Dragonfly Bones (25 page)

Intent on the ground, I didn't see the three-wire fence until I smashed directly into one of the metal poles. Bounced off the pole, ran parallel to the fence without a thought in my mind, ramming another pole, and this time I got knocked to the ground. Sat on my butt, blood running from open gashes in both legs and arms, and suddenly I was blind. I swiped a forearm across my eyes. It came away wet. Red. Blood. Wincing, I felt a small gash in my forehead, but my blood pressure was so low that none of the wounds bled much. I was in real trouble.

35

T
he ambulance hit a dip in the old pavement, traveling so fast that when it rose up to the top of the next rise, all four wheels flew a few inches off the road. When the ambulance slammed back to earth, my hip banged the side panel and I came to.

A young EMT let go of the overhead grip, steadied himself as the ambulance rocked side to side. He checked a tubing that ran to my left side, and I moved my head enough to see an IV inserted.

“Where am I?” I croaked.

“Hey. Back to life, are we?”

“Where am I?” I asked again, my head very fuzzy and beginning to ache.

“In an ambulance.” He switched the saline solution bag hanging on the rack above me. “Yeah, I know. In an ambulance. Bad joke. You're on your third IV bag so far.” He looked out the rear windows. “We just went through Sells.
Another forty or so minutes, you'll be in St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson.”

“Where…find me?”

He unwrapped what looked like a green lollipop, stuck it in a bottle of water, and put it between my lips.

“You're almost bone-dry, girl. I can't let you swallow any water, but squeeze this between your lips. Get things a little wet, so you sound less like a frog when you say something.”

The moisture felt wonderful. I clamped on the spongy green square, sucking and squeezing everything out of it. He smiled approvingly, but I saw that the smile didn't extend up to his eyes and I knew I wasn't doing very well. He pulled on another pair of latex gloves, unrolled some gauze bandages, dipped them into a solution, and started to work on my right arm.

“
Je
sus,” I screamed.

“Yeah. It's gonna sting. I got your left arm done while you were still out cold. Sorry about this, but I've gotta clean all these wounds. Oh. They found you kinda west and north of Organ Pipe, almost halfway between there and Cabeza Prieta. People that regularly check the emergency water towers found you at one of them.”

The moisture eased my cracked lips and seemed to clear my head. I moved. Not a great idea at all.

“I'm gonna strap you down if you try that again.”

Raising my head, I saw jagged scabs on my right arm, bandages all over the left one.

“More on your legs. What the hell did you do out there? Run through a bob-wire fence?”

I nodded yes, clamping my lips on the now-dry sponge, clenching my jaw against the pain of the cleansing antiseptic.

“Your forehead, too,” the EMT said. “All in all, you're one lucky girl.”

“Where…we going?”

“Tucson. I've already radioed ahead. St. Mary's emergency room is all set to take you in.”

“No hospital,” I said, struggling to sit up, unable to muster enough strength to do more than raise my head. “Got…other things…got to do other things…”

“I'd like to knock you out with a shot, but you're so weak, I want to keep you talking to me. So talk to me, girl. What's your name?”

“Name is…name,” I mumbled.

I tried to raise the patterned disposable sheet covering me.

“Well, I had to cut them all off. I'm afraid you're kinda naked under there.”

I spit out the green spongy lollipop. He dipped it in water, put it back between my lips.

“So, like, were you trying one of those endurance runs? Out in the desert? Except you got lost or something?”

The ambulance launched off another dip in the road. I remembered that road.

“Eighty-six?” I croaked.

“Oh, yeah. You were eighty-sixed outa that desert, all right. Oh. You mean, are we on 86 the death road between Sells and Tucson?”

I nodded.

“People drive pretty fierce along this road. Lots of shrines. I've responded to a lot of accidents. I'm based in Sells, in the Indian Health Services hospital. I'm Ojibwe, so when I finished IHS training, do you think they'd send me back to Michigan? Back up to the Upper Peninsula, back to L'Anse? Oh, no. They sent me out in the middle of the desert. Okay. We're done with that arm. Now. I'm gonna bunch this sheet here up around your waist. I've got to work on your legs. I'll try to keep your privates private, so to speak. But I've got to cleanse all the wounds.”

