The Healer's War (21 page)

"Xinhdy died, Kitty."

"Died?" I asked stupidly. "What do you mean she died? C'mon, Sarah, get real. I'm talking about Xinh, in the last bed? She couldn't have died. All she had was a broken hip, for Christ's sake. She wasn't even on the seriously ill list. She wasn't authorized to die." I know that sounds like a bad joke to an outsider, but we had a seriously ill list and a very seriously ill list. If a patient was not on the very seriously ill list before he died, staff members were considered to be derelict in their duty.

Sarah didn't answer me, but Mai emerged from the bathroom. This time more than her hair was wet.

"Mai . . . ?" I began, still stroking Ahn's back and shoulders. Mai looked away, then covered her face with her hands, and I knew there was no mistake.

But there had to be. When I left the ward the night before, Xinhdy was perfectly okay. Well, she was restless and was sweating more than usual. She had a very slight temp, which I charted. I told Sarah in report I thought Xinh might be coming down with the flu. She'd been so cranky all evening Meyers had asked very carefully if she might be on her period. She kept thrashing around, shifting from one position to another, demanding that things be moved to accommodate each shift. This from the most self-sufficient bedfast patient on the ward. When the other Vietnamese visited, she complained to them in a loud voice until they left again, disgruntled. Still, I figured it was just a little upset. Hospitalized people can get colds and the flu too. My God, had I missed the beginnings of some horrible fast-killing Vietnamese strain of pneumonia? The empty bed stared blankly back at me. I expected a gurney to be wheeled in at any moment with Xinh in her hip spica cast leaning up on one elbow to smile and wave hello like a Rose Bowl princess as she passed the other beds on the ward.

"What was it, Sarah?" I asked. "Did she-was it some kind of flu? Were you able to get Joe?"

"Not till it was too late," she said. "He was over at that generals'

mess at I Corps and didn't get back till later. Captain Schlakowski came over at eight and checked her but thought she was okay. Then we got three new patients on the GI side, and when I came back to do

'dn'ght meds Xinh was having trouble breathing. I was taking her mi I pulse when she arrested. I started CPR while Ryan called a code and tossed me the ambu bag. The team got here right away but it was just too late."

"How could she arrest?" I asked. "She's twenty-two years old."

"I know, I know," she said, her voice getting softer and softer. "Joe came in to pronounce her. He said it was a fat embolism. Sometimes it happens with bad hip injuries who are bedridden for a long time. I never heard of that before, did you?"

"No-l-where's Joe?"

"In surgery with one of the GIs. I don't know how he can do it, Kitty.

He was more upset than anybody. Except maybe Xe. He woke up when the team brought the crash cart and I guess he was confused by all the commotion. He tried to get out of bed by himself and fell, then kept crawling toward us. It was awful," and now Sarah started to cry and I put my free arm around her. "I'm filling out an incident reportnow.

"Old guy's more trouble than he's worth, isn't he?" I said, but my voice cracked.

I didn't cry until toward the end of the day, though. You aren't supposed to cry in front of the patients, but that wasn't it. I just couldn't believe she was gone. Well, gone, yeah, but dead? I kept wandering back to her bed. The silence, without Vietnamese TV, was oppressive. Mai simply made herself scarce except when she had specifically assigned duties. The other patients slept, except for That, when I did her treatment, and Ahn, who clung to me and wanted me to carry him all day.

The day passed in a haze until mail call. I opened a care package from home when I got back to the ward. A nest of fat, bright yarn hair ties lay in the bottom and I pulled them out. My first thought was Xinhdy will love these; and then I looked at her stripped bed and aping bedside table. My throat clamped down. I dumped Ahn in his wheelchair and bolted for the nurses' bathroom on the GI side. I don't know how long it took me to stop crying, but when I did, the fog had lifted and the pain had definitely set in. I wish I could say that I nobly comforted everybody else, but we all handled it as we handled most things in Vietnam, isolating ourselves from one another until we could convince ourselves that the anguish was nonsense, that war was a tough situation and you just had to do the best you could. The patients slept. Mai went home early. The corpsmen and Sergeant Baker furiously cleaned the ward as if the President were visiting the next day. Joe was a pain in the ass when he made rounds, ordering all kinds of useless things for patients he hadn't done more than cursory exams on for months.

