A Bird in the Hand

by Lynn Stansbury

  “So how’s the Baltic schooner crowd involved?”

  “My talking chief exaggerates. I believe they will provide cruises to Ofu-Olo-sega Park.”

  “I didn’t see any luggage with the people they sailed off with today.”

  “Maybe today’s just a get-acquainted junket,” Welly said, reappearing and handing the telephone to his cousin.

  “Yeah, well,” Han said. “From what I hear, doesn’t sound like you’re going to loose your Birdman to them. Or at least not that way. But I still need to talk to the guy myself.”

  Welly grinned. “Good. You can take me out to the hospital. That’s where he is now.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Ann hung up the telephone and went back to the shower-stall-sized consult cubicle where she had parked the biologist. She had gotten to the hospital after her shower, found Grayson still sitting on a bench in the ER waiting area, ushered him into a cubicle, and then, for all those reasons generic to emergency rooms the world over, all hell broke loose. Two hours later, the kid with the temp of one-oh-five and no urine output was slated to fly out on the Nightingale, the long-distance American military medical air-rescue team now on their way from Honolulu, and the old woman probably having a heart attack was on her way to ICU. And then Ann remembered Grayson. Fuck!

  He was half asleep, leaning against the wall of the cubicle and shivering occasionally. He also stank of whiskey, or at least something potent and distilled. He didn’t have his pack with him, so he must have had a bottle in his pocket or some kind of flask.

  “Dr. Grayson?”

  The Birdman opened his eyes. “Gotta outta here.”

  “Yeah, well,” Ann said, leaning out into the hall, looking for a nurse. “We haven’t been very good hosts so far, but we do need to try to take care of you.” A nurse appeared. “Get his temp again, please. And let’s get an IV set up.”

  “Don’t want IV.”

  Ann ducked back into the cubicle. “Not a whole lot of choice, my friend.”

  “Gotta get my ride. Free ride to Ofu. All the luxuries.” Grayson’s lips and tongue fumbled over the words like hands in mittens. The nurse arrived with the thermometer, a loaded IV pole, and three hundred pounds of Samoan female authority.

  “Where you going?” she said sternly. At that point, Ann had left to call Welly. By the time she got back, Grayson’s vital signs were neatly recorded in his chart and he was dressed in a clean gown. His temp was also one-oh-five. For an instant, Ann wondered if the thermometer had just chosen that for the temperature dujour, but fever would certainly explain why he was getting more and more bizarre. It was a wonder that he was conscious at all.

  “Look,” she said to Grayson, “You’re going to fry your brain if we don’t get some fluid into you. It may just be that the oral antibiotic wasn’t enough to hold you, but my guess is that your original abscess seeded somewhere else in your body.” Stateside, they could have scanned him and found it, like Bones McCoy on Star Trek re-runs. Here, they actually had to know what they were doing. And be really lucky.

  Grayson was mumbling.”Ofu. Gotta be there. Schooner’ll take me. N’camera. Film hatching. Sea turtles hash…hatching. Birds need protein. Protein for eggs.” He giggled, like he had on the beach, but the sound was bitter now. “Bring fucking tourists to protect tur.turtle eggs. Step on half. Somebody’s gotta look out for the birds.”

  “Well,” Ann said, “You can die on Ofu with the baby turtles. Or you can spend the night in the hospital and keep your hand. As well as your life.” She stretched his good arm out on a towel on the little writing bench, looking for veins, but they had pretty well used that side up the last time he had been in hospital. Grayson lurched to his feet.

  “Just give me pills, okay? Fuckin’ pills. Gotta be on that boat. Gotta take care of the bird.” Ann remembered the eagle on the schooner. Or at least the god-awful scream. She’d never actually seen the bird. She looked up at him. In the tiny space, she was surprised by how big he was. He towered over her. Which pissed her off.

