by Robin Winter
"Cover the yard," the Colonel said to Jantor.
Jantor established himself by the door with lithe ease, pulling his bush hat over his eyes as a shield against the sun. But Gilman found her attention riveted on the Colonel. He must be the German, Steiner. She'd heard speculations about him, and seeing him at close range did not reassure her at all. Nazi Youth, Algeria and the Congo. He thrust his Schmeisser at her. She jumped, holding the passive baby tighter.
"Pay attention."
She nodded at him to emphasize that she did.
"Are you alone here?"
Gilman swallowed. Allingham might still be in the next room. She didn't want to betray him into a potentially dangerous situation, but the third merc was watching the door like a cat at a mouse hole. God only knew how he'd react if Allingham blundered in.
"Alone?"
The door of the inner room opened. The third merc dropped to one knee and cleared his gun.
"Gilman, why are you chat..." It took him a breath. Allingham saw the gun aimed at his belly and gulped.
"Get out here." The mercenary covering him grinned at Allingham, and standing up, poked him in his stomach with his Schmeisser. Gilman felt her palms break sweat. "You got the keys to the supply room?"
"No." Allingham eyed the mercenary with a mixture of hatred and terror in his broad sallow face. "I'm International Red Cross," Allingham said. "I'm a completely neutral agent."
The gun nudged him again, harder.
"Quite sure you don't have them?"
"I've got the keys," Gilman said. "If you tell me what you want, I'll get it for you."
"We want the keys," Steiner said. "Now."
Gilman hesitated.
"Oh, terrific. Can I search her?" The merc covering Allingham shot a sidelong look at her.
"You had your turn last week, Masters," Jantor said from the doorway.
Gilman fumbled in her pocket for the ring of keys and thrust them at Steiner.
An exaggerated sigh of disappointment rose from Masters. "Too bad, Jantor," he said, and shook his head.
Gilman almost trod on Steiner's heels. She followed him out of the room still holding the infant, rather than stay with the jokester. Masters came right behind her and the skin on her back twitched at his nearness. Even if she couldn't stop them, she could at least see what they were going to steal.
Chloroquine, morphine, penicillin. She winced when Steiner took boxes of each. His gesture loosed Masters to grab packages of gauze and bandages.
"We know your work is important," he said, formal, no contractions. She saw again the flash of his pale eyes. "We will leave some of each kind of medicine."
"You ever decide you like frontline surgery, we might use you," Masters said.
Her courage revived.
"Cold day in hell." Gilman patted the baby. Steiner and Masters strapped shut their knapsacks.
"Yeah." Masters gave one wary glance to his commander as if he worried that his talk might annoy. "That's what they all say. Ta-ta, Doc."
Gilman sat writing up her notes in her tent. The troops returned early that morning from a successful ambush. There had been casualties and wounded to attend. A noise broke her concentration and she looked up, fixing on the tall grimy figure of Jantor before her.
"Sit down," she said, assessing the uncontrollable shudders that wracked the mercenary, noting the hunching of his shoulders. She gave him a professional stare. He made the effort to smile. One week since the raid on her supplies and this man looked a wreck.
"Malaria, Doc," Tom Jantor said.
"Had any antimalarial?"
He looked at her. "Wouldn't be here if I had."
Gilman scowled at him, checking what she had on the dispensary table. She thrust a thermometer into his mouth.
"Out of chloroquine again," she said. "Wonder what you do with the stuff. I thought you filched a supply on your last visit."
He shrugged, his mouth closed around the thermometer, jaw quivering in his effort to keep his teeth from chattering.
"Don't bite it." She pulled out a box of chloroquine. He seemed untroubled by her manner, checking her out in a way that made her want to laugh. Men. Even sick men. She tried not to react, checking his vital signs, reading his temperature and silently agreeing with his diagnosis of malaria.
"You've had bouts before," she said. "Where'd you pick it up?"
"In the Congo."
