Wild Cards 13 : Card Sharks

by George R. R. Martin

  "Yeah, I sorta figured. Well, could I wait in ... Doctor's office? I'd like to get with a patient as soon as possible."

  She didn't miss my hesitation before I said the word doctor. She gave me a look, and I had a feeling my smart mouth had just shoveled me out another hole, but she did lead me though the doors to the right of the desk, and down the hall lined with examination rooms. I conconcluded (correctly as I later found out), that the doors to the left led to the small fifty bed hospital.

  As we walked I realized that what I'd taken for stains on the linoleum was actually dirt. It bugged me so I said, sharper than I should have, "Doesn't anybody know how to use a mop around here?"

  "It is long rain season, we are understaffed, and Doctor thinks it best if we concentrate our energies on patient care."

  "I didn't mean to imply that one of us health care professionals should sully our hands with menial labor. I was thinking about some kid. Pay him a little each week. That sort of thing." Her flat, implacable stare was starting to get to me. I shut up.

  "You have a lot to learn about Africa, Dr. Finn," she said as she opened the door to Faneiul's office, and gestured me in.

  She shut the door so fast and hard she almost caught my tail.

  ***

  It took the French Schweitzer forty-five minutes to get around to me. By then I'd read all of his diplomas and citations three times, and perused the out of date medical journals twice, and decided I couldn't bear to look at pictures of him shaking hands with famous assholes again. Not that he didn't deserve all the kudos. His professional life had been an example of service and self-sacrifice spanning three continents. It was why I wanted to work with him. I'm just a typical American, and I hate to be kept waiting.

  He wasn't what I'd expected even though I'd just finished looking at photos. He was much taller in person, an improbably long and lanky figure whose thin legs scissored along like a wading heron. A shaggy mop of grey brown hair, a small, receding chin that combined with thin, almost transparent eyebrows to give his face a naked look. That made the jutting beak of a nose all the more incongruous on that unfinished face.

  His smile, however, was warmth itself. A big relief after the popsicle out front. He strode across the room with that sharp, jerking walk, his hand aggressively outthrust.

  "Doctor Finn, how pleased I am to meet you at last."

  "And I you, sir." He had a good shake, and there was none of that almost imperceptible withdrawal which you get from most nats.

  "You have met Margaret?" I correctly gleaned that he meant the nurse, and nodded. "Invaluable, but terrifying woman. She keeps me straightly in line," he concluded with a laugh.

  My response was the epitome of tact and diplomacy. "I can see how she might," I said, and then added. "Well, I'm eager to get started." I let my voice trail away suggestively.

  "You don't want to see your, how do you American's put it, your digs first?"

  "Digs is British, actually, but thanks no. They'll still be there tonight, and I've got the whole afternoon ahead of me. I'd rather work, check out the clinic, get acquainted with our patients."

  He laughed, a high whinnying sound. "Good, an 'eager beaver' and that is an American idiom, yes?"

  "Absolutely."

  "We will put you to work."

  "Good."

  ***

  So I began my life at Kilango Cha Jaha. Southwest of Nairobi our village was close enough to the city to obtain supplies with relative ease, but far enough away that the nats didn't have to look at us, and it was a real effort for Fundies to come out and raid the ghetto for fun.

  My home was a traditionally shaped African hut, a rondavel. I bedded down on a mattress thrown on the dirt floor, and surrounded by mosquito netting. Thatch roofs are imminently practical, but unfortunately they are also great homesteads for bugs of every kind, shape and variety. And they grow them big in Africa. Mosquitoes the size of B-52's, bedbugs the size of bisons, roaches like touring limousines. I was especially tormented by critters with too many legs because I have a lot of hide, and it's naked to their assaults. I went through gallons of bug repellent, but I always managed to miss a place because it's tough to maneuver back across the entire length of my back and hindquarters. I considered trying the rhino's approach - find a big mud hole, wallow, and cake myself - but I didn't think the AMA would approve.

