The Harvest

  And Matt looked away politely while Jacopetti slipped his dentures into his mouth.

  “Everybody says angina,” Jacopetti said. “It’s not a heart attack, it’s angina. Okay, good, but how is that better? It feels like a fucking heart attack.”

  “They’re not necessarily different. Angina pectoris is the pain you feel when your heart’s not getting enough blood through the coronary arteries. The heart works harder to compensate, and it simply gets tired—the way any muscle hurts if you overwork it. It’s a symptom of coronary disease, but in your case the heart itself seems to be basically sound. We can treat the angina with drugs called beta blockers, which help the muscle ease up a little bit”

  Jacopetti was frowning, trying to digest this information. “How long do I take these drugs?”

  Probably the rest of your life, Matt thought. If we can find a supply. And keep them from going bad. It was one of those facts of life he still hadn’t grown accustomed to: no new pharmaceuticals. No more free pencils or coffee mugs from drug companies promoting Tofranil or Prozac. No more Tofranil. No more Prozac. No more insulin, come to that, or penicillin, or measles vaccine… not unless he could locate every ounce of every significant drug and store it somehow, refrigerate it, prolong its active life.

  Must get this advice to the Boston and Toronto people, Matt thought. Should have done it sooner.

  Christ, everything had gotten away from him these last few months. He had been blinkered by his fear for Rachel, transfixed by her slow evolution. But Rachel was gone. It was past time to pick up the fragments of his life, including his work.

  “You’ll probably be on medication for some time,” Matt said, “but I can’t tell you for sure until we do a more thorough workup. Not until the storm passes, obviously.”

  “If it ever does,” Jacopetti said. “In the meantime… it still hurts.”

  “I’ll go up to the pharmacy and find you something. Lie still while you’re waiting, all right? Don’t exert yourself.”

  “I’m not going fucking dancing,” Jacopetti said.

  * * *

  Matt checked in with Abby before venturing upstairs.

  She might have fumbled the Jacopetti crisis, but she was doing a fine job as den mother. She had helped Miriam Flett into a dry outfit and settled her onto a mattress with coffee and Oreos. Now Abby was contemplating the possibility of a hot communal meal—“Maybe a little later, if Tom gets his generator working and we can run the microwave. I think that would cheer people up, don’t you? It’s hard enough just keeping track of everybody. Some of us want to move into the hallway—it’s quieter there and closer to the bathroom. Would that be all right?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “People are scattering all over. I don’t know where Beth got to. Or Joey, for that matter. Is the whole basement safe?”

  “Oh, probably. But we should encourage people to stay together. And I don’t want anyone running around upstairs.”

  “Upstairs is dangerous?”

  “It could be. If not now, later.”

  “But you’re going up there.”

  “Only for a moment, Abby.”

  “Matt, you look terribly tired. Maybe you should lie down for a while.”

  “Soon. I just have to pick up some pills for Mr. Jacopetti.”

  “Poor man. Sick on a night like this. Matt, I had the most terrible thought about him.” She lowered her voice. “I thought he was having a heart attack because it was the best possible way to annoy me. For maybe three seconds, I really thought that! Should I be ashamed of myself?”

  “Abby, if I’d been here, I might have had the same suspicion.”

  She looked pleased and grateful. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Check in when you come back downstairs?”

  He promised he would.

  At that moment, the thunder began.

  * * *

  The storm was complex, peculiar—a whole inventory of storms, Matt thought, one layer upon another.

  The stairs ran upward through a cinderblock stairwell at the southwestern corner of the hospital. The ground-floor fire exit had been boarded over, but there hadn’t been time to seal the second- and third-story windows. One had broken. A trickle of rainwater ran down the stairs between Mart’s feet.

  The thunder, a sudden new presence, was continuous. It had taken Matt a moment to identify it as thunder, not the approach of some mechanical leviathan from the west. With the thunder, lightning. The lightning lit the stairwell from above with a diffuse reddish-purple glow. It flickered but was never wholly absent.

