FAME and GLORY

by K. T. Hastings

  A small smile played at the corners of Bruce's mouth. “What is it with you guys and butts tonight? First Diane wants to paddle Brandee's, and now you're measuring Janelle's? I think I'm with a couple of bull dykes!”

  Suzi hit him, and none too lightly. “I'll show you what a bull dyke I am when we get done here!”

  Bruce rubbed his arm where, he was sure, a painful bruise was destined to rise. Sometimes, he thought, his ideas would best be served staying in his own mind.

  Diane was quietly talking on her phone across the breezeway from where Suzi and Bruce were sparring. The drummer snapped her phone closed and joined the other two.

  “Jake is getting a ride here. The guy who's driving him says that they are only about five minutes out.”

  “Good," Suzi said. “I'll be glad when we're all together again. If we get good news from inside, we can decide together what we do next. If we don't get good news...” Suzi's voice trailed off and her eyes filled with tears. She wondered what would happen if Brandee were seriously damaged by the trauma that she had suffered at Cache Creek.

  Bruce put his big arms around Suzi and took her head to his chest. Diane spoke with authority in her voice. “Don't think like that, Suzi. Brandee's young, strong, and determined. Who knows that better than us? She's going to be just as good as new by the time we get into Oregon.”

  Bruce slowly rocked Suzi back and forth as they stood in the cool of the evening in the shadow of the Yolo County ambulance that had led them to St. Helena a couple of hours earlier. All three of the musicians were lost in thought when a maroon and white Chrysler Sebring pulled up to the emergency room entrance. Jake hastily thanked Rich for the ride and jumped out of the car, the three musicians immediately surrounding him. It had only been 13 hours since they had left him beside the steaming Nissan in Sacramento, but it seemed so much longer than that.

  “How is she?” Jake asked. “Where is she?”

  “She's doing really well," Diane said, patting Jake's arm. “They are running some tests right now, but she's doing fine.”

  “What kind of tests?” Jake asked.

  “Tests on her brain to make sure that it's not scrambled from the electricity," Diane said.

  “Brain tests?” Jake said. “They think that she might have br--”

  Bruce broke in. “They think that she's just fine and so do we. We talked to her and she was fine and making sense. They're just doing the test as a precaution. She'll be out pretty soon and you can see her. Meanwhile, the nurse at the desk wants to ask you about insurance.”

  Jake nodded and started toward the door. He would take care of the paperwork before Brandee came back out. It was hard to put the thought of his 23-year-old wife having brain damage out of his mind, but he still needed to take care of business. When he got inside, he saw Janelle sitting in a chair, as close as she could get to the door that led to the examining area. Jake noticed all over again how young she looked. Young, lost, and worried to death. He knew how she felt.

  “How are you holding up, Janelle?” he asked before going to the desk.

  “I'm okay. I just want her to come back out.”

  Jake thought that he and Janelle suddenly had more in common than that morning.

  “They tell me that she'll be out soon. Do you want something to eat or drink?”

  Janelle didn't answer, at least not audibly. She just shook her head and stared at the door through which Brandee had been rolled. She was sure that it must have been hours since Brandee had been taken from her.

  Jake quickly dispensed with the particulars at the desk. He glanced again at the forlorn figure sitting curled up in the chair and went back outside to join his friends.

  “What happened out there tonight?” he asked the three musicians.

  “We don't exactly know. Brandee's face got caught with some kind of little flame that came out of the mike She was using the 57 tonight and it was like it caught fire," Bruce said, looking to the others for corroboration. Suzi and Diane nodded their agreement.

  “I thought she liked the 58 better. Why wasn't she using that?” Jake asked.

  “The 57 tested better at the casino, so she went with it,” Diane responded. “I don't know if it was the mike itself or the Mogami wires that were connected to it. One way or another, something shorted out. Brandee went down on the front of the stage and that's how we ended up here.

  “You said it was a flame. Is she badly burned?”

  “Not too bad," Suzi said. “She's in some pain, though. They couldn't give her anything before the tests. That made her mad.”

  Bruce interjected. “That's why I think she's going to be all right. She was really quiet on stage while the paramedics were working on her. That's not like her. By the time that she got here, though, she was telling the nurses that she by God didn't want a Popsicle, but that she wanted some pain meds.”

  Suddenly, the beeper that the nurse had given Diane activated. It vibrated in the drummer's hand while the red lights on its perimeter went off in sequence, looking like a light race around the dark brown disk.

  “She's back!” Suzi cried out excitedly.

  The four friends trooped back inside through the door where Jake had so recently emerged. By the time they had gotten to the receptionist desk, Janelle was already in the examining room, having seen Brandee's wheelchair as it exited the elevator.

  The receptionist waved the four friends through. “Go ahead folks. Ms. Evans should be right inside that door.”

