Chapter Five · Sienna
CHAPTER FIVE
SIENNA
Trip came out of the ICU on a Wednesday with a chest tube scar, a discharge folder nobody would read, and orders not to lift anything heavier than his own opinions for six weeks, and when I pulled up to the patient loading zone at Carilion he was already outside in a wheelchair he clearly hated, arguing with a transport aide about whether he could stand.
“He can stand,” I told the aide. “He signed himself out against exactly nobody’s advice, he’s twenty-three, and if he tears something showing off, I’m the one who gets the call, so we’re all invested.”
“Ma’am,” the aide said gratefully, and fled.
Trip stood. It cost him, and he let me see about ten percent of what it cost him, which by patch arithmetic meant it cost him everything. He folded himself into my truck one careful inch at a time and got the seatbelt across his chest and sat there breathing shallow with his jaw set.
“Thank you for not letting me die in a ditch,” he said.
“I didn’t let you do anything. I showed up and did my job.”
“That’s what I’m thanking you for.” He looked out the windshield. “Showing up.”
I drove him to the clubhouse because that is where he asked to go, and because I understood without him saying it that he needed to be around patch more than he needed to be around people who would look at him like he was made of glass.
His mother had been at the hospital every day and had cried every day, and there is a kind of twenty-three-year-old who can take a bullet easier than he can take his mother crying, and Trip was that kind, and it was not my job to fix it.
He didn’t sleep, which surprised me. He watched the corridor go by with his head against the glass, the terminals and the weigh station and the exits counting down to home, and somewhere around Christiansburg he said, to the window, “I keep thinking about how loud it wasn’t.”
“The shot?”
“Everything after. I’m laying there and I can hear the creek.
I can hear Boone yelling into his phone way off somewhere.
And I keep thinking, this is it, this is the whole thing, a creek and somebody else’s voice, and I hadn’t done nothing yet.
Not one thing you could put in a paragraph.
” He rubbed his sternum, careful, over the seatbelt.
“Twenty-three years old and my paragraph was going to be that I rode with a club and got shot on a road.”
“And now?”
“Now I figure I owe a paragraph.” He looked over at me. “That sound stupid.”
“That’s the least stupid thing anybody’s said to me all week,” I said, and meant it, and he went quiet in the way of a kid who got the answer he needed and didn’t want it noticed, and slept the last twenty minutes with his mouth open like the age he actually was.
I had not been inside the Copperhead clubhouse in ten years.
I want to be accurate about that, because accuracy is the only thing that has ever kept me upright.
I had been in the parking lot. I had put staples in a prospect’s scalp on the tailgate of a truck in that lot when Trip was nineteen.
I had loaded two men out of that lot into a rig over the years and been polite and fast and gone.
But I had not crossed the doorway, because a doorway is a statement in this county, and I had spent ten years being careful about my statements.
I crossed it carrying Trip’s discharge folder, which is the kind of loophole a person builds for herself.
Inside it was cooler and darker and smaller than my memory insisted, the way those rooms always are.
Somebody had been cleaning it who believed in cleaning, which was new.
There was actual furniture, and a corkboard by the door with the training schedule for the yard printed on real paper, and a coffee smell instead of a beer smell, and I stood there recalibrating ten years of assumptions while three men moved around Trip with the specific gentleness of people handling something expensive.
And on the far wall there was a length of black cloth pinned above a row of photographs, and I did not let myself look at it twice, because the newest frame was Pike Danner, and I had known Pike since he taught my driver’s ed class in a church parking lot, and there is a limit to what a person can carry through a doorway in one afternoon.
Diesel met me by the office. He is younger than his job and older than his face, and he was wearing a wedding ring that still looked surprised to be there.
“Sienna,” he said. “Come in the office a minute.”
I came in the office. He closed the door and sat down behind a desk that had a filing system and a printer and a wire basket labeled SAME DAY in a woman’s handwriting, and I revised another decade of assumptions, because whatever this club had been when I left, somebody had gotten hold of it since.
“Trip’s solid,” I said, before he could start. “The lung’s up, the tube site’s clean, and he needs sixty days of being bored. His biggest risk is his own personality.”
“That’s not what I want to talk about.”
“I know it isn’t.” I stayed standing, because his office had two chairs and sitting in one of them was a negotiation I wasn’t ready to open.
“But it’s what I want to talk about first, because he’s my patient and you’re his president, and the order matters.
He’ll push. He’s twenty-three and embarrassed and grateful, which is the most dangerous combination in medicine.
Somebody with authority tells him to sit still, he sits still. That’s you.”
“That’s me,” Diesel agreed. “Done.”
Diesel put his hands flat on the desk, and I watched what it cost him, because Diesel Harrow is not a man who asks for things, and I understood that whatever was coming had been rehearsed.
“Somebody shot one of mine from two hundred yards and there wasn’t a thing any man in that lot could have done for him,” he said.
“You had him packaged in twelve minutes. Sixty seconds either way and there’s a new frame on that wall out there.
” He looked at me straight. “I need my people trained. Bleeding, airways, when to call and when to drive. I need someone to teach my men how to keep a man alive in a ditch, and I need it to be you, and I’m asking. ”
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t finish.”
“You asked. I answered. No.”
He sat back and was quiet for about five seconds, which I would learn was his negotiating style, and which is a good one.
“Why.”
“Because I’m the county,” I said. “Not the club. The county. You opened your charter and your books last fall, and that was the right thing, and I’ll tell you something you maybe don’t know, which is that it hasn’t reached Ammons Creek yet.