  Matt supposed Abby was right, he was tired, mortally tired—too tired, at any rate, to be frightened of this new evolution of the storm. It wasn’t even a hurricane, it was something larger, still nameless. Peak winds in a hurricane were what, 200 miles per hour? Maximum. And in this tsunami of wind currently breaking against the flank of the Coast Range? Three hundred miles per hour around the eye wall? More? And how powerful was that? Powerful enough to level Buchanan, Matt supposed. And drown half of it in the storm surge.

  As he climbed from the hospital basement to the ground floor, he listened to the wind gusting through the upper reaches of the hospital, slamming doors and rattling gurney carts down vacant corridors. And he listened for the voice of the storm itself, a tympani growl, alive, organic, pervasive.

  It was out there devouring his town. Uprooting it and devouring it.

  He thought of Jim and Lillian Bix, wholly changed and wholly alien, inhabiting their paper-thin bodies only long enough to consummate some process he didn’t understand or wish to understand, the translation of Lillian’s unborn child and the delivery, incidental and trivial, of its derelict hulk. He supposed Jim and Lillian had abandoned their own skins by now. Their skins, like so many others, must have been carried up by the typhoon wind, perhaps to the high atmosphere, somewhere peaceful above the rain.

  Matt shook away these troubling thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.

  Pharmaceuticals were stored at various key points around the hospital so that each floor had an accessible supply. These caches were locked—the drugs stored there included narcotics—but Matt had been carrying a key and a duplicate since September. He followed the corridor from the stairwell and cursed himself for not having had the wits to bring a flashlight. Kindle had hooked up a gasoline generator in the basement, but it was only feeding the emergency lights, incandescent bulbs at ten-yard intervals.

  The drug cupboard, a room approximately large enough for one person to stand in without touching the shelves, was dark as night. Inside, Matt stood blinking, hoping his eyes would adjust, boxes and labels would reveal themselves in the faint glow leaking from the corridor. They didn’t.

  He stepped back into the hallway, pondering the problem. He could go back for a flashlight, but there was an element of time here. He didn’t trust that elevating rumble of thunder, the new intensity of the storm.

  He hurried to the nursing station down the corridor. For years, Hazel Kirkwood had been the clerical day nurse on this station. She had her own desk at the rear, away from the busy corridor. Nurse Kirkwood, Matt recalled, had been notorious for her ten-minute breaks every hour, when she would duck outside—or into the stairwell, furtively, in bad weather—to indulge a cigarette habit.

  He rummaged in Nurse Kirkwood’s desk drawers. He found an abundant supply of Bic pens, paperclips, and knobby pink erasers; a stapler and a pocket calculator and a single, lonely, plastic-wrapped tampon… and lastly, at the back of the bottommost drawer, a package of filter Kents with a matchbook tucked into the cellophane.

  He took the matchbook into the supply cupboard. One match to home in on the propranolol for Paul Jacopetti. Another match to empty a cardboard box of tongue depressors; a third match as he filled the box with anything nonperishable he hadn’t already crammed into his Gladstone bag: antibiotics, painkillers, a bag of sterile cotton. All the while berating himself for not havin
g done this before the storm.

  A last match to double-check his work… then he turned and found Joey Commoner blocking the doorway.

  * * *

  He was too weary to interpret this—Joey’s presence merely baffled him—until he saw the knife.

  It wasn’t a big knife, but it caught the faint light from the hallway; the blade glittered as it trembled in Joey’s hand.

  Joey said, “I want you to stay the hell away from her.”

  His voice was shrill and barely controlled, and it occurred to Matt that, whatever else might be troubling him, Joey was also very frightened of the storm. “You shouldn’t be up here. It’s dangerous up here.”

  “I don’t want you near her,” Joey said.

  “Can’t we talk about this later?” There was a guncrack of thunder above the general dull roar. “We could end up with a wall on top of us.”

  “Fine,” Joey said. “Just tell me you’ll stay away from her and we can go downstairs.”

  Matt was suddenly, deeply tired of all this. The storm, Miriam, Jacopetti, Joey. It was all a single phenomenon, and it was too much; it made him weary. He dropped the pharmaceuticals and stepped forward.

