Ed Gorman - Wake Up Little Susie

My Ford bucked, swerved, screeched, whined, and bucked some more before I could fight it to a stop on the wrong side of the road. By now, the woman’s image had finally registered. Mary! It was Mary!

I jumped out of the car and ran back to where she’d been.

But she wasn’t there any longer.

I was alone on the blacktop. Prairie moon. Bay of coyote. Distant odor of skunk. Alone.

I ran up and down the shoulder, frantically calling her name. My legs wanted me to sit down. Bringing the ragtop from 100 mph to zero so quickly hadn’t been good for me or the car.

I ran way past where she’d been. No sign of her.

I looked up at the pines. Had she gone back into the forest? This particular patch went on for miles. Finding her, if she had set her mind on hiding, would be impossible.

Something moved on the edge of my vision, something to the right. But when I turned to look all I saw, about three hundred feet away, was a large culvert. I could hear water trickling from it. There’d been a lot of rain recently.

She peeked out again. That’s what I’d seen moments ago. She might have been a frightened deer, scared of the nearby human, uncertain of his motives.

She saw me. Our eyes met for a second.

She still looked wild, bestial. And then she retreated back inside the culvert. I imagined her racing through the culvert and out the other side to the riverbank.

I had to grab her quickly.

I hurried down the gully, through the knee-high grasses, to the culvert itself. The interior smell was terrible. Rancid water, weeds, animal feces.

She crouched in the center. I could barely see her.

“I want to help you, Mary. Please don’t run away.”

It really. was like talking to a frightened animal.

I was afraid she’d bolt at any moment.

“Please, Mary.”

I started into the culvert on hands and knees.

I could feel the sodden waste soak my trousers and coat my palms. I moved inch by inch.

She starting moving too. Every time I moved, she moved. Back.

“Mary. You need help.”

Our game continued. I’d move forward; she’d move backward. The stench kept getting worse.

She made her move without any warning whatsoever. She had room to turn around, and turn around she did. And immediately started scrambling from the culvert.

She was gone before I could get moving. When I crawled out to the riverbank, I saw her stumbling away far downstream. After the darkness of the culvert, the stars seemed especially low and bright and numerous. Dark water gently lapped the bank.

I ran after her. She helped me by looking over her shoulder every few yards and by stumbling several times.

The river’s edge was sand and hard mud. On a warm night like this, you’d usually find a fisherman or two. The rutted mud explained her stumbling. I stumbled a few times myself.

And then I closed on her. By this time, we were both out of breath and had slowed down measurably. I came dragging up behind her and took her shoulder and pulled her to a stop.

She screamed.

I pulled her to me and clamped my hand over her mouth.

She started kicking me in the shins. It hurt like hell.

“Mary, what’s wrong with you?” I said. “It’s me, McCain. McCain, Mary.”

Then I saw something awful. Something impossible. Those eyes of hers. There was no recognition in them.

Exhausted, she’d quit kicking me. Quit wrestling inside my grasp. I let go of her, took my hand from her mouth.

“Mary,” I said, “don’t you know who I am?”

She looked at me with the frank, uncomprehending gaze of a child. In a very quiet voice, no melodrama whatsoever, she said, “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

“You’re saying she has amnesia?” Miriam Travers said.

Dr. Watkins pawed at his jowly face.

He still wore a black rinse on his once-gray hair and still filled his showerhead with aftershave lotion.

He stank of it the way frontier docs, according to legend, had stunk of John Barleycorn. His wife had died two years ago. He was sixty-four and had just started dating. There were a lot of gentle jokes about his love life.

“Now that’s one of those five-dollar words I hate to use,” he said, fiddling with his stethoscope. The only hospital in Black River Falls was a sixteen-bed affair. If you were very bad off, you went to Cedar Rapids; worse than that, you went to Iowa City. He peered down at Mary, asleep in her hospital bed. She’d been cleaned up but you could still see bruises. “She’s had some kind of terrible shock. So right now she’s not remembering too good.”

“But she didn’t even recognize me!”

Miriam said. She’d held back tears for quite a while now. It was 2ccjj A.M. and she was spent. She had a very sick husband at home and a daughter whose state had yet to be determined.

I slid my arm around her. She leaned against it, frail and weary.

“Again, Miriam, we don’t know what happened. But obviously something pretty bad did. Amnesia, as they like to call it on television, comes in all kinds of forms. It rarely lasts very long. I expect in a day or two she’ll be saying hello to you when you walk into the room.”

“But where has she been? What happened to her?”

Miriam said.

Those were the questions of the evening. I’d brought her straight to the hospital. She’d slept most of the way. Not once had she shown any recognition of me. A couple of times, I wondered if she was still alive.

“As I told you, Miriam, there’s no sign of concussion. She has feeling in all her extremities. Her limbs are functioning well. And the bumps and scrapes she has are relatively minor. Cleaning them up made them look a lot less threatening. Her injuries mostly seem to be psychological. And there again, once she gets her physical strength back, she’ll be better able to deal with whatever happened to her.”

“Was she… raped?” Miriam asked, obviously dreading the answer.

“Not that we could tell.”

“I didn’t tell Bill about any of this,” she said to me.

“Good,” I said.

“I’m not sure he could stand to hear it.”

I gave her another squeeze.

“Now, I recommend some bedrest for you too.

You’re nearly as worn out as your daughter. You need some sleep. And you also need some help around the house.”

“We can’t afford it.”

“I’ve got a high school girl who plans to go to med school at the university. She helps out in my office ten hours a week. I pay her thirty-five cents an hour. She wants to get as much experience as she can. I’ll have her give you a call.”

“That’s very nice of you, doctor.”

He smiled. “Well, isn’t that what doctors are supposed to be, Miriam?

Nice?”

On the way back home, she said, “She was going to tell you something.”

“Yes.”

“I wish I knew what it was.”

“So do I.”

She turned and looked at me. “I shouldn’t say this, Sam. But she loves you so much.”

The streets were empty. A rising wind whipped the streetlights around, casting shifting patterns of tree leaves on the street. The cars along the curb looked like slumbering animals. All the house windows were dark.

She said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s fine, Miriam. It’s fine. It’s just I don’t know what to say back.”

She put her hand on my shoulder. “That’s all right, Sam.”

“I keep wondering about that envelope from the county.”

“So do I. I don’t know why she’d write them. What would she be looking for?”

“I’ll have the Judge call over there,” I said. “The woman I spoke to didn’t want to wade back through all her correspondence.