13 Views of the Suicide Woods

by Bracken MacLeod

  Pickett looked Sam in the eyes, his thin mouth upturned slightly in that New England expression of extreme pleasure. Caring for an animal brought him the kind of contentment he’d never found in a bottle, boat, or brothel. And Sam had heard in his youth, Pickett spent considerable time in all three.

  “You two make sure she don’t move now. I’m gonna give her a local anesthetic. It might sting a little, but not as bad as gettin’ the jab in the first place. How’d you say she got this?”

  Callie’s blushed as she said, “I threw a stick into the pond for her to fetch. She jumped in and yelped and when she came out, she had this. I guess she must have landed on something sharp below the surface.”

  “Nothing you coulda done about that. Not your fault. Now get ahold of her while I work.” Sam leaned in and held Gina’s leg while Callie hugged her body and shushed and whispered to the dog. Dr. Pickett went to work. Gina whined louder, but sat still and let the old man do his job. He used to have an assistant—his wife, Joye—but since she’d taken ill, he was left to work on his own.

  Despite the stroke that had left his right hand less agile than it had been a decade earlier, Dr. Pickett’s hardened hands moved with the practiced ease of a young doctor. His motions looked to Sam like some kind of sleight of hand trick of redirection and dexterity that transformed a bleeding wound into a stapled line of restoration.

  “She’ll have a scar to show for it,” he said. “But don’t we all?”

  Callie hugged the old man, kissing his cheek with the kind of Midwestern passion that made northern Yankee men blush. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said.

  “How many times I asked you to call me Garrett, hon?”

  Callie dropped her gaze. She stroked her Viszla’s muscled golden shoulder and tried to hide her embarrassment behind the few loose dreadlocks that had fallen in front of her face. “How much do we owe you, Garrett?”

  “Not sure. I’ll have to sit down and figure it out, I reckon. I’ll send you a bill when I get around to it.”

  Sam turned to Callie and said, “Hon, would you fetch me my backpack?”

  She smiled, winked, and walked out to their truck cradling Gina in her arms. When she returned, Sam expected her to still be holding the fifty-pound dog like one of those toy breeds skinny ladies from the city carted around in handbags. Instead, she carried only Sam’s Army surplus rucksack. He took it from her, undid the canvas fasteners, and withdrew a quart bag of oily green marijuana buds.

  “This is for Joye. And a little extra for you too. Send us the full bill when you know what we owe.”

  Garrett Pickett didn’t balk or try to do anything but quietly and clearly say “Thank you” as he took the bag. He wasn’t the kind of man who shared his problems. He came from that stoic breed of New England men like Sam’s grandfather and father. Men who believed dignity was not about breeding or wealth or taste; it was about not trying to lessen your own load by saddling others with your troubles. People got their own worries, Sam’s father would say. You got shoulders enough to carry your own without spreading it around. Few people knew about Joye’s pain. The few that did simply gave what help they could and never asked for anything in return. People like Sam and Callie. Good Maine folk.

  The way life should be, as the tourist slogan went.

  Outside, the heavy crunching of a car skidding to a stop in the gravel in front of the clinic and the sound of shouting men and slamming car doors cut Sam’s next statement off.

  “Sounds like something can’t wait,” Dr. Pickett said, stuffing the quart bag into a cabinet behind him. “Better make some room.”

  Sam had time to pull Callie away from the door as it slammed open into the wall. Two men carrying a third shoved through the opening.

  “Hell, boys! It’s open; you don’t need to knock the door down.”

  “Shut the fuck up, old man!” The one with his back turned shuffled toward the table as his partner tried unsuccessfully to kick the door shut while holding on to his friend’s legs. He missed the door and knocked over a coat-tree instead. The men hauled their friend up and slammed him down on the table. The young man groaned loudly, clutching at his glistening red gut. Sam thought he couldn’t be more than eighteen or nineteen.

