Tortuga (20 page)

“Well, that's all there is to it,” Ronco grinned. “It's his opponent's shot. The thing you have to remember is that shot was made at the beginning of the universe, and during all that time the balls have been exploding out across the table, settling into galaxies, universes, worlds which grew little plants on them then men like us … but for God and his opponent all that time has been only a few minutes, and they're so big they can't see us crawling around those little worlds that serve their pool game … it's just a game to them. They're standing across the smoke-filled room from each other, eyeballing each other, trying to hustle each other. It's big stakes they're playing for up there, control of all space and time, not just us little piss ants on this world … God tried to set up a few rules to play the game, but if that other guy outshoots him then it's the end, cause his opponent don't care for rules … He just wants to bring everything crashing down!”

“My, my,” Billy mumbled, “I never thought of it that way …”

“You been reading too much science fiction, pardner,” Buck grinned. “Why everybody knows God's not a city slicker, a pool hustler! Why he's a cowboy, and all those stars are his cattle. And when he starts the round-up, watch out! There's going to be hell to pay, he's going to put his brand on everybody, rich or poor, saint or sinner, there's going to be jangling of spurs for music and dust and turmoil … but God's going to watch out for all his dogies, you bet. Yahoooo! And I'm going to be riding with him!” He tossed his hat in the air, and because he was sitting up he came close to tumbling off the bed.

“Watch it!” Mike shouted. Buck balanced himself, put his hat back on and sat back in bed. He looked like a mummy with a cowboy hat on.

“I think God's an old guy just sitting on top of a mountain, all by himself, just watching us do our crazy things,” Mike said and made up a story for the occasion. “Once in a while he gets lonely and he comes down to earth to mess around … that's where we get all these virgin births from. And as soon as he gets tired he hightails it back up the mountain to rest …”

“He's supposed to have everything he wants, right?” Sadsack asked, “so why should he come down?”

“Ah, a beautiful woman can draw even God off the mountain,” Mike smiled. “Their little garden is what makes the world go around. Ask Tortuga … Ismelda's got him ready to climb out of the bed and get it on!” They laughed.

“Hey, Tortuga, what do you think of all these stories?”

I didn't answer. I didn't know or I wasn't ready to answer. I knew I had prayed and there had been no answer, that faith in the old powers was as dry as dust. I knew I had to find something to hold on to, we all did, but I wasn't quite sure what it was. The hospital and the desert which surrounded it seemed to be hopeless, and beyond that the world I had known before the hospital seemed to have only pockets of love fighting against a huge machinery which crushed everything. Here, at least, there was Ismelda, and Salomón, Mike and the other kids, and the doctors who helped …

“… You gotta remember, God doesn't think like us.”

“Oooh my—”

“He doesn't see good and evil the way we do … in fact he doesn't care about things like that. He's more interested in just running the universe …”

“Then he doesn't run our destiny?”

“No. In fact, he's busy enough trying to find his own destiny—”

“He runs mine!” Danny shouted. He started shaking and scratching his arm furiously. “I don't care what you say, but I know God runs my destiny! He tells me what to do! It's like the story Salomón told about the visitors from outer space who came down a long time ago and wired all the peoples' heads so they could control them! Well that's how I feel about God! He planted a little radio in my brain and I can hear his signals from heaven! Glory be! Hell-a-loo-jah! Sometimes I hear ringing in my ears, and I stop whatever I'm doing and I answer, ‘Is that you God? Is that you?'”

“Take it easy, Danny! Quiet down or you'll get sick!” Mike grabbed him and tried to settle him down, but Danny squirmed like a fish to get free. White spittle formed at the edges of his twisted lips.

“I'm his radio and he's calling me!” Danny shouted, almost hysterical. “I will do his will! Come in, God! Come in! I hear you! Glory be! Glory be!” he shouted uncontrollably.

Mike couldn't hold him. So he hauled back and slapped him then pushed him against the bed and held him down.

“Take it easy, Danny! Get hold of yourself!”

