Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“Your eyelids turned blue. I even cried to make that asshole take you into emergency receiving, and he shot me the finger.”

“Don’t worry. I’m going to make this fellow’s life a little more interesting for him in the next few weeks.”

“I didn’t think you believed in charging the barricade.”

“I don’t. There’s always ten others like him who’ll crawl out of the woodwork to take his place, but you can’t fool with the Lone Ranger and Tonto and walk away from it.”

We went inside, and I sat in a chair while she washed the lump on my head with soap and water. The tips of her fingers were as light as wind on the bruised skin.

“There’s pieces of rock and dirt in the cut. I’ll have to get them out with the tweezers,” she said. “You should go to the hospital and get a couple of stitches.”

“Do you have a quart of milk in your icebox?”

She went into the kitchen and came back with a carton of buttermilk and a pair of tweezers in a glass of alcohol. I drank the carton half empty in one long chugging swallow, and for just a moment the thick cream felt like cool air and health and sunshine transfused into my body, then she started picking out the pieces of rock from the cut with the edge of the tweezers. Each alcohol nick made the skin around my eye flex and pucker.

“What are you doing? I don’t need a lobotomy.”

“You probably don’t need blood poisoning, either.” Her eyes were concentrated with each metallic scratch against my skin.

“Look, let me have the tweezers and give me a mirror. I used to be a pretty fair hospital corpsman.”

“Don’t move your head. I almost have it all out.” She bit her lip and squeezed out a splinter of rock from under the cut with her finger. “There.”

Then she rubbed a cotton pad soaked with alcohol over the lump.

“There are other ways to clean a cut. They ought to give first-aid courses in the Third World before you kill somebody with shock.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, and went into the kitchen again and returned with a piece of ice wrapped in a clean dish towel. She held it against my head, her almond eyes still fixed with a child’s concern.

“A cold compress can’t do any good after the first two hours,” I said.

“What was that Bean Camp stuff about last night?”

“Nothing. I create things in my head when I try to run up Jack Daniel’s stock a couple of points.”

“Were you in a prison camp during the war?”

“No.”

The whiskey edge was starting to wear off, and gray worms and spots of light swam before my eyes when I tried to stand up. She pressed her hand down on my shoulder.

“You ought to pull the fishhooks out. You’re all flames inside,” she said.

“I feel like I’ve been dismantled twice in three days, and I’m not up to psychoanalysis right now. It seems that every time my brain is bleeding someone starts boring into my skull with the brace and bit.”

“Okay, man, I’m sorry.”

“I’ve got a brother that can make you grind your teeth down to the nerve with that same type of morning-after insight. There’s nothing like it to send me right through the wall.”

“So I won’t say anything else,” she said.

I felt myself trembling inside, as though all the wheels and gears were starting to shear off against one another at once. My palms were sweating on my knees, and I realized that my real hangover was just beginning.

“Let me have one of your cigarettes,” I said.

She laid the ice compress down, lit a cigarette, and put it in my mouth. The smoke was raw in my throat, and a drop of sweat rolled off my lip ont

o the paper.