Sewing Can Be Dangerous and Other Small Threads

by S. R. Mallery

  He thought of bleeding inoperative hemorrhaging because there was such an abundance of blood supply in the palate, so of course, a massive stockpile of bandages would be needed. Due to budget concerns, he would have to forego a geneticist and psychologist, but an orthodontist, audiologist, and an ear, nose and throat specialist would be much appreciated. A bi-lingual speech therapist would be ideal, but having scribbled late into the night, he was beginning to get anxious—his list had become so extensive. How far could he actually push Jack? he wondered.

  Then it hit him. Narcotics. Drugs for anesthesiology and for pain. Oh, my God. How in the world was he going to carry narcotics across the border? He knew from experience post early tissue operations could use Tylenol or other weaker aids, but bone-grafting and post palate procedures were a different matter altogether. The very idea of all these children having to endure these operations without proper painkillers made his stomach churn.

  He was thinking of scrapping the entire operation when his office phone rang. “Hey, Peter, I think we might have a go-ahead on this.” Jack sounded excited.

  “You’re kidding! Well, I’ve thought of a problem.” Peter said.

  “What’s that?” Excitement had leaned towards impatience.

  “Narcotics. Those kids cannot have certain operations without them. The pain is just too great. You can’t bring narcotics over the borders, you know Jack?” Peter couldn’t hide his disappointment.

  There were several seconds of silence. Then, “Call me tonight. I have an idea.”

  After a long day of anxiety, Peter finally phoned. “Hi, Jack, it’s me.” He waited nervously. “Well…?”

  “OK,” Jack started in. “I don’t think it will be a problem, because my cable station has worked with a doctor down in Mexico who says he can supply morphine, etc. in exchange for helping some villagers he knows with this problem.”

  Peter breathed a huge sigh of relief; maybe it was all going to work out after all. He went ahead and signed his Professional Leave papers from his clinic, and contacted Jack daily about all the things he needed until at last, he felt he was ready to go.

  “Oh, Rosen, there’s one more thing I forgot to tell you,” Jack said casually. Peter cringed. Oh, boy, here it comes.

  “It seems my driver, who has been transporting all the wallets for my “Give Children A Wallet” out of this little village, suddenly quit, leaving me high and dry. Since you mentioned you’re thinking of putting a clinic near there, I thought maybe you could pick up the wallets yourself. I’ll be looking for a new driver, but for now, maybe you could pinch-hit for me?”

  “Sure, sure, no problem,” he laughed. “Just when do I start?”

  From birth, sucking on his mother’s breast had been an altogether different experience for Eduardo than it was for his brothers and sisters. When they nursed, their tummies were soon filled with warm, nutritious milk. When Eduardo tried to feed off of his mother, all he got for his efforts was pain and total frustration.

  “Ah, Dios mio, what are we going to do?” his mama would say, tenderly looking down at her odd little one, the one many villagers claimed was the work of Satan. Her eyes would fill with tears as she watched her baby desperately try to suckle, his cheeks working furiously, his hands squeezing her flesh. But as the liquid spilled out between the two gaps on the top of his mouth, he would end each feeding session with an explosive wail.

  Her husband Ernesto pronounced the boy was no good, but Rosalie wrapped him even tighter in his swaddling clothes, keeping him warm and safe, away from the world. Still, she couldn’t always protect him. As Eduardo grew, she could see how everyone else treated him. Children threw things at him as he walked to school, and many of the adults in the village, when they saw him coming, would scurry over to the other side of the street, making the sign of the cross. So she shielded him the only way she knew how. He was to stay close at home, never appear in public, and with her limited education, she would teach him how to read.

  In time, Ernesto admitted there was no good reason to complain about Eduardo; he was a good child, after all, with an acceptance of life far beyond his years. In fact, he was so quiet and well-behaved, his father often didn’t even notice his son sitting by the big front window, his face pressed against the glass, gazing at all the other children scampering back and forth from school each day without him. It just bothered him that his son could only manage strange guttural tones that no one but Rosalie could understand.

