Rainy Season (15 page)

“Isn’t there a clinic on the Zone? There’s got to be something else,” I plead. “There has to be.”

“Too far to drive across the isthmus.
Cristóbal
isn’t too far; it’s just downtown a ways.” Ted turns the ignition; his mind’s made up. Charlie doesn’t speak a word against the plan since Mom and Dad still aren’t involved in it, and so I’m silent. I’ve never seen a downtown hospital, but I imagine cracked concrete floors and exposed lightbulbs and mean-faced old Spanish-gibbering nurses.
Santo Cristóbal.
It sounds scary.

Ted turns the engine over and the truck lurches forward. I wonder what he’s thinking; Ted, who thinks that all locals are out to steal and swindle the Zonians, now having to drive downtown to get help from them. I’m scared for Charlie and me, too. What if we get to the hospital and people start shouting, “Gringos go home!” I feel sick to my stomach, thinking about it.

We turn onto the
Tumba Muerto
and then swerve onto the underpass, under the bright cigarette billboard, and through to a part of the highway I’ve never seen, never thought I’d see.
Peligroso,
even Marita is quick to warn. Not the right place to be driving at night.

The road’s empty, though, except for a few smelly eighteen-wheeler trucks. Many of the highway streetlights are smashed, but there’s enough light from the moon to read the highway signs and the white lines in the road. I bet it’s way after midnight by now.

Marita points out directions as we keep exiting and getting on different little stretches of the highway, until we have turned onto a lifeless section of downtown, the other end from where I’ve ever been when Mom and Alexa take me shopping. This section is darker; there are no shops, only dark rows of jammed-together old buildings. The air is weighted with dirty smells of exhaust fumes and rotten fruit. I try not to breathe too much. I don’t like the idea of breathing up anything more than pure air.

I see a dog, his stomach stretched bone-skinny, snuffling at a plastic bag on the side of the road. A woman, wearing a pink dress even brighter than Alexa’s lipstick, is leaning in the door of a red-lit bar. A car pulls up from behind, its radio turned on loud enough to frighten me, and it’s windows are blacked out so I can’t tell who’s riding inside it. I wonder if I’m safe, out here in the nasty open air in the back of Ted’s truck. Locals shoot at MP’s all the time—to them, I’d probably pass as target practice.

When
Santo Cristóbal
looms up in front of us, looking more like a church than a hospital, I try to resist jumping out of the moving truck and running the rest of the way. A stone statue of Balboa, standing with his sword drawn at the gate entrance, seems both comforting and fearsome. Marita jumps out of the truck before any of us, Charlie heavy in her arms as she lugs him to the emergency room door. She’s shouting in Spanish. I recognize the words
help
and
child,
but that’s all.

Lights burst forward with the swinging doors, a group of people dressed in green shirts and pants swoop down on little Marita, and I watch as Charlie is picked up and thrust inside on one of those metal wheely beds. Ted and I jog behind, into the bright lights and uniforms and toy-colored plastic furniture of the emergency waiting room. Marita is already speaking to a man—a doctor, I guess—who jots words quickly on his chart. The doctor touches Charlie’s leg and shines a pricking light into Charlie’s blood-crumbly mouth. Then he pries Charlie’s hand away from his eye to squint in there, too. He speaks softly to Charlie, who keeps his face in one expression, trying to be tough.

I bet he’s thinking, “Indians don’t cry, Indian’s don’t cry,” which is what Emily and Charlie and I always used to say to each other if one of us got hurt, to force ourselves to be tougher. A long time ago, Emily had read somewhere that Indians never show emotion in public, and we all decided this was pretty cool. Later, when Charlie and I were in the hospital together, we would whisper it to each other. Charlie looks at me now.

“Indians.” He rolls his eyes. I know what he means—even if you don’t want to think, “Indians don’t cry,” every time you’re in pain, you just end up thinking it and then it’s like you
have
to be like an Indian. I have the exact same problem.

“Heya, Ted,” Charlie whispers. He sticks his hand out from under the cover and swipes at Ted’s arm. “You come in with me? Lane’s a wimp about blood, of course.”

“You know it, Charleston. I’m going to have to back up your Lightning Gods story, right?”

“Yeah.” Charlie laughs. I wonder what’s with Ted and this Lightning God thing. It must be some weird Zonie legend. Zonie’s all seem to like lies and legends more than religion, even if they’re technically Jewish or Catholic or whatever.