Danny quit shouting. When he saw he couldn't break Mike's hold he relaxed and slid to the floor, whimpering crazily that he could hear God's signals from heaven. “I can hear the ringing in my ears,” he cried.

We were silent and he settled down. Then Ronco said, “Danny, you can't believe everything you hear. You hear wild stories and you twist them up inside, you twist them to suit you. Don't you realize, if things don't make any sense then maybe they just don't, but don't go around trying to change them so they fit your thinking. That's what's getting you in trouble.” He turned to us. “Last year we saw a movie about atoms in science class, and this crazy teacher tried to tell us that there's empty space between the electrons and the nucleus of the atom … he compared it to the space between the planets and the sun. So, he said, if all atoms are mostly empty space, then you should be able to walk through a wall by squeezing your atoms through the empty space, right? Well, it's stupid, but not for Danny. He tried it. For a whole month he went around walking into walls. Broke his nose twice!”

“The worst part of it was that he had all the other kids doing it too,” Mike added. “Man, once a weirdo starts believing in something watch out! They're dangerous!”

“Someday I will be able to walk through a wall, and nobody will see me,” Danny said and stood up. He was still trembling. He raised his withered arm and wiped his nose.

“You okay?” Mike asked.

“Yeah,” Danny answered and dusted his pants.

“I didn't mean to rough you up, but you were getting wild—”

“I hear things,” Danny muttered.

“Well, an atom ain't space,” Buck said, “it's just an electric buzz … that's what you're hearing, Danny, your own atoms buzzing with electricity.”

“Could be,” Mike said, “everything's made of electricity—”

“Our bodies, our bones, our blood?”

“Oh my.”

“Sure, we're just a walking battery, charged up with a positive and negative pole. When your battery runs down you get sick. Then you gotta charge it up, get the flow goin' again—”

“That's what Tortuga's doin' with the mountain, gettin' charged up, and with Ismelda and KC?”

“Maybe … but you have to do it. You gotta find that opposite charge that will get you going. That's what love is, attaching like a magnet!”

“Híjola! I can believe that!” Ronco laughed, “I got a positive pole looking for a charge all the time! Last night I dreamed I was in a cathouse where all the mamasotas were big and fat and juicy!”

“Ah, you're making it up!” Sadsack interrupted.

“I'm not making it up!” Ronco shot back, “It was a dream! It was real!”

“Bull! Bet you played with yourself and now you wanna make a big story out of it!”

“Isn't that what we all do?” Buck grinned. “We make big stories out of little jack-offs!”

We laughed and they went on arguing if dreams were real or not, but I wasn't listening. I was thinking about my own dreams, dreams I couldn't share with anyone. In the empty days and lonely nights that flowed over me like water I had sketched out the dreams of my destiny, and they all led to Ismelda's door. She was the woman I had met in many forms since I arrived at the hospital, and in some strange yet unfathomable way she was all the women who had touched my past and forced me to become a man. My mother. The old goat woman who nursed me. The girls who shared their first holy communion with me … there was a power there which filled my fever, but which I couldn't touch. Ismelda seemed to know something of that past, and she knew about the mountain.

In my dreams we sat on the river bank and I sang to her. She smiled as the river gurgled past us. Her long, dark hair covered our naked bodies. Later I tried to remember the words of the song, but I couldn't. I only knew it was a song of love. And when she came with Josefa to make the beds and mop the floors I wanted to tell her about my dream, but I couldn't. She took good care of me, always giving of herself, never forcing what I could not yet offer. And that is why I was so bothered, because I had nothing to give in return. Sometimes when I wanted to explain my love a lump formed at my throat and when I shouted only angry screams came out.

“What's the matter?” Josefa asked me when we were alone, “Don't you know she has fallen in love with you—”

“I know,” I whispered.

