She lugged, over the bucket of cooling boiled water, set it on the floor, fished out the towel with the Bowie knife in it, holding it gingerly in the steaming towel, tossing it from hand to hand so she wouldn’t scald her fingers.
“You’re going to die sane,” she said. “You’re going to feel it coming.” Her eyes narrowed, her face got mean, she burst out, “You son of a bitch!”
She pulled up the second of the two chairs, sat facing him. She opened the hot towel, took out the Bowie knife, poised it above the infected wound.
“Grab onto something besides me or I’ll kill you before I want to.”
Her arm jerked. Pus squirted. Dain gave a single yell and was silent. She worked with the blade, wiping sweat from her face with her sleeve from time to time, rinsing out the wound with the boiled water and sterile towels when she was finished.
“Fun time,” she said to the silent Dain.
And poured about half the bottle of iodine into the opened wound. He screamed again, then was silent again. She felt his pulse; it was racing. Better than not going. She had no way to check his blood pressure, wouldn’t have known what was good and what was bad even if she’d had the proper instrument.
Finally, it was time for the coffee can full of seething maggots from the dead carp. She sat down on the edge of the bunk and very carefully began packing the fat squirming white creatures into Dain’s infected wound. When she had used enough, she wrapped it with gauze and used adhesive tape to bandage it.
Miles away in the swamp, two flatboats were pulled up on the edge of a broad, lakelike waterway. In a small clearing were the hunters’ two tents, their flaps closed. On a little natural raft of vegetation just below the low bank, a bullfrog carrunked away, swelling its throat to drive a ball of air back and forth over its vocal cords and create its thrumming sound.
Without warning a raccoon killed it with one savage crunching bite. The coon began backing off the raft of vegetation with the dead frog in its mouth. As it did, a bobcat on the bank gave a sudden high scream.
Maxton’s voice yelled, “Jesus Christ, what’s that?”
The coon had dropped the dead frog to flee. A powerful flashlight began playing wildly over the inside of one of the tents. The bobcat slunk into the underbrush with the frog.
“Your conscience, maybe?”
The tent flap opened and Inverness looked out. Maxton’s pale face appeared beside his in the narrow V-shaped opening. He was still waving the flashlight around.
“It... it sounded like... a woman’s scream.”
“That isn’t until we get to the camp,” chuckled Trask from the other tent.
Inverness could feel the pressure building inside. He just wanted it finished. He just wanted fucking Dain dead. Maxton and the two creeps could do what they wanted to Vangie. He let the flap drop back again.
“Go to sleep, Maxton. You’ll need it. I smell rain.”
Through the small mosquito-netted window on the east side of the fishing shack, dawn was staining the horizon with a narrow crimson line. But neither of them was awake to see it. Vangie was crowded into the same narrow bunk as Dain, his head resting partially on her breast and partially on her shoulder. His wound was tightly bound with fresh white gauze.
“No,” he said suddenly in a conversational voice. Vangie’s eyes opened. He began throwing his head from side to side. “Run, Albie!” he cried. “Ru...“
He subsided. She put her hand on his forehead. It was cool to the touch. The fever had broken in the night. Just some nightmare... But Dain thrashed again, almost throwing her off the bunk with the violence of his movements. She saved herself only by putting one foot on the rough plank floor.
“Marie! Look out!” He paused for a moment. Then, a loud cry, “Vangie!” Softer voice. “They’re... coming...”
She leaped out of the bunk, ran on bare feet to the table, pumped the dying lantern bright again. She sat down heavily and, hunched forward, regarded Dain intently, an almost frightened look on her face.
She shivered. “Why me... in his nightmares...”
When he had begun bucking like an out-of-control stallion, her old perverse reactions took over as they had so often in the past. She’d started to feel sorry for him. Yesterday, she’d wanted to kill him. This morning, when he had been bucking beneath her, she’d wanted to fuck him. It was as old as mankind, deny death with an act that affirmed life, sometimes created it. But here and now, with this particular man, her body’s reaction seemed a betrayal and made her angry.
“Goddam you,” she exclaimed, “if you’re going to die, I wish you’d do it.”
Dain made no more movements or outcries. Vangie’s head gradually slumped to her forearms, crossed in front of her on the table beside the slowly dying lantern. She slept again.
Midmorning, rain pouring from a leaden sky. Vangie was coming from the marshland in the pirogue through the driving storm, wearing gleaming raingear. Two cylindrical chicken-wire traps in the bottom of the boat were crawling with live crawfish.
Inside, Dain awoke to the sound of rain drumming on the roof, swung his feet to the floor and tried to sit up. On his second try he managed to stay upright. His right arm was immobilized under its gauze wrappings; he gingerly scratched at it. His color was better, he felt totally rational.
“Be a hero,” he said aloud to himself. “Stand up.”
He tried. Fell back on the bunk. Tried again. This time he managed to get to his feet, swaying but upright. He began a very slow progress across the room. Rested, hanging on the back of a straight wooden chair. Panting. He looked at the inviting bunk a continent away. Started back again. Made it.
Sat down. Rested. Stood. Started back toward the table.
Made it. Back to the bunk. Stayed upright.
Again. And again and again and...
The door was jerked open and Vangie was blown into the cabin by hurled sheets of rain. She set down her bait bucket full of live crawfish as the door slammed behind her. Only then did she see Dain on his feet, halfway between bunk and table.
The color left her face and her mouth fell open in astonishment. Perhaps Dr. Frankenstein’s face had worn a similar expression when the monster he had stitched together actually sat up and was alive.
She snatched the Bowie knife off her belt and held it low and in front of her like a knife fighter in a bout.
“You son of a bitch!” she shrieked at him.
Dain stared at her quite mad face. There was a calmness and detachment in him that was almost animal, perhaps the contract of death that naturalists have noted between prey and predator, perhaps the detachment that often comes to people who have suffered pain or been tortured for long periods of time.
“I’m starving to death and this thing is itching like hell,” he complained to her.
Vangie didn’t know what to do. She was ready to kill him and he was acting like a character in a TV drama. She covertly slid the knife back in its scabbard, picked up the bucket of crawfish and set it in the half-drum sink and started pumping fresh water into it as if the knife had never been in her hand.
“That’s, ah, not, ah, not surprising,” she told him. “I packed it full of live maggots last night, and repacked it this morning before I went out. Maggots eat only dead, infected flesh, leave the healthy flesh alone.”
Dain paled and sat down rather abruptly at the table. He stared at her, looked down at his shoulder, back up at her. He made a “whew” mouth and blew out a long breath as she carried the water and crawfish over to the stove.