Allen rode a police cruiser into town from the east as the blizzard moved in from the west. The harried deputy dropped him off promptly and drove away. Chilled and cramped from the canoe, he stiffly dragged Broker’s waterproof duffel up the sidewalk as a thirty mph wind knocked him sideways. He made it through the shin-deep drifts and opened a door with a small orange neon emergency room sign. He dropped the bag in front of the dispatch desk where a woman stood up to confirm his identity. Deputy Iker, she explained, had radioed ahead and now she was monitoring the rescue party which was in flight to “pick up the patient.” She motioned down a corridor and a lean, dark-haired woman came forward in a blue cotton smock.
“Nancy, take Dr. Falken to Boris,” the dispatcher said.
The nurse regarded Allen with the tired slit eyes of someone who’d been up all night. Then she led him down the hall to a nurse’s station where a wiry man dressed in a white medical smock was talking to a woman wearing a sweater and jeans with fresh snow trapped in the cuffs. She held a clipboard in one hand and a telephone in the other.
“This is the doctor who paddled out of the canoe area,” said the dark-haired nurse.
Allen removed his gloves and extended a hand shriveled pinkish-white from cold water. “Allen Falken,” he offered.
“Hello, Boris Brecht, I’m glad to meet you. They said on the radio that you’re a belly guy.”
“That’s right,” Allen said. He blinked and almost lost his balance as the ward swam around him with bright lights and tile, like a large, very clean, very warm bathroom.
“Is your physician’s license current?”
“Yes, I. .”
“May I see it and a picture ID, and I need a contact number where you currently practice?”
Allen cocked his head. “Come again?”
“Dr. Falken-Allen-I’m a family-practice physician. I take out tonsils, maybe. I can’t operate on this man they’re bringing in.”
Allen was furious. “What are you talking about? He’s in bad shape, he could perforate. He needs a level-one trauma center. .” His shaky smile didn’t match his voice; his words and parts of his body were evidently thawing at different rates. “There’s supposed to be a helicopter to take him to Duluth.”
Brecht pointed his finger at the ceiling. “Hear that moan? That’s a blizzard. The roads are closed. There is no helicopter. We’re it. We have an anesthetist on call and we’re trying to reach her, but she could be stuck out there with the whole day shift.”
“Jesus.” Allen rallied, as he plucked the clipboard from the woman in the snow-cuffed jeans, took her pen, and wrote a number on the top of the work schedule attached to the board. Then he dug in a zippered pocket, removed his wallet from a Ziploc bag, and handed Brecht his physician’s license card and his Minnesota driver’s license.
“Call Ron Rosenbaum, he’s the senior surgeon at Timberry Trails Medical Group where I’m on staff. Now, how are you set up?”
“We have an operating-room suite on the lower level for scheduled elective surgery when a surgeon is available, usually from Virgina, sometimes Duluth or even the Cities.”
“Can you do general anesthesia?” Allen asked.
“We’ve got a Narcomed II.”
“What about the anesthetist?”
“What about her? We’re paging her.”
Allen forked his index finger and thumb, pressing his eyes and reminding himself not to be patronizing. Get focused. “Let’s assume the worst and she doesn’t show, who does that leave?”
Brecht grimaced, “If nobody makes it in before the patient arrives-it’s you, me, and,” he pointed to the woman in jeans, “Judy, which leaves Nancy on her own to cover the emergency room and two other wards. But we can’t handle the anesthesia machine.”
“Your anesthetist should have an adult intubation tray,” Allen said.
“We are a hospital. We have a pharmacy,” Judy said.
“Ketamine?”
“It’s there.” She narrowed her eyes. “Will that hold him if you open his abdomen?”
Allen shrugged; he’d operated with it on worse trauma cases in Bosnia in very hairy conditions. “It’ll have to work if there’s no alternative.” Then he cleared his throat and gestured with his arms, indicating his bedraggled clothing and wet boots. “Look, I need a cup of black coffee, some scrubs, and some comfortable shoes, if that’s possible.” He took a deep breath, exhaled. “If there’s a room where I could be alone a few minutes and use a telephone. Then I need to see the OR.”
“Sure,” Brecht said. “I have to call the state licensing board and your hospital-just, you know, going through the motions to satisfy our administrator. He’s, ah, gone sort of apeshit on the subject of emergency surgical privileges. Judy will fix you up.”
