J.C. and the Boys - Chapters 13-15

Chapter 13

                  Diego left Jonquil in her pain. There were other patients to be seen, patients who needed his presence almost as much as Jonquil, patients not nearly so caustic. As he closed the door, he wondered why her parents had not named her Ivy—for poison ivy—instead.

                  The next in sequence was Marie Jefferson. He could not make anything of the events yesterday in her room. He did not really believe in faith healing as practiced by the Pentecostals and their ilk. There was always the suspicion that the people they “healed” weren’t all that sick, or were only temporarily cured. Some of the victims of those healings, he knew for a fact, were paid actors. The whole business was unsavory. Further, there was no evidence that anything had really happened to Marie. A few marks had appeared on her skin, he reminded himself. That was all. It was purely coincidental—probably an allergy to the chrism, although he had used it before on the woman without eliciting a reaction.

                  Diego automatically scanned the unit as he moved to the door of room Eight. Vivian, whose dark self-possession reminded him of a proud African princess, was busily arguing with someone on the telephone. She had sent Jeannie Christopher off to lunch, to give her a chance to calm down from the confrontation with Jonquil. Hoss Jackman was in the emergency room. That left Prissy-Jo and Maureen to cover the five patients currently on the unit. Diego would continue his rounds, but he would try to stay alert in case the others needed backup. He was not trained as a nurse, especially in critical care, but he could answer a telephone or run an errand with the best of them. Comforted by the reminder of his usefulness, he pushed through Marie’s door, smiling at his vanity.

                  Marie was unchanged. Her children must have been in to visit her during the previous evening; a get-well card stood on her dresser.

                  Maureen was with another patient. Diego turned on the small cassette player, and discovered why it had been silent. Maureen hated jazz, or any music that was not German. Had it been Bach, Beethoven, Brahms or Wagner, she would have left it playing.

                  But it was Marie’s music that came from the tiny speaker, music she had made herself, before the accident. A blue clarinet sang high, sad and clear above the piano, bass and drum of the quartet. In the background he could hear the noise of the club, the quiet murmur  of muted conversation, the tinkle of ice in drinks, the footsteps of the waitresses, even the semidarkness of the club, that Marie had incorporated into the music. She had woven the sounds of the place into the music she made. He fancied that he could even make out his own voice in the background. He had been seated at the table when Jeff Walters had made the recording. Some of the doctors and their families had visited the club at his insistence to hear Marie play. Walters had nearly dragged Diego from the hospital, claiming that they all needed some time away from the daily grind.

                  The old priest had been entranced by her playing, by the relaxed comradeship around the table, by the glimpse of his coworkers apart from the hospital. He had even fallen in love a little with whatever it was in Marie Jefferson that made music, although he had never spoken to her. He was used to keeping an ideal in his mind, and preferred not to sully it with the details of physicality. Chastity was an old habit.

                  Involuntarily, he compared the remembered vision of her as she played with what he saw before him now. Pity and anger surged through him that the creator of such beauty now lay mute in her bed.

                  But not still. Marie was restless today, working—mindlessly, he knew—against the cloth restraints that kept her hands from tearing and the probes and needles that needed to invade her body if she was to have a beating heart. The movement was new. It started when he turned on the music. He would have to tell Dr. Walters, but first he would perform again the anointing of the sick, no longer a last rite, but the sacrament of God’s special love for the sufferer.

                  Diego’s hands trembled as he opened the small tin containing the chrism, the ointment consecrated especially for the benefit of the sick. When he anointed Marie on the forehead during the previous day, his thumb moving on her skin in the shape of the cross, a welt had grown where his thumb had touched her. He thought that it was just an allergic reaction; God did not work that way, at least in his experience. But so many strange things had happened to the priest of late that he no longer felt so certain. The fabric of everyday reality felt thinner, stretched almost to the breaking point, ready to tear open and reveal—something else. He was not alone in the feeling. He had heard the nurses talking. Everyone was stressed; reality was growing thinner. But he shut such thoughts away, falling back into the familiar routine of ritual, hoping for normality. Miracles terrified him.

                  He spoke the sacred words, murmuring softly, the door closed to avoid distraction. Marie continued her reflexive struggle against the restraints. There should have been a nurse with her, giving one-on-one care, but Jonquil’s fit had taken out one nurse with an injury and another with emotional reaction.

                  The words of the rite comforted Diego, more from their rhythms than their sense. A priest was all too vulnerable to doubt. He had too many opportunities to believe prayer unanswered, perhaps unheard. He had said these words over many, had seen so many of them untouched. If God had a plan, it was invisible, unknowable, unconscionable in the suffering He caused. But Diego followed the rite, because he had no idea what other course to follow. It was all he knew.

                  The time came to anoint Marie. Diego found his fingers trembling still. He fumbled with the chrism and dropped it to the floor. He knelt to retrieve it and felt something touch his head. He whirled, tangled his legs, and fell to the floor. He looked up in fright to see Marie’s hand dangling over the bed rail, moving slightly, as if searching.

                  He backed up, still on the floor, edging away from the moving hand.

                  He tried to stand, his whole body now trembling. Finally, he made it, his back against the wall. Marie’s hand flailed weakly toward where he had been on the floor. The chrism was melting in his sweaty hand. Somehow, her left hand had slipped its restraint, which had been tied loosely to avoid cutting off her circulation.

                  There was nothing supernatural, he told himself. Angry with his own fears, he took Marie’s hand and slipped it through the circle of cloth. He retied the loop a little more tightly to avoid a repetition. As he finished, she gripped his wrist. He moved her grip off himself, carefully gentle. The hand went limp, palm up on the bed in seeming supplication.

                  He resumed the rite of anointing. His hand was already coated with the consecrated oil. He bent over Marie to touch it to her forehead.

                  Her eyes opened.

                  Her mouth opened.

                  And moved.

                  As if she could speak with the ventilator working her lungs, Diego heard her.

                  “Help me…”

                  “I’m here,” Diego said.

                  “…’el…eee…” she groaned. Her consonants were gone. “…ease…ur’s…”

                  The effort drained her; Marie went unconscious. Diego applied the chrism to her forehead. As he touched her skin, the inflammation blossomed, just the same as before. He closed the chrism carefully and put it back in his pocket. Not knowing what else to do, he knelt by the bed and, holding Marie’s hand to his forehead, prayed.

                  His prayer was wordless. He held her up in his arms, standing before the throne of the Ancient of Days, shaking with fear but not willing to back away from the fearful Presence, not while Marie’s life was in his hands. The Creator looked down on them. It terrified Diego, but he was responsible for this life he held, and he stiffened his backbone. Standing there, he felt a pressure on his leg. He looked for its source. A lamb was leaning against him, helping to steady him.

                  He had almost found the words to say to God when a voice interrupted him.

                  “How is she doing?”

                  Diego’s vision deliquesced. He had been in the Presence, and now he was not. He was furious.

                  Maureen stood in the room, her Teutonic presence looming over him. She moved to the dresser and shut off the tape cassette.

                  “What are you doing?” Diego demanded. He was trying to hold onto some shred of normal behavior, but it was difficult. She had ripped him—not bodily, but nonetheless painfully—from such powerful prayer as he had never known in his life.

                  “I do not approve of such music,” Maureen answered. “Get up.”

                  Diego rose from his knees, trembling with anger at her open scorn. He brushed at the dust on his knees. Who can I talk to about this?

                  “Can’t you at least knock?”

                  “On the door of a comatose patient?” Maureen said. “That would be foolish.”

                  “She’s—” Diego was about to deny that Marie was comatose, but stopped. She lay quiet in her bed, her breathing mechanically steady at twelve, her face somehow more relaxed, more human, than it had been.

                  “It is time for her exercises now,” Maureen said. “You will have to leave.”

                  “Why don’t you take a break?” Diego asked. “I’ll stay with her.”

                  “I have just enough time before lunch to give her the exercises. If I take a break, Vivian will find something else for me to do. And the exercises still must be done.”

                  Diego acquiesced. The chrism was still sticky on his hand. He left Eight, wondering whom to tell of Marie’s brief consciousness. It was a breakthrough, he knew, but he could not bring himself to face Maureen’s rationalistic scorn.

                  Jeannie Christopher was in Seven, taking vital signs on the new admission, Peter O’Flynn. O’Flynn was sitting up in bed, wires trailing from his chest. His hand, which was cupped in preparation for caressing Jeannie’s buttocks, stopped still in the air when he saw Diego’s collar, then retreated to lay innocently on the sheet.

                  “Hi, Father,” O’Flynn said. He winked, a male co-conspirator, even though his comrade was clerically celibate. Diego recognized O’Flynn’s intent and did not mention what had almost happened.

                  “Mr. O’Flynn.” Diego extended his hand to shake the young man’s. O’Flynn looked perfectly healthy. His grip was strong, his grin infectious. “I’m Father Diego, the hospital chaplain. Your card says you’re a Catholic.”

                  “Yep.”

                  “Anything I can do for you?”

                  “Don’t think so,” O’Flynn said. “How about yourself? Anything I can do for you?”

                  O’Flynn was young and arrogant, a jock temporarily sidetracked from a promising athletic future. He seemed to have no idea that what was wrong with him was life-threatening. Jeannie’s movements, Diego noticed, were abrupt, jerky, unfriendly, her expression carefully neutral. The girl could never mask her real feelings. She thought that O’Flynn was, in the west Texas female vernacular, a butthole.

                  Diego had not recovered from his vision. Holding up his end of a meaningless chat was beyond his ability. “Well, I’ll be going on to someone else, then. My extension number is seven-six-seven-six. Call if you want to see me. Anytime.”

                  He ducked out of the room with relief. Out in the hall again, he felt the rhythm of the hospital, felt himself somehow apart from its pulse. Wanda Sue passed by him, not registering his presence, her arms full of supplies, the air around her full of her musk and faintly nauseating. It was as if he saw this normal activity through a dark glass. Earlier, he had been integrated within its working rhythm. Now he felt himself drawn away. Absently, he rubbed the spot on his chest. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but there was a dull sort of pressure. Not enough to worry about. He had felt worse many times.

                  He knew why he had come up early for his rounds. It was to experience the visions he had just had. And then to talk to Joe Wood. Joe had had a rough night. He could probably use some distraction. And maybe he would be able to understand.

                  Diego knocked on the door of Six.

                  “It’s open.” Joe’s voice lacked it usual punch.

                  “Good morning, Joe,” Diego said.

