Stu's struggle with pneumonia lasted two weeks. He drank quarts of Gatorade, V-8, Welch's grape juice, and various brands of orange drink. He rarely knew what he was drinking. His urine was strong and acidic. He messed himself like a baby, and like a baby's his stools were yellow and loose and totally blameless. Tom kept him clean. Tom dragged him around the lobby of the Utah Hotel. And Tom waited for the night when he would wake, not because Stu was raving in his sleep, but because his labored breathing had finally ceased.
The penicillin produced an ugly red rash after two days, and Tom switched to the ampicillin. That was better. On October 7 Tom awoke in the morning to find Stu sleeping more deeply than he had in days. His entire body was soaked with sweat, but his forehead was cool. The fever had snapped in the night. For the next two days, Stu did little but sleep. Tom had to struggle to wake him up enough to take his pills and sugar cubes from the restaurant attached to the Utah Hotel.
He relapsed on October 11, and Tom was terribly afraid it was the end. But the fever did not go as high, and his respiration never got as thick and labored as it had been on those terrifying early mornings of the fifth and the sixth.
On October 13 Tom awoke from a dazed nap in one of the lobby chairs to find Stu sitting up and looking around. "Tom," he whispered. "I'm alive."
"Yes," Tom said joyfully. "Laws, yes!"
"I'm hungry. Could you rustle up some soup, Tom? With noodles in it, maybe?"
By the eighteenth his strength had begun to come back a little. He was able to get around the lobby for five minutes at a time on the crutches Tom brought him from the drugstore. There was a steady, maddening itch from his broken leg as the bones began to knit themselves together. On October 20 he went outside for the first time, bundled up in thermal underwear and a huge sheepskin coat.
The day was warm and sunny, but with an undertone of coolness. In Boulder it might still be mid-fall, the aspens turning gold, but here winter was almost close enough to touch. He could see small patches of frozen, granulated snow in shadowed areas the sun never touched.
"I don't know, Tom," he said. "I think we can get over to Grand Junction, but after that I just don't know. There's going to be a lot of snow in the mountains. And I don't dare move for a while, anyway. I've got to get my go back."
"How long before your go comes back, Stu?"
"I don't know, Tom. We'll just have to wait and see."
Stu was determined not to move too quickly, not to push it - he had been close enough to death to relish his recovery. He wanted it to be as complete as it could be. They moved out of the hotel lobby into a pair of connecting rooms down the first-floor hall. The room across the way became Kojak's temporary doghouse. Stu's leg was indeed knitting, but because of the improper set, it was never going to be the same straight limb again, unless he got George Richardson to rebreak it and set it properly. When he got off the crutches, he was going to have a limp.
Nonetheless, he set to work exercising it, trying to tone it up. Bringing the leg back to even 75 percent efficiency was going to be a long process, but so far as he could tell, he had a whole winter to do it in.
On October 28 Green River was dusted with nearly five inches of snow.
"If we don't make our move soon," Stu told Tom as they looked out at the snow, "we'll be spending the whole damn winter in the Utah Hotel."
The next day they drove the Plymouth down to the gas station on the outskirts of town. Pausing often to rest and using Tom for the heavy work, they changed the balding back tires for a pair of studded snows. Stu considered taking a four-wheel drive, and had finally decided, quite irrationally, that they should stick with their luck. Tom finished the operation by loading four fifty-pound bags of sand into the Plymouth's trunk. They left Green River on Halloween and headed east.
They reached Grand Junction at noon on November 2, with not much more than three hours to spare, as it turned out. The skies had been lead-gray all the forenoon, and as they turned down the main street, the first spits of snow began to skate across the Plymouth's hood. They had seen brief flurries half a dozen times en route, but this was not going to be a flurry. The sky promised serious snow.
"Pick your spot," Stu said. "We may be here for a while."
Tom pointed. "There! The motel with the star on it!"
The motel with the star on it was the Grand Junction Holiday Inn. Below the sign and the beckoning star was a marquee, and written on it in large red letters was: ELCOME TO GR ND JUNC ON'S SUMMERF ST '90! JUNE 12 - JU Y 4TH!
"Okay," Stu said. "Holiday Inn it is."
He pulled in and killed the Plymouth's engine, and so far as either of them knew, it never ran again. By two that afternoon, the spits and spats of snow had developed into a thick white curtain that fell soundlessly and seemingly endlessly. By four o'clock the light wind had turned into a gale, driving the snow before it and piling up drifts that grew with a speed which was almost hallucinatory. It snowed all night. When Stu and Tom got up the next morning, they found Kojak sitting in front of the big double doors in the lobby, looking out at a nearly moveless world of white. Nothing moved but a single bluejay that was strutting around on the crushed remnants of a summer awning across the street.
"Jeezly crow," Tom whispered. "We're snowed in, ain't we, Stu?"
Stu nodded.