"Take that cot." Gilman gestured to the corner of the tent. The cot was on the small side, barely big enough for her. How would he manage to fit? All the other beds in the hospital held patients, she rationalized to herself, glaring at him when he hesitated. Under all the dirt his skin had a grayish cast. He could have left this too long and God knows malarial complications could kill. She watched him walk the few steps to the cot. She almost reached to steady him.
Why had he come in so late? Had he been left behind on some detail that brought him back almost a day later than the rest of his force? She watched him arrange himself half curled on the cot and tossed a few thin blankets over him. She bent and teased the knots on his boots loose, tugged the muddy things off, dumped them at the foot. She allowed herself a smile.
"Revenge is sweet," Gilman said.
"Don't you mean coals of fire?"
Although she sat and moved papers across the desk for a while, Gilman found it took a long time before she really began to work again. She had to rid herself of the uneasy but somehow pleasant awareness of that alarming shivering figure on the cot.
Allingham came for her an hour later, and she spent the next four hours in OR. After the surgeries of the night, she'd nearly forgotten about Jantor when she came back to the tent to leave her clipboard. Seeing the bulky shape on the cot startled her. Gilman felt for a moment as though the whole episode centered around him had happened days, or even weeks ago. She left her kerosene lantern on a crate and went to see how he slept.
Some mud had flaked away from his skin. She had the impression that he must have hated to come to her, though he'd tried to carry it off with humor. The other times she'd encountered him, he'd been clean, like a good predator, well groomed except for his unruly hair.
He had a strong face, features slightly blunted, jaw rough with several days' worth of beard. The eye sockets looked hollowed. Should she have put him on the drip for dehydration? She gently pinched the skin on his forearm, but the skin reshaped immediately, so he wasn't seriously in need of a bag. She liked the eyebrows, with a natural quirk that spelled mockery and he had a nice wide mouth. A long guy—she'd been right to wonder about him fitting the cot. He breathed deeply now, as if something had disrupted his earlier shallow breaths. Suddenly embarrassed, she turned away and picked up her lantern.
A rustle behind her, and she whirled to face the cot. Jantor sat up, propped on one elbow, staring at her in the dim room.
"Who's there?"
She could hear disorientation in his voice, aggression.
"Your doctor. The lady with the lamp," she said, quelling her fear. Oh yes, he was still armed. She'd known better than to take his weapons. He'd overreact if he found himself without protection.
"No need to jump," she said. "I'm not here to assassinate you. Hippocratic oath, you know."
He stayed half upright, peering. She didn't move, hoping that he'd recognize her. At last he sighed and let his weight slump back on the cot.
"How long have I been here?"
"Something over five hours."
Gilman perched on the edge of her desk. His eyes caught the light, stared in her direction.
"Go back to sleep," she said. "It'll be a while before you feel quite the thing."
"Doc knows best, is that it?"
She smiled. He'd managed a note of teasing. Must be feeling a lot better. Outside the tent the night hum of insects rose and fell. Gilman listened to Jantor's low breathing. She told herself she should go, let him find his cure in rest and the medicine now working in his veins. But a selfish part of her insisted th
at such an opportunity would not come again, so she asked a question.
"Why a mercenary?"
"What?" he asked. "Well, why are you here?"
After a moment's astonishment she said, "It's my job."
"Hell," he said. "I guess that's my answer as much as yours. Now it's my turn again, Doc. How come you couldn't get a decent job in a good hospital in the States?"
"I could. Anytime."
"Then why didn't you? Maybe," he said, without waiting for her reasons, "we're more alike than you want to think."
She shook her head, but could no longer ignore the profound exhaustion in his face. She slid off the edge of her desk, professionalism taking over. "Goodnight."
He mumbled something. Gilman picked up her lantern and went out the door.
The next morning, no Jantor. He'd left a note on Gilman's desk, torn from an old envelope, the heavy black lines somehow characteristic of the man. "Jimmied your lock and stole some more chloroquine. Thanks, Doc."
