Mystic Cowboy(4)

A tattooed tank named Thunder was all she had? What had she gotten herself into?

The clinic was better on the inside than it was on the outside. The floors were swept, the lights all flickered on, and there was no mistaking the comforting smell of chemical clean. “Like I said, sorry I’m late. Indian time, you know.”

No, she didn’t, but she wasn’t going to own up to that level of ignorance in the first three minutes. “It’s fine,” Madeline replied with what she hoped was a friendly, easy-going tone as she scoped out the joint. Style-wise, the waiting room was what one might term original, as in everything in it looked like it was original to the building, circa late 1960s. The Naugahyde chairs were held together with duct tape, and she saw a grand total of four tattered magazines. She could barely see the huge desk underneath the rotary phone, an old computer and about two thousand files. No filing cabinets?

Clarence sidestepped the desk with a level of grace she wouldn’t have attributed to a man his size. “After Tara gets the patients all checked in, I bring them back here.” He waved to four exam tables, one of which had stirrups for gynecological exams at the ready. On the other side were two hospital beds.

The room was wide open. Each bed was backed against the far wall with a small tray separating them. No monitors, no blood-pressure machines—no walls. “No walls?”

“We got them curtains a few years ago.” Clarence shrugged, gesturing to the tracks on the ceiling. Each one ringed the four exam tables. And tied against the wall were the curtains in question. The pleats on three of them were still crisp. Only the one around the gyne table looked like it ever got pulled. “Someone thought we needed them. Can’t seem to recall why.”

For the first time, she noticed his accent. He clipped the ends of his vowels, which gave his voice a lilting quality. It seemed an odd fit on a man who looked like he did, but not unpleasant. “Doesn’t that violate HIPAA? Patient rights?”

“Don’t really matter. Everyone here’s family.” Clarence fixed her with a stare that walked a fine line between amused and irritated, and she resolved to be more agreeable before she pissed off her one and only nurse.

Before she could even process that thought, the door whooshed open. “Clarence? Dr. Mitchell? It’s me, Tara.”

Tara, it turned out, was a plump young woman with big hair and bigger earrings. She was wearing a skin-tight red T-shirt and low-cut jeans that left little of her muffin top to the imagination. “Hi. I’m Tara Tall Trees. I’m the receptionist—and I do the transcribing,” she added, propping the door open with a fan.

Okay, the names were crazy, but she was the one who’d come to the Indian reservation, right? She was the one who loved a challenge, right? She smiled as warmly as she could manage with her head swimming. “I’m Dr. Madeline Mitchell. Nice to meet you.”

She didn’t get the chance to make any more chitchat. Suddenly the waiting room was mobbed by people who looked like seven levels of hell. The time for pleasantries was over. She had a job to do.

It didn’t take her long to realize that the job was going to be a hell of a lot harder without actual supplies. The normal conversation went along the lines of, “Where’s the iodine?” Or saline or cotton swabs or vaccines or any number of things a clinic needed to function on a daily basis.

“Don’t have any.”

“When are we getting some?”

“When someone pays us.”

Over and over and over. The clinic didn’t have any supplies beyond four bottles of Tylenol that were about three days from expiring, two boxes of bandages and half a box of hypodermic syringes. She’d brought supplies, sure, but a few boxes of bandages and needles weren’t enough to hold her through the morning. By eleven, the supply closet was empty of everything but alcohol swabs.

She didn’t have time to get frustrated. The patients came in droves. Diabetics who were in danger of losing feet, what seemed like dozens of people with the stomach flu, and people who were going blind from chronic alcohol poisoning. Few people actually looked at her, unless she caught them staring out of the corner of her eye. Half of them didn’t even talk to her, just to Tara and Clarence.

The worst was a guy who came in looking like he’d wandered right out of a cage match. He was compact and muscled with his head shaved on the sides and his hair was pulled into a tight, tribal-looking braid. Which was intimidating enough, but with the flesh wound he was sporting on his shoulder? Mercenary, was all she could think. That, and what did the other guy look like? Clarence wouldn’t tell her what his name was. “That’s nobody,” was all she got out of anyone. No one looked at him, and he looked at no one.