The Healer’s War

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  I thought: Far out, complimenting myself on my Technicolor imagination. I watched the colored thing’s progress passively as if it were a weird movie. I could see perfectly well beyond the light and everyone was still sleeping.

  Behind the light, at first dim but growing brighter all the time, was a man’s figure. Initially it seemed legless, but as it grew brighter it lit him up like a Christmas tree. I could see that he had his legs tucked up under him, yoga style.

  He was floating about five feet off the ground, just above the iron ends of the beds, and underneath his toes I saw the intake and output clipboard hanging from Xe’s bed foot. Through the transparent white spark his hands clasped at his chest.

  I don’t know if I actually said it, but I thought: What a great trick, Xe. I didn’t know you could do that. I also thought it was neat the way he’d grown his legs back, but I didn’t want to say anything—it seemed crass to mention it.

  As I watched, the light shifted with the same jerkiness as everything else, so when the pink tendrils started wafting toward me, it was again a case of presto chango, now I see them and now I don’t know if I like this whole trip or not. I scooted back and my leg fell off the chair, which sent shafts of fire up it. The tendrils shriveled, and as they shrank back to the center, they deepened to bright red, then deep brick red, surrounding the whole pattern. Through the light I saw Xe’s face, and that made me scramble even farther backward.

  With another of those animated frame shifts, I blinked and saw only the little desk lamp. Xe was lying quietly, his eyes closed, looking maybe a little more tired and sadder than I remembered from before, but otherwise the same. I caught the glint of Ahn’s eye as he rolled onto his stomach, looking around him as if he thought a cougar would pounce on him. I started up from my chair but blinked again and there was Ryan leaning across me over the desk. “L.T., you okay? You look real bad.”

  “I’m burning up,” I told him and realized it was the truth. “And I gotta pee.”

  Inside the narrow toilet cubicle behind the nurses’ station, I saw in the mirror that my face looked ghastly—if I had a patient who looked like that, I’d put them on the seriously ill list. My hair was matted with sweat that rolled off my pasty face and trickled down the back of my neck, though there were still goose bumps on my arms and ice water running through my spinal column. When I pulled down my trousers and tried to sit on the seat, my leg didn’t want to bend from the hip. The rock in my groin was harder, and a ribbon of blush ran all the way down my leg.

  I thought: Oh shit, and pried off my boot, which seemed embedded in my leg. I was glad I was already on the stool when I finally pulled my toe free because it hurt so badly I would have messed myself otherwise. Rolls of puffy calf and ankle flesh almost obscured my boot garter and I cut it off with my bandage scissors. The toe was red and twice as big as the other one, and the whole foot was bloated with edema. When I limped back outside, I shoved a thermometer in my mouth before doing Thai’s treatment. I thought something was wrong with the thermometer. The mercury hit 105. I took three aspirin and left the rounds to Ryan.

  When the shift was over, I reported to sick call and spent the next three days in my hooch soaking my foot in purple solution and popping antibiotics.

  “Dear Mom,” I wrote during that time, “I now know how it feels to be delirious. You wouldn’t believe the dreams! And I think they may put me in for a Purple Heart on account of I got this service-incurred disability….”

  My toe was already turning toe-colored again, except for a slight residual purple stain, when Father O’Rourke made his sickbed visitation. The two of us sat in the lawn chairs on the porch outside my hooch and listened to my new Irish tapes, which had arrived from home a day or two before. The priest guzzled beer and I guzzled lemonade—alcohol interferes with antibiotics. I elevated my purple foot on the rail and tapped air in time with the music. It felt good to be alive and not in solitary and not baking with fever anymore.

  And if there was any man I loved to hear talk almost as much as he loved to hear himself talk, it was Father O’Rourke. It was the brogue, mostly, of course, emerging deep and sonorous from that dark and burly man, who gave the impression of being large without physically taking up all that much space. He could have made supply memos sound like Shakespeare. Or Brendan Behan, more appropriately. But he was also a lover of music and books and knew more theology than what was in his breviary.

