Docoaxaca.2020.07

Doc Oaxaca

William K. Eley

1-8089850731

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

“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.

❖

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.

John was in motion before me. He waved down the first car, and then several more stopped, and men were getting out and asking what happened. A flatbed truck stopped on the other side, and the mestizos clinging to wooden rails in the back all jumped out and stared at the mudslide that had cut through a hundred feet of road only minutes before.

Below us, the dear old camper van was just a red tin box of broken glass and punctured naugahyde, perched in a set of hemlock trees like a wounded red bird that had fallen from another world.

Shaking off the nightmare, we starting thinking about other people on the road, and put up warnings and roadblocks. Once the traffic stopped, we decided to recover some of our belongings, and skittered down the muddy slope like scarecrows doing semaphore. Gingerly, we reached into the teetering van to retrieve passports, John’s “black bag” full of medicine, and my camera and typewriter, and our backpacks. And a bottle of fine Jamaican rum.

“That’s all we need,” I said, loading up for the climb back up to the road.

“We’re lucky,” John yelled across the blasting wind.

“How d’ya figure?” I shouted back.

“Van could have blown up, or maybe it could have gone down further.”

I hadn’t realized it, but I could see he was right. The short stand of hemlock trees was the only thing between the crumpled red van and another 500-foot drop.

We scrambled back up to the road, and now the line of trucks and cars was growing. A posse of wise-eyed campesinos surveyed the wreckage, shaking their heads and clicking their tongues. They noticed the bottle of rum, and we noticed that they were shivering in the cold. We passed it to them.

There were children, too, from some nearby huts. One of the boys offered to guard the car. “One dollar a day,” he said, probably thinking we’d haggle over the price.

We didn’t.

We shouldered our packs, laughing bravely in the brisk air.

“You suppose that army barracks has a winch?” I asked, shaking, the shock setting in now.

“Take more than that,” he said casually, adjusting his pack's straps. “Anyway, I suppose we better stop in to the military and report it. That checkpoint was only a few miles back.”

“I can see it now: ‘Hello. We’d like to report a very close thing.” I mugged the words but found myself shivering, then shaking uncontrollably. John’s hand on my shoulder seemed to draw the fear away.

I tried to laugh then, but it sounded hollow and heathen and desperate. And I remembered that laugh. I’d heard it before, back on the city beat. It was the kind of laugh that you’d hear coming from the cops and coroners and congressmen and news writers who wrestled with fate every working day.

Good men but see it

For a while, we were wrapped in silence as we crunched down the gravel road back to San Jose.

"There was something," I said, after a long moment. I was still trying to understand. "A black thing… and … it wanted me."

"I felt it," he said.

"And I saw it," I said, shivering again. "Never seen anything like that before. Ever."

"Did you see the other thing? It was … rather bright.”

“Bright? My God yes. Blinding. Like the sun covering a black hole. What was it?”

"I don’t know. Something you don’t see too often. Let’s call it Glenda, the good witch. It did give me that one extra moment to reach you."

“John,” I shivered. “It was all real. We were looking across eternity. Those were living supernatural beings… It was all real … wasn’t it?”

John shrugged, like a tired tightrope walker who’s been asked if he ever looks down.

“Good men but see death,” he quoted. “The wicked taste it.”

“Shakespeare?” I asked.

“Ben Johnson.”

Think of the bright thing, I told myself. Forget the other thing. Don’t look down.

On that long walk into San Jose, I realized that anyone can sense Death. But if you’re a doctor, you have to live with it, like an un-showered roommate in a boarding house. You avoid eye contact when you pass Death in the hall. You even wish Death would maybe run the fan once in a while after stinking up the bathroom.

But avoiding the hard gaze doesn’t mean not sensing it. Just as a blind man can feel the warmth of sunlight, an experienced doctor can feel the seductive paralysis that comes to a patient just before Death arrives.

So when you think about another person’s death, you will wonder how it seemed. Steering into the skid, feeling the bullet, watching the curtain descend – what do they think?

But if you ever see Death for yourself, you will know that it’s an actual living thing, and that it comes sliding through its own cave-dark cloud, spreading its own grim anesthetic, freezing the fated, and bringing you, passively, into the numb and humbled fold.

Or not -- if you have a friend like John.

Sunset in San Jose

The quiet road, gravel crunching underfoot, led us back into San Jose. Although we had driven that way only an hour before, we hadn’t really seen the village. Now, for the first time, we were able to see it as we approached on foot.

The colors out of day were returning after the storm, and the corrugated tin roofs reflected the pale orange Pacific sunset that still seeped over the western wall of purple-black mountains.

Below the orange tile roofs, behind the bone white walls, the yellow lanterns began to glow in a dozen windows. In the dim light, we could see the outline of a barefoot man walking slowly down one of the town’s paths. He seemed surefooted despite the dark. But of course, I realized, he must know the village by heart. They all did.

Around the next bend in the road, the Army barracks had absorbed none of the charm of the village. It was a simple, two story white wooden building with olive drab trim. A scar-faced

sergeant, rude and unsympathetic, said we could talk about the accident with the colonel in the morning.

We didn’t mind his rudeness. We thanked him. We were happy to be alive, and everything amazed us.

Back in San Jose, a stooped, sad-faced storekeeper heard our story and nodded with sympathy, stroking his chin, as if this kind of thing happened all the time.

“I have a cousin with a cottage near the army barracks,” he said. “It has a thatched roof, and a dirt floor, but it’s very clean.”

It seemed like a bargain at $10 a night.

We asked the storekeeper if there were any other Americans here in San Jose.

“No way,” the storekeeper insisted. “No gringos for a hundred miles. Maybe more.”

Then John remembered something. He knew someone else from San Jose, but couldn’t remember his last name. Julio somebody.

“No way,” the storekeeper said again. “No Julios here.”

And no matter. It was late. We were exhausted. So the storekeeper walked us to a small house near the main road.

“The morning is wiser than the evening,” he said, with a kind of twinkle in his eye. We had no idea what he meant.

❖

Chapter 3

San Jose

The next morning

A braying, barking, bleating, crowing symphony of dogs and donkeys and goats and roosters greets dawn in the Sangre de Christo mountains. Then the second symphonic movement follows, with children grumbling, and women singing, and men laughing together in the streets. Everywhere is the cloying scent of cilantro and green firewood curling through the crisp mountain air.

And you realize this is not the way you usually wake up.

You’re so accustomed to explosions in steel engine tubes, and the droning of polystyrene tires on asphalt highways, and the screaming of rolls royce turbines in the flyways overhead; and the constantly hum of fans and vents and refrigerator motors and the thousands of other noises yanking out a counter-melody to the rhythm of your day. You’re even used to the odor of high-octane petroleum that hangs on your hair and in your clothing.

And you wonder how did all the gimcracks of the industrial revolution overtake these simple mornings?

So you are grateful to wake up just as they did in Benares or Jerusalem or Rome or Beijing a thousand years ago.

And you remember what it is to be alive, unconcerned about the next peril.

Gringos next door

Somewhere close, we heard a sharp axe thump cleanly through a block of wood.

John yawned out of bed and stumbled to the door, his thin frame and sandy beard silhouetted in the dawn.

He looked intently at the yard next door. A stocky man with wiry red hair and a wild mustache was

deftly splitting a brittle pine log. The man’s pale thin face gaped up at John, then took on an angry amazement.

“Who are you?” he demanded in English.

"Hey, this is cool," John smiled. "We heard there weren't any other gringos in town."

The stranger didn’t smile back. "We're not exactly on the tourist circuit," he said in a slow, suspicious Texas drawl.

I jumped out of bed, shrugged into my sweater, then emerged from our hut. Next door, a second, bearded gringo, much larger than the first, with a gnarled face and a flannel shirt sauntered out of the other cottage, leaving the door open.

“Hey, gringos … How ya doing, guys?” I said trying to be neighborly, and not too … curious. But on the other side of the door I could clearly see several hundred red waxed paper bricks stacked against the far wall of their cottage. Marijuana? hashish ? opium ? God knows. Oh Jesus.

The gringos looked at each other. "Mornin’ Austin," said the bearded one to his pal. "You know these folks?"

Austin’s face twisted in anguish. “Who are you? What are you doing here?" he demanded, striding over to the fence, axe still in his hand. As his stride lengthened, his eyes narrowed and took on a hollow, dark look.

“Why don’t you all come over here and sit down,” Austin said. “Gene,” he said to the gnarly-faced man, “you go take a look and see who else is in that cabin.”

“It’s just us,” I said. “Nobody to be alarmed about.”

“What are you doing here?” Austin asked.

“The storekeeper rented us the house for the night,” John explained. “We were on our way to Puerto Escondido. Road washed out. Van went over. We got out just in time.”

"Man, I don’t believe this shit," Austin said, lighting a Camel cigarette and dragging deeply.

The gringos stood huddled against the outside of their cottage. They whispered rapidly, their tone frantic with worry, all but a few words snatched in the wind. “… must know … so close … Mexican army checkpoint."

“Oh, man, we have a problem,” Austin said, glancing from the red bricks to the Army checkpoint and then back to us. He looked over at Gene and sliced his finger across his neck. Once again, I thought I felt the black-razor Presence, but then John glanced sideways at me with that piercing,

bemused intelligence. That woke me up. What could he possibly be smiling at?

Who’s a doctor?

John stood up and interrupted the gringo smugglers.

“Hang on a second,” he insisted. Everything depended on a single impression, he was thinking. If it didn’t take, we wouldn’t stand much of a chance.

“There's a problem all right – but it's not what you think," he said in his deep, authoritative voice. “You see," he said letting a long pause hang in the air, "we are doctors.” “So?” They stared back with hollow black eyes.

“Well, for one thing, it is the worst possible luck if anything were to, uh, happen to a doctor. Worse than breaking mirrors or anything else. That’s because doctors always help the poor. Whenever a doctor dies, thousands of other people die needlessly. Maybe …” another dramatic pause, voice pitching even lower now… “maybe somebody you love… Maybe… even… you.”

Austin’s brow furrowed. “I don't believe in luck. What if anyone found out about our, uh, operation," he asked, glancing back at the red bricks.

“Also, did you know, we have an oath of secrecy. Like priests.”

"What are you talking about?" asked Austin suspiciously. But Gene's wrinkled forehead showed he was at least beginning to wonder.

John took a deep breath. First the diversion, then the money shot. He took a deep breath and pitched his voice to its deepest, calmest level.

"It’s part of the Hippocratic Oath," John said.

"What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment, or even outside of the treatment, in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about."

After a long silence, Gene asked: “Doctors? Really?" He glanced at Austin, who frowned back at him. "Well it is the hypocritical oath," he said.

“Wait a minute,” Austin said. “How do we know you guys are doctors?”

John relaxed slightly. Austin had bought the premise. The Marcus Welby magic medicine sideshow was back in town. Just one thin dime, gonna getcha heeeeyullin I said heeeeyullin…

But this was life and death, and John was the only one laughing.

“Good question,” he said. “How do you know we're doctors? Well, you can ask me anything you want -- the number of bones in the skull or how to reduce a fractured humorous, or maybe the etiologies of malabsorption.”

“Why do you say reduce?”

“It just means to restore broken bones to their normal alignment,” he said.

“What about him?” he asked, pointing me out with a bony finger.

As luck would have it, I’d been reading a book by a contentious surgeon named Frank Nolan, and over the years I’d worked at the medical school doing media, helping with slide shows and shooting film of operations. So I knew the talk. I had even passed myself off as a medical student with more than one nurse. I understood the relaxed but formal way they talked about their work.

“Well, you could ask me about bowel resection or gall bladder removal.”

“Billy here is a surgeon,” John said smiling, “although the ladies say he’s just a smooth operator.”

Austin snorted, as if to signal that simple stories and cute jokes wouldn’t trick him.

“Tell me about your last operation.”

I spread my palms up and cleared my throat to hide a serious case of nerves. “Simple appendicitis, 12 year old boy, typical symptoms -- High fever, halitosis, weak pulse, vomiting, rebound pain. After anesthesia I made a three-inch lateral incision at the McBurney point …” Hey, I remembered the McBurney point. John’s eyes flashed quick approval. A little technical jargon couldn't hurt.

“What’s that?” Austin asked.

“It’s a point two thirds of the way between the navel and the rise of the upper hip bone.” I gestured to my abdomen.

“Oh, where the appendix is,” Austin said. “Why didn’t you say so? And what’s a lateral incision?” As he talked, his black eyes gained a little luster, like dawn on a remote and rocky atoll in the middle of a lonely ocean.

“Just means cutting across. So anyway, you go in through the muscle, being careful to cut cleanly across the fibers and avoid the major arteries, tying off the bleeders …”

“But there is some controversy,” John interrupted academically, “about the benefits of pulling muscle groups aside instead of cutting across them …”

“Yes, but in some patients that weakens the abdomen and leads to hernias,” I responded with feigned exasperation.

John was quietly laughing at me, remembering this same argument we had witnessed at one of his hospital’s “morbidity and mortality” review meetings only a few months ago.

“You had a younger patient, and surely the faster recovery time …” We were just beginning to enjoy ourselves when we were brought sharply back to essence of our peril.

“Whoa, whoa, hang on a second,” Austin cut him off, waving his hand in the air like a rattlesnake. “Are you telling me that you are doctors, and you don’t even agree on how to operate? That don’t sound right.”

John winced. We had been too clever by half. Austin simply couldn’t believe that real doctors would argue with each other. Like most people, he thought medicine was exact, like arithmetic, rather than political and theoretical, like any other science or high art.

Bottom line for Austin: if John and I argued, we couldn’t be real doctors.

We had taken him into the light too quickly. Now his eyes went dark, like a curtain coming down for a scene change. In the silence, Gene was crossing himself.

Austin pulled out a large bowie knife and balanced it across his fingers, musing, envisioning our deaths. But Gene was still curious.

“How do we know that you’re doctors?” Gene's gnarly face screwed up and rose into the morning light, stretching for the thought like a brook trout rising for a bright green mayfly.

It must have been something more than destiny, something that would take a full scale bildungsroman, as the Germans call their coming-of-age novels, to really explain who he was and how he got here. And it would take another one, a kunstlerroman, which is what the Germans call their artist’s novels, to explain my own arc of character.

Maybe someday. Right now we just don’t have the luxury.

John and I are about to be gutted like two trouts on a plank in the highlands of Oaxaca.

So we have to ask:

What is a doctor? Where do doctors come from?

And who was Doc Oaxaca?

❖

Part II Iatrogenesis

Chapter 4

The rituals of the keg — College Station, Virginia

Five years ago

I met John Connor the way most guys meet in college — across a beer keg, talking about football and women.

He looked familiar. Maybe I’d seen him around the medical school, where I worked part time shooting film to help pay my way through journalism school. Or maybe he just looked like someone who ought to be a friend.

He said he was from Mumford county, and right away some guy asked if he knew the famed Connor clan, those notorious moonshine savages who have been on the other side of English law for five or six centuries. Yup, he said. That’s my family. We moved the fight from the peatreek plantations of the Highlands to the backwoods of Virginia. But it was the same fight, still and all.

And yes, he was in medical school.

“Why?” I asked, laughing. It seemed like an odd question. Who wouldn’t want to be in medical school? Grueling ordeal, true, but a life of luxury thereafter. Or maybe it was the prestige and power, the God-like ability to summon the forces of healing. These are the typical shallow reflections on the life in medicine.

But that’s not quite what I was thinking. I’d been around the medical school long enough to get over my high regard for medicine. Even before meeting John, I was beginning to see a grossly dysfunctional system that forced smart people into gilded cages for mercenary purposes. And even though individual doctors and nurses wanted to help people, the system itself was predatory. The only terminal condition was medical bankruptcy.

❖

“Why?” He repeated my question with a smile. “Not the usual reasons. I was born on January sixth, the ‘old’ Christmas day. So, according to Appalachian lore, I was a healer. And so my … family… thought it was proper…” He almost said “clan” instead of family, but that word was had bad connotations down-mountain, among “the English.”

“When did they realize you had to use your gift?” I asked.

The story he started to tell seemed like a cliche from “My Side of the Mountain” or some other maudlin Appalachian tome.

“There was a hawk in the barn one day,” he said. “I could see that a few shotgun pellets had hit his wing. It wasn’t broken but it must have hurt like hell. So I took some tweezers and I pulled a few pieces of buckshot out… So, eventually the hawk flew again, and …”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said gently, reaching for a deeper answer, like the writer I wanted to become some day. “How did the people around you know? If you were from the Connors, you must have had some help getting into medical school.”

He smiled and cocked his head sideways at me, because he realized that I knew as well as he did that even a genius doesn’t just walk into medical school in Virginia. The good old commonwealth is in effect a gigantic plantation. It doesn’t matter if you’re smart or not. You have to have family connections to advance into the professions. The more connections, the less intelligence required, until finally, at the top of the plantation pyramid, the people who actually run the hospitals and universities and government are all dumber than cartons of surgical tape.

“Actually, that’s sort of an interesting story,” he said.

And over the next few years, I was able to piece it together.

❖

Mumford County, Virginia

Twenty five years ago

Stinging, icicle wind. Whirling snow. Enormous flannel arms swooping him into a cedar kitchen. Wood stove glowing like a bright red cherry. Warm is good. But don't touch. Hot is bad. So many confusions.

Summer's much more better. Barefoot in the garden below Misty Mountain, eating crunchy-raw peas green in the pod. Sister drops them into her red apron. Stay off the cabbage, she said. At night mom's whistle-kisses tucked him in. Vvvmmmsmch. If your dream breaks, don’t worry, mom will fix it.

Smell of horse sweat in the hot barn; the feel of sun on his burning face; the watery plop of a

plastic bobber fishing in the pond on Sunday.

Moments of memory glowing brightly and then fading, like constellations of fireflies in a twilight hayfield.

I love you all the way to sun and back, he told his mom. She scrawled it on a scrap of paper and hung it on the ice box.

Watching the stars come out, listening to the birds going quiet, he realized something important: At night, the birds become stars in the sky.

At bedtime dad told him stories about the many lives of dragons, and wild Indian boys, and the people who lived in cities floating on the oceans of the future. Where did he get that imagination? Dad would smile. People who spend their afternoons plowing fields and mending fences don’t always do it with empty minds, he said.

Healing and haunts

By the time he was eight, John began thinking about healing. He did heal a hawk with a broken wing. It took a few weeks, but eventually they’d see him in the mornings, perching high on the barn rafters, cocking his head, watching the farmyard below, catching his own mice now with a crooked swoop.

Once the hawk was flying, it stayed close, flying high behind him as he walked down the long gravel road and across a field to the school.

His sister Kate thought it was funny. “He loves you,” she teased. “Why don’t you marry him?”

In the coming months and years, the hawk kept track of John day and night. On the weekends, when he roamed in the woods, the hawk would guard, floating overhead like a feathered angel. Mom and dad could always tell where John was. She told the neighbors: it was utterly charming.

The hawk also watched as other wounded animals come to John. Shot-up dogs, lame deer, broken-winged wrens, even a lost bear cub. John’s skilled hands and soothing talk would calm them. Something inside him told him what to do. Voices without words.

“Maybe he had a haunt,” said a neighbor. “An wasn’t it about here that ol’ Doc Surber had his stroke and fell off his horse one night not so long ago?”

“No way,” said another neighbor, leaning across a split rail fence. “He has the Touch; he’s a healer. Not a good for nothing old drunk like Doc Surber.”

Mom and dad didn’t mind the talk too much. They let him have his way, long as he did chores and school work.

Deep woods

When he could slip away, he’d lope long hours through deep woods, deftly dodging branches at a dead run, canteen and deer knife flapping on his hip belt, and overhead, his hawk, always.

From dad he learned the fox walk -- running quietly, rolling on edges of your feet, jumping twigs. An uncle taught him the wolf ears, holding his hands up beside his head, listening to the slightest noises. You could know everything about a forest, and stay out of danger, just listening. But the hawk taught him stillness in motion.

“There,” whispered uncle Bob, one hot August day as they stopped in a pine thicket. "Hear that?"

"Hear what? It’s gone quiet.”

"Tha's what I mean. Summat’s comin’.”

And in a few moments, they heard the snapping of tiny twigs as an enormous, graceful elk passed near them. He stopped, sniffed the air, sensed them, and then bolted away into the brush.

"His kind don' hear too well, but they have a sense of smell that can see back in time," Bob said. "Imagine walking a trail and seeing shadows of everything that came by in the past three hours. That's their world."

Like his Dad and uncle Bob and their friends, the Connors found freedom in the wooded world. Sometimes they carried guns and called it hunting. Sometimes they ran for hours in total silence. To see a dozen of them running after an exhausted, panting deer -- swooping low as they ran across a clearing, fading like ghosts into the gray Virginia oaks -- you could understand why the English feared them, why the Yankees held them in awe, and why the Germans found them so hard to fight.

John smelled the wood smoke in their flannel, watched them pass mason jars, heard them howling wild.

The Highlanders of the Blue Ridge were nothing less than a force of nature.

The Connors of Mumford

He was a Connor, dad told him, from the clans of Scots and Irish who survived a relentless English slaughter and moved to America in the 1740s. When they arrived, the English already had the good farmland in New England, and the Germans already had the mid Atlantic and Ohio Valley. So the Scots and Irish kept moving south and west into the mountains of Virginia, Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. And there they dug in, high in the remote mountains, safe from the feudal traditions of the English.

A pint of moonshine was the best currency. Besides, it was much easier to carry down the mountain

than two bushels of corn. It was welcome in payment for anything a man might need. It wasn’t hard to make, either, John's father explained. Uncle Bob made it from corn they grew right here on Misty Mountain.

“First you take some corn or barley, get it wet, and let it sprout. That's called malting. There's something in malt that breaks down the starch in corn and turns it into sugar.”

“Why not just buy the sugar?” John asked his dad.

“You buy 500 pounds of sugar from the store, and you might as well put up a sign for the revenuers.”

“Who are they?”

“The jackasses from the government who try to collect whiskey taxes.”

“Why do they do that?”

“Oh, money, I guess,” his dad said. “But it ain’t fair. We don't tax their courts. Why should they tax our stills?”

“So how do you make it?”

“You cook some cracked corn, mix in the malt, let it get nice and sugary. Then you cool it and add yeast. We have our own special yeast we keep alive in bread dough in the kitchen. Yeast that came over from the hills of Inverness, my granddad once said. Yeast that survived the Glencoe massacre. Anyway, you add the yeast and it makes beer. Takes a week or so. Then you take the beer and heat the pot. You have a coil of copper tubing coming off the top of the pot, and the steam goes out. We call the tubing the ‘worm.’ Well, then the whiskey boils off from the beer and its in the steam. Once it goes through a tub of water, and cools off, you get white lightning.”

“Is it dangerous?” he asked.

“What’s dangerous is when you come across a working still in the woods,” dad told him. “It’s likely to seem deserted. But there’s always somebody, probably a man with a rifle, watching you very closely.”

"What do you do?" John asked.

"Three things," he said, looking hard at him. "Now remember this, ‘cause your life could depend on it.”

"One," he held a finger up, almost like testing the wind. “Don’t look around." He held up two fingers. "Two, you walk over to the mash pot and stir it, or if the fire is low, throw on another stick of hickory."

"And three?"

"Get the hell out of there quick," his dad laughed.

“Here. Have a taste.” He handed John the mason jar.

It felt smooth as an ermine pelt, thick as glycerin, clear as the air after a thunderstorm, pure as the silver water from a fern covered spring. And strong? Strong enough to stop your heart and start it again in a flashing moment. Strong enough to make a weak man fight and a weak nation go to war. Which is pretty much what happened in “the damned Civil War,” his father said.

“Your great-great grandfather, John Conner, left his pregnant young wife and joined one of the mountain regiments in the spring of 1862 after planting the crops. He wrote letters home describing some of the glories and miseries of camp life. They always had strong drink before battles, but he never wrote about the battles he was in -- Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Petersburg. He made it all the way to Appomattox. After they folded up the flags, he limped back home, through the Bedford pass and up into the Blue Ridge. His young hair was gray now, and his eyes were set deep, and one leg had turned to wood. But he was lucky.”

Hard life, Blue Ridge

Sometimes on a rainy day, John would gaze at pictures in the family album. The old confederate married Liz Campbell and kept farming until he died thirty years after the war. His son Frederick, named for a friend he lost on the battlefield, kept the farm up as best he could. At one time he’d tried milling and brokering grain, but he kept coming back to farming.

In the 1890s, life was hard in the Blue Ridge. Sometimes, when there was nothing in the pantry, they would tell the children to go hunt some dinner. Squirrels were tasty, or maybe they would find fish or a big salamander down in the creek. And if not, hunger would keep them awake for an extra hour or two as they tried to fall asleep.

Frederick’s wife Sarah was a mystery. When John asked why she died so young, mom would roll her eyes. Later, one of his aunts gave him the story. “She must have been very depressed,” aunt Mattie said. “She realized she was pregnant with her fourth child and jumped down the well.” John didn’t understand at first. “She killed herself.”

“But why?” John asked.

Matilda shook her head. “She just couldn’t take it.”

He suspected that wasn't the whole story.

One day he took lunch out to his dad as he harrowed one of the bottom fields. Innocently he asked about Sarah. His eyebrows arched and his face took on that bemused look, as if to say, OK, but

you're not going to like it.

“She was pregnant all right, but it might not have been her husband's child. That's what we think, anyway. He might have been away for a while. So, the moral is, sometimes -- life sucks."

John’s Dad

He should know, John thought. Dad was in his late 20s when the war came. He was a lieutenant, but really an old man with his platoon of boys. They went through Sicily. Monte Casino. Anzio. The hard Italian winter campaign of 1943, just as the Germans realized they were going to be beaten.

Suddenly he understood, and John looked at his father as if it was the first time.

“Those Germans thought they were better than you, didn’t they?”

“Everybody thinks that. English too. They can’t stand being beaten by men who aren't as good, or strong, or pure as they think they are. How could they be beaten by men who hadn't practiced iron discipline all their lives? By men who weren't trying to become perfect? By men who were merely free, whose freedom -- or so they thought -- had kept them weak.”

John tried to parse that irony. “Maybe freedom could make you weak, but it sure can make you strong if you want. Didn’t they see that?”

"For a twelve-year-old you sure think a lot," his dad said with a grin, reaching over and towseling his hair. "Some day I'll tell you the stories." Then he got back on the tractor and drove slowly into the field. He looked back once, and smiled wistfully. It was the first time he really saw his father for who he was, and he never forgot the moment.

Soon the more questions John asked, the more mysterious his family became. On the face of it, their lives seemed perfectly conventional, each day or week or season with its pre-ordained and age- old progressions. But like a clock whose face hides intricate gearing, the moments and movements of the Conner clan were powered by a mainspring that John could feel but did not yet understand.

❖

Chapter 5

Father Stephen — Mumford County, Virginia

Fifteen years ago

Gawd. Starch for Sunday. The stiff collar. The hot coat. The cardboard shoes. Especially horrible in mid-summer, when a shirt was just for dinner and the calluses on his soles grew so thick that he could run down gravel roads barefoot.

That was when church was torture.

Occasionally there were compensations. As the adults gathered on the lawn or in the meeting rooms, sometimes he and the other boys would slip away for some “chapel-racing.” They would lay on their backs on the waxed oak floor, then pull themselves under the pews, racing from the front of the church to the rear and back again.

One day, a red face with a priest’s collar glowered down from the altar rail at the boys’ finish line. John wished he hadn’t come in first. The priest reached down and lifted him by the ear. He took John back to the rooms behind the chapel, and pulled down his pants to spank his naked bottom when one of the altar boys slipped in and coughed in a nervous sort of way.

He remembered this first encounter with Father Stephen later, when he learned about his terrible ordeals and unnatural affections.

On the outside, Father Stephen was lean as a wafer, quick and athletic, with bristling short gray hair and a long, serious face. He was a priest to be reckoned with. Dad half jokingly called him the “holy terror of the town.” His approach to his congregation was to drive out sin, by force if necessary, and by next Tuesday at the latest.

From a kid’s vantage point, that wasn’t so bad. It was refreshing to see the priest scold the adults, like some kind of super-grandfather. Especially the teachers. But like all kids, and most adults, John quickly learned to scurry out of his way.

Father Stephen liked to prospect for sin in unexpected places, like a miner seeking the lead instead of the silver. Sometimes he preached against the glorification of worldliness in the movies, or the coveting of a neighbor’s particularly lovely wife. As the intensity of his sermons would mount, he would stare passionately into the faces of the particular presumed sinners, perhaps someone who had been seen at a movie, or someone who had confessed to breaking a commandment.

Some people came to church just to watch them squirm. In the hard light, John thought, it was all just another low comedy on a high altar. Of course, he believed in God, as any 14 year old might. But

when he really felt that worshipful wonder, it was on a summer afternoon, on a windswept high field watching purple thunderheads rolling across Bent Mountain. That was the Real Church of the New World.

Sometimes, although he didn’t let mom know, the old church wasn’t so bad. He might catch an inspiring phrase in a sermon or a whiff of forgiveness near the choir. Timeless hours would pass in a trance as he watched the light shift in the stained glass windows. His favorite window showed a little girl sitting up in bed, Jesus on the right, a rabbi on the left, and the mother kneeling in prayer. It was one of the famous healings from the book of Matthew. And the central miracle of life, John began to see, was healing. The best miracles of Jesus involved curing the sick or the lame or the blind or raising the dead. Healing was the most important thing one person could do for another. Healers evoked a reverence reserved for priests. Maybe he would be a doctor someday. Folks said he was a natural.

As he mused, staring at the window, the sharp voice of Father Stephen would pull him back from his respectable future into the disreputable present.

Baseball card blizzard

One particularly hot Sunday in July, Father Stephen thundered about baseball. He had developed a passion for the game as a young boy, but then he realized it was keeping him from God. There was even a particular player he nearly worshipped. But that was wrong. He should have been worshipping God. At least he had realized his mistake. Pleasure loving people will never know the joys of heaven, he insisted. God’s way was straight and narrow, and there was no room for frivolous sports.

The good priest’s eyes locked onto John. Maybe he could see into John’s suit jacket where he kept his collection of baseball cards wrapped in a thick green rubber band. John slipped away from the pew and quietly crept up into the balcony. Getting closer to the ceiling fans might cool him off.

As he leaned over the balcony rail, absent-mindedly shuffling his baseball cards, a wasp landed on his hand. He tried to shoo it off, but suddenly a thousand hot needles jabbed through his bones, and the cards leaped up from his hands and tumbled into the whirling blades of the ceiling fans. The fan blades caught the cards and scattered them across the entire church. Parishioners gasped as a storm of genuine Ace Baseball Trading Cards fluttered down from the ceiling like a slow motion cardboard blizzard.

Then suddenly, heads turned back to Father Stephen who walked through the storm of white rectangles twirling and fluttering around his head, his arms, his feet. One of the cards fluttered to the front of the pulpit, and he bent to pick it up from the plush red church carpet. His eyes bulged, and his rounded mouth worked the air like a trout pulled up on a river bank.

Beaming back at Father Stephen, the card showed a smiling face in a baseball uniform with

Dodgers stadium in the background. Santorowski, James, RBI 276, batting avg 377.

“My God,” Father Stephen gasped. “This is the player. This is the one I worshipped.”

Down in the pews, people whispered, pointing up at John now glowing red as a beet, trying to hide behind the rail in the high balcony. Then the heads all turned back again as Father Stephen grabbed at something crushing his chest and collapsed over the pulpit.

John rushed down the balcony stairs and forward to the front of the church, into the charmed circle surrounding Father Stephen. They held back, uncertain of their next move. Without knowing why, John pulled the priest’s head back, cleared his throat, loosened his collar and elevated his feet. His twelve-year-old voice piped orders to adults as if he had been the physician in charge all his life. He pushed and pulled on the priest’s chest and arms to force air in and out. Nobody thought to question him.

“Angels, I see angels,” he wheezed, his words barely intelligible. “They’re coming for me… No, the angels are not coming for me. Oh, God, no, no, not them… Don’t let THEM come for me. NO, not THAT.” He clawed at the air as the men held him down.

Father Stephen’s face was gray and green when they carted him off, but now he was breathing pure oxygen from a bottle. He still clutched the Santorowski card, John noticed.

Masks of separation

John’s mom and older sister Louise were among the ladies of the church who visited Father Stephen at the big hospital down in the valley. She told John that the doctors did not seem to have a lot of hope. They were all surprised when, a few days later, he asked for John.

It was the first time John had ever seen an intensive care unit. The first thing he noticed was how hard it was to find Father Stephen. The patents were all hidden behind gothic masks of oxygen and hospital linen. He saw these as modern twists on the ancient rituals of separation that were just designed to prepare them for the journey to the afterlife. Father Stephen blinked back at him from an acrid-smelling corner surrounded by tubes and beeping machines. He beaconed the boy closer while his mom nodded and stayed back.

As he hesitated, John said: “I’m sorry about the cards.” But the priest waved his hand, as if to say it was nothing. “And I’m sorry about the chapel-racing.” Again, the hand waved. “And since we’re doing confessions, I’m really sorry about the wedding.”

This time the hand stopped. “That was you?” he croaked.

Perfect flaws

“The” wedding. Everyone talked about it for years afterwards. It was an absurdly lavish affair,

put on by Fred Zilcher, a wealthy timber baron, for his daughter. Everything, down to the fifth limousine, had to be just right. The gown, the cake, the bridesmaids dresses. Someone estimated that it cost the equivalent of two millhand wages for a year. And, as a perfect set piece, it was utterly boring – that is, until the very end. As the vows were said and the bride was kissed and the families applauded and the bride began her triumphal march back down the aisle, it was at that moment when the organ music stalled and faded. Apparently the organ pipes were out of air. Someone had turned off the air compressor, Father Stephen thought. Everyone froze. The bride, in mid-march, had no idea what to do next. She stood there trembling like a newborn deer. There was dead silence. One beat. Two beats.

And then the mother of the bride turned to old Fred Zilcher and said, in a comically loud tone: “Damn it Fred, couldn’t you afford to pay the church organist?” Then, as if on cue, the air came back again. The music wheezed and swelled, the bride marched and the people laughed – and talked. And talked. It was the most celebrated wedding for years.

Father Stephen laid back on the bed and eyed John.

“That was you?” he asked.

“An accident. I was fooling around on the stairs. I opened the door to the organ loft and saw a button. I had no idea …”

So all the theories about radical millhands getting their revenge were wrong, Father Stephen thought.

“Do you know my boy,” he choked, “those people were glad it happened.”

John was amazed.

“Oh yes. Not because it ruined the wedding, but exactly because the wedding was too perfect. It showed that these people, no matter how rich, were just as human as anyone else. And it also showed that they could handle it gracefully. With humor.”

“Well I am sorry, and I should have confessed it …”

“Yes. Its been quite a week for confessions. Well, no matter, now. You are forgiven. And I have something important to tell you,” he hacked, grasping tightly to the sides of the bed.

“When I nearly died of my heart attack, I was given a second chance. And I saw, like Jonah, that I had been too proud of my prophesy and unkind to my people.”

His eyes began glazing over, and his skin took on a terrible translucent quality. “It’s true, heaven is real,” he said quietly, his voice calming. “ I saw it clearly when I died. It’s wonderful, far beyond your dreams. If you knew what it was like, you wouldn’t want to live here any more. You might even

want to die. That’s why we’re not allowed to know.”

John watched Father Stephen closely and a creeping, uncanny idea suddenly dawned in his mind. He believes -- but only now. Like Miguel de Unamuno's ironic priest, Father Manuel Bueno, he had utterly lost his faith. All those years of disbelief, all those words he intoned from the altar, dressed in vestments that must have felt wooden, going on only because his congregation needed him more than he needed to quit. He was the flesh and blood sacrifice. But now he knows. There is a heaven. There actually IS. And he knows it. You can see the wilderness of joy in his eyes, realizing that much of his life was not in vain. You can see his soul aching to fly away from that pale tormented body.

And he could also see that, just by observing him, John had smoked out his secret. He smiled wistfully.

“I was not headed for that heaven,” he said. “I have sinned, in ways you cannot imagine, young man.” His eyes opened as if to reveal the dark stains on his soul – stains which he now seemed to have been scrubbed nearly clean, like blood soaked deeply into marble. “When you saved my life in the church, you also saved my soul, because you gave me the time I needed. Now those … those things …. those awful things … won’t get me.”

He began coughing. “I must tell you, before I leave…” he said. John leaned closer to hear him whisper. His mom had drifted out of earshot now, talking with a ward nurse.

“You, John Conner … you will be a great healer, a doctor, but not just any doctor. I have seen it. And I have seen how we must help you…” He coughed again. When he recovered, he whispered very quietly, so only John could hear: “You must go see Marilyn Janney. I’ve already talked with her. She knows what to do.” John recoiled. Marilyn Janney was the town’s madam, a prostitute of wide renown. Everyone knew that.

Father Stephen winked and drew a crumpled baseball card from under the white flapping sheet. He handed it to John and said, in as loud a voice as he could manage: “I’ll be playing baseball in heaven when you are in school next week. Strange, isn’t it? Fun is not …” he wheezed … “Fun is not a sin.”

Behind John, the quiet buzz of voices now assumed a frantic whispered frenzy. He’s gone off his rocker, one muttered. “The poor man,” a woman in pink chiffon said in her most practiced stage whisper.

John looked behind him. A delegation from the church had arrived, a dozen or more men and women. They were hidden behind their gifts of flowers. What they heard was a crazy man, and what worried them was that Father Stephen might breech the rituals of their ceremonial farewell.

But Father Stephen was beyond caring. “The lost souls … are counting on you, John.” And then he turned white and simply stopped breathing. The monitor let off a loud series of alarm bleeps. Three

nurses ran to the bedside, but they stopped, remembering the “do not resuscitate” order. A doctor in a long white coat shook his head. He felt for the pulse, then solemnly pulled the sheet over the mortal remains of Father Stephen.

They buried him, a few days later, with the baseball card that John managed to return to Father Stephen’s pocket.

❖

Chapter 6

Decisions

Ten years ago

❖

The village of Mumford, Virginia, boasts a single stop light at the courthouse corner. Standing guard between the stoplight and the two-story brick courthouse is a marble man on a high pedestal with a flintlock and a blanket roll across his chest.

Some people saw the Confederate statue as a monument to their brave and noble ancestors. Others with a more critical eye would look at it and hope the tilt in the pedestal wouldn’t cost the county any money next year.

John would see it and wonder why those men would choose to fight for the Virginia elite and their splendid Civil Catastrophe. They were Scots-Irish, and the people from the Virginia flatlands were “the English," also known as “the enemy.” But then of course, some went to West Virginia, visible 50 miles across the valley on a clear day. The Scots Irish of those nearby hills had seceded from the insanity of the secession. There was probably a sad exodus of wagons headed northwest when war broke out, a century beforehand.

He always enjoyed his own little exodus from the farm, riding a bicycle five miles into town and back. But today he would call on Mrs. Marilyn Janney, and he was nervous. She had phoned to ask him over for afternoon tea and he had gulped an awkward acceptance, remembering Father Stephen’s last words. He didn't tell mom, fearing the worst, but he told his dad. An ironic, pleasant look crossed his face, but he just nodded and said "OK. Whatever you need to do."

"Father Stephen thought she could help me with college," he had told his dad.

"Be careful," he said. "And don't let your mother know."

John dismounted his bicycle and walked past the broken iron gate up the weedy, rutted driveway. The south side of the rambling red brick three story mansion was covered with ivy and creeper, and two of the five chimneys leaned over at angles that a brick mason might have thought impossible. Down the hill from the mansion, across a lawn that badly needed a trim, he could hear a wide brook burbling cheerfully.

As the county’s only working bordello, the run-down mansion seemed unlikely for Mumford, sort of like the single stop light. Was Mumford too poor to afford more than one red light or one red light district? Apparently.

And sort of like the old Confederate statue, John had to wonder why Marilyn Janney ended up on

that side of the class and culture war. She was from a top-drawer Mumford family that had made millions in the moonshine trade during Prohibition. Her parents died young, when she was just 22, and she had inherited the Janney mansion.

She had always lived life at full throttle, but she ignored the fact that she was driving on an ancient gravel road. Soon her 10-bedroom house had a reputation for wild parties and city ways. It had also become a magnet for women with no visible means of support, as the sheriff had said.

“No, no, no, god damn it,” she had insisted. “They are wayward girls with nowhere else to go. It’s a charity to take them in.”

Everyone in town knew the story – and the controversy. Every time the sheriff staged a raid, someone had called ahead. The sheriff got the prosecutor to call a session of the secret grand jury. But the day before it met, he disappeared. The search took weeks, but after two years he was declared dead. Everyone suspected Marilyn Janney, but then, not long ago, the sheriff had turned up in Las Vegas. Not only was he alive, but he didn’t want to be found. Maybe he had run away from something, people whispered in Mumford.

John pondered the mystery as he walked up the mansion’s creaking steps. Three teenage girls cutting lilies in the flower garden stopped talking and stared stony-eyed at John's sheepish intrusion. “Hello, ladies,” he said, waving from the porch, trying to manage a carefree voice. They shook their heads. “Dweeb,” one of them muttered.

Coming to the screen door, a graceful woman in her early 60s, with a little too much makeup and dozens of gold bracelets, flashed a generous smile at him.

“John Connor, look at you. Why you’re practically grown up now. You must be – seventeen?”

“No’m,” he said, swallowing the words “no madam” in his Sunday best Southern accent. “Almost fifteen.”

He followed her, watching her hips sway under her flowery dress, down a long hallway filled with dark oil paintings, through a doorway with hanging glass beads, and into a pantry kitchen near the back porch where a pot of black tea was steeping on a small table.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said, smiling. They sat as she poured tea. She already knew the essential details. Severely gifted, but dirt poor; not likely to attend college. At least, not in Vah- gin-yah.

“They say you saved Father Stephen’s life when he had his heart attack in church,” she said.

John’s initial shyness began fading.

“I just did what seemed right,” he said, sipping his tea, recalling his feeling of triumph at keeping

Father Stephen alive. “Nobody else seemed to know what to do,” and as his enthusiasm rose, he said: “It was great. You should have been there.”

Ooops. John flushed, remembering that ladies like Mrs. Janney were not welcome in church. But then why would Father Stephen … ?

She read it all on his face. Like a brook trout going for a mayfly, she thought.

“Let me fill you in on a little something,” she said in a confidential tone, leaning closer. “I lived a full life for many years, and I’m not ashamed one bit. It’s the stodgy old matrons who run this town who have so much to answer for.”

“I don’t get it,” he said, trying to hide his suspicions behind his innocence.

“Oh, you will, if you’re going to be a doctor,” she said, shaking her head. “Oh, boy, will you ever.”

“I’m not sure I can be a doctor,” John said. “That takes a lot of money.”

“Father Stephen wanted us to start working on that. Now I want you to start coming to the house a few times a week and doing some chores for me.”

John nodded, sipping the tea, while Mrs. Janney reached behind her and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. “Want some?” she asked, pouring a blurp into her teacup.

“Im only fifteen,” John said.

“Live a little,” she said with a laugh, pouring a shot into his tea cup. “Now, what did you really want to ask me?”

“Seriously?” he asked.

She nodded, but John was quiet, not sure how to ask the question without seeming graceless and inept.

“OK, let’s start with what Father Stephen told you,” she said.

John took a gulp of tea. He coughed as the whiskey burned, and Mrs. Janney grinned.

“He told me he had sinned in ways I couldn’t imagine.”

“Obviously true, because its plain to see that you’ve never thumbed through the great Sears catalog of human transgressions. Anything else?”

“He told me I needed to serve the lost souls. Who are they?”

“Also true, but we’ll get to that soon. Anything else?”

“Apparently he had had time to save his soul because I had saved his life.”

“You did. Those bozos gathered around the pulpit would have just watched him choke to death. You gave him time. But what did he do with it? Any idea?”

“Prayer, confession, forgiveness … what else would there be?”

“Imagine, John, what he had to confess to. And to whom.”

“The bishop, I suppose. I heard he came out to the hospital the day after.”

“Why would the bishop care so much about his confession?”

“Cause he was a priest? I really have no idea.”

