The Healer's War (10 page)

Of course, I had no idea who the old man was or how great his power had been until it was nearly gone, even though he had already shared it with me once. I'm glad I didn't know. If I had, I would have missed the point: that even a great master like Xe was only a part of the process.

I think if I had known about him I would have been quick to discount my own role in that process. That would have been a fatal mistake, in more ways than one. As it was, the mistake we all made of treating Xe like an ordinary, slightly crazy old man is only embarrassing. And though I'm sure some of his anxiety was real, I wonder now if the old man wasn't having a secret laugh at our expense.

The fracas started when Voorhees began prepping Xe for surgery. Xe had permitted Voorhees to shave and bathe him and clean his nails without a problem. Xe had never been combative before, but I'd noticed when I did his dressings his eyes were always angry and troubled. Once I caught him watching me while I did Dang Thi That's wound irrigation, and his expression was unfathomably miscrable. Mostly, though, he had been withdrawn and almost sullen. I thought perhaps he was still suffering the hostile stage of brain healing I mentioned earlier. On the other hand, it was normal enough for anyone to be angry and confused on awakening from a head injury to find his legs missing.

He sometimes spoke briefly to Mai, their exchanges no more than a few careful words, as if they were trading eggs. When he was sleeping, he mumbled and clasped his hands to his chest. When he was awake, he stared at the wall or followed us with his eyes, though if we said something to him, he looked away.

"I bet he's a VC," Meyers said once. "He looks sneaky."

"Oh no," Mai objected. "He very holy man."

"$o were those monks that barbecued theirselves, and look what they got us into," Sergeant Baker snorted.

Mai carefully refrained from looking offended, but lowered her eyes. "I hear about him from my friend," she said and turned away. I could have kicked Baker for discouraging her from saying more. According to Marge, Mai's "friends" told her a lot of things-like when there were likely to be heavy rocket attacks or when it would be unsafe to go to downtown Da Nang.

But while Voorhees didn't treat Xe with any particular reverence, he had shaved and bathed the old man with his usual stolid gentleness and patience, as if he were grooming some prize piece of livestock for a 4-H

show. The trouble began when he tried to remove the pendant the old man wore.

Xe clutched his fists to his chest and glared defiantly at Voorhees, who turned to me, looking hot and perplexed.

"I don't think he's real impressed with the surgical checklist, Lieutenant. We better get Mal to explain it to him."

I was hot and perplexed myself and sick to death of hearing little Ahn's incessant crying. "They borrowed her in ICU," I said. Lucky her. She was as frustrated with babysan's nonstop wailing as the rest of us. The kid hadn't stopped crying, or thwarting efforts to get him to surgery, since he arrived. Mai had told me that morning that some of the Vietnamese patients were threatening to smother him if he didn't shut up, so they could get some sleep.

"Well, we got to find some way to tell the old guy he can't wear jewelry to O.R.," Voorhees said. "I'm sorry, but I'm not going to fight him for it. I didn't sign up for hand-to-hand combat. Any ideas?"

I rose from charting my meds and walked to Xe's bedside. The old man's bony jaw thrust pugnaciously forward over his doubled fists and his narrow black eyes snapped from me to Voorhees and back again as if we were threatening him with torture and further dismemberment.

"God, papasan, don't look at me like that," I said, in English, of course, but hoping he'd find my tone reassuring. "I'm not going to hurt you. Nobody's going to hurt you. Not here. But you gotta give me that." I pointed to the thing he clasped to his larynx. "I keep safe for you."

He looked suspiciously at my outstretched hand. How in the hell was I going to explain to him that he couldn't wear his necklace because it would get in the anesthetist's way? For all I knew, his idea of anesthetic was biting a rock.

Fortunately, Xinh had forsaken Vietnamese TV for the live entertainment we were providing. She had too much energy not to get antsy lying in bed day after day, and now she clearly itched to get involved. Her English wasn't as good as Mai's, but she seemed to understand more than she spoke. "Xinh, you know when you go O.R.," I began in the simplified English that, mixed with a few words of Vietnamese and a few words of bastardized French, made for a sort of pidgin common language between Americans and Vietnamese.

"O.R.?"

"Surgery? Doctor fix your leg?"