                  “Mornin’, padre.” Joe’s habitual grin had been replaced by a weak smile.

                  “How are you feeling today?” Diego asked. “I hear you’ve been having dreams.”

                  “Sit down, padre. Take a load off.”

                  Diego lowered himself into the chair. He wanted to give Joe a chance to talk if he felt like it, but did not want to pressure the man into an emotional state. But Diego had his own agenda, too, if Joe seemed strong enough.

                  Joe was almost eager to talk. His face even seemed different, more open, less determined to put out the image of a man full of energy, at peace with the world—less of the salesman, more of the man.

                  “I was hoping you’d come by today, padre.”

                  “How did the tests go yesterday?”

                  “They can’t figure me out. That’s nothing new. They don’t say so, but I know I’m not in good shape. Right now, I could almost kill for a cigarette, and I know how bad they are for me. I guess it’s too late to change.”

                  “Never,” Diego said. “If I believed that, I’d have to quit my job.”

                  Joe laughed; then he coughed, wetly. He grabbed a tissue from his overbed table and hawked the phlegm into it. “Excuse me.”

                  “Of course,” Diego said. From long experience, he read the sign. Joe’s lungs were starting to fill.

                  “I guess you would have to quit, at that,” Joe said. “But listen, I don’t think I’m going crazy. I mean, that’s what all those tests were for yesterday, to see if the old gray matter is still working okay, right? Touch your nose, touch your toes, which way’s left, which is right, what kind of things do you do at night, can you feel this, can you feel that, what do you hit with a baseball bat?

                  “They think I’m losing it,” Joe went on, oblivious to his rhyming recital, “because I talk about things they can’t see. But I figure maybe I see some things they can’t. I mean, they’ve seen lost of people get sick and die, right? But they’ve never done it. Not all the way, or they wouldn’t be around to wonder what’s wrong with me. I was reading somewhere, I don’t know, that when a wildebeest gets caught by a lion, when the lion has him in its jaws, the wildebeest, even though he’s been running like hell to get away from that lion, when it’s inevitable that he’s going to get himself eaten up and there’s no escape, he doesn’t feel the pain anymore. He doesn’t panic any more. He kind of gives himself to the lion, almost like he doesn’t mind.”

                  Joe had been leaning forward as much as he was able. Now he leaned back against the pillow.

                  “Maybe God does something like that with us. Maybe when it’s time to die, he sends us word, to get us ready. Sometimes. Not all the time, I guess. I mean people die in accidents without any warning, so I guess it doesn’t happen all the time. But I think that’s what he’s doing with me. That’s why I have all these dreams now, and why Evans came and talked to me, and why I left my body yesterday. He’s telling me he’s coming to get me. Or maybe the docs are right and my brain just doesn’t get enough oxygen any more. I don’t know which is right, but I know which one I like better.”

                  Through Joe’s verbal hash, Diego felt a sense of guilt for initiating another neurological exam for Joe. His own doubts had meant that Joe had had to endure a pointless examination. Caine had been right to fight him on it, and Diego wrong to insist. The exam had led to no new knowledge. He didn’t have a cure.

                  “You’re not the only one,” Diego said, offering his own vision in compensation, “who’s been having strange things happening.” He described his time with Marie Jefferson in the next room, told an edited version of his argument with Dr. Caine the day before, when the light fixture exploded, explained how both events made him feel that there were something going on that he did not understand. He left out Evans’ deathbed vision of Jesus, because Joe did not need to be reminded of impending doom.

                  Joe had found some hope in his interpretation of his own state, a God-given calm before death. Diego did not want to take that from him. It was what he tried to give the terminal patients. But Joe’s ideas were not coming from Diego. Instead, the flow of images was the other way. The patient was comforting the priest. So what, Diego thought, if Joe’s thinking was skewed by a shortage of oxygen in the brain. Maybe that was God’s way of easing his passing.

                  Joe was tired from his restless night. He dropped off into sleep while Diego was still talking. The priest watched the salesman doze, keeping an eye on his breathing, but it remained steady and uncompromised. He said a brief prayer for Joe, then it was time to move on to the next patient.

                 

***

                 

                  Diego knocked on the door to Five out of the habit of politeness. The daughter’s quiet permission to enter caught him by surprise. She was bent over her mother’s bed, fixing her hair. Diego was nonplussed at her presence, after the previous day’s confrontation.

                  “Good morning, Father,” she said. “How is your hand?”

                  “Uh, hi,” Diego said. “I can come back later, I—”

                  “No, it’s all right,” she said. “You did the right thing yesterday. I am not angry. In fact, I ought to thank you.”

                  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude—”

                  “You’re not intruding. Look, I could use a break anyway. Would you watch her while I powder my nose?”

                  “I’m Father Diego de la Vega.”

                  “Oh. Introductions.” The daughter smiled. “My name is María Sanchez. Excuse me.” Ducking her head as she passed him, the daughter went out of the room, leaving Diego standing in the doorway.

                  He wondered briefly at her abrupt departure. He wished that people would not be so nervous about accepting forgiveness. Of course she was embarrassed and ashamed about threatening Jeannie Christopher with the knife. But that was over with, as far as he was concerned. He had nearly forgotten his bandaged hand.

                  He pushed the door shut and moved near the bed. La Curandera—it must be Mrs. Sanchez; the daughter wore no wedding band—still lay in bed. The tic still moved across her face, but the disfigurement it caused was less, and her daughter had fixed her hair and applied a little makeup. She was almost surely raised a Catholic. Diego bent over her to administer his blessing and he looked at her face for the first time.

                  It was Elena.

                  He did not know how long he stood there, bent over, staring at her. How could he not have seen it yesterday? She was older than he remembered her, not unnaturally, since he had known her thirty-odd years before. Age had, contrary to Shakespeare, changed and diminished Elena. She was no longer as he had carried her secretly, in memory. Like him, she had grown older.

                  Elena would have shattered his vocation, but she was too strong-willed to have allowed it to happen. She was the steadfast one in their relationship. Even then he knew it. If those roles were reversed, they never would have fallen in love.

                  Without apparent transition, Diego’s memory removed him from the present and threw them back in the steaming jungle town in Nicaragua. Elena had moved from dangerous notoriety in Managua to obscurity in the northern jungle, to the tiny town where Diego had been sent, where he was trying to build una communidad de base as early as 1960.

                  La Trinidad was overflowing with three hundred inhabitants. It was inevitable that the political activist and the priest of what was not yet known as liberation theology should meet, should become prickly friends. They shared a moral vision, though not their respective faiths. Both labored to lead the peasants out from under the power of the demonic dictator. Elena was a budding Communist who followed the revolution in Cuba with the same frenzy as Fidel followed American baseball. Diego—even there called Padre Zorro—suffered the same privations as his tiny flock and felt himself called, as a vocation, to help them escape the terrible poverty that doomed their infants to early death and left the survivors ignorant, malnourished, and prey to every disease and sin that the dictator’s troops could inflict.

                  He knew Elena’s face from the pages of the capital’s newspaper that occasionally reached La Trinidad weeks late and mauled by scores of hands. She was older then he, perhaps by ten years or so. He never asked. When she appeared, in company with two unshaven and dirty men who guarded her on her journey and through her stay in La Trinidad, he knew who she was, and the knowledge made him worry for his parishioners. He never heard the guards’ names; they did not speak, not even to one another. They obeyed only her; she accepted their devotion as unremarkable. They followed her everywhere in La Trinidad, had followed her through hundreds of miles of jungle. They were standing on either side of her when Diego was forced to leave La Trinidad.

                  Elena was more than an incipient Communist, although she idolized Fidel. She believed him a man of power. But she had her own charisma. When she attended Diego’s services in the poor building that served as La Trinidad’s church, the people watched her for her reaction to Diego’s homilies. If she seemed pleased with what he said, the people followed him. If she appeared skeptical, the people stayed away from Diego until the next mass, when he would be tested again. No matter that Diego spoke the language fluently; she was of this people and he was not.

                  She waited for him to come to her. It didn’t take long.

                  Elena had set up her residence next to the church. Diego saw her every day; she watched him go about his daily activities. When he left the church to say the last rites over a dying child, she saw him go. He saw her watching him, although each pretended disinterest in the actions of the other.

                  When he brought the people together twice a week for study of the Bible and its reflection of their own lives, she was there, along with her silent bodyguards. Diego saw the results of a year’s careful work with the community disappear. Elena must have seen it, too, because at the second meeting she attended, on her fifth day in La Trinidad, the gathering was more spirited. Let a thousand flowers bloom, he had later heard, was her comment. Que crezcan mil flores.

                  This crone who lay in the bed still had power, even unconscious. She stirred feelings that he had long thought buried. Lying under the sheet, she could still make him uncertain, make him remember the crises she had brought him to.

                  The outline of her body took him back to the jungle. He saw her as she had been. Even the atmosphere around them seemed to grow moist and close and warm.

                  Weeks after she had first appeared in La Trinidad, she came to his tiny rectory. She was without her guards. She came through the open door silently. Diego was hunched over the rough plank table he used as a desk, making notes to himself for the evening Bible study.

                  He smelled Elena before he was consciously aware of her presence. Her fragrance grew slowly around him, and he did not notice at first because it had been next door, faint but present, for the past weeks.

                  He looked up at her in the afternoon light. Most of the inhabitants of La Trinidad were asleep, taking siesta in the heat of the day. Only the ever-present flies were moving around the village—the flies and Elena.

                  Diego liked siesta time; it was his one chance during the day to spend an hour or so that belonged to himself alone. His first reaction on seeing Elena was irritation. He had to have his lesson for the evening class ready. But her perfume was intoxicating, moreso because she was, unlike most of the villagers, bathed, scented with talc, with flowers in her hair. Their scent and softness disarmed him.

                  When he turned to see her, all he knew was their mutual desire. The bishop and his discipline were far away in Managua.

                  “It is time,” Elena said.

                  “Yes,” Diego replied. “I am afraid.”

                  “Of what it will mean for you?”

                  “Yes.”

                  The heat of her body penetrated his distance. Their embrace—his first since entering the seminary years before—kindled a heat he had not known himself capable of. She was experienced, and led him through the dance until he knew its movements in his deepest being, until he gasped in recognition of what celibacy had always denied him. Her heat was a gift like the serpent’s to Eve, waking in him the knowledge his calling had kept hidden, and he embraced it with her.

                  After the first time, they touched again and again, until both were exhausted, sated, sore with passion. Evening was stealing into the light, spreading shadow around their bodies, illuminating them with darkness.

