Mastodonia

TWENTY-FOUR

So began a period of waiting. Safari had said it might be ten days or two weeks before the first of their parties arrived. We went on a few trips into the surrounding country. We saw a number of mastodons and bisons. We found another colony of giant beavers.

We sighted a number of bears and a few cats, but none of the cats was a sabertooth. I began to wonder if the sabertooths might be thinning out or be already extinct, although that seemed unlikely. Once Rila thought she glimpsed a glyptodont, one of the prehistoric giant armadillos, but when we arrived at the place where she had thought she’d seen it, we were unable to find any trace of it. We kept a lookout for horses, but saw none. There were a lot of wolves and foxes.

We selected a spot for a garden — Rila said we should put the virgin soil to use — but we never got around to doing anything about it. One thing we did do was lay in a telephone line from Ben’s office so that someone wouldn’t have to come trotting into Mastodonia each time they wanted to talk with us. We got the line in, but it wouldn’t work; a signal would not pass through whatever it was that separated Mastodonia from the twentieth century. I had Ben get me a number of steel rods. I painted their tops red and hammered them into line to serve as guides into the time roads that Catface would be setting up into the Cretaceous. Hiram’s wooden stakes had been all right but the steel rods were more permanent; they could not be broken off as could the wooden stakes. I laid out lines for four time roads, and still had plenty of rods remaining to mark the other ends once we had the time roads.

Between Catface and Stiffy, Hiram was kept busy.

Whenever he wasn’t visiting one of them, he was with the other. Bowser usually was with him. I did some worrying about this loose-footedness of Hiram’s, envisioning all the different kinds of trouble he could get into, but nothing happened and I told myself that it was foolish of me to worry so much, but I somehow couldn’t stop it.

Early one afternoon, I was sitting at the lawn table having a can of beer. Rila had gone into the house to make a salad she had planned for dinner. The place was peaceful, as it always seemed to be. On the slope below me, I saw Hiram coming up the hill. I watched him idly, looking for Bowser. Then I saw the dog, a little way from Hiram, nosing at the grass as if he might have picked up something interesting.

Suddenly, Hiram let out a frightened bellow and bent forward, seeming to stumble. He went down on his knees, then got up again, thrashing around as if his foot was trapped in something. Bowser was running toward him, ears laid back. I jumped up and started running down the hill, yelling for Rila, but not looking back to see if she had heard.

Hiram began screaming, one ragged scream and then another, never letting up. He was sitting down and bending forward, holding his left leg with both his hands. Off to one side of him, Bowser pounced on something in the grass, then jerked his head up and shook it savagely. He had something in his jaws and was shaking it. One look at it told me what it was.

I reached Hiram and grabbed him by the shoulders, forcing him back.

“Let go of that leg,” I yelled. “Lay back.”

Hiram quit his senseless screaming, but he bawled at me, “It bit me, Mr. Steele. It bit me!”

“Lie back,” I said. “Be quiet.”

He did lie back the way I told him, but he wasn’t quiet. He was doing a lot of moaning.

I pulled my jackknife out of my pocket and ripped his left pant leg open. When I pulled it back, I saw the darkening bruise and the two punctures, with a bright drop of blood glistening on each of them. I used the knife to rip the pant leg lengthwise, then hauled the pants up so much of the thigh was exposed.

“Asa,” said Rila behind me. “Asa. Asa. Asa.”

“Find a stick,” I told her. “Any kind of stick. We’ll have to put on a tourniquet.”

I unfastened my belt and stripped it from the loops, then wound it around his leg above the wound. Rila crouched on the other side of him, facing me. She thrust a stick at me, a dry branch. I looped it through the belt and twisted.

“Here, hold this,” I said. “Keep it tight.”

“I know,” she said. “It was a rattler. Bowser killed it.”

I nodded. The wound had told me that much. No other North American snake in these latitudes could inflict such a wound.

Hiram had quieted down somewhat, but was still moaning.

“Hang on,” I told him. “This will hurt.”

I gave him no chance to protest. In telling him, I was only being fair, giving him fair warning.

I sliced a deep gash in his leg, connecting the two puncture marks. Hiram howled and tried to sit up.

Rila, using her free hand, pushed him back.

I bent my mouth to the cut and sucked, tasting the warm saltiness of blood. I sucked and spat, sucked and spat. I hoped to goodness there were no broken tissues in my mouth. But it was no good thinking of that now.

Even had I known there were, I would have done the same thing.

“He’s fainted,” Rila said.

I sucked and spat, sucked and spat. Bowser came up to us, sat down ponderously, watching us.

Hiram moaned. “He’s coming to,” said Rila.

I rested for a moment, then went back to the sucking. Finally, I quit. I’d pumped out at least some of the venom; I was sure of that. I sat back on my heels and reached for the stick. I loosened the tourniquet’ for a few seconds, then tightened it again.

“Get one of the cars turned around and headed for Willow Bend,” I told Rila. “We’ve got to get help for him. I’ll carry him up.”

“Can you handle the tourniquet and still carry him?”

“I think so.” I said to Hiram, “Put your arms around my neck. Tight as you can. And hang on hard. I have only one arm to carry you.”

He locked his arms around me and I managed to get him lifted and started staggering up the slope. He was heavier than I’d thought he’d be. Ahead of me, Rila was running for one of the cars. She had it turned around and waiting for me when I got there. I hoisted Hiram into the back, got in beside him. “Come on, Bowser,” I said. Bowser leaped aboard. The car was already moving.

