Cherry Ames 04 Chief Nurse (13 page)

“I think I’d better go, Cherry,” her brother whispered.

“Maybe another time—–”

She nodded and stepped outside the tent with Charlie.

Clasping his hand tightly, she encouraged him, “Don’t feel too bad about Gene, Charlie. We
will
find some way to help him!” Her brother silently returned her warm handclasp, turned quickly and disappeared into the dark.

It was very late by now, very quiet in the isolation tent. The flier was still lying there with his dark blue eyes wide open. His expression altered ever so slightly as Cherry softly re-entered. He looked as if he had been in some world of dream or memory, and returned to the present as Cherry approached his bed.

She smiled at him as cheerfully as she could, and said, “Aren’t you getting sleepy by now? I think I’m going to give you a glass of milk.”
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She went over to the bedside table to get the thermos

—her own precious thermos bottle—and poured a glass of cool milk, then a glass of water from the pitcher, to follow the milk. As her hands worked, her mind was at work too. She did not know much about psychoneurological nursing—except that the ancient Greek word, taken to pieces, meant the nursing of soul, nerves, and reason, and that it would require all her sympathy and imagina-tion. After she had given the airman his milk and settled him more comfortably on the pillows, Cherry started to talk, with great care in her choice of words and ideas.

“Gene, Charlie and I know that something extraordinary happened to you. Now, look. We can’t cure you until we figure out what happened, and clear it out of your memory. And I have an idea—” she looked into his eyes and knew he was relaxed and listening closely,

“—that you are trying to remember. In fact, I think you can’t quite remember, and that worries you, and so you are trying to reconstruct everything that happened. Isn’t that right?”

She waited tensely. The soldier briefly closed his eyes to say Yes! Cherry caught her breath. Then she felt her way with her next sentence.

“And I think too that, while you are making an effort to remember, you are also trying to avoid the memory, because it is so horrible. You want to remember and get it straight, but still you would rather not think about it.

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Isn’t that right? So your mind is sort of—locked—

between the two efforts. And that’s why you can’t talk.

Isn’t that right, Gene? Oh, Gene, try to tell me!” The soldier uneasily turned his head on the pillow.

He was breathing hard. What she had said had distressed him. “He wouldn’t be so upset if I hadn’t stumbled on the truth,” Cherry thought. Suddenly she had an inspiration. She had never thought of it before, never tried it before, because until now, Gene had lacked the strength for even this.

“Gene, try this! Please, Gene, help me to help you!” She pulled out of her voluminous pocket a pencil and a small pad of paper. Gently, she fitted the pencil into the boy’s right hand, his good hand, and held the pad under it. She hoped he was strong enough to write. Yes, his fingers gripped the pencil and held it!

“Tell me what happened. Whatever bits you can remember. Write it. Write for Charlie, for me.” He looked deeply into her face, as if wondering whether he could trust her. Then his dark blue eyes dropped to the paper and slowly, painfully, the pencil started to move. Cherry’s hand trembled as she held the pad for him. The pencil wrote, waited, wrote again, and slid off onto the blanket. The airman’s face and hands were covered with perspiration but he had a look of infinite relief. He had written, in big, weak, clumsy letters:

“Concealed guns—maybe—I am trying—–”
c h a p t e r v i i i

Monkey and Other Business
the trouble with this particular monkey business was that it involved a real live monkey.

The girls were in their back yard, teasing Cherry and asking her what she was going to do about this new situation. Gwen, pinning pink panties neatly on a guy-line attached between the Ritz Stables and a palm tree, remarked:

“That monkey is a whole lot cuter and nicer than some people I know!”

Cherry lifted her dripping, soapy head from a bucket, where Vivian was giving her a shampoo. “I never said anything against the monkey. It’s a lovely monkey. One of the best. Who am I to go around slan-dering a poor, innocent, helpless little monkey? It’s just that——”

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“Put your head down,” Vivian commanded. “This is the Ritz Beauty Parlor. Monkeys not allowed here.”

“I saw a doe and two doelets stroll into camp the other day,” Josie Franklin offered conversationally, standing around in the hot sun.