“Call the Duchess,” Ted orders. He fishes deep in his pocket and shakes a mound of silver change into my hand. “And get yourself and Marita a drink or something.”

“’Bye, Lane.” Charlie coughs as he is wheeled down the hall.

“He’s okay.” Ted’s voice is firm. Marita and I wait until they disappear around the corner before we return to the waiting room. I find the phones in the corner.

I pick up the receiver and slide a dime into the box to dial home. The connection’s awful—the roar of a noise that sounds like the ocean almost drowns out the ringing; once, twice, three times. I count to fifteen before hanging up.

There’s an ancient-looking vending machine standing beside the phone. I feed change into the mouth of the machine, pressing the buttons for a candy bar, but I do the numbers wrong and the machine drops a package of popcorn instead. I buy two colas for Marita and me, and there’s still change to drop in my pocket.

I tear open the popcorn as I walk back to the line of connecting chairs where Marita sits and offer the cola and bag to her. She pops the can and digs out a handful of popcorn.

“¿Vìenen el Señor y la Señora?”

“No, I couldn’t get hold of anyone. The party must be too loud or something.”

“Ay—so many people, what a mess.” She knuckles her hand to her chin and we sit, drinking our colas and passing the bag of popcorn between us. It’s stale and the kernels creak as I chew them into my back teeth. Salty, too.

“We’ll need the right car to get back on base,” I mention. “I don’t know what we’re going to do if we can’t get hold of Mom and Dad, and I feel weird about calling up their friends. I mean, it’s so late and everything.”

“No te preocupes.
Don’t worry.” She yawns. I slide back and I close my eyes.

When Charlie and I were in a hospital together, last time, I had liked the curtain divider all the way closed and Charlie liked it half-closed, and we kept yanking it back and forth between us, not talking but both of us just listening to the jingle of the curtain rungs. Back and forth, back and forth, it would move, until one nurse on duty threatened to move me down the hall.

We stopped yanking the curtain after that, switching the battle to clicking our remote controls to the shared television back and forth to different channels. Click, click, click, neither of us saying a word to the other. Sometimes the fights would drag on so long that they were almost funny. Fighting with Charlie is one thing I’ve always counted on to make me feel really intense, really alive. He sure knows how to get to me.

Marita sits down next to me.
“Dios mío,
I hate hospitals.”

“Me too.” I close my eyes and yawn, wishing for bed. Marita nudges me.

“Five to win,” she says. She throws a piece of popcorn from her last handful up in the air and catches it neatly with a crocodile snap of her mouth. I try to copy her but mine bounces off my nose and under my feet. Marita flicks up another piece, and again, another perfect catch. Two to zero.

“Keep on your eye,” she instructs, pointing to her own eye. I flip up a kernel, open my eyes wide, and it drops squarely into my mouth.

“Perfecto.”
Marita claps.
“¡Fabuloso!”
She throws her next piece a good three feet into the air and it dive bombs right in.

“Fabuloso,”
I laugh. What a Charlie game—fun and stupid, and of course there’s no way I’ll win. My next piece lands in my hair. She beats me five to two.

Marita folds the bag into a square once it’s empty and then saves the square in the pocket of her jeans shorts; why, I don’t know, but I don’t ask.

W
E DOZE IN THE
waiting room for over an hour before Ted appears.

“Well, it’s a nice messy break, Charlie style,” he informs us with a tired smile. He rubs his fingers over his eyebrows so that they bristle up. “And, for our side dishes, we have bruised ribs and a split lip. I wouldn’t recommend the oral surgery tonight, but the scraped—”

“Okay, that’s enough. I don’t think I can listen to all the details.” I put my hand on my stomach. “As long as he’s going to be all right.”

“He’s okay. Nothing that won’t heal. Come on and see for yourself.”

Marita and I follow Ted down the hall and up a flight of stairs. This hospital doesn’t look too different from an army one; just shabbier. The walls are dark mustardy colored, though; not white, and the scarred linoleum floor curls up where it meets the wall. Still, it reminds me of a regular hospital in that every molecule of air I inhale smells like the word
sick.

Ted nods to a couple of nurses standing together at the other end of the hall and pushes a door open. The room is windowless and the boxed air is a bad mixture of vinegar and air freshener smells. Charlie lies propped up on the one narrow bed; chin down, arms crossed, and shoulders hunched up high enough to touch his ears. His ankle-to-thigh leg cast, in the uneven light, throws a chunky shadow on the wall.

