“. . do not bleed freely and the point of entry seals quickly, making the depths of the wound ideal for the propagation of infective agents. Tract should be laid open and excised and débridement carried out in the manner described under Contaminated Incised Wounds.”
Mother Rooney also heard a loud mauling at the door.
Silas and the old guy were making a ram attack on it. Monroe yelled unspeakably filthy words at them. His pages were still rippling. Then he threw the book out through the front bay window and there was a horrendous collapsing of glass. Then the ambulances came squalling up Titpea. By mistake, two of them came to the same house. Monroe ran on. There were steps and voices and the red lights outside.
Mother Rooney bellowed, “Is it the police, Harriman? I always thought they’d come in and stop Hoover’s cruelty to me. I thought they should have been at the tennis courts at Hoover Second’s crash, declaring it illegal and unfair, and restoring him to me. But they never came. They’re worthless. Tell them that if they try to get in the door.”
Harry Monroe studied the standing brooch on her chest. Do you pull it out? And because the brooch looked silly sticking in the old lady, he walked to her quickly and snapped it out, then flung it down the hall at the back of the house.
He unlocked the door, and there was big Mr. Silas, asking, “What is occurring? I’ve got the lover here.” The old man was riding piggyback on Silas’s huge shoulders; he had combed his white hair back with his own drunkardly, lonely spit, using his fingers, and he was scared to death. The two men waddled in, looking at Mother Rooney.
Monroe ran at Silas and slugged him in the eyes and Silas abandoned the old guy and fell into the dining room upon Monroe. A brawl could be heard by Mother Rooney. The table went over. Silas was reaching for Monroe, who kicked away and whimpered, and that was what the brawl amounted to.
The old boy lay dazed in the lobby, fallen where he was shucked off Silas. He had landed hard and didn’t move. Then his body, with its ruined hairdo, started sliding on the slick boards, face up, down toward Mother Rooney. He moved on down and she saw he was really a red old drunk.
The first ambulance crew thought he was the one and rolled him out expertly. The second crew noticed the woman bleeding. But she was standing now, and went out to the ambulance walking. One of the ambulance men had to go in and break off Silas from Monroe, and now Monroe was another case, and Mother Rooney sat beside him and petted him, all the way to the hospital.
1979–1985: Captain Maximus
Getting Ready
HE WAS FORTY-EIGHT, A FISHERMAN, AND HE HAD NEVER CAUGHT A significant fish. He had spent a fortune, enough for two men and wives, and he had been everywhere after the big one, the lunker, the fish bigger than he was. His name was Roger Laird, better off than his brother, who went by the nickname “Poot.”
Everywhere. Acapulco, Australia, Hawaii, the Keys. Others caught them yesterday and the weather was bad today and they were out of the right bait. Besides, the captain was sick and the first mate was some little jerk in a Def Leppard T-shirt who pulled in the big grouper that Roger hung because Roger was almost pulled overboard. Then the first mate brought some filets packed in ice to Roger’s motel door because Roger was ill with sunburn and still seasick.
Roger had been paying money all day for everything and so when he went to bed, ill, he inserted a quarter for the Magic Fingers.
Something went wrong.
The bed tossed around worse than the boat in four feet of waves.
There was vomit all over the room and when Roger woke up, hearing the knock on the door, he opened the ice chest and looked at the big grouper filets and before he could do anything about it, he threw up on the fish, too, reeling blindly and full of bile back to the bed, which was still on, bucking. His wife was still asleep — but when she heard the new retching sounds from Roger, him trying to lie down, she thought something amorous was up and would have gone for him except for the filthy smell he had.
She crawled away.
Mrs. Reba Laird was a fine woman from Georgia, with her body in trim. She had looked up the origin of the Laird name. In Scots, it means landholder. She knew there was an aristocratic past to her husband, for she herself had found out that her side of the family were thieves and murderers brought over by Oglethorpe to populate and suffer from the jungles of Georgia. She thought Roger was a wonderful lover when he wasn’t fishing.
Roger eschewed freshwater fishing in Louisiana, where the Lairds lived now, except for the giant catfish in a river near the Texas border. He got a stout pole, a big hook, and let it down weighted with ocean lead and a large wounded shad. He had read all the fishing tips in Field & Stream and he knew those giants were down there because there were other men fishing right where he was with stiff rods and wounded live shad.
The man to Roger’s right hooked into one and it was a tussle, tangling all the lines out — so Roger felt the mother down there, all right.
When they got the fish out, by running a jeep in and hooking the line to the bumper, it was the weight of ninety pounds.
The jeep backed over Roger’s brand-new fishing rod and snapped it into two pieces and ground his fishing reel into the deep muck. Roger saw the fish and watched them wrench it up, hanging from the back bar of the jeep. He was amazed and excited — but the fish was not his. Still, he photographed it with his Polaroid. But when Roger added up the day, it had cost him close to three hundred dollars for a Polaroid picture.
The thing about it was that Roger was not dumb. He was handsome, slender, gray at the temples, with his forehair receding to reveal an intelligent cranium, nicely shaped like that of a tanned, professional fisherman.
Roger watched the Southern TV shows about fishing — Bill Dance, others — and he had read the old Jason Lucas books, wherein Lucas claims he can catch fish under any conditions, even chopping holes in the ice in Wisconsin at a chill degree of minus fifty and taking his limit in walleye and muskie. Also, Roger had read Izaak Walton, but he had no use for England and all that olden shit.
It was a big saltwater one he wanted, around the Gulf of Mexico where he lived. On the flats near Islamorado, Roger had hung a big bonefish. However, he was alone and it dragged the skiff into some branches where there were several heavy cottonmouth moccasins.
He reached for the pistol in his kit. One of the snakes, with its mouth open, had fallen in the boat. Roger shot the stern floor out of the boat. As the boat sank, all his expensive gear in it, Roger Laird kept going down, reloading, firing at the trees, and when he went underwater he thought he saw the big bonefish under the water, which was later, as he recalled, a Florida gar. He could see underwater and could hold his breath underwater and was, withal, in good shape. But the.25 automatic shot underwater rather startled the ears, and the bullet went out in slow motion like a lead pellet thrown left-handed by a sissy. So Roger waded out of the water, still firing a few rounds to keep Nature away from him. Then got his wind back and dove in to recover his radio.
The Coast Guard came and got him.
Roger’s father, Bill Laird, was a tender traveler of eighty years in his new Olds 98. Old Mr. Laird found remarkable animals all over the land. Behind a service station in Bastrop, Louisiana, he saw a dog playing with a robin. The two of them were friends, canine and bird. They had been friends a long time. Grievously, one day the dog became too rough and killed the bird. The men at the service station were sort of in mourning. They stared at the nacreous eyes of the bird on the counter. The dog was under the counter, looking up sorrowfully at the corpse.