Abraham returned. He prepared the morphine and inserted the syringe into its rubber top. Patrick watched him out of the side of his eye. The man seemed to know what he was doing. “May we use the betadine to clean the injection sites?” he asked.
“I’ve got it.” Dr. John grunted. “Show me where.”
“His uninjured side for the morphine and antibiotic.” Abraham touched Barry’s exposed injury site. “Here for the lidocaine?”
Dr. John rubbed the areas clean with a small amount of betadine on a gauze pad.
“Thank you.” Abraham injected the needle and depressed the plunger. “Morphine.”
“Will that knock me out? Please tell me it will,” Barry said.
Patrick responded, “Sorry, buddy. You’re going to be awake for this. Sleepy, maybe.”
Barry moaned. “This pain is worse than anything I went through in Vietnam. When are you giving me the shot?”
“I have already administered the first one,” Abraham said.
“Huh.” Barry pursed his lips. “I didn’t even feel it.”
He’s skilled, Patrick realized. “I only have the one syringe.”
Abraham was already cleaning it. “I understand. I will take care.”
Patrick was sure now that the needle work was in good hands. He began trimming Barry’s hair away from the area around where the metal shaft had entered his side. When that task was completed, he washed it gently with gauze and alcohol, then rubbed betadine over the entire area.
“In case you were wondering, I still feel that. And by feel I mean you’re killing me,” Barry said.ß
Abraham pushed the syringe needle into Barry, delivering the lidocaine. “You won’t after this one.” To the doctors, he said, “I packed the wound with fabric before I taped it closed. I apologize. I did not have sterile materials, but I did the best I could.”
“I understand more than you could guess. In the wilderness, you make do with what’s available,” Patrick said.
Outside, a coyote howled. “That wasn’t as far away as I would have liked,” Dr. John said.
Abraham nodded, his face creased with worry. “Antibiotic.” He gave Barry the third shot. After he had cleaned the syringe again, he said, “I’ll be prepared to help staunch blood flow when you have removed the tape.” He held gauze in both hands.
“Thanks. The lidocaine should have kicked in by now. Let’s do it.” Patrick held Barry’s skin down as he peeled back the tape, moving slowly toward the wound. He didn’t want to rip up skin or tear the opening further.
“I feel pressure,” Barry said.
“That’s not a problem. Tell us if you feel pain.”
Blood gushed around the edges of the tape and what looked like part of a fleecy sweatshirt. When Patrick had the tape off, he lifted the fleece as carefully as if he was clipping wires on a bomb. Abraham pressed against the bleed with his gauze. It didn’t do much to stop it.
Dr. John grunted. “There’s a lot more blood than I’d like to see.”
Me either. Moving as fast as he could, Patrick cut the remaining hair away, cleaned it with alcohol, and irrigated the entire area with betadine. Abraham kept pressure on the wound. The gauze was soaked through.
“All yours, Dr. John,” Patrick said.
Dr. John wiggled his fingers like he was warming up to play the piano, a pre-surgery ritual Patrick had seen him perform countless times over the last few years. In reality, the man didn’t play the instrument, but he did play the banjo like a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Surgeon, clock maker, banjo player. A true Renaissance man.
Dr. John puckered his lips to the side. “The light’s not great. Lucky for you, Barry, I’m not having to stitch your face.” He looked up at Abraham and Patrick. “I guess it doesn’t do any good for me to say ‘suction,’ but I’d appreciate it if the two of you could keep things as dry as you can, so I stand a chance of poking him in the right spots.”
“Not making me feel any better about this,” Barry mumbled. He sounded softened, like the morphine was taking the edge off.
Patrick smiled. Dr. John had a jovial way of defusing tension. Another gift from his maker.
“No problem, Dr. John,” Abraham said.
“Let’s see what we see.” With two fingers, Dr. John probed in the wound. He frowned and moved his fingers first one way, then the other. “If you had to guess, Patrick, what would be your diagnosis?”
“Based on the bleeding and shock, I’d say you’ll need to tie off at least one bleeding vessel,” Patrick said. “And I’d pray that’s it.” Beside him, Abraham nodded.
