J.C. and the Boys - Chapter 4-6

Lots of inexplicable stuff in this episode.

Chapter 4

                  Father Diego tapped tentatively on the door to Six.

                  “Come in, come in, whoever you are!” Joe sang out. Diego pushed against the door’s pneumatic resistance. Joe Wood was sitting up in bed, a big grin stretching across his face. The door shut itself behind him.

                  “It’s Father Zorro!” Joe traced an imaginary sabre-tip through the air in the shape of a Z. “Zip-zip-zip!”

                  Diego would have sworn that no one else knew.

                  “Mr. Wood—” he began.

                  “Call me Joe,” the patient said.

                  “I thought I would—”

                  “I said, ‘Call me Joe.’”

                  “Joe.”

                  “That’s better. Now we can get on with it. That little girl Jeannie sent you to see me, didn’t she? You don’t have to answer. I know everything that goes on here now. I might not know all the fancy words, but I know what they mean, and that’s more important. I know what’s wrong with the old woman in the next room; no one asks me, no, but I know. It doesn’t matter. If she’s supposed to get better, she will. Hospitals aren’t here for the sick ones, you know. Uh-uh. They’re for the nurses and doctors and families—and clergymen. Bet you never suspected that, huh? Sit down, take a load off.”

                  Once again, Diego sat in an orange plastic chair.

                  “I was wondering how you’re feeling, Joe,” he said.

                  “Terrible. I have a bad heart and I’m right on the edge of a stroke. How would you feel?”

                  Diego chuckled. “Terrible, you’re right. But at least you have your sense of humor. That means a lot.”

                  “Less than you’d think, padre.” Joe turned ashen gray for a brief moment; then color flooded his cheeks pink again. “‘Scuse me, that was a bad one.”

                  Diego relaxed into his normal feeling of helplessness in the presence of pain. He was normally so healthy that he really had little or no idea of how the patients he saw felt.

                  “All you have is sympathy, right?”

                  Diego found himself nodding wordlessly in reply.

                  “You’ll get your chance,” Joe said. “Right now, it’s mine. You don’t have to talk much. Just make encouraging noises now and then, so I’ll know you’re still awake.”

                  Years ago, in preparation for his stint at counseling the sick, Diego had gone through a course of psychotherapy aimed at unearthing his own fears of illness and disability. Part of the process had involved hypnosis. He had been a bad subject, too unwilling to deliver control of his consciousness into the will of another. The difficulty had plagued him in therapy, in prayer, even to the point where he found it difficult to relax enough to go to sleep in the evening. But when he realized that he was relaxing into a hypnotic sleep, he was too surprised by its fleecy comfort to react against it.

                  “It’s a lot easier when you don’t fight so hard,” Joe warned him. “Anyway, here goes.”

*

                  A few years ago (Joe explained), I died. Many times. It was part of an experiment. There were a bunch of us, and it was all very hush-hush, military secret stuff, think-tank CIA stuff, you understand. There were others besides me—some of us survived, some of us went on. You would say they died.

                  Anyway, I’ve been to the other side of the mountain. I remember a lot of it, but it’s awful hard to find the words that explain it. It goes back to original sin, if you can believe that. I won’t mind if you don’t. I have trouble with it when I’m in my right mind, which is less and less these days, fortunately.

                  Now, what you want to do is relax, don’t try to figure out how you can prove I’m crazy—I’ll probably prove it for you, before long. That’s not the point. I need to tell this to someone who can sit and listen, and maybe take it in. It’s not a revelation; it’s a kind of confession, so you can’t even tell anyone.

                  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

                  I have never confessed before.

                  The sin is refusing what is offered. And now I’m afraid that I’ll never be offered it again. I can’t remember it all—none of us could, back then. That’s what drove the experimenters nuts. We could show them we’d been somewhere, but never give them enough details to show them where we had been.

                  It ended in fire.

                  We thought, those of us left alive afterwards, that we could stay together and spread the word. But Moses and all the prophets weren’t enough; why should we be? And we split up.

                  Original sin. We wanted to know the secrets, or thought we did. Thought I did.

                  Original sin. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth—but without form, and void. Void of what?

                  God needed an audience. Not to applaud, but to delight. So he made people. And people were pretty good at it. They were aware. Still are, for that matter. That tree of knowledge story says so. Aware that something more than themselves was afoot. Before there was knowledge of good and evil, there was only knowledge. Original sin is judgment, putting your own value on experience. Remember: “God said that it was good.”

                  But people wanted to say that it was good. Maybe Eve’s sin was that she wanted to be the first interior decorator. “I don’t like the sun setting in the west all the time. Couldn’t we move it around some, so that sometimes it gets hotter, sometimes it gets colder?” She thought the climate in Eden was boring, for Chrissakes.

                  She probably held out on Adam, until he agreed to take a bite out of that apple.

                  Whatever, it’s all just a story. You know what I think? I think that people used to enjoy it all—not just the good parts, but everything, whatever came their way. And now, because of that knowledge of good and evil business, we have pain and ugliness and depression. It got to be so that whatever made your life easier was called good; whatever made it harder was called evil. I don’t think there’s any other way to talk about it. I mean, look at the punishments—Adam was forced to work for a living by the sweat of his brow. Eve had to suffer in childbirth. Both of them had to hurt to get along.

                  You know, I don’t think God changed a thing when they ate that apple. I think He gave them exactly what they asked for—they knew what was good and what wasn’t. Lying in the sun with a full belly was good. Screaming with pain was a drag. I think before they knew the difference, they appreciated everything. Afterwards, they hardly liked anything. And it made their minds small. Tiny. They only wanted to feel the good things, and they fought the bad things so hard that they twisted and confused themselves.

                  They invented guilt, which, as near as I can figure out, is feeling bad because you feel good about something that’s bad, or maybe something that’s good. See what I mean by twisted? God, I hate words.

                  But what else is there? We see through a glass darkly, don’t we?

                  Anyway, once you’ve got good and bad fixed in your mind, that invents another problem that’s been bothering people ever since. Why does God let bad things happen, if he gives a shit about us?

                  It beats the hell out of me. The only thing I can figure is that He doesn’t think they’re bad. I mean, he came up with the whole scheme, right? And he’s supposed to have said it was good. Nowhere in the Bible or anywhere else does He say that what He made is bad.

                  So, where’s Jesus? I mean, if the whole thing is so good, why have Jesus at all?

                  Maybe Jesus is our cheerleader. Maybe we screwed ourselves up so bad that we need Someone to encourage us.

                  Oh, I can hear you thinking, Father Zorro. You’re thinking, even in your trance, that this man is nutso—or at least blasphemous. He’s got to be.

                  You may be right. Maybe I am. Maybe I’ve been sent by the devil to tempt you. Beats the hell out of me.

                  What about the devil, anyway? Now there’s a bad guy, pure and simple. He always looks like the old gods, have you noticed? The ones that we dreamed up before we dreamed up God.

                  That’s all I know about him.

                  I don’t think he’s very good.

                  Maybe it all turned to shit when we learned to talk. I mean, if you’re going to talk, you have to have something to talk about, right? So we grew a set of opinions. I like this. I hate that. This is good. That’s bad. .

                  Good and evil.

                  That’s all.

                  You can wake up now.

*

                  Diego came to without realizing he had been gone, even though he remembered everything Joe had told him. It puzzled him, but too many strange things were happening to him today.                  “Ms. Christopher mentioned to me that you’ve been having some odd experiences,” he said.

                  “Ms. Christopher doesn’t know the half of it.”

                  “She said you were pretty upset,” Diego probed.

                  “Uh-uh, padre. The word is scared.”

                  Joe’s demeanor was all wrong for what he was saying. His voice was relaxed, his body slack with bed rest.

                  “I shat myself, I was so scared.”

                  Diego leaned forward. “Do you want to talk about it?”

                  Joe opened his mouth, then closed it. He shook his head. Diego found himself getting angry. He stood, preparing to leave.

                  “Don’t go.” Joe’s words were strangled, his expression suddenly desperate.“Don’t make me be alone.” Beads of sweat appeared on his face. His face was a mask of fear.

                  Diego watched him from the doorway. The change in Joe, so rapid and unexpected, was frightening in and of itself.

                  “I thought you had it all figured out,” Diego said.

                  “I do,” Joe insisted. “Sometimes I can even believe it, except that I have bad dreams. Stay a while. Please.”

                  Diego moved the chair closer to the bed, sat down, and took Joe’s hand in his own. It was clammy with sweat, and the odor of fear rose from the patient. Joe’s terror was contagious; Diego shivered in sympathy with him. His free hand cradled the small cross he wore around his neck as he waited for the fearful man to talk.

                  “I’ve always been a talker, padre,” Joe said, in the pauses between rapid, shallow breaths. “Talk myself into anything. Or out of. Salesmen have to be talkers. As long as I’m talking, everything’s OK. Talk myself into anything. Even believing I know the answers.”

                  Joe’s breathing was ragged, his phrases short and hurried. “Slow down, Joe,” Diego said. “Catch your breath.”

                  “Not many left now,” Joe said. “Going to die soon. Forever this time. He told me.”

                  “Slower—come on now. Slower and deeper.”

                  “Gotta tell—”

                  Diego tightened his grip on Joe’s hand. “First breathe. Come on, you can do it.” He imitated the kind of breathing he wanted from Joe, slow and deep. Gradually, Joe followed his lead. Diego had nearly hyperventilated by the time Joe’s breathing came back to a reasonable pace.

