The Low Road

by Chris Womersley

  I can’t do anything about it. There’s no exit wound, as far as I can tell, which means the bullet is still inside him. It needs to be taken out. This is not really my thing. You need to get him somewhere where they can operate. Was he shot here? In the . . . luxury suite?

  She shrugged. No. Don’t know where. Someone dumped him here last night.

  Dumped him?

  Yeah. It happens.

  You know him?

  Not really. Just from around the traps. Lee’s his name. She produced a packet of cigarettes from a fold in her clothing and lit up. Can’t you do something?

  Wild regarded Sylvia’s chicken neck and parchment cheeks. She could be aged anywhere between fifty and one hundred. One of those people who, having no use for youth, emerge straight into midlife. Born on the kitchen sink, smoked from age five, run this motel forever. He recalled the Greek myth of the oracle granted eternal life, but who was subject to mortal ageing and shrivelled over time until small enough to fit into a jar suspended from a tree.

  Where’s your bag? she asked.

  What?

  Your. Bag.

  He held up his hands in a final attempt to dissuade this hag from involving him. Look. I’m not a doctor. I mean, I am, but . . . There is nothing I can do here for this kid. You’re going to have to call someone. Call an ambulance or something.

  No. You got to do something.

  In an effort to keep the panic from it, Wild lowered his voice. Look, lady. I don’t know where you got your information from, but while it might be true that I have some medical training, I’m not really equipped in any way, shape or form to deal with something like this. I was a GP, for God’s sake. If the kid had a broken arm or needed a tetanus shot or even if he had an ingrown toenail, I might be able to do something, but this? No. Even if it wasn’t out of my league, it would still be out of my league.

  What about that oath you all got to take?

  Wild sighed. She was obviously not to be underestimated, even if she was a thousand years old. And how on earth was it that every man and his dog had heard of the Hippocratic Oath? This woman was really irritating him. He should never have opened the door. He should never have come to this crappy motel. He should only have stayed one night. There were a lot of things he shouldn’t have done. He could go some way into the past with this line of thought, but it wouldn’t help him return to the place where it all went wrong, if there were such a place.

  It’s a long story.

  Yeah. It always is, sweetheart. Isn’t there somewhere you could take him? Someone you know?

  Gee. How about a hospital? Wild wiped his hands on his trousers and moved towards the door, shaking his head, hoping to convey the impression that he’d love to stay and help but would have to leave her to it. He brushed past her.

  Sylvia crossed her arms. Come on, mate. No use being all high and mighty anymore. Look around you. You two got more in common than you might like to think. I been around a while. I reckon you can smell crime on a man and you boys both need a good scrubbing.

  Wild hesitated with his hand on the door handle. What are you getting at exactly?

  I’ve heard of you. The Junkie Doctor, they’re calling you.

  He turned to face her. You’ve heard of me? The what?

  I read the papers. Yeah. You’re in a spot of trouble, I reckon. Man like you must know somewhere a man like Lee can get some help. Look, just get him the hell out of here and stop fucking me around. I tried to be nice about this, but let’s be clear: you owe me money, I need a favour. You’re on the run, big fella. You don’t have any cards to play. This kid isn’t going to die in one of my rooms. He’s just not. And I’m not someone to mess with.

  So I see.

  Don’t get smart.

  He scratched at his throat with bitten fingernails. The kid on the bed arched his back and muttered. There is somewhere I could take him. Out on the plains. An old doctor friend of mine. Fellow called Sherman. I used to go there a lot to . . . I used to go out there but I haven’t been in a few years. Not sure if it’s still safe out that way.

  Nowhere is safe these days.

  No. I suppose not.

  Where’s your bag?

  What?

  Your bag. You want to maybe put some dressing on him or something before you go.

  Wild sighed. It’s back in my room. I’ll go get it.

  I’ll get it.

  No, it’s OK, I’ll—

  I’m not being polite, mister. I’ll get it. Don’t move.

