“You’re not okay.” She showed him the bloody Kleenexes.
He gaped. “Well, swap me pink and call me Bluey. No wonder I got a headache!”
“No wonder at all,” Marian agreed. “Dolores, get me some more of these, will you please?”
“Sure thing,” the other secretary said, and did.
Dr. Toohey rushed in no more than a minute later; nowhere in Weed was very far from anywhere else. He had his black bag in his hand. “Let me patch up that cut first of all,” he said.
“Never mind me, Doc. Slap a Band-Aid on it or somethin’. Tom Andersen’s the one who needs you bad,” Hurley said.
“If he’s worse off than you, then he must,” Toohey said. They hurried out together. Two car doors slammed. An engine roared.
Marian stared at the handful of soggy, bloody tissues she was holding. With a small, disgusted noise, she threw them in the nearest wastebasket, then went into the ladies’ room and washed off Billy Hurley’s blood. None of the high mucky-mucks down the hall had even noticed the commotion out front.
“That was fun,” she said after she came out. “Does this kind of thing happen all the time during the winter?”
“Not all the time, but it happens, yeah,” Dolores answered. “You did all you could for Billy there. That was great.” The other office workers nodded.
“I was closest to him, that’s all. Anybody else would’ve done the same.” Marian looked down. “We’ve got blood on the rug.”
“Cold water. Lots of cold water,” Dolores said. “That’s not the kind of reminder we need.”
Billy Hurley came back to the office a couple of hours later. He wasn’t bleeding any more. His nose had stopped, and he had a bandage wrapped around his head-so much for slap a Band-Aid on it. “Doc dropped me off. He’s taking Tom down to the hospital in Redding,” he reported. “Says he’s got some busted bones he can’t deal with here.”
“How far is it to Redding?” Marian asked.
“Eighty miles-something like that,” Dolores said.
“Poor Tom!” Marian wouldn’t have wanted to spend all that time in a car jouncing down US 99. She’d known Weed had no hospital, but she hadn’t thought about what that meant till now. If something went badly wrong…“There’s not even an ambulance that could take him?”
“Nope,” the logger said. “Doc’s it, pretty much.”
“You ought to-we ought to-be able to do better. Logging’s dangerous work. People get hurt.” Marian glanced down the hall. The bosses were still busy doing whatever bosses did.
“Stuff like that costs money, though,” Billy Hurley said. “Who’s gonna fork it over? Lord only knows how Tom’ll come up with the cash for whatever they got to do to him down in Redding.”
The lumber companies ought to pay, Marian thought. They’re the ones whose people go off the roads in the snow or have trees fall on them or get hit in the leg by an axe that goes wrong.
But even though she thought it, she didn’t say it. She knew what would happen if she did say it. Shasta Lumber would fire her. They might not open the door before they kicked her through it, either. They’d call her a Red and a radical. No one else in town would hire her after they canned her. She and Linda would have to move away. The way things were these days, that kind of reputation, deserved or not, was liable to follow her, too. Political arguments made everybody insanely suspicious.
She got less done the rest of the day than she would have liked, even if nobody else complained. Weed wasn’t a bad place. It had reasonably nice people and a breathtaking view. After Camp Nowhere, it had seemed like heaven on earth. But it wasn’t.
Had it been just her, she might have packed up and left from sheer annoyance at the lumber barons. Linda was settling in pretty well, though. She’d already had her life torn up by the roots twice this year-three times if you counted finding out that her father was dead. Little kids shouldn’t have that happen to them. Sometimes they did, in spite of everything, but they shouldn’t.
On the way home from work, she stopped at the office of the Weed Press-Herald, the town’s weekly. The editor was a tall man named Dale Dropo. “Yeah, I heard Tom got hurt,” he said. “It’s a shame, but logging’s a tough business.”
“I’ll tell you what’s a shame,” Marian said. “It’s a shame the town doesn’t have an ambulance, much less a hospital.”
Dale Dropo couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. He wasn’t more than a few years older than Marian, in other words. He might never have worried about the lack of such things before. Till today, she hadn’t. He scratched at one ear. “You know what?” he said. “You’re right.”
“Would an editorial light a fire under anybody?” she asked.
His grin was sour. “I only wish it were that easy. Weed would have a lot of things it doesn’t if people paid any attention to my editorials. But I was wondering what I’d put in the one for next Friday’s paper. Now I know. I’ll give ’em something else to ignore me about. Thanks.”
“Any time,” Marian said. “Any time at all.”
–
Ihor Shevchenko was an old soldier. He was also an old soldier who acted like an old soldier: he did no more than he had to do to get by. The way he looked at it, he’d done everything he needed to do to serve the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War. He had the scar and the limp to prove it. If the Soviet Union wanted more from him now, that was the rodina’s hard luck.
His attitude did not endear him to Sergeant Prishvin. Of course, he could have been a Stakhanovite for extra duties and worn a Hero of the Soviet Union’s star on his chest, and that wouldn’t have endeared him to Anatoly Prishvin, either. Since he was a Ukrainian, dying was the only thing that would have endeared him to Prishvin.
“You’re a lazy, worthless cunt,” the sergeant said. Ihor stood mute. He was willing to cop to lazy, but not the rest of the abuse. Prishvin went on, “They should stick you in a penal battalion. See how you’d like being lazy then.”
Penal battalions were for getting rid of soldiers and officers who’d screwed up in a major way. If you lived, your sins were expiated. But the whole point to penal battalions was using the bodies of the men in them to smother the fires the enemy started. Men went in where things were hottest. Most of them, by the nature of things, didn’t come out again.
Prishvin went right on glaring. “Well? What have you got to say about that?”
“Nothing, Comrade Sergeant,” Ihor answered. Anything he did say would only inflame the Russian more.
Saying nothing didn’t help, either. “You’re too lazy to even talk to me, huh? No wonder you and that cocksucking blackass hang around together. I bet he smokes hashish to make him like he is. What’s your excuse?”
Ihor made a small production of starting to clean his AK-47. He’d always kept his weapons in good shape. That helped you stay alive, which he approved of. He hadn’t trained on the Kalashnikov, but you hardly needed training to take care of it. The mechanism was about as simple as it could get and still work. It was so simple, it would go on working even if you didn’t bother cleaning it.
Not quite idly, Ihor swung the muzzle toward Anatoly Prishvin. That was just to take the edge off his own feelings. He couldn’t reassemble the rifle, release the safety, and pull the trigger here and make it seem like an accident. When they went into action against the Americans, though…A corpse shot by an AK-47 looked the same as one shot by an M-1, especially after it had a few days to swell up and change colors and stink.
He did wonder how many stupid, vicious officers and fuckheaded noncoms had died at their own men’s hands during the Great Patriotic War. The tally wouldn’t include only the fuckheads who served the Soviet Union badly. Plenty of Fritzes who gave orders were vicious and stupid, too. Ihor had developed a healthy respect for the ordinary German soldier. Here and there, Landsers would have weeded out their assholes, too.