                  “Better?” Diego was lightheaded and faintly nauseous, but Joe was calming down.

                  “Yeah,” Joe said. “Guess I got a little carried away. Gonna get carried away anyway, before too long.”

                  “No use rushing these things, though, is there?” Diego tried to joke.

                  “That’s pretty good, padre. They teach you that in padre school?”

                  “One of the first things,” Diego said, smiling.

                  “I guess I’m all right now,” Joe said.

                  Diego did not move.

                  “If you have something else to do, I understand,” Joe said.

                  “Nothing that won’t wait,” Diego answered.

                  “I guess that was just an anxiety attack,” Joe said. “I apologize.”

                  “What are you anxious about, Joe?” Diego asked.

                  “Nothing, now.”

                  “Oh.”

                  “It’s just that—well, hell, it’s embarrassing. The last one left me curled up in a corner, covered with shit.” Joe looked away from Diego as he spoke. “Something took over. I watched the whole thing. It was like it was happening to someone else at first. Then—then I could smell myself.”

                  “Is that when you screamed?” Diego asked.

                  “Uh-huh.” Joe looked suddenly at Diego.“Shouldn’t one of the nurses have showed up to check on me? I’ll bet I pegged the needle on their machines, just then.”

                  “They’re busy,” Diego said,“and they know I’m in here with you. They’ll come if you need them.”

                  “God, there I go again. I didn’t use to be this way. Now I’m scared of everything. Of all people, I shouldn’t be scared. I mean, I know what I’m getting into. Sort of. Why should I be scared of dying?”

                  “You mean, for real?” Diego asked.

                  “For real. Yeah.”

                  Diego looked into Joe’s eyes and saw a terrifying desperation. The eyes flickered, resting only momentarily on an object before moving again to something else. Joe was, apparently, searching for something in the room, something mobile and deceptive. Joe caught the priest watching him, grinned nervously, and looked away. He wiped sweat from his forehead, grinned again, and laughed, a short bark devoid of humor.

                  Diego looked away, to remove his small share of the emotional pressure on Joe. He scanned the room, looking for some mark of Joe’s personality in it. Flowers were normally forbidden ICU patients (Jonquil had raised such a fuss that the rules had been relaxed in her case); they took up space that might be needed—would be needed—in case of a code. But most patients managed to receive a get-well card from a friend, or had some of their own possessions to keep their spirits up.

                  Joe had nothing of his own visible. The only reading matter was the daily newspaper given to all the patients and the menu waiting to be filled out for tomorrow’s meals from the dietician. Not even a paperback book or magazine helped him to pass the time between one burst of terror to the next:

                  Yesterday, Joe had not been this way. Yesterday he had spent much of his time laughing and joking with the staff, entertaining two nurses, an aide, an orderly, and his physician with his traveling salesman’s repertoire of jokes.

                  Diego’s experience of ministry to the sick and dying had confirmed much of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s manifesto about the emotional stages of the process of dying, though not in the rigid way in which they had been presented in her writing. Denial, anger, fear, bargaining, acceptance were not clear-cut plateaus on the journey to death. They mixed with each other. A patient might jump in seconds from one to another, in any order. Some people followed an orderly procession, as if they had studied her book and followed it like a prescription. Others were more labile, and still others simply died, without realizing what was happening to them.

                  But those people who had gone through near-death experiences normally approached their final death with a larger degree of equanimity. As Joe had said, they felt as if knew what they were getting into. They were calm, and displayed greater trust in whatever it was that they called the thing they trusted—God, the Light, the Presence, Christ. Joe was panicky today; yesterday he had seemed fine.

                  Where was the fear coming from?

                  Two possibilities existed. Either Joe had managed to load something on his conscience since yesterday—and that seemed unlikely given his physical condition and location; it was damnably difficult to engage in mortal sin while interned in ICU—or there was something hidden in Joe, which the imminence of dying had brought to conscious, or semiconscious, awareness.

                  Diego checked himself. There was, potentially, a medical reason for Joe’s anxiety. His TIA’s, the micro-strokes that came and went rapidly, could be having more effect on his emotions than expected. Diego knew just enough medicine to be dangerous, and he was aware of his shortcomings. But if the small bits of ischemia were located in the right spots in the brain, they themselves could be setting off Joe’s anxiety reaction.

                  It was a theory, anyway—worth checking out. Maybe a small dose of a tranquilizer would do Joe more good than all the talk in the world.

                  In this world, anyway.

                  In spite of himself, Diego was caught up in the tortuous relationship between flesh and spirit. He had seen, over and over again in his work, what should have been dead flesh, ready for the mortician’s scalpel and syringe, animated by purpose and intention. More discouraging, he had seen the possessors of healthy bodies lose all will to live. The spark of life just seemed to go out of them. In perfect health, they died.

                  He decided to talk to the staff neurologist, Dr. Caine, about Joe’s case.

                  “How are you feeling now, Joe?” he asked. Joe’s breathing had slowed to normal. His color was better, the sheen of fear-sweat had dried from his skin, and the hand he still held in his own had relaxed its frenzied grip.

                  “Better, padre. I’ll be OK now,” Joe answered. “I know you have other people to talk to. But I think I can tell you now what scared me so bad. Have you got time before you go?”

                  Diego tried to settle more comfortably into the uncomfortable chair. He assumed the mask of the professional listener.“Sure, Joe, always.” It was nearing his lunchtime. With the best of intentions, Diego knew that his stomach would announce its noisome emptiness to everyone around him soon. He could already feel the preliminary rumblings. He prayed for gastric silence; Joe had finally worked up the courage to talk directly about his fear.

                  “You don’t have a cigarette, padre?” Joe asked.

                  “Sorry.”

                  “Didn’t think so. I just miss them.” Joe sighed, leaning back against his pillow. “When that fellow next door died this morning, I went with him. Partway, I mean. I mean, I’m still here, so obviously I didn’t die. But he came in here while they were working on him. He was really afraid, ’cause even though he looked unconscious, he really wasn’t, not at first, and some of the stuff they do to you in a code hurts. Anyway, to get away from the pain he kinda drifted over here, if you see what I mean.”

                  Diego felt Joe’s eyes on him, expecting a response. “Go on.” The words came out in a strangled whisper.

                  “Scary, ain’t it? Well, I was lying here in my bed, not doing much, just watching TV. When this fellow showed up, the TV went kind of dim. I didn’t know why, at first. I figured it was one of those TIA’s I’ve been having. It’s kind of like a mental brown-out, and I’ve been getting used to them. But this was different. I’ve had enough TIA’s to know what one feels like, and that wasn’t it. I wasn’t confused, and there was nothing wrong with my sight—in fact, it got better, somehow—and I wasn’t paralyzed. The TIA’s feel kind of like something is happening to you, something dark and uncontrolled. This was different. This was like hearing someone call from way far away, so far that you’re not quite sure that you really heard anything, but you know you heard something.

                  “‘Make them stop.’ That’s what he was saying. I don’t mind telling you, I was so scared I couldn’t move. Then he seemed to realize that he wasn’t alone—I mean, it was like he noticed me, you know? And he kind of floated down from the ceiling to my level, and we talked. I stopped being so scared, because he was. If that makes any sense.”

                  “Sure, Joe,” Diego said. A priest needs to be a skeptic. He is so vulnerable to self-delusion and to the delusions of others, that he must grow an armor of doubt, to protect himself from false miracles. Thus, he stands in danger of missing a real one. God has so decreed, it seems, and the priest can do nothing but follow. The Church presumes to judge the truth of miracles. But even the suggestion that one has occurred draws on the witness the doubt of the whole Body of Christ. There have been that many deceptions.

                  “When he noticed me,” Joe said,“it seemed to calm him down. I think he thought he was alone and was going to be forever.”

                  “What did you and this—this fellow—talk about?” Diego asked. He tried to keep his skepticism out of his voice, but from the look on Joe’s face, knew he failed.

                  “C’mon, padre,” Joe said. “This is right up your alley, ain’t it?”

                  “I’m not really used to this, if you want to know,” Diego said. He swallowed against the dryness of his mouth. “Go ahead.”

                  “Well, I kind of told him what to expect. It turned out that he had his heart attack while—uhm, you know, while he was, uh, engaged in conjugal relations with a woman other than his wife. He was a Baptist, see, so he couldn’t really confess it to anyone and get it off his chest, and he was scared of going to hell. I mean, this guy could smell the sulfur and feel the brimstone blistering the soles of his feet, and I kind of knew what he meant—I mean, I could feel it with him. It wasn’t quite like talking, if you know what I mean.”

                  “What was it like, Joe?”

                  “Well, I knew what was going on inside this fellow, and he knew what was going on inside me. There he was, floating over my bed, but he was in the next room, too. It wasn’t your regular sort of conversation.”

                  “I didn’t think it was.”

                  “Anyway,” Joe said,“he was pretty scared, so I remembered for him what it was like to be near dying. The dying part he could handle OK, it was the damnation that he couldn’t take. So I told him about the things I remembered—the light and the tunnel and such. About the time he started to calm down—he was real grateful—it got bright all around here, and I saw the mouth of the tunnel open up, and he went into it. He kind of waved as he went, sort of a thank-you. Then Jeannie came in with breakfast.”

                  Diego was puzzled. The experience Joe described did not sound so frightening as to warrant Joe’s reaction. It was strange enough, but if Joe himself had been through the near-death experience several times as he claimed, his spectral interview with what he took to be the spirit of the man in the next room should not have been so traumatic.