  “Hey now, fellas,” Sam said, “This isn’t the E.R. You need to take this kid—”

  “I said shut the fuck up,” the first man shouted. He reached behind his back and produced a pistol, aiming it at Sam. “Shut the fuckin’ door, hippie!” Sam put his hands up involuntarily. Callie tried to pull him away from the gun, but they both backed into a counter that arrested their retreat.

  “Let’s all just calm down,” Dr. Pickett said. “Nobody’s done anything they can’t take back yet.”

  The man spun, pointing his pistol in Pickett’s face in reply. Pickett kept his hands at his sides, not stepping back. To Sam, he seemed to grow six inches in that moment. He took on the presence of the man he’d met twenty-five years earlier. The kind of man with heavy hands who’d make you regret forcing him to ball them up into fists.

  The gunman seemed unimpressed, however. “Mickey! Shut the door.” The man’s partner shuffled over and slammed the vinyl door closed. He struggled with the lock, but eventually twisted it into place.

  “Christ, this guy is ancient,” Mickey said.

  “S’what Yelp said. A hundred-year-old guy in a trailer. He’s the doctor.”

  “Fuckin’ old.”

  Pickett’s eyes narrowed but he didn’t protest. “I can only imagine you want me to do something for this young man right here.” He said “young” with a mocking undertone, as if there was more life left in him than the man on the table.

  “You imagine right, grampa.”

  “I ain’t set up for a gut shot. Don’t have the tools or hands to save this boy.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “This trailer look like Maine Medical to you?”

  The man pushed forward with the barrel of the gun to emphasize his impatience with the colloquy. “I don’t need your sarcasm. I just need you to fix up my friend.”

  “I don’t know what I can do,” Pickett said as he snapped into a fresh pair of gloves. He grabbed a few sterile pads and lifted the boy’s shirt to get a look. The kid groaned, but he didn’t have much fight in him, and lay more or less still. Wiping away the blood that was pooling, Pickett leaned in a little closer and took a deep breath through his nose.

  “You smell that? That’s the odor of what we in the business call a complication of a diaphragmatic injury. Whoever shot your boy—I’m assuming it weren’t you, even though you don’t look all that bright—perforated his intestine. You take him somewhere they’re equipped to help and he might live. I don’t know what else in there is damaged. But if I treat him here, he’ll end up dying of fecal peritonitis.” When the gunman didn’t respond, he added, “You following me, son?”

  “You’re full of shit,” Mickey said from the door.

  “No. But your friend’s peritoneal cavity has been filling up with it. My professional opinion is his time is short. For however long you geniuses been driving around looking for a country vet on your fancy little phones, his liver maybe—seems to me from eyeballing that wound there and the amount of blood gushing out of it—has been oozing like crazy.” Dr. Pickett pulled a box of sterile gauze pads and tape out from under his exam table. He placed a pad over the seeping hole in the kid’s stomach. As he pressed it down, however, a fresh circle of blood soaked through, growing in size with alarming speed.

  “How the fuck would a vet know?”

  “I know exactly what a vet knows. I saw my share of gut shot wounds in Korea. I can give him this here battle dressing and then you’d better be on your way to a real hospital. Even if I had something to staunch the bleeding, he needs surgery.”

  “What fuckin’ good are you?”

  “You came to me for help, son. I didn’t invite you. I ain’t worked on a human animal since ’53. Still, I remember those boys and what done t
hem in. I might need trifocals now but I can still see when something is trouble. Can smell it too.”

  “Why are you stopping?”

  Pickett shook his head slowly. “Can’t help him better than tying down the dressing and calling an ambulance. I cut, he dies. Nothin’ in life is simpler to understand than that.”

  The gunman’s hand shook as he thumbed back the hammer on his junk gun. “Try!”

  Dr. Pickett slowly raised his hands, not in defense of the man holding the gun in his face, but to implore him to use common sense. “You care about this boy, you fellas need to take him up the road to Augusta. I can’t help you here anymore than this I’m ’fraid.”

  “What do we do, Patrick?”

  “You shut your mouth, Mickey. This old man is gonna help us or else he’s gonna die.”

  “I’m gonna die anyway,” Pickett said. “Just like your friend here, you keep wasting time.”

