Chris Offutt - The Good Brother

The next time he woke, he felt stronger. The room was small, with the lowest ceiling he’d ever seen. The window ran from the floor to the ceiling, and as he looked through the glass, a bull trotted by, its gait as buoyant as that of a deer. A flock of starlings landed among the boughs of a cottonwood. He heard children laughing. Wind moved the high grass like the surface of a lake. His leg ached and he was relieved to see its outline below the blanket.

Joe could recall nothing after the truck ride off the mountain. Something prowled the edges of his mind but he couldn’t capture it. The woman entered the room and he feigned sleep until actual slumber came.

Each time he woke he was stronger and more hungry. On a bedside table were a clock, toothbrush, water pitcher, and glass. Two bedpans sat on the floor and he was embarrassed by the sight. He wondered if he could walk, a thought that drenched him with fear.

The room seemed to belong to a young boy. Rough planks mounted on the wall held the bounty of the woods — skulls of raccoon, fox, bird, and deer. There was a beaver skull bigger than his clasped hands, its incisors the dark gold of feed corn. Beside severed bird claws lay what appeared to be the scalp of a great horned owl and next to that, a roundish skull with huge eye sockets. The walls were festooned with feathers he didn’t recognize. The pelt of a coyote hung beside an enormous wing. A snakeskin was pinned to the window frame.

Beside him the digital clock flicked a minute. He didn’t like such a clock, which seemed to hold time in place. A clock with a face and two hands lent a sense of time’s movement, its immensity, and Joe wondered if he was old-fashioned. Maybe people had felt the same resistance when timepieces became portable enough to carry on their person. He had no idea how many days he’d been in bed.

He woke later to a presence in the room and slowly recognized Ty sitting in a chair. Joe tried to speak but the words emerged slow and garbled as if he were hearing his voice underwater. Sleep overcame him. When he woke again, Ty was gone and the woman was back. She wore boots, a denim workshirt, and heavy wool pants with red suspenders. Against the low ceiling, she seemed very tall.

“You look better,” she said. “Hungry?”

Joe nodded.

“About time.”

She left, the heels of her boots heavy on the slat floor. She closed the door and Joe noticed that it had no interior knob. He stared through the window. Above the ridge was the biggest cloud he’d ever seen. It was like a gunship moored in the sky, its lower half dark gray, its wispy tips a glare of white. The woman returned with a plate of cold meat. His jaw ached from the abrupt salivation but after six bites his appetite was sated and he was tired again. As sleep pulled him, the woman wiped grease from his lips.

When he woke, he heard the sound of children’s voices rising in laughter, turning to tears. The woman was changing the bandage on his leg. It throbbed at her touch. The entry wound was healing into a slight depression, but the other side of his leg was still a mess.

“Not as bad as it looks,” the woman said. “I’ve seen legs worse that a bull walked on.”

“Who are you?” he asked. His voice sounded rusty at the edges, a neglected tool.

“I’m Botree.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Ten days.”

He frowned in surprise.

“You’re on drugs,” she said. “They make you sleep and lose track of time.”

“What kind?”

She plucked a small bottle from one of the shelves. Three more sat beside it.

“Butorphanol,” she read aloud.

“Never heard of it.”

“Knocks a horse out easy.”

“I could have swore I heard kids.”

“You did.”

“Was Ty here?”

She nodded.

“Am I a prisoner?”

“No.”

“Then why’s there no doorknob?”

Botree pointed to a screwdriver on a string that was tied to a nail beside the door.

“That’ll get you out. Been there twenty years.”

“What is this place?”

“My room when I was a girl,” she said. “Like it?”

Joe closed his eyes. His leg stirred him with pain and he swallowed the pills by the table. He didn’t know if weeks or hours had passed when the low voices of men woke him.

“This whole damn setup could cost my license.”

“Nobody knows nothing on it.”

“Johnny talks a blue streak.”

“He won’t.”

“He might brag it up, Owen.”

Joe opened his eyes. Two men stood just outside the door, talking quietly.

“There’s other things to worry on right now,” Owen said.

“Like me getting used as a medic for your games.”

“These aren’t games and you damn well know it.”

“You got your first casualty, a goddam innocent victim.”

“We don’t know anything about him.”

“Took three men to bring down one in the timber.”

“Rodney, we all appreciate you taking care of him.”

“Yeah, and I’ll appreciate you paying off my school loans if I lose my license over treating a man ought to see a real doctor.”

“You’re a real doc.”

“We’re talking about a man might not walk again,” Rodney said. Joe pushed himself up on his elbow.

“I’ll walk,” he said.

The men stepped into the room and Rodney’s gaze calmed the flare of anger that had driven Joe to speak. Owen emptied a sack onto the bedside table. Joe recognized his toothbrush and personal items, including his cash, the gold piece, and the belt balancer Morgan had given him. He wondered about his pistol.

“Got this stuff off Ty Skinner. Travel light, don’t you.”

“I get it,” Joe said. “You shoot a man, take his stuff, and evict him all at once.”

“That’s not how it is.”

“I guess it’d be a whole lot easier if I went ahead and died.”

“I don’t know how easy it’d be,” Owen said. “But things would sure be on the simple side, Rodney here’d sleep better, and I’d get to keep your money.”

Joe began to laugh. The two men joined him, awkwardly at first but relaxing into the shared need for release. Joe realized that laughing with these men was what Boyd would have done.

Rodney sat on a chair beside the bed and lifted the blanket to expose Joe’s leg. Owen left the room. Rodney removed the bandage and cleaned the wounds, his touch gentle, his expression tightly focused. Joe flinched at the rivets of pain that cleared his head and watered his eyes. He stared at the yellowed skull of a deer and repeated in his mind the phrase “Not me, not me.” The pain subsided and he relaxed. Sweat slid into his eyes. He was more fully alert than he had been since the barn.

“Well,” he said to Rodney.

“It’s bad.”

“Tell me all of it.”

“The first bullet lodged against the lower femur near the knee. Your little surgery drove that bullet out pretty good. Problem is, the second bullet fragmented. I picked pieces out all night. You cracked the bone, but that’s pretty much healed already. There’s nerve damage but I don’t know how much. Worse is you nicked the patella and severed the medial collateral ligament,”

“What’s all that add up to?”

“Know how a knee works?”

“No,” Joe said.

“It’s where your leg bones meet. Ligament holds them in place. There’s a big one on top that covers your kneecap, two in between the bones, and two more on the side. You cut the side one in half.”

“What’s a ligament?”

“It’s like a short piece of rubber stapled to the bones. The rubber gives when you walk but it always snaps the bone back in place.”

“So what’s that mean?”

“Bottom part of your leg won’t always stay where it’s supposed to,”