No reason given.
All right, but Dree wasn’t going to quibble about that one, either.
Maxence continued, “So if we want this mission to proceed, we will be riding motorcycles. We’ll have to divvy up some of the supplies into the saddlebags, but we’ll probably be wearing backpacks while we ride. Is everyone okay with that?”
All the men guffawed and assured him they were more than fine with that.
That was not the proper way to phrase a question where the answer might have people’s lives riding on it. Dree had learned medical questioning techniques in nursing school.
Dree spoke up. “So, it looks like we’re going to be wearing unwieldy backpacks while we’re riding these motorcycles. I saw a lot of unpaved roads barely cut into the sides of mountains while we were landing. It’s going to be mountains on one side of the road, sheer cliffs on the other. Does anyone feel uncomfortable with the thought of riding a motorcycle while wearing an unwieldy backpack over roads that might be rutted, or maneuvering around large obstacles like fallen rocks?”
Father Booker folded his hands in front of himself as if in contemplation, and then he made purposeful eye contact with Dree. “I am more than proficient at riding a motorcycle, and I believe that my expertise is valuable on this mission. However, if it comes to a point where I feel that I am unsafe or endangering others, I will return to Jumla and then Kathmandu. I assume everyone will do the same?”
Dree liked Father Booker. He was sane.
And so, under the wan winter sunlight, the six team members unpacked the medical supplies from the cardboard boxes and stuffed them into the saddlebags that some of the motorcycles had, and then they found room for the rest of the supplies in the extra pockets of the backpacks.
Dree asked Maxence, “You said something about tents?”
His breath puffed out, and he scowled. “Dammit. Batsa! Do they have the damn tents?”
They did indeed have tents, but they only had three.
Dree could tell from looking at the tiny little sticks and scanty amount of fabric that they would only sleep two people each.
And even then, those big guys had better be pretty good friends.
She told Maxence this, muttering under her breath so the other guys wouldn’t hear.
Maxence nodded and whispered back, “We’re staying in an inn tonight. We’ll figure out how to do this later. I can sleep in a tent with Isaak and Alfonso. We went to boarding school together. We have no secrets.”
Dree mounted her motorcycle and figured out how to turn it on, making sure she engaged both the clutch and front brake with the levers on the handlebars to ensure the bike didn’t go anywhere in case it wasn’t in neutral. The other guys also managed to start their bikes without running themselves over, which Dree took as a hopeful sign.
Batsa asked for directions to the inn where they had planned to stay that first night before setting out into the wilderness of Jumla, and he turned out to have an excellent memory and eye for directions as they rode to the inn. Plus, he could read the signs in the Nepali language.
Father Booker and Batsa were steady on their bikes.
Maxence and Alfonso seemed more than adequate.
Isaak wobbled a lot, but he knew what the handles did.
The inn that Batsa guided them to looked like pictures that Dree had seen of houses in New Orleans with porches on the first and second floors. The roof was painted the same lapis lazuli color as many of the other roofs that they had seen from the helicopter, and the plaster was white with emerald patches of moss. A small shrine to an elephant-looking idol out front had prayer flags hanging from cords that formed a little tent around it.
Batsa went inside as the advance guard and talked to the people who ran the inn. When he emerged, he said, “The good news is that the rooms are free as long as we promise to buy supper at the inn because it’s the off-season. They’re thrilled to see any guests.”
Isaak asked skeptically, “I thought tourists rented all the cars?”
Batsa laughed. “There aren’t any tourists, just people who are here for the holidays. Everyone stays with their families and sleeps on the floor when they come home for holidays. They flew or rode a bus to get here.”
As Dree was a girl who had grown up in what was gently called reduced circumstances, though reduced from what she never figured out, Dree doubted this. She speculated that there were never any jeeps at all, or that the jeeps went somewhere else for some other reason.
Maxence asked Batsa, “If that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?”
Batsa sighed, and his sour expression looked like he didn’t want to say what he had to. “They only have three rooms.”
