Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) (8 page)

“There is so much that went with Mama,” she said, her voice cracking. “Things that should have been said but had been put off. And now it is too late.”

Neva stared at her.

“Don’t waste time with pride, Neva.”

Then, at the moment that she was thinking,
There; I got that out
, congratulating herself for not missing the opportunity, so enthused at her accomplishment that she was trying to come up with more that would seal the healing
between father and daughter, there came horrified shouts from the arena, the type of shouts that caused the blood to run cold.

She and Neva about ripped their necks off turning.

A horse had lost its footing rounding a barrel. For a horrified instant, it seemed the world held its breath as the horse desperately tried to find ground. Then the horse went over on its side, and the small rider shrieked.

“Oh, Lord…that’s little Pammy,” Neva said and spurred her horse toward the arena.

As she jumped off Lulu and dropped the reins to the ground, Rainey saw Harry sprinting for the fence. It seemed as if she blinked, and he was through the cable fence and running across the arena toward the girl with all his might. The girl’s horse, having scrambled to his feet, just about ran Harry down, but at the last minute, not breaking stride, Harry veered out of the way.

He was pushing a man out of the way by the time Rainey and the others got to the girl.

“I’m a doctor,” she heard him say and watched him go down on his knees beside the child.

The little girl was crying, “My leg…my leg,” and beside her a wild-eyed woman was saying, “My baby! Oh, baby!”

Harry took the girl’s hand, made her lie back and leaned over her, seeming to capture her eyes in a hypnotic manner. “We’re gonna take care of you, honey. I’m a doctor. It’s hurt, but it isn’t anything we can’t take care of.”

She was about twelve and small for her age, Rainey saw. Tears streaked her face, but her eyes locked onto Harry’s, and her cries stopped.

He jerked off his shirt and spread it over her and called for someone to get something more to cover her. Rainey ran and
got her mother’s pillow and sweater, and thought to grab the last of the napkins in case they could be needed.

Returning with her things, she pressed them on Harry and knelt beside him to help. She saw then the full extent of the child’s broken leg. A bloody stain was spreading on the girl’s pant leg. She looked at Harry’s face and could read nothing. Someone, probably J.T., called attention to the blood and said he had a knife for cutting away the pants, but Harry tersely said to leave it alone until they got to the hospital.

He made all his examinations with one hand, never letting go of the child’s hand gripping him. This made his effort to remove her boot difficult, and Rainey, seeing his intent, did it for him and reported that the circulation in her toes was okay. Only then did he seem to realize it was she who was assisting.

He said to the girl, “You’re gonna be the envy of all the kids at school, with a cast for everyone to sign,” making certain to speak to her as he and Rainey moved her injured leg to position a folded blanket between it and her good one, taking her mind off what was going on.

“I need belts, strips of anything to tie her legs together.”

Belts and girth straps and rope were instantly produced, as if coming out of the sky. Rainey had done this once before with a cousin, and she was able to work with him and his one available hand to secure the child’s legs together.

A Bronco appeared, and Harry swiftly lifted the girl from the dirt and placed her in the back seat. He hopped out and assisted the hysterical mother in beside her daughter, and then rejoined the two at the girl’s feet.

The Bronco started off, and Rainey stood there, holding the puppy by the lead, watching the figures through the dusty back window as the vehicle drove away as fast as possible over the clumps of grass.

“He’s a doctor,” Neva said beside her.

“Yes,” she said. Of all the things he could have been, she had not thought of this. She supposed she could understand more why he had been wanting to get away. She could imagine a doctor’s life must be very stressful.

It looked like he wasn’t getting away far enough, though.

Pennies In Our Pockets

R
ainey drove to the hospital in Buck’s truck. It had a true truck transmission and difficult clutch. She about ran into the back of a little Fiat when she stopped in the parking lot.

Upon entering through the emergency doors, she was immediately set upon by the child’s mother, who pressed Harry’s shirt to Rainey and proceeded to thank her in an overwhelmingly sincere fashion for bringing Harry to the arena. The woman credited Harry’s very presence as the sole cause for her daughter not suffering any internal injuries. In fact, she seemed to credit Rainey for Harry’s very presence in the world and appeared possessed of the belief that Rainey had known he would be needed and had therefore brought him deliberately to save the day.

