“Second door to the right,” the driver said, and we went there. I sagged down on a white, tight table, the sheets straining under me. In a minute or two they brought Lewis, but didn’t bring him into the room. They put him on a table outside the door, and then noiselessly rolled him on, toward the faraway window. I lay and held my old friend, my side.
The doctor came back on soft feet. “Let’s see now, buddy,” he said. “Can you raise up just a little bit? Does this zipper still work?”
“I think so,” I mumbled. I tried to sit up, and made it easily, and even zipped the zipper down with my good hand. He took off my tennis shoes and I slithered out of the remains of the flying suit. My shorts were stuck into the wound like the nylon I had bound up in it, but he put something painless out of a bottle in the whole mass of cloth and flesh, and the shorts began to come away. He threw what I had been wearing into a corner, and started working on my side.
Things were dissolving there. Piece after piece of cloth, or of me, softened, softened, and came away, and he kept throwing them down below me, in the bare room. My side was breathing like a mouth, and it did not feel at all bad anymore, only stranger and more open.
“Good Lord, fellow,” he said. “What’s been chopping on you? Looks like somebody hit you in the side with an ax.”
“Does?”
Then more professionally, “How’d you do this?”
“We were trying to do a little illegal bowhunting up and down the banks of the river,” I said. “It’s not such a good thing to be doing, but we were doing it. We were going to miss the regular season, and we wanted to try it this way.”
“How in hell did you manage to shoot yourself with an arrow? I didn’t think it could be done.”
He was working and looking into my blood all the time, very busy and talking calmly.
I talked calmly. “I had the bow and arrows in the canoe with me when we dumped. I tried to hold on to the bow because I didn’t want to be in the woods without any weapon at all, and it sliced up my hands.” I held up the hand the arrows had sliced up, just as I said, “and the next thing I knew I had tangled with a rock and something was going through my side and the bow was gone. I don’t have any idea where it went. Downriver; that’s all I know.”
“Well, it made a good clean cut,” he said, “that got ragged. Part of it is real clean, and part of it is hacked up and looks sawed. You’ve got some kind of foreign matter in here, that I’m going to have to get out.”
“There was some camouflage paint on the arrows,” I said. “That’s what it is. But there might be something else in there, too. God knows what’s in there.”
“We’ll get it out,” he said. “Then we’ll sew you up like a quilt. You want a shot?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Scotch.”
“You can have another kind, before you get the Scotch,” he said. “You might have to wait awhile for the Scotch; this is a dry county.”
“You mean you don’t have any moonshine in this here hospital? And you way off in the country like this? What the hell is north Georgia coming to?”
“No white lightning,” he said. “We advise against it. Contains lead salts, most of it.”
He gave me a shot in the hip, and started working again. I looked out the window at the closing green of the day. There was nothing to see but the changes of green.
“You want to stay here with us tonight? There’s plenty of room. We’ve got a whole hospital. And you’ll never get another chance like this one; I can tell you. It’s peaceful here. No shotgunned farmers. Nobody who tangled with a tractor. Nobody on glucose from a drunk smashup. Nobody but you and your buddy, and a little boy, a snakebite case. And he’ll be gone tomorrow. Copperhead poison is not such hot poison.”
“No thanks,” I said, though I would have stayed with Lewis if I thought there was any use in it. “Get me sewed up and tell me where there’s a rooming house I can stay in. I’d like to call my wife, and I’d like to be by myself. I wouldn’t like sleeping in a ward, if I can help it, or in a hospital room if I don’t absolutely have to.”
“You’ve lost some blood,” he said. “You’ll be pretty weak.”
“I’ve been weak for days,” I said. “Give me whatever you need to give me, and I’ll get going.”
“I sent your friend, the other fellow at the canoe, to Biddiford’s, down in town. They’ll treat you OK. But if I were you I’d stay out here tonight.”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll be all right. Tell the police where I am. Just drive me over there and take care of Lewis.”
“The other doctor’s working on him. It looks like a complicated situation, with him. He’ll be lucky if there’s not some gangrene building up around that place. That’s a hell of a break.”
“We’re lucky we’ve got you,” I said.
“You’re fucking aye,” he said. “Hands of an angel.”
He drove me in his own car down through town, and in the main filling station were sitting Lewis’ station wagon and Drew’s Olds. I went in, up tight in my side but not having to hold it together anymore, and talked to the owner, and got the addresses of the Griner brothers so that we could send them the rest of the money. Lewis had arranged it all, and I had to have the owner of the station give back to me what I was supposed to do. I didn’t have enough money, but I could either get it from Lewis or mail it in when I got back to the city. The main thing was that the keys were there. I said good-bye to the doctor, told him I’d come out to the hospital the next day. Then I called Martha and told her something bad had happened, that Drew had drowned and Lewis had broken a leg. I asked her to call Lewis’ wife and say he was in the hospital up here and would be for some time, but that he was going to be OK. If Mrs. Ballinger called her or Lewis’ wife they were just to say that we’d be back in a couple of days. I wanted to tell Mrs. Ballinger about Drew’s death myself. I said I thought I’d be home about the middle of the week.
I drove Drew’s car down to Biddiford’s, a big frame house booming and knocking with people and light. Everybody was at supper around a long swaybacked pine table with strips of flypaper hanging down to within a foot of it. Bobby was there with his face working around a mouthful of food, and I winked at him and sat down. They made a place for us—farmers, woodsawyers and small merchants—and I lost interest in everything but eating. Fried chicken came around me—came at me from every angle—again and again, and potato salad, and heavy coarse biscuits and gravy and butter and collards and lima beans and big hominy and turnip greens and cherry pie. It was good; it was all good.
Afterwards a woman showed me upstairs to a room with a big double bed, which was all they had left; Bobby was somewhere else. But for some reason I was too dry; my mouth was dry, and my skin. So I went down and took a shower in the basement, in the blue-green country night, where I stood with the river-water pouring over my head, making my tight new bandage grow like a heavy side pack, making it bleed a little with the warm water. I nearly went to sleep there, but woke up as the water gradually turned cold. Then I went upstairs, my hair and side wet, and got in bed. It was over. I lay awake all night in brilliant sleep.
After
When I woke up I was holding on to my side again, a tight, glowing package. I came awake fairly fast, because the midmorning sun, or so it looked and felt, was beginning to sting my eyelids. I was in a big country room with loud reddish curtains and a huge mirror on the wall opposite me, a little bathroom behind me, a dresser with all the knobs missing on one side, and a hooked rug on the floor under the bed and all around.
I lay and thought. I wanted to see Bobby first, and then Lewis. I got up, naked except for the bandage, which felt very much like clothes of some sort, and picked up what was left of my flying suit from the floor, clotted, armless and ragged. I sure didn’t want to put it back on, but I did, and felt for some money. I had a couple of bills that appeared to have been made and issued by the river, but they were still money, and we needed it. I left the knife and belt in the room, and started to go after Bobby. There, in the mirror, I was the survivor of some kind of explosion, with a shirtsleeve ripped off and a pants leg blown open, bearded and red eyed, not able to speak. Out of this I smiled, very whitely, splitting the beard.