Hearing the news was a devastating blow. I had pulled her from bed in the middle of the night to have her tell me it was pretty much hopeless. Chase wouldn’t handle the news well, and I was equally concerned with where to put the body when it was over as I was with how Job was going to handle a slow and painful death. Suffering in the last moments of life would not be the way I would choose to go. I would beg someone to kill me first. He needed to overcome his fear of speaking up if he had a final request. He remained silent.
Chase returned, carrying a yellow floral print sheet and matching pillows from my bed. How wrong of me it was to think about not giving them up for this cause, but I didn’t have many nice types of linen to choose from. He could have at least taken something from the closet, or used a blanket instead of my only pillows. I was just going to have to steal from the couch until he left.
Sally made quick work of the sheet – pulling it from opposite corners and rolling it up into a rope to get the most length out of it. She looped the middle around the back of his left ankle, bringing the sheet together over the top of his foot and tying it around. I wanted to question her on the technique she was using, but I dismissed it as she had been a nurse, and knew more than I would about the matter.
Job watched what she was doing and began to take in deeper gulps of air, each one rasping against the splintered bones in his chest. He was trying to slide away with his hands, but the agony that shot through his body again forced him to stop. He was trapped, and didn’t have any choice but to lie there and let her help. I had to reassure him that it was in his best interest to stay.
“You need to calm down,” I said. “It will feel better when she’s done.”
My comment got him to stop moving around, but his hand was still gripping the bed, making his knuckles go white. All the color seemed to run out of his face. Job knew what was coming next. His apprehension was getting the best of me, and I got up to leave before I could be roped into helping. Chase was on the same page, as he was closer to the stairs and scooting along the wall, hoping to go unnoticed.
“I need you both to stay and help,” Sally firmly interrupted our quick exit.” One of you is going to have to hold him down so he doesn’t slide off the bed, while the other needs to hold the sheet to help me pull his leg into place.”
“You plan on knocking him out first – right?” I couldn’t fathom anything else.
“With what? I’m not going to beat him in the head till he’s unconscious. I don’t really have much of a choice here. It shouldn’t take too long,” Sally replied, sounding uncertain.
Neither Chase nor I wanted to be there. We had already seen him suffer enough, and I could feel my stomach lurching at the thought of him being awake through the impending torture. Chase hesitantly reached for the sheet and wrapped the ends around his hand to get a good grip. I knew he was stronger and more equipped for pulling than I would have been. I stayed where I was, steadying my hands on his upper chest and shoulder, leaning into him. I could feel the warmth of his skin and quick pace of his heart under my hands. He turned his head to look at me again. I could see from his face he was terrified. His one wide eye stared at me. His look was begging me to stop. I needed him to tell her. I wanted to tell Sally that we could wait, but I knew that there were other injuries to attend to after this that couldn’t.
“On the count of three, we need to pull,” she said, mounting her large, beefy hands below his knee.
I pressed firmly against his chest, putting all my weight into it. I wanted to say something comforting to him. The best I could do was mouth to him I was sorry. I wasn’t sure if he would understand.
“One.”
He kept staring at me, his eye growing wider. It caught the reflection of light for a split second, reflecting the gold glimmer in it. I knew in my heart he had the choice to speak up. He knew what we were about to do and wouldn’t stop it. He could have asked me for anything in that moment and I would have done it to make it easier. It wasn’t fair. I may have disliked his species, but I was not inhumane.
“Two.”
My stomach knotted, and I could feel my dinner coming up the back of my throat. I swallowed hard, keeping it where it belonged, making an attempt to keep anyone from noticing. His one good eye burned through me with terror; I shut my eyes so I at least didn’t have to watch him. His face was going to contort and the expression would be too much for me. I would let go and he would end up on the floor in worse shape than currently. I already felt guilty enough.
“Three.”
I expected to hear a sickening snap from his leg as it was ripped back into place. If there was, I couldn’t hear it over his instant screams of agony. There was no stifling them. It was a long, pitiful sound I had never heard from anything before and seemed to continue in one breath. He became rigid, and as hard as I pressed into him, he pushed back – arching his body, trying to make me let go. Every pull I could feel from his lower half brought another crescendo of excruciating cries.
At last, he breathed in deeply and then stopped for a moment, catching his breath. The tugging had stopped. It was over before he could start back up. I had opened my eyes in time for another sudden yank and a cracking sound from below. His next howl started up. It was even worse than before.
The look on his face couldn’t be described. His mouth had become so wide I could see down to the back of his throat, his perfect white teeth absent of fillings. Every blue vein in his face and neck bulged against his skin like it was tissue paper, and his tan skin had become red from the pressure. I leaned into him again, but this time there was no holding him down. He was far stronger than me, and his arching back nearly threw me off like a bucking bronco.
I thought it would only last a few seconds and then be over, but his spasms were not letting up. The movies always showed one pull, one scream, and one snap and it was done, but this felt like an eternity. Even though it had only been a couple of minutes, the wretched cry continued on. I turned my head away from him to see why the process was taking so long. Sally was giving Chase orders on how hard to pull, while still trying to manipulate the splintered bones back into alignment. His leg was much straighter than before, but his foot was still severely turned outward. I could hear Job draw in another lungful of air, preparing for another guttural scream, but it never came.