Marilyn Janney gazed through the window, out onto the lawn where a few of the girls were now playing croquette. “See the one in the white shirt?” she asked. John nodded. “Tammy. She got pregnant when her grandfather raped her. When her father found out he beat her senseless.

“What?” John blanched.

“You heard me. He didn't beat the grandfather -- the one who raped her. He beat his daughter. You can still see the bruises on her face and it was more than two months ago. So now tell me, John, should this girl have that baby? Or should she get an abortion?”

He sighed. "I guess so. Yes, definitely. Maybe she could go to Canada.”

“They say it might be legal soon in New York. After all, this is 1964. OK, but would you do it here, if you were her doctor? And what would you think if her Baptist minister came and told you he was watching you, and would tell the entire town if you did it? Or if you even suggested it to the girl?”

“I don't know. Maybe I’d talk to a priest.” He paused. “Oh my God.”

“You’re beginning to get the picture,” she said. “You've probably never heard of the Clergy Consultation Service?” He shook his head no. “Of course not. It’s like an underground railroad for people like Tammy. Ministers and priests all over the country refer the girls to a church in New York city. Its called Judson Memorial. The girls come by the hundreds every week. Rape victims. Incest. Bad situations. These are not just surgeries of convenience. These are the fruits of wretched sins visited on the innocent.”

“So helping rape victims find abortions was Father Stephen’s sin? It sounds pretty reasonable to me.”

“No, darling, that’s just the gateway to the world that Father Stephen and I lived in – the world that I still live in. We called it Dante’s door, the entrance to the First Circle of Hell.”

“You’re saying abortion shouldn’t be a sin?”

“The fact that it’s been made a sin is itself a sin," she waved a hand in the air. "If men could get pregnant it would probably be a sacrament.”

"What about the Hippocratic oath? How does it go?"

Mrs. Janney wandered into the living room and found a book on a shelf, and after a moment read this:

"I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and in holiness I will guard my life and my art."

His eyes searched the ceiling, as if for an escape.

“But get this: The oath also says you won't perform surgery." She looked at the book again. "I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from (kidney) stone(s)…"

She snapped the book closed and looked sharply at him.

John Conner remembered that moment for the rest of his life. There seemed to be an ageless silence and a distant smell of camphene and coffee, and magnolias, and mildew, hanging in the lacy table cloths. The ticking grandfather clock magnified the silence. She looked down from what seemed an enormous distance and quietly said one word:

"Decide."

He gulped. “You're saying sin is relative? Situational? You think that's what Father Stephen would have said?”

She shook her head no, then started, her soft voice grinding like bare feet on pea gravel:

“The oath says one thing, the oath says another. The Bible says one thing, the Bible says another. But you — You’re the one who has to decide."

"I need to think. I need to know more about this. I need to understand your world."

“That’s easy enough, I suppose,” she said, sliding down again to a seat at the table, dolloping more whiskey into the tea.

“I live in an upside down world,” Marilyn said through gritted teeth. “It’s an antipode, a place

where people who look righteous are the sinners; a place where the victims are the real saints.”

John looked confused.

“You've just wandered through the looking glass, young doctor, and now you see it for the first time. The people they call sinners – the girls looking for an abortion, the draft dodgers on their way to Canada, the old people and the crazy people who need illegal drugs to control their pain – these are the people whose souls are cauterized by harsh life. Maybe they are walking on stumps, but at least they are clean.”

“But how clean is a rich old man like Zilcher with his toxic factory, spewing out lead and driving people crazy? Hell, even the police chief has a blue line across his gums – classic lead poisoning. And the millworkers, exposed to mercury, mad as hatters.”

"And the church ladies like dragons in their lairs, clutching their jewels – and rearing up with all their phony righteousness. And what does it protect? Lies. Bigotry. Laws that trap young women. Wars that murder young men. Institutions that exploit every possible form of human suffering in every possible way.”

Her jaw stuck out defiantly. “You have to understand. Howling mad demons run this land, John. They pound the Bible when it suits them, and ignore it when it doesn’t."

She poured another shot of bourbon into her tea, taking a sip, and a deep breath, calming herself.

"Father Stephen and I did everything we could to undermine it, and if it meant saving one soul, we were willing to risk losing our lives, or even our own souls, in the process.”

John chewed on that for a moment. “I’ve heard of giving your life,” he said. “But not that.”

"Yes," she said flatly, staring deeply into his eyes. "That."

John was reminded of a novel he’d been reading: "Willie Stark, you know, the hero in All the King's Men, said good can come from bad, but I think the point was ironic, and that Robert Penn Warren really believed it was the other way around. The ‘good’ people push back everything that's not like them. And by gathering up all the money and the power, following their ideas about what’s good, they create a wild area on the edges of their lives where all kinds of bad things tend to happen.”

“That’s an interesting idea. So take it another step. How does it happen? Who causes it? Do you believe in evil?” she asked. “Is there a devil? Can you lose your soul to its wily purposes? Because that’s what they tell you in church. That's what they want you to fear."

John stared out the kitchen window a long time. "Yes, I suppose you can lose your soul," he said. "But I don’t believe there is evil trying with every wrong turn to steal it from you. There is only the

one light in the world. The shadows are just the places it doesn’t reach. The light will always overpower the shadows because only the light has intelligence."

“What about the devil? What about your catechism?" she asked.

“And what about reason?” his voice blew up in a sudden fury, rising in a way he’d never experienced before. “What about conscience? What about leaving the world of superstition behind, in the Middle Ages, where it belongs?”

A very long moment passed while she regarded him with a small and satisfied smile. She seemed to shrink, in fact, to be allowing herself to deflate and to diminish. She made a deferential gesture that was almost a curtsy.

"Then you are one of us, and not part of the world of illusion." She walked over to the window and sighed deeply, looking out at the girls sitting in the garden. The game had stopped. The new girl was sobbing hysterically, and one of the others had an arm over her shoulder, lilies drifting slowly in the fish pond.

“First thing, you have to learn to protect yourself,” she said. “Then you’ll find ways to serve, or, more likely, those ways will seek you out. Your calling will come.“

Confessions

The depth of Marilyn Janney’s audacity astonished John, and details of her mysterious life unraveled over the next few weeks as John came to the Janney mansion for painting or gardening. He would work all afternoon, sweating in the Virginia sun, on carpentry or painting or setting bricks in a walkway. Around five, Mrs. Janney would bring him some tea and they would sit by the fish pond, gazing at the coy peering from behind water lilies.

Father Stephen, it turned out, had been helping Marilyn smuggle girls across the West Virginia border, to a small clinic where a sympathetic doctor named Fred Clawson would perform abortions. The bishop was sympathetic when he first heard about it, but later he became very upset. It was not as if the priest had gotten the women pregnant. In fact, Father Stephen even said that very thing to the bishop, but the bishop knew him too well and saw right through it. Father Stephen was only interested in women when they needed help. He was not, Mrs. Janney said cryptically, interested in women.

“What is that supposed to mean?” John asked. “Was he some kind of queer?”

“Sort of,” she sighed. “Better tell you now. He liked boys. Because Father Stephen was a priest, he was afraid of getting a woman pregnant.

“So he … liked … boys,” he said slowly, remembering the look on the face of the altar boy when Father Stephen was about to spank him.

“And so did his friends. Some of the richest men in town. They knew boys who were very vulnerable. The boys got passed around.”

“But that’s – that’s – monstrous.”

“So, now you can start to connect the dots, John. Think about the girls, on the one hand, who had to get illegal abortions. And the old people who had to get illegal drugs. Think about the very powerful men who would have stopped all that – except Father Stephen had something on them.”

“And they had something on him, too.”

“Sort of a mutually assured destruction.”

“What about the sheriff? The one who disappeared?”

“Yep,” she said, as if that explained everything. And maybe it did.

After a long pause, John asked sadly: “Will you confess to a bishop, too?”

“Ha. Good one,” she laughed. “It’s true, I didn’t just stand by and watch,” she said, pausing and mulling her words over.

“You know, everyone thinks Father Stephen saved me,” she said. “That was a convenient notion. Actually, it was the other way around. I saved him. He stopped the whole business before he died a few years ago. I helped him stop it. But the way things stood, he had to confess to the bishop, and I had to take on some of the loose ends.”

"And me."

She gave him that look. My, my, you are the bright one, she thought. Like a trout going for a mayfly, you rise right to it.

"True. Aside from those girls tossing lilies into the stream, John, you are my last loose end. Once you're in medical school, I'll be thistle-down in the Southern breeze."

❖

Chapter 7

Three funerals

Ten years ago

Phil’s funeral

Was it only a few months later, or had a few years drifted by? John’s one friend in school, Phil, had dropped out, found work in the garage, and then got drafted.

Phil would have been perfect for the infantry – he was a great shot and a seasoned woodsman. But the Army recruiters told him that helicopter gunner position was the high prestige job. “You’ll be floating above the battle,” they said. He lasted a little longer than most – three months. Then they poured what was left of him into a box and shipped it home.

John wondered how his last moments had been as he stood under the black umbrella. It was a perfect day for a Mumford funeral, with cold clouds hugging the hills, trailing wisps through the top of the tall pines. Intermittent rain pounded the clay piled beside the grave, and little rivulets of brown water crept across the luminous green lawn. The casket creaked going down, and just as it thumped softly at the bottom, Phil’s girlfriend Chris tore loose with an unnerving banshee wail. It had a familiar hellish quality. The men were oblivious, but the women all glanced at each other, then quickly looked away. They all knew the sound. And John realized that he knew as well.

Oh my God, she’s pregnant, he realized.

And suddenly he saw the funeral through a detached haze, a hard light that would descend at moments when people began acting strangely. His own mother hugged Phil’s mother, but not Chris, who stood alone, sobbing by herself, in the pouring rain. No one even looked at her. And why should they? She wasn’t family. She didn’t have the paper -- just the embarrassment.

John looked across the grave at his sister Louise, begging her, with his eyes, to help Chris, not to let her stand alone at this moment. She refused. His eyes narrowed with the threat. “Clawson” he whispered. She took a deep breath. OK. You win, she nodded.

His older sister had always been a mystery to him, at least, until he found out that Mrs. Janney and Father Stephen had driven her across the border a few years ago.

And that was why, he now realized as he stared down into the grave, his father had trusted him to go work for Marylin Janney. She had kept his own daughter from ruin. John realized this as he watched his dad watch his sister put her arm around Chris. Dad knows about Chris now too. But he didn’t see my part, he thought. Or did he? It was something John would never know.

Barb’s abortion

A ringing phone brought Marylin Janney's voice the next morning.

John, I have a friend who needs a ride to see Fred. You remember, Dr. Fred? I can’t drive her. How about you?

Her name was Barb. She sat motionless and silent, staring out at the forest rushing by her window. As they crossed into West Virginia they stopped for some gas and a coke. She took a long swallow, then looked sheepishly at John. “I havn’t thanked you yet,” she began.

“No, no problem,” he said. “I’d do it for any of Marilyn’s girls.”

“Want to know what happened?”

“Only whatever you want to tell,” he said, accelerating down a side road.

“It was my brother. I always make my boyfriend wear a rubber. But my brother … got all … excited … one day when mom and dad weren’t home …” She broke down sobbing.

Dr. Clawson’s house had a side path leading to a small wood paneled clinic in the basement. The balding, portly doc greeted them with a Chesterfield hanging off his lips. A thick drawl and a fresh whiskey slur turned Clawson’s greetings into mumbles.

After pocking $150 cash, Clawson took them into a small surgery where he asked Barb undress behind a screen. He turned to John.

“Im glad her boyfriend is with her today, ‘cause my nurse is gone. Im going to need your help.”

He started to tell Clawson he wasn’t her boyfriend, but Clawson put his finger to his lips as Barb said, over the screen, “Boy, Im glad he’s here too.”

To John’s questioning glance, Clawson raised an eyebrow. “It’s a trick, but it’s not my trick,” he whispered. “It’s how people cope.”

He definitely has whiskey on his breath, so that’s how he copes, John thought. And hey, he doesn’t even have a nurse.

His eyes said: You catch on fast kid. Watch this.

The instruments were already laid out in a tray of alcohol. The speculum, to hold the vagina walls open. Long stainless steel dialators of various diameters looking like knitting needles. A small hypodermic and a vial of painkiller, a longer hypodermic with a plastic tip called a suction catheter,

and strange set of very long forceps. “That’s the tenaculum,” he said. “It’s to hold the cervix steady to get the catheter up into the uterus.”

John was fascinated. He was going to assist in a surgery. It would have been wonderful – if it wasn’t illegal. And what would Hippocrates have said?

Barb slipped onto the table and Clawson clipped a curtain across her waist, a bow to modesty but also to keep down panic. Never watch the man behind the curtain.

Clawson went into another room and came back stinking like a single malt distillery. He washed his hands and had John help him with surgical gloves, then rubbed a lubricant on them.

“OK, honey, I’m going to ask you to put your feet in the stirrups. There you go. Good girl. This is going to feel a little uncomfortable, but I want you to try to relax. The first thing we’re going to do is examine you.”

He placed on hand above her pubic bone and gently slipped a finger into her vagina. “John, you might want to know a little about this. We need to do a manual examination to be sure of which way the uterus is pointing. Normal is when it kind of goes up. If its pointing down and you don’t follow it when the catheter goes in, you can rupture the lining and even puncture a bowel. Then you have a serious surgical problem on your hands. Level 2. Nearest hospital like that is Beckley, over an hour away. So we want to be very, very careful.”

“What about Covington?”

“Cant go into Virginia on this kind of emergency. I’d be arrested. They are a little more understanding on the west side of the border.”

His eyes widened as he recognized yet another dividing line between the Scots and the English. The bastards. “Just be careful,” John said.

“OK, hon, You’re very normal. Everything feels just fine. Next step is a little local anesthetic to help your cervix open up. This will just pinch a little bit.”

The shining stainless steel walls of the speculum opened the cavity like a soft, wide mouth. There was nothing sensual about it. In the hard light, John saw just another body part at risk from a half- drunk doctor. Jesus, he thought. This is like tiptoeing through a minefield.

Clawson motioned John to come behind the curtain. “See that button like thing?” John nodded. “That’s the cervix. It’s clamped shut now, so we have to open it with the dialators. But that can hurt, so we’re going to inject this anesthetic. Thing to be careful about, though, is where you put it. If you hit a nerve, you can cause a reaction. If you imagine it as a clock, the nerves are at four and eight. So you put the anesthetic at 12, the very top.”

Clawson’s hands shook visibly as he approached the cervix with the needle. “My hands are steady, would you let me?” John asked.

“Sure, kid. If it’s OK with your girlfriend.”

Eyes wide in growing fear, she nodded slightly.

John had given injections to horses on the farm before, but it was the first time he had done it to another person. Still, his technique was flawless. “Way to go, kid. Good shot.”

Barb relaxed a little.

After a few minutes, Clawson picked up a long stainless steel dialator. It looked like a pencil, narrow at the tip and widening out very slightly along the way.

“We’ll start with the two millimeter,” he said. Working the tip into the cervix, he began slowly widening the opening. Barb shuddered, and John moved around the curtain to look into her dark blue eyes. There was a moment of recognition, almost as if he could see the dark shape hovering over and just behind her head.

Oh, my God, Clawson, don’t come unstuck on us …

Suddenly Barb’s face clenched and her body writhed in pain.

“Oh damn,” Clawson said. “Damn damn damn.”

Barb was screaming. Blood began trickling, then rapidly pumping, through the speculum opening, bright red blotches of blood spreading quickly across the white sheets. He pulled the speculum out and pulled off the surgical curtain in one quick movement.

“Hospital,” Clawson said quickly. “You decide. If you go east to Covington, you didn’t come from here. Swear it.”

“How much time have we got?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Then it would kill her to go to Beckley.”

“It would be safer.”

“For who?”

“For you, kid,” he said. “I’ve been warning about amateur abortionists for years. You just proved my point.”

At first John was breathless, then he took a step back.

“Wait a minute. You’ve been through this before, haven’t you?”

Clawson shuffled through the door to his office. “Better get going. Not much time.” He glanced down. “Unless you’re going to Beckley.”

“Ya bastard. Ya damned bastard,” he hissed as he carried Barb out to the car and quickly laid her in the back seat.

“Hang on darling.”

Through the window, John saw Clawson tipping back another glass.

The medical examiner

An hour later he was sitting in front of the medical examiner’s desk.

“How exactly did this happen. Tell me again.”

The balding medical examiner with black horn-rimmed glasses seemed friendly enough at first. But the image of Barb’s alabaster white arm hanging down from the gurney, not quite covered by the rest of the sheet, haunted him. He looked at a steel trash can, thinking about the nausea growing in his throat.

“Well, its simple,” John said, trying not to sound unemotional. “Barb tried to give herself an abortion. I found out and tried to help her, but something went wrong and she started bleeding.”

“When you tried to help, did you give her an injection?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“This woman has been attended in a surgery. Someone gave her anesthetic and examined her with a speculum. We believe the puncture wound came from a surgical grade dialator. Good equipment, very sloppy work. Except the anesthetic.”

The examiner stared through his thick glasses. He just put all his cards on the table, John thought. He really thinks Im going to help him. And how can I?

The examiner nodded at John’s silence. “Clawson is the name that comes to mind,” he said. “I’ve seen it before. This is his work. Your car’s engine is barely hot. You didn’t come far.”

He checked the car? John wondered how much trouble he was in.

“I don’t know anything about that, either,” he lied, but he choked as he said it, and suddenly the medical examiner felt sorry for him.

“It’s OK, son. We’ll get the bastard. Now, what are we going to tell this girl’s parents?”

“You can’t just say she fell out of the car?”

“Of course not. You can’t lie on a death certificate. I’m just wondering how you are going to explain your part in this.”

“I just tried to help her. I just tried …”

“And how are they going to see it? Hmm? Maybe its your fault in the first place. Aren’t you her boyfriend?”

“Oh, God no, I just gave her a ride…”

“So you don’t have the stomach to play the bad guy? I thought so,” the examiner bristled. “Kid, you tell whoever sent you, Clawson’s career is over.”

“Oh gawd, what have I done?” John asked, realizing just how difficult it was going to be.

“Im worried about what you’re going to do, kid. You have a lot to learn.”

Barb’s funeral

A few days later, Barb’s family buried her in the same Mumford cemetery where so many of their parents and grandparents rested. Chris was one of her few friends who attended. Afterwards, she took John by the arm and they walked together down a gravel road.

“I'm going to Wilmington to have my baby,” Chris said.

“Good decision,” John said. “Are they going to help?”

“Phil’s folks? Ha. Damn them anyway. I don’t want their help. All I want is to study nursing and raise Phil’s baby. Some day they’ll wish they had a grandchild.”

And so once again, John thought, the lines between the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, the righteous and the real, were drawn with blood.

Mumford County had never looked so pitiful to his weary eyes.

The bank account Marylin Janney set up had swollen to an unexpected size, feeding his hope for the future as the ridiculous rituals of high school graduation passed. Getting into Virginia Technology Institute had been a snap. With high grades and stellar SAT scores, the acceptance

letter came quickly. He even had a bid from the prestigious engineering college. But he decided to stay with pre-med.

Learning was easy, but being taught took patience. The professors were detached, arbitrary and irritable. They also seemed lonely in their autonomy.

Holidays found his battered station wagon lurching down the old dirt road to the farm, waiting for the hawk’s call that reminded him to watch for hidden traps. Reminding him, he thought, not to sell himself to the English. He called back in his best hawk voice. Caaaaawwwwkk.

Summers were best. His young hands were much stronger than dad's now as they gripped the worn steering wheel of the old Massey Furguson tractor.

The garden glowed golden green in the mornings. The hawk had patches of gray in his feathers. Sometimes John found it near the grain bins, watching the mice, but not caring to catch them. Detached with age.

Dad’s funeral

One spring he got the call. Dad was dead. He had passed away quietly in his sleep last night. Blinking through tears, John navigated past a hundred cars on their gravel road. The all-purpose oratory, the church graveyard, the neighborhood women bustling food in the kitchen -- the scenes floated by like surrealist cinema.

He walked out to the barn, looking for an old friend, but the rafters were empty. He spent the night in the hayloft, rain drumming on the tin roof, looking at all the places the hawk had been.

Shivering, asleep on the hay, he dreamed of hiking in the Mexican desert, the sky open and the air smelling of sage and sandstorms. He seemed to be looking for someone. He came to the edge of a well, and Chris was at the bottom. No, it was Louise. She was trying to tell him something.

No, it wasn’t Louise. It was great grandmother Conner, although it looked just like Louise.

The voice floated up from the circles of stone: I wish I’d had a friend like Marilyn Janney.

❖

Part III. Rockpile days

Chapter 8

Med School — College Station, Virginia

Seven years ago

His dad never knew John made it to medical school, and he would have been proud but a little amazed at the turns that things had taken. He was a good candidate for medical school. His grades were good, and he studied hard. But his social status was far below the norm.

The letters and recommendations are what put him over the top.

Marilyn Janney spread them out on the table one afternoon in January of his senior year in college. They made his eyes bug out. Every big-shot judge, lawyer, businessman, doctor and banker in five counties had written glowing letters of recommendation urging his acceptance in medical school. A federal judge in Roanoke; a hospital administrator in Blacksburg; the partner in a law firm in Grundy; the owner of a shopping center in Patrick. All were effusive and enthusiastic, recounting his cool wit in saving Father Stephen, his volunteer work with unwed mothers, and his dedication to the Less Fortunate.

Of course she had called in all her debts, and he shook his head as he kept reading.

“This is like going to your own funeral,” he laughed. “Hey, you even got old Dr. Clawson, to write,” he said, holding up his letter. “I can’t believe that guy is still in business.”

Marilyn nodded. “He’s done too many people too many favors to get thrown out on his butt,” she said. “Of course, they did have to dry him out for six months and pretend it was all about his alcoholism.”

“Well, he was a heavy alcoholic,” John observed.

“Sure, but look to root causes,” Marilyn said. “He was the wailing wall for thousands of tormented women. Of course he started drinking. Gawd - wouldn’t you?”

After a long silence, John wondered: “Am I going to be able to live up to all this?”

The look in her eyes told the rest of the story. “They owed me. And now you owe -- but not me. You owe your career to the legions of people in pain. Remember what Father Stephen said: ‘The lost souls are counting on you.’”

Lilies

And so in the fall of 1971, in a trance of bewildered pride and confused gratitude, John Conner drove east to the state’s big medical school, checked into the dorm, and stacked four cartons of

books. His roommate was a bearded gnome from the Bronx, David Schiff, who watched the world with intelligence and sophistication sparkling behind quiet brown eyes.

“They have a few books here, you know,” he said with a smile.

“Rayhhiit,” John said, exaggerating his Appalachian accent. “These he-yah is just in case they go an run aught.”

And after only a few weeks, a call came from one of the Lost Girls.

“Marilyn died last night,” she said softly, in a weeping voice.

“How?”

“We found her sitting outside by the fish pond this morning with a lily in her hand. Heart attack, the coroner says.”

“You and I know it wasn’t that.”

“Yeah. Heartbreak, more like. Well, now she and her priest can be together.”

“I never quite …”

“Oh yeah.”

After a long silence, John said: “Thanks for calling.”

“Will you come for the funeral?”

“Cant. Already have exams. Wish I could.”

“It’s OK,” she said, laughing. “You dweeb.”

John laughed back.

So Marilyn Janney got her priest, and Father Stephen got his wish, and John Conner got into medical school.

Sagan Hall

The human anatomy lab on the tenth floor of Sagan Hall ranks among the eeriest places on this earth. Long aluminum caskets on wheels hold wrinkled, carved up human bodies pickled in formaldehyde, ready to be cranked up to knife level and dissected.

The windows in the lab are blacked out with heavy tar paper. The shelves are covered with large yellow glass jars. Brains, livers, fetuses, deformed legs and a thousand other bizarre curiosities of the human condition float inside.

To complete the atmosphere, the wind pouring down the river valley makes a deep, moaning sound as it strikes the side of the building with a noise like a thousand souls in mourning. No one knows quite which satanic architect managed the right combinations of building angle and resonance to achieve this effect, but it induced an unlikely levity among the med students.

To their credit, they felt they had to fight the melancholy of this antiseptic necropolis, so they made a point of whistling, burping, talking loudly and cracking grotesque jokes.

A perennial source of humor involved the “Namin’ o’ the Corpse.” Sometimes a physical abnormality suggested the appellation: Shorty, Sparky, or Ol' One-Eye. Others were given more endearing names: Miss Piggy, Toe tag, Mud Slide Slim.

David named his corpse Peter Crooks since the corpse had had Peyronies, a disease that causes fibrosis of the penis, making it bend.

John was assigned a young Indian man who looked like he'd never had quite enough to eat in his brief life. He called him "Gupta" – “That's Hindu for Bubba," John laughed. Gupta died from liver failure and his skin was a stark shade of yellowish-brown. He probably got the disease from bad drinking water. From the look of his callused hands he had been a laborer, and from the splaying of his toes it was clear he never owned a pair of shoes in his short life.

As John began dissecting Gupta, he wondered why he had to die. If he had lived in the West, John thought, Gupta's disease could have been treated with a few dollars worth of medicine and he probably would have survived. Every day millions of people died from simple ailments that were easy to cure.

Stalking the aisles between the aluminum caskets was Dr. Frank Gillespie, a crew-cut pathologist who had spent most of his career in the Army. He would stop at each of the dissecting tables to observe the students as they methodically sliced, hacked and sawed their way through various human systems.

John admired Gillespie. He was a no-nonsense scientist with a face like a hawk and photographic memory. His lecturing style was crisp and he didn’t waste time.

One day, as Gillespie stopped by to see about John's progress with Gupta, John mentioned some of the questions that had occurred to him.

"You know, we spend billions on our medical system," John said, "while the vast majority of people in the world can't afford to see a doctor for a simple problem."

Gillespie nodded. "That’s true. But what can be done? There certainly aren't any easy solutions." Gillespie talked a little about Albert Schweitzer, who had followed his conscience and opened a famous clinic in Gabon, Africa. "Schweitzer was an inspiration to us all," he said in a tone as lofty and empty as a searchlight hitting a few low-scudding clouds.

“Schweitzer was attempting to deal with a vast problem without many resources,” John said. "Like trying to empty the Atlantic with a teacup."

Gillespie nodded again, but shrugged. "Not much you can do about it."

"But wait," John said, laying down his gore-encrusted scalpel. “What if, instead of training hundreds of doctors to practice in hospitals, we trained thousands of nurses and physicians assistants to recognize and treat simple diseases? They tried it in Cuba, and look at what happened. Infant mortality went from 140 per thousand in 1955 down to 10 per thousand in 1965."

"Cuba?" Gillespie rolled his eyes. "Surely you're not a Marxist, John?"

"No, no, its got nothing to do with Marxism. I mean, you don't have to believe in a dictatorship of the proletariat to want medical care for poor people."

Gillespie shook his head. "I agree with the diagnosis but not the prescription," he said. “And think about the implications. What if your life depended on one of these barefoot communist doctors? Isn't a little knowledge more dangerous than no knowledge at all? What would happen to the medical system if any quack could pick up a license with a little training and open shop?"

One of the other med students joined Gillespie's defense of American medicine. "Really, John, aren't you advocating one standard for the Third World and another for the West? Wouldn't that perpetuate the same global imbalance you are objecting to?"

"Sure, in a way, but maybe its, um, an intermediate step," John said, searching for the words. "How can we object to something that could be saving lives and helping people?"

"Isn't there some Marxist philosophy at work there after all?" Gillespie asked. "You know, they use this low level clinical medicine as a kind of social reward. They dilute medicine to the point where everyone can get it, but only a little of it. If you're really sick, where would you rather be -- in a Cuban hospital? Or here?"

For a brief moment, John wanted to back off. "Well, um, Dr. Gillespie..." He looked around at the other med students, training for a life of privilege and power, golf courses and country clubs. Then he stared down at Gupta, lying open to heaven in a thousand pieces, and something inside him snapped.

"Look at this poor bastard lying here," he said, his voice quavering. "Even a primitive clinic would have saved his life."

"Get a grip, John," Gillespie shot back.

"Goddamnit, man, don’t you see it?" John yelled, his voice twisted in agony, as the tudents at other tables stopped working and gazed up in amazement.

"You're saying it's just, just -- utilitarian, like some clever bait to sell people Marxism. And I'm saying it's the humane and decent thing to do, and the hell with Marxism."

Gillespie's face tightened around his eyes. His thin lips smiled, and his nose flared as he took a deep breath. "John, you are an incurable do-gooder, and let me tell you, no good deed goes unpunished in this world." Some of the students laughed.

John shook his head. The wind outside Sagan hall moaned again, and the sounds of hacking and cutting once again permeated the antiseptic pedagogical necropolis.

From a corner of the lab, David let out a long, deep, quavering belch.

Finding life

It was time consuming but, for him, not all that hard. He was brilliant at diagnostics, and he really did seem to have the Gift. They said he was destined for a good internship, a residency in a “good” hospital, then a “great” private practice and a “rewarding” career. Bets were that he’d be a millionaire by the time he was 40.

But he realized that there was hard light around that one, too. In all his years of studying biology, he had never really acquired a life. He was detached, like the old hawk; he had watched life but he hadn't really lived. He had never even had a girl friend. He was strangely strong and fragile, with the mind of a sledge hammer and emotions like eggshells.

From the window his dorm room one afternoon, he watched two young women walked lightly into the sun, hair catching the light like straw on fire. They were headed for a rock concert. He ached to join them.

He'd watched life through microscopes, read about it medical books, took notes about it in lectures. What was life? The world around him was ablaze in revolutions, vibrant, chaotic and fascinating, and he had worn a mask.

Someday he would be free. Medical school would end eventually. And what would be next?

Most of his classmates knew exactly what to expect. Upscale suburbs, beautiful wives, smart kids, expensive vacations. Why not? Still, was it the life for him? He had promised Marilyn that he would care for the lost souls. What did that mean?

“What does it matter?” he muttered to himself, not realizing he was speaking aloud.

Across the dorm room, his roommate David echoed his words. “What does it matter?” he asked, staring out the same window at the same women. “Ill tell you what matters. Politics is nothing more than medicine on a grand scale. We matter. We’ll make a huge difference. You’ll see.”

“And then those girls will be going to concerts with us?” John asked.

“No, they’ll still be with the rock stars,” David grinned. “But it just won’t matter. OK, now, anatomy.”

It wasn’t much to be content with. He laid back and drifted off, thinking about the two women walking down their street. When third year exams were over, he would be free.

Fuck Nam

Sometimes he wandered the warm evening streets, drinking in the sidewalk scenes. Exotic women in bell bottom jeans and tank tops. Long haired men with Indian eyes and frontier beards and fringed jackets. Smells of incense, patchouli oil and resinous Mexican hemp floated by. Random laughter. Head shops with black lights and day-glow posters. Panhandlers begging spare change. Radical newspapers hawked by hungry teenagers. Who killed JFK? they shouted. Hey, who wants to know? Someone yelled back. Music pulsing from second story windows open to the summer. The Who, the Dead, Hendrix, Starship, the Beatles. The air vibrated with the electric sounds and thick animal scents of cultural revolution.

One evening, wandering an area they called The Village, John waited for a light to change. He noticed a bearded man in a faded khaki jacket carrying a guitar headed in the same direction. John asked if he had a gig.

"Umm-hmm. Village coffee house. Singing songs about Nam."

"Fuck Nam," John spat.

"Fuckin' A," the beard grinned.

Swept away by the eloquent exchange, and prodded by his new resolve to take chances, John followed the beard into a crowded cafe off Main Street and sat near the stage. A waiter wrote a name on a chalkboard near the stage: Mark Logaman. After belting back a few mugs he began strumming his guitar and singing:

"How many lies will we endure?

How many wounds that can't be cured?

Glory guides the bombs and swords,

Pins their chests with tin rewards,

It’s not much of a lure

But they seem so God-Damned sure."

Mark ignored the colorful crowd babbling quietly at their tables. They returned the favor, but he was oblivious, banging his guitar, bellowing, resurrecting the dead souls he carried with him from Nam. John watched in awe, remembering friends from Misty Mountain, thinking about Phil who had died for a lie, sent home in his khaki shroud. Military efficiency wasn’t always an oxymoron.

That ghastly feeling was totally in tune with grim times. He prayed – and prayed hard -- for something to lift him from the hopeless depression descending like a dark fog.

Voices without words relaxed him, like a ghostly hand brushing the back of his neck, and very slowly he shifted back in the seat and looked across the cafe. Surprise. Her eyes locked into his. Incredible green flashes. Beautiful. Sculpted nose. Long blond hair. Minutes ticked by. Mark's voice quavered above the cafe crowd. They couldn’t stop looking at each other. She blanched. John blushed. Mark howled. Long fibers stretched electric signals across the room.

After a few more songs Mark put the guitar down and called for a pitcher of beer. John looked up, but she was gone. He dodged between tables and around the rising cafe patrons, but she had disappeared. He asked people standing next to her. Who was she? Nobody knew.

It wasn’t fair. He had prayed hard, and glimpsed a very interesting answer, only now to find it vanished like a smoke ring in a thunder shower. Sometimes you have to let it go, he thought.

Mark was packing up his treasured Martin guitar. He poured John a beer and they started talking.

"I haven't been in Nam," John said. Mark knew. You could always tell, Mark said, and they nodded sagely. There was something twisted about Nam vets, a particular frame of mind.

"Your music really hits me, because lots of guys I knew have gone to Nam and died."

Mark’s throat twisted in the strange, hollow, rattling laugh, the kind you hear coming from cops and coroners and soldiers. "Hey, come back to my place. We'll have a few drinks. Get stoned. Forget the war."

"Fuckin A." They laughed. John told him about the girl across the room. "Well, forget her too. Women. Huh. Who needs 'em?"

❖

Chapter 9

The Rock Pile

Four years ago

A thick green canopy of elm leaves overhead filtered the last rays of sunset across the dusty brick townhouse facades. Packs of squealing children and snuffling dogs scurried around the twilight neighborhood, and the old-timers watched them with curiosity from their front porch rocking chairs.

“This is the place,” Mark said as they walked up the concrete stairs and through a weather beaten wooden door. Rainbows from stained glass danced around the hallway as they entered; incense, laughter and the sweet smell of marijuana billowed down the stairs, as if in greeting.

Ascending the stairs, John noticed an elaborate cartoon depicting the modern mileau. At the bottom of a cliff, a hundred stick figures pawed through a garbage dump filled with electronic detritus. At the top, Deputy Dan was shooting the bystanders while the Beagle Boys robbed the bank. A large caption demanded: “Is civilization really a bonus?”

On the top landing, in bold red letters, was the house motto: "If you love something, set it free."

To the right, above a rounded doorway leading to the living room, was a poem by Jack Kerouac:

"Whither goest thou? I mean, man, whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

As they crossed the Kerouac threshold, John saw her sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, in a circle of friends, holding a thin white cigarette, like Marlena Deitrich in a printed frock. It was the girl from the coffee house, the one who had psychically called to him from across the room.

She gave him a fierce hug, as if she had expected him all along. “Welcome to the Rock Pile,” she said.

History lesson

Most of the once-fashionable townhouses surrounding the campus were managed through a real estate agency whose sole concern was prompt payment of rent. The sewers could clog, the heat could fail, and the residents could paint purple polka dots on the front porch — many did — but the only time we ever heard from the real estate agency was when the rent was an hour overdue.

The six bedroom two story brick townhouse called the Rock Pile was owned by a pair of New York beatniks who popped in during the summer to get away from the fervid Soho art scene. They never

touched the collection of mysterious memorabilia left behind over the years. Among the cherished items were signs, tapestries, lamps, beaded curtains, old bicycles and an army of cats and dogs that no one seemed to actually own. One sign hanging in the living room said: “Do not throw paper trays in the walrus pool.” No one knew where it came from, or how or why, or what it meant.

Even the “Rock Pile” name was part of the mystery. Could it have described the house karma? Could it refer to the jail sentences handed down to drug dealers arrested there some years back, and now, fortunately, long gone?

One theory was that the name Rock Pile had come from the idea that there were two major impulses in life — security and adventure. So the further you go for adventure, and the tougher the journey, the more you need a secure Rock Pile to come home to.

Was it generic or specific to the house in College Station? When several of the residents announced that they were moving to “a rock pile” in the country, and John was told that there were now spaces open in “the Rock Pile.” So both, maybe.

John and David moved in, along with Richard Rollins from medical school. Downstairs was occupied by Susie Kovacs and some of the part-time residents like Patty and Cindy. Mark Logaman, the screwball Nam vet studying zoology on the G.I. bill. lived in the back, and that was because he was very strong and very protective of the Rock Pile ladies, they said.

Stumbling into the Rock Pile

Like most of the other privileged pilgrims, I stumbled into the Rock Pile at a crucial moment in my life when, as it happened, all my worldly possessions were flying out an apartment window. Pants. T-shirts. Some underwear. I made a leap and, with luck, caught my battered old guitar. Then one of my albums fluttered to the sidewalk, right in front of John Connor, and we remembered each other from across the keg a few weeks ago.

“Hey, the Yardbirds,” John said, bending over to pick it up. “I used to worship those guys.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was thinking about Father Stephen when he said that.

At the time I was thinking about the enraged female who was shrieking “chingado!” at me from a second story window.

“Keep it,” I said, looking back up, watching the window slam down on my old life. As I began picking up a few pairs of jeans from the bushes, John grinned.

“Hey, man, thanks for the album. Say … you need a place to stay?”

Later, when the guys gathered upstairs, just past the Kerouac threshold, I asked him: “What if I

hadn’t given you my Yardbirds album?”

“It wasn’t the album,” he said. “I wondered whether you were detached enough to let it all go for something new.”

“Hey, there’s still some underwear under her bushes,” I laughed.

“That’s detachment,” Mark said, pulling a zippo from the top pocket of the Army jacket and taking a deep, satisfying toke from a bamboo bong.

“Why do you wear that jacket all the time?” I asked him.

He looked over the top of the pipe with bulging bong eyes, then choked in a high squeaky voice: “I wear it …” he stopped and laughed, exhaling, then continued in a normal tone. “I wear it to remind people that I am a crazy-assed Nam vet capable of unimaginable violence and …” He inhaled a gigantic cloud of sweet smoke and squeaked again: “… and not someone to be trifled with.”

It was hilarious. The macho talk in the squeeky pot voice just set me off. I laughed for half an hour. “Not someone to be trifled with,” I squeaked. And laughed some more. Finally, I thought about something serious.

“Tell us about the women here in the Rock Pile,” I asked him as he exhaled another storm cloud of blue smoke.

He shrugged, as if to say it was a bush-league sort of question, but what the hell. “You mean Susie. She is a wild one, a red-headed political science major who loves to get stoned, read poetry and screw your brains out," Mark said. “Everyone who lives here has to sleep with Susie. It’s a rule, not just a guideline.”

There were others. Patty, Cindy and Pam. They would come and go. But Susie was the interesting one, at least for Mark.

“Susie is fun, night or day,” he said. “But then she’ll blow your mind away.”

“Poetry, Mark?” John asked.

“Something for the novel,” I laughed.

Country Stars

Later that night, we drove out to the country rock pile. That was the night that John realized just how birds turned into stars. During a lull in the party he walked a hundred yards out into a field, away from the pools of light, and laid down gaping at the heavens.

Suddenly he felt weightless. The stubble of new-cut hay poking his neck and arms and back reminded him of the massive earth behind him. Not below him, but behind him, turning so fast it should have flung him out into the starry diamond brilliance. Beyond small conceptions of God, maybe he could believe that he was part of a grand Intelligence. Powerful, loving and yet strangely detached.

With a quiet crush of hay stubble, David walked out from the party and sat next to him. He handed John a pipe filled with powerful Colombian marijuana. A sweet, smoky smell lingered around them.

"I'm so glad we tried this," David said.

"I don't believe it. This is incredible."

"It's better than those damned pharmaceuticals they leave lying around the emergency room. It’s better than the finest Scotch."

"The only problem is, it's addictive," John said.

"Get out. You don't believe that propaganda, do you? John, you've got to get a life. You've been living with those books too long."

"I was just thinking that."

They were silent for a moment, then John asked: "So, sitting out here in the fields, stoned, do you see God?"

"You only see God if you can bow low enough," David laughed. “That’s not my idea – it’s Martin Buber. But he had it right. It’s what religion is really all about. Putting your ego aside. Bowing low enough to sense something bigger out there."

After a few quiet moments, John asked: "Do you ever feel like you are standing in the sky? Seriously."

They leaned back and put their feet in the air. They looked down at the stars and laughed.

A few minutes later, others at the party wandered out into the field. Terry and Cindy, Pam and Steven, George and Frank. As each pair of eyes adjusted to the crystal clear night, the voices gasped at the depth and brilliance of the heavens laid out below their foreheads.

"We're standing in the sky" David said.

"Well then, let's start dancing in the sky," Patty yelled, tracing a wide circle with her outstretched arms. Soon we were all howling hysterically, running together and playing crack the whip in the

dark field, twirling in circles against each other. The circles began converging, the arms connecting, the unstable legs twisting together, falling, laughing, breathless in a heap of a dozen souls. Not erotic. Just friendly. And an electric new idea jolted through them in a flash. It was an idea of solidarity beyond personal alliances. A communal loyalty more powerful than individual affairs. Not a group marriage, exactly, but maybe a collective engagement. A rock pile.

Aching from laughter, they fell silent for a moment and again, quietly gazed off into the infinite. "There’s a great old science fiction book called Star Maker," Patty said after a few minutes. "The book follows a story of one poor soul who lives out many lives in all kinds of star systems. Eventually, he meets other souls and begins living his lives with them. Finally, he merges with a cluster of thousands of souls living together. They grow so bright they start giving off their own light."

"And that," John whispered, "is how birds turn into stars."

Gaping at the open heavens, it was easy to believe there were no coincidences. Together, we would push back the envelope of a suffocating, hypocritical society.

Maybe we were just fooling themselves, but there was a time when something we did not understand pulled us together like gravitation, and then, suddenly, set us free to tempt the fates and attempt the outrageous.

The Rituals of Certification

By the fourth year of medical school all the advanced rituals of certification are complete. Etiologies are memorized, preliminary medical board exams are taken, and the young doctors have been assigned to their clinicals, assisting experienced physicians who take careful pains to challenge, test and humiliate the new doctors.

John and the others would work 24 hour shifts, catching only a few hours of sleep at a time, with two days off afterwards. The schedule would have been impossible, except that the drug companies had generously donated many convenient sample bottles of amphetamines.

Sometimes the bottles had a label: "From Dr. Smith, to Dr. Smith, take as needed for somnulence."

The clinicals varied widely. Pathology was gruesome, but leavened with gallows humor. You could get over the smells, but somehow John never quite got over the sound of bones being snapped. Pediatrics was a lighthearted romp after pathology, and you could sometimes get a little sleep. Psychaitry was bizarre. How on earth did they expect you to help these whackos with ice cold Freudian analysis and a physicians desk reference? Oh, they admitted it was an "emerging discipline." Whatever the hell that meant.

Emergency medicine was the nightmare. Patients arrived in waves. Heart attacks at 8. Broken

arms at 9. Gunshot wounds at 11. Auto wrecks at 1. Grief hung thick in the disinfected air. All the horrors and heroics of medicine were focused in the moment.

It was hard to talk about, except back at the Rock Pile.

"People fucking croak, right in front of your eyes," John told the circle one of his first nights at the Rock Pile. He was gesturing wildly, and staring hard into the eyes of fellow med students. They knew what he was trying to say.

"We had a gomer the other night," George shook his head. "Perforated lungs. Sucking wound. Gruesome."

"Did he make it?" John asked hopefully.

"No. We got it draining and prepped for surgery, but his heart gave out. He had the weirdest look on his face when he died."

“Weird? How?”

“Like he was suddenly happy. I don’t know,” John said. "But sometimes they see something, right before they die. Sometimes they look happy."

"I think they usually look surprised," David said.

I couldn’t resist throwing in an over-ripe cliche: "Death is the ultimate trip."

Patty shook her head. "Get real. Death is the end. Fucking is the ultimate trip."

I grinned at her. She glared back. "Not you, Billy."

"No, death's not the end," George said. "People have spirits. When death comes, the soul rises up out of the body, and what's left is just meat."