Which Judy proceeded to do. Allen took off his wet clothing and cat-washed in the men’s lavatory, then changed into a clean smock and trousers and a pair of somebody’s worn Nikes. When he came out of the john she was waiting with a cup of hot black coffee and then she showed him to an examining room. He thanked her, smiling stiffly, as she pulled the door behind her; then he turned his back to the door and planted his shoulders against it.
Allen carefully sat the coffee down on the small nurses’ table, wrapped both arms across his chest, clasped his shoulders, and hugged himself. The notion of him operating to save Hank’s life brought a slight tremor of irony-he recalled Hank’s tough-guy pontificating yesterday morning. Well, Hank, it looks like the situation is now slightly reversed.
His eyes fixed on the telephone sitting on the desk, next to the blood pressure monitor and the coffee cup. He took a moment to clearly remember a time when he was totally satisfied with himself. .
He remembered Jolene Sommer at that party a year ago at Milt’s river place. She had playfully mussed his hair and had told him it was too perfect.
Allen, you’ve got to learn to unwind a little.
Her touch had left him permanently tousled. Like a warm breeze it had carried hints of foreign vacations and easy laughter. After meeting her he’d returned home to his life and discovered it was a colorless shell furnished with brand-name cliches.
There is more, she’d seemed to intimate.
There is me.
But she hadn’t said anything remotely like that. It was a wish on his part. It wasn’t that he thought Jolene could change. He thought he could change and she might be a catalyst.
Change into someone less wooden, more with it. .
He rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling and reminded himself: You’re too disciplined, too trained, too tidy a man to contemplate such messy human knots.
As always, there was refuge in his work. So he sat down at the small desk and sipped the strong, familiar, bad hospital coffee from the familiar generic Styrofoam cup. The room’s furnishings were also familiar-the whites, grays, and tans of the examining table and the cabinets, the strident biohazard logo on the Sharpes disposal box.
Allen took a deep breath to steady down. He used diaphragmatic breathing as part of his pre-op checklist to enhance visualization. But this deep breath was to prepare him for the phone call to Jolene.
As he exhaled, he visualized the sprawling house tucked on the shadowy pine bluff overlooking the St. Croix River, south of the Hudson Bridge. His watch said 9:18 A.M. He had an idea of how she spent her days. He did not think of her at night when she was with Hank. The idea of her touching his gnarled old body that smelled of cigarettes. .
At 9:18, depending on the weather, she’d be settling into the Mission oak rocker in the sunny corner of the kitchen with a cup of coffee. She’d be listening to the morning show on public radio. She followed the current events program every day to build her vocabulary and deepen her range of subjects. She’d have a pen and a notebook in her lap. She’d be taking notes.
Hank was proud of the fact that Jolene had never graduated from high school.
She’d be wearing the white chenille robe that complemented her green eyes and brought out the ruby highlights in her dark hair. Her smooth skin had an olive cast and she joked that she’d deliberately ordered it a size too small, like a pair of jeans, so that it would fit snug. That damn gray cat he despised would be curled on her lap.
When Allen shut his eyes he was startled by the abyss of fatigue that met him in the dark behind his eyelids. The sound of the window shuddering in the wind brought him up sharply on task and he oriented himself on the serious fact that five lives were suspended inside a tiny airplane somewhere in that sky. All to bring Hank Sommer back here.
What if the plane crashed? Suddenly he saw himself comforting Jolene, winning her over. He’d take her to Florence.
Allen killed the fantasy with a stab of concentration. He was gifted with the highest utilitarian virtues; he was meticulous, he was thorough, he’d memorized a Latinized medical library with almost total recall. His steady hands were capable of tying almost invisible knots in synthetic, absorbable Vicryl sutures.
He could not afford an overactive imagination.
So it bothered him when he couldn’t control the adolescent excitement that speeded up his heart as he dialed the area code and the number and counted one ring, two, three. .
“Hello,” the voice came on smooth and tight and to the point.
“Jo?”
“Allen, well, that was quick; who got the big Bambi?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the kitchen looking at the Weather Channel, you guys must be really catching it.”
“I want you to sit down and listen carefully; something happened.” He spoke in the available, but guarded, professional tone he used with the families of critical patients. He was not a hand-holder but he didn’t stand in doorways with his own hands in his pockets, either.
“Oh Christ, Hank didn’t fall off the wagon, did he? The way he was yelling on the phone. .” She paused. When she resumed talking, first fear stiffened her voice. “Allen? Is everything all right?”
“Jo, it’s Hank. He ruptured himself. Bad.”
“Oh, Christ. I told him to have that taken care of.”
