Tortuga (7 page)

“Oh Tortuga,” Ismelda smiled, worked her way around the nurses and touched my forehead.

“Water …” She held the straw to my lips and this time the water was cool and refreshing.

“Look, doc! Look!” Mike shouted.

“Just a spasm …” Steel said. He pushed up my eyelid and shone a light into my eye. “Get the kids out,” he said again.

“Everybody out!” the big nurse shouted.

“Keep the sheet cold … bring down the fever … he'll be all right …”

“No! No! Look! He moved! Tortuga moved!” Mike shouted and pulled at the doctor.

“Tortuga moved!” one of the kids shouted and they rushed to the window to see if the mountain was indeed moving. Dr. Steel turned, looked, cautiously, cynically.

“Move it again!” Mike shouted. The kids shouted, beat bedpans, tripped over each other to get to the window.

“Damn little bastards!” the nurse swore under her breath.

“Don't cuss us, we'll report you to the committee.”

“100 degrees,” another nurse called, flipped the thermometer and stuck it back in my mouth.

I groaned, found the thread again, the thin light which had been gone for so long and which was now responding to my call, a fine gossamer thread burning in my brain, pounding in my heart, acrid-wet with electricity, and I said move and it moved, jumping the long-dead relays, sizzling like the rivers of fire and water deep in the mountain, it went careening through my dark flesh and withered tendons.

“See!” Mike shouted. “See!”

“Yes,” Ismelda whispered and wiped the sweat from my forehead.

Dr. Steel turned and looked at me. “I don't believe it,” he said, “I want to but I don't. Can you do it again? I'll watch.” “I can do it again,” I answered, “I can do it all day long,” and I smiled and pushed the switch again.

“Doctor, the fever's down … perhaps an enema …” a nurse suggested.

“Oh my …”

“Yeah! It's moving!” the kids at the window shouted. They were looking at poor old Tortuga changing colors and groaning as the new storm gathered over it, and they saw it move … ancient dreams, reptilian flesh, cold as ice, now moving to a new found melody.

“Sharp or dull,” Steel asked as he poked along my legs with his needle.

“Some sharp … I think …”

“Yahoooo!” someone shouted by the door.

“Algo es algo, dijo el diablo!” Mike responded and grabbed my leg and shook it. “It moved!”

“Nurse, get the kids out …”

“All right! Everybody out!”

“Down to 99 degrees—”

“Good … good,” Dr. Steel nodded, straightened up, stood there with his stethoscope still dangling from his ears, shook his head, said, “I don't believe it,” but he did, and he looked at me and winked.

I relaxed for the first time since I started straining and when I did my guts seemed to tear loose and a hot, frothy mess spilled on the bed. Gas rumbled through my empty stomach and exploded. The nurse who had just finished cleaning the bed groaned, pulled out the dirty sheet and started again.

“Dull or sharp?”

“Sharp … yes, I'm sure …” I tried to nod, felt the restraint of the cast, felt weak from hunger and pain.

“He farted!” “Damn!”

Tortuga, Tortuga, two by four

Couldn't get to the bathroom door

So he does it on the floor
.

“On the bed!” “Yeah.” The kids laughed, drummed their bedpans and urinals louder and louder.

“At least he's moving.” “Yeah.”

“Out!” the big nurse shouted and grabbed at a young man with a harmonica who was leading the singing. “Out! Right now.”

“Mike, get them out,” the doctor said. “He's okay now. He just needs to rest, something to eat …” He turned to the nurse and told her to clean and powder the bedsores. Mike turned to the kids, repeated what the doctor had just said and they all began to file out quietly.

“Tortuga needs to rest … That's all, just rest …”

“Poor ole Tortuga …”

“Yeah, poor ole Tortuga …”

They went out singing:

Poor ole Tortugaaaaa!

He never got a kissssss …

Pooooor ole Tortuga
,

He don' know whad he misssss …

“I'm sorry,” Dr. Steel said and folded his stethoscope and put it in his pocket, “this won't happen again … Will it, nurse?” he asked the big nurse.