"That's what I was getting at. I want to see it," Patty said. "I want to see a spirit rising out of a body."

"Its more like you feel it," John said. "And think about it, really. Healing is not about the meat. It should be about the spirit."

"So how do you heal a wounded spirit?"

"Right," David laughed. "Can't you see old Dr. John back in med school, teaching faith healing 101?"

"Ya'll will HEAL," John said, placing his hands on David's head. "Heal. HEAL."

The black bag of the mind

It was October, and one day John and I were out driving in Van Gogh when a blinding thunderstorm descended out of nowhere. Up ahead the highway traffic stopped, and crowd had gathered at the edge of a steep bank.

We looked over the edge. Two men were flailing, trying to pull themselves out the windows of an overturned pickup truck. Down through the swirling gusts we could see a spreading pool of bright red blood in a puddle of water.

"John, get your black bag," I screamed through the liquid wind. John winced and yelled back: "You don't still believe that Marcus Welby shit, do you? Let's go."

Minus the black bag, we skidded down the slope. John reached the first man. "Bleeder," he muttered. He grabbed my shaking hand and forced it down on a spraying artery. "Hold him. I'll check the other guy."

I looked into the pain and shock of the injured man's face. "Don’t worry," I said. "There's a doctor here."

His eyes relaxed in acknowledgement. A doctor. All would be well. Bloody bubbles froze on his lips. His eyes rolled back in his head. "A doctor..." he whispered. Then he stopped moving.

John came back around the truck and stopped for a moment, looking at the man. He pushed a little on his chest, and from the gurgling sound, even a journalism student like me could hear something very wrong. Then John reached down and pulled my bloody hand back from the dead man's neck.

"Pine box at roadside. The other one, too. Oh well."

He shrugged and started walking back up the hill. I looked at my hand, drenched with blood.

"Hey. Wait a second," I screamed. "Shouldn't we do CPR? Don’t you want to save these guys?"

The look on John's face was grim and detached. Professional. Totally unaffected. And it infuriated me. Was it arrogance? Callous disregard for life?

”Couldn’t we at least try?"

"Waste of time. Dotted Qs."

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Daughtedques. Dottykuwes. Whatever. We rode home in silence, John saddened, me furious.

Back at the Rock Pile I washed off the blood and smoked a fat Mexican joint with John and Susie and George. John described the scene and my reaction and they shook their heads.

"Really," he said, "Nothing we could have done would have made a difference."

"He's right, you know," George said kindly.

"But medicine works all kinds of miracles," I said in what was more of a question than anything.

"Don't believe the propaganda,” John said. “You've got to realize, it's not an exact science."

"Well, then, nothing is an exact science," I said, surprised, a little, at an underlying bitterness in my own voice.

"Well there it is," John said in a slow Southern drawl. "The story of the century. Put that in your newspaper."

George leaned over. "Hell, even in the operating room, with all the support you could want, a guy with a crushed chest probably would not make it. Nothing you can do."

Richard’s eyes narrowed as he stirred his coffee. "You're naive," he said, looking directly at me. "Don't go pasting your cardboard illusions on us. Medicine is like everything else we think we know -- its peppered with omissions and prejudices. Nothing is solid."

"Here, Billy, listen to this," George said. "It's from a novel about the British navy. It says the captain of this boat, Jack Aubrey, felt pretty good that he had this character Steven Maturin aboard as ship's doctor."

He could face gales far south of the line with an easy mind. 'It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard. It's like sailing with a piece of the true cross.' [Aubrey said.] 'Stuff, stuff,' said Steven [the ship’s doctor] peevishly. 'I do wish you would get that weak notion out of your mind. Medicine can do very little, surgery less. I can purge you, bleed you, worm you at a pinch, set your leg or take it off, and that is very nearly all. What could Hippocrates, Galen, Razes, what can Blane, what can Trotter do for a carcinoma, the lupus, a sarcoma?' He had often tried to eradicate Jack's simple faith, … and Steven, looking at Jack's knowing smile, his air of civil reserve, knew that he had not succeeded this time either.

In the days that followed the wreck, I kept thinking about prejudice and what I didn’t know about medicine. I began to imagine writing about young doctors interested in spiritual healing. And I made the mistake of telling journalism professor Ray Chamberlin one day after class. Chamberlin was nearly bald, and his comb-over was nearly as threadbare as the elbow of his tweed coat.

"Spiritual healing. Ha. Good one," Ray said, throwing his graying head back and laughing. "Maybe for the April First edition of the paper." He patted me on the back and shuffled off to a

faculty meeting.

I was feeling a serious panic. Medicine, the pinnacle of science, shot through with prejudice. Journalism, the search for truth, nothing more than defense of the credulence. Gawd. Was everything phony? Everything?

Chapter 10

The Kerouac Threshold

Four years ago

Deep into the late hours one night, well past the Keroac threshold, the Rock Pile crew wrestled again with the ghosts of marcus welby and doctor kildare and joseph pulitzer. I wanted to believe. Wasn’t healing a miracle? Wasn’t medicine a science? Wasn’t public service a worthy life? Maybe he had it backwards -- the miracle of science ... and...

"No, no, you don’t just have it backwards, its much worse than you think,” Susie insisted. "Eighty percent of what makes people sick they cure themselves," she said. “A few percent can be patched up with a few drugs. The rest die. Doctors can’t really do all that much. Think about the way artists look at the white space around the picture. Don’t look at the picture, look at the hole behind it. Think about what medicine doesn’t do, what it never can do."

Richard chimed in: "Don’t look so surprised, Billy. This is all too common. Gallileo's doctor was once asked if it was true that there was very little he could do for illness. When he answered yes, he was then asked how he could take money for his services and still think himself an honest man. So he says, 'I am a guardian at the patient’s door, giving him a chance to heal himself."

"Sometimes when you talk with patients it seems like a con game," George said. “You want to calm people who are anxious about their problems. And it really helps then. So it's a trick, but it’s not our trick. People heal faster when they are attended by confident physicians. It's a trick of human nature."

"You mean even the way you act around a patient is like giving a placebo?"

“Sort of, but not exactly," John said. "There's an Arizona doctor named Andy who says communication is the core of the healing experience. For a doctor, it’s like an illogical Zen koan, like the sound of one hand clapping. How can doctors project confidence? They know the limits of their powers. But patients heal better if the doctor is confident. What it all means is that healing has to be spiritual at the center, whether it's cloaked in a white lab coat or part of a ritual with chanting and incense."

"Of course, spirit is not an issue in medical school," George said. "Hey, maybe it should be. It's an overlooked part of the whole picture."

"There's a word for enormous sins of omission," John said. "It's 'Lacuna,' Latin for 'hole,' -- it means something missing that should have been there."

George banged his bongo drums and started repeating Lacuna, Lacuna, Lacuna.

John caught the rhythm and began singing an old Mexican tune, called "Tequila."

Da-da dada da da da dah -- "Lacuna!" Da-da da da da da-dah "Lacuna!" In moments the Rock Pile inmates were on their feet, Susie in front, dancing in a conga line, screaming: "DA-DA DA DA DAH DA DA DAH -- LACUNA!"

In a daze, Susie pulled them up into the dance with a look of absolute freedom and wild lust in her eyes. They danced for what seemed like hours, drawn involuntarily into a vortex of emotion. Her powerful and beautiful eyes led them on. Soon they were undressing, dancing in underwear and togas. Patty and another woman joined them.

"DA-DA DA DA DAH DA DA DAH -- LACUNA!"

They woke up in a heap the next morning. John searched his aching brain but couldn’t quite remember who had done what to whom in the dark last night.

He hoped to hell he hadn’t done anything shameful, and he sheepishly asked what he had been doing in Patty's bed with Susie and George.

"You fell asleep, John my boy, that's all that happened," Susie teased. He looked incredulous.

"The truth," his froggy voice croaked.

"Lacuna. Ask yourself, what didn’t you do?" she said, swishing provocatively into the kitchen.

"You are a witch, you know," he said.

"And you are a frightened boy who needs to be set free."

Sacrifice of the Innocent

I was the last guy on Susie’s list, to tell you the truth. Then, one rare quiet night just before Thanksgiving, she led me into the darkened living room.

"Wait here and get comfortable. Take off your clothes, and I'll be back after I get ready,” she said.

I took off my shirt, but as I dropped my pants around my ankles I heard giggling. Then suddenly the lights were on, and a dozen people jumped up from behind the couch and the kitchen counter.

"Surprise, happy birthday," they shouted, pelting me with confetti and balloons.

"But, but, but," I protested, awkwardly pulling up my pants. The room got suddenly quiet. "I mean, it’s not my birthday. That was last month."

"Wait, I thought you were a Scorpio," Mark said. "Oh well. Guess we can't party tonight."

"Aw, Oh no," the Greek party chorus groaned. Several men pawed the ground with their right foot, Southern style, and the room grew still. Everyone waited for me to say something.

"Mark, I'll tell you what," I said. "For you — just because you are such a pal — I'll change my Zodiac sign. OK?" Astounded silence greeted this concession. Then Mark slowly wiped away a mock tear.

"You know, Billy," he said, sobbing, "nobody has ever changed their Zodiac sign for me. This is really special." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a brass medallion on a chain. "Here. For you."

It was a Scorpio medallion, the kind of kitch object that might hang off a weekend hippy’s Nehru jacket. A chuckle escalated into a guffaw, and suddenly we were howling with laughter. Once again we had passed through the equilibrium point and across the Keroac threshold.

Later, my own picture, complete with Zodiac medallion, joined the others in the Rogue's Gallery. "Sacrifice of the Innocent," was the caption pasted onto the wall of the Rock Pile.

Outrage

"Try to look normal as we go through," John laughed. His eyes squinted against freeway lights as he drove Van Gogh, his white Dodge van with thick red carpeting piled in the empty back.

"This is outrageous. What if we get caught?" George asked, slowly exhaling a cloud of smoke and leaning over the front passenger seat as he passed the joint.

"Just a med school prank," he said. "You worry too much.”

"I dont know, John," Richard said in a worried tone.

"You want out of the van?"

Richard shook his head.

"Besides," George laughed, "You're the one who stole it."

John turned for a moment and grinned into the back seat. "That's right, Richard. It was your corpse. You are in this up to your eyeballs."

"Armpits," he said, laughing despite himself.

The attendant looked up blankly as the arm came from the driver's window. He grabbed automatically for the money but instead felt a rubbery formaldahyde-pickled hunk of human arm dangling from his hand. Moments later the van screeched out of the toll gate and the attendant screamed as a human arm thumped onto the pavement in front of him. As the attendant squinted to read Van Gogh's license, a camera flashed from the back window .

Choking with laughter, John swerved across three lanes.

"JESUS man LOOK OUT."

"Did you get the look?" John screamed. "Gawd, the look."

Later, when "the look" of the tollbooth attendant was enshrined in the Rock Pile's rogues gallery, they gave it a caption: "Highway robbery: An arm, if not a leg."

Gupta at the threshold

“Did I ever tell you about Gupta?” John asked Susie.

It was late on a weeknight, and the Rock Pile was quiet for once. We were passing around a pipe full of passable Mexican weed talking about formative moments. What made us who we were?

John's most powerful moment in medical school had been in the human anatomy lab, staring down at the cadaver of an Indian man who could have been saved with only a few dollars worth of medicine. Why couldn't we spend more on health care for the world? Why did all the money and effort flow to the top?

“Gillespie couldn’t believe that I would advocate a barefoot doctors program,” John said.

"Yeah, well he's just defending the credulence," George said.

"Then he ought to be a journalist," Richard said, digging me in the ribs.

John stared off into space. "Once you get past the Keroac threshold, Gillespie is really full of shit. Who benefits from the status quo? Isn't some primitive medical system better than nothing at all? Or witch doctors?"

"Shamans," Susie said in her "politically correcting" tone. Richard gave her a disgusted look.

"Hey," David said, "what if the shamans are better than some rudimentary medical system? Maybe they would know about plants that worked better than Western medicines."

"That's interesting," John said. "How would you open a clinic in the Third World without threatening the local shamans? Maybe you could even learn from them."

A seed popped in the pipe and a spark sizzled onto the stained carpet. Something had sparked in John as well.

"No shit, the infant mortality rate in Cuba dropped from 140 to 10 per thousand? In ten years after the Cuban revolution?" George asked.

"Ten years," John said.

"Gillespie is an asshole," Susie said.

"Second that motion," growled Richard.

The vote was unanimous.

Ounce of Prevention

One sleepy Saturday afternoon a clump of Rock Pile people were wondering what to do with themselves when John jumped up with a wild, inspired look in his eyes.

"Road Trip," he yelled. In minutes a dozen people piled into Van Gogh and sped off into the west. They had no idea of their destination. George told me they had done this once last year and ended up in Boston. They had to panhandle money to make it home. "Imagine med students on the street asking for spare change."

This time John's destination was a lake not too far out of town where his family had a pontoon boat. When we arrived at the docks, the van doors exploded in a cloud of sweet smelling smoke and wild college students. The locals did not look amused, but in a few moments we were churning off across an expanse of green Virginia waters, heading for a deserted cove to indulge in some serious skinny dipping. No one had thought to bring a bathing suit.

We anchored in an area that seemed safe, threw our clothes in a heap on the pontoon boat floor and fell over into the cool, clear water. Richard was the first to spot the approaching water police. Water police? John didn’t know they had any.

As the police boat pulled up, Susie noticed that some idiot had hung a large clear baggie full of green leafy substance from the rafter of the pontoon boat. While the others struggled to yank dry clothing over their wet bodies, Susie quickly took off her shirt, exposing a set of round, beautifully nippled breasts.

"Good afternoon," one officer said from his patrol boat. "Do you all have ... um..." he noticed Susie… "um ... enough life preservers?"

John smiled and showed him a collection of a dozen life preservers under a seat.

"Well, um, OK," he said, still staring at Susie.

The other officer nudged him.

"OK, right. Be safe," he said, still staring at Susie.

As they sped away, the officer still staring, John asked, "What made you do that?"

Suzie pointed to the baggie hanging from the rafter.

Soon another photo was hung in the rogues gallery: Susie, half naked on the pontoon boat, with the baggie in the background.

"An ounce of prevention," was the caption.

Specialists

"Internists know everything but do nothing," John laughed, toking on the pipe. "Surgeons know nothing but do everything."

"Right," David chuckled, taking a puff on the smoldering pipe and passing it along. "Pathologists know everything but it's always too late. And radiologists just look at pictures."

The jokes were a kind of cynical shorthand for comparing the specialties that the young docs were choosing and being chosen for. Most had been developing their preferences in the first two years of med school when they took classes and focused intensely on their books. A lot of the nervously athletic types were leaning toward surgery or emergency medicine, but the intellectuals who wanted a slower pace were looking at internal medicine or subspecialties. If you enjoyed puzzles, you might be thinking about pathology, cutting up dead bodies and checking what they had for dinner.

David, gentle, bearded, intensely intellectual, liked pathology. John and George, on the other hand, were dreaming about opening a general practice in a rural area, while Richard, athletic and nervous, leaned toward surgery.

We listened as John and the others joked about "clinicals," where they would follow a resident physician around a ward in small groups, stopping in on patients, testing out diagnostic techniques and enduring endless humiliation from the residents. This led to another set of socializing ritual

jokes.

"Hey Billy, what's a gomer?"

I knew that one. "Get out of my emergency room."

"How about pbab?"

I shrugged.. George smiled. "Pine box at bedside."

David jumped in. "What's a dotted 'Q' sign mean on a chart?

"Cue? Let's see -- a floor manager's signal in a television studio?"

Laughter. "Aw, man, you need to get hip to this stuff."

What?

"Its when the patient is so sick his tongue is sticking out like the bottom of the 'Q'."

"And when you see a dot after it ..." David took a pencil and drew a large "Q" on a napkin with a period after it, like this: "Q."

"The little dot is a fly on the guy's tongue. So people who are really far gone are dotted Qs.

"Ahh, daughted cues. You know, John ..." I said, suddenly remembering the two men who died in the auto accident and George's reaction, where he called them dotted Qs.

"I would have told you if you'd asked."

"Well, anyway," I said glibly. "Now if I go into a hospital I'll know exactly what to be afraid of."

For a cold still moment they all stared grimly at me. It was like suddenly being surrounded by skulls. I had never seen the hard light turn on so fast. George turned blazing eyes on me with scorching intensity.

"Everything," he hissed. "Be afraid of everything in that damned place."

Then they all laughed again, that hollow and bitter laugh. It caught in their throats, and their eyes squenched up in their faces, wincing, as they all thought at once about the sanitized horrors they had witnessed.

It was like Mark's laugh, the laugh that caught in the throats of cops and coroners and congressmen. It was raw and fresh, and intensely magnified by the stuff they were smoking that afternoon.

Now I was terrified, and in an attempt to come to grips with it, I opened an old wound. After a long silence, I said:

"Let me tell you what bothered me about the incident with the wreck where those two guys died. How is it possible for you to be caring, dedicated doctors on the one hand ..."

"You’re assuming that we actually do give a big rat's ass," Richard said grimly.

"OK, assuming that, and on the other hand you guys are so unfeeling and hard. Somebody's dying, you just leave them in peace. People are sick and you make fun of them. Hospitals screw up and you just shake your heads."

"Well, some people do take it too seriously," George said. "It's just medicine. Its not nuclear physics."

"You can’t let it get to you," David said. "You have to have some objective distance so you can make rational decisions. It's human nature."

"That’s what my journalism professors talk about. Objectivity. Like its some kind of sacred talisman. I think it’s totally schizophrenic. I think you have to care as much about the individual people as you do about your professionalism."

"Well, you're right in a way, but there are, you know, mitigating factors," John's voice moved down half an octave as he put his feet up on the table and folded his hands behind his head. "Be practical. You only have so much of yourself you can give away. And on a professional level, whether you care deeply for a person or not, you still have to act professionally. It’s expected. If a little compassion comes through that's all to the good, but they tell you not to let too much of it get out."

John’s gaze wandered out the window. He wasn't sure he believed it. The idea of professional objectivity had a perfect flaw, like Steinway piano with a cracked sounding board.

"There was a med student who almost dropped out last year," Richard said in his usual gruff tone. "Mrs. McGilicutty died on him and then Mr. Norman died on him and before you know it the guy is going ape. Next time he sees a terminal patient he starts blubbering all over their chart.

"Now there's a comfort to a dying patient. A blubbering doc."

The heads nodded sagely. "I remember him," David said. "After his resident called him a fool, he started beating his wife.”

"It’s all right now," Patty said provocatively. "She left him. She swore off men. Now she's getting it on with other women."

"Get out. How do you know that?"

“I got it on with her a week ago," Patty said.

The men sat for a moment in suffocating silence, but Susie giggled. “Jeez, Patty, now you’re scaring them.”

“It was the least I could do,” she said.

I turned to John. “OK. But really, what can do you do with all the pain that accumulates in the job?" I guess I just had to ask.

"Get stoned. Get laid. Most of all, get away."

But that was just a way of dodging the damned question. Lifetimes would pass before we understood that one.

❖

Chapter 11

Objectivity

Four years ago

About a week later, I was thinking about the psychotic split between professionalism and personal allegiances when I saw Ray the journalism professor again. He was walking down a rain-slick brick sidewalk. I ran to catch up with him.

“Excuse me, professor Chamberlin,” I said. “Can I talk with you a moment?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I think I have a problem with this idea of objectivity,” I said.

Ray smiled. “Well, you could always join an editorial staff,” he joked.

“No, seriously. How can we write truthfully about people if we don’t care about them?”

“Who says we don’t care?” Ray asked. “We just don’t have to show it. It’s not professional.”

“Well, you see…”

Suddenly, Ray staggered, slipped, and then dropped heavily on the sidewalk. I thought I heard something snap. He winced, then gasped as he struggled to get up.

"Oh, God, something's broken," he whispered. "I cant get up. Oh, man does that hurt. Jeez. Better call the campus cops or something. Wow. That really hurts.”

A small crowd started gathering, and a bystander went off to get the police. I tried to remember how to make people safe and comfortable after an accident. I got some books to prop up Ray's head and a coat to put over him, then I told the gathering crowd to back off and give him some room.

"You OK, Ray? How are ya?"

"Doing OK in here, Billy,” he said weakly, his pupils growing wider. In a few minutes one of the campus kiddie cops pushed his way through the crowd and, looking at me, said: "What's happened to him?"

Ray was still perfectly awake. "Ray, what happened?" I relayed the question.

"I slipped and I think I broke my leg," he said. “Maybe my hip.”

The cop looked at me again. "Tell him to lay still. We'll get an ambulance over in a few minutes."

The cop wouldn’t talk directly to Ray. The growing crowd also kept talking about him in the third person. "Poor guy, what happened? How is he? Anybody call an ambulance for him?" They were students and secretaries and other professors, and they all knew Ray. They didn’t even know me; I was just some student. But nobody would talk directly to Ray. They all talked to me.

The Beefy Ambulance Guys arrived in a red flashing cloud of glory. They looked at me with half inquisitive, half bovine faces. "How did it happen?”

"Ask him yourself."

They looked at him, and in sing-song kind of voice, they recited The Speech: "OK, relax, we're going to put you on a stretcher and take you to the medical school. Everything will be fine."

They looked at me and asked again. "How did it happen?"

"Ray, how did it happen?"

Ray started to answer but the stretcher thunked down next to him and rough hands hoisted his body sideways.

I looked Ray directly in the eyes. "Ray," I said. "This is objectivity. Only this time, you are being objectified."

Fear flashed across his face for a moment. "Come down to the hospital with me, Bill, so you can call my wife and keep an eye on things." I knew what he meant. A person couldn't check into the med school ER without losing their wallet, watch and wedding ring. It was Charon’s toll — even if they didn’t let you cross the river Styx.

I jumped in the back of the ambulance and kept my hand on Ray's arm on the way downtown. I kind of wanted to hold his hand but it seemed kind of a sissy thing to do. Ray told me about ten times how much he appreciated me going along, but I couldn’t think of much to say. I didn’t want to reassure him he would be OK. I choked on that lie. He handed me his watch and ring.

The ambulance pulled into the emergency room ramp and the Beefers dropped Ray onto a gurney. I snatched the wallet from light fingers, apologizing that I would need to give the hospital administrators his insurance information myself. Then I called Ray's wife to let her know what was happening and then wandered back into the warren of curtained-off prep rooms.

A familiar voice came from behind a curtain. "So, what have we got here?" John asked. I paused a second until Ray had explained what happened, then joined them in the room.

"Hey, how are you?" John asked. "You with him?"

I nodded. "My journalism teacher. Guess he broke something." Now I was objectifying Ray, and I felt that somehow I stumbled to the cliche as I faced the miracle of medicine.

"Ray, you let guys like this into your journalism school?" John nodded at me, laughing.

"Yeah, standards keep slipping," Ray said, smiling and shaking his head. “But he has heart, you have to give him that.”

"Tell you what, Ray. We're going to get you stable, put in an IV, mix in a little pain killer, then take you down to radiology in a few minutes and get a look at that leg. Probably take about an hour or so to figure out what to do next."

A mischievous look crossed John's face. "We're also going to try out an experimental procedure on you. Nothing radical. Just a little faith healing."

"Huh?" Ray said. But the nurses were already wheeling him down to radiology.

I stayed behind. "John, what are you up to?"

"That's right, I've been up about two days now. Want some Ritlin?" He pulled a plastic bottle of compressed speed out of his lab coat.

"What are you going to do to Ray?" I asked, gulping down a couple of the bright red pills.

He grinned. "You'll see."

After the X-Rays, they put him in a private room, and a few minutes later a figure in a white coat with a ghoulish mask waltzed through the door. In one hand was a bundle of incense and in the other a rattle with feathers and beads.

"Hey-ya, hey-ya..." he began chanting. "Healing powers of the universe -- Align! -- Bring our brother Ray back to Health. Hey-ya, hey-ha."

He danced around the bed, making elaborate gestures with the incense, waving it over the broken leg with a flourish. Ray's eyes were wide as saucers. "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded.

"You will heal, you will heal," John chanted.

At first I was terrified at the audacity of the act, here in the very sanctum sanctorum of an emergency room, but then I felt the laugh, that hollow hard-light laugh, raw and powerful, origin

unknown. I had never laughed like that before, and suddenly I couldn’t stop. It was all coming out now, and through the tears and the wonder, I was choking helplessly with laughter and sorrow and amazement at the sad pity of the human condition and John just kept dancing around the bed and chanting with that stupid mask.

Ray tried to sit up and sputtered: "This is outrageous," he said, but we could barely hear him. "This is a disaster."

"Ray," I said, half laughing and half choking, "try to relax. It's an experiment."

"What's an experiment?" boomed an authoritative voice coming in through the door.

In a New York moment the mask was under the bed and the incense was in my hand, not John’s. The voice came from a nurse, beautiful but gothically efficient. In fact, I recognized her. She was one of John's blind dates who never got past the Kerouac threshold.

"Billy here was just trying this faith healing technique." John handed her a rattle. "Ever see one of these?"

"John, this is just too much. Of all things. How could you? How could you?" He laughed, and looked at me as she stalked out. "Don’t worry. She'll get all worked up and get so emotional that nobody will believe her. Besides, what are they going to do?"

I nodded, hilariously aware that I had been nominated as scapegoat of the hour. As the security guards rudely escorted me from the hospital, John waved goodbye with a smirk. Ray’s wife had arrived and of course I gave her his wallet and ring and pointed her in the direction of his room in the ER.

Later, I hung up the mask in the Rockpile rogue’s gallery with a photo of my own face underneath — a souvenir of the afternoon I learned how to laugh.

As it turned out, Ray's femur was broken, but a month later, the orthopedic surgeon said he had never seen a bone heal so quickly.

"What's your diet like?" the surgeon asked suspiciously. Ray didn't have the heart to tell him about the ritual. Besides, Ray thought, that didn’t have anything to do with healing. And, objectively speaking, how could it?

❖

Chapter 12

Snowfall

Four years ago

Indian summer slid so quickly into winter’s deep that we were still in sandals and t-shirts, and had to rummage through the closets just to find jackets and shoes. Then one morning we woke to a crystalline quiet. Outside, the purple light played across a deep quilt of snow covering the dirt yards and truncated trees and rusting cars; our rude little town purified by some gracious act of celestial mercy.

As George and I gazed out the window at the miraculous transformation, John sang a bellicose version of Winter Wonderland, and we could hear the other inmates making vaguely human sounds in their rooms.

After a quick cup of thick black coffee, we hurried to pull on boots and gloves and emerge into the miraculously clean new world.

We felt like disembodied spirits hovering over a strange but familiar landscape, like ghosts at our own funerals. “This is what it must be like,” John said, “to die and see this world through the white veil of light before going on to the next.”

We stood silent for a moment, caught in the stillness of John's strange premonition. Then Patty's snowball caught John on the ear, and we returned to mortal pandemonium.

Soon a dozen neighborhood kids poured out of the other townhouses, yelling to each other in delight, the streets now theirs for one blessed day. They saw our small snowball fight up the street and held a conference. What say we gang up on the hippies? They all nodded and, in a moment, lined up behind the cars on the other side of the street.

We saw them coming and, with a Napoleonic flourish, John declared himself the minister of defense and directed the construction of a snow fort. He put Patty and Susie in charge of ammunition, told George and me to hold the left flank, and led Richard and David on a sortie to the right, down the alley, to come up behind the attackers.

The kids pressed their advantage, but as Patty and Susie joined the fight, the Rock Pile managed to hold the line. Then John and David and Richard attacked from the rear, and the kids retreated down the street. Several snowballs seemed to hit with unintended force, and one of the kids started crying.

Someone's mother, a wrinkled woman in hair curlers and a Chesterfield cigarette dangling from

her lips, slung open a window. "Y'all hippahs gotta lotta gaddam nehve, treatun our kids that way."

"Hey, it was all in fun," John said, bewildered at her anger.

"I'm calling the cops on you. Just cause you is high an mighty college boys don’t give you no call t' be hittin theyse kids."

They retreated in the face of her wrath, outwardly apologetic but inwardly choking with laughter, shaking off the cold snow, stomping back into the sanctuary of the Rock Pile.

They were just sitting down to lunch when a screech of metal and crunching glass came from the street. A woman was screaming.

They ran out to find the same woman, still in curlers, cradling her boy's head as he lay under a car. "Oh, gawd," she cried. "Jamie, Jamie." The man behind the wheel was aghast. "Somebody call an ambulance," he shouted. The car had gone over both of the boy's legs, and a circle of red blood spread out over the white snow.

Once again, John took charge. Short, sharp commands: "Billy, get a car jack. Suzie, blankets. George, get the bag. Richard, find some way to keep the car propped off him when we jack it up."

"We don't need no help from no hippies," the woman spat.

John smiled calmly. "Actually, ma'am, we're not hippies, we're medical students. And yes, you do need our help. We're going to save your boy's life."

Suddenly her anger evaporated. "I never knew..." she said, in awe. The Hippocratic magic of medicine opened doors even in a mother’s tormented mind.

John flashed a pen light into the boy's eyes. The pupils were beginning to dilate. "What's your name, son?" he said. "Jamie, Jamie Miller," he said with a whimper.

"Jamie, you're going to be all right. We're going to get the car off you, very slowly, and put you on a blanket. Then we're going to take you down to the hospital. O.K?" He nodded, then his eyes began dilating and losing focus. It was not a good sign. John looked around in exasperation, but then George arrived with the little black bag, and John rummaged for a tourniquet. David helped me put the jack in place. Moments took hours, yet every move seemed as gracefully choreographed as if we had practiced the routine for a week.

The car rose, Richard pushed a log under to hold it, then we slid the blanket under Jamie. We lifted him into the back of a pickup truck and John and George jumped on, still in their t-shirts. Patty threw them two sweaters she had retrieved from the house. I couldn't help noticing the way George clutched the symbolic black bag.

The boy's mother chewed her knuckles as she climbed into the front seat of the truck and turned to watch through the cab window as John cut away a part of the boy's sleeve to give him an injection. Then the truck skidded away down the slick streets, honking at intersections, the sound receding in the still winter air.

The neighbors stood around waiting for the police, dazed by the swift course of events. The Rock Pilers had never really talked with most of them. They had seen them all as rednecks, blue collar stiffs without much life or class. Now they were shaking hands, choking on their Marlboros, talking about young Jamie and assuring them of his excellent chances for survival.

I found myself falling back on a Southern accent I hadn't used for years, making gestures and guttural sounds I'd picked up on Saturday mornings long gone, when I would sit on the front porch of an old country store and listen to the old men talk about The War. It came back so quickly, yet I was surprised to be so easily slipping into the Southern cadences that I had unconsciously absorbed so many years before and very consciously shucked off as a teenager.

“Hey, we didn't know y'all was doctors," said one boney, runny-nosed neighbor who said his name was Ralph.

"Hell, we wouldn'ta called the cops on your party that time last year..." said another neighbor in a flannel shirt named Steve.

"Well, I know, we do look kinda scruffy," I said, pawing the ground with my right foot, hands in my pockets. "But then, y'all ever listen to the Allman Brothers? Or Lynyrd Skynyr?”

They nodded. "Favorite group," said Steve.

"Well, they're kinda scruffy too," he said. One of the other crew cuts nodded.

"Yep. Takes all kinds," he said.

I took this as a major concession and smiled as the man passed me a mason jar. I swirled the clear liquid, as I'd learned to do as a child on that storefront porch. “Nice bead,” I said. The large and long-lasting "beads" that formed at the edge of the surface indicated a high surface tension, which meant high-proof moonshine. They smiled at each other. I took a long swig and tried to pass the jar to Richard. He shook his head but wisely kept his New York accent to himself. A police cruiser pulled around the corner, and I passed the jar behind my back. It disappeared.

We left the police to Jamie’s family, and as we retreated to the Rock Pile, Richard looked at me with disgust. "I didn’t know you spoke redneck," he said sarcastically.

"Language, old boy, is the essence of diplomacy," I retorted in my worst British accent. "And besides," I said, returning to normal voice, "maybe we've underestimated those folks. They might be good neighbors."

"Good fences make good neighbors," he said.

"That's not the way Robert Frost meant it in the poem, Richard,” I said. “It was supposed to be sarcastic. And maybe we've got some fence mending to do."

❖

Good neighbors

It didn’t take long for the word to get around. Suddenly the Rock Pile was no longer the haven of hippie pariahs. People smiled and waved, and started called me, John and George by name.

Jamie's mom, Sarah Miller, actually looked human once she got the curlers out of her hair, and one night a few weeks after the accident, she invited the Rock Pile crew over to dinner.

It was ghastly, with fish cubes fried in Crisco, boiled frozen vegetables and instant whipped potatoes swimming in margarine. John seemed to relish it, though, and when the dinner was almost over, he asked Mrs. Miller what kind of health problems people had in the neighborhood.

"Well, there's old Mrs. Wilson, with her rhumatiz, and a'course, Charlie Steele with the TB. He goes to the Veterans clinic but they don't help none, so he just coughs and coughs. Sam down the block was a coal miner, so he got black lung benefits, which he says is pretty good. Most of the kids ain't had no shots, a'course, cause we're just workin folks without much money." She paused a moment. "Why do you ask?"

"Oh, you know, I come from the mountains, and we didn’t have much in the way of docterin' up there, so I thought it would be a good idea to study medicine and learn to help people out."

She snorted. "Most doctors I ever heard of just hang out at the country clubs and play golf and charge a fortune for quack stuff that don't work." She squinted at John. "I hope you're different."

He smiled. "I hope so too."

Charlie Steel and the turning Wheel

John trudged heavily up the Rock Pile stairs, past the Kerouac threshold, and collapsed into an ancient overstuffed armchair.

“Anaesthesia!” he croaked. “Stat!”

I got up from the kitchen table with and handed him a fat spliff. He lit it and John took a long, deep drag.

“Interesting day?” I asked.

John stared at the ceiling and took another drag, letting it out slowly this time.

“Just got off 24 hour rounds. But that’s not the weird part.”

“I’ve been wondering about the weird part,” I said.

John rolled his eyes. “Stopped by to see Charlie Steel. The guy Mrs. Miller told us about. I don’t think its black lung or TB. He’s a gomer. Looks like cancer to me.”

“What can you do?”

“I wanted to get him out to run some tests, but he wouldn’t go. I got a blood sample ...” he gestured at his bag “ ... but that’s just going to give a white cell count. Hey, Billy, stuff that sample in the fridge, would you? I’ll take it in tomorrow.”

As I took the tube full of red-black liquid into the kitchen, a thought struck. "John, tell me something. Why did George get out the black bag for that boy Jamie last week, but not for the guys in the overturned truck last October?"

John groaned, but I persisted. "You could just as easily have yelled for a tourniquet and 5 ccs of adrenalin."

"OK, Ya got us there, Billy," he said. "We had to establish credibility very quickly," George said as he came into the living room. "God knows what would have happened if we hadn't moved fast. Kid might have bled to death waiting for an ambulance to get through the snow."

"So the marcus welby routine comes in handy."

"On occasion," John grinned. "But you don’t have to believe it."

"I don’t know what I believe any more," I said.

“Ah, now. There it is, the seed of wisdom," John said with a gentle smile.

Free clinics

"Hey, why don't we set up a free clinic for this neighborhood?" John asked George and Richard a few days later. "You know, start seeing some of these folks on a regular basis."

"Why not?" George asked.

It wouldn't have to be anything formal, John suggested. Sometimes a sick neighbor would come over, or sometimes they'd invite him or George over for dinner and a chat about their arthritis. That was all.

Richard resisted the idea. "Look, they've got Medicaid if they can't pay, that’s tough. We’ve got studying to do.”

John looked at Richard and asked abruptly: "Why are you in medicine? Is it just an intellectual exercise? Something you can do with your mind, like going down to the gym?"

"Don't patronize me," Richard said. “I’m not going to go out and save the world next week."

"We just want to help our little corner of the world," George replied gently.

"You guys have a messiah complex. Just leave me out of it," Richard said, his eyebrows knotting together. “And free clinics suck.”

Patty pulled a copy of “Arrowsmith” by Sinclair Lewis off the bookshelf.

“You’ll like this, Richard,” she said, and started to read:

These clinics — outrageous … the people that go to them that can afford to pay — pauperize people. Now this may startle you — oh you had a lot of crank notions when you were in school, but you aren’t the only one .. Sometimes I believe I’d be better for the general health situation if there weren’t any public health departments at all, because they get a lot of people into the habit of going to free clinics instead of to private physicians, and cut down the earnings of doctors and reduce their number, so there are less of us to keep a watchful eye on sickness.

Everyone looked at Richard. “It’s true,” he said.

“Bullshit,” John said. “Free clinics make people too dependent? You can’t believe that.”

Richard sighed deeply and left the room. A few days later, he packed up and moved out of the Rock Pile to a plush apartment uptown.

"I'm through with all this hippie shit," he said on the way out the door.

"The nerve, the absolute unmitigated gall." George was incensed. "Hippie shit. Like it was a fad he could take or leave."

"What a phony," I agreed, passing the pipe around the table.

"Well, what is it?" John asked. "What makes us think it’s not just another fad? Are we any different from anybody else? Are we special?"

"Fair question," Patty said. “Forty years from now, what are we going to tell our kids? Hey, we lived in a colorful time. We took some acid, smoked a lot of weed, protested the war and screwed each other sore."

"Honey, do you need some cranberry juice?" asked Susie in a confidential tone.

Patty laughed.

"No, no, you're missing something," I protested. "There's something new in the culture, something better happening. "

"Oh right. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius."

"There's a change. Freedom. Honesty. Down with materialism, up with the working class, women's rights, civil rights, peace..."

"Dont forget peace," Mark said in his squeaky voice, exhaling a cloud of smoke. "Mmmmmm. Peeeeeaaace.”

"Peace, love and tie-die. Yeah, but hey, Lucy, we goin' to have some 'splaining to do."

"Look, we're emerging from the straightjacket of the 1950s. Sure, long hair and tie died shirts will probably seem as ridiculous as raccoon coats and straw hats. But at least we tried something new."

"Oh, yeah, we got that going for us," John laughed. “And tomorrow, we get going, so tonight we party like it’s 2020.”

Christmas at the Rockpile

By Christmas Eve the snow had melted and the Rock Pile was deserted. Everyone but Susie and I had a destination over Christmas break. My own family was too far away for a visit that year, and Susie hadn’t much family at all. Together we found a one dollar "Charlie Brown" Christmas tree and decorated it with popcorn and cutouts from magazines. We were broke, but we managed to scrape together enough for some wine and a loaf of French bread. Around nine we began thinking romantically, and by 9:30 we were about to roll into bed together. I was her last conquest, she told me. How had I resisted? She’d already slept with everyone else in the house.

“Patty too?” I asked.

“Mmmm, Patty especially.”

Then, out of nowhere, the sound of a choir came from the front porch.

"Silent night... Holy night..."

At first we couldn’t believe it. The neighbors -- those damned redneck neighbors -- were pounding at the front door and singing on the porch.

We pulled our clothes on and hurried downstairs.

Jamie, in a wheelchair, was holding a wrapped box while Sarah directed the choir. Steve and Ralph and the whole crew, and two dozen neighborhood kids, and even old Charlie Steele wheezing in the back, belted out the old classic like it was yesterday's country-western hit. They were totally out of tune and beautiful beyond words.

When the song ended, Jamie handed us a box. "Open it, open it," the group shouted. Inside was a mason jar filled with what Ralph called the "cleanest, purest Mumford county white lightning known to man." In no time it was making the rounds, even among some of the older kids.

"Well, we havn't got much, but you might as well come in out of the cold," Susie said. They gawked as they climbed the stairs, looking at the mural. "What does that mean, 'Is civilization really a bonus?" asked one. "And who is Kerouac?” But they made it past, no problem.

They found a guitar, and Steve pulled out a banjo, and Susie sat down to the ancient Rock Pile piano. We sang until midnight, and with the warm glow of moonshine lighting up the evening, Susie and I felt that these neighbors, too, were kindred spirits, ordinary people and yet extraordinary, each in their own way.

"Well, doc," one said as he was leaving, "y'all are a little strange, but you are OK."

I started to protest. Wait, no, I'm no doctor, I was going to say, but Susie caught my eye. Don’t spoil it, she was thinking.

An hour later we were together in bed, for the first time, and it was ecstatic. She drew me inside her like the vortex of a tornado sucking a church steeple up into the heavens.

A little voice inside me wondered why I was so lucky. I should have listened to that inner voice. I should have known something was up.

But moonshine will fool you that way.

❖

Chapter 13

Charlie Steele

Four years ago

Christmas morning came roaring in with a hangover and the nagging feeling that someone, somewhere, was pounding on something. The door. My tongue was covered in thick felt. Susie moaned next to me. The door. I staggered to my feet. The door. Then, I realized. Somebody was pounding. On the door.

I peered out into the foggy morning to see Steve, one of the neighbors. "It's Charlie," he said. "He's had a heart attack. Get your black bag."

I ran upstairs and picked up one of the bags in John’s room. Stethoscope. Thermometer. Homeopathic capsules. Tourniquet. A hypodermic and a couple of ampoules of something I couldn’t read. I shook my head and dropped the black bag.

Susie and I ran down the street to Charlie's and found him laying on the floor, gasping like a carp hooked up out of a stream. His blue face and his hands clutched over his chest told the story.

"You called an ambulance, right?" I asked. "Not yet," somebody answered. I wanted to scream. "Well, let’s do it."

Susie pulled his head back and cleared his mouth. I checked the pulse on his neck. Nothing. His breathing stopped. I pulled his head back and cleared his mouth. I put my mouth over Charlie's, pinched his nose and breathed hard, then pushed his chest down to expel the air. I breathed into his mouth again, then remembered that Charlie might have TB. No, John said it wasn’t TB. Gawd, what am I doing? I asked myself. Susie put her hands together and pushed hard on his chest. One, two three. Now breathe, she said. OK. Fifteen pushes on the chest. Now breathe, Charlie, breathe.

After an eternity, the ambulance crew arrived, shoved everyone aside and loaded Charlie onto a stretcher with all the finesse of grocers handling a sack of potatoes.

"Aren't you going with him?" Sarah asked.

"They'll take it from here," I said. "Besides, I'm not a doctor."

She looked surprised. "But I thought you were all doctors. What are you then?" she asked.

"I'm a writer," I answered. "And Susie here is a political science major. But John and George really are doctors," I said, "and so are some of the other guys.”

After a moment of silence, I felt I had to repeat it. “So yes, I’m just a writer."

She shook her head and looked deep into my eyes. "OK, if you're just a writer, maybe you'd better write his obituary."

And so I did.

Obituary for Charlie Steel

“Charlie Steele was a union man, a family man, a lifelong member of the Elks and a Marine Corps veteran of the Belleau Wood campaign of the First World War...”

That much I knew from the neighbors. He worked in a machine shop for 40 years, raised three kids, survived his wife and lived alone for another decade. He was an ordinary man, a quiet man, a good and decent man. What more could you say?

Sarah, with her curlers back on her head now, took me to his house the day after he died. "You don’t think he would have lived if John had been here, do you?" I asked her.

"I don’t rightly know," she said as we looked around for an address book to call his relatives. "I reckon not. He was old, and it was his time. You done your best, no need to fret now. Just do them justice with what you write.”

Do them justice. If you wanted to boil down the ethics of journalism, or history for that matter, you couldn’t. Find a better motto. Do them justice.

Sarah found a scrap book and a diary in the back room and I started reading while she and Susie called the relatives.

I expected the diary to start with Charlie's war experiences in France, but I learned that Charlie lied about his age and joined the Marines in 1913. A few months later he was sent to Mexico to fight revolutionaries who had taken over the Standard Oil fields of Veracruz. The entries opened a side of that war most people never knew about.

At one point, Charlie's battalion of Marines marched into an oil refinery in Veracruz. Charlie didn't think much about the right and wrong of it, at first, since he was only a private. But then something happened.

“April 22, 1914 -- The fight in the oil refinery has been intense. The captain ordered the first platoon into the tank area. They were all burned to death when the oil tanks exploded. We could hear them screaming but we couldn’t get to them. Our platoon managed to pin down the Mexicans. When ten of the surviving revolutionaries ran out of ammunition and surrendered, Sergeant Jackson formed a firing squad and ordered the men to execute them. We knew we couldn’t refuse, so when the order came to fire, we all aimed our shots well over their heads.