“I concur. And I think I’ve found the main bleeder. I’ll look around while I’m in there and see if anything else was damaged, but tying off this vessel will be my first task.”
Patrick couldn’t argue with that.
Dr. John picked up the scalpel. “All right, then, gentlemen, let’s get down to business.”
Patrick and Abraham shared a glance. Patrick hoped his eyes didn’t look as worried as Abraham’s, but he had a feeling they did.
Chapter Thirty-one: Switch
North of Clear Creek Resort, Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming
Friday, December 30, 1977, 6:00 p.m.
Patrick
Patrick leaned over the hole in Barry’s side, nearly bumping heads with Abraham and Dr. John. He had two pieces of gauze at the ready, and he and Abraham were taking turns absorbing the fluid that could otherwise make it impossible for Dr. John to do his work.
A splash of blood landed in an abstract splatter pattern on Barry’s intact skin. On it. Not dripping from it. Patrick looked up, first at Abraham. He’d seen it, too, and made wide eyes of acknowledgement at Patrick. It didn’t look like it had come from him. Abraham shook his head, and Patrick took that to mean it hadn’t come from Patrick, either. Patrick glanced up at the ceiling of the cave. He didn’t know what he thought he’d find, maybe an owl or bat with its dinner.
There was nothing.
His eyes moved to Dr. John. Blood was trickling from one nostril, around his mouth, and down his chin, where another drop was poised at the precipice, ready to torpedo Barry‘s open wound. “Dr. John, your nose,” Patrick said.
Dr. John grunted. “What about it?”
“It’s bleeding. Profusely. And falling onto Barry near the incision site.”
“Wha-at?” Barry said. He sounded woozy now. Patrick was glad the morphine was doing its job.
Dr. John froze. He couldn’t wipe his face with his hands mid-surgery. “Can one of you wipe it before I contaminate the surgical site?”
Abraham swiped at Dr. John’s chin, then up the blood trail, smearing it. He pulled the gauze away. For a few seconds, they all held their breath. Maybe it had stopped. Then the flow gushed anew.
“Didn’t work,” Patrick said.
“The dryness out here. Been needing to get this cauterized. Of all the bad timing, when I’ve got Barry open. But all I had left to do was the stitching. Unfortunately, there’s going to be a whole lot of stitching.” His eyes met Patrick’s. “I’m going to need you to take over for me.”
Patrick’s throat tightened. Operate in the wilderness on his brother-in-law? But Dr. John was right. Of course he was. “Let me wash my hands again.”
“Move fast. I want to get this over with quickly.”
Patrick fumbled over to the snow at the cave mouth and scrubbed his hands, trying to calm his overactive nerves. It’s going to be all right. You’re not going to kill Barry. Go in, find your bleeder, tie it off. Then approximate the muscles and tissues as anatomically as possible and align the skin as best you can. Even though right now it looks like the broken teeth of a saw blade. Keep it clean, close it up. No problem. Then he returned to the line of supplies. Abraham had the alcohol ready and poured a small amount into Patrick’s palms. Patrick rubbed his hands briskly together.
“This reminds me of medical school. They taught us to tie off sutures by having us do it with our hands inside a jar and the lig
hts out,” he said.
Dr. John was pinching the bridge of his nose, his head leaned back and chin tilted up. “Some things never change. That’s why I took up working with clocks.”
“I’ve heard other doctors tie flies for the same reason.”
“Or so they say. Any excuse to fish.”
Patrick smiled. He realized the knot in his stomach had eased. He’d be fine. He’d done harder surgeries than this hundreds of times.
“Wait. You guys are letting the quack operate on me?” Barry said.
“Where’s a gas mask when you need one?” Patrick said. He picked up the line, threaded it through the needle, and leaned in. “All right. It’s time to put Humpty Dumpty together again.”
Chapter Thirty-two: Hunker
Piney Bottoms Ranch, Story, Wyoming
Friday, December 30, 1977, 7:00 p.m.
