Chapter 1
Jake LaMott slowly shook his way to consciousness. It was dark and cold. He was shivering slightly. “Black as the inside of a gravediggers arse,” he thought. Reaching out for the light on the nightstand by the bed, he jammed his fingers into a solid wall. Spreading his hand, he could feel satin with no give under an inch or so of batting.
“Maybe I’m in a sleeping bag.” Rolling onto his side only served to wedge his shoulder into the top of the what? Box? Above him. Struggling, Jake managed to get his old Zippo lighter out of his pocket. A wrist flick flung the cap back and a spin of the striker wheel brought a flare of light and a glimpse of cream colored satin igniting in front of his eyes, spreading outwards in a circle like a drop of fiery oil on water. For a frantic few moments, Jake beat at the flames until all that remained was the stench of burnt nylon and hot points of sticky plastic attached to his hand. And the beating of his heart. Oh yeah, it was doing box office business inside his ribcage, beating like there was no tomorrow. If it kept up, there’d be no tomorrow – he wasn’t sure how strong the grafts on his bypassed arteries were at this point…
“Where in hell am I?” Jake muttered aloud. His one flickering glimpse of his apartment put him in mind of a coffin.
Huge somethings crashed down on his world, outside of his cell. Vaguely, muffled voices could be heard to rumble like thunder in the distance. His breathing quickened. With dwindling strength, he started kicking the bottom of his enclosure with the heels of his dress boots. A startled shout and then some knocking above his head from outside brought renewed hope and increasing blackness as he lost all contact with his surroundings, slipping once again into unconsciousness.
Jake LaMott slowly came to consciousness like cream poured into strong, black coffee, swirling and mixing white with black, roiling up in an oily mass from the depths. He felt queasy, weak, disassociated from his body. It was there, alright, he could feel his pulse beating at his temple like a manic drummer, but it wasn’t real. The toes he wiggled were attached, but not completely under his control. Fingers wiggled, but not with intent. Eyes opened, but nothing moved, all was black – “black as the inside of a gravediggers arse,” he thought to himself, repeating a handy phrase he’d learned at his Father’s knee when just a wee tyke. Sounds were present, but lacked meaning. Clicks and hums and the occasional beep… not anything he could place. Gathering up his scattered willpower, he attempted to raise his head. Lightning burst before his eyes, thunder echoed in his ears as the rush of blood thrummed in his head amidst excruciating pain.
“Easy there, Jake, lie still,” commanded a woman’s voice to his right. A voice he didn’t know, an accent he couldn’t place. He started to raise his head again, only to feel immovable resistance at his forehead.
“Lie still, I said,” commanded the voice more forcefully this time. “Moving is out of the question. You are just lucky to be alive, again…” the disembodied voice explained. It was the last thing he heard. A sharp pain, then a rush of warmth signaled the departure of consciousness once again.
~ ~ ~
Waking was more abrupt this time. One moment, Jake was conversing with his Father over a glass of Tullemore Dew on the fate of his Grandfather Seamus’ horse in the peat bog, the next he was surrounded by a rush of cool air, efficiency in motion as he was rolled onto his side and warm water was applied by a strong hand, briskly rubbing the tingles away as goose bumps rose on his skin, then surrounded in a heated blanket and rolled onto his other side, scrubbed and massaged and chilled and warmed and rolled supine to have his front attacked with equal enthusiasm and no sense of hesitation or false modesty on the part of the wielder of the wash cloth (for he’d determined the nubbly cloth must be a wash cloth like his Momma used on him when he was young – bumpy and coarse and all business.) Quickly, another heated blanket cocooned him in its fluffy warmth and Jake relaxed into it, suddenly aware of the tension he’d been suppressing leaving him even as he realized it had existed. A pillow was inserted behind him as his head was raised by strong, sure fingers.