  “Sit down, Dr. Grayson. Or you’re going to fall down.” He looked at her as if she had hit him over the head with a club. If she could have reached that high. “By tomorrow night they can whack your arm off and feed it to that eagle, and you won’t care. Or just wait another day and they can have your whole body. Should be enough of you to keep her going for most of a week.” Suddenly, Ann was thinking about the body in the dump. “As long as no one minds the smell.”

  He stared at her, his gaze disconcertingly unblinking. His eyes were pale grey, like clam shells, set unusually close and deep and now shadowed by illness like heavy makeup. He put his good hand out to steady himself on the wall and then sank down onto the bench. But with surprising clarity, he said, “If you put me in the hospital, when can I get out?”

  “When I let you,” said a voice, and the curtain snapped back. “Gimme the hand.” Welly Tuiasosopo took the man’s wrist and rotated it to look at the surgical wound in the palm. The whole palm was swollen and red, the wound gaping. Welly reached a finger toward the wound. Grayson snatched his hand back, shouted and took a swing at the surgeon with his good hand. Welly ducked back, caught the man’s wrist, and grinned like a barracuda.

  “Never try to hit your surgeon.” Grayson grinned back, wriggling in the other man’s grip but unable to free himself. Ann wondered that he didn’t protest, but maybe he thought he’d broken through to an alternative reality. Welly looked at Ann. “You talk to OR?”

  Ann did not get to evade her ER shift by going to surgery with Welly. For one thing, the obstetrician and a visiting surgeon had just started a caesarian in one OR and the lights didn’t work in the other, so Grayson was bumped back yet again. But that had given them time to run a couple of liters of fluid into him along with the most expensive antibiotics in the house and to make sure his kidneys and liver were still working. Around eleven, things had finally slowed down in the ER, and Ann went over to the surgical suite to see if Welly was done yet. The nurse anesthetist and one of the ICU nurses were packing Grayson out to the ICU for recovery. Welly was long gone.

  “Lucky he didn’t lose his hand. Again,” the nurse anesthetist said. “Had about a pint of pus in there. Again.” The nurse anesthetist was a retired Army medic, married to a local girl, for exactly what reason no one was quite sure, since he and this ICU nurse were also an item. Or so the rumor went. The nurse smiled but said nothing. He didn’t wear a flower behind his ear at work, but he might as well have and the only name Ann knew him by was Pua, flower. He was certainly the prettiest thing in a nurse’s uniform in the hospital, by a long shot, as well as the most competent.

  Ann took one end of the stretcher, relieving the anesthetist to get back to cleaning up the OR. To Pua she said, “You on tonight?” A night with Pua on duty in ICU was usually a night Ann would get a full night’s sleep and find no disasters awaiting her in the morning.

  “Oh, no.” The young man’s face lit up. “We get him settled. Then I am off. Party tonight. I have a new friend. A policeman.” The boy’s eyebrows waggled up and down.

  Good luck, Ann thought and walked back over to the ER.

  Her replacement turned up on time, for once, and she left him to it. As she did every time she left the hospital after dark, she had to talk herself out of asking for one of the guards to walk her over to her flat. In four years in both Samoas, she had only been physically at risk once, someone who had broken into her flat in the middle of the afternoon. And she had reasons now just as strong for wanting to be unaccompanied, but the memory, the jolt as she looked across the road into the dim quad, was always there.

  Even before she got her door half open, she knew, like an animal, that there was someone in the flat. She reached one hand through the opening and flipped on the light.

  A man’s body lay sprawled across the folded double futon in her little sittin
g area. She walked over and prodded the body with her toe.

  Han grunted and opened his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “Waiting for you.” He elbowed himself up so that his back was against the painted concrete block wall. It would be cooler than the night air. Ann thought about the word muggy. What came first, the crime or the feeling of night in Samoa?

  “Why aren’t you home with your wife and kid?”

  “You found me a body, remember?”

