“Me?” Hugh almost choked. “Oh, no. I can’t. Not me.”
“You said you used to operate on sick people. You said you never lost a patient.”
“That was a lifetime ago!” Hugh wailed. “Look at that wound! It’s too close to the heart!” He held up a palsied hand. “I couldn’t cut lettuce with a hand like this!”
Robin stood up and approached Hugh until they were almost nose to nose. “You’re a doctor,” he said. “You’re going to take the bullet out and make him well, or you can start digging graves for you and your friends.”
“I can’t! There are no instruments here, no light, no disinfectants, no sedatives! I haven’t operated in seven years, and I wasn’t a heart surgeon, anyway! No. I’m sorry. That boy doesn’t have a—”
Robin’s pistol was cocked and pressed against Hugh’s throat. “A doctor who can’t help anybody shouldn’t be living. You’re just using up air, aren’t you?”
“Please ... please ...” Hugh gasped, his eyes bulging.
“Wait a minute,” Sister said. “Hugh, the hole’s already there. All you have to do is bring the bullet out.”
“Oh, sure! Sure! Just bring the bullet out!” Hugh giggled, on the edge of hysteria. “Sister, the bullet could be anywhere! What am I supposed to stop the blood with? How am I supposed to dig the damned thing out—with my fingers?”
“We’ve got knives,” Robin told him. “We can heat them in the fire. That makes them clean, doesn’t it?”
“There’s no such thing as ‘clean’ in conditions like these! My God, you don’t know what you’re asking me to do!”
“Not asking. Telling. Do it, Doc.”
Hugh looked to Paul and Sister for help, but there was nothing they could do. “I can’t,” he whispered hoarsely. “Please ... I’ll kill him if I try to take the bullet out.”
“He’ll die for sure if you don’t. I’m the leader here. When I give my word, I keep it. Bucky got shot because I sent him out with some others to stop a truck passing through. But he wasn’t ready to kill anybody yet, and he wasn’t fast enough to dodge a bullet, either.” He jabbed the pistol into Hugh’s throat. “I am ready to kill. I’ve done it before. Now, I promised Bucky I’d do whatever I could for him. So—do you take the bullet out, or do I kill all of you?”
Hugh swallowed, his eyes watering with fear. “There’s... there’s so much I’ve forgotten.”
“Remember it. Real quick.”
Hugh was shaking. He closed his eyes, opened them again. The boy was still there. His whole body was a heartbeat. What do I remember? he asked himself. Think, damn it! Nothing would come together; it was all a hazy jumble. The boy was waiting, his finger on the trigger. Hugh realized he would have to go on instinct, and God help them all if he screwed up. “Somebody’s ... going to have to support me,” he managed to say. “My balance isn’t so good. And light. I’ve got to have light, as much as I can get. I need—” Think! “—three or four sharp knives with narrow blades. Rub them with ashes and put them in the fire. I need rags, and ... oh, Jesus, I need clamps and forceps and probes and I cannot kill this boy, damn you!” His eyes blazed at Robin.
“I’ll get you what you need. None of that medical shit, though. But I’ll get you the other stuff.”
“And moonshine,” Hugh said. “The jug. For both the boy and myself. I want some ashes to clean my hands with, and I may need a bucket to puke into.” He reached up with a trembling hand and pushed the pistol away from his throat. “What’s your name, young man?”
“Robin Oakes.”
“All right, then, Mr. Oakes. When I start, you’re not to lay a finger on me. No matter what I do, no matter what you think I ought to be doing. I’ll be scared enough for both of us.” Hugh looked down at the wound and winced; it was very, very nasty. “What kind of gun was he shot with?”
“I don’t know. A pistol, I guess.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything about the size of the bullet. Oh, Jesus, this is crazy! I can’t remove a bullet from a wound that close to—” The pistol swung back up again. Hugh saw the boy’s finger ready on the trigger, and something about being so close to death clicked on the façade of arrogance he had worn back in Amarillo. “Get that gun out of my face, you little swine,” he said, and he saw Robin blink. “I’ll do what I can—but I’m not promising a miracle, do you understand? Well? What are you standing there for? Get me what I need!”
