“You’re a friend. I’m going in, too,” Eddie said.
“You’re not working on him.”
Eddie bulled up to the little Indian. Eddie’s face in Ranjay’s. Eddie wanting to punch the guy, except he saw, in those brown eyes, strength and determination. Eddie slumping. Eddie unable to speak. Ranjay turning and, with the emergency staff, rushing Joe into the operating room.
Ranjay calling back to Eddie, “Come! Major! Come in and see!” Then, as if addressing a child, “But don’t touch.”
They inserted a long catheter into Joe’s abdominal cavity. They wheeled in saline solution, just salt water, but warm, and began the flush. It was like flushing a car radiator. The warm solution was supposed to raise his body temp, but not too fast.
Eddie remembered a story. It was that a capsized boatload of Italian seamen had been rescued from the Atlantic, not from the ocean like the frigid one here, not iced over, but from waters that were only fifty degrees.
The rescuers had carefully warmed the seventeen grateful victims in blankets and poured them coffee. The Italians had recovered nicely, quickly, in no way in as bad a shape as Joe. They stood up, unaided. They walked together to the ship’s mess. They were smiling and chatting. Within minutes, out of the blue, all seventeen collapsed and died. Heart attacks.
Can’t warm up too fast.
My best friend, Eddie thought, going back in memory. Uno and Eddie at college, in Massachusetts, in ROTC. Roommates. Eddie and Joe at Parris Island, competing to see who was the better Marine. Eddie winning the push-up competition, Uno winning on the obstacle course. Eddie in hand-to-hand combat. Uno, earning his monicker, Number One, during war games in the hills, capturing the general of the “Blue” team.
You were always better at strategy than me, Joe.
Eddie watched the monitors. They held steady. Joe’s limbs looked less waxy. The pulse rose a tiny bit, and so did Eddie’s hope. Ranjay ordered more saline solution brought in. Joe’s blood pressure was almost nonexistent. Eddie remembered all the piss-drenched clothes they’d cut away, all the sweat, bodily fluids lost in his body’s attempt to warm itself. Eddie saw cold blisters on Joe’s limp hands.
Ranjay to Eddie, as they finished. “Now we wait, Major. He was badly injured even before the exposure. He needs a CAT scan. He’s got back injury. He’s got bumps on the front and back of his head. Major, even if he survives, we may need to do amputations.”
“I understand, Ranjay. Christ.”
“Let’s get some coffee.”
“Ranjay, you’re a good guy. You’re an honorary Marine.”
The little man beamed. But then he looked sad. His head wove side to side in the Indian mannerism. We must wait and see and hope for fate to be kind.
“Tea for me, please,” Ranjay told the cafeteria girl.
TWENTY-FOUR
The wedding started well but then things went sour. The ceremony was held in the small, white-steepled Methodist church in Smith Falls, the Massachusetts town in which I’d grown up. It was October, peak of New England leaf season, and the oaks, maples, and birches had lost their summer green and taken on crisp, bright hues: pumpkin orange, dazzling yellow, maroons in shades ranging from dried blood to the deep rich of an emperor’s cloak.
Karen pulled up in a dogsled outside, through a shower of leaves, the huskies puffing as she stepped off the runner, dressed in a clinging white gown that showed her lithe body. I hate big gowns, the hoop kind, that make brides look like they stepped out of an Alabama antebellum ball. My parents smiled at us from the first pew. Behind them sat kids, still ten and eleven years old, with whom I’d attended school, and beside them an old drill sergeant from Parris Island, odd because he’d died of cancer. The admiral sat beside General Homza. It was a happy scene, with sunlight brightening the stained-glass windows. But then I saw that the scenes depicted on those windows were not from the Bible. Afghanistan didn’t show up in the Bible. Neither did a tarp-covered troop truck exploding. In the center window, each piece of colored glass in the mosaic showed a different aspect of the explosion: a shard of metal, a severed limb, roiling smoke.
And the faces on that window — eyes turned toward heaven, fractured into Picasso-like angles — belonged to eight dead Marines, who I’d blown up. Their eyes were the color of sapphires and their helmets reflected the gold of the sun. I’d never met them. I’d seen photos. Depicted in glass, their eyes followed the reverend, as he took a step toward Karen and I.
“Do you promise to lie, honor, and obey?” he said, smiling pleasantly.
“It’s not a lie if you do it for your country,” I answered.
Karen looked angry at that. Wrong answer. The faces in the pews, when I turned, were sad. Eddie sat in back, trying to tell me something. I heard the sled dogs outside, baying. The air in the chapel grew cold, and my fingers hurt, and I felt the brush of snow on my abraded face.
Karen was walking off without me, out the church.
“I can’t pronounce you,” said the reverend, and I realized that his voice had deepened and acquired a foreign accent. He still wore vestments but now he’d morphed into Jens Erik Holte. Jens holding a Bible. No, not a Bible, but an advertisement for an Arctic eco lodge.
Jens said, “Lots to see!”
I opened my eyes and saw white ceiling. I heard a roar which I recognized vaguely as fighter jets taking off. Through gauzy curtains a low, bright sun flooded in. My fingers really did hurt. They lay beneath clean covers. I turned my head on the pillow and saw what had to be another hallucination, because it was Admiral Galli, in a light gray suit and striped red-and-blue tie, sitting in a visiting chair a few feet away.
The room smelled of tulips. Tubes ran into my arms. I held my hands in front of my face and saw stained wrappings. The pain was fiercest inside the bandages wrapping my right hand.
“He’s awake,” Galli said.
“I’m not, sir,” I said, in the dream. “I’m not awake if you’re here.”
He stood. He nodded. I smelled the faint aroma of cigars that often came off the admiral. He said, softly, “Homza’s out. I’m back. The administration wants a face that reporters like. The quarantine ended. You’re awake, all right. You’re in Anchorage. Joe, do you remember telling us about Holte? The rabies? The ice cellar?”
“Now I know I’m up, sir. You didn’t ask how I feel.”
He smiled. His hand on my shoulder was light, reassuring. “You feel like shit, what’s to ask? And it’ll last awhile. CDC’s confirmed it, Joe, rabies not contagious. We found the vial in your parka, where you said it would be. But we still need to figure out where it came from. Colonel, you did a hell of a job.”
I closed my eyes. I heard hospital machinery beeping behind me, heartbeat low, blood pressure could be better. I heard a cart squeak out in the hall. The door was open, and a man was weeping copiously somewhere beyond my range of vision. I smelled Lysol and boiled chicken, boiled string beans and packaged orange juice. The ubiquitous hospital meal. Chicken. The least-fortunate creature on the planet, designed for one purpose, slaughter.
“Yeah, I did one hell of a job,” I said.
“I’m sorry about Karen.”
I closed my eyes.
“Joe, you’re going to have to testify on the Hill.”
I opened them.
“In secret. We’ve got half of Congress accusing us of a cover-up, hiding some weapons program, thanks to someone named Tilda Swann. We’ve got the other half wanting to double appropriations against terrorists. The quarantine’s over but what the hell happened?”