Pavement Ends: The Exodus
Page 19
"I’m sorry." She said, as she sobbed.
Theresa came in just then and asked from behind her dust-mask, "How are things going, in here?"
"I tried to give him water," Norah cried. She couldn’t speak for a moment and concentrated to pull herself together. "And it hurt him. He spit out all this blood."
"Okay," Theresa said. "Let me sit there for a minute." She plugged her recently liberated stethoscope into her ears and sat down on the stool that Norah had just vacated.
"Salvador," Theresa said softly. "I need to look you over a bit. Do you understand?"
"Yesh," he groaned.
Hank had come up with a penlight for her and she used it to look into his pupils. They weren’t dilating properly. His right eye was slow to respond and when she sat back to look at him, she saw that one pupil was a near pinpoint while the other was almost fully dilated. His lungs were clear and his pulse was strong. Those were good signs.
"All right, Salvador," Theresa said, looking him in the eye. "Here’s my diagnosis. Are you with me?"
"Yesh," Salvador cogently replied.
"You’re in good health, so you will heal. But your concussion is life-threatening." She paused before going on. "We don’t have I-Vs, so you’ve got to drink enough water to stay hydrated. If you get through the next twenty-four hours, I’ll probably start giving you painkillers. But for the next twenty-four hours, you get a couple of Tylenol dissolved in a cup of water, every six hours. Do you understand?"
"I..." Salvador tried to speak, but finally settled with, "yesh."
Theresa picked up the glass of water and put the straw in his mouth. "It’s going to hurt, and sometimes it will taste bad, but you need to drink this and keep it down. Okay?"
Salvador’s eyes were full of despair. "Oh-kay," he said and pressed his lips together, forming a seal around the straw. Water rose along the length of the straw and disappeared into his mouth. Pain creased his face, but he swallowed and drew in more water. After a few swallows, he opened his lips and let the straw slip out.
"Good," Theresa said with a nod. "I’ll be back in a while to check on you, so you better have drank this whole glass of water by then. Okay?"
"Oh-kay," Salvador answered.
On her way out, Theresa reiterated to Norah that she needed to keep him awake and hydrated. Norah reassured the nurse that she would follow her instructions exactly. Then Theresa left to find her way down to her own bed.
After the family meeting, Evie set about making breakfast for twenty-seven people. They opened the front and back door for ventilation and fired up the camp stove on the, now defunct, glass-top stove. The electric skillet and electric griddle were working commendably, as did the waffle maker. Eggs and bacon were the main course. The chickens provided an abundance of the former and the refrigerator was no longer keeping the latter cold.
One of Bertel’s wards, a four-year-old girl named Leslie, initiated a small riot among the younger children. The normally calm and shy girl fell into a screaming tantrum when her request for Pop Tarts was denied. No substitute would quell her outrage. As soon as she heard Leslie ask for Pop Tarts, Abby demanded a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, which she pronounced "Hun-nutter-O’s." Evie’s inability to comprehend her granddaughter only compounded the fact that she had none of that particular food to feed the fiery tempered girl.
While Bertel and Evie were coping with the raging girls, the three-year-old Gregory quietly pulled the bowl of waffle batter down on his head and proceeded to paint the cabinets with the goopy paste. He wailed a surly protest as Val whisked him away for a prompt cleaning. During all of that, the five-year-old Jimmy attempted to swipe a plush bear from the peacefully playing Cassie and Kimberly, who were respectively six and four. In the end, all children were pacified and fed and the adults were finally served.
While they enjoyed their meal, Hank summarized his plan to the houseguests. He studiously avoided speaking to Candice the entire time. Not one to be ignored, however, Candice finally blurted, "I want to come with you!"
Everybody looked at her as if she had uttered some sort of original vulgarity. Hank finished chewing what was in his mouth and swallowed it down with a swirl of coffee. Everybody was silent while Hank wiped his mouth and cleared his throat. Candice sat serenely, although the slightest tick played at the corner of her right eye.
