The Bohemian Girl

Chapter NINETEEN
They came at night, night after night, and led him out over the prairie. They had horses and they made him ride one, a raw-boned old stallion with gaunt ribs. The beast had a terrible canter and it was torture for his back, but they rode on and on and then every night it was the same: the empty town, the doors blowing in the wind. Alone. He had been in a hotel but he was out in the town looking for something and then he couldn’t find the hotel where Janet was waiting for him, only the dark streets and the deserted railroad station, the iron tracks gone and the sleepers decayed among the cinders, the pain of the brutal ride always with him. People came and went but were not people, only shadows, shapes. He thought he would have to kill them or they would kill him. He found a store with the shelves still stocked but everything dusty and gritty, no light, feeling his way, looking for a gun. Somebody was going to kill him. He could feel his heart seize up and almost stop. The shelves were full of boxes. He’d take down boxes and go through them and find women’s hats, coffee pots, dolls, and some stuffed with bloody rags, and he’d put them all back and put the boxes back on the shelves and he’d take down more boxes and they’d be the same ones, women’s hats, dolls, blood-soaked rags, and he’d put them back and go to a different part of the store, different shelves, and he’d take them down and they’d be the same ones, women’s hats, rags brown with dried blood. His back was breaking from bending over. There was a gun there, he’d left a gun there, bought it one day and said he’d come back for it and now the store was closed and he had to find it. He found ammunition and set it aside and then he went through more boxes and he couldn’t find the ammunition. There were more boxes, a huge pile of boxes; he had to stand on boxes to reach the boxes he wanted; he needed a knife to open them but there was no knife—
They came for him and gave him a hideous, raw-boned stallion to ride and they galloped over the prairie, the ride painful; he couldn’t keep his seat in the saddle, bouncing like a beginner, feeling his back almost break, blisters forming down his thighs. He had trouble walking because of the blisters. The town was dark, empty, dead. They were coming for him and he had to get a gun, but he’d left it in the hotel and he couldn’t find the hotel, they kept lying to him about where it was, an evil-faced child laughing while she lied to him. In the store, he began to pull boxes from the shelves in the dark, looking for a gun; the boxes piled up, box after box of women’s hats. Then they were coming for him. Most of them came to watch; only the one came to kill him. The figure came into the store carrying a shotgun, saw Denton and came very close and in the dark Denton could hear and he could smell the approach, the figure in a long duster with the collar turned up and hat low over the eyes, tobacco breath and horse and something foul, as if somebody had soiled his trousers. Denton turned and the boxes were in the way; he ran over them, jumped them, climbed them, and the figure shot him in the back, the pain intense, heart-stopping. He put a hand to his back and felt blood, a hole his hand went into, meat. The figure shot him again.
When they gave him the horse, he said he couldn’t ride because he’d been shot but they made him get into the saddle and they tied him on. The horse was ugly, emaciated, huge. He bounced in the saddle; his back was on fire. At the hotel he asked for a doctor and they said down the street, but down the street it was dark, everything closed; there was no doctor. He couldn’t find the hotel where Janet was waiting for him. He went into a store whose door was hanging open, banging in the wind like gunshots. He thought he might find a gun in there. They watched him, laughed at him. They bent over him and stared into his eyes and an evil-faced child laughed. He began to take down boxes, women’s hats, smelly rags all bloody, the warehouse was full of boxes, all the same, and he opened each one the same, took out the hat, put it back, checked it off on the paper and closed the box and took down the next. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over—
When it was light men came and looked at him and spoke in some language he didn’t understand and shook their heads and went away.
They said when he’d finished the boxes he could have a bath but he had to finish the boxes. When he made mistakes they laughed at him. Over and over. Over and over.
He spoke to one of them. She put her hand on him. She was praying. He didn’t like her laughing at him. They made shadows on the ceiling. If he could recognize the shadows, they said, he could have a bath. They kept projecting shadows on the ceiling. Over and over. He made mistakes and had to do it all again. Over and over. Over and over.
The figure with the shotgun said he’d never do it right and shot him in the back. They took a pair of blacksmith’s pliers and reached down into the hole the buckshot had made and twisted his bones. He screamed. An evil-faced child laughed. He was dying. They said he was dying. They reached into the wound again. Over and over. Over—
‘Can you hear me?’
‘How are we this morning?’
‘If you can hear me, blink your eyes.’
They gave him a half-dead old horse with a blind eye to ride and said he could escape on that, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t find the way out of town; they kept changing the streets, a street he had just been on suddenly having a dead end. If there was a doctor’s office there, he couldn’t find it. The horse was labouring and it stumbled, the wrench it gave his back like fire. He got down off the horse, almost falling; he couldn’t lift his leg over the pommel. Finally, he fell off. The horse staggered. It was dying. He led it by the reins, but it wouldn’t go and he left it there, pitying it but unable to help it. The town was empty and dead. Everybody had gone on west, they said. They’d taken up the tracks behind the last train. He sat in the empty saloon and waited for them to come. If he could find his office, he had a gun there. Over and over.
‘Mr Denton? Can you hear me, sir?’
He tried to speak, but his mouth was dry as sand. A huge shadow was cast on the ceiling by the man bending over him. He knew the man, he was sure. He had an accent. A beard. A kindly eye. He tried to say the name: Bernat.
‘Try to drink a little. Your mouth is dry. I keep telling them to give you water but they don’t. Here - drink - drink—’
He felt the coolness in his mouth; then he choked. He tried to cough, tried to sit up. Pain grabbed his back across the kidneys like a huge hand.