“There now, Mr. LaMott. That’ll do you for another morning, I think,” boomed a deep, scratchy voice – the kind that whiskey drinkers and chain smokers develop over decades of flogging by their personal addictions. “I’ll be back with your meds shortly. You just rest.”
And then it was gone with the swish of pant legs rubbing against each other and the pneumatic hiss of a self-closing door, the thunk of the latch offering punctuation to the woman’s statement.
Jake relaxed in the warmth and came to some conclusions. Rather, hypotheses. He was in a hospital of some sort, or a nursing home. He was all there. He could feel fingers and toes. His head itched under the wraps of what he supposed was a bandage. He couldn’t see anything, but he chalked that up to the bandages. He was injured, but he couldn’t remember how or why. He wasn’t sure where “here” was. He didn’t recognize the accents of the two voices he remembered, but they didn’t sound foreign. He knew his name was Jake. He supposed his last name was LaMott, at least that was how the last voice had addressed him. His grandfather’s horse was stuck in a peat bog and he was desperate to help, but couldn’t seem to reach him. Every step taken was like dragging through the deep marine mud of the flats off Eastport. Even as he pondered how he knew that and where in heck Eastport might be, the warm rush in his veins signaled another trip down the well.
~ ~ ~
“He’s stable now. I’m still not happy with his ‘crits, but I think you can let him spend part of the day awake. Give him 10mg Morphine now and p.r.n. We’ll let him self-medicate in time for his pain. Call me if there’s any significant change, of course. I’ll unbandage his eyes if my assessment this afternoon of his condition warrants it. No ambulation today, perhaps a trip to the bathroom this evening if he’s willing. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Certainly, Doctor. Solid food OK?” asked a second male voice, younger, higher in timbre.
“Nothing heavy, Roger. Clear broth and dry toast for midday. We’ll see how he tolerates it and go from there. No stimulants. No coffee, tea. No cigarettes – the dilation of his pupil is such that particles of smoke could be disastrous.
Jake swam upward through a veil of swirling mists, grasping, clawing his way to full alertness. Morphine? He must have been hurt far more seriously than he’d thought initially. He’d have to find a phone, call his superiors for instruction. Only, he still couldn’t see. And didn’t know where he was. He did know his name though. John Jacob Astor LaMott, Jake LaMott to all but his family. Family. Mother and father, now dead. Raised in Maine as a young man, uprooted to Connecticut as the fishing industry collapsed. His father worked at Sikorsky Aviation building the composite rotors needed by the Black Hawk/Seahawk line of military attack utility helicopters. Graduated high school in 1978. Ex-Marine. Graduated into adulthood on a little island nation in the Caribbean named Grenada, killing Cuban soldiers that had blocked the road into the port city in 1983. Served with distinction, getting shot and wounded but never leaving his post as a guard detailed to the United States Embassy in Jamaica during the upheavals following the deposition of “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Recovered for six months at Bethesda Naval Hospital and then at his grandparents’ former home in Eastport, Maine, now owned by his brother Bill, a carpenter and his wife Tammi, a nurse.
“Good Morning, sleepy head. Time to wakey-wakey,” a new voice, female, young. The bed hummed and vibrated, the head-end rising as the leg end dropped in response to unseen, unanticipated commands. Strong arms lifted him and placed a pillow behind him.
“Time to get cleaned up. You’re starting to look like a hoary old mountain man, judging from the whiskers I can see peeking through the bandages on your face. I’m Cindy and I’ll be your aide this morning. Janice is your nurse and Roger is Charge Nurse for the unit,” she went on. “Don’t get up. Roger seems to think you were alert and listening while the Doctor discussed your care plan with him this morning.”
I slowly nodded my head in the direction of her voice. I could hear her shoes on the floor, they made a “squishing” sound with each step she took on her way to the bathroom, which I judged to be off to my right. I could hear water running, the sound of a toilet flushing. More water. Then “squish, squish, squish, squish” as footsteps approached rapidly from the direction they’d disappeared to earlier.
