Rush

by Wozencraft, Kim

  His eyes went to his arm, and then over his body to his right foot, which lay helplessly flopped at the end of the bed.

  “I can’t feel it,” he said.

  I started to talk, I tried, and then things went scrambled in my head. I slipped my hand under his, careful not to disturb the I.V. plugged into his vein. I did not know what to say and, even had I known, I don’t think I could have said it. The doctors did not know if he would walk. They did not know if they could avoid chopping off his arm. It was too soon to know anything. And I had walked away from it with a deep rectangular gouge in my biceps, a bruise, and a few tiny holes where pellets had skipped across my arm on their way to Jim. He took it, he took all of it. It did not seem right to me that I should be able to walk in and out of his hospital room while he lay wondering how long he might have an arm. We sat there, just looking at each other, not sure why we were still alive.

  Finally he spoke, softly, almost in a whisper.

  “You did it right,” he said. “You saved my fucking life, girl, and I have to tell you that you have never looked better than when you grabbed that shotgun and cranked off those rounds.” He paused for a moment, swallowed, took a breath and continued. “The form was just right. Weight forward, leaning into the shot, so damn precise. It was beautiful. Don’t you feel bad for a minute, girl, you saved my life.”

  But he must have known what I was feeling. It was working inside me like venom: the awful, aching guilt of the partner who’d been spared.

  * * *

  It was dark, gloomy dark, and smelled of ammonia-scrubbed cement. Cold. I remember it always being cold in there. The cell I lived in was haunted by Will Gaines. I couldn’t close my eyes because each time I did I saw shotguns. I couldn’t keep them open because the face of Will Gaines edged around corners, slipped out from under the bed, floated, shimmering, in the gray light of the cell. Smiled. Always smiling.

  Protective custody. The word around the department was that Melton Stack was fond of the bottle, that his transfer back to our quiet little office, supposedly to help Dodd run things, was actually a measure taken to keep him out of harm’s way. He greased his dyed-black hair straight back and wore white slip-on shoes. It would be four years before he was pensionable, and El Jefe seemed happy to let him ride it out behind a desk in the back room. This was the man Nettle put in charge of keeping Jim and me alive.

  Jim’s situation was easy; Stack put a twenty-four hour guard outside the door of his hospital room. But it was late in the afternoon before good old, scotch-smelling Stack came up with a solution for me, sweet-talking me into a holding cell in the basement of the P.D. There was a small kitchen down there, and a shower. I would be required to wear a bulletproof vest whenever I left the station.

  In the cell, he had laid a large sheet of heavy plywood across the center, resting it on the bunks bolted into opposite walls, and laid a mattress on the plywood. He stood box springs upright against the metal end of the bunks to block the view of the stainless-steel toilet from the camera in the corner of the cell. I had to climb across the bed and squeeze around the box spring to reach the toilet, but it was worth it for some kind of privacy. After Stack left, I put tape over the intercom and tied the cell door wide open, looping a long piece of rope repeatedly around the bars and tying triple knots in it. Chain would have been better, but Stack had refused that request. There was a camera that surveyed the hallway, broadcasting its signals to monitors in the dispatch office upstairs, offering a twenty-four hour view of the goings-on in detention.

  I piled some clothes on the upper bunks, hauled my stereo and television into the hallway, and set about the business of waiting. For what, I did not know. I breathed and my heart beat. I listened to it, was amazed by it. I spent long hours sitting in the middle of the mattress in my cell, staring through the open door at the TV, washing down Seconal with scotch and 7-Up, premixed in a two-liter green plastic bottle.

  I wasn’t locked in. I could roam as I pleased, provided I did not leave the station except in the company of a uniformed patrolman. Yet I stayed in the cell, how many days, sitting on the mattress staring out at the silent TV screen and listening to Steely Dan or Supertramp. Hour after hour. I brought a tiny brass incense burner from the evidence vault and hung it from one of the bunks to cover up the pot smell. I knew it was 12:30 a.m. when the local station stopped broadcasting, and I knew it was 5 a.m. When they came back on the air with the “Farm and Ranch Report.” The rest of the time was filled with television voices or jittery gray light and white noise, all of it in an attempt to keep Will Gaines away.

