The Pines (6 page)

His sudden anger fading, Wes went back to cleaning out the buck’s leaking intestines, a noxious mess shot with black. He didn’t pay much attention to the other man’s talk. Al was always going on about sex. Specifically, he was always going on about sex with old lady Stewart. In spite of having been past her prime and exceedingly obese for as long as anyone could remember, Lizzie Stewart had been covered by every man and, if there were any truth to rumor, half the farm animals in four counties.

“She come over to the gin mill t’other day, while I was checkin’ the still. I really let her have it.” He thought a minute, scratched at his stubble of gray-blond beard. “You wouldn’t believe the sorta thing she likes, boy.”

Though he’d had plenty of opportunities to discover the proclivities of the lady in question, Wes dutifully responded, “You dog.”

“Marl stuck ’is head in the door while I was goin’ at ’er, an you shoulda seen the eyes bug outta his head.” Al guffawed. “That boy took off like the Leeds Devil was after ’im. Couldn’t find’im fer a hour.”

Wes finished trussing the buck. He put the jacklights away in the rucksack and hefted his shotgun. “We best get started ’fore it gets any later.” He rubbed at his eyes. “All that rum we drunk last night. Meat’s gonna spoil in this heat. We shoulda been long gone as is.” He saw that Al hadn’t moved. “‘Less you want ’em to catch us outlawin’.”

“You always worryin’, boy.” Al reached for the tin cup. “I ain’t even had no coffee yet.”

She took the rig down an infrequently used expanse of old highway—the call hadn’t given an exact location. The sun felt blisteringly hot on Athena’s left arm and shoulder, and she glanced to the side: a burned-out section of forest, all scorched earth and blackened stumps. Flame red flowers dotted the charred earth though, and glimpsing them, she smiled a little. The ride seemed almost smooth, save for a new knocking in the engine.

Behind her, Doris still lectured. “Then a lot of the time victims refuse treatment, or have left the scene, then what you do is—”

Athena interrupted, “There it is.” Her pulse quickened in anticipation.

“That siren sounds like it’s dying,” said Doris, as she climbed up front. “It’ll be the next thing to break down, I guess. Wouldn’t you know the first call we get would make a liar out of me? I just got done telling the kid we don’t get car accidents.”

“Well, that ain’t true anyways, Doris.” Jack turned to Larry. “We got this tractor-trailer wreck once where we had to scrape the guy up with a fish knife.”

“Cut it out, Jack,” demanded Doris.

A blue and white state police car, just parking on the shoulder of the road, honked a greeting. The highway shimmered in waves of heat, and two shattered vehicles hissed, angled on opposite sides of the road. Pulling the ambulance over by the nearer car, Athena turned off the siren as Doris jumped out into the white haze. Larry clambered down behind her, blinded after the dimness of the rig’s interior.

A uniformed trooper called over. “You handle this, Doris?”

Crowbar in hand, Athena climbed down, mumbling to herself. “One of these days we’re going to have to deal with someone she doesn’t know. Bound to happen.”

“I’ll tell ya whether or not we can handle it after I see what it is,” Doris muttered. “Jack, Athena, take this one. You come with me, Larry.” She called back to the trooper. “What happened here, Fred?”

“Header, looks like.”

Doris sprinted to the car on the far side of the hot asphalt. Nervous and eager, Larry followed.

Halfway out onto the buckled, shining hood, a woman sprawled in a welter of blood and glass, and while Doris checked for vital signs, Larry squinted at the burning glare. The woman’s hair was red now. One side of her face was laid open in the sunlight, her back teeth grinning blue and yellow.

The empty road ran parallel to the highway, down which flowed a steady stream of traffic, placid and so close.

The tar was soft and blistered. No air stirred. Larry felt an internal doubling of the heat. His shadow turned black, and the road seemed to be burning through the bottoms of his sneakers, while the sun glinted around the blood on the car. Bits of steering wheel lay all around him.

“Fred? Call the coroner’s wagon to come get this one.”

The trooper stood by the police car. “Will do, Doris. Sure is a scorcher today.” He stooped to the window and said something to his partner.

“How you doin’ anyway, Fred?” Abruptly, Doris squeezed Larry’s arm. “Go sit over there and put your head down. You’ll be all right in a minute.”

“Just fine, Doris,” the trooper replied. “How’s yourself?”

“Can’t complain.” She peered into the police car. “Don’t say hello, Jim.”

