The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Author:Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2014-04-16T23:32:40+00:00

12

The atmosphere on the ward the next morning was as dismal as the weather. Navy-gray clouds rolled in from the South China Sea like tons of concrete, dropping rain in thick splats. The din of rain on a tin roof can be rather pleasant if you’re inside. But combine the din with the discordant notes of those same drops plonking into basins and bedpans inside your shelter and the cursing of personnel tripping over the basins, and it’s too noisy to think.

Sergeant Baker glowered at me when I came in and Voorhees declined to meet my eyes. I made old Xe’s bed with him in it that morning. He was still asleep when I brought his medication, but his respirations were loud enough to be heard from several feet away over the rain. His chest sounded like a rattle. Ahn sat in bed and watched, his eyes as round as if he’d never seen anyone sick or hurt before. I thought again how quickly he had begun to act like a normal child. I wondered if I had done him any favors by convincing him that he could afford the luxury of a childhood, however brief.

The sheets I bunched under the old man were damp. Ahn slid out of bed, grabbed his crutches, and helped me. Watching Mai and the corpsmen, he’d learned to make hospital corners as sharp as any probationer’s, and while he tucked, I rolled Xe toward me. When I rolled him onto his back again, his eyes were open—one of them, anyway. The other lid drooped heavily over the eye and the side of his mouth tugged at the corner. I grabbed a blood pressure cuff, but there was no particular change. At some point, while he slept, Xe had had a stroke. It could have happened to anybody his age, but combined with his amputations and the rattle in his lungs, it was ominous.

“Aw, shit,” I muttered, half to myself, half to Ahn, who had moved to my side and was watching the old man as if he might explode. “Now I have to call Krupman in early.” I couldn’t help but take a hard look at Ahn.

“No, mamasan, no call bac si. He cat ca dao papasan, same-same Ba Thai. Mamasan, you make papasan numbah one.”

“No can do, Ahn. Sin loi,” I said, and started for the phone as Ahn continued his protests in ever-shriller Vietnamese. Xe’s right hand curled over his chest like a claw, but his left one whipped out and grabbed my arm in a viselike grip.

He moved his mouth, but nothing save a dribble of spittle emerged.

“What did he say, Ahn?” I asked. “Does he need anything?”

“Papasan say he fini pretty quick.”

“Give me a break, kid. You sound like Krupman now.”

The right hand stayed hovering over the chest, but the left one steered my hand to the old man’s neck and the thong, and my fingers found the amulet. Together we steered it back to its place over his sternum, and his good hand clamped mine over his bad one and the amulet.

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