Everything in the room had stopped. His body fell limp under my weight and I drew my hands back in alarm. The pulling from below ceased as everyone held their breath, waiting for me to confirm whether he had survived the torture or not.
“Is he breathing, Emily?” Sally asked. Her voice was hard to hear, since my ears still rang with the sound of his screams.
Hesitantly, I placed a hand on his chest. It continued to rise and fall, slowly and erratically, with each labored breath. I could still feel his heart pounding and knew he had just passed out. I wasn’t surprised; the body can only endure so much before it shuts down. Even one that wasn’t human. I was just relieved he was still alive.
“I think he’s out of it,” I said, trying to get control of my shaking hands. I was still pressing into him, but I didn’t have to hold him down as hard as when he had been thrashing about.
“That’s good. It’s what I was counting on. If he had kept on like that, we would have been waking up neighbors this time of night. We really don’t want to attract any attention. Besides, it solves the pain problem for now, and we can get whatever is in him out without having to worry about him shifting.”
She talked as she went back to work, holding his leg along the fracture with one hand and untwisting his ankle with the other, creating a crunching sound, until she felt it was as close to normal as she could make it. I turned to look at Job. Now that I knew he wasn’t suffering, I could look at him again.
He looked so peaceful. Seeing him asleep again, it was hard to imagine that just minutes ago he had to be held down while we tortured him. I hoped that he could stay like this for a long time. I didn’t think my stomach or my he
ad could handle another round of abuse.
Sally finally stood up, physically exhausted. Job’s leg was propped up on the pillows Chase had stolen from my room. It was splinted from his knee down around the bottom of his foot with the two halves of the yard stick, wrapped in the elastic bandage. Open gaps exposed parts of his bruised leg. His swollen ankle was still partially angled, but looked ten times better than before she had started. She removed the gloves she had been wearing and pulled out a new pair, handing me a pair to put on as well. I already had a lot of his blood on me at this point, so didn’t see the reason I should wear them. I forgot that this was not for me, but for him; no reason to expose him to anything that could cause an infection, after working so hard to prevent one. I didn’t question it out loud; I just slipped them on, feeling the powder rubbing against my fingers, the smell of talc hanging in the air.
She excused Chase from the room, since he was becoming more of a hindrance than a help at this point. He had used the last of what he could muster up pulling the sheet, but the mixture of stress and alcohol had affected his small motor skills, and he was barely able to stand on his own two feet. How he had held on this long was beyond me. He didn’t even look back as he waddled up the stairs. I was sure I would find the remains of his binge in the toilet when I got up to the bathroom – another mess to clean up after him.
Armed with the remaining towels, bottled water, and gauze, we moved over to Job’s right side to remove whatever had stopped him from shifting in the first place. Most of the bleeding had stopped, leaving small trickles that seeped slowly from the edges. Sally shoved a few towels under his back so that anything dripping could be caught. Even if it wasn’t a deep cut, it was wide. It extended for about three inches at a diagonal angle across his side, below his ribs. The copper piece itself wasn’t nearly as broad. It must have cut through him, leaving jagged edges, before being left in its final resting place.
I had a hard time believing that someone so strong could be taken down so easy. I had watched him carry the box to Chase earlier without strain. His graceful moves should have prevented him from even succumbing to an attack – yet here he was, battered and broken, clinging to life by a thread.
Sally, in her nurse voice, instructed me on our next course of action . “I’m going to pull it out and try to clean it with water first. If it starts to bleed, and I hope it does, you’ll need to hold the gauze over the wound and put pressure on it until I can get some stitches into him.”
I nodded and was ready for the go. I glanced up at Job again, hoping that he would sleep through it this time. Except for the slow rising and falling of his chest, I thought he easily could look dead. I remembered he had promised he would be okay. It was a useless vow. I wasn’t going to travel to the great beyond and tell him that I was upset he broke a promise that he probably never understood.
I watched Sally use her fingers to push down the torn skin and congealed blood from the edges of the copper object, making it easier to grasp. As soon as there was enough exposed, she gripped it between her fingers and pulled it out. It was no more than a couple inches long in a crude knife shape. She quickly tossed it aside and used the bottle of water to rinse out the gaping hole that it left. Rust-colored water rushed down his side, staining the towels under him. She stopped for a moment, and the hole filled with dark blood. It was my cue to step in and hold the gauze against the gash, preventing it from flowing too fast.
Even through my gloves, I could feel the warm fluid soak through too quickly before it ran between my fingers and back down his side. I put another piece of gauze over the first one, pressing even harder, trying to hold the ragged end together till she could get her needle and thread together; it seeped through as well, but much slower. I was readying my third piece when she asked me to pull them back. As I lifted the soaked rags, I looked over to see her hands shaking. Her calm nerves had become as shattered as mine. This was all too much for the both of us. I offered to sew him up for her, but the request snapped her back into reality, and she declined, smiling. That was a relief to me, since I could barely do a cross stitch and make it look anything like the sample picture. Who knows what his side would end up looking like when I was through with it.
