Читать книгу All The Young Men - Ruth Coker Burks - Страница 9

Chapter Three

Sister Angela Mayer met me by the giant cross in the lobby of St. Joe’s. She wasn’t in a habit, but she had the look of a nun to her, so I went up to her right away.

“Are you Ruth?”

“Yes,” I said, extending my hand. She didn’t even look at it. Pretended it wasn’t happening. The Sisters of Mercy had founded this hospital a hundred years before. I wondered if she’d been around then.

“Come with me,” she said, already moving to the elevator. She didn’t say a word until the elevator doors closed and we were alone. “As I said on the phone, this hospital is not equipped to handle this case. We need to transport the patient elsewhere.”

“Where?”

She looked at me, and her true voice glinted through her administrator voice. “I don’t care what you do with him.”

The doors opened. I wanted to press the L button. To get out. She must have known, because she moved her arm as if to touch my back to usher me out, but stopped just short of actually touching me.

The nurses were waiting but made no move to greet me, just stared at me.

“Can I see him?” I asked.

Sister Angela led me down a hall, and a nurse handed me a pile of protective clothing. It felt like I was getting ready to go into space. The sister stared at me, nodding, as I put on the booties, the gown, balloon-cloth pants, a hat, and a mask. Just like with Jimmy, the hallway had trays of food lined up on the floor.

Before I put on the mask, I turned to the sister. “What’s his name?”

She looked at me. “It’s on the chart,” she said. “He was dumped at the ER doors.”

She said it like it was an excuse. I don’t think she even wanted to touch the chart, which said he was Ronald Watkins. I didn’t know any Watkins people, and I knew a lot of people.

I walked in alone, and he was so far gone, I could tell death was a matter of hours. I could just tell, and if anyone had actually gone in his room they would know too. He was a skeleton. I walked out quickly to tell Sister Angela there wouldn’t even be time to move him, but she was gone.

So I went back in.

“Ronald, I’m here for you.” I sat down.

I held his hand, and it just felt wrong to do it with a glove. I took it off. I left the stupid space suit on, but I took off the mask and the silly cap. My hair wasn’t going to get AIDS.

I sat and talked softly to him. I was talking to a body, he was that close to death, but it felt wrong to just sit in silence. Like Jimmy, Ronald simply stopped breathing, but this time I was less scared. I watched the artery in his neck pulse a few more times, slower and slower, until it too stopped. Seeing how long his soul would stay.

More calls started coming.

I guess the nurses and doctors all went to the same places to drink and unwind, because I later found out they got to talking.

“Oh my God, we had this insane woman come in, and she went right in the AIDS patient’s room.”

“Wait, you had someone come in to take care of him for you? What’s her name? What’s her phone number?”

They all wanted to get rid of them. I had two calls that first month, which I thought was crazy. Then three the second. Little Rock had the Med Center, a Baptist hospital, a Catholic hospital, and Doctors Hospital. Hot Springs had AMI Medical Center and St. Joe’s. Those were the big hospitals. Then there are all these little towns around Hot Springs that had little clinic hospitals. If it was bad—and with AIDS, by the time the patient got help, it always was—those little clinics sent patients to a hospital in Hot Springs.

As the months wore on, they had more and more of these gay guys coming into the hospital emaciated, alone or left at the ER. They were all my age or younger, twenty-three or twenty-four. They’d been afraid to get help, or maybe just didn’t know what was happening. It was a six-week thing from the first sign of symptoms. The diarrhea, a fever that wouldn’t go away, night sweats, and what I saw most then, pneumonia. They wasted away, their bowels evacuating so much they were down to sixty or seventy pounds. By the time I was brought in, they were at death’s door.

My work schedule selling time-shares was flexible, so I could work around that in emergencies. I imagined the commissions I was missing out on but put it out of my mind. Allison had turned four in May, and I had her in a KinderCare preschool day care five days a week. She spent weekends with her father, which helped. But when she wasn’t with him or at school, she was right there alongside me at the hospitals. She often ate her meals there and already had her preferences. Allison thought the food at St. Joe’s was the best, especially the pancakes. But the people at AMI were nicer.

