Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories Page 4

  In the confusion of the struggle, the woman felt something warm on her face. Not blood but the dog’s loathsome slobber.

  The dog’s master managed to extricate the dog from the couple. Still it was barking hysterically, lunging and leaping with bared fangs.

  The woman cried, “Help him! Get help for him! He’ll bleed to death.”

  The young man apologized profusely. He was holding the struggling dog down with both arms. Claiming the dog had never done anything like this before—not ever . . . “Jesus! I’ll get help.” There was a rangers’ station a half-mile down the trail, the young man said. He’d run, he’d get help from the rangers.

  Alone with the injured man, the woman cradled him in her arms as he moaned and writhed with pain. He appeared to be dazed, stupefied. Was he in shock? His skin felt cold to the woman’s touch. She could barely comprehend what had happened, and so swiftly.

  The crazed dog had bitten and scratched her hands, too. There were cuts and abrasions in her flesh, bleeding. But her fear was for the man. She fumbled for her cell phone, tried to call 911 but the call failed to go through. She wondered—should she try to make a tourniquet to stanch the flow of blood from the man’s forearm? Years ago as a high school girl she’d taken a course in first aid but—could she remember, now? For a tourniquet you had to use a stick? Her eyes darted about, searching for—what? So slowly she was thinking, with the effort of one trying to walk through sludge in a dream. Like a foolish trapped bird her heart beat erratically in her chest.

  The man was insisting he was all right, he could walk to the rangers’ station—“Hey, I’m not going to die.”

  Grotesquely, he tried to laugh. He had no idea how torn and bloody his face was.

  The woman helped the man to his feet. How heavy he was, and how uncoordinated! His face was a mask of blood, it was terrifying to see flaps of loose skin in his cheeks and forehead. One of the man’s earlobes had been torn.

  At least, the man’s eyes had been spared.

  The woman gripped the man around the waist, clumsily. With effort he was able to walk leaning heavily on her. The woman was trying to comfort him—she had no idea what she was saying except that there would be help for him soon, he would be all right . . . She saw that the front and sleeves of her sweater were soaked in dark blood.

  By this time the sun had sunk below the tree line. It was now dusk and the air was cold and wet as if after a rain. The woman’s teeth were chattering. The woman and the man made their stumbling way along the trail. They’d begun to hear calls, cries—two rangers were running up the shadowy trail with flashlights, shouting. The man was limping, wincing with pain. His clothes had been torn as if with a giant scissors. Though he must have weighed sixty pounds more than she did, the woman was managing to hold him erect, trembling with the effort. As she was about to collapse the man was lifted from the woman’s grip.

  They were taken to the rangers’ station and treated with first aid. Sterilizing liquid, bandages. For the man’s lacerated forearm, a tourniquet deftly applied by the elder of the rangers. It was observed that the man was lucky—“The artery wasn’t severed.” A dog attack was a serious injury, there was the possibility of rabies. It was imperative to locate the dog.

  The straggly-bearded young man had fled the park with the mastiff. Incredibly, he had not reported the attack. But others had seen him, and had reported him. A hiker returning to his car in the parking lot had taken down the plate number of the young man’s Jeep.

  Beneath the bandages, the man’s face was ashen. His breath came quickly and shallowly. He was urged to lie down on a cot. Despite his protests, an ambulance was called. Dog bites are highly dangerous, the ranger said. A vicious dog-biting has to be reported. The dog’s owner would be prosecuted. And leaving the scene of the attack—the son of a bitch would be charged for that, too.

  The man’s facial injuries required stitches, that was clear. First aid wouldn’t be enough. The woman had seen with horror what the dog’s teeth and nails had done to her friend. Already the gauze bandages on his face were darkening with blood.

  Within minutes the ambulance arrived in the now near-deserted park. The tearful woman wanted to ride with the injured man in the ambulance but the man insisted that she take his station wagon, and meet him at the hospital; he didn’t want his vehicle locked in the park overnight.

  Even with his injuries, half-dazed by the attack and speaking with difficulty, the man appeared to be thinking calmly, rationally.