She could have fooled me that she had never done this before. She was so quick and precise with each stitch, and it looked like she had performed this operation a hundred times over. As each one went in and was pulled tight, the blood flow was cut off at that point. After the seventh one, it had stopped entirely. She continued sewing up the shredded edges of the gash, keeping them close to each other in case one didn’t hold as well as the others. Fifteen in all.
After she covered it with a large bandage and taped it into place, she stood up and took a deep breath, looking over what she had accomplished. The whole ordeal was bittersweet. Sally had successfully repaired his visual injuries, yet there was the possibility that there were more hidden that we would miss.
The remaining cuts and bruises seemed superficial in comparison, and didn’t require stitches or realignment. Most were cleaned out and left as they were so that they could scab over and heal on their own. The gash over his eye wasn’t deep enough for stitches, but Sally had butterfly bandages she placed over it, just in case it was to split again. After we cleaned up the mess of destroyed clothing and bloodied towels, he looked just as good as he might have if he were in a hospital – without all the beeping machines and cords hooked up to every part of his exposed skin. He was resting as easy as could be expected. He would be left to spend the rest of the night fighting for his life.
For me, it was a relief to know it was over. All that was left was the matter of getting him out of my house and returning him to his rightful owner where he belonged, so I could move on.
4.
Reaching the top of the stairs, it felt good to get out of that stuffy little room for a while. The walled off half of the basement was too small of a space for so many bodies to occupy at once. There were no windows in there, and the air could barely reach it. My hands were cramped from squeezing, pressing, and pushing. I could feel a slow ache in my lower back from being hunched over for most of the duration. My arms and legs were still sore from the heaving of a heavy body and the bouncing around, holding him in place. I could only think of how nice it would be to just lie down in my bed and sleep through tomorrow – sleep through the next few tomorrows. I had to be up early for morning check outs and was hoping I could use this as an excuse to Sally to take a day off.
The kitchen lights were so much brighter than the ones in the basement. Blinking hard, it took my eyes some time to adjust. My once clean Formica counters were now lined with empty bottles of water. They would need to go out for recycling, but for now they could sit there. A trash bag on the floor, filled with towels and scraps of clothing, sat waiting for trash day. I had tied it up tight to keep the smell from permeating the house.
In the living room adjacent to the kitchen, I could see Chase from the back. He had already made himself comfortable on the couch, with the throw blanket over him. He had forgotten again to take off his shoes before putting his feet up, leaving pieces of dead grass and mud stuck to the cushions. As much as I wanted to smack him in the head and tell him to clean up, I had no energy left to even raise my voice, let alone my hand. It wasn’t worth the effort. I wanted to sit down on the soft couch, but for the moment I could relax at the kitchen table. Sally was right behind me and had the same idea.
“I just don’t get why someone would do this,” she said. “People still get kicks out of beating them. They used this so he couldn’t defend himself.”
Sally held up the knife she had extracted from Job a little more than an hour ago. She was holding it in a piece of cloth, looking at it intently, like it held the key to all the questions of the universe.
The copper dagger was small and crude. Flat along the backside and curved with small ridges on the front, coming to a very sharp point, it looked like someone had made it themself. The hand
le was broken clean off, and could be lying out in the parking lot or in someone’s pocket, for all we knew. There was no point in rehashing how he wound up here. I was so tired that I just wanted to get Job back where he belonged and go to bed. I figured I could use this opportunity before it got too late.
“Should I wake Chase up now to help take Job back to the Carter’s,” I said, “or did you want to just have the two of us do it?”
Sally’s expression was shocking, to say the least. Nurse Sally had packed up and gone home, and so did sweet Aunt Sally. The Sally in front of me I had never met. She had a fierceness in her eyes that I couldn’t ignore. I had no idea why she had become so enraged, but I knew I was going to find out soon enough.
“Do you ever think of anyone other than yourself anymore?” she asked. “Are you really that naive? He almost died and still could, and all you can think about is how fast you can send him on his way? If Susan knew how you turned out–”
“That Copperback has nothing to do with my Mom!” I had no idea where this explosion came from. Usually I would have a slow fuse, but tonight every emotion I went through gathered together into one big ball of fury and I couldn’t help but scream back at her. She had no right to drag my mom into any of this.
“Really, Emily?” she said sarcastically. “He has everything to do with her. And don’t ever let me hear you call him or any of them that again! It’s a disgusting name.” She slammed the cloth- wrapped knife down on the table, making everything shake.
Copperback was a derogatory name given to them. I used it on occasion, since there was no love lost on them. It had been created since Sayner, Wisconsin had put up such a fight about having them named after the town. The bad press they received, still going on ten years later, was more than they could handle. The new name was used in passing, but the media still referred to them by the city name.
She wasn’t backing down. I had no idea what brought this on. It could be her way of releasing stress, but she picked the wrong time to vent it on me. I was under the same amount, and past my boiling point for one evening.
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