  During the time I was recovering in my hooch, I’d had a couple of dreams about what I’d seen on the ward that night. While I could pass off Xe’s light show as being due to my delirium, there had been too many other off-kilter occurrences between that old man and me for me to pass it off so lightly. The brilliant light had had a very spiritual feeling about it, and I thought it might be bound up with halos after all. Everyone kept telling me Xe was a holy man. Unlikely as it seemed, I wondered if maybe—maybe, because my illness had altered or expanded my consciousness as LSD was supposed to, I had been enabled to see his halo—maybe he wasn’t just holy, but a saint or even an angel. Okay, so it sounded farfetched. But I hadn’t expected to find bubonic plague in Vietnam either, and I had.

  “Father, can I ask you a question?”

  “After the song’s over, my child,” he said. The song was about an execution of an Irish patriot three hundred years before, and if I’d been paying proper attention I’d have noticed before I asked that Father had tears rolling down his cheeks.

  When he’d mopped his face with a Kleenex, I tried again. “What I want to know is, who has halos and who can see them? Do saints have halos, or is it just angels? And can somebody be a saint without some sort of papal decision about it? I mean, could there be maybe Buddhist or Hindu saints that God knows about but hasn’t let the Church in on yet? Could just anybody see their halos, if they let you?”

  The chaplain glowered at me from under his bristling black brows. With such brows, he always seemed to be glowering, whether he intended to or not. “My dear child, what is it you’re tryin’ to do? Start another holy war? Is the one not enough for you, then?”

  “No, it’s not that, it’s just that…well, when I first got sick, I was delirious, you know? And another time, I thought I saw—don’t laugh at me, damn it, it isn’t funny. I want you to regard this as being as confidential as if I were one of your patients.”

  “Flock.”

  “Okay, one of your flock. Even though I was delirious, I think this was sort of like a dream and it must mean something. I haven’t experienced anything like it since I had the measles and heard this radio that wasn’t really playing and smelled salted nuts when there weren’t any in the house.” I looked at him quickly but he had composed himself, his backwards baseball cap pulled down over his too assertive eyebrows, the words “God Power” machine-embroidered on the cap’s hem. “The other night, when I first got sick, I thought I saw this giant halo that was all different colors and shapes around one of the patients, an old Vietnamese guy. And before, when the old man was in surgery, it looked like the major and our interpreter and Meyers and everybody had little halos too. Do you think, if the old man is a saint, well, could it be contagious somehow?”

  O’Rourke tilted his cap back and stopped balancing his chair on the back legs, squarely setting it down. “Ah, life among the heathen isn’t fittin’ for ye of little faith, I see that now. Some of this Eastern stuff seems to be rubbin’ off on you.”

  He was kidding me—the Irish always got a whole lot thicker when he was pulling your leg.

  “What Eastern stuff? Halos?”

  “Not halos, darlin’ girl. The Holy Father holds the patent on halos and on saints and angels, since you ask. Auras, now. Anyone can have an aura. Buddhists and Hindus and the lot are lousy with them. They have quite a few over to Duke University back in the States as well.”

  “What did you call them?”

  “Auras.”

  “Like the northern lights?”

  “That’s auroras, though I daresay i
t comes from the same root. Light, bands of light. Colored light, as a rule.”

  “Sounds like a halo to me.”

  “Only on your proper martyrs and such. Buddhists and them other Easterners are only authorized auras, martyrs or no. You mark my words, girl, and watch your step. They get you poor little lukewarm Methodists and all over here and pump you full of Asian germs and start showing you auras, next thing you know you’ll be runnin’ around shoutin’ Harry Krishna and playin’ with matches and gasoline.”

  The weather changed while I was on quarters. It started getting cooler in the evenings. At first I thought I just felt cooler because my fever had gone down, but long after I returned to work, the nights remained quite pleasant, balmy but no longer sweltering.

