Gaffney, Patricia (23 page)

Nobody ever mentioned Gault, and Jesse figured he was the
second-to-last man anybody would figure for a Good Samaritan. The last being
Wylie.

What Wylie made of these secret, last-minute bailouts, Jesse could
only imagine. The son of a bitch must be going crazy. Which wasn't much of a punishment
for what he'd done to Cady, but it was something. Jesse began to feel a little
better. Broke, but better. It helped that in all the excitement about the
money, she forgot to ask him what he was going to do with Wylie. It looked like
the whole mess might just blow over after all.

He should've known better.

His room was habitable again, but he'd taken to spending the night
in Cady's, and it was a hard habit to break. One night, though, after the
saloon closed, she went upstairs with him while he got a clean shirt for the
next day. They started fooling around, one thing led to another, and they ended
up falling asleep in his bed instead of hers.

In the morning, he was glad. He had a high, east-facing window,
and the sun beaming in on Cady's skin, mellow gold against the white of the
sheets, was as pretty a sight as he'd ever seen. He kissed her half-awake,
loving her drowsy-eyed smile and the starting-to-get-interested sounds she made
in the back of her throat. These were the times he liked best, when it was just
them, nobody else, and they weren't talking. The trouble with talking was that
it usually meant lying, and he was getting sick of that. Kissing Cady was much
better.

They were doing more than kissing when the first shriek came.

The window was open or they might not have heard it—it came from
the back of the building. And since it was Ham's voice, Jesse didn't think much
of it, not at first; He's
playing,
he assumed. But Cady knew right away.
Critical moment or not, she called everything off by rolling out from under him
and scrambling out of bed. She'd have run out of the room bare-ass naked if he
hadn't thrown her shift at her while he grabbed for his pants.

By the time they hit the stairs, Ham was screaming in short,
panicky, repetitive bursts, horrible, earsplitting; Jesse's heart pounded in
his chest as real fear got a grip on him. This wasn't a game: Ham was in some
terrible trouble.

They found him writhing on his back behind the blueblossom bushes,
and Jesse's first thought was that he was ill, sick to his stomach—he was lying
by the open door to the outhouse. Then he saw the snakes.

Three of them—four—five—a sixth slithering out of sight under the
floorboards. Rattlers, fat and muscular and brown-blotched, flat, triangular
heads swerving, clubbed tails chattering. Cady screamed once. Jesse yelled for
her to stop, but she kept moving, white arms flailing, and all except one of
the snakes curled and coasted away in fright. The last one bared dripping
fangs, reared up, and lunged at Ham's bare foot, striking him on the heel.
Instead of screaming, he uttered an awful sound, strangled and despairing, a
hopeless croak that made Jesse's blood run cold. He managed to grab Cady's
flying hair and yank her back before the snake could coil and strike again. Ham
curled onto his side in a tight ball of panic. Barefooted, desperate, Jesse ran
at the snake, stomping and shouting curses and waving his arms. Instead of
charging again, the reptile cringed away, forked tongue flicking, spitting;
with a flash of dusty scales it changed direction and skittered, rattling, off
into the long grass.

Cady dropped over Ham, covered him like a blanket with her body,
cradling him, crooning to him. Gently, then not so gently, Jesse pried her
away. "Move, honey. Come on, Cady. That's it, that's a girl."

Bad, it was bad. The snakes had bitten Ham in two places Jesse
could see, his heel and his calf, and there might be other bites under his
clothes. "Run for the doctor. Hear me? Go get Doc Mobius.
Cady."
Her
swimming eyes focused on him. She shook her head, reluctance to leave Ham, even
let go of him, obvious in every line of her face, her body. Jesse told her
again to
go,
repeated it, ended up shaking her by the shoulders. With an
angry sob, she finally scrambled up and ran out of the yard.