"How was your breakfast, Candice?" Hank asked her with a cordial demeanor.
"Quite good, actually." She had eaten two eggs, two slices of bacon, a slice of buttered toast and a cup of coffee. "I would have recommended the place to my associates, if you were a restaurant."
"Thank you," Hank said, holding the same cordial tone. "Would you like more coffee, or maybe another piece of bacon?" He peeked into the kitchen. "I think we have some left."
"No thank you," she said. "I’m quite satisfied." Tossing her wadded napkin on her plate Candice said, "Listen, Hank. I know we didn’t get along last night. Everybody was on edge. And maybe I was a little drunk. But it’s a new day. Let’s put the past behind us." She stood and reached out her hand across the table. "Let’s forge a new relationship this morning. Let’s shake and make up."
Hank stood, slowly, regarding her proffered hand. "Yesterday morning, I would have taken your hand. Yesterday morning, we would have shaken hands and I would have smiled at you and counted the minutes until you climbed into your car and drove away." He deliberately stood tall and crossed his arms.
"This morning, things are different." Candice’s eyes bulged from her head and her lower lip quivered. "You can put your hand down because I am not going to take it. Your clothes are dry and hanging on the back of the bathroom door." He pointed in that general direction. "We’ve provided you with shelter for the night and fed you. Now I want you to leave."
Candice sniffled and swallowed, hard. She smiled meekly, blinking back tears. "Hank," she said with a hoarse voice. She cleared her throat and began fresh. "Hank, I’m sorry for being so rude. Please don’t turn me out. I live in Olympia, in a condo. There’s no way for me to get home and there’s probably no home for me to get to."
Shaking his head, Hank said, "That’s not my concern. In fact the only thing I’m concerned with is the well-being of my family and friends."
"Come on, Hank," she pleaded. Tears slid down her cheeks and her voice cracked. "You know what happened last night. If you won’t let me stay, you may as well sentence me to death."
"No, Candice." Hank gnawed at his bottom lip. "There is nothing you can say and nothing you can do to make me change my mind. There’s a house, a few blocks down the street, where a group of people have taken shelter. If you’re really nice, they might take you in. But you’ve worn out your welcome in this house and I don’t want you to waste any more of my time. Go away."
In his eyes, Hank could feel the cold fire of absolute authority. He did nothing to mask his conviction. Candice was not blind to it. She saw that he would physically throw her out if she didn’t leave by her own feet.
In less than five minutes she had changed into her dress-suit and walked out the door. She didn’t say good-bye or ask for anything or even look back. A palpable tension collapsed as soon as she left. Those who watched her leave immediately took to expressing their opinions of her. The opinions were without reservations and in complete support of Hank.
"What a bitch!" "Can you believe how she acted?" "She’s a compulsive liar." "I’d say she has penis envy." "Do you think she’s a lesbian?" "I’d have tossed her out last night." "Do you think they’ll take her in?" "Maybe we should warn them."
When everyone had relocated to the comfort of the living room and settled down, Hank asked his neighbors if they would like to join his family in their exodus to the mountains. Dale and his family had already discussed the idea of leaving the city. They had planned to salvage any belongings that had survived the fire and hike out to the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge. After hearing Hank’s plan, the Yost family readily accepted his offer.
Bertel, howev
er, adamantly insisted on staying put with the children. She claimed that she had to see that the children were reunited with their families. Nothing Hank could say would convince her otherwise. Pauline intended to continue nursing Brian and if he was going with them, so would she. Val asked her about Carter. The grief on her face brought the room to silence.
"He took a load to Grants Pass, yesterday," she said. "He forgot his pack, with his insulin. I had just got off the phone with him when everything went to hell. He was having an episode with his diabetes, so I was going to call dispatch and have them send an ambulance to his truck." Pauline swallowed hard and her voice broke as she finished explaining. "I never got through. Carter is dead." She hugged her arms around her shoulders and folded her head down to her knees.