On Monday, Sergeant Baker plopped a wad of R&R pamphlets on the desk in front of me. "Forms are right there, Lieutenant. Pick your spot, fill

'em out, and get the hell away from here while you still got the chance."

I leafed through them. The waters of the Great Barrier Reef looked abnormally blue, the mountains of Japan steep, and I already had a camera and a stereo coming from the Pacex catalog. As for the shopping of Singapore and Hong Kong, who needed sleazy silk clothes or outdated beaded sweaters? I couldn't work up any enthusiasm, yet I knew that Sarge was right, I needed to leave, and soon.

Heron was leaning against Xe's side rails when I returned from passing meds to the new GI casualties that day. He looked tired and ungainly, his body angling off in several directions to bring his face close to the still one of the shrunken old man. Xe's left hand fluttered like a moth until it lit in the medic's palm. As I approached them, the old man's eyes opened. His face was agonized as he looked up at Heron, like a dog asking to be put to sleep.

Without turning around, Heron asked, "How long has he been like this?"

"Since last night. He fell out of bed. He was trying to-urn, he was-"

I broke off and bit my lip, swallowed, and continued, "One of our long-term patients died last night. She was-a friend of Xe's. I think he was probably so scared for her he forgot he couldn't walk-"

"Who was it?"

"Xinhdy-Xinh. The girl in the last bed. It was-a sort of freaky thing.

My voice died away as my throat closed off again. "I think -I think he's grieving-"

"That's putting it mildly," Heron said bitterly. Then he turned to face me. "Sorry, McCulley. But you have no idea how special this man is."

"I'm starting to. You've spoken of it before. And-some things have happened."

"Like the deal with the men on the other side of the ward?"

"Heron, I want you to know it wasn't that I didn't mean to help Xe. But I saw Meyers coming and I still had to dress Dickens's legs and I don't think the men would have really-"

He gave me a disgusted look. "Of course they would have. But I understand when you've got two patients who both need you, your inclination would be to stay with the white guy."

"That's a goddamn lie," I said.

"Okay, okay, cool it. Can you get someone to relieve you? Good. Theri.

let's go for a nice walk. If you really want to know about Xe, I'll tell you. But I don't want to talk anymore in front of him and I don't much like spending time in rooms full of people. It makes me jumpy."

He stopped, said something in soft Vietnamese to Xe, and bowed slightly.

The old man wearily inclined his head and closed his eyes, his hands crossed on the amulet in the gesture I'd seen so often. Only this time it reminded me of the classic pose of a corpse holding a lily.

I let Sergeant Baker know I was going to be off duty for a few minutes and led Heron through the screen door at the back of the ward, through the curtain of rain draining off the roof of the building and onto the streaming sidewalk between the perimeter fence and the back row of Quonset hut wards. It wasn't raining hard then, but we were both wet in patches before either of us spoke again. A cool green smell waited in from the perimeter, of ozone and fresh growth.

Outside I saw that Heron was in worse shape than I was, though not as bad as Xe. His eyes were infrared maps, and in the blue circles lining the sockets a large vein jumped. His mustache, waxed to ferocious points like the toes of Turkish slippers, twitched.

"Heron, I do care about Xe and I wouldn't have let anything more happen to him, you've got to believe that. I guess I just don't think on my feet that quickly and Meyers and Feyder were quicker. But I'm getting ready to go on R&R. Can Marge or someone on the ward contact you if anything happens to Xe?"

He shook his head dismally. "Nope. That's why I came over today. To say good-bye. I'm being reassigned to the field next week. I got in a little trouble I couldn't talk my way out of."

"Was it with drugs? Because I know you use pot-I saw you with Meyers and Feyder. . . ."

"Did you?" He looked mildly amused. "Is this a bust?"

"Come off it. What I mean is, you use drugs, well, pot anyway, you have access. I just need to know. The drugs aren't part of this power of Xe's you're talking about, are they? I mean, you don't have to be on something to see it? He doesn't, like, give people something . . ."