Alfonso chuffed a laugh. “Considering it’s almost Christmas, I suppose we should be grateful there are any rooms at the inn.”
Father Booker looked at his feet. “I guess we know who Mary is, but which of us is Joseph, and which are the three wise men?”
Isaak glared at the two-story building and said to Batsa, “I thought you said there were no tourists.”
“They only have three rooms for rent in the entire inn. That’s it. Jumla isn’t a tourist area, especially in the winter. If we want to try to find some other hostel, we could. It would probably mean splitting up because I don’t think we’re going to find anything bigger.”
Dree volunteered, “I can sleep in one of the tents in the yard.”
Maxence shot her a disapproving look. “If anybody is sleeping in the yard, it’s one of us. In the meantime, Dree, you can have one room. The five of us will split the other two rooms. All missions have some unexpected setbacks. We will figure out how to do this.”
Dree saw why it was easier to have only one gender along on these missions. Trying to figure out how she could maintain her modesty, as those five guys probably thought about it, was cumbersome.
An even split of men and women would have worked better than one girl and five guys. She should note that to Augustine at some point.
Maxence, not Augustine.
Still weird.
Chapter Five
A Demon in her Ear
Maxence
That night, Maxence Grimaldi slept on the cold floor of the hostel room with a folded blanket as a pillow. He wished he’d laid out one of the sleeping bags piled in the corner, but he was too tired and fading in and out of twilight sleep to get up and grab one after he’d lain down.
Isaak and Alfonso hadn’t snored when they were all in boarding school together as teenagers, but now they did.
A lot.
Seriously, he worried about their adenoids.
It didn’t help that right after they had turned out the lights to go to sleep, Alfonso had quipped, “If you’re uncomfortable on the floor, Max, I volunteer to go bunk with Nurse Andrea Catherine.”
“You’re pronouncing it wrong,” Max had told him from the floor between the two beds. “It’s ANN-Dree-uh, not Ahn-DRAY-ah.”
“How did she get on this mission, anyway?”
Max gritted his teeth. “She’s a nurse practitioner. Our peds doctor backed out, and she volunteered.”
“But, how did she come to volunteer? Did you know her from your previous drunken debauchery before you took Holy Orders?”
Not from before, no. “Her Catholic high school principal knows Father Thomas Aquinas of Immaculate Conception Church in Arizona.”
“Oh, Catholic Charities mafia.”
The wooden floor rubbed a sore spot on Maxence’s tailbone, and he shifted over to his side, pulling the two thin blankets with him. His butt became cold. “Yes. Quite.”
Alfonso said, his voice rising wistfully, “She is very beautiful.”
Max growled, “This is a Catholic Charities trip, not a hook-up cruise.” He coughed so that it sounded like he had something in his throat.
Isaak said in the dark, “I didn’t take a vow of celibacy, and neither has she.”
Max breathed slowly, feigning sleep.
&n
bsp; Alfonso and Isaak hadn’t taken vows of celibacy, and neither had Dree.
Max reminded himself that, while he may be there to keep Dree safe, he was not there to be her chaperone, and he was not her father.
But if either one of those two assholes laid a finger on her, Max was going to kill him.
They would be out in the wilds of Nepal.
No one would find a shallow grave covered with rocks.
That was rather further down that line of thought than he had meant to go. He wasn’t going to kill anyone and bury them in a shallow grave.
No one in Max’s family had done that for at least a few generations. His ancestors definitely had, but those were different times. His father probably hadn’t. Neither had his uncle, most likely.
Maxence’s older brother Pierre, however, was probably a tossup.
And then there was his cousin, Alexandre, but Alex hadn’t buried anyone in a shallow grave.
That Max knew of.
But if Alex had killed someone and successfully buried them in a shallow grave and no one found them, Maxence wouldn’t know about it.
Alexandre was probably an outlier.
