His terrified eyes still stared up at Con with a vague pleading hope. “Water. Water. One drink of water,” he said dryly, gaspingly.
Someone emptied a canteen slowly about one foot in front of his mouth. He crawled forward and licked at the wet earth trying to salvage a few drops but his tongue lapped up only earth and he began to spit of the cauky mud.
Doc Travis went out to take a look at him.
The Kachins cheered.
“How long’s he got?” Con asked the Doc when he returned.
“Fortyfive minutes. An hour maybe.”
“Get me out of here,” Con said. “Take over, Ringa.”
Niven and the Doctor helped him up. A pathway through the men spread open after considerable coaxing by the Subadar Major. All eyes had been too centered on the arena to see the departing Dua. The last thing Con saw of the circle was Ringa going toward the prisoner, several pieces of split bamboo in his hand and the Kachins cheering louder than they had yet cheered.
“Well I guess we know who their favorite gladiator is,” Con managed to smile weakly. Then he fainted.
The Doctor gave him a sedative and he did not wake for two days. They fed him intravenously with glucose. When Con awoke the sun shone through the basha window and Niven was sitting by his side.
Con looked around the room. It was hazy. “Where’s Lau’rel?” he asked.
“He flew out a couple of hours ago. All the wounded are out except you and one other. Your plane’s due anytime.”
“Ringa?”
“He’s attacking the road. Danny was here yesterday but had to get back to his outfit. He talked to Nautaung for a long time.”
“Did you ever shoot that rat?” he asked.
But he never heard the answer.
The next time he awoke he was in a hospital. Sometime in his sleep he could have sworn he heard the Colonel’s voice saying, “You don’t know that bunch, Doctor. He’ll be ready in thirty days. In time for the fall offensive. I’ll bet you a new garrison hat on that. And by all means don’t let anyone shave off that goatee, or beard, or whatever it is now.”
But he was in a hospital because the sheets were clean and he was in a bed. And someone had shampooed his goatee. He didn’t have to feel it with his fingers to know that. What difference did it make what hospital?
He was naked in the bed, he discovered suddenly. Naked in the bed between clean sheets. What a life. What a hell of a fine life. What a hell of a much better better fine fine life if your woman were here. Carla? Carla? Get in on the other side. It’s the left side that’s hurt. Well, not really. It doesn’t really hurt. Not that much.
Jesus Christ where am I. Really, where? I wonder if Niven ever shot that son-of-a-bitching rat?
CHAPTER XXX
“Where am I?” Con asked opening his eyes.
“The base at Assam,” she said. “The tea plantation.”
“You’re American. Where are you from?”
“Indiana.”
“What day is it?”
“Labor Day,” she smiled prettily. She was small and young with dark hair and wide brown eyes; very American.
“Did you shampoo my beard?” he asked running the back of his hand across his goatee.
“I did,” she said. “Personally I think they should have cut it off. It was filthy.”
He grinned. “Help me up.”
“You stay still,” she ordered. “The Doctor will want to look at you.”
“Goddamn it, help me up.”
“Watch your language, Major. You’re not in the jungle anymore,” she said prissily.
He sat himself up but not defiantly. There was no sharp pain in his side but rather an ache. “May I have a cigarette?” he asked.
She just looked at him, her hands on the white iron rail at the foot of the bed, her crisp white nurse’s uniform still early morning fresh.
“Will you please give me a cigarette?” he asked grinning. “Please.”
“That’s better,” she said. She offered him an English cigarette.
“No thanks. Get me the Doctor.”
“The Doctor’s not here.”
“Then give me an American cigarette.”
“I don’t have any,” she said as if she enjoyed being able to say it
“Borrow one.”
“I’m sorry but I can’t leave.”
He was in a small room with a concrete floor and thatched palm walls and a grass roof. It was a clean room and now on the other side of the wall he could hear voices and they were speaking in Kachin.
“My wounded in there?”
“The wounded are in there,” she said.
