Garden of Lies (39 page)

Novocain. Tonight was the first time she’d been off her feet in forty-eight hours. She felt as if she

hadn’t truly slept since arriving in Vietnam six weeks ago.

In the dark, she batted aside mosquito netting, and swung her [229] legs over the side of the

cot, fumbling into a pair of khaki trousers crumpled on the floor, yanking them over the man’s T-

shirt that hung down almost to her knees.

“It’s me. Medevac chopper just came in,” Lily answered, sounding a little out of breath. “Eight

wounded. Most are in bad shape. Doctor MacDougal needs you in Triage.”

“How bad is bad?” Rachel asked.

She stood up, tugged on the chain that connected to a single overhead bulb. Bright light

slapped her awake, and she looked around the concrete room she shared with Kay. Small, austere

as a prison cell, but oddly, it suited her. Two iron cots tented in mosquito netting, and a single

rickety dresser. Wooden louvers in place of windows. Walls bare except for the cracked mirror

over the dresser, and a Grateful Dead poster Kay had Scotch-taped over her cot. She saw that

Kay’s cot was empty. Still on shift. Good. She would need Kay. Lily, too.

She turned her gaze to Lily, poised in the doorway, dressed in wrinkled, bloodstained nurse’s

whites. Tiny, fragile-seeming, as exquisitely wrought as an ivory figurine ... yet she had the

stamina of a water buffalo. She could keep going for days without sleep, and not seem to tire, and

Rachel once had seen her wrestle to the ground a two-hundred-pound Marine strung out on

heroin.

“Their platoon walked into an ambush,” Lily said. Her English was perfect. Her father had

been a high-ranking official in the government before the war. “Five were killed.” She paused,

and added softly, “From the looks of it, those were the lucky ones.”

Rachel thought about the young Marine who had died yesterday because of her mistake. The

boy in her dream.

A paralyzing helplessness swept over her.

She thought:
I can’t go out there. I can’t let that happen again.

But she knew she would go. Panic was a luxury. And there was no time for luxuries.

“Tell Mac I’m on my way,” Rachel told her. Lily nodded, and hurried off, leaving the door

ajar.

Rachel stuffed her bare feet into a pair of thongs made of old rubber tire tread with strips of

canvas sewn across the top. She’d bought them from a street vendor in Da Nang for thirty-five

piasters. The expensive boots she’d brought from New York had fallen apart [230] after two

weeks of mucking about in the Tien Sung monsoon mud.

She paused in front of the mirror to bundle the loose gold-brown waves that tumbled down her

back into a single thick hank, twisting it up in a loose knot, and skewering it with a small pointed

stick that fitted into a strip of perforated cowhide to form a barrette.

She stared at herself in the cracked mirror for one long second, at her pale face, the purple

hollows under her eyes.
God. I look like a missionary straight out of a melodrama, battling

plague and killer ants in the deepest heart of Africa. Leora in Arrowsmith.

She felt a flicker of morose satisfaction, followed by shame.
You’re punishing yourself, aren’t

you? The “Sackcloth and Ashes Hour,” starring Rachel Rosenthal. What will it be next, hair shirt

or self-flagellation?

Yeah, okay, maybe that’s how it
had
started. Coming here probably had been a way of

punishing herself for David and the baby. But not now, not anymore. Now she
wanted
to help, to

make a difference, however small.

Rachel turned and gave an impatient shove to the half-open door, striding out onto a covered

walkway that ran in a straight line the length of the barracks-style concrete building. Morning,

she saw, had blinked its bloodshot eye open. Sunlight backfired off the jumble of corrugated tin

roofs below. The village was beginning to stir, even at this hour. She spotted a handful of conical

straw hats bobbing among the tall stalks in the rice paddies. She could hear the mournful lowing

of water buffalo, the wheels of an ox cart creaking along some rutted road. And another sound,

jarring, out of tune, the whiffle of a helicopter’s blades scything the sluggish air.

Reminding her of why she was here.

