Flight from a Firing Wall

by Baynard Kendrick

The gardenias were defeated, but I became conscious of the smell of fresh brewed coffee overlaid with layers of Latitude 50 perfume. I hoped the MacDonalds would never find out that I had entertained women in my room. I took off into space, wearing myself out with endless questions that were never answered, and endless trips over stormy seas that were never completed.

  Milagros and I got married again, while Our Lady of Mont serrate flunked out on Her miracles. We fished and loved and laughed again aboard my cruiser the Margaret-A, and the name reminded me of Margaret Adams, my mother, and how she had died.

  I hopped again from Havana to Hartford, from manhood to boyhood and from mother to grandmother. I began to run and run and run, until my bones had turned to water. I had gone back through the looking glass with Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The figure holding to Alice’s hand and dragging her remorselessly on had been resurrected from my childhood memories to torture me. She had come to life—Sir John Tenniel’s graphic illustration of that sinister chess piece, the Red Queen. I could see her too vividly pulling the faltering Alice from square to square with Tony Carrillo hooked on behind like a red caboose, doomed forever to follow in their train.

  Then I realized that the curtain of light which was dazzling my eyes was not the side of the red caboose, but the very first rays of the morning sun shining through the slats of the Venetian blind. Like Alice and the Queen, I hadn’t moved but was still nailed down to the confines of that chessboard. It was still my move, still my job to collect the pieces, red or black, and tuck them away at the end of the game.

  The electric clock said half-past five. I sat up on the edge of the bed and lit a morning cigarette. My pajamas stuck to me clammily, but the soles of my feet felt coated with ice as though I’d touched them to a frozen tombstone someone had set in the floor.

  I showered, shaved, tried to eat a tasteless breakfast of my own cooking, and well before he got there I was waiting for Dr. Christopher Shaw, Chief of Staff of the VA Hopsital, in his office on the top floor.

  Dr. Chris Shaw was not only a veteran of medicine, but he bore a couple of scars, himself, to remember the pleasure of the Second World War and Korea. If Miss Langley had been guilty of mothering me, it wasn’t too far wide of the truth to say that I’d been wet-nursed by Dr. Chris Shaw through the University of Miami refresher course, and the examination of the Educational Council for foreign medical graduates, along with some 800 other Cuban physicians and surgeons.

  I knew that he was perfectly aware of the work I had been doing with Luis and the AFAO. I also knew that it had his tacit approval. Otherwise, he would have been the first to say, just as he would have been the first to crack down if I had shirked any of my hospital duties with the VA.

  It was a comfort, if you could call it that, to know that I wouldn’t have much explaining to do. He demanded thorough medical work-ups, but he didn’t like life histories. He expected you to realize that before you started working for him, or under his supervision, whatever your nationality, he had your background tabbed and filed and was one jump ahead of you all the way.

  He made his usual jaunty entrance looking washed and polished, well slept and well fed. I was seated in one of those waiting-room chairs in Salesmen’s Row. He gave me a cold hard glance, then grinned and jerked his thumb toward his office. I knew he was anxious to get me out of sight before anyone else came in and I didn’t blame him. I must have looked like that bag of old used clothes ready for the wagon from CARE.

  He closed the door and we settled ourselves. A light began flashing on his desk telephone, one of those new highly touted jobs that leaves both of your hands free. He pushed a button and said, “There’s nobody home! Tell ’em I won’t be in for fifteen minutes yet.” His gimlet eyes re-examined me. “Hell’s fire! You’d better make it thirty minutes.” The light quit flashing.

  I said, “I heard last night that my wife in Cuba is still alive.”

  “Milagros?” He ran a hand lightly over his iron-gray crew cut and explored the flesh of his palm for splinters.

  “Yes, Milagros.”

  He said, “Once, more than twenty years ago, our outfit rescued an American flyer in occupied France who had been worked over by the Gestapo. You look worse, and your voice has the same lilting tone of defiance as his had, like your brain had been put through a washing machine.”