“Six weeks of this monster.” Ted walks to the foot of the bed and raps the plaster with his knuckles. “Charleston, you’re sure not built for speed right now.” Marita makes a soft clucking sound and presses her hand on Charlie’s cheek. He flinches.

“Don’t,” he says. “I hurt too much.”

I move closer to the bed and curl my hands around its scratched metal side bar, leaning closer to study Charlie as if he’s an exhibit at the zoo. He raises his head and looks at me hard. He’s wearing a silver metal cup that looks like a sieve taped over one eye, and a couple of black stitches have taken over his top lip.

“Zorro.” I point. “You have a mustache.”

“Ted says I’ll have a mean scar.” Charlie looks at Ted, who nods.

“Like a pirate. Charlie Hook” Ted’s smile turns into a yawn. “Okay guys, I’m heading back to the Zone to trade the truck for Dee’s car with the pass sticker. Then I’ll cruise back and pick up the three of you. It’ll be a while. Are you cool to hang out?” I give him the thumbs-up. He waves, and we watch him go. Marita hovers a minute, then she leaves, too, drawn out to the hall by the sound of Spanish-speaking nurses.

“I come back,” she says vaguely. “Just be out here.”

“Do the light, Lane?” Charlie asks when it’s just us. I flip off the light switch, relieved at the darkness that fills the ugly bareness of the room.

“I never got hold of Mom and Dad.” I sit carefully on the edge of Charlie’s bed. “No one was answering the phone. What are you going to tell them when we get home?”

“Something. I’m still thinking of the right story.”

“It makes the bike accident last month look like nothing.”

“Yeah, this is something.”

“Sure is. Something else.”

We are quiet together for a long time, so long that I think he has fallen asleep, and when he breaks the silence, I’m startled and I realize I must have been half asleep, too.

“Lane, you think I’m crazy?”

I think about all the people I know who are crazy. There’s old Mrs. Hibbits, who lives in a big spooky house near Mina and Pops and who lurks in a shrunken shadow behind her mildewed kitchen curtains. She’ll be silent for hours and then suddenly yell, “Everybody get away! And no bikes on my lawn!” even if it’s only you, without a bike, walking on the sidewalk not anywhere near her lawn. Definitely crazy is Michael Ambrosia in my grade, who staples the wings of moths and butterflies together and once even stapled the skin of his own two fingers to each other, but I was out sick that day; Steph had to phone me and squeal all about each disgusting detail. And you can’t forget those crazies you read about, like the man who lives in a house with no food and fifty-six dogs until the Humane Society finds out, and then you see his picture in the paper and think,
Would I have known he was crazy if I’d bumped into him on the street?

“No, you’re not crazy, Charlie,” I tell him. “You’ve just been in a bad mood for a while is all.”

“Sometimes I feel crazy,” he says. “Because I think I have a certain feeling in common with crazy people.”

“A feeling like what?”

“A feeling that nothing’s too scary. Nothing, not one single thing is
too
scary to see, or do, or find out about. So you might as well try it. You know what I mean?”

“I guess,” I say slowly. “But it’s hard for me to know
exactly,
since I’m scared of everything.”

“I don’t know if that’s so great either.” Charlie sighs. “Ted was cool through the whole time in the emergency room. He just kept cracking jokes, making me laugh. I kind of hope he’ll stop calling me Charleston, though. Charlie Hook’s a little better.”

“He likes renaming people.” I grin.

“No, not everyone. Just our family,” Charlie points out. “You know, this might sound weird and sort of—I don’t know, but sometimes, like today when we were driving in the truck and getting the wood for the fort and stuff, I was sort of pretending a little that he was my older brother.”

“Sometimes, in a way, I do that too,” I admit. Charlie smiles, and looks relieved. “But I mean, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing; in a way it’s lucky for us. To have an older brother. I mean, it’s not a replacement for anything, it’s just Ted, it’s who he is.”

“Right.” Charlie agrees. He coughs and stares up at the ceiling and he twists up the covers around and around in his fingers. His body is tense by the thoughts pressing out from inside him. Once he opens his mouth and then closes it into a frown. “Lane, I need to break the rule, okay?” he says finally. “Just for a couple minutes.”