Every single nurse and doctor thought they were the first person to tell me it was wrong to have a little kid there, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I asked a nurse, who wouldn’t even go in the room, “If we go home, will you take better care of this man?” She nodded her head at me but walked away. Helping these men changed how I interacted with my daughter—I was constantly checking her for fever.

When I had to go to a hospital at night, I would wait until she was asleep and then put her on a pallet in the back seat and drive her to Bonnie’s. Bonnie was the only person who knew what I was doing. I’d bring in Allison, still sleeping like a little sack of potatoes, and lay her on Bonnie’s couch with her blankie until morning.

The hospitals were already mad they had to let them die there, so they needed the bodies out immediately. They’d heard I’d done it once, so they decided that was my job. I’d ask if there was insurance or next of kin, and they’d laugh. I learned that I had to have the person declared indigent by the county judge. Indigent burial or cremations are paid for by the county, as the funeral home has a responsibility to society to bury the person for only the actual cost. Hot Springs had long been a place where people had come to be healed by the waters, and so many indigent people had come here and died—whether of TB or whatever—that the county had set up a fund to pay for these burials long ago.

I started spending a lot of time at the courthouse, clicking my heels on the black-and-white tiles the size of nickels. I’d climb the stairs to the county judge’s office, wearing something flowy in case I needed to distract someone. The goal was to get in and get out. Judges would all be excited when they saw me show up in a dress, and then their faces would fall when I explained what I needed. They weren’t going to be making any time with me.

“They’re indigent, and there’s nothing we can do, and we’ve got to get them buried,” I’d say. The judge is supposed to make sure there’s been a diligent search for a family member with the means to pay or a church that would be willing to help with the costs. All I had to say was that this person had died of AIDS—there was no wasting time thinking that there might be someone to help.

I’d get the judges to sign off, then head back downstairs, slower now. An unfinished portrait of George Washington hung over a water fountain at the end of the hall, and we’d eye each other as I walked toward him and then turned right to leave.

Nobody once asked what I was going to do with the ashes.

Allison trailed behind me in Files Cemetery, still dressed for church. Her little white shoes crunched hard on the brown pine needles.

“We’re just tending to the graves, sweetie,” I said. Allison brought her little kids’ sand shovel, and if we weren’t dressed so nicely it might have looked like we were heading to the beach.

I was holding a tote that had two cookie jars in it. There had been two deaths that week. I’d been back to my friend Kimbo at Dryden Pottery a few times, but I never bought more than I needed. Superstition, I guess. I lied and told him I’d taken to giving the cookie jars as birthday gifts.

What’s funny is that everyone’s ashes are a different color. You might think the ash is powder, but it’s tougher stuff. You see the fragments of bone, proof that this was a real person.

Today would be my grandmother’s turn to take in two souls. “You’ll like her,” I said, taking the jars out of the bag and setting them on the ground next to her grave site. “She’ll take good care of you.”

I always brought a little plant with us in case somebody came along and wondered what we were up to. Even though nothing grew here, no matter how hard I tried to pretty it up with rosebushes.

“Ruth?” I said under my breath. “She’s just planting flowers. Why in the world would you think she’s burying AIDS patients? That would be crazy.”

Allison knelt beside me, and I smoothed her reddish curls. “You are just the most beautiful angel,” I said. “Now, help Mama dig a little.”

I dug the two holes as deep as I could, piling the red dirt in a neat mound. Allison lost interest and started trying to do somersaults.

“Not in the cemetery, honey,” I said, placing the jars of ashes gently into the ground. “And not in that dress. Keep that dress nice.”

I smoothed the tote on the ground, and she knelt on it. I took her little hands and clasped them in front of her face so she knew that this was a prayer.

“Close your eyes and think about love,” I said. “And we’ll send it right here so the grass and flowers grow, okay?”

“Okay.”

“God, I don’t know these men but You do,” I said. “Whatever their religion, we ask that You take them into Your care. Bless anyone who cared for them on this earth, and to anyone who has been kind to them who is now in Heaven, please greet them with love and mercy.”

I opened my eyes and saw Allison’s big green eyes looking at me. “Well, I think these plants are safe and sound and ready to grow,” I said.

