by David Cole
“I don’t know yet how you two know each other. But I know you’re connected, somehow. I’m going to have to find out from this young woman just what she knows. Back in Medellín, I was known as the best cleaner to call. You know, the guy who comes with the bottles of acid and the bags and gets rid of people. You, you’re going for a long run into oblivion. Thirty-nine people have already died in the area of the desert where I’m going to drop you. And that includes the cooler months, includes the ones who froze and the ones who got dehydrated.”
“Spider!” I shouted.
“Spider,” he said. “A nickname? Tell me more.”
I clamped my mouth shut.
“Or not,” he said. “I don’t care. Once I’ve dropped you in the desert, I’ll come back for this little spider, this tarantula, this black widow that will want to sting me. But I’ve already arranged an identity kit for her, passport, tickets on a private jet, where she’ll be stabilized with tranquilizers.”
“Where are you taking her?”
“South.” He grinned. “To my own place, in the mountains. I’ll keep her there until she tells me whatever I want to hear. Then I’ll do something with her. I just don’t know what yet.”
He pulled a roll of duct tape from his pocket, cut off a strip, and whipped it around my mouth. Punching the button for the electric door, he waited for it to clunk to a stop at the top.
“All right,” he said. “’Bye, my spider. I’ll be back.”
He dumped me back in the trunk, held the ether rag to my face again.
34
I groaned, tried to stretch, but stabs of pain all over. Stop stretching. Don’t move! A taste of vomit in my mouth, behind that sour taste something chemical, something hospital. I’d been drugged, now I remembered.
Ran a finger over my teeth, trying to clear those tastes, trying to spit, but my mouth too dry. Reached for water, but of course none to drink. I thought of tomatoes and blueberries, of succulent and damp fruits, of raw eggs, of honey molasses, but calling up good-tasting things didn’t get rid of the bad taste. Running my hands across the ground, I found a smooth stone, a pebble, and put it in my mouth to suck on. The pebble was flecked with an amber-colored substance, the yellow polished by decades of being rolled along by winds and rain.
I tried to figure the worst-case scenario.
Best-case, I corrected myself. Best-case scenario.
Negative. Dehydrated so much that sweat scarcely formed. Positive. Sweat didn’t flow continually into my eyes, so they didn’t burn anymore. Negative. Bleeding from at least a dozen scrapes. Positive. The smell of the blood so intense that I could focus on it to the point of ignoring some of the pain.
Heat. Negative. Well over one hundred and ten degrees.
Heat. Positive. At some point, temperature doesn’t really matter. The organism dehydrates, blood pressure drops. At some point, you don’t think about it.
Negative.
I was going to die.
Positive.
I wasn’t dead yet.
Always surprising what the human body can do if the mind is shut off from thinking about things too much.
Think, you die.
Stand up, one foot in front of the other, total body focus, you live.
What to do.
Getting to my feet. My bare feet, I quickly realized when I stepped onto the hot desert floor. Panic of sudden realization where I was, didn’t know where I was except it was in the middle of the desert. Slowly swiveling completely in a circle, I saw nothing alive, no birds, no snakes or critters or insects. They were out there, but with the sun directly overhead, nothing wanted to move.
I had to move. I had to find water. I had to find somebody.
Nothing I could use to bind my feet, the first hundred yards excruciating on my soles as I limped across the desert. No shifting sands here. Just corniche. Lots of small, sharp rocks, tufted dry grass. Here and there, discarded plastic supermarket bags from undocumented workers crossing up from Mexico. I gathered a few, tried to tie them around my feet, but they quickly tore on the stones and grass.
Stopping at the first saguaro, I used a stone to bash a hole between two saguaro ribs, looking for water. I pulled out clumps of the pulp, trying to suck moisture from them.
A dark plastic bag. I pulled it over my head, tied the loops under my chin, some relief from the sun although after five minutes my scalp felt like it was in a dishwasher. Hot, moist. I couldn’t afford the water lost through the sweat and ripped off the bag.