When the smoke cleared, the ten revolutionaries stood alive, against a brick refinery wall, and all the Marines and the all Mexicans laughed with relief.

Everyone laughed. Except the sergeant. He hollered at us, calling us old women and punks and sissies. Then he coldly executed each of the ten revolutionaries, one at a time, with his revolver. He had to reload after the first six, and the final four were praying in Spanish out loud while he did that. I hated him – we all hated him. And he knew it. This is what it means to be Marines, he screamed at us, as he finished the last four off. He had pulsing grey brain tissue splashed all over his shiny black shoes. My own boots were quickly covered with vomit.

The next day a delegation of one hundred unarmed campesinos, waving banners and singing, advanced on the refinery. The Marines blocked the road with bayonets fixed to their Springfield rifles.

"Go home," the captain told the campesinos. "Regressan a sus casas." When one of the campesinos pulled out a machete, the captain gave the order to fire. This time, Charlie was too scared to fire over their heads. He pulled off five shots, directly into the crowd, and saw men and women fall. Then, as the survivors ran, he sank to his knees and vomited again.

This time his sergeant stood in front of him, laughing coarsely. "Welcome to the United God Damn States Marines," he said. The men around him laughed, too.

During the rainy summer of 1914, Charlie decided he would learn Spanish and began talking with some of the Mexicans who sold serapes and souvenirs in the camp. He was especially fond of one young woman, Phillipa, who did the laundry. Charlie learned a lot of Spanish during those months. And later, he wondered whether she had been pregnant when he left.

The battalion got orders to evacuate Veracruz in November, with only a few day's warning. Phillipa hardly had time to say goodbye, and there was so much more in her eyes.

They didn't expect snipers on the march back to port, and in fact, there was only one shot. It caught the sergeant in the back of the neck, and he died puking and whining like so many of his victims. Nobody knew where the bullet came from. Nobody was sorry. They dumped the body outside a local funeral home and boarded the transports.

Within a few years they were in Flanders fighting the Germans. Charlie wrote with ferocious intensity about the muck and blood of trench warfare, about his buddies dying and getting wounded, about the gas attacks and the nighttime flares and the spikes of terror amid the grotesque plateaus of muddy boredom. He wrote about how they got to know some of the enemy, especially around the holidays, when men on both sides of the line would sing the same songs in different languages. One Christmas Eve they all sang Silent Night, then emerged from the trenches and met without weapons in no man's land, trading chocolates and cigarettes and brandy.

After that, when the Germans were ordered to attack, Charlie and the Marines would deliberately fire at their legs, rather than at their chests or heads. It was a strange war, Charlie wrote. Soldiers on both sides were trying not to kill each other. Besides, a wounded soldier cost the enemy more, the men in the trenches reasoned. And they hoped that, when they were in some German's gun sights, their restraint might be remembered. It seemed to have been, at least in Charlie's case. A bullet hit his knee during a frontal assault in the spring of 1918, and he was sent home.

Back in Virginia, war mania had taken hold, and many of his friends and neighbors called Charlie a hero. They wanted the details of his campaigns, the facts of life in the trenches, the glory of the war. He should have been pleased. But he was deeply depressed and confused. His minister avoided his eyes and advised prayer. But his doctor took a deep look and nodded. He was a wizened old man, wheezing as he climbed the rickety steps of his downtown College Station office, but he understood the problem. He tapped on Charlie's chest and said two words: “Soldier's heart."

He leaned back and looked at Charlie, his red eyes narrowing in sympathy over his wire rimmed spectacles. "After the war between the states, lotsa fellows got it," the old doctor had said. "Its partly guilt for having survived." Charlie nodded glumly. "Its also partly shock at the gruesomeness of war. And there's another thing. Its sadness that people think war is so grand and glorious, and seem to want another one. That’s the really sad part."

In later years, Charlie's friends at the VFW hall told him the other words for it: “shell shock” for WWII vets, and “the thousand yard stare” for Korea. It was "Vietnam veterans syndrome" for the modern age. But the old doctor's diagnosis made more sense to Charlie. Soldiers heart.

As the years passed, Charlie kept track of the dates of his marriage, the birth of his children, and the death of his wife. He wrote about the good times they had, the courtship, the quiet evenings at home, the movies, the first ride in their first new car. He'd tried to tell her about the war, but she didn't understand. And it didn't matter. She knew he needed to go down to the VFW hall every now and then, to talk with the guys about it, and to drink.

Some of the last entries in the journal, after his wife had died, were about Phillipa in Mexico. He wondered if she'd had that child. And he said that she had given him something that protected him, just a little, from the horrors of France. He had been a better father and husband because of her, he realized. Soldier's heart, for Charlie, had not been fatal.

❖

So I wrote an obituary that was straight out of the journalism textbook, although I inserted a small sentence about the idea of veterans coping with "soldier's heart." One of Charlie's friends, Spencer, said that he knew I’d read Charlie's journal when he saw the obituary. I asked Spencer how things were now, with the VFW and the Vietnam vets coming back.

"Strange breed. Can't tell 'em anything. Lot of 'em are long-haired, dope smoking weirdos."

"Was it any easier when you World War I vets looked and talked the same as everybody else back home, but inside you were, well, different?"

"I get your point, young man," he conceded. And he tapped his chest. "Charlie knew. It was enough for me."

"Do me a favor, Spencer. Tell a Nam vet. Tell him you know."

Spencer smiled. “That’s why we’re here.”

❖

Chapter 14

Soldier’s Heart

Four years ago

The Rock Pile crew drifted back from Christmas vacation one by one, and listened in fascination and horror as I told and retold my tale of Charlie's death. John laughed when he learned I had almost taken along a medical bag. "

Turning you into a believer, are we?" he asked.

“Yes. Shave my head,” I laughed. “Teach me the chants.”

John said, in an Eastern mystic voice: “Sorry we are not taking on any more patients.”

George added in Gregorian monk style: “You have an incurable condition but you should not give up hope…”

Mark chimed in: “Payment is due when services are ren… der… ed.”

I told them about the idea of soldier's heart, and Mark found all that particularly interesting, so I introduced him to Spencer and a few days later he ventured with him to the VFW hall.

And a few hours later, roaring drunk, Mark crawled up the front steps of the Rock Pile and passed out on the front porch. Spencer left him with a disgusted look. "He couldn’t stop drinking and talking about his war," Spencer said. "Part of the thing you expect younger people to do is listen, not just yammer on and on about their own problems."

Spencer looked at Billy and tapped his chest. "This guy has it bad."

Mark woke up sobbing the next morning. It was time, he choked over a cup of coffee, that they knew what he had done in the war.

“Its all right,” John said. “You did what you had to do.”

“No, I did what everyone else did. But I didn’t have to. It was mechanized butchery.”

“What are you talking about, Mark?” Susie asked,

Eyes rolled. With a look, George pleaded: No, Susie, don’t encourage him.

“Let's get this out in the open,” she said in a determined voice. “Mark, what is it you did in the

war?”

He started slowly, at a deliberate pace. “I was assigned to recon for a forward artillery unit in the mountains near Khe Sahn, up around the DMZ. Basically, you blast off the top of a mountain, then you land a few howitzers and stock up a few thousand rounds of ammo, and then anything that moves in a five mile perimeter you blow up. The recon team ..."

He sobbed, and his eyes glazed red as the memories flooded back.

“... The team would go out and see whether the targets were destroyed. Sometimes they'd ask us to pick new targets. A small farming village. A cluster of huts by the side of a paddy. Everyone that lived in the area was supposed to have been moved to a fortified camp, something they called a strategic hamlet. Those were actually just big prisons, but the Vietnamese were supposed to be able to go out and farm during the day and return at night, as if this prison was their home…”

He paused for a sip of coffee, then continued.

“You can’t do that to people. You can’t just tell them to move into a prison. Especially the Vietnamese. They have deep roots to a single field or piece of land. Their ancestors are buried there, and they can't even think of leaving. So when the soldiers round them up to go to the strategic hamlets, they would get away and return straight home.

“Of course, when they went home, they were considered Viet Cong sympathizers. So it was OK if we blew them up with a few howitzer rounds.

“I used to go out and find whole families -- women, children, grandfathers -- just blown all to pieces. They might have a cat, and some chickens, and few farm tools in their huts. Nothing more. And we would just waste them. For nothing. The whole goddam war, for nothing. The people who made us do this were criminals. Nixon. Kissinger. War criminals. And me too.”

Susie rubbed his back and put her head on his shoulder.

“Then I got transferred to another unit,” Mark continued in hoarse, distant voice. “It was called a ‘lurp’ – long range recon patrol. We would go deep in the forest, hiding, listening, creeping very slowly, very quietly. We had all kinds of listening equipment and night vision stuff. A lot of it was secret. Sometimes we'd come across a Viet Cong camp at night. If somebody could quietly kill the sentry, we'd sneak into the camp with our knives out and our M-16s strapped to our backs.

“Plunging your knife into the chest of a sleeping man makes a hideous, ghastly noise. They gurgle. Sometimes they cry out. You wear thick gloves and cup your hand over their mouths. They bite you as they die. The thing feels like nothing you could ever dream of doing. You think, why am I here? How could this be happening to me? How could I be doing this insane thing? But you’re a machine and you’re on automatic, and you can’t stop the madness.

“If you're lucky you'd get two or three before the rest start waking up. Then you'd just fade into the forest. The idea was to demoralize them or something. I don’t know. It was like some fiend from hell had entered my body. I was drunk with blood. I couldn't stop killing. Everyone who wasn’t wearing khaki green was my enemy.

“Then one night I was out on lurp, sitting quietly, listening with that predatory patience, when somebody crawled up next to me. I was surprised. I hadn’t heard him at all. I tried to put my gun on him but he was too close, and he was unarmed. He was wearing black pajamas, Viet Cong style, but I could tell he was an American. So, at first I figured he was an escaping prisoner. ‘Hey buddy,’ he says. ‘How are things back in the states?’

“I asked, and he said, no, he wasn’t an escaped prisoner. He lived with the Vietnamese. ‘Have you gone over to the Cong?’ I asked. ‘I know them,’ he said. ‘I don’t fight with them. I just live with them. I teach them English. I teach them about the American army and the marines, how they do things, what kinds of documents they use, that sort of thing. They get around pretty well, you know. Sometimes, if the Cong are in a hurry to get somewhere, they put on the US uniform and hitch rides on army helicopters.’

“He looked at me with this amazing intensity. He says: ‘You guys have got to stop this war. It’s destroying these people. Maybe you're not rounding up the whole population and putting them in gas chambers, but in the end it is the same. You've seen all the farm families that have been killed by these artillery barrages. You've seen napalm and b-52s and the carnage below. The war isn’t just dirty, it’s unclean, its a horror. It’s technologically disguised genocide.’

“Then suddenly he was gone. Like a phantom in the bushes. I tried to trace him with my infra-red goggles but it was like he had never been there. And I started thinking, maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe it was me, talking to myself, starting to go crazy out in the field. It was true I hadn’t slept for three days, being high on benzedrine and that heavy Vietnamese dope -- so I came in off long patrol and found a bunk and slept three days, and when I woke up it seemed like I was on a planet I didn't know.

“I saw everything in a new hard light. And I realized at that point, one way or the other, my own war was over. I didn’t care if I lived or died.

“I was wandering around the camp later that afternoon when a few stray mortar rounds came screaming in. I didn’t even dive for cover. Some of the shrapnel hit me in the legs and they shipped me out. On the way home during a debriefing I told a psychiatrist what I had been thinking. He said I was crazy, and made a few marks in a chart.

“Back in The World they treated me like a pariah. Even on the Army base. Especially on the base. The syndrome, they said. Got my honorable discharge and came here to college. Once my hair grew out people treated me great. By the way, nobody ever spit on me. I never saw a vet get spit on. That legend is crap, probably made up by some right wing asshole. But on the other hand,

nobody ever really cared about me, either. I never told ... anybody else ... not even other vets ... until last night...”

He had utterly collapsed, sobbing, shaking, bawling, his hidden face twisting in agony.

After a long silence, John took his hand. “You will heal,” he said, in a surprisingly authentic, stentorian voice, like Asclepius or Galen declaiming down through the centuries. “These wounds will leave their scars, but you will heal, starting now.” He looked into Mark's bloodshot eyes and smiled. “Its over. You're home. And you have to heal, so that other people can understand. And so that you can live a good life.”

Something came over Mark in that moment, a wave of energy, almost dancing inside his chest, a pure and intense healing power he could never have believe existed, even in a place like the Rock Pile.

And, in the following months and years, another one of John Connor’s miracles took root and flourished. Mark really was healing. And now he was pissed off, which, at first, seemed to be a good sign. It wasn’t.

Letter from an orchard

"You do have the gift, John," Susie said later, after Mark had fallen asleep on the couch. "You really do. So what are you going to do with it?"

"I’m still trying to figure that out," he said.

"You know, the natural foods co-op is working with a farmers marketing group," she said, gracefully pouring a cup of green tea. "Last fall, they had a problem with a some migrant farmworkers. Nobody could speak Spanish out there, so they called me in.

"They took me up into the mountains where there was a thousand acre apple orchard. Place called Woolwine. We went a long way down a dirt road and came to a cluster of quanset huts, you know, those long round metal buildings, sort of like half a tube.

"I went inside to talk with the migrants. You cant believe how these people have to live, crowded together, the cold, the stench. They have a hose -- no showers, no sinks, just a hose.

"Anyway, it turned out that one of the crew bosses had collected their pay and then disappeared. They were pretty upset about it. It was a month's wages for fifteen men -- about twelve thousand dollars.

"I explained the situation to the farm manager and he leaned back on a fence and thought about

it for a few minutes. He told me he could just turn them in, but that would be suicide. Only half his harvest was in. And he asked me, what if I pay these guys half of what they are owed for this last month? Would they stay with the harvest this next month?' The migrants were amazed.

"One of them said, 'Senor, clearly you are a Christian gentleman. You have treated us with such kindness, so we will be glad to stay. But we need your help with something else, too. We need a doctor."

"Ahh. I was wondering why you were telling me this story," John laughed.

"Well, we tried to get some of the local docs to come out, figuring you guys were busy studying, but after treating a few minor problems they said nothing was really wrong. I wrote one of the migrant leaders -- Julio was his name -- and asked what they meant when they said they needed a doctor. Apparently the letter was forwarded to Mexico. I just got his response. You want to hear it?”

“OK.” John looked at the envelope. "Its from Ok-SAK-A."

"No, that's Oaxaca, pronounced Wa-HA-ka."

"Where is it?

"It’s a state, like Nebraska or Wyoming are states in the U.S. It’s also the capital city of the state. Its in the western mountains of Mexico. South of Mexico city, halfway to Guatemala. The Pacific ocean side is jungle, the interior side is desert. Interesting place. So anyway, here's the letter:

"Dear Susie. It's been a while since we returned to our village. To answer your letter I have our priest, Father Juan Carlos, helping because my writing is not any good and I have also no English. When I said we need a doctor last year in the Virginia apple fields, they sent some men who made us stick out our tongues. They gave us a few shots. But it didn’t help nobody, really. We told them we had a bad situation that is making people sick. This situation is happening there in Virginia. The chemicals we spray on the crops make us sick. Also the water we drink gets the spray in it. We don’t want to come back, but we have no money and the children are hungry, and all we can do here in Mexico is grow corn and get poorer. We will go back to the Woolwine farm next spring. If there is any way you can help us find the kind of doctor we need, the kind that can heal a village, all the saints in heaven would smile kindly on your soul. Go with God. Signed, Julio de la Mata, San Jose, State of Oaxaca, United States of Mexico."

John stared at her, quietly, for a long moment.

“Do you hear something?” Susie asked finally, breaking the spell. “Sort of a bell-like sound. Just in the corner of your conscience.”

“You set me up, you witch,” he said, laughing with amazement.

Mark’s Song

A few days later, Mark burst into the living room as a few Rock Pile inmates were sprawled on couches, reading textbooks and studying for mid-terms.

"I've got a new song. You've got to hear it."

"Go on, man, we’re studying."

"Here, listen," he said, thumping his guitar.

Charlie Steel was long gone dead

After losing love's first thrill,

And then he died again, he said,

With the first man that he killed

Wondering if he should have gone

Soldiers heart beating fast and red

Gone on before his final song

Long before his friends were dead.

Fight for honor, they would mumble

Fight to keep the world at bay,

Charlie saw his old world crumble

And soldiers heart was all they'd say.

In the end, he was that glad to go,

To see his world stop spinning round.

This wayward place had lost its glow

Soldiers heart put Charlie down.

"Fabulous, Mark," said John. "You are healing."

"Other than that, your poetry is all screwed up," said Susie. "The meter is wrong. The rhymes are weak. You couldn’t turn that in to a freshman writing class."

"Poetry is emotion. This is what I feel," Mark said.

"Well, dont stop digging. I think you've just scratched the surface."

"Well, maybe I'll have to find another way to express it," he said, sounding disappointed.

"He's right, Susie," John said. "Suppose a man were wounded by an arrow, and when the surgeon arrived, he said "Don’t pull the arrow out until I know who shot it, what tree it comes from, who made it and what kind of bow was used."

"What's that from?"

"Buddhist philosopher. Majihima Nikaya.”

"So what's the point?"

"Well, of course, a person will die long before they discover all the answers. So if you say you cant express yourself until you are healed, or in the Buddhist story, you cant be a monk until you solve all the questions of the world, it will take all your life."

"So healing takes faith," Mark said. "I agree with John."

Susie kept her eyes down, then flashed The Look at John.

Oh you clever, clever man.

Ah, Susie

I was becoming more and more infatuated with Susie. Maybe it was love, or at least, that’s the

way it seemed to me. It didn’t matter that we weren’t a perfectly matched couple, or that she kept saying we were just “friends with benefits.” It didn’t matter that she’d jump back in bed with John or George from time to time. I could handle all that.

What mystified me was how two-hearted she was. One day she’d see things in a certain light, and the next day it was as if the links between us had all been broken. A week later those links would be back, and I could feel the physical connections between our bodies. And then suddenly they would be gone, and she’d be more interested in John than me, more interested in symphonic music than rock n’ roll, and more interested in romantic poetry than hard-edged fiction.

One day that winter I noticed a small tattoo of a fish on her ankle. It was gone the next week, and then back again in February. Red flags should have gone up. But I was studying for the make-or- break media law mid-term, and fully focused on the Red Lion case and the Sullivan standard. So, two weeks later, when I noticed the same spot was just a sore, I didn’t think to ask.

I remember catching her off guard when we went out to dinner one night. I opened a fortune cookie and read: “God has given you one face and you make yourselves another.” It was a quote from Hamlet, right before he tells Ophilia to go to a nunnery. Somehow it harmonized with my deep but unacknowledged suspicions.

“So you know, do you?” she asked, cryptically. “Or do you just suspect?”

But then she reached over and saw that these were really the words on the fortune cookie, and smiled. I remember that smile. She knew I was clueless, and I knew that it made her happy, that I had missed something important.

At the time, my conscious suspicions had to do with her lesbian friends and her bisexuality. But just as Charlie Steel had soldier’s heart, Susie had two hearts.

I knew that. I just didn’t realize how important it was, or what it meant.

❖

100

Chapter 15

The Puppy Burn

Four years ago

It seems to me that it’s not enough to simply be for or against some gigantic evil, like a bad law, or a warped philosophy, or a genocidal war. To really challenge the system, you have to have the imagination of a poet, the purity of a saint, and the bull-headed tenacity of a guy like Mark.

Well, two out of three wasn’t so bad. The purity thing was not for Mark.

Nobody was sure how the “puppy burn” started — Mark might have swiped the idea from a guy named Kelso in Richmond. But I can sure tell you how it ended:

Disaster.

It was too early for the tulips, but the dogwoods were budding in the park that mild sunny Saturday in College Station. They started drifting in towards the stage early, and by noon, five thousand university students sat on the grass or milled around on the lawn. Some carried signs that said "Fuck the Draft" or "Cluster bombs kill Vietnamese kids."

Boys with thin, fresh beards hawked copies of the Free Press. Girls with long blonde hair blew giant soap bubbles. Small knots of students gathered around guitars, singing and clapping. Others were simply reading books, cramming for spring mid terms, and waiting for something to happen. A microphone hummed from the open air stage. Now and then a small group would start the John Lennon song: "All we are saying, is give peace a chance." It would catch on and then fade. Sometimes a chant would start: "One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war." A group with red flags in the far corner chanted a counterpoint: "Stop the war in Vietnam, bring the war home." An empty space separated them from the rest of the crowd. Otherwise, you’d think it was a concert.

I waited on the sidelines near the stage with my trusty Pentax and a dozen rolls of film taped up to my camera strap like ammo on a bandolier, surrounded by a cluster of TV cameras and sloppy guys in thin ties, khaki pants and blue jackets.

The press corps, Gawd love ‘em. Hey, nobody else does. Or will.

101

“He’s really going to burn it?" one of the reporters scoffed.

"Good God, no," I told him. "It’s just a stunt to get everybody's attention." The other reporters shook their heads.

"I heard he was a screwball Nam vet," said one, waving a finger around his ear in the universal symbol for “crazy.”

"Too many nights in the old tiger cage is what I heard,” said another.

"There's some fraternity that's going to try to stop him," another said. "The police say there's going to be violence."

Dozens of police cars ringed the edge of the park, and hundreds of men with powder blue helmets thumped eager nightsticks against their beefy palms. Behind the safety of the police cars, men in rumpled suits took pictures of the protesters with telephoto lenses. The microphone squawked. Everyone waited.

John emerged from the crowd to say hello. "Looking for a good story today, eh?" he grinned at the other reporters. They scowled at his blue jeans and moderately long hair. I thought it was prejudiced, but then, journalists are often paid for their prejudice. They never dreamed, I thought sadly, that the next time they might next see him, he could be in a surgical mask, hovering over them in some emergency room.

I wanted to tell them that it was extraordinarily bad luck to scowl at a disciple of Asclepius. But just then a car pulled up next to the park, and Mark emerged, grinning, cradling a brown and white spotted puppy and a gallon marked “gasoline.” Dozens of cameras followed him as he walked through the parting crowd and climbed onto the open stage.

Silence descended on the expectant crowd like a slice of duct tape plastered across their faces.

“What?” his voice echoed across the park from a microphone, and he let the silence hang a moment. Then he said, in an incredulous tone: “Am I the only one who brought a puppy today?”

Nervous laughter rippled through the crowd as he hoisted the puppy and the can of gasoline.

"Ladies and gentlemen, should I burn this puppy now?" he yelled through the microphone.

"No, no," the crowd screamed in horror. A group of clean-cut young men in polo shirts began rushing toward the stage.

Mark put down the gasoline can and gently tucked the puppy into his backpack.

"No, No, I'm not going to burn the puppy," he said, looking at the young men still rushing the stage.

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"You guys came here to defend the life of a little puppy, but you are perfectly willing to stand by while innocent women and children get fried with napalm in Vietnam. You should be ashamed."

So that was the point that Mark had come to make, and he was walking away from the microphone when I saw the man transformed into the animal that had once ruled the jungles of Indochina.

Through the lens of my Canon, I caught the instant when the undercover police jumped onto the stage. A second frame captured a moment when their leader turned Mark sideways and pulled back for a roundhouse punch. In a third frame, Mark ducked expertly and kicked sideways; you could see the man's knee breaking, tip of bone protruding from his khaki slacks. Another one tried to choke Mark from behind in the fourth frame. The fifth frame caught his body sailing through the air. Six more frames caught the others quickly going down.

Mark’s killer instincts had taken over, and he was barely winded.

He stopped, barely winded, and stood the microphone back up in the stand.

"OK, OK," he said. "Lets settle down. This is supposed to be a peaceful gathering."

A rapid series of popping sounds, like champagne corks with grim attitude, burped up from the police lines. The smoking trails of tear gas canisters arced into a dozen points in the panicking crowd. Above the screaming, you could hear the sound of a perfunctory police megaphone squawking something about an illegal gathering and an order to immediately disperse. Our position near the stage gave us a clear view of a line of blue helmets moving in on both sides of the crowd. We ducked behind the stage as I loaded a new roll of film.

"Hey, guys, lets get the hell out of here," Mark said. He jumped off the stage and threw off his faded khaki jacket to avoid being spotted. I looked at the jacket lying there, for just a moment of incredulity.

“Why do you think I wear it all the time?” he laughed, and then pulled off a fake mustache from a spot he had shaved the night before. He ran quickly for a line of trees behind the stage. John and I followed, crouching, behind him. We all ducked behind a large bush as the line of angry police crashed past us into the crowd.

Mark's eyes were as cold as flint caught in a glacier. "Now get your shots," he said. I watched through the camera lens as nightsticks flailed the luckless students. A girl with blood streaming down her face cried helplessly on her knees. A sobbing boy held the middle of his forearm where it had been broken. Dozens of students fell limp on the ground behind the police line, some moaning, some lying quietly.

In front of the blue helmets, hundreds of students tripped frantically over each other in desperate, clawing backward retreat from the rhythmically flailing line of black nightsticks. The police were

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not arresting anyone. They were merely administering a good beating to those ne’er do wells.

"Spare the club and spoil the man," Mark spat out the old Phil Ochs line.

Sanctuary

The three of us ran down an alley, then jumped a stone wall and found ourselves in the back garden of the cathedral. An older man wearing a clerical collar looked up from a bench and snapped his book closed in surprise.

"What's this?" he asked.

"Sanctuary," Mark gasped.

"You've been reading too much Victor Hugo," the bishop laughed.

Mark laughed. "Please, just for a few minutes," he said. "The police have gone crazy."

"You might say that of the whole world, my boy," the bishop said calmly. "Tell me what is happening.”

Mark told him how his plans for a peaceful protest had erupted in violence. The bishop nodded sagely.

“So you’re Mr. Logaman, the man who planned the puppy burn,” he said.

“And you're bishop Ryerson, the conscience of the South“ he said.

The bishop nodded again, but looked at John, somehow sensing his urgency.

"Listen, if you don't mind, I've got to get down to the emergency room," John said. "I’m supposed to go on in a few hours, but they'll be needing me now."

"It's OK," the bishop said. "I'll drive you through the police lines.” Then he looked at Mark and his puppy, who was emerging from the backpack. “But you, and, um, Toto there, are going to ride in the trunk."

As the police waved the bishop's black sedan through a checkpoint, Ryerson turned to John. "So, now you're a doctor," the bishop said. “You’ve come a long way from Mumford. How will you use your gift?" he asked.

"Do you know me?” he asked.

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“I’ve heard of you. Father Stephen recommended you, I believe.”

John stared at the rapidly receding park, filled with the smoke of tear gas and the flashing blue lights. “I don't know what I’m going to do,” he told Ryerson. “My family was poor, not like most of the other guys in medical school. They all seem to have their careers planned out. They'll have beautiful wives and two point four children and Land Rovers and golden retrievers. I don't know what I'll have when its all over. "

"Your soul," the bishop said, smiling.

"What?" John said. "My soul? That's a little quaint."

"You know the scripture. What's the profit if a man gains the world but loses his soul? Don't lose yours. Don't surrender to Mammon. Don’t worship money. You know what I'm talking about. Find a way to use your gift. Serve others. Put aside your ego." Ryerson waited a moment for all this to sink in.

“There was a great movie with Frank Sinatra about doctors,” the Bishop said. “It was called Not as a Stranger. At one point the slick young city doctor visits a country clinic, and the head of the clinic looks out the window and sees a Cadillac convertible. ‘I was told you’d have a Cadillac,’ he says. And Frank Sinatra, who plays this city doctor, says ‘That’s just a front. The Cadillac has me.’ So that’s what I hear all the time from so many people. The Cadillac has them.”

John looked hard at the old bishop, searching the space around him for the hard light. He was, John decided, speaking from the true point, well past the Kerouac threshold. "The lost souls… ” John started to say, remembering what Father Stephen had told him.

"Are counting on you," the bishop said.

"You suppose I could pray for a sign?" John laughed.

"Just keep your eyes open," he said.

Once burned

As Mark emerged from the bishop's trunk at the emergency room, cradling the puppy in his arms, I snapped the last shot on the roll for our rogue's gallery. The caption: "Once burned, twice shy.”

A few hours later I dropped by the newsroom at the Progress Dispatch, hoping to sell my photos. Through a cloud of cigar smoke, the editor gave me the cold light stare.

“Journalism student?” he asked with a sneer, as if he had smelled something offensive.

“These are good photos. Here, take a look.” I shoved the stack at him.

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“Nah, we got plenty,” he said, waving me away.

“You don’t have these. This shows that the police created the riot. That they were just itching to beat the students.”

“Ah, kid,” he said, blowing cigar smoke into my face. “Aren’t we all?”

“Sir, I think you are showing prejudice.”

“Get out of here, kid. Your idealism is showing, and its unwelcome here.”

Next morning, only one photo graced the front page of the city’s daily newspaper: it was Mark, holding up his puppy in one hand and an empty gallon of gasoline in the other. According to the story, the police had rescued students from a violent arsonist intent on setting fire to all the dogs in the park. Two policemen, according to the newspaper, had been injured. One had his knee broken by a karate kick, the paper said.

I felt something deep in the back of my professional paradigm give way, like a crack in a bridge girder. And I thought, hey, what about the fifty people in John's emergency room that night? What about the “fraternity boys” who rushed the stage?

The student newspaper offices were open, and Gary, the editor, agreed to print some of the photos a week after the demonstration. But a day later, he caved in under pressure from the university's staff media "coordinator," who refused to let the editors identify Mark's assailant as an undercover cop.

"Gullible bastards," I had mumbled.

"Did you say something?" Gary asked when he told me later.

"What a disaster.” I said.

Later that night, as we passed the unpublished photos around, we talked about how to get Mark out of town. I wasn’t much help. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more the ground of reality fell away underneath my size 10s.

Journalistic objectivity turned out to be even more vacuous than medical objectivity, I realized as I sipped a cup of bitter coffee and stared at my unpublished photos.

The stomach-churning bit of insight was not that they myopically missed the truth, and that anyone could do this better, as I used to believe. Instead, the editors gladly papered over inconvenient facts as a kind of insult to the protesters. And they had been doing it all through the labor movement and the civil rights movement. Those editors weren’t stupid, and they weren’t being censored from the top. They were spiteful little creatures themselves, little gnomes happy to keep the minds of

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their fellow citizens locked up in chains of lies. Why was I studying to become another jailer of the human soul?

Susie wandered in and sensed my despondency, her eyes taking a long, deep look, and then sitting beside me on the couch. We were as silent and still as the last empty glass at a funeral wake, and she put an arm around my shoulder. I wanted to cry but I was too sad to mourn. After a while, my world slowly started to roll back over and right itself, like a gasping turtle too tired to keep flailing, but then somehow rescued by a gentle soul on a woodland trail.

“ Onward,” she said gently. “Onward through the fog.”

❖

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Chapter 16

The Orchard

Four years ago

Spring arrives like an absent-minded old friend in the rolling, wooded hills of the Virginia Piedmont. It never calls ahead; it's just there on the doorstep one morning, thickening the air, greening the elms and oaks and maples, and pretending that it never abandoned you, six months ago, to face that long gray winter all alone.

Only last week John had bundled into his thickest coat, blinking at the harsh winter sun as he walked to the medical college. A few days later, he looked up in surprise at a bright green canopy that had popped open overnight.

That spring morning, letters from the national matching program waited for him and 250 other fourth-year medical students there, among almost 15,000 nationwide. Sitting on a bench outside the school, he quietly contemplated the letter, then tore it open on an impulse. He read a few words and his anxieties melted into a puddle of relief.

A residency at the University of Virginia medical center.

He imagined his father reading the letter over his shoulder and patting him on the back.

Suddenly a red-tailed hawk called from high above the street, its piercing cry echoing amid the buildings. Kaaaww, kaww, kkawww, kaaaaw. He called back. Kakawww. Kaaqqqww. A passing nurse smiled quizzically.

John wandered into the coffee shop and saw David. The bearded gnome was beaming. "Columbia Presbyterian, by God," David half shouted. "I'm going to Columbia."

"It's UVA for me," John said enthusiastically. "Jeez, this is great. I can't work today. I'm calling in sick. Hey, I’m calling in well. Lets go back to the Rock Pile and get wasted."

"You bet your ass," David said.

George and Richard had also decided to play hookie, and the four of them passed a pipe of strong Mexican marijuana. George was bound for a family practice internship in Kansas City, of all places. Richard would practice emergency medicine at a hospital in Dallas. "God, its good to be alive," John giggled as he passed the pipe around the table.

Just before noon, Susie dropped by from work. "Look at you lazy bums," she laughed. "Pass me

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that pipe."

"How's the co-op, Susie?" John asked.

"Not bad. Oh, I meant to tell you. We heard from the migrants yesterday. There's a group of them back in Woolwine, pruning trees and spraying. Why don't you come out with me next Saturday? We'll spend the night under at a campfire, under the open sky. It'll be tres romantique.

Books in brooks

The road from College Station winds gently up into the deep green forests of the Blue Ridge plateau, past sermons in stones and books in running brooks, and deep into the wonders of a life exempt from public haunt.

What if those books and sermons had names, and wandering in the forest was like browsing in a library, John asked.

Susie laughingly pointed out one of the books in the running brook: “Look, it’s Achebe, you can see that Things Fall Apart.”

John recalled the 1741 sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, which was always so popular among the Primitive Baptists in the Blue Ridge mountains near his home. “You are a burden to the earth,” he quoted Johnathan Edwards. “The sun doesn’t shine so that you can sin…” And he laughed.

“Ok, I’ll see your ‘burden to the earth’ and raise you Rudyard Kipling,” Susie said. “‘There is no sin as great as ignorance.”’

By the time they arrived at the farm, last Saturday afternoon, they had plowed through half a library and a good bit of forest besides, as if they were re-creating the Aryanyakas — the forest texts — that were the basis of the Hindu Vedas.

After a long silence, John asked:

“Where’s the romance in this getaway? I’m not sure I’m feeling it.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Susie said.

“Just last week you said there was a desperate pull of love in your life,” John said.

“I said that?” Susie asked, with a little too much surprise in her voice.

But John missed it. What he heard was that she was feeling depressed, and didn’t love him as much. What he didn’t hear – what he should have heard, he later realized – was that she didn’t

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remember what she said last week. And how was that possible, for a woman that had hoped to spend the night under the stars?

Migrants

She drove into a parking lot near a cluster of rusted Quonset huts and cramped trailers.

“Tin city,” John said under his breath. “Still looking for that romance.”

The migrant workers huddled around a 55 gallon barrel “campfire” and fed small apple branches into the quickening flames. Their hard, lean faces and torn clothing told John of a life spent in backbreaking field labor. Yet their ready smiles and easy gestures told a second story, not as easy to read, about lives spent supporting family and friends; lives that John made himself imagine as remarkably similar to his own, and the connections linking his family in Mumford, and his own small group of friends at the Rock Pile.

He walked over to the men and put his hands out above the barrel to warm them.

"Buenos dias," he said, "Como estan ustedes?"

"Bien, senor," they murmured warily. John smiled. They think I'm some kind of overseer. He waved at Susie in the pickup truck. "Hey, c'mon, I need a translator."

Susie walked over to the men. "Hola, Susanna, que uvo?" said one of the younger ones. "Que pasa?"

After talking in Spanish for a moment, Susie returned to English and introduced John to the group. "Manuel Diaz, here, is making his first trip to the U.S., but most of the other guys have been here at least once. There's Gabrielle, Jaime, and Pedro," she said. "They were all here last fall for the harvest. Oh, and over here, this is Julio de la Mata. He's the one who wrote to us last winter." A thin young man with an easy grin and a thick mustache shook his hand enthusiastically.

"Bienvenido," Julio said. "We're so glad you're here."

She asked a few more questions in Spanish and turned to John.

"They say all the women have stayed behind for sheep shearing and corn planting, but they'll be coming in a few weeks. For now, these guys have been spraying thousands of acres of apple trees with this stuff." She pointed to a gallon sized paint can nearby. John picked it up and under the label’s skull and crossbones, read: "Diphenyl amine (DPA). Poison. Fungicide and insecticide. To be applied only in proper mixtures by licensed technicians using proper protective equipment."

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"So, do these guys have proper protective equipment? Like masks or gloves?" John asked.

Susie translated the question, and the men laughed hilariously.

"Are they licensed?" Again, the men laughed.

"Where do they mix the chemicals?" John asked. They pointed to a hose in front of the Quonset hut. "Is this the same place you wash your dishes and take your showers? he asked. They nodded.

Susie smiled sardonically. “Now you’re getting the picture," She pulled her camera out of a backpack. Near the Quonset hut a man backed a farm tractor with a spray wagon up to the hose and began mixing chemicals. Susie snapped off several shots.

"What's your plan, Susie? What’s happened to our romantic evening?"

"We've already talked with the farm operator. He says that he has one license and that's all that the government requires. He also says the company he works for doesn’t have a budget for a lot of protective gear, and the Mexicans are all engaged in a man's work, and they should know how to take precautions if they want."

As they were talking, one of the men leaned over the spray wagon and plunged his hands deep into the milky-white mixture. "Pump's clogged. They have to reach in and clear it. He'll be OK -- he can use the hose here. Out in the field, they just have to keep going."

"What happens then?"

"Usually the guy who does it gets very sick for a day or two, fever, vomiting. Of course, he doesn’t get paid if he stops working, so they hide the sick ones way out in the orchards."

John was incredulous. "You mean they get sick from these sprays, then they have to hide when they can't work? They are sacrificing their lives for this tiny paycheck, and they don’t even get paid for the time they spend throwing up? Is this legal?"

Susie looked grim. "The problem is that we can’t document their illnesses because if they get officially sick, they get taken off the payroll."

John rolled his eyes. "There's more," Susie said. "We can't go to the manager, or to the agricultural extension workers, or to the people who regulate the pesticides, because the minute somebody complains, the owners call the "migra" -- the Immigration Service -- and they simply arrive and deport all the undocumented workers. Which, of course, solves the problem very nicely. "

"So we do a little documentation on our own, eh?" John said.

"Exactly," Susie said, smiling. "So, take this camera in your pack. Some of the men will take you to

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where they hide the sick workers. Write down the symptoms and treat them if you can. They'll hike with you out to a side road where I'll pick you up around noon tomorrow."

“So much for romance.”

Susie smiled. "If I don’t get going, the boss will come down and throw us both out. They already saw the truck going in. So if they see me leaving, we’re good.”

John just shook his head. "Hey, I don’t speak Spanish."

"Here's a dictionary,” she said, handing him a little red book. “Buena suerte. Good luck."

Apple spray

John followed Julio and Enrique through rows of blossoming apple trees, ghostly white in the gathering twilight. Beyond the most remote orchard, up a densely forested slope, he walked on for half an hour until they reached a small clearing. Several green plastic sheets hanging from trees served as shelter, and a few migrant workers hunched over a small Sterno stove cooking soup. Two or three others were lying behind them, wrapped up in blankets despite the warm night.

Between his halting English and John's dictionary, Julio and John just barely managed to communicate. "These guys laying here got sprayed pretty badly yesterday. They have been shaking and -- como se dice? -- they are hot, muy caliente.” John pulled out a thermometer and read one man's temperature. "Ouch," he said, shaking down the thermometer. "One hundred three." He used a flashlight to look at the man's pupils.

John also noticed blue stains around the man’s fingers. “What’s that?” he asked.

“When you use this stuff called DPA, it can turn your hands blue if you smoke, or if you have shot a gun.”

“You mean it shows gunpowder?” John asked.

“Yes, exactly. Sometimes the police use it to tell if a man has been shooting a gun.”

John looked again at the shivering man.

"How often does this happen?" he asked.

"We take turns. Everybody gets the spray sickness once or twice," Julio said.

"How long does it usually last?" he asked.

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"A few days. Long enough to make the crew bosses nervous. If they take you to the hospital, that's it, you get a free ride back to Mexico. And no pay. So you have to hide out here until you are better."

"Have you done this?"

"Si, senor. Once."

"How did you feel a week later? Were you back to normal?"

"No, I did it a month ago. I still feel sick. I can't eat right, even if we did have good food, I just cant keep it down."

Using his flashlight, John scribbled a few notes onto his pad and checked the other two shivering men under heaps of blankets.

Then he joined the men around the sterno can. A familiar smoky smell came from a pipe the men were passing.

"Fumes mota?" asked one. "You smoka mary jane?"

John smiled. "De vez en cuando," he said, remembering the words for "every now and then."

He took a deep drag and noticed the hum of cicadas for the first time. Their insect song seemed to rise and fall rhythmically, like waves of sound. He looked up and saw the constellation Andromeda through the pines, and recalled the Greek myth about the young princess chained to a rock. She was going to be sacrificed so that the kingdom could survive, but then she was rescued. And, he wondered, what Persius could rescue these people and break the chains that held them?

He tried to express his idea in broken Spanish and pidgin English, but he coughed on the strong Mexican pot and the men laughed. They asked if he was really a doctor, and what kind of doctor he was, and what kind of training he had, and why he wore his hair long and smoked pot and wore blue jeans like them. They were incredulous that a man who was a doctor would be so much like them, or that he would want to be different. Gringo doctors are rich, aren’t they? No, no, not the ones that live in the country and treat poor people, he said. I'm like an old time doctor, not the fancy modern doctors that drive sports cars.

"The old time doctors lived with the people. Loved by all and paid by few, as the saying goes. They took vegetables and chickens when people didn’t have money." He paused as Julio translated. "They cared more about keeping people healthy than they did about making a lot of cash. It just wasn’t as important back then. Besides, there wasn’t as much to buy, maybe a horse and a buggy and a house. What else was there? No radio, no phones, no televisions."

"Sounds like San Jose," said one, laughing.

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"Tell me about San Jose," John said.

"We got more horses than cars, that's for sure," he said. "Its in Sangre de Christo mountains, in the state of Oaxaca, on the west coast of Mexico. The mountains are very high in some places, three or four thousand meters. San Jose has about a thousand people, maybe another five thousand or so in the farms around the town. We have a couple of big celebrations every year, Easter, Christmas, the Day of the Dead, and whenever the movie truck comes around."

"Movie truck?"

"Its a truck with a generator, and they show movies. It costs five centavos to get in. Everybody goes."

"What kind of doctors do you have there?"

Julio looked blankly at John. “Doctors? We don’t have any doctors. There is a hospital down in the main town of Oaxaca, and there is a church clinic in a small town at the base of the mountain, but there are no doctors for maybe two hundred kilometers.”

"So what happens when somebody gets sick?"

"First we ask Carmellita to come. She’s my aunt. She is also our bruja, how do you say, our healing woman. Witch. She knows a lot about what plants can heal you."

"If Carmellita can't help, sometimes there is a pharmacist who has some drugs. A lot of times people go to the hospital, but they don’t usually come back. Better to die at home. The hospital is a strange place. They don’t let your relatives in to see you, except for an hour or two every day, and they put you in a bed with scratchy white sheets. You cant get up unless they let you. Its not a place to get well. Its like a prison or something."

"Maybe I can come to San Jose some time."

"You would be very welcome. Mi casa es su casa. My house is yours."

Kinda human

In the morning, Julio walked with John out to the road where Susie was waiting. They drove back in silence, John brooding and staring out the window. When the photos were developed, and the case notes typed up, John asked me to take a look into the situation and write a news article about it. I interviewed the farm manager and the local agricultural extension agent.

"Just like you said," I told John. "The manager blames it on the market. The extension agent blames

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it on consumers. Listen to these quotes: ‘We know there are problems, but we have to live in a competitive market. If we started spending a lot of money on workers, we would have to sell our produce at a higher price.’ That was the owner. Here's the agent: ‘If people would accept one worm in a hundred apples, we could cut pesticide use by 75 percent. But everybody wants perfect apples.’”

"This is hard," John said, half smiling at Susie. "I've known these kind of people, these farm owners and agents, all my life. They aren't bad people. They know the migrants should be treated better. They think there's nothing they can do. But what would it take for the agricultural extension service educate people about low-pesticide produce? Why can't farm owners set up regulations, or some kind of co-op program, so the migrants don’t have these problems. They just don’t have the energy to try to change the system."

