A man pinched my arm and offered me a drink from a bottleâclear rum, I think. A few translucent fish scales were stuck to the bottle. He watched me closely for signs of gratitude. I took a drink and sighed and thanked him and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand in an exaggerated gesture. At the edge of the stream some children were taunting a coiled black snake with an inflated inner tube. They were trying to make him strike at it. He would bump it with his snout but he had already sensed that the fat red thing wasn't living flesh, only a simulacrum, and he refused to bring his hinged fangs into play.
I asked about Webster. The children hadn't seen him. I wondered how he and other people had fared during the storm, thinking of them one by one, even to Father Jackie's mother, on whose yellow flesh I had never laid eyes. Had Dr. Symes made it safely out of town? And if so, how? He wouldn't ride a bus and he wouldn't fly and he was certainly no sailor. What did that leave?
Cars and trucks were moving once again in the streets. There was a lot of honking, at drunks who blocked the way, and in celebration too of life spared for another day. I picked out the distinctive beep of a Volkswagen and almost at the same instant I saw Christine in her van. She was caught in the traffic jam. She was beeping away and slapping her left hand against the door. Victor was in his seat blowing a plastic whistle.
I went to her and said, “You shouldn't be out in this.”
“I'm all right. It's Melba.”
The glass louvers on the driver's side were open and I saw Melba lying down in the back, nestled in amid all the art and green coconuts.
“What's wrong with her?”
“I don't know. I'm trying to get her to the hospital.”
“This is an emergency then.”
“You bet your boots it is.”
I walked point, flapping my arms in front of the van and clearing the way like a locomotive fireman shooing cattle from the tracks. “Gangway!” I shouted. “Make a hole!
¡Andale!
Coming through!
¡Cuidado!
Stand back, please! Hospital run!” I can put up a fairly bold show when representing some larger cause than myself.
All the rolling tables were in use at the hospital and I had to carry Melba inside the place and down a long corridor jammed with beds. She weighed hardly anything. She was all clothes. Her eyes were open but she wasn't speaking. There was standing room only in the emergency room and not much of that. Victor found a folded wheelchair in a closet and Christine pulled it open and I set Melba down into it. We couldn't find anything in the way of restraining straps and so I put a big Clorox carton on her lap to keep her from pitching forward.
Christine waylaid a nurse or a female doctor and this person looked into Melba's eyes with the aid of a penlight and then went away, doctor-fashion, without telling us anything. I rested Melba's chin on top of the empty brown box to make her more comfortable. A male doctor, an older man, began to shout. He brandished a stainless-steel vessel and ordered everyone out of the room who wasn't a bona-fide patient. He had to repeat the order several times before anyone made a move. Others took up the cry, various underlings. Christine told me that proper identification was very important in a hospital. We looked about for admittance forms and name tags. But now the crazed physician was shouting directly at us. He wouldn't allow us to explain things and we had to go. I wrote “MELBA” on top of the box in front of her chin and we left her there. I couldn't remember her last name, if I had ever known it.
Scarcely was I out of the room when I was pressed into service again. This time it was helping orderlies push bedridden patients back to their rooms. These people, beds and all, had been moved into the central hallways during the storm, away from the windows.
Christine went off on her own to look for Mrs. Symes and to buck up sick people. She made a cheery progress from bed to bed, in the confident manner of a draftdodger athlete signing autographs for mutilated soldiers. Some were noticeably brightened by her visits. Others responded not at all and still others were baffled. Those capable of craning their necks stole second and third glances as she and Victor passed along.
I worked with a fellow named Cecil, who knew little more about the layout of the hospital than I did. He was out of sorts because it was his supper hour. He looked sick himself and I took him at first for an ambulatory patient, but he said he had worked there almost two years. Once he led us blundering into a room where seven or eight dead people were laid out on the floor, the tops of their heads all lined up flush as though by a string. Spann must have been among them but I didn't see him that time, having quickly averted my gaze from their faces.
