I rose from charting my meds and walked to Xe’s bedside. The old man’s bony jaw thrust pugnaciously forward over his doubled fists and his narrow black eyes snapped from me to Voorhees and back again as if we were threatening him with torture and further dismemberment.
“God, papasan, don’t look at me like that,” I said, in English, of course, but hoping he’d find my tone reassuring. “I’m not going to hurt you. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Not here. But you gotta give me that.” I pointed to the thing he clasped to his larynx. “I keep safe for you.”
He looked suspiciously at my outstretched hand. How in the hell was I going to explain to him that he couldn’t wear his necklace because it would get in the anesthetist’s way? For all I knew, his idea of anesthetic was biting a rock.
Fortunately, Xinh had forsaken Vietnamese TV for the live entertainment we were providing. She had too much energy not to get antsy lying in bed day after day, and now she clearly itched to get involved. Her English wasn’t as good as Mai’s, but she seemed to understand more than she spoke. “Xinh, you know when you go O.R.,” I began in the simplified English that, mixed with a few words of Vietnamese and a few words of bastardized French, made for a sort of pidgin common language between Americans and Vietnamese.
“O.R.?”
“Surgery? Doctor fix your leg?”
“Nooo…”
Well, actually, she hadn’t been to surgery yet. “Uh, well, anyway. Papasan Xe go surgery. His legs numbah ten. Doctor fix. Make better.”
Xinh nodded energetically, her gleaming black pigtails waggling. I thought I was getting through to her. “But before go surgery, must take off all jewelry.” I demonstrated, removing my own rings and putting them in my pocket. But although Xinh’s eyes followed everything I did, she looked puzzled. So I reached for her watch, and though she looked doubtful, she unbuckled it and handed it to me.
“Jewelry,” I told her, and jingled the watch and rings together in my hand. Xinh looked scornful. She knew that. I continued. “Now then, you papasan.” I pointed to her, and Xinh shook her head that no, she wasn’t papasan.
“Play like. Play like you papasan.”
Xinh drew in her breath and nodded. She bicced—understood—“play like.”
“I take your jewelry and lock it up,” I said, and walked to the narcotics cabinet, looking back to see if Xinh was still watching. Xinh’s head bobbed like a buoy on a windy day.
“Then you go surgery, get legs fixed.” I pantomimed Xinh’s bed rolling down the hall and made vague fixing-up gestures at her knees. “Then you come back”—I continued the charades with more laborious gestures, then scuttled back to the medicine cabinet and with a flourish worthy of a magician produced the watch again and handed it back to Xinh—“and you get your jewelry back. Bic?”
Xinh looked puzzled for a moment, then broke into another flurry of earnest nods.
“You explain to papasan for me?”
I expected maybe three or four more explanations and charades would be necessary, but Xinh drew herself up with the self-importance of a teacher’s pet chosen to be hall monitor, leaned over the edge of her bed, and shouted to Xe in strident Vietnamese loud enough to be heard over Ahn’s whimpering. Xe, who had steadfastly refused to watch my shenanigans but had withdrawn into staring through the corrugations of the tin wall opposite him, looked startled. He shifted onto one hip to face Xinh, then loftily turned away and said something argumentative, gesturing at me and the ward with more animation than I’d seen in him so far.
Xinh assumed the airs of both a princess and a mother as she replied, lecturing him. The old man set his jaw even more firmly and she repeated what she had said, this time in a more coaxing tone, intermittently pointing to me.
Xe watched me impassively for a while, his fingers idly stroking the thing at his neck. After a couple of minutes his jaw relaxed and he beckoned me to his bedside with a lift of his head.
This time Xinh shouted her encouragement to me, no doubt urging me not to drop the ball after she, Xinh, had gotten things rolling. I leaned over the old man and he pulled the thong from his neck and tenderly handed me the object on the end. I started to carry it to the medicine cabinet, but Xinh, like a referee calling a foul, began bouncing up and down, crying, “No, co! No, Kitty!” and indicated that I was supposed to put Xe’s necklace around my own neck.