He stared me down. "What do you think?"

"I don't know what to think. You tell me Xe is some kind of native doctor and I've seen him get hurt twice trying to help other people, but the experiences I've had with him were like how I've heard LSD trips described. So when I saw you pushing pot to my corpsman and one of my patients, it made me wonder, you know?"

He looked down at his foot and nodded, his lips compressed. "Yeah, well.

The smoking's got nothing to do with Xe, but I'll tell you how that is for me. I think we need a little light anesthetic sometimes to get through this war. A man who's good and stoned isn't so uptight he's going to go shooting up whole villages, you bic? But that's my thing.

Xe doesn't need drugs for the kind of high he generates." He turned his back on me as if he had had the last word, and started walking back toward the ward.

I walked backward until I caught up with him, passed him, faced him. The sun came out behind him and I had to squint up. His lantern jaw shuttled back and forth beneath the pointy mustache. "Fine. I won't argue with you. Listen to me a minute, okay? Let me tell you why I even asked about drugs."

I told him about the ball of multicolored light around Xe and about the day I'd worn the amulet. "But was it really just that I was sick, or did I see something? Father O'Rourke said it could have been auras. Is that right? And if it is, why did I see them on everybody that one day when I wore the thingy he has around his neck, but then the other time I just saw his aura, but brighter, without wearing the necklace?"

"He allowed you to wear the amulet?"

"He insisted. He was going to surgery, and Xinh-l-he told her he wanted me to wear it if he was going to take it off."

"And you saw colors?"

I nodded.

"Shit. I wore it once, too, and I didn't see a damned thing. He's talked about you before, but he never let on that you'd worn the amulet.

The way he explained it to me, the amulet is a sort of magnifying glass.

It makes the auras of other people clearer to him, although he can see them, of course, without its help. But with it, he perceives physical and spiritual information about people that helps him heal them."

"I don't get it," I said. "It's usually pretty clear what's wrong with my patients, but I can't do anything about it just because I know what's wrong

"Maybe not, but he can. The way I understand it, the amulet also amplifies his aura so he can use his energy to help someone else's.

Before he got hurt he traveled all over the north part of the countrynobody ever gave him shit, not VC, not NVA, not ARVNS. Because he knew how to read them, how to heal the folks around, so that they always protected him from the hard-core badasses. Too fuckin' bad mortar shells don't have all that much of an aura." His voice was bitter again.

"How about the night I saw the ball of light, then?" I asked. "I wasn't wearing the amulet."

But he'd had enough of my questions and looked at me as if I were a sister who'd gotten more than her share of cake at his birthday party.

He shrugged. "You said you were sick. You figure it out." And he returned to the ward to say a good-bye to Xe that I suppose both of them must have known was final.

When I dreamed that night it wasn't about R&R or about Xinhdy or Tony. I dreamed about Xe. I couldn't remember much except that he was floating around in a big balloon and seemed to be looking for something. I had the feeling he was looking for Heron, but I also knew, the way you do in dreams, that that wasn't quite right. And ihen I thought it might be me he was looking for and I wanted to tell him where I was, but Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock was hiding in the jungle somewhere with a rifle and if she found out I was watching that balloon instead of being back on the ward, she'd shoot me and make sure I wouldn't get my Bronze Star either.

I went to Taiwan for R&R. After Xinh's death and my cheerful chat with Heron, I couldn't bear to stay in Vietnam one extra minute.

As soon as my papers were processed and Marge had rearranged the schedule, Sarge drove me out to the airport. Ahn rolled over on his stomach and wouldn't say good-bye to me, but That squeezed my hand and Mai handed me a folded paper fan. "Airplane too hot," she explained, fanning herself with her hand.

At the airport, the NCO in charge of the R&R flights said no way could he get me out. I started feeling panicky. It was one day of my leave just sitting there. I told him to send me anyplace, anyplace at all, just get me out of country. He found one seat on a plane to Taipei. I didn't have the faintest idea what I'd do in Taiwan. The corpsmen told me proudly of their exploits and showed me photos of their bedroombound dates, but I was damned if I was going to spend my little taste of freedom from the 83rd in one lousy room.