Mad River

gone.
    Becky tried to keep Jimmy awake because she was terribly afraid that if he went to sleep, he’d die. She didn’t know why she thought that, but she did.
    Early in the afternoon, she helped him into the bathroom, and then back to the couch; she almost lost him on the way back, when he lost his balance, and they began to reel out of control. She managed to steer him onto the couch, and he screamed when his leg hit the leather.
    Ten minutes later, despite her chatter, he went to sleep. She sat with him, watching his breathing, like a new mother with her first baby; and she kept one eye on the television, where she saw Duke’s temper tantrum. From that, she took away one thing: if Duke’s men caught them, they’d be killed.
    She tried to wake Jimmy, gently rocking his shoulder, to tell him about it. He barely responded, cracking his eyes open, and then he was gone again.
    She didn’t know what Becky Welsh would do, so she thought about what a nurse would do, and on the basis of more than twenty years’ sitting in front of TVs, she decided to look at the wound.
    Jimmy was wearing nothing but his undershorts, and was asleep on his back, which made it easier to do. He was still wearing the big first-aid bandage, which was white on the outside, but as soon as you looked deeper, she could see that it had soaked up quite a bit of blood.
    When she decided to look at the wound, she first went to the old man’s linen closet and found his cleanest sheet. Pretty sure that wasn’t good enough, she hand-washed it with a lot of dish soap, then tossed it in the clothes dryer and went and watched more TV while it dried.
    And when it was dry, she made a new bandage pad by folding over the biggest part of it, and made ties by ripping off the ends. All, she thought, pretty professional.
    Jimmy was deep in sleep. She tried to gently wake him, but this time he didn’t open his eyes. Just as well, she thought. She used a pair of scissors to cut off the ties on the first-aid bandage, and then carefully peeled it off. The wound looked like a really bad, overcooked personal pizza, the kind with too much tomato sauce and islands of runny yellow cheese; the surface at the center was damp with blood, but it dried out toward the edges. The edge of the wound, where the leg was trying to heal itself, looked a bit like pizza crust, as well.
    She didn’t know it, but the deputy that McCall had shot had been using police hollow points on a .40-caliber handgun, and the bullet had done its work. The entrance wound was no bigger than Becky’s little finger, but the exit wound was half the size of a dollar bill.
    She still had some small bandages from the first aid kit, and she smeared some antiseptic ointment on one of them and brushed it across the top of the wound. Jimmy made a low throat sound, not quite a moan, and she stopped, and then started again. She was almost done, working from the middle to an outside edge, when she pushed too hard. The scab at the edge of the wound broke open, and a thumb-sized curl of yellow pus squirted out, almost like shaving cream from a can.
    And it smelled, something of the stink of an animal dead on a hot summer highway.
    She said, aloud, “Oh, no,” and ran to the bathroom and got some toilet paper and came back and mopped it up, but then, feeling that the corruption should be removed, pushed on the wound, and more pus came out, and finally, some purple blood.
    She looked at the wound for a moment, then went into the kitchen and got a fork from the silverware drawer, brought it back, smeared it with antiseptic, and used one of the tangs to pick and press another edge of the wound. And when it cracked, more pus bled out. She was ready for it this time, and the smell, and she worked methodically around the wound, picking at the parts that looked yellow or swollen. When she was done, she’d taken out enough pus to fill a small jelly jar.
    A lot of pus.
    When all she got was blood, she went back to work with the antiseptic, wiping the wound again, then binding it with the clean sheets. She threw all the dirty bandages and toilet paper in the trash, and came back and looked at Jimmy.
    He was still sleeping, but the sleep looked easier, somehow.
    •   •   •
    A HALF HOUR LATER she was clicking through the relevant TV channels and found a helicopter shot; the shot was following a truck as it climbed a hill toward a farmhouse, part of the search. She was shocked when the camera pulled back a