  “It’s also been through a wringer and a mangler, Doctor. I’ve been working on it all night long. It should be smooth and flat by now, but it’s not very clean. That patient I sneaked in here last night is her father. He’s a piece of top brass from Fidel’s secret police—colloquially G-2—Comandante Ernesto García. He’s the one in A-3.”

  “Sneaked?” A pulse throbbed at the side of his temple. “I object like hell to that word you used, Doctor,” he rapped out at me. “Nobody sneaks things over on me in this hospital. I gave you permission to use that room as you may recall. Knowing you, I felt certain I’d hear the details sooner or later, even if you were going to castrate a gorilla. Now maybe you’d better draw me a picture or part of it, if not all.”

  “Only Salvador Dali could draw the picture,” I told him. “It’s a nightmare straight out of the surrealist school, but I’ll give you all the facts I know.”

  I did, and they sounded more insane than when I taped them for Luis. Once you are caught up and made the integral part of a fantasy you have to reach a state of delirium before you can accept actual facts as being real. At that point the fantasy has become a part of you.

  Dr. Shaw listened, examining his fingernails. When I’d finished about the Red Queen, Albert Clooney, the Friend of Cuba, Dr. Villaverde’s illness and closeness to death, and told how Villa verde’s nieces, Liliana and Soledad, had established a private communications line via the good ship Kerritack, I was certain he was going to press one of his buttons and get the nearest psychiatrist on the phone. One thing I’d taken care not to spill was about Miss Langley’s suggestion that we inoculate the old boy in A-3 with a few cc’s of Pentothal. That was one drug I hadn’t yet crossed out of my personal pharmacopoeia.

  He reverted to type and fell back on his medicine as all doctors do when the human elements have us so confused that we are left at sea. “What’s your diagnosis of your father-in-law?”

  “Medically or personally?”

  “I’m not in the habit of being facetious, Doctor!”

  I recognized the criticism of me, but instead of explaining that I preferred clowning to suicide, I obediently removed my red nose and motley. “I’ll know more after a work-up, Doctor. I haven’t seen him yet, this morning.”

  He shrugged impatiently. “It doesn’t make sense to me. Have you any idea why he should stick his neck out by coming up here?”

  “Desperation,” I said after a moment. “He’s a man who has never made a move without weighing every possibility. I believe he knew that unless he got proper treatment and medicine quickly his chances of survival were dim. He saw a chance with the Kerritack and decided to get away.”

  “Defected?”

  “Quizás—perhaps. Who can say? I’m going to turn him over to an expert for questioning as soon as I think he is able. Tomorrow maybe or later today.”

  “This Albert Clooney you mentioned? He’s a good man. I happen to know him. He’s a lawyer—”

  “With offices in the Ainsley Building,” I broke in before I had to hear it again. “Yes, Doctor. Meanwhile, as soon as I have anything definite on the patient I’ll let you know.”

  “Yes, do that.” He swung his chair halfway around, crossed his long legs and sat rubbing his chin. “You’ll be late for your rounds, Doctor. Hadn’t you better tell me what you came here to say?”

  “I’m checking out, Doctor. Resigning.”

  “Just like that, eh?” He swung around the rest of the way until his back was to me and looked out of the window.

  “I’m afraid so, Doctor. There are too many things I must find out and they’re all in Cuba. Also I feel I must get some medicine down there
to Dr. Jorge Villaverde, even if I risk my life to do it. He’s primarily responsible for my being a doctor today.”

  “Stout fellow!” he said. “Aren’t you overlooking a little assist from this crummy old USA?”

  “I don’t want to appear ungrateful—”

  “But you have to check up on your Commie wife. In the midst of our desperate shortage of doctors and with citizenship, resettlement, and private practice all right in your grasp, you’re ready to toss it all away?”

  “Yes. Just like that, Doctor!” I stood up knowing that my face was white and pinched and my knees were shaking with anger. “My typed resignation will be on your desk within half an hour. I’m sorry I kept you so long, Doctor, but you’ve heard what I had to say.”

  “Yes, do that, you damned romantic fool.” He whirled around to face me so quickly that I took a step backward. “Put your resignation right here on my desk so I can tear it up and flush it down the can. In all the time you’ve been here with me you haven’t had a day’s vacation. If you’re nuts enough to go to Cuba, you’re nuts enough to find a way. Make me a list of the medicines you need to take with you, and I’ll see that you get them.”