“Let’s get that johnny off you,” the voice I knew to call Cindy said. “We’ll get you cleaned up and then I’ll put a pajama top on you.
Slowly, one at a time his arm was lifted, supported and cloth drawn off his shoulder, down his arm. Just as slowly, he was lowered back to the bed. The pain in his head was intense. Deep, black, scalding white hot when his neck flexed, fading to gray and then to blue, purple, finally back to black as the intensity eased off, his breathing slowed, the blood pounding in his temples whooshing instead of doing the Conga. It seemed worse on his right side, he thought. Perhaps that is where he was injured.
Suddenly he had a flash of memory. A hand bearing a gun, a 9mm Sig Sauer, black, coming at him suddenly and then… nothing. No further memory. No idea who might have hit him, either. He never got his arm up to block the blow. He sensed… no, recollected actually… feeling betrayed and hurt.
Someone had gotten the drop on him. That’s what he was feeling betrayed about. Someone he had trusted had done this to him, whatever “this” was.
Pain shot through his head like a hot knife through butter. Cindy had just raised him off the bed to take the other sleeve of the johnny off him. She’d been scrubbing him briskly the same way she’d done before.
“Now that’s odd. I just thought to myself that Cindy had done this to me before, but I don’t recall when.” Jake struggled to speak, but all he could muster was a hoarse croak.
“Don’t you be trying to talk yet, me boyo,” ordered a new voice from the bottom of the bed.
Female. Pleasant enough voice he supposed, mid-forties, maybe. Must be the nurse Cindy had mentioned. “What was her name? Oh yeah, Janice.” The name came to him slowly, like catfish floating up to the surface of the St. Croix after a discharge from the sewer treatment plant when he was a boy. He remembered an old wooden rowboat with oars about two times too big for him, a couple of cinder blocks on a fathom’s length of rope he’d scrounged from his grandfather’s shed, a long, bamboo pole and some netting twine with a big red and white plastic bobber and a big snelled hook he’d found in the wrack after a spring tide. The squeal of the oarlocks as he pulled, feathered then repeated his stroke up the river to the big, black pipe that ran out across the mud bank of the river to the trickle in the channel at low tide from the sewer plant. He preferred to fish there at slack tide because that was when the operators discharged into the river. One minute he’d be sitting over calm, blue water. The next saw the surface boil and roil with brown gobbets of something coming from the pipe eight feet down, spreading out in a widening gyre around him. There were many catfish, “hornpout” actually, was what they were called, in the immediate area of the discharge pipe. Something in the effluent paralyzed them and they’d come floating belly up to the surface. They weren’t dead, only stunned like. In a moment or ten, they righted themselves and swam away. But before they did, it was like floating amidst the dead bodies he’d seen on TV, the ones in Viet Nam, floating on the water of a river far away. But those bodies didn’t right themselves and swim away. Patrol boats came and men, strong men heaved the bodies into boats and carried them away. He’d seen it on the news. Uncle Walter told him about the dead bodies, “an act of a cowardly terrorist,” boomed the stentorian tones of the newsman.
He liked Walter Cronkite. He’d sailed into Eastport harbor one summer aboard this big, beautiful, white yacht, just him and his wife and a news crew filming them. It was covered in glistening mahogany, dull teak on the deck so one didn’t slip and slide overboard, polished brass and chrome. It was a marvelous sight to a 12 year old boy. He and Sammy Beal and John Jones had been buddies then and inseparable all summer long. That was the year his mother was ill with the cancer and he pretty much ran wild. They’d ride their bikes down Steamboat Avenue, this dinky little lane that fetched up at the edge of the river. The tough kids would hang out there on occasion, smoking pot they’d caged from the hippies in the commune up on High Street. The cops would sit down there in their cruisers, doing paperwork and drinking coffee, catching 40 winks, listening to the radio. Jake and Sammy were the same size and almost the same age, Sam’s birthday in August and Jake’s in September. John was about six months older, but he’d been a year ahead of them in school until the fifth grade when he got held back. He was bigger than they were, stronger, with just a hint of moustache appearing on his upper lip. He even had some hair under his arms and down there, in his crotch. Jake had seen that the last time they’d gone skinny-dipping out to the Quarry and John had swung back and forth on the rope hanging from the maple tree, bareass naked for all to see, just swinging in the breeze. The girls had all averted their eyes, but he’d gotten rather more of an eyeful than he was comfortable with. Johnny had grown up. It was the last time John went skinny dipping with the gang that summer.
