by Ninie Hammon
There’d been nothing she could do for Charlie and there was nothing she could do for Malachi. She just held his head like she had done for Rusty so many times when he was little.
She was in that emotional space when Holmes Fischer appeared … just appeared. She saw him, she’d been looking right at him … well, right at where he wasn’t and then suddenly was. Holmes Fischer, the county’s token homeless drunk. Except he was technically not either. He had places he stayed. And when she thought about it, she realized he always looked disheveled, but he didn’t smell bad, didn’t look like somebody living in a cardboard box under a bridge. So he had somewhere he bathed, somewhere he kept clean clothes. But she didn’t know where that might be.
Sam wasn’t a doctor. Shoot, she wasn’t even a paramedic. She was a licensed practical nurse who was paid to check in on people who were ill but not sick enough to be hospitalized, people who could stay home if somebody came by to keep an eye on them, take their blood pressure, make sure they were taking their meds properly and basically provide them contact with the outside world, which, in the end, was probably the best medicine she gave any of them.
But you didn’t have to have a medical degree to see that Holmes Fischer was choking, and would choke to death in only a few minutes if somebody didn’t do something.
She got up from Malachi’s side, who likely didn’t know she had left because he probably didn’t know she’d ever been there, and ran to the bench in the shelter, kneeling in front of where Holmes Fischer was seated, gasping. No, not gasping. You had to have air to gasp and he seemed to have no air. Seemed to be desperately trying to breathe.
She had to stifle a little hysterical burst of laughter — Fish was like a fish out of water. But that was what he looked like, like a fish that’d been thrown out of the river onto the shore, his mouth open, gaping, trying to get in air.
“Mr. Fischer … are you sick?”
He didn’t respond, but it was clear he couldn’t. Clearly something was stuck in his throat and he couldn’t breathe. She started to lean him over on his side on the bench but he fell that way before she touched him. She was able to grab hold of him and turn him so the momentum of his fall left him lying on his back. One good tug and she had scooted him to the end of the bench with his head dangling off it, opening up his trachea.
Sam wished she had something, anything to use to disengage whatever was causing the blockage in his throat, but there was nothing for it but to stick her fingers in his mouth …
And then Liam Montgomery suddenly appeared. Just appeared
The sight was shocking, surprising, but more than that it scared Martha Ann Sheridan in a way nothing else in her life ever had. This was really happening and her fear was too great to express with something as simple as a scream. You had to experience some kind of ground-zero, basic-humanity fear when you were confronted with a thing that was contrary to the laws of the universe. People didn’t just show up — bang. Not just once. Twice. Two people had just … she wouldn’t use the word “materialize” because that word brought to mind television shows and science fiction movies and this was everyday life in the Dollar General Store parking lot, for crying out loud.
But he is the greatest of fools, her father would have said, who continues to deny reality when it stands there in front of you, hot and stinking and demanding to be noticed. It was what it was.
Chapter Thirteen
Pete Rutherford had been breathing in and out at the good Lord’s pleasure for going on seventy-three years. Not all that time was spent breathing the air of the Kentucky mountains, neither.
He wasn’t the classic rube like so many of the people who lived in the hollows of Nower County were, so deep up in there sometimes you had to wonder if the sun actually made it there every day. There were people who had never left this county, who had never seen the outside world, what they called “out there on the flat,” people who had never been to the big city, which they would define as Lexington, Kentucky. Fish had got out by virtue of the Second World War, enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, not yet eighteen but lied about his age and they took him anyway. He was one of the soldiers the songs sang about, “How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Parieeee.”
They’d put him on a train to California, then on a ship to the South Pacific. He had battled flies, jungle rot and Japanese soldiers, had made the close personal acquaintance of terror and loss during what were the formative years of a young man’s life. It’d changed him. It’d changed all of them. Hard to surprise a man who’d watched his buddies get blown into so many pieces there wasn’t enough left to ship home along with the dog tags.
But Pete Rutherford was surprised now!
In all his many adventures out there in the wide world and the blessedly quiet no-adventure life he had led in Nower County since then, he had never seen somebody just …
Just what?
Just appear.
There was nobody sitting on that bench. Pete would have sworn, would have taken a pistol in his hand, put it to his temple and announced to the universe that he’d pull the trigger if he was mistaken and there really had been somebody sitting there and he just didn’t happen to notice.
That wasn’t the way of it. And they was other witnesses besides Pete Rutherford to testify to the reality of what they seen that couldn’t no way in the world be real but was.
Then Sam screamed again, a real scream, no holds barred and sitting on that bench down from where she was trying to clear out Holmes Fischer’s throat so he could breathe was another somebody who just appeared — Deputy Sheriff Liam Montgomery.
He looked around, but wasn’t no need. It wasn’t like a police car had pulled into the parking lot and the deputy got out but Pete was tyin’ his shoelaces and just didn’t see it.