What to do, what to do.
I was in serious trouble.
Gripping large clumps of saguaro pulp in both hands, I guessed which direction was north, hard to guess with the sun directly overhead, but I had to pick a direction so I did.
And I jogged off into the desert.
When starting out, without realizing it, I’d taken in the sense of shadows from saguaros and mesquite and creosote bush. I mean the lack of shadows, the sun so precisely overhead that its vertical rays hit directly down on the anvil of the desert. Now, seeing a saguaro shadow about two feet long, I knew that time had passed. Both my feet bled, but not badly. I’d done so much long-distance running that my feet had built blisters on blisters, the soles callused enough for occasional pricking, but on the whole, and I had to focus on the whole, the total foot was okay.
But that saguaro shadow was ominous. I estimated it was at least an hour since I’d started running. At least a quart of sweat, of moisture evaporation that I couldn’t replace. Weighing the odds, I picked up my pace to something like a twelve-minute mile. The extra speed meant I had to watch my step. A trip, a fall, anything like that could be painful at minimum, potentially dangerous to the point of fatal if I broke bones. I shifted my path several times, the ground increasingly rocky, and I sensed I was on an incline, running uphill, and I didn’t like that extra effort, but I had little choice. A covey of quail scattered in front of me, their song like Indian flutes, but the beauty of those flutes scarcely registered. My head was buzzing, inside, almost a rattle, like the sun was drying out my brain and leaving it to twitch about like the tail of a huge timber rattler. I went up and over a small escarpment, down the other side with a thud onto solid rock, impatient with my progress slowing down as I fought against tripping and stumbling, my eyes so intent on the two and a half feet of my next stride that I misjudged the next rocky outcrop and fell on my rear, sliding down the rocks for several yards until I stopped, my panties shredding, bright lines of blood on my rump. I clawed at the rocky desert, got to hands and knees, not bothering to look at the scrapes, willing myself erect and running again to the top of the small outcrop, where I stopped with a deep sob.
As far as I could see, nothing but desert, as flat and hot as the bottom of an iron. In the winter, I’d been in the desert at night, with temperatures down around freezing, the slightest breeze chafing any bare skin, piercing your sinuses and eardrums. But that was the other side of the calendar.
Until falling, I’d not been thinking about anything but the immediacy of being in the desert, of needing to get out of the desert. But now my head was full of the future, of eternity in the desert. In extreme sports, you do not think of the miles left, the time to completion, the summary of mental and physical exhaustion which will be stretched out beyond comprehension. In extreme sports, this is unthinkable. You just put one foot in front of the other, swim another stroke, pedal the bike one more revolution.
This totally freaked me.
I stopped again. I wanted to just lie down, cry myself into wellness, into healing, into begging for somebody to find me.
Two years ago, I’d have done just that.
Given up.
Not this woman, I thought. Not this time.
I carefully gauged the shadows, figured I’d been running at least two hours, figured my mind wasn’t rational anymore so it could be three or four hours, the shadows having that midafternoon, indeterminate length about them.
Raising both hands, I cuppe
d the palms around my eyes, shading out the sun, looking at the horizon. At first, I thought the tower was just another saguaro, maybe half a mile off. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them to slits, looked again carefully. It really was a tower. Maybe two, three miles away. I saw no other towers, so it couldn’t be a power line, maybe a telecommunications satellite tower. That was bad news, since anything like that would be so tall that I was underestimating the distance to it. It’s a survival tower, I said to myself. One of those emergency signals to those on the desert illegally because of the hundreds of illegal travelers who died every summer.
Water! Here! the tower signifies.
My entire map of existence shrank to those few miles. Even the horizon was blurred, indistinct. I kept that tower etched in my head, even when I couldn’t see it, which was most of the time, both feet bleeding heavily now, and my pulse so faint I could barely pick it up except at the base of my neck.