  Joey thrust the knife wildly. The blade nipped his forearm, slicing his shirt, digging into the skin beneath—a vivid, immediate pain.

  Matt stepped back and came up against a shelf. The walls were mercilessly close, there wasn’t room to swing his arms, and Joey was poised at the entrance like a snake.

  But Mart’s resentment was irresistible. It propelled him forward. The situation was childish, inappropriate, a frustration not to be borne. He kept his eye on Joey’s knife hand and thought about getting inside the periphery of it, knocking Joey out of the way. In the corridor he would have room to maneuver.

  He took a second step forward. Joey shrieked, “Don’t make me do this,” and slashed the air. The knifepoint missed, but narrowly. “Just say you’ll stay away from her! That’s all you have to do! That’s—”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. There was suddenly a taller silhouette behind him—Tom Kindle.

  Kindle twisted Joey’s arm up behind his back until Joey yelped and opened his hand.

  Matt came out of the supply cupboard and backed away from the two men.

  Kindle pushed Joey against the wall of die corridor and let him go. Joey spun around. Slowly, Kindle moved away, hands spread. Then he bent and picked up the knife. Peered at it.

  “Swiss Army knife,” Kindle said. “Real good, Joey. After you kill him, you can trim his nails.”

  “Fuck,” Joey said, rubbing his abused arm, “I didn’t come up here to kill anybody.”

  Matt clamped his hand over the cut on his forearm. It was superficial but messy. He’d left a trail of blood spots on the green linoleum floor.

  Kindle shook his head. “You came a little too close, in that case. Stupid thing to do. Wave a knife at somebody! There’s only ten of us in town, Joey, is that too many for you?”

  No answer.

  “Is there some reason you came up here?” Joey nodded. “He fucked Beth.”

  Kindle did a small double take. Then he pocketed the knife. “Matt? Any truth to the charge?”

  “I taught her CPR,” Matt said. “She’s been getting first-aid training.”

  “That’s not what I hear,” Joey said.

  “What do you hear?”

  “I hear the doctor’s fucking her.”

  “Who told you that?”

  Self-righteously: “Beth did.”

  There was a momentary silence… if you could call it silence, Matt thought, with the wind banging the walls.

  Kindle said, “Joey… a woman might say a thing and not mean it. Especially if she thought she was being neglected. A woman might think, What would piss off Joey the most? What could I say to really aggravate this asshole who hasn’t even asked me the time of day since Christmas?”

  Joey seemed to ponder the idea. Maybe, Matt thought, on some level, he was flattered by it.

  “I just wanted to warn him.…”

  “Warn him what? That you’ll kill him if he hangs around your ex-girlfriend?”

  “Fuck you,” Joey said mildly.

  “Fuck me because I don’t want the town doctor knifed by a jealous asshole? Christ’s sake, Joey, how is it even your business what Beth gets up to? She’s not your wife, and even if she was, adultery’s not a capital crime. You were pissed off and you wanted to wave that knife and make yourself feel better. But that’s so stupid—in the situation we’re in, that’s absolutely suicidally stupid. And that surprises me, frankly, ’cause you’re not as stupid as people think.” Joey looked up, wary of a trap, not sure whether he’d been insulted. Kindle went on: “I know what people say. What they used to say. Nobody held Joey Commoner in high esteem. But that’s changed a little, maybe you noticed. You set up the radio—”

  “That shithead Makepeace took it over,” Joey said. “I don’t get close to it anymore.”

  “Point is, it wouldn’t be there without you. Who found Boston on the twenty-meter band? Who found Toronto? Shit, Joey, you’re the only individual in town who can read a circuit diagram. You know that. So why do a stupid thing like this? Come up here wavin’ a little red pocketknife just because some girl tickled your nuts?”

  “You don’t understand,” Joey said, but there was a note of conciliation in it, a hint of regret.

  “Maybe,” Kindle said, “if the doctor agrees—and it’s his call, he’s the one who got cut—maybe we can not mention this incident downstairs. Not ruin your reputation for being smart.”