                  In the aftermath, they talked quietly, urgently. Diego felt a priest’s remorse, which Elena sadly put to rest.

                  “You can be forgiven,” she explained. “But the passion of the body is a need you must know. You have decades of work yet to do, which you will do the better, the more compassionately, now that you understand.”

                  “The people will know,” he said. “They will know I broke my vows.”

                  “And they will love you the more for it,” Elena answered with brimming eyes.

                  “I—forgive me,” Diego said. “I think only of myself.”

                  “It is a masculine failing,” she said, “and not unexpected.” Her face was shadowed; he could not read it. He had no experience, in any case, to guide him, no way of knowing that such oneness as he had felt required a time of separation to restore perspective. Later he would see it; now he could only feel post coitum triste as remorse. He pulled the rough blanket over their nakedness as the darkness deepened around them, letting it scratch at his skin like a hundred tiny scourges.

                  “What you have given your life to, I do not believe,” Elena said. “I believe in the things I can touch and manipulate. I believe in struggle. Someday, my people will be free, and I will have helped them in their freedom. And so will you, even though I do not believe what you believe. I can see the effect of the work you have done here. Soon they will send you away. The Somocistas have their agents even in La Trinidad. They keep their eyes on me, on you, and they will know everything they want to know.” She burrowed into the crook of his arm, against his will, but he would not refuse here even in his remorse. She had made herself too vulnerable, too precious to him, to refuse her the solace of his body.

                  He wondered silently if the villagers in his Bible class would assemble as usual, or whether they somehow knew not to appear tonight. Elena might have told them; he could imagine her arranging everything. The arranging itself was part of her pleasure, her need. She cried out to lead, without giving up her desperate autonomy—always the teacher, never the taught, a rebel born.

                  Silently, in darkness, both wept until he fell asleep. When he woke in the morning, she was gone from La Trinidad. The villagers told him that the government soldiers had come early and take her from her house, treating her as a bruja, a witch. They claimed that the Somocistas would not kill her; they did not need another martyr. Instead, they would banish her from the country, from the pueblo, from the rebellion. The villagers thought she would come back somehow, to defy the Somocistas, but she never did. No one in Nicaragua ever heard of Elena Sanchez again. Not long after, the bishop in Managua, acting on the orders of the government, removed Diego from his mission and sent him back to the Jesuits in the United States. There would be no priest in La Trinidad. The people were left alone.

                  “Father?”

                  The daughter’s voice staggered him.

                  “Are you all right?”

                  “Yes, thank you,” he managed to say. She sounded so like the thirty-years-ago Elena! “Excuse me. I was lost in thought, I—”

                  He turned and looked into his daughter’s eyes, so unlike her mother’s, green and European, set into a face that Cortés himself might have looked on when he first faced the Aztec kings.

                  He stumbled from the room, realizing only than what his loyalty to his vocation had cost him.

                 

***

                 

                  Downstairs in the cafeteria, Jeannie glumly surveyed the gelatinous masses on the steam table in front of her. She had decided not to call Abraham Caine when she came downstairs. But her caution had not paid off. He had waited for her at the entrance to the cafeteria. Now he was waiting again for her to make up her mind about what she wanted to eat.

                  He stood at the end of the line, by the cashier, his tray piled with a little of everything. Jeannie’s tray so far held only a half-pint of milk. Everything else she saw—the grayish tuna casserole peppered with flecks of something old and once green, the gray, stringy meat overcooked from sitting in greasy, jelly-like gravy, the limp, exhausted broccoli, the potatoes lumped in gray-white heaps like tired thunderclouds, the Brussels sprouts floating like shriveled testicles in a pale green soup twisted her insides. People were bunching up behind her, while in front, at the register, Caine was scowling in her direction.

                  She snatched a Saran-wrapped sandwich from the pile and moved down the line. The smell of food left out too long was bothering her, and kept her jaws clenched to defend herself against her stomach. She had to eat something, or she would never make it through the afternoon.

                  Caine reached into his pocket for money.

                  “Is this for both of you?” the cashier asked.

                  “No!” Jeannie said. She had a few dollars in her jacket.

                  “C’mon, my treat,” Caine said.

                  Jeannie thrust her money at the cashier, shaking her head at the neurologist. “Uh-uh,” she muttered.

                  “Fine,” Caine said, pouting.

                  “I gotta get it from him, first,” the cashier said.

                  Caine paid his bill, handing the cashier a fifty peeled from the outside of thick wad.

                  “I just cleaned out the register,” the cashier complained. “I’ll have to call for change.”

                  They waited, while a supervisor came with a box of cash and changed Caine’s bill.

                  Caine stuffed the change carelessly into his pocket. He stood aside to let Jeannie pay. She got a couple of coins back. She was nervous with him standing by, as if they were together. The dozen or so people in line behind them would spread the report through the hospital—Caine was after another conquest. At least she had paid for her own food.

                  He nodded for her to precede him. Together they emerged from the food line into the dining room. Scores of white formica tables speckled on top with flecks of gold, filled the room, each table surrounded by four orange plastic chairs. It all assaulted the eye. The only virtue of the decor was that it gave the illusion of cleanliness; all the surfaces were hard and smooth. Few of the staff lingered for after-meal conversation or relaxation. The colors shrilled: Hurry up! Back to work!

                  But Caine seemed immune. He let Jeannie select a table while he nodded greetings to the room’s inmates, letting them know he had found another one. His face wore a smirk of self-congratulation. Jeannie could see it as she sat down with several people from Pharmacy. There was only one seat; maybe Caine would take the hint.

                  But it was not to be. He dragged a chair from a nearby table, forcing the druggists to make room for him and his overburdened tray.

                  Colleen, the pharmacy tech that Jeannie had argued with the previous morning, led the exodus.

                  “Time to go,” she announced, grinning. “We don’t want to interrupt anything. Supernurse and Superdoc have important things to talk about.”

                  The pharmacists left the table piled with the detritus of their lunches. Jeannie stood and busied herself with clearing off the mess, while Caine watched her and wolfed down his food.

                  “Aren’t you going to eat?” he finally asked.

                  “This place is a mess,” Jeannie said. “I don’t like trash around me when I’m eating.”

                  She was racking her brain for some means of escape. As she cleared the last of the pharmaceutical debris, she saw the phone on wall.

                  “Excuse me, just a minute,” she said, smiling. “There’s something I forgot up on the unit.”

                  “It’ll keep,” Caine said.

                  “Oh, I don’t have to go back up. I’ll just call. She left Caine to eat his meal and dialed the unit. She spoke on the phone briefly, then returned to the table and sat down. Caine was nearly finished.

                  “Sorry,” Jeannie said. “It’s so hard to grab a minute to yourself around here. I just couldn’t let that matter rest, though.”

                  “What was it?”

                  “Nothing, really,” Jeannie answered. “Just some unfinished business.”

                  “You’re smiling,” Caine observed. “You have a good smile.”

                  “Thank you.” Actually, she was grinning. Caine thought it was for him, and, in a way, it was.

                  Right on schedule, she heard the preliminary click of the public address system.

                  “Dr. Caine, Dr. A. Caine,” the operator said, broadcasting throughout the hospital, “to Emergency stat. Dr. Caine to Emergency, stat!”

                  “Shit.”

                  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Jeannie said. Her grin grew. She ate with renewed appetite. She was grinning so hard that she felt as if the food must be squeezing out from between her teeth.

                  “I’ll call you,” Caine said as he stood up. “Gotta go.” He surveyed the room, unconscious of the fact that everyone watching him was aware of his self-importance. He visibly gathered himself for the coming struggle in ER, his every gesture tuned to male self-display. He strode out of the cafeteria, head high, brow knotted in concentration, readying himself to do battle with the forces of illness and death.

                  Once he was out the door, a small chuckle ran through the diners, with more than a few glancing Jeannie’s way. She saw questioning looks on their faces and held up her hand, asking them to wait. Her acknowledgment gave the watchers enough encouragement to make them nudge their neighbors. In a moment’s time, all eyes were on Jeannie.

                  She moved again to the wall phone and dialed the paging number. Again, the preliminary click echoed softly through the building. She held a napkin over the receiver and pinched her nose.

                  “Dr. Caine,” she said, in perfect imitation of the day shift switchboard operator, “Dr. A. Caine, you are needed in Proctology, stat. Dr. Caine, go to Proctology, stat!”

                  Hanging up the phone, she bowed in acknowledgment of the laughter and applause that rocked the cafeteria.

                 

***

                 

                  “You look happy enough,” Gus said.

                  “I’m having fun!” Jeannie answered.

                  “Here?” Gus rolled his eyes. It had a weird effect on his face, and Jeannie giggled. All the lines and wrinkles crinkled. “I’ll notify administration. They’ll be worried. Maybe they can issue a memo.”

                  “Oh, God, not another one.”

                  “Hell, they gotta do something to earn their money,” Gus said, “or else someone might notice who does the work around here. Speaking of which—” He held out his hand. Jeannie fished for the change in her pocket and handed it over. Gus put the coins in his plastic change purse, let it snap shut, and replaced it in his hip pocket.

                  Jeannie felt refreshed by her brief absence from the unit. It was a useful, cheering reminder that there were other places, even in the hospital, where pain was not the determinant of existence.

                  She stopped in the head nurse’s office to let Vivian know she was back from lunch.

                  “How’re you doing?”

                  “Better.”

                  “I heard.”

                  “Already?”

                  “That was your voice.”

                  “I didn’t think anyone could tell.”

                  “Everyone, J.C. Everyone in the whole hospital.” Vivian’s tone was terse, but she was grinning. “Made my day.”

                  “Glad to be of service.”

                  “Can you keep an eye on Marie Jefferson? Maureen has to eat sometime, too.”

                  “Let me check on Sanchez,” Jeannie said.

                  “Oh, we have her first name. Father Zorro knew her years ago. It’s Elena. Ring any bells?”

                  “No.”

                  “Go to work.”

                  Jeannie relieved Maureen after looking in on Elena Sanchez. Maria was still with her mother, reading quietly by the bedside. She looked up when Jeannie stuck her head in.

                  “Everything OK?” Jeannie asked.

                  “She’s quieter,” Maria said.

                  “Let me know if anything happens. I’ll be in room Eight.”

                  “I will.”

                  Maureen was waiting for her.

                  “You are late.”

                  “Sorry,” Jeannie said. “Too many things going on. Anything I should know?”

