Tortuga

by Rudolfo Anaya

  Mike came in, took the letter from my hand, folded it neatly and put it in my nightstand.

  “How are things at home?” he asked.

  “Rough,” I said, “no jobs, no money … they had to sell the car just to get by, so they won’t be coming for me … no way to make the long trip …”

  “I know,” Mike said, “things are hard—” he nodded.

  “There was a big fight, a revolution or something … the people were trying to change things … there was so much suffering, so much despair, so many backs getting busted … the people were trying to change that …”

  “Are your folks okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah … but I get the feeling something’s not right—”

  “Look, don’t worry about it,” Mike said, “we don’t get much news from the outside … and maybe it’s better that way. You gotta concentrate on yourself, I know it sounds selfish, but you gotta get the legs going because that’s the only thing that’s going to get you outta here!”

  “I know,” I said, “it’s just that sometimes I get the feeling that things are getting worse out there instead of better—”

  “Ah, the friggin’ world’s never going to learn any better!” Mike cursed. “Everyday there’s a new patient, a new battered kid. If it isn’t polio or MD or palsy it’s what we do to each other. That’s the worst kind of sickness. Somebody out there is always cracking a kid’s head: parents, cops, teachers, you name it, the name of the game sure ain’t love. It’s the opposite. And that’s why we’re here, in one way or another that’s why we’re here. We’re in limbo, it seems, the only time we get news is when somebody new comes in …”

  “And the few letters—” I thought aloud.

  “Ah, you can’t depend on the letters,” Mike said, “they don’t really tell us the truth … they can’t. Now that big fight you said the people were having against the bosses up north, I’m sure there’s going to be some people killed, but they can’t tell us about it … news will trickle in as new cases come in from the north, but that’s it. Damn, I’d like to be back there now! It seems like there’s finally some changes taking place. I wouldn’t mind getting busted up for that!” he smiled.

  “How about your father?” I asked, “Doesn’t he live up north?”

  “Yeah,” Mike frowned, “but that old bastard wouldn’t raise a hand to help anybody. I haven’t seen him since I landed here. When I was at the other hospital, the one for burns, he came by once, drunk as a skunk, had a whore with him, and they were living it up. He came in trying to act concerned, telling her I was his only son and how proud he was of me and asking me if I needed anything to let him know, he’d take care of it. He gave me a few bucks and told me to buy something. Boy, did that piss me off! I was burned clean to the bone, bleeding, the grafts they were trying to sew on weren’t sticking … I mean I was just that far away from having the legs sawed off because the infection was spreading. I sat up in bed and I cursed him till my nose bled and I passed out. I swore I was going to get my legs in shape just to kick his ass! I got so angry it seemed the anger was a reason for living. I started telling myself I’m going to get better, I’m going to get better, and I did. The old bastard doesn’t know it, but he saved my life. He forced me to be angry enough to live … Now I don’t care about kicking his ass anymore … I don’t care about him. I just want to get back home and make a new life for myself … find that girl of my dreams,” he grinned.

  At the same time Ronco and Sadsack came in, complaining about the visitors who had shown up for visitors day.

  “I wish they’d stay away period!” Sadsack cursed and nervously fiddled with Buck’s radio. We knew he was angry because he had expected his parents to come.

  “Hey, don’t mess up my station, Sad! Took me a week to get it right!” Buck grabbed his radio. Samson had wired the antenna wire around the traction bars so the reception improved, but the only stations we could get alternated between an evangelical hill billy preacher trying to save us from damnation and the cat-wailing of what Ronco called sad-ass western blues.

  “What happened?” Mike asked.

  “No one showed up,” Ronco said.

  “Little old ladies showed up!” Sadsack corrected him, “and they spent their time telling the kids that all this is God’s will being done! Damn!”

  “Take it easy,” Ronco tried to calm him, “it’s good for the small kids to have visitors—it’s not our fault your folks didn’t show.”

  “Ah! It’s depressing!” Sadsack mumbled. He turned the radio dial and for a moment the radio whined, there was garbled static and a voice we had never heard before broke through. We held our breath. We thought he had found a new station. Then the voice faded and the hill billy evangelist shouted his Sunday sermon at us. “Screw you!” Sadsack said and turned him off.

  “It’s hard for poor people to make the trip,” Mike said.

  Sadsack turned and looked at us. “My mother used to come … she used to come every Sunday. She used to bring me candy, spending money for cigarettes—I didn’t mind being sick then. Then she came only once a month, then she stopped coming altogether. We used to sit and look at each other. After awhile there was nothing to say. It’s the same way with everybody here, I’ve seen it heppen. First they come to visit every week, then once a month, then not at all. They start looking at their watches, making excuses for not coming, then they forget—”

  “Nobody comes to see me,” Danny said. He had sneaked quietly into the room. He stood by the door.

  “Who wants to visit a bunch of cripples?”