  Joey said nothing. Waited, his eyes averted.

  Matt said, “I guess I can go along with that.” Joey looked at him expressionlessly.

  “Get on downstairs,” Kindle said, “and consider yourself lucky.”

  Matt watched him amble down the corridor to the stairwell. The door opened and closed inaudibly, the sound of it buried under the noise of the storm.

  Kindle turned to Matt. “Some medical advice from a civilian? You ought to bind that cut.”

  He bandaged it quickly and rolled his sleeve down to cover the evidence. “Since you’re here, maybe you can help me carry some pharmaceuticals.”

  “Sure enough,” Kindle said. “I brought a flashlight, by the way. Abby mentioned you’d gone up without one.”

  “Thanks. And thank you for what you did with Joey.”

  “I didn’t do anything except derail him. I’ve been worried he’d do some shit like this. When Joey gets mad… he gets mad all over. You know what I mean?”

  “He said he didn’t come up here to kill me. But it might have happened.”

  “It’s not just temper. It’s like some old hurt he never paid back. There’s a button in Joey that shouldn’t get pushed.”

  “You did a good job turning him around.”

  “Yeah, for now, but in the long run…” Kindle looked unhappy. “People are such shits, Matthew.”

  “They can be.”

  “Joey sure as hell can be. You’re still shaking.”

  “It’s been a long night.”

  “Damn noise,” Kindle said. They had been shouting to make themselves heard. His voice was raw. “Matthew… a little more friendly advice? You have to watch out for yourself.”

  “I think we all do.”

  “Sure we do.” Kindle, looking vaguely embarrassed, gathered a carton of pharmaceuticals from the shelf. “So what do you think, are we gonna live through the night?”

  The roar of the storm had increased a notch. It sounded like some disaster more tangible than wind: trucks colliding, trains derailing in the dark.

  “Probably,” Matt said. “But we should get downstairs and stay there.”

  “Come morning,” Kindle said, “there won’t be much left of this town.”

  * * *

  Matt gave Abby some of the sterile cotton, which she wadded into her ears: “It does help. Though it makes conversation difficult. But no one’s talk
ing much anyhow. Matt? Did you hurt your arm?”

  The bandage had seeped a little. “Cut myself on some glass. Nothing serious.”

  “Get some rest. If you can!”

  He promised he would. He medicated Paul Jacopetti, then found a mattress for himself and stretched out on it. Everybody had moved into the hallway where it was quieter. Beth and Joey were three mattresses apart, glaring at each other from time to time. Tom Kindle wadded towels under the stairway door where some rainwater had begun to trickle through. Everyone else was simply waiting.

  Waiting for the storm to peak, Matt thought, or for the ceiling to drop. Whichever came first. And because there was nothing to see of the storm, the temptation was to listen to it… try to decipher every rumble that penetrated the basement.

  After a time, Abby consulted Tom Kindle, and the two of them managed to tap enough generator power to run a microwave oven—suddenly Abby was distributing cafeteria trays of steaming instant dinner. She’d been right, Matt thought, about the restorative power of hot food. It was an act of defiance: We may be huddled like rats in a hole, but we don’t have to eat like rats.

  Dinner ended with a crash that seemed to shake the concrete under their feet.

  “Jesus,” Chuck Makepeace said. “We must have lost part of the building.”

  Kindle, who was collecting empty trays, said, “Maybe. More likely something hit us. One of those big trees at the west end of the parking lot, maybe.”

  Jacopetti, pain-free but still pale, was impressed by the idea. “What would it take to pick up one of those trees and fling it that distance? What’s a tree like that weigh? Eight, nine hundred pounds?”

  “I never weighed one,” Kindle said.

  “Pick it up like a stick,” Jacopetti marvelled. “Pick it up and throw it!”

  Matt checked his watch. Ten forty-five.

  * * *

  Eleven fifteen: Beth Porter said she thought she smelled smoke… maybe coming down through the ventilators? Kindle said he didn’t think it was likely, but for safety’s sake he was going to shut off the generator. “Get those battery lamps going. Eye of the storm should be overhead soon.”