Then his knees were sinking in deep sludge, and water filled his mouth, his nostrils. Brian pulled his head up, choking, coughing. The gray mist behind his eyes rolled away, and he saw that he was waist deep in water.
The water folded its wings about him, lifted him up, and it was all he could do to keep the limp weight of Trang from being dragged [227] off by the sluggish current. He struggled to keep them both afloat, straining his head back as the black water crept up over his mouth, leaking into his nostrils.
Staring straight up, he saw that the clouds were breaking up. The sky underneath the color of a fading bruise, yellow and pink, a few stars poking through like splinters of bone. Almost morning.
He began to cry. So close. And he wasn’t going to make it. He could feel the last of his strength ebbing downstream with the current. And the pain rising, huge and terrible, a mountain made of broken glass he must climb on bare hands and knees.
Then he heard a voice, distant but clear as an echo at the end of a long corridor. Rose’s voice.
You promised, Brian. You promised me you would come back. You promised. ...
But his promise didn’t count anymore. It had been so long since he had held Rose. Somewhere in that endless corridor of time he had lost her. Or she had lost him.
She had stopped loving him. ...
And now it was time to let go.
He wanted to let go. Let go of this burning agony, and just drift, peaceful, borne weightless as a twig or a blade of grass along the slow-moving current.
Then he felt Trang struggle weakly in his arms, and knew he couldn’t let go, not yet. For Trang’s sake, at least.
Brian, summoning a strength he didn’t possess, his heart nearly bursting with the effort of keeping the both of them afloat, began to swim.
Chapter 13
TIEN SUNG, 1969
The corpses were stacked like cordwood against the concrete wall of the operating room. Their olive-drab fatigues stiff with dried blood, their sightless eyes fixed on the ceiling with blank milky stares. Rachel drew close, and saw that one of the bodies on top was still alive. She froze with horror. His eyes were rolling in a face that wasn’t a face at all, but a mask of caked blood. Now she was reaching out, her arms made of elastic, stretching on and on forever before her hands finally closed about his shoulders. She struggled desperately to pull him free. Maybe she could still save him, maybe there was still time. Then tears began spilling from his eyes, cutting in muddy creeks down the ruined wasteland of his face. His mouth fell open, and he cried: “Why did you let me die? I am your son. Why did you—”
Rachel came awake with a sudden bolt. She shot upright in her narrow iron cot, bathed in cold sweat, heart lodged like a dry stone in her throat. She scrubbed at her eyes with sticky, trembling hands.
A nightmare, just a stupid nightmare, she told herself. But, oh God, so real. And that face. That bloody mask. She knew him.
The boy she had killed.
He called himself my ... but no, I won’t think about that. If I start thinking about the abortion again on top of all this, I’ll go crazy.
A rattling sound now. Someone hammering at the door.
“Dr. Rosenthal!” a woman’s voice called. The hammering stopped, and the door cracked open a few inches, a head silhouetted in the crack. Delicate features, straight hair pulled back in a knot. One of the Vietnamese nurses. “Doctor ... please, you must come!”
“Wha ... that you, Lily?” Rachel felt groggy, disoriented. Her body leaden, as if shot full of Novocain. Tonight was the first time she’d been off her feet in forty-eight hours. She felt as if she hadn’t truly slept since arriving in Vietnam six weeks ago.
In the dark, she batted aside mosquito netting, and swung her [229] legs over the side of the cot, fumbling into a pair of khaki trousers crumpled on the floor, yanking them over the man’s T-shirt that hung down almost to her knees.
“It’s me. Medevac chopper just came in,” Lily answered, sounding a little out of breath. “Eight wounded. Most are in bad shape. Doctor MacDougal needs you in Triage.”
“How bad is bad?” Rachel asked.
She stood up, tugged on the chain that connected to a single overhead bulb. Bright light slapped her awake, and she looked around the concrete room she shared with Kay. Small, austere as a prison cell, but oddly, it suited her. Two iron cots tented in mosquito netting, and a single rickety dresser. Wooden louvers in place of windows. Walls bare except for the cracked mirror over the dresser, and a Grateful Dead poster Kay had Scotch-taped over her cot. She saw that Kay’s cot was empty. Still on shift. Good. She would need Kay. Lily, too.