Ben
No lights were on at Piney Bottoms when Ben arrived. The ranch’s lone hand lived by the axiom of “early to bed, early to rise.” Ben figured he’d probably finished up and tucked into his cabin an hour before.
Just as Ben had been counting on.
He didn’t want to be disturbed. He was tired into his bone marrow and had nearly driven off the road multiple times in the last hour, which wouldn’t have been good—he was driving much too fast for the weather and bad roads. Now all he was looking for was a decent night’s sleep after he’d packed up his things. In the morning, he would evade the watchful eyes of the hand and start the next leg of his journey.
He parked behind the house. When he turned off his truck, he dropped his forehead on the steering wheel. He’d been partly relieved and partly disappointed that Trish hadn’t been home when he’d dropped by her house on the way through Buffalo. As much as he loved her, it would have been a hard conversation, one he’d rehearsed in his mind for hours. Yes, I just gave you a promise ring, but I’m leaving, I’m not one hundred percent sure where I’m going or what I’ll be doing, and I have no idea when I’m coming back, if ever. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d have picked up a baseball bat and chased him back to his truck. He tried to imagine how he would feel if she were dumping him and running away.
He’d be devastated and want to understand why.
But he didn’t know how to explain something to her that didn’t make complete sense to himself. He just knew that he had to do this. No matter how badly it hurt to walk away from her and the Sibleys, he needed a fresh start in a place where he wouldn’t disappoint or hurt anyone. Where his past wouldn’t follow him. A beautiful, remote, rugged place. Under a new name. Not the one his criminal father had hung around his neck like an iron collar. He’d forge a new path. His own path. Not college. He wasn’t going to waste his or the Sibleys’ money. He belonged outside, doing something physical.
He jerked and his forehead bounced on the steering wheel. His chin felt wet, and he wiped it with his hand. Drool, all the way down to his neck. He’d fallen asleep.
He forced himself to sit up and stretch. Time to go inside. Crawl into his comfortable bed in the nicest house he’d ever lived in. He opened the door and hopped down, almost falling in the process. He looked back at his bags. There was nothing he needed in them. He shut the door softly and walked through the snow to the back door. It was dark out, but he didn’t have to worry about a key. It was always left unlocked.
He opened the door, which creaked on hinges he had forgotten to oil the week before. He stumbled over Henry’s work boots in the vestibule, even though he knew they were always there, sitting below the hook where his cowboy hats hung, straw for summer, felt for spring and fall. The vestibule emptied into the kitchen. It smelled sweet, of the old bananas Vangie saved up to make her famous banana bread. He walked past the big refrigerator. It was always well stocked. Ranching was hungry work, and Ben raided it for snacks several times a day. Tonight, he was just too tired to eat. He passed it, moving on through the dining area where only a few weeks before there had been a huge Christmas dinner with more food than he’d ever seen at one time in his life, then into the living room and the hallway to the bedrooms.
His footsteps echoed on the wood floors. The house seemed empty, like him. Funny to feel alone now when I’ve been by myself so much of my life. His mom had disappeared before he was old enough to remember much about her, even what she’d looked like. He tried to bring up a picture of her in his mind’s eye, but it was fuzzy. She’d been on the tall side. Or maybe that was just how a toddler saw the world. She was pretty. He’d been told he got his dark eyes and hair from her. She’d smelled good, like cinnamon and sugar and butter. She’d sung him to sleep at night—he couldn’t recall the song, only her voice. It was one of the few things he remembered for sure about her, other than her bruises and black eyes, and that he’d loved her. He was sure he had.
But she hadn’t stuck around. She hadn’t kept him safe.