                  What Jeannie Christopher had described to him was something far worse than what Joe was willing to talk about.

                  “Then what?” Diego asked.

                  “Then nothing,” Joe answered. His face was closed. There was more, but he was not ready yet to talk. “I ate breakfast. Then you showed up.”

                  Something had happened between breakfast and Diego’s arrival, but Joe had lost it. Maybe, Diego thought, it was protective amnesia—when the mind can not deal with an event, it buries what is too painful to remember. It is not necessarily a favor to the sufferer to force memory on him.

                  “You look as if you’re feeling all right now,” Diego said. “Is that true?”

                  “Yeah, I feel fine, padre. Say, did you ever hear the one about the rookie priest? He was just ordained, and he was fixing to give his first sermon, and he was real nervous about it. So he asks this older priest what to do. The old guy’s been a priest for thirty years or so. He tells the young one, ‘Just have a wee taste of the communion wine before you go up in the pulpit. It’ll relax you, make you stop worrying. You’ll see.’ Well, the young priest takes his advice. In fact, he’s so nervous, he takes it three or four times. He gets through the first part of the service all right, and when it’s time for the sermon, he’s feeling no pain. He gets up into the pulpit and rips out a whing-ding of a sermon. Afterwards, he goes up to the old priest and says, ‘How’d I do?’ And the old priest says, ‘Well, that was pretty good, son. You only made a couple of mistakes. It’s not the usual custom to refer to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as Big Daddy, Junior, and the Spook. And it was a taffy-pulling contest at St. Peter’s, not a peter-pulling contest at St. Taffy’s.’”

                  Diego laughed. The joke was old when he had gone to seminary, but he still loved it; and Joe’s imitation of the old Irish priest was deadly in its accuracy. It sounded exactly like Diego’s first rector.

                  “If you’re feeling better,” Diego said, still smiling over Joe’s delivery, “I’ll be on my way. There’s still one or two other patients to drop in on.”

                  “I’m doing fine, padre,” Joe said. “Go spend your time with someone who needs your help.”

                  “Anything you need?”

                  “Nope—nothing,” Joe said, flushed happily with the success of his performance. Then his face grew serious. “Only, pray for me.”

                  “Right now,” Diego said as he stood up. He raised his right hand over Joe Wood.

                  “‘Lord Jesus Christ, by your patience in suffering you hallowed earthly pain and gave us an example of obedience to your father’s will. Be near this man, Joseph, in his time of weakness and pain; sustain him by your grace, that his strength and courage may not fail; heal him according to your will; and help him always to believe that what happens to him here is of little account if you hold him in eternal life, my Lord and my God. Amen.’”

                  As Diego finished the prayer, he heard a cry of pain from the corridor.

                  “What the hell was that?” Joe said.

                  “I’m going to find out,” Diego answered. “See you later.” Diego ran from Joe’s room into the hall. Jeannie Christopher was backing away from the entrance to the crash room next door. In the doorway stood a tall, raven-haired Hispanic woman, a wheel chair in front of her, occupied by the patient from Five, La Curandera, still unconscious. The younger held Jeannie at bay with a wicked-looking knife.

                  “I’m taking my mother out of here,” the woman said. “You might as well get out of my way.”

                  Jeannie stopped giving ground.

                  “You’d better move!” the woman warned.

                  “I can’t,” Jeannie said. “I can’t let you hurt my patient.” Diego was astounded at the determination in Jeannie’s face, her stance, in every fiber of her body. He had known that there was strength in the young woman, and a sure and certain perseverance, but the raw physical courage she displayed moved him, without his realizing what he was doing, to interpose himself as the woman’s daughter, startled by the sudden appearance of the other nurses, lunged for Jeannie with the knife. He parried the blade as best he could and heard it clatter to the floor as he twisted the offensive arm up behind the woman’s back and pushed her face-first to the floor. He looked down at her, surprised at his own action, then looked across her to Jeannie.

                  “Get the knife,” he ordered.

                  Jeannie scooped it up and tossed it into the nurse’s station, well out of the daughter’s reach.

                  “I’ll call security,” Vivian said. She had appeared from her office.

                  “No,” Jeannie said. “We don’t need any more trouble.” She turned her attention to the daughter, still caught in the distinctly unmerciful grip of Father Zorro, who was fascinated to notice that the head nurse gave in to Jeannie’s wishes.

                  “I think you can let her go now, Father,” Jeannie said.

                  “All right, everybody,” Vivian said. “Everything’s under control now. Back to work.” And so saying, Vivian led the retreat from the field of battle. Wanda Sue and Prissy-Jo, wanting to watch the outcome of the brief struggle but afraid to oppose the head nurse, drifted back to work.

                  Diego released the daughter, who crumpled soundlessly to the floor. He helped her rise and led her back into Room Five. He intended to watch her while he and Jeannie dealt with La Curandera, but Jeannie had other ideas.

                  “Help me put your mother back to bed,” she said to the daughter. The dark woman did not answer, but moved silently to obey. As she and Jeannie lifted the old woman, Diego finally noticed the warm stickiness of fresh blood running down his arm and dripping onto the floor.

                  “Let me look at that,” Jeannie ordered. “Take your jacket off and roll up your sleeve.”

                  Diego obeyed, feeling a little hurt that Jeannie seemed so curt with him, and a little dizzy from seeing his own blood dropping onto the floor.

                  “And sit down, for God’s sake,” Jeannie added from the bedside. “Is it serious?”

                  “I don’t think so,” Diego said. He sat down, a little wobbly, in the abandoned wheelchair.

                  “Good.” She hit the call button.

                  The speaker responded with a distorted version of Wanda Sue’s voice. “Can I help you?”

                  “The father’s got a cut on his arm, Wanda Sue. Come and get him out of here and take a look at it, will you? I’m kind of busy.”

                  With Diego taken care of, Jeannie turned her attention to the daughter. Wanda Sue came in and wheeled Diego out, as Jeannie began the process of re-installing the monitors and the intravenous solutions the the daughter had removed. As she did so, she explained each item, what it was intended to do and how it worked, to the still-silent daughter.

                  Diego was a little woozy from the adrenal rush of the encounter and from the sight of his own blood. But he had not lost enough to be dangerous. He discovered, however, that Wanda Sue, in walking to Five to get him, had left a scent trail behind her, and she wheeled him efficiently through it. The perfume was heady stuff indeed, especially for a celibate already lightheaded with victory.

                  “You wait right here,” Wanda Sue said, putting on the brakes by her seat in the nurse’s station. “I’ll be right back.” She vanished into the medication room, leaving Diego alone with his thoughts.

                  His spirit soared with the relief of action. With Joe, he had been only mildly effective. But when confronted with a crisis that required decisive action, he had come through, he had been willing to sacrifice his own safety for another, and even sustained a wound in the process.

                  Wanda Sue reappeared, bearing antiseptic and bandages. Her scent intensified as she approached, overpowering Diego’s sweat and the always-present eau d’hospital.

                  “You’re a regular hero, Father,” she gushed. “Not just anyone would’ve done what you did.” She leaned over him to examine the cut. He was intensely aware of the pressure of her breasts against his unwounded arm; in spite of his wishes, they filled his awareness.

                  “Now, that doesn’t look too bad,” she said. “More blood than hurt. This might sting a little.”

                  She dabbed alcohol on the wound, leaning against Diego with slightly more force than necessary.

                  Fortunately, the alcohol did more than sting. The cut, while not dangerous, was deeper than it appeared, and the alcohol seeped all the way into the bottom. Diego’s effort not to feel the effect of Wanda Sue’s breasts pressing against him was aided by the pain, and the alcohol’s sharp smell cut through the sexual muzziness of Wanda Sue’s musk.

                  Diego, eyes closed, suffered himself to be ministered to, and gave thanks for the distraction of pain.

                 

Chapter 5

                 

                  The daughter sat in the visitor’s chair, unspeaking, unmoving, as Jeannie explained what each piece of equipment was for. Her eyes were hooded, watching, not missing a movement that Jeannie made, but giving away nothing of her own feeling.

                  There was urine on the floor, spilled from the Foley catheter disconnected by the daughter as she prepared her mother for the failed escape. The surveillance gave Jeannie the chills, hut she tried to suppress her anxiety and continued to explain her work.

                  “First things first,” Jeannie said. “That ocean of pee contaminated everything. You made a hell of a mess.”

                  Jeannie mopped up the worst of the urine, shoved the mop and bucket outside the door, and scrubbed her hands in the sink. The mess annoyed her; it was unnecessary.

                  “I could use some help,” Jeannie said.

                  The daughter made no answer. Jeannie busied herself against the silence. She arranged her patient more comfortably in the bed, straightening wrinkles in the sheets that could eventually lead to bedsores, making the bed and its unconscious occupant neat and, well—right.

                  Then she quickly examined La Curandera’s unconscious form. There were no bruises; the daughter had handled her mother gently, if hurriedly, in trying to make their escape from the unit.

                  “She looks to be in pretty good shape,” Jeannie said. “You were very careful with her.”

                  Again, only silence answered her.

                  Jeannie reattached the leads from the heart monitor, careful to shield La Curandera’s nakedness from the room’s window on the hallway, then snugged the blanket up around her chin, leaving an arm outside the covers. The intravenous line needed replacing. She picked up the phone and ordered a new bag of IV fluid stat from Pharmacy. The old one, the sterility of its tubing compromised in the abortive escape, she discarded. Then she cleaned the IV site with an iodine solution followed by a quick scrub with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol. Its sharp odor filled the room.