Where was the hotel? The streets were dangerous and dark. He was afraid. They would hunt him down and kill him. If he could get to the hotel, he could hide. Janet would hide him. Or Mrs Castle. Or Jack Pendry. Pendry would give him a gun. If only—
She cast a shadow on the ceiling, but it was very pale because the room was full of light. Her eyes were huge. Her hair was different.
‘Janet.’
‘My God.’
He felt her hand on his forehead, then the back of her fingers against his cheek. He tried to sit up, and pain pushed him back like a big hand. He made a sound, half scream, an animal.
‘Don’t try to move. You can’t move; you’re strapped down.’
The room was bright. The air smelled of carbolic. Something smelled fetid. He guessed it was himself. He said, ‘Don’t let them get me. They’ll try it again.’
He heard her say, ‘I know,’ and he passed into blackness, not understanding what it was she knew.
He slept. The dreams came back, but they were wispy, as if they’d lost their power. He had to repeat some of the old tasks, but he kept waking out of them and then going back to them or other tasks like them. When he woke again, the light was different and Dr Bernat was there. Bernat made him drink from a tube.
‘Something is lying on my leg.’
‘No.’
‘Right leg.’
‘You were shot.’
Did he remember that? The feeling of fear clutched him; his heart tried to stop beating. Shotgunned in the back - the hole, wet, meaty—
He had made the animal noise again, and Bernat was clucking at him, wiping his forehead and telling him not to agitate himself.
‘What’s the matter with my leg?’
‘A piece of bullet went close to the spine. It is all well now. We took it out. You will be all fine. Sleep, my friend.’
They woke him now to put the bedpan under him and to change the metal tube that went up inside his penis. He could roll his head and see other tubes, red India rubber, dropping away from him on both sides of the bed. They were draining the wounds, Bernat said.
She came back. She smiled down at him. He said, ‘I don’t want you to see me like this.’
She said, ‘My dear, I’ve been seeing you like this for weeks.’
Weeks?
When she was gone, he told them he didn’t want any visitors. No, she was not to visit him any more. No, he wouldn’t see the police. Keep them all away.
‘What’s that music? I hear music!’
‘It’s almost Christmas. You must sleep, Mr Denton.’
They woke him for morphine injections. He tried to stop them, but Bernat said he would be in too much pain. He remembered the men from the war who had come to like the morphine more than their wives or their children. He said he wanted to do without it, but he couldn’t.
They moved him again, this time to a nursing home. Bernat explained what had happened to him: he had two entry wounds and no exit wounds, the big, soft-lead bullets staying inside his body. One had gone in below his shoulder blade and nicked his lung, ending against a rib. The other had entered between his kidney and his spine and had broken into three pieces. The shoulder injury had gone septic, then the lower one, and they had been almost four weeks draining the wounds, waiting for him to conquer the sepsis, thinking for a while they would lose him.
‘You are a very tough cut of beef, Mr Denton.’
‘Not as tough as two .45-calibre bullets.’
‘We had to collapse your lung, but it reinflated when the sepsis ended. You have a small incision in your chest; the surgeon took the ball out that way and put the tubing in. The other injuries are healing.’
‘My leg?’
‘One step at a time.’
‘Have I lost the use of my leg?’
‘You talk nonsense. Your nerves are bruised, yes. There is wounding, yes. But you are tough. Also strong. You will walk.’
‘I’m as weak as water.’
‘Temporary only. Five weeks in a hospital bed, the great Ajax would be being weak. Soon, you get out of bed, you get stronger.’
‘When?’
‘Soon. Also, I want you to see Mrs Striker.’
‘No.’
‘You are being very cruel to her. You think you protect her but you make her life unhappy. I want you to see her.’
Denton cowered under his bedclothes. ‘I don’t want her to know me like this.’
‘That is vanity. It is wrong to put vanity ahead of the people who love us.’
He told them to let her visit. They said she was coming every day as it was and sitting outside his room. Now she sat by him, either reading silently or reading to him.
‘So you remember it was Struther Jarrold now?’ she said.
‘I’d been at Ruth Castle’s, looking for you. Then - all I remember are the dreams. Nightmares of doing the same things, over and over. And riding, a horse that made my back hurt—’
‘They moved you once, from one hospital to another. The ambulance was very rough.’
‘You were there by then?’
‘I told you I’d come back.’
‘Ruth Castle said you would. I don’t remember anything after I went down her steps.’
He tried to recall the shooting, but he couldn’t bring it back. He started to tell her about going to France with Heseltine.
‘Don’t concern yourself with it.’
‘It matters to me. Anyway, I was going to see Munro. Munro needs to be told what we found.’
‘Not yet. You’re not to be “agitated” - Bernat’s orders.’
‘Janet, good God—’
‘Shut up.’
He sighed. ‘I feel ashamed.’
‘Because somebody shot you in the back? You could hardly have prevented it.’
‘I should have. I should have seen it coming.’
‘How?’
‘I need to talk to Munro.’
‘Not yet.’ She opened her magazine. ‘Soon.’
‘You sound like Bernat. “Soon.”’
Next day, they got him out of bed. Two nursing sisters and the doctor helped him to try to stand; he swayed for a few seconds, and they put him back down.
‘You must make an effort, Mr Denton. Doctor’s orders.’
‘Go away, sister.’
‘Get up.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Mr Denton, get up! Oh, why are you so stubborn?’
‘Because I can’t move my leg! Because I’m a cripple, you stupid bitch!’