"Nooo . . ."

Well, actually, she hadn't been to surgery yet. "Uh, well, anyway.

Papasan Xe go surgery. His legs numbah ten. Doctor fix. Make better."

Xinh nodded energetically, her gleaming black pigtails waggling. I thought I was getting through to her. "But before go surgery, must take off all 'ewetry." I demonstrated, removing my own rings and putting them in my pocket. But although Xinh's eyes followed everything I did, she looked puzzled. So I reached for her watch, and though she looked doubtful, she unbuckled it and handed it to me.

"Jewelry," I told her, and jingled the watch and rings together in my hand. Xinh looked scornful. She knew that. I continued. "Now then, you papasan." I pointed to her, and Xinh shook her head that no, she wasn't papasan.

"Play like. Play like you papasan."

Xinh drew in her breath and nodded. She bicced-understood"play like."

"I take your jewelry and lock it up," I said, and walked to the narcotics cabinet, looking back to see if Xinh was still watching.

Xinh's head bobbed like a buoy on a windy day.

"Then you go surgery, get legs fixed." I pantomimed Xinh's bed rolling down the hall and made vague fixing-up gestures at her knees. "Then you come back"-I continued the charades with more laborious gestures, then scuttled back to the medicine cabinet and with a flourish worthy pf a magician produced the watch again and handed it back to Xinh-"and you get your jewelry back. Bic?"

Xinh looked puzzled for a moment, then broke into another flurry of earnest nods.

"You explain to papasan for me?"

I expected maybe three or four more explanations and charades would be necessary, but Xinh drew herself up with the self-importance of a teacher's pet chosen to be hall monitor, leaned over the edge of her bed, and shouted to Xe in strident Vietnamese loud enough to be heard over Ahn's whimpering. Xe, who had steadfastly refused to watch my shenanigans but had withdrawn into staring through the corrugations of the tin wall opposite him, looked startled. He shifted onto one hip to face Xinh, then loftily turned away and said something argumentative, gesturing at me and the ward with more animation than I'd seen in him so far.

Xinh assumed the airs of both a princess and a mother as she replied, lecturing him. The old man set his jaw even more firmly and she repeated what she had said, this time in a more coaxing tone, intermittently pointing to me.

Xe watched me impassively for a while, his fingers idly stroking the thing at his neck. After a couple of minutes his jaw relaxed and he beckoned me to his bedside with a lift of his head.

This time Xinh shouted her encouragement to me, no doubt urging me not to drop the ball after she, Xinh, had gotten things rolling. I leaned over the old man and he pulled the theng from his neck and tenderly handed me the object on the end. I started to carry it to the medicine cabinet, but Xinh, like a referee calling a foul, began bouncing up and down, crying, "No, co! No, Kitty!" and indicated that I was supposed to put Xe's necklace around my own neck.

I hesitated, doubting the professionalism of wearing a patient's jewelry-particularly since it didn't look like very hygienic jewelry.

But Xe was making small nodding movements. He was urging me to wear it, not lock it up. Once I slipped it on, he seemed satisfied and with lordly dignity allowed Voorhees to finish prepping him.

I remember thinking that the necklace could have had value to no one but Xe, and even at that the value had to be purely sentimental. The pendant on the grungy theng looked as if it had been carved, or melted maybe, then molded, out of the bottom of a soda pop bottle. It was still roughly round and had a deep wave running through the middle, with something like ears on the side. It sure wasn't the Hope diamond, but then it wasn't mine to worry about either. just so the theng didn't contain living creatures. I detected nothing more noxious than the old man's sweat, so I tucked his treasure inside my fatigue shirt, the pendant lodging under the top button above my cleavage. I'd promised to guard it with my person, if not in so many words, and I would, though why anybody would want to steal such a thing I couldn't imagine. But even as Voorhees rolled Xe off to surgery, the old man cast a backward glance my way to make sure I was living up to my end of the bargain.

