War Baby (23 page)

Ryan brought a glass and a bottle of Bushmills out to the green wrought-iron table on his Georgetown patio. A yellow carriage lamp threw shadows across the paving. The evening was cool, ripe with the scent of flowering jasmine.

He poured a slug of the whisky and swallowed it down, closing his eyes as the liquor burned the back of his throat.

He picked up the ashtray on the table, a souvenir from the Continental in Saigon, and stared at it. He remembered the evenings he and Crosby and Cochrane and Webb had spent on the Shelf, drinking and talking over Saigon politics or their most recent contact in the boonies. The best of times, the worst of times. From inside the house came another fragment of that memory, the electric buzz of Jimi Hendrix.

He couldn’t help it, Cochrane had got to him. He was right, he did miss Saigon. The trouble with peace, he decided, is that it’s dull. Sure everyone wants peace; most of the time and most places. But you had to have a war somewhere or people would go crazy.

But he was not going back. He had given his word; to Mickey, to Salvador, to the dead women and children in the plaza at La Esperanza. He’d given his word to whatever god there was that listened to him babbling that night Buford chained him to the bed.

He heard Mickey at the front door. She took Hendrix off the record player and replaced All Along the Watchtower with an Easy Listening CD. Compact disc technology, something else he hated about the eighties. He liked the dust and the scratching. Who needs perfection?

Mickey appeared on the balcony with a
Stoli
and orange.

‘What’s this shit you’re listening to?’ he said.

‘It’s the Police.’

‘Sounds more like the school prefect.’

‘Planet Earth calling Sean Ryan. We have a message for you. The sixties are over. Do you receive?’

He scowled at her.

‘Have a bad day?’ she asked him.

She was still in her nurse’s uniform. She leaned over his chair to kiss him; her clothes smelled of sweat and antiseptic. It reminded him of too many bad times spent in hospitals.

‘I saw Cochrane today.’

‘And?’

‘He thinks I look too sour, whatever that bloody means. Like charm is everything for a journo, right? I mean, what am I, a stand-up comic? I could do El Salvador jokes, right? How many death squads does it take to change a light bulb?’

‘You did have a bad day.’

‘Schultz gave a press conference on Central America. Evidently the Russians are going to invade New Mexico sometime in August. Helping the El Salvador government massacre half the native population is a diversionary tactic.’

She poured him another Bushmills.

‘How about you?’

‘One T&T gunshot wound, a stabbing, a road trauma DOA, two drug ODs, one of them a twelve-year-old black kid. The usual.’

‘You okay?’

‘It’s cold out here. Let’s go inside.’

Ryan went into the kitchen and made coffee. Mickey sat at the breakfast bar. She worked a long strand of hair loose from her ponytail and started to chew it. Ryan watched her for as long as he could stand it.

‘What’s up?’ he said.

‘I don’t know how to tell you this.’

‘What, you’re sick? You lost your job? Tell me.’

‘I think I’m pregnant.’

Oh, great. The perfect end to a perfect day. ‘Are you sure?’

‘No, I’m not sure. I missed my period. My nipples are sore.’

He nodded.

‘Are you pleased?’

‘Sure.’

‘You don’t look very pleased.’

‘The thought of being responsible for somebody else’s life terrifies me.’

‘Me too.’

They looked at each other like two total strangers, trapped in the same lift. The television was on in the lounge room, a news report of the latest fighting between the Russians and the
mujahideen
in Afghanistan. His eyes moved away from her to the screen.

‘How come you never look at me like that?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You just look so horny when you see a Pathan with a handheld missile launcher. I can’t compete.’

‘Not that again.’

‘If you’re not interested in this baby ...’

The kettle boiled on the range. ‘I thought you wanted a kid,’ he said.

‘But will you still be around when it’s born? When it’s growing up.’

‘Of course I’ll be around. Where else would I be?’

‘That’s the burning question, isn’t it? Get it right and you win the car.’

‘Translation?’

She stood up. ‘I don’t want any coffee. I’m bushed. I’m going to have a shower and an early night. I’ve got another early shift tomorrow. Are you coming to bed?’

He looked vague. ‘I’ll be up in a while.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It may just be a false alarm.’

She went upstairs to the bedroom, then decided she would shower in the morning instead. She stripped off her clothes and fell into bed. It would have been nice to have had him slip between the sheets beside her, so she could hold him, have him hold her. She put a hand on her belly, wondered if she could feel anything growing in there, or if it was all just imagination. She had wanted a baby so much.

She had thought he had wanted it too; but it was hard to know what her husband wanted any more.