                  “You see, we’re not hurting her,” Jeannie said.

                  “You’re not helping her, either.”

                  Jeannie looked to see if the daughter had really spoken. There was anger in her deep brown eyes, a harsh turn to the shape of her mouth. “Her face—it still moves. She does not speak. She sleeps, and nothing wakes her. You are accomplishing nothing.”

                  “If we knew what caused her symptoms—” Jeannie began to say.

                  “If you knew what caused her symptoms,” the daughter said, “you would stay as far away from her as you could. But she is my mother, and I must stay with her.”

                  “What caused her symptoms, then?” Jeannie asked. If the daughter knew something, she was taking her damn sweet time about telling anyone about it.

                  “You would not understand.”

                  “I might,” Jeannie said. “I’m good at what I do, but I can’t figure it out alone. I need your help.”

                  The daughter looked at Jeannie, who felt herself shrink under the unwavering, scornful gaze.

                  “You are a child.” The pupils of her eyes seemed to widen. Jeannie tore her gaze away. “You know nothing. They were right. She should not have been brought here.”

                  Jeannie stopped her nervous busy-ness. “What do you mean?“

                  “My mother is not sick.”

                  “Well, she sure looks sick to me,” Jeannie said.

                  The daughter took Jeannie’s hands, both of them, in her own.

                  “You can be confidential, yes?”

                  Jeannie nodded affirmation, afraid to disturb the sudden change of mood.

                  “I wonder, can I trust you?” the daughter mused. “You do, or seem to do, what you think is best for my mother. I can see the compassion in your hands as they work. You put everything you have into your actions, and your body speaks more loudly than your words.”

                  Jeannie’s hands, normally cold in the air-conditioned atmosphere of the hospital, were sweating, clasped between the daughter’s. Her face felt flushed.

                  “I think that I must tell someone, but the knowledge is a burden.”

                  Jeannie wanted to ask questions. But the solemnity on the daughter’s face kept her silent.

                  “It is a curse. That’s all it can be. A curse.” Jeannie waited. The daughter still held her hands, and was working up the courage to continue, when Caine shoved the door open.

                  “What’s been going on here?” he demanded. The two women jumped apart as if they had been shocked.

                  Jeannie’s hands tingled.

                  “You,” he said, pointing an accusing finger at the daughter, “will get the bloody hell out of here. Wait in the lounge. I want to talk to you later.”

                  The daughter rose from her chair and stepped close to Caine, forcing him to back up until he bumped into the bed. Jeannie saw a brief but sudden fear cross his face. The daughter cleared her throat and spat the phlegm on Caine’s black patent-leather shoes. She moved to the door, stopping to catch Jeannie’s eye, and left.

                  Caine was motionless for a full minute. He stared at the glob on his shoe.

                  Jeannie held out a tissue from the box on the over bed table. Caine took it, bent over, and dabbed at the mess on his foot. “What’s going in here?” he demanded. “I heard there was trouble—”

                  “And now that it’s over, you’re here,” Jeannie said. She had been on the verge of getting some real information out of the daughter, establishing enough of a relationship that she might have found out what was really going on with this pitiful old woman who still lay, twitching, on the bed, when this stupid—stupid!—doctor busted in and ruined everything.

                  “What happened?” Caine asked.

                  “The patient’s daughter was removing her from her room. She had a knife. Father Zorro took it away from her. That’s all. It’s all over now.”

                  “That’s all?” Caine asked. “A woman tries to kidnap one of our patients, and you say ‘That’s all’?”

                  “It is all. Everything was fine until you got here.” Jeannie turned away from the neurologist, willing him to leave her alone. Her hands sought the minutiae of nursing. She straightened the already-straight bedclothes, rearranged the few objects on the over bed table, brushed La Curandera’s fine gray hair off her forehead. It was a release denied to the men with whom she worked, the men who must find significance for their every action. She knew precisely what she was doing; the small actions released, in a small way, some of the tension of the confrontation. It was not that she felt she was in the wrong; exactly the contrary was true. But the power in the situation lay with the physician, simply because he was the physician, therefore by definition right, especially when in fact he was on the wrong side in an argument.

                  “And you let her go?” Caine asked, shocked. “Why didn’t you have her arrested?”

                  Still with her back to the doctor, Jeannie answered, “There didn’t seem to be any need. She was just upset.”

                  Caine mopped his forehead in frustration. “Just upset? She went after you with a knife! Doesn’t that make you just the least little bit angry?”

                  Jeannie whirled on him, the dam of her self-restraint broken. The words rushed over Caine like a flash flood through a dry arroyo.

                  “You’re damn right I’m angry, Doctor. Where else are we going to get any kind of a history on this woman?” Her hand waved at the comatose old lady. “You want to arrest the only person we have who could tell us anything. She was right on the edge of talking to me, when you threw her out.”

                  “She threatened violence!”

                  “That was over!” Jeannie said. “She was calming down.“

                  “She—she spat on me.”

                  “If you’re afraid of body fluids, you’re in the wrong job, Doctor.”

                  Caine was speechless, and Jeannie was enjoying it. It had already been an awful day. She was ready to get even with someone for everything that had happened.

                  “I’m going to lunch. Do you have any orders for the patient?“

                  “Yeah,” Caine mumbled. “I think we ought to do a tox screen—barbiturates, heavy metals, stimulants—the works.”

                  “Fine,” Jeannie said. “When you get done writing the order, I ought to be back from lunch.”

                  She wheeled from the room and strode into the nurse’s station, past Wanda Sue and Father Diego, to the door to Vivian’s office.

                  She pushed the door open and stuck her head in. Vivian looked up from her paperwork.

                  “I’ll be back in half an hour. I need to eat and get away from here for a while.”

                  “Understood,” Vivian answered.

                  Jeannie shut the door and started to leave, stopped, and turned back to Diego.

                  “Thank you for what you did,” she said. “I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t come along.”

                  “I’m afraid it was just reflex,” Diego said.

                  “Damn good reflexes, Father. Damn good.” Jeannie walked down the hall toward the door that marked her route to temporary respite.

                  She pushed open the door. Gus was waiting. “All sorts of excitement today, eh, Missy?” Jeannie dug in the pocket of her jacket and flipped him a quarter without breaking stride. “Not now, Gus. Here’s the silver I owe you from this morning.”

                  He trailed along in her wake. “What happened in there?“

                  “I said not now. Leave me alone.”

                  Gus watched her bypass the elevator and start down the staircase. After the door closed on her, he whistled appreciatively. “Must have been one hell of a morning,” he said as he examined the quarter. There was no telltale glint of copper in the milling. Real silver.

                 

*

                 

                  As gently as he could, Diego extricated himself from Wanda Sue’s musky presence. Dr. Caine was emerging from Room Five, and Diego wanted to talk to him about Joe Wood.

                  Caine moved to the chart rack, pulled one out, and began writing orders on it. Diego stood at his side, ostentatiously not reading over his shoulder, waiting until Caine was finished.

                  “Doctor?” Diego asked. “Might I have a word with you?“

                  “Not now,” Caine said. “I’m an atheist.“

                  Diego was nonplused, but he tried to forge ahead. “No, I—uh, I wanted to talk to you about Mr. Wood.”

                  “Wood?” Caine asked. A look of puzzlement crossed his face.

                  “In Room Six,” Diego said. “The MI, with TIA’s. You consulted on him when he was admitted, didn’t you?”

                  “Wood.” Caine could not remember. “Don’t think so.” Diego steered the neurologist to a corner of the nurse’s station, away from Wanda Sue, whose odor still floated around them. Maybe Caine would remember better with a clear nose.

                  “How’d you get that cut?” Caine asked.

                  Diego explained what had happened in the corridor, minimizing his own participation.

                  “Damn brave of you, padre,” Caine said. “You ought to get a medal.”

                  Diego sighed with frustration. “The reason I was here at all was to see Mr. Wood. Ms. Christopher called me up. It seems that he’s having some problems, and they might be neurological.”

                  “When did you get your medical degree?” Caine inquired.

                  Diego’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t think—“

                  “That’s because you’re not paid to think, padre, you’re paid to pray. The MI in Six didn’t have any neuro problems when I looked at him. Just cardiac, which I don’t do.”

                  “I know that,” Diego said. “But I think he might be developing some—at least it’s something that ought to be ruled out. If it’s not neurological, then it’s either psychological or spiritual—”

                  “Neither of which exist,” Caine interjected. “It’s all just a ball of gray jelly, padre. I’ve looked. I know.”

                  “I don’t want to argue with you, Doctor—“

                  “I wouldn’t suggest it,” Caine said. “Look—I’ve done the consult, for which I was paid three hundred and thirty dollars, which, by the way, I haven’t collected. For me to look at him again will cost him another three hundred and thirty dollars. He doesn’t have it. His insurance is about tapped out. He does have TIA’s, but he’s a lousy surgical risk and there’s nothing I can do for him.

                  “What you’re looking for is a way out,” Caine continued. “He’s doing some things you don’t understand, and you want me to explain him to you. Well, padre, he’s sick. His heart’s worn out and the arteries in his neck are worn out, and his brain is not getting enough oxygen, and sooner or later, one thing or another will just give up and he’ll die. It happens to all of us. Tough shit.”