She looked down at the grave. “Good job, plants!” she said. “I love you.” And she was off, skipping through the gravestones.

By the end of summer, I’d buried eight men from all the hospitals. It seemed like so many then. I had no idea.

They were always right at death’s door, so there really wasn’t a lot I could do. Except offer comfort. I had to make that clear as soon as I walked in, because I knew they could still hear me. Yes, I was another stranger coming in, but I wasn’t going to be mean to them like everybody else had been. I just couldn’t imagine being that sick and vulnerable and having people be nasty to you. I would sit with them, hold their hands, tell them they were okay now. Some would die quickly, but some would die over hours. I would tell stories to comfort them and me.

Sitting with them, I saw a river. I felt like I was taking these young men in my arms and carrying them across the river to the other side. And there were all the friends and family, people who wouldn’t judge them, waiting to take them. I took them over that river and handed them safely to those who would love them.

And then I turned around and I was back on land, standing alone at the water’s edge. I would get up, close their eyes and close their mouths, brush their hair, and straighten them up in the bed. Give them dignity.

A young man at St. Joe’s changed everything. Howard.

He had pneumonia and what looked like bad thrush in his mouth when I got to him. I knew his doctor could see it, even if he was just standing in the doorway. The doctor was all done up in his space suit standing there, and he scolded me for not wearing a mask. He was a cancer doctor. They were sticking the patients with cancer doctors, because they still thought it was gay cancer. The doctors sure resented it, and they always let me know it, like it was my fault. Here, they’d just gotten into this moneymaking field, and now AIDS was gonna ruin their practice, and no straight people were gonna come anymore. I heard all that.

I went down to the cafeteria and got some buttermilk. Yuck, but I knew it would kill the thrush. I got this from my grandmother on my father’s side. She and my grandfather helped settle the Florida Keys. They ran a fish camp down there, but she was the go-to person for medical stuff and could cure anything. She could diagnose things. I don’t know if it was magic or voodoo or what she had. Maybe just plain common sense. But whatever it was, I’ve got it too—a lot of it.

My daddy would take me down there in the winters before he died. He taught me all that stuff, like how to make a poultice and put it on to draw out the infection. “Well, go pick this from that tree and pick that from this plant.” There weren’t doctors around them, and our family didn’t have money to go to doctors anyway. So this is what you did.

I visited Howard three days straight, missing out on work while Allison was at her preschool. The buttermilk worked on him, and I tried to spoon-feed him yogurt, but he couldn’t eat. He was in and out of it, but we could have snatches of conversation here and there. He had made it all the way to New York, right out of high school.

“If you have fifty cents and you’re gay, you get on a bus out of Arkansas,” he said. “Pick a coast and head for it.” He got work assisting a bookkeeper. “It was off-the-books,” he whispered, “which I always found funny.”

“My rule is that I will take any job as long as it’s legal and vertical,” I said.

“Smart rule.”

“I’m no dummy,” I said. “I may be blond, but my roots are dark.”

He started to laugh, and I felt so guilty because it started a coughing fit.

“Did you have someone in New York?”

“Ken,” he said. “The most handsome man. That is what it would be like to be with him—you would walk around and see people react like, ‘That is the most handsome man.’ He got sick. I kept missing work, so my boss fired me. I think he knew. They hate us. Everybody hates us.”

“I know, honey,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“He died at St. Vincent’s. July 11. There were crosses on the wall, just like here.”

We both looked at Jesus, as if he might join the conversation.

“Is it better there in New York?”

“Not really,” he said. “Nobody knows what to do.”

“Are people doing anything?” I asked. They had to be doing something about this in New York.

“No.”

“Why did you come back here?” I asked.

“I started to get sick, and I thought my parents—” He stopped and swallowed. “I didn’t have anyone. I had friends, but they started to disappear when Ken got sick. People are afraid to breathe the same air as me, so . . . We had a dog. A King Charles spaniel—our baby, Clementine. Clem. I snuck him in a bag the whole way down here. Mama said Clem could stay. She said, ‘I pity this poor dog.’ Dad stayed in his shed. Wouldn’t come out.” He took a long pause, then gave up on whatever he was going to say.

