Journal (14 page)

I
got a fairly good look at her at this point.  She was older than the guy with
the chin whiskers by more than a few years and a little overweight.  She had on
a pair of denim jeans with the cuffs rolled up several turns and wearing some
kind of hat with earflaps.  Below her headwear, long, straight, yellow hair
showed.

After
they passed me, I belly crawled out beyond the edge of the orchard just to make
certain it wasn’t some kind of a trick.  But sure enough, the man tossed his
shotgun on the front seat, and they both climbed in the back of the car.  I
couldn’t see what they were doing back there of course, but I had a pretty good
idea.  Sex, the idea of it as part of my life, is something that had fa south along the riverged and llen
into a state of hibernation.  Living the way I have these last couple of years,
there was no promise or prospect of it, so I just never thought of it anymore. 
But now those feelings have been re-awakened.  I wish they hadn’t.  I’m afraid
of them.  I’m afraid of their power.

As
I started backing up, I spotted a large drainage pipe that went under the road
to the other side.  Apparently the ditch I had earlier stumbled upon, literally,
drained into the pipe or vice versa.  I thought,
This is our way out
. I
hoped so anyway.

I
got back to Gabriel and Anna and learned that the guy with the whiskers
apparently got bored just standing in his shack and went to walking the road.  First
he went one way, was out of sight for a few minutes, and then he walked back.  Anna
heard him coming, his feet scraping along, and told me she thought she better
get a little deeper into the trees, but in doing so she stepped on something
that made a noise.  The rest you know.

For
my part, I told them that I thought I had found a way to cross the road unseen
and had them follow me.  Once we arrived at the mouth of the drainage pipe, I
had Anna and Gabriel position themselves in such a manner that if the sentries heard
or saw me and came running, they could put them out of action.  I didn’t think
this likely.  I figured their attention would be on other things.

The
bottom of the pipe was, as you might expect, thick with muck and stunk like a stockyard
on a hot day.  So my pants, from my knees to my shoes, as well as my hands and
sleeve cuffs, got rotten, muddy wet.  I made it across, though, and set up on
the other side of the road, as per our plan.  I signaled Gabriel and Anna to
start across and that’s pretty much it.  They made it across, we crawled some
more on our hands and knees, probably a good hundred yards, which is no easy
task (it ruffs you up something terrible) and did a low walk for another
hundred yards after that before allowing ourselves the relief of standing
upright.

I
wanted to make up for the time lost, so we moved along pretty good after that. 
It was flat and fairly open, the only impediment being stubborn, waist tall
bushes that forced us to an irregular course.  I was also a little nervous
about our exposure.  Depending on the vantage point, we were silhouetted by a
filtered moon light, but then so would be our adversaries.  In daylight, we
would have taken a different way altogether.

We
walked on for a good five or six hours, so I would estimate that we covered
another fifteen, sixteen, maybe seventeen miles.  We would have kept on walking,
too, except we encountered an east-west road that skirted the edge of a steep,
narrow canyon.  At the bottom of the canyon we could hear, more than see, a
swift moving creek.  This was a serious obstacle; another one of those, ‘what
else can go wrong’ moments.

As
I saw it, the big problem was that I couldn’t see down to the water, so I
didn’t know if it was one of those impossible big rock bottoms, or if the bank
was lined with brush too thick to get through, or if the water was one foot
deep or ten feet deep.  We could conceivably work our way down there, only to
find that we couldn’t get across and have to climb right back out again.  We
still needed to get across, though.  But before even attempting it, we started
out by walking ea the Author

I
stuck my rifle into my pack to have both hands free and started out going down
at an angle that was sharp enough that my uphill hand was actually touching
down.  Digging the edges of my boots into the rocky earth was the only thing
that kept me from sliding.  In this way, it took me maybe five or six minutes
to descend the approximate sixty to eighty feet to the bottom.  No, no, not
that much, I guess maybe more like fifty to sixty feet.

