He drove through the gates of the park, obsessed with his mirrors and the reflections of the lands shrinking within them. He wrestled the nine hours to Fort Worth on coffee, pot and heavy metal, arriving in the arms of Cleburne State Park where he spent the night under the tall elms tucked into the shallow folds of the prairies. The next morning, he ran six miles of loopy trails, ate lunch and took several worthy shots of the waters and the trees before he realized his right arm was swollen and perspiring. It felt like a mere poison ivy reaction so he ignored it and drove into the city to find a beer and maybe some companionship. He spent an hour talking to a redheaded television producer with freckles like seeds on a strawberry before he asked her opinion on his arm. She immediately spotted the two fang marks on the soft underskin of his wrist and told him a spider had bitten him. He considered the possibility but disagreed. Dude, her smile filled with comic disappointment, that is a spider bite; see these two holes? see this red rash here? it’s gonna keep moving up your arm; that’s the infection; it’s in your blood. I don’t know. Fine, don’t believe me, cowboy.
Bitten when? Then a fleeting memory of the incident came to him, the prick of pain that must have shocked him awake and the conclusion that it had been a twig or some other tiny sharp object. He had swept out the bag into the bed of the truck with his hand and gone back to sleep. He looked now at the tiny holes and the dark pink discoloration creeping up his arm like the crack in a windshield, waxing longer every time he looked at it, worming its way to his lymphatic systems.
Listen to me; like I know what I’m talking about, lymphatic.
Jane? he said even though it was obvious that it was she. Marcus? Hi, Jane; can you talk? She should have said, no, standing in a room full of emergency room doctors, some of whom gave her the exact look she expected from their ilk. She slipped out the door behind her into the hallway filled with people in wheelchairs and the sounds of FOX News and game shows. This better be good, like I’m-dying-and-I-need-to-make-amends type of good, Hatchet. Love you, too, Arness. I don’t wanna risk causing a scene at my place of work but I most certainly fucking will. I need some medical advice, Jane. She thought of bullets, knife wounds, gangrene. What kind of advice? One: how would I know if I’ve been bitten by a spider and two: if it is a spider, how bad could it be? what should I do about it? You didn’t see the spider? Nope. Where’s the bite. On my wrist. Is there dark bruising or anything green going on? No, just a rash. And the rash is growing? Yeah, that’s it. A spider has bitten you and it's given you a blood infection; go to the emergency room or an urgent care center and they’ll hit you with antibiotics that will take care of it. But I have to be somewhere in an hour. You can be somewhere or you can be nowhere, she stated matter-of-factly, sorryboutcha; otherwise, are you safe? unharmed? Yeah, Jane, I’m fine. Good, now don’t call me again; I’ll call you. And she hung up.
Then she wiped a tear from her smiling face, wiped her hands on her scrubs and re-entered the room.
His visit to the local emergency room went quick as soon as he showed the attending nurse the red stripe that had traversed his bicep. She hurried him into a makeshift room full of broken arms and bleeding fingers and bloody towels held up to eyes and a television bulging with the face of a reporter. The captioning beneath it transcribed the difficulty that police were encountering with the Calvary Fellowship robbery. A doctor examined him with the speed of a branding iron and within minutes, a port little woman fired long hypodermic needles into both of his ass cheeks. Hatchet, caught up in the speed of the operation, stood too soon after she administered the drugs and he fainted, revived by a giggling pair of nurses who flirted with him as they shoveled him into a booth where a yellow dollop of a woman asked him to sign here and pay $500 for services rendered.
Bitten when? Then a fleeting memory of the incident came to him, the prick of pain that must have shocked him awake and the conclusion that it had been a twig or some other tiny sharp object. He had swept out the bag into the bed of the truck with his hand and gone back to sleep. He looked now at the tiny holes and the dark pink discoloration creeping up his arm like the crack in a windshield, waxing longer every time he looked at it, worming its way to his lymphatic systems.
Listen to me; like I know what I’m talking about, lymphatic.
Jane? he said even though it was obvious that it was she. Marcus? Hi, Jane; can you talk? She should have said, no, standing in a room full of emergency room doctors, some of whom gave her the exact look she expected from their ilk. She slipped out the door behind her into the hallway filled with people in wheelchairs and the sounds of FOX News and game shows. This better be good, like I’m-dying-and-I-need-to-make-amends type of good, Hatchet. Love you, too, Arness. I don’t wanna risk causing a scene at my place of work but I most certainly fucking will. I need some medical advice, Jane. She thought of bullets, knife wounds, gangrene. What kind of advice? One: how would I know if I’ve been bitten by a spider and two: if it is a spider, how bad could it be? what should I do about it? You didn’t see the spider? Nope. Where’s the bite. On my wrist. Is there dark bruising or anything green going on? No, just a rash. And the rash is growing? Yeah, that’s it. A spider has bitten you and it's given you a blood infection; go to the emergency room or an urgent care center and they’ll hit you with antibiotics that will take care of it. But I have to be somewhere in an hour. You can be somewhere or you can be nowhere, she stated matter-of-factly, sorryboutcha; otherwise, are you safe? unharmed? Yeah, Jane, I’m fine. Good, now don’t call me again; I’ll call you. And she hung up.
Then she wiped a tear from her smiling face, wiped her hands on her scrubs and re-entered the room.
His visit to the local emergency room went quick as soon as he showed the attending nurse the red stripe that had traversed his bicep. She hurried him into a makeshift room full of broken arms and bleeding fingers and bloody towels held up to eyes and a television bulging with the face of a reporter. The captioning beneath it transcribed the difficulty that police were encountering with the Calvary Fellowship robbery. A doctor examined him with the speed of a branding iron and within minutes, a port little woman fired long hypodermic needles into both of his ass cheeks. Hatchet, caught up in the speed of the operation, stood too soon after she administered the drugs and he fainted, revived by a giggling pair of nurses who flirted with him as they shoveled him into a booth where a yellow dollop of a woman asked him to sign here and pay $500 for services rendered.
Edit 11.26.2018