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Standing just inside the front door was a skinny man with a long graying beard. His overalls were dirty and the bottoms frayed around filthy boots. The edge of his shirt sleeves and collar were also frayed, as though he’d been in these particular clothes a very long time. He didn’t come into the house, probably because of the mud he tracked, but stood just inside the door twisting a very worn felt hat.
“Can I help you?” she asked him.
“Doc here?”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Let me get him for you.”
She fetched Doc to the front door and while he was chatting with the man, she checked on Chloe. When Doc finally came back to the kitchen, he was wearing a very unpleasant expression. “We have to make a call. See if you can rustle up someone to keep an eye on the baby.”
“You need my assistance?” she asked, perhaps more hopefully than she wished.
“No,” he said, “but I think you should tag along. See what’s on the other side of the tree line.”
Chloe stirred in her bed and Mel picked her up. “Who was that man?”
“Clifford Paulis. Lives out in the woods with some people. His daughter and her man joined them a while back. They have regular problems. I’d rather you just see.”
“Okay,” she said, perplexed.
After a few phone calls had been placed with no success, the best they could do for the baby was take her across the street to Jack’s with a few diapers and a bottle. Mel carried her little bed while Doc managed the baby in one arm and his cane in the other hand, though Mel had offered to make two trips.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” she asked Jack. “You might have to change her and everything.”
“Nieces,” he said again. “I’m all checked out.”
“How many nieces, exactly?” she asked.
“Eight, at last count. Four sisters and eight nieces. Apparently they can’t breed sons. Where are you off to?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Paulises’,” Doc said. And Jack whistled.
As they drove out of town, Mel said, “I don’t have a good feeling about this. Seems everyone knows about this family except me.”
“I guess you deserve to be prepared. The Paulises live in a small compound of shacks and trailers with a few others—a camp. They stay out of sight and drink a lot, wander into town very rarely. They keep a supply of pure grain alcohol on hand. They’re dirtpoor, miserable folk, but they haven’t given Virgin River any trouble. Clifford says there was a fight last night and there’s some patching up to do.”
“What kind of fight?”
“They’re pretty gritty folk. If they sent for me, it must’ve been a good one.”
They drove a long way into the woods, the dirt road a narrow, bumpy, one lane before it finally broke open into a clearing around which were, as Doc had said, two shacks and a couple of trailers. Not mobile homes, but camper shells and an itty bitty trailer that had seen better days, along with an old wheelless pickup truck up on blocks. They circled an open area in the middle of which was a crude brick oven of sorts. There were tarps stretched out from the campers and shacks with actual furniture under them. Not outdoor furniture but household—tables and chairs, old sofas with the stuffing popping out. Plus old tires, a couple of small trucks, unidentifiable junk, a wringer washer lying on its side. Mel peered into the trees and blinked to clear her vision. There appeared to be a semitrailer, half buried in the ground with camouflage tarps over the top. Beside it was, unmistakably, a gas-powered generator. Mel said, “Holy shit.”
“Help if you can,” Doc said. “But try not to talk.” He peered at her. “That’ll be hard for you.”
Doc got out of the truck, hefting his bag. People started to drift into the clearing—not from within their homes, such as they were, but more like from behind them. There were just a few men. It was impossible to tell their ages; they all looked like vagrants with their dirty and worn dungarees and overalls. They were bearded, their hair long and matted, like real sad hillbillies. Everyone was thin with sallow complexions; they were not enjoying good health out here. There was a very bad smell and Mel thought about bathroom facilities. They would be using the forest; and it smelled as if they didn’t get far enough from the camp. Their facilities were minimal. It was like a little third-world country.
Doc nodded to people as he pressed forward, getting nods back. He’d obviously been here before. Mel followed more slowly. Doc ended up in front of a shack outside of which Clifford Paulis stood. Doc turned to make sure Mel was with him, then entered. She felt their eyes on her, but they kept their distance. She wasn’t exactly afraid, but she was nervous and unsure and hurried behind Doc to enter the shack with him. There was a small table inside with a lantern on it. Sitting on short stools at the table were a man and a woman. Mel had to stifle a gasp. Their faces were swollen, cut and bruised. The man was perhaps thirty, his dirty blond hair short and spiky, and he twitched and jittered, unable to sit still. The woman, maybe the same age, was holding her arm at an odd angle. Broken.
Doc put his bag on the table and opened it. He pulled out and put on his latex gloves. Mel followed suit, but slowly, her pulse picking up. She had never worked as a visiting nurse, but knew a few who had. There were nasty hovels all around the poorer sections of L.A. where paramedics might be called, but in the city if you had a situation like this, you’d notify the police. The patients would be brought to the emergency room. And in the event of domestic violence, which this clearly was, these two would both be booked into jail right out of the E.R. When there’s an injury in a domestic, no one has to press charges besides the police.
“Whatcha got, Maxine?” he said, reaching out for her arm, which she extended toward him. He examined it briefly. “Clifford,” he called. “I’m gonna need a bucket of water.” Then to Mel he said, “Get to work on cleaning up Calvin’s face, see if sutures are required, and I’ll attempt to set this ulna.”
