by Beverly Bird
“But you can’t know that!”
“I know.” He looked at the man. “Go home, Lance. It’s okay.”
“No!” Catherine protested.
“Leave him alone.”
Catherine tried to block the man’s way. In the next moment Jericho had her wrist in his hand, stopping her.
She felt the blood drain from her face at the suppressed fury in his grip. He didn’t tell her to sit down, didn’t waste the words. He pushed her implacably backward until she felt the chair bump up against her legs. She dropped hard and looked wildly at Lance again.
He was gone.
Anger pounded hard at her own temples. “That was irresponsible.”
“No, it wasn’t. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let you embarrass him further.”
He let go of her wrist, moving around the desk so that he was facing her. He leaned forward, his palms flat against the wood.
For the life of him, he didn’t know why he was going to bother explaining to her. She would give up and leave in another week, and he would have three extra bucks from Shadow. She was a stuck-up, bleeding-heart princess, tiptoeing down from her ivory tower to mingle with the savages. They all started out that way, and they all ran. One way or another, they all ran.
The old pain came back, strangling him.
“Lance drinks,” he growled.
His hands, Catherine thought. She stared at them.
They were strong and calloused, and suddenly she remembered the way they had felt when he had lifted her off the chair three days ago, hard and hot at her waist. When he had pushed her to sit down, his grip had been like iron...but he had not hurt her. Velvet and steel, she thought, and swallowed hard. She wondered what they would feel like against a woman’s sensitive skin, without cotton or denim to dull the sensation of them.
Why was she thinking this?
She looked slowly, dazedly into his face again. “I...beg your pardon?”
Jericho felt an invisible fist ram into his gut. Don’t do this to me, Cat Eyes. Damn you, don’t do it.
She squirmed a little in the chair, a breathless little hitching of her weight, and hot need sluiced through him. She was so damned readable, so open in her awareness of him. No woman could be that guileless, that innocent.
He straightened away from the desk hard and fast, turning his back to her. “Lance drinks,” he said again. His voice sounded strained, even to his own ears. “His habit,” he began, biting out the words, “is to do it near an old abandoned windmill not far from my place. My habit is to swing by there on my way home. I sober him up and send him back to a harping, dissatisfied wife who can’t keep her mouth shut about the kids who’ve left the Res and never come home. There’s not a damned thing wrong with his head except a woman named Ida and a jug bottle of Thunderbird.”
He picked up the jar of prairie clover again and slammed it back on the shelf. Before Catherine could respond, he was gone.
She sat very still in the sudden quiet of the clinic. Outside, she heard the engine of the Rover roar to life.
She felt stupid, useless...shaken. She couldn’t have known that. She couldn’t have known because she didn’t know the people here, and it was doubtful they were ever going to allow her to.
Suddenly she wanted to go home so badly she ached with it. She wanted to go back to Boston, where people didn’t mock her and look through her. But more than anything, she wanted to run from this man with his burning eyes and strong hands, this man who was making her feel things she didn’t dare feel again.
Again? No. This was like nothing that had ever happened to her before.
She stood shakily and scrubbed at the hot tears that had somehow escaped her eyes. She took the jar of prairie clover root and turned out the lights, locking the door carefully behind her.
If no one would tell her what medicinal properties these weeds had, then she would just have to find out for herself.
* * *
No one at all came to the clinic the next day—not Jericho or Ellen, not Shadow or Dr. Kolkline. By mid-morning Catherine felt wild with isolation. Energy made her skin itch. She couldn’t say she missed Jericho or the nurse, but she needed to do something before she went crazy.
She found the keys Ellen sometimes dropped absently into her jacket pocket before she left at night. She wasn’t interested in the locked glass cabinet. Except for the herbs, everything in it was stuff she had seen before and was familiar with. She was more curious about the two bottom desk drawers that were always kept locked. She sifted through the keys until she found one that fit.
Patient files. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected—more dead voodoo birds?—but she felt deflated. There were precious few of them; she had noticed that Ellen did not keep records of her own treatments. These files were all on the rare patients Dr. Kolkline had treated, and a few apparently went back even before his time. Those were signed by a Dr. Medford.
She counted all of them. Forty-two files for what—seven years? No wonder Dr. Kolkline could get away with never showing up. No one ever needed—or wanted—his services. She put the old ones back and piled Dr. Kolkline’s in front of her. At least they might tell her a little bit about the man.
She opened them and noticed immediately that the five on top were victims of the Mystery Disease—what had Jericho called it? Tah honeesgai. That was even better. She had been here nearly a week now and still didn’t know anything about the ailment other than what she had read in the eastern newspapers. She poured herself a cup of coffee and settled down to study them.
The first thing that struck her was the sudden, fierce onset of the illness. She could understand why a superstitious people would think it to be some sort of spell or curse. She read further, taking notes. Apparently it was characterized by a high fever, muscular cramps, and respiratory problems. Many of the patients had been fine in the morning, and dead by the afternoon.
Catherine shuddered unconsciously. Until the CDC learned what was causing it, they could only treat the patient’s symptoms. There was, at present, no known cure.