  If he had managed to sound tired or even angry or bitter, it would have been something. But all she heard was a man who had just been handed an excellent means of keeping his wife and his mistress apart for his own convenience. Poor Sakiko. The thought came to Ann, just like that. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of beer from the quart of Vailima in the refrigerator. She didn’t offer any to Han. He almost never drank alcohol, and if he had wanted it, he’d have already taken it for himself. For Sakiko, what could it have meant to be an artist, a potter, and be told that your husband is dragging you and your infant off to Samoa for an unknown length of time? There are lots of reasons why Samoa has no native ceramics tradition.

  “D’you identify her?”

  “No. And I’ve tried everywhere. All blond white girls present and accounted for. Did finally ID the T-shirt. A Western Samoa ecology do-gooder group. Found it just now in the Apia phone book in the hospital lobby.”

  “So maybe a day-tripper from Apia. New Zealander, maybe?”

  “Not that T-shirts mean anything. But it would explain her being both a palagi and unknown here.”

  Ann hadn’t moved from beside the refrigerator. If she turned around or even lifted her head, she would see him through the opening over the kitchen counter. She stared at the floor instead. Blue linoleum, swirled in dirty white, curling at the edges. “I wonder if he thinks of it as a double murder,” she said. “The killer, I mean.” She got the bottle of Vailima out of the refrigerator again and re-filled her glass.

  “If he knew. Would she know she was pregnant by then?”

  Ann’s eyebrows went up, and she glanced at him. “End of the first trimester? Oh, yeah: she’d have missed at least two, probably three periods by then. You’d have to be pretty dim not to have some guess, even if your periods weren’t terribly regular.” She looked at the floor again. “But, people are certainly dim about a lot of things. Look. It’s late. Why don’t you just go home.” He didn’t answer, and she glanced over at him again. “I got four hours sleep last night.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’m tired. I just want to go to sleep.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Samoa’s just getting to me, I guess. I just want to be someplace I belong.”

  “So, go home.”

  She ignored the obvious implied trailer and get out of my life. She smiled sourly at the blue linoleum. “And where would that be?”

  “Hawai’i. Connecticut. Where ever.”

  “Yes, well, having a job in Hawai’i would be nice.” Hearing herself say the words having a job, she was embarrassed by the lie. A job didn’t have anything to do with it. Self-respect maybe. And not having a failed marriage and a failed affair and a half-finished education littering up the place. Another place she had tried too hard to belong. Is that what we all do? Sell our bodies as the only currency of belonging? Jesus, you do need a night’s sleep. You’re getting seriously pathetic.

  “Maybe you should have a baby.”

  “A baby?” She stared at him. “A baby,” she said again. “What the fuck would I do with a baby? Kids aren’t like buying furniture. We’re talking real live human beings here.”

  He shrugged. “When women say things like that, I assume they mean they want to have a kid.”

  She heard the bitterness in his voice, but only just too late. She was already speaking.

  “I can’t believe you said that.” The problem of course was that it was true: she knew plenty of women who had no more insight into their compulsive child-bearing than their bank accounts nor into men as anything more than the means to one or the other. A fair enough description of both of her pairs of half-sisters. Connecticut: that pretty well summed it all up. All those infantile middle class American assumptions about what people’s lives were about, boiling down to bank accounts and me. There has to be something else: the world is bigger than that. Life is wider than that. And somehow I thought that was you. How could I be such an idiot? She knew the answer, and that was something more than just sexy shoulders and a flat, hard gut. It was the acuity of an intelligent man always just slightly on the outside of things, who never made assumptions about anything. And a smile that could twitch in the corner of his mouth like a cat’s tail and turn her heart over. But maybe that was an illusion too. What were Sakiko’s illusions? What had she thought she was seeing? She looked at him. “Just get out, okay? For tonight. Just let me get a night’s sleep.”

  She closed the door behind him, listened to the slap of his sandals as he walked away. “I can’t believe you said that,” she said again. She went into her tiny bathroom to get ready for bed. When she wiped herself on the toilet, the tissue was blood-stained: her period had started. She began to cry. The tears came for real this time, like a storm at sea.

