by Joe Cassilly
I did not know how long I was unconscious; face down on the jungle floor. The rain was still beating down. I tried to raise myself, but neither my arms nor legs would respond to the messages my brain sent. The area around my face had started to fill with water. It was making it difficult to take a breath. I had to turn my head sideways or else I would drown in a puddle. I went to turn my head, but a horrible pain almost made me blackout again. I moved my bottom jaw sideways, opened my mouth, dug my chin into the earth, and then pushed with my chin and moved my jaw across. By repeating this process several times, I managed to push my head enough to the side that I could escape the water. But then I wished I had not, for when I opened my eyes, I saw Jim. The eyes staring into my own were lifeless. The hideous hole, where his cheek should have been, had the gray pallor of death. If I had moved faster to save my friend, then I would not have been hurt and I could have saved Jim. I began sobbing. “Jimmy, Jimmy,” my hoarse voice called.
“Jake, Jake.”
I heard the voice. I was confused. It was not the little voice at the back of my mind that called. It was a familiar voice. My mind began to pull back from the soggy, cold clothes and rain. Jimmy’s eyes were replaced in my vision with big, soft brown eyes in a pretty face with short brown hair. “Suzie, oh God, it’s Suzie.” I grabbed her head and kissed her lips and cheeks carelessly. Then, I looked around on the chance that maybe I was still at Walter Reed and this whole experience at the VA hospital was some other bad dream I kept having. Suzie was surprised, but she remained close to me and slid her arms around me in a hug, a tight embrace. “Thanks, God,” I whispered.
12
Three Nurses
I started shivering. Suzie brought her hand up and touched my short stubble of hair. “Bad dream, huh?” I nodded. As she held me, I looked up and saw Cathy standing by the foot of the bed. I stretched out my hand. She came forward and took it and I pulled her so that she sat on the edge of the bed.
Suzie looked at me. “I’ll help you with your bad dreams if you’ll help me with mine.” I did not understand the remark but it was the wrong time for questions.
When I could speak, I spoke hoarsely, still trying to clear some of the emotion from my throat. “What in the world are you two doing here?”
Cathy flashed a big smile. “Suzie asked me if I wanted to go south between semesters. I thought she meant Fort Lauderdale; next thing I know, she’s turning in here.”
The men around my bed started drifting away. Joe White asked if I wanted him to bring something back from chow, but I said I was fine. I asked how things were at Walter Reed. First, Suzie and then Cathy took turns telling me about the staff and patients. I looked at them attentively, the short brown hair, the long blond hair, the soft brown eyes, the pretty blue eyes. I wasn’t really listening to them because I was trying to figure out why these two women had driven all this way. When I had despaired of anyone caring, why had they appeared that day? Maybe God does know our limits.
Then, there was the sound of a throat being cleared. Standing at the foot of the bed was a short, stocky nurse. While she was on duty, she made herself useful by being in charge of everything and everybody. She enjoyed making it clear to the patients that she would tell them what to do. The previous Saturday, a patient, who had been there for months, had returned from his first evening out of the hospital with a few too many drinks. She had gotten on his case and he had mouthed off. She wrote him up and, by Monday, he was told to leave the hospital. The patients always referred to her as “the Bitch,” and even some of the staff did, as well.
“You women may not sit on that bed,” she commanded.
I was embarrassed, but it quickly became an angry response. “Where the hell do you get off with this crap? Guests sit on the bed all the time. There aren’t any chairs on the ward.”
“If they do not get off of the bed, I will call security and have them escorted from the hospital grounds,” she snorted. Suzie and Cathy stood up. She began to walk to the nurses’ station.
I was fed up. “You officious little bitch.” She did not acknowledge it, but I knew that she had heard me.
“Want to show us around the hospital?” asked Suzie to distract me.
“They haven’t let me up in a wheelchair yet,” I said. “Besides, the only places that I have been since I got here are this ward and therapy.”
“Then we’ll show you around the hospital.” She winked and walked down the ward to a gurney and pushed it back to my bed. Cathy unhooked the urine drainage bag from the bed, moved the gurney close to the bed, and hooked the bag to the gurney. As the women helped me slide onto the gurney, the sheet did not slide with me. For a second, I was naked before them. I struggled to pull the sheet over me, but my crippled hands would not grab it. Suzie pulled it over me. My mind told me not to get embarrassed or feel humiliated; after all, they were both nurses and had seen me naked at Walter Reed. I was no longer their patient, however, and I wanted to be their friend.
“Damn it to hell,” I muttered too loudly.
Suzie saw the color in my face and the clenched jaw. She put her arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. She put her lips close to my ear and whispered, “I’m sorry we embarrassed you.”
My God, I thought, after all these months, somebody actually noticed what I’ve been feeling. As the women started to pull the gurney away from the bed, I pointed to a small canvas bag on the bed stand. “Hand me that little bag, please. It’s got everything I own and I don’t want to leave it.” Then, Cathy took one side and Suzie the other and they wheeled me from the ward, down the hall past the door I had come in that first night. The hall went for maybe two hundred feet before making a left turn and widening into an area about twenty-five feet wide and fifty feet long, where lines of patients were waiting to go into the mess hall. As we went by, I could hear a few comments and whistles for the women. I looked up at their faces to see if they had heard.