                  Caine turned to leave, throwing La Curandera’s chart down onto the counter with a metallic crash. Instead of letting the doctor go, Diego followed after him down the corridor. They reached Room Thirteen, in the southwest corner of the unit. Diego steered him into the bedless room, which was set up as a physicians’ lounge, and sat him down on the sofa. Caine was taken by surprise.

                  “Hey! What are you doing?” he cried as Diego’s hand tightened around his upper arm. Before he could say more, he was sitting down. The door to the lounge was shutting, and Diego was poised over him, his face red with anger.

                  “Don’t you ever walk away from me again!” he hissed. A part of the priest seemed to watch the drama from a point somewhere over his right shoulder. It was a part of him long suppressed by canonically-ordained mildness. He almost could hear it cheering him on as he accosted the physician. “You made a mistake this time. This time you turned your back on God.”

                  “Wh-what are you talking about?”

                  Diego was enjoying his display of righteous anger. He was not certain where it had come from, but when Caine had turned away from him, brusquely ignoring his request, something seemed to take over. Uncharacteristically, he made no attempt to restrain himself.

                  “You apparently failed to notice that I’m doing God’s work.“

                  “Are you crazy?” Caine tried to rise. Diego put a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back down into the sofa.

                  “Sit down!”

                  Caine gaped up at him, open-mouthed. “Is everyone up here going crazy?” he finally managed to say. “Let me go.”

                  “You’ll sit there and listen to what I have to say,” Diego ordered.

                  “Like hell I will!”

                  Diego grinned at him. “Are you going to hit me?“

                  “I might,” Caine said, but both knew he was lying.

                  “I almost wish you would.”

                  “You are crazy. I’m going to report you.” At that point, the ballast in the fluorescent light fixture in the ceiling shorted out. There was a sudden flash as the tube exploded from the electrical overload. The fixture’s cover contained the broken glass, but the acrid electrical smell filled the room. Diego glanced at the ceiling and smiled. Caine followed his gaze, then looked back to the priest’s face.

                  “That didn’t—you don’t think—”

                  “Hard to be rational all the time, isn’t it?” Diego said, smiling. “Is it true that there’s nothing to be done for Mr. Wood?”

                  “I, uh—yes, it’s true. He really is a bad surgical risk. His heart couldn’t handle the extra strain.”

                  “Could these TIA’s give him hallucinations?“

                  “Sure. Easily.”

                  “Is that common?”

                  “No. Usually there are just deficits.” Caine kept glancing at the light fixture. “Don’t you think we’d better call someone? That could start a fire.”

                  “I don’t smell any smoke.”

                  “I do.”

                  “It’s just the fried insulation,” Diego said. “It’ll be okay.”

                  “Look,” Caine said. “Now you’re being unreasonable. Let me report that to the electrician. It could be dangerous.”

                  “I’ve never had a thunderbolt before.”

                  “It was a short circuit.”

                  “Now it’s a short circuit,” Diego said. “But a minute ago, you weren’t so sure. Go on, get out of here.”

                  Caine stood, carefully avoiding bumping into Diego, and fled the room. Diego regarded the blown-out fixture with a mixture of awe and self-satisfaction.

                  It wasn’t every day that one received a sign.

*

                 

                  “We who are about to die salute you,” Prissy-Jo chanted.

                  “Good luck,” Jeannie said. “I think I’ll just wait until I get home. The way today has been going, the mystery meat would explode in my face.“

                  “Is it mystery meat again?”

                  “That’s what the menu says,” Jeannie said. She was sitting at the nurse’s station, bringing the chart on La Curandera up to date. For the moment, everything was quiet. The daughter was with the old woman, and Mr. Wood was, for the moment, asleep. Jeannie’s choice was either to grab a quick lunch or catch up on her charting. When, downstairs in the cafeteria, she had glanced at the menu, her stomach had performed a double somersault. She opted for charting. There were only a few hours left on her shift; she could eat when she got home.

                  Prissy-Jo stuck her head into Vivian’s office. “Everything’s up to date,” she said. “I’m off to lunch.”

                  “Don’t take too long,” Jeannie heard Vivian’s voice. “We’re getting a new admission in a while.”

                  “Great. Just what we need,” Jeannie mumbled. “Anything to make life interesting.”

                  “Do you want me to bring you anything?” Prissy-Jo asked.

                  “Yeah,” Wanda Sue said. “Make him about six-two, a hundred and seventy-five, and blonde. Hung like a horse—a thoroughbred.”

                  “Dreamer,” said Prissy Jo, and walked down the corridor and out the door.

                  She, at least, had escaped for a while. Jeannie bent over her charts, using the comparative calm to catch up on her paperwork.

                  Wanda Sue filed her nails. Jeannie felt the younger woman’s eyes on her, but forced the feeling to the back of her mind. She had to file an incident report on the actions of the daughter, Father Diego’s intervention, and the work done getting everyone settled down again. But she wanted to minimize the threat, because she felt that the daughter would now cooperate in her mother’s treatment. Father Zorro deserved a medal, but would not get one. They—the faceless people who thought they ran the hospital because they counted the money—wanted only a smooth-running operation, with no incidents, no problems that might lead to litigation, no unhappy customers.

                  She knew her judgment was unfair, that there had to be caring, dedicated people among the administration. But they hid themselves so thoroughly in that bureaucratic jungle that it was easy to believe that they had been gobbled up by some kind of administrative predator. Someone, though, had to order the supplies that she used every day, buy the drugs, keep track of the employees’ health insurance, arrange the schedules, establish operating procedures, build additions to the hospital, maintain, to whatever degree, the physical plant, hire and fire the staff, and raise the funds necessary to keep the hospital’s doors opened.

                  She suspected that it was the administrators’ secretaries who actually did the work. Staring at the blank form of the incident report, she wished that she had one right now.

                  She glanced over the monitors by reflex: all four patients were quiet, thank God, but Jonquil’s blood pressure seemed a little high. She leaned across the desk for a closer look when Jonquil’s light glowed.

                  She keyed the microphone into Jonquil’s room. “Can I help you?” she asked.

                  “I feel funny.” Jonquil’s voice was irritating at the best of times. Over the tiny speaker, it was almost incomprehensible.

                  “I’ll be right there,” Jeannie said. Wearily, she rose from her chair and went across the hall into Jonquil’s room. She pushed open the door, took one look at the patient, and gasped in dismay. Jonquil was gray with pain.

                  Jeannie leaned out the door and called to Wanda Sue. “Get Preacher up here stat.” She moved to Jonquil’s bedside.

                  “What’s the matter?” she asked. She did not wait for an answer, but slapped a switch on the monitor that would run a strip on the electrocardiograph. She suspected an attack of angina, but needed to confirm her provisional diagnosis. It could just as easily be an MI. In fact, angina sometimes lead to a full blown heart attack. She could see the tracing on the monitor screen, but she wanted to have a hard-copy strip in hand for later study.

                  Without pause, Jeannie snatched the bottle of nitroglycerin tablets.

                  “Open your mouth, Jonquil,” she ordered.

                  Frightened, the woman complied, lifting her tongue so that Jeannie could place the small pill underneath.

                  “Let it dissolve,” Jeannie commanded. “Does it hurt a lot?“

                  Jonquil nodded.

                  Jeannie wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Jonquil’s upper arm and pumped air into it. She placed the bell of the stethoscope in the crook of Jonquil’s elbow and adjusted the ear pieces so that she could hear through them. Simultaneously, she noted her patient’s respirations—rapid and shallow, because of the pain in her chest and the fear in her mind. As she let the air slowly escape the cuff, Jeannie heard Jonquil’s pulse bounding. The first sound told her that the systolic pressure—the force exerted on the arterial walls by the systole, or contraction, of the heart—was up high. She waited, still drawing off the air pressure, until the sound disappeared from her stethoscope. The diastolic pressure—the force on the artery walls while the heart was relatively relaxed between beats—was also much higher than normal.

                  The higher pressure in Jonquil’s arteries forced the blood to move with extra force. But the arteries around her heart were narrowed with plaque. Plaque was cholesterol, a kind of fat. It was deposited on the inner surface of the arteries, making the blood travel through a narrower space than it should. For too many years, Jonquil had lived on a typical Texas diet of marbled beef and fried foods—juicy T-bones, KC steaks, French fries, and chicken-fried steak with cream gravy. Now she was paying the price.

                  The increased pressure of the blood flowing through the narrow arteries of her heart caused the blood vessels to spasm. Each artery sensed the higher pressure. The nervous system interpreted the high pressure as a demand for more oxygen, therefore for more blood. Its response was to increase the blood pressure even further, which, under normal circumstances, would result in a greater supply of blood to the cells that needed it. But as the coronary arteries tightened to increase the pressure, they just about closed off the flow to the heart, because of the narrowing caused by the deposits of fat that Jonquil had laid down over the years. The heart struggled harder to supply more blood to itself; the arteries narrowed even more. If something did not intervene to break the cycle, it would intensify until her heart starved to death.

                  Jeannie could swear that she smelled smoke—cigarette smoke. She moved aside an empty coffee cup and lifted the lid of the over bed table. The odor assaulted her as she saw a butt floating in the dregs of coffee in a styrofoam cup. She carried it into the bathroom and threw the sodden mess into the trash. Then she removed the bed table from the room, leaving it out in the hall to air out.

                  “You can be a goddamned fool sometimes, you know that?” she complained to Jonquil. Her breathing had slowed and deepened, some color returned to her face. “Are you feeling better now?”

                  Jonquil nodded, weakly. Then a look of alarm passed across her face.