I hesitated, doubting the professionalism of wearing a patient’s jewelry—particularly since it didn’t look like very hygienic jewelry. But Xe was making small nodding movements. He was urging me to wear it, not lock it up. Once I slipped it on, he seemed satisfied and with lordly dignity allowed Voorhees to finish prepping him.
I remember thinking that the necklace could have had value to no one but Xe, and even at that the value had to be purely sentimental. The pendant on the grungy thong looked as if it had been carved, or melted maybe, then molded, out of the bottom of a soda pop bottle. It was still roughly round and had a deep wave running through the middle, with something like ears on the side. It sure wasn’t the Hope diamond, but then it wasn’t mine to worry about either. Just so the thong didn’t contain living creatures. I detected nothing more noxious than the old man’s sweat, so I tucked his treasure inside my fatigue shirt, the pendant lodging under the top button above my cleavage. I’d promised to guard it with my person, if not in so many words, and I would, though why anybody would want to steal such a thing I couldn’t imagine. But even as Voorhees rolled Xe off to surgery, the old man cast a backward glance my way to make sure I was living up to my end of the bargain.
That incident exhausted all of the good humor I had for the day, and when I sat down to do the chart, I felt like a boiling lobster. Sweat saturated my hair and dripped into my eyes. My fatigues stuck to my back and armpits, the backs of my legs, and my crotch. My bra was soaked and clammy. I hate heat and always have. It shuts down my thinking ability by at least 75 percent. I get slow and clumsy, and my skin feels like a freshly tarred road gumming onto everything that touches it. I get faint and headachy and my temper is about as stable as nitroglycerin. I gulped two salt tablets and sat down with my head between my knees for a moment, my hands, where they pressed against my eyes, feeling sticky as those of a two-year-old who’s just finished eating candy. Ahn’s shrill whine sawed through the heat, irritating as the buzzing of a thousand mosquitoes. Damn! And I still had to do the little bastard’s dressings. I peeled myself off the chair and jerked the dressing cart away from the wall so hard it clattered. Jesus, it was so hot even my skin seemed to be sending off red light, as if it were boiling. I paused for a moment, closing my eyes just so some part of me could be cool in the shade my eyelids provided. I couldn’t touch the kid feeling like this. I took three deep breaths and opened my eyes again. Well, better. My skin was only giving off a hot rosy glow now. I wheeled the cart over. Now it looked as if the kid was glowing red—red and kind of a murky eggplant color that intensified and darkened when he glared up at me and started shrieking.
“Oh, shut up, I haven’t touched you yet,” I snapped. He looked right at me and howled louder.
“Okay, kid, that’s it. I’ve had it with you and so has everybody else. You’re not the only one around here who’s been hurt, you know.” But he just kept howling. I couldn’t, I simply could not, keep listening to that racket while I worked on him. I pushed him over on his side and swatted his rear. “Now, em di, dammit. We’re all tired of you. Just shut up.” I gave him about four swats, the pink of my hand blurring to red as it hit the red around his rear.
He didn’t yell any louder. In fact, his shrieking died off to a whimper, then a snuffle, by the time I got control of myself and stopped abusing my patient. He sniffed and looked at me for the first time without the hatred and terror I was used to seeing in his face. I couldn’t figure it out. I was feeling like the Marquise de Sade and the kid was definitely in the best mood he’d been in since he arrived. The light around him looked cooler somehow, too, and less murky. My own had fade
d to dusty pink. I laid my hand on his forehead, thinking that maybe the color had something to do with fever.
His skin was sweaty but cool, and he watched me, not fearfully, but with a funny kind of anticipation. And it came to me that he didn’t know nurses weren’t supposed to paddle their patients. He knew he’d been thoroughly annoying everybody, but he felt lost and abandoned. The spanking and my scolding voice, even speaking English, had made it seem as if his mother were still with him, in control of the world, telling him what to do. I knew that as certainly as if he’d told me, though I didn’t know then how I knew it. But whatever passed between us he didn’t ask to understand but simply accepted with relief. His face smoothed out of its monkeylike scowl and his lids dropped like rocks as he passed into long-overdue sleep.
“Ooh!” Xinh cried and shook her hand. I left the dressing cart by Ahn’s bed and walked to hers. A blur of blue-green light surrounded her. I blinked hard, but the light remained.