Rainey thought the woman was either on drugs or needed some.

“Perhaps you should speak to the doctors,” she said, trying to guide the woman to a chair in the hall and looking around for a nurse to help. She had a sense that the woman, having held
herself together by a thread through her daughter’s emergency, was now giving way to her hysteria with gratefulness, in the way of someone who has perhaps been taking her child for granted.

“Oh, I could have lost her,” the woman repeated a number of times. She only barely sat in the chair and then popped up, about to grab the man mopping the floor and thank him, too, except that she was taken in hand by a nurse and led away to sign forms.

For a moment Rainey wondered about her mother’s pillow and sweater, and then she decided to give them up for lost—her mother would probably have been thrilled to know her old things had seen a crisis—and turned to find Harry.

A nurse at the desk said that she had seen him disappear moments before into the men’s room. Clutching his shirt, Rainey went to stand beside the door. She wanted to give him his shirt immediately. No doubt he felt odd walking around a hospital half bare. He would be cold. He had hard, wiry muscles, not an ounce of fat to provide warmth.

She stood there, smelling the hospital smell, which reminded her of her mother breathing her last in a hospital room, when she should have been breathing that last at home. She blinked to clear her teary vision and turned her thoughts to Harry.

It was amazing to learn he was a doctor. And she was a little annoyed that he had not told her, although she could not honestly find a reason why he should have. Would she have been as astonished to learn he was an airline pilot, or an IRS agent? She saw now that in her mind, for some reason, he had absolutely been a stockbroker, which, in retrospect, made her very shortsighted.

A sound reached her. Retching. From inside the men’s room.

It seemed pretty silly, but she thought she recognized it as being Harry’s retching.

She placed a tentative hand on the door and called through the crack, “Harry?”

No answer, except a cough.

She went inside and found him bent over a toilet. Immediately she soaked paper towels.

“You are in a men’s bathroom,” he said, straightening.

“I’ve been in one before.” She went to dab one of the wet towels over his face.

“Why does that not surprise me?” Scowling, he snatched the towel from her hand and wiped his face.

“I was only tryin’ to be of assistance,” she said, swallowing. The sense of needing to fall through the floor swept over her like a wave and made her angry.

A man came through the door and stopped dead, staring at her in surprise, then checking the door plaque, as if to make certain he had the right to be there.

“I was just leavin’,” she said, lifting her chin and breezing away from Harry and past the man, resisting the urge to shut his mouth for him.

Harry was right behind her.

“I brought Buck’s truck,” she said, thrusting his shirt at him and continuing on toward the exit at a pace just shy of running.

She heard his boots tap rapidly behind her on the tile flooring.

“Hey, what’d I say?” He grabbed her arm.

She gazed into his eyes and felt all manner of forceful emotional turmoil, which was both perplexing and embarrassing.

“Why do men always say that?” she asked, taking the offensive.

“What?”

“’What’d I say?’ Just by askin’, you know that you said an insulting and hurtful thing.”

He stared at her with surprise. And then a nurse called to him. “Pammy would like to see you.”

Confusion swept his face. Rainey told him that she would wait in the truck and hurried away, pushing out the glass doorway, tears threatening. She walked quickly, thinking. He certainly had not said anything to bring this on. And the child was okay—Rainey herself had had her leg badly broken and knew the child would recover and now have a story to tell.

Her brother’s voice echoed in memory:
You’re just too sensitive, Rain
. He had told her that since she was a child and always said it with his condemning frown, as if being sensitive was a fault needing to be scrubbed away.

Sometimes she thought that she had worked so hard at not being too sensitive that she had lost the ability to know what she felt at all.

Looking up, she suddenly saw a purple truck in the place where she had thought she’d left Buck’s red one. Then she realized that it
was
Buck’s truck and that the light from the pole lamp made it look purple. She went over and got behind the wheel, stuck the key in and sat there thinking for several long minutes, all thoughts that, one way or another, ended up being,
Well, I’ll be danged, he’s a doctor
.

