‘I don’t think you’re going to be in a cast at all.’
Carol looked up into Ted’s face wonderingly.
‘It’s not broken, child, only dislocated. Someone hit you on the shoulder — ‘
‘Harry Doolin — ‘
‘ — and hard enough to knock the top of the bone in your upper left arm out of its socket. I can put it back in, I think. Can you stand one or two moments of quite bad pain if you know things may be all right again afterward?’
‘Yes,’ she said at once. ‘Fix it, Mr Brautigan. Please fix it.’
Bobby looked at him a little doubtfully. ‘Can you really do that?’
‘Yes. Give me your belt.’
‘Huh?’
‘Your belt. Give it to me.’
Bobby slipped his belt — a fairly new one he’d gotten for Christmas — out of its loops and handed it to Ted, who took it without ever shifting his eyes from Carol’s. ‘What’s your last name, honey?’
‘Gerber. They called me the Gerber Baby, but I’m not a baby.’
‘I’m sure you’re not. And this is where you prove it.’ He got up, settled her in the chair, then knelt before her like a guy in some old movie getting ready to propose. He folded Bobby’s belt over twice in his big hands, then poked it at her good hand until she let go of her elbow and closed her fingers over the loops. ‘Good. Now put it in your mouth.’
‘Put Bobby’s belt in my mouth? ‘
Ted’s gaze never left her. He began stroking her unhurt arm from the elbow to the wrist.
His fingers trailed down her forearm . . . stopped . . . rose and went back to her elbow . . .
trailed down her forearm again. It’s like he’s hypnotizing her, Bobby thought, but there was really no ‘like’ about it; Ted was hypnotizing her. His pupils had begun to do that weird thing again, growing and shrinking . . . growing and shrinking . . . growing and shrinking. Their movement and the movement of his fingers were exactly in rhythm. Carol stared into his face, her lips parted.
‘Ted . . . your eyes . . . ‘
‘Yes, yes.’ He sounded impatient, not very interested in what his eyes were doing. ‘Pain rises, Carol, did you know that?’
‘No . . . ‘
Her eyes on his. His fingers on her arm, going down and rising. Going down . . . and rising.
His pupils like a slow heartbeat. Bobby could see Carol relaxing in the chair. She was still holding the belt, and when Ted stopped his finger-stroking long enough to touch the back of her hand, she lifted it toward her face with no protest.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘pain rises from its source to the brain. When I put your shoulder back in its socket, there will be a lot of pain — but you’ll catch most of it in your mouth as it rises
toward your brain. You will bite it with your teeth and hold it against Bobby’s belt so that only a little of it can get into your head, which is where things hurt the most. Do you understand me, Carol?’
‘Yes . . . ‘ Her voice had grown distant. She looked very small sitting there in the straight-backed chair, wearing only her shorts and her sneakers. The pupils of Ted’s eyes, Bobby noticed, had grown steady again.
‘Put the belt in your mouth.’
She put it between her lips.
‘Bite when it hurts.’
‘When it hurts.’
‘Catch the pain.’
‘I’ll catch it.’
Ted gave a final stroke of his big forefinger from her elbow to her wrist, then looked at Bobby. ‘Wish me luck,’ he said.
‘Luck,’ Bobby replied fervently.
Distant, dreaming, Carol Gerber said: ‘Bobby threw a duck at a man.’
‘Did he?’ Ted asked. Very, very gently he closed his left hand around Carol’s left wrist.
‘Bobby thought the man was a low man.’
Ted glanced at Bobby.
‘Not that kind of low man,’ Bobby said. ‘Just . . . oh, never mind.’
‘All the same,’ Ted said, ‘they are very close. The town clock, the town whistle — ‘
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