Authors: Charles Knief

Silversword (6 page)

BOOK: Silversword

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T
he pretty young nurses worked hard to help me heal. They tried almost everything. The way they cared for me I was confident that Chawlie's orders had been explicit.

But the only thing that would really make me heal was time and my body's own system. The doctors had done their job. I tried to be a good patient. I willingly did what the nurses told me to do. Up to a point. And then I did that, too. They were so sweet and earnest that I couldn't bark and I couldn't refuse them, even when I felt crabby and disjointed, even when I would rather have been left alone to rest and lick my wounds like an old bear. So I gritted my teeth and went along with every regimen they brought my way.

Chawlie had provided a large-screen television in the room. I tried to watch it, but nothing interested me and most of it repelled me. The news was scary. People were killing each other all over the planet, sometimes singularly, sometimes in organized groups. Europe and Asia, those continual hotbeds of organized mayhem for much of the past millennium, had decided to bring in the twenty-first with pogroms and ethnic cleansings, as if nobody in those places had learned a thing from the miseries of the past. I avoided the news.

In the daytime, the programming seemed to consist of victims and whiners or smiling plump ladies shaking their fingers at us
from the other side of the screen, earnestly wanting us to see things
their
way. At night, the insipid comedies took over.

I left the TV off. The thing was too overpowering in the room, anyway.

For his part, Felix had little to do and was absent much of the time. Errands for Chawlie, he explained, as if that meant something. I had no need for a bodyguard; that was evident both to Felix and me, but the money must have been good, or he had found a friend, because he stuck around. As he once told me, it was an opportunity to work for the man who seemed to be a legend in the Chinese underworld.

It was good to see a young man striving to make his mark. Even in that kind of business.

Every day my nurses forced me to get out of the bed and walk across the room and down the corridor. And back.

All four of my nurses were there to support me. I returned from each excursion and fell exhausted into the deep feather cushions of the bed.

John Caine, action hero.

Every day they made me try again. From time to time, inertia took over and my body didn't want to leave the comfort and safety of the big old bed. When that happened, Angelica insisted, and so, in fact, would my conscience. Together the two of them guided me out of the bed and across the room and into the living room of the suite and down the hall again. I tottered around as if I were three hundred years old, and then wobbled back to bed, feeling as if I had accomplished something.

The doctor came to visit later that first day and fussed over my wounds and drains, telling me that he would take the drains out within a few days. He seemed pleased that the incisions were healing, as if he had anything to do with my improvement.

The bullet wound in the back and the incision in front gave me a hole that went all the way through me, in one side and out the other. The image both appalled and fascinated. It wasn't the first time my body had been holed. But this was one of the worst. And in one of the worst places.

But I was getting better, steadily improving in tiny increments. In a few days the nurses let me wander down to the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian and out to the lawn, a distance of maybe a couple hundred meters. A little farther than the Wright Brothers flew that first day at Kitty Hawk. My accomplishment was nowhere near as momentous, but seemed a true milestone.

Finally, the day came when I could venture outside and walk along the beach. I must have looked a sight, a big pale haole, skinny as a stork, his clothes too big for him, accompanied by a bevy of beautiful little nurses in their crisp white uniforms and odd little hats, every one of us barefoot.

With a nurse on either side I slowly meandered along the sand where the gentle waves lapped the shore. The warm water washed over my feet and caressed my ankles and then rushed back out to sea. I looked down and laughed because it felt good to be here, it felt good to be outside again, on the beach of my island, in the sunshine. It felt good to be alive.

My little nurses laughed, too, because they knew that I was healing. Their merry laughter reminding me of a mountain stream rippling over smooth stones.

That night, after Felix went out on his round of errands for Chawlie, we had a little celebration. Three bottles of Dom had been sent up from the hotel bar. We drained them before dinner and got a little giddy. Angelica looked at me as if I were some kind of conquering hero.

“You are a good patient, John,” she said.

“The word is interesting,” I said. “Patient. As in wait.”

She giggled. “You must wait. Your body is healing. You will be well, soon.”

I nodded. “Now tell me why they call what doctors do a âpractice'?”

She smiled a crooked smile. “You have lost a lot of weight.”

“I'll gain it back.”

“But a lot of it is muscle. It will be difficult for you. At your age.”

“At my age?”

“You are not a young man. It will be difficult.”

“You mean when I return to working out?”

“Yes. It will not be easy.”

“Angelica, honey, if I shied away from things just because they were hard, I would have done something else with my life.”

She shook her head. “Chawlie said that you are a good man, that you are like an ancient warrior. Chawlie said that you must once again prove to yourself that you are a man.”

It took a moment before the subtext registered. “What are you saying?”

“Chawlie is worried about your manhood. He says it will be a problem for you if you cannot â¦ do what a man has to do.”

“Are you saying what I think you're saying?”

“Chawlie told me to make you happy. Tonight I think I will see what we can do.”

“Wait a minute. That's not a part of your duties.”

“It is if I want it to be,” she said. “I am to make you well, and to make you well I am to make you happy.”

“It's all right, Angelica. I'm old enough and tired enough I don't need you to do anything for me.”

