The Ferguson Affair

chapter 25

INTO THE LANDSCAPE of a hundred dreams. I was out in the orchard sailing chips in the creek. The rolling hills on the far side supported white cumulus clouds. Above them the sun soared, brightening. It blasted my face with heat. The creek dried up. I covered my eyes. When I looked up again, the sun was red; the hills were black as lava, except where barns were burning. The apples turned black on the trees and dropped in the black grass. I went into the house to tell my father. “He’s dead,” said an old brown woman I didn’t know. “They flit by the window, and what’s become of Sally?”

The thought of her took hold of me and jerked me out of dream country. I felt floor against my face, hot air on the back of my neck.

“There’s a Santa Ana blowing,” I said. “Somebody left a window open.”

No one paid any attention. I lifted my head and saw the firelight dancing on the wall. It was a pretty sight, but it annoyed me. With the desert wind blowing, it made no sense to build up the dying fire.

I rolled over and sat up. One side of the room was alive with flames. They fluttered toward me like ribbons in a fan draft, and toward the woman lying on the floor. I thought with something approaching awe that Gaines had included her in his plan of destruction. Her clothes were disarrayed as though she had put up a struggle. A blue bruise spread from her temple across one eye.

I started to crawl toward her, and discovered that my right arm wasn’t working. Before I reached her, a tongue of flame licked at her outflung hand. Her fingers curled up away from it. Her whole body stirred sluggishly. She wasn’t dead.

Which meant I had to get her out of there. I scrambled to my feet. Fire flapped like flags around her. I twisted my good hand in the tails of her shirt and heaved. The shirt tore and came away from her body.

She was becoming very important to me. Holding my breath against the heat, I caught hold of her limp wrist and dragged her into the hallway. It was like a wind tunnel. Air poured through the open front door. I pulled her out into the blessed night.

The fire was beginning to sing and surge behind me. In no time at all it would be a roaring furnace. I looked for my car. It was gone. I maneuvered the unconscious woman to the edge of the veranda, hauled her up to a sitting position, crouched in front of her, and lifted her by the wrist across my good shoulder.

Somehow I got my knees straightened out under her weight, and started down the driveway. I had a fixed idea that I must get her as far as the road, in case the trees caught fire. It wasn’t likely, after the winter rains, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly.

The trees on either side swayed mystically in the moonlight. I swayed not so mystically. My faint and hunchbacked shadow mocked my movements. The soft burden on my back seemed to increase with each step I took. Then it began to slip.

Before she slithered from my grasp entirely, I went to my knees at the side of the drive and let her down carefully. We were still under trees, a hundred feet short of the gate, but this would have to do. She lay like a marble torso fallen from its plinth, waiting for someone to lift her back into place.

I sat down heavily in the weeds beside her. I couldn’t have been so very far gone, because her bare breasts disturbed me. I got my jacket off and covered her with it.

The right side of my shirt was dark and clammy. I felt the dark goo with my fingers and only then recalled the shocking image of Hilda sighting across her knees and firing. With my left forefinger I found the hole she had made, just under my collarbone. It was wet and warm. I balled my handkerchief and held it against the wound.

The woman whimpered. Faint coppery lights were moving on her face. I thought for an instant she was coming to, then realized it was the fire’s reflection. The upstairs windows of the house were rectangles of twisted orange and black. Black smoke boiled up toward the moon in clouds whose bellying undersides were flame-lit and peppered with flying sparks.

The Forest Service would be sure to sight it or get a report of it. They were probably on their way now. I might as well relax until help arrived.

It arrived sooner than I expected. A single pair of headlights fanned up the winding road, turned in at the gate without pausing. I got up onto my feet and stumbled into the middle of the driveway.

The headlights stopped a few feet short of me. Behind them I recognized the bulky shape of an ambulance. Whitey and his partner Ronny climbed out on opposite sides of the cab and converged on me.

“You got here fast, boys.”

