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Doc Oaxaca by William K. Eley 1 [email protected] © 2019 Registered US Copyright Office Library of Congress 1-8089850731 All rights reserved 2 To Carroll Behrhorst, 1923 – 1990 Helen Caldicott, 1938 - present Obie Minter, 1946 - 1978 George Guess, 1947 - present and Jude, Saul, PJ, Alan, Peter, Lucretia, Patty, Susie, Tommy, Meg, Carol, Carlton, Nancy, Henrietta, Patch and the many other friends and denizens of the Rockpile, Wherever you may be And to many more who shared those fabulous times on the gringo trail "Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale… Doctors are the natural advocates of the poor, and social problems are … their jurisdiction." -- Karl Virchow, 1880 3 Invocation So. This is the end. Let it go, you tell yourself. Accept this moment, this alert painless paralysis. Watch that feather cloud of black razors, hovering, grim, seductive. And think: at least it’s me, and not John. At least fate isn’t fool enough to lose the doctor just to save the writer. You’ve heard of John? Maybe you only know the legend of Doc Oaxaca. And maybe it is crazy to write about him, and to conjure up that grinning ghost from our misdiagnosed era. Cowards love silence. God damn them anyway. Draw the brave and hollow circle. Lean forward and light the fire. Listen to that wind, as it blows sheets of stinging rain through this soul, and go back, again, to that moment. 4 Part I San Jose Chapter 1 San Jose, Sangre de Christo mountains, Mexico Sometime in the late 20th century Thunder startled me at dawn, and the smell of coffee, bubbling on the camp stove, banished a lingering dream of home in Virginia. John was already up, and his wistful smile greeted me, shivering, in the morning air. He was 5 smoothing out a map on a picnic table, squinting in the soft lantern light, thin fingers tracing our path from a college town, through the chaos of northern Mexico, and south, to the province of Oaxaca. On the map, at least, it looked simple enough to drive from Oaxaca to that lush Pacific beach on the far side of the Sangre de Christo mountains. We heard there were gringas and mota and good times. But maps lie. Looking west, across the shimmering desert of central Mexico, we wondered if we could cross those massive citadels of purple rock, wreathed in gray clouds and spotlighted from the inside by gigantic bolts of lightning. Should we wait out the storm? Might it blow over? The thunder echoing across the desert floor begged the questions. We gulped our coffee and shrugged. Something called us, drawing us, up into the storm, as if there were no choice. The red camper van smelled like scorched tin and diesel as it whined up the eight thousand rising feet of angry gravel, pushing us into the wool-thick clouds. A fierce mountain wind sent the van across the oncoming lane and then pulling it back. I wrestled the steering wheel like a rodeo clown on a bull spinner. The first dozen miles took us through pine forests twisting in the hard wind. Then our ears popped as we rose up past the tree line. We looked out between the clouds, over the successive waves of purple-grey granite mountains, frozen like some giant’s rocky purple ocean. We stared down, past the empty spaces where guard rails might have been, into hellishly remote valley floors, and the danger wracked our kidneys with constant jolts of adrenaline. The van’s trouble light flickered like a drunken firefly. Probably the alternator. “We don’t have enough to worry about?” John laughed. The fierce wind blew in gusts now, and the rain came and went in torrential sheets, the battalions of gray clouds separated by a few officers of the fog watch. Now we could see ahead on the high plateau. With less strain on the engine, even the trouble light dimmed out. We drove up slowly to a Mexican Army checkpoint perched atop the continental divide. Its yellow and black striped wooden barricade was down, and the soldiers, with darkly veiled pinpoint eyes, grunted and gestured with their rifles, telling us to get out. In the guardhouse, a grizzled sergeant glanced blankly at our passports while his soldiers pawed around in the back of the van. Nobody said much. With the wind so loud and the storm so fierce, ordinary human affairs seemed small in comparison. Finally the soldiers raised the barrier, shrugged us through the checkpoint, then scurried back to 6 the guardhouse, bent over in the wind, green ponchos flapping around their muddy leather boots. As we drove through, the storm rushed us in gray curtains that