Our job was not as easy as it might seem. The displaced beds were not always immediately outside the rooms whence they came, and there were complicated crossovers to be worked out. The patients were a nuisance too. They clamored for fruit juice and dope and they wanted their dressings seen to and they complained when we left them in the wrong rooms or when we failed to position their beds in precisely the same spots as before. Cecil, old hand at this, feigned deafness to their pleas.
I was dead on my feet, a zombie, and not at all prepared for the second great surprise of that day. I found Norma. It was there in that place of concentrated misery that I found her at last, and my senses were so dull that I took it as a matter of course. Cecil and I were pushing her into an empty room, a thin gril, half asleep and very pale, when I recognized her from the pulsing vein on her forehead. Her hair was cut short and there was a red scarf or handkerchief tied around her neck, just long enough to tie and leave two little pointed ends. Some thoughtful nurse has provided this spot of color, I said to myself, though it was no part of her job to do so. My heart went out to those dedicated ladies in white.
I spoke to Norma and she looked at me. There were dainty globules of sweat on her upper lip. She had trouble focusing. I had a weak impulse to take her in my arms, and then I caught myself, realizing how unseemly that would be, with Cecil standing there. I drew closer but not rudely close. I didn't want to thrust my bird face directly into hers as Melba had done so often to me.
“Midge?” she said.
“Yes, it's me. I'm right here. Did you think it was a dream?”
“No.”
She couldn't believe her eyes! I explained things to Cecil, babbling a little, and I searched my pockets for money or some valuable object to give him, to mark the occasion, but I had nothing and I just kept patting him on the back, longer than is usually done. I told him that I would now take charge of her and that he could go on about his business. Cecil was turning all this over in his brain and I could see he didn't believe she was my wife, even though she had called my name. I could see in his eyes that he thought I was a perverted swine who would bear watching. And it is to his credit, I suppose, that he refused to leave me alone with her. He stood in the doorway and watched for his supper and kept an eye on me.
I questioned Norma at some length. Her answers were slow in coming and not always to the point. I was patient with her and made every allowance for her condition. She said she had been in the hospital about a week or ten days. Her appendix had been removed. A week ago? Yes, or maybe longer. Then why was she not yet on her feet? She didn't know. How had she happened to get appendicitis? She couldn't say. Had she been in a private room all along, or a ward? She couldn't remember. Couldn't remember whether there was anyone else in her room or not? No. Did she not know there was a great difference in the cost of the two arrangements? No.
She turned away from me to face the wall. The maneuver made her wince. She stopped answering my questions. I had been careful to avoid mention of Dupree and other indelicate matters but I had somehow managed to give offense. I smoothed out her sheet and pulled it tight here and there. She didn't shrink from my touch. She had turned away from me but my touch wasn't loathsome to her.
“I have a little surprise for you,” I said. “I brought your back pills all the way from Little Rock.”
She extended a cupped hand behind her.
“I don't have them now but I did have them. What is your doctor's name?”
No reply.
“I want to have a talk with that bird. What is he giving you? Do you know?”
No reply.
“Do you realize you're just skin and bones?”
“I don't feel like talking, Midge. I'm trying to be polite but I don't feel good.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“Yes.”
“With me?”
“I guess so.”
“What's wrong with me?”
“You just want to stay in the house all the time.”
“I'm not in the house now. I could hardly be further out of the house.”
“You don't want me back.”
“Yes, I do. I'm hard to please too. You know that.”
“I don't feel like talking right now.”
“We don't have to talk. I'll get a chair and just sit here.”
“Yes, but I'll know you're there.”
I found a folding chair and settled in for a vigil. An elderly fat woman passed by in the hall and Cecil grunted and directed her into the room. It was his mother. She had his supper in a plastic bucket. He glared at her for being late, a hurricane was no excuse, and he picked over the food and rejected outright some of the things in the bucket. I was surprised she didn't know what he liked after all these years. Maybe it was impossible to anticipate his whims. They exchanged not a word. Cecil had no thanks for her and she was content to stand there and hold the bucket in silence and watch him eat, a slow, grinding business.