                  “When the priest came visit, he said that she was agitated. I did not see it. She has been quiet since then.” Maureen turned and left.

                  There was suddenly too much silence, even with the rasp of the ventilator. She found the music player and turned it on.

                  She hated working neuro, but Marie’s case was more unfair than most. The divorcee’s children were regular visitors, attended by Marie’s mother, who cared for them. Marie’s ex-husband probably was unaware that anything had happened, did not bother to know that his children were without their mother.

                  The music surrounded her. She listened for a while, then began talking to Marie. First, she identified herself. No one really knew what a comatose patient could hear. The nursing texts were clear, though, that even though the patient was unresponsive, you had to talk to her, let her know what was going on around her. Sometimes it felt stupid, talking to someone who apparently was not listening, but Jeannie forced herself to follow the protocol. It could make a difference.

                  “I’m going to take your pulse, Marie,” Jeannie said. She picked up the woman’s wrist. The skin was warm to the touch, its color a healthy pink.

                  While Jeannie watched the second hand of her watch turn a quarter of the way around the dial, she felt Marie’s fingers curling in an attempt to touch Jeannie’s hand. At first she thought it was just a twitch, the firing of a random series of neurons somewhere in her patient’s nervous system. She straightened out the groping fingers gently. But it happened again, and Marie’s pulse quickened when Jeannie tried to interfere.

                  Jeannie eyed her patient. Marie’s eyes, overflowing with tears, were open and focused on the nurse. Her lips moved. The alarm on her ventilator tripped; the sound—not a loud wail, but more a subdued electronic keening—filled the sickroom’s air. Marie was panicking at having air forced into her by a one-armed octopus; she wanted to breathe on her own.

                  But, Jeannie knew, the last thing that Marie Jefferson could possibly remember was sunning herself on the deck of a small boat. Now she woke to the nightmare of the real conditions of her existence.

                  Jeannie slapped a switch on the ventilator that put it into “demand mode.” It would only pump air into Marie if it detected that she had stopped breathing on her own.

                  “You’ve had an accident,” Jeannie said. “You’re in the hospital. You were hurt very badly, but you’re doing better.” She was still holding Marie’s hand, which clutched at hers in desperation.

                  Marie’s lips moved. Jeannie could not make it out, but Marie’s free hand moved to her throat.

                  “You’re on a ventilator. It’s to help you breathe. It won’t hurt you, but you can’t talk with that tube in your throat.”

                  Marie nodded. For a moment her eyes were closed, then snapped open again. She waved a question in the direction of the music player, smiled, traced a question in the air, and knitted her brows.

                  “The music?” Jeannie asked.

                  Marie nodded weakly.

                  “It’s yours.” Marie’s pulse had settled down a little. “Do you know Jeff Walters? He brought it in here for you; he thought you might like it.”

                  Smiling, Marie moved her hand again, in the sign of a cross.

                  “I’ll tell him you did,” Jeannie said. “Welcome back.”

                 

 Chapter 14

                  After Jeannie called in Vivian to confirm Marie’s awakening, after Vivian called in Jeff Walters, after Walters called in Abraham Caine, after Caine could find no neurological deficits of any significance, after Marie was removed from the ventilator, a small party was held at the ICU nurses’ station, in which Marie Jefferson’s health was toasted with thick, late afternoon coffee.

                  Unqualified success was rare. Miracles were not unknown, but they came so seldom that celebration was called for. Even Caine seemed almost human. He stood around claiming to have had nothing to do with the blooming of the Turnip. He left Jeannie pointedly alone, except when Jeff Walters walked up to him and whispered something rude in his ear. Caine’s face darkened in response, and he glared at her before stalking out of the unit. Walters grinned at her, though, gave her a thumbs-up before returning to his duties.

                  Everyone was back from lunch, from the lab, from X-ray. All the patients were quiet and, for the time being, comfortable. The shift was winding down to paperwork, the mood of the unit better than it had been for days.

                  The double doors at the end of the hallway swung open. A pair of bureaucrats bulled through the door and down the hall, followed, at some distance, by Sister Mary Catherine.

                  Horst Appleby walked up to the nurses’ station.

                  “Miss Christopher, come with us, please.”

                  The nurses’ happy bubble burst, leaving droplets of tension among them.

                  “The rest of you are free to go,” Appleby said, “when your shifts are over.”

                  “What the hell is this?” Vivian demanded.

                  “We’re continuing our investigation,” Appleby said. “Come with us.”

                  He turned his back peremptorily on Jeannie and the others, and, whistling tunelessly, headed for the doctors’ lounge in Thirteen. Delilah followed in his wake. Sister Mary Catherine held back to gather Jeannie in.

                  “Lord Almighty,” she said, “you’d better come along. He’s really upset; he’s doing the Horst whistle song. I think he’s been looking forward to this all day.”

                  Jeannie looked back at the others helplessly as Mary Catherine took her in hand and made her follow after Delilah and Horst. “What you did yesterday was fun,” she said. “I don’t remember the last time I laughed so hard. But they won’t let go of it now. You made them look silly and stupid, and they won’t forget it.”

                  “But I do my job,” Jeannie protested. “And I didn’t steal anything.”

                  “I know that, dear,” Mary Catherine said. “You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know that—and, I think, so do they. But they have something to prove. I can’t stop it.”

                  “Then what are you doing here?” Jeannie was rough with the nun, unwilling to be interrogated as a suspect in the crime she herself had reported. “Why bother?”

                  “Because you’ll need someone on your side.”

                  “Great.”

                  They were at the door to the lounge. Mary Catherine pushed her into the unused patient room. No one wanted to be treated in room Thirteen. The bed was gone, replaced by an easy chair, a sofa, and a couple of tables covered with old magazines. There was a faint aroma of spoiled food and old grease. Mary Catherine’s hand kept a steady pressure on Jeannie’s back until she was safely inside and the door shut behind her.

                  “Sit down,” Delilah said, “please.”

                  Jeannie ignored the order and leaned against the heater/air-conditioner that ran the length of the wall below the window, which faced west. Her position put the afternoon sun at her back.

                  “What’s this all about?”

                  Horst Appleby leaned against the sink, across the room from Jeannie. Sister Mary Catherine sat on the couch. Delilah was trying to choose between standing under the TV set mounted on the wall opposite the sofa and sitting in the easy chair at Jeannie’s left.

                  There was a mirror behind Appleby. Jeannie could see his bald spot reflected along with the afternoon sunlight. His bushy white eyebrows rode his forehead above his tanned and shadowed face. The tan was purchased along with pleasure, not earned by working in the west Texas sun. The area around his eyes was white, a Ray-Ban mask. Ominous freckles were scorched into the flesh of his nose. Overall, his features looked painted and glued, cancerous—a makeup man’s caricature of malignancy.

                  In contrast, Delilah’s skin was nearly the same shade as her starched white uniform, with blue eye shadow and crimson lips. She looked nearly corpse-like under the fluorescent lights. She finally decided to settle under the TV set, preferring to hunch her head down rather than to sit at Jeannie’s side. No one wanted to be near the victim.

                  “What it’s about, Miss Christopher, is the theft you were associated with yesterday.”

                  “You mean the missing drugs I reported.”

                  “Whatever.” Horst waved a dismissive hand. “There are still some questions we have to settle.”

                  “I’ve told you everything that I know.”

                  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

                  “What does that mean?” Jeannie asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

                  “You are not here to make sense. You’re here to answer my questions.” Horst reached into his pocket and pulled forth a folded sheaf of papers. Jeannie recognized them as the report she had written the day before.

                  “You were late arriving for work yesterday morning.”

                  “Yes.”

                  “Why?”

                  “I overslept.”

                  “Why did you do that, I wonder?” Appleby’s voice was a corrosive caress.

                  “I don’t know.” But she did. It was the mind’s defense against returning to the atmosphere of distrust that permeated the hospital. At the end of every pair of days off (she was luckier than most; her two days were consecutive), Jeannie had to steel herself to return to the frustrations and tensions of the unit, of the hospital itself. “I was tired, I guess.”

                  “You were tired. I see. In any case, you were late.”

                  “I’m usually not.”

                  “Yes, we know. But yesterday, you were.”

                  “Yes.”

                  “And yesterday you failed to give Mrs. Hennessy her medication. Is that correct? Medication that had been ordered by Dr. Walters?”

                  Why was he trying to make her look guilty? Pharmacy hadn’t delivered the medicine; anyway, it was to be taken with food. She tried to explain why she had not given the drug, but Appleby rode over her objection with his own.

                  “Did you give the medication? Yes or no.”

                  “No,” Jeannie answered, “I didn’t.”

                  “That’s correct,” Appleby said. “In fact, you went out of your way to be abusive toward Mrs. Hennessy, didn’t you, as well as Dr. Walters. You failed to gather her vital signs when you arrived in the morning. You enraged your patient with your bizarre behavior, until, frightened and angry at your actions, she lashed out, unfortunately catching Dr. Walters instead of you.”

                  “That’s not right,” Jeannie protested. “It wasn’t that way.”

                  “I have complaints against you from both Mrs. Hennessy and Dr. Walters.”

                  “They’re both fools.” Jeannie understood where the attack was heading. “You weren’t there, you didn’t see.” She looked for support to the only possible source in the room; Sister Mary Catherine was pointedly examining the hem of her habit. A pleased smile played at the corners of Delilah’s mouth.

                  “What are you accusing me of?” Jeannie asked. Why was Mary Catherine not defending her?

                  “You failed to monitor your patient’s vital signs; you failed to give her prescribed medication; you were verbally and physically abusive toward her. You were observed to make fun of Dr. Walters when the unfortunate incident of the breakfast tray occurred. When the theft of drugs occurred on your unit, you conspired with your head nurse to violate the conditions of the investigation set down by your nursing supervisor. That was yesterday.”

                  “You mean there’s more?”

                  “Much more,” Delilah said. Here tone was severe, but a glint of nearly erotic amusement sparkled in her eyes. Jeannie suddenly understood the supervisor. She was a sadistic voyeur, sublimated into her work situation. She could dominate her nurses through the medium of the male supervisors. Her hands were never dirtied, but her id was awash with the pleasure of being witness to Jeannie’s degradation.

                  “You’re enjoying this!” Jeannie accused.

                  “Jeannie—” Mary Catherine tried to stop her, her own face a web of pain.

                  “Let her talk,” Delilah said.