"People just haven’t got the courage,” Susie said. "The gumption. The cojones. The brass..."

"The sand ..." I said with a grin.

John started singing from a familiar movie.

“Just because I’m presumin that I could be kind-a human, If I only had heart …”

"A brain.." I laughed.

“The nerve …” Susie sang.

❖

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Chapter 17

An informal hearing

Four years ago

The migrant story found a place on the front page at the Progress Dispatch the next week. "Poisoning common in state apple orchards," a headline read. The photos were credited to John Connor, and I quoted John and Susie in the article saying that the growers and extension agents were taking chances with workers lives.

A few days after the article was printed, the medical school’s president, Warren Winslow, summoned John into his walnut paneled office. John found himself sitting in a leather armchair across the desk from Winslow. Facing him from Winslow's flanks were John’s medical school dean, Joseph Strumpet, and his anatomy professor, Frank Gillespie.

"I've called you in, to this informal hearing, because there have been serious complaints about this newspaper article," Winslow said, thumping it on his desk. "I've also looked at your record and talked with your dean and your academic advisors here," he said, nodding to Strumpet and Gillespie, "and you seem to be an exemplary student. Your idealism and enthusiasm for medicine is remarkable, sometimes admirable."

"Thank you," John said dryly.

"However, if you felt compelled to perform public health research on migrant farm workers, why didn't you approach it scientifically? Why didn’t you do a literature review, apply for a grant and spend some time doing epidemiological studies? Why this shoot from the hip stuff? And journalism – journalism, of all things. That’s pretty low. I've been getting some pretty angry calls about this."

John took a deep breath. "First of all, I didn’t write the article."

"But you did make materials available for it, you lent your name to it," said Strumpet.

"OK, that's true, but its not quite the same thing." The three men stared at him with blank faces. "Look, I heard about a specific problem and I investigated it ..."

"Clandestinely...." Strumpet said, accusingly.

"... in the way that Hippocrates would have done. I went out and saw it with my own eyes. And by the way, I didn’t spy on the migrants. They welcomed me."

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"But you sure as heck didn't ask permission to go on that farm. That was an invasion of private property."

“The migrants are not someone else’s property,” John said. "And you seem pretty upset by this."

"Son, do you have any idea whose farm that was?" Winslow asked. John shook his head. "It belongs to Harry Byrd. Ever hear of the Byrd machine?"

What Virginian had not heard of the Byrd machine? It controlled the jobs of every county clerk, every sheriff, and every judge in the state. Byrd was the great feudal lord of Olde Virginia, the patron of every plantation poltroon south of the Potomac.

"They are thinking about suing you, and the newspaper, for libel and invasion of privacy."

"I went over that with an attorney already," John said, lying. Actually, he'd been pouring over my media law book that morning and probably absorbed more in an hour than I had learned in a semester. "The name of the farm and the owner wasn't in the story. If there is no identification, there can be no damages, and hence, the tort is moot. It'll get thrown out of court."

"Mr. Connor," Winslow said in a condescending tone, "this is serious. They can choose the court where the case will appear. They can also argue for indirect identification and libel per quod."

"It could cost you plenty, John," Gillespie said, speaking up for the first time.

John smiled. Judge, bad cop and good cop, he thought, looking at Winslow, Strumpet and Gillespie. He felt strangely detached and stared out the window at the town below.

"The important thing for the reputation of the university is that you apologize," Winslow said.

"For what?" John said. "Treating poor people who are sick? For talking to a journalist about it? I don’t think so.”

"We're not here to play games," Winslow said. "You have offended powerful political interests, and it has put us in a bad light. I'm afraid that if you don't apologize, we'll be forced to take disciplinary action. You could be expelled from medical school."

John stood up and started to speak.

Gillespie cleared his throat. "You know sir, Conner here has passed his boards and he is finishing clinicals now. He's a week away from graduation. His grades are exceptional. He may sometimes lack political judgment, but this is certainly not the kind of breech of medical ethics that would indicate an expulsion."

“Well, thank you, Doctor Gillespie," Strumpet said dismissively.

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"Let me be a little more specific," Gillespie said in a pointed tone, fighting his growing anger. "What I'm trying to tell you that the faculty would not go along with an expulsion under these circumstances."

Strumpet gaped at Gillespie. Winslow shot him a furious look. John looked at him with new admiration.

"Connor, you can't bring yourself to apologize for this?"

John shook his head. "No, sir. Not when people are so badly treated. I have to stick to my guns, so to speak."

"Very well, have it your way. But I see here in the file that you were scheduled to begin an internship at the University of Virginia."

"Past tense, sir?" John asked.

"Very past tense, you, you ..." Winslow searched for a suitable word and, not finding it, waved his hand in dismissal. "Ah, get him out of here."

"I have something more to say," John said, standing up to leave. “This just shows what Karl Virchow used to say. Politics is nothing more than medicine on a grand scale, and doctors are the natural allies of the poor. Thank God, you can’t stop that."

After John left, Gillespie stood up. "You may not agree with him, but this young doc has a strong conscience," he said. "He stands for something. He is what medicine is all about. Yes, he's different. Hell, we're all different. But you have to respect him. I just wish more of our students were like him."

"I don’t need a third year med student quoting Virchow to me, and as for you, Gillespie… ” Strumpet’s massive jaw worked like a bass on a sandbar, so angry he could hardly think.

Gillespie laughed, thanked Strumpet and ran out to catch John in the hallway. Together they walked out of the medical office building and onto the street.

"Thanks. I didn’t expect that," John said.

"From me, you mean?" Gillespie laughed.

"You stood up for me,” John said. “I thought you didn't like me.”

"Actually, I don’t like you,” Gillespie said with wry sort of smile. “Or at least I didn’t. You’re a snotty-nosed kid that needs to learn some manners. But manners can be taught. And people grow up. On the other hand, compassion and integrity, that’s something you either have or you don’t."

He gave John a wry smile.

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"What about you?” John asked. “What will the dean do?"

"Oh, the usual. Give me a bad schedule for a semester. Move my office into a broom closet,” he laughed. “Nothing serious."

It’s never over

They headed for the coffee shop, and Gillespie bought a couple of cups of pudding-thick black java.

"Well, I'm just glad it’s over,” John said.

“Oh, don’t say that. It’s just begun, young man. Welcome to the fight.”

They sipped in silence for a moment, and John thought back to his evening with the migrants.

“I’m wondering about something the apple growers told me,” John said. “They’re using a pesticide called DPA. Ever heard of it?”

“Oh sure,” Gillespie said. “Diphenyl amine. Nasty stuff. We used it for the paraffin test when we did pathology work for the police years ago. It shows if someone has fired a gun. There are better techniques now. The Griess test, the Harrison-Gilroy test, a few others.”

“Was there something wrong with the DPA test?”

“It also shows tobacco smoke, so it was challenged in court a few times. Still, an experienced pathologist can tell the difference. Gunpowder shows up dark blue, in a spotty sort of pattern you’d expect from the blowback from powder grains. Tobacco smoke is uniform, and DPA reveals a lighter color blue. Try explaining that on a witness stand.”

“Something else I’ve been wondering about, if you don’t mind a personal question,” John said. "Why did you get into pathology in the first place?"

Gillespie sighed deeply. “I was a surgeon during the war in Europe, in the Italian campaign, and then later in France, in 1944. I was up to my elbows in guts and gore every day. We all hated the war, but we were doing out bit. I was glad to work on our boys when the Nazis had wasted them, but, I guess, the pain started getting to me. People moaning, crying, screaming all the time. I have a hard time coping with people in pain. I started drinking, maybe you could say drinking a lot, and then my hands started shaking, which is very bad for a surgeon. When war was over, I had to find something else to do. Pathology seemed OK because the patients were never in pain."

John looked at Gillespie with new fondness in his eyes. “You know, the med students are always

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talking about this," John said. "We've all had a hard time coping. I heard that one student was going home from the oncology ward and beating his wife."

"It happens. It's the compassionate ones that suffer the most. That's going to be your problem, too. Maybe you'll find a useful specialty that can suit you, like I did. I hope you don’t turn into a drug addict or an alcoholic like some guys. No, I don’t mean smoking a little pot. And by the way, I could always smell that stuff on you guys when you came into the lab." John blanched. Gillespie smiled ironically.

“I’m talking about heavy drugs. The serious stuff. Morphine. Cocaine, amphetamines, barbiturates. My guess is that you'll find a constructive way to cope. Its not easy. It's all part of becoming a doc."

John stared at him with new appreciation. "It's funny to be hearing about these things now, only a week away from graduation. I wish I had gotten to know you better. And, ah, sorry about the scene in the anatomy lab last semester."

"You know, maybe you can learn some manners, you weirdo," Gillespie said with a grin. "Too bad about the internship. So -- how's your Spanish?"

“What do you mean?” John said.

“Ever hear of the Indian Health Service?” he asked. “You’re going to need an internship.”

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Chapter 18

Looking for a sign

Four years ago

That night, John dreamed of soaring high above the Mexican mountains. He could see a train of donkeys loaded with burlap sacks stumbling slowly down a rocky path. A mile below, a truck raised a light brown cloud of dust, and he heard its gears grinding as it sped down a dirt road. From a cluster of whitewashed houses with red tile roofs he could hear dogs barking and roosters crowing. In the far distance, beyond the hills sloping down into a thick green forest, he could see the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean shimmering in the afternoon light.

A large raven circled up from the village and flew over to him. The look in the raven's eye was penetrating, challenging. This is my land, the raven seemed to be saying. You might be welcome here. Or maybe not.

John was flustered and began losing altitude, but suddenly found himself bouyed up on a warm ocean current. He put aside his doubts. I am supposed to be here, he said. I’m looking for something … wisdom, or maybe destiny.

Corre, gringo. Run. And I hope you find what you’re looking for, the raven said. Watch for a sign from the feathered serpent.

Then the raven called two times, and the sound echoed down through the mountains below: Awwkkk, awwwkkk.

John answered: Kaww, kaw, kaw, kaw.

From out of the blinding sun, flashing golden reflections, an enormous feathered snake floated towards him. It smiled. But suddenly a buffeting wind blew up around him. He turned, and George was shaking his wings. What was George doing up here in the clouds? Where was that crow?

"Wake up, John. Wake up."

He heard Susie’s laugh.

"What? What?" he sputtered.

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"You were dreaming," George said. "You were making your hawk call, really loud. You woke us all up."

"Scared me half to death," Susie said. "Who's this crow you were talking to? What's this about feathered serpents?"

The Bish

Bishop Ryerson welcomed John into his office like an old friend and took him out into the garden behind the cathedral.

"I'm really not sure why I came, but you seemed like someone who would understand my problem," John said.

"Advice is cheap, my young friend. Have you been given a sign, the way we discussed?"

"I've been given the left foot of fellowship," John said grimly.

"I read the article, and I can guess what the medical school did."

"I had a great internship lined up."

"And now you have to find something else. But you didn't answer my question. Have you had a sign?"

John told Ryerson about the dream.

“The feathered serpent is Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of wind, fire and wisdom," said Ryerson. "He was the emblem of a warlike tribe, but he was essentially a force for good. The crow in your dream might have been someone you will meet."

"That sounds pretty mystical for a Catholic bishop."

“Well, my son. Nothing is beyond the power of God. The mystery of this world just grows and grows as you get older. Wise men seek God in many ways."

“Do you think Father Stephen has found God?”

He was silent for a long time, then finally said: “I can’t believe what happened out there in Mumford County. Thank God it didn’t get into the newspapers.”

“You had to compromise with Rachel Janney, didn’t you? About the abortions, I mean.”

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Ryerson didn’t answer, but opened his eyes, deeply. It seemed to John he was staring into a well of sorry so deep and so vast that it was beyond the capacity of one person to carry. So this is who a bishop can become, he thought.

“Just as I carry this spiritual weight of many dark confessions, you will also learn to carry a weight.”

“I don’t know if I can handle that.”

“Weight is not always a bad thing. There is a story I use sometimes in sermons. It’s about an Indian tribe that lived near a very strong river. Any time someone fell into the river, they would be swept away, sometimes never to be seen again. One day, their enemies came for them, and the people had nowhere to go. They had to try to cross the river. They thought they would all drown, but they decided that at least they would drown together. The children and the very old ones climbed on the back of the younger, stronger ones. And when they waded off into the river, they found that the weight of the children and the older ones kept them from being carried off in the current.”

“So, sometimes, the weight is a good thing,” John nodded and mulled the story over for a while. “OK,” he said. "Suppose I went to the Indian Health Service? What would I do? What would happen?"

"Well, at least you could innovate. Don't look so surprised – I didn’t say experiment on people. I mean, try to find ways to make the system work for the people. Have you ever heard of Carroll Behrhorst? Not many people have. We had to hide his project from the death squads. It all started in the ‘60s when a Protestant missionary service sent him to Guatemala. And he found that people were just going to the church to get free medical care from him. Although they were very well meaning, the church people were basically using him to further their own work. He felt as if he was just, I don’t know, bait or something. So, he quit, but he couldn't quite leave Guatemala. The people and the land enchanted him.

"One day he visited a little town in the highlands, where there are no doctors, he was sitting on a park bench and he was talking with a few Mayan Indians, and they found out he was a doctor. They took him to see a young boy who had pneumonia. Behrhorst gave him some antibiotics and prayed. And soon there was a line of people every morning at his park bench.

"You have to understand, Mayan Indians do not like hospitals. They don't like the idea of abandoning their family and leaving them in these strange hospital wards. It doesn’t look like a healing place to them. They had been resisting western medicine for many decades. What Behrhorst did was very different. Rather than come in with money and set up a clinic on a pre-conceived plan, he started asking people what kind of clinic they wanted to have in their town.

"Within a year, Behrhorst was running a rather large hospital out of an old hacienda, and the Indians were coming from hundreds of miles away with all kinds of problems. He charged them a dollar a day and he enlisted the help of their families. The ones who couldn’t pay did extra work

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around the hospital.

"In other words, he just made himself available to them on their terms. And all kinds of things started happening. Maybe something like that will happen to you, too."

"It would be one hell of a residency," John said.

Graduation Fiesta

Two days before the medical school’s formal graduation ceremony, on a hot morning in May, the Rock Pile held its ceremonial drunken blowout at the country rock pile.

Terry had mowed the fields and started an enormous bed of coals to cook shad for a few hundred people in the Virginia tradition. George cleared trails and cut poles for a tipi they set up in the high field overlooking the house. Pam and Susie and Patty dubbed themselves mistresses of the plantation and directed the kitchen work. Mark appointed himself Ubermiester of Kegs and went about his chores with a maniacal Germanic intensity. David and Richard pieced together a sound system. John put up lights. A few others cobbled together a small wooden stage.

Music throbbed from a stereo. Little Feat, Phil Oakes, Steve Miller, the Stones. Soon, dozens of dented Volvos and painted Volkswagen vans converged on the country house. Knots of people danced, swilled beer and passed fat hand-rolled cigarettes. The party took on a low technicolor roar as the last wave of people added motion to the crowd.

In the late afternoon, John mounted the platform and the music faded. "Ladies. Gentlemen." The crowd cheered, chanting "speech, speech."

"The end is nigh," John laughed, thinking about what was coming. “And as we prepare to part company and go our separate ways, tradition demands that we present -- ta da -- the Medical Follies. So, let me introduce, Doctors Heckle, Jeckle and Hyde."

Just then David, George and Richard, wearing white coats, stethoscopes and Groucho glasses, strutted officiously toward the small stage. "Welcome to clinical review in internal medicine," said David. "We have several patients with interesting symptoms, and I've asked my interns here to give their case histories."

"Well, man," said George in a slow California beach drawl. "This one patient is, like, a 25 year old medical student with no obvious physical abnormalities. His chief complaint is that he just can't get his shit together."

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"Defecation in order," corrected David, in his officious chief resident tone. "Common problem. What did you prescribe?"

"Wow, like, the indicated pharmaceutical was a fumigant extract of delta-9 tetra-hydro- cannabinol, commonly known as hemp." Wild cheers greeted the prescription.

"A powerful organizing agent for defecation disorders," said David. "And the prognosis?"

"Dynamite. You have to take a hit of this," he said, passing a yellow hand-rolled cigarette.

"OK, thanks,” he said, taking a hit, and looked at Richard.

“Now Doctor Jeckel, what is the history of your case?" David asked Richard.

"This is a very perplexing case. Fourteen-year-old high school student, no history of other problems or allergies, seems to have developed a sudden swelling in her lower abdomen."

"What does she think is the cause of the swelling?"

"Medical students."

"So this may be iatrogenic?"

"Yes. Apparently, several medical students ran a series of tests on her. A new technique, they said."

Catcalls and hoots erupted from the crowd. "Sounds like an old technique to me," Mark yelled.

"And the prognosis?" David said.

"Could be a 12-gauge wedding, could be a seminar in the slammer for somebody."

"Good case histories, doctors," said David. "Next, we have proctological and pathological exhibits for your consideration."

Richard unbelted his pants and bent over, mooning the audience.

Davide cleared his throat and pulled out a teacher’s pointer. “Pay attention now,” he said to some of the rowdies in the back. Then, pointing to Richard's posterior, he said in a loud, theatrical tone:

"Does this look good to you? If so, you may have a future in one of America's most highly paid medical specialties, proctology. That’s right, I said proctology. And just this week, we’re running a special on home proctological training kits. If you order yours today, you may be able to win a free speculum. But wait -- there's more. What would you give for this set of Ginsu hemorrhoid knives?" he sassed. "Nineteen nighty five? Thirteen ninety five?"

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“Yes, yes,” the audience bellowed. “Tell us more.”

“Well folks, this week only, for ten dollars and ninety five cents, it can all be yours. And if you order today…”

The speech drowned in the howls of laughter. As it subsided, and Richard pulled up his pants, Susie and Patty carried out a large green frosted cake in the rough shape of a person and set it on a table in front of David.

“Now for the pathological exhibit,” he said, picking up a long knife. "Notice the technique as we make the Y cut." David slashed halfway across one side, then dug the knife in deeply as he cut the other side and pulled down.

John reached over for a piece of cake and pushed it into David's face. "Notice the technique, David," he laughed.

David stood calmly for a moment, then reached for another piece of cake and hurled it at John, who ducked and laughed as it splattered onto Mark's face. Pandemonium broke out in seconds. Hunks of green gooey cake hurtled through the air. Screams and laughter echoed across the farm fields.

When it was over, John stood up on the stage, long green stripes of icing hanging from his long hair and beard. Others stood around quietly for a moment, brushed cake from their hair or licked their fingers. "What we need now," John declared, "is rain."

A clap of thunder echoed across the fields and wind sprang up.

"Rain," he chanted. "Give us rain, rain, rain." He began stomping and dancing around the fire. Soon other joined in, and within a few minutes enormous hailstones were falling.

"Sorry, we asked for rain," John yelled up at the heavens. "Must be some mistake."

A dark curtain of rain swept across the field and the skies opened on the cake splattered Rock Pilers.

"This is the life," screamed David, standing with his face to the streaming sky.

"Yeeeehoooo...." A shout from the top of the tipi startled them. "Take me now," the voice yelled from across the high field. It was Mark, standing at the top of the tipi, arms in the air, defying the lightning flashing all around him.

"Please take me now, I'll never be happier than this,” he yelled to the sky.

"No, no, don't take him now," shouted a dozen newly minted doctors. David yelled up at Mark:

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"Dude, this is our day off. We don't want to work today. Get the hell down from there."

"Take me Nooowwwww," Mark bellowed at the sky, ignoring the worried people below and the angry gods above.

The thunderstorm crackled menacingly and seemed to be getting closer. A loud crack echoed from the woods, followed by an intense boom of thunder.

"Mark, don't do it," someone yelled through the blinding rain as the crowd gathered inside and around the tipi.

Suddenly the afternoon threatened to turn into a nightmare. Mark wasn't just drunk or stoned. From his maniacal grin and his chattering teeth, they could see he had taken a far stronger drug than beer or marijuana.

"How do we take the tipi down?" John asked.

"Simple, really," George said. "Take off the cover, unwrap the top poles, take away the extra poles and you have a tripod. Then pull the tripod apart and it comes down."

"We have seconds to do this," John said.

As the lightning crashed around them, the three worked feverishly to save Mark and bring down the tipi. The party crowd chanted and clapped, as if they were watching a movie. Finally the extra poles came away and the tripod started opening up. As the remaining poles collapsed, Mark dove for the mud next to the tipi. Suddenly a brilliant streak of blue-white light broke down from the sky across the wooden poles.

When the smoke cleared, tips of the poles where Mark had been sitting were smoldering. "That's what you would have looked like, you crazy motherfucker," George said.

"But you guys are doctors. I would have been fine. You would have fixed me up, right?"

"Ahh, Jeesus," laughed John, slogging drunkenly back to the house, arm around Mark's shoulder. "Where do we start? Where do we even fucking start?"

Mexico beacons

Two weeks later, the boxes were packed and the rental vans were waiting. We were scattering like gravel, leaving the Rock Pile, and there was nothing pain. Kansas – New York – New Mexico – all the new places waited. Adventures, but places without friends, without memories.

As we packed, surprising things emerged from under couches and behind book cases. A broken

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pipe; a wedding ring lost long ago; the remains of someone’s virginity.

The morning before I left, a book appeared on the coffee table. “Seven Wonders of the Gringo Trail” by Wassichu G. Buckra. And for some reason it was flipped open to the page about Oaxaca.

Most of the year, gringos only stop in the town of Oaxaca for gasoline on the road south to San Critobal or Antigua, Guatemala. But at Christmas, the little town shakes off the desert and surges out into the night, loopy on cheap pulque liquor and over the counter street legal pharmaceuticals. Not to mention the illegal stuff. Thousands of Indians come down from the mountains of Oaxaca province, mixing with Mexican university students and gringo tourists.

You can run with the bulls in Pamplona, fly over Angel falls, or sail from Costa Rica to Fiji, but you haven’t really lived until you’ve been drinking until dawn, dancing with the giant Kalinda dolls at Oaxaca’s Radish festival. It is one of the seven wonders of the fabulous Gringo Trail.

“Hey, where the hell did that guidebook come from?” John asked.

“I think Susie left it,” I said, gulping down a black Russian, wondering why it had been so easy for her to say goodbye.

John looked at the book as if somehow drawn to it, magically, or something.

“It’s by Wassichu, the legendary storyteller of the Gringo trail,” I told him.

"So, why do they call it the radish festival?" he asked as we packed up our books and took down the old concert posters.

"Smokestack says that the radishes were a special food of the ancient Mitla culture,” I said. “They were a pre-Aztec group that worshipped at a tree said to hold the heart of Quetzalcotl. The Catholic priests tried to stamp out the old religion, but they never quite succeeded.”

John thought quietly about it for a long time. “I want to go to the heart of Quetzalcoatl,” he finally said. “I want to go to Oaxaca.”

“Hey, next year,” I said. “Do your internship, I’ll work for a newspaper for a while, and we’ll meet up and head south. What do you say?”

“Deal,” said John. And so it was.

❖

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Chapter 19

What’s a doctor — on the road to Oaxaca, Mexico

A few months ago

We packed what we needed.

John took along a foot locker full of antibiotics, anticonvulsives, anaesthetics, anti-inflamatories and antidotes — all chosen from the recent World Health Organization list of essential medicines. I took along a few hundred feet of 35 mm film and a few cameras, along with a kit for developing negatives while on the road. As it turned out, photographic “hypo” was also on the WHO list. Who knew?

And we took along the big question:

What makes a doctor, a healer, a medicine woman, a sha-man?

What is sha?

The questions bounced between us like fuzzy yellow tennis balls as we drove straight into the grinning green maw of Mexico.

Medicine was the albatross around our necks; our white whale; and maybe our final exam. What if we were not the doctors that other people thought we ought to be? We hardly realized it at the time, but we were rehearsing for the crazy gringo drug smugglers, we would soon meet.

I flashed back on all the times we had taken up The Question. It came up as a casual remark as we left Virginia that fall, rolling down Highway 81 past Roanoke:

“So who was the most famous doctor ever?” I asked.

“Jesus.”

“Get out.”

“No, it’s true. He’s very famous. He’s in almost every Bible.”

“What about Louis Pasteur? — He’s on every milk carton, but he’s not even missing.”

“Asclepius? — His staff is on every doctor’s door…”

“How about Joseph Bell?” John asked.

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“Never heard of him,” I said.

“Ah, but you have, Watson. He was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.”

“Right. The famous medical detective at the University of Edinburgh.”

“Arthur Conan Doyle was his clerk for a while.”

Sometimes, as the miles clicked over on our odometer, we imagined a museum of medicine. In Tennessee we decided that the first gallery would feature the classical age — Asclepius and Hippocrates and Galen …

“Oh hell no,” I said. “The museum would start with the membership desk where they’d demand money. Oh, and would you please sign this release form? The museum doctor will be with you in a millennium.”

“OK, and then after the membership desk, the classics,” John conceded. “It would have tapestries. Asclepius would have to be at the center, in all his glory, the demigod of medicine from ancient Greek mythology, leaning on his staff with snakes crawling all over it.”

“The museum would probably have to explain why snakes are all about healing,” I said.

“To get rid of worms, in ancient times, doctors would twist them on a stick, slowly, pulling them out from under the skin.”

“Oh God that is gross,” I said, making the ‘gag me’ gesture. “Is the public ready for ripping yarns about heroic medicine?”

“Well, the tradition about snakes also has another historical interpretation: the cult of Asclepius apparently had healing temples all across the Mediterranean, and each of them raised non- venomous snakes.”

“Much nicer. Friendly snakes. I like it.”

“OK, so you’d have Asclepius and his snaky temples, and then his daughters Hygieia, the goddess of cleanliness, Meditrine, the goddess of medicine, and Panacea, the goddess of healing.”

“But that’s all legend, isn’t it?”

“Choosing between truth and legend, you print the legend,” John said, quipping from the great American movie, Liberty Valance.

“OK, but then, beside the legend, you’d have historically real disciples on various sides: Hippocrates, known for his oath of course, as well as Galen and Sushruta.”

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By Arkansas we were envisioning the next room in our medical museum devoted to Middle Eastern medical history.

“It would start with a stained glass window of Jesus, making socialized medicine look effortless,” John said. “He wouldn’t have minded sharing a little credit with Ishaq bin Ali Rahwi, who wrote the first book on medical ethics 800 years after Jesus, although — ahem — raising the dead was strictly forbidden in Rahwi’s book.”

“That’s the point of Mary Shelly’s book about Dr. Victor Frankenstein, too,” I said.

“Another famous doctor,” John laughed.

As we sped past Texarkana, we moved ahead through the Middle Ages with Ramazzini’s discovery of occupational medicine and the ghosts that were said to haunt the miners who toiled in the mercury and lead mines.

In Oklahoma we decided that the next wing of the museum would be about public health in the 1700s, featuring James Lind and the cure for scurvy — lime juice mixed with rum. Other doctors hated it because they didn’t understand why it cured scurvy, but the British Navy didnt care — it saved lives.

“So they mixed it with rum, and all the sailors loved it,” I said.

“Great compliance technique,” John laughed.

And then there was Percival Pott, and his study of chimney sweeps who all had scrotal cancer. Nobody stopped using coal for ol’ Percival, unfortunately. But he did manage to link cancer to pollution for the first time ever.

Once we crossed the Texas border, we entered the industrial age and the fight between good and evil. Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud would tell you that human history was a fight between two contrary forces, one peaceful and creative, the other destructive and vengeful. He called them Eros and Thanatos.

By Dallas, we had included French scientist Louis Pasteur, who also talked about the forces of good and evil. “Which of these … will ultimately prevail, God alone knows, but we may assert that … (medicine) will have tried, by obeying the law of Humanity, to extend the frontiers of life." That Pasteur. What a guy.

We also had a special display case for the late 19th century German physician Karl Virchow who said that doctors were “the natural advocates of the poor,” and that politics “is nothing but medicine on a grand scale.”

As we sped past Dallas, we were thinking about medicine and social justice, and about an early

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20th century French doctor named Albert Schweitzer who hiked off into Gabon to build clinics and spend a lifetime serving the humblest people on earth. And we were wondering about the way he was trying “to empty the Atlantic with a teacup,” as the unknown Schweitzer of Guatemala, Carroll Behrhorst, said. It was Behrhorst who taught the highland Indians to become “barefoot” doctors and nurses, only to have them butchered by the Guatemalan death squads.

By the time we crossed the border into Mexico, we realized our museum would have to have a library, and we entered the realm of fiction.

There was Moliere’s Doctor in Love, and other plays, and of course George Elliot’s Doctor Lydgate in Middlemarch. In Monterrey, we talked about how the great German writer Thomas Mann saw medicine victimizing people in The Magic Mountain. A patient named Hans Castorp keeps trying to escape the grasp of the cynical doctors. And what about “Enemy of the People,” by Heinrik Ibsen? A doctor who tells the truth about environmental pollution is denounced as a lunatic by the people of his town.

By Saltillo, we recalled that George Bernard Shaw said something similar in the Doctor’s Dilemma — medicine is a conspiracy against the laity. And medical research only takes place, as a character says in a later play, through the “aristocracy of money.”

Truth is elusive in many of the films, too. Take the cabinet of Dr. Caligari - dark movie from a dark period in Germany. Was it all just a dream?

By San Luis Potosi, we concluded that most of the mid-20th century novels and films see money as the real antagonist. Every doctor longs for a Rolls Royce and a country club membership, Dr. Simon Sparrow says in a 1954 film, Doctor at Sea.

Or how about Frank Sinatra, in the film “Not as a Stranger.” Sinatra’s doctor is asked if it’s true that he has a Cadillac. “It’s only a front,” he says ruefully. “The Cadillac has me.”

Then there was the great Dr. Kabir — Peter Sellers — in the Millionaires, a nearly unknown film from 1960. He won’t fall for Sophia Loren because he is devoted to medicine, not money.

“Get real. Not falling for Sophia Loren. Is he a robot?”

“Yeah, it’s definitely not right, but it makes it all the more poignant when she says she is from the aristocracy of money, and he says: ‘Ah, well, that is a disease for which I do not prescribe. The only known cure is a revolution, but the mortality rate is high, and sometimes, if it is the wrong sort of revolution, it intensifies the disease.’”

But, we realized, not all the books and films about doctors revolved around money.

Don’t forget the greatest doctor novel of all: Doctor Zhivago. He just wanted his girlfriend back.

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And the revolution swept them apart, like two corks on a raging sea. You can hear the balalaikas now…. Da da da, da da da da ….”

There was that hopelessly confusing 1971 film where George C. Scott plays a suicidal doctor. What was it called? The Hospital. In the end, he disappears and goes to Mexico.

“That’s where they should have started the novel,” John said.

The contradiction between knaves and nobles is enough to drive you mad. And yet, there has to be something worthwhile amid the heaps of detritus. As the TV character Dr. Who says: “You and I know, don’t we Rose, that the doctor is worth the monsters.”

And so, as we drove into Oaxaca province and snaked up that angry gravel road into the Sangre de Christo mountains, and lost our van, and fell into the hands of the gringo drug smugglers, we figured the short answer was just this:

To be a doctor in the late 20th century was to inherit grossly polarized expectations. Quacks and saviors, frauds and demigods, greedy madmen and religious heroes — our ideas about doctors were utterly schizophrenic, but — maybe — worth the monsters.

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Part IV Whats a doctor?

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Chapter 20

Prove you’re a doctor

San Jose, Mexico

The present

Moments of fate take on abstractions of distance, like watching life through the wrong end of a telescope.

And that morning, waking up in San Jose, finding the gringo drug dealers camped out so close to the Army barracks, we saw Austin Baily, a weary and weather-beaten old dope smuggler, in that hard light, through that short telescope, abstracted like an agent of fate.

Austin Baily, on the other hand, was wondering how to kill us. He balanced a deer-gutting bowie knife across his gnarled fingers, muttering and grimacing and pacing the tiny cabin like a jilted troll.

Sitting next to him, squatting against a red adobe wall, his friend Gene Stuart stared out a small, unglazed window into the Sangre de Christo mountains. His continuing curiosity made us heirs of hope.

Down the mountain to the east we could hear the first trucks of the morning, gears grinding up to the Mexican Army checkpoint. Soon they would be passing through town on their way to the coast. A repair crew was already out on the road a few miles west, trying to fix the place where our van had gone over the night before. We might never be on that road again.

The irony was quickly molting into panic. To die now, having come so far -- John, from a poor Appalachian family to medical school; and me, from a culturally illiterate military family into writing. We were college friends, and we had driven such a long way into Mexico over past few weeks. We were looking for the seven wonders of the Fabulous Gringo Trail – the beaches of Mazatlan, the butterflies of Michoacan, the ruins of Palenque, the Radish festival of Oaxaca, and of course, the Women.

We thought we might find adventure.

And instead, it found us.

An inviting mountain road had developed a gaping washout. The Volkswagen van tumbled over a cliff, but we had miraculously escaped. We rented a cabin late at night, near an army barracks, and in the morning, we met Gene and Austin, our neighbors. Glancing into their cabin, we couldn't help but see stacks of red waxed paper boxes. Big stacks. Hundreds of kilos of something or other.

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Pot? Hash? Heroin? No matter. We already knew too much. Now they were thinking about killing us.

But John had been trying to convince them that we were doctors, which, as luck would have it, was fifty percent true. John finished medical school and internship, and he'd done a year of residency before our vacation. On the other hand, I finished journalism school and two years of an editorship at a weekly newspaper in Dogswater, Virginia.

I was no more doctor than I was dervish, but my time as a media guy at the medical school had given me some insight. I had filmed doctors in action, given slide shows, organized educational materials. I had never pretended to be a doctor, except on dates with nurses. It hadn’t worked then, but now, our lives depended on it.

The smugglers were not going to be easy to convince. John recited the entire Hippocratic Oath to assure them that their secrets would be kept. Did they believe us? It seemed like thin reeds for the drowning.

“How do you tell who is a doctor?” Gene asked, weathered face screwing up into the morning light, stretching for a thought like a brook trout rising for a bright green mayfly. “How do you know? What is a doctor, anyway?”

“Prove to me that you’re a doctor,” Austin kept saying, balancing the bowie knife on his fingers in a menacing little ritual. He probably does that to all his victims, I was thinking. But John was thinking five moves ahead.

"I wish I had my diploma,” John said. “But I can tell you anything you’d care to know about medicine.”

His gamble had paid off. They had accepted the premise. We had a chance.

“What’s diabetes?” asked Gene. He whispered to Austin: “My uncle had that.”

“It's a condition caused by slowing or stopping of insulin production by the pancreas. Your uncle probably had to take pills or shots to make up for the lack of insulin."

Gene nodded.

"Its usually genetic, but sometimes its caused by obesity, or overeating sugary foods. Early symptoms include gastro-intestinal pain, thirst, eye trouble, red palms and bottoms of feet, later symptoms are blindness and poor circulation in limbs, fluid malabsorption, bloated abdomen.”

"That was him," Gene said.

"Hey, I got one," Austin said. "How come shots don’t make you bleed?"

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"Well, actually they do, but not much," John said. "In fact, that’s why we are careful to give shots in the muscle, with tiny needles, so you wont bleed too much. If we hit a vein or an artery it can cause internal bleeding. If you see purple bruises, you can tell that a nurse has been sloppy and hit the wrong spot."

"Can you set a bone without an xray?" Gene asked.

He looked at me. I screwed up my courage. "Yes, but it has to be done by feel and you need a lot of experience to do it well. John is really better at bones."

"Did you have to cut up dead bodies?" Austin asked. "How did you stand it?"

"Yep. It was pretty weird," I said. "They pickle them so they don’t smell. Most people throw up once or twice.”

"Do you guys get good drugs?" Austin asked, nearly laughing.

"The best."

"Really?"

"Drug companies leave them around. Very easy to get addicted. They like that. Makes you easy prey."

"Do you smoke pot or hash?"

"Drug companies didn't like that, but yes, we did.”

“All the time,” I added, trying to emphasize that we were fellow members of the stoner club.

Austin loaded up a pipe and offered it around. We both took deep drags and began to feel the sensual float coming on. It was an awkward contrast with our deadly peril, but we understood it as a ritual. We had passed the first part of our test, like stirring the mash when you come across a moonshine still in the deep woods.

Gene offered the solution first.

"You know, Austin, there are some mighty sick people in this area. What if we let these guys prove they are doctors by, you know, actually working as doctors?"

"If they can keep from talking with anyone from the outside," Austin said. "No calls, no letters. At least not for a few weeks. That might work. But what about the Comandante?"

"Let’s just see what he says."

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At that moment, a young face popped through the doorway of the house.

“Doctor John, what a surprise,” Julio de la Mata grinned. He looked familiar to John, then he remembered a weekend volunteering at a rural clinic. “You came and treated us up in the hills of Virginia.” He pumped John’s hand enthusiastically. “Hey, this guy is one great doctor,” he said to the smugglers.

"This is Billy," he said, and we shook hands. “How did you know we were here?” John asked.

“We saw your van down the cliff. Actually everybody in town heard about it last night. We all ran out to see the wreck this morning. When we saw the Virginia tags we went down and took a good look and thought it might be yours.”

Julio looked up and seemed to notice the somber mood for the first time. “Was anyone hurt in the accident?”

“No, no, we’re just trying to work something out with these guys.”

Julio tried hard not to look at the bricks of hashish stacked against the wall. But he took a second look at the drug smugglers.

“You know, we have a lot of sick people here in town,” he said. John and I smiled. He had guessed our situation almost immediately, as if he had been listening to the previous conversation. But of course, I thought. He probably had been listening. Like everyone else in this tiny village, he probably knew exactly what was going on. And maybe somehow he’d even helped the storekeeper set us up.

We’d been played, I realized. And everyone knew it but us.

“Sick people here? Really?” said Austin in a sarcastic and menacing tone.

“There is a very sick woman who is the niece of Colonel Culmonares,” he said in a surprisingly firm tone. “These men could help her.”

“Well of course, if the colonel would be happy, then we would be happy,” he said.

John paused. "Would you like us to examine her?"

Austin sighed. "OK, if you’re who you say you are, that would be the test, wouldn’t it? Let’s go."

Julio whispered some instructions to a boy waiting outside. His flat brown feet made quick slapping sounds on the hard brown dirt of a San Jose road.

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“Hey, where’s he going?” asked Austin.

“He’s going to get the priest. Father Juan Carlos. We may need him,” said Julio.

“Let’s hope not. If the girl needs a priest…” he said, patting the knife hanging from his belt, “a lot of other people will need a doctor.”

John grabbed the black bag from the cabin and we followed Julio down a side street into the small town of San Jose. He also threw a jacket on over his t-shirt in an attempt to look more formal.

Chocolate mud from the night's rain was now a dried tan in the morning heat, and the story it told was remarkable. A hundred feet, mostly shod, and a few dozen hooves, mostly unshod, had come this way since dawn. There were no tire tracks.

A thousand impressions of an ordinary Mexican morning poured into our senses as we neared the town center. The roosters crowing, the children laughing, a bell ringing, carpenters working with hand tools. We did not hear motors, except the trucks grinding by on the main road half a mile away. San Jose was entirely pedestrian, a barefoot town, John observed, the kind of place where you’d “sooner see a jackass than a jalopy.” I wondered how many we would meet in our time here.

We came to a neighborhood of brightly painted cement walls roofed with sheets of corrugated zinc. We could see the center plaza down one street where the small adobe church and its bell tower stood as a stout and sober sentinel.

We took another street and passed an open laundry center. Already a dozen women were gathered around the washing tables, chattering and laughing and working together. How many Americans longed for that community of spirit? And why didn’t they have it in their lives? Were they too burdened with personal things? Could they ever give up their home washers and their “labor saving” devices? Maybe in saving labor, they’d lost the knack of sharing it.

Down the hill from the church, we knocked on doorframe of a shack, then followed Julio as he pulled aside a burlap curtain and ducked through. A middle aged woman with an enormous belly sat up in a bed, moaning, and an older woman sat beside her, holding her hand and muttering a rosary.

They were alarmed when they saw two gringos but relaxed when Julio explained. “Hey, these guys are doctors,” he said. “They just arrived last night. They would be willing to look at Rosarita.”

“Oh, please, yes," said the older woman, her face relaxing and then tensing up again. "I have no

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money right now but I could pay soon.” John smiled.

“My fees are very low,” he said in a kind tone. “Muy baratos. Now, if I could see your – daughter?”

"Yes, Rosarita is my daughter," she said. "She has been in labor for three days."

“Soy Juan Conner,” he said. “Aqui es Guiermo Burton.”

“And I’m Consuela Culmonares,” she said.

“Mucho gusto, senora Culmonares,” John said in a proper tone.

John sat down on the side of the bed and looked over his patient, thinking that saving a life could mean saving his own. She was sweating, her eyes were dilated and she had been throwing up. She moaned and cradled her enormous convulsing abdomen.

"How old are you?" he asked. I translated. “Cuantos anos tiene?”

"Forty," she said through gritted teeth.

“Are you in a lot of pain?” he asked. "Tiene mucho dolor?" I asked.

“Si, senor doctor,” she said, moaning again, gripping her belly even tighter.

“Doctors,” John said, emphasizing the plural. Even then, he was determined to save me, too.

John felt the woman’s forehead, more as an affectionate gesture than anything, and then reached down and felt the swollen lymph nodes on her neck. They were hard as rocks.

“Ill need to examine her,” he told senora Culmonares. “Julio, if you would wait outside." He nodded to the mother. "Could you arrange her blankets for me?” Senora Culmonares nodded with a slight smile, content that John had respected the girl’s modesty by bringing the mother into the examination. It was a small thing, but she was aware and appreciative. Most male doctors, even Mexicans, might not have made that gesture of respect.

John pushed down on her abdomen. He used a lantern to examine the woman under the blanket. His face took on a worried look.

“Billy, look at this and tell me what you see.”

Aware that I was under scrutiny, I tried to be as clinically accurate as possible, imitating the style I had so often seen while showing training films or handling slide projectors at the medical school.

"Looks like about 20 centimeters dilation. But that's not the crown of a baby’s head,” I guessed, trying to sound certain. "Besides, there's a lot of bleeding."

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“Right," John said. "Looks like placenta previa." To my quizzical gaze he whispered: "The placenta comes out first. Danger of bleeding..." He let the sentence hang in the air, omitting the conclusion: "… to death."

Don't look down, don’t look the shadow in the eye.

He pulled a stethoscope from the old black bag and listened carefully to the abdomen. "The baby's heart is weak," he said. "But it is still alive."

"Do you have a midwife?" John asked, and after I fumbled with my Spanish-English dictionary, said: “Hay una partera?”

"Yes. Carmelita," senora Culmonares said. "But she had to go. Another birth across the valley. She said a doctor would come. And she gave me this to give to you."

John looked at me with a puzzled expression and took the bottle of blue tincture from her. “Caulophyllum thalictroides — cohosh azul” was written by hand on the label. We thanked the mother and went outside to talk. We didn’t think about the blue cohosh. The stormy night had given way to a sunny morning, and a warm Pacific wind blew up into the mountains. We wandered over to the front patio of the church where an empty picnic table seemed to offer a view of the mountains and a solitary place to talk.

The bright weight

Yet as we sat, we felt the bright weight of a hundred eyes starting at us, wondering what was going to happen next. A block away, the store's porch was crowded with Indians who made only feeble attempts to look busy. The windows of nearby houses were open and heads gophered over sinks and craned around corners. A glint from a window at the Mexican army barracks, a quarter mile up the hill, told us that the binoculars were out. We could see Gene and Austin outside the building, talking with someone in uniform.

From the other direction, a tall man in a long black robe and priest’s collar walked confidently towards us. I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect contrast to the hard-bitten gringos and the grinding poverty of San Jose. The priest was in his early 40s, and he had a thin Roman nose that would have looked more at home under a conquistador’s helmet or a corporate headquarters logo than behind a communion rail.

"Father Juan Carlos," Julio said. "Meet Dr. John and Dr. Bill."

He had a bone-crushing handshake too.