  Wild remained where he was. He averted his gaze from the kid on the bed and instead watched the progress of a cockroach as it clambered along the skirting board, stopping here and there to measure the air or whatever with its antennae. Survive the Bomb, they say of cockroaches. The poor bastards.

  Sylvia returned a minute later with his bag and handed it to him before closing the door. Wild squatted by the bed and prepared an injection of morphine. He drew the liquid from an ampoule into the syringe and tapped the chamber to clear it of air bubbles. Saliva flooded his mouth, the expectant prick of bile.

  You giving him all that? Seems a lot.

  Wild laughed as he looped a tie tightly above his elbow and set about hunting down a vein. Nope. This is for me. Doctor’s orders.

  He had his hit, absorbed its pillowy impact and began cleaning Lee’s wound with shaking hands. It always amazed him how much blood a person carried inside them. Gallons of the stuff. The bullet appeared to be lodged under the skin just below the kid’s left ribcage. The area was swollen and badly bruised. Most likely there were a couple of broken ribs but he might have avoided any serious tissue damage. There was almost certainly some sort of internal bleeding. He daubed the area with disinfectant but decided to apply a dressing after the wound had dried out slightly.

  Will he be alright?

  He shrugged. Depends what you mean by alright. Infection is maybe the danger at this stage. Hard to tell if any organs were damaged, but I guess we’ll find that out. What do you care, anyway?

  Sylvia smoothed the front of her dress and made a sound in her throat. I don’t like to see anyone die. Specially not a kid like this. How far is this place you’re heading?

  A day’s drive, more or less.

  When you leaving?

  He hadn’t thought about it. I might wait an hour or two. When it’s starting to get dark. That OK?

  Sylvia nodded, her eyes fixed on the kid on the bed. She looked depleted. Yeah. But no longer. I got to get rid of these sheets and scrub the place.

  Wild indicated a suitcase on the floor beside the door. Is that his?

  Yeah.

  What’s in it?

  Sylvia shrugged. Don’t know.

  His nose and face itched. Trouble breeds trouble, he thought. Like those bloody organisms that divide and divide again until there’s a billion of them before you know it. Still. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of Sherman before. It would be the perfect place to stay for a while until things blew over, if they ever did. He was almost cheered at the thought of Sherman’s crinkling half-smile, the way he rubbed his eyes without even removing his round glasses.

  He wondered about Lee. It seemed unlikely he would be able to get him to Sherman’s before he died. Inside the tiny bathroom he washed blood from his hands and considered himself in the mirror. Am I the kind of person, he thought, who could dump a man beside the road and keep on driving, or is that yet to come?

  When Wild returned to the room, Lee murmured, stiffened slightly and sagged once again onto the bed. In the ghastly afternoon light, the kid appeared insubstantial, as if about to dissolve into the bloodied bedclothes. Wild detected a strange sensation within his chest, like a small animal turning in its sleep. It was, he was surprised to realise, pity.

  He drew a chair up to the bed and lowered himself into it with a great sigh. Lee, now apparently conscious, raised a hand to his face as if checking on his existence. Dried moons of blood had hardened under his fingernails.

&nbs
p; The kid’s eyelids flicked open and he looked first at Wild and then Sylvia, his gaze sliding from one to the other. His brow furrowed and he gasped for air. I don’t think I’m meant to be here, he said at last, in a slender voice.

  Wild wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Despite the cold, his skin was damp with perspiration. Believe me. I know exactly how you feel.

  3

  With one hand, Lee gingerly touched the left side of his torso, where the escarpment of ribs slid away to the softer flesh of his stomach. He felt the dark heat of a bullet wound and levered himself into a sitting position to see better. With a grimace he lifted his blood-soaked t-shirt to expose a black, peasized hole, fringed by a mineral crust of dried blood. The surrounding skin was swollen, tender. There was blood all over his hands and smears of it on his jeans. His own blood, presumably, although he couldn’t be entirely sure. He flinched at the memory of that woman and the jump of her gun. That blunt truck of surprise. Her slow blink. Bang.

