Cain sat beside a sleeping Woodman, his hands on the wheel as he drove their rental car closer and closer to home. It was a nine-hour drive from Bethesda, Maryland, to Apple Valley, Kentucky, not including stops for food, gas, and pissing, which had added another two hours to the drive. Thankfully, Woodman’s pain meds had kicked in about an hour ago, and he’d been snoring ever since. Cain checked the dashboard clock: with a little under two hours to go, he was hoping he could pull into the circular drive of Belle Royale before nine o’clock tonight and surprise his aunt and uncle with an early arrival.
Woodman muttered in his sleep, a soft, low, guttural sound of pain, and instinctively Cain reached over and placed his hand over his cousin’s, rubbing his thumb over the white, freckled skin until Woodman quieted down. It was over two months since the accident that had crushed and almost claimed Woodman’s foot, and thus far the road to recovery had been long and painful.
On their way back to Norfolk, Virginia, after a port visit in Barcelona, Woodman was on deck, acting as a safety observer, when his right ankle had been accidentally crushed between an aircraft wheel and forklift. He’d been taken by helicopter to the Morón Air Base, then airlifted to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where they’d set his broken fibula, but he’d had to wait several days for the swelling to go down on his ankle before the medical staff was able to reconstruct his ankle’s crushed talus with cadaver bone, a plate, and five screws. After three weeks, his ankle bone had started to die from a lack of oxygenated blood, and he’d required follow-up surgery to reroute his veins to feed the remaining bones. Stable three weeks later, he’d been transferred to Walter Reed hospital in Maryland, and yesterday, nine weeks after the accident, Woodman had finally been given the okay to go home. His retirement was still under adjudication, but that was really just a formality since he’d been injured after three years of a four-year, active-duty contract.
For now he could get around okay on crutches since his upper-body strength was solid. He’d require at least a year of physical therapy (which could only do so much to improve the strength of his rebuilt ankle) when he got home, but the sad reality was that Woodman would probably walk with a limp and a cane for the rest of his life.
Cain, who’d taken several days of liberty at various ports of call over the past three years, hadn’t actually taken an extended vacation since his enlistment. With seventy accrued days, he’d used ten of them to be with Woodman at Landstuhl and asked to use another thirty days to accompany his cousin home to Kentucky. It was unusual for a man of Cain’s rank to be given a full month of liberty, but exceptions had been made based on his cousin’s condition, which found them—here and now—speeding down Interstate 71 toward Cincinnati with the dying sun out Woodman’s open window and the open highway up ahead.
Cain rolled down his window and leaned his elbow on the sill, his mind shifting to the moment he’d heard that Josiah was en route to Morón. Without a full account of his cousin’s injuries, Cain had been almost paralyzed by the fear that Josiah’s wounds were mortal, and had headed straightaway to his commanding officer, demanding, with all the composure he could muster, to be released from duty immediately so he could follow Josiah’s transport. He’d be forever grateful for the compassionate calm that Lieutenant Carlson had shown, directing a distraught Cain into private quarters to explain the extent of Woodman’s injuries and assure Cain that, while his foot was in grave danger, his life, most likely, was not.
After a full report on Woodman’s condition later that day, Cain had formally requested leave and headed straight to Germany, where he spent a few hours every day keeping Woodman company. When Woodman wasn’t totally out of it from the constant drip of pain meds, they’d play cards or swap stories about their shared childhood and their past three years in the service. The rest of the time, Cain’s German came in handy as he caught up on a couple years’ worth of sex with many a Rhineland Fr?uleins.