                  But Jeannie saw the suffering in the nun’s face. She did not understand the warning, but she saw how serious it was. Did this unholy duo have something that threatened Mary Catherine as well, or was it all aimed at Jeannie? She felt herself caught up in something larger, something no one would explain to her. Was it just more of the in-house maneuvering that took place in any large institution, sinister enough in its own way, or something else? Mary Catherine had the look of a trapped animal.

                  “I’ll wait.” Jeannie tried to compose herself, settling down for the next round.

                  “Very well,” Appleby said. “The pattern of impulsive, antiauthoritarian behavior continued. You violated hospital security procedures when Ms. Sanchez tried to remove her mother from your care. Luckily, it had a happy outcome when Father de la Vega intervened, but it could have been disastrous. This is a hospital, Miss Christopher, not a prison. We don’t keep people here against their will. Maria Sanchez is an attorney; you might have found yourself brought up on criminal charges. And, I might add, the outcome was not entirely happy for Father de la Vega—he suffered a substantial injury. It could have been serious, perhaps even deadly. You are, it seems, becoming dangerous to those who work with you.”

                  He was twisting everything. Even the good she had done looked wrong through Horst Appleby’s eyes. She kept silent, waiting. The payoff was on the way.

                  “You were involved in yet two other incidents with Mrs. Hennessy. You verbally abused her when you found her smoking a cigarette—”

                  “And making herself sick!” Jeannie tried to hold back, but failed.

                  “—and, when she was panicked and agitated, you did both verbal and physical violence to her. You acted unprofessionally in both cases. Her attorneys have been called in. When their investigation is complete, I expect you will find yourself in some difficulty.”

                  So that’s it, Jeannie thought. He was afraid of a lawsuit.

                  “Your pattern of uncontrolled behavior must have a cause,” Appleby went on. “It’s not limited to your dealings with Mrs. Hennessy. You also went out of your way to humiliate Dr. Caine during lunch today.”

                  Then it was the nursing supervisor’s turn. Delilah gathered a nod of permission from Appleby, then turned on Jeannie.

                  “We don’t mean to say that you’re a bad person, Jean,” Delilah began, “but surely you must see that there’s something erratic in your behavior. I don’t know about the others, but—”

                  Others?

                  “—but I’ve always thought of you as a talented nurse, a good nurse, but with a weakness in your sense of professionalism. You have compassion, you have technical skills far beyond most of your fellow nurses. You really care about the people you take care of. But Jean, you’re a flake. You do bizarre things that get other people upset. If you would only try to fit in better, go by the rules a little more, none of this would be happening to you.”

                  Hunched under the television, finished with her speech, Delilah leaned back. She bumped her head on the steel frame and cried out in sudden pain.

                  Appleby shifted his gaze to Mary Catherine, ignoring Bancroft’s hurt. It was the nun’s turn to speak. Appleby’s eyes were on her; it looked to Jeannie as if they would bore right through the older woman. Sister Mary Catherine was being controlled in some way. The realization saddened Jeannie, because Mary Catherine had been for years one of the few to raise her voice against the increasingly shrill and demanding decrees of the bureaucrats and physicians. In Sister’s face, Jeannie saw the changes the hospital had gone through while turning from an institution of compassion and mercy into an institution of business and balance sheets. Each line signaled a compromise of New Testament charity with the publican’s addiction to profit and efficiency.

                  Charity was senseless, in the eyes of the business people, an ideology for fools.

                  An odd compassion swept over her toward her attackers. They would not see—could not. Maybe it was condescending of her, but she pitied them their narrowness, their fear of not getting what they felt they had coming. And she finally understood about sin: that there were the sins she had always heard about, and there was the sin that followed all the rules, obeyed authority, saw itself as good, but inflicted harm after harm on the very people it claimed to help, because it was narrow, limited, and self-protective.

                  Charity seeks not itself.

                  How, then, could she respond to the accusations that had been hurled at her? And what did they really want from her? They were two different questions with different answers, but she knew neither. Her instinct was to keep her mouth shut, not to respond at all. There was something more coming, she felt sure.

                  She was to be the scapegoat.

                  “I suggest,” Mary Catherine said softly, controlling anger, “that unless you have some direct evidence against Ms. Christopher, she is under no obligation to answer your charges.”

                  “But the drugs!” Appleby exploded. “What about the drugs?”

                  “You’ve been implying that this nurse is a user, that she stole narcotics, and that using these drugs has affected her professional behavior. Can you prove it?”

                  “Well, not at the moment,” Appleby said, “but we’re—”

                  “Do you have any evidence that points at her?”

                  “She had the keys—the responsibility!” Delilah was still rubbing her head. An arrangement she had felt sure of was collapsing. It hurt almost as much as her head.

                  Jeannie laughed.

                  “Stop that, Jean,” Bancroft ordered. But Jeannie could not stop. The interrogation had no power behind it. It was harassment, institutional terrorism. She knew there was no proof against her, but she also knew the need of the institution for quick fixes to public problems. Whether the fix addressed the problem was immaterial; what counted was that something was tried, some solution attempted. The bureaucrats would at least look as if they were doing their jobs.

                  Jeannie wanted two things, now. One was to escape to her home where she could be alone, where no demands would be made on her worn psyche. The second was to know what Appleby was trying to hold over Sister’s head.

                  Mary Catherine would never tell. It was hospital business, which she never discussed unless one had a specific need to know. And if it was personal, she would never mention it. Mary Catherine’s professional life enveloped her completely. Running the hospital was her vocation, not her job.

                  “Everything you have against this nurse is circumstantial,” Mary Catherine continued. “If I were not a charitable person, I might believe that you’re operating a vendetta against her. But I have to be charitable—it’s in my job description. So I will believe against my better judgment that you’re merely mistaken, until such time as you prove differently.”

                  “Get out of here,” Appleby said to Jeannie. His voice was thick with anger.

                  “Stay put,” Mary Catherine said. “You have a right to hear the rest of what I’m going to say.” She returned her attention to Appleby. “My order still runs this hospital, now matter how many people like you we’ve hired to help us be efficient. Try to remember that the reason for your efficiency is the increase of charity. And charity begins at home.”

                  She seemed to float from the couch to her feet, belying her sixty-seven years, and moved toward Jeannie.

                  “Come along, dear.” She took Jeannie by the arm and started them both out of the room. “This is over.”

                  “For now,” Appleby growled. “Don’t think we’ve given up. We’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

                  “Don’t bother,” Mary Catherine said as Jeannie began a retort. “It only encourages them.” She steered Jeannie quickly through the door, letting it fall shut behind them, and took her to the locker room.

                  Jeannie slumped on the bench in front of her locker. She usually wore her uniform to and from work, but she kept a set of civvies inside, for when she wanted to go somewhere directly from work. Inside it was freedom: her civilian clothes, her tennis shoes, the keys to the car that would take her away from this place. But she did not have the energy to open the lock.

                  “Hell of a day, huh?” Mary Catherine groaned to a seat beside Jeannie. “Sometimes I think I’m still whoring for a living.”

                  Jeannie gaped at her; nuns were not supposed to say such things.

                  “Not you, too,” Mary Catherine said. “I thought you knew better than that.”

                  “I didn’t mean—I mean, I—” Jeannie turned away, blushing.

                  “Bastards,” Mary Catherine muttered. “Not you, dear,” she said as Jeannie’s head swung around again.

                  “Yeah,” Jeannie said, grinning ruefully. “They are. I thought they were going to fire me.”

                  “You’re different, that’s your problem. It’s not that they hate you—personally, I mean. They don’t even know you. But you do have a way of drawing attention to yourself. In two days you have been at the center of almost everything that has happened in ICU. Why you?”

                  Jeannie shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s true enough. Everything does seem to happen to me. But I don’t know why.”

                  “Let me guess,” Mary Catherine said. “When you’re here, at work, you don’t think about your boyfriends, your car your family, your friends, anything like that, do you?”

                  “Not much,” Jeannie admitted. “There’s always something that needs to be done.”

                  “The work is never finished, is it?”

                  “No.”

                  “Even when you leave, there’s always something that nags at you, something you might have done better.” Mary Catherine watched Jeannie, eyes downcast, pull off her shoes.

                  “Yes.” Jeannie’s voice was small. Hot tears filled her eyes. “Always.”

                  “You take,” the nun said, “every patient home with you. Your apartment must be crowded with them.”

                  “Some of their ghosts,” Jeannie admitted. “The ones we discharge alive get to leave.” She placed her work shoes in the bottom of the open locker.

                  “And the others stay with you.”

                  “They keep me company,” Jeannie defended herself. “They help me not to make mistakes.” Jeannie tried to feel wooden. This interrogation was worse than the one she had just been through. Mary Catherine knew too much about her. She trusted the old nun, but she wanted no extra pressures right now. She made herself not feel. She was wood, glass, inside, anything that would insulate her from the anger and fear that threatened to run wild through her. The air around Jeannie seemed to shimmer with potential energy, energy that she wanted desperately to dodge. But like a lonely tree on the open plains, she was rooted to the spot, waiting for the inevitable lightning.

                  It was almost a relief to know that the lightning would finally come; she had been waiting all her life. She could almost hear Mary Catherine suggesting that she take some time away from the hospital, time to put her thinking together, to see if nursing was really for her after all. She could envision her disappointment at being eased out of the profession, but it was laced with the anticipation of release from the awful sense of responsibility for every being with whom she came into contact. It would hurt, but the hurt would have an end. The present pain seemed eternal.

                  Jeannie never talked about her ghosts. They were not the usual white phantoms howling through empty hallways. Hers were internal, the memories of the ones she had been unable to help, the ones who had had more pain than she was capable of easing. They were mostly silent, mostly faces contorted in pain or blank with unawareness. They lived in her memory only. There were children, adults, and many, many older folks among them. They rose unbidden into her sleep, where she saw their faces gray and dying, pillowed on the white of their beds.

                  Their eyes accused her of being less than they needed.

                  Anyone, everyone, was less than the dying needed. Jeannie knew that fact, knew that the dying were insatiable.

                  And their eyes still accused her.

                  Mary Catherine knew. The knowledge was in her eyes, in her flesh, and now, at last, in her words. The old woman in black and white put her hand on Jeannie.

                  “I have mine, too,” Mary Catherine said. She did not describe them; her decorum, hard-won and much-prized, prevented it. But Jeannie knew the background of the order of the Sisters of Forgiveness of St. Mary Magdalene. “I think everyone does.”

                  Mary Catherine’s ghosts were of sins long forgiven, sacramentally forgotten, dead but perversely living in the nun’s memory, in all the nuns’ memories, warnings of lives wrongly begun, a goad to sacrifice, to compassion.