It was like the woman beside him suddenly came to life, like maybe she’d been froze there and suddenly thawed. At the sight of the deputy sheriff, she turned to Pete and asked, “Would you look after Merrie for a few minutes?” Didn’t bother to wait for a reply, just looked down at the little girl and told her, “You’re going to wait here for me. This nice man whose name is …?”
“Pete,” he said.
“Pete is going to be right here beside you.” The little girl tuned up to pitch a fit and then her mother said, “I’m going over there, just right there” — she pointed to the bus shelter — “and you can go with me if you want to but it’s gross. People have been throwing up and—”
The little girl shook her head violently, the crown bandage flopping about, even took a step backward.
“Yukky!” she said.
“Then wait for me.” She looked at Pete and placed the little girl’s hand in his. Then she turned and was crossing the distance to the sheriff’s deputy, who unlike the others was not vomiting. He was just sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. And his nose was bleeding … gushing down his upper lip in a torrent.
“What’s yore name?” Pete asked the little girl.
“Merrie.”
“Oh, like Mary had a little lamb.”
“No, like Merry Christmas, except with an ‘ie’ instead of a y,” she said, clearly parroting words she’d been taught to say but didn’t understand. She understood what she said next, though. “Why’s everybody throwin’ up?”
“Guess they ate bad beans,” he said absently, watching Sam turn Fish back onto his side from his back where he lay taking big gulps of air. He started to sit up, Sam pushed him back down and he sat up anyway, shaking his head. Then his nose started to bleed. It was then that it occurred to Pete Rutherford that he didn’t have to be totally useless. He didn’t know more than the rudiments of first aid and couldn’t move fast enough to do anybody any good in a crisis. But there was one thing here that needed doin’ and he was just the man for the job.
“I need you to help me do something,” he said to little Merrie, whose name was spelled strange, either to be pretentious or for some reason the
little girl didn’t understand and nobody else cared about.
He got the child to fetch the cane he’d dropped and then used it to accomplish a reasonably rapid hobble to the side of the Dollar General Store where the Clean Out Your Car machines were located. He picked up the water hose and turned it on and was rewarded several seconds later with a stream of water that actually had a decent amount of pressure. With Merrie’s help, he uncoiled the hose and hobbled back toward the bus shelter, squirting the water onto the asphalt as he walked, washing away the stinking remains of the contents of several stomachs.
Malachi Tackett had gotten to his feet, though he still looked woozy. He stood, leaning against the piece of graffiti-ed plexiglass that formed one end of the shelter, holding his rifle, looking as thoroughly confused as everybody else. And it occurred to Pete then that there was, indeed, one thing more shocking than watching somebody appear out of nowhere. And that was being the person who done the appearing.
The woman, Merrie’s mother, said she and the little girl had been driving down the road, though she hadn’t filled in the blanks about why she’d decided to take an injured child for a drive or where she’d been going.
She’d been driving and then she was here. Wasn’t no in-between.
Pete put his thumb over the end of the water hose to create more pressure and used the spray as a kind of broom to sweep the foul-smelling vomit off the asphalt and down into the roadside ditch.
If the others had had the same experience, then Malachi Tackett had been out squirrel hunting when the … whateveritwas — a sudden desire to throw up in the bus shelter in front of the Dollar General Store? — had assaulted him. Fish, who was now sitting up with his head leaned back as Sam applied pressure to his nose to stop the bleeding, had been wherever he’d awakened after sleeping wherever he’d spent the night. Maybe he was drunk. Pete couldn’t tell.
“I do it! I do it!” the little girl cried, begging to play with the water hose.
“Okay fine, you do it. Just squirt the water on the ground.”
The child gleefully took the hose and began to squirt water every which way, but that worked because the parking lot was sloped toward the road and no matter where she squirted, the water would flow down that way washing away some of the yuk.
Charlie reached out to the young blond man in a brown Nower County Sheriff’s Department uniform, sitting elbows on knees, cradling his head in his hands … as blood poured out his nose and dripped onto the asphalt.
When she touched his shoulder, he groaned.
“Are you hurt?” she asked him. He heard her, but it clearly took considerable effort on his part to lift his face up toward her and look at her. His eyes were bloodshot, the whites a veined angry red, like he’d just come off a week drunk, and there were dark circles under them. His face was chalky white.
“There’s a needle” — the words rode a ragged whisper where every word seemed to deliver a painful blow — “in my head. A needle in my brain.”
When he’d turned his face up toward her, the gush of blood from his nose had changed direction, pouring down his lip to drip off his chin onto the front of his crisply ironed brown shirt. The name tag said he was Deputy Sheriff Liam Montgomery.
“It … hurts.”
Charlie had no idea what to do or say. But she understood on an empathetical level that if the pain in his head carried with it anything like the force of the nausea that had hammered her, yeah … it hurt. It hurt a lot.
The young man carefully lowered his head back into his hands and held it there the way you’d hold a tray of Waterford crystal.
“Where …?” Fish began at the same moment Malachi Tackett asked, “What?”
Malachi had come around the side to the shelter and was standing, though wobbly, in front of the bench where Fish was sitting up, finally beginning to breathe normally, and the young sheriff’s deputy was cradling his fragile skull in his hands.
