Captivity
After replacing all the diving gear in the machine shop, Kelly took a two-wheel hand truck out onto the quay to handle the groceries. Rosen insisted on helping. His new screws would arrive by boat the next day, and the surgeon didn't seem in any hurry to take his boat back out.
'So,' Kelly said, 'you teach surgery?'
'Eight years now, yeah.' Roeen evened up the boxes on the two-wheeler.
'You don't took like a surgeon.'
Rosen took the compliment with grace. 'We're not all violinists. My father was a bricklayer.'
'Mine was a fireman.' Ketty started wheeling the groceries towards the bunker.
'Speaking of surgeons...' Rosen pointed at Kelly's chest. 'Some good ones worked on you. That one looks like it was nasty.'
Kelly nearly stopped. 'Yeah, I got real careless that time. Not as bad as it looks, though, just grazed the lung.'
Rosen grunted. 'So I see. Must have missed your heart by nearly two inches. No big deal.'
Kelly moved the boxes into the pantry. 'Nice to talk to somebody who understands, doc,' he noted, wincing inwardly at the thought, remembering the feel of the bullet when it had spun him around. 'Like I said - careless.'
'How long were you over there?'
'Total? Maybe eighteen months. Depends on if you count the hospital time.'
'That's a Navy Cross you have hanging on the wall. Is that what it's for?'
Kelly shook his head. 'That was something else. I had to go up north to retrieve somebody, A-6 pilot. I didn't get hurt, but I got sicker 'n' hell. I had some scratches - you know - from thorns and stuff. They got infected as hell from the river water, would you believe? Three weeks in the hospital from that. It was worse'n being shot.'
'Not a very nice place, is it?' Rosen asked as they came back for the last load.
'They say there's a hundred different kinds of snake there. Ninety-nine are poisonous.'
'And the other one?'
Kelly handed a carton over to the doctor. 'That one eats your ass whole.' He laughed. 'No, I didn't like it there much. But that was the job, and I got that pilot out, and the Admiral made me a chief and got me a medal. Come on, I'll show you my baby.' Kelly waved Rosen aboard. The tour took five minutes, with the doctor taking note of all the differences. The amenities were there, but not glitzed up. This guy, he saw, was all business, and his charts were all brand new. Kelly fished out another beer from his cooler for the doctor and another for himself.
'What was Okinawa like?' Kelly asked with a smile, each man sizing up the other, each liking what he saw.
Rosen shrugged and grunted eloquently. 'Tense. We had a lot of work, and the kamikazes seemed to think the red cross on the ship made a hell of a nice target.'
'You were working while they were coming in at you?'
'Injured people can't wait, Kelly.'
Kelly finished his beer. 'I'd rather be shooting back. Let me get Pam's stuff and we can get back in the air conditioning.' He headed aft and picked up her backpack. Rosen was already on the quay, and Kelly tossed the backpack across. Rosen looked too late, missed the catch, and the pack landed on the concrete. Some contents spilled out, and from twenty feet away, Kelly immediately saw what was wrong even before the doctor's head turned to look at him.
There was a large brown plastic prescription bottle, but without a label. The top had been loose, and from it had spilled a couple of capsules.
Some things are instantly clear. Kelly stepped slowly off the boat to the quay. Rosen picked up the container and placed the spilled capsules back in it before snapping down the white plastic top. Then he handed it to Kelly.
'I know they're not yours, John.'
'What are they, Sam?'
His voice could not have been more dispassionate. 'The trade name is Quaalude. Methaqualone. It's a barbiturate, a sedative. A sleeping pill. We use it to get people off into dreamland. Pretty powerful. A little too powerful, in fact. A lot of people think it ought to be taken off the market. No label. It's not a prescription.'
Kelly suddenly felt tired and old. And betrayed somehow. 'Yeah.'
'You didn't know?'
'Sam, we only met - not even twenty-four hours ago. I don't know anything about her.'
Rosen stretched and looked around the horizon for a moment. 'Okay, now I'm going to start being a doctor, okay? Have you ever done drugs?'
'No! I hate the goddamned stuff. People die because of it!' Kelly's anger was immediate and vicious, but it wasn't aimed at Sam Rosen.
The professor took the outburst calmly. It was his turn to be businesslike. 'Settle down. People get hooked on these things. How doesn't matter. Getting excited doesn't help. Take a deep breath, let it out slow.'
Kelly did, and managed a smile at the incongruity of the moment. 'You sound just like my dad.'
'Firemen are smart.' He paused. 'Okay, your lady friend may have a problem. But she seems like a nice girl, and you seem like a mensch. So do we try and solve the problem or not?'
'I guess that's up to her,' Kelly observed, bitterness creeping into his voice. He felt betrayed. He'd started giving his heart away again, and now he had to face the fact that he might have been giving it to drugs, or what drugs had made of what ought to have been a person. It might all have been a waste of time.
Rosen became a little stern. 'That's right, it is up to her, but it might be up to you, too, a little, and if you act like an idiot, you won't help her very much.'
Kelly was amazed by how rational the man sounded under the circumstances. 'You must be a pretty good doc.'
'I'm one hell of a good doc,' Rosen announced. 'This isn't my field, but Sarah is damned good. It may be you're both lucky. She's not a bad girl, John. Something's bothering her. She's nervous about something, in case you didn't notice.'
'Well, yes, but -' And some part of Kelly's brain said, See!
'But you mainly noticed she's pretty. I was in my twenties once myself, John. Come on, we may have a little work ahead.' He stopped and peered at Kelly. 'I'm missing something here. What is it?'
'I lost a wife less than a year ago.' Kelly explained on for a minute or two.
'And you thought that maybe she -'
'Yeah, I guess so. Stupid, isn't it?' Kelly wondered why he was opening up this way. Why not just let Pam do whatever she wanted? But that wasn't an answer. If he did that, he would just be using her for his selfish needs, discarding her when the bloom came off the rose. For all the reverses his life had taken in the past year, he knew that he couldn't do that, couldn't be one of those men. He caught Rosen looking fixedly at him.
Rosen shook his head judiciously. 'We all have vulnerabilities. You have training and experience to deal with your problems. She doesn't. Come on, we have work to do.' Rosen took the hand truck in his large, soft hands and wheeled it towards the bunker.
The cool air inside was a surprisingly harsh blast of reality. Pam was trying to entertain Sarah, but not succeeding. Perhaps Sarah had written it off to the awkward social situation, but physicians' minds are always at work, and she was starting to apply a professional eye to the person in front of her. When Sam entered the living room, Sarah turned and gave him a look that Kelly was able to understand.
'And so, well, I left home when I was sixteen,' Pam was saying, rattling on in a monotonal voice that exposed more than she knew. Her eyes turned, too, and focused on the backpack Kelly held in his hand. Her voice had a surprisingly brittle character that he'd not noticed before.
'Oh, great. I need some of that stuff.' She came over and took the pack from his hands, then headed towards the master bedroom. Kelly and Rosen watched her leave, then Sam handed his wife the plastic container. She needed only one look.
'I didn't know,' Kelly said, feeling the need to defend himself. 'I didn't see her take anything.' He thought back, trying to remember times when she had not been in his sight, and concluded that she might have taken pills two or perhaps three times, then realizing what her dreamy eyes had really been after all.
