Criminals (4 page)

S
omeone said, “At this point, all religions are cultural treasure.”

It was an older woman in a batik halter dress, with skin tanned dark as that of the waiters, if not silky and luminous like theirs. This was a party in a garden with lanterns. She was English, maybe she was the hostess.

She gave Amy's hand a downward yank when they were introduced and turned to John. She was saying that before she came she had sat herself down to do her reading, and made her husband do the same. Some of the new arrivals, the wives in particular, had no idea. They were surprised to get off the plane and find themselves in a Muslim culture. Though there was more to it, of course, than Islam. “I drove myself here tonight! I drove the Federal Highway in that awful car!” So she was not the hostess. “Our driver is sick. Why? He saw the Penanggalan and it put him to bed.”

The Penanggalan was a ghost, a head that flew, trailing intestines. “I have no doubt he saw it!” the suntanned woman said, shaking her finger at Amy, who had started to laugh without any feeling of amusement. She was doing that here, in the heat, if she had anything to drink. That was when the woman, curving one shoulder toward John in a way that excused Amy from having to speak, said to John, “All religions are cultural treasure.”

Why are there so many people now I can't stand? Amy thought.

Allah, the Koran said, “imposed mercy on himself as a law.”

The half dozen women in the Koran study group wanted to do without a guide, to be under no obligation, as Eleanor said—she was the one emerging as the leader—except to consider just what the meaning of the sacred book might be.

Amy would imitate Eleanor. “I say, this may do the trick.” If John was tired she did various women in the group to make him laugh: the know-it-all doctor, the timid Japanese woman Eleanor bullied, the nice Australian—that was their neighbor who had fried the pork. “‘Yehs, the attitude to animals . . . yehs . . .'” That was Eleanor, with her sprayed gray permanent and her maddening “yes” on the intake of breath, listening intently, especially beforehand when they were all drinking tea, or after an hour or so when the planned topic would wilt of its own accord like a parachute that had made it to earth. Almost as soon as she met you Eleanor found something in her big embroidered bag for you and whisked it out. The second time Amy was there Eleanor said, “A member of the royal family has made animals her cause,” and she slipped Amy a little pamphlet and patted her hand closed on it.

The newest member of the group, the doctor, had arrived some months after Amy had, but she already knew how everything worked. She knew all about the place, she knew it was not going to be her favorite stint overseas. “It's the religion,” the doctor said briskly, whenever anyone in the group complained about anything. She said the female medical students were not permitted to touch a patient. Because they were women they had to reach out of their deep sleeves and touch with a pencil. A pencil! If she felt that way, why was this doctor attending the Koran study group? “I have to do something with my mind,” she said.

This woman knew how to drive in the flying traffic to a particular kampong for batik, and to the Batu Caves outside the city to take pictures. She was a photographer as well as a doctor. She showed her slides at the meeting, lingering over one of a monkey on the stone steps to the Hindu temple, taken with a wide-angle lens so the eyes in the monkey's lined face bugged with weary comment at a pilgrim carrying up a tray of fruit. Another was of a fantastically wrinkled trishaw driver smoking a cigarette. “You've captured him, dear!” Eleanor said. The driver's eyes were abnormally bright yet full of calm. Amy looked away from them.

The women in the study group knew how to choose a live chicken, and behind which cement wall in the open market the sellers of pork
were sequestered, and where the veterinary hospital was, and which teacher at the International School belonged to which religion. All of this tired Amy, made her balk.

She had always been efficient. Why in this country was she going in circles in the heat, when all the vendors had the same red chilies, the same sheaves of long beans, to find the vendor who had smiled at her? She didn't want to choose a live chicken swung by the legs with straw between its toes; she went in secret to the new supermarket to get chicken in a package. Quite suddenly she was not practical, not enterprising. She wouldn't have a car. They took the cheap taxis when they had to go somewhere. If she had to go out she scraped her hair back or wore a scarf. They could say foreign women, too, had to veil themselves, as a faction was proposing, and she would do it gladly.

In a storm, blue lightning flew through the house along the wiring and spat out of the outlets. She would sit on the floor with her back to the inner wall of flagstone, at the farthest point from any outlet, and plug up her ears. If John was home to see it he said, “Is this the girl who saved Guatemala?” He liked to be reminded of how long he had actually known her, as if years held the power of gradual sanction.

She had always been one of the calm ones who could be put to work with the dog handlers. Hours after the Guatemala earthquake she had been on the plane. They worked through the aftershocks, twenty-hour stretches in the rubble with dogs. For a surprising number of days they could dig out bodies that were alive; she had seen a slab of concrete act as a perfect tourniquet.

By the time she was in her mid-twenties she had stepped out of floatplanes and cargo jets all over the world. Sometimes on her return she could hardly say what country she had been in. A place of crumpled awnings, statues lifted off their bases, roads heaved into ditches, where her team had sat on sand, seen eels and bright fish in a new lagoon where houses had been standing a few days before. The dazed figures lining up to get out were not the men and women they had been previously, any more than she was the same person who had
been pacing with her coffee in an airport hours before. Once you felt your teeth bite down on ash, or used your hands to gouge out mudbanks, once you herded the mesmerized, all airports, all normal sleeping and eating, were set aside. Rescuer and rescued were indistinguishable, like heads bobbing in the water in a lifesaving class.

Her boyfriend Tommy had put this choice of hers down to being raised with no mother, raised with brothers. Raised
by
brothers, to strap on a catcher's pad, gap the spark plugs, go for the two-year EMT course after graduation. Though she knew her brothers had expected her to go to college, even to medical school. She was smart enough for that, they thought. But she wasn't and she didn't want to.

