his probing fingers felt stiff as boards. She sat silently with her eyes closed, but he could feel some of the tension easing in her body.
“What else you prescribe, Coke?”
Coke fished a pillbox from the pocket of his leather jacket, opened it with a flick of his thumb, and held it out to Samantha.
“Come on,” he said, and removed a flask from an inner pocket of his jacket. She opened her eyes and looked down at the box of pills.
“Pop a couple of these and have a taste,” he said.
“Think that’s all I need?” But she took two of the pills and swallowed them with a sip of whiskey. Then she said, “Where’s Manolo and them black kids now?”
“Biggie collected them twenty minutes ago; they’re probably at that circus the cops are staging for the boob- tube set. What’s in this for us, Sam? She’s a white kid. Snow-white, the magic princess. What’s that got to do with our brothers and sisters?”
“I told the Gypsy I’d help him,” Samantha said, and winced as needles of pain pierced her temples.
“You need more than pills and booze to stop those ice picks punching your eardrums,” Coke said, looking at her clenched jaws and flaring nostrils. “You’re rippin’ yourself off, Sam, helping Whitey. And what’s worse, helpin’ honkie cops.”
“You’re a dumb nigger,” she said. “How come you’re talking like a headshrink?”
“Don’t take an Einstein to dig it. Look. You and me travel first-class. But most of the brothers have to kiss white-fuzz ass, grin, and bob their heads at ‘em, hoping, just hoping, they won’t ram their nightsticks up their butts. So when you help cops who do that to your people, then you put your head in a vise and crank the handle to hurt yourself as bad as you can.”
Samantha sighed and looked down at the backs of her hands. They were a nice color, she thought. There were places in the world men would write poetry about them. Places she could take Manolo.
“Lemme say something, Coke,” she said. “I can’t help the way I feel. I wish I could. God, how I wish I could! But something inside me won’t let me hate like you do.”
Coke smiled and took a swig of whiskey. “Let’s keep that our secret, Sam,” he said.
Her mother did not think that white people were devils. Neither did her grandmother. Nor had Emma and Missoura, who from faded photographs she knew as large, cowlike girls, her great-great-aunts and the daughters of slaves. They all had kind words for white folks, because a white man had once been kind to Emma and Missoura at a time when kindness to blacks had a high price tag on it.
But what a cruel kindness it had been, Samantha thought.
Emma and Missoura had worked for a white family, the Meltons, in the twenties in Mobile, Alabama. They lived in the black community on the outskirts of town, without heat, light, or plumbing facilities on meadows that were churned frequently into nightmarish quagmires by seasonal rains and hurricanes that swept across them from the Florida coastlines. But Emma and Missoura shared a comparative comfort with their elderly mother, subsisting on toting privileges and what money the Meltons paid them.
It had been on one of those rainy nights when Mr. Melton committed that act of kindness which sang down the filaments of time and caused Samantha’s throbbing headaches when the Gypsy asked her for official favors.
One night Mr. Melton had told his black chauffeur, Abraham, to drive the girls home during a rainstorm. Abraham had been frightened and had made some excuse. No chauffeur drove dumb black maids around in those days. So Mr. Melton drove the girls home himself. He had done the same thing on numerous other occasions. He had been warned by white friends that he was making a mistake; he was ridiculed for it. And he was threatened because of it.
But Mr. Melton hadn’t budged, had driven the girls home whenever the weather was too bad for the five-mile walk. If he’d done it just once, Samantha thought, she could write it off as just plain damn foolishness. But he had done it for the three and a half years the girls had worked for the Melton family.
The stories of Mr. Melton, sagas more like it, had come down to Maybelle Cooper like tales from King Arthur’s