Val crossed over to sit on the sofa next to her friend and neighbor. She tried to comfort the older woman.
Pauline had touched a fountain of grief inside herself that she could no longer restrain. She mourned. "My Carter is dead. Our home is gone." Over and over she cried those words. Her neighbors spoke comforting words that she did not hear and touched her shoulders with sympathetic hands that she could not feel. Finally they left her to weep upon Val’s shoulder and tended to the new demands of an alien day.
By eight A.M. the mess from breakfast was already cleared and cleaned. Children were playing on the emerald lawn of a front yard that, except for an abundance of leaves, was pristine. They frolicked as if it were the most natural thing for a red brick house with a white picket fence to be surrounded by the blackened ruins of a day-old cataclysm.
Patty, the ten-year old daughter of Dale and Val, befriended the girl who Salvador had brought home. Since her two best friends, Kalika and Lietha, were sequestered with the flu, Patty had nowhere else to focus her attention. At first the girl, who had been folded into Bertel’s flock, did little in the way of interacting. Patty was relentlessly friendly, however, and she pecked away at the carapace of despair that had formed around the child.
Doting on the girl, Patty invited her to engage in every device of play that was at their disposal. The girl, who might optimistically be described as dour, finally whispered her name to Patty and began telling about herself over a game of Jacks.
Amanda was eight. Last week was her birthday and her mommy had given her a kitten that she named Penny. Penny got burned up in their apartment. Amanda told Patty that her mommy was in heaven because a man had hit her until she stopped crying. She told Patty, in a whisper, everything that had happened.
Between the adults, as they watched the girls talking and Patty reaching out to hold her new friend, they discussed how to handle the situation. There was nothing, they decided, that could be done about the girl’s trauma and the best way to cope, they knew, was for her to talk about what happened.
Patty’s parents were apprehensive about allowing their daughter to be the girl’s comforter. They feared that their daughter would also be traumatized by all of the horrible things that Amanda would, no doubt, divulge. They didn’t believe that Patty was ready for such things. In the end, however, they all agreed that they could not insulate the children from the truth, no matter how gruesome it was. They could protect them from harm, but all of the rules were different now and sugarcoating reality would be the worst thing they could do.
Proving out to be of tougher stock than her parents had imagined, Patty finally left her new friend and went to talk with her mother. Val consoled her daughter as she retold Amanda’s story, but the girl only hurt for her new friend and not for herself. With heart shredding, Val looked at her daughter with a new respect, and a little sorrow, as she saw a portion of childhood innocence being crushed before her eyes.
While Patty had bonded with Amanda her brother stood with the adults, all of whom had eventually gathered to sip coffee and evaluated their circumstance from all angles.
Finally, Dale made a statement that was the culmination of their mutual observations. "We should start getting together everything that might be worth taking. You know, go through all of the wreckage and find anything that we can use."
"Yeah," Hank said with a heavy sigh. "There’s a lot that needs to be done. We should start with…." He gnawed on his bottom lip for a moment. "God! I wish we had Salvador." He shook his head and sucked in a calming breath. Then he followed a different track. "I’d really like to know what’s going on around us," he said contemplatively. And then, as if discovering the right course, he said, "Okay, I’m going to start tearing into that U-haul." Nodding toward Dale he said, "You, Jeremy and Camille should start sifting through the rubble.
"Start with the houses and cars within a block of here. Pauline should just keep her eye on Brian and help out where she can." With concern, he reached out a hand and squeezed her shoulder, adding, "If you feel up to it, that is." Pauline gave him a wan smile and nodded. Squeezing her shoulder again, he went on. "Bertel will look after the kids and keep them out of the way. Evie and Val can start going through everything packed in the U-haul."
Hank was no longer speaking to any one person, but sorting out his thoughts for everyone to act upon. "Any other ideas?"
"What about Theresa?" Jeremy asked.
Hank gave him a half-smile. "Let’s all try not to get hurt. She’s sick and we’re not doing much to help her get better."