“Well, you were right to come here after all. There is nothing more beautiful than Hot Springs in the fall, right?”

“I loved the lakes in fall,” he said dreamily. “They cool off, and the people are all gone.”

“You can go out lake fishing and never see another person,” I said.

“My daddy would take me and my brother out on the weekends,” he said. “I just wanted to see the leaves change again.”

I started to cry too and looked around. There wasn’t even a box of tissues in here. He started to fade again. “Well, if we are going to act like this, we need tissues,” I said. “I will be right back, I swear.”

He looked scared. “I promise,” I said. I got up to go outside, and after I closed the door, I stepped on one of the trays of food they left by the door. I looked down at this pitiful baloney sandwich lying in spilled apple juice. Some dam in me broke.

I marched halfway to the nurses’ station. Two nurses stood there staring, and here came another one.

“These trays on the floor?” I said, trying so hard to remain as ladylike as I possibly could, when I just wanted to scream. “He’s not a dog. He’s not gonna come out and eat off that tray. Stop it. I don’t wanna see that again.”

“He doesn’t eat,” said one.

“How can he? If you don’t want to go in there, put a tray table outside that door and you put that there food on that table. Would you eat something off the floor? I wouldn’t, and I am not gonna have you disrespect a human being like that. It’s not right.”

Sister Angela emerged, like some sort of devil. “You need to calm down,” she said.

“I am calm,” I said. Then I lowered my voice. “Look, here’s the deal,” I said, looking back at the nurses. “You might not like him. You may not want to go in there. But one of you, I know, will.”

I turned to the sister. “One of you has God’s love in your heart.” Back to the nurses. “Why don’t you trade off if you don’t want to go in there, but don’t be a jerk about it. One of you has the strength. Find it. Do what you do and help him.”

“The patient . . .” Sister began to say.

“Howard. He went to New York. He had a whole life . . .” Sister Angela stared at me so I met her eye. “I could just go home,” I said. “I could go home and not come back. This is the deal.”

She curled her lip ever so slightly so I could see her disdain for me. She shot a look at the nurses and walked away.

“Now, may I please have a box of tissues?” I asked.

As they stared at me, I started to take off my space suit, removing the balloon-cloth pants and the huge top. A nurse handed me a box of tissues.

“Thank you,” I said, throwing back my hair. I clicked my heels hard on the floor on the way back to his room, stopping to throw the space suit in the garbage.

I never wore one at any hospital again.

Howard became less lucid with each day until he died a few days later. It was like he was drowning in bed, he had so much fluid in his lungs. He never saw the leaves change again. His mother told me she didn’t want him, so I asked to speak to Howard’s father.

“He can’t come to the phone,” she said. I heard a dog bark, and she hissed, “Lucky, heel.” I wondered if she had even changed his dog’s name.

I buried him near Jimmy in Files. I told no one but Bonnie about the hospital visits. She was my sounding board, and we talked just about every night. Bonnie was adapting to her new life with a feeding tube and had managed to regain something like a voice. To be honest, she sounded a lot like Daffy Duck. And the thing is that Bonnie was so smart that she always used the big words. Maybe from all her years doing the typesetting at the newspaper. When I took her to her doctor, and he asked how she was, she might joke, “Resplendent.” That would take about five minutes of decoding.

Her oncologist was Bruce Leipzig, a rabbi from New York. So, you know, he stuck out in Arkansas. He taught me how to care for Bonnie, help her with her medicines and her feeding tube. This wasn’t new to me. I didn’t have any medical training, but I had cared for my father when I was a little girl. His lungs would fill with fluid, and my mother would hear him gurgling in the night. She’d wake me up to suction him. She had married him for his military pension, and he had married her because she was a nurse, so it was a trade-off they both were aware of. She was sick, very sick, and sometimes she couldn’t get out of bed, so I was her caretaker too. Daddy had a hole from a tracheotomy, and he would help me put the tube down his trachea and into his lungs. We would do one lung and then the other, usually filling half a jar with fluid. Which was about all I could carry at that age anyway. Then I would have to take the jar and empty it. I would gag, but you do what you have to do.