“These boys been locked up too long,” said Cathy.
“Horny bastards,” said Suzie with a growl.
“They just appreciate pretty women,” I said in their defense.
“You’re probably the horniest of them all,” said Suzie. I immediately wondered what I had done to give myself away. We went by the gift shop and a snack bar. Then, we turned into a lounge area with big windows. It was dark outside. For the first time, I saw the snow swirling in the lights of the parking lot.
“Aren’t you guys worried about driving back in this snow?”
“There is a motel back by the interstate. We’re gonna stay over there and drive back tomorrow,” said Suzie. I could not keep the smile from spreading all across my face. I could have visitors on Saturday. Maybe my luck had changed. The thought salved the pain I was still feeling from my mother’s letter.
“Are you hungry?” asked Cathy.“’Cause I’m starving.”
“We passed a pizza place about two blocks from here. I’ll run down and get one,” volunteered Suzie.
“Okay, but I’m buying,” I said.
“Where you gonna get money?” Cathy wondered.
I pulled open the bag. First, I pulled out my beret. Suzie grabbed it and put it on so that it slipped down over her eyes. Cathy laughed. Next, I pulled out a pack of photographs wrapped in a rubber band and, finally, a camouflage patterned nylon wallet. My clumsy fingers fumbled with the snap. Suzie reached for it to help me but I pulled it back from her.
“It may take me a minute, but I can get it.” When the wallet was unfolded, the girls were stunned to see a stack of fresh green bills, several hundred, mostly twenties. “Five months worth of Army pay and not a damn place to spend it.
“To hell with pizza,” said Suzie, “I’m gonna find carry-out lobster.”
I slid out $60 and handed it to Suzie. Her eyebrows became question marks. “I’m not really getting lobster.”
“No, but I also want to pay for that motel room.” I pushed it into her hand. “I’d rent it for a month if I could get you two to
stay.” I rubbed her hand softly between mine. There was a silence between the three of us for a while.
“How about everything on it,” said Suzie, pulling on her coat. Cathy reached for her coat, but Suzie said, “No, no, you better stay here with him. I think that this is a tow away zone. If we leave him, they’ll put the hook on this thing and drag him down to the impound yard.”
Cathy and I watched out the window as Suzie ran through the snow to her car. Cathy sat on top of a table and pulled her knees up under her chin. We watched as the wind lifted the fallen snow up into the lights so that it looked like a crashing wave against the darkness.
Cathy scooted around on the table so that she could look at me. “You know that you don’t have to give us all that money. I mean, what are you going to do for money when you get out of the Army?” I was touched by her concern. I imagined she thought my future involved selling pencils from a tin cup.
“I am out of the Army. It was a singularly anti-climatic event. Some VA clerk came in back in early February and handed me a piece of paper that said I was retired with a medical disability. So I’m nineteen years old and retired already.”
“What are you going to do for money?”
“Ohh, being crippled is a real racket. First of all, I get almost a thousand dollars a month disability pay.” I put my hand beside my mouth and in a stage whisper said, “That’s the going rate for two legs and a couple of crippled hands. They’re going to pay for job retraining so that I can make beaded wallets, and get this: they’re going to buy me a car!” She knitted her eyebrows to see if I was serious. “Yeah, really. The benefits clerk said they will pay for a brand new car with hand controls and everything.” My voice took a sarcastic tone. “I’m telling ya, if I had known it was gonna be this good, I would have become crippled years ago.”
My sarcasm made her uncomfortable; maybe she thought I was mocking her concern. She turned her head and stared back out the window. I was distracted by the stitching on her jeans. I noticed how it came up the insides of her thighs and joined with the stitching that came down from the zipper. The convergence of the thread provided a focal point for my eyes.
Cathy broke through the trance. “Can I look at these?” She had picked up the pack of photos.
“Yeah, sure.”
She pulled off the rubber band and took off a piece of protective cardboard. She realized that I could not see the photos so she dragged the gurney closer to the table. The first photo was of me and another guy playing guitar and a girl in a Red Cross uniform singing.
“Who are they?”
“Well, her name was Connie. She was a Red Cross girl and he is a chaplain’s assistant. If I was in base camp, we would go play together at Mass. Connie was the singer.”
The photo made me remember my times with a guitar, practicing to fill the hours in Vietnam. I would sit on top of a sandbagged ammo bunker, in the darkness, the humid air moving softly through hairs on the back of my arms, playing until the calluses on my fingertips had grooves in them. One night, I felt someone watching me. I spun around, ready to bash the guitar over some bad guy’s head.
The first sergeant had come up quietly and was sitting on the bunker. He leaned forward and spit a long stream of tobacco juice. “I been sitting here listening,” he drawled in a Georgia twang, “and you ain’t half bad.” Then he slid off and walked into the darkness. That was the only time he had talked to me before he came to see me in the hospital in Long Binh.
I had held a guitar in Walter Reed once, but the calluses were gone and my fingers would not curl around the neck. Tears had run down my cheeks. A lump in my throat made it hard to swallow. I pushed the guitar back into the hands of the volunteer who had let me hold it.