“Not doelets, dear, fawns,” Cherry sputtered, as Vivian firmly seized her by the hair and poured clear water mostly down the back of her neck.

“But about that monkey,” Gwen relentlessly insisted.

“All right!” Cherry exclaimed. She got up from her knees, tied a towel turban-fashion about her head, and announced, “We will now settle that monkey business for once and for all!”

“We’ll come along!” the girls chorused and trooped down the dusty, sandy road with her. “To make sure justice is done,” Gwen said between her teeth.

“Monkey justice, I suppose,” Cherry said disgustedly.

“To be really fair, he deserves a jury of his peers.”

“What’s peers?” Josie Franklin asked, looking quiz-zical behind her glasses.

“Equals. In this case, a jury of monkeys. And a monkey judge,” Cherry explained to naïve Josie. “If anyone says ‘monkey’ to me just once more——”

“Monk—” Gwen started.

Cherry chased her, in and out among the coconut trees. She could not catch her but Gwen did sober up.

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The monkey in question belonged to Private First Class Joe Troy. He had caught the little creature, tamed it, and found a leather collar and a chain for it. Where he had gotten these was one of the minor mysteries of Pacific Island 14. It was amazing what articles the soldiers could rustle up, such as extra watch hands, springs for a bed, and a bass horn. The monkey, whom Private Troy had named Tojo to show his questionable estimation of the Japanese Emperor, always rode on his master’s shoulder. The soldier had a lonely and difficult job: he was a G.I. spotter, sent out alone into the jungle to watch the sky for Jap planes. So Tojo’s company meant a great deal to him. Cherry certainly did not want to take his pet away from him, but it had been impossible to find the source of infection that had sent Private Troy to the malaria ward. Monkeys can catch malaria too, and Cherry felt there was a vague chance that the soldier might have contracted malaria from his pet. The animal had been examined twice before, but no proof that Monkey Tojo was guilty had been found. There was no other source, in this case, to prove him guiltless, either. Meanwhile, other soldiers were taking care of the heartbroken monkey. No more boys had reported to the hospital—so far—with the headaches and feverishness and hot burning that spell malaria. But, to take no chances, Tojo had better go. It would be a move that would hardly add to Cherry’s popularity, but an epidemic
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would not help matters either. Cherry felt badly about this. It would have been easier for her if she had been positive the monkey was a health menace, but she did not want to take the chance to wait for definite proof.

First, Cherry and her delegation went to see Private Troy and tell him that his pet’s days were about to come to an end. Private Troy was too sick to care.

Then the stern, turbanned Chief Nurse and her party marched down to the barracks where Tojo was quartered.

A howl went up from the men when Cherry took the monkey’s temperature and pronounced him a suspect, as a carrier of disease. If the animal were ill with malaria, he probably could not be cured. The monkey did not like this examination: he blinked his tiny bright eyes and chat-tered angrily and tried to pull off Cherry’s turban.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” Cherry said, including the monkey too, “but Tojo is about to go to monkey heaven.” The boys called her unfeeling, hard-hearted, a murderess.

“You’ll be dead if he isn’t,” Cherry warned them.

“Malaria is nothing to monkey with—and that’s not a pun. I mean it.”

She was sorry: the men here were so lonely and homesick that even a little animal could engage their affections.

One boy went up to the little brown animal and took its paw. “Prepare to meet your Maker,” he said, making a horrid face at Cherry.

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“Oh, come now!” Cherry said in exasperation, “You can find yourselves another monkey, one you’re
sure
is healthy. Why don’t you,” she suggested with tongue in cheek, “hold burial services for this one?” As a matter of fact, they did. The Chief Nurse did not attend. “I really feel like a meanie, this time,” she confided to Gwen. “But it had to be done.” A number of other ticklish duties had to be done, and they fell on Cherry’s shoulders. One of them was disciplining her nurses. The girls were not having an easy-time of it, and Cherry’s carefulness that they always let her know just where they could be found, and that not more than ten per cent of them ever could leave the hospital area at one time, did not sweeten tempers.

