Authors: John D. MacDonald
“Missy, you got a good hard little skull, or somebody didn’t get a good solid swing at you with that rifle butt. What that needs is some sewing, and maybe I can and maybe I can’t. All depends.”
When the pot of water began to sing, he dropped the handful of tea leaves in it and took it off the fire and swirled it. He filled a tin cup, tasted it, blew on it to cool it, put two spoons of sugar in it, stirred and tasted it again, and took it over to her. He supported her with one arm behind her, thumb and finger at the nape of her neck. He poured hot tea into her slack mouth and it ran out and down her chin and onto his blanket. He tried twice more with the same result.
He shook her, and yelled, “Swaller it, God damn ya! Stop messing up the bed!”
When he tried again, her throat worked and it went down. A sip at a time, he got it all down her and lowered her gently and said, “Missy, when I yell you got to understand it comes out before I think a thing about it. Now I got to see how that back looks. Kindly excuse me.”
He shifted her over onto her face and peeled the blanket away, tugging carefully where it had adhered to the drying fluids that leaked from the burned flesh. He swallowed hard at the faint sicksweet smell of infection, and said, “Now you lie still there. It’s not so bad at all, missy. There was a boy in my outfit, when we got pulled back there in North Africa to get some rest, can’t recall his name, blond boy, he got dog drunk, passed out on the beach, didn’t wake up ’til afternoon, and he looked worsen you.”
He examined her carefully. It was easy to see what had happened. She’d had a pretty good tan, but not across the buttocks where skimpy pants had covered her, and not across the band across her skinny back. There the burn had bitten deep, had blistered, cracked,
suppurated, and was now a strange dark rough red, marked with random areas of yellow and yellow-green.
He pondered the problem. He went and got the little jar of the sulfa ointment he used when he got an infection from a barnacle scratch, or a catfish spine, or a bug bite. Damn little of it. Piece it out some. So he opened one of the small tins of butter, put about two parts of butter to one part of the salve in a bowl and mixed it thoroughly. Next he got his half bottle of snakebite whisky from under the bed, took a sheet of paper from his scratch pad and crumpled it, rolled it between his palms. He sat on the edge of the bed, soaked the paper ball with whisky and, after hesitant moments, began to scrub the bad-looking areas, breaking the crusts, rubbing down to a healthier rawness.
He thought she made some small sound, but could not be certain. “Got a poor sad little can on you, missy, all crumpled in and the bones showing, and these here little knobs down your back, like in that labor camp we took over that time. And your belly is puffed the way it is on the starving folks. Now that’s the worst of it for a little time, and I can butter you down now.”
He smeared her back glistening with the mixture he had concocted and then began rubbing it in. He hummed to her and he closed his eyes and he began to rock slowly back and forth, thinking that even starved down, hurt and burned, she was a soft, sweet and tender little thing. Suddenly he realized he had begun to breathe quick and high and shallow, and he jumped up and covered her over and paced back and forth, cursing the evil for wanting to come out at such a time. He wiped his hands on the toweling, settled himself down, and tried to think of some kind of covering for the burns.
Remembering he had some fine netting somewhere, he looked until he found it, cut squares of suitable size, boiled them, wrung them out, and pressed them onto the contours of the burned areas,
turned her very gently onto her back and covered her over with the edge of the blanket.
The head wound took more time and trouble. He had to light the bright gasoline lantern and bring it close. He had to soak the matted hair, lather it, shave it with great care. He put a needle and some braided nylon line in the saucepan to boil clean. But what to put on the wound. Not a thing left.
Suddenly he jumped up, swatted himself in the forehead and said, “There’s a damn fool in this world every place you look, missy.” He hurried down and got aboard the fine boat and located the first-aid kit in one of the stowage areas in less than a minute. It was a good one, a big new one, the seal unbroken.
