As she dropped lightly down from the loading platform of that odd warehouse and moved toward them in her already muddy high-buttons, she declared, "I'd just about given you and my microscope up for lost. We're in a lot of trouble here, Custis. As you see, I've been able to commandeer this empty icehouse for use as an emergency ward but without proper lab equipment-"
Then Longarm was down off the wagon to steer the educated lab technician around to the tailgate as he tersely explained, "Don't take no microscope to see what's ailing this customer I brought you. But for the record, those teeth marks all over his right knee were left by a gator, not one of Doc Finlay's mosquitos!"
When Longarm unfastened the tailgate, the well-rounded Norma got up under the canvas with surprising grace and proceeded to rip what was left of Papacito's pants off below that tourniquet. As she took in the full extent of the Mexican's injuries she whistled softly, then declared, "They do tend to overdo things here in Texas. We have to get that tourniquet off if we're to save that leg. But first we have to tie off some arteries and make a hundred and fifty stitches, minimum. So we'd better get him inside, on the table, the day before yesterday!"
She added something about going inside for a pair of stretcher bearers. But Longarm was already following her with the chunky but smaller man in his arms, like an injured child. So Norma told all of them to follow and they did, like a worried line of ducklings.
It was warmer inside than out, despite the gloom under the bare wooden trusses holding up the big cork-lined roof. Longarm saw lots of the heat had to be rising from the hundred-odd folks filling most of the folding cots spread across the sawdust floor. Nobody had more than a sheet covering them. But some were twisting like worms caught on a tile walk by a baleful rising sun. The smell was disgusting as well. Pine oil and fresh linens could only do so much when folks took to puking and shitting all over themselves and a sawdust floor.
As Norma led the newcomers through some hanging sheets and into a corner she'd improvised as a sort of lab and autopsy or operating room, Longarm glanced up through the gloom and said, "You say this here is supposed to be an icehouse, Doc?"
Norma pointed at two kitchen tables with a door across them. "Make him as comfortable as you can there while I scrub up again. They tell me they used to store ice from New England in here, before that meat packer down the other way installed ice-making machinery a year or so ago. I commandeered this layout as soon as they assured me it was the nearest we could get to a hospital ward here in town. That Coast Guard clinic is too small as well as too far away. This space is too small for all these repeat customers we keep getting, bless their fevered brows."
Longarm told the four Mexican folks they'd best wait outside. None of them argued. But as the older daughter ducked out Norma said, "Me and my direct approach. I didn't mean every one of them. Somebody who can speak both languages might save us a wrestling match here."
Longarm allowed he could likely translate any medical jargon a hoe farmer was likely to understand, so the motherly-looking Norma swung around from her washstand with a lethal-looking load of cutlery on an enameled tin tray, saying, "I'm low on morphine to begin with, and the dosage can be tricky when a patient's in shock after losing Lord knows how much blood. So I want you to tell him it would be better if I irrigated and sutured his wounds without any anesthetic. Tell him he won't feel much more pain than... well, a whole lot of pinpricks."
Longarm moved to the far side of the improvised operating table, nudged the semi-conscious Mexican, and told him they were going to have to hurt him. Since he was talking to a grown man, not a cry-baby, he felt no call to bullshit about pinpricks. The badly bitten farmer smiled gallantly up at the woman in white and croaked, "Que bella es. Quando comienza?"
Longarm said, "He thinks you're pretty and wants to know why you ain't started, Miss Norma."
So she picked up a wet sponge and wrung it out over the gory mess. The liquid rinsing blood and crud from the lacerations looked like water. Longarm suspected it was something stronger when the man on the table stared thunderstruck and shouted, "Ay, mierda! Eso es una mierda!"
So Longarm assured the old gent it was more likely alcohol than the shit he suspected. But he doubted the Mexican heard him. As he shot a questioning glance across the table, Norma Richards assured him, "Only comatose. Just as well. I want to suture these torn arteries before I unfasten that tourniquet, and that's the part that seems to inspire unpleasant remarks about a poor old woman who means well."
As he watched her clean, skilled fingers mend the ends of what a lay man could take for bloody macaroni, he said, "Aw, you ain't so old, considering how much training it would take to get so good with that curvy needle, Miss Norma. But no offense, whatever happened to the doctors, military and civilian, in these parts?"
She irrigated the unconscious man's knee some more as she made a wry face and said, "The pharmacist's mate in command of the Coast Guard clinic is just outside, running a fever we can't get down with quinine sulfate, if that's what's in those brown bottles he issued me before he was stricken himself. Now that you've brought my own medical supplies, however limited, I may be able to get a handle on what on earth they've all been coming down with!"
He said he'd be glad to get his own possibles back, and asked what had happened to the civilian docs a town this size would surely have.
She picked up a smaller needle and began to close the wounds of the ripped-open farmer as she said simply, "There were three, they say. I never met any of them. One died and the other two skipped out before I got off that coastal steamer a million years ago. They say the local doctor who caught it and died had been the only one trying to fight whatever it is we're fighting. The other two said there was no use risking the lives of themselves and their families on something they just didn't understand."
She rinsed away more blood and made another skillful stitch as she pensively added, "Maybe they had a point. The oath physicians take makes no mention of running off and leaving patients to die, but it happens. YOU should have seen the stampede we had over to the northeast in New Orleans in the last bad yellow fever outbreak."
Longarm nodded soberly. "I heard. This fever we got in Escondrijo ain't like yellow jack?"
She shook her head, either unaware of or not caring about the one soft brown strand of hair on her sweat-beaded brow, as she replied, "I'm sure it can't be that. Nobody's been vomiting black bile, even in the last stages. It's more like the classic plague, or malaria, save for the fact that quinine sulfate seems to have no effect at all. I'll know better as soon as I finish here and administer some quinine I know to be the real McCoy."
Longarm didn't ask any dumb questions. She'd said she'd gotten the Medicine she'd been giving them from government medical stores. But on the other hand, he'd arrested more than one son of a bitch for cheating the taxpayers with worthless drugs and inedible Indian rations.
Before he could ask any brighter questions, the sheeting parted and a blandly pretty gal, wearing too much face paint and red hair Mother Nature had never issued her, popped in, the butcher's apron over her blue calico summer frock smeared with all sorts of crud. She sobbed at old Norma, "I think the poor boy from the Coast Guard station must be dead, Doctor Richards!"
Norma went on stitching as she muttered something to her self, and then asked Longarm, "Would you know, and could you make sure for us, Custis? As you see, I only have four arms."
Longarm allowed he'd seen a few dead folks in his time, and followed the mock redhead outside. As they passed the cluster Of worried Mexican folks, he assured them in Spanish their Papacita was doing just fine. The older daughter still tagged along as he followed the fancy nursing sister across the cavernous icehouse between the rows of close-packed cots.