by Aaron Saylor
HOSPITAL
Twenty minutes later, they parked beneath a street light in the lot of the Sewardville Medical Center. They got out and hurried into the building, with the mother carrying the sleeping little one in her arms.
The Sewardville Medical Center occupied the old middle school building that stood alongside Highway 213 in the western corner of Seward County, a mile or so outside of Sewardville proper and not far from the East Kentucky Parkway westbound exit, ideally situated both for quality medical care and also quick transfers to the larger hospitals up the road in Winchester and Lexington.
On the exterior, the structure itself looked straight out of the nineteen sixties, red brick and white cement, green gutters, simple rectangles. The interior, however, was a complete contrast. The building had been refitted with the most modern office furniture and medical technology that a few million dollars’ worth of rerouted state infrastructure funds could buy. Sleek modern stainless steel and ceramic and high–dollar electronic displays. The place still smelled new.
The center consisted of only two floors, but the small town only needed two floors. The first floor housed the emergency room, and the X–ray machines, and the CRT tubes, everything needed for the quick ins and outs. Twenty–four proper rooms waited for admitted patients on the second floor, with calm pastel walls and the omnipresent odors of disinfectant and unnamed body fluids.
They entered the elevator and went up to the second level, with the little one still asleep, head resting on her mother’s shoulders.
At night, the hospital was quiet, empty of non–medical personnel, the silence penetrated only by the dull electronic hum of the lights overhead.
For most people, visiting hours were closed. For most people.
They walked past the nurses’ station, and the nurse on duty didn’t even look up. They moved on down the hallway, to the room at the end of the corridor. There they stood in the doorway and peered at the room’s lone occupant: Sheriff John Slone.
He lay in bed with his upper body raised at a slight angle, hooked up to three separate intravenous tubes, his head resting on thick white pillows. An EKG beeped in steady rhythm with his heartbeat. His breath was shallow, but steady. His head turned to one side, facing them. His eyes were closed.
“I thought he was awake?” she said.
“That’s what the doctor told me,” he answered.
He left her there to watch the sheriff and went in search of the doctor. Soon he found him, Doctor Hall, a short bald man with olive skin, the only doctor on shift. At night, Sewardville needed but one doctor.
“You said my son was awake,” he said to the doctor.
The doctor stiffened. “I told you not to come down here tonight.”
“You know better,” the father said. “Go check him again.”
The doctor sighed, shook his head the way doctors shake their head when faced with stubborn human beings who have no concern for medical reality, only for their own emotional reactions.
Doc Hall and the father walked back to the doorway where the daughter stood watch over her brother. “The guy took a gunshot to the chest last night,” said the doctor, while they stood there. “He’s not ready for visitors. He was awake, yes, for a moment, but it will be a couple of days before he can see anybody. He’s a strong man, but it will take time.”
She looked at her father. The expression in his eyes – the lack of expression – brought her no comfort. Why had the doctor called them if John wasn’t awake?
Suddenly, she felt she couldn’t stand there in the doorway any longer. Over the doctor’s objections, she handed the child to her grandfather, went in to the hospital room, approached her brother’s side. She touched his hand, felt his warmth, then turned back and faced the men at the door.
“It won’t be long,” she said. “He’ll be awake soon. Tonight.”
The men at the door shrugged. They nodded slowly, just being polite. Arguing with her served no purpose.
She turned back to the sheriff, touched her hand lightly against his forehead. “It won’t be long at all,” she whispered to herself, to them, to him. She held her brother’s hand and she wanted to cry, but she didn’t cry. She stood by his bed. Exactly three hours later – to the second – Sheriff John Slone opened his eyes, and when he did, his sister Karen was still standing there.
PART THREE: DUMB BOY
In the early 1900’s, a passenger train route went right through the middle of Sewardville. The town was widely held as a thriving industrial and cultural center of Appalachia.
In 2009, only fourteen percent of Sewardville households had a car that was less than 5 years old.
On the last United States census report, the median household income in Sewardville, Kentucky stood at $19,347. If Mayor Slone and his family were removed from the equation, the number dropped down to $13,243. The public school system was the number one employer in town. The Department of Sanitation was second.
Three 80mg OxyContin pills might cost a hundred and fifty dollars on the street in Sewardville.
Per capita, more people died every year as a result of prescription–drug overdoses in Sewardville than in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco combined.
TIME
Two weeks after Sherriff John Slone awoke in the hospital, he was discharged and sent home, where he finished his recuperation without much incident. He was working again by Thanksgiving, against Doctor Hall’s best advice, though he did promise Doc that he’d stay behind a desk until spring. The Sewardville Times ran a full–page photo welcoming him back to work.
At first, the courthouse employees kept their respectful distance, figuring John would not appreciate bombardment with questions about that traumatic night at the Bears Den. But soon enough, the ladies in the building found entertainment in asking the sheriff to show them his bullet wounds, and John Slone found entertainment in obliging them, always unbuttoning his shirt and pulling it down far enough to show them his quarter–sized pink scars.