  Yet there was one joy in Eduardo’s life—watching his mother weave bright, beautiful cloths. Her wooden loom took up most of their back bedroom, and it was there he would spend hours observing her shift the different threads with her hands and feet, combining colors that lingered inside his head for days at a time.

  Often she would instruct Eduardo not to interrupt her, particularly when weaving her ‘material especiale’ for that Nice Mr. Reinhold’s made-to-order wallets. Her concentration was of the utmost importance for them all; on this she would insist, reminding him how much better their lives had become since connecting up with Mr. Jack and how vital his business was to them.

  Her methods were simple. She would take out several different colored strands from her parents’ hand-carved trunk—navy blue, magenta, yellow, pink, red, white, and green. Threading them carefully into her loom, she would start humming. This was the part Eduardo loved the most; it meant his mother was happy and he could relax.

  In and out the different shuttles flew. Up and down the foot pedals danced until soon, a beautiful striped heavy fabric would begin to emerge. And as the afternoon light angled in through the window lower and lower, Rosalie would keep weaving until finally her neck and back felt the familiar muscle tension she knew so well. Time to stop and prepare dinner. Then she would get up, and stretching into a yoga-like position, laugh at Eduardo, sleeping next to their dog, curled up like a baby, not the eight-year-old boy he really was.

  “I think I’ve gotten everything you wanted on your list, Buddy. It’s all ready to be moved into your facility in the town of Quolonga, as requested.” Jack couldn’t control his smug grin. “Give me a call the second you get down there, OK, Rosen?” he went on. “I wanna make sure you and all the equipment made it all right. I also want to make double sure after a week, you get over to the Gonsales house to pick up those wallets.”

  “Of course, of course. I promised you, didn’t I? You know me. The conscientious one. Don’t worry—I’ll definitely pick up those wallets.” Peter tossed a wave to Jack as he hopped into the front cab with the driver and the truck pulled away.

  In Quolonga, a small staff of three greeted them in front of a rundown, paint-peeled clinic on one of the few paved streets in town. Inwardly, Peter groaned, but in a few days they had managed to make sure it was scrubbed, cleaned, and sterilized—at least it was sanitary and usable.

  It turned out Jack remained true to his word. Not only did Peter receive most of the items on his list, his former roommate had also done extensive PR. Within the first week, Peter had patients standing in line, more than ready for their first operation. Babies, swaddled in their mothers’ arms, were the easiest. It was the older children that Peter was the most concerned about and without morphine, he felt completely stymied.

  When Jack phoned, he assured the doctor about a delivery soon, and speaking of deliveries, had he picked up the wallets from the Gonsaleses yet? Peter felt like snapping at him; wallets were certainly not as high a priority as these children, but he bit his tongue and agreed to go the very next day to pick up the trinkets.

  Watching Peter trip over one of their chickens clucking happily in the front yard, Rosalie giggled. These gringos. They might all have money, but en realidad, they had no grace. Walking through the rusted front screen door, she greeted him politely, then motioned for him to follow her into the house where all the wallets were kept.

  Stepping inside, Peter gasped. The tiny living room exploded with beautiful fabrics hung up in every conceivable inch of space—
from an armoire, several cupboard doors, to even a standing lamp. He had always admired these kinds of woven cloths at the Texas open-air markets, but it was quite another thing to see that many intense colors up so close.

  With a proud grin, Rosalie coaxed several members of her family to come out of the back bedroom to meet Peter. Ernesto shuffled his feet nervously, his eyes cast downward as Peter extended his hand. Little five-year-old Maria stared up at the strange man with the biggest brown eyes the doctor had ever seen, but it was Eduardo who immediately captured his attention. Just seeing that bilateral lip, he understood instantly how miserable the boy’s life was and most probably, had always been.

