A Short History of a Small Place (42 page)

Of course Mr. Bridger had already dragged himself into the front yard by the time Mrs. Stiers got home from Miss Rascoe’s “Hair by Trish” but his faculties were sufficiently jumbled on account of his fifteen to thirty-five foot fall to prevent him from providing Mrs. Stiers with a sound explanation as to why he’d had to crawl out of the forsythia bush in the first place. Instead he told her all about a mongrel hound his daddy had given him when he was eleven and told her about his Uncle Rutherford Bridger who had retired from the railroad to raise goobers in Pitt County and explained to her how a fish filters his air out of lakewater. Then he rolled his head from side to side in the grass and said, “Mr. Zeno is sure enough a sight in his underclothes.”

“Mr. Zeno?” Mrs. Stiers asked him.

“,Yes ma’m,” Mr. Bridger told her. “I ain’t never seen such legs.”

And that was the last Mr. Bridger saw of Mrs. Stiers until two full days afterwards at the hospital where she had come to sit with her husband, and as Mr. Bridger tells it he laid alone in the grass for a solid hour and was fixing to crawl to his station wagon and drive himself to the doctor when little Buford found him and offered to call an ambulance. And according to little Buford’s sworn and duly certified testimony, Mr. Bridger struck in right off with a few unseemly comments on the topic of Mr. Stiers’s underclothes and then passed several minutes reviling a man named Peyton Randolph, who little Buford could not recollect though he did testify to an acquaintance with a Mr. Jimmy Randolph of Madison-Mayodan and theorized that the two of them were from the same bunch. Finally Mr. Bridger came to himself enough to suggest to little Buford that he go on in the house and use the telephone and maybe hunt up Mrs. Stiers while he’s about it, and little Buford said he found the front door standing half open and so stuck his head inside and hollered up the stairs but nobody answered. Then he let the rest of himself inside as well and called out for Mrs. Stiers and called out for Mr. Stiers but still nobody said anything back, so little Buford helped himself to the telephone in the back hallway and then set out all over the house in search of any Stiers he could come up on which turned out to be Mr. Zeno who was sprawled across the heat duct by the bedroom window in his sleeveless undershirt and his cotton briefs and who looked to little Buford to be very convincingly dead, but then little Buford did not have much experience in authentic paroxysms.

The ambulance came directly, or anyway Mr. Bridger and little Buford heard the ambulance coming almost as soon as little Buford had returned to the front yard. And as the siren grew steadily louder and more irritating, Mr. Bridger and little Buford followed the sound of it off the Richardson Road, along Lawsonville Avenue, and onto Lamont Street where Mr. and Mrs. Stiers lived. Then the two of them together watched the ambulance itself sail on past the house with all of its exterior apparatus flashing and moaning and screeching most unbearably, and before either one of them could wonder out loud where it was going it turned around a ways up the road and came sailing back by the house from the other direction and went into Lawsonville Avenue what sounded to little Buford like sideways. Then it flashed and moaned and screeched off to the north for a block or so before ducking off the avenue again and Mr. Bridger and little Buford listened somewhat forlornly as it wailed and howled its way almost entirely out of earshot, but presently it turned around in somebody’s driveway and slid back out onto the avenue heading towards Lamont Street once more, and little Buford Needham, at risk of some considerable peril to his bodily person, met the ambulance at the intersection and directed it into the Stiers’s front yard.

The driver hopped out first and then stuck his head back inside the vehicle and said, “I told you it was back here and look for yourself, it ain’t no Spanish adobe, ain’t nothing foreign about it. Great Creeping Jesus Christ, I believe I’d just fall over dead if you ever wrote down an address.” The sheer force of all this displeasure seemed to push the other fellow out the passenger door and he stood beside the ambulance with his arms crossed and studied the right front hubcap in humiliated silence while the driver persisted in reminding him how unfit he was to draw breath. He said it was siding, just plain pine siding, with pickets around the front porch and double-hung windows and aluminum gutters and downspouts, and then he turned around to little Buford and demanded of him, “Does this look like an adobe to you? Does any damn thing around here look the least bit Spanish?” And little Buford, who Daddy says is probably the most obliging individual he’s ever had the pleasure to know, made a conscientious survey of the house and grounds before he ventured to say, “No sir, not a thing.” And the driver laid both his arms on the roof of the ambulance and looked across it to where the other fellow stood in his revery over the hubcap. “Holy creeping son a God,” he said. “You ain’t worth two farts in a bucket.”