It sounded like she did sit down from the rush of concern in her voice. Succinctly, he explained the storm, the rupture, leaving Milt and Hank in the winter camp, the paddle out, how the guide and the cops were going back with a floatplane, and how he was now stranded in this one-horse hospital with a skeleton staff in a blizzard, anticipating operating under less than ideal conditions.
“Just be prepared,” he told her in his best level tone.
The velvet wore thin in her voice as she showed some bare knuckle. “Just what’s that supposed to mean? I’m not some fucking Boy Scout-you’d better give me more than that. You’d better tell me he’s going to be all right.”
“I’m just saying it’s bad up here, there’s a blizzard. Christ, he’s in this little airplane with some cowboy pilot.”
“Promise me, Allen. You’ve got to pull him through.”
“Don’t worry, Jo.” He pressed the cool plastic of the receiver against his forehead and blamed the fatigue, because he found himself looking at all the possible outcomes on this bad morning, and in one of them the plane simply disappeared into the storm and was never seen again. An Act of God.
She broke his glide. “Give me the phone number for the hospital, there must be an airstrip up there. I’ll watch the weather. I’ll get Earl to find a quick charter. .”
“I don’t think Earl is a good idea under the circumstances,” Allen said tightly.
“He’s handy, he knows how to get things done. Like hire a plane on a short notice. I’m just being practical.”
“Hank hates him,” Allen said.
“Let me worry about that. You tuck your head into your surgeon’s cap and take care of business. I’m counting on you.”
“Yes,” Allen said simply, suddenly helpless before the inadequacy of language; so he gave her the hospital phone number, hung up the phone, and tried to wipe the sweat from his forehead with the sweat on his palms. Enough of this bullshit. It was time to get serious.
And finally the traction of his willpower engaged and he jettisoned the distractions-his personal life, the exhausting canoe trip out of the park, even Jolene. They became irrelevant as he narrowed in focus until his triangular face seemed to winnow to a point.
Then he raised his raw, blistered hands and inspected them. As always, he felt contempt for people who never touched anything except keyboards and telephones and money, who talked their way through life.
He took pride in making his living with his hands. During his surgical residency at the Mayo Clinic he had worn a red-and-white- striped regimental tie under his staff coat. The pattern and the colors invoked the bloody bandages of the barber pole that had served as the original shingle surgeons hung out to advertise their profession. The surgeons had followed European armies out of the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the modern era. They’d cut hair and they’d amputated arms and legs.
Allen smiled. Then, with the help of Mother Church, they’d rooted out the village midwives and the herbalist “witches” and consolidated their hold on medicine.
He was not without history. He was not without wit.
A surgeon of his generation couldn’t wear a tattoo on his arm like the new kids coming up-or like Hank Sommer could, and Allen envied Hank the cryptic messages dyed into his skin. And if Allen could have a secret tattoo it would be a Bard/Parker number-ten scalpel blade and it would say: HEAL WITH STEEL.
Now he mentally stripped himself until he saw himself as nude as a Michelangelo anatomy study. Then he dressed himself in successive layers of knowledge, confidence, and control. Only when he was fully mentally garbed did he visualize the entire operation, starting from the first incision.
He absolutely believed that anything he could visualize he could make happen in the controlled environment of an operating room.
When Allen stood up, his brow and his palms were dry. The guide, Broker, did not look like he was intimidated by Acts of God; he would persist. He would bring Hank back and lay him on an operating table and, true to the oath he had taken, Allen would insert a blade of the sharpest stainless steel just above Hank Sommer’s pubic bone and slice him open, lift out his guts with his two hands, repair them, and save his life.
* * *
The pilot leaned back, grabbed Iker’s arm, and rapped a knuckle on the map. Broker climbed forward and put his finger on the point in Fraser Lake.
“The rocks are real bad. You’re gonna have to land in this bay where the point joins the shore, and we’ll carry him out to you,” Broker said.
The pilot shook his head. “No time. Lots of bad bush in there. We’ll take our chances with the rocks. The guy with the bad arm-can he walk?” he asked.
“Sure,” Broker said. “He can make it on his own.”
The pilot nodded. “Okay. Listen up. You two are going to strap him on the Stokes and haul him through the rocks and load him. We do it the first time or we’ll have to ride out this storm on the lake. Which will not be good for the patient.”
“Eh, Pat?” called a deadpan voice on the radio. “Be advised. I’m looking out the hangar window and I can’t see the wind sock on the point.”
“Outstanding,” the pilot replied.