Jake was yanked back to the present by pain shooting through his right eye. Cindy had finished and gone off to tend other patients. He was alone in the room for the time being, he judged, hearing no breathing other than his own, no footsteps or the scritching of pen on paper indicating the presence of a nurse or doctor. He fumbled around, feeling for a cord to pull to summon help. The pain was excruciating, red, angry throbbing in time to his heart. Finally locating a pushbutton device between his thigh and the side of the bed, he held the button down until a voice addressed him from a speaker over the bed.
“This is the front desk, Mr. LaMott. Someone will be with you as soon as they can. Is there an emergency?”
Jake just croaked, lay back on the pillow. He could feel sweat rolling down his forehead and into his eyes under the bandages. He raised a hand now to feel the bandage. Or at least, he tried to raise his right hand. It refused to cooperate. He got it about six inches off his chest and then couldn’t get it to move any farther.
“Dammit to Hell! What is wrong with me?” he thought angrily. He’d been top of his class in boot camp. He could lift a full 160 pound carboy of lobsters when he was sixteen. He thought nothing of bench pressing 220 pounds at the gym at Quantico where he worked out after running the six mile loop. He humped a 70 pound pack for twenty miles in training like it was nothing. And now he couldn’t lift his arm?
A rustle of skirts, or perhaps pant legs, Jake couldn’t tell. The air smelled faintly of lilac – it must be the nurse, Janice. Cindy had smelled of flowers, roses, he thought. This was lighter, subtle. A cool hand took his pulse, then the familiar rush of warmth spread up his arm and he gratefully succumbed to the black fingers of Morpheous.
~ ~ ~
“Maybe I’m in a sleeping bag.” Rolling onto his side only served to wedge his shoulder into the top of the what? Box? Above him. Struggling, Jake managed to get his old Zippo lighter out of his pocket. A wrist flick flung the cap back and a spin of the striker wheel brought a flare of light and a glimpse of cream colored satin igniting in front of his eyes, spreading outwards in a circle like a drop of fiery oil on water. For a frantic few moments, Jake beat at the flames until all that remained was the stench of burnt nylon and hot points of sticky plastic attached to his hand. And the beating of his heart. Oh yeah, it was doing box office business inside his ribcage, beating like there was no tomorrow. If it kept up, there’d be no tomorrow – he wasn’t sure how strong the grafts on his bypassed arteries were at this point…
“Where in hell am I?” Jake muttered aloud. His one flickering glimpse of his apartment put him in mind of a coffin.
Huge somethings crashed down on his world, outside of his cell. Vaguely, muffled voices could be heard to rumble like thunder in the distance. His breathing quickened. With dwindling strength, he started kicking the bottom of his enclosure with the heels of his dress boots. A startled shout and then some knocking above his head from outside brought renewed hope and increasing blackness as he lost all contact with his surroundings, slipping once again into unconsciousness.
Jake LaMott slowly came to consciousness like cream poured into strong, black coffee, swirling and mixing white with black, roiling up in an oily mass from the depths. He felt queasy, weak, disassociated from his body. It was there, alright, he could feel his pulse beating at his temple like a manic drummer, but it wasn’t real. The toes he wiggled were attached, but not completely under his control. Fingers wiggled, but not with intent. Eyes opened, but nothing moved, all was black – “black as the inside of a gravediggers arse,” he thought to himself, repeating a handy phrase he’d learned at his Father’s knee when just a wee tyke. Sounds were present, but lacked meaning. Clicks and hums and the occasional beep… not anything he could place. Gathering up his scattered willpower, he attempted to raise his head. Lightning burst before his eyes, thunder echoed in his ears as the rush of blood thrummed in his head amidst excruciating pain.