  I started to speak but he sliced me off. “Godamighty, you blister me! Resigning, hell! This is worse than the US Army. Nobody takes a powder on me unless I say so, not if we need you in the VA. But you’d better get back here in ninety days, and bring your wife. I have a yen for red-headed queens, and I just have a hunch that you’ll find she’s okay.”

  “Ninety days, Doctor?” I looked down at my feet, which had grown larger, so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

  “I’m giving you three months’ leave, Doctor lout. Starting as when you go away.”

  My feet had grown so big by now that I couldn’t even shuffle them like a guilty schoolboy. I said, “There’s a chance, you know, that I may not get back in ninety days. What happens then?”

  “Hell, you’d better be back in ninety days,” he told me. “If you’re not I’ll have to stop your pay.”

  12

  Nothing can be found in medical books, or in refresher courses, in any language that indicates the proper bedside manner to adopt with a patient when the attending physician is harboring thoughts of murder, or nurturing a secret hope that if this isn’t a terminal case he can turn it into one.

  My rounds must have been most perfunctory for the chart of every veteran under my care bore the name of Ernesto García. My usual lively and therapeutic dialogue that so endeared me to all sounded, even to my ears, like it had been plagiarized from the cue sheet of a Humphery Bogart movie.

  Miss Kitteridge, the nurse accompanying me, was new and impressed. For once I was very grateful that Miss Langley, who would have deflated me with a look, didn’t come on duty until noon. Moving from bed to bed, I rehearsed a dozen entrance speeches for that dreaded interview with papa-in-law and discarded them all. Whatever his ideology, he had a heart like a golf ball, a plywood hide, and a scalpel brain combined with all the tenderness of a five-year-old turkey buzzard.

  To me, no one had ever more fairly won the title of Señor Bastardo of 1965, but as a politician he was certainly a pro. When it came to being a bandit, I had to admit he was el mejor, the best. He definitely had to be the best to have reached top brass in the ranks of two such opposite bandidos as Batista and Fidel. When it came to intrigue he had me badly outclassed and I didn’t relish the prospect of being reduced to the status of the rawest recruit in his mysterious circle of conspiracy.

  As a means of delay, I even found myself undergoing a type of masochistic enjoyment from the completion of my rounds and the daily exchange of insults with one of the patients, Pop Knox, in Ward North-A. The raucous voice of a television set mounted high on a rack just inside the door turned that ward into a blaring inferno for forty more-or-less happy patients all day. It could have been that some of them with headaches or fever weren’t so happy, but they couldn’t get away.

  Pop Knox, in Bed 4, as the oldest living inhabitant was the self-appointed program director and sound engineer, and as such had the final say. As a defense mechanism, most of the other patients had their own transistor radios on the lockers beside their beds. When any of them disagreed with Pop’s current showing, the rebel just turned his transistor up full. Not even Robert Stack, the actor, with all his skill acquired in dodging bullets through years of playing Agent Ness in The Untouchables could have escaped untouched by the flying decibels loosed in Ward North-A at the peak of its horrendous din.

  Once, before the backs of my ears were dry, I had dared to protest to Dr. Shaw, suggesting meekly that the noise in North-A offered something less than an atmosphere of repose. I was still sitting down cautiously on the spot where he had chewed off my skin.

  “Don’t you read the newspapers, Doctor? I’m surprised at a Cuban complaining of noise. Holy cow! From what I’ve read, whenever a family of Cubans move into a house they make such a blasted racket that all the neighbors have to move away. Twenty-four-hour drunken brawls. Yelling, screaming, fighting and arguing. Radios, televisions, and phonographs turned up full night and day.”

  “I’m speaking about noise in a hospital, Doctor.”

  “Yes, so you are, so you are. Well, those old fellows are all veterans of the First World War. I’m astonished, Doctor, that you’d even suggest robbing them of all the amusement they have while they’re lying there ill, waiting out their time. None of them has many years to go. If they want the television it will stay.”