                  “Compassion,” Mary Catherine said, “is not weakness. But Jean, sometimes I think you are too much alone. You think you can bear it all, that a worthy person can handle anything. You have to learn to lean, to bend. Or else you’re going to burn out very quickly.”

                  “Burnout!” Jeannie snorted. She escaped the older woman’s hand by standing up and stepping out of the loose blue pants. “Every time I turn around nurses are talking about burnout.”

                  “It’s a word abused,” Mary Catherine agreed. “But the work does something to you. You can’t just take it day after day, year after year, and believe that it won’t hurt you.”

                  Jeannie put on her blue jeans, snaking the heavy fabric up her legs and buttoning the snug waist. “You just live with it.”

                  “Aha!” Mary Catherine said, “a stoic. Just live with it, she says.”

                  “What the hell else can I do?” Jeannie demanded. She snatched her blue surgical blouse off and threw it against the locker. It dropped in a crumpled heap on the floor and settled into the dust. “You didn’t give me any help in there with them, nothing at all. They’re accusing me of stealing, and you sat there and didn’t lift one of your goddamned holy fingers to defend me.” She jammed her arms into her civilian blouse and buttoned it up the front with short stabbing motions.

                  Mary Catherine still sat.

                  “What do you want from me?”

                  “Nothing,” Jeannie said. “You don’t owe me a thing.”

                  Mary Catherine picked up Jeannie’s shoes and held them out to the nurse.

                  “Thanks,” Jeannie said. She moved down the bench to sit to put them on. There were burrs on the shoelaces. She picked at them with fumbling fingers. She did not want Mary Catherine to see her face; her eyes burned with unshed tears. “Why didn’t you say anything? I thought you were on my side.”

                  “I am.”

                  “Then why?”

                  “Two reasons,” Mary Catherine said, “one for you and one for them.”

                  “For me.” Jeannie spat the words at Sister.

                  “Both for you, really—at least in a way.”

                  “Tell me!” Jeannie said. She wanted to shout; but outside, others would hear. She was on the point of not caring. The suspicion directed against her isolated her, made her feel guilty even though she had done nothing wrong: she was guilty because someone suspected her.

                  “Jean, do you trust me?”

                  “I don’t know. I did.”

                  “Grow up.” Sister Mary Catherine was suddenly afire. “You’re young, but you’re not so young that you should still imagine that the world is fair. I did defend you, and you’ll remember if you want to.”

                  “But—”

                  “Be quiet and listen. What I didn’t do was quash their little investigation.”

                  “But—”

                  “I can’t, not yet.” Mary Catherine was standing now, face to face with Jeannie. “They’ve got this burr under their saddles, and if I try to get rid of it, they’ll just find something else to fight about. They’re not after you, dear. They’re after me. Even though you’re involved, it’s not your fight. It’s mine.”

                  Jeannie slumped against the cold steel of the locker.

                  “If they’re trying to hurt you, why are they messing up my life? It’s my records they’re going to blacken. Jesus, I’m the one who’s being investigated for stealing drugs. I’m the one who’s going to have to live with this for the rest of my career.”

                  Jeannie had put everything she had, everything she was, into her work. The specter of losing the investment of her lifetime because of a political squabble infuriated her.

                  She thought about losing her license. A void yawned in front of her. Nursing gave her purpose and significance. Without it, she would fade into the gray mass of people who lived purposeless lives. The thought nauseated her. She slid down the locker, scraping her back against its vents. The pain distracted her from the turmoil in her stomach.

                  “It’s not right.”

                  “No, it’s not,” Mary Catherine agreed. “But you brought it on yourself, in a way. By being independent, by refusing to play the game by their rules. They probably think it’s a God-given opportunity.”

                  “To get rid of both of us?”

                  “You damn betcha,” the nun replied.

                  “But why you?” Jeannie asked.

                  “I don’t know,” Mary Catherine admitted. She slumped against the wall, next to Jeannie. “For the love of God, I don’t know. Ambition, maybe, the need to make a name for themselves.” The nun let herself slide down the face of the locker door. Both women sat on the floor, arms across their knees. “The need to convince themselves that their lives matter. No one ever explained it to me. I ask God, but He doesn’t answer.”

                  The cool metal of the locker door felt good against Jeannie’s back, the warm presence of Mary Catherine good at her side. Finally, after all the events of the day, she was beginning to relax. Her fatigue seemed to drain into the floor.

                  She heard Mary Catherine sigh and looked over at her. The nun was grinning at the nurse.

                  “Second reason,” Mary Catherine said, “was this: some people, I swear, are chosen by God for easy lives. Everything seems to come to them. Maybe that’s an illusion, born of our inability to see inside the minds of those blessed people, but I don’t think so. They never seem to have anything to worry about but which dress to wear or which car to buy. Maybe they have problems I can’t see but I’m reasonably sharp, and I don’t think so.

                  “Others, like you and me, are born to trouble. Not legal trouble—we’re not thieves or anything like that—just trouble. It comes from giving a damn about what we’re doing here, from caring about the people around us, the job we seem to be put here to do.” Mary Catherine shifted herself into a more comfortable position. “J.C., you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in this situation. I’m not going to tell you what to do; I have enough troubles of my own. You’re tough enough to wade through this bullshit. Whatever happens, I’ll keep it from getting on your record; I can still do that. But remember this: if they win this thing, and everyone thinks they’re great and you’re awful, they have their reward now. Yours will come later. Now go home. I have work to do.”

Chapter 15           

                 

                  The third day of Jeannie’s week came all too soon. She awoke with a start from dark, turgid dreams, in which she fled from shadowy pursuers through troubled places. By they time she was bathed, dressed, and arrived at the hospital, she had lodged the nightmares in a safe place in her unconscious and felt ready to face whatever difficulties the day might bring.

                  But Jeannie was drawing heavily on her emotional reserves. Her morning optimism was as thin as the formica on her bathroom counter top. It could stand a battering, but might be vulnerable to a thousand tiny scratches.

                  Again, the parking lot’s asphalt radiated hear stored from the day before. Even shortly after dawn, the surface was warm underfoot, as if something hot and malevolent lay just below her, trying to break through the layers of crushed rock and black tar.

                  The sun squatted red on the horizon, ensorceled with wisps of morning cloud, a giant hemmed about with fragile mists. She glanced at the flattened ball, shuddering in spite of the early heat, and made her way into the hospital again. Its artificial chill was cold comfort. She hugged herself inside her lab jacket.

                  She was early today, determined to give Appleby and Bancroft no further cause to criticize her, to be a model of medical propriety and competence—mostly propriety, since no one had taken offense at the work she actually performed. She would be deferential to her superiors, pleasant with her peers, and correct with her subordinates. Her paperwork would be flawless, her attitude and demeanor professional and “appropriate” under all conditions. Jeannie believed, deep down, that the universe reflected her own state of mind, that one got as good as one gave. Thus, everything that happened around her was her own doing, and if things were unpleasant, then the cause was in her. So, therefore, was the ability to change the way of things. It was all, she had convinced herself, a matter of attitude.

                  The elevator was a cage full of chirping birds, as nurses and aides chattered and rose through the hospital, fluttering off to their assigned perches. Jeannie smiled at everyone, so much that her face hurt by the time the elevator opened its doors on the third floor. With her lips stretched over her teeth, Jeannie escaped the cage and fluttered down the hall and around the corner to ICU.

                  Gus was waiting. When, she wondered, did he wake up in the morning? He was always there before the day-shift nurses arrived and stayed until after they left. When she filled in for someone else, either nights or evenings, Gus was still at the door. Were there three of him? Did he have two identical brothers? He would never say.

                  “What’s going on today?” she asked. He always knew, before anyone else. He was the only male “pink lady” in the hospital. He wore a standard Pepto-Bismol-pink jacket like the other volunteers, down to the darts on the front, which made the coat pook out as if in memory of breasts. It gave him a hollow look, as if his chest were sunken, cadaverous.

                  He held out his hand.

                  “Ain’t you forgetting something?” he drawled.

                  Jeannie fumbled in her jacket pocket for Gus’s quarter.

                  “What’s the matter with your mouth?” he demanded.

                  “Nothing,” Jeannie said.

                  “Then why do you look like that?” His hand was still out.

                  “I’m trying to be cheerful.”

                  “Forget it. It looks like someone’s stretchin’ your lips,” Gus grunted. “It won’t work. The bitch is inside, waitin’ for you. Don’t be cheerful,” he lisped. “Be tough. You can take ‘em.”

                  “Thanks.” Jeannie put the coin in his hand and moved through the door. She did not want to be tough. She wanted to crawl into a hole, where no one would find her—especially Bancroft and Appleby.

                  The night shift was gathered around the nurses’ station. Most were writing notes on charts or standing around drinking coffee, waiting for morning report. She envied them the quiet of nights, when few doctors and fewer supervisors complicated the work of caring for the sick.

                  As she went by Thirteen, the lounge, she noticed a stranger, somehow familiar, setting up some sort of equipment. But she hurried on without paying much attention; he was most likely a technician of some sort.

                  As she reached the conference room, a silence fell. Delilah was there, head to head with Horst Appleby. The stranger moved past her and joined them. Vivian was seated at the head of the table, a stony expression on her face. Hoss, Maureen, Wanda Sue, and Prissy-Jo were scattered around the table. They were all wound tight with tension. The night crew stayed outside.

                  Delilah nodded at Vivian, who failed to notice. The supervisor’s lips pursed, gathered as if Horst Appleby, standing next to her, had pulled a drawstring. Her head moved toward him, too, another part of her on his string. He nodded, almost imperceptibly, his bushy eyebrows blowing in the slight breeze of his movement.

                  Delilah cleared her throat. Vivian noticed her.

                  “Proceed.”

                  Vivian cleared her throat. The night nurses were still absent.

                  “I will give report,” she said.

                  It was out of character for the head nurse to report on the status of the patients. The nurse who had been handling each case normally briefed her relief. She was the one who knew best, in the most detail, what had been happening. Vivian had a standing rule against second-hand reports.

                  She ran through the conditions of the patients on the unit. Joe Wood had had another restless night, with moderate chest pain and increasing periods of disorientation. Marie Jefferson had slept normally and awakened without difficulty while morning vital signs were being taken. She had been extubated during the evening shift. Jonquil Marie Hennessy was still agitated, although her angina had settled down some. Peter O’Flynn was doing all right. La Curandera—Elena Sanchez—after a slight improvement the previous day, seemed to be sliding slowly downhill; no one had any idea why. The excrescence from her skin had returned; the night shift had not had time to clean her up (nights seldom seemed to find time for the nastier jobs) and again she had the foul odor.

