“Maybe on my lunch hour I’ll be able to come by and take a look,” Carol said. “At least I should be capable of saying if she should be got to a hospital or not.”
Marcelle thanked her — not without first laying down a curse against doctors who set themselves up like bankers — and hung up the phone. Nervously tapping her fingers against the table, she thought to call in Merle Ring or maybe Captain Knox, to get their opinions of Flora’s condition, and then decided against it. That damned Dewey Knox, he’d just take over, one way or the other, and after reducing the situation to a choice between two courses, probably between leaving her alone in the trailer and calling the ambulance, he’d insist that someone other than he do the choosing, probably Flora herself, who, of course, would choose to be left alone. Then he’d walk off believing he’d done the right thing, the only right thing, without it ever occurring to him that he’d missed the point of the whole dilemma. Merle would be just as bad, she figured, with all his smart-ass comments about illness and death and leaving things alone until they have something to say to you that’s completely clear. Some illnesses lead to death, he’d say, and some lead to health, and we’ll know before long which this is, and when we do, we’ll know how to act. Men. Either they take responsibility for everything, or else they take responsibility for nothing.
Around one, Carol Constant arrived in her little blue Japanese sedan, dressed in a white nurse’s uniform and looking, to Marcelle, very much like a medical authority. Marcelle led her into Flora’s trailer, after warning her about the clutter and the smell—“It’s like some kinda burrow in there,” she said as they stepped through the door — and Carol, placing a plastic tape against Flora’s forehead, determined that Flora was indeed quite ill, for her temperature was 105 degrees. She turned to Marcelle and told her to call the ambulance.
Immediately Flora went wild, bellowing and moaning about her babies and how she couldn’t leave them, they needed her. She thrashed against Carol’s strong grip for a moment and then gave up and fell weakly back into the cot.
“Go ahead and call,” Carol told Marcelle, “and I’ll hold on to things here until they come.” When Marcelle had gone, Carol commenced talking to the ill woman in a low, soothing voice, stroking her forehead with one hand and holding her by the shoulder with the other, until, after a few moments, Flora began to whimper and then to weep, and finally, as if her heart were broken, to sob. By now Marcelle had returned from calling the ambulance and was standing in the background almost out of sight, while Carol soothed the woman and crooned, “Poor thing, you poor thing.”
“My babies, who’ll take care of my babies?” she wailed.
“I’ll get my brother Terry to take care of them,” Carol promised, and for a second that seemed to placate the woman.
But then she began to wail again, because she knew it was a lie and when she came back her babies would be gone.
No, no, no, no, both Carol and Marcelle insisted. When she got back, the guinea pigs would be here, all of them, every last one. Terry would water and feed them, and he’d clean out the cages every day, just as she did.
“I’ll make sure he does,” Marcelle promised, “or he’ll have his ass in a sling.”
That calmed the woman, but just then two young men dressed in white, the ambulance attendants, stepped into the room, and when Flora saw them, their large, grim faces and, from her vantage point, their enormous, uniformed bodies, her eyes rolled back and she began to wail, “No, no, no! I’m not going! I’m not going!”
The force of her thrashing movements tossed Carol off the cot onto the floor, and moving swiftly, the two young men reached down and pinned Flora against her cot. One of them, the larger one, told the other to bring his bag, and the smaller man rushed out of the trailer to the ambulance parked outside.
“I’m just going to give you something to calm yourself, ma’am,” the big man said in a mechanical way. The other man was back now, and Carol and Marcelle, looking at each other with slight regret and apprehension, stepped out of his way as he pushed through with the black satchel.
In seconds, Flora had been injected with a tranquilizer, and while the two hard-faced, large men in white strapped her body into a four-wheeled, chromium and canvas stretcher, she descended swiftly into slumber. They wheeled her efficiently out of the trailer, as if she were a piece of furniture, and slid her into the back of the ambulance, and then, with Marcelle following in her car, they were gone.
Alone by the roadway outside. Flora’s trailer, Carol watched the ambulance and Marcelle’s battered old Ford head out toward Old Road and away. After a moment or two, drifting from their trailers one by one, came Nancy Hubner, her face stricken with concern, and Captain Dewey Knox, his face firmed to hear grim news, and Merle Ring, his face smiling benignly.
“Where’s my brother Terry?” Carol asked the three as they drew near.
It was near midnight that same night. Most of the trailers were dark, except for Bruce Severance’s, where Terry, after having fed, watered and cleaned the ravenous, thirsty and dirty guinea pigs, was considering a business proposition from Bruce that would not demand humiliating labor for mere monkey-money, and Doreen Tiede’s trailer, where Claudel Bing’s naked, muscular arm was reaching over Doreen’s head to snap off the lamp next to the bed — when out by Old Road the woman Flora Pease, the Guinea Pig Lady, came shuffling along the lane between the pine woods. She moved quickly and purposefully, just as she always moved, but silently now. She wore the clothes she was wearing in the morning, when the men had taken her from her cot and strapped her onto the stretcher — old bib overalls and a faded, stained, plaid flannel shirt. Her face was ablaze with fever. Her red hair ringed her head in a stiff, wet halo that made her look like an especially blessed peasant figure in a medieval fresco, a shepherd or carpenter rushing to see the Divine Child.
When she neared the trailerpark sufficiently to glimpse the few remaining lights and the dully shining, geometric shapes of the trailers through the trees and, here and there, a dark strip of the lake beyond, she cut to her left and departed from the roadway toward the swamp. Without hesitation, she darted into the swamp, locating even in darkness the pathways and patches of dry ground, moving slowly through the mushy, brush-covered muskeg, emerging from the deep shadows of the swamp after a while at the edge of the clearing directly behind her own trailer. Soundlessly, she crossed her back yard, passed the head-high pyramids standing like dolmens in the dim light, and stepped through the broken door into the trailer.
The trailer was in pitch darkness, and the only sound was that of the animals as they chirped, bred and scuffled in their cages through the nighttime. With the same familiarity she had shown cutting across the swamp, Flora moved in darkness to the kitchen area, where she opened a cupboard and drew from a clutter of cans and bottles a red one-gallon can of kerosene. Then, starting at the farthest corner of the trailer, she dribbled the kerosene through every room, looping through and around every one of the cages, until she arrived at the door. She placed the can on the floor next to the broken door, then stepped nimbly outside, where she took a single step toward the ground, lit a wooden match against her thumbnail, tossed it into the trailer and ran.