  I started to suggest the addition of a bowling alley to be installed down the center of the ward, but he hadn’t finished with me. “Why, just last week I attended a luncheon of fifty Cuban doctors and I never heard such a row in my life. Everyone of them was talking at once, screaming so loud that I couldn’t understand a word any of them had to say.”

  That really crushed me since he doesn’t speak Spanish and was yelling at me to make sure his English was coming through. Remaining silent in two languages, I left his office and slunk down the hall.

  Pop Knox completed my morning rounds. When I found myself loitering around his bed and studying his chart, I knew it wasn’t the old man’s company I was enjoying but merely the delay. In addition to being ward sound engineer, Pop was an expert on Cuban-American relations. He didn’t approve of “furriners,” a term which embraced anyone who came from the other side of town.

  Pop was in his eighties, approaching senility, and an arthritic with a bad hip. He was almost a permanent fixture in Bed 4, and would probably finish his days there. It was easy to feel sorry for him, and equally hard to take him. He had been around, and in his travels had mastered just enough water-front Spanish to be obnoxiously insulting. His affections for Cubans, and particularly the doctors had somehow dimmed with the years. In these tense times, his opinions coupled with Orvie’s and properly aired could easily have replaced the Maine in starting another Spanish-American War, a conflict in which Pop claimed he had injured his hip while charging with Teddy up San Juan Hill.

  Miss Langley stoutly disputed this statement, claiming that Pop’s hip had been broken while trying to charge up drinks in a Tia Juana bar. Regardless of the disputed merits of the stars on Pop’s battle flag, the very fact that I hung around longer than necessary to be battered by his morning invective is a fair indication of the state I was in.

  I scrubbed off Miss Kitteridge on my way to get the Coman dante’s chart. Then, conscious of the heavy burden of World Peace which rested on my discretion, bypassing switchboards, I closeted myself in a telephone booth by the elevators and contacted Luis through the usual backhanded call. I explained that I hadn’t seen my patient yet and that I would telephone Clooney, the great examiner, later in the day. I followed that with the news about my three months’ leave with pay, and Dr. Shaw’s voluntary offer of miracle drugs for me to take along.

  I could hear him sigh. “Chico, have you ever thought of taking up blackmail as a full-time career?”

  “No es ta
n tonto como Ud. cree— He’s not as dumb as you think,” I said modestly. “He finally admitted that the hospital would have to close without me.”

  “¡Dios mío!" he exclaimed and snorted disgustedly. “Then you really are going?”

  “You know it.”

  “When?”

  “When I’ve milked Ernesto dry, aided by your man with the thumbscrews.”

  “How are you going to get there?”

  “Certainly not on the Kerritack. Pan-Am is out and so is P. & O. The walking is wet but your pal, Joe Slade, said he might produce a boat if I ever needed one. I thought I’d leave the arrangements up to you since you know him better than I do.”

  “You’re impossible, chico, damn it all! You not only run out on me and the hospital, but now I must provide you with transportation. Next, you’ll want me to come along and hold your hand.”

  “Why did you think I joined the AFAO? It was you who taught me to live dangerously.”

  “I didn’t expect you to die the same way.” He rang off on me, but I knew the boat would be waiting when I got ready to go.

  It was nearly noon when I got Ernesto’s chart and studied it with deep intelligent furrows of medical concentration on my brow. Lunch was being served but I didn’t think he would eat much and my appetite was missing entirely although I might have relished a dry martini.

  He had had a bad night, although the last temperature recorded was down to normal. Apparently Samson, the night orderly, had become interested in Ernesto and taken him on. Samson could be a pain in the neck when he wanted to but, on occasion when he fell for a patient for some obscure reason of his own, he could be sharper than a great many practicing physicians and professional trained nurses I had known.

  We had gotten to be very good friends, once he discovered that I was totally unaware of that strange invisible barrier known as “the color line.” One afternoon when we were having drinks together in the sanctity of my own apartment, I had questioned him about his unexpected flashes of medical lore. He had laughingly informed me that he was descended from a long line of Witch Doctors, and was an ardent student of the Merck Manual to keep up with what miracles were new.