“That’s our job.” Whitey looked me over in the glare of the headlights. “What happened to you, Mr. Gunnarson?”

“I have a shoulder wound that needs attention. But you better look after the woman first.”

“What woman?”

“Over here,” Ronny said from the side of the road. His voice was vaguely familiar, though I didn’t remember hearing him speak before. He switched on a flashlight and examined her, turning up her eyelids, sniffing her breath.

“She may be under drugs,” I said.

“Yeah. It could be an overdose of morphine, or heroin. There’s needle marks on her arm.” He indicated several dark pinpoints in the white flesh of her upper arm.

“She was talking and acting as though she was high on something.”

“Whatever it is, she’s mighty low on it now.”

“You mean she talked to you?” Whitey said. “What did she say?” There were dancing orange gleams in the centers of his eyes, as if he was burning up with curiosity.

“She said a lot of things. They’ll keep. Let’s get a temporary dressing on this shoulder.”

He answered slowly. “I guess we better do that. Ronny, leave the pig lay for now. I may need your help with Mr. Gunnarson.”

The hinges of my knees were as loose as water. I barely made it to the ambulance. They hoisted me up into the back, turned on the roof light, and let me down gently on a padded stretcher. As soon as I was horizontal, my head began to swim and my eyes played tricks. Whitey and Ronny seemed to hover over me like a pair of mad scientists exchanging sinister smiles.

“Strap his wrists,” Whitey said.

“That won’t be necessary, I won’t fight you.”

“We won’t take any chances. Strap his wrists, Ronny.”

Ronny strapped my wrists to the cold aluminum sides of the stretcher. Whitey produced a triangular black rubber mask attached to a narrow black tube.

“I don’t need anesthetic.”

“Yes you do. I hate to see people suffer, you know how I am.”

Ronny snickered. “I know. Nobody else knows, but I know.”

Whitey shushed him. He fitted the soft rubber mask over my nose and mouth. Its elastic strap circled my head.

“Pleasant dreams,” he said. “Breathe out and then breathe in.”

A sense of survival deeper than consciousness made me hold my breath. Behind my eyes, broken black pieces were falling into place. I had heard Ronny’s snicker on the telephone.

“Breathe out. Then breathe in.”

Whitey’s face hung over me like one of the changing faces you see between sleeping and waking at the end of a bad day. I raised my head against the downward pressure of his hand. The end of the black tube was wrapped around his other hand. Using both hands, he forced my head back down.

“Listen,” Ronny said. “There’s a car coming up the hill.” After a listening silence: “It sounds like a Mercury Special.”

“Cop car?”

“Sounds like it.”

“You should have been monitoring the police calls. You goofed, man.”

“You said you needed me in here.”

“I don’t any more. I can handle him.”

“How’s the patient doing?”

“He’ll be gone in a minute. Get out there and give them a story. We pulled him out of the fire, but he died of asphyxiation, poor fellow.”

He leaned hard on the mask. I was far from gone. One of my sports was diving without a lung.

Ronny leaned over to look at me. I doubled up my right leg and kicked him in the middle of his face. It felt like stepping on a snail.

Whitey said: “You devil!”

I tried to kick him. He was beyond the reach of my flailing legs, bending over my face with his full weight on me. The dark wheel of unconsciousness started to spin in my head. I tried to breathe. There was nothing to breathe.

The sound of a motor whining up the grade detached itself from the whirring of the dark wheel. Before the two sounds merged again, headlights filled the ambulance with light. The pressure was removed from my face. I caught a blurred glimpse of Whitey standing over his prostrate partner with a black automatic in his hand.

He fired it. The ambulance interior multiplied its roar like an echo chamber. The single sharp crack that followed was more than an echo. Whitey bowed like a performer at the footlights, clasping his abdomen.

Pike Granada came into the ambulance and took the rubber thing off me before I followed Broadman and Secundina all the way into darkness.