While Spencer checked out of his own head, Theo went over it with tweezers and water and hydrogen peroxide until he felt like he could dry it off and smear some antibiotic ointment on the gauze and hope for the best—or rescue as soon as possible.
By the time he’d finished with that and zipped up the flight suit, Spencer was shivering, his teeth chattering hard, and Theo shucked one of the many pairs of sterile gloves that had been packed in the ice chest and risked a trip across the raft for a wool blanket.
“Oh God,” Spencer muttered as Theo tucked it around his chin. “It smells worse than wet dog. Wow. This… this is special.”
“My dad was retired army,” Theo told him, adding another one behind Spencer’s head as a pillow. “He said these things kept them warm when it was cold and kept the sun off when it was hot. He swore by them.”
Spencer grunted. “Well, he’s not far wrong. Just… you know. I know my wet dogs. I had no idea wet sheep gave them a run for their money.”
And boy, did he ever seem obsessed with his dog.
“I’m a cat person myself,” he said, thinking about poor Stupid. Thelma had been so upset. Theo hated to think of the cat alone and wet and scared, but the fact was, Stupid was not, actually, stupid. He was smart—a hunter, loyal, and clever. He’d once brought down a jackrabbit and brought it into the kitchen, then sat patiently as Thelma had skinned it and cooked it. She told Spencer that the cat had sat across from her at the dinner table and ate from his plate with all the manners of a duke, and when she’d been done, she’d left the bones outside for other predators, and he hadn’t touched one.
“You got any cats?” Spencer asked, and since Theo had to move on to dress his leg next, Theo figured they could stick to pets and let Spencer distract himself.
“Not since my mom passed,” he said, jerking on the fabric of the flight suit.
Spencer gave a grunt and pulled something from his belt, unfolding it.
“Wow, mister,” Theo said, feeling hopelessly naïve. “That is a big knife.”
Spencer’s laugh was rusty but still a laugh. “Only big boys can handle a knife like that,” he said gravely. “Are you a big boy?”
Theo winked. “I can grow into a knife like this,” he said, taking the bowie blade from him. Grimly, he went to work on the leg of the flight suit, more tolerant of Spencer’s bulldookie now that he’d seen the extent of his injuries. Theo had worked with kids at the rec center for years—even as a teenager himself. He was starting to recognize the symptoms of someone running their mouth off to mask their pain.
He ripped at the fabric of the flight suit, the knife helpful but not eliminating the stress entirely. When he saw what lay exposed beneath, he refrained from letting out a low whistle.
“Oh shit,” Spencer muttered, staring at his face. “That’s bad.”
“I don’t think it’s broken,” Theo said, biting his lip. But that was a small mercy. It looked like Spencer had gotten stuck on something and had yanked his foot free—at the expense of the flight suit and the skin and the muscle beneath. Theo had never seen a person’s naked bone before, and he had to close his eyes for a moment to get himself under control.
“Great,” Spencer said, breaking into his thoughts. “I’ll take it. Not broken will work. Just, you know, fix it up, and I can stand.”
Theo glared at him. “No, seriously—”
“Yes, seriously! Look, I’m not sure if the water’s going to stop rising before we get tangled with the branches of this tree, and even if it does, the current is going to be fierce. We’re going to need to steer, and that means I need to be standing up at the least. C’mon, Junior Woodchuck, I know you can do this because you brought the stuff! Patch me up and let me help!”
Theo shook his head and slipped on the new gloves as Spencer asked, matter-of-factly, as though he wasn’t about to deal with massive quantities of pain, “Hey, talk about your mom’s cat some more, okay?”
Wonderful. But, well, Theo’s pain was two years old, and it wasn’t bleeding all over the deck of a makeshift raft. “Yeah, well, my mom had a cat named Annie when I was a kid. We got her when I was in second grade, maybe. Delicate little thing—one of those eight-pound wonders, you know? Calico? Moved like she was on greased rails?”
“Those are good cats,” Spencer mumbled. “I like those cats.”
“Yeah, well, Annie was a trouper. When my mom got sick, she used to sleep on Mom’s chest every night. I was worried at first. Mom had lung cancer, and it seemed ill-advised, but Mom insisted it was the only time she could sleep. All that purring, she used to joke. Knocked the shit in her lungs loose and put her right out. So Annie was there, right up to the end. And the thing was, Annie was older—fifteen or so—but she wasn’t ancient. She was a little thin, a little long in the tooth, but sort of like Thelma. Tough. She’d spent her life hunting lizards and voles. I thought me and Annie would have another five years together after Mom passed.” As he spoke, he was rinsing out the skin and flesh that had been, well, rumpled for lack of a better word, and then pulling it up to cover the bone. The story hurt, but it was a sort of faded hurt. He’d told it to all of his mother’s friends and the people in town and even his aunt Cassie who lived in Vermont. But this telling now, to this man who was sucking air in through his teeth to keep from screaming, seemed to be the most important version of the story.
“It wasn’t to be?” Spencer asked, when Theo spent a moment too long in the telling.
“No,” Theo said, surprised that he’d been paying attention. “No. But it was okay. I was next to Mom’s bed when she passed, and Annie was on her chest, and about the time the machine told me and the attendant Mom had left us, I noticed that Annie had stopped purring. She and Mom, I guess. Two kindred souls, you know?”
“Aw, man.” Spencer took a deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth, and when Theo checked, he saw that the man’s dark gray eyes were red-rimmed and shiny.
“Sorry. Did I pull too hard?” Oh hell! Theo wasn’t a doctor. He was barely an EMT. He’d taken the training to help with things like sprains on the softball field and kids with the flu.
“No.” Spencer gave him a crooked little smile, and even in his drawn and pale face, it made Theo’s heart twinge. God, this flyboy was pretty. “It was a good story, that’s all.” Spencer leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Gives me hope. Me and Colonel, we can go out together.”
“Wait a minute,” Theo muttered, doing math while he was cleaning what he hoped were the last of the splinters out of Spencer’s flesh. “That don’t make no sense. My mom was barely fifty when she passed, and that’s still too damned young! What’re you? Thirty?”
“Thirty-three,” Spencer muttered. “Why?”
“Because you’re planning to go out in, what? Ten years? That’s stupid!”
“I said I planned to go out with my dog,” Spencer replied stubbornly, and Theo was glad he sounded surly now, because he was going to have to do some jerking on parts of this man’s body that were not designed to be messed with. Maybe the adrenaline would help.