His skin was sweaty but cool, and he watched me, not fearfully, but with a funny kind of anticipation. And it came to me that he didn't know nurses weren't supposed to paddle their patients. He knew he'd been thoroughly annoying everybody, but he felt lost and abandoned. The spanking and my scolding voice, even speaking English, had made if his mother were still with hid'mn control of the world, it seem as I I I telling him what to do. I knew that as certainly as if he'd told me, though I didn't know then how I knew it. But whatever passed between us he didn't ask to understand but simply accepted with relief. His face smoothed out of its monkeylike scowl and his lids dropped like rocks as he passed into long-overdue sleep.
"ooh!" Xinh cried and shook her hand. I left the dressing cart by Ahn's bed and walked to hers. A blur of blue-green light surrounded her. I blinked hard, but the light remained.
"What's wrong, Xinh?"
She held up her hand so I could see the fingernail broken into the quick, a thin line of burgundy light pulsing from it. "Nothing. Tete dau," she said, her frown vanishing.
She took my hand in her sore one and swung it back and forth, companionably. This made me a little uncomfortable, but I knew from watching Vietnamese people that same-sex friends often held hands in public. I was grateful for the gesture, since I was still feeling a little like an ogress for spanking Ahn, despite the surprising way he had reacted. Xinh was impossible to dislike. Her emotions swept across her face like weather on a seascape, sunny one minute, stormy the next, but open and changeable. She painted her nails and tried different hairdos and watched the performers on Vietnamese TV. I was sure that if I could understand what she and Mal gossiped about, it would have been what my friends in nursing school talked about, boys, clothes, normal things that had nothing to do with the war. The only thing funny about her was that blue-green stain. I must have a bad case of heatstroke, I thought, and reclaimed my hand. "I have to get back to work, Xinh," I said.
She pulled her own hand away and started to suck on the broken 'l, then stopped with't halfway to her mouth. "Heyy! Numbah one!"
nal she said, her eyes shining. She held up her nail, perfectly intact, with about a quarter inch of unpainted growth showing above her ruined polish job. She looked at me as if I had pulled a coin from behind her ear. "How you do that?"
"Huh?" I said stupidly. Maybe Xinh wasn't feeling so good either -she was that funny color around the edges. Maybe we were both sick. I looked at both of Xinh's hands-all of the nails were intact. I shrugged. She shrugged and happily accepted the mending of her manicure as a miracle of American medicine. I felt distinctly dizzy as I started back for the nurses' station.
Mal returned to the ward, her hair newly washed, and glowing irl
'descent pink. I rubbed my eyes and looked away from her.
The lunch cart arrived, and Meyers and Voorhees started passing lunch trays. I joined them at the cart and pulled a tray out, then started giggling helplessly. Not only did a baby-pink glow wrap both corps men, but the food was also color-coded: a pale green wisp over the cottage cheese, a faint orange to the fish.
"You okay, Lieutenant?" Voorhees asked.
"Uh-yeah. But I think I'd better sit down. Everything looks funny to me." I turned back toward my chair and tripped over my own feet.
Meyers caught my arm. "Whoa there, ma'am, what you been on?"
Istared hard at the dark brown center of his face and ignored the fluff of pink tipping his modified afro. "I dunno. One of you guys put a drop of acid on my fizzle or something? You're all weird-" I started to say "colored" and was afraid Meyers would take it wrong, so instead I asked for a drink of Kool-Aid and sat down again with my head between my knees. Maybe I was having some kind of drug reaction, but I found that hard to believe. More likely it was the heat. I had fainted during my first scrub, when I stood in a closed operating theater in muggy ninety-degree heat and watched a particularly bloody mastectomy while unwiped sweat ran down my face and pooled under my surgical mask. I'd also fainted during my first O.B. case, also in the summer, when the heat made the blood smell like hot metal. But I hadn't ever seen colors like this before-a roar in my ears and a sudden blurring of vision, but never distinct shades surrounding perfectly welldefined individuals. And I'd been sick those other times. Today I didn't actually physically feel any worse than I'd felt every day since I'd been in country.
Maybe I should have my eyes checked? But that wouldn't explain why Xinh had a blue-green halo while everybody else's was pink. Did only staff get pink halos? I'd have to ask Chaplain O'Rourke about that one. Maybe there was more to that angel-of-mercy stuff than met the eye. Trying to figure it out did make me start to feel a little nauseous, so I avoided the whole issue by refusing to look at anyone and finishing my charting instead.
When the major returned from her Tuesday morning staff meeting, she pushed Xe's gurney in front of her. A rosy glow surrounded her. He looked gray around the gills.
"Joe says it will take a couple more procedures to get Xe's stumps in shape for prostheses," she said. "But he came through this like a champ. Get his vitals, will you, Kitty?"
As I bent over to listen to his blood pressure, the amulet fell out of my shirt. I pulled the necklace off over my head. "Here you go, papasan. Safe and sound," I told him, and looped the theng back over his shaved head. His color and my vision immediately improved. That is, the gray around him vanished and a little warmth touched his cheeks, not above them but right there in the skin, where it belonged. The glow disappeared from around my hands too. I knew something strange was happening, and remembered what Heron and Mai said about the old man, but I misunderstood even then and got it backward. "You must be a holy man, papasan," I said. "You seem to have cured whatever was wrong with me."
suppose so far it sounds as if we never treated anyone but ivietnamese patients. Sometimes, the slower times that was almost true. Joe kept the native patients as long as he could, until they were as completely well as we could make them, because life outside the hospital was more conducive to dying than to healing.
But we did treat GI casualties, of course, and when they came, it was in swarms that all but swamped us. The first big push came the day after Xe's surgery. It was what I had imagined it would be like while I was in training, while I was at Fitzsimons, while I was working neuro, where we seldom got mass casualty patients except as overflow. The pushes weren't as constant as I'd believed they would be, which was just as well, because despite all my imaginary scenarios of how I would handle that kind of situation, when the first one came I definitely was not ready.
Partly, that was because of the way I had spent the night before.
Tony had ambled onto the ward during evening report and hung out at the coffeepot until I finished. "Carry your books home for you, Lieutenant?" he asked, grinning.
He'd pushed his aviator specs back into his curls and looked like a movie star playing a helicopter pilot. "Hi, soldier, new in town?" I kidded back, slipping into the space under his arm as we walked out of the hospital.