  After retreating towards the back of the house, Rosalie returned, carrying a large cardboard box. Peter took it from her, set it on the floor, and opened it up. Inside, were dozens of beautiful, hand-woven wallets. As he exclaimed, “Oh, how wonderful!” Rosalie came and went, carrying box after box, until the small room overflowed with cardboard and vibrant colors.

  She pointed to an address on a small slip of paper, then to the boxes. “Muy importante, muy importante!” she insisted.

  Frustrated with Jack, Peter frowned. What was he, a delivery service or a doctor?” Then he felt ashamed. After all, Jack was making his dream come true; it was the least he could do for him and the wallet campaign for kids.

  Turning to Eduardo and placing his left hand on the boy’s shoulder, he tapped his own chest with his right index finger first, then gently laid it over the two gaps above the boy’s lip, declaring, “I can fix. Me…el doctor. Comprende?”

  There was a split second before it hit her. Rushing over to Peter with eyes the size of two hundred peso coins, Rosalie kept asking, “Es posible? Es posible?”

  Peter nodded. Without warning, she flung her arms around the young doctor’s neck, crying and laughing all at the same time.

  The next several weeks were a blur. Twenty-four-seven, Peter focused on the children, and although all the morphine had arrived, he realized he would have to divvy it out sparingly. As far as his weekly trips to the Gonsales household to pick up the wallets were concerned, they didn’t bother him that much—his official driver, José, turned out to be pleasant enough. Each week, they got into a light banter about baseball and American culture while José loaded his truck with the ‘wallets especiale,’ as Rosalie had coined them.

  Eduardo was doing remarkably well, considering, although his series of cleft repair operations had been as difficult as they had been painful. Because the child had never had the initial tissue procedure that Peter normally would do at three months, they had to make up for lost time, and then, when they saw some intraoperative hemorrhaging, they decided to perform major suturing in order to stop any excessive bleeding. But throughout the operations and his stay at the clinic, Eduardo never complained; he just kept nodding his head and gazing up at Peter with nothing less than adoration.

  Even outside the clinic, life had picked up for Peter. Jack bought him a black Range Rover for his weekly trips with José and in addition, two good business suits for when he was slated to go to ‘important meetings with corporate heads’ back in the States. Although those meetings never seemed to amount to anything, the doctor didn’t notice. He was too busy flying north with Jack on the station’s Lear jet and admiring the view from cream leather-double-club seats.

  Jack and his companion George began their slow descent over the sparse, arid terrain, as huge dust clouds rustled up dirt particles, paper debris, and dried plant life. After landing, they climbed out of the small Cessna and ran for cover into an old, mud-splashed building, just long enough for Jack to radio someone over his walkie-talkie.

  “Get ‘em all ready. We’re comin’ over now,” he ordered into the mouthpiece. Turning around, he winked at his associate.

  Soon, a bug-splattered jeep shuddered to an abrupt halt outside the building, and when the driver vaulted off the truck to reposition himself next to the window on the other side, some fine dust from the ground seeped in under the crack in the door, causing Jack to give two quick coughs before heading out.

  With George in the middle, the three men rode in silence for quite some time as they traveled far up into the hills, where the habitat was bursting with vegetation, birds, animals, and humidity. Nearing the top, odd, unintelligible sounds echoed repeatedly, but as the jeep got closer, the sounds became almost familiar, until finally, the car pulled up in front of a large, Spanish-style hacienda. There, the sounds were perfectly clear.

  Barking dogs clogged the otherwise peaceful air, making it almost impossible to hear oneself think. As soon as the men exited the jeep and walked behind the house to a large wired kennel, the frenetic hounds jumped up in unison, their noses twitching like rabbits as they desperately clawed the fence.

  Most of them appeared to be Bloodhounds, but several were German Shepherds, and one was a Doberman. Judging from the timbre of their barks and the slight curl of their lips, he surmised they were not necessarily friendly, simply territorial.

  “See, George, I told you these dogs are special,” Jack announced proudly.

  “OK, OK, but why? You never said why, Jack.”

