Gloomily, Scipio said, 'You gwine get a lot o' niggers killed. They rise up in the USA, lots o' they poor buckra get killed. We don' rise up together. They white, we black. Things is like that, an' that's how things is.'
'Come the revolution, black an' white be all the same,' Cassius said.
For once, Scipio got the last word: 'Yeah. All be dead the same.'
VII
Captain Irving Morrell lay between starched white sheets in an airy Tucson hospital that smelled of carbolic acid and, below that, of pus. He was sick of hospitals. The words sick to death of hospitals ran through his mind, but he rejected them. He'd come too close to dying to make jokes, or even feeble plays on words, about it.
His leg still throbbed like a rotten tooth, and here it was December when he'd been hit in August. More than once, the sawbones had wanted to take it off at the hip, for fear infection would kill him. He'd managed to talk them out of it every time, and having a toothache down there was heaven compared to what he'd gone through for a while. He could even walk on the leg now, and with aspirin he hardly noticed the pain-on good days.
A doctor with captain's bars on the shoulders of his white coat approached the bed. Morrell had never seen him before. He didn't know whether he'd see him again. The doctors here-the doctors at every military hospital these days- were like factory workers, dealing with wounded men as if they were faulty mechanisms to be reassembled, often moving from one to the next without the slightest acknowledgment of their common humanity. Maybe that kept them from dwelling on what they had to do. Maybe they were just too swamped to invest the time. Maybe both-Morrell had learned things were seldom simple.
The doctor pulled back the top sheet. He peered down at the valley in the flesh of Morrell's thigh. 'Not too red,' he said, scribbling a note. The skin of his hands was red, too, and raw, cracked from the harsh disinfectant in which he scrubbed many times a day.
'It's the best I've ever seen,' Morrell agreed. He didn't know whether that was true or not, but he did know how much he wanted to get out of here and return to the war that was passing him by.
The doctor prodded at the wound with a short-nailed forefinger, down at the bottom of the valley where a river would have run had it been a product of geology rather than mere war. 'Does that hurt?'
'No.' The lie came easily. Morrell's conscience, unlike his leg, hurt not at all. Compared to what he'd been through, the pain the doctor inflicted was nothing, maybe less. I really am healing, he thought in some amazement. For a long time, he'd thought he never would.
Another note, another prod. 'How about that?'
'No, sir, not that, either.' Another lie. If I can convince everyone else it doesn't hurt, I can convince myself, too. If I can convince the quack, maybe he'll let me out of here. Worth trying for. The judgment was as cool and precise as if Morrell were picking the weak spot in an enemy position. That was how he'd got shot in the first place, but he chose not to dwell on such inconvenient details.
Two orderlies came into the warm, airy room, one pushing a wheeled gurney, the other walking beside it. Bandages covered most of the head of the still figure lying on the gurney. Yellow serum stained the white cotton at a spot behind the left temple. Between them, the orderlies gently transferred what had been a man from the gurney to a bed. The axles creaked slightly as they turned the gurney in a tight circle and rolled it away.
In his time on his back, Morrell had seen a lot of wounds like that. 'Poor bastard,' he muttered.
The doctor nodded. Next to that breathing husk, Morrell was a human being to him. 'The worst of it is,' the doctor said, 'he's liable to stay alive for a long time. If you put food in his mouth, he'll swallow it. If you give him water, he'll drink. But he'll never get up out of that bed again, and he'll never know he's in it, either.'
Morrell shivered. 'Better to be shot dead quick and clean. Then it's over. You're not just-lingering.'
'That's a good word,' the doctor said. 'Head wounds are the dreadful ones. Either they do kill the man receiving them-and so many do, far out of proportion to the number received-or they leave him a vegetable, like that unfortunate soldier.' He clicked his tongue between his teeth. 'It's a problem where I wish we could do more.'
'What's to be done?' Morrell said. 'A service cap won't stop a bullet, any more than your tunic or your trousers would.'
'Of course not,' the doctor said. 'Some of the elite regiments wear leather helmets like the ones the German army uses, don't they?'
'The Pickelhaube,' Morrell agreed. 'That might help if you fell off a bicycle, but it won't stop a bullet, either. A steel helmet might, if it wasn't too heavy to wear. You probably couldn't make one that would keep everything out, but-'
He and the doctor looked at each other. Then, at the same moment, their eyes went to the bandaged soldier with half his brains blown out. The doctor said, 'That might be an excellent notion, certainly in terms of wound reduction. I may take it up with my superiors and, upon your discharge, I suggest you do the same with yours. Knowing how slowly the Army does everything, we could hardly hope for immediate action even if we get approval, but the sooner we start seeking it-'
'The sooner something will get done,' Morrell finished for him. He hated the way Army wheels got mired in bureaucratic mud. Maybe, with the war on, things would move faster. He hadn't had a chance to find out; he'd been flat on his back almost since fighting broke out. But the doctor had spoken a magic word. 'Discharge?'
'You're not one hundred per cent sound,' the doctor said, glancing down at the notes he'd written. 'Odds are, you'll never be a hundred per cent sound, not with that wound. But you have function in the leg, the infection is controlled if not suppressed, and we may hope exercise will improve your overall condition now rather than setting it back. If not, of course, you will return to the hospital wherever you happen to be reassigned.'
'Of course,' Morrell said piously, not meaning a word of it. Inactivity had been a pain as bad as any from his wound. Once he got back in the field, he wouldn't report himself unfit for duty, not unless he got shot again-and not then, either, if he could get away with it. He'd buy a walking stick, he'd detail a sergeant to haul him around as necessary-but he'd stay in action. There had been times when he thought he'd go crazy, just from being cooped up in one place for weeks at a time.
'I am serious about that,' the doctor said; Morrell had had better luck fooling some of the other quacks they'd sicced on him. 'If the infection flares up again, or if it should reach the bone, amputation will offer the only hope of saving your life.'
'I understand,' Morrell said, which didn't mean he took the medical man seriously. If they hadn't chopped the leg off when it was swollen to twice its proper size and leaking pus the way an armored car with a punctured radiator leaked water, they weren't going to haul out the meat axe for it now.
'Very well.' The doctor jotted one more note. 'My orders are to put any men, especially experienced officers, who are at all capable of serving back on active-duty status as soon as possible. Therapeutically, this is less than ideal, but therapeutic needs must be weighed against those of the nation, and so you will be sent east for reassignment.'
'I will be glad to get out of here,' Morrell said, 'but isn't there any chance of sending me back down to the campaign for Guaymas? Last I heard, we'd bogged down less than a hundred miles from the town.'
'That's my understanding, too,' the doctor said. 'The reassignment center, however, has been established in St. Louis. You'll get your orders there, whatever they turn out to be.'
Morrell nodded, accepting his fate. That sounded like the Army: set up one central center somewhere, and process everyone through it. If you went a thousand miles, then came back to somewhere only a hundred miles from where you'd started, that was just your tough luck. You chalked it up to the way the system worked and went on about your assigned business.
And, of course, there were no guarantees he'd get sent back to Sonora. He could as easily end up in Pennsylvania or Kansas or Quebec or British Columbia. War flamed all over the continent.
He started to ask the doctor when he could expect to head out of Tucson, but the fellow had moved on to the next bed and was examining a sergeant who'd taken a shell fragment that had shattered his arm. He had suffered an amputation, and was bitter about it. Now that the doctor was looking at him, Morrell might as well have ceased to exist.
Knowing he would soon be allowed to escape the confines of the military hospital, to see more of Tucson's