“Where was this?” Her question brought me back. Cathy was holding a photo of some Vietnamese children and a Ranger kneeling in their midst, all smiling at the camera.
“That was in Cu Chi, the village outside our base.” I laid there watching her eyes studying the photos. She became aware of this and looked back at me.
“Having you girls come see me is the best thing that’s happened to me since I got to this concentration camp.” I took a breath. “But why did you come?”
“Well, it was Suzie’s idea. The day they shipped you out, we were both off. The next day, we arrived on the ward at the same time. I went down to your bed and Suzie was standing there. She seemed upset and she asked me where you were. I told her I didn’t know. We checked at the nurses’ station and found that you had been sent here.”
She paused to brush her hair back off her face. My blue eyes were fixed on her, waiting for more. “At lunch, I sat with her and we talked about you. I told her about you receiving the Purple Heart and she told me about Christmas Eve.” There was a sly twinkle in her eye when she said that. “Anyway, I could tell that something was bothering her and I asked if she wanted to talk to me, since you weren’t there. So she told me that, instead of staying in Vermont skiing, she decided to go see her husband in Illinois; apparently, something you said about being with her at Christmas.” She arched an eyebrow.
“She had a key to their townhouse and let herself in. She found the rat in the bedroom doing an extra credit project with one of his students. He didn’t know Suzie had seen them. Suzie said she felt faint and went down and sat in the living room for a while to think. Then, she went to his desk and took out their joint bank accounts, some cash, and his wedding ring and walked out. The next day, you’ll love this, she hocked his wedding ring and used the cash to make a down payment on a divorce lawyer.” Cathy was gleeful when she related this last bit of information. I decided you had to be a woman to really appreciate it.
“For the past few weeks, we would talk and we got to be friends.” I shook my head. “Then this morning, after my exam, she all the sudden says let’s go to Richmond and here we are. Although, until she told you about the motel, I didn’t know we were spending the night.”
“You don’t mind, do you?” I asked, afraid there might be a change of plans.
“No, I want to see you too.” She slid her hand across my cheek and rubbed the back of my neck. I shivered.
13
Pigeon-holed
“Hey, hey, hey, no sex in the lounge, please, or I’ll have to call that charming little nurse.” It was Suzie back with the food. She slid it onto the table. Out of a paper bag she pulled a six-pack of beer.
“Whaddya think this is?” I asked, pushing the bag in front of the beer to conceal them from passersby. “An Army hospital,” I said. “That little bitch sees this stuff here, she’ll tie a knot in my catheter.” The two women looked at me with wide eyes and arched eyebrows and then burst out laughing.
Suzie dabbed her eyes and gasped, “I gotta go to the bathroom before I pee my pants,” and ran out of the room.
Cathy leaned over to me. “Look, don’t let her know I told you about the divorce. It might be something she wants to tell you or not.”
The three of us ate, drank, and told stories about home, school, and the Army until almost nine o’clock. I explained to them about being retired and about disability pay. The women were surprised that the VA didn’t give the patients beer. The Army provided two beers a day for their patients. We started laughing, talking about the time I was flat on my back with tongs in my head. Suzie was holding a can of beer with a straw in it for me. I blew bubbles into the can and it foamed all over me.
On the way back to the ward, the women went into the gift shop and bought toothbrushes and extra large T-shirts to use for nightgowns. Then, they helped me back into my bed to a chorus of kidding from the other guys. They kissed me goodnight and turned to leave. There stood Miss Adams, the nurse who had first greeted me upon my arrival at the hospital. She said goodnight in response to the women’s greetings. Then, she moved up beside me, slipped a thermometer under my tongue, and turned to watch the women walk down the ward.
“Now, Scott boy, are you going to tell me one of those girls is your sister
?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Cousin?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Damn, boy, I’d a never thought it to look at you. You’re a ladies’ man?”
“No, ma’am, just lucky.”
“So what did you do to the short nurse?” The sudden change of topic, as well as the change in the tone of her voice, took me off-guard. The only response I could come up with was a wide-eyed, innocent “who me?” stare. She continued, “When I came on tonight, she was working overtime typing something into your file.”
“I called her a bitch.”
“Are you ready to be thrown out into the cold, cruel world?”
“No, ma’am.”
She took a typed sheet of paper from her pocket and crinkled it up and tossed it into the trash. “Try and stay out of trouble.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I lay back on my bed and decided it had been a very profitable day. I was ahead in this world by three friends.
§ § § § § §
In the motel bathroom, Suzie stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. She knew she was too thin. She turned sideways and looked at her profile. Why had that son-of-a-bitch soon-to-be ex-husband preferred sex with another woman to her? She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms across her breasts. She remembered the places where Jake’s hands had pressed against her back.
14
Morning
I slept well that night and did not dream. I was up early watching for the girls. At about eight, Suzie walked in. She caused a little commotion. It was before visiting hours and some of the guys were still getting dressed. She pulled the curtain around the bed to give the other guys privacy. She sat on the bed and pulled two large coffees and doughnuts out of a bag.
“Where’s Cathy?”
