Longarm reined in long enough to extend a strong hand and haul the small but nubile young gal up beside him. She likely didn't notice, and so he never commented on the one tawny tit the two of them managed to expose getting her aboard. As she sat down beside him, Longarm already had the mules swinging through the opening in the cactus she'd just popped out of. But as he headed for the rambling row of brushwood jacales and corrals across eight or ten acres of beans and corn, his distraught guide pointed off to their west, telling him, "Me padre is over that way, closer to the water."
Longarm saw no water. But an older and fatter version of the gal beside him was huddled with two younger boys over something or somebody down in the knee-high peppers they had growing in that corner to his right. So he looked for a good way through their modest crops, and then, as the worried gal beside him said not to worry about the damned old beans, he drove right over.
One of the boys took the reins as Longarm followed the daughter of the house over the side. He was sort of sorry he had as soon as he caught sight of the stocky middle-aged Mexican sprawled there in the mud and crud with his white cotton pants and right leg torn all to hell. Longarm saw they'd improvised a rope tourniquet around the stocky farmer's muscular upper thigh. He could only wonder how much worse the poor cuss could bleed with nothing at all wrapped above the ghastly wounds around his busted or dislocated knee. He told the English-speaking girl, "We have to get him to a doctor in town muy pronto. We ain't got a litter. We ain't got time to make one. So tell him this is going to hurt and ask your brother there to lower the tailgate of that wagon box."
She did, in a rapid singsong he'd have never managed on his own in a lingo he had to sort of feel his way along in. The badly injured Mexican bit his lower lip and hissed like a steam kettle, but never let on how bad it really must have felt as Longarm picked him up, with some effort, and shoved him gently as possible into the wagon behind the trunk. Then the young gal raised the tailgate and ran around to the front, calling out, "Abordos y vamonos pa'l carajo!"
So the old gal and all three kids scrambled aboard as best they could as Longarm drove back across their already battered crops.
The young gal wound up seated beside him some more as her mother in the back hung on to her injured man, sobbing at Longarm to go "mas rapido!" but also crying "cuidado!" as he did his best, without any advice, to follow the wheel ruts as fast as he safely could.
The young gal explained that the poor mamacita was upset, but that she knew how kind and thoughtful he was trying to be to people he'd never been introduced to.
He assured her he followed her mamacita's drift, and added, "She has every right to be unsettled by that fearsome bite out of Papacito's poor leg. What in thunder did he tangle with back there, a tushy old sow with a litter she was guarding amid them peppers?"
The girl shook her head. "I do not know what the beast is called in your tongue. We call aligador!"
Longarm whistled softly. "That's close enough to alligator if we're talking about the same critter. I'd heard they could be found all around the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Yucatan but... out in the middle of a pepper crop?"
She sighed. "Is a bahia pequeria, what you call a tidal creek, I think, just beyond our back seto... you say hedgerow, no?"
When he said that sounded close enough, she explained, "Las aligadoras come out on land for to sun themselves when the weather is as cool as this morning. Pero, like yourself, Papacito was surprised to find such a big one on our side of the cactus seto when he went out for to look at our poor peppers. It grabbed him before he knew it was there, and he thinks it was trying to take him home for to feed its own family. They were rolling all over when the rest of us rushed out for to see what Papacito was cursing about. My brother, Miguelito, beat la aligador many times with a hoe, a steel-bladed hoe, before it let go and slid back through the cactus into the bahia. Miguelito is only twelve, but muy macho, just like Papacito!"
Longarm smiled thinly and said, "They both must have been. I'd say that gator was unusually macho as well. They ain't supposed to act so bold as a rule. Has anyone you know been feeding 'em around here?"
"Feeding, senor? You have heard of people who would actually feed such dangerous beasts? One would have to be loco en la cabeza, no?"
He shrugged. "Greenhorns likely feel they're just out to be neighborly. But they got signs posted over Galveston way that warn folks not to do so, 'less you get them gators really dangerous."
He could see a street intersection down at the far end of their hedged-in wagon trace now as he continued. "They say gators get to coming in when they get used to hearing splashes at a particular bridge, boat dock, or whatever. Makes it more dangerous than usual should a dog, or kid, fall in. The critters aren't inclined to consider before they snap, left to their own unkindly natures. Do I have to explain further why it's not so wise to feed 'em until they lose their natural caution?"
She shuddered and reminded him she and her kin had just pulled a family member out of a sassy gator's jaws. He nodded. "That's my point. Their more usual diet would be fish, ducks, muskrats, and such. So the critter as just went for your dad must have picked up such bad habits around other humans. I don't know my way around Escondrijo. Which way do we swing when we get to that cross street ahead?"
She said the curado they usually went to dwelt down to the right.
He said, "No offense, senorita, but your old man don't need any herbs or even Prayers right now. He needs surgical stitching, considerable surgical stitching, by a surgical sawbones trained gringo in manner, if not a pure gringo by birth!"
She sobbed, "I never called you a gringo, senor. pero, you are the one Who brought it up, is no cirujano gringo in Escondrijo who would treat a greaser, as I think you call us."
He said, "I don't call colored folk niggers either. But I do follow your drift. So which way might that Coast Guard station be from here?"
She didn't follow his drift before he'd repeated Guardia Costa in her own lingo. Then she said, "I thought that what You meant. Is a la izquirda, Pero very far, and even if we get there in time I do not think they will wish for to take Papacito in!"
Longarm swung the team left Onto the cross street, which seemed the Only important north-south thoroughfare in the dinky collection of sun-silvered frame buildings as he assured the injured man's oldest child, "I don't care if they want to take him in or not. I aim to tell them they have to, I'm a U.S. deputy marshal, here on federal business, and I reckon I can say who may or may not be a federal witness under protection and hence eligible for emergency medical treatment at any infernal federal clinic I can find!"