                  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

                  “Too bad,” Jeannie said, as she held an emesis basin under Jonquil’s chin. Jonquil coughed and upchucked. Jeannie tried not to listen. It wasn’t the smells and sights of nursing that got to her; it was the sounds. Her brief experiment in working as a surgical nurse had ended when she first heard a scalpel cut through flesh. While Jonquil vomited, Jeannie imagined herself somewhere else. It usually worked.

                  Jonquil finished.

                  “Are you okay now?”

                  “I think so.” Jonquil’s voice was shaky.

                  Jeannie again moved to the bathroom, rinsed the basin, and replaced it in the bedside table.

                  “I ought to read you the riot act,” she said. “What are you trying to do—kill yourself?”

                  “I’m sorry,” Jonquil sniffed.

                  “Cigarettes and coffee!” Jeannie said. “Where did you get them?”

                  “That horrid young woman who works with you, the one who smells, brought me the coffee.”

                  “What about the cigarette?”

                  “I had my own.”

                  “Where?”

                  “That was the last one. Honest.”

                  “Bullshit, Jonquil!”

                  “Really.”

                  Jeannie was past exasperation. She had warned, the doctors had warned, her husband Henry had warned Jonquil to lay off coffee and tobacco if she wanted to go on living. But Jeannie could not stop herself.

                  “You know better. You’re not stupid—I know you understand. Why are you doing this to yourself?”

                  “Nothing’s fun any more,” Jonquil said. “Everything I like is gone.”

                  “And you’ll go with it if you’re not careful.” Jeannie heard the over bed table being rolled away from the door. Jeff Walters, Preacher’s brother, stuck his head into the room. “What’s going on?”

                  “I called for the other Dr. Walters,” Jeannie said. “Sorry to bother you, Dr. Jeff.”

                  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m covering for Preacher anyway. He’s in a meeting. How are you feeling, Mrs. Hennessy?”

                  “Not too bad, Doctor.”

                  “Do you have Mrs. Hennessy’s chart, Miss Christopher?”

                  “It’s at the nurses’ station.” Jeannie moved to go after it.

                  “Well, let’s go out there and look at it. I’m not up to date on Mrs. Hennessy’s case,” Walters said. To Jonquil, he added, “Don’t go away. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

                  He led Jeannie from the room and to the nurse’s station across the corridor.

                  The younger half-brother of Hezekiah Walters, Jeff was forty-two years old. Jeannie could not help comparing him to his senior brother. She knew, from hospital gossip, that Jeff always lived in the shadow of Preacher, even began med school at Texas Tech, where Preacher had gone before him. After the first year, though, Jeff had transferred to Tech’s arch-rival, the University of Texas, to complete his training and become his own man.

                  Jeff was the first of the two brothers to specialize in cardiology. As soon as he began, Preacher added the specialty to his own repertoire as well, but never, in the opinion of the nurses who watched both of them work, caught up to the younger brother.

                  Of the two, Jeff Walters was, as far as Jeannie was concerned, the better doctor. Preacher was rigid, Jeff experimental. If the accepted approach failed, Jeff would try something new, something that might work, where Preacher would only repeat the useless treatment. Jeff’s mortality rate was lower than Preacher’s, but, in this conservative community, the figures mattered less than the apparently greater maturity of Preacher, the elder brother. He had more patients that Jeff; more PCP’s referred their patients to him. Jeff, in large measure, had to be satisfied with Preacher’s leavings. Preacher’s patients tended to be richer than Jeff’s, too.

                  Wanda Sue was nowhere to be seen. Jeff reached across the counter, pulled Jonquil’s chart from the rack, and scanned it quickly.

                  “Her morning medication’s not charted,” Walters said. “Did she get it or not?”

                  “If it’s not charted, she didn’t get it,” Jeannie said. “If you read the rest of the chart, you’ll find out why. I chart everything.”

                  Jeannie waited while Walters read her notes on the morning’s episode with Jonquil.

                  “So she didn’t get the Ismelin?”

                  “Do you see an order for it to be given without meals?”

                  “No,” Walters admitted. “You always give it with food.”

                  “You make her eat, I’ll give her the medication.” Jeannie folded her arms. Walters sighed, exasperated with her logic.

                  “Then give her something else.”

                  I need an order,” Jeannie said.

                  “Fine,” Walters said, scribbling on the chart. “There. I hope you’re satisfied.”

                  “Look, doctor,” Jeannie said, “Jonquil’s not even my patient today. Prissy-Jo is off to lunch and I’m covering for her. Jonquil threw a shit-fit this morning, wouldn’t eat, tossed her oatmeal at Preacher’s nurse, and is generally uncooperative and disruptive. She won’t follow orders. She sneaks coffee and cigarettes. What do you want from me?”

                  “Just give her 500 milligrams of methyldopa, p.o. That ought to hold down her pressure and keep her quiet,” Walters said. “Anything else you want from me, or can I do my rounds, now?”

                  “That’s all,” Jeannie said, “Doctor.” She thought about asking him to schedule another neuro consult for Joe Wood, but Father Diego, she remembered, was going to see about that. Walters was already less than happy with her. Better to let things quiet down again—if they ever would.

                  “Good,” Walters said. He disappeared into Mr. Wood’s room. Jeannie went to the medication room to get the dose Walters had ordered for Jonquil. A supply of methyldopa—tradenamed Aldomet—was kept on the unit. Ismelin, the medicine Jonquil had refused that morning, was not. If there was a logic to the situation, Jeannie could not see it.

                  The medication room was at the center of the nurse’s station, equally accessible from the entire intensive care unit. It contained virtually all of the drugs used in the arsenal of modern medicine—especially those that might be needed instantly to cope with an emergency. One of the duties of the head nurse was to keep track of the supplies as they were used, so that a drug would be present, fresh and in sufficient quantity, the very moment it was needed.

                  Jeannie was not the head nurse, but she had been delegated the task of inventorying the med room often enough that she automatically surveyed the contents whenever she entered. It was a habitual action, one she did not even notice doing unless something was wrong.

                  Something was.

                  She stood in the middle of the room, trying to figure out where her sense that something was off came from. Because her instantaneous survey had been unconscious, she could not pinpoint the source of her intuition.

                  She wanted to check, to perform a formal inventory, but Jonquil was waiting for the Aldomet, and she did not need to wait any longer. She found the bottle and double-checked the dosage—two yellow tablets, 250 milligrams each, totaling 500 milligrams. A little heavy for an initial dose, she thought, but Jonquil had just had a moderately severe angina attack. The dosage made sense, she decided.

                  She placed the round yellow tablets into a paper cup and carried them out toward Jonquil’s room. Prissy-Jo was back from lunch, seated at the nurse’s station.

                  “Any trouble?” she asked.

                  Jeannie laughed. “Not much. Jonquil had some angina, and her pressure shot up. Did she get any kind of antihypertensive yet today?”

                  “Not from me,” Prissy-Jo said.

                  “Okay. I just wanted to check. Jeff Walters showed up when I paged Preacher, and I didn’t want to double-dose her if she’d already got some.”

                  “Want me to give them to her?” Prissy-Jo offered.

                   “No, I’ll do it.”

                  Jeannie went into Eleven. Jonquil was lying peacefully in her bed.

                  “Here’s some medicine to stop you from having another attack like that,” Jeannie said. She held out the paper cup. Jonquil took the two pills in her hand and looked suspiciously at them.

                  “What’s this?” Jonquil asked. “I haven’t had anything that looks like this before.”

                  Jeannie poured a cup of water from Jonquil’s pitcher. “Here, they’ll go down easier if you drink some water.”

                  Jonquil accepted the cup, but kept the pills in her hand. “It’s Aldomet,” Jeannie said. “To hold down your blood pressure. It’s okay, Dr. Walters ordered it.”

                  “Which one?”

                  Jeannie was at a loss. “Both,” she said. “Five hundred milligrams.”

                  “I meant which Dr. Walters, stupid.”

                  “Jeff.” The word scraped between Jeannie’s clenched teeth. “Oh, okay.” Jonquil swallowed the pills and chased them with a drink of water.

                  Preacher’s voice boomed behind Jeannie. “What are you taking?”

                  “Hez!” Jonquil said. “How nice to see you!”

                  Preacher Walters bustled past Jeannie as if she did not exist. She looked around herself, examining the space about her to see whether or not she was visible, but the pantomime was wasted on both Jonquil and the Preacher.

                  “What’s this I hear about some sort of a crisis with you?” Preacher asked Jonquil. The patient began a detailed recital of anxieties and symptoms, built, for the most part, on fantasies she had entertained since entering the hospital. Jeannie, ignored and apparently still invisible, melted from their presence. She returned to the med room, glancing over the monitor bank on the way, making sure that her patients were all right, and shaking her head over the ability of Jonquil Marie Hennessy to twist a pompous but apparently sane and reasonably intelligent physician around her little finger.

                  Then it struck her—where she had seen similar behavior in the past. Those two used to be lovers. Had to be! Not now, of course, probably not for a long time, but sometime, probably years before, they had been madly, passionately, and pathetically in love with each other.

                  The image of Preacher and Jonquil in bed together leaped fully-formed into her mind, Preacher wearing his stethoscope, his office nurse standing with an open chart by the bedside, taking notes, a gaggle of respectful residents gathered around, naming parts of Jonquil’s anatomy as Preacher paid homage to each, Jonquil squirming delightedly under his touch.

                  A giggle escaped Jeannie’s lips. The thought—the images-tickled her, and the giggle grew into an outright laugh.