An unconscious old man was wheeled into the room and then a girl came by with trays of food on a cart. Norma drank some tea but I couldn't get her to eat anything. The sick man in the other bed was snoring. I ate his supper. A nurse stopped in to take temperatures. She ordered Cecil to the nursery, where he was needed to clean up a mess. He said he was off duty now and was going home, addressing the nurse as “Sister,” though she wasn't a nun. He and his mother left.
The nurse told me that Norma was slow in recovering because she would eat nothing but ice. She was dehydrated too, from a long siege of diarrhea. But there was no fever to speak of and no other signs of peritonitis. Weren't intravenous fluids indicated, I asked, in cases of dehydration? At this implied reproach the nurse became snippy. As for the current plan of treatment, she said, I would have to take that up “with doctor”ânot “with
the
doctor.”
I crumbled some bread into a glass of milk and every half hour I woke Norma and forced her to swallow a spoonful or two. Later, another nurse came around with some candles and asked that the lights and the fan be turned off so as to allow more electricity for areas of greater need. It didn't matter to me about the light because the emergency generator was producing just enough wattage to heat the bulb filament a dull red. I missed the fan for its companionable hum. After the first candle burned out, I didn't light another one. A small gray coil of anti-mosquito incense smoldered on the windowsill. The smoke curled about the room in a long tendril that kept its integrity for quite some time. I fanned Norma with a magazine when I thought about it. She asked me to stop waking her. I told her it wouldn't be necessary if she would only finish eating the bread and milk and the little cup of yellow custard with the nutmeg on top. She grudgingly did so and then we both slept, I in my chair.
She woke me before daylight and asked for a glass of crushed ice. Ice at five in the morning! I got some ice cubes at the nursing station and chopped them up with a pair of scissors. Now she was fully awake and ready to talk. I suppose it came more easily to her in the dark. She crunched on the ice and told me about her travels with Dupree. I was fascinated. Her voice was little more than a whisper but I hung on every word. She could have been one of Melba's psychic heroines, with eyes “preternaturally bright.”
What a story! What a trip! They had first gone to Dallas, where Dupree was to meet with the well-known radical photographers, Hilda Monod and Jay Bomarr. I say “well known,” although Norma had never heard of these people. Dupree had been in touch with them through a third party in Massachusetts, a fellow who had vouched for him, telling Hilda and Jay that Dupree had threatened to kill the President and was okay. He also told them, or maybe it was Dupree himself, that Dupree owned a shopping center in Memphis which produced a vast income that was now available to the radical movement. Hilda and Jay were eager to confer with him, or so they said.
But they didn't show in Dallas, telephoning instead from Florida to say they would be delayed, that they were conducting a workshop at a home for old radicals in Coral Gables. Dupree was to continue on to San Angelo and wait. There was another hitch and he was told to proceed to Wormington and see a fellow named Bates. Bates was to put them up in his house. But Bates had not been informed about the arrangement and he refused to talk to Dupree. Bates owned a cave near Wormington in which the temperature remained constant at 59 degrees Fahrenheit. How this grotto figured in the overall plans of the radicals, or if it figured at all, Norma couldn't say, and it must remain a matter for speculation. She and Dupree checked in at the motel. He paced the room and became impatient and called Hilda and Jay with an ultimatum. Either they stopped giving him the runaround or he would take his money and ideas elsewhere.
A meeting in Mexico was agreed upon, at San Miguel de Allende. Hilda and Jay were to take part in a seminar there with a visiting radical from Denmark. It would be a safe and quiet place to talk business. But they needed a car. Could Dupree furnish them with a car? Not at that time, he said, but once in San Miguel, on completion of a satisfactory personal interview, he would give them the keys to a Ford Torino.