  Housing might lack even the simplest of amenities, poverty and disease were rampant, but God, did we have scenery! Our setting was magnificent; rising up almost directly from the western edge of Kilango were the Ngong Hills. "Hills" don't really do them justice; while the incline on the west was relatively gentle, when you reached the ridge top you were gazing down several thousand feet into the Great Rift Valley. Slither and skitter down this escarpment to the floor of the valley, and you were in the Ololkisalie Game Reserve.

  It was there I met J.D. and Mosi. I had been mooching about the reserve when I came across the startling sight of a small herd of elephants calmly breaking down trees and masticating them. These were the first elephants I'd managed to find, and I quickly hid in the brush to watch. About a quarter of an hour later I was returned to my surroundings by a gun barrel being screwed into my left ear. I jumped, hollered, the elephants went pounding away, ears flying like sails, and trunks upraised, and a disgusted voice with a pronounced Aussie accent said, "Well, I guess you aren't a poacher, but I'm damned if I know what you are."

  I risked a glance, and observed a stocky man of indeterminate years, a bush hat crammed down over his thinning fair hair, and a face so seamed and lined with wrinkles and old scars that he looked as if he'd been tied to the tracks, and toy trains had been run back and forth across his phiz for, oh, six or seven years.

  Another man arose like a waking god from the brush off to my right. Well over six feet tall, he looked as if he'd been carved from a single block of obsidian.

  "J.D.," said the God of the Night. "You are such an ignorant sod, I am sometimes ashamed to work with you." J.D.'s response to this was to seize his left buttock, and shake it at his partner.

  Eventually introductions were made. The elegant Zulu with the Oxford accent was Mosi Jomo, and the Aussie J.D. Snopes. They escorted me back to Kilango, and stayed for dinner and a few hands of poker. As they were leaving J.D. peered between my hind legs at my equipment, and said with a snort that I might want to stay out of Ololkisalie. I didn't understand so he carefully explained that with huevos like mine I might get shot so my parts could delight the palates of Arab or Chinese gourmands, or be ground up and fed to some Japanese businessman to improve his potency. When I refused to curtail my rambles, Mosi mildly suggested that I might want to fly an American flag off my tail, and be very, very careful. I said I would, we parted, and I'd made my first friends in Kenya.

  Thereafter it became a weekly ritual to gather at either my hut or the wardens house in Ololkisalie for dinner and poker. I learned that Mosi played classical clarinet, and read Proust for fun. J.D. introduced me to Australian Rules Football, and proved to be a working man's philosopher. His comments on governments in general, and third world governments in particular, I have shamelessly incorporated as my own. They also consistently beat the ... er ... pants off me in poker.

  ***

  During those first months my admiration for Dr. Faneuil grew until I was like some kind off primitive worshiper at the altar of a loving and mournful god. I had never seen a man work so tirelessly to ease the passing of the dying. If I came in to make late rounds I would hear his deep voice murmuring in Swahili or Kikuyu, and never platitudes. His bedside manner left his patients feeling valued and respected; not jokers, not dying meat, but human beings. When the struggle for another breath ended, he would walk away to weep alone. I ached to comfort him, to help him, to ease his and their pain. The only way I could think of was to stop the hemorrhage, and I didn't have a clue how to accomplish that. My first day I'd thought I'd be vaccinating happy babies, caring for minor injuries encountered in the fields, assist
ing Faneuil in surgery; in short, being a healer. Instead I had joined him as a ticket taker for Erebus. Death reveled in Kilango despite our best efforts.

  I knew we were taking all possible precautions given the lack of funds, but I had done my residency at Cedar Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, and I was used to practicing medicine with the best that money could buy. Medicine in the third world is a whole other ball game. I'm convinced it was some doctor in Uganda, or Belize, or Cambodia who coined the phrase about necessity and mothers of invention.

  The first time I vaccinated a child I was in worse shape than the screaming kid. See, nobody makes reusable needles anymore, and even if they did no one knows how to use a whetstone and sharpen them. We use disposable needles which are sharper than sons a bitches - once. The second, third time, fourth time around, the patient feels like we're excavating with a pick ax. It hurts, kids cry, and I get crazy. I also assumed I had solved the mystery of the resentful, suspicious urchin from my first day. I was wrong, and it just goes to show you that kids can be a hell of a lot smarter than so called adults.

