Lee Goldberg: The Walk

“Hey Marty,” a voice yelled, “wake the fuck up.”

He turned his head, looked up to his right and saw a figure standing on the edge of the high, vertical riverbank.

It couldn’t be.

Marty blinked hard and squinted at the trick of the light.

“I knew you were alive,” Buck yelled happily. “You’re the luckiest damn guy I’ve ever met. Now, are you going to lie there all day feeling sorry for yourself or are you going to get up?”

It was one of those utterly improbable and convenient coincidences that he railed against every time he came across them in a script, an undeniable hallmark of weak plotting and hack writing. And yet there Buck Weaver was, like a western hero, the sun behind his back, casting his long shadow across the concrete river.

Marty smiled. “Buck, what are you doing here?”

“Saving your skinny ass.”

“What are you waiting for?” Marty replied, “Get down here and do it.”

“That’s not exactly the plan I had in mind.”

“Then what’s your plan?”

“My plan is that you get up off your ass, like I said.”

For a moment, Marty’s anger actually eclipsed his crippling pain. “I’m impaled on a fucking piece of rebar. Why don’t you come down here and help me?”

“Because I’m not fucking Spiderman. These banks are totally vertical, so that’s out, and if I try climbing down that bridge, I could bring it all down on top of you, not to mention me. I suppose I could go all the way back to Balboa Park and walk up the canal from there, but you’ll probably bleed to death before I get back. So you might as well get off your ass. You’re fucked no matter what.”

Marty closed his eyes and groaned. He felt the blood pulsing out of his wound. “And then what am I supposed to do?”

“Walk to the park and climb out of the river.”

Marty had to laugh, even though the slightest motion of his stomach caused a new wave of pain. “I got a better idea. You go find help. I’ll wait here.”

“There isn’t any help. I’m it. And I’m telling you to get up. Be a fucking man.”

Be a fucking man.

Of course, Marty thought, why didn’t I think of that. “How did you find me?”

“We can have a fucking chat when you’re on your feet,” Buck yelled angrily. “Now get up, goddamn it! You can’t catch fish with your line in the boat.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me. Get up!”

Marty didn’t know how to lift himself off the spike, and even if he did, he was afraid the pain would be so bad, he’d fall right back on it again, impaling himself somewhere else even worse. He was also afraid of how much it would hurt, though it was hard to imagine anything hurting more than it already did.

“How am I supposed to do this, Buck?”

“Grab the car with one hand, use the other to steady yourself. Then bend your knees, plant your feet, and use your hands and legs to simultaneously lift and push yourself up. Nothing to it.”

It sounded like the most complicated physical procedure Marty had ever heard. At this moment, Olympic gymnastics seemed simpler to perform. But Buck was right, Marty had no choice, unless he wanted to stay there and bleed to death.

With his left hand, Marty grabbed hold of the car, made sure he had a firm grip, then placed his right hand flat beside him and tried not to think about what the spongy surface was under his palm. Then he drew his knees up, which caused him to slightly shift position. The bolt of pain that shot from his wound took his breath away.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Marty whispered to himself. Somehow, though, Buck heard him.

“I read about this Texas Ranger in the old west, got himself captured by the Mexicans. You know what they did to him? They made him stick an arm into this knothole that went through a pecan tree. They put a big rock in his hand, then tied his fist shut around it so he couldn’t pull his arm back through the knothole. They left him like that for the wolves or the Indians or whatever. You know what that tough bastard did? Cut his own arm off with a pocket knife and dragged himself 40 miles to the nearest settlement. And you’re complaining about one, lousy sliver in your flab?”

Put like that, his problems did seem a bit petty. Marty counted to three and did it.

The agony was excruciating. He screamed, the rebar sliding out of him with a moist squish. It felt like half his guts came out with it, too. Just before he fainted against the Buick, he imagined his intestines trailing out behind him, tangled in the pipe.

For a moment, he was just floating, the pain was gone, and he was blissfully calm. Then his consciousness came back, pushed forward by a stampede of pain that pounded through his body.

His eyes flashed open again.

“See, that wasn’t so bad,” Buck said.

“My side is killing me.”

“You got to walk it off, like a cramp.”

Marty tried to stand up straight, but the pain was so bad, he started to see lights in his eyes, like flashbulbs going off. He blinked hard, his vision cleared, and he stumbled around the bloody spike, trying not to look at the other bodies impaled on it. He staggered into the river bed, clutching his side, feeling the blood coursing between his fingers.

“I’m gonna bleed to death, Buck.”

“Probably,” Buck replied from the bank. “Shove your shirt into the wound and press as hard as you can, try to stop the bleeding.”

“It’s going to hurt.”

“It already hurts, how much worse can it get?”

“Easy for you to say.”

Marty untucked his shirt, gathered up his shirt-tails, and crammed the fabric against his wound. It was like sticking another spike in his flesh. He whimpered.

“Press harder, Marty.”

“It hurts,” Marty yelled, nearly crying.

“It’s better than being dead, goddamn it. Now hold it tight against the wound and start walking.”

Marty hugged the concrete bank to his right, staggered under the tunnel created by the fallen section of overpass, and then he just kept going, dragging his shoulder along the wall, using it as a support to prop himself up.

Above him, Buck followed along. “When we get to the park, you can follow some of the medical advice I gave you at the field hospital.”

“You want me to look for horsehair to put in the wound?”

“Horseshit would be better, but mud will do.”

This talk about the field hospital and treating his wound raised an obvious question. What was Buck doing here?

“So now will you tell me how you found me?”

“I wasn’t looking for you. I was looking for Clara Hobart.”

Marty looked up at Buck, but from his angle against the concrete wall, he couldn’t see Buck’s face, just the shadow he cast as he followed him. “How did you know about Clara?”

“You told me.”

“I did?”

“It was one of your rants explaining why you didn’t have to do a fucking thing for anybody because you already did your heroic deed for that kid’s mother,” Buck replied. “But since Molly’s toast, and you technically did nothing heroic, I said it didn’t count. Saving her kid would count.”

“I don’t remember having that conversation.”

“You wouldn’t, selfish bastard, which is why I decided to come here and do it for you. I figured you’d forget about her. So, as you can imagine, I nearly shit myself when I saw you down there.”

“I know I didn’t say anything to you about Dandelion Preschool.”

“You didn’t have to, I’m a licensed investigator and bounty hunter. This is what I do for a living. I saw the kid was wearing a Dandelion Preschool t-shirt in the picture you’re carrying around, so I deduced, as the crack investigative professional that I am, that she might be enrolled there.”