“Do you want a hypo?” she asked.
“I don’t think we’ll need that,” he said.
Mel got out some peroxide and cotton and approached the young man warily. He lifted his eyes to her face and grinned at her with a mouth full of dirty teeth, some of which appeared to be rotting. In his eyes she saw that his pupils were very small—he was full of amphetamine, higher than a kite. He kept grinning at her and she tried not to make eye contact with him. She cleaned some of the cuts on his face and finally said, “Wipe that look off your face or I’ll let Doc do this.” It made him giggle stupidly.
“I’m going to need something for the pain,” he said.
“You already had something for the pain,” she told him. And he giggled again. But in his eyes there was menace and she decided not to make any more eye contact. Doc made a sudden movement that slammed Calvin’s arm onto the table, hard, gripped by Doc’s arthritic hand. “You never do that, you hear me?” Doc said in a voice more threatening than Mel had heard before, then slowly released Calvin’s forearm while boring through him with angry eyes. Then Doc immediately turned his attention back to Maxine. “I’m going to have to put this bone right, Maxine. Then I’ll cast it for you.”
Mel had no idea what had just happened. “You don’t want an X-ray?” she heard herself ask Doc. And her answer was a glare from the doctor who’d asked her to try not to talk. She went back to the man’s face.
There was a cut over his eye that she could repair with tape, no stitches required. Standing above him as she was, she noticed a huge purple bump through the thinning hair on the top of his head. Maxine must have hit him over the head with something, right before he broke her arm. She glanced at his shoulders and arms through the thin fabric of his shirt and saw that he had some heft to him—he was probably strong. Strong enough at least break a bone.
The bucket of water arrived—the bucket rusty and dirty—and momentarily she heard Maxine give out a yelp of pain as Doc used sudden and powerful force to put her ulna back into place.
Old Doc Mullins worked silently, wrapping an Ace bandage around her arm, then dipping casting material into the bucket, soaking it, and applying it to the broken arm. Finished with her assignment, Mel moved away from Calvin and watched Doc. He was strong and fast for his age, skilled for a man with hands twisted by arthritis, but then this had been his life’s work. Casting done, he pulled a sling out of his bag. Job done, he snapped off his gloves, threw them in his bag, closed it, picked it up and, looking down, went back to the truck. Again, Mel followed. When they were out of the compound she said, “All right—what’s going on there?”
“What do you think’s going on?” he asked. “It isn’t complicated.”
“Looks pretty awful to me,” she said.
“It is awful. But not complicated. Just a few dirt-poor alcoholics. Homeless, living in the woods. Clifford wandered away from his family to live out here years ago and over time a few others joined his camp. Then Calvin Thompson and Maxine showed up not so long ago, and added weed to the agenda—they’re growing in that semitrailer. Biggest mystery to me is how they got it back in here. You can bet Calvin couldn’t get that done. I figure Calvin’s connected to someone, told ’em he could sit back here and watch over a grow. Calvin’s a caretaker. That’s what the generator is about—grow lights. They irrigate out of the river. Calvin’s jitters don’t come from pot—pot would level him out and slow him down. He’s gotta be on something like meth. Maybe he skims a little marijuana, cheats the boss, and trades it for something else. Thing is, I don’t think Clifford and those old men have anything to do with the pot. They never had a grow out there before that I know of. But I could be wrong.”
“Amazing,” she said.
“There are lots of little marijuana camps hidden back in these woods—some of ’em pretty good size—but you can’t grow it outside in winter months. It’s still the biggest cash crop in California. But even if you gave Clifford and those old boys a million dollars, that’s how they’re going to live.” He took a breath. “Not all local growers look like vagrants. A lot of ’em look like millionaires.”
“What happened when you grabbed his arm like that?” she asked.
“You didn’t see? He was raising it like he was going to touch you. Familiarly.”
She shuddered. “Thanks. I guess. Why’d you want me to see that?”
“Two reasons—so you’d know what some of this country medicine is about. Some places where they’re growing are booby-trapped, but not this one. You should never go out to one of those places alone. Not even if a baby’s coming. You better hear me on that.”
“Don’t worry,” she said with a shudder. “You should tell someone, Doc. You should tell the sheriff or someone.”
He laughed. “For all I know, the sheriff’s department’s aware—there are growers all over this part of the world. For the most part, they stay invisible—it’s not like they want to be found out. More to the point, I’m in medicine, not law enforcement. I don’t talk about the patients. I assume that’s your ethic, as well.”
“They live in filth! They’re hungry and probably sick! Their water is undoubtedly contaminated by the awful, dirty containers they keep it in. They’re beating each other up and dying of drink and…whatever.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Doesn’t make my day, either.”
She found it devastating, the acceptance of such hopelessness. “How do you do it?”
she asked him, her voice quiet.
“I just do the best I can,” he said. “I help where I can. That’s all anyone can do.”