                  Prissy-Jo looked up from the counter and raised an eyebrow. Jeannie shook her head, helplessly, unable to contain the laughter that grew into a guffaw. Prissy-Jo’s unspoken question just made matters worse. She leaned against the counter, doubled over, her side hurting from laughing so hard.

                  “What’s so funny?” Prissy-Jo asked.

                  Jeannie shook her head again. “Just an idea I had,” she giggled.

                  “Are you all right?“

                  “’m fine,” Jeannie smirked. It really was too silly for words. She collected herself. “Really, I am.” She stood erect, squared her shoulders, and marched into the medication room.

                 

Chapter 6                 

                  When she entered the med room, Jeannie’s laughter dissolved into silent unease. Something was not right.

                  Ismelin, was a slow-acting drug, retained by the body for a long time after the drug was withdrawn. Missing a single dose should not make a patient’s blood pressure suddenly shoot up. In fact, this morning, even before morning medications were given, Jonquil should barely have been able to stand without passing out with orthostatic hypotension. Ismelin was potent stuff. It had a tendency to make patients dizzy with low blood pressure if over-prescribed. But, obviously, Jonquil had undergone a pretty severe period of hypertension. Maybe it just did not work on her. Not every patient responded appropriately to every drug.

                  Jeannie stood in the middle of the medication room, surrounded by drugs of every description. It was a junkie’s dream made real—tranquilizers, stimulants, hypnotics, narcotics, sedatives, even a few hallucinogens. Each substance—liquid or solid, injectable (IV, subcu, or IM), insertable, edible, chewable—was supposed to be tested, examined, and passed by competent chemists, biologists, and physicians. But Jeannie had read the PDR’s warnings often enough—and seen the sometimes adverse and paradoxical reactions of individual patients—to know that not every drug always did what it was supposed to. A large part of her job in ICU was to watch for—and prevent—anomalous drug reactions and interactions.

                  When Jeannie, a year before, had developed a strep throat infection, the Emergency Room physician had routinely prescribed Ampicillin. Jeannie had the shot in the examining room. Before she could get back to the waiting room where she had left her coat, she was in anaphylactic shock. It started with a feeling of panic that came out of nowhere. Even though she was chilly, sweat broke out. She went suddenly weak and could not catch her breath. She had felt her throat swell inside, choking off her breathing, seen the itching rash break out on her skin, even as she slipped semi-conscious to the floor.

                  The rest was a blur. She remembered clearly the sting of the needle that someone used to inject her with epinephrine, the pain of being rapidly intubated while nearly awake; the doctor had been hurried and rough. Even now, she swallowed hard at the memory of the scraping pain.

                  She had never shown any sensitivity to penicillin before, but the life-giving drug had nearly killed her.

                  The experience made her doubly careful when dispensing medications. They did not always do what they were supposed to do, and Jeannie watched their effects on her patients.

                  Something in the med room was out of kilter. Standing among all the drugs, she could not put her finger on it, but she sensed something out of place. If she had been working on the previous day, she would have known almost immediately what it was, but she had had a blessed two days away from work and did not know what had gone on in her absence.

                  Narcotics! She had left the narc cabinet open for maybe ten or fifteen minutes this morning, because of the hurry and confusion of the code and her own tardiness. She looked through the glass of the locked cabinet. The vials and bottles were tumbled in disarray, as if someone had hurriedly just reached a hand through the door and snatched whatever he could reach. Damn! It must have happened this morning, while she had left the cabinet unattended and unlocked.

                  Jeannie’s first impulse was to get Vivian in here and show her what had happened, but Preacher was still on the floor. She did not want him involved in this. This was a nursing problem, not medical.

                  She was still carrying the keys. She unlocked the cabinet and began an inventory of the remaining contents, working from the loose-leaf notebook containing the drug records. Every time one of the potent substances was given to a patient, a form had to be filled out. The original went with the patient’s chart, one carbon to the Pharmacy. The third was kept in the unit for inventory control, until the unit’s files were full, then went into long-term storage somewhere in the basement.

                  Paper work.

                  Once the vials and bottles were properly put back in order, she checked them off one by one, looking at the drug’s name, dosage form, and quantity. Vivian would need the information for the incident report, anyway.

                  Missing were injectable forms of Demerol and morphine. The thief was haphazard. Some of each were left, but most of the supply was gone. Strangers on the unit—were they responsible? She ran over the morning in her mind, certain that when she had gotten the morphine for Prissy-Jo, right at the beginning of the shift, everything had been in order. It must have happened during that time she had left the cabinet unlocked.

                  Who had been present during that time? The entire complement of staff in the unit had been busy with the code, except herself. It could not have been the daughter of La Curandera; that had happened later, after the cabinet was locked again.

                  And it was injectables that had gone missing. That fact suggested a habitual user, someone who was not afraid of the needle.

                  By the time she finished the inventory, Preacher and Jeff had both left the ICU. Jeannie re-locked the cabinet and pocketed the keys. She masked her face in calm and walked to the head nurse’s office. For once, Wanda Sue was working at her desk (probably not realizing that the doctors had left); she did not notice Jeannie, who slipped into Vivian’s office without knocking, and shut the door behind herself.

                  “What is it?” Vivian asked.

                  As usual, she was an island in a sea of paper, the flotsam and jetsam of medicine. Paper of all colors—pink, green, yellow, blue, white—lay stacked on her desk in neat piles, each stack clipped securely to keep it from becoming mixed with other stacks. The papers included census figures for the unit, requisitions, reports, memoranda, in-service lessons, schedules, budgets, personnel files, applications for employment, new procedures, and scores of other papers, each essential to the smooth running of the unit—at least in the minds of the insurance companies that handled the hospital’s liability coverage, the hospital accreditation board, the Center for the Study of Contagious Diseases in Atlanta, the state hospital board, the nurses’ licensing bureau in Austin, the county public health office, the nursing supervisor, the hospital’s accountants, the purchasing department, and the drug companies.

                  “I feel like one of the people Noah left behind,” she said, laying down the stack she had been working on. “I’m drowning in here. Sit down. I can use a break.”

                  “You won’t like the one I’m going to give you,” Jeannie said, sitting. “It’s more like a tidal wave.”

                  Vivian leaned back in her chair. “Go ahead. It can’t make things any worse than they already are.”

                  “Someone is stealing things out of the narcotics locker.”

                  “I was wrong,” Vivian admitted. “Things can get worse. When do you think it happened?”

                  Jeannie explained her reasoning.

                  “Who else knows?” Vivian asked.

                  “I haven’t talked to anyone else,” Jeannie said.

                  “About what?”

                  They both turned their heads to find the source of the new voice. Delilah Bancroft, RN, BSN, the Nursing Supervisor, stood in the doorway.

                  Bancroft supervised the work of all the nurses in the hospital except those in Surgery and Recovery. She watched them—she would say she watched over them—from the moment they were hired until they left St. Maggie’s employ—their work schedules, their assignments to the various units, their level of performance, their discipline when necessary, and their continuing education. She intercepted their telephone messages, informed them of family emergencies, arranged their time off from work, and indoctrinated them in the mysteries of hospital policies and protocols.

                  She was the mother of all—all the registered nurses, licensed vocational nurses, ward clerks, and nurse’s aides. Under stress, she gathered them unto herself like a mother hen her chicks.

                  She looked a little like a hen, too. At fifty-seven, she was of middle height and plump with the plumpness of a woman who feels secure in maternity. Her hair was a discreet salt-and-pepper. Her voice was almost always modulated and controlled.

                  Her “children”—the nursing staff—felt differently, including Jeannie and Vivian. When Delilah made rounds, whether or not there is work for them to do, the nurses perked up reflexively, knowing mother was on the prowl. Like most mothers, Delilah inspired as much fear in her children as affection.

                  Delilah lived up to her name. She could not give strength, only take it away. Somewhere during her rise to command, she changed her loyalties. When she began nursing, she railed with the rest of her peers against the waves of paperwork required as a hedge against litigation and a sacrifice to government regulation. Her sympathies were all with the patients under her care, and she defended them against unfeeling administrators and careless, sometimes callous, physicians. She was tempted, though, by the thrill of advancement and promotion. She learned to play the game of hospital politics by agreeing with the doctors and administrators who controlled the purse strings.

                  A hospital, she learned, is a microcosm of society, even more conservative, in spite, or perhaps because, of the constant technological change experienced not only by the patients but also, more intensely, by the people who work day after day within its precincts. The women, she perceived, performed mostly direct patient care. The men gave the orders, even after the passage of anti-discrimination laws.

                  She learned, though, that the women could get their way more often than the organizational charts suggested, but in order to achieve anything, she felt she had to be subversive, to disguise herself as an “agreeable” woman, who followed without complaint the directives of those above her.

                  It was not pure ambition that had led Delilah upwards. Once, at the beginning, she had wanted to change things—to raise the quality of care, to involve the nurses more directly in the decision-making processes of administration and treatment. She still made abortive efforts in those directions. But they almost always met with opposition from above, and Delilah had trained herself to listen and obey too well.

                  The disguise—and it had begun as a disguise—became so effective that Delilah got lost in it. She got what she wanted—a position of authority, from which she could influence what happened in the hospital. But on the way up, she had learned to abase herself. The mask became the face, and Delilah Bancroft had lost her soul.

                  Advancement had its costs.

                  Now, she seldom tried. She liked to talk about her earlier battles, but when one of her “children” complained about a policy or a practice that caused problems, Delilah counseled patience, always patience, like a harassed mother dealing with an adolescent.

