“Bill, with your help I can get him up all right.”
So, with all his weight on their shoulders, they got Dan upstairs and stretched out on the sleigh bed. Bill said, “I’m going to be sick.” He left them. Helen brought clean, wet towels. Dan’s body shook and quivered. His skin grew clammy. He was having a chill. Randy lifted his thick wrist and after a time located the pulse. It was faint, uneven, and rapid. This was shock, all right, and dangerous. Randy said, “Whiskey!”
Helen said, “I’ll handle this, Randy. No whiskey. Blankets.” He respected Helen’s judgment. In an emergency such as this, Helen functioned. This was what she was made for. He found extra blankets in the closet. She covered Dan and disappeared. She returned with a glass of fluid, held it to Dan’s lips, and said, “Drink this. Drink all you can.”
“What are you giving him?” Randy asked.
“Water with salt and soda. Much better than whiskey for shock.”
Dan drank, gagged, and drank more. “Keep pouring this into him,” Helen ordered. “I’m going to see what’s in the medicine cabinet.”
“Almost nothing,” Randy said. “Where’s his bag? Everything’s in there.”
“They took it; and the car.”
“Who took it?”
“The highwaymen.”
He should have guessed that it hadn’t been an accident. Dan was a careful driver and rarely were two cars on the same road. Traffic was no longer a problem. In his concern for Dan, he did not immediately think of what this loss meant to all of them.
Helen found peroxide and bandages. This, with aspirin, was almost all that remained of their reserve medical supply. She worked on Dan’s face swiftly and efficiently as a professional nurse.
Randy felt nauseated, not at the sight of Dan’s injuries—he had seen worse—but in disgust at the beasts who in callous cruelty had dragged down and maimed and destroyed the human dignity of this selfless man. Yet it was nothing new. It had been like this at some point in every civilization and on every continent. There were human jackals for every human disaster. He flexed his fingers, wanting a throat in them. He walked into the other room.
Lib’s head lay across her arms on the bar. She was crying. When she raised her face it was oddly twisted as when a child’s face loses form in panic or unexpected pain. She said, “What are you going to do about it, Randy?”
His rage was a hard cold ball in his stomach now. When he spoke it was in a monotone, the voice of someone else. “I’m going to execute them.”
“Let’s get with it.”
“Yes. As soon as I find out who.”
At eleven Dan Gunn came out of shock, relaxed and then slept for a few minutes. He awoke announcing he was hungry. He looked no better, he was in pain, but obviously he was out of danger.
Randy was dismayed at the thought of Dan, in his condition, loading his stomach with cold bream and catfish, orange juice, and remnants of salad. What he needed, coming out of shock, was hot, nourishing bouillon or broth. On occasion, when Malachai or Caleb discovered a gopher hole and Hannah Henry converted its inhabitant to soup, or when Ben Franklin successfully stalked squirrel or rabbit, such food was available; but not on this night.
The thought of broth triggered his memory. He shouted, “The iron rations!” and ran into his office. He threw open the teak sea chest and began digging.
Lib and Helen stood behind him and watched, perplexed. Helen said, “What’s wrong with you now, Randy?”
“Don’t give him any food until you see what I’ve got!” He was sure he had tucked the foil-covered carton in the corner closest to the desk. It wasn’t there. He wondered whether it was something he had dreamed, but when he concentrated it seemed very real. It had been on the day before The Day, after his talk with Malachai. In the kitchen he had collected a few nourishing odds and ends, tinned or sealed, and dubbed them iron rations, for a desperate time. Now that the time was desperate, he couldn’t find them.
He found the carton in the fourth corner he probed. He lifted it out, tore at the foil, and exposed it for them to see. “I put it away for an emergency. I’d forgotten it.”
Lib whispered, “It’s beautiful.” She examined and fondled the jars and cans.
“There’s beef broth in here—lots of other stuff.” He gave up the carton. “Give him everything he wants.”
Dan drank the broth and chewed hard candies. Randy wanted to question him but Helen stopped it. “Tomorrow,” she said, “when he’s stronger.” Helen and Lib were still in the bed room when Randy stretched out on the living-room couch. Graf jumped up and nuzzled himself a bed under Randy’s arm, and they slept.