  The woman took his key from the man’s shaky fingers, and his wallet and backpack, and followed in his station wagon. Followed the ambulance along curving mountain roads. She could not breathe, the loneliness was palpable and suffocating as cotton batting.

  Inside the man’s station wagon, and the man not at the steering wheel! This seemed unnatural to her, baffling.

  She thought He will be all right. We will be all right, then.

  She could leave him, then. She would call a taxi, and be driven to her home approximately twelve miles away.

  Yet it was shocking to her, she could not quite fathom it, the dog’s young master had fled the park without reporting the attack. The straggly-bearded young man who’d seemed so concerned about them had cared so little about their welfare, he’d fled knowing that, if his dog wasn’t located by authorities, both bite-victims would have to endure rabies shots.

  She’d been told by the park rangers that the dog’s owner would be apprehended within a few hours. The attack had already been reported to local police. A warrant would be issued for the dog owner’s arrest. She’d been assured that authorities would find the man and examine the dog for rabies but in her distressed state she’d scarcely been able to listen, or to care.

  At the brightly lighted medical clinic, the woman hurried inside. She understood that she was wild-eyed, splotched with blood, looking distraught and disoriented. She saw—the man was being carried into the ER on a stretcher. To her horror she saw that the man seemed to be only partly-conscious. He didn’t seem aware of his surroundings. She asked one of the medical workers what was wrong and was told that her companion had had a kind of “seizure” in the ambulance, he’d lost consciousness, his blood pressure had risen alarmingly and his heartbeat had accelerated, in fibrillation.

  Fibrillation! The woman knew only vaguely what this meant.

  “Oh God save him,” the woman begged. “Don’t let him die!”

  She was prevented from following the man into the ER. She found herself standing at a counter, being asked questions. Her face was streaked coarsely with tears like a billboard ravaged by weather and rain. She fumbled with the man’s wallet, searching for his medical insurance card. His university ID. How slowly she moved, her bandaged hands were clumsy as if she wore mittens. One of the EMTs who’d brought the man into the ER was telling her that she should be treated as well, her lacerated hands and wrists should be examined in the ER, the rangers’ first aid wasn’t enough. But the woman refused to listen. She had more important matters with which to deal. She flushed with indignation when the woman at the counter asked what relation she was to the injured man and sharply she said:

  “I am his fiancée.”

  HOW LONG SHE REMAINED in the ER waiting room the woman would have no clear idea afterward. Time had become disjointed, confusing. Her eyelids were so heavy, she couldn’t keep them open. Yet she was sure she hadn’t slept for even a few seconds.

  Several times she inquired after the man and was told that he was undergoing emergency treatment for cardiac arrhythmia and she could not see him just yet. This news seemed terrible to her, unacceptable. He’d only been bitten by the damned dog! He had not seemed so badly injured initially, he’d insisted upon walking . . . The woman was light-headed, breathing quickly. Her bandaged hands and wrists throbbed with pain. She heard her thin plaintive voice begging—“Don’t let him die!”

  With her affrighted eyes she saw how others regarded her. A woman slightly crazed with worry, mounting
fear. A woman with a voice raised in panic. A woman of the sort you pity even as you inch away from her.

  The woman’s clothes were damp with blood. Her blood, and his.

  She saw that her coarse-knit sweater, that had been one of her very best, most beautiful and most expensive Scottish sweaters, had been torn and mangled by the massive dog past repair.

  On the trail coming down from Wild Cat Canyon Peak she’d been so cold her fingers had stiffened but now her fingers burned and stung beneath the bandages. In a bright fluorescent-lit restroom outside the ER unit her face in the mirror above the sink was blurred like those faces on TV that dissolve into pixels to disguise the guilt of identity. She was thinking of the way in which the massive dog had thrown itself at her and the way, astonishingly, in which the man had protected her from the dog. Her brain felt as if it were throbbing, flailing to comprehend. Did the man love her, then? Or—was she meant to love him? What a coward she’d been, the craven way in which she’d ducked behind the man to save herself, desperately she’d grabbed at him, as she’d have grabbed at anyone, cringing, crouching, whimpering like a terrified child. The man had thrust himself forward to be attacked in her place. A man who was virtually a stranger to her had risked his life for her.