“Easy there, Jake, lie still,” commanded a woman’s voice to his right. A voice he didn’t know, an accent he couldn’t place. He started to raise his head again, only to feel immovable resistance at his forehead.
“Lie still, I said,” commanded the voice more forcefully this time. “Moving is out of the question. You are just lucky to be alive, again…” the disembodied voice explained. It was the last thing he heard. A sharp pain, then a rush of warmth signaled the departure of consciousness once again.
Waking was more abrupt this time. One moment, Jake was conversing with his Father over a glass of Tullemore Dew on the fate of his Grandfather Seamus’ horse in the peat bog, the next he was surrounded by a rush of cool air, efficiency in motion as he was rolled onto his side and warm water was applied by a strong hand, briskly rubbing the tingles away as goose bumps rose on his skin, then surrounded in a heated blanket and rolled onto his other side, scrubbed and massaged and chilled and warmed and rolled supine to have his front attacked with equal enthusiasm and no sense of hesitation or false modesty on the part of the wielder of the wash cloth (for he’d determined the nubbly cloth must be a wash cloth like his Momma used on him when he was young – bumpy and coarse and all business.) Quickly, another heated blanket cocooned him in its fluffy warmth and Jake relaxed into it, suddenly aware of the tension he’d been suppressing leaving him even as he realized it had existed. A pillow was inserted behind him as his head was raised by strong, sure fingers.
“There now, Mr. LaMott. That’ll do you for another morning, I think,” boomed a deep, scratchy voice – the kind that whiskey drinkers and chain smokers develop over decades of flogging by their personal addictions. “I’ll be back with your meds shortly. You just rest.”
And then it was gone with the swish of pant legs rubbing against each other and the pneumatic hiss of a self-closing door, the thunk of the latch offering punctuation to the woman’s statement.
Jake relaxed in the warmth and came to some conclusions. Rather, hypotheses. He was in a hospital of some sort, or a nursing home. He was all there. He could feel fingers and toes. His head itched under the wraps of what he supposed was a bandage. He couldn’t see anything, but he chalked that up to the bandages. He was injured, but he couldn’t remember how or why. He wasn’t sure where “here” was. He didn’t recognize the accents of the two voices he remembered, but they didn’t sound foreign. He knew his name was Jake. He supposed his last name was LaMott, at least that was how the last voice had addressed him. His grandfather’s horse was stuck in a peat bog and he was desperate to help, but couldn’t seem to reach him. Every step taken was like dragging through the deep marine mud of the flats off Eastport. Even as he pondered how he knew that and where in heck Eastport might be, the warm rush in his veins signaled another trip down the well.
“He’s stable now. I’m still not happy with his ‘crits, but I think you can let him spend part of the day awake. Give him 10mg Morphine now and p.r.n. We’ll let him self-medicate in time for his pain. Call me if there’s any significant change, of course. I’ll unbandage his eyes if my assessment this afternoon of his condition warrants it. No ambulation today, perhaps a trip to the bathroom this evening if he’s willing. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“Certainly, Doctor. Solid food OK?” asked a second male voice, younger, higher in timbre.
“Nothing heavy, Roger. Clear broth and dry toast for midday. We’ll see how he tolerates it and go from there. No stimulants. No coffee, tea. No cigarettes – the dilation of his pupil is such that particles of smoke could be disastrous.
