Author's Note: Let's see now, where was I? Oh, right, Chapter Seven.
Chapter Seven – Sharp Edges and Hard Surfaces, Dark Corners and Explosive Weapons
Interlude 2: Hippocratic Oath
I. I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients and never do harm to anyone.
It was Cooter that found him, soaked to the bone and covered in red clay mud, walking on the side of Rosebud Road. Waving the tow truck down with one hand, rubbing at the back of his head with the other. The worst, Cooter had reported, was that after he got into the truck, stumbling and clumsy, he shivered. Luke Duke, who wouldn't admit to feeling a chill while shirtless and wearing only shorts in the middle of an ice storm, had shaken like a wet puppy. Involuntarily, of course.
"Would've taken him to Doc—" Cooter had said.
"Don't need Doc," Luke had answered, even if talking had started him off into an uncontrolled cough.
"—Except for that," Cooter finished. "And I woulda brought him straight home," he went on to explain, even if Jesse was only half listening, as he stripped Luke's shirt off.
"Get yourself next to the fire, boy," came the old man's grumble as he shoved Luke into the living room, leaving Daisy behind in the kitchen to hear out Cooter's guilty confession.
"But he made me take him back for the General," Cooter finished. "Dang fool wanted to drive him, too, but I wouldn't let him. Hooked the General up to my wrecker instead, 'cause Lukas there wasn't in no condition to drive nothing."
Luke's rebuttal to that statement, such as it was, came in the form of a cough echoing back from the living room. Followed by Uncle Jesse suggesting a warm bath and then the kind of hacking that sounded like it must be leaving permanent scars on Luke's lungs.
"Back to the General?" Daisy asked. Someone had to entertain the company and maybe even thank them for their efforts in dragging home a wet and filthy family member. But her uncle was shoving Luke off toward the bathroom, for cleaning and lecturing, no doubt, so the social graces fell to Daisy. As always. Seemed like these things went better back when there were more Duke women-folk around to tend to such needs. Two would be enough: one to fetch the lemonade and another to tsk at the misfortunes of townsfolk.
Their friend shrugged. "He says he ain't sure how he wound up on Rosebud Road, exactly. Him and the General was up at the old Hastings Horse Camp up there on Trestle Road." Cooter took the seat she offered him, thanking her with a nod for the beer she dug out of the back of the refrigerator. She was going to have to get the whole story out of him relatively quickly, since they didn't have but the one can in the whole house. Unless he'd let her substitute coffee, but it was a little late in the day for that. "He didn't exactly confess to getting hit over the head, but I figure that's what happened. Mostly he just wanted to get back to the camp." Cooter took a big swig from the can, then grimaced. Served him right for guzzling store-brand beer. Not that it was any worse than Boar's Nest swill.
Daisy standing next to him wasn't hurrying Cooter along any, and for all the noise coming from the bathroom, it didn't seem like Jesse needed any help. Mostly it was coughing, not arguing, going on in there. "Good thing the General was still there," she said, pulling out a chair and taking a seat. "Best make that last," she added. Being direct was more Jesse's style, but she reckoned straighforwardness was best in this situation. "We ain't got but the one."
Turned out to be a mistake. "Sorry Daisy," Cooter answer. "You want to split it?"
No, it was probably half backwash by now. Should have known better than to go back on her raising. Aunt Lavinia would have managed to strike a balance between hospitality and honesty, probably. Maybe not, with the way Luke was telling Uncle Jesse he was fine, just fine. Lavinia wouldn't have tolerated that for a second, would have excused herself from Cooter's presence long enough to mother her older nephew.
"No, sugar," she sighed. What she really wanted was for Luke to have taken her with him this morning, or for him to stop coughing now, or just maybe for Bo never have to been arrested in the first place. "It was a good thing the General was still there when you took him back." Someone had to get this conversation back on track.
She got a knowing snicker for that comment. "He hid it." Of course he had. "Kept saying he must've been awful close to something and he needed to get back to work. You're just lucky he was moving slow as he was, or he might just have gotten out of the truck and gone back out there like he wanted."
Yeah, well, that was Luke. That was any Duke really. "Where exactly was he?" Because that old horse camp was huge and sprawling, and she certainly didn't have time to search the whole place in the day's last hour of light, but if she knew just where to look—
"Daisy," that was Uncle Jesse, and his voice wasn't calm. "Call Doc Appleby, tell him he needs to come out here."
Which effectively ended the conversation in the kitchen. In fact, it pretty much chased Cooter out of the house, once he'd swigged down the last of his beer, or course. Medicine wasn't exactly the mechanic's strong suit, and tolerating genuine illness didn't seem to be anything he really had in mind to do tonight.
