every single nerve. Someone screamed out for morphine. Someone groaned, lowly cursing the driver. Someone grabbed his wrist, poking a needle into a vein. As the pain subsided, a warm sensation filled his extremities, relaxing him.
“He's lost a lot of blood — ”
The initial dose of morphine had worn off. He was so thirsty. Two men were transporting him on a stretcher, running across the apple orchard by the Naktong. Sunlight burned his forehead, as blinding hot as the pain which coursed in heightened, spasmodic waves. They passed a sergeant he had only spoken to a couple of times, the man's pace then quickening as he jogged alongside the stretcher for a moment, leaning a tanned, grubby face toward him, saying, “Got to hang in there, Adams. Can't go belly-up until after you get to Yokosuka. Them nurses are so damn beautiful — you'll be thanking that gook who did this to you, no kiddin’. Just hang in there — ”
And so Hollis had somehow hung in there, delivered from the waking nightmare of Korea to the bright, airy confines of a U.S. Naval Hospital which hadn't yet been given an official dedication ceremony (the public works operating on twenty-four-hour shifts, remodeling and converting additional buildings, creating further ward space for a patient census which would soon triple). In time, his mind would regain its full lucidity, his memory becoming less piecemeal. The pain medication was decreased; the pain itself still flaring up when he or a corpsman or a nurse tried lifting his bad leg. But with each nurse who stopped at his bedside — same white uniform, same accommodating manner — he attempted without success to recall which one had bathed him on that first night, had wiped his body with a sponge, scrubbing places where no woman other than his own mother had ever cleaned: Nurse McGill, Nurse Hayward, Nurse Christian, Nurse —?
Subsequently, he had been washed by corpsmen or Japanese male orderlies, yet it was the invigorating touch of that particular nurse which he longed to feel. And if recollections of McCreedy's final seconds ever flashed across his mind — or the corpse of the boy he had killed beside the Naktong — Hollis banished such images by letting better thoughts of the nurse's gloved hands preoccupy him at night, his fingertips acting as her fingertips while he slid them between his legs: the breathless, viscid aftershock of orgasm producing immediate disgust and regret, a potent kind of self-loathing which lingered through the daylight hours, often turning his face red whenever any of the nurses conversed with him, causing him to avert his gaze and, too, making it impossible to simply ask who it was that had tended him upon his arrival at Yokosuka. Instead, he said very little, appearing painfully shy, and feared that his uncontrollable blushing might actually betray the embarrassing truth behind his shame.
For a while, one day at the naval hospital was much like the next, and he had only to rest and eat and heal, his needs met by the small staff of nurses, corpsmen, and doctors who busily roamed the ward — checking wounds, emptying bedpans, offering magazines and small talk. From his bottom bunk, he watched the comings and goings, aware of the new patients helped into the double-and triple-deck bunks which had previously been unused: some had slight injuries, a little shrapnel embedded in a thigh, calf, shoulder; some had shattered jaws and cheekbones, a Penrose drain inserted at their necks, their mouths wired shut; some were the worst of the worst, having bugged out at the front, escaping combat by shooting themselves in the foot or hand; some were bandaged head to toe; some didn't have arms or legs, or legs and arms. As the main military objective of the hospital was a prompt turnaround, many of the patients would be sent back to the battlefield once their wounds had mended, but those who were the most seriously injured would also leave Yokosuka, allowing extra room for incoming patients by completing their recovery at stateside naval hospitals.
Hollis belonged to the latter category, for that single shot from a Japanese-built rifle had rendered him useless, something he finally understood at Yokosuka when the bandages were changed — the gauze unfurling down the length of his left thigh, slowly displaying the extent of his injury and its repair. What he had imagined as a dime-shaped perforation was, in fact, a seventeen-inch scar after surgery was completed, with a sizable gash indenting a portion of his thigh so deeply that it looked as if the skin had collapsed into a cavernous sinkhole of discolored flesh. At some future point, he was told by a nurse, the indention would decrease, the scar would thin out. Another forecast came from a pair of young doctors — Dr. Golding and Dr. Buchman — who sat in chairs on either side of his bunk. Both similar-behaving, deadpan-voiced men leafed through files and sheets of notes while they took turns speaking, concluding a prolonged rehabilitation was in store for him, a period in which Hollis would have to use a wheelchair, then crutches, then a cane, then — if all went well — his own two feet.