Bonnie was hardheaded too, and she wanted to live. When Dr. Leipzig told her she had only a three percent chance of living through the chemotherapy, she said, “I’m gonna die anyway, try it on me.” He shrugged and smiled. “We’ll try it then.”

On one of the visits, I told him I’d heard about AIDS “on TV” and I wondered what he thought.

“You know, we doctors thought for a while that we had all the answers,” he said. “Cut out the tumor, use this antibiotic.”

“Done,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “I can tell Bonnie, ‘Hey, let’s try this.’ I can tell another patient, ‘This will prolong your life.’ These people, what can you do? There’s no answer. I can’t imagine looking at a patient and saying, ‘I have absolutely nothing to give you.’ I mean, can you imagine?”

“No,” I said, lying. Bonnie looked at me, knowing exactly what I was up to. “What do they think is causing it?”

“I guess they’re saying it’s a virus, and when you get it at first you have the worst flu of your life, and then it passes. But it starts to destroy their immune system. They’re sitting ducks for anything that comes along. You have these young guys getting old man diseases.”

“Like a monster movie,” I said.

“I mean, as a doctor, it’s fascinating,” he said. “But it’s people. I guess the only thing you can do is prevent it. There’s talk about quarantining them, but how do you go about doing that?”

One day I was at St. Joe’s looking for a doctor.

“Oh, I think he’s looking up something in the library,” said a nurse.

“The library?” I said. “You all have a library here?”

“Yeah, it’s by the doctors’ lounge,” she said. “The medical library. They sometimes hide in there doing ‘research.’”

I just smiled, but as soon as the coast was clear around evening time, I marched myself back there. The lights were off, and I turned them on to see shelf after shelf of not just books but also the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet . . . I let out a breath, and then I started, taking the most recent copies of each and turning pages until I found any mention of AIDS. The articles confirmed what I knew: HIV was a virus spread through sexual contact, blood transfusions, sharing needles, or mother to child. It was not like the cold or the flu, and they had ruled out what they called insect vectors, which I realized meant mosquitoes. There were long articles about statistics and projections about AIDS, and letters about the ethics of mass testing and the importance of prevention in the absence of a vaccine or therapy. Even the words “epidemic” and “vaccine” gave me hope someone was trying to create a cure.

Then I discovered the larger library at the Med Center in Little Rock. Every week I had to take Bonnie to a social worker there who did touch therapy. She was an older woman named Tweed—“like the fabric,” she’d say. She clearly cared about people, and we got to talking about what I was doing, and I told her I was on the lookout for any kind of information I could use. Tweed got me into the Med Center library, which was even better than the one at St. Joe’s because this was a teaching hospital. It was larger and more formal, and there was always a librarian stationed at the front.

“I’m going in to do research, and she’s helping me,” Tweed told the librarian.

“Okay,” was the answer. “How’s your day going?”

“Oh, it’s good, thank you,” I said. And I was in. We went back several times, doing this routine where Tweed would leave to check on a patient and then simply not come back. After a few visits, I was able to go in without her, smiling at the librarian and maybe paying a compliment as an entrance fee.

Interns and students in their final years of med school, all male, used the library for studying and dozing off. I sat among them reading, and soon they were used to me too. The library had a microfiche reader, and I scanned through articles on-screen, taking notes. It brought back memories of using one in the school library when I was a kid. I didn’t learn like other kids, and nobody—including me—figured out that I had a form of dyslexia. I just thought I had to work harder than everyone else. So I had spent hours in the school library alone, trying to catch up, reading the same sentence twice, three times if I had to, anything that would help. This was no different.

Bonnie had me help take her feeding tube in and out for when she left the house, but it hurt her so much that she just started leaving it in. She would unplug it and kind of tuck the tube behind her ear. People watched us as I took her around the grocery store. She was a sight. No hair, radiation burns all on her face and throat, quacking at me, with her feeding tube up in that jaunty tuck. “Here we come,” I used to say to her whenever we walked in anywhere.

Bonnie didn’t have two pennies to rub together and was living in a shotgun shack out in the woods. She was what my mother would call “froggy.” Anyone poor and white, she said they lived out with the frogs in the woods. All Bonnie had for heat was a pot-belly stove to burn wood in. That first December after the surgery, the temperature went down to the twenties. I went over to check on her, and the house was freezing.