He stopped in the bathroom with the lasso wallpaper that he’d used since he moved in, staring at himself in the mirror as he splashed warm water on his face. A week after his mom had left his life, his father, worthless piece of horse manure that Chester Jones was, had taken after Ben with an empty whiskey bottle to the head for the first time. Not hard enough to break the bottle, but hard enough to drop Ben to the floor. The first few times, Ben had thought his dad was just sad because his mom was gone. But it kept happening, and it was even worse when his dad’s half-brother, Ben’s Uncle Billy Kemecke, showed up to drink with Chester. The brothers were big men, and Ben was just a little boy. Once, they’d gotten tired of playing cornhole and had forced Ben to stand against the wall in the Jones’ foul-smelling little house while they took turns knocking beer bottles off his head with the beanbags. When Ben had started crying, his dad told his Uncle Billy to give Ben something to cry about. But Ben hadn’t cried any more, because he’d passed out when Uncle Billy had jerked him across the room and dislocated his shoulder.
It hadn’t taken many episodes like those for Ben to learn to speak softly and become invisible. He became so good at hiding that most of the time his dad couldn’t find him when he was wasted and looking for something to wallop. By the time Ben reached his teens, he’d even forgiven his mother for her disappearing act. Maybe she’d believed her husband wouldn’t hurt their son. Ben had certainly become adept enough at disappearing, but, unlike her, he always had to come back.
Deep down, Ben couldn’t shake his growing certainty that she hadn’t left. That Chester had killed her and hidden her body. He’d never know for sure. His father was dead. There would be no confession, no trip to a grave where Ben could weep for her and tell her goodbye.
Trish used to worry that Ben would hate her someday because Dr. Flint had killed Chester during her rescue. Ben had tried to convince her that he would never feel that way, but he’d been too afraid to tell her the truth—that he was glad his father was dead, and about why, and what his father had done to him.
Ben opened the closet in the hall. He kept a box in it from his old life. This is what he’d come to Piney Bottoms for. Part of him wanted to burn the pictures, his birth certificate, and the family Bible his mom had recorded his birth in. The hateful fact of his paternal parentage was memorialized in all of it. The only time Ben let himself think about his dad now was when he was reminding himself of the kind of man he didn’t want to be.
The truth was he was grateful to Dr. Flint for setting him free. He probably would have killed his father someday himself if Dr. Flint hadn’t beaten him to it. His dad’s death had been the beginning of the process, for Ben, of moving away from fear. Not that he hadn’t been scared in juvie. He’d been almost as scared there as he’d been at home in Cody.
But when he’d been released from custody, he’d gotten a second chance with the Sibleys. Ben hadn’t felt safe from the time his mother disappeared until he moved in with Henry, Vangie, and baby Hank. Here, in this empty, echoing house, he’d been able to breathe and relax and stop looking over his shoulder, for th
e first time in years. Maybe ever. He’d felt like part of a normal family in this house.
The house he was going to leave behind in the morning.
He pulled the box off the shelf and set it against the baseboard in the hallway. Wherever he was going, it would have to come with him. He would bury his past when he had a handle on his future.
After a quick detour to oil the creaky hinges, he entered his bedroom without turning on the lights, diving headfirst onto his bed, and was asleep almost before his face landed on the pillow.
Chapter Thirty-three: Interrogate
North of Clear Creek Resort, Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming
Friday, December 30, 1977, 9:00 p.m.
Patrick
Patrick watched the rise and fall of Barry’s chest as he slept, alert for the slightest change. A tapering, a shallowing, the sound of distress. So far, so good. His brother-in-law’s pale greenish gray skin color wasn’t great, but he’d just endured a traumatic injury and wilderness surgery, the operation performed by firelight in the middle of a blizzard. Patrick couldn’t expect him to be in the pink of health. He’d done well during the surgery, though. Patrick had worried the painkillers wouldn’t be sufficient to keep the pain at bay, but they’d done the trick. A blessing. The fact that he’d survived the accident was a miracle, much less the surgery, and Patrick thanked God for that grace repeatedly, each time asking Him to keep Barry alive a little longer and a little longer still. Occasionally he threw in a bit about how glad he was there had been no damage to internal organs, especially the GI tract. A bowel perforation wouldn’t have been something even Dr. John could have saved Barry from, given their lack of the types and quantities of antibiotics that would have warded off a peritoneal infection and sepsis. He touched Barry’s forehead. The skin was warm, but warm from the fire, not from fever.
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