  I watched, I kept watching. His ghost was there with me, floating around my cell.

  * * *

  Some days after the shooting, I don’t remember how many, Lieutenant Stack stumbled downstairs and said I had to go with him to the trailer. He was drunk enough that two miles down the road he pulled over and asked me to drive.

  My vision went yellow at the edges as we turned onto the winding drive at Pleasant Oaks Mobile Home Park. I thought for a moment that I would pass out. Something was wrong; the sun was shining and the lawns were mown, two kids rode by on bicycles. Everything was calm, but I felt as though my blood had gone viscous.

  I kept telling myself, as we walked toward the open door of the trailer, “It’s alright, it’s safe, it’s safe.”

  I don’t know how long I stood outside, staring at the shattered windows, remembering. I felt a hand nudge my shoulder and heard Stack say, “Let’s go in.”

  “Why are we here,” I said.

  “Just go in. Let’s do it and get out of here.”

  Sitting in the living room, pointing a broomstick at a couple of deputies who sat at the other end of the L-shaped sectional, was Ranger Burton Cash.

  He stared when he saw me, but shrugged back his shoulders and re-aimed the broomstick.

  “It would have to be this angle,” he said. One of the deputies wrote something on a notepad.

  “You’ve got it wrong,” I said. “We weren’t sitting that way. I was on this section, Jim was there. We were asleep, lying down.”

  “No,” Cash said. He leaned the broomstick against the couch and stuck his face out at me. He needed a shave. He needed a brain. “I figure there was a second shooter involved,” he drawled. “The evidence don’t quite agree with your story.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “You think you know what you saw. There’s an awful lot of unanswered questions.”

  “I’ve got one.” I said. “Why wasn’t the crime scene protected?”

  “We sealed it,” one of the deputies said.

  “After you walked all over it.”

  “Look,” Cash said, “up here you’ve got flesh on the ceiling, and some blood over here, and back on that wall. It can’t be that way if things happened like you say.”

  “I told you the truth in my statement,” I said.

  “There was a second shooter, and he was inside.”

  I moved toward the couch. I wanted to touch it, to know that it was real. I needed some kind of physical confirmation that I was really in the room and this was happening. Cash would have his theories and wasn’t about to believe anything said by anyone who worked narcotics, especially words that were being spoken by a twenty-four-year-old female.

  “Never mind,” Stack mumbled to me, “you want to get anything while you’re here?”

  “No” I said, “nothing.”

  Stack turned to go. Cash stood up, kicking the broom onto the floor.

  “Hold on there,” he said. “I’ve got some questions and I’ll get some answers, whether your chief of police cooperates or not. What about this Walker fellow.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” I said. “He lives up around the block.”

  “Now ain’t that convenient. Ya’ll being neighbors and all. How many times did you fuck him? Ol’ Jim like to watch?”

  I looked around the room, at the dried blood and flesh on the paneling and ceiling at the end
of the couch. Pieces of Jim, there on the wall.

  And one dumb son of a bitch sitting right on top of exactly the kind of evidence he wanted, the box top that held marijuana and Jim’s business card there under the couch, maybe four inches from the heels of his boots, but he wouldn’t find it. He wouldn’t even look, wouldn’t move a thing. He was busy with theories.

  “Who needs hard evidence? I said. “There’s a feeling in the gut when things aren’t right.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” he said. “And I’ll tell you right now I don’t appreciate the attitude downtown.”

  It was almost funny. El Jefe was holding fort against the Rangers and the sheriff’s office, trying to keep everything running smoothly and under control even where he had no jurisdiction.

  The couch cushions lay scattered around us, blasted full of holes and crusted with blood. Cash saw me looking and said he wanted to take them.