She was thoroughly engrossed when she heard the arrival of a vehicle outside. She jumped to her feet, startled to realize that the morning had somehow passed without her being aware of it. When she reached the open doorway and looked up, she saw that the sun was high overhead.
A big, ponderous truck was parked beside the water barrel. It was the water delivery from Shiprock that Shadow had mentioned. A muscular young man worked to unravel an immense hose from the back of it. Catherine said a little prayer that he wouldn’t ignore her like everyone else did around here and hurried over to him.
“Hi,” she said, planting herself beside him. “Can I help you with that?”
A feeling of relief swam through her when he smiled at her. His hair was black like everyone else’s, and it fell into eyes that were a startling blue.
“Left you here all by yourself, did they?”
“It seems that way.” She hesitated. “Do you know where everyone is?”
“Sure, and I’m headed there myself soon as I finish here. Jericho Bedonie is doing an Enemy Way sing over at Old Lady Yellowhorse’s place.”
Of course. She had forgotten that it was Friday. It was frighteningly easy to lose track of time in this ageless land where the mountains and the desert never changed.
“How long do these things take?” she asked. “I thought I heard Jericho say something about three days.”
“That’s about right.” He threw a lever to send water hurtling through the hose. “An Enemy Way is one of our three-day sings. ‘Course, people usually stay for a while after it’s over. You got to understand, this Res is huge and there are only a few hundred thousand of us living here. So anytime we get a chance to meet, it’s a big deal. Anyone even remotely related to Tommy’s or Jericho’s clans will show up. There’ll be dancing and all the old women will get together to gossip. They’ll throw a few sheep on the coals and we’ll all eat until we burst.”
Absurdly, Catherine felt slighted that she hadn’t been invited, not even by Shadow. She was also a little put off that no one had checked to make sure she didn’t mind manning the clinic while they were gone. But by the same token, she was hardly surprised.
She sighed as he wound up the hose again.
“That oughta hold you till Wednesday or so,” he told her. “In the meantime, hang in there. Everybody’ll be back by Monday.”
Monday. He drove off to the ceremonial festivities, and Catherine hugged herself as she watched him go.
It seemed a lifetime away.
* * *
On Sunday she scrubbed the clinic floor for lack of anything better to do. Her own place was as clean as it was going to get, and she’d long since memorized the patient files.
She was up to her elbows in suds when she heard a vehicle outside again. She wondered without much hope if the sing had ended early, then she knew that that wasn’t the case. This car was moving fast. Its brakes screamed and gravel spattered as it came to an abrupt stop.
Catherine ran to the door. A boy leaped out from behind the wheel, and her heart staggered.
“You the doc?” he demanded.
Oh, my God. Panic closed her throat and for a moment she couldn’t answer. She nodded mutely. She knew beyond a doubt that only one thing would bring this boy looking for her instead of Ellen or Jericho. If it were something they could handle, he would certainly have gone to the sing to find them.
He had come here instead because he was scared, because Tah honeesgai had claimed another victim.
She hurried to meet him. On closer inspection, his face was flushed and sweaty, but other than that he seemed fine and she almost breathed again. Then he motioned toward the back of the old, dilapidated Dodge.
“It’s my sister. She’s in there.”
Catherine pulled open the door. The girl was young, sixteen or so, and she lay prone across the back seat. Her face and eyes were bright with fever, just as the Tah honeesgai files had indicated the other patients had had. She half wheezed, trying to get air; half groaned as she hugged herself against muscular cramps.
“Help me get her inside.”
They dragged her out between them, draping each of her arms over their shoulders to carry her into the clinic. Catherine’s heart pounded and her head hurt as she tried frantically to remember what she had read in those files.
Damn Kolkline. Damn him a million ways to hell for not being here, for not caring! It had been four long years since she’d had any hands-on practice with medicine. She wasn’t even legally a doctor yet. She wasn’t equipped to deal with this.
But she had to be. In that moment, technicalities didn’t matter much after all.
They laid the girl on a table in one of the examining rooms and the boy looked at her with frightened, pleading eyes. “Is she going to die?”
Catherine closed her eyes, thinking hard. For once, for this one time, the people here needed her. She had to do something. She had to try.
She took the girl’s temperature. Her fever was at a hundred and four—dangerous, but not in itself a bad thing. Her body was just speeding up its metabolism to conquer the invasion of infecting microbes. Unfortunately, none of the files had told her what those microbes might be. Even the CDC didn’t know yet.
Some germs died when the body temperature was raised above normal; others did not. If she brought the girl’s fever down, the Mystery Disease might run rampant through her system, killing her. On the other hand, if she didn’t bring it down, maintaining such a fever could eat up her body’s stores of protein, thereby debilitating her strength.
Catherine grabbed the IV equipment and started her on an intravenous saline solution to combat her cramps and dehydration. “When did it start?” she asked the boy.
“Just a little while ago. We were up Two Gray Hills way. I took her to see her boyfriend. Then we heard about Jericho’s sing down here and we decided to come back. We were halfway home when she started getting sick.”
Two Gray Hills way. Where had she heard that before? But there was no time to think about it now.