  When they got inside, they saw Brandee still seated in the wheelchair, awaiting assistance to get back into the bed. Actually, they saw a little bit of Brandee and a lot of Janelle, hugging Brandee. Nurse Mayfield was gently peeling Janelle off the patient.

  “Step back for just a minute, child. Give her some air. Step back!” she said, a little more sternly.

  Janelle reluctantly moved away from Brandee, allowing Nurse Mayfield to move Brandee efficiently from the chair to the examining bed. Only after smoothing her sheet did she invite the visitors to the patient's side.

  “Hi, honey," Brandee said to Jake.

  “Hello, baby. How do you feel?”

  “Pretty okay, considering,” she drawled.

  Nurse Mayfield spoke next to the visitors. “We gave her 1000 milligrams of Percocet, so she's going to be pretty drowsy. You can talk to her for a little bit, but then she'll be needing to go to sleep. The doc will be here shortly to talk to you.”

  “Do I look awful?" Brandee asked Jake, reaching up in an attempt to touch the fresh dressing that had been placed over her burns, but instead just waving around in the neighborhood of her injury.

  Jake smiled and took her hand. “You look beautiful. You're going to be just as good as new.”

  Brandee's eyes were already closed. She wasn't asleep, but the lights of the examining room suddenly seemed awfully bright to her. She thought that she would just rest her eyes for a bit.

  A middle-aged man with glasses and a stethoscope came in just then.

  “Which one of you is Mr. Evans?” he asked, looking at the crowd around the bed.

  “I'm Jake Evans.”

  The doctor held out his hand. “I'm John Merrick," he said. “I've been taking care of your wife tonight.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Merrick. How is she?”

  “She's going to be fine. Her tests all came back normal. The burns on her face are just superficial except for one tiny area. The skin right under the cheekbone is a little bit thinner than it is on the fleshier part of the face, so the burn is a little more substantial there. Other than that, though, she checks out fine.”

  Jake led the group in a simultaneous sigh of relief. Diane asked the next question.

  “What about scarring, Dr. Merrick? Will there be much?”

  “There shouldn't be. Maybe a slight one under her cheekbone, where I said, but even that shouldn't be more than a dot. She should be able to cover it easily with cosmetics at any rate. She should change the dressing twice a
day for a week. We'll send her home with some cream to put on the burn and she can apply the cream whenever she changes the dressing. She can put the cream on more often if she wants. Just make sure that she changes the dressing each time.”

  “When can we leave with her?” Suzi asked.

  “We'll have the paperwork done in a half hour or 45 minutes. She can leave then, or she can sleep off the Percocet right here. We're more than half empty tonight, and I understand that you folks are a traveling show.

  “Speaking of that,” Suzi said. “Is she okay to travel?”

  Dr. Merrick hesitated for a second before answering. “Actually, she should be good to go after one more day. We're only going to give her one more dose of Percocet. After that, she'll be able to get by nicely on Tylenol.”

  Bruce spoke next, this time to Jake. “Why don't we just let her sleep. I don't want to leave her here, but I need to get out of this room with the beds and the needles and the machines. We can just stay on the couches in the waiting area upstairs. Once Brandee sleeps off the meds, we can take off and find a hotel to stay in tomorrow.”

  Jake nodded. He was suddenly too tired to think about leaving right then, even if he wanted to. The adrenaline of worry had rushed out of his system, replaced; as such adrenaline always is, with exhaustion. He stepped closer to Brandee's bed and whispered to her, “I love you baby girl. I'll see you in a while.”

  “Mrrrffm,” Brandee said in response.

  Everyone except Janelle headed for the door. The young girl waited back. Just as the door closed behind the members of the band, Janelle leaned over the bed and kissed Brandee tenderly on the lips. She didn't know if it was her imagination or not, but it seemed to her that Brandee's lips parted, ever so slightly, in response.

  ***

  “DAMN IT TO HELL!” Brandee shouted when she looked into the mirror that she had demanded the nurse bring to her when her dressing was due to be changed the next morning. “I LOOK LIKE SHIT!”

  Truth be told, Brandee had a point. She looked worse than she had looked the night before. She had a bruise on her left cheek that made it look like she had been in a bar fight with Mike Tyson. There was an angry welt from under her left eye all the way to her left ear. The pretty young singer that had taken the stage at Cache Creek the night before was nowhere to be found today.

  The morning nurse, a thirty-ish redhead with a name tag that announced her name as “Deanne”, put her hand on the hospital bed blanket in the area where Brandee's foot was tapping an agitated rhythm. Deanne gently rubbed Brandee's foot in a comforting manner.

  “You're actually a really lucky young lady. All of your neurological tests came back perfect. The marks on your face will fade with time and, until then, a little concealer in the right spots and no one will know that you were even hurt.”

  Brandee wasn't convinced. What Deanne called “a little bit of concealer” might need to be five pounds of road grade blacktop if it was going to cover the kind of damage that Brandee was examining critically in the mirror.

  “I don't know. This is pretty bad.”