“I am not one of your American women who think sex is bad, or something merely to be bartered. I am a healing woman. Sex has much to do with healing.”

“Thank you, butâ”

“I notice when I wash you, your member doesn't even stir.”

“Well, that's just â¦” I had no answer for that. I had noticed it, too, and it did bother me, but only a little. It had happened before, after major trauma. But she was a beautiful, healthy young woman, and when she touched me it should have caused some reaction. Even wounded, I wasn't dead.

“See, I can tell that it bothers you.”

“But that doesn't mean you have to â¦”

“I don't
have
to. That's the point. I
want
to.”

What do you say to that? The other nurses were watching and listening intently, keeping quiet, their warm, dark eyes following every nuance of the conversation. I had no idea what they were
thinking. I wasn't sure I wanted to know. I felt like an object in a museum.

“I, ah â¦”

“We don't have to do anything right now, if it makes you uncomfortable, John. Drink your champagne. It will help you.” She filled my glass again.

“Therapy, huh?”

“Chawlie wants to know that you're still a man.”

“Tell Chawlie it's none of his business.”

“He says that it is. If you cannot be a man in that sense, then he says you cannot be a man in the other.”

“That's nonsense.” Now I was getting angry. Chawlie had his ways and his culture, but he didn't have to impose them on me.

“I have to tell Chawlie what you do.”

“That's even worse. You're a beautiful woman, but even if I were inclined to bed you on a moment's notice, I couldn't now because I'd know that Chawlie would be getting a blow-by-blow description.”

She blushed. “I don't usually do that.”

“That's not what I meant, Angelica.”

“What shall I tell Chawlie?”

“Make something up. Tell him that I satisfied you eight times.”

The other nurses laughed, hiding giggles behind their palms.

“Eight? Eight is a bad number.”

“Okay, then. Tell him nine times.”

They all laughed again.

“You mean that, John? Is that what you really want? We shall just talk about it, and then I'll report that to Chawlie, that you satisfied me nine times?”

“Yeah. It's not something I like to discuss with everybody in the room, and it's not something that I can do in cold blood. I'm sorry. I'm not turning you down because of anything you are, or because of anything you're doing, but this is not me.”

She nodded, her face blank, and I couldn't tell if I had hurt her. I hoped not.

During dinner she stared at me as if I was some strange alien she had never seen before. It felt uncomfortable to be under such scrutiny. When dinner was over I excused myself, took a careful sponge bath, and crawled into bed.

I lay there staring at the ceiling, listening to the music from the Royal Hawaiian's luau on the lawn below, wondering what kind of fool I had become. Was I applying for sainthood sometime soon? If she wanted to do it, then who was I to play the blushing virgin? I'd been around the block a few times, and had nobody in my life at the moment. Why the heck not? The girl had her orders. Chawlie would know she was lying, and it might even be dangerous for her to lie to him, especially since I had said what I had said in front of the other nurses. One of them certainly would report what had actually happened.

Had I put her in an untenable position?

Would it be harmful to her if I refused?

Wow. That's a new one. Man refuses sex, thinking it is noble, and puts the woman in a difficult position.

Well, I did not want, under any circumstances, my sexual life reported to Chawlie. It was an intrusion I was not prepared to endure.

That was only part of it. I wasn't certain I could perform. In fact, I had my fears that I could not. There was no way to tell, but nothing had aroused me since the shooting. Little John just lay there like some disinterested Lotus Eater. I was male enough not to want to have that fact reported to my old friend. There's no telling what he would do, given
that
information.

The door opened and a small figure slipped into the darkened room.

“Angelica, Iâ”

She put her finger to her lips and shushed me. I watched as she removed that ridiculous hat and shook out her long, lustrous black hair. She placed the hat on the chair beside my bed and continued undressing all the way down to her fine, taut, golden skin.

“I grow old, I grow old,” I murmured.

“What?” She unsnapped her bra and leaned forward to let it fall from her breasts.

“I was thinking of eating a peach.” My voice became husky, my throat constricted.

She smiled and shook her head at my foolishness.

The band on the lawn below began playing one of those soft, sentimental hapa-haole tunes with plenty of sliding steel guitar in the melody line. It was sappy enough to be pretty, given the Hawaiian ambience, given the warm tropical night and the beautiful girl undressing in my bedroom. Angelica swayed with the music as she undressed.

I watched, wishing I could be aroused.

My psyche was aroused as was my spiritâI was acutely aware of the wonders and the pleasures that a young woman's body could provideâbut my flesh was weak.

When she turned down the covers and climbed into the bed next to me, laying her soft warm breasts upon my chest, I wrapped her in my arms and held her close. She placed one smooth leg over mine, her knee nestled near my groin.

The music played on, but knee or no knee, nothing happened up here in the penthouse.

We lay quietly for a few moments, listening to the band. I could feel her sweet breath against my neck.

“Aren't you going to do anything?” she whispered in my ear.

“I don't think anything is going to happen.”

She reached down and touched me, her fingertips lightly brushing me. It was a pleasant feeling, very erotic, but my body responded to no stimuli.

“I think I can make you interested.”

“I don't know â¦”

BOOK: Silversword

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