The Healer's War (23 page)

I cleaned and dressed That's wound, helped her use her trapeze to swing herself free of the bed, and walked her, deliberately waiting until Krupman arrived the next day to talk to him about his preposterous orders.

He beat me to it. "What are these people still doing here, nurse? I have written orders that they were to be discharged."

"Xuan and Dinh are waiting for someone from their village to collect them, sir," I said. They might be waiting, but their village was near Tam Ky and their relatives had no idea how to locate them.

"How about the old woman?"

"I wanted to talk to you about her, sir. That's been making great progress-I'm sure Dr. Giangelo told you how hard we've worked with her, how hard she's worked, but she's not quite healed yet and-"

"Lieutenant, I am the physician here. I make that determination," he said, despite the fact that he had yet to examine her. "She's on her feet. She's well enough to go to her own facility and give up her much needed space to a deserving Gi."

"Sir, we haven't had to admit GIs to this side since I've been here and the census isn't especially high right now. We don't need the bed.

There are four empty beds-"

"I've given you an order, lieutenant. I expect it to be carried out. Do I make myself clear?"

"But, sir, when you've been in country awhile and seen what Province Hospital is like-"

"See here, young woman, I'm not listening to any more of these crappy war stories by you so-called old-timers. I want that woman out of here and I want her out of here now. Sergeant!"

He was talking to Baker. "Yes, sir," Baker said. "Voorhees!"

Voorhees dropped the thermometer he was about to put in Dinh's mouth.

"Sergeant?"

"You heard the doctor. Get an ambulance and transfer the patient in bed four to Province Hospital ASAP."

"Yes, sir."

I glared at Sergeant Baker, but he didn't meet my gaze.

Voorhees moved slowly, rebelliously, but he was up for promotion, so he got the ambulance and he got the stretcher and he started loading Dang Thi That onto it. I went over to help, to try to reassure her. I don't remember where Mai was, but she wasn't there to translate or I would have tried to find someone else, a friend, a relative, to let them know about That's departure. I took her hand and said, "New doctor say you well, mamasan. Send you Province Hospital."

I hadn't gotten the words out of my mouth before she grasped my arm with both hands, digging in frantically with her fingernails. Her face, which had reflected slow and agonizing suffering for so long, was suddenly suffused with terror. "No, co! No!" She started climbing my arms, crying and begging. "Kitty, no-" Her eyes pleaded with me to change things, not to betray the hope and trust I had-we all hadencouraged her to have in us.

I held on to the stretcher, but Voorhees was pulling it away. That's nails grazed my arms as her hands lost their grip. Sergeant Baker tugged gently at my shoulders. "Come on, Lieutenant. No need to get hysterical over this," he said. "How many ladies like her you think are out there ain't had nobody to look after them?"

"No, Kitty! No!" That cried, but now Voorhees, who looked about to cry himself, was patting her and trying to calm her. He pulled the cart away from me and rolled her down the hall. I looked after them.

Voorhees was still comforting, but That was silent now, her arms folded across her chest, her streaming eyes turned toward the ceiling.

I whirled around to glare at Krupman, but the bastard hadn't had the guts to stick around and hear her cry, so I glared at Baker instead.

"Thanks for the backup, Sarge," I said sarcastically.

"Don't go gettin' hurry on me, L.T. I just saved your butt. That doctor outranks both of us, and he said she goes, she goes. I didn't like it neither, but this is a war we got going' on here. Lkts of folks got less chance than Mrs. Dang out there on their own. At least he sent her to the hospital."

"You heard what Voorhees said about that place! She'll die there and she knows it." I was still shaking, so I concentrated on licking my finger and smudging the bloody tracks That's nails had left on my arms.

"You don't know no such thing, ma'am. It's the place these people would go to if we weren't here. They got their own ways, you know."

"I guess so," I said, and turned away because I didn't want him to see me crying. I was sitting at the desk watering the charts when I felt something warm close by. I turned slightly and Ahn leaned against me, nodding his head wisely, his eyes filled, not with fear, but with a mixture of cynicism and the sort of pity an adult gives a child the first time the child has a toy his father can't fix.