                  Vivian went on to the day’s assignments. La Curandera went to Prissy-Jo. Hoss took O’Flynn and Jefferson; neither needed one-on-one care. It was Maureen’s turn to float to another unit, she could leave now. There was the disturbance of Maureen’s exit, then Vivian went on: Jeannie would care for Jonquil; at least she had not been bitten by the woman. Joe Wood also fell to Jeannie’s care. He was undemanding, but needed watching.

                  “That’s it,” Vivian said. She tilted her chair against the wall, which bore the scars of Vivian’s skepticism from previous lectures, policy meetings, and administrative get-togethers.

                  Delilah brightened, as if Horst had turned up a rheostat on her personality. She moved in front of the green chalkboard, resplendent in her starched white uniform, an ornamental stethoscope hung about her neck.

                  “I know all of you are as upset as we are with the theft that took place on the unit yesterday,” she began. “Now, we in administration—and I want to make this perfectly clear at the outset—don’t harbor any doubts or suspicions against any of you. Is that understood?”

                  There was no reply, no movement in her audience.

                  “Good.” Delilah smoothed her starched belly. “I was hoping you’d all understand.” Again she rubbed her abdomen. Something must be riding up, Jeannie thought. Maybe she has gas. “A good attitude, I’m told, can make all the difference in the ease with which the next phase of our investigation proceeds. I would like you to welcome, if you would, the person who is going to help us through that phase, the chief investigator for and proprietor of Wes-Tex Investigations, Mr. Hans Appleby!”

                  Delilah actually applauded in her excitement. When no one followed her lead, her solitary clapping died away with an embarrassed giggle. A red flush crept up her neck and suffused her face. It’s not gas—she’s turned on, Jeannie decided. She loves this shit.

                  The back of Vivian’s chair was deepening the scar in the plaster, a steady tapping against the wall as the head nurse rocked.

                  Hans Appleby strode to take his place at the front of the room. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt, polyester plaid Sansabelt trousers, string tie. He draped a clashing plaid jacket over a chair. A tattoo of a cobra adorned his left bicep. His hair was crew cut, and he wore a mustache that was meant to be Hitlerian, but had turned out Chaplinesque.

                  “Ladies,” he began, then pretended to notice Hoss. “And gentleman, your bosses here at Saint Mary Magdalene Hospital have hired me to do a Job. I am going to find out who took those Illegal Drugs from this ward. Let there be no doubt about that Fact. I am going to Observe you while you work and while you relax. If I feel the need, I am going to follow you home at night and sit outside your window all night long, If That’s What It Takes.”

                  He spoke in capital letters, Jeannie noticed. She felt as she were watching the freak show at the circus.

                  “I expect this Surveillance to cause you some discomfort,” Hans went on. “That is its Purpose. The Thief—and you know who you are—will Panic as I close in on him.”

                  Hoss cleared his throat.

                  “Or her,” Hans amended. “You’re right—you can’t depend on anyone, These Days.”

                  Jeannie laughed. She could not stop herself. Hans was a character out of a comic book, a real marvel.

                  Hans scowled in her direction, without making eye contact. It was possible, she thought, that there was nothing behind his eyes to make contact with, and that set her off again.

                  “Do you find this amusing, Miss”—he consulted a piece of paper—“Christopher?”

                  “Sorry,” Jeannie choked.

                  “As you should be,” Hans said. Jeannie clamped her teeth together, but the effort was vain. Another giggle escaped her. Vivian glared at her, but the two caught each others’ eyes. A smirk appeared on the head nurse’s lips; she snorted. The laugh cartwheeled through the small room, catching Hoss next, who grinned openly at Wanda Sue. She shifted in her seat.

                  “Now come on,” she protested, “this is serious.”

                  “Oh, come off it,” Prissy-Jo crowed. “It’s just Horst’s kid brother!”

                  “Really?” Wanda Sue said. “And there I was, thinkin’ he was kinda cute. Yuccch!”

                  For some reason, Wanda Sue’s dismay tickled all of the nurses, except Delilah. Hans waited at the front of the room until the general laughter died down, then waited some more. The silence stretched uncomfortably before he resumed.

                  “You know, I think I’m going to enjoy this Investigation,” he said. “You may laugh now, but the Polygraph examinations will begin tomorrow. In the mean time, I’ve kept you here long enough. I’m sure you all have work to do. Remember: I’ll be watching you.”

                  “Kid brother is watching,” Hoss observed, as he stood up to go out into the unit. “Orwell had it almost right.”

                  “Who’s that?” Wanda Sue asked.

                  “Never mind,” Jeannie said. “It’s just something he read.”

                  “Oh, well, I don’t have time for that,” Wanda Sue said.

                  “No one thought you did, dear.”

                  Jeannie glanced back at the trio left in the conference room before the door swung shut. There were a grim-faced lot, robbed of their assumed authority. They would grow more dangerous, unless the theft became permanent.

                  Jeannie rebelled against threats. She was an obeyer under most circumstances. She believed that most rules had reasons. If she did not understand the reasons, she tended to obey anyway, knowing that she didn’t know everything there was to know. As a girl, when the others had experimented with shoplifting, she had held back, with the sure and certain knowledge that, although the others got away with it, she would be the one who felt the hand of the guard on her on her arm as she left the store with an illicit tube of lipstick. She had tried to screw her courage up to participating in the adolescent rite because the other girls laughed at her timidity, but she had too much imagination to carry the act through: whenever she came close to doing it, the living vision of her mother’s wounded face as she bailed her out of jail was more than enough to arrest the surreptitious movement of her hand toward the cheap merchandise.

                  But this was different. Jeannie was innocent and knew it. She was involved in something else, something that had grown out of stupid bureaucratic wrangling. She would not be someone’s sacrificial victim; she had serious work to do and this—stuff—was getting in her way.

                  Report had been perfunctory. She went to the rack and pulled Jonquil’s chart, to see what she had been up to lately.

                  The others had scattered to work. For all their bravado while together, Jeannie wondered how well they would stand up to the threat of the lie detector. She knew enough physiology to understand how it worked. The polygraph depended on an individual’s degree of socialization—how badly she felt about lying. Jeannie despised liars. Lying violated the whole idea of trust between people. If she wanted to lie to the machine, she could not. Her skin would sweat, her breathing change, her pulse grow fast, her blood pressure shoot up. She would have nothing to fear, though, if the test were honest.

                  Jeannie had had a friend, June, who had gone to work for a department store. Before she was allowed to start, the personnel office had insisted on giving her a lie detector test, afraid she would steal the merchandise.

                  The inquisitor was a greasy, dirty old man, who took too much pleasure in fitting the band around her stomach. He smelled of stale tobacco and rancid hair oil. His belly lay limp across his thighs when he sat down, ballooned flaccid when he stood.

                  What could he have known of truth?

                  The questions began easily enough. He asked her name, age, and address, her place of birth, where she had gone to school, what kind of grades she had achieved, all the while peering the strip of paper on which his needles scratched thin lines.

                  June sat in the hard wooden chair, tethered with wires from her belly, arm, and fingertips, afraid of the electricity, afraid of the fat man, afraid her own body would betray her by revealing something she believed was a lie.

                  The questions went on. He asked her to tell a lie, then another. She lied about her schooling, her work history, until he said it was enough. Now he wanted her to tell the truth, and so did she.

                  The questioner repeated the early, innocent questions. June repeated her answers, trying to explain some, but he refused to listen to her details, only wanting the words Yes or No for answers. His machine refused details, refused the qualifying of truth, wanted only the impossible Yes/No, truth in absolutes. The fat man and his machine were color-blind to shades of gray.

                  Her inquisitor trained June in the behavior his machine demanded. Not until she was well behaved, and not until he had his baseline of her autonomic, automatic bodily responses, would he move to the juicy stuff.

                  They had been in the tiny room alone for more than an hour before they moved on from the innocent. The inquisitor demanded intimacy, privacy, for his act, intimacy that June could not deny him; she needed the job.

                  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

                  “Yes.”

                  “He’s an actor?”

                  “Yes.”

                  “Does he make a good living?”

                  “Fair.”

                  “Yes or no.”

                  “No.”

                  “Do you sleep with him?”

                  “I—yes.”

                  “Do you sleep with anyone else?”

                  “No.”

                  “Have you ever slept with anyone else?”

                  June hesitated. What did this have to do with the job she was trying to get?

                  “Have you ever slept with anyone else?”

                  “Yes.”

                  “With another woman?”

                  “No.”

                  “Are you telling me the truth?”

                  “Yes.”

                  “Have you ever had a sexual experience with an animal?”

                  Jeannie had not believed that the detective had asked such a question when June later described the session. It was too bizarre, too far out of line.

                  “Just my first boyfriend,” June had answered.

                  “Yes or no.”

                  “No.”

                  The questioning went on. He asked her if she had ever stolen from an employer, even little things—an unauthorized pencil taken absent-mindedly from an office, a pad of scratch paper, a hamburger or French fries from her first teenage job.

                  “Unauthorized taking,” he called it. And June had to answer Yes to some of his questions, tearful at times, and fearful that she had lost the job she needed so desperately, driven to frightened remorse for crimes so minor as to be unnoticed except by the frightened nervous system she inhabited, that betrayed her trivial dishonesties as if they were crimes against humanity. Her pulse and breathing tripped her up, the electrical resistance of her skin told the truth, the whole truth, whether it was true or not.

                  When Jeannie had worked in emergency, she had had to sometimes deal with the victims of rape, listen to them and comfort them while they told their stories to the police men called in one each case. The worst part was hearing how the rapist had forced the women to cooperate in their own degradation, how some of the women tried to please the rapist to protect themselves from his fury.

                  Jonquil’s chart dropped from her hands and crashed to the floor, wrenching Jeannie back into the present. She was not helping anyone, least of all herself, by concentrating on bad memories. She was violating her self-promise to concentrate on her patients, not her problems.

                  “Nervous?” a strange voice asked from behind her. She whirled and dropped the chart again. Hans Appleby stood in the nurses’ station.

                  “What are you doing here?”

                  “Nothing. Observing.”

                  “You’ll have to leave. The doctors will be here any minute,” Jeannie said.

                  “I don’t think so.” He knelt, picked up the fallen chart. “You dropped this.”