  “Anything,” I said. “Follow the goddamned yellow brick road.”

  * * *

  I went to the hospital each afternoon and stayed to watch Jim eat dinner. He ordered guest trays of tasteless hospital slop, and got furious when I had to cut up his meat for him. The harness bulls hated us. Hated escorting me to the hospital, to the doctor’s office, to the pharmacy to fill my generous prescriptions. They especially hated it when I sent them to pick up a pizza. But they did it. Nettle’s orders. Keep her happy. Keep her calm. Do what she asks.

  Hours crawled past while I sat in Jim’s room, whispering to him when he was awake, but mostly just sitting there. He lay on his bed, dosed on painkillers, hollow-eyed and pale, and looking so fragile I was almost afraid to touch him.

  I returned to my cell each night around midnight to take up my watch. Even after Gaines surrendered, two weeks after the shooting, I watched. Sitting on the mattress with my back to the wall, I would smoke a joint, eat some Seconal, and settle in for the long night of staring at the visual static on the TV screen, peeking, every few minutes, at the edges of the cell.

  It was dusty, I remember that. Big gray dustballs in the corners. And I remember Nettle himself, only a couple of days after Gaines surrendered, driving me over to see a shrink, and the two of them sitting in the walnut-paneled, Persian-carpeted office trying to persuade me to take sodium amytal.

  “This was the standard treatment for shell shock after World War Two,” the shrink said. “And it may help you recall more fully what happened.”

  “It might be a good idea,” Nettle said. He sat smugly in his jacket and tie, his legs crossed and his hands in his lap.

  “The Ranger thinks I shot Jim.”

  “We know that’s nonsense,” Nettle said. “But it would look better if you took the treatment.”

  What would look better? Nettle tucking a tape recording of my voice while I was on truth serum into his office safe? Another precautionary measure? I didn’t know why he wanted it, but the simple fact that he did was enough to make me say no.

  “If he thinks I shot my partner, let him. Let him investigate until he drops dead. Gaines already surrendered.”

  “And pleaded not guilty,” Nettle said.

  “How are you sleeping?” the doctor said.

  “Behind Seconal,” I answered. “I get a couple of hours from a hundred milligrams. Too much adrenaline.”

  “I’ll give you something for that,” he said, his teeth yellow behind his Freud-like beard. He scribbled out some scripts and handed them to me. “The Placidyl is for sleep. The others are Azene and Inderal. They’ll stop the anxiety. Think about the treatment. It might be just the ticket.”

  “I’d like to go now,” I said. “Jim’s expecting me.”

  When I got to the hospital, the intern who came to the room each day around three to clean Jim’s leg wound was already at work. I sat watching and second-guessing myself, wondering what action I could have taken. I shouldn’t have put my gun on the floor, I should have had it down in the cushions, right next to me, where I always put it before going to sleep. Or I hadn’t realized quickly enough that Gaines’s shotgun was empty; in that instant when I was kneeling on the floor, reaching for my pistol, I could have gone ahead and picked it up, stopped him. But Jim was already hit by then. I didn’t know. I looked at the hole in his leg. I felt that I should have. I should have known. I should have done something, anything, differently.

  The intern was saying something.

  “. . . It’ll have to be done every day, even after he’s released.”

  I took a pair of surgical gloves from the box and pulled them over my hands.

  * * *

  I swallowed everything the shrink gave me, on schedule and sometimes ahead of it. The fear came each night, a sudden surge that exploded from somewhere down around my stomach and turned my body into a thing of rock and jelly, unable to breathe until the last second, until I thought surely I would choke to death, curled on my mattress in that cell. Only then could I draw a breath, and after that first one I couldn’t get enough. I would sit up, gasping, my wet-sponge lungs filling with the dark, ammonia-filled air that pressed the concrete walls around me.

  Each afternoon, I poured peroxide into the hole in Jim’s leg, took gauze in my gloved hand, and swabbed out the wound. It was so deep that it swallowed most of my finger. Jim would lie staring at the ceiling, his face tightened.

