Mud Vein

“Is that how this happened?”

“I jumped down the table,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking. The asthma—”

The corners of his mouth pull tight. “You had an asthma attack? While this happened?” I nod. I can only see his face with the dim light of the fire, but it looks as if it’s paled.

“Your tibia is fractured. Your leg must have bent at just the right angle when you fell to cause the break.”

“When I jumped,” I said.

“When you fell.”

He’s working with his hands, opening packages. I hear little rips, the clatter of metal. I lean my head back and close my eyes. I hear little bursts of air, I think it’s Isaac, but then I realize that I’m panting.

He looks straight at me. “You must have gotten my body temperature back up. You did everything right.”

“What?” I’m dizzy. I want to hurl again.

“You saved me life,” he says. He glances up at me at the same time I crack open an eye.

“I need to move you.”

“No!” I grab his arm. “No, please. Just let me stay here.” I’m panting. The thought of moving makes me sick. “There is nowhere to move me, Isaac. Just do it here.”

Do what here? Was he really planning to operate on the floor of the attic room?

“There’s not enough light,” I say. The pain is intensifying. I’m hoping he’ll forget this whole thing and let me die. He reaches round his back and brings out the flashlight from downstairs. When I was a little girl, my mother would have chided me for reading under that light, now Isaac is planning on operating with it.

“What are you going to do?” I do a quick survey of what he’s brought with him. There are six rolls of what look like bandages, alcohol, a bucket of water, a needle and thread, a bottle of tequila. There are some other things but he’s placed them on a baking sheet and covered them with what looks like a bandage.

“Fix your leg.”

“Where’s the morphine?” I joke. Isaac props my upper body under pillows he gets from the bed so that I’m in a half sitting position. Then he unscrews the lid from the tequila and holds it to my mouth.

“Get drunk,” he says without looking at me. I chug it.

“Where did you find all of this?” I take a couple of deep breaths letting what I’ve already swallowed settle, and then I lift the bottle back to my mouth. I want to hear how he found my discovery. He speaks while the cactusy taste of tequila burns its way to my stomach in small gulps.

“Where do you think?”

I bite my lip. My mind is numb from the alcohol. I wipe away what’s running down my chin.

“We were starving, and all along…”

“I have to operate,” he says. Is it my imagination or are there beads of sweat on his forehead? The light is so vague it could be a trick of the eyes.

He screws the cap off of a bottle of clear liquid and before I can open my mouth to stop him, he uncovers the gauze and pours it over my wound. I brace myself to scream, but the pain isn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.

“You could have warned me!” I hiss at him, rearing up.

“Hush,” he says. “It’s just saline. I need to clear away the dead tissue … irrigate the wound.”

“And then…?”

“Set the bone. It’s been too long already … the risk of infection … your soft tissue…” He’s mumbling things. Words I don’t hold the meaning to: debridement … osteomyelitis. He reaches up and wipes his forehead with his shirtsleeve. I’m going to have to set your bone. I’m not an orthopedic surgeon, Senna. We don’t have the equipment…”

I stare at him as he leans back on his haunches. He has a face full of scruff, and a head of hair that is standing every which way. He looks so different from the doctor that operated on me last time. The cuts around his mouth deepen as he stares into my wound. He’s more scared than I am, I think. This is his job, his profession—saving lives. He is an expert at saving lives. Yet, this is out of his area of expertise. There is no one to consult with. Isaac Asterholder is positioned at a keyboard instead of the drums, and he doesn’t quite know where to put his hands.

“It’s okay.” I sound peculiarly calm. Detached. “Do what you can.”

He reaches for the flashlight, holds it right above the gash.

“The tissue is red, that’s good,” he says. I nod though I don’t know what he’s talking about. The room has started to spin and I just want him to get on with it.

“It’s going to hurt like hell, Senna.”

“Fuck you,” I say. “Just do it.” I sob on the last word. Such a tough guy.

Isaac gets to work. He washes his hands in the bucket using an amber colored soap. Then he douses his hands and arms in alcohol. He pulls on a pair of gloves. He must have found them down the well with the other supplies. So the zookeeper left us gloves. For what? Surgery? For when we decided to spring clean? Maybe we were supposed to fill them with air and draw faces on them with markers. Our captor though of everything. Except morphine, of course. Somehow I know that one was on purpose. No pain, no gain. This guy likes us to suffer.

Isaac does it. Without warning. While I’m thinking about the zookeeper. This time I don’t scream. I pass out.

When I come to, my leg is throbbing and I’m wasted. That’s what you get when you pour half a bottle of tequila in your starving stomach. He is sitting a few feet away with his back resting against the wall. His head droops down like he’s sleeping. I crane my neck trying to get a look at my leg. Isaac cleaned up most of the mess, but I can see dark spots on the floor around my body—blood. My leg is propped on a pillow, the area where the bone broke through my skin is wrapped in gauze. He’s splinted the leg between what looks like slabs of wood. I feel good about the scar it’ll leave. It’ll be long and jagged.

Isaac wakes up. Once again I notice how terrible he looks. Last night I thought he was dead, and now here he is fixing me. This wasn’t right. I want to do something to make him better, but I’m lying on my back, drunk. He gets up and comes to me. He half scoots, half crawls.

“You were lucky. The bone only broke in one part. It was a clean break so you didn’t have any fragments floating around. But since it tore through the skin there could be nerve and tissue damage. There was no internal bleeding that I could see.”