Jimmy Sumner’s memorial went about as well as anyone might have expected. The short service took place on the edge of the woods behind their mother’s house. She allowed them that. No one attended except for Boone, Harley Faulkner, and Brother Wayne, the pastor at Presbyterian. Brother Wayne said a few words and recited a passage from the Bible, which Boone didn’t recognize. After that Boone said a few words himself. They didn’t have a coffin, or a body, since Jimmy hadn’t been found yet. But they had a funeral.
The entire time, Mama stayed inside the home, and watched through the kitchen window. Boone understood.
Six long months rolled off the calendar.
Autumn passed into winter, a pitiless season for Sewardville, Kentucky. Mother Nature blasted the area with three separate snowfalls of at least eight inches’ depth, and an average temperature for the season of twenty–one degrees Fahrenheit, well below the norm. Between December 15 and February 1, at least one inch of snow covered the ground for all but two days. In that same period, the children went to school exactly six days total, and not at all between Christmas and January 20. Twice, the county exhausted their stockpile of road salt and Walt Slone put in a personal call to the governor to get the supply replenished. Even worse than the snow and cold, two ice storms roared through the latter days of January, and the weight of the falling ice splintered so many trees and utility poles that it looked like an air force squadron cluster bombed Seward County.
By the end of winter, Seward County saw its population dwindle by twelve people: five killed in traffic accidents, three frozen to death during power outages, one in an electrical fire, and the other three cooked in a meth lab explosion. After a short investigation, the meth lab explosion was not attributed to the weather.
Eventually, though, the bitter temperatures gave way to spring warmth.
Treetops enshrouded in winter’s gray blossomed lush as the weather turned to spring. The Mountain orchids bloomed full, yellow, pink, red, and especially white, c
lean sparkling white, the favorite color of Ellen Slone. Children played in freshly–cut backyards. Laughter again echoed throughout the valley.
Construction went quick on a new Shell gas station and convenience store, out by the East Kentucky Parkway, not far from the medical center. A front page story in the Times heralded the coming of a Taco Bell to the corner of Second Street and College Avenue, and when it opened for business, four hundred cars went through the drive–in window the first day alone.
So spring sprung, bringing rebirth with it. Life returned to the area, and the people welcomed it with open hearts.
As the garden flowers unfurled their new petals, everyone in town looked forward to the Orchid Festival, the town’s annual spring celebration. It happened the final weekend of every April, and this year was no different. City workmen readied the Sewardville City Park for the occasion; they carefully trimmed the grass, picked up the branches that fell during winter, and between the trees hung white vinyl banners that were ten feet long. Anticipation sparked in the air. Folks looked forward to the festivities: the car show, the Miss Orchid Pageant, the concerts. The annual caravan of vendors would come from across the commonwealth, offering rides and hobby crafts and food of all sorts. The funnel cakes, the gyros, the corn dogs, the candy apples. Patrons would come from all corners of Seward County and the counties surrounding, intent on riding the rides, sampling the food, seeing all the sights.
Great days lay ahead, the best days of the year for the people of Sewerville. They would celebrate the flower of their home, the flower that grew no place else on Earth but the green hills of Seward County, Kentucky. Orchistradae Mountain, the Mountain orchid, whose long white petals drooped down and came together at the ends like tiny hands clasped in prayer.
MAMA
On the Tuesday before the Orchid Festival, Boone went back to Mama’s house. He hadn’t seen her since Jimmy’s memorial, and that had only been through the kitchen window. Many times since then, he’d considered a visit, but never had he actually worked up the guts to do it. Until now.
He scaled his way up the rickety front porch, which was only three feet off the ground but which also in this moment seemed high as Kilimanjaro. He paused, gathered himself, and knocked on the door. Soft, ever so soft, just soft enough that maybe she couldn’t hear.
But he knew she could hear.
“Mama?”
She did not answer. Boone knocked again.
“Mama? You in there?”
Still no answer.
He knew she was in there. He knew she knew that he knew she was in there. Regardless, Mama didn’t come to the door, and as Boone stood there he thought that didn’t really surprise him. He wondered: maybe it was a good thing that she didn’t answer. A blessing of sorts. After all, if she had answered the door, what would he say? He hadn’t thought that far ahead. He didn’t know what he would say if she answered.
But she wouldn’t answer the door.
So Boone waited. He owed it to himself, he owed it to Jimmy, he even owed it to Mama not to run away anymore.
Soon enough he heard a miracle from inside the house: the creak of her walk across the old wooden floor. She was coming, she was coming. She was coming. He stepped back from the door to give her a little room, so she could swing the door open wide and see him standing there.
He didn’t know what he would say when she answered. But he would say something.
A minute later, the old door slipped ajar. She didn’t swing it wide at all. Instead, Mama popped her head out in the narrow space between the open door and the frame. She set her jaw firm, squinted, and looked Boone square.
“Go away,” she said. Then she slammed the door in his face, and they were done.
ELMER
Later that week. Friday.
From where Elmer Canifax stood, the naked girl on his bathroom floor looked awfully pretty. She was the kind of pretty and young that often graced his bathroom floor in the morning hours following one of his famous soirees on the distant outskirts of Seward County.