He ran his right hand over his left side where he was taped widely.
“You’re a lucky man,” she said. “Two busted ribs.”
“My lungs?”
“One of the ribs must have pressed against the lung but no damage.”
Con cupped his hands over his mouth and hollered toward the wall in Kachin: “You offspring of a mongoose and a viper. You illigitimate sons of an Indian fakir. Get out of those soft beds and back to the war where you belong.”
There was loud laughing and shouting in the native tongue.
“It is the Dua.” “We wait for you who sleep for us all.” “If this is the high class American life give it back to the carrion birds.” “A wounded man should be nursed on laku. Not from the soup of underweight chickens.”
“Please, Major,” she said. “There’s some very sick men in there.”
“Children you mean.”
“Yes, and I don’t want them all excited.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“How many are you?”
“Three Americans and one Burmese nurse,” she said. “For over eighty patients twentyfour hours a day.”
“My heart bleeds for you.”
“But of course you get special attention.”
“Get out of here,” he said.
“I will not.”
“Get the hell out of here before I get out of this bed and throw you out,” he said.
“You wouldn’t dare,” she said.
He threw back the sheets. He was naked. He stood up. She ran from the room. He felt dizzy but managed to get on a pair of pajama bottoms hanging from a hook on the wall. He went out into the hall. His room was at the end of the basha but down the hall were about twenty beds on each side, a Kachin in each bed, or sitting on a bed, and a couple of groups of them playing cards. There was much shouting and greeting.
“I’m hungry,” Con said. “Don’t these damn fool American ever feed us.”
About every Kachin had some food stashed either in between his extra blanket, or under the mattress or pillow, or on his person. Con sat down at the first bed with a group of men around him and ate a cooked, canned chicken leg, and some dried mashed potatoes that one of the soldiers had wrapped in a handkerchief, and two chocolate bars, talking all the while.
And there was much bragging about the size and area of the various wounds and considerable bitching about the food and discipline of the hospital.
“Where is the laku?” the Dua asked finally, finishing his last candy bar.
“No laku,” one said.
“That is why we do not recover,” another said.
“We will remedy that,” Con said. “Come on, there must be a phone in this place. I will show you people a phone.”
Con and about ten of them walked the length of the ward and went into the nurses’ office. There was no one there but there was a G.I. phone. Con picked it up and cranked the handle. The Kachins were fascinated.
“Hello,” Con said to the voice on the phone, “this is General Stilwell. I want to speak Colonel Pearson.”
“Yeah,” replied an American voice. “Well, this is General Marshall and I just sent Stilwell out to get my lunch.”
“Talk to me,” Con said. “Recite a poem or something.”
“Who the hell is this? This is a communication s
ystem not a goddam.…”
Con passed the phone around so that all the Kachins could hear. They laughed and giggled and commented.
“This is Reynolds,” Con said finally. “Give me the Colonel.”
“Right away, sir,” the voice said. “Gee, I’m sorry …”
“Come off it, Jack,” Con said. “It don’t make a goddam to me. Stop by this so-called hospital and have a drink sometime.”
“Gee, thanks Major. I could use one.”
He got the Colonel on the line. The Colonel said he would be right over. Con asked him to send a message to Ringa to have them pack up a couple of goat skins of the finest laku and send it out on the next plane. And to keep sending all the extra he could. The Colonel said he would.
Con hung up. He turned around. They started to file out of the nurses’ office. She was standing with folded arms in the hall, a bald headed doctor with horn-rimmed glasses by her side.
The Kachins bowed their heads sheepishly, silently, as they walked past her.
“Her father was a Shan and her mother was a tarantula,” one of them said in Kachin as they went down the hall.
“She is solid between the legs,” another said.
“She is the offspring of a Nat spirit,” another said.
“I agree that she is solid between the legs,” another said.
Con listening to them was laughing uproariously looking down at her.
“I’m Captain Levy,” the Doctor extended his hand.