  I’d walk home from the ward for midnight supper break and sit on the porch outside my hooch. At night everything was so much nicer. You couldn’t see the barbed wire and the concrete and the raw plywood and sandbags and olive drab so clearly. The sky was black and velvety and star-studded, as glamorous as if there were no war on at all. Palms swayed on the horizon, and the South China Sea lapped gently at the beach. You could even forget the smell if there was a little breeze. I couldn’t help thinking that if I were Vietnamese, I could hate the Americans on aesthetic grounds alone. Poor as the native houses and cities were, they blended with the countryside. Our compound reminded me of a strip mine I’d seen high in the Rockies. Everything else around it was breathtakingly beautiful and then there was this gutted mountain and a lake that looked like liquid cement.

  On the way back to the ward, the compound was dark and muffled, with only the red glow of a cigarette tip from the guard tower to remind you it was manned by a bored soldier with a rifle. Inevitably there was a little muted rock music from some corner of the compound, a radio turned down low.

  The ward was quiet, too, those first few nights except for a whisper of pages turning in Ryan’s book. I still took the flashlight and rolled Dang Thi Thai’s graft, but now she sometimes slept through the procedure. I was more curious than ever about Xe, but he slept all night. Sometimes Ahn would wake up when I did rounds and climb into his wheelchair and come sit with me by the desk, watching with serious dark eyes as I charted or read or wrote letters. I showed him how to write his name in English and he drew the letters like an artist, his small grubby hands oddly graceful, the hooded light of the lamp at the nurses’ desk gleaming on his bowl-cut black hair. He was very quick. The worst problem was keeping him quiet. Already his sessions with Xinhdy and Mai had him babbling away in fluent pidgin. Still, he would leave them to follow me if he thought I had a scrap of attention to spare him. I wrote my mother and asked her to comb the garage sales for children’s clothes.

  Evenings when I came on duty, Xe would be visiting with Dang Thi Thai or with Xinhdy. He nodded courteously to me if I happened to catch his eye, but otherwise paid me no observable attention, though sometimes I felt him watching me. I wondered about him more than ever. Thai always seemed to feel better after he left, but while her wound improved with each new procedure, the process was as long and gradual as Joe expected. I wonder now if Xe’s power was really so diminished at that point, or if he simply felt that the hospital was the safest place for all of them to be.

  Anyway, casualties came and went, including a pair of VC. I had no idea they were VC. They just looked like your average injured villagers to me, although, looking back, I remember them as a little more demanding and aggressive than most, but that could be my imagination. Anyway, one day they were admitted, seriously wounded, and when I came on shift again they were gone. I asked what had happened.

  Mai chimed in. “Patients say they VC. Xinhdy say to me if we not move VC patients, other patients kill them,” and as she said the last she ran her finger across her throat.

  “So where’d they go?” I asked.

  “The POW ward,” Marge said. “The MPs came and got them.”

  I tried not to wonder what became of them after that, and not to imagine what might have happened to us or our patients if Xinhdy and Mai weren’t so close.

  The last night I was on the ward was quiet and Xinhdy la daied me down to her bedside. She took my hand and looked at my ragged nails. “Numbah ten,” she said and got out her file and polish and started giving me dragon-lady points. I let her. My work was caught up until midnight and I’d missed her cheerful, normal company. She more than anyone else let me imagine that at one time there must have been a happier kind of life in Vietnam, where people could be frivolous and worry about what was pretty.

  “Kitty, when you fini Vietnam?” she asked.

  “Oh, I still have months to go,” I said.

  “Good. I cry when you fini Vietnam.”

  “I’ll miss you too,” I said. “Do you think you might ever get to come to America?”

  “I don’t think so, but maybe. I like America. You know Hollywoo’? Vietnamee movie stars, they poor. Mai have more money than movie star. Not like Hollywoo’.”

  “I guess not. Why, do you want to be a movie star?”

  “Hollywoo’ movie star, yes. Vietnamee movie star not so good. My fam’ly say movie star not so good for Vietnamee lady.”

  When she gave me back my hands I resembled Madame Nhu from the wrists down, stiletto nails, blood-red polish, and all. But Xinhdy thought I looked glamorous.

