28. After the Thrill is Gone
Same dances in the same old shoes
You get too careful with the steps you choose
You don't care about winning but you don't want to lose*
He could remember better days. Better days in better places: the smell of bread cooking, the taste of lemonade on his tongue, Sunday afternoons rolling out lazily because they didn't have to work. Just sat on a porch, their own or someone else's, and watched the day pass in its slow and steady way. But Cooter was nothing more than a boy then, time stretching out before him like taffy. The menfolk farmed and women baked and it seemed a nice enough life, even if he didn't halfway understand it.
Then the war had blown across the land like a hot wind, taking the crops and the homes, the beauty of their simple lives along with it and whatever it was that he was meant to become got caught up in the storm. Hardly past his voice changing and there he was on a battlefield because back then everyone was. Young or old, didn't matter; there was a duty to protect the beautiful south from those who wanted to rape her for her bounty, and so he went. Didn't ever handle a gun well enough to be of much use as a fighter but he had a knack for gadgets. For small tools that accomplished big things, and he pulled his first musket ball from the leg of a soldier when he was no older than sixteen. Steady fingers that never shook and an innate sense of how deep to chase after a lump of lead before his efforts turned an injured man into a hemorrhaging man and then a dead man. From then on he was destined to fix what got broken.
But just because he was good at it didn't mean he had to like it.
Or just because he liked it didn't mean he really wanted the opportunity to do it. Because pushing forceps into flesh to dig out a foreign body stuck inside meant that one man had leveled a gun at another, then pulled the trigger. And Cooter would give up all his surgical skills in a heartbeat if people would just quit shooting each other.
Bo Sheridan banging on his door well after midnight, with blood on his clothes and stinking of whiskey, was just about the last thing he ever wanted to see. And the boy refusing to cross the threshold, to let Cooter take him in and care for him, minister to his injuries and give him a bed for the night, well that made it even worse. But the hardest part to take might have been the boy's agitated state, the way he talked without making a lick of sense, arms flying and face a sweaty, flushed mess.
"We're gonna need Cletus," were the first words he could understand. "Hurry up!" And the boy turned like he was going to run back off into the night.
"Whoa," Cooter commanded.
The ladies of the town, like Missus Rhuebottom and Miz Tisdale always said he had a charming smile, then pinched his cheek when he showed it to them. "Just like a little boy." Sometimes they meant his pudgy, dimpled face, but mostly they were talking about his personality. His lifestyle, more like, with his utter lack of tidiness and the way he hadn't settled down. The boys at the orphanage never complained when he came by to check on their health. After looking down sixteen throats, staring into thirty-two eyes and getting a gander at thirty-one ears (poor little Edward had been born with only one) he would take them out onto the soft grass of the grounds and challenge them to play a game of king of the mountain or red rover until they were all rolling around on the lawn together, holding their stomachs in fits of laughter. Though he had been an adult for longer than anyone liked to admit, Cooter was known as the town's biggest little boy.
But he could be serious, too. He could summon a commanding tone that stopped all action and compelled people to listen, and that was the way he spoke to Bo Sheridan right now.
"You just halt right there and tell me what's going on." His eyes, he'd been told, shattered the illusion of his boyishness. Not always, but when he cultivated a hard stare, he was like a snake; he froze his prey right where it was. No one with a little boy's face and temperament was supposed to have eyes like that, the ladies would complain, but he figured that his eyes had seen enough that they had earned the right to be whatever they needed to be.
"I already told you," Bo complained back at him. "Duke's been shot. He's in some field not too far from the railroad tracks and he's in a bad way. He says he's dying."
Come to think of it, those first words that he'd dismissed as gibberish had sounded an awful lot like that. Duke's been shot.
"Duke," Cooter repeated back at him. "You mean as in the Duke? Cap Porter's favorite son, Duke?"
Though of course Duke wasn't related to Porter at all; he'd had his own family not that long ago. Cooter could remember him then, a skinny kid with ropy, farmboy's muscles, those same blue eyes that had grown cold and steely staring up at him back then with anxious hope. Cooter had tended to the Duke boy's mother until her death, and had been the one to suggest that his little brother would heal from the buckshot wounds to his hind end, given time.
Once, and within relatively recent memory, Duke had been an earnest and gentle enough little boy. Now he was a legend, and not the good kind.