“No, sir! No, sir! But it was the night nurse who was on duty, sir.”

“I don't care who's on duty. You run this ward, and I'm saying this won't happen again. Clear?”

“Yes sir,” the nurse nodded, turned and looked at me with a scowl on her face.

“Look!” one of the aides pointed.

“What?”

“He's peeing …”

“Whad they say?” someone asked from the hall.

“Nothing,” Mike laughed as he went out, “they just said he's peeing, that's all, just taking a good old healthy leak.”

“Peeing turtle pee, I bet.”

“Yeah,” they laughed.

“Oh my.…”

They all laughed, even the nurse who had to pull out the sheet again and start over.

“It's a good sign,” Dr. Steel winked and walked out.

“98.6—”

“See you later, Tortuga!” Mike called from the hallway and the rest of the kids repeated, “Yeah, see you later, Tortuga!” “Try using a urinal!” one of them added and they all laughed.

The nurses finished cleaning me up by powdering the bedsores. Somebody brought me something to eat, which I gulped down with shut eyes because the drug in the shot was already pulling me into sleep … Then they turned me on my stomach so the talcummed sores could dry. Face down, buried against the bed, I fell asleep, dreaming I was a turtle slowly clawing its way across a wide desert … towards a cool, northern mountain lake.

4

The nurse came in and checked my blood pressure and took my temperature every hour. She was a silent woman, cold and precise, so I said nothing but I felt better. The fever was gone, I was eating everything they brought, and the pain from the bedsores was better. But most exciting to me was that I could control the muscle spasms. They weren't spasms anymore, they were actual commands I could send down to my legs and they obeyed. It was an excitement I hadn't felt since the initial paralysis. Then I had tried so hard to make my legs move, and finally I had given up and withdrawn into resignation.

Now there was movement, slight and feeble, but with it returned a sense of hope. I looked out the window at the mountain. I thought of Filomón and what he had said. I thought of my first night at the hospital and the woman in the dreams, Ismelda, the woman who had led me to the springs where we entered the mountain. And Mike? How had he found me? Why? How were they working their way into my new life? In the other hospital I couldn't remember faces. Many people had come to see me, and they had gathered around my bed, looking at me with silent, sad eyes, praying they could lift the paralysis with their pleas to God … and my mother, growing gray before my eyes, hers was the only face I remembered. But nothing they could do or say had cut through that numbing weight of the paralysis as had these strange powers that worked their way at the foot of the mountain …

“You're doing fine, just fine,” Dr. Steel said when he checked me that evening, and he went out shaking his head, making his rounds.

Other boys who lived in the ward dropped by to say hello. Most were my age, polio victims, cripples of every sort, but some were just kids, ten or twelve year olds who lived in a world of their own, raised hell whenever they could but quickly settled down when Mike spoke. He seemed to be the leader in the ward. He was bunking with two other boys, Jerry and Sadsack, and he was trying to get me moved to their room where there was an extra bed. In the meantime I waited, lying alone in the bare room, listening to the rush of sounds that filled the ward in the morning and which settled down as the kids went swimming or to physical therapy or to the classes that were held for those who cared to attend.

There was also a lull during mid-afternoon. I lay quietly and listened to Franco strumming his guitar and singing western or rhythm and blues songs. Somebody told me he looked exactly like Elvis Presley but that he had lost his legs to an incurable disease, so he kept to himself in his room, roaming the halls only at night in his wheelchair, taking old songs and changing the words to tell his story.

He had already composed a song for me. I lay thinking and listening to the words which drifted through the stale, antiseptic air of the ward.

Tortuga was a wounded turtle

Cast in a lonely shell

He thought of heaven

And he dreamed of home

But he had come to hell …

Then Danny came in. “Psst. You awake, Tortuga?”

“What do you want?” I asked. After our first encounter I didn't trust him.

“I just came to see how you are,” he said and moved into my sight. He stood there for a long time, looking at me, mulling something over in his mind, and I felt sorry for him because he was a pathetic kid, dressed in an oversize hospital shirt and holding his withered hand up as if he had to keep it in sight, had to keep asking himself why the hand was drying up and dying on him. His pale yellow eyes darted back and forth, from me to his hand to the window which held the mountain framed as a still life.