Jesse scoured his brain for everything he knew about snakebite.
Don't let the victim move—moving made the venom spread faster. Scooping Ham up
as gently as he could, he carried him into Cady's room and laid him on her bed.
He'd begun to shiver and whimper. Tears streaked the dirt on his face; his big
dark eyes were glazed. "You're all right, you're going to be okay, hear
me? Where else did they get you, can you tell me? Where'd those slimy bastards
get you?" While he talked, he undid buttons and pulled the kid's skinny,
shaking arms and legs out of his shirt and corduroy knee pants and drawers.
Another purpling puncture wound was swelling on his bony kneecap. Jesse shook a
pillow out of the case and tied it around Ham's thigh, just above the knee.
Between
the wound and the heart,
he remembered; that's where you wanted to cut off
circulation. He shook out the other pillow and tied that case—the one that said
Life Is Duty—under the boy's other knee, above the calf wound and the bite in
his heel. Then he wrapped him in the coverlet and tried to think what else to
do.

The room started filling up with people, neighbors and passersby
who had heard all the yelling. Some of them he knew, some he didn't. Everybody
had advice, and all of it was urgent, had to be done
now.
Jesse sat down
next to Ham, who was crying silently, dazedly, and put his arms around him, not
just to comfort him but to keep everybody away from him. Where was Levi? Where
was the doctor?

Cady found him in his tiny rented house next to the livery, up and
dressed, thank God, and heating coffee on the wood stove in his kitchen. Almost
all she said was "snake" before he ducked out of the room. Ten
seconds later he was back, with his black bag in one hand and a glass bottle of
something yellow and liquid in the other. "Put that on," he advised
as they hurried out through the door, and she saw a worn gray frock coat
hanging by a hook in the wall. For the first time she realized what she had on:
her chemise and nothing else, unbuttoned to the navel but staying closed, sort
of, out of habit. "Good God," she muttered; and then, "I don't
care." But she grabbed Doc Mobius's coat and stuck her arms through it as
she trotted after him down the street, and when they burst into her room at the
Rogue she was as modest as she had time to get.

Good thing: it was full of people. Jesse's face when he saw her
made her heart clench. Doc told everybody to get back, get away, and her
neighbors— Jacques, the Schmidts, old Mrs. Sheets, Lisabeth Way-man, Arthur
Dunne—started to drift outside, murmuring and shaking their heads, taking last
looks back. Jesse didn't get up, but he put his arm out, and Cady went to him
and let him embrace her, his hand strong and sure on her hip. "Ham,"
she said. "Oh, Ham." His eyes were closed, so she let herself cry.
Jesse squeezed her, or she might've broken down. He looked so bad! "How is
he? He'll be all right, won't he? Won't he be fine?"

Doc Mobius ignored her, and she took some comfort from the
sure-handed, impersonal way he touched Ham. But then he stripped the quilt away
from his skinny, naked, brown-skinned body, and she saw two ugly black dots,
livid and swollen, in his knee. Two more in his other leg. Oh, God—two more in
his foot! Jesse caught her as she sank to the mattress edge, weak with dread
and revulsion.

Doc did things. She tried to watch. She saw him make two deep,
oval slashes in Ham's knee, and she saw him pull the skin away from his calf
and snip off skin, flesh, and bloody wound with a pair of scissors. She saw the
piece of broken fang he cut out of Ham's foot. Mostly she saw black, from
burying her face in Jesse's bare chest, and bright colors from pressing her
fingers against her eyelids. Ham was barely conscious; he didn't scream until
the doc swabbed the yellow liquid—chloride of lime, he said it was when Jesse
asked him, white-lipped—into all three wounds.

Thank God Levi didn't come until it was over. Cady let go of Jesse
and stood behind Levi with her hands on his shoulders while he hovered over
Ham's limp, sweating body. "He ain't breathing right." She could hear
him trying to keep the panic out of his voice. "The poison gettin' to him?
Doc?"

Doc Mobius stood up, his bones creaking. His face wasn't
reassuring, but then he always looked like death warmed up. "Come outside
with me," he said, and Levi got up slowly, stiffly, and followed him out
of the room.

Jesse grabbed Cady's hand. She wanted him to hold her tight and
tell her everything was going to be fine. Instead they sat down on either side
of the bed and looked at Ham, and touched him softly, and murmured things to
him.