  He sat on the edge of the low bed, to see what it felt like, preparing for a more committed movement. The linoleum floor was cool beneath his toes, almost like water, and he licked his lips. He would love nothing better right now than to dangle his feet in lake water, but that seemed a long way away now, more remote than ever. With one hand behind him on the bed for balance he eased back to relieve the pressure on his wound. He breathed heavily and gritted his teeth, now fully alert to the regiments of pain marching through him. He held his breath until the pain subsided. Perhaps he would die here, right where he was.

  He inspected the backs of his hands, as if surprised to find them there. Small and bloodstained. He turned them over, unintentionally assuming an attitude of half-hearted supplication. The lines crisscrossing his palms. Once with his sister he visited a fortune teller at a country fair, a woman who wore a suit and smoked a pipe, a woman who, when Lee had inquired after his future, said—without the merest change in expression—What makes you so sure you got one? And it was her voice more than anything he could always recall, a sound like a knife shredding cabbage. That, and the look of horror on Claire’s face as she dragged him by the wrist from the dusty tent.

  His gaze travelled along his forearm, tracing the creamy plank of flesh with its submerged design of blue veins, the indecipherable map of his inner architecture. The workings of his own body were a mystery to him. He turned his hands back over and balled them into fists before splaying them as much as he could. The tendons and muscles slid and arched beneath the skin, creating tiny ramparts across his knuckles, an entire language of movement as unknown to him as Sanskrit or Ancient Greek, deep in conversation inside his body.

  Awkwardly, Lee removed his leather coat and t-shirt, slung them on a chair and staggered into the bathroom to inspect his torso. Under the fizzing fluorescent light, he could see the skin around his bullet wound was swollen but also discoloured with what appeared to be disinfectant. Someone had attended to him while he slept. He caressed the yellowed smear and raised the finger to his face. A hospital sprang up within his senses, a kingdom of wards and machinery, of hallways and steel. He inhaled slowly, seeking damp mops and dry bandages, the odour of laundry and steamed broccoli and inside that again he expected to hear the squelch of nurses’ shoes on linoleum as they made their rounds during the night. He rubbed his hands on his jeans and bent to the sink to slurp water from his cupped hand. The water tasted of mildew.

  With thin and innocent fingertips he traced his surfaces, from the bony meat of his chest down across his stomach, searching for further signs of violence or distress. Nothing. Just skin and hair, the distinct fabric of human flesh with its topography of ridges and bumps. Some minor scratches and the strangely glossy scar from a childhood car accident that ran down his right side. Otherwise his skin appeared almost without texture. He angled his head and looked into the mirror with dark eyes, relieved to observe his hair had at last grown free of its prison severity. A squadron of mosquitoes hummed in the shower recess.

  At the bedroom window, in the bruised afternoon light, he could see a car park below, around which the motel was constructed. Goosebumps rose on his naked skin. Lights were coming on in the distance. The world turned on its hinge.

  Holding the curtain to one side, he could make out dislocated segments of walkway outside his room and the other rooms of the first floor. The windows of the rooms opposite his own, a slice of rusted roof. There were few signs of life, apart from the occasional flock of birds that spattered across the darkening clouds. The roofs that stretched into the distance were unfamiliar but not entirely foreign and he scanned the horizon for a landmark by which he could orient himself: a building, a hill, a neon sign, anything. But there was nothing. He wondered how long he’d been here.

  A couple appeared below him in the motel car park, arguing in low tones. It was clear they had done this before, this arguing, perhaps many times. Their gestures were tired. Although the man had his back to Lee, he looked familiar. Perhaps this was the person who had daubed his stomach with disinfectant? He allowed the curtain to drop and stood as far as possible to one side of the window while still able to observe them. He waited for the man to turn around, but he never did. A trio of thick-chested dogs lay patiently at the woman’s feet like luggage to be loaded into the car. The woman raised a hand to her mouth and looked away across the highway, perhaps hoping to see something on which to focus. It seemed a decision had been made, one she was only reluctantly agreeing to. She was small and wiry. Middle-aged. She wore a loose, white shirt, a man’s shirt by the look of it, several sizes too large. It billowed about her waist in the wind. A tendril of dark hair bisected her features from one temple to the opposite side of her jaw. After a minute she shrugged, clicked her fingers at the dogs and walked to the car with them trotting around her, their tongues lolling like lengths of salmon.

