Mercury Boys

by Chandra Prasad

  But Paige stood her ground and insisted Adrienne take the seat that Mike had vacated. The impression of his blocky body was still molded into the black vinyl.

  “Tattoos first, payment after,” she said.

  “Yeah,” finished Sara Beth. “That’s the deal—take it or leave it.”

  “Take it,” said Jimmy grudgingly, looking at the sisters with a combination of annoyance and wolfish interest.

  The process didn’t take as long as Saskia thought it would. Adrienne, Lila, and she all had theirs done first, and then the sisters asked them to step outside.

  “Why?” Saskia asked Paige urgently.

  “Tattoos in private places require privacy,” she whispered back mysteriously.

  Saskia didn’t like the idea of leaving the building for anybody’s sake, but she did as told, thinking that the private places Paige was referring to must be scandalous indeed if the normally uninhibited sisters didn’t want their friends to see.

  After all the tattoos were complete and the girls had reconvened, Jimmy told Paige and Sara Beth to meet him in the back room.

  “Sure,” said Sara Beth. Then she looked at her sister evenly. Saskia noticed that neither girl seemed scared or creeped out like she would be. They told Jimmy to give them a few minutes in the restroom “to get ready,” and he agreed.

  But only thirty seconds after they’d walked down the hallway and disappeared into the restroom, Saskia received a text from Paige instructing her, Lila, and Adrienne to sneak to the car as soon as Jimmy headed for the back room. Saskia was shocked, but she knew better than to question Paige.

  Five minutes later, when Jimmy strolled down the hallway to see what was taking the sisters so long, she grabbed Lila’s and Adrienne’s hands and rushed them out the door. When they ran to Lila’s car, they were shocked to see that Paige and Sara Beth were already there, crouching in a shadow.

  “Unlock this thing and get us out of here,” Paige instructed Lila calmly but forcefully. “Now.”

  Lila fumbled with the keys, unlocked the Buick, and started the engine. Saskia worriedly stared at the door to Graphic Content, knowing any moment Jimmy would come bursting out.

  Lila pulled out so fast the Buick scraped against the side of the car parked in front of it. Its wheels squealed as they raced down the street, the old engine rasping with effort. Paige and Sara Beth began laughing hard in the back seat, great big belly laughs, while Adrienne and Saskia glanced nervously through the back window.

  “We’re fine!” Paige assured them, her cheeks flushed. “Everything’s fine.”

  “You Sampras girls are one hundred percent certifiably crazy AF,” Lila said, ducking down another street.

  And I love it, Saskia wanted to add, thrilled by their getaway.

  Miles from the scene of the crime, the girls were still high from their madcap escape, periodically doubling over in laughter as they roamed the aisles of a Walgreens. They were looking for either Lubriderm or Aquaphor, which were good for tattoo aftercare, at least according to a website Adrienne had found. Saskia couldn’t wait to remove the dressing Jimmy had secured with white medical tape. She was both excited and scared about what lay beneath.

  She’d gotten her tattoo on her hip, a place she figured few would notice, except a boyfriend—if she ever found one—or maybe her pediatrician. She liked the way the tattoo had turned out: the letters so elegant, like calligraphy on a wedding invitation. But she was anxious, too. She worried she’d second-guess herself later and regret what she couldn’t undo.

  When the needle had first pricked her skin, she’d almost fled the chair. But she’d gone through with it in the end. The deciding factor wasn’t alcohol or peer pressure. It was Cornelius. She liked the idea of committing to him in some way, even if he never found out about it.

  Getting the tattoo had hurt—a lot. But she’d muscled through it, her hands curled into fists as the needle punctured her skin, buzzing like a dental drill. It was like getting stung by a wasp over and over again. Torture.

  Now the tattoo felt like an open wound, which she supposed it was. Blood, pus, and little blobs of black ink soaked through the bandage. The pain was steady but tolerable now, not nearly as bad as the blister had been. She picked up a bottle of Tylenol as she and the girls headed for aisle nine: skin care.