Jake swam upward through a veil of swirling mists, grasping, clawing his way to full alertness. Morphine? He must have been hurt far more seriously than he’d thought initially. He’d have to find a phone, call his superiors for instruction. Only, he still couldn’t see. And didn’t know where he was. He did know his name though. John Jacob Astor LaMott, Jake LaMott to all but his family. Family. Mother and father, now dead. Raised in Maine as a young man, uprooted to Connecticut as the fishing industry collapsed. His father worked at Sikorsky Aviation building the composite rotors needed by the Black Hawk/Seahawk line of military attack utility helicopters. Graduated high school in 1978. Ex-Marine. Graduated into adulthood on a little island nation in the Caribbean named Grenada, killing Cuban soldiers that had blocked the road into the port city in 1983. Served with distinction, getting shot and wounded but never leaving his post as a guard detailed to the United States Embassy in Jamaica during the upheavals following the deposition of “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Recovered for six months at Bethesda Naval Hospital and then at his grandparents’ former home in Eastport, Maine, now owned by his brother Bill, a carpenter and his wife Tammi, a nurse.
“Good Morning, sleepy head. Time to wakey-wakey,” a new voice, female, young. The bed hummed and vibrated, the head-end rising as the leg end dropped in response to unseen, unanticipated commands. Strong arms lifted him and placed a pillow behind him.
“Time to get cleaned up. You’re starting to look like a hoary old mountain man, judging from the whiskers I can see peeking through the bandages on your face. I’m Cindy and I’ll be your aide this morning. Janice is your nurse and Roger is Charge Nurse for the unit,” she went on. “Don’t get up. Roger seems to think you were alert and listening while the Doctor discussed your care plan with him this morning.”
I slowly nodded my head in the direction of her voice. I could hear her shoes on the floor, they made a “squishing” sound with each step she took on her way to the bathroom, which I judged to be off to my right. I could hear water running, the sound of a toilet flushing. More water. Then “squish, squish, squish, squish” as footsteps approached rapidly from the direction they’d disappeared to earlier.
“Let’s get that johnny off you,” the voice I knew to call Cindy said. “We’ll get you cleaned up and then I’ll put a pajama top on you.
Slowly, one at a time his arm was lifted, supported and cloth drawn off his shoulder, down his arm. Just as slowly, he was lowered back to the bed. The pain in his head was intense. Deep, black, scalding white hot when his neck flexed, fading to gray and then to blue, purple, finally back to black as the intensity eased off, his breathing slowed, the blood pounding in his temples whooshing instead of doing the Conga. It seemed worse on his right side, he thought. Perhaps that is where he was injured.
Suddenly he had a flash of memory. A hand bearing a gun, a 9mm Sig Sauer, black, coming at him suddenly and then… nothing. No further memory. No idea who might have hit him, either. He never got his arm up to block the blow. He sensed… no, recollected actually… feeling betrayed and hurt.
Someone had gotten the drop on him. That’s what he was feeling betrayed about. Someone he had trusted had done this to him, whatever “this” was.
Pain shot through his head like a hot knife through butter. Cindy had just raised him off the bed to take the other sleeve of the johnny off him. She’d been scrubbing him briskly the same way she’d done before.
“Now that’s odd. I just thought to myself that Cindy had done this to me before, but I don’t recall when.” Jake struggled to speak, but all he could muster was a hoarse croak.
“Don’t you be trying to talk yet, me boyo,” ordered a new voice from the bottom of the bed.