However far up he bunched the sheet, I never knew. I passed out again and woke up in a bed in the emergency
room, two nurses and a doctor hunkered over me.

“Awake,” one of the nurses said.

“Name?” the doctor said. He looked Indian or Pakistani, his bedside manner limited either by his English or his concern.

“Name…Laura. Winslow.”

“Laura Winslow.” The nurse made a notation on a clipboard. “You still need me here, Doctor?”

“Do you hear me?” the doctor said.

“Kinda,” I said, “but I understand her better.”

They both laughed.

“Good, good. Humor. You got some humor. Good thing. Cool beans.”

The nurse changed out the empty saline bag hanging above me for a full one.

“Five bags in twelve hours,” the doctor said. “I think almost a record here.”

“Twelve…hours? I've got get up.”

“Not you, Miss Laura Winslow. Your tank was really low.”

A blood pressure cuff squeezed my right arm and they both waited for the readings.

“Improving,” the doctor said. “The EMT man, when he first found you, he had trouble finding a pulse on most of your body. Your blood pressure was seventy-five over thirty-eight. You were this far from going into a coma.”

He held out a thumb and index finger, paralleled them about two inches apart.

“How…long…” I couldn't even seem to get out a whole question.

“We'll keep you here for at least another twelve hours. Until your systolic pressure goes over one hundred and your heart rate stabilizes. Right now your heart is beating steady but really low, barely above fifty beats per minute.”

“Runner,” I said. “I run. A. Lot.”

“So you normally have a low resting heart rate?” I nodded. “How low?”

“Fifty. Nine.”

“Well, Miss Laura Winslow. That is good news, then. You just relax. These are good people in here, but now we have to go see about a stabbing victim.”

I lay there for hours, dozing on and off, until the shift changed and the tone of conversation grew louder, more people in the room, and more patients. I lay in the bed for at least two more hours until a nurse came to start moving my bed.

“We're moving you to the ICU,” she said.

An aide came to help with the IV stand, and the two of them wheeled me out into the corridor, where people were stacked up in beds.

“Busy gangbanger night,” the aide said to the nurse. “So how's your boy?”

“Didn't I tell you?”

“No. Last I heard, you were taking him to a nose and throat specialist.”

They ignored me completely.

“Yeah, right,” the nurse said, as they maneuvered my bed into an elevator. “Well. You know he's been snuffling for weeks, and he kept telling me he couldn't breathe through his left nostril.”

“I heard that part. So? What did the nose doc say?”

“He looks up Sammy's nose. Now, Sammy, you know, he's barely three years old, he can't really describe what's going on, but he starts screaming like crazy when the doc puts a swab up into that nostril. So I'm there, his nurse practitioner is there, the two of us are holding poor Sammy down while the doctor takes out an extraction tool and goes to work up Sammy's nose.”

We came out of the elevator, the aide asking somebody at the nurses' station where to move me, and we started down another corridor.

“So?” the aide said.

“I mean, like, this doc is twisting and pulling and finally
he gets the extraction tool where he wants it, he tells us get a firm hold, and he pulls out the green moss.”

“Moss?”

“Looked like moss. Like moss that was
growing.
So what the hell is that? I ask the doctor. A pea, he says. A green pea. Kids like to stuff peas up their noses. I figure this one had been there quite a while. It was growing roots. Here we are.”

They wheeled my bed into a room, docked the bed in an empty space, and hooked up all their gauges without saying another word.

A green pea
, I thought.
What would that be like, having one grow up your nose
? I passed out again.

36

A
t two in the morning, the grogginess finally cleared enough for me to see that I was in a private room of the ICU. I got out of bed and peered down the hall at the nurses' station. Nobody sitting there. I yanked the IV needle out of my arm, IV fluid spurting from the dangling tube and blood oozing from my arm. I found a roll of gauze, used my teeth to rip off several feet, wrapped it around the needle hole, and tied it tight.