Now Mr. Bridger, who was still stretched out in the front yard next to the forsythia bush, was taking all of this in with some attention since, by his own admission, he enjoys a fiery exchange as much as the next man, but nonetheless he was becoming a little anxious for some treatment and so when it appeared that the driver had creeping Jesused himself out, Mr. Bridger gave vent to a moderate selection of anguished moans and thereby jarred little Buford who in turn reminded the driver who told the other fellow to see if he couldn’t find the medical bag. “It’s black grain leather,” he said, “and looks a little Italian.” But the driver ‘hadn’t hardly gotten to Mr. Bridger and the other fellow hadn’t hardly cleared the front end of the ambulance with the black Italian medical bag when little Buford recollected to tell the both of them that there was a gentleman upstairs in far graver condition, perhaps so grave as to be dead. And immediately the driver leapt away from Mr. Bridger like he was a snake and followed the other fellow, who had already made a mid-course correction, through the front door and into the house and they had not been under the roof for a half a second when the driver hollered, “Upstairs, UPstairs, you pigheaded bastard,” and then everything was quiet once more and little Buford and Mr. Bridger were again alone in the front yard beside the forsythia bush and little Buford put his hands in his pockets and set in to whistling “Rocky Top” but before he could get well underway Mr. Bridger grabbed ahold of his ankle, shook it as best he could, and said, “Well shit, Buford.”

The two ambulance attendants stayed upstairs with Mr. Stiers long enough to convince little Buford he had not been a corpse after all, and when one of them finally did come back downstairs and out into the front yard it was the pigheaded bastard who was not worth two farts in a bucket and he sailed through the front doorway at a gallop and across the lawn over to the ambulance out from the back of which he fetched a canvas stretcher that he wrapped his arms around and fairly much sprinted off with, but before he could get full across the lawn again and back up to the house Mr. Bridger moaned at him from beside the forsythia bush and though it was not one of your more anguished moans it was sufficient to turn the pigheaded bastard’s head which proved to be a sad and untimely thing since it left the pigheaded bastard in no position to see the ends of the stretcher catch on opposite sides of the doorframe and so in attempting to dash on through the doorway he very nearly broke himself in half.

As little Buford calculated it in his official testimony, Mr. Zeno Stiers came out into the frontyard atop the stretcher not more than five minutes after the pigheaded bastard had recovered his wind enough to get up the stairs, and little Buford swore and certified it appeared to him that Mr. Stiers was about as near to corpsehood as he could get without actually having crossed over. Little Buford said he was an ungodly bloodless shade of white, but when Sheriff Burton asked for something a little more vivid to set down in the official statement little Buford decided that Mr. Zeno’s pallor was closest to the color of lowfat milk, which the sheriff found considerably more appealing. And according to little Buford, once the attendants had situated the stretcher in the back of the ambulance the driver jumped in behind it and the pigheaded bastard slid under the wheel and the ambulance itself struck out for the hospital with the flashing and the screeching and the general uproar preceding it and following it and just hovering all around it like a swarm of bees. And little Buford said he shot his eyes sideways at Mr. Bridger who was looking so extraordinarily displeased that it would have been difficult to judge what sort of savagery might have ensued if Mr. Bridger had been able to draw himself upright.

The hospital sent another ambulance eventually but not before Sheriff Burton had arrived and commenced his statement taking which by tradition started out with the victim, and though Mr. Bridger told the sheriff a great variety of things in a very hot and unrestrained fashion, Sheriff Burton chose not to pencil any of them into the record and instead wrote “Delirious” next to Mr. Bridger’s name. Of course little Buford turned out to be far more cooperative since his pelvis was not in the leastways fractured and together him and Sheriff Burton sat side by side on the Stiers’s front steps and constructed little Buford’s official testimony with great efficiency and dispatch and very few hindrances except for one exceedingly sharp and tormented shriek from Mr. Bridger when he attempted to crawl across the yard and strangle the both of them. But a new pair of ambulance attendants hauled Mr. Bridger off straightaway and Sheriff Burton’s statement taking proceeded fairly smoothly thereafter. Needless to say, the chief sticking point was Mrs. Stiers who could not be found in the house and was very obviously nowhere in the yard either, so Sheriff Burton and little Buford and the better part of the crowd that had congregated on the front lawn walked all over the property shouting for her but soon enough the sheriff was satisfied that Mrs. Stiers was out of earshot and so licked the end of his pencil and wrote “Vanished” next to her name. And that was pretty much the end of the statement taking so the sheriff wagged his nightstick at the crowd and dismissed little Buford telling him not to leave town under penalty of law, which little Buford himself had insisted he get told to satisfy the desperado in him.

