Night Must Wait

by Robin Winter

  She hurried in. Arterial bleeding. Shoulder wound. Gilman pushed a turbaned woman aside and reached to stem the spurting blood. A sticky spray across her left cheek, the thick hot taste familiar in her mouth.

  Pressure points, get that gusher stopped. She needed help and none of the curious crowd of Nigerians surging through the doorway of the examination room could give it.

  "Clear out—give me space, Goddamn it."

  Sister Catherine appeared, white cape and veil asserting her authority.

  "I heard screaming," Sister Catherine said. So Irish. Fifteen years nursing in Africa but she still had her convent accent.

  "Shut up!" Silence welled about Gilman.

  Sister Catherine took over the pressure points. No time for gloves. Her tanned triangle of face, faded-blue eyes and wide mouth framed in white coif remained calm. When they'd first met, Gilman had tried to shake the nun's composure, but she'd lost the game.

  The curious crowd edged into the room, all competing for a better view. The noise rose, voices talking about what happened, what was to come.

  "Knife wound. Ragged edge. Rusty? Goddamned hunting knife, I'll bet."

  She needed the operating room. Tetanus jab. Penicillin. Sister Catherine could keep pressure on at this angle for a few minutes. Gilman pulled out pads of gauze and surgical tape for a temporary dressing. Meanwhile, the racket rose outside the room again. A motor raced, backfired. More exclamations erupted. So much goddamned noise.

  Lucky bastard. Knife must have nicked the arterial wall, which held until moments ago. She glanced at the clock on the wall, but her attention caught on a familiar face. Intent narrow features. Alert and silent.

  "Damn it, Wilton, what're you doing here?"

  Wilton turned away, faced the people jostling in the doorway and spoke. Their expressions quieted and the mass of bodies melted away. Wilton closed the door.

  What in hell had she said to work that magic? Gilman, envious, happy with an intensity all the greater for the unexpectedness of her friend's appearance, finished whipping the pressure bandage into place.

  "This is Sunday. He's a refugee, headed North." Wilton spoke so low Gilman had to read her lips. "Minority tribe—Tiv. Muslim. Worked down on the coast, near Port Harcourt. Made it all the way here, over two hundred miles."

  "Do you think they know?" Gilman motioned to the closed door, then glanced down, registering a detail she had missed. No one could see the man's tribal scars, or his racially distinctive bone structure. Wilton had wrapped a bloodied rag around his face. All she could see was his terrified, bloodshot eyes. Nothing unusual in his clothing, and with a face wound, no one would expect him to talk.

  "Never mind," Gilman said. "I see you covered that."

  Sister Catherine laughed.

  Chapter 5: Lindsey

  December 1966

  Lagos, Western Region, Nigeria

  Uniformed police flooded the Records Building like brown ants after sugar. Lindsey had to sit at the reception table and answer questions. Everything she said ground into her the awareness of what she hadn't done, of the impotence of her actions. At least she'd kept her cool.

  The Yoruba captain, handsome in a greyhound way with broad tribal cicatrices enhancing his high cheekbones, smiled at her. Polite, supportive, no doubt dismayed by her self-control. He'd probably been chosen for his command of English.

  "Are you well? Do you need some gin, perhaps sherry?"

  "I'm not the fainting kind," she said more sharply than he deserved.

  "No, Madam Kinner, of course you are not. I admire your aplomb. But this has been a dreadful shock, and on behalf of my country and my people, let me apologize that any incident so sordid and indelicate should involve you."

  She wanted to smack him but picked up a pen from the table, played with it. Yes, she said, she'd been working though it was lunchtime. No, she hadn't recognized the men. The captain didn't expect her to, and that irritated her. Simply because they were Nigerians didn't mean they all looked alike to her, she wanted to say, but the sad truth was she remembered only the flash of their eyes, their approximate heights measured by the doorway and the darkness of their clothing.

  "No, no," the Yoruba captain said, telling her by his repetition that he spoke the official line and not his thoughts. "I assure you, dear madam, that this is not a tribal killing. Something personal or perhaps an unpaid debt."

  After the police had gone, in came the office staff, including some she barely recognized from the lower floors. Word of the tragedy must have buzzed out of the place on the backs of flies. People patted her hand and made sympathetic noises and talked in a mix of Yoruba and English among themselves.