Her skin was smooth and white as the bathroom tile beneath her. No traces of meth use yet. The meth wracked those young nubile bodies. That made Elmer sad. Goodness gone to waste, that’s all it was, and no matter how many times he saw it happen it still kicked him in the gut. Beautiful youth turned into staggering meth monsters, all rotted teeth and infected skin. How far and fast they fell. It broke his heart, even if he was usually the one selling them that meth.
Elmer watched the girl for a moment, waiting for her to breathe, or move, or make a sound. Anything that would show she was alive. The last thing he needed was a dead teenager sprawled out on his bathroom tile. But a few seconds later, her chest expanded and gently dropped again, and that was the proof he needed.
He leaned back against the bathroom sink and lit a cigarette. This had become part of his morning routine, this sweep through the house each morning, exploring all rooms for remnants of the previous night’s party so he could get them up and out of there before any upset boyfriends or girlfriends (or worst of all, parents) showed up and raised hell. There was nothing worse for Elmer than hell being raised in his face when he stood in the vapors of a hangover. He hated that.
So, he explored every morning in the party aftermath, and when he did, he often found pretty young things like this one.
And even though he was glad he found them before their parents/boyfriends/girlfriends found them, he was too often faced with another discomfort when, in the clearer wisps of morning light, some of the girls just looked a little bit younger than maybe they did the hazy night before. When the booze and the drugs and the love flowed freely, it was just so much easier to believe them when they said they were eighteen.
He realized that he couldn’t remember her name. That didn’t surprise him. Elmer Canifax threw a hell of a lot of parties, and there were a hell of a lot of pretty girls at those parties. He’d long ago given up knowing them all on a first name basis.
A few different names rolled through his mental catalogue. Jessica? Jennifer? Lisa? Lana? Whothefuckknows. Whatshername. He hoped she was eighteen, at least. If she was eighteen – really eighteen – then everything would be fine.
Elmer prodded whatshername with his foot. “Hey. Hey, you. Girl. Wake up. ”
The girl sighed and rolled over onto her side, away from him. “What time is it?” she murmured, not really awake.
He said, “How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” she said with her eyes still closed. “Why?”
Relief waved over Elmer. In his experience, the wily female brain produced most of its truths when just humming into consciousness, when it floated halfway between awake and asleep, a magical place where there was no need to scheme, lie, or otherwise make shit up. If this girl said she was eighteen now, still fully under sleep’s control, then she likely wasn’t bullshitting. That made him feel much better.
What was her name?
What was her name?
What was her name? Whothefuckknows. Whothefuckcares.
He took some time to appreciate her a bit more. Whatever her name, she was a real beauty: tall and lithe, with long black eyelashes, curly auburn hair six inches past her shoulders. Smooth clean tanned body. Perfect C–cup tits. oh, how Elmer loved those perfect tits, nipples the size of quarters, drawn up tight, hard against the cold tile, the expensive tile.
He pulled a navy blue bath towel from the towel rack next to the sink and tossed to the naked girl on the tile. “Rise and shine, honey pot.”
He turned his attention elsewhere. Another girl slept in the bathtub, a blonde. She wore one of Elmer’s white Hanes undershirts, and nothing else. He wondered how she got that piece of clothing, but after considering the hows and whys for a moment he decided that maybe he didn’t want to know after all.
Unlike the beautiful creature on the tile, the one in the bathtub wasn’t much to look at. The meth had taken this one. Her face was sallow, washed out like old newspaper left too long in
the sun, and cratered with deep sores and pockmarks. Sick bruised bags gathered under her eyes. She had brittle blonde hair, with two little ragged patches noticeable in their absence. Each was about the size of a nickel, one just below the crown of her head and the other behind her right ear.
The meth girl rested against the tile shower wall, the same tile covering the floor. She splayed one bony leg over the side of the tub, while the other stretched out in the bottom of the tub. She was wide open, for anybody that wanted to see.
Elmer gawked at her and tried not to look at her chemical–burn face. She probably had a name, just like her friend, but he couldn’t remember this one, either. Susan? Allison? Stacy? Whothefuckknows? Whatshername.
He surely had been introduced to both of these girls last night, but that was information meant for last night and last night was long gone. In the corner behind the door, he could see two black–and–red Sewardville High cheerleaders’ uniforms laying in a loose pile, with two pairs of lacy panties (one black, one lavender) thrown haphazardly atop them.
Elmer stepped towards the girl in the bathtub, tapped her lightly on the chin. “Time to get up,” he whispered.
Behind him, Tile Girl sat up slowly.
“Morning, sunshine,” he said.
“That was a hell of a party,” she answered.
Elmer smiled back at her. “Thank you,” he said. “But unfortunately, now back to reality.” He decided to take a stab at her name. “You ready to go, Shana?”
Instantly, the sunshine in the girl’s face clouded over. “My name’s not Shana, asshole.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty damn sure.”
“What is it, then?”
“Fuck you, Elmer.”
Tile Girl pulled the bath towel around her and rose to her feet. So did Elmer. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I was just kidding.”