Islands Page 10

  “I have had word that they have been detained in Guatemala,” Dr. Mendoza said. “Some foolishness at the border, no doubt.”

  “Those docs can kiss their asses good-bye,” Lewis muttered to Henry.

  The three nurses, rubbing sleep from their eyes, were short and squat, with Indio blood apparent in their opaque black eyes and slightly flattened noses. They wore proper nurses’ uniforms, none too clean, and did not speak a syllable of English. The interpreter had missed his plane to Chihuahua and was considering renting a car.

  “We can kiss his ass good-bye, too,” Henry growled.

  “I didn’t realize there would be a clinic,” Lewis said as amiably as I have ever heard him. It was an ominous sound. “It’s going to be hard to share techniques and suggestions if we’re busy all day treating walk-in patients. I was prepared to show you some new orthopedic surgery, and I know that Dr. McKenzie has some new wrinkles in cardiology. Most of these folks look like a nurse or a family physician could handle them.”

  “Oh, but you will treat and I will watch, and then I will show the two doctors when they come,” Dr. Mendoza said happily. “And as you see, we have nurses.” He gestured at the three young women. They gazed back with blank, obsidian stares.

  “But they have no English,” one of the general surgeons said, in a tight, constipated voice. “And unless I’m mistaken, none of us has adequate Spanish. Who is going to interpret?”

  Dr. Mendoza looked hopefully at me.

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not good at all with Spanish. I’m really here to help you set up a program of resources available to your patients.”

  Dr. Mendoza puzzled for a moment, and then spat out something in rapid-fire Spanish to a young girl who looked relatively mobile. She left the trailer and trudged back toward the town.

  “I have just the answer,” the doctor said. “Mrs. Diaz speaks wonderful English. She will help us out.”

  And so it was that the first day in the hospital of Dr. Mendoza, the madam of the local house of joy served as interpreter and sometime disciplinarian, and did it very well indeed.

  “What will happen when you have to go back to your daytime work?” I said to her as we sat, wiping sweat from our faces, in the folding plastic chairs outside the barracks. I had been drafted to serve as receptionist and appointments secretary, and that is what I did until the day we left. Almost immediately I liked this big, vital woman with luxuriant dyed hair and enough lipstick to frost a cake. She was intelligent, industrious, matter-of-fact, and virtually unflappable. I thought she was sorely wasted as a small-town madam, though I did not say it.

  Carmella Diaz grinned. She had a fine gold tooth.

  “My no-account esposo can get his sorry ass out of bed and keep the cantina,” she said tranquilly. “Work really doesn’t start until nighttime, and it don’t take much to keep those hyenas in line. By the time they want one of my girls, they’re too drunk to cause trouble, anyway.”

  I felt my cheeks burn, and then laughed. Why not? It was the way of things in Ciudad Real.

  We triaged and treated as best we could until past eight that evening. Fevers, diarrhea, broken bones, cuts from God knows what, endless coughs and colds, one or two real medical problems that, without facilities and assured nursing care, the doctors could not handle.

  “You need to evaluate every case and get the ones in real trouble over to the nearest big town,” Lewis said at the end of that interminable day. “I can’t operate here without surgical nurses and equipment and no antibiotic except penicillin. There are many good new ones; I’ll make you a list. And anesthetics, too. You can’t use the same one for everybody. You’ll need an internal medicine man immediately; he can tell you what supplies you’re apt to need. And you’ll need a highly trained head nurse. Nursing care is going to make the difference out here.”

  “But here they are,” Dr. Mendoza said, indicating the three young women, who had not moved.

  “But who’s going to train them?” one of the general surgeons asked.

  “You doctors?” Dr. Mendoza said hopefully.

  “No. Out of the question,” Henry said. “I wish you’d been more specific about your problems when you got in touch with our people in America. You don’t need new techniques. You need trained clinicians.”

  “And here you are,” the doctor said, beaming.

  The next morning the silent gastroenterologist said curtly, “Boil the goddamn water,” and hired the husband of Señora Diaz to drive him to Madera. The two surgeons lasted until Wednesday. At this rate, I thought, Mr. Diaz is going to be a rich man.