  Now the woman found herself in possession of the man’s wallet. She had his backpack containing his camera equipment. In her state of nervous dread she looked through the wallet which was a leather wallet of good quality but badly worn. Credit cards, university ID, library card. Driver’s license. A miniature photo of a tensely smiling middle-aged man with a furrowed forehead and thinning shoulder-length hair whom she would have claimed she’d never seen before. And she discovered that he’d been born in 1956—he was fifty-seven years old! A decade older than she’d have guessed, and sixteen years older than she was.

  Another card indicated that the man had a cardiac condition—mitral valve prolapse. A much-folded prescription dated several years before for a medication to be administered intravenously. Nearest of kin to be notified in case of emergency, a woman with the man’s last name, possibly a sister, who lived in San Diego.

  The woman hurried to the ER, to speak with a nurse. She pressed the prescription onto the woman who promised her, yes she’d report this discovery to the cardiac specialist who was overseeing the man’s treatment.

  They would only humor her, the woman supposed. The hysterical fiancée! They’d performed their own tests upon the stricken man.

  “Ma’am?”—the waiting room was nearly empty when an attendant came to inform her that her companion was hospitalized for the night, for further tests in the morning and observation in the cardiac unit. The cardiologist on call had managed to control the man’s fibrillation and his heartbeat was near-normal but his blood pressure and white blood cell count were high. The woman tried to feel a rush of relief. Tried to think Now I can go home, the danger is past.

  Instead she went upstairs to the third-floor cardiac unit. For several minutes she stood outside the doorway of room 3112 undecided whether to enter. Inside, in a twilit room, the man lay in a bed, unnaturally still, as nurses fussed about him. His heartbeat was monitored by a machine. His breathing was monitored. The woman saw that the first-aid bandages hurriedly applied to his face had been removed, his numerous wounds had been stitched together and bandaged again, in a yet more elaborate and more lurid mask of crisscrossing strips of white. The man’s arms and hands had been bandaged as well.

  The horror was, the ugly dog had wanted to tear out the man’s throat. Tear off his face. And how easily that might have happened.

  A kindly beautiful face the woman thought it.

  She’d entered the hospital room, her knees were weak with exhaustion. Almost she felt that she might faint. A sick, sinking sensation rose in her bowels, into her chest, a dread beyond nausea. Yet she felt gratitude for the man’s courage, and for his kindness. Shame for herself, that she’d valued the man so negligently.

  In the room, the woman pulled over a chair and sat beside the man’s bed. Slowly the woman moved like a person in a dream not her own.

  The man had been undressed, his torn and bloodied clothes removed from him. In a hospital gown he lay unnaturally still, eyes shut. His breathing was quick and shallow but rhythmic. The bed had been cranked at a thirty-three-degree angle to allow for easier breathing.

  His eyelids fluttered, startled. Was he seeing her? Did he recognize her?

  The tear-ravaged face. The bandaged hands and wrists. The woman thought He has forgotten my name.

  From what the woman could make out of his stitched-together face beneath the bandages, the man was trying to speak. Or—trying to smile?

  He was asking her—what? She tried to understand but his words were slurred.

  The woman reached over, to take the man’s hand. His fingers too were bandaged, and felt cold, stiff. She squeezed his fingers, and the man squeezed back.

  She heard herself explain that she would be staying for a while. Until visiting hours ended. She had his wallet and his camera and the key to his station wagon and other things of his, for safekeeping.

  She said she would return in the morning, when he was to be discharged. She would drive him home, then. If he wanted. If he needed her. She would return, and bring his things with her, and drive him home. Did he understand?

  In the cranked-up bed, the man drifted into sleep. They’d given him a sedative, the woman supposed. Powerful medication to calm his racing heart.