People came tumbling out of the rear door of the office building when Rila pulled up and leaned on the horn. I lifted Hiram from the car. Herb was the first to reach us. “Snake bite,” I told him. “Rattler.

Get an ambulance.”

“Here, let me have him,” said Ben. “There’s a bottle of whiskey in my lower left desk drawer. I don’t suppose you gave him any.”

“I’m not sure …”

“Damn it, I am. If it doesn’t help, it won’t hurt. I’ve always been told it helps.”

I went for the whiskey and brought it back to the front office, where Hiram was stretched out on a sofa.

Herb turned from the phone. “The ambulance is on its way,” he said. “There’ll be a paramedic with it. He’ll take over. I talked with a doctor. He said no whiskey.”

I put the bottle on a desk. “How are you, Hiram?”

I asked.

“It hurts,” said Hiram. “I hurt all over. I hurt terrible.”

“We’ll get you to a hospital,” I said. “They’ll take care of you there. I’ll go with you.”

Herb grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to one side. “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

”But I have to. Hiram is my friend. He’ll want me.”

“Not with those newsmen out there. They’ll follow the ambulance, in the hospital, you’ll be fair game to them.”

“The hell with them. Hiram is my friend.”

“Be reasonable, Asa,” Herb pleaded. “I’ve built you and Rila up as mysteries. Recluses. Publicity shy.

Exclusive people. We need that image. For a while longer, at least.”

“We don’t need an image. Hiram needs help.”

“How can you help him? Hold his hand? Wait while the doctors work on him?”

“That’s part of it,” I said. “Just being there.”

Ben joined us. “Herb’s right,” he said. “I’ll go along with Hiram.”

“There has to be one of us. Myself or Rila. It should be me.”

“Rila,” said Herb. “She’ll be upset, hysterical.”

“Rila hysterical?”

“The newsmen won’t press her as hard as they would you,” said Ben. “If she says she won’t talk, she’ll have to say it fewer times than you would. She could build up her exclusiveness, while you …”

“You’re bastards!” I shouted. “Both of you are bastards!”

It did me no good. In the end, Ben and Rila rode the ambulance and I stayed. I felt horrible. I felt I’d lost control, that I was no longer my own man, and I felt a terrible rage and fear. But I stayed behind. On this end of the operation, Ben and Herb were, calling the shots.

“This will give us a fresh headline,” said Herb.

I told him what he could do with his fresh headline I called him a ghoul, I rescued the bottle we hadn’t used for Hiram and went into Ben’s office, where I worked on the bottle morosely. The drinking didn’t help. I didn’t even get a buzz on.

I phoned Courtney and told him what had happened. For a long time after I had finished, there was a silence on his end of the line. Then he asked, “He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m waiting to hear.”

“Hiram is the one who talks to Catface, isn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“Look, Asa, in a few days, Safari will be there to go into the Cretaceous. Is there anything that can be done? The time roads, I suppose, aren’t open yet.”

“I’ll try to talk with Catface,” I said. “He can hear what I say, but I can’t hear what he says. He can’t answer back.”

“But you’ll try?”

“I’ll try,” I told him.

“I’ll be seeing you in a few days. That senator I was telling you about — he wants to talk with you. Not with me, with you. I’ll bring him out.”

I didn’t ask him if he had any idea what the senator wanted. I didn’t give a damn.

“If Hiram doesn’t make it,” I said, “there’s no use bringing anyone. If that happens, we’re dead. You know that, don’t you?”

“I understand,” he said.

He sounded sad about it.

Herb brought me some sandwiches and coffee.

There had been no word from Rila or Ben. We talked for a while and then I went out the back door. Bowser was waiting for me and we walked across the lawn to the house. We sat on the back steps, Bowser close beside me. He knew there was something wrong and was trying to comfort me.

The barn still stood, the lopsided door hanging crookedly on its hinges. The chicken house was the same as ever and the hens were still there, clucking and scratching about the yard. The rosebush stood at the corner of the chicken house — the rosebush where I had seen Catface looking out at me when I had gone out to get the fox and, instead, had walked into the Pleistocene.

That much was familiar, but little else was. The strangeness of the rest of it seemed to make the barn, the chicken house, the rosebush unfamiliar, too. The fence stood high and spidery and inside the fence humped the strangeness of the floodlights. Guards walked along the fence and outside of it were clustered knots of people. They were still coming to stand and gawk at us. I wondered why they continued to come.

Certainly, there was nothing to be seen.

I stroked Bowser’s head, talking to him. “You remember what it was like, Bowser, don’t you? How you’d go to dig out a woodchuck and I had to bring you home. How we’d go in the evening to shut the chicken house. How Hiram would come to visit you almost every day. That front lawn robin.”

I wondered if the robin was still there, but didn’t go to look. I was afraid I wouldn’t find him.

I got up from the steps and went into the house, holding the door so Bowser could go in with me. I sat down in a chair at the kitchen table. I had intended to walk through the rest of the house, but I didn’t. The house was too quiet and empty. The kitchen was too, but I stayed. It had a bit of home still left in it. It had been my favorite room, a sort of living room, and I’d spent a lot of time there.

The sun went down and dusk crept in. Outside, the floodlights went on. Bowser and I went out and sat on the steps again. In daylight, the place had looked strange and foreign. With the coming of night and the flaring of floodlights, it was a bad dream.

Rila found us sitting on the steps. “Hiram will be all right,” she said, “but he’ll have to stay in the hospital for quite a while.”