  But we had to re-use needles because there wasn't money to keep us supplied in disposables. Don't misunderstand me, we weren't (or at least I wasn't) a bunch of quacks and incompetents preying on the hapless natives. We took all possible precautions to avoid contamination, but if it's a choice between re-using a sterilized needle, and not getting a kid vaccinated against diptheria - well, you try to make that choice.

  Our procedure was elaborate. The used needles were first placed in a steel tray with tiny prongs over which we slid the base of the needle. The tray was then immersed in a bath of soap and scalding water. Next it went into a bath of hot water and Clorox, and finally into a special dip which had been concocted by Dr. Faneuil, which Margaret was quite brayingly insistent that we use. I thought it was probably overkill, but living saints have a tendency to be just full of funny quirks; you make allowances because they're living saints.

  Anyway, three months into my tenure, I finally couldn't stand it anymore, so I hauled ass into Faneuil's office for the obligatory Young Whippersnapper Doctor to Older, Wiser Doctor talk. Faneuil was making notations in a file. When I entered he capped his fountain pen, closed the file, and folded his hands atop it as if protecting something precious.

  "Sir, it's this needle situation ... and the blood plasma situation, and the three in one vaccine - we're almost out, and half the kids in the village haven't received it. And can't the government get us a decent anesthesia unit? Sometimes I think it'd be safer to just hit 'em on the head with a brick bat. And our x-ray equipment...." I made a disgusted sound. "I'm surprised the nuclear regulatory commission hasn't waded in, and declared us a nuclear power."

  Faneuil bestowed a soft, kindly smile on me, but there was a waggish light in his pale eyes. "Bradley, as long as you're listing wants how about a CAT scanner, or an MRI, or a dialysis machine? Money, Bradley, money, all those things cost money, and we haven't got any."

  I licked my lips nervously, and plunged in. "Well, that's the thing, sir. My dad's a rich Hollywood producer. He's got a lot of friends who are other kinds of rich Hollywood parasites. They just love to get together over rubber chicken at some benefit dinner and raise the money. They do that real well. So, how about I get my dad to put together a plane load of goodies for us?"

  "Sounds lovely, Bradley. You must coordinate it with the Kenyan government, the International Red Cross, and the World Health Organization."

  "Why?" I blurted. "I mean, would I have to involve the U N if I wanted a box of chocolate and condoms for me?"

  "Ah, but this isn't just for you, Bradley. Bureaucracies must fiddle, it's a law of nature."

  "More like the jungle," I muttered, but I surrendered to the realities. "Okay."

  I turned to leave, but was arrested before I exited by him saying, "Bradley, you have a good heart."

  I felt myself blush. "Thank you, sir." Recovering I added, "It's just the rest of me that's a little weird."

  ***

  So, I had managed to impress Faneuil, and I was hangin' with J.D. and Mosi, but friends inside Kilango continued to elude me. There is enormous distrust of whites by Africans (understandable). Enormous distrust of hospitals and doctors by native people. (Also understandable. Hospitals are where you go to die.) The fact I was a joker helped, but one out of three ain't so good. I decided the kids were where I needed to apply the wedge, and I proceeded in my usual shameless manner - I bribed 'em.

  A call to Mom, and I soon had a supply of frisbees, soccer balls, baseballs, bats and gloves, dolls, crayons and coloring books. Ironically these were a lot easier to obtain then my plane full of vaccines and needles. Dad was whacking through a jungle of red tape, but it was all taking a lot longer than I wanted. But you know Americans - if there's one thing we don't do well, it's wait.

  Anyway, once I got the toys, I organized teams and started a scout troop. I'd hoped Margaret Durand would handle the girls, but she gave me that "you must be kidding" smile, told me she was too busy (and implied I ought to be too busy), and declined. I combined the boys and the girls, and figured what the parent organization didn't know wouldn't hurt them. Faneuil laughingly called my kids the Pony Tail Irregulars, which I admit bugged me a little, and made some crack about Americans and our unnatural appetite for sports. I got him back by referring to Frenchies and their unnatural appetite for snails.