"Mucho gustho, and bienvenidoth to our town,” he said with a slight lisp. A Mexican would say

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“gusto” and “bienvenido.” Comparing the priest’s accent to the rural Mexican accent would be like comparing the voice of a BBC announcer with an Alabama cotton farmer.

“I know you have had some problems,” Father Juan Carlos said.

"This is pretty serious," John began. "Rosarita's baby is very weak and the placenta is in the wrong place. She's an older mother and she's a smoker.” He paused, searching the priest’s deep grey eyes. “I’m saying, I think it's going to be a dangerous delivery."

The priest smiled and looked down, thinking that he liked John immediately. Juan Carlos had only mentioned “some problems,” and John responded first with thoughts about the patient's troubles, and not his own.

Gene and Austin sauntered down from the barracks, walking half hunched over, like sidewinder snakes across a hot desert floor.

"What's the professional opinion?" Austin asked in an angry hiss.

"She can't be moved very far. Is there anything like a clinic nearby? Would the Army bring in a helicopter?"

"The nearest clinic is at the base of the mountain, in Zapoteca, about 75 miles," he replied. "You already know what the roads are like. It would take all day to get there. And don't even ask about helicopters. They don't have any."

"OK, then I guess we set up a delivery room here," John said. "We'll just try to induce labor and bring the placenta around. We just do our best."

Father Juan Carlos interrupted politely. "Gentlemen, why not use my office in the church? We have electricity, its clean, with running water, and a large table that would serve."

John nodded, but the priest held up his hand. "First … " he said, looking at Austin and Gene. "I think we need to know what kind of protection you are offering -- under the circumstances."

Austin sighed deeply, and his tough outer demeanor seemed to shrink. "I have to tell you," he said in a nervous tone, "that I have never once killed anyone in my line of work. All I wanted to do was make money, and so far that's all I've done."

"And you are quite right to worry about murder, my son," Father Juan Carlos said. "Your immortal soul would be lost."

Austin gave him an exasperated look, but continued. "So I think, and the colonel thinks, that the best thing is for you two doctors to stay in San Jose for the next couple of weeks. You can treat sick people, get stoned or do whatever you want. But don't go anywhere. No letters. No phone calls.

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And don't talk to anyone outside San Jose."

The priest beamed. "That is an excellent arrangement, and it shows the wisdom of the colonel. You tell him I will guarantee it."

Austin nodded. "Well, I guess now it’s up to you to save Rosarita," he said with a thin smile, reaching over and shaking John's hand.

Father Juan Carlos put his hand over John and Austin's hands. Then I shook the gnarly paw as well, convinced we had only cheated death by a few hours or days, and that it would be back for us. And again, the priest seemed to bless the agreement by covering our handshake with his own hands that were surprisingly light and thin and warm.

From the porches and windows of San Jose, old women with scarves and young men with cowboy boots all smiled and looked relieved.

In a few hours, we had been embraced and pulled into the heart of a very sick town. As far as Julio and the people were concerned, two gringo doctors now understood the depth of San Jose’s illness, and got a glimpse of the hopes for its cure.

❖

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Chapter 21

Life on the line

The present

As we walked over to the office, Juan Carlos declaimed quietly, but in a stentorian timbre:

“First of all, just as medicine is used by the sick, yet is held in honor by the healthy, so too with mercy. Although those who deserve punishment may invoke it, yet even the guiltless cherish it.”

“Seneca?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Seneca. It’s from De Clemencia — On Mercy.”

“It was written as an appeal to the Roman emperor Nero,” I remembered.

“The appeal didn’t work with Nero, but it echoed through the ages,” Juan Carlos said. “The teachers made us memorize it back in the seminary in Spain.”

“Wasn’t Seneca a Spaniard himself?”

“You are surprisingly literate — for a, ah, doctor,” said Juan Carlos with warm suspicion.

“This little town is just full of surprises,” I said, trying to brush it off.

One surprising thing about San Jose was that lots of people knew their own blood type. We wondered how we’d be able to give a blood transfusion. John had brought along a few quick check cards, but something had spilled on them when the van went over the cliff. So we couldn’t count on their accuracy.

But as Juan Carlos told us, everyone in the town had seen doctors with a charity immunization program, organized by the famous MAGA — the Medical Assistance Group of America -- so there were lots of type O donors handy. Even Rosarita was type O, which meant that she could take blood, or give it, from just about anyone.

When we returned to the freshly scrubbed church office, senora Culmonares was already there, bending over a sweating, gasping Rosarita.

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"There is a great deal of bleeding," she said, laying a hand on Rosarita's forehead, glancing up at John. "I tried to get her to go to the hospital last week but she refused."

"Lo siento, lo siento…" Rosarita gasped. "I’m sorry."

"Yeah, it's not good," John said, when he came back into the kitchen with Father Juan Carlos and senora Culmonares. "I've delivered maybe a hundred babies, and this is among the worst I've ever seen. Placenta previa, hemorrhaging, low blood pressure. She's been in labor two days. She's not going to make it if we don’t try to do something."

Rosarita's husband, Enrique, stood in the door listening to the talk. "Que piensan?" he asked. "What do you think?" I translated.

"This will be risky," John told him. “Va a ser riesgoso.”

"Will the baby live?" Enrique asked.

"The problem is, the baby's heartbeat is getting weaker," John said. "Normally, we would have diagnosed placenta previa long ago. We would have managed Rosarita’s anemia and other complications, and we would have scheduled a cesarean section for 37 weeks, or just before term." I did my best with the translation, and they nodded and grimaced.

Enrique and senora Culmonares stared blankly at us. John took a breath and began again. "Sometimes, in a situation like this, we have to operate. But we can't do that here. So we have to do the best thing for the mother."

"You should do the best thing for the baby," Enrique said. "That is the way God wills it."

"Yes, that's fine," John said. "But the choice would normally be between a vaginal delivery and a C-section. Without hospital backup, the C-section could kill them both."

He shook his head. Stop talking, I thought. Just tell them.

"I’m sorry, but Rosarita is in trouble,” he said. “We don't know if she will live."

Enrique carried his shivering wife from her bed to the priest's desk, now draped in clean linen. John and I had put on aprons and rubber gloves. God help me, I even winked at Rosarita, as if everything was fine, as if it was just another routine day in her life. She smiled back. It was her last smile on this earth.

John looked up at the crucifix on the wall and took a deep breath.

"OK, let's give her ten units of patosin and see if we can speed her up. Billy, get the instruments

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ready just in case."

He began by rubbing oil on his hands and then pushing back the uterine wall, trying to make space for the placenta to emerge.

“You do the anesthesia," John said. "I'll cut."

"Tell me about the anesthesia," I said, eyes wide with fear.

"Nothing to it. Gauze mask, two drops of ether every minute or so, very, very slowly. Keep checking her pulse."

"OK," I said nervously. "We have some blood for her?"

"We need to get some from her family. Can you do that?"

"Jeezus. This is really ...."

"... Meatball surgery. I know. It would have been worse if you weren't here."

John's emergency surgical kit was small and not quite adequate. It had everything we needed for appendectomies and minor surgery, which is all he expected to find on the road. I had never drawn blood but I'd seen it done often enough, and nobody noticed my hands shaking. Or the big purple bruises I left in the donors arms.

When I returned with a bag of blood, John stood between Rosarita’s spread-eagled legs. "If we can just push the placenta back and widen the uterus," he said, closing his eyes in concentration and moving his hand high up into the woman, trying to slip a finger in the bulging place between the placenta and the uterine wall. She screamed in pain, and John stared at the large amount of blood covering his glove. "Jeeezus."

The husband crossed himself.

"Anesthetic. Billy? Quickly now. Anesthetic."

I sprinkled another drop of ether onto a gauze mask over her nose.

As she relaxed into semi-consciousness, John reached inside the woman with both hands and pushed the placenta aside. He took the scalpel and faced it outwards and upwards, then slid it up the vagina wall, creating a wider slit to help the baby out.

"Gawd, I wish I just had some forceps," he said, pulling the scalpel up, cutting through the tissue at the bottom of her pubic mound.

I had never seen the procedure before, and my eyeballs must have widened in amazement over

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my mask.

"Not that many blood vessels in the dead center," John said. "Had to learn this for home deliveries. Anyway, nature meant for women to tear here, we just help her along," John said, pulling on the baby.

Within a few moments, a deep sucking sound came from between the woman’s legs, and John held a blurred bundle of red blood and yellow-white tissue. Rosarita's sister held the baby in a towel as he suctioned its mouth and nose. The baby was already crying when he cut and clamped the umbilical cord.

"It's a boy," the woman shouted, carrying it into the next room triumphantly. I hadn't noticed. John looked worried, and whispered urgently. "Help me out here, man. Get the sutures ready."

I laid a couple of threaded curved surgical needles clamped in a needle holder on a plastic cafeteria tray, then checked the blood pressure cuff on her arm. "Jesus, man, we're losing pressure -- fast."

Sweat dripped from John's forehead onto the bloody sheet as he wrestled with the large purple hunk of placenta tissue. It looked like liver, and it bounced off his leg, then slushed onto the concrete floor. The woman groaned and I sprinkled another few more drops of ether on the gauze pad. Working rapidly with a curved needle, John tied off several more blood vessels on the vaginal wall – by feel. "Pulse is dropping to 50," I said in a panicked tone.

"I dont understand. We've clamped off the main bleeders. Maybe it’s a clot."

"Pulse dropping. 40. 35."

"Keep that blood coming."

"Bag's full."

"Squeeze it."

"20"

"This can't be happening."

An hour slipped by, and as the woman's moans grew fainter, John's forehead shimmered in sweat, and his sober, worried glance burned into my eyes. Juan Carlos wiped the sweat off John’s forehead as he worked feverishly, his arm deep in the woman's body, his fingers gently probing the delicate uterus, searching for the clot.

The blood continued pouring. Another bag from another sister.

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Two hours later, the flow of blood unabated, John wondered whether he had taken the right course. "She's torn. I can't find it. If we had done a C-section, it might not have happened."

But of course, if John had attempted a C-section under the primitive circumstances, it could have meant doing harm. At least with the natural approach he wouldn't be accused of having caused the death himself. But then, we couldn't have known that anyway. His face told one story of agony and indecision, his labored breathing and slumped posture told another story of fatigue and failure.

I checked the pressure. He stared glassy-eyed. "No pulse," I choked.

Then I felt it again, the feathery black razor creature, dancing and sending out its horrible anesthesia. It hadn’t come for me — and I didn’t look down. Suddenly Rosarita convulsed. Then a gurgling sound came from her mouth, and the whiff of relaxing bowel filled the kitchen.

"She's gone," John said.

I gasped.

"Shouldn't we do some CPR." It wasn’t really a question.

"No. She's gone. That's it." John said flatly.

His eyes filled with tears.

"We did what we could," I said. "At least the baby lived."

"It's not enough," John said. "This was so primitive. We could have saved her if we'd had decent equipment. If we had been prepared. If she had been recognized as a high risk case and sent down to the valley hospital."

"But senora Culmonares said she refused."

Juan Carlos said: "Hombres. This is Mexico. You did what you could."

I stared at the woman’s face as it instantly turned from light pink to translucent alabaster.

And I wondered why. I didn’t wonder why this fate or that fate – that’s for amateurs, for the people who get stuck in a pattern recognition loop. Oh no, I wondered why we know so much about the human machine, but so little about the spark that animates it.

They say you never get over the feeling of helplessness and humbled awe in the Dark Presence, but then in contrast, the light around Father Juan Carlos, as he leaned over the body in prayer, seemed strong and saintly.

From the other room we could hear soft, muffled sobs and a muted discussion in Spanish, but couldn't

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make out the words. John's eyes blurred and he turned to a water bucket to wash off his hands.

He looked down at the broad smear of blood on his pants, and it brought back memories of a dozen other failures. The Indian with the knife wound in Colorado. The migrants and their pesticide poisoning in Virginia. The gunshot wounds and broken backs and lacerated faces from the gruesome, lonely nights in the emergency room. Alone again now, he backed up to the tile wall and slid down to the cold floor. Next to him, the rubbery placenta was hardening in the air. They hadn't had time to throw it away. Tears welled up in his eyes and vomit raced up his throat. He grabbed a pan and heaved.

In a few moments he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Enrique. "Gracias, senor. Dont feel too bad. You did your best."

He wondered what he must have looked like, covered with gore, vomit dripping off his beard. And here the dead woman's husband was comforting him. Offering him a towel. John pulled himself together and gratefully wiped off his face. "You are too kind."

"And you are too young and sentimental. You can't cry for every patient you lose," the man said.

“Yes, I can," John said. "I have to... to stay human."

“Well, you do what you have to do," he said. "And thank you for saving my boy."

Tequila time

So we cleaned up and followed Father Juan Carlos to his office. He reached into a drawer and thumped a bottle of tequila on the desk. He took a long, deep gulp for himself.

“That … was ... difficult," John said, wiping his mouth and passed the bottle to me.

"You did the best you could,” the priest said.

“Shit,” John muttered.

“A Mexican might say we just lost a battle to Cihuateotl.”

"What's that?”

"Not what. Who. She's the ancient Aztec mythological figure," he said. "The story goes that a

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woman who lost her life in childbirth became a goddess of the underworld and went on to spread disease and death. She was sort of a Mexican demi-god, a small-scale Shiva, if you follow the analogy to the Hindu diety.”

“Good to know your enemy,” John said. “But there are so many more enemies… dirt, hunger, poverty, injustice…”

“All of them are allies of Cihuateotl. She is their Joan of Arc.”

After a few more deep pulls on the bottle, John began talking with the priest, answering questions reluctantly at first, then slowly unwinding the whole story of Misty Mountain and the rigors of med school, the Rock Pile and the migrants in the Virginia orchards. I filled in a few details as the bottle passed around.

Juan Carlos told us we didn’t need to call him “father” when we were alone. “I am your friend and ally,” he said. “Don’t let the priest thing get in the way.”

John told him that he'd nearly been expelled from medical school for campaigning for migrant workers, and how that had earned him an internship in the boondocks of the Indian Health Service instead of the coveted spot at the University of Virginia.

"In the IHS, I got used to treating poor people, but we always had decent equipment and a little bit of backup,” he said. “Sure I lost a few, but never in surgery on an office desk, for God’s sake."

"Have you thought about staying on, after these two weeks?" Juan Carlos asked. It seemed an odd question, but Juan Carlos was three or four moves ahead of us.

"You mean, at the clinic at the base of the mountain, in Zapoteca?" John asked. "Maybe. Who do they consult when they have difficult cases?"

"There is a small hospital in the town of Oaxaca. One of the docs went to med school in the states, did a residency in family medicine. That's Louis. I'll introduce you to him. He'll take you on some rounds and get you hospital privileges there. Mexico City also has a very good medical school. Several others went to Spain or France. But there's not much backup out here. Couple of surgeons. Three or four internists. Only one trained radiologist, really."

"Would they have any problem with the fact that I just finished my residency?"

Juan Carlos laughed sardonically. "A one eyed man enters the kingdom of the blind."

"I don't know," John said, looking out a window. A blur of black feathers crossed above the street, and a crow's caw echoed across the hills of San Jose.

John shot a questioning look at Juan Carlos. "The bruja," he said with a raised eyebrow. "She knows

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you're here."

All your life

In his dream, John was flying with the crow, crossing immense mountains and swooping into broad green valleys full of banana trees and men with straw hats and brown shirts and machetes gleaming like brushed aluminum smiles as they cut the thick green cane.

How long have you known me? He asked the crow in a voice that sounded foreign.

All your life, she said. Your hawk was my friend.

How did you know about the hawk?

He was my father.

How could he be your father if he was my hawk?

Because he disappeared when your father died, to help him make the journey.

This doesn’t make sense.

Once you understand who you are it will all make sense.

Who am I?

Well you're not a crow, we know that much, and you're not a hawk.

He looked over at the white feathers spread from his wingtips. I must be a sparrow.

Maybe you are an owl.

I still don’t understand.

You will.

Long lines

It didn’t take long for the word to get out that John saved Enrique Barata's son, even if he couldn't save the mother. Austin said Colonel Culmonares found it acceptable, although not commendable. "Those were his exact words," Austin said. "Acceptable, but not commendable." But what the hell did he know?

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The next morning John saw a ten year old girl with pneumonia and prescribed a course of strong antibiotics. He puzzled over a teenage boy’s cough and told him to get down to the hospital for a tuberculosis test. He checked a middle-aged woman’s female problems and suspected ovarian cancer. Another hospital test. He sent an old man, back home with a worried look and lecture about taking care of his liver. "That means no drinking. No cervesa. No tequila. And no salt, either."

And, he figured, that would about wrap things up. Since San Jose was only a small town with a thousand people, he had seen just about every sick person there was to see.

But the very next morning, the line outside the church office was longer. Seven people. The next day there were eight more, and the following day a dozen people were lined up.

"It's a good thing," Juan Carlos said, gallantly surrendering his office. "You are needed and appreciated. If you stay, we'll make you a proper clinic."

As one week turned into two, a daily routine developed. The worst cases were showing up early in the morning, and we would deal first with those. I usually watched and helped translate, mindful that I had to continue pretending to be a doctor in order to survive the ordeal.

At the same time, I was getting a very rudimentary medical education, and along with my readings, I was beginning to recognize the common problems. Nearly all of them were the kinds of things that we found easy to deal with only 500 miles to the north.

We would have been happy to leave, I suppose. Ordinarily, two weeks as a volunteer is good for a year’s worth of guilt-free living. But we couldn’t go anywhere.

Gene and Austin were coming and going, the Army trucks would arrive and depart for the coast, the burro trains would arrive with mysterious packs, and we watched with dismay as the size of their drug operation became clear. Millions of pesos worth of drugs were passing through the little town every week. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The more we saw, the deeper we went. And the deeper we went, the more we saw. There didn’t seem to be any easy way out.

❖

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Chapter 22

Gringo captives

San Jose, Mexico

The present

Walking through a remote section of the town one afternoon, John and I came across a group of children playing soccer in the street. Many had swollen bellies and placed on their arms and legs where they had raw sores. Their game was slow and unethusiastic for kids that age. John smiled and waved.

"Hola, muchachos," John said. "How are you?"

The kids giggled and hid their ragged smiles behind their hands.

"No sean tan asustizos. Don’t be so shy." Some of the younger ones ran back and hid behind an old car, but a few of the teenagers bravely came over and challenged us.

"Hey, you guys are the gringos we heard about. The gringo doctors."

"That's right," John said. "Can I see your ball?" he asked. As they handed it to him, he turned it over in his hands, saying, "This is a fine ball. I think it needs a little air, because you guys must really knock it around hard." They laughed. "But its really good." As he turned the ball over in his hands, he look at the children, each in turn – hair, skin and swollen stomachs.

He kicked the ball expertly back to one of the goalies and waved goodbye as we walked on.

"Hookworms," he said out of the corner of his mouth, still smiling and waving. "Swollen bellies. Dry hair. Skin problems. Very thin. Listless. Saw it near San Luis, in little Indian community up in Colorado mountains. Nasty things."

"What do you do?" I asked.

"Actually, the medicine is easy and pretty cheap," he said. “Mebendazole is a generic drug that costs a half a cent per dose here in Mexico and in most of the world. In the US, the big drug companies sold it for about $20 until this one company got its hands on it, now it’s in the hundreds.”

“Per dose?”

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“Yep. Remember Carl Virchow? Medicine is politics.”

“What about ringworm? Is that related?”

“No, it’s a fungus, not a parasite. But both parasites and fungus are neglected diseases of poor people in the tropics.”

“How do you treat ringworm? I saw some of that the other day.”

“Well, one treatment involves your photographic hypo — sodium thiosulfate.”

“I have a batch mixed up for the latest rolls of film,” I said.

“There’s a place for your chemicals in our medical foot locker,” John smiled. “But listen, the thing about hookworm is that you can’t just treat it, because they'll just get it again. We need to start looking at the root causes."

"Sanitation?"

"And how. Did you smell that sewage? Whew. It's on the ground. Its leaking all over the place. That's what spreads it. Bad water too."

Early the next morning, we joined Juan Carlos for coffee on the church patio. He smiled indulgently at me and said, “Isn’t it time you stopped playing doctor?"

"The moment is going to come," John agreed, "when they expect you to make medical decisions."

“I can apply band-aids,” I said, meekly.

"But it's not enough," Juan Carlos said. "Why not think of a more positive role? Like public health. If they think you are a doctor, and you start working on public health projects, nobody will think any the less of it."

"You mean water and sewer projects."

"Yes, that would be a start. We might have some money for equipment, through the church. And of course its not like we haven't made some progress already."

"But that's going to take months."

Juan Carlos smiled. "How long do you think you are here for? A few days? A week?” He shook his head and smiled. “I don’t think they’re going to let you go so easily."

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I practice medicine, badly

The next day, John rode off on Julio's horse to visit a very sick old woman who lived in the next mountain valley. I had twisted my ankle and decided to stay behind and take inventory of our rapidly dwindling pharmacy and clean up the office.

A young mother poked her head around the door with a timid smile.

"Senor doctor? Are you still open? Can you see my son?"

She had an eight year old boy with fever and strong stomach pain, but no vomiting or diarrhea. He seemed active and alert. I had him sit on the table and felt his stomach. He didn’t have pain in a specific place, and especially not in the right lower belly where you might have expected it if he had appendicitis. His lungs sounded clear and his bowels were gurgling along. I told the mother that we needed to wait and consult the other doctor. I told myself not to try anything rash, and I told John about the situation when he came back a few hours later.

"Man, we need an x-ray lab up here," he said. "And a blood lab too."

Did he think it was appendicitis? Or something else?

"You can get abdominal tenderness from pneumonia when it starts out," he said. I looked sheepish. “Oh, don’t worry. That one even throws a lot of well trained pediatricians off."

The boy's pneumonia was easily treated with a course of antibiotics – easily, that is, except the family did not have a dollar for the pills. As my inventory had shown, the antibiotic supply was nearly gone. There were antibiotics available in a nearby town, and they weren't all that expensive. One of the campesinos showed us some that he was taking, but they didn’t seem to be working.

John gagged. "Well no damn wonder,” he said, turning over one of the boxes in his hand. "This one's ten years past the sell date."

What all the world knows

Three weeks into our vacation in San Jose, we realized we had been working twelve hour days and not thinking much about where it was all leading. The lines outside the door were getting longer, not shorter, and the hard cases were beginning to arrive. Campesinos suffering from blindness, tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, various kinds of cancers and other ailments began arriving on busses from all over the mountains of Oaxaca.

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Some of them had set up tents outside the church office.

“Why are you here?” I asked one group as they lurched and hobbled off a bus. They looked at me with surprise, sizing me up as a clueless American tourist.

"All the world knows why sick people come to San Jose," one man said. A neighbor chimed in: "That's right. All the world knows about the gringo doctors who had been taken captive by the drug lords in the mountains of Oaxaca."

He tapped the side of his nose. “Todo el mundo.” All the world.

“Hostage? Captive? What do they mean?" I asked, feeling dizzy and bewildered, sipping our early morning coffee on the church patio with Julio and Juan Carlos and John.

The thin morning air felt bright, and the view over the rugged Sangre de Christo mountain chain seemed to hold some elusive but sacred promise.

"It's what I was trying to tell you the other day," Father Juan Carlos said. "How long do you think you are going to be here? Remember? I asked you that. But it's not a question you can answer."

"It's true, senor, everyone says it," Julio added quickly. "We prayed for a doctor and we got one… Uh, or two," he said as an afterthought, nodding in my direction with a smile. By now even the residents of San Jose had realized I was not actually much of a doctor, but they maintained the half-hearted fiction with a sense of humor.

"What do we do?" I asked. "Can we escape?"

"No, no, you don't want to try that -- it would be dangerous," Juan Carlos said. "Besides, it's a strange sort of captivity. If you play it right, you could turn it inside out."

"That's right," Julio said, he face lighting up. "You could hold them hostage."

"You mean setting up a clinic and a pharmacy and a hospital and a sanitation program and … well that's just overwhelming," I said. "It’s crazy. It would never happen."

Juan Carlos looked at me with compassion. "God never asks us to do anything that isn’t in our power," he said. "Do you remember the story of how Jesus turned water into wine? The servants at the wedding in Cana just had to fill the water jugs. It was Jesus that turned it into wine. We are like the servants. We fill the jugs."

"…And wait for the miracle," John said in a bemused tone. "Interesting, hmm," he said, and you could see an idea spreading across his face. “A rural clinic makes sense, too, because the population is so far from the cities. Hmm…” He seemed to be glowing.

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It was one of those moments when I watched John grow, stretching his soul into something a little more than human. This is how birds become stars, I realized, and I gaped like a damned fool at the miracle of it. Juan Carlos, watching me gape, made a small gesture with his hand, pushing his own chin up, quietly telling me that my mouth was open. I closed it quickly. Even though I had known John for so long, it was always amazing to be in the Presence of something Else that he managed to channel down.

John didn't see any of that. He stared across the San Jose valley, past the small corn fields and the little stands of pinon trees, across the rocky scrub slopes, taking in the massive, purple, cloud- shattering Sangre de Christo mountain range dominating the horizon. Then he shifted his gaze to the three of us sitting over our morning coffee – Julio, the farm worker from San Jose, Juan Carlos, the village priest, and me, his gringo friend from the good old Rock Pile back in College Station, Virginia, that now seemed so far away.

"What would happen if we did open a clinic and it grew to something far larger than the army or the guerillas or the drugs? What if we could resurrect village life in the mountains of Oaxaca?"

Juan Carlos nodded sagely, but I was horrified.

"Either way, we're dead men," I said, fatalistically.

"Billy Burton, for shame,” John said. “What does a man live for if it’s not something to die for as well? We each have our moment in time, our parts to play. And we play them — or we hide. But either way, we are all dead men. The question is whether we are living spirits.”

He leaned closer and looked me in the eye as he whispered. “I can play this role, but I can’t do it alone. Join the company.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, it is a great stage,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt. John waved like a prince to the green and purple mountains stretching to infinity, to the wilderness of deep forest and small farms. "Full of wise saws and modern instances, And so he plays his part…”

The Shakespeare in me wanted to believe, despite my craven, demon fears. I knew it would take everything. Maybe even more. And what more did we have? A crow call echoed from high above.

I wondered whether we weren't falling into what, for want of a better term, we might call the Great Trap. Things seem easy enough to change, and yet they never do. Action feels seductive and yet is fraught with danger. Simple things become impossibly complex. The wrong step sends your innocent fate tumbling down the cataracts. Like blindfolded men walking down the middle of a freeway, we live on the narrow borderline between the great clashing forces, never knowing or understanding the cosmic catastrophes hurtling all around us.

But the stage was set. Our eternal entites were on the line. We could almost hear Marilyn Janney

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and Father Stephen, back in Mumford, Virginia, reminding us of the lost souls and laughing all the way to their rendezvous in some cosmic confessional.

So we come, we go, we die, we live, we die again, and sometimes, in the great heap of confusion and struggle, we get a glimpse of someone great or, even better, something divine.

“Then what?” I asked John one night after we had crossed the Keroac threshold.

“That’s when you don’t need a doctor,” John said. “That’s when you really do need a writer.”

❖

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Chapter 23

The monastery

San Jose, Mexico

The present

The thin mountain air had us puffing like steam engines as we walked up the winding path to the monastery. I wondered if I’d ever get used to the altitude. Father Juan Carlos shouted encouragement over the constant wind. “Let’s not take all day,” he laughed.

The cedars and oaks along the forest path all twisted to the east, bending ever lower with increasing altitude, like a permanent wind gauge.

“This,” Juan Carlos said, sweeping his arm as we walked out into a meadow, “is the Monastery of St. Francis of Bernardone.” We stood like children at the shore, transfixed by the immensity of the Sangre de Christo mountains curving with the earth, fading into the sky — rocky purple in the foreground to angelic blue haze to the infinite distance, and the Pacific Ocean, golden and rippling, like a vast living creature in the western light.

It took more than a few astonished moments before we could finally lower our gaze to the old Franciscan monastery on small plateau on the far side of the mountain. With about ten acres of meadow, it was a collection of two long stone buildings and a chapel, a covered well and small fenced garden. A dozen goats grazed at the meadow's edge and a weathered man in a brown robe put down his hoe and closed the garden gate behind him. He moved in the studied, slow manner of the monk, walking towards us with a puzzled look until he saw Juan Carlos coming around, behind us on the path, with a bulging knapsack.

"Bienvenidos, padre," he said, then shouted to the buildings. "Hey, everybody, Father Juan is here."

Three other old friars in weathered brown robes turned out to be "everybody." The came from the buildings with smiles. One was wiping flour off his hands.

They had known Juan Carlos since his appointment five years ago, and had found him a kind young man, somewhat more worldly than they would have liked. They watched with mixed guilt and delight as he unpacked wine, crackers and candy on the table. The delight won out.

After catching up on the news, Juan Carlos casually came around to the point of his visit.

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"We were wondering if perhaps we could suggest a new way for this monastery to serve God," the priest said. "There are four monks here, in a cloister that once held almost fifty.”

"Yes, this is a problem," the older monk said. "We have not attracted many new monks to the order."

"What if there were doctors who would start a hospital here?"

The monks laughed. "Do you mean you actually know doctors who would want to come here?" one of them asked. "Here?"

Juan Carlos laughed along with them. "You fathers don't get out much do you?" He looked at me and John as the laughter died down into amazement.

"Doctors?"

"They've been the talk of the town for the past three weeks."

"Oh, well, how long has it been since anyone went to town?" the oldest looked at the youngest. “You went a few months ago, when that little carnival came…"

"Coincidence," he said. "We needed something from the store."

"But you forgot what it was," the others laughed.

San Jose meeting

At the same time, about a mile away in an adobe house with weathered white walls, Julio's father, Juaquin de la Mata, rapped on a table with a heavy brass candlestick. "Let's get this meeting under way," he said. The town elders sat on rickety wooden chairs and on the floor.

"We need to decide about something today. Julio is going to talk."

Julio passed a few packs of Winston cigarettes around the room. For ceremonial reasons, rural Mexicans often use a smoke to get things going. Most of the men didn't smoke tobacco regularly – that would be too expensive. But they liked cigarettes as symbols of importance. American cigarettes were particularly expensive.

Winstons waving from their fingers, smoke pouring from their lips, they began chattering in ancient Zapoteca – a language incomprehensible to non-Indians. The colonel, listening through a secret

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microphone, was baffled. But the Indians knew they could speak freely.

"Here's the thing," Julio said in Zapoteca language. "Last year I wrote a letter to a friend in Virginia telling them that we needed a doctor who could help a whole village. I met one of these men in an apple orchard there. He was very concerned and he helped us out a lot. And now he’s come here, with his friend. In fact, they were on their way to the beaches on the Pacific coast on some kind of a vacation. We didn’t know they were coming and they had not quite realized what town we lived in. They probably would have missed us all together.

"Well, what happened next is that Quetzalcoatl opened up part of the road, and then helped them to survive, gracias a Dios. They asked for a house and my father put them next door to the gringo smugglers.

One of the men called out "Well done, Juaquin."

"It might have turned out worse," the older man admitted, "but Julio here kept his eyes on them."

"Yes, and in any event, their predicament has bound them to us," Julio said. "They are in effect captives.”

"Hey, aren’t we all?" asked a voice from the back of the room. The men in the room puffed their cigarettes and nodded grimly. "Ever since the Army came with their damned checkpoint. They say they are looking for drugs and guns, but they are the ones running the drugs."

"That's the truth,” the other Indians shouted.

"They are even holding our children hostage."

“That’s right. They killed my boy because he found out too much.”

“They are the shadow of evil on this land.”

"They will never leave us alone."

The angry voices rose like a storm cloud over the mountain peaks.

"Yes of course, of course," Julio said, gesturing with palms down for everyone to be quiet again. "So here's the thing. Maybe what these doctors bring is a new way to fight the army. Maybe … well, maybe a lot of things."

"You say doctors," said one of the elders. "But I hear one of them isn’t really much of a doctor."

"Yes, that's true, the younger one named Billy. I don’t think he has much training, but I hear he worked at the medical school for a while. Anyway, if he is killed, John won't stay. So we need to protect him, too. It's best if everyone calls him doctor, even if he isn’t really one. OK? We have to

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pretend."

The men rolled their eyes but nodded and murmured agreement.

"But there's more. My question for the council right now is this: Can we help them? The church has the land. In fact they are talking with the Franciscans about the old monastery right now, this morning. And the drug dealers – they will contribute money."

"Then what can we give?"

"Labor. The blessing of the council. And, maybe, some trust."

There was a long silence. Then one of the men coughed politely and asked: "How much money?"

Julio suppressed a smile. "They're working that out now."

❖

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Chapter 24

Wheels in Wheels

San Jose, Mexico

The present

Half a mile further east, in the Army barracks, Col. Mario Culmonares looked around his green Spartan office at the men seated in uncomfortable wooden chairs in front of him. What he heard from the two gringos – Austin and Gene -- almost made him choke with fury.

"How much money?" he coughed.

"One hundred and twenty thousand," Austin said, pounding his fists together. "They want a lab and a fucking x-ray machine. And a bunch of beds. And even a new building."

The colonel's well tanned, aristocratic face winced. He was an avid chess player and usually saw the board ten moves ahead. This business with the doctors had caught him off guard.

"This has gone too far," said Capt. Jose Mahina with a crisp Madrid accent as he leaned over the colonel's desk. "Let's put a stop to it." Mahina knew it was his role to play the hard man, and he did it well.

"No, no. You don't understand," the colonel said, pulling his hand over his short salt and pepper hair, looking up at the ceiling. "It's too late," he said in a self-pitying tone. "We can't kill them now."

"Sure we can," said Austin with a look that seemed to say he had killed many men for less.

"No," the colonel slammed his palm down on the desk, making the others in his office jump. "No. Definitely not. Everyone knows they are here. Even the general down in Oaxaca. Orders have gone out. They said: 'Let the doctors see the people. Don't interfere.' Damn."

"What?" asked the captain. "How did that happen?"

"You know as well as I," the Colonel said.

"La Iglesia. The church."

Austin and Gene looked incredulous. "The church? What power do they have?" The colonel and the captain just stared at the gringos. They couldn't be that stupid, could they? Were they just ignorant rubes who don't know anything about Mexico? Or maybe they were communists, trying to say that the church should not have power? Either way, these gringos were yet another problem that would

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have to be solved eventually.

"I bet the priests planned this all along," the captain said to the colonel.

"Those sanctimonious hypocrites."

"Wait a second," interrupted Gene. "What's the harm? If people are better off, isn’t that better for us too? I mean, isn’t that why you're here?"

"It might come out all right," the colonel said guardedly. "So long as they don't get ideas."

The captain looked at his shoes for a long moment, and the Colonel turned to Austin and Gene.

“We’ll let you know when we decide something. Go ahead with the regular run to the coast tomorrow.”

When the door closed and the gringos could no longer hear their conversation, the Colonel turned to the captain and said quietly: "Remember, when you talk to those two, you are talking to the revolutionaries."

Captain Mahina looked startled. "Why do you say that?" he asked.

"Didn't you hear that Marxist crap? He came right out and asked what power does the church have?"

"Maybe they're just dumb," the captain said.

The Colonel shook his head. "Dumb as foxes. Listen, I happen to know, there have been leaks. The rebel comandante seems to know things. Lots of things. Anyway, we wouldn't want them to know about the way we move cash around," he said.

Captain Mahina nodded. "We have half a million sitting in a suitcase in the office. That was from last week. Of course, there are people who have to be paid … but then, if the church wants us to use the money for a clinic …” He stopped and toyed with the ash tray on the Colonel's desk. "You know, it might not be so bad having the church in our debt. And these gringo doctors, taking drug money like that, maybe we could use that if we needed it."

The colonel smiled and lit a cigar. "Yes, there might be ways we could use this to our advantage. After all, how can it hurt for the church to be in our debt?"

"I love the way you think, colonel," the captain said.

The rebels meet

And on a rugged and remote hillside fifty miles north of the barracks at San Jose, Comandante

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Jaime Manzana watched his unit with pride. Even in blue jeans and baseball caps, their well-kept guns and straight formations showed a fine military demeanor. He would know. As a graduate of the Antonio Maceo military college in Cuba, the comandante had a degree in social science and a minor in military politics.

The patrol had arrived quietly, with the late afternoon fog, and the pickets guarding the ridge met their comrades with smiles, handshakes and hot coffee. After they had all arrived, they fell into formation as Manzana approached in the dusk.

“Companieros,” he began. “We have a new mission — to protect the working poor from private armies. All this time we have been waiting, and building, and training. And now our moment has come. In places where there are mines or factories, and they use child labor and wage slavery, we will disrupt the system and force the capitalists to respect the workers.”

Wrapping up the pep talk, Manzana told the troops that dinner was waiting in the mess tent. He dismissed them with the traditional “Viva la revolucion!” They shouted back enthusiastically. “Viva.”

As they broke formation, one of the lieutenants from the San Jose region took Manzana aside. “We have some news," he said. "Something strange is going on in San Jose."

"Good or bad?" the comandante asked.

"Maybe you can tell me. Apparently the Army has some gringo doctors."

“Doctors?”

“Well, from what I hear, one of them isn’t really much of a doctor, but the other one has a medical degree.”

“What do you mean, the Army has them?"

"Well the word among the campesinos is that the doctors are prisoners or hostages or something. Apparently the doctors stumbled into Colonel Culmonares' smuggling operation."

The comandante laughed. "Oh, cousin, that was clumsy," he said smiling and shaking his head, laughing at Culmonares’ misfortune.

The lieutenant nodded. He’d heard that the rebel commander Manzana was a cousin of comandante Culmonares in San Jose, and he wondered if the two of them had been worked together, trying to keep up the appearance of revolution while making money in the drug trade.

"There's more. Somehow the church is involved in protecting them. And they are going to set up a clinic in the old Franciscan monastery."

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"Paid for with…?"

"Well, that's the strange part. Our … source … says that they are going to use our protection money."

"What? I have arms dealers waiting for that money. They already delivered the M-16s. This upsets the entire balance of power in the region."

"So it's bad?"

"Well, I don't know," the comandante said, stroking his salt and pepper beard. "Maybe we can use it to our advantage. After all, it can never hurt when a friend of your enemy owes you a favor."

“Leverage,” the Lieutenant said.

Palatine Princess

That same morning, three hundred miles to the north, in a secure meeting room behind the great cathedral, Archbishop Gandolfo Mastretta sipped his coffee and sighed as another interminable audience began. He looked around a black mahogany conference table, nodding and smiling, slightly, at the four men who took their seats.

The agenda looked mercifully short. There was a political report on an upcoming election, a scandal in the church in Campeche, and questions about how best to help immigrants from Guatemala. Nothing unusual except … “What’s this, Father Ochoa? Item four.”

“Something unusual is brewing the Sangre de Christo mountains of Oaxaca, on the Pacific coast,” said Father Donato Roberto Ochoa, a wolfish looking young Jesuit priest. “Word is that the drug lords have kidnapped a pair of American doctors.”

“Sir, that’s not the way we heard it,” interrupted Father Luis Gonzalez, a man with short grey hair and thick horn rimmed glasses who sat at the far end of the table. “Palatine intelligence says it’s not a kidnapping. These doctors are working with the church. Apparently there was some run-in with smugglers, but the church there protected them.”

Mastretta looked over at a sad-faced, balding man in a simple black cassock. “Javier? Don’t we have a church there in San Jose?”

“Sir, the diocese would like to keep this quiet,” said bishop Javier Nieto, assistant to the Bishop of Oaxaca.

“No,” Mastretta said. “I want this out on the table.”

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“You’re the boss,” Nieto said, shrugging. “OK, it seems that the Mexican army allowed the doctors to stay because the church found out about it. As you know, the army says they need to, uh, finance their fight against the guerillas in the Oaxaca mountains.”

“Right. Incidental cash,” Mastretta said. “We knew about that.”

“Well, it may be a bigger operation than we thought,” Nieto said. “And the problem is that they gave the doctors a bunch of cash for the clinic, and now they have to ramp up the drug trade even more.”

“What worries me is that they let the US doctors get involved,” Ochoa said in an offhanded way. “Why didn’t they just kill them?”

Mastretta frowned at Ochoa. Damn the Jesuits.

“Sir, I didn’t mean that to seem as if it would be a good thing.”

Mastretta nodded. “Carry on.”

“There’s something about a debt to an American bishop,” said Nieto. “It may be important. Anyway, as I understand it, the new pontiff wants us to be a force for change, to help the campesinos. Protect them if we can. And especially protect the ones trying to help, like these doctors.”

“Any idea who they are?”

“Would you like a first-hand report, sir?” Nieto asked. “We have two agents standing by for this briefing.”

Mastretta smiled. “I’m always amazed by the efficiency of the Palatine Guard,” he said. “Please show them in.”

In a few moments, two nuns in novitiate habits paused at the conference room door and bowed slightly.

“Please sisters, come in and take a seat,” Nieto said. “This is sister Susan and sister Jennifer,” he said. “They work with the Palatine Guard’s protective division based in the United States.”

“Bless you,” Mastretta said. “Please tell us what you know about the situation in San Jose.”

“Of course, in terms of the strategic situation, Father Gonzales is the best source,” said sister Susan deferentially. “But we knew both of the gringo doctors when they were in college. One is a doctor who trained at the medical school in Virginia named John Connor. He did a residency with the Indian Health Service. Good man, concerned about the poor, good doctor too.”

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“And the other one?” Nieto prompted.

“Not much of a doctor,” she said, suppressing a smile.

“What else?” Mastretta asked.

“We had a file on these guys when they were in college. Protests and stuff.”

“Dissidents?”

“Nothing terribly serious. But Bishop Ryerson of Richmond got to know them, and it’s really on his behalf that the church extended its protection.”

The Jesuit narrowed his eyes. “And you know this … how?”

“We lived with them,” said sister Jennifer in a half-giggle. “Or at least, we took turns living with them.”

Mastretta cocked his head sideways, then glanced at the Jesuit priest. “We need not go into sources and methods at this moment,” the archbishop said. “I would like a private conference with Father Gonzales, and the two sisters, please.”

As the Jesuit and the Oaxaca bishop’s assistant left the room, Mastretta was alone with Gonzales.

“Let’s start again, without the damned Jesuits listening in. What the hell is going on?”

Father Gonzales sighed deeply and began.

“As you know, the Palatine Honor Guard was established in 1870 and served as the Vatican Army for a century. It was disbanded – well, mostly disbanded, in 1970.”

“Let’s skip the ancient history,” Mastretta said. “What are you doing collecting intelligence in the United States?”

“The Holy See felt that it had to understand the civil rights and anti-war movements, so we sent in agents so that we could understand it first hand. These agents had to participate in all of the social rituals to be accepted.”

“It was all for Christ, reverend sir,” said sister Jennifer.

“Did you say you switched places?”

“Yes, archbishop. We are identical twins, you see, and …”

For the first time, the women held their faces up, and archbishop Mastretta could compare their

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appearances. “Uncanny,” he whispered. “What a resemblance.”

“We grew up in a very Catholic family and decided to take holy orders,” sister Susan said.

“Our family was also very much involved in the American government’s clandestine services,” she added.

“You mean the CIA?” the archbishop asked. The women kept their lips tightly shut.

“Never mind,” he said, waving his hand, as if presented with some impossible conundrum. “Why did you take turns?”

“Practice, mostly,” she said, frowning as she realized her coffee had gone cold. “It was Bishop Ryerson’s idea, oh and Father Gonzales too. I’d jump in, she’d jump out. We changed about once every week or so. The trick was being sure to brief each other and not being seen together outside the church.”

“We tested them, had them help some of the workers in the apple orchards, and hoped to put them to Christ’s service in America, helping migrants and being advocates for the poor and so on.”

“Did they pass the test?”

“They are compassionate people, but not very devout.”

“Can you find a way to casually run into the doctors?”

“Why?”

“We should protect them.”

Susie’s face caught the hard light. Oh, right, she thought cynically.

“And maybe learn something about the relationship between the Mexican army and the drug smugglers,” said the archbishop. “And the church.”

“We already know about all that,” Susan said.

“Yes, yes,” Father Gonzales said, agreeing with the archbishop. “But we don’t know what we don’t know, now, do we?”

“We can’t just go driving up to their front porch. They haven’t told anyone where they are.”