Charlie looked at Sam, who was staring at Malachi with an unreadable look on her face. Then Sam’s gaze shifted to Charlie and the two locked eyes. She could sense that Sam felt as she did, that somehow the two of them were “responsible” here, like the in-charge grownups at a party where all the teenagers were falling-down drunk. By virtue of being the first people on the scene of this … yeah, this what? And because the two of them — and the old man, who was helping Merrie squirt water out a hose to wash away the vomit — were the ones most in possession of their faculties.
Fish’s eyes were clearing fast, though, but Malachi Tackett still had a dazed look and Charlie wondered if that might be his normal look, an expression that had nothing to do with suddenly finding himself beside the bus shelter at the crossroads and everything to do with why he thought an invading army was attacking him there.
“Anybody want to tell me what’s going—?” That’s as far as Fish got before Malachi Tackett sucked in a gasp, and then let the air out with a single incredulous word riding it.
“Mama?”
When Charlie and Sam followed his gaze, they saw a woman lying on her side in the grass beside the bus shelter. The woman was Viola Tackett.
Chapter Fourteen
When Malachi cried out to his mother, and Sam turned to see her lying in the grass beside the shelter, something inside Sam switched off. Or maybe switched on. She changed gears in some way then and seemed to go on some kind of autopilot.
Considerations of how and why and what became secondary to the reality that there were several people here in various conditions of physical distress. Physical distress was all she’d allow herself to call it because she didn’t have any other names that didn’t make her skin crawl.
She rushed to Viola Tackett and knelt beside her, with Malachi kneeling on the other side. He was calling out to her, had put his hands on her shoulders to lift her up, but Sam stopped him.
“We don’t know what’s wrong with her, Chai, and until we do, we shouldn’t move her.”
Chai. She hadn’t meant to call him that. It’d just popped out but he was in such a state that he certainly didn’t notice the word and by tomorrow morning wouldn’t remember anybody’d said it.
“What’s wrong with … where …?”
“I don’t know and I don’t know and I don’t know. Until further notice, sprinkle those as needed at the end of every question about what’s going on here.”
As she spoke, she’d been taking Viola’s pulse, which was thin, rapid and thready, but she didn’t know what kind of rhythm would be native to a woman in her seventies who had led the kind of … shall we say “reckless” life Viola had led. Her breathing was shallow but regular. She lifted the woman’s eyelids. Her pupils were not dilated and they were both the same size.
Turning toward Pete Rutherford, she called out, “Would you please go get Eli? I know he’s there. I was just in his office—”
How long ago? Ten minutes? Half an hour? It couldn’t possibly have been such a short period of time, in the world of minutes and seconds because in the world of life occurrences it was something like an epic. “Tell him I need his help.”
Then she turned her attention back to Viola Tackett, who lay on her back in the grass unconscious. Not vomiting. No nose bleed. And until she woke up, they wouldn’t know about the “needle in the brain” phenomena Liam was experiencing.
She groaned.
“Mama!” Malachi was holding her hand, patting it. It was such a tender gesture Sam wanted to look away, fearing she might tear up. She didn’t. “Can you wake up and talk to me, Mama?”
Viola opened her eyes and immediately closed them again.
“Who burnt them beans?” she mumbled.
Sam and Malachi exchanged a look.
“What beans, Mama?”
“How many kinds of beans we got in the garden?” she snapped, but still didn’t open her eyes. The strength in her voice was encouraging.
“Mrs. Tackett, this is Sam Sheridan. You remember me. I came out to the house when Neb got that spider b
ite and it got infected. Remember?”
“Onliest bite I remember was the goat got ahold of Obie’s backside, tore the whole back out of his pants and got a good chunk of his butt with it.”
Malachi smiled.
Clearly, the old woman was capable of lucid thought. She was confused and disoriented, but it didn’t appear there was any serious—
Her eyes snapped open.
“Where’s them boys?”
She made to sit up and Sam tried to restrain her but she shook Sam off like a pestering fly and sat upright. When she did, blood began to seep out of both ears and run down her neck. Looking around, her confusion quickly morphed into anger.
She spotted Malachi and dumped the anger on him.
“You want to tell me what you’re doing here, and don’t you lie to me, boy, or I’ll snatch the hair off your head so quick your eyebrows’ll be gone right along with it.”
“Where is here, Mama?” he asked. Again, the kind, gentle tone.
“Why here—?” She looked around and closed her mouth. The anger drained off her face slower than it had flashed into place there and what came behind it was bewilderment.
Join the club.
She reached up to feel the wet on her neck and when she saw blood on her fingers, she cried, “What’s goin’ on? Where are … what are we doin’—?”
She made to get up and this time Malachi denied her.
“You sit right where you are until we’re sure you ain’t gonna fall on your face soon’s you stand upright.”
E.J. arrived right then, which wasn’t the most auspicious moment in terms of dealing with a disoriented and confused Viola Tackett. His presence added another whole level of strangeness.