Chapter 39: Gilman
April 1968
Uli Area, Biafra
Gilman locked the supply room door. She left the clinic and crossed the yard of red earth beaten by the passage of hundreds of feet into brick-like hardness. She could feel it through the papery worn soles of her sandals. Soon those would give up too. Gilman banged the screen door of the mess tent. Still pondering one of her last and most unpleasant cases, she went to the sink to scrub her hands, her anger rising, as it did so easily these days.
War injuries—shrapnel and gunshot, bayonet stabs. Civilians turning up with pieces of buildings and the very earth itself driven into their limbs and bellies. Infections raging in every type of wound and abrasion. Parasites having picnics. Fevers raging. Before the war she'd thought the old Dane guns blowing up in the villages a tragic problem. What a delusion that had been. The maggots and flies she'd once endured now obsessed her. Allingham drove her crazy with bickering. Sister Catherine's patience tried hers. She wished the nun would snap at her one of these days, come down to being human.
"If I have to fish out one more of those squirming obscene what-ya-call-'em worms from someone's leg, I'm going to scream," she said, this more to the sink than to the staff at the mess table the other side of the screen. "You should've been there today when I reamed out Sampson's leg. If it's not one kind of worm, it's another. Sampson's leg was all eaten out by those damn white fuckers. Allingham, I know you say that they only eat tissue that's already dead, but by God I still hate those things and I don't believe you about their diets. They're not so refined. Parasites don't have the decency to wait for a corpse."
"Gilman," Sister Catherine said, "people are trying to eat."
Gilman flinched. Sister, a model of deportment. Not here, not now.
"Well, I'm sorry," Gilman said over a violent splashing of water. "I handled three cases in a row. One had this delicious fungal creep moving up his groin, one had liver fluke—terminal stages, and hey, I've just about gotten used to the flies, but I refuse, I absolutely refuse to get used to the worms. They make me sick."
She shook some of the water from her hands and dried them, tossing the towel into a crate and starting around the screen toward the table where the others sat. She saw outsiders and stopped.
"Doctor," Sister Catherine said, peaceful and blinking behind her wire-rimmed spectacles, "if you've quite finished, we have company to dinner. An old friend of mine from the Congo."
Gilman felt her face go hot. In one confused glance she took in the brown hair and keen face of her former patient, Major Jantor. She glanced down at her dirty feet, suddenly aware of ragged shorts and baggy yellow T-shirt, bare dirty knees and unkempt hair.
"Sorry," she said.
Though disguised by the protective veil of her order, Sister Catherine appeared to struggle not to laugh.
"Doctor Gilman, this is Major Thomas Jantor, a friend of mine from Rwanda. And Tom, this is Katherine Gilman, one of our finest surgeons."
"Pleased to meet you," Gilman said, daring him to mention any of their previous meetings. God, how many introductions to him had she suffered now? She gathered he must have preferred not to share with Sister Catherine the raid on the clinic, or the bit of surgery on the floor of the airport shack. Or the malaria bout.
Of course, Allingham hadn't mentioned the raid. Allingham hadn't any credit to his name from that episode. She sat down to gaze into a bowl of lukewarm soup. Gray, half-congealed, with the characteristic sour smell of garri.
"Can't you get those men of yours to wear real shoes?" Allingham asked with even more than his usual belligerence.
Jantor laughed. Gilman glanced up, noticing Jantor's clean uniform, the skull and crossbones on his brown armband and the friendly eyes. But they weren't friends. He looked past her at Allingham's disapproving face. Jantor barely resembled the man she'd blanketed on her rickety cot. She saw no trace of the bully in the shape of his mouth or the expression of his eyes. Only amusement.
"Shoes?" there was a note of incredulity in his voice. "Oh no, not really. If we can get any, the men will eat them before they try to wear them. Besides, it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference. If they wore shoes, they'd stomp around like elephants, go crashing right into ambushes and get blisters that would turn into jungle rot to feed Doctor Gilman's worms."