  Lee stepped away from the window and it was only then that he noticed the suitcase on the floor beside the door. He stared at it, disbelieving. Surely not. He looked around and swallowed. It was unmistakably the same one, the one he’d taken from Stella. His breath quickened. Brown and battered, with a rounded metal edge on each corner. A faded sticker on one side showed a woman frolicking in the shallows of a beach with a red ball. A grinning fish. Je me baigne à Agadir, whatever the hell that meant. He rested a hand on the aluminium windowsill. Again he remembered the woman with the gun, the way she shook her head and blinked slowly before pulling the trigger, before he could say even the tiniest word. No or Don’t. No time for any sort of plea.

  Ignoring the pain across his side, he lurched over to the suitcase. He crouched down, lay the suitcase flat and opened it. Inside, arranged head-to-toe like bodies in a grave, were coloured bundles of money. His gun, the one Josef gave him, rested on top of the cash. He skimmed a palm over the money, as if across water, and chuckled. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.

  And then the scraping of the door against the linoleum, a blast of cold air on his naked back. He turned to see a large man in a tattered overcoat step into the room.

  Ah, the man said in a deep voice. You’re awake at last.

  4

  Lee lost his balance and fell to his side, but was able to grab the gun. It seemed heavier than it should be. He fumbled with it and pointed it up at the man standing over him. Should he just shoot him? It was then that he realised that the safety catch was probably on, but it was too late to investigate. He wasn’t even sure where the safety catch was. His heart beat about in his chest like an injured bird.

  The man had a large black bag in one hand and held up his other hand, palm outwards. Whoa, fella. No need for that.

  Who the hell are you? Lee asked. Fresh blood sumped from his bullet wound into the folds of his stomach. He withheld a grimace but was sure he’d betrayed the amount of pain he was in by the airless quality of his voice. He feared he might throw up.

  The man shrugged but made no other movement. He seemed both grave and uninterested. He wasn’t wear
ing shoes. The hems of his trousers were torn. Lee motioned with the gun for the man to close the door, which he did with his bare heel, still holding one hand at shoulder height.

  That’s quite a hole you got there.

  Overcome by pain, Lee didn’t answer but unwillingly inspected himself. His right hand, the one clasping the gun, was sticky with blood.

  The man joggled his bag. You must be in quite a lot of pain? A bullet inside you, right beside your ribs? Got something here might be of help. Some bandages and disinfectant. I took a look before—

  You what? Who the hell are you? Where are we, anyway?

  The man dropped his bag to the floor with a thud and held up both hands. It’s OK. I’m not armed or anything.

  The man swayed, as if on a boat. It made Lee wonder if, in fact, the world itself were pitching slightly. It wouldn’t surprise him. Nothing would surprise him.

  Lee remained where he was on his haunches, shirtless, the gun in one nervous hand while his other rested on the floor. Microbes of grit pressed into his palm. It was an almost pleasurable sensation in the presence of such other enormous discomforts. The suitcase was open beside him. Some of the money inside was spattered with blood. He looked at this large stranger with his thin, greying hair, pale beard and doughy face.

  Finally, Lee struggled to his feet, patted the stranger down and shoved him into the chair. The man smelled of alcohol and chalk. Lee grabbed the man’s bag and emptied it onto the bed.

  Hey. Don’t do that—

  Shut up.

  Bandages, underwear, syringes, a toothbrush, ampoules, wads of cotton wool and a dozen bottles of pills clattered onto the bed like cheap jewellery. Lee stood and wondered what to do.

  As you can see, the man said, I’m a . . . doctor.

  Because you got a doctor’s bag? You’re not even wearing shoes, for fuck’s sake.

  Look. We’ve got to get out of here. The manager wants us out tonight or she’ll call the police or something. She’s crazy.