She turned her gaze to Lily, poised in the doorway, dressed in wrinkled, bloodstained nurse’s whites. Tiny, fragile-seeming, as exquisitely wrought as an ivory figurine ... yet she had the stamina of a water buffalo. She could keep going for days without sleep, and not seem to tire, and Rachel once had seen her wrestle to the ground a two-hundred-pound Marine strung out on heroin.
“Their platoon walked into an ambush,” Lily said. Her English was perfect. Her father had been a high-ranking official in the government before the war. “Five were killed.” She paused, and added softly, “From the looks of it, those were the lucky ones.”
Rachel thought about the young Marine who had died yesterday because of her mistake. The boy in her dream.
A paralyzing helplessness swept over her.
She thought: I can’t go out there. I can’t let that happen again.
But she knew she would go. Panic was a luxury. And there was no time for luxuries.
“Tell Mac I’m on my way,” Rachel told her. Lily nodded, and hurried off, leaving the door ajar.
Rachel stuffed her bare feet into a pair of thongs made of old rubber tire tread with strips of canvas sewn across the top. She’d bought them from a street vendor in Da Nang for thirty-five piasters. The expensive boots she’d brought from New York had fallen apart [230] after two weeks of mucking about in the Tien Sung monsoon mud.
She paused in front of the mirror to bundle the loose gold-brown waves that tumbled down her back into a single thick hank, twisting it up in a loose knot, and skewering it with a small pointed stick that fitted into a strip of perforated cowhide to form a barrette.
She stared at herself in the cracked mirror for one long second, at her pale face, the purple hollows under her eyes. God. I look like a missionary straight out of a melodrama, battling plague and killer ants in the deepest heart of Africa. Leora in Arrowsmith.
She felt a flicker of morose satisfaction, followed by shame. You’re punishing yourself, aren’t you? The “Sackcloth and Ashes Hour,” starring Rachel Rosenthal. What will it be next, hair shirt or self-flagellation?
Yeah, okay, maybe that’s how it had started. Coming here probably had been a way of punishing herself for David and the baby. But not now, not anymore. Now she wanted to help, to make a difference, however small.
Rachel turned and gave an impatient shove to the half-open door, striding out onto a covered walkway that ran in a straight line the length of the barracks-style concrete building. Morning, she saw, had blinked its bloodshot eye open. Sunlight backfired off the jumble of corrugated tin roofs below. The village was beginning to stir, even at this hour. She spotted a handful of conical straw hats bobbing among the tall stalks in the rice paddies. She could hear the mournful lowing of water buffalo, the wheels of an ox cart creaking along some rutted road. And another sound, jarring, out of tune, the whiffle of a helicopter’s blades scything the sluggish air.
Reminding her of why she was here.
She ran at a half-trot, her heels slapping against the concrete with muffled clocking sounds. The walkway ended abruptly in a dirt pathway that led through a grove of palm trees to the hospital, fifty or so yards away. Rachel stepped down, sinking into mud up to her ankles.
“Shit,” she swore softly.
In the milky light, she slopped her way onto a makeshift boardwalk of two-by-four planks caked with mud. Da
mn the monsoons, she’d take New York City slush any day over this. She picked her way along the planks, fighting the urge to run.
At last the shadowy hospital building took shape. Two stories [231] of crumbling vanilla stucco festooned with crimson bougainvillaea and liana vines thick as a man’s wrist. Old, charming, as French as anything found in the heart of Paris ... and the last place in the world any sane person would want to walk into.
Rounding the east wall, where the landing pad faced on the entrance to the courtyard, Rachel saw the chopper, a big transport Chinook, rotary blades cutting lazy arcs against the strawberry-milk sky, its cargo hold gaping open. Medics in green uniforms, white armbands, were unloading something on a stretcher.
Something swathed in bloody bandages.
A memory came swooping out of left field. Sixth grade. Her class had gone on a day trip to the wholesale food markets in lower Manhattan. She remembered seeing the rows of butchered beef dangling from hooks, bloody, stripped of their hides, veins and tendons exposed, and how she’d whoopsed her snack of milk and Oreos right there on the sawdust-sprinkled floor. What lay on that stretcher bore a sickening resemblance to one of those bloody carcasses.