Though it turned out that Jesse's primary concern was the welt on Luke's head, and the missing memories. There was no way of knowing how much time her cousin had lost to unconsciousness, but it had to have been long enough to move him out to where he'd woken up, on the edge of the overgrown old Mason meadow just north of Rosebud Road.
Of course, Doc's cure for a concussion, because he reckoned that was what it had to be, was to knock Luke out again. "Barbiturate," Appleby explained. "Should manage any pain, and keep him out overnight."
"Good," Jesse grumbled. "I'm too old to be fighting that boy." Because of course Luke didn't need to be in bed, he'd never needed to be in bed a day in his life. He only ever went to bed to make sure Bo slept and with Bo over in the jail—
"That cough," the old Doc shook his head. "I ain't sure about it. He musta already been sick, but being out there in that rain all day didn't help him none."
Jesse challenged Doc Appleby with just his eyes. You just try keeping that boy under control. Of course, a doctor had various forms of knock-you-out-cold drugs at his disposal, so he actually stood half a chance against Duke stubbornness.
Seemed like all their lives, every cough any of the Duke cousins ever got carried with it the risk for pneumonia. And—
"Luke needs to rest. We don't want that cough getting any worse and leading to pneumonia." It was the kind of thing a girl could set her watch by, if she wore one. None of them, no matter what kind of nasty, ugly bronchitis or laryngitis they'd ever contracted, had ever come close to pneumonia. Hard to say whether it was one of those things that the previous generation worried too hard about, because they'd seen so much of it in their youth, or if there really was any chance that Luke could get that sick.
Antibiotics were left behind, along with strict instructions to make sure that Luke actually rested, and, of course, to call if the cough got worse. Which, with Luke, it would be hard to tell. For all that Bo made the most noise on any average day, a laughing or coughing Luke had enough volume behind it to make the walls shake.
By the time old Doc had been thanked and promised payment in chickens, either live or fried, whichever the man preferred (and either way it was going to come down to Daisy to do the hard work of preparing and delivering said chicken), the dingy light was threatening to leave the sky.
"Uncle Jesse." She had every intention of telling him how there was something up at the old Hastings Camp that she had to take a look at, right quick, before it got too dark. But there were already circles under the old man's eyes, and an exhausted drag to his steps, and then there was Luke's cough rising from the back of the house. "I'll take the first shift with him," was what wound up coming out of her mouth. Because, medicated or not, her oldest cousin would bear watching against "sleepwalking" and other wandering types of maladies. If he wasn't so clearly miserable and currently unconscious, she'd be yelling at Luke for pulling the whole family's attention away from Bo.
II. I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts.
Luke was nothing better than a dang fool. Seemed like at some point the boy should have learned about sharp edges and hard surfaces, dark corners and explosive weapons, but he hadn't. If there was a danger, Luke zeroed on it, noted the exact location and its distance from him, calibrated his internal compass, and walked right into it.
Lavinia used to worry after that one, always claimed he bore more watching than Jesse reckoned he did, even though Bo was more apt to come home with a bloody nose, swollen ankle or in need of stitches. Bo, she counseled, is smart enough to cry when it hurts, and to realize that pain means it's time to stop doing whatever's causing it.
Jesse dismissed her words as woman's worries. He always reckoned that slicing a finger instead of an onion was one thing; cooking could be interrupted long enough to tie it up with gauze. But out in the fields, a man was far enough from bandages that he had no choice but to just ignore the way corn stalks could cut up his hands. And the still, oh that was a whole different story. There was no walking away from a batch mid-cooking, whatever crazy injury might have occurred. Coming back out of the woods had to be a surgically pristine extraction on a good day; there could be no careless stumbling out, come blown vat or broken bone. Besides, all the medicine a man needed was right there. Drink a sip of 'shine, pour the rest on any open wound, and everything was good as new.
So Jesse just reckoned he had himself a good farmer and future moonshiner in Luke. And after Lavinia died, and some of the local widows vied for a chance to take her place with promises of taking good care of those poor children, he'd informed them all that Daisy was no problem to raise and Bo and Luke could take care of each other. He had lots of evidence to back his theory up, too. Stories of Luke piggy-backing a sore-footed Bo for the last mile of an overly ambitious hike, of unexplained black eyes and bruised knuckles that told their own tales of one cousin standing up for the other. It wasn't one-sided, either. Bo answered to needs that Luke never admitted having, like companionship and a reason to expect that maybe mornings wouldn't dawn gray and miserable.
Luke stirred in the bed next to where Jesse was pretending to read. Hard chair was keeping him awake, that and his ire, but his eyes were too tired to bother making out words.