We got in a push of GIs later that week, and Krupman was too busy enjoying being a combat physician to banish any more of the native patients. I did my job and was barely polite, but as I worked with him that week and the next I couldn't help realizing that with the GIs he was a good doctor, caring, skillful, and thorough. I had to close my eyes and see That's face to remind myself what an ass he was. But I was beginning to be almost able to stand the man when Voorhees returned from the orphanage.

"We stopped by Province Hospital on the way back, Lieutenant," he said.

I was afraid to ask but I did anyway. "Did you see That? How is she?"

,,She died a few days after she was admitted. Wound infection."

"Shit," I said, but that was all.

Mai returned from her daily shampoo in time to hear me. "What the mattah?" she asked, looking from me to Voorhees.

He told her.

I just sat there, and when I started to move, I felt as if I'd had a great big novocaine shot that affected my entire body.

Behind me, I heard the Vietnamese talking, but I didn't pay any attention. When it was time for dressings, I missed doing That's as I had every day since she'd left. Forty patients on the census, and I missed dressing one hollow hip.

When it was Xe's turn, I bent over to dress his stumps and felt his hands come up at the sides of my head. The numbness there began sliding away, and a deep ache replaced it.

"What are you doing?" I snapped, but then I looked at him to find in his face a perfect counterpart of my own pain and sense of failure. And I knew what had been slowly killing him. We were in the same boat, but his was sinking faster. We were both there to help, and he, who according to Heron had once been so much more powerful than I, was now even more powerless.

His hands, transparent as paper, hovered on either side of my head and he ignored my question but kept watching me. Something silken and balmlike touched the burning edges of the ache, then fell away. The sorrow in his eyes deepened even as he lowered his hands.

But the ache in my head receded and the numbness returned.

I walked away from the hospital, the cold afternoon drizzle soaking through my uniform. I didn't even bother with my poncho. I went straight to the club and knocked back three straight tequilas. The tequilas weren't so much to bolster my courage as to tranquilize me so I didn't attack Krupman with my bare hands. Usually booze just makes me sleepy, but that night I had to quit drinking before I calmed down.

The anger swelled up inside me till there was no longer room to swallow.

I wanted Krupman to come into the club. I wanted to make a scene. I wanted to ream him out in front of everybody. But he didn't come, the bastard, so I staggered over to his hooch and stood there pounding on the screen while rivulets of water poured off my boonie hat and down my arms. The doctor was inside, headphones enveloping his ears while his reel-to-reel deck rolled shiny tape from one cylinder to another. He looked up, and no one could accuse him of undue sensitivity or second sight.

"What is it, lieutenant?" he asked, almost amiably. "An emergency?"

"Not exactly," I said. "I just wanted to give you something to celebrate. I thought you'd like to know that poor woman you sent to Province Hospital accommodated you by dying. That seems to be what you wanted-"

He had lifted the headphones when I started to talk; now he tore them off his head and flung them on his bunk. "I didn't want anything one way or the other, lieutenant. I just didn't give up my practice to treat slants." He picked up a photo of a group of people, and I admit I didn't register what they looked like because I thought he might be planning on using it as a weapon. "You see this boy in uniform here?

That's my baby brother. He volunteered to be an American adviser and help these goddamn people and they let him walk into an ambush.

"I came over here to help boys like him and keep them from dying in this idiotic war. How people like that Giangelo guy and you can make pets out of the locals when you see what they do to your own people is a mystery to me, but as long as I'm in charge of orthopedics we are treating Americans, and the gooks can take care of their own. I'll tell you something else, lieutenant"-his face was perfectly calm through all this and his voice was as even as a numbed-out marine's, though not as loud-"as soon as I have a little free time from the men who need me, I'm going to clean that place out, starting with those panhandlers who've been using up American medical supplies for the past few months. So you might as well start getting used to it."

He slammed the screen, then the inner door, in my face. As the door slammed, I saw him slip his headphones back on.