  “These dogs are ‘specially trained for border patrol guards, U.S. Marshals, and drug enforcement organizations in the states. We have also used them in Mexico and further south. They’re beautiful, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So anyone would think they do top-notch drug sniffing work, because they’re smart, they look great, and they certainly have the energy. But I have a little secret. I’ve hired an expert dog trainer to brainwash these little fellas here, so they don’t locate the drugs. They even start looking elsewhere. Great plan, don’t you think?”

  George stared at Jack for a couple of seconds then shook his head. “Son-of-a-bitch! That’s brilliant! It must really work, you bastard, you’ve sure gotten rich. But what about this partner of yours, this goody-two-shoes doctor friend?”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Jack snorted. “He’s totally oblivious, and so into his kids and their operations he wouldn’t be able to tell cocaine from white table salt. Forget about him.”

  Three months later, when Peter spotted a shiny black Mercedes parked halfway up the street from Rosalie and Ernesto’s house, he didn’t think anything of it. After all, his current mission was infinitely more important. He had brought with him his new young friend and together, they quietly walked up the front path and slowly opened the screen door.

  Eduardo took one look at his mother and said clearly, like any other boy, “Te amo, Mama.” The hushed silence lasted a good two seconds before she burst into tears.

  “O Díos mio,” she sobbed, clinging to Eduardo and rocking him back and forth in her arms. “Es muy claro, sí?” she finally whispered to Peter.

  Smiling, he nodded. Yes, it was very clear, for the first time in Eduardo’s life.

  Suddenly, a rifle blast cracked through the air, shattering the front window and scattering broken glass everywhere.

  “Get down! Get down!” he hollered. There was no time for a Spanish translation and apparently, no need for one. Before Peter could say another word, he watched the members of the Gonsales family crawling on their hands and knees military-style to the back of the house, with Rosalie signaling him to follow as they all bolted out the back door. In less than one minute, they had ended up at a hidden outhouse, where an old, rust-covered pickup truck was already fired up, with Ernesto behind the front wheel.

  One of the children shoved Peter towards the load bed, and jumping in, he landed on a semi-soft dark green army tarp. When he lifted up a corner, he saw more bolts of the beautiful woven fabric. Stunned, all he could mutter was, “Que pasa? Que pasa?” What the hell is going on? he wondered.

  “No problema. Es no problema. Paciente, por favor. Please,” Rosalie begged, as one of the older daughters covered them all up with the tarp. The truck sped off, bouncing so high, Peter had to grab Eduardo to keep him from
flying out.

  After the first field, the truck slowed down, stalling long enough to pick someone up. Peter could hear Ernesto and another adult male in the cab, talking rapid-fire Spanish, and although the man’s voice had a recognizable ring to it, he couldn’t quite make it out over the rattle of the old engine and the crunch of road pebbles. His right hip bone was throbbing and edging up on his elbow, he called out to Ernesto, just as the truck unexpectedly slammed to a dead stop.

  Cupping his right hand against his forehead, he tried shielding his eyes from the fierce sun as someone slowly lifted up the tarp. After several seconds, his eyes adjusted and he blurted out, “Oh, my God, José! What the hell are you doing here? What’s going on?”

  José grinned. “Hey, amigo, this is the way it is down here, you know? We all gotta live, we all gotta eat.” With a quick shrug of his shoulders, he walked back to the cab.

  Peter lay still for a moment, trying to think. Obviously the Gonsaleses were in on this whole thing, so was José, and Jack—Oh, my God! Jack had to be the ringleader, he…A wave of nausea washed over him. If Jack was up to his eyeballs in drug trafficking, where did that put him? Where did he fit into all of this?

  He sat up in a panic and yelled at the muddied half-opened cab, “Hey, José, stop and answer me RIGHT NOW! Stop the truck!” The two men up front continued in stony silence for a couple of minutes, until they had rounded a bend and got into a more deserted territory before stopping.

  The driver switched off the engine and Ernesto twisted his torso to look back at the doctor. “Señor, what is it you want to know, eh?”