Levi came back by himself. Jesse gave him his place on the bed.
"He gone to get some other kinda medicine. Perma something; he got to make
it up special in his office." He reached for Ham's hand and kissed it.
"He say you done jus' right," he told Jesse. "The cases you
tied, they was the right thing to do." Jesse nodded gratefully. "You,
too, Cady— gettin' 'im so fast. He say that was a good thing."

"How is he, Levi?" Cady got up the courage to ask.

His Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. He dipped his bald head and
whispered. "He can't tell. Say he young and strong, and that's good. But
three of 'em... three..." His lips pulled apart in anguish and tears
started to roll down his cheeks. "But he got this other medicine, and it
could help. He give it in a shot, and maybe it get to the heart before the
poison. It an anti..."

"Antidote."

"Yeah." He wrapped Ham's little hand up in his two big
ones, hunching over him, eyes shut tight, and stayed that way until the doctor
came back.

Permanganate of potash, five grains to two ounces of water; he put
it in a syringe and injected it three times, in three different places.
"I'll do it again in a couple of hours. Meanwhile, watch him close and
keep him quiet. He'll probably just sleep, and that's the best thing. He's got
a
good chance,
I'm telling you," he said with force in his voice.
"I think he'll make it. I do, that's the truth. Anyhow, we'll know in a
short while. Stay with him, Levi, and try not to worry so much." His tired
face creased in a smile; he knew how useless that advice was.

Cady and Levi nursed Ham all day. Jesse disappeared. She didn't
realize he'd gone for good until an hour went by and he didn't come back. She
knew where he was—she felt it in her bones: Wylie's.
Good,
she thought.
I
hope he kills him. I hope he shoots him dead.
Did Levi hope so, too? She
looked at him curiously. He sat in a chair pulled close to the bed, his big
hands folded, eyes closed. He might've been praying. He must know as well as
she did that Wylie was behind this—Glen said that Arthur Dunne said there was a
gunny sack in the outhouse. But something told her Levi wasn't sitting there
hoping Jesse would shoot Wylie. Even before he'd started reading about Buddha, Levi
was a gentle man. A good man. A much better person than Cady was. If she had
her hands around Wylie's neck right now, she'd squeeze until his eyes popped
out.

In the afternoon, Doc came back for the third time. When he said
Ham was going to be okay, Cady broke down.

She tried not to; her blustery tears were making Levi cry, too,
not to mention sending Willagail into hysterics. But she couldn't help it.
Relief knocked the props out from under her; she just gave way. It was the one
and only time in the long, awful day when she was glad Jesse wasn't there with
her.

She went to his room and lay down on his bed. Just to wait for
him, and rest her eyes. She couldn't remember ever feeling so tired in her
life.

When she woke up, it was dark and he was sitting beside her,
watching her. "Jess, did you hear?" She rose up, into his arms, and
they held each other close for the longest time. She had such a feeling of
rightness then, close to contentment, of being exactly where she was supposed
to be.

She thought she'd cried out all the tears, but here came more. But
they were gentle tears, sweet ones even, all the bitterness gone. And Jesse
felt so good, solid and warm and real. Her man. She whispered his name, the
only way she could say to him,
I love you.

He started to kiss her. As lovely as that was, she arched away—she
wanted to talk. "What happened, Jess? Where's Wylie?"

"Where is he?"

"I mean—did you kill him?"

He stiffened, let his arms fall. She saw the flash of his teeth in
the semidarkness, and heard his airy laugh. It didn't sound real. "No. I
let him live."

"Well. That's good. I guess. Tell me what happened. Where was
he? What did you do to him?"

"We talked. Cady, let's not get into it now, okay? I'm
beat." He started taking off his boots.

She stared at his back. "You talked to him? That's all?
Well—what did you say?"

"What difference does it make?"

"I just—"

"Everything's fine. I took care of it."

"That's what you said before."

He kept his back to her and didn't answer.

"Jess? That's what you said before, and look what happened.
Ham almost
died,
he—"