  Somehow it did not occur to the three of us to leave. There was a staggering load of illness to handle, and we did our best, day after day. Henry and Lewis swabbed throats, lanced boils, listened to chests, sewed up lacerations, thumped pregnant stomachs, handed out aspirin and vitamins and what little penicillin they had left. I held babies for shots and wrote down appointments, and learned to give injections. The three nurses watched it all impassively.

  In the evenings, so tired that it was hardly possible to stumble up the hill, we retired to the cantina. It was a rough, smoky place, with a kind of savagery not far under the surface, but the patrons soon became used to us, or too drunk to bristle like roosters at the usurping gringos, and the food was not bad. If it ran heavily to chicken and what I thought might be goat, but did not ask, it soon ceased to matter. After the first four or five offers for my services, Carmella Diaz’s blistering tongue got the message across that I was not for sale. I don’t know what the patrons thought when I kissed Lewis and Henry on the cheek and went up to bed at the ridiculous hour of nine o’clock, even before the putas came to work.

  “The word is out that you’re some kind of fertility goddess,” Lewis smirked.

  “God forbid,” I said.

  I seldom found it difficult to fall asleep, lying cocooned in my floral sheets. I had long since given up on the television. There was only one fizzing channel, and it was in Spanish. It seemed to be football. No English newspapers or magazines made their way into Ciudad Real.

  “You can send them all your old office magazines,” I said, and they laughed. We laughed a great deal in those two weeks, Lewis and Henry and I. Our time there had a kind of comrades-in-arms feeling to it, as I imagined must have been engendered during the blitz of London. I felt skin close to both of them, as if we were a single unit.

  I was sitting with Carmella in the plastic chairs, toward the end of our stay, thinking that I would miss her very much. She asked me why I had come to Ciudad Real and I told her about Outreach, and what it did.

  “But I don’t think you’re far enough along for anything like that,” I said. “Maybe when the hospital is fully staffed…”

  “So you need someone to find out what people need and then get it for free,” she said, going straight to the heart of the matter.

  “That’s it exactly,” I said.

  “I can do that,” she said dismissively. “Many wealthy men will be coming to our village now that the new road is open. People have heard of my girls. I will remind them that our people need many things they could supply, far more than their wives need to know about their evenings here.”

  It was a measure of my assimilation that I said, “Perfect. I couldn’t have done better myself.”

  On our last night in the village, Lewis gave Carmella fifty American dollars and followed me up the stairs to my room.

  “They’ll be talking about it for years,” he said. “Wondering what kind of woman you are to cost a man fifty dollars a night.”

  We lay in bed, my cheek against his heart, listening to the music drifting up from the cantina, and the thin howls of ersatz lust the three young women employed. They were invariably the same: a piercing “Aye, mi Dios!” followed by a series of yips, as from a small dog.

  “Shall we?” Lewis said, pulling me over him.

  “Yip-yip-yip!” I cried.

  Before dawn of the day we were
to leave, Dr. Mendoza wrung our hands and pronounced himself ready for any kind of medical emergency, and capered away into his hospital. Carmella came to hug us good-bye.

  “I will let you know about this outreach,” she said.

  Henry and Lewis and I walked to the Land Rover with our arms around one another’s shoulders.

  “What was all that about?” Henry said.

  “Blackmail,” I said serenely.

  When we roared out of the square, there was nothing left behind but a cloud of dust and Carmella, faintly visible through it, waving.

  We slept most of the way from Chihuahua to Mexico City, and then to Atlanta. When we came into the Atlanta terminal, everything seemed too bright and too big and too loud, a sensory assault. I felt thickheaded, stupid. It was like coming up from underwater.

  Henry handed the ticket agent our tickets to Charleston, and the man looked at us strangely.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, why?” Henry said.

  “Where have you all been? Charleston’s closed down tight. Hurricane Hugo went through two nights ago and just flattened it. Part of it’s under martial law.”