“What’s wrong, Xinh?”
She held up her hand so I could see the fingernail broken into the quick, a thin line of burgundy light pulsing from it. “Nothing. Tete dau,” she said, her frown vanishing.
She took my hand in her sore one and swung it back and forth, companionably. This made me a little uncomfortable, but I knew from watching Vietnamese people that same-sex friends often held hands in public. I was grateful for the gesture, since I was still feeling a little like an ogress for spanking Ahn, despite the surprising way he had reacted. Xinh was impossible to dislike. Her emotions swept across her face like weather on a seascape, sunny one minute, stormy the next, but open and changeable. She painted her nails and tried different hairdos and watched the performers on Vietnamese TV. I was sure that if I could understand what she and Mai gossiped about, it would have been what my friends in nursing school talked about, boys, clothes, normal things that had nothing to do with the war. The only thing funny about her was that blue-green stain. I must have a bad case of heatstroke, I thought, and reclaimed my hand. “I have to get back to work, Xinh,” I said.
She pulled her own hand away and started to suck on the broken nail, then stopped with it halfway to her mouth. “Heyy! Numbah one!” she said, her eyes shining. She held up her nail, perfectly intact, with about a quarter inch of unpainted growth showing above her ruined polish job. She looked at me as if I had pulled a coin from behind her ear. “How you do that?”
“Huh?” I said stupidly. Maybe Xinh wasn’t feeling so good either—she was that funny color around the edges. Maybe we were both sick. I looked at both of Xinh’s hands—all of the nails were intact. I shrugged. She shrugged and happily accepted the mending of her manicure as a miracle of American medicine. I felt distinctly dizzy as I started back for the nurses’ station.
Mai returned to the ward, her hair newly washed, and glowing iridescent pink. I rubbed my eyes and looked away from her.
The lunch cart arrived, and Meyers and Voorhees started passing lunch trays. I joined them at the cart and pulled a tray out, then started giggling helplessly. Not only did a baby-pink glow wrap both corpsmen, but the food was also color-coded: a pale green wisp over the cottage cheese, a faint orange to the fish.
“You okay, Lieutenant?” Voorhees asked.
“Uh—yeah. But I think I’d better sit down. Everything looks funny to me.” I turned back toward my chair and tripped over my own feet.
Meyers caught my arm. “Whoa there, ma’am, what you been on?”
I stared hard at the dark brown center of his face and ignored the fluff of pink tipping his modified afro. “I dunno. One of you guys put a drop of acid on my fizzie or something? You’re all weird—” I started to say “colored” and was afraid Meyers would take it wrong, so instead I asked for a drink of Kool-Aid and sat down again with my head between my knees. Maybe I was having some kind of drug reaction, but I found that hard to believe. More likely it was the heat. I had fainted during my first scrub, when I stood in a closed operating theater in muggy ninety-degree heat and watched a particularly bloody mastectomy while unwiped sweat ran down my face and pooled under my surgical mask. I’d also fainted during my first O.B. case, also in the summer, when the heat made the blood smell like hot metal. But I hadn’t ever seen colors like this before—a roar in my ears and a sudden blurring of vision, but never distinct shades surrounding perfectly well-defined individuals. And I’d been sick those other times. Today I didn’t actually physically feel any worse than I’d felt every day since I’d been in country.
Maybe I should have my eyes checked? But that wouldn’t explain why Xinh had a blue-green halo while everybody else’s was pink. Did only staff get pink halos? I’d have to ask Chaplain O’Rourke about that one. Maybe there was more to that angel-of-mercy stuff than met the eye. Trying to figure it out did make me start to feel a little nauseous, so I avoided the whole issue by refusing to look at anyone and finishing my charting instead.
When the major returned from her Tuesday morning staff meeting, she pushed Xe’s gurney in front of her. A rosy glow surrounded her. He looked gray around the gills.
“Joe says it will take a couple more procedures to get Xe’s stumps in shape for prostheses,” she said. “But he came through this like a champ. Get his vitals, will you, Kitty?”