I headed toward the tower. Trying to run, really just a loping pace, slowing now and then to a fast walk, gradually slowing even more to shorter steps, my mind hallucinating, my strength really going now, felt like my blood was boiling directly out of my skin, reducing my circulation, reducing blood pressure to the point where I knew I was light-headed and getting dangerously near that point of low blood pressure where the body just collapses into a coma. And out here, a coma meant death.
Double vision. I shook my head violently, huge globules of sweat flung left and right, but no luck. Every bush had a double image, both of them sharp, overlaid, like two serrated leaves, one laid almost on top of the other.
A black lightning bolt hit the ground, no, hit the prairie dog, the strike a blur, talons ripping into the prairie dog, ripping a long string of entrails as the hawk swooped upward, suddenly skittering a full ninety-degree turn as I waved my arms at it, furious. I’d watched the prairie dog, licking his paws, satisfied, no longer hungry, alive and then dead. The hawk wheeling in a disdainful arc. I was no threat. It flapped its wings slowly, rising on a thermal, disappearing into the sun.
Intent on the ground, I didn’t see the three-wire fence until I smashed directly into one of the metal poles. Bounced off the pole, ran parallel to the fence without a thought in my mind, ramming another pole, and this time I got knocked to the ground. Sat on my butt, blood running from open gashes in both legs and arms, and suddenly I was blind. I swiped a forearm across my eyes. It came away wet. Red. Blood. Wincing, I felt a small gash in my forehead, but my blood pressure was so low that none of the wounds bled much. I was in real trouble.
35
The ambulance hit a dip in the old pavement, traveling so fast that when it rose up to the top of the next rise, all four wheels flew a few inches off the road. When the ambulance slammed back to earth, my hip banged the side panel and I came to.
A young EMT let go of the overhead grip, steadied himself as the ambulance rocked side to side. He checked a tubing that ran to my left side, and I moved my head enough to see an IV inserted.
“Where am I?” I croaked.
“Hey. Back to life, are we?”
“Where am I?” I asked again, my head very fuzzy and beginning to ache.
“In an ambulance.” He switched the saline solution bag hanging on the rack above me. “Yeah, I know. In an ambulance. Bad joke. You’re on your third IV bag so far.” He looked out the rear windows. “We just went through Sells. Another forty or so minutes, you’ll be in St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson.”
“Where…find me?”
He unwrapped what looked like a green lollipop, stuck it in a bottle of water, and put it between my lips.
“You’re almost bone-dry, girl. I can’t let you swallow any water, but squeeze this between your lips. Get things a little wet, so you sound less like a frog when you say something.”
The moisture felt wonderful. I clamped on the spongy green square, sucking and squeezing everything out of it. He smiled approvingly, but I saw that the smile didn’t extend up to his eyes and I knew I wasn’t doing very well. He pulled on another pair of latex gloves, unrolled some gauze bandages, dipped them into a solution, and started to work on my right arm.
“Jesus,” I screamed.
“Yeah. It’s gonna sting. I got your left arm done while you were still out cold. Sorry about this, but I’ve gotta clean all these wounds. Oh. They found you kinda west and north of Organ Pipe, almost halfway between there and Cabeza Prieta. People that regularly check the emergency water towers found you at one of them.”
The moisture eased my cracked lips and seemed to clear my head. I moved. Not a great idea at all.
“I’m gonna strap you down if you try that again.”
Raising my head, I saw jagged scabs on my right arm, bandages all over the left one.
“More on your legs. What the hell did you do out there? Run through a bob-wire fence?”
I nodded yes, clamping my lips on the now-dry sponge, clenching my jaw against the pain of the cleansing antiseptic.
“Your forehead, too,” the EMT said. “All in all, you’re one lucky girl.”
“Where…we going?”
“Tucson. I’ve already radioed ahead. St. Mary’s emergency room is all set to take you in.”
“No hospital,” I said, struggling to sit up, unable to muster enough strength to do more than raise my head. “Got…other things…got to do other things…”
“I’d like to knock you out with a shot, but you’re so weak, I want to keep you talking to me. So talk to me, girl. What’s your name?”