“Tell them you heard it through the grapevine. What about the radish festival in a few weeks?” he said.

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“That would be perfect, but how could they get away?” she asked.

“Maybe the church would help them, if you could arrange it.”

“How?” Susan asked.

“We’ll have bishop Nieto to invite the doctors down to be part of the holy procession,” he said. “That would give them the mantle of church protection.”

“And we’ll stay undercover, then?”

“When do you take your final vows?” he asked.

“It’s been delayed too long,” Susan said. “We were supposed to take holy orders in a few months. Then we would enter the convent for good.”

“This will all be over soon,” the archbishop said. “Then you can join the convent.”

Later, when the two sisters finished their evening prayers, they had a moment to talk in private.

“We have been so wicked,” sister Jennifer said.

“It’s for God,” sister Susan said. “But you didn’t enjoy it all, did you? That would be the sin.”

“How could I not enjoy it? This is why God gave us bodies.”

“You know that’s the devil talking, right? The temptation that you feel.”

“Well, it doesn’t really matter. Soon our earthly lives will turn forever to Christ. And after that, Father Gonzales and the Palatine won’t need us any more.”

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Chapter 25

The Bruja

San Jose, Mexico

The present

The dusty burro tracks of the Sangre de Christo mountains hug the lee side of the mountain ridges, fringed with twisted trees that cling to the rocks like gnarled fingers plunged into granite pudding. There’s an unworldly feeling, even on a sunny afternoon, John shuddered, remembering the stormy afternoon a few months ago, when the van had plunged over the cliff, and remembering also the powerful spirits that roamed through the mountains.

As he walked around a corner, he abruptly came upon a thin woman with white hair and piercing green eyes. She seemed to be waiting for something.

At first glance she seemed quite frail, but on second glance, John felt a surge of her inner power. And, suddenly, like an angel spreading her wings, she no longer seemed old or frail, almost as if she had overpowered her age, and could now reveal a powerful form of beauty.

"Hello John,” she said. “Why don’t you come over for some coffee? " she asked. "Or beer. I hear you are fond of beer.”

"Who are you?" John asked.

“I’m just someone interested in you, and in the gringo doctors here," she said with a sweet but knowing smile. "Arent you the one that stood up to the millionaire apple growers in Virginia? Isn’t your friend Billy the one who wrote the obituary for Charlie Steele?"

"You seem to know a lot about us. Who are you?”

"Think about it," she said. "You were an owl.”

John tried not to laugh out loud. Come to think of it, he did have a dream where he was an owl, where he met a raven circling up from a Mexican village. But how would she know that?

"I did have a dream like that, but it was just a dream. "

"Life is just a dream. "

"And death? "

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"Its an awakening. For most people, the good people, its like a candle going out at dawn. Its beautiful."

"I can’t agree, " John said, shaking his head. "I fight death all the time. It's hard to think of it as a benign awakening in some better world. It looks pretty gruesome from down below here."

“Of course it does. That’s because of Cihuateotl. I know her," she said in a hard voice, her face changing yet again, now taking on a bronze warrior-like appearance. “She is my enemy, and yours too. And I know you are also a friend of Quetzalcoatl, like me. So let’s not waste any more time. Follow me."

She took his hand as they began walking up a steep mountain trail. She continued to hold tight. Wisps of fog crossed their path and suddenly they were surrounded by dense fog. John sensed something large and dark watching them from just outside the rim of fog. Carmelita slapped her thigh and screamed a crow call. A sound of heavy wings moved away quickly.

"What on earth was that?"

Carmelita shook her head. "You are an over-educated fool," she chuckled. “But it’s OK. I’m here to keep you out of trouble."

The trail leveled out for a few hundred yards as a cluster of small cinder block houses materialized through the mist. A stone walkway took them through a yard full of small nursery beds. John saw arnica, ginseng, acinacia and a dozen other medicinal plants.

“Oh, so you’re Carmelita?” Somehow he'd expected a frowsy, billowy woman, like someone depicted in a Medieval woodcut. Instead she was modern, lively, attractive and energetic.

Carmelita bustled around her kitchen, building a fire in the stove and grinding up coffee beans. " I bet you heard I was a witch, right? More than just a midwife or partera. That I was a bruja."

John smiled. Of course she was a witch. What else could explain healing in the primitive Mexican mountain culture. "Father Juan Carlos said I could learn a lot from you. He said your medicine was pretty effective."

She shrugged. "He also says I interfere too much in his work as a priest, and he doesn’t really want to understand me. He just wants me to be a healer, like it was some kind of trade or craft."

“I would like to understand you. In fact, if Im going to work with somebody," John said, taking an appreciative first sip of coffee, "I like to get to know them. Where they come from. What their parents did. What they hope for."

"You would work with me?" Carmelita asked, taking a seat and sipping her coffee. She was startled by the sparkling intelligence she read in John’s blue-gray eyes.

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"Why not? You have the knowledge of medicinal plants. You are trusted by the people here."

"In my experience, most doctors are filled with prejudices. This is medicine over here, that isn’t medicine over there.” Her hands made chopping gestures. “This is good. That isn’t. This is science, that isn't scientific."

"It's called positivism," John said. "The point is to exclude the unknown."

"Ah, well of course, but then it will always be the unknown."

“Yes, I agree, but there are reasons to exclude superstitions,” John said with a smile. “When people’s lives are at stake, you follow the proven course.”

“Yes of course,” she said. “But the plants I use have been curing people for many centuries.”

“I know, and I would love to learn about that. And about you, too, Carmelita."

She sighed as the reawakened memories came to life in her mind.

“Well, for me, there’s a long story. My mother was just coming of age when the Mexican revolution started in 1912," she began. "She was from San Jose, and so were most of my ancestors as far back as anyone knows. My grandfather was a village leader who ran the general store. My sisters run it now. Anyway, a few years into the revolution, mother was growing up, and had a suitor, a young mechanic, who took her to church and out for walks in the town -- It was always with the duena, the chaperone, nearby. They were a very proper couple. But my grandfather did not like the young man, especially when his ideas about modernizing Mexico began to sound more and more revolutionary. When he asked grandfather for her hand, he refused.

"Eventually they ran away together and both joined the revolutionary army. That must have been in 1914. She helped in the kitchens and in the field hospitals. They thought they were leading the most romantic life possible, but on April 22, the young revolutionary was killed by the American marines during a fight over an oil refinery in Veracruz.

“She became bitter and decided to find a way to retaliate. She dressed as a simple peasant woman and offered to work for the soldiers, to do their laundry. She was going to try to kill a few marines, but then she fell in love with one of them. They weren't all bad. Just the sergeant. And she took care of him before he left.”

"She fired the bullet? The one that got him in the neck?"

"You knew about that?"

“I’ve heard this story. It was in a diary," John said.

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She nodded sagely. "Well, anyway, she had a baby, which was a disgrace in Veracruz of course, because she wasn't married, and she had to return to village here in the mountains. She raised me here in the traditional way."

"Did you know the young marine's name?"

"Oh yes, Charlie Steele. My mother kept some of his letters from France. I still have them.”

"This is a coincidence, then. Back in Virginia, I knew a Charlie Steele. He died last year."

"I know."

"Were you in touch with him? "

"Not until recently. But I would be a fool not to know when my own father left this world. But you speak of coincidence, as if to dismiss it. My mother and her grandmothers did not believe in coincidence. They believed in the patterns of light that bind us together on the wheels of life. "

"Coincidence means we can't explain it, that's all. "

"There are many things you can experience without explaining. "

"Why do you say wheels of life? What does that mean?”

"People are bound up in different wheels of life. I see you and I bound up in three wheels. There is the medicine wheel, and it is like our horizon. It is spins small and fast. It has great power, and I see you use it wisely, although you have a lot to learn.

"There is also the wheel of fate, an energy wheel that is held together by the spokes of suffering. I see it moving through our world with enormous force, grinding and sparking against the dead weight of medieval traditions that holds us back here in Mexico.

"And there is the third wheel, the wheel of light, of spirit, and of fire. It is the wheel that leaves miracles in its tracks. It was this wheel that turned to reach you, in Virginia, moving through the Mexican revolution to the young people's rebellion in America, reaching you through Charlie Steel and something you called, I think, a pile of rock, but again, like the earth, binding you with the medicine wheel.

"You have an interesting way of understanding, " John said. "I have only my wits and a growing sense of urgency about this situation."

A long moment passed.

“You have seen a shadow … ” Carmelita said. She sipped from an enormous cup of tea, almost a bowl, and looked deeply into John’s eyes. In the quiet, she seemed to be probing his soul.

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"You mean Rosarita? The woman who died in childbirth the other day?"

"No, earlier. Something very unusual. It left a mark on you and your friend Billy."

“Yes, the shadow of death, that must be what it was,” said John, shivering. “But there was more. There was another presence.”

“Describe it,” the old woman insisted, her eyes glowing like greedy hot coals.

"Something good, and clean, came between us and the ... thing ... the cutting black feathers.“

“Ahh, so you did see it,” she said sharply. “You owe your life to that Something good and clean. It’s Something you need to learn about. And let me tell you a few other things, young man.” Carmelita’s voice was rising with impatience. “First of all, you are not who you say you are.”

“We didnt say who we were,” John laughed, surprised.

“Yes you did. Your hair, your blue jeans, your hippie van” -- she pronounced it with a “j” — “jippy” -- “All of that says something about who you are. But that is not who you are. You cannot fool one who can See.”

“OK, who are we?” asked John in a bemused tone.

“You decide.”

John’s smile faded. She sounded like Marilyn Janney, back in Mumford County, ten years ago, telling him he had to decide.

“You were drawn here because my land and my people have needed you. You are being protected for a reason.”

"Protected from …"

"The thing you saw. It was coming for your friend when the road collapsed.."

"I try not to look at death if there is work to be done," he said.

“Oh no, that was not death,” she said, her voice moving down to a whisper. “It was like a cousin. It does the same work, but … well, we won’t speak of it now,” she said, a shiver passing through a body that seemed old and frail once again.

“OK. What else? Why are we not who we say we are?”

“Your friend's woman. Susan. She is not what she seems."

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“Susie. What? Is she here?"

"Actually, I see her in two places. I dont know why. She is in the mountains, and she is in the city. Usually I only see people in the place their hearts are. But she has two hearts. You will have to unravel this mystery. I do not understand it.”

“Tell me, Carmelita, is the army what it seems? Why do they allow gringo drug smuggling?"

"They don’t allow it," she said laughing. "They arrange it. The gringos work for them. The army is in charge."

"That makes sense. Gene and Austin are dumber than nematodes."

"Speaking of which …"

"Yes, we ran into the hookworm infestation the other day. Billy is going to start working on public health."

“That is wise. The word is, he isn’t really much of a doctor.”

John laughed. “OK, another question. What is with the guerillas here?"

"They fight the Army from time to time, but its said that they are also working for the army. The commandante and the colonel are cousins. It’s all very convenient. There is money to be made running drugs. This is Mexico, and things do not change. Nothing changes."

“If nothing will ever change in Mexico, what's the point? If you need us that must mean that something could change."

“Things happen but nothing changes. Only people change. That is the hope."

“That doesn’t make sense,” John said.

“Dont be a fool. When you change yourself of course you change your world. You leave one unchanging place behind for another unchanging place."

“I dont get it,” John sighed.

“You will,” she laughed in a detached voice. "Let's leave it for now. There are some other things we need to talk about."

"Yes, medicine. Billy is putting together an order for the pharmacies, but what do we have locally that could help treat people? How about some alcohol to help prepare your herbs, your traditional medicines?”

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“Good idea. Not the denatured stuff,” she said. “By the way, you should have tried the blue cohosh," she said.

John thought back to the little blue bottle that senora Culmonares gave him. “Why?”

“It would have stopped the bleeding. You might not have lost the mother. Her death was foretold, but you might have staved it off a few weeks.”

“But we had patosin.”

“And yet here, in Mexico, traditional medicine works better.”

“Good theory. We’ll have to test it. Obviously, I have a lot to learn."

"But you also have a lot to teach. Why dont you teach medicine to young men and women?"

John looked surprised.

"What? I mean, how? I cant just set up a medical school out here in the middle of … Mexico."

"You almost said nowhere. Its OK. And it wouldn’t have to be a full scale medical school. Or even a nursing school. It would be a little school for health.”

"You mean like barefoot doctors? Like China and Cuba?"

"Uniquely Mexico. They’ll come from all over Oaxaca. Elected by their own people. Promising young men and women. Serious people concerned about the life of their villages and their neighbors. You could train them to guard the health of their people. It would bring honor and fame among all men … “

"I would not swear falsely," John said, smiling, remembering the Hippocratic oath she had quoted:

… If I fulfill this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite be my lot.

“It’s true, we could learn a lot from each other,” John said. “Your herbs, your traditional medicines…

“So this is the main thing I have to say to you: If you would learn from our traditions, then you must let the traditional ones learn.”

“I think we could work something out,” John said.

“What will they think of that back home, at the medical universities in Virginia?” Carmelita asked.

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“What does it matter? They already kicked me out of their country club. Besides...” his voice trailed off for a few moments. “Besides, if it’s a choice between Mammon and Asclepius, I think the choice has already been made.”

“You knew Mammon pretty well, back in Virginia, is what I hear,” she said.

“Yes, but I could never stand the smell of his deodorant.”

She laughed. “Brave words, my friend. Sometimes I think I hear Quetzelcoatl talking through you. Sometimes I think that we can change things in the mountains."

"I thought you said Mexico never changed."

“Well, I guess we’re going to find out."

❖

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Part V Healing Mexico

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Chapter 26

Life in the Clinic

San Jose, Mexico

The present

Aperi, Dómine, os meum ad benedicéndum nomen sanctum tuum:

The chanting should have sounded angelic and inspiring, but at 4:30, the coarse enthusiasm of four old men sounded more like drunks singing in the alley. In Latin.

From the open doorway I heard John singing an counterpart in equally enthusiastic English:

Aperi, Dómine, Open thou, O Lord

os meum my mouth

ad benedicéndum to bless

nomen sanctum tuum thy holy Name.

The old Franciscan mouths thundered their blessings as if the dawn itself depended on it. John sang along quietly, from the other room, almost in a mocking tone, and yet still singing as if he meant it.

I pulled the pillow over my head. They could wake the dead…. But then, they believe that the dead are saints and that the saints walk here among us and that they guide us by whispering in our ears.

“Open thou, O Lord…” John’s soft voice whispered in my ear.

That woke me up. Fool that I am, I’d risen to that idea like a trout going for a mayfly. I shagged off the blanket and wandered out into a quiet fog, brushing my teeth over the old wooden horse trough, and wondering, what was really whispering inspiration and hissing fear? Some magnetic field had thrown off my innermost compass.

Putting down the toothbrush, picking up the blade, the razor tugged my neck. The future was a

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book I could see but not read. The pages were turning. How would the story end? A whisper came somewhere behind my right ear: “Like it always does.” Aperi, Dómine, os meum ad benedicéndum nomen sanctum tuum:

“You wouldn’t think four old men could sing so loudly,” I mumbled over breakfast. Father Juan Carlos laughed and explained that they were not usually this enthusiastic. “They are excited about the success of the clinic. We all are.”

Powerful forces come to our aid

Perhaps the momentum fueled the excitement, too, because it seemed as though we were all being swept forward by the same forces. Everyone seemed to know what to do, and every now and then you would see someone stop and listen, and nod, and then carry on. Everyone seemed to be hearing those whispering voices. We began whitewashing the main dormitory and setting up portable cots. That same day we started digging the latrines on the far side of the grounds, John and I wielding pickaxes and shovels along with a dozen volunteers organized by Julio and his father.

Late into the evening we wrote out page after page of orders for medical equipment, a generator, electrical supplies, an x-ray machine, blood testing equipment, and drugs, drugs, drugs – everything a small hospital needed.

And early the next morning an army jeep delivered two black leather brief cases jammed with stacks of neatly banded five thousand peso notes. Father Juan Carlos took the bags and headed for Mexico City. We never touched the stuff, never knew exactly how much there was. But we knew that we had gone into hoc to the narco-militares.

One of the friars thought he saw blood dripping through the tooled leather brief cases, but nobody else noticed.

A few days later, I was unpacking one of the first truckloads of supplies when I saw two teenagers carrying a middle aged mestizo man up the hill on a stretcher. He groaned in pain as they eased him down.

He said his name was Jesus, and he worked in a sugar cane mill on the coast until last year. Local doctors told him that he would never walk again. It made the pain even worse.

“I have sworn,” Jesus said when his sons were out of earshot, “that if you cannot cure me, I will commit suicide.”

There was no doubt that he meant it. A bedridden man could only be a burden in a barefoot

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society. I was horrified, but John took a cheerfully professional attitude as he looked at the man’s hip and back.

“Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said. “The other doctors told you that you would never walk again?”

“They said only if … maybe if … a miracle could happen.”

“So it hurts here, in the hip, not here, in the back?” he asked. Jesus nodded.

“And it hurts so much that you can’t walk at all?”

Another nod.

John gestured me over, and I observed the man’s left hip. An angry red balloon of swelling had puffed the hip out to twice its normal size. John gently turned him on his side and examined his back.

“Not tuberculosis.” And he explained, in a whisper, that if it were TB, the infection would be in the man’s back. In that case, it would be true -- he never would walk again. With the infection in his hip, though, it had to be something else.

John winked at me and then announced to the sick man and his sons in Spanish: “We will ask the friars to pray for a cure, and we will also do what we can do here on earth.”

John conferred with a friar who quickly dropped his broom and hurried off to the chapel. I kept a straight face and watched as John shoo’d Jesus’ sons off to join the friar in prayer. As they left, Jesus watched us through narrowed eyes. He was not fooled.

“What are you doctors up to?” he asked.

John pulled an enormous 13 gauge needle and syringe out from under a linen cover. “Billy, hold the pan, would you?”

He looked at Jesus and gave him his ‘this-is-going-to-hurt-like-hell’ smile.

“Your turn to pray,” he said. “Out loud, please.”

“Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos,” Jesus began. The needle went in, and John pushed through the outer inflammation… “Santifi-CADO sea tu NOMBRE….” His teeth were grinding from the pain.

I held the kidney-shaped pan under the needle. A gush of bloody, foul-smelling pus followed it out. For ten or fifteen minutes, as the friars prayed loudly from the nearby chapel, and Jesus rolled his eyes to the ceiling, John and I prayed our own special, cursing prayer of craven medical

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carnality.

“Get out of there, goddamnit,” he said, trying to roll a pocket of pus out from under a major vein. “Difficult place to poke a needle,” he said by way of explanation. “Damn, damn, damn.”

In the end, we emptied two bedpans full of the stuff. The man’s fever broke, and after swallowing some antibiotics, he fell soundly asleep.

We walked over to the chapel and paused at the threshold. I whispered: “aprons,” and we quickly balled up our bloody coverings by the holy water font at the door. Everyone looked up as he knelt in front of the altar. “Our father who art in heaven…”

“Padre nuestro…” they chimed in. A gentle wind swept through the chapel and the sun played across the ochre stones. Who was John fooling now? Nobody. It was real enough. Now it was a prayer of thanks. He had poured the water. We waited. And there was the wine.

Jesus was up and hobbling in a few days, and the pain was gone in a week. He was gaining weight. His sons were overjoyed and bounded around the meadow, kicking a soccer ball and acting goofy.

They made friends with a young lad named Antonio who had just arrived, and tried to get him to kick the ball with them. At Lauds, a week later, Jesus and his sons overpowered the Friars with their bellowing prayers. At least we hadn’t enlarged the old cemetery -- yet.

One evening John and I sat on the edge of a cliff, high above the monastery, looking out over the mountains to the south. Nobody else was around, and we shared a few puffs on a Mexican spliff. “The new Keroac threshold, eh?” I observed. “So how did you know?”

“About the typhus in the hip? Classic. Saw it once in Colorado. Also heard there had been a salmonella outbreak in the water supply down on the coast.”

“Think there are a lot of other people with this?” I passed the joint.

“Probably forty or fifty in various stages in his region. He was the worst,” John said.

“Will they come up here?” I asked.

“They won’t need to. The clinics on the coast will hear about this and figure out what happened. They’ll treat everyone else with similar symptoms. Ideas can travel faster than illnesses. Quetzelcoatl can win, sometimes, over Ciahanatl.”

Salmonella typhi – it even sounded ugly. But that’s what had been keeping Jesus bed ridden for the past year. It took a needle, two dollars worth of antibiotics and some common medical sense to get him up on his feet again. And they said he wouldn’t walk.

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“Why did that happen?” I asked.

“It was an injustice,” John said calmly. “It shows what Carl Virchow meant in the 1870s when he said medicine is politics. Jesus only saw a pharmacist. He didn’t have money to go to an actual doctor.”

Jesus’ cure seemed like a miracle, and we needed it. In fact, the case of Jesus being cured by Franciscan prayers seemed amusingly ironic to the farmers and herders of the Sangre de Christo mountains. They also knew that it might not have happened at all without the most famous doctor in all of Oaxaca.

I wasn’t sure how it happened, but suddenly, a nick-name stuck. One day he was just John Connor, good ol’ boy from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, just a guy who went to med school and accidentally became a prisoner of the drug lords. The next day he was a legend in the Sangre de Christo mountains. The famous gringo medico -- Doc Oaxaca.

They asked for him when they came to San Jose: “Donde esta el Doc Oaxaca?”

“It sorta has a ring to it,” I said as night fell on us at the Keroac point.

“Maybe fame will protect us.”

“I’m still bothered by the drug money,” he said “We started this going into hoc with the military. How will it end?”

For once I held back. What could I say about the whispering? How will it end? Like it always does. Fame is certainly no armor against fate.

Outrage follows injustice

Jesus had suffered injustice, true, but what happened to little Antonio Gonzales was an outrage.

Antonio and his mother lived in a small shack on the outskirts of a coffee plantation on the Pacific side of the Sangre de Christo mountains. They were so poor they had no money for a bus ride. In fact, they never even drank the coffee they cultivated. Not even once. The plantation owners counted every bean. Every. Single. One.

When Antonio’s mom heard about Doc Oaxaca, she strapped a chair to her back and carried the boy through the mountains for seven days. She said he was 12 years old, but it seemed hard to believe. He was only four and a half feet tall and weighed about 45 pounds. He had severe shortness of breath and some kind of heart problem, his mother said.

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John listened to his heart, and I listened too. Bump bump sploosh. Bump bump sploosh.

“Hear the leaky valve?” John asked. “Rheumatic fever. Heart disease from years ago. Simple staff infection. Probably could have been cured easily when he was an infant. Now its congestive heart failure.”

We made him comfortable and we talked about his life. He always envied his brothers and sisters who could play soccer, he said. Jesus and his sons, who were packing up, tried to get him in the spirit. The friars took him out to talk as they worked in the garden. He sat by the radishes and asked questions about heaven, and the friars told him wondrous tales about the great things that angels do.

“Heaven is so very beautiful,” the old friar said, “that we’re not allowed to know much about it. If we did, we’d want to go there right away.”

“What’s it like?” Antonio asked.

“It’s a summer feeling, like bright sunshine, and warmth in the deepest part of you. That’s God’s grace. And there’s always plenty to eat and drink, and sweet things …” The old monk seemed to be listening for something, then suddenly he straightened up and looked very sober. His voice took on a deeper and more serious tone.

“You will be surrounded by all the people you love. Your little grandmother – your abuelita – she will be waiting for you. She will guide you over.”

Watching the old monk, I realized he had been listening to the whispers. And I could see something -- some very slight change in the light – just behind him.

They called us in to dinner, and I asked the old monk who he had been listening to.

“My old abbot talks with me from time to time,” he said. “If you listen, maybe sometimes you can hear him too.”

I promised to try.

Antonio sat next to John at dinner that night, but ate very little. We could tell he was getting weaker. “So brave a boy,” John said. “So very brave.”

His mom and the friars prayed, but John had a private word with Father Juan Carlos. “God answered our prayer with Jesus, but He may not want us to become too proud of our small gifts,” he said. “This one may not make it.”

In the United States, little Antonio might have been flown to a heart center for an operation that would replace the heart valve. But here, in Mexico, where only a few dollars worth of antibiotics

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could have cured the staff infection a decade ago, the cost and the logistics of a heart operation were beyond conception.

He began to slide into unconsciousness. Twelve days after arriving, we awoke to hear his mom crying at the bedside.

There was a little patch of meadow, beyond the garden, that seemed just perfect for our new cemetery. Antonio Gonzales was the first. We cried with his mom, helped dig the grave, and felt shocked by the injustice of it all.

That night, beyond the Kerouac threshold, I cursed and raged and shook my fist at the sky. “We were right to use the drug money, damnit. Why not take the cash any way we can get it from those stupid, bovine Americans. Why can’t they help these people? Why do they keep it all for themselves?”

“Hey, you’re a bovine American too,” John reminded me.

“But wising up all the time,” I said, letting the rage pass. “Wising up.”

We paused for a moment, then we both moo-ed at the moon. “Moo. Moo-ooo… Moo… Moooooo…:

❖

Who’s underdeveloped?

The days, then the months, went by in a blur as we quickly transformed the Franciscan mountaintop into a working clinic.

The Friars told John they thought he was like a saint, caring so much for the poor as he did.

No, it’s the other way around, he said. They are helping me work through something. I could never have done this in the United States.

But the US is a big powerful country, and we are undeveloped, they said, wide-eyed.

“It’s really the US that is the underdeveloped country,” he replied in a thoughtful tone. “Here we are free to help, and to innovate, without being overpowered by the usual the professional institutions.”

I didn’t quite believe that myth he was trying to spin. For one thing, we weren’t about to experiment on people. What John intended was more along the lines of teaching ordinary people about

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medicine and public health. American institutions did that too, in a cautious and bureaucratic way. And then, of course, we still had to cope with the drug lords. We were still their captives, and in the clinch, our innovations would amount to nothing in the face of their gun barrels.

We’d heard that that Austin and Gene had come back from yet another successful run into the US, and one day they dropped by to remind us that we were still their prisoners. John smiled. “How will this end?” he asked them. “We can’t be your prisoners forever.”

“Soon we’ll be moving our operation away from all this activity,” he said. “Soon this will just be an ordinary little town.” But typically, John saw the problem three moves ahead on the chessboard, and I guessed as well.

“Austin, how will they justify moving the Army checkpoint? There would have to be some kind of guerilla activity, a fire fight of some kind, in the place they want to move to.”

Austin sneered. “Y’all doctors mind your own business, or you’ll be in worse trouble.”

As Austin got in his red Jeep Cherokee and drove away, a weathered but official looking white sedan arrived. Dr. Enrique Esteban, a corpulent man in a rumpled gray suit, explained that he had come up from the main hospital in Oaxaca at the request of the state medical board.

John had already been exchanging letters with Esteban. Their correspondence had been carefully screened at the colonel’s office, and then delivered by Father Juan Carlos. He looked us over with a spark of great curiosity behind his beetle brows, and after an extensive tour, must have decided we were OK. It didn’t hurt that medical licensing is not as strict in Mexico as it is in the US.

“The clinic is certainly adequate,” he said, “even admirable in some ways. There can be no impediment to the practice. In fact, this area has needed something along these lines for a long time.”

Dr. Esteban said that I would be free to be part of the medical team so long as I didn’t falsely advertise that I had medical training. We worried that this might be a little awkward, but Esteban understood our predicament and promised to keep our arrangement confidential. It was still important, we told him, that the smugglers thought I was a doctor.

Father Juan Carlos also talked with Enrique before he drove back down the mountain to Oaxaca, eight hours away. “Church business,” he said.

A few weeks later, hundreds of boxes of pharmaceuticals found their way into one of the storage sheds. We would need a pharmacist soon, at least part time. And we needed groundskeepers and laundry workers and electricians and carpenters and masons and … really, an entire village.

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Word gets out

The one thing we did not need was patients. Once word got out that we had a permanent medical establishment, dozens of people would descend on the town every day. The bus line added an extra daily run. San Jose had become a small city overnight. “A barefoot metropolis,” John joked.

With Austin and Gene gone from town, and the Army barracks apparently packing up too, as there was less need for secrecy. With the colonel’s permission we began writing letters home, explaining that we’d been working to start the clinic and had been so busy we didn’t have time to write.

It wasn’t long before we heard back from the crew – David kept everyone in touch. He’d been working at Greystone psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. Patty moved to Vermont, got involved in a group marriage, wondered if she needed a group divorce, and started teaching literature in a small girls college. Steven had moved to Chicago and worked in an oncology ward, where the emotional stress was so high that he joked about checking into Greystone.

The farm was still going strong, and they were growing organic produce and giving horseback riding lessons. Everyone was prospering, and everyone sent money – large checks and small.

But no one knew where Susie was. Someone heard she had gone to Europe, but no one was sure.

One night past the Kerouac threshold, John wondered if, or when, the Mexican Army would stage a fight to justify moving to another area of operations. It was as if he had already felt the coming storm.

❖

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Chapter 27

The Raddish Festival

City of Oaxaca, Mexico

The present

For a while, it seemed as if Mexico was changing; and, as the weeks slipped by into months, with the summer rainy season giving way to a crisp and brilliant fall, the future looked promising.

The clinic survived the first surge of patients and was now doing a brisk but steady business. We had an X-ray machine and a small blood lab. Contributions were coming in from friends back in the states who had heard about what we were doing.

John worked closely with Carmelita as she filled out our dispensary with local medicinal herbs, and they had begun writing a book together. The brothers at the monastery were also becoming passable nurses and excellent gardeners. Father Juan Carlos would drop by twice a week to say mass and then stay for dinner. Julio had finished a major sanitation project and got a government grant for additional work.

For a while, it almost seemed as if the Quetzelcoatl was winning and Cihuateotl was being driven back like a shadows. But the balance would soon be restored.

Fifty one weeks a year, the city of Oaxaca bakes and snoozes in the desert mountains halfway between the chaos of Mexico City and the lush Guatemalan rain forest.

But for just one week -- the week before Christmas -- the town erupts in a human torrent. Tens of thousands of Mixtec and Zapoteca Indians descend from the surrounding highlands for the Radish festival, and the marketplace floods over into the next half-dozen streets. Vendors by the thousand set up small wooden stands and awnings, turning once sleepy avenues into a network of narrow twisting paths like an impenetrable Mexican casbah.

At twilight, naked light bulbs by the thousand appear from the pin oak branches, illuminating the paths around the manicured Zocolo park in the center of town. The usual complement of old men, shoeshine boys and sarape vendors is engulfed by waves of white-shirted Indians waving bottles in bags and shouting half-Christian, half-pagan slogans.

From the sidewalks, vendors with a dozen serapes shouted loud boasts about pure wool and quality weaving and natural dyes. "Pura lana, pura lana" their voices echoed across the Zocalo, until a

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brass band starts up in the gazebo bandstand.

Young boys hustled the crowds and set off firecrackers. University students hustled marijuana and mushrooms amid the hundreds of gringos who had come down for the festival. Sometimes a Mexican student would talk about the really dangerous stuff -- revolution. But the feeling would be quickly absorbed in joyous cacophony, since even a poor family could feel suddenly rich at the Radish festival.

Visiting the city

During one of his regular visits, Father Jan Carlos had asked us to go to the Radish festival in the city of Oaxaca, saying the bishop had arranged a small but very public part for John, and his blessing was important to help protect us. Back in the states, John’s part would have been “grand marshal” of the parade, probably just blowing the whistle to start things off and sitting in the reviewing stand to watch it.

The idea in Oaxaca was to attend the church service and, afterwards, just walk a block with the bishop to start off the procession from the church down into the Zocalo park.

We took a bus lurching down the mountains from San Jose, our kidneys aching again from the shots of adrenaline and the constant fear of sliding off a mountain road and down a long cliff. I kept thinking that lightning doesn’t strike twice, so why should fate?

They had a room for us in a local hotel, and the next morning we were up early for the main ceremony. The bishop had a priest find John and wait at the front of the cathedral. As the ceremony ended, and the procession came out into the main square, the bishop put his arm around John’s shoulders, a gesture of protection, and pulled him into the parade. Someone from the back of the crowd yelled “Viva el Doc Oaxaca!” and the crowd took up the shout for a few moments.

“Go with my blessing, son,” the old bishop whispered in his ear. “It’s all I can do for you and for my beloved old friend, Bishop Ryerson.”

I caught up with John as he made his way through the crowd, shaking hands and trading smiles with the people, telling them that they should just call him John.

“Hey, why do you call me Doc Oaxaca?” he asked. “There are plenty of doctors in Oaxaca.” “Yes, in the city of Oaxaca, but not in the rural state of Oaxaca,” one of the campesinos grinned. “The voice of the land called, and you heard it. I wish more of our doctors had your heart.”

“And your ears,” another one joked.

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“Well if you find one with my liver, let me know” he laughed. “I’m going to need it back, because I’m going to have a few drinks.” The campesinos thought this was hilarious and repeated to their friends as they left us and walked into the market.

We found a quiet corner in a small restaurant, and a waiter brought tortillas in a plastic pan and a pair of Double-X beers.

“The church really wants our clinic to succeed,” he said as we took sips of beer. “They see the drugs and the violence and the pollution as really dangerous, and they want something positive to counteract it.”

“Pollution?” I asked.

“Mining down near the coast, apparently,” he said. “He’s asked Father Juan Carlos to give us a tour in a few weeks.” He started off into the surging crowd.

“So how was your afternoon?” he asked.

I told him I’d spent the day learning about the “Night of the Radishes — El noche de rábanos.”

“The what?”

“Radish night,” I said. “That’s tonight. It’s a sort of remnant of a very early Mixtec culture. They were here even before the Aztecs. They built stone slab houses that were earthquake proof. They were brilliant. And they worshipped at a tree that holds the heart of Quetzalcotl.”

“Yes, I heard about that, long ago, in Virginia,” John said.

“Long ago Virginia,” I said. “Sounds like a song.”

“So what is the radish thing all about?”

“The radish was a staple food, but it has a double taproot and can form almost human shapes, as if it has legs. Nobody knows much about their rituals. The Spanish priests tried to bring the radishes into the Catholic culture, but they never quite succeeded.”

“A radish is just a vegetable,” John said. “What’s the big deal?”

“The Indians dress them up and create little manger scenes and other creches that depict the Holy Family at Bethlehem.” I gestured across the park. "See the booths over there? It's amazing what they can do. The radishes grow three feet long, and the Indians spend all summer and fall cultivating them. Sometimes they plant large rocks underneath the radishes, hoping to make the roots fork or grow in a certain direction. Then they carve the tops and dress them like big dolls."

The blare of trumpets from the gazebo focused all attention on a bright section of the park.

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"Hey, the parade is coming around the park," John said, standing on tiptoe and looking over the sea of dark heads.

From the far corner of the park, a litter carried by twenty men held a young woman dressed in white, a young man in robes, and a small electric light concealed inside a manger. The holy couple gazed adoringly at the light. As the litter came around the corner, a priest led a crisp Latin rosary into a squawking megaphone. “Padre nuestro, quien es in el cielo…”

As the litter passed by, we could hear the gasoline generator burping along underneath. Not even the brass band could quite drown it out. All that noise for one small light -- another surreal Mexican illumination.

Behind the creche came the school children with banners flying, and behind them were veterans and city elders who stumbled slowly in a half-drunken attempt at solemnity.

And behind the boozy elders, a dozen Kalinda dancers, enormous paper mache effigies fifteen feet tall, sashayed and twirled to the music as the crowd roared its approval.

The dancers came abreast of the table, and one leaned over the crowd to look down at us. John jumped up and pretended to kiss the large paper mache face.

From inside the Kalinda figure came a shout — “Hey, gringos, queres bailar? Want to dance?”

Suddenly the parade stopped, the music went mute, and the entire crowd turned to watch John’s reaction.

“Do I want to dance? Hmmm.” He pulled out a dictionary and pretended to study it for a moment.

“Demaciado asustizo,” he said. “Too shy.”

The crowd roared with approving laughter and the parade started again – Kalindas dancing, music blaring, bottles passing in a world eager to make joyful noises.

I felt her pull before I saw her. She didn’t see us at first, or at least, pretended not to see us, for some reason.

I walked over and touched Susie on the shoulder.

“Billy,” she yelled, and hugged me fiercely. “And John!” She hugged him too, then pulled back, arms still around him. “I hear you’re quite a celebrity now.”

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“What do you mean?”

“It’s all over the gringo trail. Pair of doctors captured. Nobody heard from you for months, and now you’re famous.”

“When did you get here?” he asked.

“Couple of days ago. I’ve been on the loose. Europe. Traveling. I was going to drive up into the mountains tomorrow, to see if I couldn’t find your clinic. You have to tell me all about it.”

She was lying. I could see the shift in the light behind her, turning slightly darker as she chattered about her time in Italy, lounging on hammocks in Naples, skin diving off Capri. I’m not quite sure when I learned to look at that light, or whether I’d learned to read it better from my time in the Sangre de Christo mountains, but it was one of my few serious talents. I could always tell when there was something wrong.

We finished dinner and I made an excuse to wander off and give them some time alone. John didn’t show up that night at the small hotel where we were staying, but came around the next morning.

“It is so nice to reconnect with her,” he said, wondering how I would react. “She’s driving us up to the hospital today. We told the colonel we wouldn’t stay in Oaxaca. And there are patients waiting.”

We all knew Susie very well, back at the Rock Pile. Not just Biblically. We knew her Hindu-ishly as a serious student of the Kama Sutra. And Zen-ishly, because it all seemed both absurd and spiritually liberating. And since her goal was to sleep with everybody in the house, men and women, sex was her personal jihad. It had all seemed so ecumenical.

Now, driving up into the Sangre de Christo mountains, she seemed changed, again, in some deep and mysterious way. It was clear she wanted John. That was cool, I told myself. It’s just that everything she did seemed different, and I couldn’t tell why, exactly.

Her gestures, the way she brushed back that flaming platinum hair, the way she gave John the doe- eyes, the way she touched his knee as she changed gears driving her jeep – It seemed warm enough, and yet calculated and deeply cunning. There was something about her that was starkly different, but I couldn’t think of what.

We talked about how our friends were doing back home as we hit the gravel mountain roads, drinking frosty cokes that we’d picked up at a roadside stand.

John told her about Carmelita and how she was Charlie Steel’s daughter, and her theory of the

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medicine wheel that had brought us to Mexico and landed us in a smuggler’s den. She was curious about Father Juan Carlos and the role of the church in protecting us, but her questions, although unobtrusive, seemed to emerge from some prior knowledge of the clinic. She might have heard something about all this through the gringo trail grapevine, I thought. How else?

Something nagged at the corner of my conscience. Or maybe I was just jealous. At one point she mentioned life in the Rock Pile, and the great snowball fight. I apologized for putting snow down her neck, and she forgave me. We were so young, she said. But actually, that had never happened. So maybe this wasn’t Susie at all.

Maybe a lot of things.

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Chapter 28

Lead and mercury poisoning

San Martin de Minamata, Mexico

The present

She would have to have a separate room, of course. This was Mexico, and we were on church property, so there would be some compromises. I thought she agreed, but the first night she slipped quietly into John’s room, and the second night she ducked into mine. So warm, so thin, and the way she wrapped around my body and slowly drew me out, like sucking venom from an ancient wound.

We were talking about her the third night.

“It’s like getting milked… like she has fingers in her vagina or something. I think they call it Cleopatra’s grip.”

“She was like that in the Rock Pile, but she’s gotten a lot better.”

“Hello boys,” she said, suddenly sliding into the room and sitting on the bed between us. She reached for the tequila and took a long, deep pull, then wiped off her mouth.

“Isn’t this jolly, just the three of us?” she asked.

“Susie, this is Mexico,” John sighed. “It’s never just the three of us. We are on stage. Everyone knows everything we are doing.”

“It’s upsetting the friars,” I said. “You need to start being more discrete.”

“I need to be discrete? I?” She slid her hands on the insides of our thighs and pulled us closer. “How about you two?”

“What do you mean? We never … ah…”

There it was. Just that flash between the three of us, like a new possibility had dawned, something we couldn’t say out loud.

“Come on, I sleep with other women all the time,” she said in a dusky voice. “It’s part of the life. You need to have many lovers and try a lot of things if you’re going to sleep well in your old age.”

“And what about VD?” John asked.

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“And what about the friars?” I asked.

“And what about this?” she asked as she unzipped both of our pants with one deft flick of her thin fingers.

Then we all three just melted into an ecstatic pool of hormones. That’s all I can tell you. Sometimes emotions run higher than the human vocabulary.

❖

The next night, high up on the bluff, beyond the Kerouak threshold, the male consensus was clear.

We had just plunged in on the deep end, all right. She had us exactly where she wanted us. There was nothing she couldn’t ask for now, and nowhere she couldn’t go.

“And I still think she isn’t Susie.”

“Why not?” John asked.

“Remember the mole? On her thigh?”

“No. There wasn’t one,” he said.

“Yes there was,” I insisted. “Besides, she kisses differently. Softer. Susie was a hard kisser.”

“Seems the same to me. But you know, Carmelita said something interesting about her. Caremelita saw her as a woman with two hearts. She said it was a mystery she didn’t understand.”

“Two hearts. Go figure. ”

Then we heard her steps on the path to the Kerouak threshold.

“Look at you guys all alone up here,” the voice came from the path below. “I’m surprised.”

“No, madam, you are astonished,” I quipped. “We are surprised.”

She pulled her face in close to ours.

“Hello boys,” she said in The Voice of Southern Seduction.

“Oh my God,” I said, balls aching.

“Not so happy to see me?” she asked, sitting between us. She nudged me and giggled: “You cocksucker.”

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Oh Jesus.

“What are we going to do?” I asked. “This is Mexico, and we’re a long way from the Gringo Trail. This sort of Cabaret stuff can be dangerous.”

John thought about it for a minute and then said: “Susie, we need to find a positive role for you — that is, if you are going to hang around.”

“I’m not sure how long I can stay,” she said in a distracted tone, then asked batting her coquettish eyelashes: “What did you have in mind?”

“How about helping me start a school?” he asked.

“You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she laughing and taking a deep gulp of tequila. “Turning a brazen hussy like me into a pencil-necked school-marm. But wait — don’t they already have a school?”

“I mean for adults, to learn medicine,” he said.

“Not my subject,” she said, still laughing, passing the bottle to me.

“I would teach. You would recruit,” John said. “You speak Spanish pretty well. So you could explain about health promoters and why they are important.”

“Be your public relations assistant?” she asked, pausing for a moment. “It has possibilities.”

I chimed in: “As the administrative assistant, I agree. We need someone with more sex appeal to do PR for this organization. But no blow jobs for the monks.”

“Awww,” she said, her voice slipping into a Mae West accent. “You boys take the fun out of fundamentalism.”

At first, the idea was just to give some plausibility to Susie’s presence. We didn’t think it would work. And yet, we were astonished when she threw herself into the role with a kind of relish and intelligence that seemed like a contradiction of her wanton ways. Or, the idea dawned on us in a furtive Kerouac moment, perhaps a penance.

She began by spending a week with Carmelita. Afterwards, she went to Catholic mass and apparently confessed something interesting, because Father Julio glared at us for a few days. Then she started going to women’s meetings where they were organized, and organizing them where they weren’t. Each hamlet and village in the Sangre de Christo mountains would select their own health promoter to go study in San Jose.

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The curriculum, she argued, would have to go beyond medicine.

“Kids get sick when they don’t have sanitation, or protein, or routine medical attention,” she said, ticking the troubles off on her fingers. “They don’t have enough protein because they don’t have enough land for growing food. They don’t have enough land because it’s been taken away from them. It’s been taken away because they don’t have social justice. Social justice means they don’t have money for sanitation or any money at all, for that matter.”

“OK,” John said. “But it doesn’t all come down to money. To paraphrase the famous Doctor Ahmed el Kabir, money is a disease for which I do not prescribe. The only know cure is revolution, and the mortality rate is too high.”

“No. It comes down to social justice,” Susie said. “Money is not it.”

“Who was el Kabir?” I asked.

“Peter Sellers,” he laughed. “In a movie where he spurns Sophia Loren.”

“That is social injustice,” I said. “Who could resist Sophia Loren?”

“Not me,” Susie said. “She was soooo hot… mmmmhhh.”