“You're lucky,” he said finally, “the doc knows what's the problem … I heard your legs moved … you're lucky.” He looked at the mountain and cursed. “Goddammit, nothing works for me.” He held his hand in front of me, close so I could see the dry wrinkles and scabs which covered it, and I smelled something rancid and dying.

“At first it was only my fingers … They got numb and I couldn't move them … then they began to dry out. I came here, and they brought all sorts of specialists to look at me, and not a one of them could tell me what was the matter … and the curse kept spreading, now it's my whole hand … like cancer, but it ain't cancer, it's just dying … Sonsofbitches can't do nothing for me! But you,” he glared at me, “you listened to those crazy stories Filomón tells about the mountain! And you believed him! Is that why they put you in a shell? Is that why you moved your legs?”

“I don't know,” I answered. “Maybe it was—”

“Bullshit!” he cut me off. “Don't go getting a holier than anything idea about those crazy stories. That nurse is going to fix you. She's going to transfer you to Salomón's ward!”

“Where is that?” I remembered the boy who told the story in my dream.

“That's where they keep the hard core polio cases,” he laughed. “Listen, there's just about every kind of cripple in this place, freaks all of them. They're either bent and twisted with polio or MD or club feet, pigeon toed, curved spines, open spines, birth defects, broken backs, car wrecks, under-nourished kids who can't even stand up, even VD cases, kids that were smashed by their parents, looney cases … every kind of gimp you can imagine is here, somewhere. But in Salomón's ward are the vegetables. Every other kid has a chance, like you, and who knows, hell, they might even find a cure for me … at least I can get around. But back there, that's the end of the line, and that's where you're headed.” He laughed crazily, as if he was glad that I was being transfered, as if some future punishment for me would alleviate his pain, and he walked away before I could question him further.

The rest of the afternoon was very quiet. I slept. The day was warm, the fragrance of the desert filled the room, as if the earth was thawing, and then the sun fell towards the rugged mountain range to the west and everything froze again. A haze from the fires burning in the homes along the river settled over the valley. Tortuga lay frozen and stiff, weak saffron rays glanced off his tired back, but he did not respond to my presence … he did not acknowledge my being.

When Mike showed up he brought Ronco and Sadsack with him. Ronco was nineteen, older than most of us. The nurse kept him isolated in a room to himself. He had a record player, the only one in the ward, and Mike said his walls were covered with pin-ups. His favorite was a large poster of Marilyn Monroe, the most beautiful woman who ever lived, he said, because she was the kind of woman who could give you loving whether you were Joe DiMaggio or whether you were a poor crippled bastard dragging around in a wheelchair.

Sadsack was a polio case. He was tall and the disease had left him uncoordinated. His arms and legs flopped around like used rubber bands. He had the sad, wrinkled face of a bloodhound, and a mop of thin hair which was always sticking up. Folds of loose skin fell over his sleepy eyes. He was a complainer.

“They're moving me to another ward,” I said.

Mike looked at me and nodded. “Yeah, news travels fast on the grapevine—”

“But why?”

“Ah the Nurse can be a bitch,” Ronco said hoarsely. The first tracheotomy they had done on him years ago had been done by a careless surgeon so when he spoke his voice sounded like a very rough imitation of Cagney.

“She likes her name spelled with a capital N,” Sadsack said, “so it's yes Nurse or no Nurse … she runs a tight ward.”

“I guess she didn't like being chewed out by Steel, so she's taking it out on you … but don't worry, we'll go to Steel and get you back here.”

“Where is this other ward?” I asked.

“It's down the way,” Mike motioned.

“It's Salomón's ward,” Danny reminded me, “it's a garden full of vegetables, a real vegetable patch!” he laughed.

“Da, dat me-means he lib-lib in dah-dah Gar-garden!” Mudo croaked in approval, his thick, swollen tongue barely unravelling the words. I knew already he was one of Danny's stoogies.