Savage Drift

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN JOSIE

The nurse tells us we have to wait in line.

“He’s an old man,” I say, my arms trembling. “His arm is broken and his breathing is all wrong. He might have a punctured lung.”

The nurse feels for his pulse.

“Listen—,” she says. “He’s very old—” Starting to say, what? That he was too old to be worth treating? That he was too old to save?

“I know Dr. Neman,” I stammer. “The doctor. She’s my friend.”

“Dr. Neman is not on duty,” the nurse answers. “You’ll have to wait—”

“Listen,” I tell her. “I was lost and wild. I was eating out of his trash can. I had killed these men and I was lost to the world and he called to me. He brought out a cup of hot chocolate and reached out to me. I could have killed him. But he believed in me. Do you understand?”

“Be that as it may—” She is reaching for the phone now, probably thinking about calling security.

“He said, ‘You put on this mask and you can have this cocoa,’ and he tossed a mask over to me. And I knew that he was offering me a way to come back to the human race. Some part of my monster brain knew that it was a chance and it was my last chance.”

Now I am crying and Lori, standing behind me, is crying, too. The rest of the kids, too, probably.

The nurse wants us to move out of the doorway but I’m not budging. Mario’s gaspy breathing is my metronome and I tell her the rest.

“I put the mask on. And after I calmed down and started to be able to think again, he handed me a note.

“See, my friends had left me behind. They had to. My… my boyfriend, he had to take the others, five of them, all kids, to safety. So he had to leave me behind.

“But he left a note.

“And Mario gave it to me and I read it.”

“I am sorry!” the nurse says. “But we don’t have the supplies to spend on this kind of a case—”

“He gave me shelter,” I weep, my arms shaking, shaking, shaking. “He fed me and let me rest and gave me new clothes and a safe place to be. And when the bombs fell, up top, we thought we were done for. We prayed through the night, asking God for the chance to live.”

“I don’t have the authority—,” she says.

“He begged God for me to have the chance to find my friends,” I sob. “Don’t you see? He’s a good man. He’s all the family I have left.”

“Rah!” she shouts in frustration. “Fine! Fine then. Come this way.”

I step forward, my arms screaming now.

“Tell your friends to go away,” she snaps.

I choke on a gasp of relief and Lori leads the kids away.

“Put him here,” the nurse says, pointing to a blood-stained cot between two holding other people—a squat man with a bandage around his waist and a sleeping woman whose head is wrapped in gauze, stained yellow at her eyes.

“What happened here?” says a Latino guy wearing a T-shirt and jeans with a stethoscope around his neck.

“Dr. Quarropas, I’m sorry. But the girl insisted—”

“She was right to insist. This guy must be eighty years old!”

“I know,” she snaps. “But he’s not the most treatable—”

“Don’t,” he says. “I’m a doctor. I won’t hear that crap about treatable cases. Not one more time.”

“It’s not coming from me—,” she protests, but he isn’t paying attention anymore. He bends over and listens to Mario’s breathing and opens his mouth gently to look inside.

“Doesn’t sound good,” he says. “What happened to him?”

He opens Mario’s eyes and looks in with a pen light.

“There was a mob at the gate,” I say. “He got trampled. Maybe hit with a tranquilizer but I’m not sure.”

“Probably sedated. What’s his name?” the doctor asks.

“Mario Scietto,” I say.

“Mario! Mario!” he says. “Can you hear me? Mario Scietto!”

Mario lays there, looking like a broken bird. He looks very small, laid out next to the two people on either side.

The doctor takes out a minitab.

“New file,” he says into the phone.

So minitabs work again. At least for people running the show.

This was the first I had known.

“Mario Scietto. Late seventies, early eighties, question mark. Sedated by Etorphine dart. Crushed in mob.”

He listens to Mario’s chest with his stethoscope, shaking his head.

“Compound or transverse fracture ulna, radius, left arm. Fractured ribs question mark.”

A gasp escapes from my lips. Dr. Quarropas looks up, as if focusing on me for the first time.

“You need to go,” he says.

“Is he going to be okay?” I ask.

Suddenly I see stars, the room goes slanted in my vision.

The doctor puts his hand on my arm. A part that is bruised from my midnight journey on the Men’s hall. I wince, the pain making the room straight again.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine.”

For some dumb reason, I put my hands behind my back. I don’t want him worrying about my stupid knuckles when Mario is in danger.

“They’re not feeding you well enough. You look like you’ll blow away. And what’s wrong with your hands?”

“Nothing,” I say.

He gives me an expectant look.

I show him my knuckles. There is definitely some greenish pus around the edges.

“How’d this happen?”

“I had to clean something,” I say. “I scraped them.”

“Rhonda,” he calls. “Where’s the roll gauze?”

“We’re out,” she calls back.

“Squares, then, I’ll tape them on,” he yells.

“We’re out of tape.”

“Jesus!”

“Is Mario going to be okay?” I ask again.

“I think so.”

The doctor crosses to a small sink and motions for me to follow. He runs warm water into the sink and motions for me to wash my hands with antibacterial soap, all the while talking about Mario.

“He’s going to sleep for a good long while now, and while he’s out, I’ll set his arm. I’m going to examine his rib cage, too. We’re going to do the best we can.”

He pats my knuckles dry with a paper towel and then he holds a spray over my hands.

“Cough,” he whispers.

“What?”

He coughs, loudly, and I join in. While we cough, he sprays my knuckles, dousing them with a foam that congeals, almost immediately, into a flexible kind of rubber flesh seal.

Rhonda comes to the door.

“Oh my Lord,” she says. “Tell me you are not using Dermaknit on this girl. You know that is our last bottle!”

The doctor winks at me.

“She was headed for a nasty infection. Had to be done.”

I am sure I was looking at him with the fish-mouthed gawk of a zombie but I couldn’t get used to being handled like I mattered, like I had some rights to humane treatment. And being joked with, like the world was a place in which people could still joke and be merry and tease each other and cough to cover up the sound of a spray.

He is being playful and kind. I must have been looking at him like he was from Mars.

“I think your friend will be fine,” he says, the smile slowly fading from his face. “Why don’t you come visit him tomorrow.”

“Now, you heard the doctor,” the nurse says to me.

“Hey!” a man from the head of line calls in. “When’s my turn?”

“I’ll need your help in a moment to set this fracture,” says Dr. Quarropas to the nurse. “But you can bring in some patients so the line doesn’t go nuts.”

The nurse puts her hand on the small of my back and shows me out of the room.

“You got what you wanted,” she says to me. “Now get out of here.”