The Zen laughter followed the bottle past the Keroac threshold.

The miners of San Martin

As promised, the bishop of Oaxaca called the Colonel and asked that Father Juan Carlos take us to the coast to see one of the mining communities with public health problems. Susie said she had some business on the Oaxaca side of the mountains, inland to the east, and would meet up with us in a week or so. Father Juan Carlos put the church jeep into gear and we started off down the mountain, west to the Pacific coast, where we were originally headed almost a year ago.

“The situation is not right, and the bishop is working on it,” he said. “In the meantime, the bishop specifically said to tell you that he appreciates your devotion to the poor people of Oaxaca. You’re giving this wounded land a way to heal.”

“But it’s only a beginning.” John said.

We traveled west, past the broken spot in the road that had now been fixed, past the Volkswagen van that was still lying there, sideways, like Prometheus chained to his rock. There were even vultures pecking on his radiator. We quickly turned the corner and started the long gear-grinding four-

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wheel slolom down the mountain to the gleaming vast calm of the Pacific Ocean, increasingly visible through the clear-cuts and the slash-and-burn farms on the mountainsides.

Our first stop was a small village outside of Puerto Escondido, really not more than a cluster of cinder block houses with tin roofs and an adobe church. A group of campesinos kicked the dust and waited for us outside the white adobe church. We chatted for a while, drank some tea they offered. John asked if he could take samples of their blood, and Father Juan Carlos reassured them, and a few minutes later they were rolling down their sleeves. And soon we were rolling out of town.

“Those aren’t the ones who are so bad off,” Juan Carlos said. “So maybe they can be, how you say, a baseline for the study.”

The old church jeep chugged forty miles along the coast, at one point crossing a plank bridge perched precariously above a muddy river. Clearing it with a sigh, we drove into the town square of the tiny little mining community of San Martin.

“These are the lost souls of San Martin,” he said, gesturing to people on the streets who were walking with a strange limp, dragging their feet, as if they couldn’t feel them, as if all the nerves in their feet had gone dead. Some walked with their arms out, with their hands dangling in front.

They looked for all the world like the old-time cinema version of Frankenstein’s monster. I must have said that out loud.

“That’s where it comes from,” John responded in a dry and clinical tone. “The cinema depiction of Frankenstein comes from occupational disease — from poisoned lead workers. They hold their arms out because they aren’t very steady on their feet, and they are afraid they might fall.”

We sat on a park bench while Father Juan Carlos started talking with some of the shaking, stuttering men playing dominoes on a table nearby. He asked two of the men, an older one named Enrique and a middle-aged man named Jamie to show their teeth to “el doctor.”

“Good teeth,” John said. Enrique and Jamie smiled with a little pride. But there was a dark blue line in their gums, above and below the teeth.

“Do you ever have pins and needles in the hands and feet?” he asked. They both nodded.

“Does your skin peel, like you have been sunburned?” he asked.

They looked up. “How do you know all this?”

We were just getting around to asking about a blood test when two priests came running out from the church across the park. They puffed up to where we were standing with Enrique and Jamie, and looked at Father Juan Carlos, and asked:

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“What do you think you are doing here?”

“I think,” Father Enrique said in a calming tone, “that people in this town are in trouble.”

“They certainly are,” huffed one of the priests with a wild look in his eyes. “Have you come to help with the exorcism?”

“Exorcism?”

“We have an exorcism planned for this afternoon.”

“No, I came to bring these two doctors…” Juan Carlos gestured to us, “because I hear there is poison in this town.”

The two priests looked us over for a minute with an arcane distance in their pupils, almost as if we were specimens from Father Juan Carlos’ collection.

“Say, aren’t these the two gringo doctors captured by the drug lords?” asked the short, stocky one, still puffing.

I stepped forward with my hand out. “I’m Dr. Burton, and I don’t believe we have been introduced.” And I waited, with my hand out, for a long minute. My hand dangled in the air like one of the lead- poisoned miner’s hands.

The two stepped back and pulled Father Juan Carlos to one side. There was a whispered conversation that sounded like the squawking of parrots. We caught something about “other diocese” and “our bishop says.”

John stepped forward. “Why do you need an exorcism?” he asked.

“If you must know,” said the thin one, annoyed to even have to talk with John, “it’s because the miners say they are seeing ghosts and spirits all the time.”

“That is a normal symptom of lead poisoning,” John said.

“No, that is the work of the devil,” the stout one said. “We must drive the devil out.”

“These sorts of hallucinations have been known since the Middle Ages,” John said. “There is a scientific explanation.”

“Ah,” said the thin one. “You want us to believe in something we cannot see?” His eyes burrowed into John like a drill bit twisting into a two by four.

It was easy to see where that was going. If we believed in one thing we couldn’t see, why not another? If we believed in lead poisoning, why not believe that it was the work of the devil?

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Juan Carlos cleared his throat, and started to speak, but John put his fists on his hips and said: “Listen carefully, priest.” He seemed to grow larger, as if he was suddenly a Gulliver towering over two Lilliputians. “I want you to think about something, not believe in it. It is something that you can see. There are tests you can do. We can know what is happening to the people of this town. We can use reason in the way that God wants. We can help heal, the way Jesus healed.”

“What exactly do you want?” the stout one asked.

“We would like to take samples of people’s blood,” Juan Carlos said. “We want to know…”

“You want blood?” the thin one’s voice was rising. “You must be vampires,” he hissed.

“Vampire gringos!” the stout one yelled. “Vampire gringos!” Several other afflicted campesinos in the park took up the mad chant. “Vampire gringos!”

And it occurred to us, for the first time, that the priests themselves must have gone mad from lead poisoning, like the rest of the people in the town.

From a distance, the ominous sound of a pair of diesel pickup trucks drew closer.

The thin priest raised his eyebrows at us. “Son los guardias de la mina,” he said with a kind of smirk. “It’s the mine guards.”

“Are there police here in town?” I asked. Official police would be less dangerous.

Juan Carlos shook his head. “Just the mine guards,” he said with a “follow my lead and keep your mouth shut” sort of look.

The mine guards pulled up to the park in what they probably thought was a blaze of glory. They jumped out of their green pickup trucks, wearing blue jeans and light blue shirts. They quickly surrounded us, pointing their shotguns and automatic weapons.

“Gentlemen, I’m a priest, sent by the bishop of Oaxaca, and these two are doctors,” Juan Carlos said. No one moved. “The doctors are under the protection of Col. Culmonares,” he said, looking back at the two priests with eyebrows up.

“Yes, that much is true,” the stout priest said. “But they are vampire gringo doctors, and they were just leaving.”

The mine guards lowered their weapons, and we gently retreated. John detoured to drink from the fountain and then filled a small plastic cup as well. “A drink for the road,” he said to the guards, making a gesture like a drunk guzzling from a bottle, and then staggered back to the car. The guards laughed.

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When we got back in the car, he held it below the window, poured it into a test tube and carefully placed a lid on it.

We drove back to the bridge, but this time there were a half dozen women leaning on the rail, gently releasing white lilies into the river.

Juan Carlos and I looked puzzled, but after we crossed over, John jumped out of the car ran back to talk with the women. We got out and watched from the river bank as he stood with them, listening, questioning, commiserating. We couldn’t hear, but they were gesturing, and first towards the river, then towards the mountains behind us, where the mines were, and then towards each other. They were crying, and from the river bank, we could see him holding the women, and kissing their foreheads, and brushing away their tears.

Juan Carlos, watching me gape, made that small, now-familiar gesture with his hand, pushing his own chin up, quietly telling me that my mouth was agape. Again.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“The face of God,” he said reverently, “is in every great act of compassion. There, you see it? Watch your friend, Doc Oaxaca. He is like a saint.”

Oh, if he only knew what that saint was doing two days ago, I thought. On the other hand, maybe he did. And who would care? But when John came back, he didn’t look like he’d had a religious experience. As he rummaged through his backpack, he pulled out the blood kit and several more sample bottles.

“Remember the women at Marilyn Janney’s house I told you about?” he asked me. “How they would drop lilies down into the stream every day, to remember their aborted children, the ones who never made it? These women on the bridge are also remembering the children that were stillborn. They know the lead mine killed them. And the mercury from the gold mine. Everyone knows. Hell, everyone knows that everyone knows.”

John went back to the river bank, behind some trees, where they wouldn’t be seen if someone from San Martin had followed us. They collected water samples for him, and rolled up their sleeves for him, and cried for him. When it was over, they even sang a song for him as we drove away. All I caught was “Recuerdos…” Memories.

We drove back from San Martin to the main highway, then drove north for another 10 miles and spent the night in a small wayside hotel. It was flea-bitten but not so bad by local standards. We drove on the next day, talking about justice and God and, always, about medicine. There was

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another town, and another mine — this one an iron mine, without so many pollutants. The village priest was educated and amenable, and helped us take blood and water samples. Tapping the side of his head to indicate crazyness, he said: “Be very careful of the priests of San Martin.” We said we would.

Driving back down the coast, Juan Carlos wondered where it was all leading. “Assuming you find what I think you will find,” he said, gesturing to the sample bag as we drove along. “What can be done?”

“For lead poisoning, there is a kind of therapy. It takes years, but it helps, a little,” he said. “Mostly this is about public health. The government needs to close down that lead mine.”

“But the lead mine feeds the pottery factories of Oaxaca,” Father Juan Carlos said.

“They can find other kinds of pottery glazes,” I said. “Stopping lead poisoning won’t disrupt their way of life. We can make sure of that.”

“Mexico never changes,” Father Juan Carlos sighed wistfully.

John asked about other mining towns in the mountains, and about other occupational disease issues. At this point I was feeling depressed, and unscrewed the cap of a bottle of tequila. Father Juan Carlos shook his head, but John took a long pull, then looked at Juan Carlos.

“What?” he said, laughing. “Hey, I’m no saint.”

“Yes, my friend, you are,” Juan Carlos said, taking the bottle and screwing the cap back on, and slipping it under the seat. “Well, at least, you’re the closest thing we happen to have. So drive carefully, please.”

We had hoped to return by a different route, avoiding San Martin, but it was not possible. Three days after we first drove through the town, we crossed the north bridge wondering what we would find. It was far worse than we could have imagined.

In the center of the town square, the priests had set up a bonfire and tied up some poor soul to a stake in the middle of it. The flames were just growing, and chants of the crowd rising, and the screams just beginning, as we turned the corner. All the heads turned at once.

“The vampire gringos are back,” the fat priest said.

Father Juan Carlos got out of the car. “No. This is wrong. They are doctors. You cannot take them.”

The women that John had met on the north bridge also got out and joined with Father Juan Carlos,

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linking arms to hold back the crowd, now starting to surge around the church jeep.

“Get out,” Juan Carlos yelled. “I’ll be OK, but they will kill you if you stay.”

“Come with us,” John yelled back.

“I have to stay, to give you time,” he yelled. “They won’t dare hurt me.”

John jumped in the drivers seat and gunned the engine, and we flew across the rickety south bridge as if it were a freeway. He stopped on the other side and looked back.

The pickup trucks full of armed mine guards were headed our way. John pulled out a tire iron from the back of the jeep and we quickly pulled up the few planks in the bridge. In a moment it was impassible, at least for a few hours.

When the mine guards realized they couldn’t cross the bridge, they began shooting their Uzzi submachine guns at us. We drove off in a hurry, but slowed at the hilltop, and saw the massacre unfold in front of our eyes, almost in slow motion. Of course, I had the camera out. And of course, the pictures would go to a press association. But this time, the camera didn’t seem to protect me from the horror that was being turned loose on the streets of San Martin.

Father Juan Carlos, arms outstretched like a Goya painting, protected the women who shook their fists and screamed defiance at the mine guards. The mine guards raised their guns and slowly, methodically, and gave each of the women a burst of machine gun fire.

We heard the gunfire continue as we drove away, hoping for a telephone, hoping to stop the massacre somehow. But we knew we were just saving our own skins.

Out of respect, I think they saved the last burst for Father Juan Carlos. They found him later, at the top of a heap of bodies, as if he had been praying at the last.

Of course there would be an international investigation. Of course the mines would be shut down. But we couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt. It was our intervention that triggered events. It was our sense of righteous duty and our devotion to public health that started the mine guards shooting.

Just like a cop might regret confronting a criminal with hostages, the public health police of Oaxaca cried, late at night, into their tequila, well past the Keroac threshold.

And the next day we got word of another massacre.

❖

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Chapter 29

Converts

Manzanita, Mexico

The present

What a mess.

The drivers had to maneuver around the bodies, scattered in heaps. The engine sounds startled the vultures, who ascended in a croaking flock and flew off into the nearby forest. Colonel Culmonares waved the trucks ahead and then got out of his jeep, revolver in hand. Army troopers tumbled from the trucks, machine guns ready, as they spread out and began searching the town.

Evidence of the slaughter was everywhere. The fallen soldiers’ bodies were draped over the mine guards, and they had fallen on clusters of civilians. Most of the civilians had been shot from the front, but most of the mine guards and soldiers had been shot from behind.

A lone crow flew overhead, kawing and scolding. The colonel cursed and fired off a few shots with his revolver. The sound ripped through the silence and echoed across the surrounding hills. The crow flapped its wings and flew off to safety.

“Keep searching for survivors,” he yelled at his men as they stared at him. “God damned crows,” he muttered.

The company captain came up an saluted. “Sir, we haven’t found anyone alive. There are probably 30 or 40 of our men dead…”

“Damn,” Culmonares said. “This was not supposed to happen.”

“There was a note pinned to one of them, addressed to you personally.”

Culmonares unfolded the note. “Dear cousin,” it began.

He frowned and put it in his pocket to read later. “Bull shit,” he said. “Let’s look around.”

They went from house to house, looking at blood spattered walls and gruesome scenes of carnage and human destruction. Some of the soldiers were found dead in bedrooms or behind sheds with their pants around their ankles. Others were prone before the huddled civilians they had just killed, in positions begging forgiveness that were remarkably similar to the civilians.

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If the army had been protecting the people of the village from the guerillas, then the soldiers bodies would have been grouped behind cover. Instead, what had obviously happened was that the soldiers, intent on rape and murder, had been surprised by the guerillas and slaughtered one by one.

But how did it happen? Usually the guerillas carried AK-47s, which made a distinctly different sound than their M-16s, warning them where the enemy was firing.

Culmonares gathered the troops together.

“What has happened here is that our valiant brothers in arms tried to defend this helpless town from the Marxist guerillas. It is to their credit and honor that they tried to do this…” Culmonares glared as one soldier coughed … “and our duty to avenge this atrocity.”

The captain led a cheer. “Viva la Patria!” he yelled. Only a few sergeants took up the cheer. The captain turned and glared at the men. “Viva la Patria” he yelled again, this time eliciting a half- hearted echo from the nauseated soldiers.

From an alley behind the plaza, a weak voice shouted “Viva la patria…”

Culmonares and his lieutenants rush to the alley to find one of their soldiers barely alive.

“What happened here soldier?” he asks.

“We tried to stop the mine guards,” he said.

“Who?” the colonel asked.

“Mine guards. They came here from San Martin. They were crazy. They were killing the villagers. We tried to stop them, but the guerillas thought we were the ones killing the villagers. It was one tragic error after another, like a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or something.”

Culmonares looks around at the soldiers. “Can we get a medic for this man? Find the rest of the wounded and get them into the trucks.”

Maybe the massacres in San Martin and Manzanita were symptoms of something else erupting, a grand malady sweeping over the land, a fever of violence that killing broke out everywhere in the Sangre de Christo mountains that week.

We heard of shootings all up and down the coast, and of guerillas fighting the army in unexpected places.

As we returned to our clinic in San Jose, people recognized John and waved, but their eyes

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narrowed and they didn’t smile. Something felt wrong. The parking lot was jammed with trucks and old cars, and a trail of blood covered the ground into the clinic. Julio and Brother Joseph, their arms and shirts also covered with blood, came running out to meet us.

“Oh my God, we’re so glad you’re back,” Julio said. “We tried to call the church in San Martin but no one answered.”

“We have some very serious gunshot cases,” Brother Joseph said. “And a lot of dead bodies.”

John ran into the clinic with Brother Joseph while Julio took me behind the clinic, to a woodshed that had been turned into a makeshift morgue.

“They came this morning,” he said. “The families brought their wounded and some of them died on the way.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Some kind of battle in Manzanita, about 100 miles south of here. We have eight dead here, another twelve in the hospital, and probably another 20 or 30 dead back there.”

I looked under the sheets draped over the bodies. Three older men, two women and three boys. Multiple machine gun wounds.

“On the radio, they said it guerillas had been fighting the Army,” said Brother Joseph. “But I don’t think so. How many 12 year old guerillas have you met?”

One of the monks popped around the corner. “Senor Billy, John says he needs you. Come quickly.”

The monks and the new nurse, Serena, had done a terrific job getting the victims stable, but there was a long night ahead of us. I began typing blood while Serena and John prepared the surgery. The first patient rolled in at dusk, and the last one rolled out at dawn.

That was when the monks came in with chicken tortillas and rice and beans, watching the sun rise over the mountains. I remember we said very little, and ate like beasts.

“Sometimes hunger is an overwhelming passion in the face of death,” John said.

“Neruda?” I asked weakly, thinking of the poet.

“No, no, just John Conner.”

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We caught a little sleep, then woke up and worked again until noon. I fell asleep in a chair, and awoke with a start, hearing John invoking the Gods, cursing Asclepeus and shouting at Galen and berating Hippocrates, as he always did when presented with tough physical problems in surgery.

“Damn, John, what is it?”

“Lost two of them,” he said. “But the rest will probably make it.”

He looked weary and deeply worried. “They say that a dozen men mine guards just came to Manzanita and started shooting civilians, and then the soldiers showed up, but then there was an ambush, and the guerillas killed all the soldiers.”

“That’s very serious,” I said.

“News reports say that all these dead and wounded were guerillas, but that guy over there…” he pointed his eyes in the direction of an older man with his arm in a cast “… says that these people were killed before the guerillas opened fire. He says it could have been worse if the guerillas hadn’t come.”

“So the guerillas saved them from a massacre, and now the army is blaming these people?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

He looked up, and out into the distance, and seemed to be thinking or listening to someone.

“Billy, there’s something I need you to do. Find a pint or two of a chemical called di-phenyl amine. DPA. They use it in the apple orchards. Maybe Julio knows where we can get some. I’d explain but there’s no time. Our lives may depend on it.”

“Is it medicine?” I asked.

“No, its one of Gillespie’s tricks. It’s a test for gunpowder.”

I ran down the road into town and found Julio wielding a pickaxe, digging a new drain line to deal with the west neighborhood’s overflowing, fetid latrines.

“Que pasa?” he asked, putting down the pickaxe and pulling out a red handkerchief to wipe off his face.

“You heard about the massacre down in Manzanita?” I asked. “We have a bunch of people badly wounded at the clinic.”

“Mierda,” he said. “We heard something was going on, but we didn’t know it was that bad.”

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“Listen. John wants you to find some DPA. You know, the pesticide from the apple orchards. He says it’s terribly urgent.”

“I think we keep some for our own orchards here,” he said. He rummaged through a shed and found a bottle for me, and I borrowed a burro to ride back to the clinic. Julio promised to bring some of his friends to help with the graves we would need.

That afternoon, an Army truck arrived in the courtyard and brought out five wounded soldiers on stretchers. They had tourniquets around damaged limbs and a few bandages, but that was just first aid. Without help soon, they would die.

As the friars hustled the men into the main ward, a grizzled old sergeant walked over to John and pointed an M-16 at his head.

“If they die, you die,” he said.

John shook his head and folded his arms.

“I understand,” he said. “I know how you feel. But I can’t do it. I can’t save your friends if I'm worrying about your rifle. Just put the thing down over there. Anyway, I need your help. Press this bandage down here.”

Grudgingly the sergeant set his rifle in the corner and, as John released a tourniquet, held down the bleeder.

John began barking orders. “We need plasma units on everyone. This one first – he has a chest wound. Let’s get some suction on him too. Cut that shirt away. This one over here – loosen that tornequet and let’s clamp the bleeder. OK this one – stable – he can wait a little while. Serena, can you insert an iv on the chest wound? Get a plasma bag on him. Oh, and Billy, find some more hemostats and the anesthesia in that cabinet over there. After you do that, get the blood types. Also, let’s get these gauze bandages out and start cleaning the wounds on these other guys. There's some alcohol. Cmon guys, move, move.

John worked feverishly to isolate wounds, stop bleeding and get plasma transfusions into each man's arm. When they were stable, he considered his next moves.

“How did this happen, sergeant?” John asked cautiously as he examined the wounds. “I thought the colonel and his cousin had an arrangement.”

“There was something wrong with the orders,” the sergeant said. “I think we attacked the wrong place, or maybe someone else did. We were not expecting this kind of fight.”

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John nodded, then began explaining slowly.

“Two of your men are badly hurt. If you take them to a hospital on a truck they may get to an operating room alive, but I doubt it. On the other hand, if I operate on them here, they still might not make it. So, either way, they may be close to death.”

“I know, I feel its presence,” said the sergeant. “Every day it lurks at the barracks door. Today it feasted on my men. Tomorrow it will feed on the guerillas.”

“How many are dead?” John asked.

“Twelve more. We were ambushed. It was professional. They must be getting help from the Cubans all of a sudden.”

“Im not here to be involved in politics,” John said. “I was asked by the people of this village to come and help them build a better life. I dont have any side in this war. When your men come in, Ill do my best. If civilians come in, what can I do? Im a doctor, not a politician. You see?”

The sergeant smiled. “I know. The colonel likes you. And the guerillas like you. And so do the campesinos. But there is a lot you don’t know.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for one thing, your girlfriends are spies.”

“What do you mean, spies?” John asked.

“What do you mean girlfriends?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Her name is Susan. Or Jennifer. They are both working for some international spy ring. They meet once a week at the cathedral in Oaxaca.”

“Them? Both?”

John took a deep breath, squinted his eyes and looked around. No one else had overheard the remark. He shrugged at me.

Late into the night, we struggled with the dark angel John saw fluttering over the two soldiers. After five exhausting hours, he looked at the sergeant. “Well, Ive done all I can do. God will have to help them now. Maybe we should say a prayer.”

“I told you, if they die, I will kill you,” the sergeant said. “I still mean it.” He looked over in the corner for his rifle. It was missing.

He jumped up. “Hey, where’s my rifle?” he roared.

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John held his hands up and said in a calming voice: “Im sure you'll get it back in the morning. One of the village kids heard what you said about killing me, and I think they wanted to put it aside for the evening.”

The sergeant smiled. “That's not going to protect you, you know.”

John sat down and poured three glasses of tequila.

“Sergeant,” he said, handing him one, “how does it feel to have spent the night helping your friends, instead of hurting? Doesnt it make you feel better inside?”

John held out the glass of tequila. The sergeant hesitated, but then took the drink with a thin, wry smile. “OK. Maybe you have a point, he said with grudging admiration. “And you might as well call me Carlos, not sergeant.”

I tried not to stare at John with the unvarnished admiration I felt at the moment. So I took the moment and drove the point home.

“Carlos, do you know what this guy has done since he's been here? He's delivered dozens of babies, set hundreds of broken bones, treated epidemics and household disease of every imaginable variety. People here are healthier, happier, and they make more money and have more fun. This community needed a doctor. He didn’t do it for money. He did it because we met people from this village in the U.S., and they asked him to come.”

I was about to continue when John shot me a glance.

“You know,” John said to the sergeant in a confidential tone, “you were doing pretty well back there yourself, helping those wounded men.”

“I know a little field medicine,” he said gruffly.

“No, you have some talent. I mean, have you ever thought of becoming a doctor?”

“Like your hero, Che Guevara?”

“No, not like him. And no, he’s not my hero. He picked the wrong side.”

“How so? You think he should have been on the American side?”

“No. I don’t mean the wrong political side. I mean the wrong side of life. He chose the military way. Guns. Bullets. Healing is the other way. He could have done better if he’d stayed with medicine. He could have changed more.”

“How do you mean?”

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“Louis Pasteur – you know, the great French doctor -- said that there were two ways of life wresting for dominance — One was … let’s see, I use to have this memorized … One way of life was quote ‘a law of blood and death, ever imagining new means of destruction and forcing nations to be constantly ready for the battlefield.’”

“And the other one?”

“The other was a law of peace, work and health, ever evolving new means of delivering people from the scourges that best them.”

“You really believe in non-violence, then?”

“I believe in medicine, which is, yes, non-violent. And I only believe in it because it works. Its the only political force that leads to lasting change.”

We left sergeant Carlos with half a bottle of tequila and something to ponder, then ducked around to the back of the clinic, near the sheds that still held the bodies of the dead civilians from Manzanita.

“There’s something we need to do,” John said, pulling the bottle of DPA of of the cabinet. “They say that they were attacked by these guerillas. Let’s see if they have any gunpowder on their hands.”

He poured some of the DPA on the fingers of the dead. Not one turned dark spotted purple, which would have indicated gunpowder. The color did change a little for most of the men, but they were smokers. None of the women and none of the children had purple fingers.

I took photos when the tests were complete, and in the waning light, I became aware that we were being watched.

❖

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Chapter 30

Following the raven

When the light turns green and the air feels like the bottom of a waterfall, and the birds fly in figure 8s, and the cats howl and chase the dogs, you are in for hell fire, high water and damnation.

From the vast blue Pacific, a category five hurricane blew up out of nowhere, and the rain began pelting the countryside and soaking the clusters of bodies in the deserted streets.

In Mexico City, 300 miles to the north, in a room behind the cathedral, archbishop Mastretta sipped his coffee and winced as the radio squawked the hurricane forecast.

“… a very large category five hurricane, Isadora will make landfall about 4 am Monday morning… evacuations proceeding slowly … anticipated large loss of life from 200 mile per hour winds along the Pacific coast … “

He called Suzie to tell her about it. “At least it will slow down the slaughter,” she said. “It seems like things have gone crazy in the mountains.”

And meanwhile in the mountains, the bruja sent her news on the wings of the wind. “Find John Connor,” she said. “Bring him here to safety.”

John thought about the bruja, too, and thought about her thinking about him, and he decided to follow the raven.

It led him up a steep mountain path that was barely visible at his feet, cawing danger, croaking a warning to hide, and bringing him up to a cliffside road where she was waiting with a burro, a serape and a large Mexican hat. “We look like ordinary campesinos,” she said, handing him a bottle of tequila.

As they approached a military checkpoint, she hissed: “Act drunk,” and started to sing. He stumbled along, pulling the hat down over his eyes, singing with her.

“Ay, ay, ay, ay,” she sang. “Canta y no llores, porque cantando se alegran, cielito lindo, los corazones.”

The guards shook their heads at the crazy old lady campesino, trying to get her drunk son home through the storm.

“Borracho,” said one, sympathetically, from inside the guardhouse. “Lucky to have a mom who

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cares.”

When they were out of earshot, John said: “So I have the ‘sing and don’t cry’ part. But what does cielito lindo mean?”

“Literally? Cute little heaven,” she sighed wistfully. “They used to call me that when I was a girl. But the meaning is more like little darling.”

“So this is a song to a little darling who needs to cheer up?”

“Yes, and if she does, she’ll make all our hearts happy.”

“And that’s it?”

“No, it’s actually a very complicated song. You see, the man sings about her eyes being like thieves coming down from the Sierra Morena mountains of Spain. That’s where gangs of thieves used to hang out in Andalusia …”

The wind tore through his serape, and sheets of rain drove them across the mountain, as they traded love songs from the mountains.

“It reminds me of the Appalachian songs that came along with people from Scotland,” he said.

As they talked, he watched her grow from an old woman to a middle aged beauty, and his eyes grew larger and more enchanted. But she laughed and pushed him away.

The storm raged all day through the mountains, and from the shelter of the Bruja’s home, he watched the bitter black wind uproot trees and send boulders tumbling down the hillside.

They emerged into a moonscape of flattened, tangled jungle. The main coast road through San Jose had been torn apart in dozens of places, and there would be no way that trucks would get through for weeks if not a few months.

John and I walked across the field, and up the path to the Kerouac threshold, later that day.

“What do you think he meant, saying Susie is a spy?”

“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” John said. “What do you think?”

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“She once got some mail from Camp Peary naval base down in Yorktown,” I said. “It’s not really a naval base — It’s a CIA training camp.”

“She has a knack of showing up at odd moments,” John said.

“Like now?” she asked, poking her head up above the rocks.

Her hand was shaking as I reached out to pull myself up to our perch, in the rocks above the clinic, up past our Kerouac threshold. We noticed that her eyes were glistening and her voice trembled.

“What’s with you?” I asked.

“Listen, I know how these things work,” she said in a nervous half-whisper. “If there are witnesses to the massacre, the army will be up here in a few hours looking for them. They will want to kill them all. Plus, I saw you taking pictures. So did the soldiers. They didn’t know what you were doing, putting DPA on the fingers of those corpses, but they will figure it out quickly. They will know that you now have evidence of two massacres on that camera of yours, Billy.”

“How do you know … ” I said with a dubious tone in my voice.

“We know how the Mexican army works.”

“We?” I asked weakly.

“I guess we’d better get some of the civilians out of here,” John said, thinking three steps ahead.

“I don’t know if we have time. We have to get you two out of here,” she said.

Then it hit me like a trout going for a mayfly.

“How do you know so much about the Mexican army?” I asked.

“We’ve been monitoring them for years. Listening in on their radio broadcasts. Reading their reports.”

“What reports? And who is this ‘we,’ white girl?”

She stopped short.

“There really is an awful lot I haven’t been able to tell you.”

But I could guess. The times Susie would turn cold on me and go off with John. And then, a few weeks later, she’d be all sweetness and light with me, and John would get the cold shoulder. Sometimes she seemed like two people. Then it hit me. She wasn’t schizophrenic. She really did have two hearts. She really was two people.

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“You have a twin, don’t you?” I asked.

She took a deep breath and rolled her eyes, and pulled the strand of hair out of her mouth — something Susie never did.

“My name is Jennifer,” she said. “Susie and I used to take turns and switch places at the Rock Pile. You guys never knew.”

“You spied on us?”

“No, no, that is, uh, we never filed reports on you. We just practiced on you.”

“You spied on us. For the CIA. You horrible hag. Oh my God. You’re the one that introduced John to Julio. You’re the one that planted the idea of having us come here in the mountains. This is all your setup.”

“No, no. Not the CIA. Damn, I hate those guys. It’s a lot more complicated. We are, ah, believe it or not, nuns. We work for the Palatine Honor Guard, the Vatican.”

“The Vatican has spies?”

“Yes, but no time for this now. You have to trust me.”

“Trust you? How can I possibly trust you? You’re the reason we’re in this fix in the first place.”

“You have to trust me because everyone’s lives are in danger. And we have to see this thing through.”

“Where’s Susie?”

“No time,” she said, handing me a serape. “Put this on.”

I didn’t even notice that John was gone, but down the hill, I could see an identical serape, draped over an exhausted John Conner, who was draped over a burro that was being led by Susie. She was dressed the same as Jennifer.

I slipped on the serape, finally catching on.

“So you and me are going to act like the decoys, while John and Susie get away?”

“That’s all Im asking,” she said. “I think it will work.”

And for once, my life was on the line for John, and not the other way around. How could I say no?

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I took one last long look as Susie led him down the mountain on that scrappy little burro, and I laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“We ended up with the wrong women. You’re the one that likes John, am I right? And the other one likes me?”

“Correct.”

“Oh, but wait. This is professional. So you didn’t want to be with the one you loved.”

“Maybe you’re not so dumb after all,” she said.

“So you do love John then?”

“Maybe,” she said, tugging me across the path, out into the open but away from the clinic. “And for the record, Susie has some feelings for you, although I can’t see why. The way I hear it, you’re not much of a doctor.”

Just then the soldiers around the clinic saw us, and we ran like hell as we heard them come running after us.

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Chapter 31

Escape

There was a moment when we thought we might get away clean, as if the mountains would just let us go. But the Sangre de Christo turned us around, and folded us in, and offered us up, like living sacrifices to Quetzelcoatl.

And, as I learned, you can’t invoke mountain metaphysics without coming to terms with hard rock realities. Flights of angels with flaming swords couldn’t have carried us to the promised land. There was, in all our human endeavor, a canyon between us and our ideals, and it seemed that even as things fell apart, and the canyon walls fell into the raging river of time, that fate simply would not let Doc Oaxaca cross over.

As Jennifer and I scrambled down the other side of Kerouac mountain, we saw the Sergeant at the bottom of a cliff, waving for us to climb down and follow him. Jennifer shrugged. Ordinarily we wouldn’t have trusted him, but we had no choice.

“The Army will come around that side,” he said, pointing his rifle to the north face of the mountain. “You need to go south.” He walked us over to a path and gave us two camouflage ponchos. “To help you hide from the helicopters,” he said. “They will be searching for you in an hour.”

We asked why he wanted to help us. “It’s funny how quickly you can become an ally of Louis Pasteur,” he said, shaking his head. “And Doc Oaxaca.”

We asked if the others had gotten away. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not good.” Machine gun fire rattled through the air, coming from the clinic grounds. “I think they’re killing the monks.”

“Those harmless old men?” I asked, my voice choking.

“They knew too much,” the sergeant said. “Go now. You have to save yourselves.”

An hour down the path from Kerouac mountain, we heard the helicopters thumping over the ridges, and we pulled the ponchos over us to hide amid the rocks. We stayed still for an eternity, but then we heard shouted commands from a patrol. We poked our heads out to see the grinning face of Jamie Manzana and his companieros in blue jeans and baseball caps, carrying AK 47s.

“Hey, its one of the gringo doctors and his girlfriend,” he said laughing. Then he shifted to a more serious voice. “Where’s our money?”

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“What money?”

“The hundred-thousand-dollar payoff the Army was supposed to give us. We heard they gave it to you.”

“Yeah. We heard you didn’t need it,” I laughed, trying to put a brave face on it. “We heard you wanted us to spend it on the poor, you know, el pueblo unido…” One of the guerillas kicked me in the ribs, and I doubled over in splintering pain.

“You are our hostages until we get our money back,” Manzana said. “No more talk. No more funny business.”

We waited until dark, then marched hard for four hours, down one mountainside and up another, finally arriving at a camp ground where a small fire warmed the guerillas. One figure looked familiar, moving among some of the sleeping soldiers, checking bandages, giving injections.

“John!”

“Billy. Susie,” he responded. “So good to see you.”

“What about Jennifer?” I whispered as I hugged him.

“She got away. And she’s bringing help. And speaking of help, would you hold this IV bag for a minute?”

Later, we laid back and looked up at the stars burning through the mists of the Sangre de Christo mountains. They reminded him of something he’d heard long ago. "At night, birds become stars in the sky."

Manzana stopped cleaning his rifle and looked up across the small campfire. "What does that mean?” he asked.

John shook his head, as if an explanation would be wasted. "They say when you come close to death, you relive your whole life. Well, today, when the bullets started flying, I didnt see anything. But tonight, safe here in the mountains, its all coming back."

"I understand," Manzana said, sighting down the barrel and loading a magazine. "Its never like you think it will be."

The pack mules snorted as the night wind swept up the mountains from the coast. We caught a faint whiff of salt mixed with the smoke.

Most of the guerillas were snoring in their blankets behind him, and off to the right, he could see

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the glow of a sentry's cigarette. Sloppy? Or just a decoy?

"You'd better get some sleep, doc," Manzana said. "We have a long way to go tomorrow."

John rolled over in his blanket, exhausted but still painfully awake to the thousand dangers the morning would bring. In the hot Mexican night, it seemed strange to drift asleep and dream about a snowstorm, and the Rock Pile, and a crazy Vietnam veteran named Mark Logaman who just never quite healed.

But there in the first glow of dawn, it really was Mark, tugging at his shoulder. Mark of all people. Mark, from the Rock Pile. Mark, the Vietnam Vet who brought out his magic healing touch.

“John, we're moving out,” he whispered. “Get up. Act casual.” He came to me and Susie too. “Be cool. Jennifer sent me. Things are about to pop.”

John and I stumbled to the edge of the camp, unzipped our pants, and shivered as we pissed. Susan squatted.

Then from the east we could hear the faint sound of motors and the cry of a disturbed raven. The Mexican Army was on the move. Suddenly all the guerillas were awake, with Manzana already in the lead.

We threw the ponchos into a pack and followed them, stumbling down a trail.

In the dim but growing light we could see the string of pack mules headed in zig zags down the mountainside, moving quickly for the cover of the coastal forest a thousand feet below.

Mark and a dozen other guerillas were bounding down the mountainside now, already way ahead of the pack mules. The sound of motors grew louder, combining with a thumping sound of helicopter blades chopping violently into the thin mountain air.

John glanced around desperately and found a thick rocky outcropping. He rolled under the rock just as the first chopper whomped overhead. We followed, hoping it hadn’t seen us. A few feet away from his face, a diamondback rattler stretched out, but was too cold to move, and far less dangerous than the death chopper overhead. A few more degrees of heat, a few minutes later in the day, and he would have been dead either way.

The chopper pilot saw the mules and circled lower. The guerillas had already reached the trees, and the mule team leader in his jeans and flannel shirt looked like any campesino out working that morning. He gave a friendly wave at the chopper as it hesitated, hovering above the steep mountain

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slope. Then it fluttered closer like a malevolent dragonfly.

Tiny orange flames erupted from its sides, and the mules started falling to their knees and rolling down the mountainside. The two mule drivers also fell, rolled and stopped a few hundred yards down, arms and legs splayed out grotesquely on the mountainside, crimson life pooling out beneath them.

Then the helicopter looped up across the ridge, and the small, snuffling sounds in its wake almost seemed like silence. John waited a few minutes, then ran down to the mule drivers. They were well beyond the simple medicine he carried in his pack.

A few minutes later he caught up with Mark in the treeline.

"Why the hell didn’t you open fire on them?" John asked.

Mark spat. "If we'd brought the chopper down they would have known where to find us."

“Didn’t they spot you?”

“Hell, no. We were under cover.

“So why did they kill the campesinos?”

“It was just target practice. The bastards.”

"Target practice? They just casually killed a couple of men? Why?" John asked.

"That's what this war is all about," Mark said, shaking his head. "Everyone in the countryside is a target. Anyone who lives outside their system is an enemy. That’s why you couldn’t be neutral. That’s why your medicine couldn’t protect you."

That’s not what medicine does, he was about to say, but I could see that he put a lid on it. Then I just had to ask: “Mark, whose side are you on? How did we end up here?”

“Billy, you kid, you,” he said, shaking his head and cleaning his machine gun. “I got inserted with the guerillas because they do more to protect American interests than the Mexican Army …”

I had to ask: “We you ever just a veteran, or did you always work with the CIA,” I said, voice rising, anger clawing at my throat. “Were you all spooks when you and Susie and Jennifer lived with us at the Rock Pile?”

“Well, no. We got word that there were some Palatines trying to infiltrate the anti-war movement …”

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“Mark, you were the anti-war movement.” I asked. “Or were you just an agent provocateur?”

John put out his hand to interrupt. “That’s not the question for right now, old friend,” he said. “The question is how we get out of this.”

Mark nodded at John. “Good question.”

Then, looking at me, wagging his finger, he said harshly: “Bad question. Bad journalist. Bad writer. Here. Have tequila. Tequila good. Make bad journalist good.”

He handed me the tequila, and we laughed, once again, that laughter that comes roaring out of the throats of cops and coroners and congressmen — and journalists — and others who have just seen too much to weep, like they should, but just can’t any more.

Mark and the other guerillas moved quickly under the low, dense canopy of forest, jumping logs and dodging columns of army ants and the occasional snake. It was like being back in the Virginia woods, John thought, only this time it wasn’t a game. They crossed a few deserted roads and skirted a small town.

Soon the terrain began to flatten out, and by sunset they had come to the edge of a sugarcane field. They couldn’t see across the field of high green stalks, but a half dozen huts clustered about half a mile away. In the distance, just barely audible, John heard the sound of breakers crashing against a beach.

“What’s next?” he whispered to Mark.

“They’ll begin loading the opium as soon as it gets dark. We jump aboard with the last load.”

“I really wonder if this is going to work,” John said nervously. “They say the Army owes them money and we are the hostages.”

“Trust me. The Army lets these ships go out all the time. It's just a matter of getting you onboard without them seeing you.”

“I dont like it. Smells like a trap. Our deaths in return for the hundred grand. The slate is clean.”

“Sorry, this is the best we could do.”

“I don’t know. I need to think about it.”

“Fine. You have exactly 45 seconds,” Mark said. “But remember: there’s nothing those federales would like better than getting the legendary Doc Oaxaca in their gunsights. It would save them a lot of explaining at this point.”

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A rustling sound in the trees overhead caught John’s attention. It was a raven, cocking her head and looking directly at him. She cawed four times, then flew down the field away from the cluster of huts.

“I’m not going on that boat,” he said. “Neither should you. That was Carmelita. She’s trying to warn us.”

“What was Carmelita?”

”The raven, Mark. We need to follow that raven.”

“John, old buddy, you have really lost it,” Mark said, wondering whether to tie him up or just knock him out. As he hesitated, John ran, crouching, into the shoulder-high sugar cane. We followed him, and Mark ran after us all. We had only gone a quarter mile into the field when we heard the popping of Uzzis over our shoulders.

John stopped to catch his breath and Mark ran quietly over and next to him, listening to the firefight. “Oh Jesus. Hear that rat-tat-tat? That’s one of our AK-47s. Hear the pop-pop-pop? That’s one of their Uzzis.”

“What happened?”

“Guess your hunch was right. It was an ambush. What do you want to do now?”

They looked up as the raven circled and flew south into the dense forest.

So we ran, breathless, heedless, headlong into the forest, the dark wind howling and the pines swaying on the steep mountainside. I didn’t know where I was going. My last glimpse of John Conner was at a fork in the trail, when he decided to go high and thought I’d have better luck going low.

I think he was headed for Carmelita’s place.

It was the last I saw of him.

I don’t know how I got out. I remember church basements and a helicopter with a red shield and crossed keys

We heard that Manzana and Culminares started worked together after the hurricane, patching up the fractured land. We also heard there was a new clinic in Oaxaca state, then another, and then another, all run by former guerillas and soldiers who had turned to the study of medicine.

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But we never heard anything from John, or about him, aside from a poem left on the doorstep of the cathedral in Oaxaca:

… The master's gone alone herb picking, somewhere on the mount, cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown… (Chin Tao, 777-841).

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Chapter 32

Years went by and the legend grew. Everyone knows, by now, how he healed the lepers of San Martin; How the clinic changed the drug culture of San Jose; How Culmonares and Manzana put down their weapons and started a law firm; How Sgt Hernandez and Serena fell in love and kept the clinic running; How Carmelita’s book became a best-seller.

Watching Jennifer and Susan take their final vows nearly tore my heart out. They were so worldly, so wise, and now they are gone from my life. I miss them both every day, and I will until I join Charlie Steel in the afterlife.

And what about John Connor? What happened to Doc Oaxaca?

We heard he’d been caught by the army, that he caught some tropical disease, that he caught a bullet. But that was all myth. All we knew for sure was that his legend caught fire.

Serena and Hernandez helped build a dozen clinics in the Sangre de Christo mountains, and they all followed his example. The Connor Clinic system — land reform, food marketing, protein for health, medicine for the people.

The conscience of guilty nations had been awakened by the bells of San Jose, and the echoes harmonized in a thousand other minds. The ideas became hardened seeds on the wind, surviving and later growing in the most durable form: the legend of Doc Oaxaca.

But the man, John Conner, disappeared into the mountains. Was the sacrifice too much? It was the man, after all, who burned with life. Legends may illuminate, but they don’t burn. Symbols have no incendiary core. That is the fire burns through us.

We had stumbled into his warm circle of lost souls and he lit up our lives. Then we, too, caught fire. Now the blaze has spread through time and generations. The fields are smoking, and the trails of embers tell many stories.

You probably think it’s crazy to write about him now, and to conjure up that grinning ghost. Even now the numb black feathered razor reaches for us all.

Maybe so. God damn it anyway. Draw the brave and hollow circle. Lean forward. And drift back to that storm soaked Mexican road.

At least it's me. And not you.

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The end

❖

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