* * *

The EMTs were running with the gurney towards the emergency room. They had put an inflatable MAST suit on the boy’s legs, and had an intravenous line running a unit of plasma into his arm, but he had already started convulsing. It didn’t look good.

Two of the residents were running with them, while the lead EMT shouted the handover.

‘I got a pulse!’

‘Notify the OR and get me eight units of O neg,’ one of the residents screamed.

Mickey ran to the phone, called in the order to the blood bank and put a page on the chief resident. When she got back to the emergency room, the two doctors and three other nurses were transferring the boy from the gurney to the table.

‘Ventilating!’

‘Multiple gun shot wounds to the abdomen, chest and legs.’

‘Pulse one sixty and thready.’

As Mickey cut away the boy’s T-shirt she looked at his face for the first time. Vietnamese.

She froze.

‘He’s hyper-resonant on the right side. I’ll decompress.’

‘Let’s intubate him. Suction!’

Suction. What did he mean, suction?

‘Suction! I can’t see a thing here!’

She fumbled around the Mayo stand, but she couldn’t think where the suction tubing was, or even what it looked like.

Kath, one of her fellow nurses, grabbed her arm. ‘You okay?’

‘Suction,’ she said.

People were shouting and moving all around her. She stared at the boy on the table.
We shouldn’t be wasting our fucking time on gooks. There’s our own boys dying out there.

She turned and walked out of the ER.

* * *

Kath waited with her in the chow line at the cafeteria. They got coffees and sat down at a table in the corner. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m sorry about what happened in there.’

‘What did happen?’

‘I froze. I’ve never done that before.’ How can I explain this away? The chief resident won’t just say ‘she froze,’ and shrug it off. He’ll want a better explanation that that. ‘I think I’m pregnant,’ she said.

‘Mickey! ... that’s great... does Sean know?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, he’s really pleased.’

She was pregnant, that was it. It was the hormones. This was the third time something like this had happened to her in as many weeks. The other two occasions she had covered up, no one had noticed.

It had to be the hormones.

‘Maybe you should ask for a little time off.’

‘I don’t need time off.’

‘Yeah? I gotta tell you, Mickey, you don’t look so good.’

Mickey felt a tear work its way down her cheek. Jesus Christ. She hadn’t cried in years. I can’t let this happen. If I come undone, it has to be at home in my own house, with the doors and windows locked.

She sipped her coffee, took back control. ‘What I said about Sean, being pleased. That wasn’t true.’

‘He doesn’t want the baby?’

‘He says he does. We’ve been trying, you know. I mean, when he’s not too tired and I’m not too tired.’ A brittle laugh. ‘But then when I said I thought I was...’ She shrugged. ‘... you should have seen his face.’

Kath reached out and took her hand. ‘Mickey ...’

She wiped at her eyes, a quick, impatient gesture. ‘Well. No one ever said it was going to be easy.’

‘Maybe he’s finding it hard, dealing with everything. Did you see the cartoon in the Post this morning?’

‘Yeah, I saw it.’ Some wiseass at the paper had drawn him clinging to the wing of America One with one hand, while he thrust a microphone towards the President through the window with the other.
Mr President, what do you think of the situation in El Salvador?

‘Next thing he’ll be in Doonesbury.’

‘I don’t think any of that bothers him. I don’t think he gives a damn what anyone says. I wish he did care. I wish he’d talk about it anyway.’

She looked into Kath’s eyes, saw sympathy and that special kind of satisfaction that comes when envy dies. Having Sean Ryan as a husband had conferred a vicarious celebrity she didn’t really want. She was sick of it.

‘I guess it ain’t that easy being you, huh?’ Kath said.

‘It shouldn’t be this damned hard.’ Could she trust Kath with her private feelings? Probably not. But what the hell, she needed to let off steam. She leaned across the table, lowered her voice. ‘I don’t know what he wants anymore. What do I do? How do I get him to talk to me?’ She let the question hang, knowing it was unfathomable. ‘He expects the President to come clean to the whole world but he won’t even open to his own wife.’

‘Have you talked to anyone?’

‘You mean a shrink? Can you imagine a guy like Sean going to counseling?’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mickey said. But the truth was, she did know. She would try and pretend the last fifteen years had not happened; she would forget about Nam, forget about the wasted years in Walter Reed and San Francisco, forget about year in the Central American jungle.

‘He’s going to leave me, Kath.’

‘What? Has he said anything?’

‘I just feel it.’

