“He’s not coming back.” Lester’s words are barely audible. The man apparently understands Spanish. He moans.
Now he’s starting to feel the pain.
Lester’s chest begins to heave and he covers his eyes with the crook of his arm. Sara and Emiliano let him feel miserable in private for a few moments. Then Sara pulls Emiliano a few paces away.
“Can you stop the bleeding?”
“He was going to kill you. God knows what else.”
“Emiliano …”
“He told his friend to shoot me. That bullet has my name on it.”
“Emiliano, we have to do something.”
“Sometimes you sound just like Mami,” he says grudgingly. He walks back to Lester, who is on his side, writhing and moaning softly. Emiliano taps him on his butt with his bare foot and realizes for the first time that he’s also bleeding. There is pain deep inside his left foot. He looks at Sara’s feet. She has her shoes on. Emiliano can’t remember whether he put his boots inside his backpack last night, like he sometimes does to keep the critters out. If he did, he’s as good as dead. He can’t survive out here without shoes.
“You think you can walk on one leg?” Emiliano asks the man.
Lester shakes his head. “I can’t even move it. The bullet busted my whole kneecap, didn’t it? God, it hurts!”
Emiliano looks over at Sara. Does she really want to help this man? He steps over Lester’s body and starts to walk toward the gully. He walks slow, planting both feet firmly on the ground. He doesn’t want to limp in front of Sara.
“Emiliano …”
“I’m going to get the tarp,” Emiliano snaps back. “We need to drag him to the gully, where there’ll be some shade. We need to stop the bleeding somehow. See if we can keep his sorry ass living a little longer.”
Sara can’t keep herself from smiling. She walks over to Lester and kneels next to him. “I don’t know that much about first aid, but the more you move the leg, the more the blood spurts out.”
“We were using those … bullets that … burst on impact.”
“Stay calm,” she says. He opens his eyes for a second to look at her with something that resembles embarrassment, like a child who doesn’t want to be seen crying by his playmates.
Sara remembers the disgust she felt toward him as they walked away from Emiliano, after she told him that she would do whatever he wanted. It was all that she could think of saying to save her brother’s life and her own. It made her sick to imagine this man touching her. Now the disgust and anger come back to her, but she forces herself to touch his shoulder through a monumental effort of will.
Her touch quiets him. He stops moving. He shuts his eyes as if her kindness is too painful for him.
In the gully, Emiliano looks at what is left of their equipment. Two thermal blankets. Sara’s water bottle, half-full. And best of all, his boots. Mami’s prayers, Sara would say. What else is left? The knife with a miniature compass that Linda gave him, and his and Sara’s hats. Emiliano sits on the ground and looks at the bottom of his foot. He clears the blood away with a sock and finds the four places where the thorns pierced his sole. He puts on his socks and boots. A foot fortunately does not bleed much, and the pressure from standing and walking will help stop what little bleeding there is. As for the pain that is now shooting all the way to his ankle, all he can do is ignore it.
Emiliano and Sara roll Lester onto the tarp and drag him to where the gully levels out, then through the gully until they reach the deepest shadows, where they spent the night. They find two rocks, which they use to elevate the leg. The man’s blood drips steadily to the ground. Sara takes the pouch with Hinojosa’s cell phone out of Lester’s jacket. She remembers Elias carried his cell phone in the same pocket of a similar jacket. That seems like ages ago. She places the cell phone pouch on top of a rock nearby.
“I’m not going to make it … am I?” Lester whimpers. He is pale and weak and has started to shiver. Sara covers him with a thermal blanket.
“Can you make a tourniquet to stop the blood?” Sara asks Emiliano.
“The bullet didn’t hit an artery, otherwise the blood would be gushing. Tourniquets are for arteries.”
“But the blood is coming out nonstop,” Sara says. “The bleeding is worse at the back of the knee.”
Emiliano kneels down and says to Lester, “You think you can lie on your stomach with your leg up on a rock?”
Emiliano and Sara take Lester’s jacket off and then turn him on his stomach and prop up the leg. They put the part of the leg where the knee used to be on a flat rock and his lower leg on a higher rock. Emiliano takes out his knife and makes a long tear in Lester’s pants. He motions for Sara to give him her bandanna and then sits next to Lester and presses down on the wound with the rolled-up cloth.
“Ohhh,” Lester groans.
“I’m going to put pressure on the wound for a few minutes to see if the bleeding slows down.”
“It’s the bone. The flesh … don’t hurt as much as the bone.”
Sara sits on the gully wall opposite Lester’s face. “Your friend will get help and come back, won’t he?”
“No. He’s gone for good. Oh, God.”
“I wish you’d stop using God’s name. You have no right to invoke his name after what you were thinking of doing,” Sara tells him.
Emiliano smiles. Again, Sara sounds just like Mami.
Lester starts shaking.
“The blood is coming out harder. Get ahold of yourself or you’ll die faster.” Emiliano pauses. “On second thought, go ahead and move as much as you can.”
“Emiliano!”
Lester takes a series of shallow breaths. It reminds Sara of a woman in labor trying to fight through the pain. “I … can’t believe … you helping … me.”
“Me neither,” Emiliano says, staring at Sara.
“It’s not possible that your friend won’t come back with help, or call someone and tell them you’re hurt. I can’t believe he’d just leave you here.” It suddenly occurs to Sara that Joe or whatever his name was probably doesn’t know that Lester has been shot. She and Emiliano didn’t know right away either. “What kind of a friend is that?”
“He’s a … rookie. Scared. Shouldn’t have … brought him.”
“You’re a very sick person, you know that?” Sara says. “And I’m not talking about the bullet wound. Your friend is sick too. You don’t leave a friend behind, no matter what.”
“I know it. I know I am.”
Emiliano removes the bandanna from the wound. They both watch the small opening on the leg. The blood has stopped flowing. Then a moment later it begins to ooze out again. Emiliano shakes his head, stands up, and motions for Sara to follow him.
Emiliano moves far enough away that Lester won’t hear them. He looks at the sun, well above the rim of the mountains. Today will be hotter than yesterday, he can tell already. “We should be going.”
Sara glances at Lester. “How bad is it?”
“He’s going to bleed out in a couple of hours. With pressure on the wound, maybe he’ll last an hour or two longer.”