Con was laughing so hard that he began to cry and his side hurt. Finally he shook hands with the Doctor.
“We well recognize who you are, Major,” the Doctor said. “But this is a hospital and not the jungle and.…”
“You’re assuming I’m something I am not,” Con said. “The nurse made that damn plain. I would like to meet a nurse that was a nurse instead of a commander sometime.”
“We know how to run a hospital,” the Doctor said.
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“I’m glad to see you had the decency to put on some clothes,” she said getting in her piece.
“I wonder,” he said sarcastically, eyeing her.
She turned her head away blushing slightly.
“I’m going to call the Colonel,” the Doctor said.
“Save your nickel. I already did,” Con said. “He’s on the way over now. Come on in,” he invited walking back into their office. They followed him. He began to open desk drawers. He found a bottle of scotch. He poured drinks for them and a glass of water for himself. They refused the drinks.
“I do believe you’re a sick man,” the Doctor said.
“Where you from in Indiana?” he asked the nurse.
“You never heard of it,” she said coldly. “Muncie.”
“How about you, Captain Levy?” he asked enjoying it now.
“You’ve been down there too long,” the Doctor shook his head. “Too long. I’m from Chicago.”
“Then let’s have a drink. I don’t want a drink but seeing I’m from Chicago and I’ve been to Muncie I’ll have a drink. Muncie, the All American city, my sociology book said. That’s a dictatorship isn’t it? Some guy by the name of Adolph Fall owns the swastika. Or is that someplace else?”
“We don’t drink on duty,” Doctor Levy said.
“That’s what Doc Travis used to say. But you like a drink don’t you?”
“Yes, I enjoy a drink,” the Doctor said.
“You don’t think my Kachins would enjoy a drink?”
“This is a hospital not a bar,” Doctor Levy said sternly.
“That’s what you said before. It’s bad enough having kids like that shot up,” Con said. “And they happen to have been shot up fighting your dirty rotten war, Mr. Levy. And they were also learning to live and laugh while you were learning how to satisfy your ambition. It’s quite plain, just watching the way you looked at them when they left this office, that you think they’re below your station. You so called democratic Americans burn my ass. You think you’re the God-Man race as much as the Germans.
“Well, let me tell you right now: maybe this hospital was run as a hospital for your convenience but from now on you’ll run it for the convenience of those kids. And if you don’t you’ll regret it. I’m damn tired of seeing them played for suckers,” Con said. Then he drank a shot of scotch.
“Why you’re a mental case,” the Doctor said and then looked at the nurse as if for approval. She was staring at Con and didn’t notice. “You can’t go around threatening people.…”
Con barked a command in Kachin. About ten of them crowded into the small office. Con was sitting on the desk and the nurse stepped over by him as if seeking protection.
Con barked another command. Two of the Kachins reached over and undid the Doctor’s .45 and gave it to Con. He checked the action and the bore and released the safety.
“Your bore’s dirty,” he said.
The Doctor didn’t say anything.
“You know how to clean a dirty bore?” Con asked slowly. “The quickest way.”
The Doctor shook his head.
Con pulled the trigger. The Doctor jumped a foot. The nurse clutched Con’s arm. The Kachins cheered and laughed.
“They’re weak, Mr. Levy,” Con said. “Do you know they are weak?”
“My God, they’re wounded.”
“They’ve all got the dysentery, haven’t they, Mr. Levy?”
“Most of them, yes.”
“You know why they got the dysentery?”
“Everyone has it. The water down there,” he said.
“They never had it from the water,” Con said. “Not before, they never did. You’ve got them on a bland diet don’t you, Doc?”
“Why, yes.”
“Because you’re too lazy to make them separate and correct diets? Diets they’re used to.”