The trooper in the car shook his head and muttered. “Goddamn wreck shouldn’t even be allowed on the road.”

“What’s that, Jim? You talking about me or the ambulance?”

“How are you, Doris?” he said louder. “Still running that outlaw rig, I see.”

“Don’t do me any favors. You don’t want to talk to me? Go ahead. Be ignorant.”

Across the highway, Athena and Jack leaned into the windows of the other vehicle. Gunmetal gray, it was ancient, back doors tied with clothesline, hot vapor still squirting from the radiator.

The smell of voided bowels filled the overheated car. Athena judged the old man to be about seventy; the boy looked fifteen at most. Glass fragments glittered like some impossible frost in the boy’s hair, and across his forehead a deep gash oozed, slowly, steadily. One of them groaned. The old man clutched feebly at his chest, and the sunlight, slanting onto his face, revealed an awful pallor.

“He’s the one—get the old guy,” directed Athena.

“Christ,” Jack said. “You could cook in here.” He tugged at the smashed door on the driver’s side, throwing all his weight into it.

“Just take it easy.” Athena reached through the passenger window. “You’ll be all right now.” She felt pieces of bone moving under the flesh of the boy’s arm, and he trembled violently. “Easy.”

“Fuck, I don’t believe it.”

“What’s the matter, Jack?”

“You see the way these back doors are tied shut? Take us a hour to cut through all this. Hey, Doris!”

The boy’s eyes focused on Athena. “My daddy…my daddy’s hurt. Please help my daddy, lady.” The voice was that of a very small child.

She realized her mistake: this wasn’t a teenager. She’d been misled by the unlined face and the subtly wrong shape of the head. This was a grown man, perhaps twenty-five years old. She watched as one of his overlarge ears slowly filled with blood. “You’re okay now. Take it easy.” In that moment, the young man’s eyes shone with complete trust, and she backed out of the car, attacking the stripping around the crack-rayed windshield with the crowbar. “I could use a little help here, Jack,” she grunted. The chrome came off easily, and in seconds they were tugging off the glass. It came out in pieces, and they tossed the chunks to the side of the road. Brushing fragments out of the way, she climbed over the hood.

The old man’s mouth moved.

“No, don’t try to talk.”

He shook, lips working.

“Okay, I’m coming. Take it easy.” She leaned her head to him. “What is it? Where do you hurt?”

His voice hissed in her ear. “My boy’s slow.” His eyes watered. “You unnerstand? You take care a my Joey first.” He croaked the words, his chest heaving in strange fluid wobbles. “He don’ unnerstand.” Breath came in liquid gulps.

“Doris!”

“Let’s get moving here!” Doris trotted over with the kit. “What’ve you got?”

“Flailed chest.” Athena crouched over the dashboard. “Little bit harder and he’d be pinned on the steering column. We’ve got to get to him—now.”

Doris grabbed the crowbar. “How’s the kid, Jack?”

“Head injuries—broken arm, lacerations,” he announced, fixing a splint. His glasses kept slipping down his nose because of the way he was sweating.

Still crouching, Athena bound the old man’s arms across his chest. As the sun pounded on her back, she felt flooded with sweat, cramping, and the heat seemed to boil away her strength. “How’re we going to get this old guy out of here? Oh.”

“That’s got it.” With a loud ripping, Doris pried the door open and snapped the hinges, letting it fall in the road. “Larry, come over here and watch this. Jack, where’s the board?”

Sweat got in their eyes, a stinging blur, as they strapped the old man to the board, lifting him out the side. Jack wheeled over the rattling litter, and the troopers lent a hand. While windshield glass fell from their clothes to tinkle and crunch on the ground, the older man and the younger steadily pleaded that the other be looked after first.

“Christ, these two are going to break my heart,” Doris muttered, running alongside the litter. “Fred? You guys hanging around to wait for the coroner’s wagon?” They slid the stretcher into the rig.

“Yeah, Doris. Catch ya later.”

As they pulled out, Athena grabbed the radio, letting the hospital know what to expect. Doris set Larry to bandaging Joey’s head, while Jack checked out the old man.

Still pale, Larry moved slowly, clumsily. Blood seeped through the bandages faster than he could wrap them, and Joey just stared doe-eyed at his father, so white and still.