  “They have their world, we have ours—Before I got sick I never saw cripples. Where were they? Did they stay home? Do they come out only at night?”

  “They’re ashamed to be seen,” someone said.

  “They don’t feel ashamed!” Mike cut in. “Look at me. When I get out I’m not going to shut myself in a dark room. No sir! I’m going to walk the streets! I’m going to be proud and walk tall!” He said it for the few small kids who had gathered in the room.

  “Bullshit!” Sadsack said, “It ain’t that easy!”

  “You gotta trust in God,” Danny said defiantly. He looked at Sadsack and scratched his arm. It was encrusted with scabs and dirt. Danny had turned to religion in an effort to understand what was happening to him. He walked around reading the Bible, and he stopped kids in the hallway and read passages to them. He ordered The Awakening, a newsletter put out by a religious group, and he read it avidly. He was looking for a clue which would point to a cure for his arm. He knew in detail the stories of every cripple in the Bible. “Did you know that Job limped,” he would say, or “Lot’s wife was pigeon-toed.” Of course he was making it up and nobody believed him.

  One of the janitors had told Danny about a holy church up north to which people made pilgrimages to effect cures. He said they walked miles to that holy place, some doing the last two or three miles on their knees, praying rosaries and novenas. The miraculous thing about the small church was a small room near the sacristry where years ago a priest had dug a hole in the floor because he was told in a vision that the earth which came from that hole was holy. Since then people had been visiting the church to cover their sores and twisted limbs and every kind of infirmity with the holy sand, and many had been cured. Everyone who made the pilgrimage came away with a Kerr pint jarful of the holy sand, and after millions of scoops of sand the hole was still at its original level. It could not be emptied.

  Danny believed the story. He got hold of the church’s address and wrote the priest, and the priest said yes, for five bucks he would send Danny a pint of holy sand, with the understanding that when Danny was out of the hospital he still owed a pilgrimage to the church. So we all chipped in to help Danny buy the curing sand. The day the jar full of sand arrived Danny was ecstatic with joy. He praised the Lord and cried that surely now he would be cured of the strange illness which was withering his arm. He began to bathe his arm with the holy earth, but all it did was d
irty up the scabs and sores he had scratched open. When Steel found out what Danny was doing he was furious, but by that time Danny had already been using the holy sand for two weeks and a strange mold had begun to grow on his arm, irritating the disease and spreading it faster.

  “Trust in God?” Ronco laughed, “sometimes I think God doesn’t give a damn about this place! He’s forgotten it!”

  “He sure doesn’t visit here anymore!” Sadsack laughed.

  “Not even on Sundays!” Mike cracked.

  “Don’t say that!” Danny pleaded. He looked at us with a worried expression. Then curiousity got the best of his faith and he asked, “Why doesn’t He visit here?”

  “Because He’s afraid of getting polio!” Ronco winked.

  13

  “So it was Danny who spread the rumor that God doesn’t visit the hospital anymore, you see, because God’s afraid of getting polio … Can you imagine that? God afraid of getting polio! Oh wow, that Danny is one crazy bird! You gotta watch him. They got hold of the preacher, you know, the skinny one that comes up from town on Sunday mornings to teach Bible study; they cornered him and demanded to know why God wasn’t visiting here anymore. Mudo and Tuerto held him against the wall while Danny stuck that ugly arm of his right under the Reverend’s nose. Oh, they were mad. They were mad because they were afraid, right, afraid that if God’s not coming around anymore then there’s no hope for them. And the preacher knew they were mad because he got real red and began to shake … I would too, you know, cause Danny and those two monkey friends of his are crazy, bone crazy!