  It was September 23, 1989, and all our lives had changed.

  4

  LATER, PEOPLE CAME to call Hugo the most destructive hurricane of that century. Despite the fact that Andrew, which ground up and spat out the Miami area a few years later, was technically a more destructive and expensive storm, Low Country people knew in their hearts that Hugo, in an odd way their own hurricane, changed more than lives, it changed a way of life.

  Oh, Charleston and the islands did eventually clean up and rebuild and paint and fix up, so that the casual visitor saw only what historians had always said about us: the most beautiful historic district in the country. The horse-drawn tour wagons rolled again, and the tour buses clotted the narrow downtown streets, and flocks of drifting visitors blocked driveways and streets, led by straw-hatted long-skirted mother hens of approved local guides.

  But to this day, Charlestonians speak of “before Hugo” and “after Hugo.” From the morning of September 22, 1989, vulnerability walked with us on our narrow, beautiful streets as it never had before. Beauty and gentility no longer protected us. No one forgot what Hugo had done. We knew another frivolously named monster could come unbidden to us out of the waters off Cape Verde, where the great Atlantic hurricanes are born. Everywhere, in those first days, people walked with the uneasy need to keep looking over their shoulders.

  That day in Atlanta, at the Delta counter, we all stared at the reservations clerk blankly, as you do at one who has demonstrated some patent insanity. Then we began babbling at him.

  “What’s left?” “How do you get there if you can’t fly?” “Are there many fatalities? Many hurt?” “What’s the worst damage? What is it: wind? water?” He lifted his hands wearily. He had obviously answered this question before.

  “That’s all I know,” he said. “That you can’t fly in there. The rest is hearsay. About the National Guard and the looting and all. There’s a newsstand over there. I’m sure some of the papers will have something about it.”

  We looked at each other out of white, empty-eyed faces. Then Lewis and Henry dashed for the bank of telephones across the concourse and I headed for the newsstand. As I ran, I muttered over and over to myself, a witless mantra, “Let the beach house be all right. Let the beach house be all right.” And then, guiltily, “Let our families and our houses be all right. Please let us get through this.”

  Lewis came back and we sat in the waiting area devouring the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It had little detail and much sensationalism. Devastation. No power perhaps for weeks. Gas leaks, downed live wires, severe flooding from a seventeen-foot storm surge that occurred with the high tides. Everywhere, trees down, windows out, roofs torn off, whole houses demolished. Looting in the downtown business area. Utilities workers from eight states pouring into the city. Food and water situations desperate. President Bush declares disaster area. Boats tossed onto highways and jammed among houses.

  Whole beachfront sections obliterated.

  I began to cry. Lewis put his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head.

  “Wait,” he said. “Wait till we know. Henry got the last free phone. Downtown has stood for three hundred years. We can clean up a few tree limbs and shingles. Just wait and see if Henry can get through.”

  Soon we saw Henry’s tall figure, incongruously still clad in scrub pants and a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt and sandals, loping across the waiting area. People turned to stare at him. One or two drew back from him. My sobs turned to hiccups of insane laughter.

  “He looks like Ichabod Crane,” I choked.

  “Got through,” he said. “Apparently a good bit of south of Broad still has phone service. I think we’re in the same grid as the hospitals, and their phones are up. I called Fairlie first, and then Charlie at the hospital. It could be worse, I guess.”

  We looked at him, breaths held.

  “Bedon’s Alley is pretty much okay. Fairlie didn’t leave, but she said it was the most horrifying night she’d ever spent. Camilla stayed with her while Charlie was at the hospital. Tradd Street has some trees down, but their house kept its roof and the storm surge just missed it. Lila and Simms weren’t quite so lucky. The Battery took a direct hit. But the house stood, even though there was about a foot of water in their downstairs, and they lost their windows. Lewis, I think you’ve got a mess on the Battery. Two live oaks through the roof, and the portico and veranda gone. I don’t know any more than that.”

  “It’s the historical society’s problem now, not mine,” Lewis said wearily. “What do you hear about Bull Street?”

