When I got back to Sherry with my meager loot she had already shifted herself on the floor and had gone through the cabinet under the sink.
There she had found a clean dishrag and an intact bottle of isopropyl alcohol.
"Maybe your friend kept it under there for cuts from cleaning fish," she said. "Whatever, it's got to help."
First things first, I used my knife to cut loose the blood- soaked sheet Sherry had used to tie off her wound and then the sweatpants fabric from around her thigh. The gash seemed less than ominous, like a half-moon slice from a pipe the diameter of a baseball bat handle. It was crusted shut with dried blood, but when I pinched the flesh on either side to open it a bit in order to pour in the alcohol, the hole opened and I could see how deep the cut went. Sherry twitched as I sloshed in the disinfectant and when I looked up at her there was a thin bright red fine of blood on her lip where she was biting against the pain.
"Sorry," I muttered stupidly.
She closed her eyes and bobbed her head, excusing me.
I then lay the clean dish towel over the wound and ripped off long pieces of the sheet and tied the bandage in place.
"We should try to keep your leg straight and immobilized. You don't know what that bone end is doing inside," I said.
"Yeah, I do," she said, her teeth now clenched together. "It's cutting, Max. I can feel it. We just gotta hope it isn't near an artery."
"You're right. But we can splint it," I said. "God knows there are enough pieces of slat wood here to do that. Maybe strap it in place with the duct tape. That'll keep it straight when we load you into the canoe."
Now she was looking more skeptical than pained.
"Got to, Sherry. Time isn't helping us any here."
"I know," she answered. "But I was just getting comfortable, you know?"
"That'a girl," I answered, again complimenting her guts and hopefully encouraging her spirit for what was going to be one hell of an ordeal we both knew was coming. I used the rest of the roll of tape on the hull of the canoe, first folding a piece of a Rubbermaid dish drainer from under the sink to cover the hole and then strapping it in place with the duct tape. While working on the patch I'd found three other punctures and a cracked rib toward the bow, but was sure the boat would still float. My next task was to find a replacement for the missing paddles and I discovered a long curved piece of mahogany under some debris that I recognized as once being the plaque backing for a bonefish trophy that Jeff Snow had mounted and displayed on one of the camp walls. The edges were smooth for grasping and pulling strokes. It would do.
I salvaged a plastic container that once held coffee and stuffed the last of the water bottles in. We could use it to bail water if we had to. I put it in the canoe under the stern seat along with the flashlight and then stored the headless shaft of the golf club along the boat's spine. Though I knew there had once been several flotation cushions and some lifejackets for the Snows' children here, I couldn't find a sign of one. A damp, fabric-covered couch pillow was the best we had left. I propped it in the bow. With everything set I dragged the canoe over to the west side of the remaining deck and slid it onto the water. Sherry was next and I flexed my jaw and moved over to her, clearing a trail of any sharp debris or nail heads, anything that might catch her clothes. I knew how much it was going to hurt to move her and she knew it too.
"I'm going to get you under the arms and kind of drag you to the canoe," I said. "I figure it's the best way to keep the leg from bending."
"Oooh, big cave man. How about just grabbing a hunk of hair," she said, again with the forced grin. I shook my head.
"Then I can lower you into the bow. You use that pillow for your head and prop the leg up on the seat. That'll keep it elevated and maybe reduce some of the blood flow," I said.
She nodded her head, steeled herself as I got a grip under her arms and lifted her. Only then did she begin to cry.
TWELVE
Harmon and his wife had stayed all night in the den that he'd built, at considerable expense, just for this. But he did not gloat over his foresight. He held his wife's hand while they watched the breathless weather reporters correct themselves every thirty minutes and then unabashedly make yet another bold prediction of the hurricane's path and speed and level of ferocity. The storm had gained in strength in the Gulf and then had taken a completely unforeseen loop and then charged due east into the South Florida peninsula. The red- dotted depiction of her path looked like a comical ampersand on the television screen, but Harmon was too scared for levity. Simone came ashore just south of Sanibel Island as a category three, and according to the supposed "hurricane hunter" aircraft, she maintained her bitchiness and speed right up until the Harmons' power went out and left them sitting in the dark, nothing but the familiar touch of their hands and the sound of the wind bringing its terrifying memories. Harmon assured his wife for yet another of the uncountable times of their safety. He'd designed this room himself. Placed it in the middle of their new home, no exterior walls, no windows. Those interior walls had been made with thickened steel studs and fiberglass-covered wallboard. Then the ceiling of this room was sealed with a single, watertight sheet of fiberglass. He'd inspected the entire roof of the house while it was being built for them, counting the double hurricane straps as they were nailed to each roof joist, not just every other joist as was the code. This was their bunker. Harmon took a lot of shit from the few neighbors he knew, just nodded when they called him paranoid. But he would never experience another Andrew. Never. He had seen how Andrew's winds had torn down the steel structure of the flight tower on the Homestead Air Force Base. Her winds had ripped away the corner bricks to expose four floors of rooms at the nearby Holiday Inn, sending the bedsheets and lampshades and luggage flying. Out in the Redlands' open fields, Harmon had personally seen a one-by-one-quarter-inch piece of wood lath the length of a child's yardstick that had been driven through the trunk of a coconut palm that was the thickness of a man's skull. When he told his friends those stories, they went quiet and stopped ribbing him. Even Squires stopped calling him a pussy and stayed away from talk of his partner's storm room.
Inside his bunker Harmon had gathered his books, most of them replacements, but a few from his collection that had been salvaged and restored after that 1992 storm. He'd begun his reading habit when he was in the military hospital in the Philippines and then later in Hawaii. He had been one of those early into the country of Vietnam, his group unnamed and barely accounted for. They were young, wire-strong Americans, most of them from the wilderness states with a talent for survival and abilities with firearms and blades that were used to killing large, warm-blooded animals. Tactical surveillance and assassination were their orders. Go in undetected, come out the same way. It was there that Harmon learned to fear no man. But they'd been sent into Cambodia, early. Made a designated kill. On the way out, maybe misled by a guide-turned- traitor, they found themselves in a dead-end gorge. The climb out was straight up. The Cambodian rebels, bent on revenge for the killing shot to one of their commanders, had seen the talent level of Harmon's group up close and needed an agent of death less vulnerable than themselves. So instead of confronting the Americans they set the narrow gorge on fire and let a strong and natural wind carry the consuming flame to the enemy. At one point the small six-man group, backed against the wall, had to decide to rush into the flame and kill what men they could or take a chance of climbing the wall with the flames following their track, stealing their air, a natural killing force unafraid and consuming. Against his judgment, Harmon was overruled and they climbed. The smell of his own burning flesh and those of his mates around him would never leave him. Only two, Harmon and an eighteen-year- old private, made it to the top. The private got them to their rendezvous spot. Both were flown by chopper to safety and Harmon, later, to the offshore hospital.