Mystic Cowboy(20)

She sat outside the High Plains Art Gallery in Rapid City, finishing her latte and enjoying the urban wilderness again. Sidewalks. Dogs on leashes. Self-absorbed hipsters. Bright awnings on freshly painted buildings. Man, she was loving the city today. Not that the clinic wasn’t on her mind. She had a Jeep full of medical supplies and canned goods, and had only one more errand on her to-do list. Mellie’s birthday was in less than a month, and she had demanded something nice. “Something Indiany,” her one and only little sister had said just over a month ago.

Had it really been a month since she’d had a latte? The days had flown by in a blur of clinic, cabin, clinic, cabin. Challenging didn’t begin to describe it. Despite her rather childish insistence that she didn’t want to see him in the clinic again, Rebel had come in on a regular basis—he seemed to know when the older patients needed a translator. Not that he ever told them what Madeline wanted him to tell them, though.

She’d gotten a shipment of flu vaccine—money talked, after all. And when it arrived on Thursday, Rebel had shown up and said a whole bunch of things to a whole bunch of people in that language that was so lovely she almost wasn’t irritated listening to it. Except that no one would let her vaccinate them. Something about the government—but what the hell did that have to do with the flu? And how had he known that was the day the vaccine would get there? It bothered her, like a micro-cut on her hands she didn’t know she had until she spilled orange juice on them.

That man. She wanted to hate him—desperately wanted to hate him—for making her job harder than it already was. But every time she wanted to strangle him, he’d turn around and do something that made her life easier. Her landline had miraculously developed a dial tone one day. He brought in some blocks and a ball, and would sit on the floor with Nelly, playing with fussy babies and talking to them all in soothing Lakota tones until they stopped squalling. And—damn it all—some of the people he talked out of medical advice had the nerve to get better anyway. Mr. White Mouse had come in—Rebel had already been there, waiting—and explained that after the sweat lodge, he was feeling much better. As much as she thought they were all nuts, people who felt better were still people feeling better. She didn’t know how an unknown quantity like Rebel made things better, but he did.

Aside from Rebel—certainly not because of him—things were, on the whole, improving. Things had slowed down after the first few weeks. Clarence had been right—they just had a backlog to work through. It had taken some serious wheeling and dealing, but she’d gotten the hospital in Columbus to ship out some stuff. The gauze supply was safe. Rebel paid a couple of people’s bills, and part of a couple of others. Where he got that kind of money, she didn’t know, and she’d decided not to think about it too much. A few other people gave her some money, and one woman gave her a quilt for bringing down a child’s fever. A quilt in July. At least it was a thoughtful thing. Patients were starting to look at her. Progress.

More and more people were coming in with that stomach bug, though, and that was beginning to be a problem. Some were repeat visits—and she was beginning to worry about the old and the young. Clarence said someone’s grandmother had died last week, but she’d never made it into the clinic. And just yesterday, a four-year-old girl had to be carried in by her mother because she was too dehydrated to walk.

As Madeline drank her latte, she worried about that little girl. Not much younger than Nelly was, and so drained she couldn’t even cry. It had to be some strain of the flu, but she hadn’t heard anything about a new one making the rounds. Madeline kept taking samples, but the lab wasn’t exactly in a hurry to get the results back to the White Sandy Clinic. Not even the Center for Disease Control was returning her calls. No one in the outside world was in a hurry to do anything for the clinic.

Well, she was going to do something—Rebel be damned. The battle lines had been drawn. She had a fresh supply of IV drips and two new poles in the back. She had the sinking feeling this flu would get worse before it got better. She could only hope to get her patients vaccinated before people’s immune systems got too weak to fight off any other infections. Which lead her thoughts straight back to Rebel again.

She caught herself. That had been last week. Today was Saturday. She was not going to think about sick little girls and dying grandmothers. She was not going to think about Rebel today at all. She was going to finish her to-do list, get her sister a lovely present, and then she was going to do something fun. She deserved a little fun today. After she got Mellie’s present, she was going to watch a movie in a dark, air-conditioned theater while eating overpriced, over-salted popcorn, and that was that. Didn’t matter what was playing. Trans fats and sodium be damned.