She ran at a half-trot, her heels slapping against the concrete with muffled clocking sounds.

The walkway ended abruptly in a dirt pathway that led through a grove of palm trees to the

hospital, fifty or so yards away. Rachel stepped down, sinking into mud up to her ankles.

“Shit,” she swore softly.

In the milky light, she slopped her way onto a makeshift boardwalk of two-by-four planks

caked with mud. Damn the monsoons, she’d take New York City slush any day over this. She

picked her way along the planks, fighting the urge to run.

At last the shadowy hospital building took shape. Two stories [231] of crumbling vanilla

stucco festooned with crimson bougainvillaea and liana vines thick as a man’s wrist. Old,

charming, as French as anything found in the heart of Paris ... and the last place in the world any

sane person would want to walk into.

Rounding the east wall, where the landing pad faced on the entrance to the courtyard, Rachel

saw the chopper, a big transport Chinook, rotary blades cutting lazy arcs against the strawberry-

milk sky, its cargo hold gaping open. Medics in green uniforms, white armbands, were unloading

something on a stretcher.

Something swathed in bloody bandages.

A memory came swooping out of left field. Sixth grade. Her class had gone on a day trip to the

wholesale food markets in lower Manhattan. She remembered seeing the rows of butchered beef

dangling from hooks, bloody, stripped of their hides, veins and tendons exposed, and how she’d

whoopsed her snack of milk and Oreos right there on the sawdust-sprinkled floor. What lay on

that stretcher bore a sickening resemblance to one of those bloody carcasses.

A wave of panic swept through her.

What if it happens again. What if I cause another man to die. What if—

No, she had to push the thought from her mind.

And run.

Don’t think, don’t feel. Just get your frigging ass in gear.

Rachel could hear Kay’s throaty voice in her head:
It’s like Venetian blinds. You pull the cord,

and see only what you have to see, block out the rest. Otherwise you’ll go crazy.

Except compared to triage, going crazy seemed easy. Triage was a scene out of Dante’s

Inferno.

Rachel took a gulp of air, and entered. The room looked more like a factory than an ER. The

triage facilities makeshift, in the style of the army surgical units for which Corpus Christi, this

civilian Catholic Relief hospital, served as backup. Sawhorses to set the stretchers on, wire strung

overhead to hook the blood and TVs on in a hurry. And in the corner, below the supply shelves,

fifty-gallon drums full of water where the bloodied strips of gauze were soaked, and when the fat

and flesh rose to the surface, laundered and used again. No sophisticated equipment, no crash

carts. The only nod to the twentieth century, the electricity fueled by a balky old generator, [232]

whose faint whine she could hear above the shouting of doctors and nurses, and the screams of

men dying in agony.

Wounded soldiers filled Triage, spilling over into the screened-off ER, some screaming,

delirious with pain. Blood was everywhere, staining bandages and mud-caked fatigues, squirting

from arterial wounds, pooling on the concrete floor.

Rachel spotted Ian MacDougal, in the corner, big shoulders hunched with weariness, his

graying rusty mop bent over a double AK amp, both legs shot off at the knees. The kid, his face

the color of curdled milk, looked no older than seventeen. He was twisting in agony, crying out:

“Mommy! Mommy!”

Rachel felt something give way in her chest, like soft dirt crumbling down a steep slope.
So

young, dear God, I’ll never get used to it. They’re just kids. ...

“Give me a hand over here,” Mac called to her in his thick Scottish burr. He sounded whipped.

“Clamp that bleeder. Good. Hold it while I debride. There now, a cleaner AK I couldn’t have

done m’self. Dana!” he called to one of the nurses. “Start a line, take him to Pre-op marked

Delayed
.” When Rachel lifted her eyebrows in question, he remarked with his usual brusqueness,

“He’ll live. Won’t be kicking a football around with the boys back home, but he’ll live.”

“Mommy,” the boy whimpered, clutching Rachel’s hand. Her heart turned over, and for an

agonizing instant she thought of her own lost baby, and of the babies she might never have. She

stroked his face briefly, a knot forming in her throat, then quickly turned him over to Dana.

