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“Dex, I have to go. I’ll be back. If possible, before curfew. You’ll stay here, won’t you?”
He squinted as if to bring her into focus. “Where the hell would I go?”
“Out to make more trouble, I don’t doubt.” She put a second blanket on him. The room was cold and he owned no fireplace or gas jets.
She hurried through torrents of dry, granular snow to the town’s medical clinic.
The town of Two Rivers lacked a hospital. This building was the nearest thing: a cube of consulting rooms with windows of tinted glass and a wide tiled lobby. Dr. Eichorn would be here today, if her luck held. She identified herself to the soldier at the door and asked where she could find him. “First office left off the lobby,” he said, “last time I saw him, Miss.”
Dr. Eichorn was the medical archivist who had been called in, like Li
“Yes…” Now that she was here, she didn’t know how to begin.
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“Yes, there is.” Forge ahead, she thought. “Dr. Eichorn, I need a course of sulfa drugs.”
“You mean, you’re sick?”
“No. It’s for a friend.”
He was like a muddy pond. It took time for things to sink in. Eichorn pushed the journal aside and leaned back in his chair. “You’re that woman anthropologist from Boston.”
“I am.”
“I didn’t know you were also a medical prodigy.”
“Sir, I’m not. But I was trained by the Christian Renunciates and I know how to administer drugs.”
“And how to prescribe them?”
“The object is to ward off infection in a wound.”
“A wound, you say.”
“Yes.”
“One of your anthropological subjects?” The question was awkward, but Li
“That would be difficult.”
“Or if you took me to the patient.”
“It isn’t necessary.” She worked to keep any hint of desperation out of her voice. “I know your time is valuable. I’m asking this favor as a colleague, Dr. Eichorn.”
“As a colleague? Am I the colleague of a woman who studies savages?” He shook his bald head ponderously. “Sulfanilamide. Well, that’s problematic. There was trouble last night—you may have heard of it.”
“Only rumors.”
“Shooting in the main street.”
“I see.”
“A fire.”
“If you say so.”
Eichorn studied her from his turgid depths. Li
“In this building,” Eichorn said, “there are antibiotics the like of which I’ve never seen. I don’t know where this town came from or where it may be going, but there were some clever people here. We’ll be reaping the rewards for decades. We owe someone a debt, Miss Stone. I don’t know who.” He rubbed his scalp with a bony hand. “No one will miss a bottle of pills. But let’s keep this between us, yes?”
Li
Maybe the change had begun when the Proctor Symeon Demarch invaded her home in Boston, or when she arrived in this impossible town. But the axis and emblem of that change was surely Dexter Graham—not only the man but the qualities she had espied in him: skepticism, courage, defiance.
She thought at first his virtues might be common American virtues, but the evidence for that was scant. Li
Obviously, she should have turned him over to the soldiers as soon as she saw his wound. But when she thought about it she remembered a passage in the book he had given her, Huckleberry Fi
I’ll go to Hell, then, Li
The sulfa pills rattled in her coat pocket as she paced through snowy gloom. Because the electricity had been turned off to punish the townspeople, there would be no streetlights tonight. The military patrols had been redoubled but the snow would slow them down.
She was allowed to come and go as she wished from the civilians’ wing of the Blue View Motel. She ate di
She fed him sulfanilamide and aspirin and sat with him through the night. When Dex slept, she slept on the sofa across the room. When he woke, often raving or thrashing, she bathed his forehead with a damp cloth.
She was aware of the danger of being here and of the danger Dex was in. The Proctors were like poisonous insects—harmless enough if allowed to toil undisturbed in their nests; lethal if aroused. She remembered the day the Proctors came to arrest her mother, before she was sent to the Renunciates, and that ancient fear rose like flood water from the culverts of memory.
While she cooled his forehead she admired Dexter Graham’s face. He was handsome. She seldom thought of the men she knew as handsome or unhandsome; they were threats or opportunities, seldom friends or lovers. The word lover sounded lewd even when she pronounced it in the privacy of her thoughts. Her last “lover,” if he could be called that, was the boy Campo. That was in the old days when she was very young and before the idolatry laws were enacted. Her father had taken the family to the a