Val asked, "How do you know what to do?" She asked earnestly. "I mean, in all of the years that we’ve been neighbors, you’ve done so many oddball projects. I'm always amazed by all the strange stuff you come up with. And now… I just can’t believe that you know so much."
Bristling with pride, Evie looped her arm around Hank's and answered for him. "Besides the fact that he was raised on a farm, he reads the most off-the-wall magazines and he has a library of How-To books. And... he’s like a bloodhound on a scent, whenever he gets a hold of some scheme." She looked at her husband with a seemingly new appreciation. "Hours and hours, he’ll spend researching one harebrained idea after another. I never really thought it would amount to anything," she concluded, affectionately stroking his arm.
"Well," Hank coughed, modestly. "The morning is wasting away and there’s a lot to do, so I say we get to it." Everyone agreed with Hank and split off to pursue their tasks.
PART THREE
Give and Take
CHAPTER ONE
Dale and his son were joined by Camille shortly after they had begun prodding and poking through the charcoal that was once their home. Jeremy maintained a constant commentary of amazement at what had melted. He found a pool of slag, which he identified as their silverware. A bed frame had melted around the remains of the floor joists in what had been his sister’s bedroom. The cylinder that had once been their water heater had exploded.
Dale finally called his son out of the house and the three men stood in contemplation of it for a moment. "It would be best," Camille offered, "if you just plowed this under and forgot about it. You could spend the rest of your life pawing through this mess and only find things to be sad about." Dale did not respond. He just stared at the gutted shell of his house. Camille wandered over to the fence, by their burned down garage. "What’s this thing?"
"Hey!" Jeremy squawked. He ran to the old man’s side and grabbed the neck of a chromed, two-wheeled scooter with a bulky engine on its rear. "That’s my Trail Ripper. Awesome!"
"What did I tell you about leaving that thing outside?" Dale berated his son.
"That if I didn’t put it away, it wouldn’t get burned up in the mega-blaze of the century," Jeremy retorted with a sheepish grin.
Camille barked a laugh at Dale. "He got you there!"
Dale rubbed the stubble on his chin and smiled. "He did, kind of. Didn’t he?"
The three of them let go of some tension in a bout of laughter. As his fit subsided, Camille yanked a white handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose into it. Carefully folding the kerchief back into a square and tucking it into his shirt pocket, he asked Jeremy, "What’s that gizmo do?"
"Did you prime it?" Dale asked with fatherly patience.
"Oh," Jeremy chuckled, embarrassed. He poked a little rubber bulb on the side of the motor a few times and gave the cord another pull. The engine roared like a chainsaw. Jeremy jumped on and revved it up. Dirt and grass pelted Camille’s pant legs as the fat knobby tires caught traction and launched the young man across the yard. At the far corner of the yard Jeremy planted his left foot and peeled an arc of grass down to bare dirt before pulling a wheelie and riding back to where the men stood gawking at him.
Letting the motor idle, he yelled over the high buzz. "Would you like to ride it, Camille?"
The old man looked genuinely amused. "I’m too big for that thing."
"No you’re not," Jeremy insisted. "It can hold four hundred pounds."
"Well," Camille said thoughtfully, "I’m too old for it. That’s for sure."
"Why don’t you shut it down," Dale instructed his son. Jeremy complied, immediately.
"Has that been you screaming up and down the street these last couple of months?" Hank asked as he came over, investigating the noise.
"Naw," Jeremy answered. "I hardly ever ride it around here. That’s Brody. He always..." Jeremy’s eyes popped wide open. "Oh, my gosh! Dad, can I go check on Brody?"
"Yeah," Dale approved with grim sobriety. "Go check and come right back." Jeremy was already yanking the motor to life. As he hopped onto his motorized scooter, Dale shouted after him, "Tell us everything you see!"
"Where does Brody live?" Hank asked while watching the young man dart north on Jasmine Street. "Wow, that thing’s fast!"