  Sandy, trapped in a corner by two chattering women with their hair twisted up in dozens of tiny pigtails, had an expression both cross and foolish. Lindsey could only imagine she looked the same.

  Lindsey began a backing maneuver that led at last down the hallway to her own office. Sandy followed. The staff members began to repeat the same comments. The novelty of the murder faded and wonder and alarm both lost force.

  Lindsey felt she'd disappointed them by not passing out or screaming. She overheard a lady with her hair up in the traditional thread-wrapped tails say, "Asika shouldn't have stayed. Just another uppity Igbo thinking he could get away with it."

  "And what 'it' she means is beyond me," Lindsey said when she and Sandy closed her office door on the others. Sandy's face looked pinched and childlike. She slid down to sit on the floor with her back against the wall. Her friend's parents had let Sandy have habits Lindsey's never allowed, before the car accident that took them. Lindsey felt a certain envy. No skirts for Sandy, no lessons in deportment. Was it telling that Sandy still wrote home? Not that she, Lindsey, had anyone left to write.

  "I still have the sandwiches," Lindsey said.

  "Don't talk to me about food or I'm gonna barf."

  "Sorry."

  Lindsey sat quiet but her stomach complained. She grabbed a pencil and began to scribble notes to herself—she needed to rewrite every word of her private report to Palmer in the Consulate. God. She'd reported that only in the Muslim North did Igbos run the risk of injury or death. Asika's death proved her naïvete. She'd change it—tell Palmer Igbos did too well in administration, made too much money, advanced too fast. Their tribal culture produced opportunists. They dominated. This was a tribal murder. Economics drove it and obviously more deaths were coming.

  She'd thought Igbos were protected here in the West. No more. Maybe they should all listen to Major Ojukwu. The Igbo Major announced his tribe wasn't safe anywhere but home in the East. Could she say that in a report without looking simple minded? Overreactive? Not smart to contradict the party line. What did Palmer want to hear from her?

  Lindsey wrote faster. She'd been perilously close to looking ignorant in front of her new employers. She should've focused on those reports from Wilton's contacts.

  Was she a fool to have left herself so vulnerable? A man murdered down the hall from her, his blood still hot when she stepped into his office. She'd never leave herself this unprotected again. She didn't have to do everything the way Wilton told her. Told. No one told Lindsey what to do or how. Wilton suggested, but in the long run, Lindsey would have her way.

  When her stomach growled, she drew the neat packet of wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches toward her across the desk.

  "I'm leaving. See you tonight maybe," Sandy said, getting to her feet. "Need some fresh air."

  "Yes. Sorry." Lindsey waited until her friend turned the corner before she unfolded the wax paper and took a bite. Her first dead person, dead by violence, and all she wanted was her lunch. It felt like some kind of test she'd passed. She'd kept control of herself. Lindsey wondered what Wilton would say. Now she had a story as dramatic as any of Gilman's to tell.

  Chapter 6: Gilman

  December 1966

  Ezike, Eastern Region, Nigeria

  Gilman rolled over in her narrow bed, grumbling, blinked
and saw a beam of yellow light. A figure standing with a flashlight at the foot of her bed. Her dazed brain assimilated—it was Wilton. She sat up, fast, with memories of times back in college when Wilton dumped cold water on her to wake her for a final.

  "Emergency?"

  "Time to go," Wilton said.

  "What in hell? Go where? How's our patient?" Gilman's bare feet slapped the linoleum floor.

  "Gone," Wilton said. "Got him to the Baptist mission in Otukpo last night. They'll keep him under cover a couple days."

  "Try to convert him, probably, while he's trapped. You shouldn't have moved him without asking me." Gilman yawned. She reached to turn on her lamp, pulled her pillow out of its case onto the bed, grabbed a handful of clothes out of her laundry basket and stuffed them into her pillowcase. She shrugged on a shirt, still buttoned from the night before, over her bra and stopped. "It's too early to go anywhere."

  "Took him to the medical clinic at Otukpo. He'll be okay," Wilton said. "Aren't those clothes dirty?"