“Bonnie, you gotta put more wood on,” I said. “You can’t live like this.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

I went over to the stove and saw a box full of twigs. She had been gathering her own firewood herself, though she couldn’t carry anything. Twigs was it, because they were light.

“Okay, that’s enough of that,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No, it’s not,” I said. I had been doing so much to care for her, and she was living like this. “It is not okay. It is not right.”

The truth is that Bonnie had lived that way even before she was sick. Making do. Her dad was a hit-and-run who probably didn’t stick around long enough to even call it a full one-night stand, and that was back when having a single mom made them outliers. Her mother worked as a switchboard operator, so they never had any money. Bonnie was just used to running on fumes.

I called the housing assistance office for her, right there. Looked it up in the phone book and called before she could yell at me. They were giving me the runaround, so we just went down there. This was how I learned to solve all of Bonnie’s problems. Just walk in with our little traveling show. If she needed a new form at the social security office or a hospital administrator wanted to charge for something, I’d wait until they got exasperated with me, and I’d say, “Well, here, Bonnie, you tell him.” She’d pause, then start in with that Daffy Duck voice, and that would do it. Any place we went, they wanted us out so bad they would be like, “Well, here, take this chair with you. These flowers? Anything else you want. Just get out.”

We found her a place on Music Mountain Road, another dilapidated shotgun shack so she’d feel at home. The rent was two hundred dollars a month, and housing assistance cleared that no problem. I couldn’t get anyone to pay for her water though. But that’s what got her out of the house and kept her social. She’d gotten to a point where she could drive again without me, so she’d go over to the cold-water fountain at Happy Hollow with her little bottles in her hoopty Toyota pickup. It’s down the mountain from where there’s a hickory tree with a nozzle in it, and that same water comes out of the fountain with the four faucets down below. People brought their milk jugs, their bleach bottles, whatever they had, and it was a social thing. You waited to see what people brought and started talking. Then she’d get a big jug of hot water from another fountain to bathe and wash her hair, which was slowly growing back salt-and-pepper. Bonnie could always spark conversations when she wanted to, even with that voice, so she developed a whole jungle-dazzle of friends there, a bunch of lost souls. She was like Hot Springs—she either drew you to her, or she sent you away.

As open as I was with Bonnie about helping people as they died, it was the opposite with my friend Sandy. I knew she hated gay people. “Why ruin a good dick?” she loved to say. “It’s unnatural and against God.” She wasn’t a religious person, but you know how there are people who find religion when it’s handy. And she really resented the ones that got the straight tourists looking for a bit of strange when they were in for a convention. “They have no reason to live except to take men way from me.”

But at least Sandy kept everything very surface, and that was what I needed. She didn’t want anything from me except an ear for her stories. We’d crash the hot tub at the Arlington Hotel, and on the milder days in December we kept up our winter tradition of canoeing down the Ouachita River. We’d rent the canoe from these hillbilly country people. Little kids and grown men staring at us in our bikini tops like we were aliens. We’d wear shorts or pants, because it did get cooler as the sun began to set.

“Did I tell you I had to kick this guy out last night?” Sandy said one day as we drifted on the water. “Dick like a cigarette.”

“Sandy, one of these men is gonna beat the hell out of you someday.”

“Oh, no, this was false advertising,” she said. “Don’t sell me Marlboro Man and then give me Virginia Slim.”

“We should get jobs out at the Dairyette,” I joked. That was where the country girls who weren’t big on working would meet the guys with the company cars—work trucks from the water and sewer companies.

“Exactly, Ruthie,” she said, playing along. “Get the sweet eye from one of the guys, and you give it back.”

“Then he comes in later by himself. ‘Where’s the rest of the guys?’ I’ll say. ‘I like that tooth you got.’”

“And you say you can’t meet men,” she said.

“Who needs them?” I asked. I turned my head as I heard a low roar in the distance. “Oh, here they come.”

A jet was coming in low over the river. When we were out the flyboys from the military base in Jacksonville always flew as close to the ground as they could.

“Hello, boys,” I yelled as the jet soared over us, so loud I could barely hear myself.