Robin lowered the pistol. He went off to get the moonshine, the knives and the ashes.
It took about twenty minutes to get Bucky as drunk as Hugh wanted him. Under Robin’s direction, the other boys brought candles and set them in a circle around Bucky. Hugh scrubbed his hands in ashes and waited for the blades to cook.
“He called you Sister,” Robin said. “Are you a nun?”
“No. That’s just my name.”
“Oh.”
He sounded disappointed, and Sister decided to ask, “Why?”
Robin shrugged. “We used to have nuns where we were, in the big building. I used to call them blackbirds, because they always flew at you when they thought you’d done something wrong. But some of them were okay. Sister Margaret said she was sure things would work out for me. Like getting a family and a home and everything.” He glanced around the cavern. “Some home, huh?”
It dawned on Sister what Robin was talking about. “You lived in an orphanage?”
“Yeah. Everybody did. A lot of us got sick and died after it turned cold. Especially the really young ones.” His eyes darkened. “Father Thomas died, and we buried him behind the big building. Sister Lynn died, and then so did Sister May and Sister Margaret. Father Cummings left in the night. I don’t blame him—who wants to take care of a bunch of ratty punks? Some of the others left, too. The last to die was Father Clinton, and then it was just us.”
“Weren’t there any older boys with you?”
“Oh, yeah. A few of them stayed, but most took off on their own. Somehow, I guess I got to be the oldest. I figured that if I left, who was going to take care of the punks?”
“So you found this cave and started robbing people?”
“Sure. Why not? I mean, the world’s gone crazy, hasn’t it? Why shouldn’t we rob people if it’s the only way to stay alive?”
“Because it’s wrong,” Sister answered. The boy laughed. She let his laugh die, and then she said, “How many people have you killed?”
All traces of a smile left his face. He stared at his hands; they were a man’s hands, rough and callused. “Four. But all of them would’ve killed me, too.” He shrugged uneasily. “No big deal.”
“The knives are ready,” Paul said, returning from the fire. Standing on his crutch over the wounded boy, Hugh took a deep breath and lowered his head.
He stayed that way for a minute. “All right.” His voice was low and resigned. “Bring the knives over. Sister, will you kneel down beside me and keep me steady, please? I’ll need several boys to hold Bucky securely, too. We don’t want him thrashing around.”
“Can we just knock him out or something?” Robin asked.
“No. There’s a risk of brain damage in that, and the first impulse a person has after being knocked unconscious is to throw up. We don’t want that, do we? Paul, would you hold Bucky’s legs? I hope seeing a little blood doesn’t make you sick.”
“It doesn’t,” Paul said, and Sister recalled the day on I-80 when he’d sliced open a wolf’s belly.
The hot knives were brought in a metal pot. Sister knelt beside Hugh and let him lean his feeble weight against her. She laid the glass ring beside her on the ground. Bucky was drunk and delirious, and he was talking about hearing birds singing. Sister listened; she could only hear the keening of wind past the mouth of the cave.
“Dear God, please guide my hand,” Hugh whispered. He picked up a knife. The blade was too wide, and he chose another. Even the narrowest of the available knives would be as clumsy as a broken thumb. He knew that one slip could cut into the boy’s
left ventricle, and then nothing could stop the geyser of blood.
“Go on,” Robin urged.
“I’ll start when I’m ready! Not one damned second before! Now move away from me, boy!”
Robin retreated but stayed close enough to watch.
Some of the others were holding Bucky’s arms, head and body to the ground, and most of them—even the Job’s Mask victims—had crowded around. Hugh looked at the knife in his hand; it was shaking, and there was no stopping it. Before his nerve broke entirely, he leaned forward and pressed the hot blade against an edge of the wound.
Infectious fluids spattered. Bucky’s body jackknifed, and the boy howled with agony. “Hold him down!” Hugh shouted. “Hold him, damn it!” The boys struggled to control him, and even Paul had trouble with the kicking legs. Hugh’s knife dug deeper, Bucky’s cry reverberating off the walls.