That incident exhausted all of the good humor I had for the day, and when I sat down to do the chart, I felt like a boiling lobster. Sweat saturated my hair and dripped into my eyes. My fatigues stuck to my back and armpits, the backs of my legs, and my crotch. My bra was soaked and clammy. I hate heat and always have. It shuts down my thinking ability by at least 75 percent. I get slow and clumsy, and my skin feels like a freshly tarred road gumming onto everything that touches it. I get faint and headachy and my temper is about as stable as nitroglycerin. I gulped two salt tablets and sat down with my head between my knees for a moment, my hands, where they pressed against my eyes, feeling sticky as those of a two-year-old who's just finished eating candy. Ahn's shril whine sawed through the heat, irritating as the buzzing of a thousand mosquitoes. Damn! And I still had to do the little bastard's dressings. I peeled myself off the chair and jerked the dressing cart away from the wall so hard it clattered. Jesus, it was so hot even my skin seemed to be sending off red light, as if it were boiling. I paused for a moment, closing my eyes just so some part of me could be cool in the shade my eyelids provided. I couldn't touch the kid feeling like this. I took three deep breaths and opened my eyes again. Well, better. My skin was only giving off a hot rosy glow now.

I wheeled the cart over. Now it looked as if the kid was glowing red-red and kind of a murky eggplant color that intensified and darkened when he glared up at me and started shrieking.

"Oh, shut up, I haven't touched you yet," I snapped. He looked right at me and howled louder.

"Qkay, kid, that's it. I've had it with you and so has everybody else.

You're not the only one around here who's been hurt, you know."

But he just kept howling. I couldn't, I simply could not, keep listening to that racket while I worked on him. I pushed him over on his side and swatted his rear. "Now, em di, dammit. We're all tired of you. Just shut up." I gave him about four swats, the pink of my hand blurring to red as it hit the red around his rear.

He didn't yell any louder. In fact, his shrieking died off to a whimper, then a snuffle, by the time I got control of myself and stopped abusing my patient. He sniffed and looked at me for the first time without the hatred and terror I was used to seeing in his face. I couldn't figure it out. I was feeling like the Marquise de Sade and the kid was definitely in the best mood he'd been in since he arrived. The light around him looked cooler somehow, too, and less murky. My own had faded to dusty pink. I laid my hand on his forehead, thinking that maybe the color had something to do with fever.

His skin was sweaty but cool, and he watched me, not fearfully, but with a funny kind of anticipation. And it came to me that he didn't know nurses weren't supposed to paddle their patients. He knew he'd been thoroughly annoying everybody, but he felt lost and abandoned. The spanking and my scolding voice, even speaking English, had made if his mother were still with hid'mn control of the world, it seem as I I I telling him what to do. I knew that as certainly as if he'd told me, though I didn't know then how I knew it. But whatever passed between us he didn't ask to understand but simply accepted with relief. His face smoothed out of its monkeylike scowl and his lids dropped like rocks as he passed into long-overdue sleep.

"ooh!" Xinh cried and shook her hand. I left the dressing cart by Ahn's bed and walked to hers. A blur of blue-green light surrounded her. I blinked hard, but the light remained.

"What's wrong, Xinh?"

She held up her hand so I could see the fingernail broken into the quick, a thin line of burgundy light pulsing from it. "Nothing. Tete dau," she said, her frown vanishing.

She took my hand in her sore one and swung it back and forth, companionably. This made me a little uncomfortable, but I knew from watching Vietnamese people that same-sex friends often held hands in public. I was grateful for the gesture, since I was still feeling a little like an ogress for spanking Ahn, despite the surprising way he had reacted. Xinh was impossible to dislike. Her emotions swept across her face like weather on a seascape, sunny one minute, stormy the next, but open and changeable. She painted her nails and tried different hairdos and watched the performers on Vietnamese TV. I was sure that if I could understand what she and Mal gossiped about, it would have been what my friends in nursing school talked about, boys, clothes, normal things that had nothing to do with the war. The only thing funny about her was that blue-green stain. I must have a bad case of heatstroke, I thought, and reclaimed my hand. "I have to get back to work, Xinh," I said.

She pulled her own hand away and started to suck on the broken 'l, then stopped with't halfway to her mouth. "Heyy! Numbah one!"

nal she said, her eyes shining. She held up her nail, perfectly intact, with about a quarter inch of unpainted growth showing above her ruined polish job. She looked at me as if I had pulled a coin from behind her ear. "How you do that?"