                  Jeannie looked away from Delilah, a flush of undeserved guilt crawling up her neck. I didn’t do anything wrong, she reminded herself. But she responded to Delilah’s question in just the same way she still responded to her own mother’s probing, trying to evade the old guilts that clung, like leeches, to her relationship with her mother. She had the feeling that Delilah already knew, and was only testing her honesty. When she recognized the feeling, she was furious with herself. She was supposed to be an adult, but she spent a good half of her time at work feeling apologetic and childish—with the patients, with their families, with the administration, with the doctors. Why do I put up with this? she demanded of herself.

                  “If it’s about Dr. Walters,” Delilah said, “he spoke to me earlier about a personality conflict between Jeannie here and our patient Mrs. Hennessy.” Jeannie was not watching her; her eyes were focused on her own hands, lying deceptively still in her lap. “I take it that the situation has been taken care of?”

                  “That’s not what we were talking about,” Vivian said.

                  “Then maybe you’ll invite me in so we can clear up whatever it is you were talking about,” Delilah said.

                  There were only two chairs in the office. Jeannie knew what was expected of her and stood up to let Delilah sit while she stood in a corner, leaning against a bulging filing cabinet.

                  Vivian wearily gestured to the now-empty chair. Delilah plumply sat down, releasing a sigh meant to be interpreted as gratitude. She maintained the fiction, and all cooperated with her, that years and years of floor nursing had ruined her arches, though she had not treated a patient in living memory.

                  Delilah waited for someone to speak. It was a contest. The first to break silence lost the game.

                  Vivian declined to play.

                  “During this morning’s code, someone raided the narcotics locker. Mainly for Demerol and morphine—injectables. Ms. Christopher just discovered it and was reporting it to me when you came in.”

                  “How much was stolen?”

                  Jeannie referred to her notes and told her. “Well,” Delilah said, “I’ll just call Security and we’ll get right on it. And Mr. Appleby will have to be brought in as well. Pharmacy, too. You haven’t told anyone yet, have you?”

                  “Not yet,” Vivian said.

                  “And you?” Delilah turned to Jeannie.

                  “No.”

                  “Good! Then maybe we can keep this quiet,” she said, “at least until the investigation gets started.”

                  “What investigation?” Vivian asked.

                  “New policy, my dear—all thefts from the hospital are to be fully investigated. Everyone involved will be asked to make a statement, so that we can get to the bottom of this.”

                  Vivian set her jaw. Jeannie saw the muscle bulge under her ear.

                  “This is the first drug theft in over a year on my unit. Why don’t you just let us handle it?”

                  “Oh no, we can’t do that!” Delilah said. “Word would get out and it would be impossible to enforce the rules if everyone knew that we made an exception in your case.

                  “It’s not that we don’t trust your judgment, dear, not at all,” Delilah went on, “but rules are rules, and they’re meant to be obeyed by everybody. I’m afraid they’re can’t be exceptions. I must ask you to say nothing about this matter until the investigation is over. Not to anyone—not other staff, not to patients, not to doctors, not to visitors—no one. Is that understood?”

                  Delilah received no answer.

                  “I said, is that understood?” she demanded. “Jeannie?”

                  “Yes, ma’am.”

                  “Vivian?”

                  “Yes.”

                  “Good,” Delilah beamed, her purpose accomplished. “I’d rather you wouldn’t even discuss it between yourselves. Walls have ears, you know.”

                  Having delivered herself of the cliché, Delilah popped herself out of the chair and vanished, to continue her rounds of the nurses. stations throughout the hospital.

                  “That woman is a walking platitude,” Vivian said.

                  “A duck-billed platitude?” Jeannie asked. Vivian groaned, reached for the phone and dialed the four digits that connected her to the Pharmacy.

                  “But—” Jeannie began to say.

                  “No buts about it, J.C.,” Vivian interrupted. “Hospital Policy is to report drug thefts to the Pharmacy. We need to be restocked—who the hell else can do it?” The two nurses grinned at each other. “And besides—suppose Nurse Bancroft decides to sit on this thing”

                  “Why would she do that?” Jeannie asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

                  “Sure it does.” Vivian was still waiting for the Pharmacy to pick up its phone. “It happened on her watch. Makes her look bad.”

                  “She wasn’t even here!”

                  “Doesn’t matter. Can you see the headline? ‘Drug Scandal rocks St. Maggie’s! Hospital spokesperson unable to explain theft.’”

                  The telephone in Pharmacy was finally answered. While Vivian reported the missing drugs, reading off the quantities from Jeannie’s inventory, Jeannie was thoughtful.

                  Even now, the town that supported St. Maggie’s was distrustful of the institution. Downtown there was a hospital established by the wife of one of the men who had founded the city a hundred and fifty years ago, and gotten rich in the process. Twice the size of St. Maggie’s, it was named after him and served as a long-term memorial to the wealth he had amassed as a turn of the century politician and businessman. In the northwest part of town, up by the shopping malls and recently-built, expensive housing developments, was the third major hospital the town supported. The three competed with each other, with the downtown institution leading the others by a wide margin.

                  And, she reminded herself, this was still part of the Bible belt—really, the Baptist belt. St. Maggie’s was connected with the Catholic church, itself still an object of suspicion among these insular people. The Catholic connection was not terribly strong; the Church only provided a handful of nuns and a chaplain. The actual work of the hospital was almost completely secularized. But the connection was there nonetheless. Anglo Catholics were in the minority. Most of the Catholic community here was Mexican—another reason for the Anglo community to be ever so slightly nervous about a Catholic institution. It was silly in Jeannie’s eyes, but still true. Old prejudices died hard.

                  Vivian hung up the phone, a gleam in her dark eyes. “I’ll be damned if I’ll let the unit stay unstocked on necessary drugs.”

                  “What if Delilah finds out?”

                  “Big deal,” Vivian said. “I’ll just smile and say, ‘I didn’t know I couldn’t do that.”

                  “But she told us not to tell anyone.”

                  “That she did.” Vivian chuckled. “But here’s a lesson for you, J.C.—it’s sometimes a hell of a lot better to apologize than it is to get permission. There was a lady admiral in the Navy—she did something with computers, and retired around eighty-six. Her name was Grace Hopper. She’s the first one who said that. It was the only way she could get anything done.”

                  Vivian leaned back in her chair. “God, I love that woman. By the way, nice work earlier with La Curandera. You’re crazy, you know. You should have just let them go. There’s nothing in your job description that says you have to stand up to a butcher knife. How’s she doing?”

                  “All right,” Jeannie said. “That daughter is something else. One minute she was after me with a weapon, the next she was helping me put her mother back to bed.”

                  Vivian grinned. “I know who she is—the daughter, I mean.”

                  “How?”

                  “Jonquil’s husband called up a little while ago—she’d been on the phone to him, bitching about us—”

                  “—about me, you mean.”

                  Vivian leaned forward. elbows thunking hard onto her desk. “No—not about you. You’re a good nurse, J.C., but you’ve got an awfully thin skin sometimes. Get this through your head: if you’re going to worry about what everyone around you thinks about you, you’re going to be useless. You handle yourself pretty well around here most of the time. I’d rather have you in a tight situation than anyone else on the floor. But afterwards, you can be a real pain in the ass, you know? You worry everything to death. You can’t always be second-guessing yourself. That way lies either madness or becoming a secretary.”

                  “Sorry.”

                  “Yeah, you’re sorry. A sorry little girl who needs to grow up a little. Trust yourself, for God’s sake. You’re good. I just wish you believed it.” Vivian leaned back again, and her eyes fell on the papers on her desk. “Give me the drug inventory. This whole business is going to cost me half a day of overtime, just filling out the forms. If I’m not careful, this job is going to turn me into Delilah Bancroft. Go on—get. You still have patients to take care of.”

                  Jeannie recognized the dismissal; she was grateful that Vivian would shoulder the paperwork. “I’m—”

                  “Yeah, I know—you’re sorry. Get to work.” Jeannie stood and moved to the door.

                  “Who is she—the daughter?”

                  “A lawyer—can you beat that? That’s all we need in here, a lawyer. Her name is Maria Sanchez.”

                  The name sounded familiar to Jeannie, but she could not remember where she had heard it.

                  “It’s been a hell of a day, hasn’t it?”

                  “Yeah, J.C.,” Vivian said, “and it isn’t over yet. Get out of here. Let me work.”

                  Jeannie shut the door softly. Vivian had backed her up completely, and it was a relief.

                  Who the hell was Maria Sanchez?

                  She felt for Vivian. The head nurse’s face was lined with the problems of the day. Each new complication etched itself a little deeper into her skin. She had seemed almost wistful when she told Jeannie to get back to her patients. The money was better for a head nurse, but so were the headaches.

                  Automatically, she scanned the monitors. No one was doing anything squirrely, but she decided to check on them in person anyway. For once, each was quiet and comfortable when she looked in on them. There was just time to bring her charts up to date.

                  She had forgotten Wanda Sue. Where was the reeking twit? As Jeannie remembered finding Jonquil in the midst of an angina attack, her anger grew. Wanda Sue knew better. Jeannie dropped her charts and set off in search of the perfumed ward clerk. She grinned. The idea of a fight she could win appealed to her.

J.C. and the Boys by Alan David Justice is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

If you'd like to have a dead tree edition of J.C. and the Boys, you'll find it here.

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A Hanging Offense begins here. It's the story of the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, set in the town of Saint Albans.