Nobody could locate Mrs. Stiers right away, not even after her neighbors and two deputies and Sheriff Burton himself had begun to search for her in earnest, and when she finally was found she was not found by anybody who knew she was missing but was discovered instead by Mr. Charles Henley Gruber who had gone out to his lespodeza patch to fetch in his cow and got Mrs. Stiers in the bargain. She was sitting a few yards off the cow’s right flank with her legs curled up beneath her and when Mr. Gruber arrived she was telling the cow a great many things about herself and Mr. Stiers and about their life together, and Mr. Gruber, who had seen hysterical women before, knew right off he was seeing another one while for her part Mrs. Stiers had never had occasion to lose her wits previously and so did not realize she had lost them now. But she had lost them; three doctors and two nurses all agreed she had lost them and they gave her a shot and shined a flashlight in her eyes and looked in her mouth and then left her to sleep directly across from the nurse’s station in a room shared by Mrs. Mae Ruth French of the Oregon Hill Frenches who, on account of her stroke, thought she was riding the ferry between Swan Quarter and Ocracoke and so buzzed the duty nurse every minute or so to find out why.

At first the doctors did not tell Mrs. Stiers that Mr. Zeno would not live, though four of them had gotten together with two interns and decided privately he would not. Instead they shined a flashlight in Mrs. Stiers’s eyes and looked down into her throat and made her swallow a bullet-sized pill out of a little white paper cup, and even by mid afternoon of the day following the Bridger Mishap when it was perfectly clear to everyone that Mrs. Stiers had fully regained her senses, the doctors still did not tell her Mr. Zeno would not live though they had not changed their minds about it. And in the early evening when three of them together stopped in to observe Mrs. Stiers’s faculties, they would only tell her that Mr. Zeno’s was a “serious case, a most serious case,” and then the youngest among them walked round to Mrs. French’s bed, put his face up close to Mrs. French’s ear, and said, “How’s the water today?”

“Rough,” Mrs. French replied. “Oooh, so very rough.”

The hospital discharged Mrs. Stiers two days after the Bridger Mishap and she went home long enough to change clothes and come back, and for the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon and on into the evening she sat in a chair beside Mr. Zeno’s bed in the ward for serious cases and watched Mr. Zeno’s eyelids flutter. Mr. Zeno himself would come to his senses from time to time and talk to Mrs. Stiers in a very strained and nearly indecipherable whisper but mostly he slept on his back with his mouth open and Mrs. Stiers watched his eyelids flutter and kept a folded Kleenex in her hand to wipe away the saliva before it could run across his cheek and onto the pillow. On her way out of the hospital Mrs. Stiers dropped in briefly to see Mr. Bridger who was in traction down the hall, but no matter what brand of pleasantry she attempted on him he would invariably respond with “Where in the hell did you get off to?” which Mrs. Stiers could not answer with any accuracy and did not wish to discuss anyway. So her and Mr. Bridger didn’t have much to do with each other after that and instead Mrs. Stiers spent all of her time at Mr. Zeno’s bedside, where she was interrupted on the afternoon of the third day after the Bridger Mishap by three doctors, an intern, and two nurses who had stopped off at the ward for serious cases in order to examine Mr. Zeno. One of the doctors shined a flashlight in his eyes and other one looked into his mouth while the intern adjusted all Mr. Zeno’s tubes under the scrutiny of the two nurses, and then the five of them together cornered Mrs. Stiers on the far side of the ward and the first doctor, with his elbow in one hand and his chin in the other, told her Mr. Zeno’s was indeed a serious case. “A very serious case,” the second doctor added at the invitation of the first, and then the intern and the two nurses shook their heads most dolefully.