  “I’ve got a solution,” Sam said. He kept Callie behind him while he drew the gunman’s attention. “It’s clear you guys can’t take him to the hospital without getting in trouble for . . . whatever lead up to this.” Sam shrugged. “But we can take him. Me and . . .” He didn’t want to say Callie’s name. It felt like giving them power over her. Of course, the gunman had all the power in the world at the present moment. Instead he said, “Me and my wife. Put him in the back seat of our truck and we’ll drive him to the E.R. You guys leave in your own car and no one says a word. We’ll make sure they give him the care he needs and you two can go wherever it is you are headed. No one else gets hurt. No one dies if we can help it.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Mickey said.

  “Fuck that! They’re just going to take him to the hospital and not tell anyone about us?”

  “The writer already called the cops, man!” Patrick’s fury distorted his face into a caricature of rage like an ancient Greek theater mask. The sound of Mickey’s mouth slamming shut was audible.

  “Don’t tell me you tried to rob Cutter Pierce,” Sam said.

  “He wasn’t s’posed to be home. Who’d’ve thought a faggot writer would have a hand-cannon in his desk?”

  “Anyone who reads Hunter S. Thompson,” Callie said.

  “Or Cutter Pierce,” Sam finished. “The guy is legendary for taking shots at people.” A small smile crept up Sam’s face. “Don’t tell me you believed that story about him having an attic full of cash.”

  “I’m supposed to buy he’s a violent gun nut, but not that he’s squirreling away money like someone waiting for the end of the world?”

  “There’s a difference between reading the police log and the gossip column, man. Cutter makes the papers up here more often for taking shots at people on his property than he does for releasing a best seller.”

  “Like it fuckin’ matters now,” Patrick said.

  Sam nodded, understanding what he meant. Patrick and his break-in crew had come north for an urban legend about a retirement score and one of them got retired early instead. Cutter usually shot to scare, not to kill, but they must have left him no choice. Sam wondered how they got off his property at all if they were close enough for the guy to hit the target in the center ring. But then, maybe he hadn’t. If Cutter was aiming for the head or the heart, the bullet dropped before it hit the mark. However it played out, it had made the survivors desperate for a getaway.

  “We promise we won’t tell anyone,” Callie said.

  “No. This is it. Right here.” Patrick turned to Pickett with a look of fury and expectant contempt like he was waiting for more hard truths to dismiss. Pickett offered none. He worked silently to finish the battlefield dressing he’d promised, doing his best to clean and dress the kid’s wounds with his meager supplies. He taped down a long piece of gauze holding sterile pads together on either side of the boy’s abdomen. Both packs were already crimson, close to turning black with saturation. He wrapped another piece of gauze around and tied this one in a knot.

  “Son, these good folk are offering to give you an out. You don’t have a choice about trusting people any more. Cutter Pierce took care of that. Take ‘yes’ for an answer and let them take him up the road.”

  Patrick turned the gun back on Dr. Garrett Pickett, husband of Joye Pickett, Korean War vet, lifelong resident of New Vineyard, Maine, and friend to animals everywhere.

  And pulled the trigger.

  The old man’s lazy eye collapsed in on itself like a dying star. It erupted with part of his skull and brains out the back of his head. Pickett dropped straight down behind the table, mercifully falling out of sight.

  “I am not your son,” Patrick said.

  Sam stared in mute shock, deafened by the report of the gun in the trailer. He thought he heard Callie behind him screaming for the man to stop, as if she existed a few moments earlier in time than the rest of them.

  Patrick shouted, “Let’s go,” indicating they move for the door with his gun hand while he stuck a finger in an ear with his other. They didn’t budge, but continued to stare at the framed portrait of Pickett’s Burmese Mountain Dog hanging on the wall behind the table. Pickett’s splattered blood ran down the image and dripped off the frame with a soft plip plip no one could hear.

  Patrick stepped closer to the couple, interrupting their trance. “Get him; we’re going.”

  Sam shook his head. Patrick raised the gun, its barrel still weeping smoke, pressed the muzzle to Sam’s forehead and said, “I’m not asking for volunteers.”