Rachel looked up, and saw Kay across the room, dear Kay, her stocky figure in bloodied

nurse’s whites, face tight beneath her mop of scrambled dark brown curls, barking out orders to

the nurses and aides in her charge.

“Get those IV lines going. Don’t tell me you can’t find a vein ... use a garden hose if you have

to ... but
find
it.”

She caught Rachel’s eye, flashing her a grim smile. “Welcome to Yankee Stadium. Think we’ll

beat the Red Sox tonight?”

Rachel forced a grim smile. Their gallows humor wasn’t much in the way of laughs, but it kept

them sane.

A far cry from her first day here. Only six weeks? It seemed [233] like a year. After two days

on airplanes, she’d arrived in Da Nang, then an endless, bumpy jeep ride to Tien Sung, only to

walk straight into a scene like this one. Worse even. A nearby village had been shelled. Kids

blown apart, babies, pregnant women. And she’d stood there, gaping, frozen with the horror of it,

paralyzed until someone shoved a pair of scissors into her hands, ordered her to cut off a two-

year-old-boy’s foot, hanging from his severed ankle by a tendon.

But she’d learned, and fast too. Act first, panic later. How to sort out the ones who would die

from those who stood a chance. Expectants were taken behind that screen over in the corner to die

a private death. Immediates were sent to Pre-op, marked
Priority
or
Delayed.

“When we were kids,” Kay had told her that first day, “we played doctor. Now we play God.”

And sometimes we make mistakes,
Rachel thought,
because we’re not gods, just human beings

doing the best we can, but never really measuring up.

Like that baby-faced Marine from Arkansas, just yesterday; he had begged her not to leave

him, said he was going to die, and she told him not to worry. A shattered kneecap, that was all.

Scheduled him for surgery behind two other Immediates, in worse shape than he, she had

thought. Checking on him five minutes later, she found him dead. Cardiac arrest. Then she

figured out why. Massive pulmonary embolism from the injured leg.

Remembering caused fresh pain to slice through her.
God, please, don’t let me make another

mistake like that.

Rachel moved ahead to meet the stretcher being carried in. Would there be hope for this one?

He was still in one piece, at least.

He was tall, that was the first thing she noticed. His mud-clotted boots dangling over the end of

the stretcher. And sinewy thin, his face all bones and angles. His fatigues were wet and muddy, as

if they’d found him face down in a rice paddy. The bandages that covered his midsection soaked

with blood. He was unconscious, his skin waxy white, almost transparent, the color of paraffin.

The color of death.

Suddenly she didn’t want to know what was under those bandages. She felt a chill tiptoe down

her spine, as if a cold draft were blowing on the back of her neck.

[234] She could barely find a pulse. Blood pressure eighty over twenty. Oh, this was bad all

right. Classic shock. Lips blue, cyanotic. He was having trouble breathing as well. Jesus, he was

slipping away, slipping right through her fingers.

“Get a line going here!” she shouted to Meredith Barnes, hovering at her elbow. “Sixteen

gauge. Draw four tubes of blood for a cross-match. He’ll need at least six units. And a couple of

grams of penicillin to start with.”

Rachel inserted a nasogastric tube to drain his stomach. Then, grabbing a pair of scissors, she

began snipping at the bandages that covered his abdomen. Jesus. Oh Jesus. It was even worse

than she’d thought. A gaping hole as if a prizefighter’s glove had punched it in. The peritoneum

ruptured too. Grayish-white loops of intestine bulging through.

Then she felt it, almost a certainty, like a clear, hard voice telling her he was going to die. No

matter what she did, he was going to die. The best she could do for him was make him

comfortable, put him behind the screen.

Then she glanced toward his face again, and her breath caught in her throat. Her body turned to

stone. She couldn’t move, or breathe, or swallow.

He was conscious now, looking straight at her. His eyes a clear, oddly lucent gray that shone

like morning light from the hollowed sockets of his dying face.

And he was smiling.