  “That was intense,” said Sara Beth, linking arms with her sister. “But we pulled it off.”

  “We did,” said Paige.

  “You guys were like Bonnie and Clyde,” Saskia told them admiringly.

  “Who are they?” asked Sara Beth.

  “Notorious outlaws,” said Saskia. “Robbers during the Great Depression. There’s an awesome movie about them with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway . . .”

  Her voice trailed off when the girls displayed little interest in what she was saying.

  No matter. Their reaction didn’t detract from Saskia’s confidence in the comparison or from her admiration for what the sisters had pulled off.

  Lila dropped Saskia off last. They didn’t make their usual run to McDonald’s. Lila said she was too tired, and Saskia felt the same way. The trip to Graphic Content had exhausted them, mentally and physically. Saskia craved rest more than anything else, except of course time with Cornelius.

  “I’m not gonna be able to sit for a week,” Lila complained, braking in front of Saskia’s house. The empty whiskey bottle rolled noisily on the floor of the back seat.

  “Why the heck did you get it on your butt?” Saskia asked.

  “I don’t know. Seemed as good a place as any.”

  “You’re gonna need to put a pillow on the phone book.”

  Lila laughed, sounding more lighthearted than usual. “I can’t believe tonight actually happened. I can’t believe we went through with it!”

  Saskia couldn’t believe it, either. Since arriving in Coventon, she’d spent a lot of time trying to forget certain things. But tonight she’d gone and done something that could never be forgotten. The tattoo would forever commemorate this particular moment in her life and the particular people she now called her closest friends: the other four members of the Mercury Boys Club.

  “Text me when you wake up,” she said, getting out and shutting the passenger-side door. After a moment, she stuck her head back through the open window. “And sweet dreams.”

  Saskia opened the front door quietly so as not to wake her father. She expected to find him passed out in front of the TV. Or maybe he was at work? She couldn’t remember if he was on call. The last place she expected to find him was in the kitchen, cooking.

  The delicious aroma of spiced meat filled the air. It was a familiar smell. Kyinkyinga, a shish kebab–like Ghanaian street food her mother liked to make. Saskia stood in the doorway, feeling a sudden wave of tenderness toward her father. He stood at the counter, his back to her, chopping something on a cutting board. She listened to the methodical clack-clack of the knife against wood, and smiled at how neatly he’d tied the apron strings behind his back. The scene filled her with such love, she almost started to cry.

  “Shit!” he said, putting a stop to her reverie.

  The knife clattered to the floor. Saskia winced. She knew at once he’d cut himself. She took a breath, ready to make herself known, but then she heard another sound, one that troubled her much more than his swearing. Her father was sobbing—the noise raw, guttural, heart-wrenching. Instinctively, she realized he wasn’t reacting to the pain or the blood. Her father was used to those; he saw them every day on the job. No, it was the cut itself that had caused him to break down. Now that he’d been punctured, she suspected everything he’d pent up for so long was pouring out: anger, jealousy, disappointment, frustration, anguish. Every last evil in Pandora’s box.

  She wanted to run to him and give him a hug, but something held her back: the knowledge that he’d be embarrassed. She knew he wouldn�
�t want her to see him like this, vulnerable and fragile, even emasculated. Nothing like the father he tried to be.

  At a loss, she tiptoed to the bathroom. Inside, she locked the door. Carefully, she took off the dressing and examined her tattoo. It was hard to see the elegant script through the damage. Her skin was raised and irritated, scabby with dried pus, blood, and ink. She hoped the tattoo wouldn’t end in regret.

  In front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, she stared at her face one feature at a time. Together, they looked like a series of disjointed parts. She wished, as she’d wished many times, that her dark eyes were not quite so far apart and her chin not so square. She wished the face staring back at her was as beautiful as Paige’s.

  She took two Tylenols and put a big Band-Aid over the tattoo. The website said it was okay to leave new tattoos uncovered after a few hours, but Saskia didn’t want to get blood on her sheets. In bed, she went through the steps of the ritual—touching mercury and the daguerreotype—and tried her best to concentrate on Cornelius. Before long she drifted off.