At one thousand feet the clouds were clotting fast, and down below the snow rippled like cheesecloth over the pine crowns and water. What had taken Broker and Allen a day of paddling and portaging to travel now buffeted past in minutes and they came up on Fraser. The pilot knew the lake, fixed the point, and flew straight for the spot that Broker had indicated on the map.
Gray smoke smudged the snow and Broker figured Milt had dumped pine boughs on the fire. Then they saw Milt’s red parka jerking among the white turtles of rock, waving his good arm.
Iker grabbed the stretcher as the Beaver hugged a tight turn and bumped down into the waves. Iker and Broker edged through the open hatch and balanced on the pontoon as the plane maneuvered toward shore.
“Go. Go,” the pilot yelled, pumping his arm.
They tried to step onto a rock but it wasn’t going to happen, so they jumped at the most solid-looking footing they could see, and both of them splashed up to their waists in the ice-cold water.
“Jesus H. Christ,” gasped Iker, scrambling for shore.
They sloshed through the waves and stumbled up the cobble beach. Milt, unshaven, gray with pain, walked stiffly out to them.
“No water or food since midnight. He’s unconscious,” Milt yelled in the wind. “Thing is, the swelling went down an hour ago and the pain went away and he was feeling great-then he started screaming. Now he’s delirious, burning up.”
“Aw God, it perforated,” Iker said.
“C’mon,” Broker shouted. “He’s dying on us.”
They stamped into the rocky cul-de-sac, swatting at the smoke and, grabbing Sommer, roughly shoved the stiff stretcher under the sleeping bag and buckled him down. Sommer woke up screaming.
Ignoring the screams, they staggered back toward the plane with their clumsy load. Milt lurched ahead, tripping and falling in the surf until he made it to the aircraft and, using his strong good arm, pulled himself aboard.
Knee-deep in the rocky wash, Broker’s legs buckled and Iker, on the back end, tripped. The sleeping bag took a wave, and now their load was heavier, soaked with water.
They dropped him and barely managed to keep his head from going under but the screaming stopped. Sommer had passed out again. Broker and Iker locked eyes and were amazed that the brief exertion had sapped their energy, that they didn’t have the strength to lift the stretcher.
But they had to.
Desperate, they wrenched the weight through the rocks and waves and banged it on the pontoon. With Milt pulling one-handed, they managed to get the front of the stretcher into the tiny cargo bay.
“Fucker’s too big,” Iker yelled, frantic. Sommer’s feet, swaddled in the soaked sleeping bag, dangled over the stretcher and bumped against the cockpit seats.
“Wedge him any way you can, shut that hatch, we’re going,” the pilot ordered.
Milt, Broker, and Iker worked in a frenzy with the stretcher, as the pilot banked into the wind and grabbed some sky with an impromptu aerodynamic magic trick. For a few minutes they bounced through turbulence, catching their breath, and then the calm voice on the radio said, “Pat, be advised, they’re getting heavy snow and ice-I say again-heavy snow and ice and sixty-plus wind gusts east of Lake Vermilion.”
“Roger,” the pilot said. Then he yelled, “Map.” Iker held it at the ready.
As the Beaver lurched at two thousand feet, Broker looked forward, between the tangled arms and legs, over the jittering dials and gauges on the console, out the window.
God had been busy.
God had built a solid, grayish-white churning wall all across the sky, and that wall was coming straight at them. Broker could see lakes and woods being vacuumed into its base.
One eye on the forest disappearing in front of the oncoming blizzard and one eye on the map, the pilot shouted in the radio, “Closest place to land with road access is. . ah, Snowbank. So. Okay. I’m going to drop into Snowbank ahead of this thing. Get a vehicle to the boat ramp. You got that?”
“You’re diverting to Snowbank boat ramp. Lay on ground transport,” the radio voice said.
“Right.” The pilot dropped the mike and yelled, “Hang on.”
Everybody groaned as the Beaver pitched over into a steep dive and the pilot bent forward, very intent on the churning white wall.
Broker was thrown nose to nose with Sommer’s corpselike face and Sommer’s eyes popped open as Iker, in the front, climbed his seat while Milt slowly moved his lips: “Holy Mary, Mother of God. .”
Their eyes were clamped shut and they were braced in the forty-five-degree dive, so they didn’t see the seething white wall break over the trees and chew inexorably into the western end of Snowbank Lake, as the Beaver leveled out and swooped down five, four, three feet off the waves, then skimmed the white caps, then bounced, rivets rattling, as it careened toward the boat ramp which was fast disappearing into the tempest, and they never saw the pilot smile as he cut the prop and coasted herky-jerky into the white churn.
It sure beat flying those commercial cattle cars.