Gilman felt suddenly overwhelmed by the inescapable ugliness. Miracle worker. She was supposed to lay on hands and perform wonders. She poked at the viscous mess in her bowl, not listening to the conversation. She wondered what Major Jantor thought of their miserable fare. His Excellency Ojukwu, leader of Biafra, certainly didn't eat like this. His favorite soldiers surely didn't either. She poked again at the heavy soup. Maybe His Excellency had goat to eat every day. She remembered the rank stringy taste with longing. Protein. Real animal protein.
"I think it's already dead, Gilman," Allingham said.
Startled from her greedy reverie, Gilman picked up her bowl and pushed back her chair.
"Excuse me," she said. "I think I'll go find someone desperate enough to suck up this garbage."
"Not so loud, Doctor," Sister Catherine said, "our new cook might hear you."
"Sit down and eat it." Allingham spoke as if Gilman were a child. "You need your food."
"This isn't food. And I hope the cook does hear. He's even worse than the one before. Ought to fire him before he poisons us." She got up and let the screen door bang behind her.
Gilman spent about ten minutes feeding her dinner to some of the older kids in the ward. They seemed willing enough to swallow spoonfuls, even though their suppers had been served not long before. But all suppers were scant. She scraped out a final thick smear and tucked it into an open mouth.
She put the bowl down and covered the last child. Evening fell quickly in the wards, the orange light dying everything with intense color. When she got to her feet again, Jantor was leaning on the door frame, watching. The sun slipped down and she felt alone with him despite all the quiet children in their beds.
"So," Jantor said at last, his deep voice carrying, "you did find someone to eat your dinner."
"Yes." Gilman tried to conceal her nervousness. She went toward the door.
He straightened in the doorway, smiling, the hardness of his face blurred in the fading light.
"Good evening, Doctor."
Nodding once, he turned and walked away across the yard. Gilman stood inside the doorway and watched him.
That night she dreamed of him, his face morphing from gangster to companion. They paddled a small boat on an endless brown river and she told him about the piranhas, which seethed in the water. The boat jerked and she woke in panic.
Gilman opened her eyes in the morning light knowing that something felt wrong. She sat up. On her knee lay Jantor's bush hat, and at the foot of her cot stood Jantor.
"So sorry to wake you up," he said, grinning. "There's fresh goat for your dinners, delivered to the mess tent."
She realized she was givi
ng him a great view of her tits with the unbuttoned cotton shirt she'd slept in, ducked down, pulling up the sheet as he laughed. He leaned in toward her, scooped up his hat and turned away as if how she looked near nude was nothing special.
The first night of goat stew, Major Jantor invited himself to dinner, though he ate little. After, it seemed natural for Gilman to accompany him part of the way from the mess hall, and when he stopped under a jacaranda, she stayed and accepted a cigarette. His were way better than those she could buy.
"You said you loved the army?" she said.
"I started in Korea." Jantor looked down at his hands. Long fingers, wide palm, with reflexed thumbs like a carpenter's. "With the Rangers. Had bad luck, got shot up. When I came out, one leg was shorter than the other. That's what they said, anyway—but damned if I think it makes much difference."
He glanced at Gilman. She listened, leaning against the trunk of the tree, enjoying how slowly and smoothly she could release the smoke from her lips. Tasted better than food.
"Got an honorable discharge out of it anyway."
"Would you have stayed in the service if you could?"
"Yeah, sure. I was good at it," he said. "Back stateside I tried college and slept through it. Tried working. Truck driving, Detroit assembly lines. Classes in accounting. Couldn't hack it."
"So you quit."
Gilman tugged the hat from his head. She patted it, surprised by how warm and soft it felt. She tossed it back. Mistake. She should have held it hostage for a pack of his cigarettes.
"You bet. Went freelancing after that. Poor pickings."
"You were in the Congo," Gilman said. "Sister Catherine said she met you there."
"I hated that goddamned pit." Jantor seemed diverted by her curiosity. "Couldn't stand most of the mercs, nor the Congolese neither. Your Sister Catherine has more piss in her than any of them. Biafra is a different thing, a different people. They have what it takes to make soldiers. G'night, Doc."
Chapter 40: Gilman
