Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [340]
About fifteen miles north of Butte, he was heading up a mountain road in the dark when a logging truck came down fast around a turn and barreled over onto his side of the road. Huge headlights.
Gibbs had a quick choice: hit the truck or ditch. He went to the right and smacked into something in the gully.
When he came to, his head was bleeding and his false teeth were broken. The side of his face was screaming with pain. He managed to get the car door open, but when he went to step out, he fell face down in the snow. No way could he put any pressure on his left leg, he had to crawl to the edge of the highway. The first car that went by saw him lying on the side of the road but just kept going. A few minutes later, a pickup stopped. Two men helped him in, and took him along the road to a cafe called the Elk Pack. There, they phoned the Highway Patrol. The bartender gave him a wet towel to wipe the blood off his head and Gibbs sat on a barstool so his leg could hang down without pressure while he drank three straight shots of whiskey.
The ambulance came and put an air bag around his leg, inflated it, laid him on a stretcher, and started down the road. Then they had to stop because a wrecker was blocking the highway in order to lift Gibbs's car out of the gully. He raised his head long enough to ask if they could get the luggage from his trunk, and the officer said he would. With it all, Gibbs noticed that his headlights were still on.
At the hospital, the doctor stitched up his scalp, and split his pants to x-ray the knee, leg, ankle and foot. Turned out his leg was shattered and his jaw fractured. The doctor also said that the tendons were torn so bad in the calf and ankle his leg would probably have to be amputated. It was certainly swollen twice its size. His foot was completely black. The rest of the limb was purple. Immediately, Gibbs said, "My leg ain't going to be taken off. Just give me a shot for pain, and I'll leave."
Before he could get out of there he had to show the highway patrolman his identification. The cop proceeded to write two tickets, one for traveling too fast under existing conditions, one for no driver's license in his possession. They hadn't had the fake one ready in Salt Lake by the time he left. So the cop said it would be $20 bail for the first, $15 on the other. Cash. Gibbs signed the tickets, paid over the $35, and asked to be taken to one of the nicer motels. The cop got him out to the patrol car in a wheelchair, and dropped him off at the Mile High. It was about midnight. They had to wake the lady who ran the place, then help him inside to register, next wheel him to Room 3 with his luggage. The shot that doctor had given was beginning to take effect, and his pain eased, and Gibbs went off to sleep.
When he awoke next morning, Christmas Day, his leg was killing him.
He called the Owl Cab Company. in Butte and asked the lady dispatcher if a cab could pick him up a bag of ice, a six-pack of Coke, a fifth of Canadian Club and some cigarettes. Once the booze arrived, Gibbs managed to get out of bed by holding onto the back of a chair, hopped to the bathroom, looked in the mirror at the stitches and his black eye, then got back into bed and fixed a good stiff drink. It did nothing for the pain, so he fixed several more. Helped a little, but not much. It wasn't like taking whiskey for a toothache.
That evening, he could stand it no longer, and called the motel lady and asked if her husband would take him to the hospital. She wasn't married, but she had two friends who had eaten Christmas dinner with her, and these gentlemen brought him to the St. James Catholic Hospital, after Gibbs asked for the best doctor in town.
There it was. The fellow's name was Best.