"Hush, boy," he said, and it came out gentler than he felt about it all. Home before dark, he'd said, and without meaning to, Luke had obeyed that part. Seemed like something he should never have had to add, come home in one piece. Don't make me worry about you when your cousin needs the whole of my attention. And, maybe most importantly, don't do anything that's going to keep you away from Bo for more than one day. Because it would break Bo's already wounded heart.
"Cousin," Luke muttered, or something close to it. Could have been Jesse's tired ears making words out of gibberish.
"Hush," he repeated, but he was talking to a sleeping man.
It was always a mistake to take his eye of either one of his nephews, even if it was only to watch the other. If Luke was a full blown idiot for getting his skull knocked in the name of helping Bo, Jesse didn't have a lick of sense himself for imagining that the boy would do anything different.
"Get some rest, you dang fool."
III. All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.
There was a sick, dull ache that nagged him through his dreams, like a socket aching for its missing tooth. Not enough to let him form cohesive thoughts in the glue of his brain, just a pain to keep him from peace. The images before his eyes were of places he'd never been, frosty greens and browns he'd have to cross oceans to get to. Leaves with shapes that didn't make sense, hanging from twisted trees, dirt too worn out to grow anything but the hardiest weed. Acre upon acre of the wrong kind of nothing – some kind of strange scrub dotting flat expanse for as far as the eye could see, and only fog beyond that. He was, or had been, chasing after Bo in some childish game of tag, running over the lumpy soil, never catching up because Bo could fly. Not all the time, or at least he mostly stuck to the ground, but whenever Luke would get close, Bo would flutter away with the same kind of lopsided loping as when he ran. Never spoke, didn't call on Luke to follow. Just a flash of blonde fluff and wide, unlined eyes – which meant Bo couldn't be smiling, though Luke couldn't see all of his face to be sure – and gone. Frustrating as hell how light on his legs he was, when Luke could barely manage to lift his own feet out of dirt beneath, and couldn't muster enough voice to be heard above the nickering, rumbling hooves—
When the ache in his head came close enough to the surface to shake him out of those endless circles he was running and into consciousness, he was grateful. Took him a minute to know he was alert; the dark closed in on him just as tightly whether his eyes were open or closed. By the feel, though, he could tell he was home, in his own bed. Same sway to the mattress underneath him, wall still too close to allow an outstretched arm, smell of musty curtains that always permeated the room whenever they had to close the windows. It was the kind of thing him and Bo only did on the coldest days of the year, but his shadowed memories included a hot bath, Doc Appleby, windows getting shut, and (most memorably) a needle in his hip. Arms were made for injections; Luke had no idea why a practitioner of medicine had never figured that much out. Backsides were no place anything sharp should ever go.
The thing that made his room alien, still his but foreign, was that he was alone. He knew it as naturally as he knew that Hazzard Pond was wet – he didn't have to drive clean across the county to see the water, and he didn't have to wait for his eyes to adjust to the dark to know there was no one else in the room. Facts were facts.
Bo was gone, outside the reach of Luke's fingertips. For the first time since he'd come back from the service, Bo was beyond where Luke could get to him, had been that way for days. There was alone, like stalking off into the barn with a don't-you-even-think-of-following-me glare over his shoulder, and then there was alone. A thing too obscure to be defined, this kind of solitude; he hadn't ever contemplated what it would be like to have his own space any more than he'd imagined living in a mansion. There were some things Dukes weren't meant to do or to have, and privacy was one of them.
He hadn't been this alone all night, though. His eyes worked fine despite the ache behind them, had managed adjust to the low light and pick out the dim line of a hard-backed kitchen chair just feet from his bed. There was an overturned book on the seat; thick enough to be the bible. Probably Jesse had sat there until he figured Luke would manage to live through the night, then the old man had gone off to bed. Silly that he spent any time watching over Luke. Even through his coughing (and he shouldn't have thought about that, now his throat tickled – itched, more like) he could have announced his expectations of surviving the night. But Uncle Jesse hadn't been interested in a dang thing he'd wanted to say.
Right there was the proof of his hardy health, how he could sit up all by himself (despite the ache in his hip where no needle had ever belonged, and that downright pesky burning in his chest like a volcano just waiting to erupt into a timber-rattling cough) and even stand. One foot in front of the other and he was out the doorway and into the hall and—
"Luke." Jesse. "What are you doing up?" It would just figure that Bo would be the one in jail and Luke would wind up getting treated like an escaped convict.
He opened his mouth with every intention of saying things that would have brought out the whip ten years earlier. Something sarcastic, about how he was off to break Bo out of jail in the rain, and wearing nothing more than his shorts, too. Sucked in a mouthful of air to say it with, and his lungs balked, choked then coughed.
