Where the River Ends (22 page)

Coal Miner knelt on top of her and began fumbling with his belt buckle. He laughed. “She ain’t gonna need it.” Limpy grabbed her T-shirt by the collar and ripped it down the middle. All three men sat back and stared at Abbie’s pale, bosomless, concave white chest. Coal Miner’s lamp lit her like a stage. “Well, I’ll be a…” The second man poked him in the shoulder. “She ain’t got no teets neither.”

Limpy leaned in. “She flatter than you, Buf.” Their laughter bounced off the vaulted ceiling. Troll turned his head sideways like a dog. “Looks like two puckering buttholes.”

The three men had now multiplied to six, two of each of them. Another draft blew across the room, tugging at the fire and pulling more flame out that lit nearly the entire room. I lunged at the man over me, grabbed the shotgun and heard him click off the safety. I pulled, causing him to reflexively yank hard on the trigger. Two feet of flame shot out of the barrel as the percussion nearly burst my eardrum. The blast of number 8 birdshot cut through the house and ricocheted off the concrete floor. I turned toward Abbie just as the butt of the shotgun came down a second time on my left eye. I landed flat on the concrete in a puddle of something that smelled like oil and heard him jacking another shell in the chamber. My vision faded from black to blurry and back to black again. The fourth man was straddling me, pointing the barrel in my face, firelight reflecting off the whites of his eyes.

Coal Miner’s hands were walking up and down Abbie. Limpy leaned in, squinting, and put his hand on Troll’s shoulder. “Verl…” He pointed. “She ain’t right.”

Coal Miner sat back. “Wha’ you talking ’bout?”

“Look at her. She looks ’bout dead.”

Coal Miner adjusted his lamp, making him look like a Cyclops, and dropped his shorts. “She’s alive enough.”

Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw a bluish-reddish flash and then heard what sounded like the flip and flop of flip-flops. Half a second later, the shotgun man’s head snapped back, he grunted and fell across me, shoving my face down hard against the concrete and back into the oil.

The man who now stood above me wore red and blue Hawaiian shorts, flip-flops, no shirt and he was holding a jagged piece of a two-by-four. Limpy leapt to his feet, only to be immediately met in the head by the swinging end of the lumber. Bits and pieces of teeth flew out across the room and scattered across the concrete. Somewhere, a small, furry, snarling thing entered the picture. It jumped off the ground—its nails scratching the concrete—latched onto Coal Miner’s butt and hung there. Limpy hit the ground like a noodle, without so much as a grunt. Coal Miner had just gotten his pants below his butt, which was real hairy. I don’t think he was wearing any underwear. Troll bounced like a cat, grabbed Hawaiian man around the neck only to get hip-tossed across the room toward me. He landed against the wall and I whacked him in the head with the side of the revolver. He moaned and I hit him again. He lifted his head and I slammed it down a third time. He lay on the ground moaning but not moving. I pulled myself across the floor toward Abbie. Coal Miner turned just in time to see Mr. Hawaii coming toward him. Coal Miner’s lamp partially blinded Mr. Hawaii, but not the little snarling beast hanging on his butt. Pants still at his ankles, Coal Miner sack-jumped to one side and took three strides back, trying to shake loose the demon attached to his buttock. Coal Miner tripped and landed on the dog, momentarily shaking it loose, but when he stood it launched itself a second time off the concrete and latched firmly onto the man’s crotch. Coal Miner began screaming at the top of his high-pitched lungs.

Incredibly, Coal Miner made it to the door and disappeared outside. I saw the reflection of his lamp as he jumped off the porch, tripped and began rolling down the grassy lawn toward the river. Mr. Hawaii looked at me, smiled, then disappeared out the door in the direction of the lamp and the sound of the snarling. I couldn’t see out of my left eye, the world was spinning too fast and the edges were starting to tunnel inward. I crawled up next to Abbie as my own nausea came in waves. I lay across her, feeling her stomach rise and fall under mine. I forced my eyes open but I knew I didn’t have long. I crawled back to the shotgun, press-checked the chamber with my finger and returned to Abbie. I pulled her up against the wall and then came to one knee, setting myself between her and the bodies in the room. Troll was moaning but his nose was spread across his face, so I doubted he felt like moving. Limpy had yet to twitch.

Sixty seconds later, we heard a loud crack somewhere outside followed by a loud splash. A single lamp returned up the hill and through the door. Its wearer was whistling and he was carrying something in his arms. I raised the shotgun, scattering my aim from the front door to the back. My arms were shaking but I wrapped my first digit around the trigger. The man with the lamp returned to the middle of the room, turned out his light and set the dog on the ground next to him. The dog sniffed across the floor to us. It licked my foot then wound behind me to Abbie. The man looked down at me but I was having a difficult time focusing. Finally, he dug a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, hung one from his lips and lit it with a shiny silver Zippo lighter. He drew deeply then slammed the lighter closed on his thigh. “Looks like you two have had some trouble.”