  When I got back to my quarters that morning, Julie Montgomery was waiting at my door. I didn’t much like Julie, as I’d mentioned to Tony. She had two topics of conversation: how irresistible she was and how many men agreed with her. Most of the other girls disliked her, too, and openly snubbed her, but I’d tried to be at least polite. Being new in country wasn’t easy. Still, I didn’t welcome her visit. I had no desire to be bosom buddies with someone who was her own biggest fan.

  “Kitty, I have to talk to you,” she said, her voice carrying a tragic wobble to it.

  “Sure. Come on in.”

  She stood in the doorway and lit a cigarette. Her gestures were short and jerky and she tried to make a tossing motion with her head, but hair as damaged by overtreating as hers doesn’t move very well. In the sunlight streaming in the door, not one glint reflected off that pile of dead straw she had teased into a bouffant. “I couldn’t bear the thought that you’d hear this from anyone else, so I decided, painful as it was, I had to come and tell you myself. You see, I don’t want you to be hurt. You’ve always been nice to me. But he said—he said you wouldn’t mind sharing. And since he’s married, I figured it couldn’t be really serious or anything and”—she giggled—“he’s such a dish and he was so lonesome….”

  I had been getting her a Coke from the fridge, but I put it back and kicked the door shut. “Wait a minute. Are you talking about Tony?”

  She nodded, giving me a soulful look through her cigarette smoke. “The way Carole Swenson acted, I thought maybe you might not know and I wanted you to hear it from me instead of her. Oh, Kitty, say you won’t hate me forever. It was just a date and you were on quarters.”

  “Let me get this straight. Tony told you that he’s married?”

  “Well, yeah—”

  “Thank you, Julie. I appreciate you telling me, but you’ll have to excuse me now, I’ve got a murder to plan.”

  Well, at least I knew who the demure creature he wanted me to be like was. I supposed that was faithfulness, of a sort. I called Red Beach and told Tony what I thought of him and never to darken my doorway again. I surprised myself by not crying. Instead, I flopped onto my cot and read until I fell asleep, feeling strangely relieved for someone who’d been jilted, as if I’d just peeled out of a tight girdle.

  At least now I wouldn’t have anyone harping at me about being ladylike or nurselike or like anything else but myself, or as much of myself as I could still find after seven months in country. Tony’s wife was probably having a ball at home. He ought to have sense enough to know that even his perfect wife would probably be a lot different if she were in my shoes. Being a dust-of
f pilot wasn’t the only job that had to be done, after all.

  I knew I’d miss him, but it was just physical, I told myself. Just because his legs were longer and prettier than mine, and his hair was so tritely perfect to run my fingers through, was no reason to fall apart. Just because his strong, beautiful fingers felt better than salt water and sun on my skin. In my mind’s eye I saw him stride jauntily toward the pad. If only the jerk hadn’t lied to me, damn him.

  The monsoon drizzle started at around three that afternoon, in keeping with my mood. I didn’t bother with a poncho but let the rain soak my red alligator-bedecked polo shirt. My flip-flops smacked against the wet cement walkway leading to the hospital and mail call. I didn’t get mail, of course, but Marge Canon clutched another letter to her bosom, this one unstamped, which meant it came from in country.

  “Kitty, you got time to come back to the ward for a cup of coffee? I want to ask you about something.”

  “Sure thing,” I said, almost hoping she’d ask me to give up my afternoon off and work extra. I felt miserable and useless, and when I felt like that, the ward was the best place for me.

  “Kitty, you ever been to Quang Ngai?”

  “No,” I said cautiously. Had I screwed up again or had it simply taken the powers that be this long to find somewhere to send me? “I never had any reason to. Why? Am I being transferred?”

  “No, but I hope I am. Remember I told you about Hal? Well, he’s in Quang Ngai now as hospital administrator at the 85th Evac. He wants me to try for a transfer.”

  Her eyes sparkled. I didn’t know whether to be happy or bitter that at least somebody’s love life was going well, but if anyone deserved to be happy it was Marge, so I said, “That’s terrific, but when would you leave?”