Robin shouted, “You’re killing him!” but Hugh paid no heed. He picked up the moonshine jug and splashed alcohol in and around the oozing wound. Now the boys could barely hold Bucky down. Hugh began to probe again, his own heart pounding as if about to burst through his breast.
“I can’t see the bullet!” Hugh said. “It’s gone too deep!” Blood was welling up, thick and dark red. He plucked away bone chips from a nicked rib. The red, spongy mass of the lung hitched and bubbled beneath the blade. “Hold him down, for God’s sake!” he shouted. The blade was too wide; it was not a surgical instrument, it was a butchering tool. “I can’t do it! I can’t!” he wailed, and he flung the knife away.
Robin pressed the pistol’s barrel to his skull. “Get it out of him!”
“I don’t have the proper instruments! I can’t work without—”
“Fuck the instruments!” Robin shouted. “Use your fingers, if you have to! Just get the bullet out!”
Bucky was moaning, his eyelids fluttering wildly, and his body kept wanting to curl into a fetal position. It took all the strength of the others to restrain him. Hugh was distraught; the metal pot held no blades narrow enough for the work. Robin’s pistol pushed at his head. He looked to one side and saw the circle of glass on the ground.
He saw the two thin spikes, and noted where three more had been broken away.
“Sister, I need one of those spikes as a probe,” he said. “Could you break one off for me?”
She hesitated only a second or two, and then the spike was in his palm and aflame with color.
Spreading the wound’s edges with his other hand, he slid the spike into the scarlet hole.
Hugh had to go deep, his spine crawling at the thought of what the probe might be grazing. “Hold him!” he warned, angling the piece of glass a centimeter to the left. The heart was laboring, the body passing another threshold of shock. Hurry! Hurry! Hugh thought. Find the bastard and get out! Deeper slid the probe, and still no bullet.
He imagined suddenly that the glass was getting warm in his hand—very warm. Almost hot.
Another two seconds, and he was certain: The probe was heating up. Bucky shuddered, his eyes rolled back in his head and he mercifully passed out.
A wisp of steam came from the wound like an exhaled breath. Hugh thought he smelled scorching tissue. “Sister? I don’t ... know what’s happening, but I think—”
The probe touched a solid object deep in the spongy folds of tissue, less than a half inch below the left coronary artery. “Found it!” Hugh croaked as he concentrated on determining its size with the end of the probe. Blood was everywhere, but it wasn’t the bright red of an artery, and its movement was sluggish. The glass was hot in his grip, the smell of scorching flesh stronger. Hugh realized that his remaining leg and the lower half of his body were freezing cold, but steam was rising from the wound; it occurred to him that the piece of glass was somehow channeling his body heat, drawing it up and intensifying it down in the depths of the hole. Hugh felt power in his hand—a calm, magnificent power. It seemed to crackle up his arm like a bolt of lightning, clearing his brain of fear and burning away the moonshine cobwebs. Suddenly his thirty years of medical knowledge flooded back into him, and he felt young and strong and unafraid.
He didn’t know what that power was—the surge of life itself, or something that people used to call salvation in the churches—but he could see again. He could bring that bullet out. Yes. He could.
His hands were no longer shaking.
He realized he would have to dig down beneath the bullet and lever it up with the probe until he could get two fingers around it. The left coronary artery and the left ventricle were close, very close. He began to work with movements as precise as geometry.
“Careful,” Sister cautioned, but she knew she didn’t have to warn him. His face was bent over the wound, and suddenly he shouted, “More light!” and Robin brought a candle closer.
The bullet came loose from the surrounding tissue. Hugh heard a sizzling noise, smelled burning flesh and blood. What the hell... ? he thought, but he had no time to let his concentration wander. The glass spike was almost too hot to hold now, though he dared not release it. He felt as if he were sitting in a deep freeze up to his chest.
“I see it!” Hugh said. “Small bullet, thank God!” He pushed two fingers into the wound and caught the bit of lead between them. He brought them out again, clenching what resembled a broken filling for a tooth, and tossed it to Robin.