  You like to think that a group of people to which you belong, whether it be based on race, religion, nationality, profession, whatever, are good and decent people. That the flaws you see in Them, we never have. Unfortunately that ain't the case. Underneath it all we're human, and not too long out of the trees.

  I had been invited up to Faneuil's for lunch, but I had a broken arm to set, and it was twenty past one before I folded my stethoscope into the pocket of my lab coat, and checked my watch. When I saw the time I put it in overdrive. My hooves rang hollowly on the hard packed earth, and dust rose behind me as I galloped up the winding road toward the farmhouse that Faneuil called home.

  Back in the nineteen twenties the land that currently cradled Kilango had been a not-very-successful coffee plantation. All that now remained was a dilapidated irrigation system and the colonial owner's home. It was a low, rambling wood affair, with a screened veranda, and a cupola on one corner. In my wilder moments I could picture the ghost of the imperialistic asshole who built the structure standing in that cupola, binoculars raised, watching the happy darkies toiling in the fields below. Now it was happy jokers who were singin' and workin' in the sun.

  As I ran I suddenly heard the shrill voices of children in the underbrush off to my left, and my stomach formed a tight, hard ball, for I know that hunting pack ululation. I had heard it enough when I was a kid. I hung a looie, and followed the noise.

  In a dusty depression eight children were flinging stones and beating with sticks a ninth child who huddled inside this circle of torment. He had flung long skinny arms across his head, and there were already a few smears of blood on the boy's dark skin. All eight of the tormentors were jokers, and five of them were in my scout troop. It depressed the shit out of me that some of my kids were involved. I went flying through them like a bowling ball through nine pins, and they fell back before my furious onslaught.

  The ringleader of this little gang of journeymen torturers was Dalila, an impossibly tall figure with a two foot long neck, and ear lobes which brushed at her breasts. At fifteen she had scorned my overtures, and dismissed our activities as "childish." There was a lot of anger in this girl, and she viewed any kind of accommodation with nat society a sell out. She gestured at someone, then indicated me, and a child whose form was basically human came hissing and undulating across the dirt toward me. His body was twisted sharply into curves, and his legs were fused into a single limb, and when he opened his mouth I saw a single big tooth which looked suspiciously hollow to me. I reared, and brought my forefeet down near his head. He got the hint, and withdrew.

/>   The bleeding boy lifted his head to look at me, and I realized he wasn't a nat - he had eyes like a chameleon - and I had an explanation for the impromptu torture. Kenyans hate and fear chameleons.

  I assumed my best daddy attitude, and daddy voice, and asked in my somewhat stilted Swahili,

  "Okay, now what's going on here?"

  Tube Neck stepped forward, and indicated the shivering boy with a flick of a hand. "He's ugly -"

  "Well, there aren't any of us who are going to win any beauty contests," I interrupted. "You're pretty damn funny looking too, Dalila."

  "He is evil," lisped Snake Boy. His palate had also been warped by the virus, and it was really hard to understand him.

  "To have him here will bring bad luck on all of us," Dalila added piously, and I could have slapped her. She wasn't a superstitious rustic, she had been born in Mombasa. This was just a way to reassert control over her peers.

  "There's death and evil everywhere - I'm looking at a little of it right now. Now listen up, you leave this kid alone, or I'll come by and stomp your intolerant and ugly joker asses into the ground." I turned to the kid on the ground, and held out a hand. "Come on, let's do lunch."

  He scrambled to his feet, ducked his head in terror, and ran. I turned back to the kids. My five were shuffling uncomfortably. "I mean it now," I said severely. "Any more of this shit, and all privileges are revoked." They looked confused. I put it in perspective by ennunciating carefully. "No more baseball."

  They ducked their heads, and slithered for the trees. I decided some lessons in tolerance were definitely in order, and I also decided I had to find the chameleon-eyed kid and get him into the Irregulars. I also needed to locate his folks, and find out if he'd been immunized. He was obviously new to the village, and we didn't want anybody carrying in any diseases from outside.