  Callie rubbed her wet eyes against her sleeve and moved around to the boy’s legs to grab hold. Sam followed suit without further argument. He glanced behind the table at Dr. Pickett’s body slumped on the floor. The sight of it didn’t seem enough to confirm what he’d convinced himself in the last few seconds couldn’t be true. His mind kept repeating he’s not dead like a mantra. But there he was.

  The old man lay in a heap, black blood pouring out of the hole where his eye once was. Mouth hanging open in dumb silence as his drool mixed with gore on the front of his white coat. One bullet had rendered one of the nicest and most generous men Sam had ever known a drooling piece of cooling meat.

  A burning pain bubbled up from his guts, stinging his throat and making his sternum ache. He swallowed his bile and shifted his attention from the dead man to the dying boy. Wrapping his arms under the boy’s armpits, he locked his fingers in front of his narrow chest. He looked his wife in the eyes and blinked that he was ready. She gripped behind the knees and together they hauled the body up easily.

  As they lurched toward the door, Mickey snapped out of his fugue and struggled again with the lock. He got it undone and wrenched the door open. Patrick pushed past, insisting on going first. “In case you feel like dropping him and running.”

  “We’re taking him to the hospital,” Callie said.

  The boy’s head lolled against Sam’s chest. The kid had groaned when the hoods dropped him on the table, but he was limp and silent now because he was slipping out of the world hot on Pickett’s trail. In the distance between the trailer door and the truck, he’d be completely gone if he wasn’t already. But if it got Patrick to let them go, hell if Sam wouldn’t rush that boy to the hospital as quickly as he’d driven anywhere in his life. He said, “We can have him there in twenty minutes.”

  Patrick’s expression darkened. He pointed toward the car with the Massachusetts plates. “Put him in the back.”

  Sam moved toward the oxidized whatever-it-was they drove. He didn’t know a damn thing about cars, but he suspected even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to place this one. Some used piece of shit bought or stolen for this occasion only.

  Callie opened the door and they lay the boy in the car as gently as the cramped space would allow. Gina barked from Sam and Callie’s truck.

  “That’s our dog,” Callie said.

  “Like I give a fuck.”

  “What now?” Sam asked.

  “Get in front,” Patrick said. “We’re going to your place. I n
eed to think.”

  “What then?”

  “I think, motherfucker! I think about what to do next. Now get in the car, you hippie assholes!”

  Callie nodded at Sam and started to climb in the back. Patrick stopped her. “No. You’re riding bitch up front with me. Mickey! Get in back with Pete.”

  “But he’s . . .”

  Patrick screamed something unintelligible that might have been “get in the car” or it might have been something else. It didn’t matter. Everyone had only one option at the present: whatever Patrick wanted.

  Sam nodded at his wife and she crawled in the car through the driver’s door. Sam got in after her and waited for the others. Patrick squeezed in next to Callie and slammed his door.

  “I don’t want to leave Gina in the truck,” Callie said. “It’s hot.”

  Patrick opened his mouth to shout something else, but Sam spoke instead, putting his hand on Callie’s thigh as he did, to reassure her. His hand shook and he tried not to squeeze too hard, but she gasped at the tightness of his grip and he realized that he was close to coming undone.

  “The windows are cracked,” he said. “We’ll come back for her.” Callie nodded and sighed with resignation. They had to go along. For now. Neither of them acknowledged that their chances of coming back for the dog were already slim and growing narrower with each passing minute.

  Sam hoped someone would come and rescue their dog. Perhaps someone else needing Garrett’s care would find her in the truck . . . and him inside. The clinic was remote, however. There was a town nearby, but the road leading to it was seldom traveled. It didn’t lead to anything but the trailer and a house or two a few miles farther. If no one came calling, both Gina and Joye would die of neglect before the weekend.

  One bullet could kill so many.

  Sam turned the keys dangling from the ignition and put the car in gear, resolving to come back. Not quite sure how, yet, but determined to figure it out on the way. He knew Callie was thinking the same thing.