Part 17 (1/2)

Randy stopped in the path and said, ”Look at me, Ben.” Ben looked up, tear streaks s.h.i.+ning in the moonlight.

”It was a wolf,” Randy said. ”It wasn't a dog any longer. In times like these dogs can turn into wolves. You did just right, Ben. Here, take back your gun.”

The boy took the gun, tucked it under his arm, and they walked on.

Chapter 10.

Randy was having a pleasant, recurrent, Before-The-Day dream. He was awaking in a hotel in Miami Beach and a waitress in a white cap was bringing his morning coffee on a rolling table. Sometimes the waitress looked like Lib McGovern and sometimes like a girl, name forgotten, he had met in Miami. She was always a waitress in the morning, but at night she became an air-line stewardess and they dined together in a little French restaurant where he embarra.s.sed her by eating six chocolate eclairs. She said, as always, ”Your coffee, Randy darling.” He could hear her saying it and he could smell the coffee. He drew up his knees and hunched his shoulders and scrunched his head deeper into the pillow so as not to disturb the dream.

She shook his shoulder and he opened his eyes, still smelling coffee, and closed them again.

He heard her say, ”d.a.m.n it, Randy, if you won't wake up and drink your coffee I'll drink it myself.”

He opened his eyes wide. It was Lib, without a white cap. Incredibly, she was presenting him a cup of coffee. He reached his face out and tasted it. It burned his tongue delightfully. It was no dream. He swung his feet to the floor and took the saucer and cup. He said, ”How?”

”How? You did it yourself, you absent-minded monster. Don't you remember putting a jar of coffee in what you called your iron rations?”

”NO.”

”Well, you did. A six-ounce jar of instant. And powdered cream. And, believe it or not, a pound of lump sugar. Real sugar, in lumps. I put in two. Everybody blesses you.”

Randy lifted his cup, the fog of sleep gone entirely. ”How's Dan?”

”Terribly sore, and stiff, but stronger. He had two cups of coffee and two eggs and, of course, orange juice.”

”Did everybody get coffee?”

”Yes. We had Florence and Alice over for breakfast-it's ten o'clock, you know-and I put some in another jar and took it over to the Henrys. The Admiral was out fis.h.i.+ng. We'll have to give him his share later. Helen has earmarked the broth and bouillon for Dan until he's better; and the candy for the children.” ”Don't forget Caleb.”

”We won't.”

Again, he had slept in his clothes and felt grimy. He said, ”I'm going to shower,” and went into the bathroom. Presently he came out, towel around his middle, and began the hopeless process of honing the hunting knife. ”Did you know,” he said, ”that Sam Hazzard has a straight razor? He's always used one. That's why his face is so spink and unscarred and clean. After I've talked to Dan I've got to see Sam.”

”Why?”

”He's a military man and I need help for a military operation.”

”Can I go with you?”

”Darling, you are my right arm. Where I goeth you can go-up to a point.”

She watched him while he shaved. All women, he thought, from the youngest on up, seemed fascinated by his travail and agony.

Dan was sitting up in bed, his back supported by pillows, his right eye and the right side of his face hidden by bandages. His left eye was purpled but not quite so swollen as before. Helen sat in a straight-backed chair close to the pillows. She had been reading to him. Of all things, she had been reading the log of Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton, heaved up from the teak sea chest during last night's burrowing for iron rations.

”Well, you're alive,” Randy said. ”Tell me the tale. Start at the beginning. No, start before the beginning. Where had you been and where were you going?”

”If the nurse will let me have one more cup of coffee just one-I'll talk,” Dan said. He spoke clearly and without hesitation. There had been no concussion.

Each day when he completed his calls it was Dan Gunn's custom to stop at the bandstand in Marines Park. One of the bandstand pillars had become a special bulletin board on which the people of Fort Repose tacked notices summoning the doctor when there was an emergency. Yesterday, there had been such a notice. It read: Dr. Gunn This morning (Friday) two of my children became violently ill. Kathy has a temperature of l05 and is out of her head. Please come. I am sending this note by Joe Sanchez, who has a horse. Herbert Sunbury.

Sunbury, like Dan, was a native New Englander. He had sold a florist shop in Boston, six years before, to migrate to Florida and operate a nursery. He had acquired acreage, built a house, and planted cuttings and seedlings on the Timucuan six miles upstream of the Bragg house.

Dan pushed the Model-A fast up River Road. Beyond the Bragg place the road became a series of curves, following the serpentine course of the river. Dan had delivered the last two of the Sunburys' four children. He liked the Sunburys. They were cheerful, industrious, and thoughtful. He knew that unless the emergency was real and pressing Herb would not have dispatched the note.