As I bent over to listen to his blood pressure, the amulet fell out of my shirt. I pulled the necklace off over my head. “Here you go, papasan. Safe and sound,” I told him, and looped the thong back over his shaved head. His color and my vision immediately improved. That is, the gray around him vanished and a little warmth touched his cheeks, not above them but right there in the skin, where it belonged. The glow disappeared from around my hands too. I knew something strange was happening, and remembered what Heron and Mai said about the old man, but I misunderstood even then and got it backward. “You must be a holy man, papasan,” I said. “You seem to have cured whatever was wrong with me.”
6
I suppose so far it sounds as if we never treated anyone but Vietnamese patients. Sometimes, the slower times, that was almost true. Joe kept the native patients as long as he could, until they were as completely well as we could make them, because life outside the hospital was more conducive to dying than to healing.
But we did treat GI casualties, of course, and when they came, it was in swarms that all but swamped us. The first big push came the day after Xe’s surgery. It was what I had imagined it would be like while I was in training, while I was at Fitzsimons, while I was working neuro, where we seldom got mass casualty patients except as overflow. The pushes weren’t as constant as I’d believed they would be, which was just as well, because despite all my imaginary scenarios of how I would handle that kind of situation, when the first one came I definitely was not ready.
Partly, that was because of the way I had spent the night before.
Tony had ambled onto the ward during evening report and hung out at the coffeepot until I finished. “Carry your books home for you, Lieutenant?” he asked, grinning.
He’d pushed his aviator specs back into his curls and looked like a movie star playing a helicopter pilot. “Hi, soldier, new in town?” I kidded back, slipping into the space under his arm as we walked out of the hospital.
“I had to see you. You glad?” he asked. Well, I was glad he wanted to see me, yeah, but I wished he’d waited till I’d taken a shower.
“Sure am. But who’s going to fly all those helicopters while you’re away?”
We just fit walking hip to hip, up the barracks stairs. “I told Lightfoot, my crew chief, where to find me if he needs me,” he said, slamming my screen door behind us, flipping on the fan, and attacking my top button in a single fluid motion. The room was smothering, as always, but Tony was a lot hotter. He finished my buttons and helped me with his during what was probably a fifteen-minute French kiss, if I’d been counting. And that was just the one on my mouth. “Come on, baby,” he said, sliding with me onto my bed. “Tell me how you want it.”
We
ll, what the hell. The dialogue wasn’t exactly from Gone With the Wind, but the action was certainly impressive. He was innovative and skillful, all over me and that bed. The man had to have pored over the Kama Sutra as thoroughly as he’d studied his helicopter manuals, and he handled me with the same sort of competence. The trouble was, I wasn’t a helicopter. Don’t get me wrong. The sex was great, and I enjoyed it even more because I felt maybe I was finally going to have a real boyfriend, someone I could get away from work with and confide things in. So I snuggled next to him, waiting until he was comfortable to tell him about the crazy thing that had happened that morning, with the colors and so on, and about Ahn and the old man. We wedged ourselves spoonlike in the bed with the fan finally evaporating some of our mutual sweat. He tapped a pack of Marlboros against his chest until one popped up, lit it, and took a couple of long, satisfied puffs. “You’ll get a kick out of this, Tony,” I said. “Something really weird happened to me on the ward this morning….” I leaned up on one elbow to watch his face. He was already asleep. I sighed, wondering why I felt it was so much ruder for me to wake him up to talk to him than it was for him to screw my brains out, then fall asleep. If he was going to sleep, I wanted out of the bed and into a cool shower. I ran my fingers through his hair to remind him that I was still stuck between his butt and the wall. He rolled over, smiled lazily, and everything started all over again.
I climbed over him while he was in the process of lighting up the next time. He was sleeping when I returned, and I pulled off my clean clothes and slid in beside him, getting slick again from his sweat. I flipped the sheet up over us and wondered fleetingly if this was what a real honest-to-God wartime romance was like before I, too, dropped off.
I don’t know how much later it was that someone pounded on the door. I woke up a little disoriented, felt Tony next to me, and thought, Oh shit, it’s the colonel. “Who is it?” I asked.
The Healer’s War Page 8