  But her last lucid thought had nothing to do with him. It had to do with her father.

  What are the chances of us both bleeding at the same time, and how long till we heal?

  Adrienne

  After Adrienne had changed and returned to the barn, Nurse Reynolds cornered her. If the older woman had seemed exhausted when Adrienne had first met her, she looked now like she’d fallen off the edge of a precipice.

  “I must get some rest. My feet are giving out,” Nurse Reynolds said. She motioned to the men in various states of ill health. “You’ll have to take care of them for an hour or two.”

  “Okay,” Adrienne replied. She wasn’t at all confident she could handle the situation, but she didn’t really have a choice. She pulled at the hem of her dress, which barely covered her knees. It was dirty and musty, and stank of unwashed skin. She had shaken it outside the cabin for all of thirty seconds before putting it on. It had seemed wrong to worry about potentially getting sick when her Mercury Boy was fighting for his life.

  “The young man whose arm was amputated . . .” Nurse Reynolds said, pausing to swipe back a loose tendril of hair. Adrienne felt her hackles go up. She didn’t want another lecture on patient-nurse protocol.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’ll want to keep an eye on him.”

  “Why?”

  “He has a fever, a bad one.”

  Adrienne remembered what Nurse Reynolds had said, about how a patient could be boiled alive. A fresh terror seized her.

  “Also, the patient who needed surgery—he just died,” the nurse continued. “The doctor and I put him in one of the tents. In the morning he’ll be carted away. He’s lucky. At least he’ll get a proper burial.”

  Adrienne wondered at the nurse’s definition of lucky. Nurse Reynolds continued to talk, but her voice began to sound like white noise, a buzzy background secondary to Adrienne’s rising panic. Her boy. A fever.

  Before becoming a phlebotomist, her mother had studied to be an RN. Although she’d never earned her certification—the mental and financial cost of the divorce had put the kibosh on that—she’d come close. Adrienne still remembered how hard she’d studied: making flash cards, staying up till the early hours of the morning poring over books. Often, at breakfast, her mother would ask Adrienne to quiz her.

  Adrienne still retained bits and pieces of information from those mornings. She remembered, for example, what a postoperative fever could mean: pneumonia, sepsis, infection. All horrible possibilities.

  She left the nurse and headed swiftly toward the back of the barn, zigzagging around cots and injured men. When she reached the boy, what she saw made her even more concerned. Sweat dappled his face and soaked his hair. His breathing was ragged. His eyes were open, but they might as well have been shut for all the life in them.

  Adrienne’s mind raced. It worked faster and harder than she could remember it ever working before. What the boy needed, she knew, was antibiotics. But clearly they hadn’t been invented yet. Christ, the doctor and nurse didn’t even know the connection between cleanliness and germs. If they did, there wouldn’t be dirty hands, bloody water buckets, filthy medical instruments, and food left out to rot. What medicine was available during the Civil War? She hadn’t a clue. But she figured even if there were something that could effectively treat infection, it wouldn’t be here, in this cruel joke of a camp. She wondered how many soldiers had died in field hospitals exactly like this one. Then again, maybe it was better not to know.

  Taking the boy’s hand in her own, she considered the options. An ice bath would bring down a fever, but she doubted refrigeration was available yet, either. The best she could do was get cool water from the stream. She’d get it near the cabin, where the water wasn’t tainted with blood. But first, she needed to take him out of the barn and into fresh air. Squeezed in the same tight, airless quarters, the men were no doubt infecting one another. They were infecting the nurses, too. That was probably why Eliza had dysentery.

  Adrienne took hold of the cot and dragged it toward the back door of the barn. Sometimes she wished she were smaller, but not now. She was grateful for her size and strength as she hauled the cot outside, far away from the barn and the tents. She finally parked the boy in the shade of a tree and held his hand a few minutes.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, wondering if he could hear her.