She told him he was talking too fast for her to follow his English. He wasn't up to explaining all that in Spanish. So he just drove on, faster than folks usually drove through town and hence attracting a lot of stares and a good deal of cussing as they tore on up the dirt-paved street.
Then, as they were passing what seemed a big whitewash warehouse, Longarm spotted a familiar figure in white and reined in to call out to Norma Richards, "Hey, Doc? I got your Saratoga trunk and a man in dire need of medical attention here. Your move!"
The motherly but sort of handsome older gal stared thunderstruck for just a bit before she called back, "Custis, is that you, with my lab equipment at last, praise the Lord."
As she dropped lightly down from the loading platform of that odd warehouse and moved toward them in her already muddy high-buttons, she declared, "I'd just about given you and my microscope up for lost. We're in a lot of trouble here, Custis. As you see, I've been able to commandeer this empty icehouse for use as an emergency ward but without proper lab equipment-"
Then Longarm was down off the wagon to steer the educated lab technician around to the tailgate as he tersely explained, "Don't take no microscope to see what's ailing this customer I brought you. But for the record, those teeth marks all over his right knee were left by a gator, not one of Doc Finlay's mosquitos!"
When Longarm unfastened the tailgate, the well-rounded Norma got up under the canvas with surprising grace and proceeded to rip what was left of Papacito's pants off below that tourniquet. As she took in the full extent of the Mexican's injuries she whistled softly, then declared, "They do tend to overdo things here in Texas. We have to get that tourniquet off if we're to save that leg. But first we have to tie off some arteries and make a hundred and fifty stitches, minimum. So we'd better get him inside, on the table, the day before yesterday!"
She added something about going inside for a pair of stretcher bearers. But Longarm was already following her with the chunky but smaller man in his arms, like an injured child. So Norma told all of them to follow and they did, like a worried line of ducklings.
It was warmer inside than out, despite the gloom under the bare wooden trusses holding up the big cork-lined roof. Longarm saw lots of the heat had to be rising from the hundred-odd folks filling most of the folding cots spread across the sawdust floor. Nobody had more than a sheet covering them. But some were twisting like worms caught on a tile walk by a baleful rising sun. The smell was disgusting as well. Pine oil and fresh linens could only do so much when folks took to puking and shitting all over themselves and a sawdust floor.
As Norma led the newcomers through some hanging sheets and into a corner she'd improvised as a sort of lab and autopsy or operating room, Longarm glanced up through the gloom and said, "You say this here is supposed to be an icehouse, Doc?"
Norma pointed at two kitchen tables with a door across them. "Make him as comfortable as you can there while I scrub up again. They tell me they used to store ice from New England in here, before that meat packer down the other way installed ice-making machinery a year or so ago. I commandeered this layout as soon as they assured me it was the nearest we could get to a hospital ward here in town. That Coast Guard clinic is too small as well as too far away. This space is too small for all these repeat customers we keep getting, bless their fevered brows."
Longarm told the four Mexican folks they'd best wait outside. None of them argued. But as the older daughter ducked out Norma said, "Me and my direct approach. I didn't mean every one of them. Somebody who can speak both languages might save us a wrestling match here."
Longarm allowed he could likely translate any medical jargon a hoe farmer was likely to understand, so the motherly-looking Norma swung around from her washstand with a lethal-looking load of cutlery on an enameled tin tray, saying, "I'm low on morphine to begin with, and the dosage can be tricky when a patient's in shock after losing Lord knows how much blood. So I want you to tell him it would be better if I irrigated and sutured his wounds without any anesthetic. Tell him he won't feel much more pain than... well, a whole lot of pinpricks."
Longarm moved to the far side of the improvised operating table, nudged the semi-conscious Mexican, and told him they were going to have to hurt him. Since he was talking to a grown man, not a cry-baby, he felt no call to bullshit about pinpricks. The badly bitten farmer smiled gallantly up at the woman in white and croaked, "Que bella es. Quando comienza?"
Longarm said, "He thinks you're pretty and wants to know why you ain't started, Miss Norma."
So she picked up a wet sponge and wrung it out over the gory mess. The liquid rinsing blood and crud from the lacerations looked like water. Longarm suspected it was something stronger when the man on the table stared thunderstruck and shouted, "Ay, mierda! Eso es una mierda!"
So Longarm assured the old gent it was more likely alcohol than the shit he suspected. But he doubted the Mexican heard him. As he shot a questioning glance across the table, Norma Richards assured him, "Only comatose. Just as well. I want to suture these torn arteries before I unfasten that tourniquet, and that's the part that seems to inspire unpleasant remarks about a poor old woman who means well."
As he watched her clean, skilled fingers mend the ends of what a lay man could take for bloody macaroni, he said, "Aw, you ain't so old, considering how much training it would take to get so good with that curvy needle, Miss Norma. But no offense, whatever happened to the doctors, military and civilian, in these parts?"
She irrigated the unconscious man's knee some more as she made a wry face and said, "The pharmacist's mate in command of the Coast Guard clinic is just outside, running a fever we can't get down with quinine sulfate, if that's what's in those brown bottles he issued me before he was stricken himself. Now that you've brought my own medical supplies, however limited, I may be able to get a handle on what on earth they've all been coming down with!"
He said he'd be glad to get his own possibles back, and asked what had happened to the civilian docs a town this size would surely have.
She picked up a smaller needle and began to close the wounds of the ripped-open farmer as she said simply, "There were three, they say. I never met any of them. One died and the other two skipped out before I got off that coastal steamer a million years ago. They say the local doctor who caught it and died had been the only one trying to fight whatever it is we're fighting. The other two said there was no use risking the lives of themselves and their families on something they just didn't understand."