“That’s not the reason at all. It’s that we don’t have the personnel.…”
Con pulled the trigger and the .45 slug went sailing about two feet over the Doctor’s head up into the ceiling. “Let’s not lie about our laziness, Doctor,” Con said. “These boys have dysentery because they’re off their diet. They were brought up on pure red peppers. Burma peppers. Twice as hot as any pepper you know of. When they don’t get their peppers they have the shits. But you wouldn’t have the time to consider that?”
The Doctor was shaking. He’s out of his mind, he was thinking.
“Do you feed them rice?”
“No,” the Doctor answered whitely.
“I’ll bet some of the patients have died in their weakness from dysentery. And all of them have been thrown off by what you feed them. You call that running a hospital? You call that inconsiderate attitude medical ethics? Why anyone of those kids got more ethics, more decent character in their little finger than you got in your whole system,” Con said, looking down at the nurse who was still holding onto his bare arm. When she saw his eyes she released her grip.
“Truthfully now, Doc,” Con said in a new voice. “If you were wounded down there and they began to take care of you, and fed you peppers and rice and goat entrails and monkey and laku and that water, things you weren’t used to, it would be a blow to your system wouldn’t it?”
The Doctor nodded whitely.
“And if in the strangeness of a foreign hospital they wouldn’t permit you to talk above a whisper, and continually discipline you, and you couldn’t speak their language, and they refused to tell you what was wrong with you, it would certainly cause you considerable worry and disillusionment, now, wouldn’t it?” Con said speaking in that soft compassionate way of his.
The Doctor nodded his head.
“These people have nursed themselves for centuries. They know a few rather remarkable things about nursing. They have little fear of death as we have it, but they have the same desire to know as we. A man has a right to know, they believe. And I believe that if they have the right to get killed and maimed for you that you have the duty to
let them know. Then the man can fight the illness in his mind. Which is half the way they have always fought their illnesses. And they get remarkable results.
“They don’t need to be cooked for. If you’re short of men they can cook for themselves. That is their way. You must respect their way. Tell me have you ever known such polite, kind, unbitching men in your life?”
“They’re like children,” the nurse said. “Well trained children.”
“Ideal patients,” the Doctor agreed reluctantly.
“Do you see how in your lack of consideration you have neglected these men to where you might have caused a death? Doctor, you can think whatever you want of me, but I’m fed up with the way all the Allies have been pushing these kids around. I won’t permit it anymore.”
The Doctor was silent. He removed his horn rim glasses and brushed his eyes and his balding head with the back of his hand.
Con spoke in Kachin and all the Kachins saluted and left. He put the safety on the .45 and handed it to the Doctor.
“I know you guys, Doc. If you think you got the ax on me you wouldn’t do a thing. But you haven’t and your not getting it. So let’s co-operate, shall we?”
The Doctor put the .45 back in his holster and the Colonel and the priest walked in and greeted Con.
“Was that you shooting?” the Colonel asked smiling.
“We were cleaning the Doc’s forty-five,” Con said. Doctor Levy nodded still white. “Aren’t you going to offer the Colonel a drink, Doc?”
“Oh yes. Of course.”
“None for me,” Con said. “I feel the one I had.”
“You’d better eat,” the nurse said.
“I’ve eaten. What’s your name?”
“Sheridan,” she said. “Jeanne Ellen.”
Con shifted his eyes to the priest. “You need a bath, Father.”
“I only got in last night.”
“Let’s go down to my room,” Con suggested when they finished their drink. The Doctor had had one with them.
They went down to his room.
“I reorganized the hospital, Ray,” Con said sitting on his bed. The Colonel sat at the foot of the bed, the priest in the chair. It was almost noon now and very hot and damp.
“What was wrong with it?”
“It’s too G.I. And the Kachins aren’t G.I. It’s that simple. They’ll do their own cooking from now on. Or the ones that are lying around the base recovering can do it for the ones in the hospital. And they’re going to be treated like humans. More, if you would arrange it. Make them feel it’s an honor being here, or something. So that when they go back to the hills they’ll have something fine to talk about. As we have fine things to say of their Hills. It will help all the way around.”
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