  “You know what they did last year? They found the hospital’s main switch and turned it off on operating day … On operating day, can you imagine? Damn, the whole place went dead … numb as a new polio case. The lights went out and Steel and his crew shit purple. I would too, you know, I mean it’s no fun to be splicing nerves and have the lights go out, right? Course they turned it back on, but the doctors and everybody else around here went bananas for a few seconds. Danny was getting even with the doctors cause they wouldn’t tell him why his arm is drying up, and of course they don’t know. It’s one of those strange things they can’t find an answer to. Have you seen it lately? It’s turning dry and brown like an old tree branch. First it was just his hand, now the damn curse has spread up his entire arm. And the more it crawls up his arm the weirder Danny gets; he says God has cursed him. So that’s why he panicked when he heard God wasn’t coming around anymore: no God no cure, right? Anyway, that’s what Danny thinks. You know, he’s spending all his free time in the art room, painting pictures of Christ, God-awful pictures. He paints Christ all twisted up and bleeding, and he even paints a withered arm on the poor man. You know why, don’t you? Cause the preacher told Danny that if Christ had lived after they nailed him to the cross he would have been a cripple, like us. Can you imagine that? A cripple like us. Maybe then we’d get better food around here, I mean if the Christians thought we were made in the image of a crippled Christ. But it makes a little bit of sense, doesn’t it? I mean, he would have been crippled the way those nails tore into his feet, and he’d probably have to lop up his food with his wrists, like Sadsack, cause his hands would be all broken. But the truth is the poor man didn’t live. He died. There’s the hope he will rise again, and if he does then so will all cripples … I think that’s why Danny’s painting the pictures, to find some kind of resurrection for the poor man. Now he’s got the art room full of these giant pictures of the bleeding, crippled Christ, I mean the poor man is really torn up, mangled, surrounded by soldiers and people poking him with spears, cutting at his arms and legs … It’s awful. I can’t go in there anymore. I used to enjoy going in there and trying to paint by holding the brush in my mouth, and I was getting pretty good … but I can’t go in there anymore. It’s like a horror show. And Danny’s like a madman who thinks he can give the painting some sort of life so his crippled Christ will just get up and walk … it’s scary. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, about Danny and his pals cornering the preacher. And he finally came up with an answer … course those guys are trained to come up with answers, even if they’re not true. He said Christ wasn’t afraid of polio, in fact Christ invented polio! Yeah, he gave them a big sermon about how Christ was the first polio case in recorded history. He said it was a mild case, didn’t need an iron lung, but he did have to go to a sanitorium, just like this one. He said right in the middle of the desert of Galilee there was a hospital like this one … and during those missing years in the Bible when nobody knew where Christ was, the preacher said Christ was really at the hospital getting over his case of polio … Can you imagine that? Christ crossing the desert with Filomón! Oh, it’s too much, but that preacher had a theory … I mean, there must be a million theories to explain what Christ did during those years he’s missing. But it makes some sense, right? I mean, if he was afflicted then that’s why he chose to walk among the crippled and lame! He was their champion! He was their hero! I mean, here’s a guy that’s saying he is the son of God and he’s hanging around with the cripples, the freaks, the dwarfs, the lepers, the prostitutes with VD, the real people, you know … I believed part of the preacher’s theory, you know why? Cause I always pictured Christ as a poor man with a limp, maybe a club foot or a break that didn’t heal right, I don’t know why, but I did … Then Danny stuck his fingers under the preacher’s nose and demanded to know why God wasn’t visiting us anymore. They even threatened the man with the Committee—”

  “What committee?” Buck interrupted.

  “Why there’s only one Committee, brother, it’s the Committee for Crippled Children and Orphans. Don’t you know, it runs the hospital. Why even the Director and the doctors have to report to the Committee. The Committee is assigned by the state to run the hospital, to watch over us … it’s really a bunch of old ladies who don’t have anything else to do so the governor appoints them to serve on the Committee to run the hospital. They meet once a month … and we can go tell them about our problems, but it never does any good … it’s just a little game to make us feel better. Once in awhile they make rounds with the doctors, pat the little kids on the head and tell them if they’re good they’ll be better in no time … bullshit, you know. Maybe you haven’t seen them because they don’t come around where Mike and Ronco sack out. They know those two won’t stand for any bullshit. At Christmas they throw a big party for us … Hey? Weren’t you here for the last one?”

  “Nah,” Buck answered lazily. “But what did the preacher do?”

  “The preacher? Oh, he got scared. He trembled and shook. Anyway, Danny and his friends swallowed the preacher’s story hook, line and sinker. By the time he finished his sermon they were beating their breasts and shouting hell-leh-loo-yah! I believe, brother! I believe if you believe! I believe Christ was a poor, orphaned cripple who died and will rise again to care for us! His chosen people! It was awful … They were beating their breasts, pulling at their hair, throwing themselves on the floor and squirming and rolling and shouting … I couldn’t stand it, I left. Right when the preacher was shouting that we should spread the word that Christ is coming to free us all. He will enter every heart that’s open to him …”

  “Is that when Danny got the saw?” Buck asked lazily. He played with the radio knob, but nothing was coming in.

  “Yeah, you know how Danny gets everything ass-backwards, especially now that he’s got religion … so he and the gruesome twosome thought the preacher meant cut everybody free! They broke into a surgical cabinet and stole a saw, the kind that’s used for cutting casts, and for a couple of hours they went around the wards cutting open every friggin’ cast they could find! Then they started sending everyone who would go to the recreation room because by that time they really believed that’s where the second coming would take place … and that’s when the day Nurse got suspicious. Here were all these kids showing up in the recreation room without their casts! It was like a circus! Even Cynthia’s bunch was there, and they only come
out at night. I’m telling you, you gotta watch that crazy Danny! Boy were the doctors mad when they caught him. They gave the Nurse hell and she turned around and gave Danny the old castor oil treatment. She locked all three of them up for a week and pumped them full of castor oil. She was giving them that stuff in their breakfast cereal, in their milk, in everything! And when they wouldn’t eat anything she had old man Maloney hold them and she forced the stuff down their throats. Oh, were they sick! They looked awful when she finally let them loose.”