Then he started withdrawing the probe, and all of them could hear the sizzling of flesh and blood. Hugh couldn’t believe what he was witnessing; down in the wound, torn tissue was being cauterized and sealed up as the spike emerged.
It came out like a wand of white-hot fire. As it left the wound there was a quick hissing and the blood congealed, the infected edges rippling with blue fire that burned for four of Sister’s rapid heartbeats and went out. Where a hole had been a few seconds before was now a brown, charred circle.
Hugh held the piece of glass before his face, his features washed with pure white light. He could feel the heat, yet the hottest of the healing fire was concentrated right at the tip. He realized it had cauterized the tiny vessels and ripped flesh like a surgical laser.
The probe’s inner flame began to weaken and go out. As the light steadily waned Sister saw that the jewels within it had turned to small ebony pebbles, and the interconnecting threads of precious metals had become lines of ash. The light continued to weaken until finally there was just a spark of white fire at the tip; it pulsed with the beat of Hugh’s heart—once, twice and a third time—and winked out like a dead star.
Bucky was still breathing.
Hugh, his face streaked with sweat and a bloody mist, looked up at Robin. He started to speak, couldn’t find his voice. His lower body was warming up again. “I guess this means,” he finally said, “that you won’t be killing us today?”
57
JOSH NUDGED SWAN. “YOU doing okay?”
“Yes.” She lifted her misshapen head from the folds of her coat. “I’m not dead yet.”
“Just checking. You’ve been pretty quiet all day.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Oh.” He watched as Killer ran ahead along the road, then stopped and barked for them to catch up. Mule was walking as fast as he was going to go, and Josh held the reins loosely. Rusty trudged alongside the wagon, all but buried in his cowboy hat and heavy coat.
The Travelin’ Show wagon creaked on, the road bordered by dense forest. The clouds seemed to be hanging right in the treetops, and the wind had all but stopped—a merciful and rare occurrence. Josh knew the weather was unpredictable—there could be a blizzard and a thunderstorm the same day, and the next day calm winds could whirl into tornadoes.
For the past two days, they’d seen nothing living. They’d come upon a broken-down bridge and had to detour several miles to get back to the main road; a little further on, that road was blocked by a fallen tree, so another detour had to be found. But today they’d passed a tree about three miles back with TO MARY’S REST painted on its trunk, and
Josh had breathed easier. At least they were headed in the right direction, and Mary’s Rest couldn’t be much further.
“Mind if I ask what you’re thinking about?” Josh prodded.
She shrugged her thin shoulders beneath the coat and didn’t reply. “The tree,” he said. “It’s that, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” The apple blossoms blowing in the snow and stumps continued to haunt her—life amid death. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
“I don’t know how you did it, but ...” He shook his head. The rules of the world have changed, he thought. Now the mysteries hold sway. He listened to the creaking axles and the crunch of snow under Mule’s hooves for a moment, and then he had to ask it: “What did ... what did it feel like?”
“I don’t know.” Another shrug.
“Yes, you do. You don’t have to be shy about it. You did a wonderful thing, and I’d like to know what it felt like.”
She was silent. Up ahead about fifteen yards, Killer barked a few times. Swan heard the barking as a call that the way was clear. “It felt ... like I was a fountain,” she replied. “And the tree was drinking. It felt like I was fire, too, and for a minute”—she lifted her deformed face toward the heavy sky—“I thought I could look up and remember what it was like to see the stars, way up in the dark ... like promises. That’s what it felt like.”
Josh knew that what Swan had experienced was far beyond his senses; but he could fathom what she meant about the stars. He hadn’t seen them for seven years. At night there was just a vast darkness, as if even the lamps of Heaven had burned out.
“Was Mr. Moody right?” Swan asked.
“Right about what?”
“He said that if I could wake up one tree, I could start orchards and crop fields growing again. He said ... I’ve got the power of life inside me. Was he right?”
Josh didn’t answer. He recalled something else Sly Moody had said: “Mister, that Swan could wake the whole land up again!”