  “Nobody Charlie knows has gotten over that way yet, but the College of Charleston is pretty much okay, and you’re right there. They got the storm surge on the ground floors, but your house is set pretty far up. A few trees down. That’s all I know…”

  “The storm surge…,” I said. I had never thought of that. I had always assumed that the great teeth of a hurricane would be wind.

  “It went clear across the peninsula,” Henry said. “Boats from the city marina are sitting on Lockwood Avenue. Low-lying streets are underwater. When it receded, the mud and debris left behind were unbelievable. I don’t think any of us got that. But Lewis…Charlie thinks that maybe that basement operating suite of yours flooded. Everything along Rutledge did.”

  I looked at Lewis. He looked off into the middle distance and then sighed.

  “There go my insurance rates,” he said. “Well, that’s what it’s for, I guess. What about Edisto? And Wadmalaw?”

  “I don’t know. Charlie said he’s heard that the people over on the river side were safe, but the beach got blasted. You and Simms might be okay.”

  Finally, because no one else would say it, I did.

  “What about the beach house?”

  Henry looked down.

  “I don’t know. Nobody does. The Ben Sawyer bridge is completely out and the National Guard is not letting anybody onto the islands. But Charlie said there were some aerial photos in the Post and Courier, and it looked…like there had never been houses there. Just gone. Bare beach, with the dunes flattened out. But he said he heard that there were a few houses that were completely untouched. There must have been some mini-tornadoes, to flatten one house and not the one next to it. People are getting over to the Isle of Palms on a ferry, but Sullivan’s Island isn’t letting anybody on yet.”

  He paused, and then said, “Fairlie said that Leroy came walking up to the house the next morning in tears, and said that the police made him leave our place at the last minute, but that he hadn’t been able to find Gladys, and they wouldn’t let him look. That’s not so good. The place lies low.”

  “Oh, Henry,” I said, the tears flooding back. Beautiful, foolish, loving Gladys. The best dove dog in the Low Country.

  Lewis said, “I’m sorry, Henry. She could be fine, t
hough.”

  “Sure she could,” Henry said, and turned away from us. “If the bastards would just let us go over there and check. I’m going when we get back. What are they going to do? Shoot me?”

  “I’ll go with you,” Lewis said, in a roughened voice.

  We went out of the waiting room then, and went down to rent a car and go home to Charleston.

  We said little on the five-hour drive. There seemed to be nothing to say. The vivid, surreal past two weeks had no place where we were headed. And the place we were headed had no reality. What you are unable to imagine you cannot easily speak of.

  It is warm, even hot, in the Southeast in September. Outside, no color had tinged the leaves; they seemed dusty and used looking. Truck traffic was steady and maddening. Inside the rental car, the air-conditioning labored mightily, washing us in stale, frigid air. I felt desperate for sleep, but could not rest.

  Henry drove the whole way. When Lewis or I tried to relieve him, he said, “I need something to concentrate on.” So did we all, but we sensed that Henry needed it most. Gladys was a piece of his heart.

  When we got within fifty miles of the Low Country, we began to see Hugo’s stigmata. At first, it was simply fallen branches and the litter of leaves, and water standing in roadside ditches. Then the first fallen trees, pines with shallow roots, mostly. On the flat plain that bordered the coast, whole forests were down, leveled as if by a giant scythe. Fifteen miles out of Charleston we began to see collapsed houses, caved-in roofs, blasted windows. Wet furniture stood in yards. Many houses were open to the sky. Everywhere, trees were down across the secondary roads, though the interstate had been cleared. We saw no evidence of people. There were few cars; the ones we saw were mostly mangled.

  We had come down Interstate 26. Long before it curved into East Bay, we could see that the devastation was past our imagining. When we finally made the turn toward East Bay, at seven o’clock in the evening, it was to see phalanxes of National Guardsmen stopping motorists, streets littered with branches and debris, power lines swinging crazily from downed poles, silent storefronts with their windows boarded, if they had windows at all. Many were roofless. The harbor warehouse facilities on our left were empty. Everything was silent.