Then on top of that, she insisted on drilling them, in the heat, after a full day’s work when their feet already were protesting.

“I don’t like this any better than you do!” Cherry shouted as she stood before the line of girls in khaki coveralls and heavy shoes and helmets and gas masks.

“I’d rather be sipping a soda or going to a movie, too! But if the Jap planes come over, we’ve got to be ready and in practice to take care of ourselves.” So they wearily drilled, and Cherry drilled most of all.

For she took the girls in relays of twenty, so with sixty nurses, she herself drilled three times, to each regular nurse’s one time. Cherry did not feel exactly gay.

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When her half-day off a week, and her full day off a month, rolled around, the Chief Nurse was always too busy to take time off. She worked right through her so-called free time.

As a grand and gloomy climax, it rained. It was the end of March, the beginning of April, and supposedly the rainy season was about over. But the rain came down in torrents, flattening the convalescents’ vegetable gardens and the wild orchids Ann had just planted around the Ritz Stables and her own ward. Tents tugged at their moorings in the lashing rain, and one did blow away, with Cherry and her girls chasing it like drenched demons. The high surf broke loose two barges and they washed up on their beach. Little, friendly lizards climbed up their screens and had to be discouraged from such neighborliness. The ward tents got wet and would not dry out, and Cherry worried about her patients. There was no use worrying about wet floors, nor about the mud that everyone carried in large cakes on his shoes. It rained till the roads were all ditches, the sopping palms drooped like weeping women, and nobody cared whether tomorrow ever came—for tomorrow it probably would be raining again.

Cherry had once thought these tropical storms were picturesque, but after she had struggled, with the help of the corpsmen, to clean up the half-drowned tent wards, she thought of rain in a class with measles,
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toothaches, and those pesky, ever-biting chiggers. When the watery fury finally slowed down and dripped to a stop, the dampness brought out insects in armies. Cherry and the corpsmen and extra volunteers worked long hours spraying the swampy greenery with anti-malaria spray.

Then suddenly the sun came out. Everything still stayed wet, but after a day or two of blue skies and crimson flowering vines and bright-hued birds singing, everyone perked up again.

Except the Chief Nurse. For now, on top of Cherry’s other ticklish jobs, Major Pierce made a new health rule for Island 14 and ordered Cherry to announce and enforce it. The rule was that, despite the intense heat, the patients had to wear long-sleeved, high-necked pajamas, and well soldiers had to wear
all
their clothing—

not only outer shirts but every article they possessed, right down to leggings and gloves and buttoned collars—

to foil this onslaught of disease-laden insects. Cherry, tacking signs to this effect on trees, and dodging the bitter complaints of sweating boys, remarked to herself:

“An executive’s job is no bargain. Who loves an executive? Nobody!” She pulled down her helmet, pulled on her own gloves, and groaned to her nurses,

“When we say we’re sweating out this war in the jungle, boy, you can take that literally!”

“If you think we can grouse and gripe,” Gwen advised her, “you should hear the G.I.’s!”
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But Cherry’s chief worry was about Charlie. She was concerned about his inability—and his crew’s—to answer the Intelligence Officer’s interrogations. Charlie was away now. Cherry suspected that he was spending at least part of his time on Island 13, with Captain May, though she heard the deep roar of transport planes at night. Cherry knew how troubled Charlie was about these fruitless questionings, and especially about Gene’s condition and learning what had happened.

Cherry wished she could help her brother. If only she could solve this mystery—even find just one clue!

The mystery seemed to be at a standstill. Nothing developed, that Cherry could learn of, from Colonel Pillsbee’s possession of the shrapnel fragments. Most disappointing of all, Gene had had a relapse. It was a purely physical relapse—he had caught cold somehow.

He was more cheerful now but too weak to be questioned. Cherry had to be content to let the airman rest and gain physical strength, before she could hope for him to talk, or even write again. She had been playing the victrola, borrowed from the recreation room, and the music seemed to help him. Once he had even smiled. And his shoulder was coming along very well.