Female. Pleasant enough voice he supposed, mid-forties, maybe. Must be the nurse Cindy had mentioned. “What was her name? Oh yeah, Janice.” The name came to him slowly, like catfish floating up to the surface of the St. Croix after a discharge from the sewer treatment plant when he was a boy. He remembered an old wooden rowboat with oars about two times too big for him, a couple of cinder blocks on a fathom’s length of rope he’d scrounged from his grandfather’s shed, a long, bamboo pole and some netting twine with a big red and white plastic bobber and a big snelled hook he’d found in the wrack after a spring tide. The squeal of the oarlocks as he pulled, feathered then repeated his stroke up the river to the big, black pipe that ran out across the mud bank of the river to the trickle in the channel at low tide from the sewer plant. He preferred to fish there at slack tide because that was when the operators discharged into the river. One minute he’d be sitting over calm, blue water. The next saw the surface boil and roil with brown gobbets of something coming from the pipe eight feet down, spreading out in a widening gyre around him. There were many catfish, “hornpout” actually, was what they were called, in the immediate area of the discharge pipe. Something in the effluent paralyzed them and they’d come floating belly up to the surface. They weren’t dead, only stunned like. In a moment or ten, they righted themselves and swam away. But before they did, it was like floating amidst the dead bodies he’d seen on TV, the ones in Viet Nam, floating on the water of a river far away. But those bodies didn’t right themselves and swim away. Patrol boats came and men, strong men heaved the bodies into boats and carried them away. He’d seen it on the news. Uncle Walter told him about the dead bodies, “an act of a cowardly terrorist,” boomed the stentorian tones of the newsman.
He liked Walter Cronkite. He’d sailed into Eastport harbor one summer aboard this big, beautiful, white yacht, just him and his wife and a news crew filming them. It was covered in glistening mahogany, dull teak on the deck so one didn’t slip and slide overboard, polished brass and chrome. It was a marvelous sight to a 12 year old boy. He and Sammy Beal and John Jones had been buddies then and inseparable all summer long. That was the year his mother was ill with the cancer and he pretty much ran wild. They’d ride their bikes down Steamboat Avenue, this dinky little lane that fetched up at the edge of the river. The tough kids would hang out there on occasion, smoking pot they’d caged from the hippies in the commune up on High Street. The cops would sit down there in their cruisers, doing paperwork and drinking coffee, catching 40 winks, listening to the radio. Jake and Sammy were the same size and almost the same age, Sam’s birthday in August and Jake’s in September. John was about six months older, but he’d been a year ahead of them in school until the fifth grade when he got held back. He was bigger than they were, stronger, with just a hint of moustache appearing on his upper lip. He even had some hair under his arms and down there, in his crotch. Jake had seen that the last time they’d gone skinny-dipping out to the Quarry and John had swung back and forth on the rope hanging from the maple tree, bareass naked for all to see, just swinging in the breeze. The girls had all averted their eyes, but he’d gotten rather more of an eyeful than he was comfortable with. Johnny had grown up. It was the last time John went skinny dipping with the gang that summer.
Jake was yanked back to the present by pain shooting through his right eye. Cindy had finished and gone off to tend other patients. He was alone in the room for the time being, he judged, hearing no breathing other than his own, no footsteps or the scritching of pen on paper indicating the presence of a nurse or doctor. He fumbled around, feeling for a cord to pull to summon help. The pain was excruciating, red, angry throbbing in time to his heart. Finally locating a pushbutton device between his thigh and the side of the bed, he held the button down until a voice addressed him from a speaker over the bed.
“This is the front desk, Mr. LaMott. Someone will be with you as soon as they can. Is there an emergency?”
Jake just croaked, lay back on the pillow. He could feel sweat rolling down his forehead and into his eyes under the bandages. He raised a hand now to feel the bandage. Or at least, he tried to raise his right hand. It refused to cooperate. He got it about six inches off his chest and then couldn’t get it to move any farther.
“Dammit to Hell! What is wrong with me?” he thought angrily. He’d been top of his class in boot camp. He could lift a full 160 pound carboy of lobsters when he was sixteen. He thought nothing of bench pressing 220 pounds at the gym at Quantico where he worked out after running the six mile loop. He humped a 70 pound pack for twenty miles in training like it was nothing. And now he couldn’t lift his arm?
A rustle of skirts, or perhaps pant legs, Jake couldn’t tell. The air smelled faintly of lilac – it must be the nurse, Janice. Cindy had smelled of flowers, roses, he thought. This was lighter, subtle. A cool hand took his pulse, then the familiar rush of warmth spread up his arm and he gratefully succumbed to the black fingers of Morpheous.
© 2004 by Wil
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