“They should have you up and walking by Thanksgiving,” Dr. Golding assured him, nodding at Dr. Buchman. “You'll be in good hands.”
“Very good hands,” Dr. Buchman concurred, nodding at Dr. Golding.
“That's right, very good hands,” Dr. Golding agreed, nodding at Hollis.
“You got lucky, private.”
“Very lucky.”
But it was a high-strung, energetic corpsman nicknamed Sparky — a third-class petty officer, a wiry reservist, a choir director back in the States, somewhat of a dandy — who let Hollis know how lucky he had really been, lucky because he hadn't lost his leg: “Take it from me, I've seen plenty of boys brought here lacking all kinds of body parts, and they were still in better shape than you are.” In fact, Sparky had taken an interest in several of the quieter patients — ”the sweet ones,” he called them — and managed to learn about their individual conditions in detail, doting on them even when the attention wasn't required or wanted, eventually gaining their trust with an overly generous dispensation of barbiturates and a relentless sense of humor. For the patients whose faces and eyes were bandaged, Sparky delighted in teasing them, joking about the only two older nurses on the ward — veterans of World War II, women who had seen their share of the wounded — commenting to the men whenever one of the gray-haired nurses walked by, saying things like, “Oh my goodness, too bad you can't see this knockout. She's a vision of perfection. She'd make Elizabeth Taylor feel like Eleanor Roosevelt.”
It was Sparky, not the doctors or nurses, who first informed Hollis about his fate prior to arriving at Yokosuka — how his left femoral artery had been severed by the bullet and was ligated by doctors in Korea, his left foot having become cold and pale and lacking a detectable pulse, the drop of capillary circulation indicated by a delayed return of color upon a release of pressure from the skin; with edema also occurring, a couple of days had lapsed before it was decided the leg could be saved. “You came close to showing up here with just one boot, but you were probably too far gone to realize it.” Sparky discreetly pressed a painkiller against his palm. “Anyway, you really must do me a favor. While you're triumphantly tap-dancing again at Carnegie Hall, please remember me, would you?”
“That pretty much goes without saying,” replied Hollis, grinning.
“Good boy,” said Sparky, patting him on the shoulder. “We're all so proud of you.”
Hollis popped the barbiturate, chased it with a sip of water, and sank into the pillow — giving a sideways glance as Sparky about-faced on the heels of polished black shoes and flitted away, whistling happily between the rows of bunks, heading for another sweet one to comfort. Presently, while shadows crept along the floorboards and evening approached, he felt the induced fog settle across his slackened body like an ethereal weight, tiring him with ease. Hell of a way to quit smoking, was his last thought — and then he slept some more, not moving an inch, free of dreams or nightmares or any memories which bound him to such an ungaugeable present.
Later on, he was woken in darkness by a heaving cough, a throat being cleared. Overhead came a raspy voice, the Southern drawl of someone talking, mumbling from the top bunk which, hours before, hadn't been occupied. “Did you stop to think?” the voice asked, the tone languid and sluggish, medicated. “Did you stop to think to ask why it was we was fighting for? Did you stop to think to ask that? What'd it got to do with us? Did you stop and did you think?” But he hadn't heard the corpsmen bring in a new patient, hadn't sensed the rattling or shifting of the bunk as someone was made to lay above him. “Did you? Me neither. I didn't.”
The voice went on and on, repeating itself with alternating degrees of volume — a faint whisper, a sudden exclamation waking others.
“Will you shut up!” somebody cried from the adjacent bunks.
“Did you?”
“We aren't supposed to ask why,” somebody else responded nearby, “so shut the hell up!”
“Me neither. I didn't stop to think to ask. You didn't neither. You didn't stop to think to ask why neither. Did you?”
As the voice persisted, Hollis caught the strains of less disquieting creatures, hearing the purring of crickets just beyond the ward windows, communicating within the groupings of abundant weeds sheltering them. And if he believed it was possible to silence his noisy bedfellow with words, he might have brought up the insects and the weeds, mentioning how they never engaged in the wars of men. Perhaps, he wondered, that was why they were
