A man in an orange suit begins slapping my face and holding my wrist. Checking my vital signs, that is what he’s doing. Maybe he had done that once before; I can’t remember. It feels strange to have a person touching my skin, though. The hairs are rising on my arm.
“That place where you’re touching me burns,” I mutter.
“Coming around,” says the man to one of his companions. “What? Around here, bud?” asks the man in the orange suit who is touching me.
“Yeah, and I know why.”
“Yeah? Do you want to tell us?”
“A fucking scorpion stung me. It came out of a stick. I tried to use a stick. As a crutch to help me walk out of this…this fucking place. It stung me right there.”
“Uh huh,” says the man. “It sure did.”
“It did.”
“You got good veins at least. How’s that? You’re gonna feel a lot better when the drip gets in you. You’re dehydrated, bud.”
“Sssuper,” I say woozily.
“The place where the scorpion stung me burns,” I say.
“Oh yeah, you said that. We’ll tell them at the hospital. Right now we’re gonna transport you out of here first, okay? Check his pupils.”
“Okay, but it burns pretty bad,” I say.
“Yeah, I bet it does.”
And twice more I mumble to the man in the orange suit about the scorpion that has come out of the stick and I try to point where I’ve been bitten, but my arm isn’t cooperating.
“We’re placing you on a stretcher now. Don’t be concerned if you feel yourself rising in the air. You aren’t going to heaven yet.”
“Oooouuuch,” I mutter.
“You’re in good hands.”
After a few minutes of being semi-conscious I feel myself rising with lots of guys in orange suits around me.
“Here we go. Are you ready?” asks one of the paramedics.
“Sure,” I whisper. Mouth has no saliva.
I endure a long journey with a drip in my arm and these guys walking beside me like my weight is nothing for them. Maybe I haven’t been that far up after all. I wonder how far I’ve gotten toward the car. I fall asleep and awake feeling the stretcher lurch, which is about to be shoved into the back of an ambulance. Two guys are sliding the stretcher. “Thanks guys. I owe you my life,” my smile is crooked and my parched lips horribly cracked, but I manage to shake both their hands weakly.
“We found you, bud. You were on your last leg, ha ha. Sorry for the bad pun. You’re dehydrated and suffering from a leg wound and exposure and a scorpion sting in your hand, but you’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna make it. You’re one of the lucky ones.”
“I know it. How did you know where to look?” I ask in amazement. I turn my head toward the ambulance attendant who is strapping me to the gurney and covering me with more sheets to stop hypothermia.
“The border patrol. I think they found your car.”
Another attendant begins prepping me for sedation and a drip. I turn to him. Cold alcohol swipes another spot on my grimy arm.
“How did you know where to look?” I ask the other attendant.
I study the drip in my arm.
“It was us. The border patrol. We found your car,” says a man who is filling out a report. “In the parking lot. Where you left it. It was visible by air; it was pretty easy to spot even though you pulled it under some branches. No one else was hiking and the lot closes every night. Yesterday someone found it on a routine check. I think they missed your car the first night, but not the second. By the third day they spotted you. We’ll tow your car into Tucson and you’re liable for the tow.”
“Someone told you I was there. That my car was in the parking lot?”
“Well, I don’t know about that, sir. I doubt it. I think they spotted it in the lot and got suspicious. They got a dog to follow the scent straight to you. And the old guy.”
Oliver. His body is leaving in the other ambulance.
But Marsha! So I did tell her where I was going. That had to be true, how else could they have found me? When had I done it? It was vague, but it seemed possible that I’d done that in some conversation in the week before I left with Oliver, oh, the poor old coot. Dead now. Because of me. The other ambulance is taking his body away, yes, that’s it. The dehydration and shock of my fall had driven my memories deep into my brain so that some of it seemed unreal. I can’t trust my memory right now, while I am recovering, but it’s fantastic, amazing, to think I’ve told her about my trip and she’d arranged for a rescue. Truly I thought I hadn’t told her. I thought I had kept it to myself. Or I figured I’d told her and she hadn’t cared enough to worry. Goddamn it, the world was surprising me again.
I cared for her, too. Cared for her and Bailey more than anything in the world. I finally knew it for sure and didn’t have any doubts about my feelings. Hiding them wasn’t even an option. Preserving a tough exterior was a stupid trick. I don’t want to keep them away. And I don’t want them away anymore. I’m going to prove my love to them. Starting tomorrow. Starting the minute I get back.