  “Trust me,” Deanne said. “I'll come back before you leave and give you some ideas.”

  She quickly finished attaching the dressing to Brandee's injury and secured it with Steri-Strips before leaving the room to return to the nurse's station. She noted on Brandee's chart that the patient was alert and oriented to time and place, and that her vital signs were all within normal range. The fact that Brandee was stressed about her face was entered in the “other comments” section. Deanne's thorough paperwork would give the doctor a heads-up before he entered Brandee's room. Nurse Deanne was a favorite of the doctors for these kinds of warnings.

  Brandee's daytime doctor quickly scanned the notes and breezed into the room. “Good morning, Mrs. Evans,” he said. I'm Dr. Kittredge. I'm glad to hear that you're doing so well this morning.”

  “I don't think I am,” Brandee said. “My face hurts and it looks like I got run over by a tractor.”

  “There there, dear, It could have been so much worse,” the doctor said as he leaned over the bed to shine a light into Brandee's eyes to check how her pupils responded to stimuli.

  Brandee had a retort ready for Dr. Kittredge, but was cut short when the rest of the members of the band plus Janelle walked into her room. Janelle started to rush to the singer’s side, but Suzi placed a hand on her arm.

  Surely, she thought, Janelle should know better than to move the doctor out of the way so she could get her hug from Brandee.

  After checking Brandee's visual acuity, Dr. Kittredge helped his patient sit up so he could check her reflexes. Brandee's foot obediently leapt into the air each time the doctor tapped her knee with his reflex hammer.

  “You can lie down and rest for a bit, Mrs. Evans. You're doing just fine.”

  Diane waited until the doctor had made his notes on the chart before asking the questions that were on everyone's mind.

  “Is she really okay, doctor?”

  Dr. Kittredge took off his reading glasses and slipped them into his pocket before answering.

  “She's doing very well. We're going to release her right after lunch. She got a Percocet last night in the E.R. and one more again in the middle of the night. That should do it for the narcotic pain relievers. She hasn't mentioned pain this morning to either me or the attending nurse. Her biggest concerns are the bruising and burn marks on her face. If she needed heavy duty pain killers, she would have been talking about how much it hurts.”

  Jake spoke next. “She'll be fine to travel?”

  “No reason that I can think of why she shouldn't. When do you folks want to leave the area?”

  “Tomorrow or the next day,” Jake said. “We're kind of waiting to make that decision.”

  Brandee took her hand away from the dressing on her face and started to take a more active role in the discussion.

  “If they say I'm good to go, we have to leave no later than tomorrow morning. We have a show at the Del Norte County Fair tomorrow night. I don't want to miss that one.”

  Diane appreciated Brandee's gung ho attitude, but wanted corroboration from the doctor that the singer would really be able to perform just one night hence. “What do you think about that, Dr. Kittredge?”

  The doctor took his reading glasses out of his pocket and polished them while he pondered the question. It occurred to Diane that Dr. Kittredge fiddled with his reading glasses as a way to buy time. Diane's own father had done the same thing with his pipe when she had asked him a question that he needed to think about. He would clean, load, and get his brown Meerschaum burning smoothly before he would answer her question. She waited patiently for the doctor.

  Finally, he answered. “I think I would cancel tomorrow night if possible. I don't have a problem with her traveling. I don't even have a problem with her driving. Performing is a whole different thing. She needs two or three days minimum to get her strength back.”

  Dr. Kittredge started to leave. On his way out, he said, “I'll have the nurse bring your release paperwork in a little bit. The orderly will bring your lunch after that. Then you can go.”

  The doctor, all business up to this point, hesitated at the door and smiled at the visitors in the room.

  “I understand they're serving fish sticks today. I wouldn't want her to miss out on a treat like that.”

  The doctor left the room and the visitors crowded around the bed. Jake leaned over and gave Brandee a gentle kiss on her forehead.

  “I'm glad you're doing well,” he said. “You really gave us a good scare.”

  Brandee nodded. “It was pretty scary being on fire. That's for sure.”

  Bruce spoke to Jake. “We'd better get hold of the venue manager at The Del Norte Fairgrounds. They need--”

  “Fuck that!” Brandee shouted. “We're going on as scheduled up there.”

  Diane shook her head. She had expected something like this from Brandee, and was ready with her own response.

&n
bsp; “You heard what the doctor said, Brandee. We want you--”

  “Fuck him too! When you fall off of a horse, you get back on. That's what I'm going to do.”

  Jake interjected. “This isn't like falling off of a horse. A horse doesn't dump you and then try to set fire to your face. Diane is ri--”

  “Fuck that!” Brandee repeated, waving Jake's objections away as if they were mosquitoes. “Maybe I'll take it a little easy tomorrow night, maybe I won't. I'm singing, though. With you guys, or without you guys!”

  Janelle let out a rapturous sigh. “You're so... brave,” she said to Brandee.