Tilting the Balance

“Found that out,” Mutt said His teeth had stumbled on birdshot a couple of times. You could break one that way If you weren’t lucky. He tossed aside a leg bone gnawed bare, then went on, “Mighty kind, of you to go to so much trouble for us, uh”-his eyes flicked to her left hand to see if she wore a ring-“Miss…”

“I’m Lucille Potter,” she answered. “What’s your name?”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Lucille,” he said. “I’m M-uh, Pete Daniels.” He thought of himself as Mutt these days; he had for years. But that didn’t seem the right way to introduce yourself to a woman you’d just met. The kids might ignore her-they were younger than most of the players he’d managed-but she didn’t look half bad to him.

Only trouble was, the kids wouldn’t let him get away with being Pete. Some of them started rolling in the dirt; even Kevin Donlan snorted. Lucille looked from one of them to the next. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

Resignedly, Daniels said, “My name’s Pete, but they usually call me Mutt.”

“Is that what you’d rather be called?” she asked. When he nodded, she went on, “Why didn’t you say so, then? There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Her brisk tones made a couple of the soldiers look abashed, but more of them didn’t care what she said, even If she had brought them food. The matter-of-fact common sense in her words made him eye her speculatively. “You a schoolteacher, ma’am?”

She smiled. That made some of her tiredness fall away and let him see what she’d looked like when she was twenty-five or so. No, she wasn’t bad at all. She said, “Pretty good guess, but you didn’t notice my shoes.”

They were white-an awfully dirty white now-with thick, rubbery soles. “You’re a nurse,” Mutt said.

Lucille Potter nodded. “I sure am. I’ve been doing a doctor’s work since the Lizards came, though. Mount Pulaski only had Doc Hanrahan, and somebody’s bomb-God knows whose-landed in his front yard just when he was coming out the door. He never knew what hit him, anyhow.”

“Lord, I wish we could take you with us, ma’am,” Kevin Donlan said. “The medics we got, they ain’t everything they oughta be. ‘Course, what is these days?”

“That purely is a fact,” Daniels agreed. The Army tried hard, the same as it did with supplies. As with supplies, war’s disruption was too great to permit hurt men proper care. He suspected his grandfathers in the War Between the States hadn’t risked much worse medical treatment. Doctors knew a lot more nowadays, but so what? All the knowledge in the world didn’t matter if you couldn’t get your hands on the medicines and instruments you needed to use it.

Lucille Potter said, “Why the hell not?”

Mutt gaped at her, startled twice-first at the casual way she swore and then by how she fell in with Donlan’s suggestion, which had been more wistful than serious. Mutt said, “But, ma’am, you’re a woman.” He thought that explained everything.

“So?” Lucille said-evidently she didn’t. “Would you care if I was digging a bullet out of your leg? Or do you think your boys here are going to gang-rape me the second your back is turned?”

“But-But-” Mutt spluttered like a man who can’t swim floundering out of a creek. He felt his face turn red. His men were staring at Lucille Potter with their mouths open. Rape wasn’t a word you said around a woman, let alone a word you expected to hear from one.

She went on, “Maybe I should bring my shotgun along. You think that might make ’em behave?”

“Y all mean it,” he said, surprised again this time into a Southernism he seldom used.

“Of course I. mean it,” she said. “Get to know me for a while and you’ll find out I hardly ever say things I don’t mean. People in town were stupid, too, till they started coming down sick and breaking bones and having babies. Then they found out what I could do-because they had to. You can’t afford to wait around like that, can you? If you give me five minutes, I’ll go home and get my black bag. Or”-she shrugged-“you can do without.”

Mutt thought hard. Whatever the trouble she brought with her, could it be worse than the hurts they’d take that would go bad without a doctor? He didn’t think so. But he also wanted to find out why she was volunteering, so he asked, “How come you want to leave this town, If you’re the only thing even halfway close to a doctor here?”

“When the Lizards held this part of the state, I had to stay here-I was the only one around who could do anything,” Lucille answered. “But now that proper human beings are back in charge, it’ll be easier to bring a real doctor around. And an awful lot of what I’ve been doing lately is patching up hurt soldiers. I hate to put it so plain, Mutt, but I think you people are liable to need me worse than Mount Pulaski does.”