He put a strong antiseptic on the head wound. He sewed it neatly and solidly, pulling the edges together where they belonged. He put a gauze bandage on it and taped it in place. He had a wealth of medicines and instructions. The instructions were hard. He could get them into his mind, but then if he read further, the first part would slide right out of his mind. He found another burn remedy, and plenty of gauze and tape for her back. And some pills for fever, for infection, for a lot of other things which sounded as if she might have them. He settled for four different kinds, and decided two of each would be about right. Getting them into her was another problem. He found he could put her flat on her back, pull her jaw open, holding her tongue down with his thumb. Then put a couple of pills as far back as he could get them at the base of her tongue, poking them back in place with a finger. Then if he closed her jaws and poured tea into the corner of her mouth, making a little pocket for it, she would swallow.
He looked out and was astonished at how much of the day was gone. He read about exposure and sunstroke and dehydration and head wounds and shock, and the treatment for some of the things
seemed to be just opposite to the treatment for others. He read the words aloud, puzzling over them. There was one certain thing. Nourishment and plenty of fluid.
He boiled the scallops, mashed them to paste, made a thick gruel out of them, gradually got all of it down her. And more tea. And boiled rainwater. And brandy he found on her boat. When there was a sharp ammoniac odor and a spreading stain on the blanket he had a feeling of pleasure. Get her full up enough so it starts running out the other end, you’re making some progress.
When night came he fixed the screens and made himself his first meal of the day. He lighted his other lantern. In the kerosene flicker she looked pretty, the way he had brushed her hair back and over to hide the shaved place. Her lips weren’t as swollen and cracked.
Heartily he said, “Got to make sure, little missy, there isn’t some hurt place I overlooked. You understand that, don’t you?”
He took the blanket off her and looked at her in the lamplight. Pretty little breasts, hardly bigger than teacups. Not as big, even. Little orangey buds on them. Poor little belly still swole. All resting sweet now on the clean bedding. Hands half curled into fists. Tufty little tan-color bush of hair down there, childish sweet and trusting. Safe as can be with old Corpo.
And he saw his big hand move slowly out to finger the little breast. He had nothing to do with it. It just moved by itself. He gave a huge coughing groan and jumped up, covered her, went over to his think place, grasped the supports, chunked his head solidly, three times, against the timber, grunting at each impact.
“What you trying to do?” he asked. “Who you think you are?”
He opened his eyes and turned and looked across at her, and at that instant the strangeness happened to him again. It happened sometimes when he was upset. It was like taking a half step backward into some bright busy area and looking from there into his life, seeing it as a dim and funny old movie. At such times he looked with
disbelief at the boxes where he kept things, the dingy empty clothes hanging from nails, the straw chair he’d found afloat after the storm, the structural braces he had meant to fix in some better way. And the strew of pans and cans, floats and nets, and the things he found on the beaches after storms—a hatch cover, most of an awning, a white plastic dog, an empty keg, the row of colored glass bottles on the board over the wooden sink he had built—bottles frosted by the slow abrasion of the surf.
In this strangeness he always wanted to ask: What are they making me do? Why are they making me be like this? In the bright busy area things moved too swiftly for him to see them, but there were faces and places, books and buildings, words spoken too quickly to be understood. As always before it faded away, leaving him back in his own place, the memory of how it felt fading as quickly as the sensation, but knowing he would recognize it at once when it happened again, the way you recognize a dream you’ve had before.
He went over to the wall where he put the girls. Each month after he cashed his check, he would buy that magazine. And when it was a girl he thought would be nice to be with, a lively girl with a lot of fun in her, then he would cut out the folded page, print her name in the corner so he would not forget it, tack her onto the wall and introduce her to the others. Doreen, Ceil, Jackie, Puss, Bernadette, Connie, Judy Jean, Charleen. And they all smiled right at him, every one. The earlier ones were mottled by the dampness, the colors bleaching out of them.
Slowly and methodically he tore them free, making a neat packet, leaving a few corners tacked to the plywood. He held the stack in position to rip it in two, but could not because it suddenly seemed like tearing through all the tenderness of flesh. He folded the pictures, pondered in what box they might belong, put them in the box with his go-to-the-bank clothes.
Squatting there, he looked at the girl and said, “Too much light
on your face, missy. Must have wore you out with all the aid station work. What the corpsmen used to say, don’t go moving them around too much. Do what you got to do right where they fall. You’ll know soon if they can stand moving, or’ll turn dead.”
He moved the lantern away from her, and in doing so momentarily put more light on her face, and was made uneasy by the immobility of it, a look of the skull. He set the lantern down, put his fingertips under the shelf of the jaw, felt nothing.