“You’ve got to go to the sing,” she told him. “Bring back Jericho and—and Ellen Lonetree.” It was no time to stand on principle, she decided. She needed all the help she could get. In the meantime she had to find Kolkline, had to notify the CDC.
“But the sing—” the boy began.
She didn’t care how sacred the damned thing was. “This is more important. Go!”
He fled as she attacked the shelves, looking for antipyretic drugs that would bring the girl’s fever down. She still wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but the only one she was legally able to administer was aspirin anyway. She found the bottle and took it back to her, helping her to swallow down the pills.
The girl’s cramps were subsiding, but she was having an even more difficult time breathing.
As the car shrieked away outside, Catherine left to get the mobile phone in the front room. She carried it to a list of emergency numbers tacked on the wall and punched in the one for University Hospital.
“Dr. Kolkline,” she demanded breathlessly when a woman’s nasal voice answered.
“One moment please.”
She held on for what seemed like an eternity before the operator came back. “I’m sorry, he doesn’t answer his page.”
He didn’t even hang around University with any regularity, Catherine thought wildly. But, of course, it was Sunday.
“Dr. Moss, then,” she tried remembering her chance meeting on the plane. “Richard Moss. He’s with the CDC.”
“I don’t have individual extensions for those doctors. They’re set up on the sixth floor.”
“Isn’t there a phone there?”
“Of course.”
“Then ring it! It’s an emergency!”
A moment later, a man picked up that line. He identified himself, and his name slid in and out of her mind. It wasn’t Richard, but then, she supposed it didn’t have to be.
She told him hurriedly who she was and what was happening. He promised to send a helicopter out for the girl immediately.
“What do I do until then?”
“We can’t cure the thing, so we can only treat the symptoms. Use antipyretics, fluids, oxygen when she can no longer breathe on her own.”
Catherine’s heart staggered. “Will it come to that?”
He hesitated. “Undoubtedly.”
She went back to the other room to check on her. The girl was struggling. Catherine rigged up an oxygen mask, and then she prayed.
She was so young. The compassion and sensitivity that had dogged her through medical school tore through Catherine anew. She found the girl’s hand and held onto it tightly, using her free one to monitor the oxygen and the IV. She leaned closer to her head and coached her.
“Breathe in, come on, pull. There, good girl. Out...good, that’s good. Now in. You’ve got to help the mask as long as you can.”
The girl’s wild eyes found hers and clung. Catherine kept talking senselessly even after she closed her eyes, exhausted from the effort.
Finally, blessedly, she heard the chut-chut-chut of the chopper blades outside. Hot tears of relief burned Catherine’s eyes.
“Just a little bit longer,” she whispered. “They’re here now. You’re going to be just fine.”
She stood shakily, gently disengaging her hand from the girl’s. Then she turned for the door and moved squarely into Jericho.
She gasped, backing up, startled. “How long have you been here?”
“Long enough.”
“Then why didn’t you do something? Your songs, your birds—” She was grasping at straws, at things she didn’t even believe in, and they both knew it. His face twisted.
“There’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.”
She didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand. She whipped back to look at the girl again.
Her chest was no longer rising and falling with each l
abored breath. But she still wore the mask. Surely as long as she wore the mask...
Catherine moved back to her and groped blindly for her wrist, feeling for her pulse. It was gone.
“No,” she breathed. Then she said it louder, not believing it, not able to accept it. “No!”
Someone caught her from behind, pulling her toward the door. It was Shadow. They dodged the paramedics and the CDC doctors coming in. Shadow led her outside. Night was falling, a million shades of blue and purple tracing across the sky.
It was too beautiful a night for dying.
Catherine cried. The tears came silently at first, then sobs took her. She sat down hard in the dirt where she stood.
“You tried,” Shadow murmured.
“Kolkline should have been here. A doctor—someone who knew, who could have done more!”
“There’s nothing anyone can do once it starts.”
Catherine shook her head. “At least Kolkline could have given her something stronger than aspirin. The CDC doctor told me to give her antipyretics, but all the others are prescriptive drugs!”
Shadow shrugged helplessly, but Catherine looked up and saw her jaw harden in fury.
“Who was she?” she whispered. “I need to know her name.” Somehow it seemed important, even as it didn’t matter anymore now at all.
Shadow hugged herself hard. “Lisa Littlehorn. She is...was...Uncle Ernie’s blood granddaughter.”
Catherine gasped. “Kin to you?”
But Shadow shook her head. “Not the way you mean it. Uncle Ernie is everyone’s uncle. He’s the grandfather of the Towering Rock clan.” Suddenly, something seemed to occur to her. “Oh, God. Jericho.”
He had come out of the clinic behind the stretcher that carried Lisa Littlehorn. “What?” Catherine asked. “What’s wrong now?”
“Uncle Ernie taught him all his sings. They’re close. He’s going to take this hard.” She backed away. “I’m sorry, Lanie, I have to go to him. He needs me more.”
Shadow ran to meet her brother at the Rover even as someone switched on the lights in the helicopter. Catherine watched them miserably in the brilliant, artificial light, then a deep pain speared all the way into her soul and she groaned.