                  Jeannie snatched the aluminum folder from his hand. “Please, go away.”

                  “Why?” Hans asked. “You haven’t done anything, have you? Why are you so worried?”

                  “I’m not.”

                  “Bullshit. Older brother has you terrified.”

                  “I didn’t do anything,” Jeannie said. “Leave me alone.” She was furious with herself, again, this time for pleading with this man for mercy when she was not guilty of anything, but there was something threatening about him, something predatory, that she had never seen close up before. She had read about such people, but always believed that they were fictional constructs, made for the convenience of authors who needed elemental forces in their stories rather than characters. She was naive enough, inexperienced enough, never to have confronted true malevolence before. She stepped back from Hans Appleby. “I have to get to work now,” she said.

                  “Sure you do.”

                  “Really.” She held the chart against her breasts like a school girl shy of a school boy’s questing eyes, and backed up.

                  Wanda Sue came wandering out of the bathroom toward her desk, moving behind Hans. She made no sound, but her fragrance turned the man’s head from Jeannie, who wasted no time moving away; she did not want to listen to whatever they might find to say to each other. She escaped the nurses’ station and bumped into Jeff Walters.

                  “Whoa,” he said, “watch where you’re going.”

                  “Sorry,” Jeannie mumbled.

                  “You OK?”

                  “Yes.”

                  “You don’t look it.”

                  “I’ll be fine.”

                  Walters glanced in the direction of the nurses’ station. “Who’s that?”

                  “Mr. Appleby’s brother,” Jeannie said. “He’s run—”

                  “Well, get him the hell out of here,” Walters ordered. “He doesn’t belong on this unit.”

                  “But—”

                  “Oh, Christ,” Walters whined. “Do I have to do everything around here?” Without waiting for an answer, he walked across the intervening space and took Hans by the arm. Jeannie was too far to hear what passed between them, but their body language made it obvious that neither was willing to back off.

                  Jeannie walked quickly down the hall to the double doors that marked the public entrance to ICU. She pushed them open; Gus was there.

                  “Come on,” she said. “Need your help.” Gus was on his feet in a second, and followed Jeannie through the doors and down to the nurses’ station, where the conflict was escalating. Walters and Hans Appleby were shouting at each other now. Wanda Sue was preening herself with pleasure; the two men were not exactly arguing over her, but at least they were next to her, and that was almost as good.

                  Their noise had brought Vivian out of her office. From Five, Prissy-Jo was poking her head out to see what the commotion was. Hoss looked out from Seven, alarmed.

                  Hans Appleby stood six feet tall. He was heavily muscled, but gone a little to fat, in the way of one-time body builders. Jeff Walters was a stubby five-eight, but seemed taller as he stood on tiptoe confronting the bigger man.

                  “I don’t care who you are,” Walters said, “get the hell out of this unit!”

                  “Make me, little man,” Hans drawled.

                  Gus, wizened and stooped with age, walked behind Hans, who was raising his hands, getting ready to start a pushing match with Walters. He ignored Gus. Everyone else seemed frozen with disbelief, not comprehending that real violence was about to erupt in the unit.

                  Gus snatched Han’s left hand and twisted it up behind the big man’s neck, into an improbable position. Hans gasped with pain and surprise.

                  “This feller botherin’ you, doc?”

                  Walters’ mouth gaped open. “How the hell did you—?” he began.

                  “Ain’t no big thing,” Gus said. “‘Bout the same as arguin’ with a cow. Got so mad at a heifer years ago that I punched it in the face. Broke my hand on its skull. Here, look, you can see where the bones didn’t quite knit together right.”

                  Gus let go of Hans to show Walters the deformity. Hans stepped back a pace, massaging his sore wrist, then fell into a karate stance behind Gus. Jeannie was about to cry a warning, when Hans launched his attack from the rear, but before she could make a sound, Gus nonchalantly ducked Hans’ kick, pushing Walters safely out of range. The momentum carried Hans past the old man and fetched him up against the counter. Jeannie reflexively steadied a computer terminal that threatened to fall.

                  Hans whirled, again in his stance, feet spread in a wide “T,” his open hands extended, left in front. A hissing breath escaped his clenched teeth, making him sound like a scratchy Japanese monster movie.

                  He advanced slowly on Gus, who gave ground out into the hall where there was more space and less equipment to damage.

                  Gus stood flat-footed, arms at his sides, while Hans danced around him, feinting in all directions. Judging the distance and angles with the care of a marksman and the relaxed attitude of a cowboy in a street fight, Gus shot a stream of saliva into Hans’ face, striking him dead between the eyes. Hans roared incoherently and charged. The old geezer threw one punch, straight to Hans’ forehead. The administrator’s brother dropped like a pole-axed steer.

                  “Yup,” Gus said, “just like the heifer. ’Bout as smart, too.” He rubbed his hand. “Damn, that hurts.”

                  “Is he all right?” Walters asked, dipping his head toward the inert form on the floor. Jeannie bent to examine Hans. His pulse and breathing were normal, and he was beginning to stir.

                  “He’ll wake up in a minute.”

                  “Good,” Gus said. “Now get out of my way.” He knelt beside Hans, nudging Jeannie aside.

                  “You aren’t going to hit him again, are you?” Walters asked.

                  “Not unless he wants me to.”

                  Gus shook Hans awake. The man’s eyes flickered open and he found himself looking up into the face of the old man. Disorientation vanished, replaced by fear.

                  “Get him away from me,” Hans pleaded, scuttling across the floor belly up.

                  “Seems OK to me,” Wanda Sue said.

                  Gus pinned him in a corner of the corridor.

                  “Please—” Hans began.

                  “What happened here just now?” Gus asked.

                  “You tricked me!”

                  Gus sat down beside the fallen man, holding him in the corner by Nine, which was unoccupied.

                  “That ain’t the only trick I got,” Gus said, “so I’m askin’ you again: what just happened here?”

                  Comprehension flowed across Hans’ face.

                  “I—I tripped?”

                  “Sounds about right. What else?”

                  “I fell, hit my head.”

                  “On what?”

                  “The—the floor?”

                  “Try again,” Gus suggested, pointing down the hall to room Thirteen.

                  “The—my equipment!”

                  “Good!” Gus said, patting him on the head. Hans recoiled slightly from the old man’s touch. “You got an awful hard head; it looks like it broke somethin’ when it hit. Understand me?”

                  “Yes, sir.”

                  “Broke it real good, ain’t that right? Be at least a week before you can get the parts in from Dallas and get it fixed up.” Gus stood and held out a hand for Hans. “Come on, let’s go look at the damage.”

                  Hans hesitantly accepted the help and got to his feet. Gus put an arm around his shoulder; he had to stretch to reach, but he led Hans down the hall toward Thirteen.

                  They could hear Gus explaining to Hans. “Now, look, you ain’t a bad guy, you just got to learn to be more cooperative with the people around you.” His voice faded as the two of them disappeared into the lounge.

                  Vivian tried to re-establish order. “Wanda Sue, you have orders to copy, don’t you?”

                  “Yes, ma’am.”

                  “Then go do it. Hoss, Prissy-Jo, Jeannie—you have patients to care for. Get on it. Dr. Walters, are you through fighting or do you care to tangle with me?”

                  “No thanks,” Walters said.

                  “Good,” Vivian answered. “Nothing happened out here. Is that understood? Let’s make it look normal.”

                  Everyone moved from their places to get to work, not speaking. No one wanted to test Vivian’s temper. The only sound was the shuffling of feet on the hard floor.

                  A sudden crash echoed from Thirteen: metal and glass. Gus stepped out into the hall.

                  “Young Mr. Appleby seems to have cut his self,” Gus called. “He ain’t hurt bad, but he could use a band-aid.” A big grin split Gus’s wrinkled face. “Maybe that Wanda Sue gal could come down here with one. She kinda reminds me of a heifer I used to know.”

                  He popped back into Thirteen. Jeannie sent the buxom ward clerk down the hall with a bottle of iodine, a box of band-aids, and a big smile cleft in her face. There was nothing Wanda Sue appreciated more than an excuse to avoid work by spending time with men.

                  Jeannie and Jeff Walters went into Jonquil’s room. For once, Jonquil failed to complain at the sight of Jeannie. She raised a mild protest when she realized that Preacher would not be in to see her today, but let it slide when his brother told her that he had an early golf date.

                  “Well, he deserves it, poor man,” Jonquil said. “He works so hard. I guess I can stand it if you can.”

                  Jeannie took Jonquil’s vital signs while Jeff talked with the woman.

                  “How are you feeling today?”

                  “Tired.” Jonquil yawned. Her hair was disheveled. She had not washed her face before going to sleep the night before, and her makeup was smeared. One eyebrow had grown a tail that streaked down the left side of her face. Her mascara had clumped in her eyelashes. She had chewed off most of her lipstick.

                  “Probably a side effect of that new medication we’ve got you on,” Jeff said. “It can do that to you.”

                  “Yeah,” Jonquil said. “That’s probably it.”

                  “Any angina last night?”

                  “Just a little,” Jonquil said. “It wasn’t too bad.”

                  Jonquil’s vitals were all right. Jeannie heard Gus in the hall with the breakfast cart. She dreaded the moment, but even Jonquil had to eat; she excused herself and went outside for the tray.

                  “Gonna risk it, huh?” Gus said, grinning wickedly, as Jeannie unloaded the tray earmarked for Jonquil.

                  “Not now, Gus,” Jeannie pleaded.

                  “Use me and throw me away,” Gus said. “That’s OK, I’m used to it.”

                  Jeannie made a mental note to slip down to the gift shop to get something for the little old man, a present to thank him for his intervention with Hans Appleby. At least for a while, Gus had saved her from a rough experience. Even if it was temporary, she felt safe. Even Jonquil seemed calm. She said as much to Gus.

                  “I don’t trust that one. She’ll find something.”

                  “Pessimist,” she accused.

                  “A realist, J.C. There’s a difference.”

                  “Hm.” Jeannie took the tray into Eleven and set it one Jonquil’s bed table. “I hope it’s still hot.”

                  “Thanks, hon,” Jonquil said. Jeannie felt a wave of relief. At least she wouldn’t be mopping up after Jonquil this morning. Thank God for small favors.

                  Jeff Walters said his good-byes and promised to check in on Jonquil later in the day.

                        Jeannie continued her duties, going after Jonquil’s morning medications.

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.

There's another story, The Communion of the Saint, here. 

And also here. 

And as a free audiobook here.

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