Gabriel
went next, starting where I did but at a little less of an angle, so more
directly straight down.  Because it was so dark, especially in the canyon, he
was presented as an intermittent shape, and at the beginning of his descent only
the silhouette of his head or shoulders was visible from time to time.  He got
approximately three quarters of the way down when I saw a series of quick,
jerky movements, which I interpreted as his arms wind milling for balance, followed
by the sound of him going down.  He cried out only once that I could hear.  The
intensity of it, though, scared the heck out of me.  It was one of those human
sounds you immediately associate with serious and sudden pain.

Anna,
still up top, must have heard him, too, because she called out to him and asked,
“Are you all right?  Gabriel, can you hear me?”  When we didn’t hear anything
back, she asked me if he was OK.  As you would expect, there was a lot of desperation
in her voice.  I can only imagine what she must have been thinking.  I was
already moving by that time and told her I was trying to get to him.  No doubt
my tone betrayed my own anxiety.  As I moved, I heard rocks kicking down from
above as she started toward us.  I thought about telling her to be careful, that
we didn’t need two people hurt, but didn’t, knowing such a warning would be
just a waste of time.

When
I got to him, he looked a mess.  He was lying on his right-side about ten feet
from the bottom, holding his left upper arm with his right hand, tight to his
body and gritting his teeth.  His breathing was deep and every third or fourth
breath formed a grunt.  One side of his face had a nice raspberry on it,
leaking blood that ran down along his jaw, stopping at that scar on the tip of
his chin.  His pant cuff on the down side was pulled up from the slide after
his fall, exposing his calf, and he had a pretty decent scrape there, too.  He had
dirt, and rock, and debris in his hair, inside the collar of his coat, on his
face, all over.  The pain must have been something else.  I did my best to
remain calm.

I
first went about taking off his pack, being mindful of his arm.  His rucksack
was all twisted around and would make it impossible to move him.  I asked him
where he hurt.  His words in reply were squeezed out of his throat, between
gulps of air, two or three at a time.  “It’s my…shoulder.  …Hurts bad.  …Something
broken.”  Just to make sure that was his only injury, I gently squeezed and
touched all up and down his body.  He didn’t complain of pain with any of my
manipulations nor did I feel anything out of place, so I was reasonably sure
that his only serious injury was his shoulder.

It
was about this time that Anna reached us.  She put her hand on her son’s
forehead and rubbed his chest while I brought her up to date, talking as calmly
as I could, though not too successfully I’m afraid.  I suggested that we try to
get his coat and shirt off to see what was going on.  And that’s what we set
about doing, a painful, slow process to say the least.  In any other situation,
we’d probably have just cut his clothes off, but he had nothing else to wear so
he’d need his clothes intact.

When
we got down to skin, I saw that his shoulder was badly misshapen.  It looked
like it had come completely out of its socket, a sickening sight.  Anna put her
hand on my back and said that she knew what to do.  She apparently had helped a
nurse put a shoulder joint back in place while she was at the hospital.  I
remember wondering how she knew I was worried enough that her assurance was
needed.

She
kissed Gabriel on his forehead and said, “It’s going to hurt baby but only for
a while.  As soon as it’s back in place, most of the pain will go away.”

First,
she bent his lower arm at the elbow, up toward his shoulder and rotated it so
that it rested on his chest much like it would rest if it were in a sling. 
That simple movement sent a wave of pain throughout his whole body, causing him
to squirm and cry out.  With a gentle hand on his cheek, she told him that the
hard part was coming now.  Without giving him time to think about it, and holding
his upper arm with one hand and his wrist with the other, she rotated his arm,
still in a ninety-degree angle, up (he was on his back at this point) and all
the way over until his hand was turned away from his body.  It must have hurt
like hell because he didn’t just cry out this time; he quite literally screamed
and dug his heels into the dirt.

Gabriel’s
pain caused his mother great distress of her own.  I saw tears roll down her
face, cutting a path through the dirt on her cheek.  When she swept them away
with her forearm, a strand of her curly, dark brown hair momentarily stuck to
the skin until I brushed it free with my thumb.