opened and closed on glimpses of green craggy mountains still rising high above us – a kind of National Geographic peep show. We were laughing about that when the moment came. The Moment On the twisting mountain road from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido, there’s a blind curve in a place where torrential rains regularly tear out long strips of road bed. We found that place at the worst moment. So, suddenly, instead of a roadbed, there was a gaping hole over a precipitous drop. We were late to recognize the danger. My feet jammed into the brake pedal, the van swerved, the tires screamed. This was it. The moment. But not quite. The front wheels popped over the edge, but the back wheels held, with a foot or so to spare. Then the noise settled down, and suddenly it was quiet. “Don’t move,” John whispered. As if. I stood on the brake pedal, mashing it, crushing it through the floorboard. Cold sweat stung my eyes. John climbed gingerly over the passenger seat, then slid the van’s side door open. He jumped out and found a rock to wedge under a back wheel. The van inched slowly forward, its chassis scraping on the cliff edge, balance shifting towards eternity. I smelled bright blood and burning oil. Then I looked through the windshield, out into the void, to see a black, moaning, twisting feather cloud with razor sharp edges, sliding straight at me. I knew what it was. Anyone would. And the dignity you would have hoped to bring to this moment turns, instead, into panting, creeping, drooling paralysis. Then the dark cloud reached a long finger, sliding it just behind my heart, starting to cut open the 7 door to forever. Somehow I defied the spreading novocaine peace. Somewhere, deep inside, my mind squawked like a chicken with a broken clutch. I held it off because I was hoping to make sense of my moment. So I was glad it was coming at me, and not John, because he was the doctor and I was just the writer, a keeper of journals and a teller of improbable tales. The van kept ticking over the crumbling cliff. And I kept thinking how good fate was being to us, because with his medical education he could save lives, and I was just another j-school grad with a banged up typewriter and a random camera, and maybe he could heal me if I got hurt but that was a favor I could not possibly return even if he were to be wounded in some literary way I could not possibly imagine and I just wondered what on earth a writer could do about healing anyway, and, and … The dark cloud drew closer, coiling, ready to strike. And then suddenly, just at the moment, a disk of light moved in, shielding me from the dark sun, like an eclipse in negative. And there was John’s voice, shouting past the howling wind: “Billy. It’s going over. Let’s get you out of there -- now.” And there was John’s hand, reaching through the sliding back door in molasses motion, fingers clutching into the fabric of my astonished shirt, pulling us both out through the back door of the falling van, and tumbling out onto the muddy crumbling pavement. And there was the rusty van, teetering, hopelessly caught in its own fate, saying its farewells, and then, with a tearing, metallic complaint, beginning its slow tumble down a jagged slope, bouncing, thumping, then shearing into a stand of thick green hemlocks, its engine still racing, but now choking, and then sighing off into silence. From the cliff edge, we could see the yellow mud settling around the van’s red tinsel sides, trapped now against harsh bark and gray granite. “No way!” barked a voice in the back of my brain. And then a pleasant notion welled up unexpectedly: now I wouldn’t need to repair the damned alternator. I laughed at that. And then I realized that I was among the quick and not the dead. And I laughed at that too. I looked up, the apparition was gone, the slow motion was gone, and John was still there, climbing to his feet, brushing off his knees. 8 “Some adventure, eh?” His smile seemed a little too matter of fact, as if it were coming through the small end of a large telescope. Saving life was an everyday routine for John Conner. Everyone who knew him had a story to tell. People owed him everything. And he would brush it off with that shy smile. Day’s work, don’t you know. ❖ 9 Chapter 2 San Jose, Oaxaca The same day Looking out across eternity, dismayed at death, astonished at life, saved from one fate, slated for another, we were stunned and wide-eyed, like people visited by angels or awakened from lucid dreams.

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