  His mouth eased open, he breathed heavily, wetly. This was the night-breathing the woman recalled, and felt comforted to hear. The woman practiced pronouncing his name: “Simon.” This seemed to her a beautiful name. A name new to her, in her life, for she’d before never known anyone named Simon.

  Now they were safe, tears spilled from the woman’s eyes, and ran in rivulets down her ravaged face. She was crying as she had not cried in memory. She was too old for such emotion, there was something ridiculous and demeaning about it. Yet, she was remembering how at the top of the steep trail the man had insisted that she drink from his plastic water bottle. She hadn’t wanted to drink the lukewarm water, yet had drunk it as the man watched, acquiescing, yet with resistance, resentment. In their relationship the man would be the stronger, the woman would resent the man’s superior strength, yet she would be protected by it. She might defy it, but she would not oppose it. She was thinking of the two or three occasions when she’d kissed the man in a pretense of an emotion she hadn’t yet felt.

  Like the man, the woman was exhausted. She continued to hold the man’s hand on the outside of the covers, less tightly now. She lay her head against the headrest of the chair beside the bed. Her heavy eyelids closed. Vividly she saw the man at the peak of Wild Cat Canyon trail, holding his heavy camera aloft, peering through the viewing lens. A chill wind stirred his thinning silvery-coppery hair—she hadn’t noticed that before. She must hurry to him, she must stand close beside him. She must slide her arm around his waist, to steady him. This was her task, her duty. He was stronger than she, but a man’s strength can drain from him. A man’s courage can be torn from him, and bleed away. She was terrified of something, was she? The pale-blue rim of the Pacific Ocean, far away at the horizon. The bald-sculpted hills and exquisite little lakes that seemed unreal as papier-mâché you could poke your fingers through. And to her horror she realized she’d been hearing a heavy panting breath, a chuffing-wet breath, somewhere behind them, and below them on the trail, in the gathering dusk, waiting.

  DISTANCE

  MA’AM? YOU CAN’T OPEN THE WINDOWS, SORRY.”

  Coolly she turned to the boy. Prissy Mexican kid wearing white-boy wire-rim glasses who’d brought up her single lightweight suitcase she’d have preferred to have brought herself, to save a tip. But at the hotel check-in downstairs the suave brisk young woman behind the counter had finessed Kathryn, handing the card-key to the bellboy, with no chance for Kathryn to intervene.

  “‘Can’t open the windows
’—why not?”

  Evasively the boy mumbled what sounded like sealed.

  “The windows are ‘sealed’? But why?”

  Kathryn’s voice betrayed surprise, dismay. A room in which other occupants had slept recently—their odors left behind, faintly disguised by disinfectant, room “freshener”—was not the ideal setting for what she anticipated.

  Asking again “Why?”—but the bellboy ignored her. Adjusting a wall thermostat, a rush of air-conditioning from overhead. In his pose of concentration there was a mild rebuke, Kathryn thought. A warning

  Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t ask questions if you don’t know the answers. Sealed windows in high-rise hotels in Vegas, you can figure.

  ON THE THIRD DAY she called L___.

  She would have said I am testing distance.

  Two thousand two hundred thirty-seven miles and three hours separating them.

  Except she’d left his telephone number behind. Or she’d lost his telephone number. She’d been hurried packing for her trip and careless as frequently she was careless in small matters despite her wish to be otherwise—seeing now with a stab of dismay clothes, toiletries, papers scattered across the unused hotel bed where she’d unzipped her suitcase and shaken it in search of the slip of paper she was sure she’d brought with her—she’d meant to bring with her—bearing such crucial phone numbers as his.

  What did it mean, she hadn’t memorized his telephone number.

  What did it mean, she didn’t know the man’s middle name—not even his middle initial! She wasn’t sure of the precise name of the road he lived on though she’d been brought to his house—by him—several times and in her mind’s eye she could make that journey along that suburban-rural road again at a distance of two thousand two hundred thirty-seven miles and three hours. Thinking I can’t be sure, I don’t know. None of it has entered that deeply into me.

  It was her decision then, to call directory assistance for his number.