She turned the key, and the truck rumbled loudly. She drove over to the doors, and a minute later Harry emerged, walking with his long-legged saunter out from the shadowed entrance into the dimly lit portico.

“She’s going to be okay, isn’t she?” Rainey said, as he got into the seat, folding in his long frame.

He nodded. “Her leg has two bad breaks but there’s no evidence of internal injuries. She’s young and will most likely heal fast.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his head.

She searched his face surreptitiously, then looked away
quickly before he could notice. She thought he looked a little pale, but not terribly sick.

She shifted and headed down the drive to the street, telling him that Buck and Neva had taken care of the pup, her horse and her rig, and would get them to Uncle Doyle’s, while in her mind she had a running argument with herself, wondering all about him and telling herself that none of it was her business and that she didn’t care, either.

Seeing a Sonic Drive-In, she was turning in even as she asked him if he wanted anything to eat. She pulled into a stall, carefully, so as not to knock the extended mirrors on Buck’s truck.

“I think I’ll get a foot-long hot dog with chili, and some fries.”

He studied the menu for a minute and said, “I’ll take a cheeseburger with everything, and milk.”

“Milk? Do you think that’s a good idea, especially with a burger?” she asked.

She had begun to suspect that he had a grave illness. It all fit. He might have some sort of brain tumor or other horrible illness, which had caused him to throw up, not his head injury. Maybe that was why he had come away from his family—to spare them his suffering, which he knew only too well, because he was a physician.

“I’m fine. And I like milk—does a body good, you know.”

She frowned, but turned to call their order into the speaker phone, and then they sat there in awkward silence. Rainey drummed her fingers on her open window.

“I sometimes throw up when I see a person in pain,” he said.

She looked at him.

“I guess I throw up when I have pain, too…but mostly it’s when I see another person’s pain. It’s no big deal. It’s like some people get nosebleeds. They just do.”

“That must be a difficult reaction for a doctor,” she said.

“It is,” he said and turned a bleak gaze out the windshield.

Watching him, she recalled him bending over the little girl, recalled the intensity of his eyes that had been all for the girl and how his voice had been calm and reassuring and his hands capable in the manner of a man who knew what had to be done and had taken hold to do it.

“You didn’t appear about to throw up when you took care of Pammy,” she said. “You took care of her and got her to the hospital before you threw up. My first husband, Robert, fainted at the sight of blood. Out like a light, no matter what. Once I was chopping carrots and about cut my finger off. I called for him to come help me, and I ended up having to wrap my finger in a paper towel, step over him and drive myself to the hospital. I got blood all over his BMW.”

As she had hoped, he gave that lazy, sad smile she had begun to associate with him when he was amused.

“Why do I think you bloodied his BMW on purpose?” he said.

“I didn’t…but I was glad.”

The girl appeared with their food. Rainey didn’t want to put the tray on the window of Buck’s truck; some people didn’t like doing that to their vehicles. She brought the food into the truck.

Harry produced several bills and told the girl to keep the change.

That the tip was a substantial one was evident from the girl’s broad grin and eager nod.

Rainey looked over at Harry, who was carefully unwrapping his hamburger with his long-fingered, broad-palmed hands. Her gaze lingered on his hands, remembering how competently and tenderly they had ministered to the hurt girl.

She had to tear her eyes away from those hands, but their image remained to echo in the back of her mind.

They were both curiously silent as they returned to Uncle Doyle’s. Rainey was wanting a bath and wondering if she would have to drive back into town with Buck’s truck, as she had left too hurriedly to coordinate plans, had simply caught the keys Buck tossed her.

When she mentioned this, Harry said he would take the truck to town for her if need be.

“You wouldn’t know where you were goin’,” she said, somewhat surprised, yet impressed by his willingness.

“How big is the town?” he answered reasonably.