‘Mickey, not every guy is happy about children at first. That doesn’t mean he’s going to —’

‘I know Ryan. I know what goes on in his head.’ She rubbed at her eyes. ‘He was just exhausted and he saw this bit of driftwood coming by so he reached out and hung on. The bit of driftwood was me.’

‘Mickey, you need a break. A few days away from this place.’

‘Maybe.’ Perhaps I need more than just a few days.

Why are you still in scrubs in an ER after all these years? Why is there still this rush every time a gurney crashes through the doors? You are replaying the same scene over and over and it never gets any better. There are sirens instead of rotor blades but that kick inside is still the same and it’s killing you.

‘I’ll work it out,’ Mickey said.

She was stopped at a red light on Wisconsin. It was late and she was tired and she had a pulsing headache. The radio was playing ‘Mrs Robinson’. When was the last time she had heard it? She smelled aviation fuel, rotting vegetation, urine and antiseptics. She wound down the window for some fresh air.

From somewhere overhead came the
whump-whump-whump
of helicopter blades. Just cops, or an eye in the sky newsman, she reminded herself. But it was no good. She felt herself start to shake. Two teenagers ran towards her Prelude holding Chicom rifles and shouting in Vietnamese. Viet Cong.

She fumbled with the door, jumped out of the car and started to run.

The helicopter circled overhead, a government gunship on the lookout for FMLN. They must have seen her running across the compound. She had no chance here in the open. She weaved across the road in a low, crouching run, heard the blaring of car horns, waited for the impact of the bullets.

She found cover behind a wall and peered back down the street but the two VC were gone. She had lost them. She looked up, searching the sky for the Huey, but the white arc of its floodlights was bow two blocks away.

A cherry-top turned off Wisconsin, red beacons flashing. A patrolman ran across the road, holding a flashlight. He saw her crouching behind the wall and stopped, one hand on his service revolver.

‘Are you all right, ma’am?’

She fumbled in her pockets for her identity papers. She had to prove she was American. She tried to think what time the curfew was. She heard the other patrolman talking into his radio in the cherry-top. Perhaps he was calling up air support.

‘Ma’am, are you okay?’ the patrolman repeated. The beam from his flashlight blinded her. She shielded her eyes and turned away. She imagined them finding her body in the morning out on the lava flow at El Playón.

‘I can’t find the suction,’ she said.

‘What did you say, ma’am?’

Suddenly the night was cool again and the sweat dried on her skin. She remembered where she was. Her heart was banging in her chest, her tongue gummed to the roof of her mouth.

‘Ma’am, please come out from behind that wall.’

Mickey stood up, her hands limp at her side. ‘I’m sorry, Officer,’ she said. ‘I’m quite all right. Really.’

‘Why did you run away from your car, ma’am? Is someone chasing you?’

She heard the thump of helicopter rotors in the distance, saw a beam of light heading east towards the Capitol. ‘You ever in Vietnam?’ she said.

‘Shoot, is that what’s bothering you? I hate those damned things, too.’ He took his hand away from his weapon and took a few steps closer. ‘You okay now?’

‘I’ve made a fool of myself.’

He called to his partner in the cherry-top. ‘It’s okay, Ray!’ He turned back to her. ‘Live far from here?’

‘Not far. I’ve got a townhouse on P Street.’

‘I’ll walk you back to your car, ma’am.’

‘No, really, it’s all right. I’m sorry I’ve been a nuisance.’

‘It’s no problem, ma’am.’

He walked her back to the corner. The Prelude was still parked at the lights, the driver’s door swinging open. She felt humiliated. You’re losing it, Mickey, you’re headed for a breakdown.

‘You take it easy now,’ the cop said. ‘Wind up the windows and turn on the radio. A little jazz is good for the soul.’

She felt outrageously grateful. He could have written her up, taken her downtown if he really wanted to ruin her night. Embarrassed, she jumped into the car, snapped the belt buckle and almost drove straight through the red light.

He leaned in through the window. ‘Now you just take it easy, okay?’

‘I’ll be fine,’

For God’s sake. Just let me get home!

* * *

She ran up the stoop, the old-fashioned gaslights throwing yellow pools of light on the steps. As she fumbled for her keys she heard the rustling of leaves in the night wind, like the murmurings of distant voices. She imagined people watching her, soldiers in olive fatigues. She looked quickly up and down the street. Empty.

She locked the door and rushed up to the bathroom. She turned on the jacuzzi, undressed, and lowered herself into the swirling, eucalyptus-scented water. She rested her head on the marble rim of the tub. Sweat ran down her face.

I must not come undone.