Randy awoke with a gunshot echoing in his ears and Graf, whining, struggling to be free of his arm. He heard a second shot. It was from the double twenty, he was sure, and it came from the direction of the Henrys’ house. He slipped on his shoes and raced down the stairs, Graf following him. He grabbed the .45 from the hall table and went through the front door. Now was the time he wished he had live flashlight batteries.
The moon was up now so it wasn’t too difficult, running down the path. From the moon’s height he guessed it was three or four o’clock. Through the trees he saw a lantern blinking. He hoped Ben Franklin hadn’t shot the shadows.
He wasn’t prepared for what he saw at the Henrys’ barn. He saw them standing there, in a ring: Malachai with a lantern in one hand and in the other the ancient single-barreled shotgun that would sometimes shoot; Ben with his gun broken, extracting the empty shells, the Admiral in pajamas, Preacher in a nightshirt, Caleb, his eyes white-rimmed, tentatively poking with his spear at a dark form on the ground.
Randy joined the circle and put his hand on Ben Franklin’s shoulder. At first he thought it was a wolf. Then he knew it was the biggest German shepherd he had ever seen, its tremendous jaws open in a white snarl of death. It wore a collar. Graf, tail whipping, sniffed the dead dog, whined, and retreated.
Randy leaned over and examined the brass plate on the collar. Malachai held the lantern closer. “‘Lindy,’” Randy read aloud. “‘Mrs. H. G. Cogswell, Rochester, New York. Hillside five one-three-seven-nine.’”
“That dog come an awful long way from home,” Preacher said.
“Probably his owners were visiting down here, or on vacation,” Randy guessed.
“Well,” Malachai said, “I can see why we’ve been losin’ hens and how he could take off that pig. He was a mighty big dog, mighty big! I’ll get rid of him in the day, Mister Randy.”
Walking home, Ben Franklin said nothing. Suddenly he stopped, handed Randy the shotgun, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Randy squeezed his shoulder, “Take it easy, Ben.” Randy thought it was reaction after strain, excitement, and perhaps terror.
“I did exactly what you told me,” the boy said. “I heard him coming. I didn’t hardly breathe. I didn’t pull until I knew I couldn’t miss. When he kicked and I thought he was getting up I let him have the choke barrel. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known he was a dog. Randy, I thought it was a wolf!”
Randy stopped in the path and said, “Look at me, Ben.” Ben looked up, tear streaks shining in the moonlight.
“It was a wolf,” Randy said. “It wasn’t a dog any longer. In times like these dogs can turn into wolves. You did just right, Ben. Here, take back your gun.”
The boy took the gun, tucked it under his arm, and they walked on.
Chapter 10
Randy was having a pleasant, recurrent, Before-The-Day dream. He was awaking in a hotel in Miami Beach and a waitress in a white cap was bringing his morning coffee on a rolling table. Sometimes the waitress looked like Lib McGovern and sometimes like a girl, name forgotten, he had met in Miami. She was always a waitress in the morning, but at night she became an air-line stewardess and they dined together in a little French restaurant where he embarrassed her by eating six chocolate eclairs. She said, as always, “Your coffee, Randy darling.” He could hear her saying it and he could smell the c
offee. He drew up his knees and hunched his shoulders and scrunched his head deeper into the pillow so as not to disturb the dream.
She shook his shoulder and he opened his eyes, still smelling coffee, and closed them again.
He heard her say, “Damn it, Randy, if you won’t wake up and drink your coffee I’ll drink it myself.”
He opened his eyes wide. It was Lib, without a white cap. Incredibly, she was presenting him a cup of coffee. He reached his face out and tasted it. It burned his tongue delightfully. It was no dream. He swung his feet to the floor and took the saucer and cup. He said, “How?”
“How? You did it yourself, you absent-minded monster. Don’t you remember putting a jar of coffee in what you called your iron rations?”
“NO.”
“Well, you did. A six-ounce jar of instant. And powdered cream. And, believe it or not, a pound of lump sugar. Real sugar, in lumps. I put in two. Everybody blesses you.”