  "Not too. But I'm going nowhere 'til you tell me what's up."

  "I made your chief give you two weeks' leave. You're going to my place in Nsukka. We have to leave before anyone can stop us. It's four o'clock, and if you give him another twenty minutes, he's going to change his mind."

  "Nuts, totally nuts. But God, the longer I think about it…"

  Gilman hauled her duffel from under the bed. She started to grin, imagining Wilton waking the head of staff, then in that unnerving quiet way bullying him into signing her holiday leave.

  "Let's get the hell out of here."

  Too hot to talk, or too dirty. Take your pick. Gilman felt the sun on her arm, and despite the grit and wind, sank deep into a pleasant catlike daze. The Citroën jarred along the partially paved road. The borders had been broken and crumbled away, so Wilton aimed for the midline, and both kept an eye out for approaching dust clouds hinting at vehicles to duck.

  "You always seem to know where you can get petrol," Gilman said at the fifth crossroads. Ten o'clock in the morning, the day vibrating with heat so that the palms and brush seemed to dance. Wilton headed down a side track searching for fuel.

  "I have a sixth sense." Wilton gestured to the barely visible men collected in the shade under a cashew, two petrol drums standing by.

  Gilman always cringed to see the petrol men put their lips to the end of the plastic tubing, sucking up the fluid to start the flow into the gas tank. She didn't care how much they spat afterwards to clear their mouths, the stuff was damned toxic and as a doctor she could have ranted about carelessness. But as Wilton said, what else were they to do? No pumps here in the bush, only a space cleared and a group of men with tubing and funnels with a couple of petrol drums under the brutal sun. Machetes as a discouragement to robbers.

  Wilton paid them, adding a string of the big copper pennies for dash. A mutter of thanks, brilliant white smiles, then the men moved back to the shelter of the cashew, leaving the blue oil drums standing in the stained ochre of the rutted roadside.

  "You paying any attention to politics and news?" Wilton said.

  "Can't avoid it."

  "Get out, Gilman."

  Gilman stared.

  "Nigeria's coming apart. Not even Americans will be safe." Wilton's gaze fixed upon something far down the road.

  Gilman hadn't been here long enough to talk about leaving. The way she lived proved it—couldn't Wilton see? She'd been too busy to settle in yet, hadn't learned all the ropes. Without Wilton's persuasion she'd never have come to Africa. Get out? Now? Had she done something wrong?

  "Go to hell," Gilman said and her stomach twisted. "I'm needed. Don't you think I've done a good job? You aren't leaving, are you?"

  The world couldn't go crazy enough to make Wilton desert Nigeria, and if Wilton stayed, Gilman could, too. Working in this fantastic place to change the strange and terrible daily lives of the Nigerians intoxicated Gilman. Medicine woman, magic woman. She'd never get anything like this in New York. She mattered here and she hadn't had enough. How could she imagine returning to the Maidenform and Hostess cupcakes America?

  "I don't care if I never go back," she said.

  Did Wilton know John had written her? Said his marriage was on the rocks and hinted, oh so couthly that there might be possibilities for romance remaining between them?

  She shuddered back from the trap. "This political mess can't last. I thought the Federal Government was mobilizing."

  "I can't take responsibility…" Wilton looked like a missionary wife, young and tense. Her faded dress with capped sleeves, giving its message of conservative order contrasted with Gilman's cotton shirt and pants. Every so often Gilman wondered how they had ever become friends. Would Wilton have burned John's letter because he was a divorced man? How conservative was she? Never had sex, that was for sure. Wilton turned her head, the ends of her brown hair brushing her shoulders.

  "I'm not your responsibility, never was," Gilman said. Talk fast, talk Wilton out of this negativism. The hot air full of scents and the taste of earth blew in her face, trying to take her words. "Don't presume, my friend. You brought me for cowboy medicine in Africa, but I took it from there. Don't care if it comes to war."

  Gilman raised her voice over the noise from the open windows. "Hell, Wilton, you sound like my mother."

  God, what would Gilman's mother make of her room at the clinic with no fans, unreliable electricity, the desk and chair made of old packing crates. Cockroaches the size of mice. No time for mascara, orange sticks and manicures. Or bridge parties.