It was real. It was typhoid. It was the typhoid that Dan had half-expected and completely dreaded for weeks, months. Typhoid was the unwelcome, evil sister of any disaster in which the water supply was destroyed or polluted and normal disposal of human waste difficult or impossible.

Betty Sunbury said the two older children had been headachy and feverish for several days but not until Friday morning's early hours had they become violently ill, a rosy rash developing on their torsos. Fortunately, Dan could do something. Aspirin and cold compresses to reduce the fever, terramycin, which came very close to being a specific for typhoid, until the disease was licked; and he had the terramycin.

He reached into his bag and brought out the bottle, h.o.a.rded for this moment. He could have used the antibiotic a score of times to cure other patients of other diseases, but he had always made do with something else, holding this single bottle as a charm against the evil sister. Now it would probably save the Sunbury children. In addition, he had enough vaccine to innoculate the elder Sunburys, the four-year-old, and the babies, and just enough left for Peyton and Ben Franklin, when he returned to the house. Correct procedure would be to innoculate the whole town.

Dan questioned the Sunburys closely. They had been very careful. Their drinking water came from a clear, clean spring bubbling from limestone on high ground across the road. Even so, they boiled it. All their foods, except citrus, they cooked.

Dan looked out at the river gliding smoothly by. He was sure the river was the villain. ”You haven't eaten any raw fish, or shrimp, or sh.e.l.lfish, have you?”

”Oh, no,” Herb said. ”Of course not.”

”What about swimming? Do you swim in the river?”

Herb looked at Betty. ”We don't,” Betty said. ”But Kathy and Herbert, junior, they've been swimming in the river since March.”

”That's it, I guess,” Dan said. ”If the germs are in the river, it only takes one gulp.”

Somewhere in the headwaters of the Timucuan, or in the great, mysterious swamps from which slender streams sluggishly moved toward the St. Johns, a typhoid-carrier had lived, undetected. A hermit, perhaps, or a respectable church woman in a small truck-farm community. When this person's sanitary facilities failed, germ-laden feces had reach the rivers. Thus Dan reconstructed it, driving back toward town on the winding road.

Dan was so absorbed in his deductions and forebodings that he failed to see the woman sitting on the edge of the road until he was almost abreast of her.

He stepped on the brakes hard and the car jarred to a stop. The woman wore jeans and a man's s.h.i.+rt. Her right knee was drawn almost up to her chin and she held her ankle in both hands, her body rocking as if in pain. A swatch of metallic blond hair curtained her features. Dan's first thought was that she had turned her ankle; his second, that she could be a decoy for an ambush. Yet highwaymen rarely operated on unfrequented and therefore unprofitable roads, and had never been reported this close to Fort Repose. The woman looked up, appealingly. He could easily have switched gears and gone on, but he was a physician, and he was Dan Gunn. He turned off the engine and got out of the car.

As soon as his feet touched the macadam he sensed, from her expression, that he had stepped into a trap. Whatever her face showed, it was not pain. When her eyes s.h.i.+fted, and she smiled, he knew her performance had been completed.

Behind him a man spoke: ”All right, Mac, you don't have to go any further.”

Dan swung around. The man who had spoken was one of three, all oddly dressed and all armed. They had materialized from behind scrub palmettos at the side of the road. The leader was squat, and wore a checked gold cap and Bermuda shorts. His arms were abnormally long and hands huge. He carried a submachine gun and handled it like a toy. His belly bulged over his waistband. He ate well. Dan said, ”Look, I'm a doctor. I'm the doctor of Fort Repose. I don't have anything you want.”

The second man advanced on Dan. He was hatless, dressed in a striped sport s.h.i.+rt, and he gripped a baseball bat with both hands. ”Get that, Mick?” he said. ”He don't have nothing we want! Ain't that rich?”

The third man was not a man at all but a boy with fuzz on his chin. The boy wore Levi's, a wide-brimmed hat, high-heeled boots, and twin holster belts slung low. He stood apart from the others, legs spread, hefting a long-barreled revolver in each hand. He looked like an immature imitation of a Western bad man holding up the Wells Fargo stage, but he seemed overly excited and Dan guessed him the most volatile and dangerous of the three.

The woman, grinning, got in the car, wrestled the back seat to the floor, and found the two bottles of bourbon Dan kept hidden there. ”Just like you heard, Buster,” she said. ”The Doc keeps a traveling bar.”

”That's my anesthetic,” Dan said.

Without looking at the woman, the leader said, ”Just leave the liquor in the car, Rumdum. We'll take everything as is. Start walking, Doc.”

Dan said, ”At least let me have my bag. All the instruments and medicines I've got are in there.”