I clicked on the safety and fumbled for the Pelican case. I grabbed two syringes, swabbed Abbie’s thigh, cracked the cap on the dopamine and injected it, followed quickly by the dexamethasone. Then I leaned against the wall and my eyelids grew too heavy to hold open. The last thing I remember seeing before my eyelashes touched, was the red glow of his cigarette. A little while later, I remember feeling my stomach jump into my mouth, my shoulders press against a hard seat and feeling Abbie wrap her arms tight about me. I tried to wake but the fog was too thick. Abbie cradled me, locked her legs around mine and pulled me into her. She was trembling. Somewhere close I heard an engine roar, felt it rumble and somebody turned on a fan.

29

C
hemo is a daily rug—three weeks on, one week off, four days a week, eight bags a day, six hours a day. It’s like having a cold for a very long time. It also did a few other things. She bled around her gums and from her nose, had nonstop diarrhea, lost her appetite and hair, lived with nausea and tingling in her fingers and toes and vomited constantly for three weeks out of every month.

The first round of chemo did what the doctors were hoping. It shrank the tumors, but it did not change their recommendation. We checked into the hospital at 6 a.m. on a Friday morning for a 10 a.m. surgery. Minutes before they rolled her down the hall, she looked up at me out of the haze and fog of whatever sleepy medicine was dripping into her veins and she asked, “You be here when I wake up?”

“Yep.”

“You promise?”

I nodded. “Tomorrow, too.”

She closed her eyes, they wheeled her down the hall and I walked to the surgical waiting room where her stepmom and dad sat. After more than a decade of being married to their daughter, we’d reached an amicable truce. They didn’t speak to me and I only spoke to them when spoken to.

I used to think I could win them over, but I’d made little progress. In truth, none. Katherine sat there reading
Architectural Digest
while Abbie’s father talked on the phone with offices in both Charleston and D.C.

During the five-hour surgery, a nurse gave us periodic updates. “We’ve finished with the right side, margins are clear, lymph nodes are good…now we’re starting on the left.” I noticed she didn’t say anything about reconstruction.

At 4 p.m., the surgeon, Dr. Dismakh, appeared. He pulled off his mask and motioned for us to follow him into the private consultation room. He said, “We’re finished. Abbie’s sleeping and I’ll take you to her shortly.” He paused, telling me I didn’t want to hear what he was about to say. “Her lymph nodes suggest the cancer has spread. We did not perform a reconstruction.”

“Okay.” I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Seems a bit insensitive to ask why when cancer is still swimming around inside her.

“The cancer is…extensive. We’ve gotten what we could with surgery. In the months ahead, we’ll need to attack it by alternating chemo with radiation.” The words
months, chemo
and
radiation
bounced around the inside of my head like pinballs. He continued, “Physically, the reconstruction would hinder our future ability to see growth or reoccurrence of the disease. Further, the recovery from her reconstruction would delay our need to start treatments as soon as possible. As it is, she can begin soon.”

They’d moved her to a recovery room and told me I could see her while we waited for a room upstairs. Prior to surgery, it was not uncommon for her to be at a function or anything where a bunch of women had gathered and for some lady to discreetly pull her aside, glance at her breasts and ask, “Tell the truth, who’s your plastic surgeon?” I walked into her room, glanced at her gauze-covered chest and knew she’d never get that question again.

That’s when I really clued in. The breast is not simply a body part. It’s a part of the whole that says,
I am woman and I am beautiful,
but it’s not on equal footing with the others. I sat in that room and realized that you can cut off a finger, cut off a hand, even cut off a leg, but if you take a woman’s breast, you are cutting more than just a body part.

It requires an adjustment.

I slid my hand beneath hers and waited. When she woke, it was somewhere in the night and she was in a great deal of pain.

I didn’t tell her until the next morning when the medicine wore off and the sun broke through the blinds. “Honey, the cancer was more…had spread further than they first thought. They got what they could. Now they’re talking more chemo and alternating that with radiation.” She glanced down at her flat chest. I shook my head. “Not yet. They didn’t want that to get in the way of…” I trailed off. What did I know. Abbie was in a lot of pain and kept hitting the morphine button after it reset every fifteen minutes.

