The blood covered everything, the rusty cans, the broken glass, the ashes from the garbage fires that the old man used to set before the town denied him permission. Warren must have climbed up on this cinder block and reached in there for something, but he lost his balance, and he cut himself.
She swung around. Warren was clutching his hand, running toward the back door, and she called to him, but he was in the house already. She scrambled toward him, across the lane and past the bushes, the back door getting larger as she reached it, fumbling at the handle, charging in. She saw the blood across the floor, and she was racing down the hallway toward the bathroom, but he wasn't in there. Where? She doubled back. He sat in his bedroom, crying, blood across the sheets. She hurried to grab him, wrapping a sheet around his hand and guiding him into the bathroom. "No!"
"I have to wash it. I have to see how bad it is." "Don't touch it!"
Warren kept crying as she freed the bloody sheet and pushed his hand down into the sink. She turned the tap on. He wailed again.
Too hot. She turned the other tap, and now the water felt lukewarm, and she was brushing at the bleeding flesh. She saw the wound, but blood kept oozing out, and she was brushing at it, freeing all the dirt and black clots, and Lord, the hand was mangled. Deep and wide and jagged. Oh, my baby, she was thinking as she felt his weight against him, and she knew before she looked that he had fainted.
ELEVEN
Warren smelled something strange, something like the powder that his mother put inside the washer when she did the clothes. His eyes fluttered. He winced from the light all around him, and he saw the strange man in the white coat leaning close. He started wailing.
"Warren, it's all right."
His mother's voice. His father close beside her. They looked angry.
"Mommy, I-"
"It's all right, Warren. Please don't be afraid. You're with a doctor."
Back now to the man, his white coat flecked with red spots down his arm. The man was holding something like a plastic pill that he had broken open, and the strange smell seemed to come from it. Warren kept on crying. This man was much younger, thinner, than the doctor he always went to, and the freckles on his face looked like the blood specks on the white coat, and Warren couldn't stop from crying.
"Ssshhh, it's all right, son. We're here now. You're just fine."
Then Warren slowly understood that they had him on a table, that his hand felt numb and awkward. He was raising it. The hand was like a white club, bandaged so he couldn't even see or move his fingers.
"He's still suffering from shock. He'll take a while to get adjusted," he heard the doctor saying.
Someone dried his eyes. His mother. She was smiling. So she wasn't angry, after all.
"Warren, can you tell us how it happened?"
He turned toward the doctor, trying to remember what the plan was.
"Yes, the glass," he told them slowly.
"In the barrel?"
"Yes, I cut myself."
His father clenched his fist. "I'm going to sue that old man."
"Harry. Please, not here," his mother said.
So I got away with it, Warren thought.
"Warren, let me tell you what I did for you," the doctor said. "You have to make sure you keep the bandage on. I sewed you up. I gave you stitches. Do you understand that?"
"Yes, like Mommy when she makes a dress."
They smiled a little.
"Something like that," the doctor said. "You were cut too deeply to let the wound heal on its own. I took some string like this, except it wasn't string. It's more like what we used to call a piece of catgut, and I sewed the cut together."
"Will the string stay in there?"
"No. A week or so from now, I'll take the stitches out, and you'll be like before, although you'll maybe have a scar," the doctor said. "But you've got a lot of growing to do, and most of the scar will disappear. What you've got to understand is that you can't put much weight on your hand. If you try to pick up heavy things or make a fist or anything like that, you'll risk the chance of pulling out the stitches too soon. Take things easy. Let your mother or your father do the lifting for you."
"Will they make my bed for me?"
"You bet we will," his father said. "And I'll still pay your full allowance."
Warren grinned then. Yes, he'd gotten away with it, and he was wiping at his tears, trying to sit up.
"Here, let me help you." His mother held him.
"He's going to be all right, I think," the doctor said. "Take him home. Here are pills for when the local anesthetic wears off. Call me if there's any trouble. But I think that all you'll have to do is bring him in a week from Monday."
"What about the bandage?"
"Change it every night. The first few times you ought to soak the bandage before it's removed. I don't want any dried blood tearing at those stitches."
"Dressing?"
"Anything you have around the house. First-aid cream is fine. I gave him an anti-tetanus injection. I don't see any problems coming up."
"Thank you."
"I'm just pleased that you got him here so quickly. He was bleeding quite a lot."
More talk, but Warren didn't listen. He looked around the room, at the cabinets and shiny metal objects, and abruptly he was dizzy. He almost toppled off the table.
"Here, young man. I think we'd better get you home."
Despite an itching, burning pain along his hand, Warren couldn't stop from feeling happy. He had gotten away with it. All night long, he'd tried to figure how to hide the bite. His hand had swollen so much that it scared him. At breakfast time, his mother had come in to wake him, but he'd snuggled in the sheets as if he wanted to keep sleeping. He had stayed there until he knew that she would surely come to wake him. So he'd listened until he heard her in the living room, and he had managed then to dress himself. The pain had been so bad that he shook. He had slipped and smeared some blood across his sleeve. But he had figured what to do by that time, and he'd snuck outside to reach the barrel over there. The worst part had been leaning in to let some blood drip onto the glass. When he had pulled the bloody rag off, he had seen the swollen throbbing ugly cut, caked with dirty blood. He'd shivered, reaching down to touch his hand against a broken bottle. That had been his plan at least. But he had lost his balance, and the cut had burst, not from the glass but from the pressure. He had never felt such shrieking pain. He couldn't stop his screaming.
TWELVE
"Okay then, sure, why not?"
And Slaughter turned up onto the loggers' road. "I've heard so much about this place I guess it's time I had a look myself."
He hadn't planned to do this until tomorrow, but he didn't like the thought of Dunlap's staying any longer than was necessary. It was fine for Parsons to instruct him to be friendly. "Give him all the help he needs." Parsons had been clear on that. But Parsons didn't have to babysit this man. Parsons didn't know about the trouble that was going on.
There wasn't much that Slaughter had to do in town, regardless. He could sit and wait for calls to come in on the police station's two-way radio. Or he could drive out, troubleshooting on the streets. But hell, the compound wasn't even ten miles down the road from Bodine's place, halfway from the ranch to town, and he was out here, going past it. He might just as well drive up and get this nuisance finished. Slaughter saw the road and made his choice, and this would help take Dunlap's mind away from what was happening in town.
Slaughter knew the turnoff, although as he had said he'd never taken time to go up it. There had never been a need to, never been an interest. Back in the sixties, he'd seen freaks enough to last a lifetime. They could smoke dope up here until they couldn't tell their ass from grass for all he cared.