And then the paramedic (his name was Oscar, Sten would later learn, Oscar Ruiz, of Oakland, California, sixty-two years old and in his first month of retirement) emerged from the building, an attendant in pale green scrubs hustling along beside him, pushing a gurney. Everyone leaned forward to watch as the attendant bent to the motionless form, checking for vital signs — futilely, as far as Sten could see, though one woman kept insisting there was no reason to give up hope because the electroshock machine, the defibrillator, was a real miracle and it had saved her husband, twice. “The guy’s gone, can’t you see that?” the man behind her put in, and a whole sotto voce debate started up. Sten ignored it. He sat there with the rest of them, sweating, thirsty, wanting only to be back on the ship. The police would be coming now, he knew that. At the very least he’d be required to give a statement, they all would. But what then? Would they charge him? Would he and Carolee have to stay here in this reeking excuse for a city for days on end — weeks, even — while all the others climbed back aboard the ship and cruised away into the sunset?
His eyes shot to the driver. The man had swung his legs out into the aisle to get comfortable. He had a cellphone to his ear now, speaking his whipcrack Spanish into the receiver, and who was he contacting if not the authorities? Sten looked to Carolee and she breathed his name, twice, in a kind of moan: “Oh, Sten, Sten.” She fidgeted in the seat, and whether consciously or not, she pulled her hand away from his and rubbed her palm, the moisture there, on her shorts. She spoke in a whisper: “You think they’ll let us go back now?”
He shrugged. He wasn’t exactly in a talkative mood. All he felt was tired. Sleep, that was what he wanted, another realm, a way out of this. He watched dispassionately as the paramedic helped the attendant load the limp body onto the gurney and wheel it up the walk and into the yawning double doors of the clinic. Everybody saw it, the retreating feet, the wheels of the gurney, the doors snapping shut like a set of jaws, and as if at a signal, people began stirring. Here came Bill, the good Samaritan, to lead it off, mounting the steps of the bus and sliding into the front seat beside his wife. A man Sten couldn’t place stood and started sorting through the daypack he’d stowed overhead. There was a rustle of bags and papers, as if a stiff internal wind had started up to whip through the bus. Bottles of water appeared. Power bars. Cellphones. The unpleasantness was over now and it was as if nothing had happened: they were tourists deprived of a nature walk and thinking only to get back to the boat, to their cabins and staterooms, to privacy, air-conditioning, cocktails, dinner at the captain’s table. They’d had an experience, all right, something to text home about, but it was over now.
“Driver?” It was Bill, the first Bill, the bald-headed one, who seemed to have become their spokesman. He was seated two rows up from Sten and Carolee, his shirt soaked through with sweat and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His wife was there beside him, her brittle hair set aflame by a shaft of sun slanting through the window.
The driver was in no hurry to respond. He pursed his mouth. Tapped the cellphone at his ear. “Driver?” Bill repeated, and finally the man swiveled round in his seat and lifted his eyebrows as if to say What now?
“We just wanted to know what the holdup is.”
The driver said something into the phone, then pulled it away from his ear and held it up like an exhibit in a courtroom. “I am talking,” he said, “to la Fuerza Pública, the police. You will need to make a testimony for the facts of this”—he couldn’t find the word—“today. A la reserva. The crime. You must make a testimony of the crime.”
“Yes, all right, fine,” Bill said, waving a hand in dismissal. “But can’t we do that back aboard ship? We’ve been through a lot here, I’m talking trauma, real trauma, and it’s not doing anybody any good to sit here sweltering for no reason. .”
“Take us back,” a voice boomed from the rear of the bus.
“Yeah, let’s get this thing moving,” somebody else put in.
As if awaiting her cue, Sheila cried out suddenly, her voice stretched to the breaking point: “We need a restroom. We haven’t — I mean, I haven’t—” She was two seats up, on the left, sitting beside the woman whose husband had been revived twice (but not, apparently, a third time). Sheila’s makeup had gone gummy in the heat and from this angle, Sten’s angle, it looked as if the skin were peeling away from her face. “We’re hot. Thirsty. I don’t know about anybody else, but I for one could use a cold shower.”
The driver slowly shook his head. “This is not possible,” he said, before returning the cell to his ear. “Not at the moment.”
“What is this,” Sten heard himself say, “a debating society?” He’d had enough. Who was this supercilious jerk to hold them here? He had no authority over them, he was nothing, less than nothing. “Hell,” he said, pulling himself up from the seat, “we can walk from here. Or get a taxi. There’s got to be taxis.”
Everyone was in motion now, people clambering to their feet, pulling down bags, looping packs over their shoulders, white hair, trembling hands, a shuffle of sneakered and sandaled feet. In the same moment the driver came up out of his seat, as if to block their way, and what Sten was thinking was Just let him try. It might have been a standoff, might have gotten out of hand — people were scared, angry, impatient — but then the doors to the clinic swung open and the paramedic, one of their own, was hurrying up the walk to them, bringing the news.
Sten watched the man duck into the shadow of the bus, then reappear in the stairwell, his face neutral. He was saying something in Spanish to the driver, something detailed, but nobody could fathom what it was. Sten felt his stomach clench. But then the first Bill, who was standing in the aisle now with the others, called out, “So, Oscar, what’s the deal, is the guy going to be okay or what? And when are we going to get out of here?”
The paramedic turned and blinked up at the faces ranged above him as if he couldn’t quite place them.
“Well?” Bill demanded.
“They’re going to need a statement.”
Sheila let out a groan. “What sort of statement, what do they want? We didn’t do anything.”
The paramedic — Oscar — held up a hand for silence. “But they say they can do that on the ship.” On the ship: those were the incantatory words, the words they’d all been waiting to hear, the spell broken, relief at hand. Everyone exhaled simultaneously. “For the witnesses, that is, and I guess that includes all of us.” His eyes settled on Sten. “Except you — they’re saying you’re going to have to wait here till the police arrive.”
He didn’t know whether to grin or grimace. His face felt hot. His back ached, low down, where he must have tweaked something out there in the mud lot, one of the tight lateral muscles that didn’t get enough use, one of his killing muscles.
“But don’t worry,” Oscar went on, “I’ll stay with you, in case you need an interpreter.”
“Yes, okay,” Sten said, barely conscious of what he was assenting to, and then he was moving forward — dehydrated, lightheaded, unsteady on his feet — and Carolee, the bag looped over her chest and clutching her hat as if it were a lifeline thrown over the side of a sinking ship, was following along behind.
There was a waiting room in the clinic and it wasn’t much different from what you’d find in the States: fluorescent lights, gleaming linoleum, a smell of bleach and floor wax to drive down the faint lingering odor of body fluids. Nurses glided through one door and out another, a trio of hard-faced women sat staring into computer screens at the front desk and a forlorn cadre of the sick, hopeless and unlucky slouched on folding chairs in an array of bloody bandages and mewling infants. There was air-conditioning, and that was a blessing. And a restroom. The first thing he did, as soon as Oscar directed them to seats in the far corner of the room, was lock himself in the men’s, turn the tap on full and let the cold water (tepid, actually) run over his face. He wet his hands and worked them through his hair, which he wore long, in the fashion he’d adopted as soon as he’d got out of the service and gone off to college, no hard-liner and no fool either, because what woman in San Francisco in that day and age would look twice at a man in a crewcut? Baby killer, that’s what they’d shouted at him when he boarded the bus at the airport, but the accusation only puzzled him. He didn’t want to hear about babies, alive or dead, or Vietnamese self-determination or the jungle that was a kind of death in itself. He only wanted to get laid. Just that.