The driver dropped the rest of us off at the union hall. My Cadillac was powdered with white dust so thick that I couldn’t see inside the windows.
“Come in and I’ll put something on your head,” Rie said. The truck rattled back down the road toward the tavern.
“Unless I figured that sheriff wrong, he’s already been to the hotel and my suitcase is waiting for me on the front step.”
“Your eye is starting to close.”
“I keep a couple of glass spares in my glove compartment.”
She put her arm through mine and moved toward the porch.
“All right, no protest,” I said.
“I thought he’d killed you.”
“I don’t believe you’re a hard girl after all.”
“Your eyelids turned blue. I even cried to make that asshole take you into emergency receiving, and he shot me the finger.”
“Don’t worry. I’m going to make this fellow’s life a little more interesting for him in the next few weeks.”
“I didn’t think you believed in charging the barricade.”
“I don’t. There’s always ten others like him who’ll crawl out of the woodwork to take his place, but you can’t fool with the Lone Ranger and Tonto and walk away from it.”
We went inside, and I sat in a chair while she washed the lump on my head with soap and water. The tips of her fingers were as light as wind on the bruised skin.
“There’s pieces of rock and dirt in the cut. I’ll have to get them out with the tweezers,” she said. “You should go to the hospital and get a couple of stitches.”
“Do you have a quart of milk in your icebox?”
She went into the kitchen and came back with a carton of buttermilk and a pair of tweezers in a glass of alcohol. I drank the carton half empty in one long chugging swallow, and for just a moment the thick cream felt like cool air and health and sunshine transfused into my body, then she started picking out the pieces of rock from the cut with the edge of the tweezers. Each alcohol nick made the skin around my eye flex and pucker.
“What are you doing? I don’t need a lobotomy.”
“You probably don’t need blood poisoning, either.” Her eyes were concentrated with each metallic scratch against my skin.
“Look, let me have the tweezers and give me a mirror. I used to be a pretty fair hospital corpsman.”
“Don’t move your head. I almost have it all out.” She bit her lip and squeezed out a splinter of rock from under the cut with her finger. “There.”
Then she rubbed a cotton pad soaked with alcohol over the lump.
“There are other ways to clean a cut. They ought to give first-aid courses in the Third World before you kill somebody with shock.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, and went into the kitchen again and returned with a piece of ice wrapped in a clean dish towel. She held it against my head, her almond eyes still fixed with a child’s concern.
“A cold compress can’t do any good after the first two hours,” I said.
“What was that Bean Camp stuff about last night?”
“Nothing. I create things in my head when I try to run up Jack Daniel’s stock a couple of points.”
“Were you in a prison camp during the war?”
“No.”
The whiskey edge was starting to wear off, and gray worms and spots of light swam before my eyes when I tried to stand up. She pressed her hand down on my shoulder.
“You ought to pull the fishhooks out. You’re all flames inside,” she said.
“I feel like I’ve been dismantled twice in three days, and I’m not up to psychoanalysis right now. It seems that every time my brain is bleeding someone starts boring into my skull with the brace and bit.”
“Okay, man, I’m sorry.”
“I’ve got a brother that can make you grind your teeth down to the nerve with that same type of morning- after insight. There’s nothing like it to send me right through the wall.”
“So I won’t say anything else,” she said.
I felt myself trembling inside, as though all the wheels and gears were starting to shear off against one another at once. My palms were sweating on my knees, and I realized that my real hangover was just beginning.
“Let me have one of your cigarettes,” I said.
She laid the ice compress down, lit a cigarette, and put it in my mouth. The smoke was raw in my throat, and a drop of sweat rolled off my lip onto the paper.
“Does it always take you like that?” she said.
“No, only when I’m stupid enough to get my head kicked in by a redneck cop.”
I smoked the cigarette and exhaled slowly, while my temple and eye beat with pain, then pushed the sweat back into my hair with one hand.
“Look, you’re not a drinker, so you don’t know the alcoholic syndrome,” I said. “I’m not a shithead all the time.”
“Sit down. Your cut is bleeding.”
“I’m going down the road. I’ll take a couple of those hot beers with me if you don’t mind.”
My legs were weak, and the blood seemed to drain downward in my body with the effort of standing.
“You can’t drive anywhere now.”
“Watch.”
“What you’re doing is really dumb.”
I started toward the counter where the remaining bottles of Jax stood, and a yellow wave of nausea went through me. The sour taste of buttermilk and last night’s whiskey came up in my throat, and I felt a great throbbing weight on my forehead. My cigarette was wet down to the ash from the sweat running off my face.
“I really got one this time,” I said.
“Come in the back,” she said, and put her arm around my waist. My shirt stuck wetly against my skin.
We went down the hallway through a side door into a small bedroom. The shade on the window was torn, and strips of broken sunlight struck across the floor. An old crucifix was nailed against one wall above a Catholic religious calendar with two withered palms stuck under the top edges. I drew in on the dead cigarette and gagged in the back of my throat. You’ve just about made the d.t.’s this time, I thought. Work on it again and you’ll really get there.
My body felt as rigid as a snapped twig. She pressed me down on the edge of the bed with her hands and turned on an electric fan. The current of air was like wind blowing over ice against my face.
“Lie down and I’ll put a dressing on your cut,” she said.
Something was rolling loose inside me, and my fingers were shaking on my knees.
“Look, you don’t need—”
“Lie down, Lone Ranger.” Then she leaned over me with her breasts heavy against her blouse, her brown face and wild curly hair a dark silhouette above me, and pressed me back into the pillow.
She rubbed ointment on the cut in a circular motion with her fingers and taped a piece of gauze over it. I could feel the heat of the sun in her skin and hair, and her eyes were filled with a dark shine. I touched the smoothness of her arm with my hand, then the light began to fade beyond the window shade, the fan blew cool over my chest and face, and somewhere out in the hills a train whistle echoed and beat thinly into a brass sky. I heard her close the door softly as on the edge of a dream.
It was afternoon when I awoke, and the wind was blowing hard against the building. The shade flapped back from the window, rattling against the woodwork, and dust devils spun in the air outside. The boards in the floor quivered from the gusts of wind under the building, and there were grains of sand on my skin. My head was dizzy when I stood up, my face tingling, and I could taste the hot dryness of the air in my mouth. I tripped over the fan and opened the door to the hallway. The sudden draft tore the religious calendar and withered palms from the wall, and the mobile made from beer bottles clattered and twisted in circles on the ceiling in the main room. I leaned against the doorjamb in the numbness of awaking from afternoon sleep. Through the front screen I could see the