Randy lifted his cup, the fog of sleep gone entirely. “How’s Dan?”
“Terribly sore, and stiff, but stronger. He had two cups of coffee and two eggs and, of course, orange juice.”
“Did everybody get coffee?”
“Yes. We had Florence and Alice over for breakfast—it’s ten o’clock, you know—and I put some in another jar and took it over to the Henrys. The Admiral was out fishing. We’ll have to give him his share later. Helen has earmarked the broth and bouillon for Dan until he’s better; and the candy for the children.”
“Don’t forget Caleb.”
“We won’t.”
Again, he had slept in his clothes and felt grimy. He said, “I’m going to shower,” and went into the bathroom. Presently he came out, towel around his middle, and began the hopeless process of honing the hunting knife. “Did you know,” he said, “that Sam Hazzard has a straight razor? He’s always used one. That’s why his face is so spink and unscarred and clean. After I’ve talked to Dan I’ve got to see Sam.”
“Why?”
“He’s a military man and I need help for a military operation.”
“Can I go with you?”
“Darling, you are my right arm. Where I goeth you can go-up to a point.”
She watched him while he shaved. All women, he thought, from the youngest on up, seemed fascinated by his travail and agony.
Dan was sitting up in bed, his back supported by pillows, his right eye and the right side of his face hidden by bandages. His left eye was purpled but not quite so swollen as before. Helen sat in a straight-backed chair close to the pillows. She had been reading to him. Of all things, she had been reading the log of Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton, heaved up from the teak sea chest during last night’s burrowing for iron rations.
“Well, you’re alive,” Randy said. “Tell me the tale. Start at the beginning. No, start before the beginning. Where had you been and where were you going?”
“If the nurse will let me have one more cup of coffee just one—I’ll talk,” Dan said. He spoke clearly and without hesitation. There had been no concussion.
Each day when he completed his calls it was Dan Gunn’s custom to stop at the bandstand in Marines Park. One of the bandstand pillars had become a special bulletin board on which the people of Fort Repose tacked notices summoning the doctor when there was an emergency. Yesterday, there had been such a notice. It read:
Dr. Gunn
This morning (Friday) two of my children became violently ill. Kathy has a temperature of 105 and is out of her head. Please come. I am sending this note by Joe Sanchez, who has a horse.
Herbert Sunbury.
Sunbury, like Dan, was a native New Englander. He had sold a florist shop in Boston, six years before, to migrate to Florida and operate a nursery. He had acquired acreage, built a house, and planted cuttings and seedlings on the Timucuan six miles upstream of the Bragg house.
Dan pushed the Model-A fast up River Road. Beyond the Bragg place the road became a series of curves, following the serpentine course of the river. Dan had delivered the last two of the Sunburys’ four children. He liked the Sunburys. They were cheerful, industrious, and thoughtful. He knew that unless the emergency was real and pressing Herb would not have dispatched the note.
It was real. It was typhoid. It was the typhoid that Dan had half-expected and completely dreaded for weeks, months. Typhoid was the unwelcome, evil sister of any disaster in which the water supply was destroyed or polluted and normal disposal of human waste difficult or impossible.
Betty Sunbury said the two older children had been headachy and feverish for several days but not until Friday morning’s early hours had they become violently ill, a rosy rash developing on their torsos. Fortunately, Dan could do something. Aspirin and cold compresses to reduce the fever, terramycin, which came very close to being a specific for typhoid, until the disease was licked; and he had the terramycin.
He reached into his bag and brought out the bottle, hoarded for this moment. He could have used the antibiotic a score of times to cure other patients of other diseases, but he had always made do with something else, holding this single bottle as a charm against the evil sister. Now it would probably save the Sunbury children. In addition, he had enough vaccine to innoculate the elder Sunburys, the four-year-old, and the babies, and just enough left for Peyton and Ben Franklin, when he returned to the house. Correct procedure would be to innoculate the whole town.
Dan questioned the Sunburys closely. They had been very careful. Their drinking water came from a clear, clean spring bubbling from limestone on high ground across the road. Even so, they boiled it. All their foods, except citrus, they cooked.