A wave of panic swept through her.
What if it happens again. What if I cause another man to die. What if—
No, she had to push the thought from her mind.
And run.
Don’t think, don’t feel. Just get your frigging ass in gear.
Rachel could hear Kay’s throaty voice in her head: It’s like Venetian blinds. You pull the cord, and see only what you have to see, block out the rest. Otherwise you’ll go crazy.
Except compared to triage, going crazy seemed easy. Triage was a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.
Rachel took a gulp of air, and entered. The room looked more like a factory than an ER. The triage facilities makeshift, in the style of the army surgical units for which Corpus Christi, this civilian Catholic Relief hospital, served as backup. Sawhorses to set the stretchers on, wire strung overhead to hook the blood and TVs on in a hurry. And in the corner, below the supply shelves, fifty-gallon drums full of water where the bloodied strips of gauze were soaked, and when the fat and flesh rose to the surface, laundered and used again. No sophisticated equipment, no crash carts. The only nod to the twentieth century, the electricity fueled by a balky old generator, [232] whose faint whine she could hear above the shouting of doctors and nurses, and the screams of men dying in agony.
Wounded soldiers filled Triage, spilling over into the screened-off ER, some screaming, delirious with pain. Blood was everywhere, staining bandages and mud-caked fatigues, squirting from arterial wounds, pooling on the concrete floor.
Rachel spotted Ian MacDougal, in the corner, big shoulders hunched with weariness, his graying rusty mop bent over a double AK amp, both legs shot off at the knees. The kid, his face the color of curdled milk, looked no older than seventeen. He was twisting in agony, crying out: “Mommy! Mommy!”
Rachel felt something give way in her chest, like soft dirt crumbling down a steep slope. So young, dear God, I’ll never get used to it. They’re just kids. ...
“Give me a hand over here,” Mac called to her in his thick Scottish burr. He sounded whipped. “Clamp that bleeder. Good. Hold it while I debride. There now, a cleaner AK I couldn’t have done m’self. Dana!” he called to one of the nurses. “Start a line, take him to Pre-op marked Delayed.” When Rachel lifted her eyebrows in question, he remarked with his usual brusqueness, “He’ll live. Won’t be kicking a football around with the boys back home, but he’ll live.”
“Mommy,” the boy whimpered, clutching Rachel’s hand. Her heart turned over, and for an agonizing instant she thought of her own lost baby, and of the babies she might never have. She stroked his face briefly, a knot forming in her throat, then quickly turned him over to Dana.
Rachel looked up, and saw Kay across the room, dear Kay, her stocky figure in bloodied nurse’s whites, face tight beneath her mop of scrambled dark brown curls, barking out orders to the nurses and aides in her charge.
“Get those IV lines going. Don’t tell me you can’t find a vein ... use a garden hose if you have to ... but find it.”
She caught Rachel’s eye, flashing her a grim smile. “Welcome to Yankee Stadium. Think we’ll beat the Red Sox tonight?”
Rachel forced a grim smile. Their gallows humor wasn’t much in the way of laughs, but it kept them sane.
A far cry from her first day here. Only six weeks? It seemed [233] like a year. After two days on airplanes, she’d arrived in Da Nang, then an endless, bumpy jeep ride to Tien Sung, only to walk straight into a scene like this one. Worse even. A nearby village had been shelled. Kids blown apart, babies, pregnant women. And she’d stood there, gaping, frozen with the horror of it, paralyzed until someone shoved a pair of scissors into her hands, ordered her to cut off a two-year-old-boy’s foot, hanging from his severed ankle by a tendon.
But she’d learned, and fast too. Act first, panic later. How to sort out the ones who would die from those who stood a chance. Expectants were taken behind that screen over in the corner to die a private death. Immediates were sent to Pre-op, marked Priority or Delayed.
“When we were kids,” Kay had told her that first day, “we played doctor. Now we play God.”
And sometimes we make mistakes, Rachel thought, because we’re not gods, just human beings doing the best we can, but never really measuring up.
Like that baby-faced Marine from Arkansas, just yesterday; he had begged her not to leave him, said he was going to die, and she told him not to worry. A shattered kneecap, that was all. Scheduled him for surgery behind two other Immediates, in worse shape than he, she had thought. Checking on him five minutes later, she found him dead. Cardiac arrest. Then she figured out why. Massive pulmonary embolism from the injured leg.