“Name is…name,” I mumbled.
I tried to raise the patterned disposable sheet covering me.
“Well, I had to cut them all off. I’m afraid you’re kinda naked under there.”
I spit out the green spongy lollipop. He dipped it in water, put it back between my lips.
“So, like, were you trying one of those endurance runs? Out in the desert? Except you got lost or something?”
The ambulance launched off another dip in the road. I remembered that road.
“Eighty-six?” I croaked.
“Oh, yeah. You were eighty-sixed outa that desert, all right. Oh. You mean, are we on 86 the death road between Sells and Tucson?”
I nodded.
“People drive pretty fierce along this road. Lots of shrines. I’ve responded to a lot of accidents. I’m based in Sells, in the Indian Health Services hospital. I’m Ojibwe, so when I finished IHS training, do you think they’d send me back to Michigan? Back up to the Upper Peninsula, back to L’Anse? Oh, no. They sent me out in the middle of the desert. Okay. We’re done with that arm. Now. I’m gonna bunch this sheet here up around your waist. I’ve got to work on your legs. I’ll try to keep your privates private, so to speak. But I’ve got to cleanse all the wounds.”
However far up he bunched the sheet, I never knew. I passed out again and woke up in a bed in the emergency room, two nurses and a doctor hunkered over me.
“Awake,” one of the nurses said.
“Name?” the doctor said. He looked Indian or Pakistani, his bedside manner limited either by his English or his concern.
“Name…Laura. Winslow.”
“Laura Winslow.” The nurse made a notation on a clipboard. “You still need me here, Doctor?”
“Do you hear me?” the doctor said.
“Kinda,” I said, “but I understand her better.”
They both laughed.
“Good, good. Humor. You got some humor. Good thing. Cool beans.”
The nurse changed out the empty saline bag hanging above me for a full one.
“Five bags in twelve hours,” the doctor said. “I think almost a record here.”
“Twelve…hours? I’ve got get up.”
“Not you, Miss Laura Winslow. Your tank was really low.”
A blood pressure cuff squeezed my right arm and they both waited for the readings.
“Improving,” the doctor said. “The EMT man, when he first found you, he had trouble finding a pulse
on most of your body. Your blood pressure was seventy-five over thirty-eight. You were this far from going into a coma.”
He held out a thumb and index finger, paralleled them about two inches apart.
“How…long…” I couldn’t even seem to get out a whole question.
“We’ll keep you here for at least another twelve hours. Until your systolic pressure goes over one hundred and your heart rate stabilizes. Right now your heart is beating steady but really low, barely above fifty beats per minute.”
“Runner,” I said. “I run. A. Lot.”
“So you normally have a low resting heart rate?” I nodded. “How low?”
“Fifty. Nine.”
“Well, Miss Laura Winslow. That is good news, then. You just relax. These are good people in here, but now we have to go see about a stabbing victim.”
I lay there for hours, dozing on and off, until the shift changed and the tone of conversation grew louder, more people in the room, and more patients. I lay in the bed for at least two more hours until a nurse came to start moving my bed.
“We’re moving you to the ICU,” she said.
An aide came to help with the IV stand, and the two of them wheeled me out into the corridor, where people were stacked up in beds.
“Busy gangbanger night,” the aide said to the nurse. “So how’s your boy?”
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“No. Last I heard, you were taking him to a nose and throat specialist.”
They ignored me completely.
“Yeah, right,” the nurse said, as they maneuvered my bed into an elevator. “Well. You know he’s been snuffling for weeks, and he kept telling me he couldn’t breathe through his left nostril.”
“I heard that part. So? What did the nose doc say?”
“He looks up Sammy’s nose. Now, Sammy, you know, he’s barely three years old, he can’t really describe what’s going on, but he starts screaming like crazy when the doc puts a swab up into that nostril. So I’m there, his nurse practitioner is there, the two of us are holding poor Sammy down while the doctor takes out an extraction tool and goes to work up Sammy’s nose.”