"Ya dang fool," Jesse hissed, but it failed to have the kind of righteous ire the man usually mustered in these situations. Sounded as tired as his uncle looked, as defeated as Luke felt, knowing how close he'd come to answers. (Had to have been close. A man didn't get hit over the head for things he wasn't about to stumble onto.) "Get back into bed."
He probably could have spoken by then; the coughing had subsided to manageable through sheer force of will and a desire to keep quiet enough to prevent Daisy from waking up to make it a threesome standing in the cramped hallway and arguing how Luke probably needed another shot in his hip, since the first one hadn't done a good enough job of keeping him down. He used a hand gesture instead, just to be safe, maybe to keep himself from commenting on how he didn't need his uncle's help in the bathroom, which was where he was headed. He reckoned he'd already been punished once for his inappropriate thoughts, before they could even become words, and his chest was a little too raw for him to want to take a chance on more retribution.
By the time he got back to his room, the light was on inside, and Jesse was deep in contemplation of the pages of his bible.
"You ain't got to sit with me." Maybe he should have been nicer about that, something to do with thanking the man for wanting to.
Jesse's eyes rolled up from the small print in from of him, interesting how those glasses made him look like a stern schoolteacher, informing Luke with just a glance that he should just sit down and be quiet now. "Apparently," cold sound of steel in Jesse's voice, "I do. Since you can't seem to remember what's important."
It occurred to Luke to remind his uncle that he'd lived up to his end of the bargain by getting in before dark. Oh, it might not have been through his own efforts, exactly, but he'd obeyed the rule that was laid down. (And then he spared a thought, just one because he needed his wits about him, to wondering exactly what had been in that shot the Doc sunk into his hip. Because it wasn't exactly wise to keep having an urge to sass Jesse Duke.)
He raised his hand instead, stay if you want in the gesture, and tried not to think about why he wasn't going to fight real hard to be alone right now.
"What was you thinking, Luke?" Well, mostly he'd been thinking about how there were limited places in Hazzard where horses could be hidden, and then he was quietly hoping the horses were still in Hazzard. And once he narrowed down what he thought might have been the only good place to hide horses (which would only bear fruit if the horse thieves were smart enough to pick a good place to keep their ill-gotten goods), he started hoping that maybe if he staked the place out he'd see someone or something useful, spot some evidence that proved Bo wasn't behind it all. Beyond that, he'd tried not to think (tried, but couldn't stop himself) that maybe whatever he found with regard to the missing horses would lead him towards the missing girl and… then he'd stopped thinking all together, what with the unconsciousness that had consumed him.
When he woke up in the drainage ditch alongside Rosebud Road, he'd thought it was nice that his attacker hadn't wanted him drowned, because they could have put him in the gathering runoff there face first. That they'd mostly left him to slowly freeze in the chilly water was a mercy, really. His next coherent thought, after the recognition that he needed to get himself out of the ditch and back onto his feet, was how close he must have been, and how badly he needed to get back to the old Hastings Camp. Because it made perfect sense – he'd been dumped several miles away, so that the horses he'd heard in his last seconds of consciousness could be moved. He needed to catch the movers in the act before all the evidence left the county.
And his mind had clamped down on that last thought, allowing no others in, even after Cooter happened by and stopped to pick him up. No, I don't want to go to home to Jesse, he'd explained. I need to go to the Hastings Horse Farm. Cooter showed every sign of ignoring the perfect logic behind the request, and Luke was just about ready to get back out of the wrecker and walk where he wanted to go (since Cooter insisted on driving in the wrong direction) until one last brilliant thought came into his brain. I need to get the General, he'd persisted. That was the key, right there. Cooter would let him rescue the car.
And when they got back to Luke's desired destination, there hadn't been any point in looking around for anything. The place was clearly abandoned in a doors-thrown-wide sort of an obvious way.
What Luke wanted had been there, but now it was gone. After that, he'd stopped bothering to think. Cooter hooked the General up to the wrecker and brought him home. Good thing he'd turned off his brain by then, or he might have had some choice words for Doc about where that needle got stuck.
Jesse was still waiting for an answer, just about tapping his foot in anticipation of the brilliant words that were about to be imparted.
Luke's breath was carefully shallow as he settled on his bed, looking for a comfortable way to lie down. Since the coughing had settled back down, his chest didn't hurt too much anymore. The pain in his head was a little more serious, but he reckoned a few more hours of sleep would fix that. And Jesse would see to it that he stayed prone at least that long.
"I guess I was just thinking about getting Bo out of jail," he said, like it was an admission of guilt. That was what Jesse wanted, a penitent boy.
The old man shook his head. "He don't want you getting yourself killed for him." Then a sigh, one that indicated Luke was beyond understanding the wisdom of an old man. Too sick, or too beaten up, or maybe just too big a fool to begin with. "Go to sleep, Luke."