Remembering caused fresh pain to slice through her. God, please, don’t let me make another mistake like that.
Rachel moved ahead to meet the stretcher being carried in. Would there be hope for this one? He was still in one piece, at least.
He was tall, that was the first thing she noticed. His mud-clotted boots dangling over the end of the stretcher. And sinewy thin, his face all bones and angles. His fatigues were wet and muddy, as if they’d found him face down in a rice paddy. The bandages that covered his midsection soaked with blood. He was unconscious, his skin waxy white, almost transparent, the color of paraffin. The color of death.
Suddenly she didn’t want to know what was under those bandages. She felt a chill tiptoe down her spine, as if a cold draft were blowing on the back of her neck.
[234] She could barely find a pulse. Blood pressure eighty over twenty. Oh, this was bad all right. Classic shock. Lips blue, cyanotic. He was having trouble breathing as well. Jesus, he was slipping away, slipping right through her fingers.
“Get a line going here!” she shouted to Meredith Barnes, hovering at her elbow. “Sixteen gauge. Draw four tubes of blood for a cross-match. He’ll need at least six units. And a couple of grams of penicillin to start with.”
Rachel inserted a nasogastric tube to drain his stomach. Then, grabbing a pair of scissors, she began snipping at the bandages that covered his abdomen. Jesus. Oh Jesus. It was even worse than she’d thought. A gaping hole as if a prizefighter’s glove had punched it in. The peritoneum ruptured too. Grayish-white loops of intestine bulging through.
Then she felt it, almost a certainty, like a clear, hard voice telling her he was going to die. No matter what she did, he was going to die. The best she could do for him was make him comfortable, put him behind the screen.
Then she glanced toward his face again, and her breath caught in her throat. Her body turned to stone. She couldn’t move, or breathe, or swallow.
He was conscious now, looking straight at her. His eyes a clear, oddly lucent gray that shone like morning light from the hollowed sockets of his dying face.
And he was smi
ling.
Rachel had an odd sensation. It was as if something buried deep inside her were cracking open, and feeling its way toward the light, like a blade of grass pushing up through a sidewalk.
It was a moment before she realized what it was. It had been a long time since she had felt this.
Hope.
Hot tears flooded her eyes, spilled down her cheeks.
The wounded soldier brought his hand up, and brushed it across her cheek, his fingertips soft as leaves. “Rose,” he murmured. “Don’t cry, Rosie. I’m coming back. Rose ...”
One of the medics, a burly black man, shook his head. “Been calling that name ever since we fished him out of the river. Damnedest thing you ever saw. Stomach all shot to shit, and he’s swimming [235] out to meet us like he’s Jesus Christ or somepin’. Dragging his dead buddy along for the ride.” He shook his head again. “Looks like this one’s for the GRs too.”
GR. Graves Registration. Where men were labeled, bagged, sent home to their grieving families. The coldness inside her turned fiery at the thought of this one, too, being trundled out like one more piece of luggage, dumped into a cargo hold.
“Not if I can help it,” Rachel said, galvanized by a determination so fierce all her muscles, her bones seemed to vibrate like taut wires.
She flew into action, clamping off arteries, debriding the wound, and digging out the largest pieces of shrapnel. Disinfecting with sterile gauze soaked in petrolatum.
“Mind if I have a look?” A deep voice startled her. She looked up. Doctor MacDougal was frowning, his shaggy reddish-gray brows drooping over his huge, sad, brown eyes.
His examination was quick but thorough. Afterwards, he drew Rachel aside. “He’s lost a lot of blood. And it looks like that right kidney will have to go. I see a lot of peritoneal leakage. And extensive damage to both small and large bowels. Lord, girl, this boy will need more than your hands to pull him through surgery. He’ll need a bloody miracle. And even if he does pull through, with shock and peritonitis I don’t have to tell you what his chances of recovery are.” He placed a broad fatherly hand on Rachel’s shoulder. “I know you hate to lose, Rachel. I never seen one so much for fightin’ the odds, but the best you can do for this one is make him comfortable, let him go in peace.”
Garden of Lies Page 27