Then the truck’s headlights lit upon Neva’s pickup and small, two-horse trailer, the horse’s tail hanging out, parked beside Rainey’s own bigger rig in Uncle Doyle’s graveled drive. Her heart leaped with the hope that her cousin and uncle had reconciled.

This proved to be something of the case, if not perfectly correct.

Neva was in the house with her father, with the door open and light shining through, and Buck was sitting out in Neva’s pickup truck, listening to the radio, twanging country music that he could, and did, drink beer by.

“That dog don’t much like men,” he said, leaning out the truck window into the silvery glow of the pole lamp when Rainey went over to give him the keys to his pickup and thank him for the use of it. “Ever’ time I go to get out of this truck, he growls.”

Harry was bending over petting the pup, who had come running and wiggled his entire body back and forth between Rainey and Harry.

Watching, Buck qualified, “Well, I guess he likes Harry. I must smell bad to him.” He gestured with his beer. “Neva’s on
in the house. I didn’t think I should go in. I think I rile that old man just by sight of me. I think he has somethin’ against facial hair.”

Rainey tried to reconcile the man she stared at with the man her cousin had described. Then Buck was calling to Harry, asking him to have a look at his elbow that was paining him when he bent it a certain way.

Rainey stepped back and watched Harry speak to Buck through the window. He went so far as to have Buck display said elbow. She had the uncharitable thought that Buck’s problem was likely from too much lying around and lifting beer.

Turning from the men, she went to the house. Neva met her at the door. Rainey figured she was probably keeping close to the screen door in order to breathe the fresh air. Uncle Doyle sat at the table in a swirling cloud of gray cigarette smoke.

Neva reported that she had given Rainey’s mare alfalfa but had not grained her, not knowing how much Rainey usually gave the horse. Then she said that she had just gotten off the phone with Juanita, Pammy’s mother.

“She told me Pammy’s doin’ real good. Her leg hurts some, but they’ve given her something for it, and she’s watchin’ the Disney Channel. I think they need to give Juanita something. She sounded on the very verge, I’ll tell you.”

“Juanita was born on the verge and just went over from there,” Uncle Doyle said. “She’s a pothead,” he explained, then puffed good on his cigarette.

Then Harry was coming in and Uncle Doyle was offering coffee all around. By the small talk that was made, Rainey was certain that her cousin had not told her father about her marriage. In fact, Uncle Doyle seemed to behave as if Buck was not sitting out there a couple hundred feet from his back door, and
Neva, wearing the desperate look of a woman balancing the affections of two men, seemed intent on not calling attention to it, either.

“I bought some cinnamon rolls,” Rainey said, unable to think of anything else to do but present some food. She brought the rolls and plates to the table, and the sight of them appeared to jar Neva into motion.

“I can’t stay to eat. I gotta go. Are you leavin’ tomorrow, Rainey?” Her eyes pleaded with her to stay.

“Not until evenin’. I’ll make chicken pot pie for supper. You all come over. Six o’clock.”

Neva blinked and then looked at her father. Rainey glanced at Uncle Doyle, who frowned down at his coffee cup but did not make a comment. Neva looked back at Rainey and nodded, hesitated, and then went over and kissed her father’s dry cheek before leaving.

Rainey went out the door with her cousin and, standing there, rubbing her arms against the fall chill, she watched Neva hurry across the yard beneath the light of a rising moon to Buck’s truck, where he now sat. It seemed like she had to wake him. Then she stuck her head in the window and kissed him in the darkness, where Rainey couldn’t see, although she witnessed her cousin’s leg come clear off the ground.

She watched until the red taillights of Neva’s and Buck’s vehicles were getting small down the drive. Then she looked down to see the puppy sitting right beside her feet. She touched his head quickly and gave in to scratching him behind the ears. Satisfied, he settled himself against the wall by the door, as if taking his place. She regarded him for a moment, and then went back inside the smoky glow of the kitchen, where Uncle Doyle was explaining about his weak knee and telling Harry the story
of how as a boy he had been run over by a tractor. Harry’s being a doctor apparently brought out people’s need to speak of their infirmities.