I could have pounded all night and been hauled off by the MPs, I suppose, but instead I sloshed back through the rain to the club to continue getting drunk. It wasn't my day. Tony was there. I hadn't seen him in weeks, except coming and going a couple of times from Julie's hooch. Carole had mentioned that they'd broken up and that Tony had cornered her and Tom to cry on their shoulders.

"Kitty, I have to talk to you-"

"Not now," I snapped. "Not ever. Let me alone, Tony. Take whatever you've got to say and put it in a letter to your wife."

"Don't be that way, babe. I didn't know it mattered to you. You were seeing jake when I met you."

"I was not 'seeing' jake," I began and then was just too tired to finish. "Look, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to talk to you."

"Baby, I miss you. We're getting fired on all the time now. I almost got creamed last time." From his tone and the slight tremble of his perfect fingers around his drink, I thought he meant it this time.

Usually, despite his fondness for military melodrama, Tony had as much faith in his own immortality as most of my patients had before they qualified as patients. But I, for one, did not give a shit what he believed.

"Tony, I'm sorry about that, but I have a few other things on my mind, all right? I'm cold and wet and I just finished talking to a so called physician who cheerfully accepted that he murdered one of my patients and intends to go on murdering them, all perfectly legally and with the Army's blessings, because he blames my patients and maybe me for the death of his brother."

"He killed your patient?"

"Yes. It was Dang Thi That."

"The old lady with the hip?"

"I'm surprised you remembered. You never liked me to talk about my patients, if I recall. They weren't as interesting as your goddamn helicopters."

"Okay, okay, I deserve that, I guess. Carole tried to tell me a little how you felt, and believe me, I never thought you were cheap or anything. It's just, we were so good together I couldn't see why you couldn't just be happy with that. Why dwell on the war all the time?"

"I wasn't talking about the goddamn war. I was talking about my patients. The same way you talk about your fuckin' helicopters. It's my work and-and that bastard is destroying everything......... I started bawling again, and could have shot myself for it.

But Tony had made up his mind to be charming, and I had forgotten how good at it he could be. He ran his hand up the back of my neck and kneaded, comfortingly, warmingly. "God, babe, I'm sorry. Tell me about it, come on. Let's go back to your place, or you won't be in any shape to do anyone any good."

I stopped crying before I told him because I didn't want to give him an excuse to hold me, much as I wanted to be held. He was unexpectedly concerned, however, and I remembered that a lot of my patients had been his patients first, in a way. He had delivered them. And Tony was a lot of things I didn't like, but for Vietnam, he wasn't much of a racist.

"Now he says he's going to do the same thing to the others-"

"Can't you head him off?"

"How?"

"I don't know. Where are they from?"

Somewhere near Tam Ky."

"Okay, I'll check it out. If we can get some relatives up here, your patients will have someone to look after them at Province anyway."

He was talking about an awfully long shot and we both knew it. Uninjured Vietnamese were even lower priority than injured ones.

"Christ," I said. "It's like triage. It's bad enough for the new people, but old Xe and Ahn . . ." He reached over and stroked my cheek with that beautiful hand and gave me a melting look from those beautiful eyes and I almost fell into his arms. But I wasn't about to. Maybe he wasn't a complete rat, but That's death was the issue here, not my sex life or his.

"Don't they have anyone?"

"Nobody. Ahn's an orphan and Xe-Tony, do you know a Special Forces type named Heron?"

"Heron, Heron . . . no, babe. Sorry. I don't-sounds familiar, but .

. ." He let his arms raise and drop and the pungency of his sweat rose up between us from the darkened green patches under the arms of his fatigue shirt.

"Will you ask around for me? Please? He's a friend of the old man's.

He got sent back to the field, but he might be able to pull some strings and get Xe sent home. But I don't know what to do about Ahn. If Marge were here she'd know what to do."

"Where is she?"

"In Quang Ngai, with her buddy Hal, who runs the hospital. If she hadn't left, that bastard Krupman would never have gotten away with this."

"She knows the kid, Ahn, huh?"

"Sure. She knew all the long-term patients. Ahn's not so sick, but his stump isn't all that healed over yet, even though he has that prosthesis Joe cobbled out of an old crutch. We've been waiting for a real prosthesis."