Passage

The technician deftly filled the tube, pulled the needle out, pressed cotton to it. “There,” he said, putting a strip of tape over it. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“No.” Carl turned to look at the IV in his other arm.

“Okay, you’re all set. See you later,” the technician said, the glass basket clanking as he went out.

He hadn’t shut the door all the way. Joanna got up and started over to close it. “It was just the IV,” Carl said, looking curiously at the clear narrow tubing dangling from the IV bag. “I thought it was a rattler.”

Joanna stopped. “Rattler?”

“In the canyon,” Carl said, and Joanna sat down again, greeting card and pen in hand.

“I was hiding from them,” Carl said. “I knew they were out there, waiting to ambush me. I’d caught a glimpse of one of them at the end of the canyon.” He squinted as he said it, bringing his hand up as if to shade his eyes. “I tried climbing up the rocks, but they were crawling with rattlers. They were all around,” his voice rose in fear, “rattling. I wonder what that was,” he said in a totally different tone of voice. “The rattling.” He looked around the hospital room. “The heater, maybe? When you were in here, did it make a rattling sound?”

“You were in a canyon?” she said, trying to take in what he was telling her.

“In Arizona,” he said. “In a long, narrow canyon.”

Joanna listened, still trying to take it in, taking notes almost automatically. In Arizona. In a canyon.

“It had had a stream in it,” Carl said, “but it was all dried up. Because of the fever. It was dark, because the walls were so high and steep, and I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were out there, waiting.”

The rattlers? “Who was up there waiting?”

“They were,” he said fearfully. “A whole band of them, arrows and knives and tomahawks! I tried to outride them, but they shot me in the arm,” he said, grabbing at his arm as if he were trying to pull an arrow out. “They — ” His shoulders jerked, and his face contorted. The arm connected to the IV came up, as if fending off an attack. “They killed Cody. I found his body in the desert. They’d scalped him. His head was all red,” Carl said. “Like the canyon. Like the mesas.” His fists clenched and unclenched compulsively. “All red.”

“Who did that?” Joanna asked. “Who killed Cody?” and he looked at her as if the answer were obvious.

“The Apaches.”

Apaches. Not patches. Apaches. He hadn’t been on the Titanic. He’d been in Arizona. She’d been wrong about the Titanic being universal. But he had said, “Oh, grand.” He had made rowing motions with his hands. And just now he had said, “It was too far—”

“You were in Arizona,” she began, intending to ask, “Do you remember being anywhere else?”

“No!” he shouted, shaking his head vehemently. “It wasn’t Arizona. I thought it was, because of the red sandstone. But it wasn’t.”

“Where was it?” Joanna asked.

“Someplace else. I was really here, though, the whole time,” he said as if to reassure himself. “It was just a dream.”

“Did you have other dreams?” she asked. “Were you other places besides Arizona?”

“There wasn’t any other place,” he said simply.

“You said, ‘Oh, grand.’ ”

He nodded. “I could see telegraph poles off in the distance. I thought they must be next to a railroad line. I thought if I could reach it before the train came through — ” he said, as if that were an explanation.

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought I could catch the Rio Grande. But there weren’t any tracks. Just the telegraph wires. But I could still send a message. I could climb one of the poles and send a message.”

She was only half-listening. Rio Grande. Not Grand Staircase. Rio Grande.

“…and it was too far to ride on horseback,” Carl was saying, staring straight ahead, “but I had to get it through.” As he spoke, he jogged gently up and down, his arms bent as if he were holding on to reins.

This is what Guadalupe thought was rowing, Joanna thought, even though it didn’t look like rowing. It looked like what it was, Carl riding a horse. He wasn’t humming, “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” she thought. It was probably “Home on the Range.”

And Mrs. Woollam had been in a garden. Mrs. Davenport had seen an angel. But she had wanted it to be a woman in a nightdress. She had wanted it to be the Verandah Cafй and the Grand Staircase. To fit her theory. So she had twisted the evidence to fit, ignored the discrepancies, led the witnesses, and believed what she wanted to. Just like Mr. Mandrake.

She had been so set on her idea she’d refused to accept the truth — that Carl had gotten his desert, his Apaches, from the Westerns his wife read to him, incorporating them into the red expanse of his coma the way she’d incorporated Mr. Briarley’s Titanic stories into hers. Because they happened to be there in long-term memory.