  I couldn’t tell him, right away, that the Ranger thought I was lying, thought I was the one who’d shot him. But when I finally did, he laughed out loud.

  “Isn’t that just like a woman,” he said. “Blow her lover’s arm and leg off, manage to wound herself in the process, and then keep the guy she just tried to kill alive until the ambulance finally gets there. Makes perfect sense. Did you do it?” He pressed his head back into the stack of pillows behind him and rolled his eyes. “Come on, you can cop, I won’t get mad.”

  I finished cleaning the wound and stripped off the gloves. It made me shake, every time I had to stick my fingers into his leg, left me squirming inside, but I did it. It became a ritual, a way to pay for my negligence the night of the shooting.

  “Help me slide up a little?”

  I leaned over him and slipped a hand under his arm put the other around his waist.

  “On three,” he said.

  His body was soft where it had never been soft, the muscle tone disappearing daily.

  “Twenty-nine days on my back.” He winced. “God, if I could just turn over.”

  “Cash is sure I did it.”

  “Maybe we ought to get married so that he can’t make us testify against each other.”

  “Some proposal.” I laughed.

  “Hey,” he said, “if I hadn’t stayed that night, I wouldn’t have got shot, would I. And if that ain’t true love I don’t know what is.” He got serious suddenly. “You save my life, girl. What are we gonna do, just kiss everything we’ve been through goodbye, pretend none of it ever happened?”

  He wasn’t kidding. He was proposing marriage.

  “Everything’s changed now,” he said. “Everything. I got a good solid look at my life when Gaines pulled the trigger.”

  He ran a finger over my cheek.

  “Look at me,” he said. “I’m all shot up, missing most of one arm, don’t even know how I’ll walk. Got my fifth surgery coming up next week. Here I am. I want you to marry me.”

  I bent over him and carefully slipped my arms around his neck. I had loved him and I had given up on him, and on the very night I had tried to leave, the first time I really thought I’d be able to make the break, we had been bound together and thrown headlong into a place where we needed each other to survive.

  It was in his voice, and I felt it in the way he put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him. He was willing, finally able, to love me now the way I’d loved him from the very start. I had proved myself.

  I kissed him and sat up, took his hand. I wondered if the drugs the shrink had prescribed were the reason I couldn’t feel anything.

 
“If they don’t lock Gaines up,” I said, “it’s only a matter of a few months before we’re both dead anyway.”

  “You’ll get over it,” he said. “I know you don’t think so now, but you will. I’ll get medical retirement and we can get the hell out of here.”

  For some reason, the term shotgun wedding came to mind.

  * * *

  We were married the day they indicted Gaines on two counts of attempted capital murder. The bride wore beige silk and no shoes so that she might lie next to the groom in his hospital bed during the ceremony. The groom wore blue gym shorts with a tux collar and matching blue tie. The ceremony was performed by a local justice of the peace. After the traditional kiss, the bride was heard to say, “Is this the part where we start living happily ever after?”

  I spent the wedding night at the hospital, massaging Jim’s right calf, trying to get some circulation going. It felt as though there was nothing but mud beneath the skin.

  “They’ll give him some time,” I said at one point. “Ten years, twenty, maybe fifty.”

  “The less, the better,” Jim said. “Far as I’m concerned. I want him on the street.”

  20

  They brought Jim to the courthouse that Monday in an ambulance. Outside of the thick oak door leading to the 252nd District Court, Nettle took a long look at him and rubbed his hands together like a miser with a new stack of cash.

  “This is great,” he said, “just great. You look like a sick whore in church. The jury will love it.”

  Jim rolled his morphine-loaded eyes over at me. He was in an old wooden wheelchair, his stitched leg extended straight out in front of him, his arm still bandaged thickly from fingers to elbow, propped on pillows on the wide pine armrest. He wore a dark green bathrobe, a get-well gift from Rob and Denny.