Max’s thoughts flopped and scurried around for six hours until daybreak. He blamed his utter lack of sleep on the floor and the blanket for a pillow, not on his mind grinding over what those two bastards had dared to say.
The next morning, Maxence dragged himself downstairs to the small lobby of the inn, exceedingly ill-prepared for a four-hour motorcycle ride on a dirt road with a slightly off-centered backpack.
Overnight, snow had dusted the town and mountains, covering everything with white. Their boots crunched the crisp layer like they were walking on a giant, delicate eggshell laid over the earth.
The farmland beyond the town was a monochromatic landscape of white canvas sliced by the black-ink pen strokes of stone walls delineating the fields. The mountains around the valley grew more imposing when covered with ice because only the largest, most dangerous boulders jabbed through the snow.
They didn’t leave too early in the morning because they wanted to give the sun a chance to warm the air, and the delay of an hour spent idling over sweet, milky chai made the four-hour ride more tolerable.
As they were loading up and getting on the motorcycles, Maxence glanced over Dree’s winter gear she’d brought from Paris. She appeared to be wearing ski clothes, like a bib and a jacket, all filled with thick down and seeming to be water-resistant, and her boots came up well over her ankles.
It was red and white, practically a diamond checkerboard like his tattoo on his forearm, and Max wondered if Father Moses had done that on purpose.
Good, he’d been worried about her.
When he’d summoned the private plane, he’d had his winter gear packed and loaded, and thus he’d retrieved it when they got to Nepal. Maxence was well kitted out in black leather winter motorcycle gear and boots, as were the rest of the guys because they’d had time to plan and pack for this contingency, too.
Batsa consulted the innkeepers about the best route to the first village they planned to visit, a tiny settlement in the hills that was not too far away. He seemed confident as he led the caravan of six motorcycles out of town.
They sped under a square arch that had been painted red. The city’s name was painted on the top in white, and Hindu religious symbols were inscribed down the sides. Once out of town, they opened the throttles and sped out into the countryside.
Maxence herded Dree’s motorcycle to take the second position behind Batsa, where he could keep an eye on her. She rode the bike very well, leaning into the turns and keeping up with Batsa easily.
After about an hour, the paved street ended, and the rest of the way was a gravelly dirt road clinging to the sides of the mountains. The noise of their motorcycle engines thundered on the sheer rock walls to their left and blasted into the empty air over the straight drop down to rivers winding between the mountains on their right.
In the warm seasons, these steep valleys would be lush.
In the winter just before Christmas, however, the dead scrub revealed the rock walls and fallen stones of the landscape.
With the motorcycle growling between his legs and the wind rushing over the padded leather he wore, Maxence fell into a rhythm of watching Dree and Batsa ahead of him. He drove slowly to steer around fallen boulders that had clattered down the mountain and hadn’t quite made it across the road to plummet down the cliff on the other side.
When they met oncoming trucks or buses, Maxence took Batsa’s lead and stuck to the side of the road next to the mountainside as they maneuvered around each other. The trucks ate up the majority of the narrow road. A driver could easily force a motorcycle off the road and down the cliff by accident.
The buses and trucks were jubilantly decorated with bright paint and fabric flags, reminding Max of Hindu and Buddhist temple elephants painted with red and yellow turmeric and saddled with ornate gold-fringed blankets. Many of the trucks that supplied the tiny grocery stores of the mountain villages had fringe hanging around the ceiling of the cabs, with icons of Ganesh, Shiva, and Ram in a tiny shrine on the dashboard. Slogans, many of them in English, were painted in white on the red trucks, such as Enjoy Today like It Is Your Last, or Make Today Count, or Bud Light.
After two hours of death-defying riding, they stopped to stretch their legs. Dree wrenched off her helmet and shook out her blond hair. Her cheeks were rosy but not cold-chapped, and her eyes were bright with glee. “This is awesome!”
Maxence couldn’t help but laugh with her. “It’s quite an experience.”
“When will we get there?”