“So you
died
on me!” he yelled. “All I done for you! Hard as I worked, you damn little bitch! Just what the hell is the Lieutenant going to say? Missy, why’d you do such a fool thing?”
Her mouth seemed to move. He stopped, bent, peered, laid his two long fingers against her throat again.
“Now why should Corpo be cussing you out? There’s that little heart going along nice. Tump, tump, tump. Just put his fool fingers wrong and missed it, because it isn’t real hard and strong, but anyway it don’t have that bird-wing feeling any more, that fluttery stuff. Missy, you sleep deep and sweet, and Corpo’s going to be close by.”
He blew out the lanterns, waited for his night vision, then went out, crossed the little clearing, climbed the ladder to the driftwood platform he had built in the highest branches of the only live oak on the island, a water oak impervious to the salt water into which it thrust its roots.
Corpo sat crosslegged, looking out over the interwoven crown of the dense mangroves. From there, off to his right, he could see the blinkings of the range lights along the Waterway, see the light on the sea buoy out there beyond the Inlet channel, see the clutter of neon of the resort lights over on the beach side. To his left were the lights of the houses that ringed the bay, and back over his left shoulder were the city lights of Broward Beach. The night breeze was freshening out of the northeast. One of the nocturnal waterbirds
flapped across the island, and made a sound like hoarse drunken laughter. He heard a rat-rustle in the cabbage palms, then a great surge and slap of a large fish just outside his channel, and the rushing sound of the smaller fish it had startled into flight. When the breeze would die, the marsh mosquitoes would cloud whining around him. He opened the wooden box he had nailed to the platform, took out the small bottle of oily repellent, greased his arms, neck and ears, annoyed at the odor of it which masked the night smells. Shortly after moving to the island he had stopped smoking, and the smells had come back until they were as strong as when he was a kid, able to find where the swamp cats slept, where owls had fed, where the swamp rattlers were nesting. This wind was a good one for the night smells. From other directions too often it had the smell of the meat they burned behind their candy houses, or the swollen stink of the city buses, or a smell from the dump fires beyond the city, a smell that to him seemed to have a color—a thin sulfurous green-yellow. Burned meat smelled purple. Bus stink was red-brown.
When he went down the ladder, yawningly ready for bed, as he crossed the clearing, he was startled to see the big pale shape of a strange boat under the porch platform, and after a puzzled moment, it all came tumbling back into his head. He hurried up the steps and into the cabin, knelt on the floor beside the bed in darkness, leaned his ear near her lips, felt and heard the weak but steady exhalations. Her breath was sour, and, through the sharper odors of the medication, he could scent the smell of sickness, a smell like fresh bread. He put the backs of his fingers against her forehead. The heat still came from it, and maybe it was a little less, but he could not be certain.
Suddenly he realized he could sleep on missy’s boat, in one of the two forward bunks. All day, and he hadn’t given that boat a real good look. It could have some good things on it, in a lot better shape than if it had gone down and they’d come washing onto the beach.
Once he was aboard he remembered seeing the flashlight in the
same stowage locker where he had found the first-aid kit. He found it by touch, a good chunky one with a big lens, a red flasher, and one of those square six-volt batteries.
He found a lot of good things. Masks, fins, snorkels, spear guns, spinning rods, tackle box, nylon dock lines, fenders, charts, boat hook, bedding, several bottles of liquor, towels, bathing suits, hats, boat shoes, fire extinguisher, cans of engine oil. And, carefully wrapped against dampness, two guns. A twenty-two caliber target pistol and, broken down, a four ten gauge, single-barrel, automatic shotgun. Fool guns, he thought. Play toys. No punch at all to knock them down if they’re coming on you fast. He admired how neatly everything was stowed, and how the stowage compartments were fitted in.
Come daylight, he would figure out the electrical system and how much fuel she had, and how the little toilet worked. He opened the foredeck hatch for ventilation and figured out how the screens worked. He decided he would not use the bedding, just sleep on top of the plastic bunk cover. Crouched double under the low overhead, he stripped down to his ragged underwear shorts, turned the flashlight off and stretched out.