“But you're afraid,” she said, “well that's natural. You are afraid to tell her you love her, because you feel you have nothing to give … well, for a girl like Ismelda that is not important for now … She knows you need time to get well, she realizes your wounds go deep, and just like the body builds scars and callouses around its cuts and sores so the soul must build an invisible shell in times of pain and loss … We know the acid of life burns deep and hot, my God, we have been here a long, long time, and we have been in all the wards—” She stopped suddenly and looked at me.

“But you have to be careful,” she cautioned, “that you don't shut yourself away forever. Ismelda's love is not an acid, but a cool liquid which heals. Her love is like the curing water of the mountain and its magic can lift you out of that smelly shell of yours. She is a strong girl, that one, and sensitive. She's got magic in her fingers, and she can help you break that shell you're building, but you have to help her, you have to meet her halfway … otherwise, it's no good.”

I knew what Josefa said was true. Ismelda's touch was magic on my paralyzed nerves. She rubbed my numb muscles every day with the ointment she said was made of goat fat and sweet herbs, and the massages soothed away the pain I felt after therapy. But I had nothing to give her in return, because my only drive was a selfish one, and that was to get out of the hospital as quickly as I could. Franco's song interrupted my thoughts:

Chains of love are rattling
,

And lonely hearts are humming

Here and there, and everywhere

There's going to be some loving …

And Salomón said, yes Tortuga, love can be as devastating as the straitjacket of paralysis
…
it can numb a person and make him useless … but as mad a force as it is, we must trust it. In the end it is the light of the sun, it is the path Ismelda walks, it is the melody of song …

“Look, Tortuga,” Mike said sternly when he got wind of my budding romance, “I don't care what you do or how you feel, that's your business, but don't ever forget that there's only one rule you gotta keep in front of all the rest, and that's to get out of this godforsaken place! Don't let anything else get in the way of that! Get out! Escape! You owe it to yourself; you owe it to us!”

“But why me?” I asked, angry at Mike for reminding me of the one, strict commandment he lived by, and suddenly angry at myself for asking “why me” again.

“Look around you,” he whispered, “what is it that all these people have in common? The doctors, the nurses, the aides and orderlies, the janitors, everyone! Look closely, and you'll discover their secret! They're all cripples, Tortuga, in one way or another they're all cripples! Samson can't talk, Maloney's nearly blind, the Nurse has a slight limp, you can barely see it, but it's there. Look at all the janitors, everyone of them either limps, walks with braces or has a missing arm like Corto. Even the Director is a former polio case, oh he tries to hide it with those fancy suits he wears and by staying locked up in his office, but he's got the polio hands all right.”

“So?” I asked, “So what? What does it mean?” He drew closer to the bed so no one else could hear him.

“I began to wonder about it when I first came here,” he said, “so I did some snooping. One day I sneaked into the Director's office, there's where all the doctors' files are finally stored. Just for the hell of it, I flipped through a few names I knew, like Samson's and Maloney's and Speed-o's, and I found that at one time they had all been patients here! I mean, I was surprised! This friggin' hospital's been here a long, long time, right? So I began to wonder who in the hell has ever left it. I asked Dr. Steel why some of the patients are allowed to work here after they're released, and he said it was common practice in most places like this to allow a kind of rehabilitation time … if they're not ready to go home, if they think they can't handle it, then they can stay around and do odd jobs till they're ready to go. But I don't think any of them go … maybe some drift down to the town below … but I don't know how many try to cross the desert on their own. My guess is very few … that's why I made the rule. Right then I knew we had to get out, and so every new kid that comes in gets burned with the rule: Get out!”

I was quiet for a long time, thinking about what he had said. It was true, though, that everyone was crippled. In one way or another everybody in the hospital was marked.

“And who's made it?” I asked.

Mike shook his head. “I can't think of anyone,” he said, “I can't truthfully think of anyone. Some have gotten home leave, like Ronco, he gets to go home every summer, but he keeps winding up back here …” He cleared his throat. “You know they make it easy to stay. Hell, we have everything we need! Good medical care, good food, school, swimming pool, entertainment, everything! It's like a holiday in hell, right? After a while you get used to being here …”