Rodgers glimpsed a cutoff tee, hiking shorts, a band of tan belly, legs that moved like flowing honey into jaunty Italian sandals. He also saw blood--oh no, not here! no Blut in the holy precincts of the Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum!--for his pen dangled from her wound like a misplaced prosthetic dug: ugly, so ugly.
In a panic Rodgers seized the pen and pulled. She put out a hand, a bridge to his shoulder, and he reacted--abreacted--by jabbing the pen upward into her throat, an involuntary (surely) reflex summoning a fresh puncture, a fresh red gout, a look of such shock that he would die if she didn't. Of mortification, formal guilt, the need to bury himself ahead of the burial owing his clumsy animal self.
"Jesus!" cried the college kid. "You vicious spaz!"
Despite his chagrin, Rodgers had either the savoir-faire or the insensitivity to say, "One or the other, not both."
"What? What?"
"Either I'm vicious or I'm a spaz, one or the other."
The kid nodded at the young woman. "The longer you let her bleed the shakier your argument, man."
Exactly. Rodgers saw her eyeballs clocking, her lissom body trembling toward a faint. Two barrellike Teutonic males and their wives looked ready to intervene, to seize the girl and maybe even to report him to the museum's guardians, who would ... what? slam him in the stocks? make him wear a bell-shaped brass overcoat? lay him on a table with a roll of spikes at his lower back? Even the callow Yankee fan wanted to help, probably as a prelude to trying to get into her pants.
Rodgers steadied the woman--girl? ingénue? jailbait?--with one arm, and pressed his soiled handkerchief against her throat puncture. (He could have pierced a jugular, or her windpipe or esophagus.) She pushed him away but kept a grip on his handkerchief, pressing it to the second of the two wounds he'd inflicted on her. (The first, at her midriff, had already ceased to bleed. Her clotting agents worked fast.)
Glancing down, Rodgers saw his pen lying on the floor. He picked it up and, with a look of penitential self-reproach, faced the young woman. "God, I've never done anything so stupid in my life."
"Oh, I'm fine," pressing the darkening linen to the wound, regarding him warily. "Thanks for asking."
)