  "Don't make me feel like her," Wilton said.

  Wilton swerved around a particularly large pothole. Did Wilton expect panic and flight? Gilman wasn't stupid. The Eastern Region where Gilman worked was the native territory of the ambitious boisterous Igbo. They grasped everything modern, including Christianity, and spread out over Nigeria taking the best jobs. No wonder Nigerian Northerners were killing them.

  "It's only a backlash against modern ways and Christianity. It won't last," Gilman said. "And I'm not Igbo. Not to worry."

  "Or Christian. You willing to test that?"

  "I love it here." Was Wilton listening? "Not going to stay forever, but I'll go when I'm ready and not a day sooner. Hey, you know you won't make Lindsey or Sandy go home any more'n me. You brought us to Africa, but you can't send us back. We're not like the two-year people."

  They all joked about the two-year people. The temporaries who left as soon as their contacts expired, desperate for the taste of hamburger, strawberries and jello, whipped cream out of a can, frantic for all the illusions of safety that the familiar promised. Gilman had worked emergency room shifts at Bellevue and could have told them a few things about safety in America. But it wasn't a perception of facts that took them back home.

  Wilton didn't answer her.

  They stopped under a mango tree at a roadside vendor's stand surrounded with piles of coiling orange rind. The orange seller was a woman, neatly braided rows of hair and the flash of white teeth, a sleeping baby on her back. Under her tree, the green shade felt cool.

  Gilman smiled a greeting but stopped when the woman turned her head. One eye swollen shut with a trace of matter trickling onto the smooth brown cheek, making a dark trace that spread where she had wiped and wiped again during her day of selling oranges. She blotted the corner of her eye with the end of her blue- and-yellow wrap. Gilman went back to the car.

  Behind her she heard Wilton greet the vendor in Igbo and the woman's soft appreciative welcome. Gilman finished rummaging in her bag, stuffed a vial and a tube into her pocket and came back to the stall. She watched the woman spinning off the long green coil of fragrant peel from the orange in her hands. You hardly ever saw an orange orange in Nigeria. Light yellow green was the usual hue, not at all what Gilman had expected. The vendor added the stripped fruit to her display basket.

  "I'm guessing trachoma," Gilman said.

  "You want to fix it," Wilton said. "I'll
translate."

  She talked in Igbo, her tone steady, positive. With an expression of hauteur, the vendor leaned back. She stared at Gilman, forcing Gilman to realize that earlier the woman had addressed only Wilton. What was the matter? Was Gilman too blonde? Too blue eyed and alien? The woman cupped her hand protectively over the eye and turned away.

  "Do you see? There's some in both eyes." Gilman spoke fast, hoping Wilton could use the information as persuasion. "It can go chronic, cause blindness—corneal involvement then scar tissue. It may be why she chose so shady a spot with mosquitoes even at midday. I see a lot of trach at the mission hospital and the Methodist clinic too. It's those goddamned flies."

  Wilton shook her head. Gilman followed her gesture to step back and wait.

  "She doesn't want you to touch."

  "I can't diagnose for sure if she won't let me evert the eyelid."

  "You can't fix everything."

  Still Wilton spoke again to the woman, moving her hand at Gilman to stem her words.

  "Not too eager," Wilton said. "Resist the impulse to indiscriminate charity. Go on back to the car, Gilman. I'll tell her you're the best."

  Set up again. Gilman began to smile, encouraged. But Wilton came back to the Citroën with a trio of the peeled oranges in her hands, frowning.

  "She's afraid you'll hurt her," Wilton said. "She's been hearing stories of strangers who hurt people. She asked if you came from the North. We'll lunch at the car and give her time to change her mind. I've a bottle of Milton water to rinse these before we eat."

  The vendor had cut the ends off the purchased fruit so they could drink from them. Milton water stank of antibacterial aromatics, but Gilman made sure to dose her orange. Bananas and canned cheese made lunch with minimal delay.

  "God, my father would have a cow to see me snarfing down canned cheddar," Gilman said. She took another large bite. "He's a snob about cheeses. Always said no American ten miles outside of New York City understood cheese that wasn't orange and square. Now I'm eating cheese out of a can. All round and rubbery, even has the impressed lines of the tin on it."