With these thoughts in his mind Pendel took a great armful of Mickie’s back and drew him to his feet, but there was not a lot of strength in the legs and worse there was no balance because in the humid heat of the night Mickie had done very little in the way of stiffening up. So the stiffening had to be all Pendel’s as he helped his friend over the threshold and, with one arm on the iron balustrade and all the strength that his gods had ever given him, down the first of four steps to the four-track. Mickie’s head was on his shoulder now, he could smell the blood through the strips of bedsheet. Ana had draped the jacket over Mickie’s back and Pendel wasn’t certain why he had told her to do that with the jacket except that it was a really good jacket and he couldn’t bear to think of Ana giving it to the first beggar in the street, he wanted it to play a part in Mickie’s glory, because that’s where we’re going Mickie – third step – we’re going to our glory and you’re going to be the prettiest boy in the room, the best-dressed hero the girls have ever seen.
‘Go ahead, open the car door,’ he told Ana, at which Mickie in one of his familiar, unpredictable assertions of free will decided to take over the proceedings, in this case by throwing himself towards the car in a free fall from the bottom step. But Pendel need not have worried. Two boys were waiting with their arms out, Ana had already mustered them, she was one of those girls who mustered boys automatically just by stepping into the street.
‘Be gentle,’ she ordered them severely. ‘He may have passed out.’
‘He’s got his eyes open,’ said a boy, making the classic false assumption that, because you can see one eye you know the other one is there.
‘Lean his head back,’ Pendel ordered.
But he leant it back himself while they looked on uncomfortably. He lowered the headrest of the passenger seat and propped Mickie’s head against it, tugged the seat belt across his huge gut and fastened it, closed the door, thanked the boys, waved his gratitude at the waiting cars behind him and hopped into the driver’s seat.
‘Go back to the festival,’ he told Ana.
But he had ceased to command her. She was her own self again and she was crying her heart out and insisting that Mickie had never in his life done anything that merited persecution by the police.
He drove slowly, which was his mood. And Mickie, as Uncle Benny would say, was deserving of respect. Mickie’s bandaged head was rolling with the curves and bouncing with the pot-holes and only the seat belt kept him from falling onto Pendel’s side of the car, which was very much the way Mickie had behaved on the journey up except that Pendel had not imagined him with one open eye. He was following the signs to the hospital, keeping his hazard lights winking and sitting bolt upright, the way the ambulance drivers sat when they sped down Leman Street. They didn’t even lean with the bends.
So who are you exactly? Osnard was saying, testing Pendel’s cover. I’m a gringo doctor attached to the local hospital, is what I am, he replied. I’ve got a highly sick patient in the car, so don’t mess me around.
At checkpoints the policemen stood back for him. One officer even stopped the opposing traffic in order to show deference to the injured. The gesture proved unnecessary however, because Pendel ignored the turning to the hospital and drove straight on, northward along the road he had come, back towards Chitré where the shrimps laid eggs in mangrove trunks and Sarigua where orchids were little prostitutes. There had been a lot of traffic as he entered Guararé, he now remembered, but leaving it there was none. They rode alone under the new moon and a clear sky, just Mickie and himself. As he turned right towards Sarigua a running black woman with no shoes and a frantic expression on her face begged him for a lift and he felt lousy not taking her aboard. But spies on dangerous missions don’t give lifts as he had already noted in Guararé, so he kept going, watching the ground turn white as he ascended.