  The sun was still beaming down, but the worst of the day’s heat was over. She found a bucket and jogged to the stream near the cabin, wondering if Nurse Reynolds had returned and was resting inside. If she spotted Adrienne, she’d be furious at her for leaving the soldiers.

  Adrienne filled the bucket and trudged back to camp, her arms aching from the effort. Water sloshed sloppily over the rim. She left the bucket near the boy, then entered the barn. It took her a few minutes to find the bottle of alcohol hidden under the surgery table. She found some sheets, too. Not clean, but cleaner than what he had. Tucking these under her arm, she willed herself not to respond to the cries of the other patients. Not yet.

  When she reached the boy again, she gingerly tugged the dirty sheet from underneath him. The mattress was made of straw, pieces of which poked up sharply through the thin cover. She managed to make the bed with the new sheet by rolling him to his side, gritting her teeth as she supported his weight with her already-fatigued arms. Then she tore another sheet into thin strips with her fingers and teeth. The boy stared at her with such destitute eyes, she couldn’t meet them, or else she’d lose her nerve.

  “I’m not gonna lie. It’s gonna hurt,” she whispered. Carefully, she began to unwrap his stump. The look of it turned her stomach. The sutured wound had turned nearly black. It looked like a dark lightning bolt edged with clots of blood and yellow pus. She wondered if the blackness were a symptom of infection. A thick, foul-smelling discharge dripped wetly from the hole the surgeon had left. Trying not to gag, she uncorked the bottle of whiskey and poured it over the stitches and hole. The boy cried out, and she nearly wept for knowing that she was the cause of more pain.

  “I’m sorry! It really will help, though.”

  Ever so slowly Adrienne cleaned around the discharge hole. Then she rebandaged the stump. Finally, she pulled him into a sitting position and forced him to drink a cup of water. It took a long time. By the time he’d finished, the sun had moved an inch closer to the horizon.

  “I have to help the other soldiers now,” she whispered to him. “But I’ll come back soon. Rest.” It was hard to leave him there all alone, but she’d done what she could. No matter what happened, she could take solace in that.

  Back in the barn, she had to dig deep to carry on. Without even realizing it, she’d started to feel like Nurse Reynolds: so exhausted she could barely stand. Once again, Adrienne thanked her lucky stars that she was strong and fit. If she weren’t, she doubted sh
e would have made it through. She tried not to think about the fact that she was single-handedly responsible for the lives of so many. Instead she focused on the tasks at hand: changing bandages, securing a tourniquet, spoon-feeding an armless soldier, changing blood- and urine-soaked sheets. She did what she could as quickly as she could.

  But when Nurse Reynolds returned, Adrienne felt more relieved than in all her life. Hurrying outside, she checked on her boy, grateful that his breathing had improved. She gave him another cup of water and brought him inside; night would be here soon. Then, getting a second wind, she offered water to each and every man, helping those who were unable to hold their cups.

  “I need to go back to the stream near the cabin. We’re out of water,” she told Nurse Reynolds.

  “Get water from the stream here. It’s much closer.”

  “Are you kidding me? That water’s disgusting. Have you seen the blood?”

  Nurse Reynolds stared at her coldly, but Adrienne wouldn’t be deterred. She knew she was right—that time would prove her right. “We need to change the straw in all the mattresses,” she continued. “And the laundry, there’s so much of it. We have to deep-clean everything.”

  “Washing is done only on Monday, every other week.”

  “Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons our patients are dying. This place is filthy.”

  Nurse Reynolds chose to ignore that. She tried to shut the barn door Adrienne had propped open with a rock, but Adrienne stood in front of it like a sentinel.

  “What in heaven’s name are you doing?” Nurse Reynolds demanded.

  “The doors are going to stay open,” Adrienne replied, crossing her arms. She was surprised by her own sass. But maybe she shouldn’t have been. She was changing this summer. Everything was changing. “We need fresh air. Ventilation. The soldiers need it.”

  “I’ve never heard such nonsense.”