She couldn't brag that she was a natural, that nothing suited her better than to grab a duffel and pass through terminal doors into the smoke and tears of whatever place had been flooded or crushed or quickly rigged up as shelter.

After a few years of that she went to nursing school. She nursed. She got married.

Always, Amy had boyfriends to spare. But except for the one prolonged, impossible crush on a married man, once she met Tommy she settled in, waited years to marry him. His mother, with five sons grown, had been waiting, too. So had Amy's brothers: the wedding swarmed with brothers, hers and his, nearly a dozen of them.

Tommy was not the baby, as she was in her family, though he was the last to marry. In the receiving line his mother, who had four daughters-in-law, whispered, “Now I've got my daughter.” “And I've got you,” Amy answered.

But she had managed without a mother since she was six. It might not be lucky for her to take someone else, even this mother-in-law who kept hugging her, for a mother. It might remove the umbrella that traveled over her, of her mother's blessing.

After she had been lifted away from the hospital bed, where she had been allowed to lie beside her mother, words had been spoken to her brothers: the spell that kept her safe.

In the receiving line Tommy's mother kept saying, “Aren't I lucky? Now Amy can do all the worrying about this guy.” In reality no one worried about Tommy, who said every day, “I'm a happy man.”

They were both lucky. By the time Tommy started his peds residency they could afford the down payment on a house. On the day they were to sign the papers, she was reading the chart as she followed a bed out of the recovery room when Dr. Woods appeared, blocking her way. He had something to speak to her about; could she have lunch? She stuttered. “Today? Today? Oh, but I—I'm supposed to meet the realtor.” In a departure from his usual courtesy he turned away with a shrug. “Well, but what about tomorrow?” she said.

“All right,” he said, frowning. “Yes, all right, tomorrow. That will have to do.”

She thought he was going to mention a position she ought to apply for. A promotion. If so the timing was right, because of the house and the fact that she was eight weeks pregnant.

Still, she was uneasy at the thought of having lunch with him. He was the one. John Woods. He was the one, with his looks and that shyness unusual among surgeons, on whom not just she but all of them had had crushes when they were in school. When he went in for his bypass, nurses had shed tears. It looked bad. It was bad; the nurses had kept the CCU filled with balloons for a month while he came back to life.

Seeing her friend Gail peel tape off the deep lines in his cheeks and lift out the sticky endotracheal tube, Amy had had a sweltering sensation. She had put her hand on Gail's arm and passed out.

For her the whole episode had stretched out and become, really, something far less agreeable than a crush. She had followed this man. Tears squeezed out of her shut eyes when she was on the phone with him about a post-op. Gail, who had three children, told her this kind of thing meant you needed to get pregnant.

In the elevator she clenched her thighs at the sound of his voice making polite replies about his health. It was a kindly voice, thickened and withdrawn a little now into his convalescence. Down it sank
into her, while the large eyes he was known for looked straight into the interior of her where the naked encounters with him took place.

He always took pains to speak to her, asking her opinion. He went to some trouble to have the patients he was uneasy about assigned to her. In her old rosary case she kept a Polaroid of him cutting his birthday cake at the nurses' station. It was hers to be held, beseeched.

All the while she was throwing on her raincoat at the end of the day, grabbing her wedding lists, running out to meet Tommy in the parking lot.

At the end of the last quarter she gave in to it. She was that way; she decided a thing. It was a dark Friday morning. Patti Smith was singing “Because the Night” on the car radio and she crossed the wet parking lot with the song going on inside her. She took a Valium out of a cup on the pre-op cart. She didn't see him on the OR schedule. He must be in clinic. Three times she pushed the heavy door into the stairwell where she often met him coming down, and mounted the concrete stairs as lightly and slowly as if she were being carried up by water. She was going to speak. She was ready.

But he was not there; he was on a plane to Mexico. He had gone away with his wife and son. It was said that this son, much younger than his other children, who were grown now, was unstable. He had had trouble in school after his father's heart attack, he had been suspended for getting into fights in the gym. Everyone said the whole family needed a rest.

Finally Amy graduated, got out. Eventually of course she got on with things, and put him out of her mind. She washed her hands of her student self, the skimping, praying, caffeine-driven girl who had treasured a Polaroid wrinkled with tears. She got ready for her wedding.

By the time she went back to work at the university his hair had gone white, but he had lost his stoop and the paunch from the long period of inactivity. They all saw him out running in his black shorts; he was tall again, fit.

The next day? That would have to do.

She said, “So I'll see you down there at what, twelve thirty?” Then she was embarrassed at knowing the time he ate his lunch. He ate in the main cafeteria rather than the doctors' dining room.

“Not in the cafeteria,” he said. “I thought somewhere outside.”

T
he son still at home, Nicky, was a freshman in high school. He began to lose weight. As that year wore on, the coach put him on leave from the JV basketball team until he could show responsibility by getting some weight back on. The coach said his fighting was serious and his thinness and loss of skills were due to anorexia. Never mind how rare that was in a boy, never mind that a coach wasn't a doctor.

Once, from the car, just before they left the country, Amy had seen this son dribbling and shooting baskets by himself. A bony, horrible slow motion dribbling on the curved driveway of the house that had been John's.
Thud. Thud.
A sound that had nothing to do with a sport.

Behind the rolled-up car window she had sunk down and down, to a place from somewhere in grade school, a place of woe, where her head was heavy, tight in the braids she did herself, where she pretended to erase something on her paper. First grade. The Sister was speaking to her. The Sister said she should be sitting her brothers down—she was the girl in the family—and praying the rosary with them, for their mother's sake.