"You sure?" he asked, but Bo was perfectly confident that Duke was bleeding his final drops in a cornfield. "Babe," he said, then caught himself. Sometimes the boy was so innocent, so trusting. "Bo," and so worried that he hadn't instantly corrected Cooter on the name. "You sure—it would be the perfect set up." A trap, and the town doctor probably wasn't its intended victim. Any Hickory worth his salt ought to go get other Hickorys to witness the death of a high-ranking Porter. Would go find all his friends and bring them back to that same spot to get ambushed—
"Set up for what?" So very naïve. No, not that, the boy had lived enough of a life that he ought to be jaded by now. Such a good and honest soul that he couldn't imagine anyone would set a trap like that. "Cooter, he ain't in no position to hurt no one. He can't even stand up. And he ain't armed. If you ain't gonna come, at least lend me your wagon so's I can go and get him."
"I didn't say I wasn't coming." But Bo had no patience for his explanations, his hesitation and attempts to protect life and limb when the boy was ready to run right out there and save the world. Or just one soul in it. "Cletus!" he hollered. Such a shame to wake his assistant that way; he heard the distant what that was only half-formed before it got followed by the thump of a backside hitting the floor. "Get up, get down here and bring the gun." If they were going to go riding off into the middle of a trap, at least they were going to be armed.
Bo shook his head, either at the gun or the delay. Didn't lodge any verbal complaints, though, just went to hitch up the creaking shambles of a wagon. Nothing more than a flat bed of wood with a bench seat at the front, but it was wide enough to carry three injured men (or just one, if Cooter had to try to perform some manner of surgery even as Cletus wheeled them from one side of town to the other).
No more than a half an hour later, though the way he was leaning forward and urging the horses to ridiculous speeds showed that it wasn't quick enough for Bo, they were crashing though hip high weeds at the edge of what had once been the Duke farmstead.
"Whoa," Cooter commanded from the side seat. The horses listened to him, though it was Bo at the reins, trying to urge them to continue forward. "Bo, whoa."
"Cooter, he's still a ways up, dang it!"
"He's here?"
"Well, there," Bo clarified, pointing off to the north. "Not far."
"Bo," Cooter whispered, "this really could be a set up. This is a dangerous place. We got to go in cautious." Cletus, behind them in the bed of the wagon with what amounted to no more than a squirrel gun clenched in his nervous hands, moaned a little at that news.
Bo didn't waste any time with complaints. "Do what you got to, Cooter," and then he hopped down and ran off in the direction where he'd pointed only a few seconds ago.
"Ya dang fool," Cooter mumbled as he urged the horses to a slow amble after Bo. "You just keep your eyes out back there," he said to Cletus.
"You betcha. My eyes are out," was slightly comforting until it got followed by, "they're closed, but they're out." Which didn't make any sense at all.
By the time they made it safely across the field, hearing nothing but the sound of weeds getting crushed under wooden wheels alternating with the clatter of Cooter's knees knocking together, Bo was sitting on the ground with the Duke boy's head in his lap. From there, Cooter's doctoring instincts came to the forefront, and he just about forgot his perfectly reasonable fear of death. Couldn't remember stopping the wagon or grabbing his bag and hopping out, but there he was in the dirt next to Bo, trying to get a good look at the damage done to Duke.
"Move," he told the boy to his right, who was fussing uselessly and patting Duke's head like he was a puppy.
"He was mumbling stuff," was Bo's explanation for soothing an unconscious man.
"Well he's out now. Cletus!" Took two tries and more words than he wanted to waste, but his assistant brought him the long board that they used to lift injured men into the wagon when those men couldn't lift themselves. And found himself half cursing under his breath after a bleeding Duke had been rolled onto the board and the three of them lifted him. Boy was dense with muscle and weighed too dang much.
"Cletus," he instructed, "you drive. Bo, I reckon it would be best if you just disappeared now. Them Hickorys wouldn't be none too happy to learn that you helped this boy. You go on and don't breathe a word about what you done, and I won't neither."
"Nope," the boy insisted. "Hold on," he said and took about three long strides into the weeds. Retrieved a jug then hopped up into the wagon seat. "Cletus," he said, handing the jug over to the bumbling assistant, "you get back there and help Cooter. I'm driving."
"Bo," he tried to reason, but there was no use.
"Now, that-there is red eye whiskey to sterilize whatever you got to sterilize. I'm driving and I'll hold her as steady as I can. And no," Bo pointed out, sparing a second to turn around and look at the bed of the wagon where Cletus was joining him in huddling over the Duke boy. "I ain't going nowhere. Whatever happens to Duke there," he jerked his thumb backward in a crude point at the prone boy, then urged the horses to turn the wagon in a tight little half circle to head them back the way they'd come. "Him and me are in it together."
Oh, the boy was a fool.
* "After the Thrill is Gone" © 1975, music and lyrics by Don Henley and Glenn Frey