“A few more hours.”
“Is there an inn there?”
“We’ll scout the village first, but this will probably be our first day of camping. In another day or two, we’ll reach some larger towns that may have an inn. This area isn’t a tourist destination like the Annapurna circuit. That’s a very long hiking trail that can take weeks, but every hour or so, there’s a little town with tea shops and restaurants, and there are lots of inns and hostels along that road. The Jumla district isn’t like that, so we’re going to have to take what we can get.”
Their group of six motored to their destination, which was a small clutch of thirty houses or so and a population of about a hundred and fifty souls.
When people heard the roar of their engines and the sputtering of their tires on the gravel, they came out to look at what had arrived in their town.
Batsa talked to them, obviously explaining that they were on a charity mission by the English words sprinkled into his quick speech to the people who came out.
One young man had a lumpy bandage held in place with rags wound around his forehead. Blood ran into his eye, and he wiped it away impatiently.
Dree stepped forward, removing her helmet and pulling gray fabric out of her pocket that she whipped over her head. The cloth was a veil like the Little Sisters of Charity in Kathmandu wore, and she tucked her hair behind it. “Let me take a look at that.”
Batsa translated for her and must’ve continued to explain that she was a nurse or other medical professional, because he talked for about three minutes before the guy allowed Dree to gingerly unwind the makeshift bandage and look at the wound beneath.
When she got down to his skin, Maxence heard her gasp. “You’ve been walking around like this?”
Batsa translated what she’d said, but Dree was already yanking medical supplies from the saddlebags on her motorcycle.
Maxence leaned down beside her. “Anything I can do to help?”
She drew a deep breath through her nose, and her eyes fluttered closed for a minute, but she said, “I’m not a doctor, but I know how to suture a wound. It’s not going to be pretty. This guy should’ve had professional medical attention days ago. I can see a lot of his skull.”
Maxence said, “If he could have gotten to a doctor, I’m sure he would have. I see horses and yaks here, but I don
’t see any modern vehicles.”
Dree shook her head. “Even in the poorest parts of New Mexico, at least some people have trucks. If you don’t have a vehicle, at least your neighbor can drive you into town for medical emergencies like this one. He should see a plastic surgeon, not a nurse practitioner.”
“He can’t. Can you treat him competently, if not at the level of a plastic surgeon?”
“I can pull those muscles and skin together and sew a few stitches into him. I’m worried about him being able to chew. All those big muscles up the sides of your head are there to move your jaw.”
“If we hadn’t come along, he wouldn’t have even that.”
“So, he would have been like that until spring when they could get to town?”
Max paused for a moment. “No, he would’ve been like that until he got an infection, and then he would’ve died.”
“Okay,” she said, staring at her neatly packed gauze and other supplies. “At least I can suture him up so that won’t happen.”
“You’re giving him a second chance at life.”
“Don’t they have doctors who ride a circuit and come out to see these communities?”
“Some areas do, and sometimes they come in the spring through the fall.”
She swallowed hard. “Oh.”
“Just one more question. Is there a reason you’re wearing the veil of the Little Sisters of Charity?”
“Sister Mariam said that people would respect a woman who had taken religious vows more and told me to wear it.”
“And, did you take vows?”
She blinked for a moment, and then the question in her blue eyes turned into anger. Her voice had a cold, steel edge when she said, “No, Deacon Father Maxence. I’m not the one who took religious vows.”
“I apologize for that, and for everything. Let’s go back to how I can help you.”
Dree shook her head. “Let’s find a place out of the wind where I can lay out my instruments. You can hold his head still while I give him a shot of local anesthetic, and then I’ll suture him up.”
They commandeered one of the larger houses to use as a makeshift clinic. Dree set out her supplies on a wooden table that had been scoured perfectly clean before they’d arrived. With Maxence standing behind the man’s chair and holding him still, Dree numbed the area, disinfected the wound, sewed him up, and then dressed the wound properly.
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