tiny corps of “doggy doctors”. They take care of Army’s guard dogs, as well as Army horses, Army cow, Army sheeps, Army pigs, Army mules, Army rabbits, Army mice, and Army monkeys. They also inspect the Army’s food.
Nancy and Jerry had bought the Victorian house not long after they had been assigned to Fort Detrick, which was nearby, within easy commuting distance. The kitchen was small, and at the moment you could see plumbing and wires hanging out of the walls. Not far from the kitchen, the living room had a bay window with a collection of tropical plants and ferns in it, and there was a cage among the plants that held an Amazon parrot named Herky. The parrot burst into a song: Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s home from work we go! “Mom! Mom!” he cried excitedly. His voice sounded like Jason’s.
“What?” Nancy said. Then she realized it was the parrot. “Nerd brain,” she muttered.
The parrot wanted to sit on Nancy’s shoulder. “Mom! Mom! Jerry! Jaime! Jason!” the parrot shouted, calling everyone in the family. When he didn’t get any response, he whistled the “Colonel Bogey March” from The Bridge on the River Kwai. And then: “What? What? Mom! Mom!”.
Nancy did not want to take Herky out of his cage. She worked quickly, putting plates and silverware out on the counter. Some of the officers at Fort Detrick had noticed a certain abrupt quality in her hand motions and had accused her of having hands that were “too quick” to handle delicate work in dangerous situations. Nancy had begun martial-arts training partly because she hoped to make her gestures cool and smooth and powerful, and also because he had felt the frustrations of a woman officer trying to advance her career in the Army. She was five feet four inches tall. She liked to spar with six-foot male solders, big guys. She enjoyed knocking them around a little bit; it gave her a certain satisfaction to be able to kick higher than the guy’s head. She used her feet more than her hands when she sparred with an opponent, because her hands were delicate. She could break four boards with a spinning back kick. She had reached the point where she could kill a man with her bare feet, an idea that did not in itself give her much satisfaction. On occasion, she had come home from her class with a broken toe, a bloody nose, or a black eye. Jerry would just shake his head: Nancy with another shiner.
Major Nancy Jaax did all the housework. She could not stand housework. Scrubbing grape jelly out of rugs didn’t give her a feeling of reward, and in any case she did not have time for it. Occasionally she would go into a paroxysm of cleaning, and she would race around the house for an hour, throwing things into closets. She also did all the cooking for her family. Jerry was useless in the kitchen. Another point of contention was his tendency to buy things impulsively—a motorcycle, a sailboat. Jerry had bought a sailboat when they were stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. And then there was that god-awful diesel Cadillac with a red leather interior. She and Jerry had commuted to work together in it, but the car had started to lay smoke all over the road even before the payments were finished. One day, she had finally said to Jerry, “You can sit in the driveway in those red leather seats all you want, but I’m not getting in there with you.” So they sold the Cadillac and bought a Honda Accord.
The Jaaxes’ house was the largest Victorian house in town, a pile of turreted brick with a slate roof and tall windows and a cupola and wooden paneling made of golden American chestnut. It stood on a street corner near the ambulance station. The sirens woke them up at night. They had bought the house cheap. It had sat on the market a long time, and a story had been going around town that the previous owner had hanged himself in the basement. After the Jaaxes bought it, the dead man’s widow showed up at the door one day. She was a wizened old lady, come to have a look around her old place, and she fixed a blue eye on Nancy and said, “Little girl, you are going to hate this house. I did.”
There were other animals in the house besides the parrot. In a wire cage in the living room lived a python named Sampson. He would occasionally escape from his cage, wander around the house, and eventually climb up inside the hollow center post of the dining room table and go to sleep. There he would stay for a few days. It gave Nancy a creepy feeling to think that there was a python asleep inside the dining table. You wondered whether the snake was going to wake up while you were eating dinner. Nancy had a study in the cupola at the top of the house. The snake had once escaped from his cage and disappeared for a few days. They pounded and knocked on the dining room table to try to flush him out, but he wasn’t there. Late one night when Nancy was in her study, the snake oozed out of the rafters and hung in front of her face, staring at her with lidless eyes, and she screamed. The family also had an Irish setter and an Airelale terrier. Whenever the Jaaxes were assigned to a different Army post, the animals moved with them in boxes and cages, a portable ecosystem of the Jaax family.
Nancy loved Jerry. He was tall and fine looking, a handsome man with prematurely gray hair. She thought of his hair as silver, to go along with his silver tongue, which he used trying to talk her into buy diesel Cadillacs with red-leather interiors. He had sharp brown eyes and a shape nose, like a hawk’s, and he understood her better than anyone else on earth. Nancy and Jerry Jaax had very little social life outside of their marriage. They had grown up on farms in Kansas, twenty miles apart as the crow flies, but had not known each other as children. They met in veterinary school at Kansas State University had gotten engaged a few weeks later, and they were married when Nancy was twenty. By the time they graduated, they were broke and in debt, with no money to set up a practice as veterinarians, and so they had enlisted in the Army together.
Since Nancy didn’t have time to cook during the week, she would spend her Saturdays cooking. She would make up a beef stew in a Crock-Pot, or she would broil several chickens. Then she would freeze the food in bags. On weekday nights, she would take a bag out of the freezer and heat it in the microwave. Tonight, while she thawed chicken, she considered the question of vegetables. How about canned green beans? The children liked that. Nancy opened a cabinet and pulled down a can of Libby’s green beans.
She searched through one or two drawers, looking for a can opener.
Couldn’t find it. She turned to the main junk drawer, which held all the utensils, the stirring spoons and vegetable peelers. It was a jam-packed nightmare.
The hell with the can opener. She pulled a butcher knife out of the drawer. Her father had always warned her not to use a knife to open a can, but Nancy Jaax had never mae a point of listening to her father’s advice. She jabbed the butcher knife into the can, and the point stuck in the metal. She hit the handle with the heel of the right hand. All of a sudden her hand slipped down the handle, struck the tang of the blade, and slid down the blade. She felt the edge bit deep.
The butcher knife clattered to the floor, an big drops of blood fell on the counter. “Son of a bitch!” she said. The knife had sliced through the middle of her right hand, on the palm. It was a deep cut. She put pressure on the cut to stanch the bleeding and went over to the sink, turned on the faucet, and thrust her hand under the stream of water.
The sink turned red. She wiggled her fingers. They worked; so she had not sliced a tendon. This was not such a bad cut. Holding her hand over her head, she went into the bathroom and found a Band-Aid. She waited for the blood to coagulate, and then she pressed the Band-Aid over the cut, drawing the sides of the cut together to seal the wound. She hated the sight of blood, even if it was her own blood. She had a thing about blood. She knew what some blood could contain.
Nancy skipped the children’s baths because of the cut on her hand and gave them their usual snuggle in bed. That night, Jaime slept in bed with her. Nancy didn’t mind, especially because Jerry was out of town, and it made her feel close to her children. Jaime seemed to need the reassurance. Jaime was always a little edgy when Jerry was out of town.
PROJECT EBOLA
1983 September 26
The next morning, Nancy Jaax woke up at four o’clock. She got out of bed quietly so as not to wake Jaime and showered and put on her uniform. She wore green Army slacks with a black stripe down the leg, a green Army shirt, an in the cold before sunrise she put on a black military sweater. The sweater displayed the shoulder bars of a major, with gold oak leaves. She drank a Diet Coke to wake herself up, and walked upstairs to her study in the cupola of the house.