Doctors Hampton, Smith and Meyer, along with Dr. Dismakh, her surgeon, stood in a semicircle around the foot of her bed. Dr. Hampton started. “Abbie, the lymph nodes we took from you tell us that your cancer has spread beyond what we call its organ of origin. The breast. At this point, it’s systemic, meaning it could be anywhere. We know of one mass on the lining of your lung.” We waited, listening but not quite comprehending. “We want to send you to M. D. Anderson in Houston. And maybe Sloan-Kettering. Both are on the cutting edge of this type of cancer.”

I swallowed and then eeked out, “What kind is that?”

Dr. Smith spoke next. “It’s aggressive, fast-growing, known for an insatiable appetite. The good news is that because it’s fast-growing, it’s also easier to kill. But that’s also the bad news. It’s fast-growing.”

At this point, I didn’t care if her breasts were ever reconstructed. We could live without them.

The doctors left us alone. When I looked up, Dr. Hampton had reappeared in the room. He sat next to us both. He asked, “Do you like to dance?”

The question came out of left field. “What?”

He smiled. “Do you like to dance?”

I shook my head. “What kind of question is that?”

“This”—he waved his hand across the room and looked at Abbie—“is a delicate dance. Because we must kill it without killing you…and before it kills you.”

Two days later, they sent us home.

30

JUNE 6, MORNING

T
he sun was just cracking through the treetops when I tried to open my eyes. I lifted my head and found Abbie sleeping next to me and dressed in clothes I had not seen before. Curled up inside her arms was a Jack Russell terrier.

The smell of cigarette smoke turned my head. Mr. Hawaii sat in an Adirondack chair against the far wall, a mound of butts and ash at his feet. The room was a porch of sorts, wrapped in screen and at least as high as the treetops, because they rubbed gently against the screen. He was tall, handsome, had shoulder-length black hair, a mustache, blue eyes, was cleanly shaven, muscular and maybe late-forties.

He held a cigarette in one hand and a Popsicle in the other. He waved the cigarette at me. “I gave her the clothes and she dressed herself. Fell back asleep a while ago.”

“How’d we get here?”

He laughed, puffed and sucked. “Well, you carried her to the Stearman and then passed out.”

“What’s a Stearman?”

“My plane.”

“We flew in a plane?”

He nodded and turned the Popsicle in his mouth.

“I don’t remember that.”

“Seeing as how you weren’t wearing any clothes, it’s an image I won’t soon forget.”

“Sorry. I had washed our clothes, and…”

He waved me off and smiled. “You took a pretty good hit. She was worried about your head swelling, so she shot you up with one of those.” On the table next to us lay the opened Pelican case. “She said it’d help with the swelling.”

A single empty dexamethasone syringe lay on the table. Two remained. My heart sank.

The rhythmic ticking of the ceiling fan tapped out a lonely tempo above me. The piercing pain in my head was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I lifted my hand to touch my eye, but Abbie stopped me. “Don’t.”

“Honey, are you—”

“They didn’t take anything.” She patted the corner of my head. “Easy, you’ll tear the glue.”

“Glue?”

She placed a cool rag on my face. “Superglue. We did our best but it’s not pretty.”

“We?”

Her voice lowered to a whisper. If he could hear us, he didn’t let on. “If he wanted to hurt us, he’d have done it by now. Once we got back here, he disappeared for a while, trying to find what’s left of the canoe.”

“And?”

“Gone.”

A quick mental inventory told me that we had the clothes on our backs, a shotgun, a revolver and the Pelican case.

I cracked a whisper, “Why did you give me one of the dex?”

She paused. “I wasn’t sure about the swelling in your head.”

“You should know better than to waste that on me.”

She pressed her fingers to my lips. “Sleep. We’ll talk later. Don’t worry.”

She laid alongside me, placing her head on my chest.

I reached across her, finding the patch. “How you doing?”

“I’m okay. We’ll work on me later.”

Sometime later, I woke to the smell of my own blood and the feel of a warm washcloth on my face.

The third time I woke it was dark and the pain in my head had morphed to a coming freight train. Complete with horn. Abbie and I were lying beside each other on what felt like two military cots. I groaned, a shadow crossed me and a large hand placed four pills into my palm. “It’s ibuprofen.” I stared into my hand, saw ten pills, swallowed them and then fought back the response to spew them across the porch. He leaned over me, a small flashlight wedged between his teeth. He shined the light into my eye several times, then clicked it off. “She wouldn’t let me take you to a hospital, or call the police, but you should go. You both should.” He paused. “But I got a feeling you already know that.”

Abbie’s hand found me beneath the blanket. She stretched it across my stomach, then searched higher, leaving it pressed flat across my heart.