  CHAPTER 13

  When a man has been kicked out by his girlfriend and isn’t ready to go home to his wife, the logical thing to do is to go to a whorehouse. Han didn’t have a particular excuse for going to the Gooney Bird, but if the sailor, Ped had not been located by his skipper, with or without the blond girl, Wendy, before the schooner had taken off this afternoon, there was always the chance that Ped would turn up. Han swung by Nozaki’s one last time but couldn’t make out whether the big schooner was among the yachts silhouetted against the floodlights from the cannery.

  He parked the jeep in front of the station and thought about changing out of his uniform. But unlike any other culture he had ever worked in, here he was more likely to get useful information by maintaining his status. And the last thing in the world a sane man wanted was to be mistaken for a Korean fisherman trying to get a drink at the Gooney Bird. At least not without the company of a dozen comrades, preferably armed.

  Light and sound spilled out of the bar into the silent, dark village. He thought about his own house out beyond the last point of Pago Bay and the Southern Cross, rising above the starlit line of waves on the reef. He should have gone home to dinner like a good boy to take part in Old Lady Nozaki’s ‘very good fish’, exquisitely steamed in sesame oil, ginger, and guilt, and to talk to his daughter in English. His wife spoke to their child only in Japanese and to him only in Korean. So he had to do something to keep things balanced out. He had met Sakiko in Korea, his first and only time there since his uncle had found him in the orphanage in Seoul. His uncle always said he didn’t know what had happened to his sister, only that she must have died in the orphanage and, being a girl, been forgotten. But the orphanage was run by Irish Catholic nuns who also ran a leprosarium south of the city. He had not found his sister there either, but with the help of the Japanese volunteer lay worker, he had found the records of her death. There had been no grave.

  Except maybe the smooth, sad, white oval of the young woman volunteer’s face, a memorial to all women who die behind walls. Marrying Sakiko had been as American as a Harley. Stupid and romantic and spur-of-the-moment, half lust and half gesture, flipping the bird to all history. Well, history had caught up with him and was now whacking him over the head. And it felt more like a bludgeon than a rolled up newspaper. Sakiko must have seen him as her last chance to escape from the prison that history, culture, religion, and her own personality had built for her. And marrying an American GI—particularly a Korean-American GI—would have just the right touch of martyrdom. She had left him a year ago for what was now billed as an extended v
isit to elderly parents but which at the time had been a rejection of Han and everything he stood for. So he didn’t know why he was supposed to be feeling guilty about whatever he might have gotten up to in her absence or anything but seriously pissed that his child now saw him as a stranger. Not to mention whatever had gotten into Ann. Tonight was definitely one of those nights when you wanted to chop your wife’s head off, farm your daughter out to some loyal peasants to raise, safe away from court intrigue, and buy off your favorite concubine’s bad temper with a gift of silks, pearls, or a fine horse. Or maybe just chop the concubine’s head off too and start over.

  “Hey, Cap-tain! Cap-tain!” A pair of girls with huge hibiscuses behind their ears and stacks of flower leis in lieu of upper garments leaned out of the front window of the Gooney Bird, half swinging on the wooden shutters, and waved to Han. A third girl, taller and even more striking than the others, but shyer, drew back from the window as the others laughed and tried to draw her forward. Han lifted a hand and nodded in greeting.

  “Evening, gentlemen.” He was headed for the side door. Arriving at the front door of the Gooney Bird in uniform was more than he was up for tonight. But he stopped and stepped back a pace. He recognized the hospital’s best ICU nurse. “Hey, Pua.” The nurse’s torso rocked out the window again, hand lifted to lips to blow Han a kiss. “Any of the sailors off the schooner here tonight?”

  “Ooo, no, Captain. Cause too much trouble. Only nice girls here tonight.” A flower lei came flying at him like a loose-jointed frisbee. He caught it. It hung for a moment in his hand: frangipani blossoms, their fragrance and their velvety fragility recognizable even in the darkness.