Paul Doiron - Bad Little Falls

Can I have a Coke? I need one dollar and twenty-five cents.

Lucas, don’t think you can trick me just because I’m upset.

When she goes out the automatic door, a cold wind blows in behind her, and the mean lady behind the desk shivers hard.

If Prester is frozen solid, that must mean his willie is frozen, too. What if the doctor accidentally snaps it off like an icicle?

OUCH!

Ma comes back and she has something in her hand. I can’t tell what. She’s got her eyes closed and she’s moving her lips like she’s praying, but no words are coming out. She sits down next to me again.

What did you forget, Ma?

She holds out her hand and there’s a little green plastic chip. It says UNITY/SERVICE/RECOVERY in a triangle around the words 3 MONTHS.

What’s that? I ask.

My good-luck charm, she says.

You can tell a lot about a town from its hospital. The one in Machias was located on a piney stretch of road, not near anything in particular except an abandoned horse-racing track festooned with NO TRESPASSING signs. Most people would have driven past the building without realizing it was the local medical center. The low-slung brick structure was smaller than my old junior high in Scarborough.

Whoever decorated the interior had gone for a casual down-home effect, sort of like a country inn. The waiting room was painted a canary yellow, with several blue couches and floral-print chairs arranged around an imitation woodstove. A totally bald man who looked like he might have fought in the Battle of the Bulge sat in a robe and slippers, watching old newsreels play in his head. The only other person in the room was an odd-looking boy who had his legs drawn up beneath him in his chair and was scribbling violently in a notebook.

We met a male nurse, a whip-thin guy in green scrubs, coming down the checkerboard hallway that led to the emergency room.

“Hey, Sheriff,” the nurse said. “What’s up?”

“Who’s on duty in the ER this morning, Tommy?”

“Dr. Chatterjee.”

“Can I speak with him?”

“He’s with a patient-it’s a severe hypothermia case.”

“Yes, I know,” said the sheriff. “The patient’s name is Prester Sewall. We have reason to believe he might be dangerous.”

The nurse nodded as if he understood-although he clearly didn’t-and disappeared down the hall in the direction of the ER.

The last time I’d set foot in a hospital had been a year earlier, when I’d had my skull fractured by the scariest man I’d ever met. He’d beaten me to within an inch of my life, and it was a miracle I’d survived. It was a different hospital, different emergency room, but the memories of that day made the hairs on my neck prickle.

After a few minutes, a doctor in a white coat and scrubs came hurrying along from the ER. He had the darkest skin of anyone I’d met in Washington County, and jet-black hair swept up from his forehead. His plastic-frame glasses didn’t hide the shadows under his eyes.

“Is there a problem?” There was a trace of Bangalore in his inflections.

“Not yet,” said Rhine.

“I’ve been up since last night, Sheriff, so I am in no shape for badinage.” When he spoke, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a walnut caught in his throat.

“I’m stationing one of my deputies in a chair beside Prester Sewall’s bed.”

Young Dr. Chatterjee gave a high-pitched laugh. “Tell him to bring a good book.”

“Now you’re the one not being clear, Doc.”

The doctor crooked his finger at us. “Follow me.”

He led us to the intensive-care unit, or med-surg unit, as they called it at this hospital. It was an open area-loud with beeping machines, buzzing phones, and snatches of conversation among passing people-where a nurse sat at a central desk, facing a row of glass-walled rooms. In one of these rooms lay Prester Sewall.

If anything, he looked even worse than the last time I’d seen him. He was stretched out on a wheeled bed, with a sheet pulled up around his chest and an IV jammed into his freckled arm. Most of his nose and both of his ears had gone completely black. His blistered cheeks were mauve. His hands were wrapped in bandages that made his arms look like soft white clubs.

“We’ve just moved him here from the ER,” said Chatterjee.

“Can he hear us?” Rhine asked.

“We’ve given him a dopamine infusion, but he’s so exhausted, he keeps slipping back into sleep.”

“This is the warden who treated him,” the sheriff explained.

Chatterjee studied my face. “You did an excellent job of rewarming him. He’s not showing any signs of atrial fibrillation.”

“So it looks like he’s going to make it, then?” Rhine asked.

“His condition is critical but hemodynamically stable,” the doctor said.

I sensed movement behind me.

“Prester!”

Jamie Sewall stood in the door. Her hair was a frizzled mess and her eyes were red as beets, but I recognized the high cheekbones, the wide lips.

“How did you get in here?” the doctor asked.

“He’s my brother!”

“Miss Sewall, please,” implored the sheriff. “You can’t be in here right now. His condition isn’t stable yet.”

“He’s my brother!” She seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilating.

Chatterjee stepped between the young woman and the bed, but she nearly knocked him aside.

“Warden, can you help me with this?” asked the sheriff.

“Miss Sewall.” I put my hand on her arm, but she threw it off. I tried again with more strength.

“Let go of me!”

“Take her outside,” the doctor told me. “There’s a room down the hall-number three. Stay with her.”

“I want to talk with him!”

“He’s sedated,” I said softly, trying to calm her down with my voice while I pulled her from the bedside. “He can’t speak to you.”

“I’ll be there in a moment,” said Chatterjee.

The woman turned her brown eyes up at me, and I felt her resistance give way. “Why can’t I stay here?”

“They’re trying to take care of him.”

It was the only answer I could muster, but it must have sufficed, because she went willingly with me into the examination room the doctor had indicated.

Inside room number three, I sat her down in a plastic chair and stood with my back against the door in case she grew wild again. She had one hand clenched into a small fist, as if ready to throw a punch with it, and she was shaking and crying at the same time.

“Why won’t they let me see him?” She had a smoker’s rough voice, although there was no smell of cigarettes on her clothing, just a touch of faded perfume, musky and sweet in the closed room. “They said when he left the ER, I could go in and see him, but now the nurse at the desk says he’s not permitted to have visitors. Why is the sheriff here? What’s going on?”

“The police are conducting an investigation. Do you know what happened to your brother last night, Miss Sewall?”

“He has hypothermia. The doctor told me he got lost in the storm.” She used her sweater hem to dab at her eyes.

“He was in a car that got stuck on a logging road in Township Nineteen. Do you have any idea what he was doing out there?”

She took a while to respond. “No.”

“Does he own any property in the Heath?”

Jamie Sewall burst out laughing. “Prester? He doesn’t even own a car.”

When she smiled, she became again the beautiful young woman I’d met the previous morning. So far, she had shown no signs of recognizing me from McDonald’s. I was just another guy in a uniform, as far as she was concerned.

“Where does he live?” I asked.

“With me and my son, Lucas, and my sister, Tammi, in Whitney,” she said.