I
don’t think Gabriel took much notice his mother’s discomfort, though.  He rolled
over onto his right side and threw up.

Unfortunately,
the shoulder only went part way back into the socket on this first attempt, so
Anna had to do it all over again.  This time she had me put pressure on the
actual joint with my hands, to help it along.  That did the job.  It reseated
itself.  I actually felt it pop back in.  Gabriel halfway smiled after that and
said that it wasn’t hurting nearly as much anymore.  Anna checked to make sure
the joint moved as it was supposed to, more pain, and finally we put his
clothes back on.

Using
my belt and a piece of airplane wing fabric, we contrived a sling that held his
arm close to his body.  To keep my pants from falling down I used a second
piece of airplane fabric to tie my two front belt loops together.

We
all just kind of sat there after that.  I don’t know what they were thinking
about, but I was thinking how one simple accident could be the end of anyone of
us — a broken leg, a laceration, even food poisoning.  None of those things
could be treated.  We our enemies wot were on foot, and as far as I knew, hundreds of miles
from help.  The person sick or hurt would just die.  That’s all there was to
it.

I
also thought about how, up to a few days ago, I didn’t know these people and
later regretted knowing them.  Now though, I fear for them no less than I fear
for myself.  We look out for one another.  When those two mutts shot me, Anna
and Gabriel stayed to help.  When I couldn’t put poor Michael Bass out of his
misery, she gave me the strength to do it.  When I heard Gabriel fall, I was
deep down scared of his injuries.  We even shared our body heat in order to
survive.  We’ve been through so much together.

A
few paragraphs back I wrote about how, at that particular time, I was thinking
that our relationship, meaning Anna’s and mine, was based on “situational
need”.  Remember that?  Now I was starting to believe that maybe that was all
just so much bull.  Maybe we were real honest-to-God friends, not just
traveling companions.  I was also realizing something else.  I hadn’t had
anyone I could call a friend in such a long time, by both choice and
circumstance, I might not even know what a friend is.  Talk about a change of
perspective, huh?

When
my mind was finally done with these thoughts, I found myself staring into the
face of Anna Sanchez.  We were not more than twelve inches away from one
another.  Her eyes were darting all over my face; my forehead, my cheeks, my
nose, my chin, my lips, my eyes, never settling in one place for longer than a
blink.  Each stop, though, was a touch that I felt well after her eyes moved
on.  Not a word was exchanged between us either; silence, accompanied on her
part with a little half smile that softened and warmed the moment.  I know this
is going to sound crazy, but next to her putting her hand on mine back there
with Michael Bass, it was one of the most intimate moments I’ve ever experienced. 
It was so extraordinary that I felt a wave of heat move from down low, right up
through my body until it flushed my cheeks.  It embarrassed me to such an
extent, I had to turn away.  I hope she didn’t read that as rejection.

As
I carefully form these last few words, I’m admittedly confused about what’s
going on with me.  For some reason I seem to be going on and on about my
feelings, and I don’t know why.  Before all this, before them, the only emotion
I felt was fear; fear of getting hurt, fear of starving, fear of dying of
thirst, fear of wandering forever alone, just plain fear.  Now, now I’m a
cauldron of emotion.  A recipe of fear, anger, hate, sadness, and something
else, too, swirling and roiling and bubbling to the surface.  You know what, I need
to shut up for a little while and think this out a bit more before writing
anything else.  Instead, I should get back to what happened next.  Let’s move
on.

There
was a stream at the bottom of that canyon, and I haven’t told you about it
yet.  It was maybe thirty feet or so across, churning past, a steady rush of
sound off into the night.  To get to the other side wasn’t going to be a matter
of just wading across it or perhaps doing some boulder hopping, especially in
the dark, and especially with someone injured on top of that.  So I left
Gabriel and Anna there and went in search of an easier way.