Dan looked out at the river gliding smoothly by. He was sure the river was the villain. “You haven’t eaten any raw fish, or shrimp, or shellfish, have you?”
“Oh, no,” Herb said. “Of course not.”
“What about swimming? Do you swim in the river?”
Herb looked at Betty. “We don’t,” Betty said. “But Kathy and Herbert, junior, they’ve been swimming in the river since March.”
“That’s it, I guess,” Dan said. “If the germs are in the river, it only takes one gulp.”
Somewhere in the headwaters of the Timucuan, or in the great, mysterious swamps from which slender streams sluggishly moved toward the St. Johns, a typhoid-carrier had lived, undetected. A hermit, perhaps, or a respectable church woman in a small truck-farm community. When this person’s sanitary facilities failed, germ-laden feces had reach the rivers. Thus Dan reconstructed it, driving back toward town on the winding road.
Dan was so absorbed in his deductions and forebodings that he failed to see the woman sitting on the edge of the road until he was almost abreast of her.
He stepped on the brakes hard and the car jarred to a stop. The woman wore jeans and a man’s shirt. Her right knee was drawn almost up to her chin and she held her ankle in both hands, her body rocking as if in pain. A swatch of metallic blond hair curtained her features. Dan’s first thought was that she had turned her ankle; his second, that she could be a decoy for an ambush. Yet highwaymen rarely operated on unfrequented and therefore unprofitable roads, and had never been reported this close to Fort Repose. The woman looked up, appealingly. He could easily have switched gears and gone on, but he was a physician, and he was Dan Gunn. He turned off the engine and got out of the car.
As soon as his feet touched the macadam he sensed, from her expression, that he had stepped into a trap. Whatever her face showed, it was not pain. When her eyes shifted, and she smiled, he knew her performance had been completed.
Behind him a man spoke, “All right, Mac, you don’t have to go any further.”
Dan swung around. The man who had spoken was one of three, all oddly dressed and all armed. They had materialized from behind scrub palmettos at the side of the road. The leader was squat, and wore a checked gold cap and Bermuda shorts. His arms were abnormally long and hands huge. He carried a submachine gun and handled it like a toy. His belly bulged
over his waistband. He ate well. Dan said, “Look, I’m a doctor. I’m the doctor of Fort Repose. I don’t have anything you want.”
The second man advanced on Dan. He was hatless, dressed in a striped sport shirt, and he gripped a baseball bat with both hands. “Get that, Mick?” he said. “He don’t have nothing we want! Ain’t that rich?”
The third man was not a man at all but a boy with fuzz on his chin. The boy wore Levi’s, a wide-brimmed hat, high-heeled boots, and twin holster belts slung low. He stood apart from the others, legs spread, hefting a long-barreled revolver in each hand. He looked like an immature imitation of a Western bad man holding up the Wells Fargo stage, but he seemed overly excited and Dan guessed him the most volatile and dangerous of the three.
The woman, grinning, got in the car, wrestled the back seat to the floor, and found the two bottles of bourbon Dan kept hidden there. “Just like you heard, Buster,” she said. “The Doc keeps a traveling bar.”
“That’s my anesthetic,” Dan said.
Without looking at the woman, the leader said, “Just leave the liquor in the car, Rumdum. We’ll take everything as is. Start walking, Doc.”
Dan said, “At least let me have my bag. All the instruments and medicines I’ve got are in there.”
The boy giggled. “How about lettin’ me put him out of his misery, Mick? He’s too ignorant to live.”
The man with the machine gun took two steps to the side. Dan knew why.
The car’s gas tank was in his line of fire.
The machine gun moved. “Get goin’, Doc.”
Dan thought of everything that was in his bag, including the typhoid shots for Peyton and Ben Franklin. He took a step toward the car. He saw the baseball bat swinging and tried to close with the man, knowing he was foolish, knowing that he was awkward and clumsy. The bat grazed his face and he tripped and fell. As he tried to rise he saw the boy’s high-heeled boot coming at his eyes and the man with the bat danced to the side, ready to swing again. His head seemed to explode. In a final split-second of consciousness he thought, I am dead.
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