Every time he bleated for his “Daddy,” Athena squirmed in the driver’s seat. She couldn’t understand why it should bother her so much. She knew little enough about fathers. Few men had hung around while she was growing up, certainly no paternal ones. The family history held that her mother had been raped. What ever the case, after her mother’s breakdowns and suicide attempts began, Athena had been carted from Alabama to her grandmother’s house in New York. “Fathers yet,” she muttered to herself. “I may be starting to crack up myself.” She tried not to listen to the boy.

“How’re you making out, Larry?”

“Okay.” Joey’s eyes seemed to float in murky liquid as Larry wrapped the bandages around and around his head, the red flower blooming through the white gauze. “You get a lot of retards out here, don’t you?”

Joey’s face quivered.

“Shut up, you idiot,” hissed Athena.

Doris helped Jack with the old man. “Inbreeding—woods are full of them,” she told him dispassionately. “There used to be a whole sort of village for defectives around here.” She glanced up. “I’m not shitting you. The state built a colony for them out in the woods. Make it a little tighter. That’s it. You’re doing fine.”

The woods are full of them.
Athena’s grip on the wheel tightened. It was what she’d always maintained: there was nothing wrong with her son, he was just a normal piney. The very word still froze her.
Piney.
Siren wailing, the ambulance joined the stream of traffic on the highway, and she swerved the rig in and out, expertly passing cars on both sides.

Frightened by the blaring siren, Joey wept. With a casual gesture, Doris reached to brush glass chips out of his hair. “There’s another roll of bandages in there,” she said. Then Joey screamed as vomit erupted from the old man, splashing across Doris’s leg. “He’s choking! Help me get him on his side!”

Larry stared.

“Come on, damn it!”

Jack leaped to assist her while she stuck two fingers down the old man’s throat, clearing the air passage. “Shit! He’s coding. Jack, mouth-to-mouth, move it!”

Jack looked at the vomit smearing the old man’s mouth. “Oh Christ.” He grimaced, then went to work.

“I want to go home. Daddy? What’s the matter, Daddy?”

Larry just kept wrapping bandages until Joey’s head looked huge. The ambulance slammed to a halt.

“Receiving,” Athena announced, and they all scrambled to unload.

Confused and panicked, Joey was wheeled through the emergency ward toward X-ray. He kept calling for his father, while men in white wheeled the old man in the opposite direction.

Alone, Larry sat on a bench. The sound of slow typing drizzled from somewhere down the corridor.

“How you feeling now? You still look a little green.” Doris slapped him on the shoulder. “We’ve just got to hang around until somebody signs for them.” She jerked a thumb at Athena, arguing at the admitting desk.

Larry nodded weakly. “It’s just it was a chick, you know? If it was a guy, I coulda stood it.”

“What? Oh, the dead one.” Doris looked at him closely, then sat. “Try not to think about it. Most of the calls we get are stuff like, oh, bleeders with minor cuts—there’s lots of hemophiliacs out here—allergic reactions to insect bites, that kind of thing.”

He smiled weakly.

“That’s better.” She punched him lightly on the arm. “You’ll survive.”

“The water fountain ain’t working.” Jack approached, rubbing his hand across his mouth. “Christ, I hate mouth-to-mouth. You hear anything about the old guy?”

A plume of dust stretched behind the battered panel truck as it bounced and grunted over the sand. The exhaust snorted smoke, and Wes fought the steering wheel. “You know, there’s niggers workin’ the construction over ta Batsto,” he said with shocked grievance in his voice.

“Yeah, I heard, I heard.”

“Sure is hard to believe.” Both men shook their heads.

Al hurled a jar against a tree.

“I thought you was gonna save that ta put booze in?”

His side of the truck lacked a door, and Al had to grip the frame to keep from being thrown out. “Shit.” With each bump, his head felt as though it would burst. He needed a drink. “Knew I shoulda brung more.” He shut his eyes for a minute, tried to pretend they were already back at Munro’s Furnace, at his place, dipping into the whiskey barrel. He could almost feel it in his parched mouth.

Their gear and guns lay hidden in back under a sticky tarp and some chicken wire. They’d gotten twenty cents a pound for the venison at the Chamong Diner. Al had wanted fifty cents, and in the parking lot he’d roared and blustered, but nobody got the better of old man Sims. The meat was bad, and Sims knew it, which—while it would not prevent his serving it—disinclined him toward paying top dollar.

The truck shuddered and bucked, while Al returned to his favorite topic. “You know what that is?”

“I am acquainted wi’ it.”

“No, you ain’t. But, hell, once they get the taste a it, they don’t want nothin’ else.” His mien grew serious. “We can’t let that happen. No, sir, none a that.”