Out there I’m still the girl who used to be Cutter Reeves’s, and the day I start teaching in this clubhouse is the day half my county decides I went patch, and then there are doors that don’t open when I knock on them at two in the morning, and people die of that.
Perception is a clinical outcome where I work. I can’t give it away.”
Diesel took that the way a scale takes weight, without argument.
“Then what would yes look like,” he said. “Because I watched a woman say no to this club once and then build the version of yes she could live with, and I’ve been married to the results since May. So I’m asking. What does your version look like?”
I had thought about nothing else since Trip came into my county shot to pieces, and we both knew it, and there was no point pretending the list wasn’t already written.
“My barn,” I said. “Not here. Evenings, my schedule. No cuts in my barn, not because I’m ashamed of you but because what I teach has to belong to the county, and a man learns different with his colors on, and I need them learning like neighbors.
Everything I teach gets taught for everybody.
The man you hate on the worst road in the county gets the same tourniquet as a brother, or none of you carry one at all.
And it’s rules, written down, and every man signs them, so there is no version later where somebody says he didn’t understand what this was and what it wasn’t. ”
“All right.”
“I’m not done. Nobody pays me. Not money, not favors, not firewood showing up stacked on my porch, and I know how this county thanks people, so I’m saying the firewood part out loud.”
Something moved at the corner of Diesel’s mouth and was gone.
“All right,” he said. “When?”
“I need a week. Supplies, tourniquets, trainers, and I have to build a curriculum that doesn’t look like I robbed a state certification course, which I will be doing. Thursday. Seven in the evening. First class is ten men, your pick, and if it goes the way I want it to, we go from there.”
“Thursday, nineteen hundred,” Diesel said, and stood, and put his hand out.
I looked at his hand.
“Nothing personal,” I said. “I’m about to write a rule about touching and I’d rather not open with an exception.”
He took his hand back with the first entire smile I had seen on him.
“Evelyn is going to like you a great deal,” he said, “and I want to be somewhere else when it happens.”
Trip was set up on the couch when I came out, propped the way I would have propped him, with water in reach, and a man on either end of the room pretending not to guard him.
I went over the wound care one more time for the room at large, because the room at large was who would be doing it: the site kept dry and covered, the walking schedule, the spirometer ten times a day and no negotiating, and the four signs that meant you put him in a truck and call me from the road.
Sudden shortness of breath. Sharp pain that changes when he breathes.
The blue tint at the lips. The fast heart with nothing to explain it.
“Say them back,” I told the biggest one, a quiet mountain the others called Mater, and he said them back word for word, twice, in the voice of a man reciting something he intended to keep, and then he wrote them on the back of a fuel receipt and put the receipt in the clear part of his wallet where a license goes, and I revised my estimate of Mater considerably.
Rae called at six, while I was still in the truck in my own driveway making lists.
“Well?” she said.
“Well what?”
“Charlene called Dorene, Dorene called my sister, my sister called me while you were still on Route 11. You’re teaching the Copperheads first aid in your barn.” A beat. “Thursdays, I hear.”
“It’s not,” I started, and stopped, because it was. “It’s stop-the-bleed for the county. They’re just the first class.”
“Uh-huh.” I could hear her moving around her kitchen. “You want help?”
That stopped me with my hand on the door.
“You’re offering to help.”
“I’m offering to stand in the back of a barn on my own time and hand you gauze so that the best trauma instructor in three counties doesn’t teach her first class in ten years alone in a room full of her own history,” Rae said.
“Also Dutch Voyles is going to show up whether anybody invites him or not, and somebody has to be assigned to Dutch.”
“He’s not on the list.”
“Honey,” Rae said, “there’s no list Dutch Voyles has ever been on. Thursday at what time?”
At the door, Trip said my name.
I turned around.
“That night,” he said. His voice had dropped, and the room politely stopped hearing us. “Everybody keeps asking did I see the shooter. I didn’t see nothing. But there’s a thing from before that I keep going back around, and I don’t know if it’s real or if it’s the drugs they had me on.”
“Tell me anyway. That’s allowed.”
“Not yet.” His jaw worked. “I want to say it once, and I want to say it right, with the people in the room who need to hear it. When I got it straight in my head.”
Eleven years of run sheets have taught me exactly when to push a patient and when the pushing costs more than the answer, and this was the second kind, and also he was twenty-three and had earned the right to author one thing about the worst night of his life.
“When you’re ready,” I said, “you know where I work.”
Cutter was on the porch when I came out.
He was smoking, ankles crossed, watching the road the way those men watch a road, and when I came through he did not speak and did not look at me straight on.
He just stepped sideways and held the screen door wide, making a space I could pass through without touching him or having to admit I had seen him.
Ten years, and the one thing that man remembered how to do was get out of my light.
I took the space. I got in my truck. I made it all the way to the second cattle guard before I let out the breath.
Here is the thing about ten years that nobody tells you.
You think of it as a wall you built, one day at a time, brick on brick on brick.
Then a boy gets shot in your county, and you walk through one doorway carrying a discharge folder, and you find out it was never a wall.
It was a door you were holding shut, by hand, the whole time, and your arms are tired, and the worst part is that on the other side of it is not the man.
On the other side is who you were when you knew him, the girl on the fender in the green dress, and she is the one I have been holding the door against for ten years, because she knew things I have spent a decade insisting I don’t.
I drove home the long way, past the barn, and sat in the driveway a while with the engine ticking, making a list of rules, which is what I do instead of crying, and has the advantage of producing a list.