My clothes and belongings were all in a drawstring plastic bag. I checked quickly to make sure my cell phone was inside, then slung the bag over my arm with the gauze, covering it up in case I got stopped. But either the staff was helping other patients or on a break somewhere, so nobody confronted me. I edged up to each open door, looking around the corner to see if a nurse was inside. Most of the rooms were empty, the rest with sleeping people. At the very last room, a young girl with body piercing all over her face and ears was
listening to an MP3 player. Without turning off the music or removing her earphones, she immediately recognized the bag across my arm, knew what I was doing.

“Go for it!” she whispered.

I could see inside her closet and I reached in to snatch a lightweight University of Arizona jacket and some blue sweatpants. She nodded okay.

“Yo,” the girl said. “Some guy whale on you too?”

Left side of her face horribly yellow and blue with bruises, a ring of marks around her neck.

“You need money?” she asked.

“I'll make out,” I said. “Soon as I get a taxi home.”

“Jesus, girl, don't go home. You got to
stop
that beating, Jesus Christ, I mean, you looked like he threw a rope around you and dragged you through cactus. Besides, no taxi driver'll take you into his clean cab. Here. I got lots of money.”

Reaching under her sheet, between her legs, she pulled out a small leather bag. Without counting, she grabbed some bills and thrust them at me.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I can't take your money.”

“
His
money,” she said. “Drug money. If he hadn't'a whacked me with my favorite alarm clock, if the clock didn't get broken…but when he left for a drug sale I cleaned out his stash. Take it. Driver's license. Credit card. Take it all.”

She crammed the bills into my hand.

“Give me your name,” I said. “Your address. I'll pay you back.”

“Girl, you got no more sense than a sack of hair. I been laying here, thinking of doing just what
you
are doing. Before he finds where I am, I'm moving east coast way. Change my name. Get a new address. Just keep the money. Use the ID. You get clear of
your
old man. Okay?”

I found the exit. In the parking lot, behind a huge mesquite tree, I ripped off the open-back hospital gown and didn't even bother with my blood-soaked clothing. And no blood
seeping through the gauze, but I left it on. My arms and legs were covered with bandages, but once I put on the sweatpants and zipped up the jacket, I figured I looked presentable enough for the taxi I called for with my cell.

Hesitating when he looked at my face, I tucked a fifty-dollar bill into his hand.

“Just take me to the nearest car rental place,” I said.

“Lady. Nothing's open this hour of the night.”

“Airport.”

“Oh, yeah. Right. They got that new facility open.”

“Before we go there, I've got five hundred dollars if you'll connect with somebody who can sell me a piece.”

“A piece of what?”

“A gun.”

“Whoa, who you think I am, anyway?”

“Any kind of gun. Handgun, shotgun. I don't care.”

He braked to a sudden stop in the parking lot. I thought he was going to ask me to get out of his cab, but he took a cell phone and made a call.

“You there?” I couldn't hear any answer. “Yo, just wake up, get that clean nine I've been storing under my bed. You cool with that, dude? Be there in fifteen.”

He took me somewhere into South Tucson, a small street off Thirty-sixth where he blinked his lights and a young boy came to the car, handing the driver a paper bag.

“You get some more sleep now,” the driver said. “I'll be taking you to school in just a few hours.”

He handed me the sack. A very worn Glock 17. I ejected the clip, saw it was fully loaded. I racked the slide, not knowing if there was a shell in the chamber, but since the Glock had no safety I was taking no chances. In spite of the age of the weapon it had been cleaned and oiled just recently. I rammed home the clip, racked the slide again, and lowered the hammer.

“Five hundred's a rip-off price, lady,” he said. “But I gots
to support three kids, and five hundred is better than four days' work.”

“Just take it. I've only got about ten bucks left, so get me to the airport.”

He counted the five hundred, thrust it into his pocket.

“Airport's free,” he said. “I might have expensive goods, but personally, I'm not a cheap guy. I won't charge you for the ride.”