Tortuga

  I cried out for help, but no one came. Speed-o had unloaded me in an unmarked isolation room. There was no telling when I would be found. My lips were cracked with thirst, and in my stomach a hungry worm fed and made it churn and growl. I felt my body empty itself on the bed, and the mess and the blood from the open bedsores wet the sheets and mattress. I laughed and cried at the same time, felt the old hopelessness return, then I stretched and felt the movement I was guarding so carefully and felt better. For consolation I turned to the mountain, but the sun had risen quickly and a new bank of winter clouds swept over the barren height.

  “Damn you!” I cursed, and the sound echoed in the bare room. “Damn all of you! Can’t you see I need help!… I need help …”

  Maybe this bare room was a room in hell and I was condemned to spend eternity here, wallowing in my filth, taunted by just the slight hope of movement, shouting for help in an empty void … I cursed again and turned my rage and the ache on the mountain.

  “Move!” I cursed like Danny, “Move, Tortuga! Get your fat ass off the ground and move! Trample everything! Show us you can move. Move … please move …”

  A strange thunder rumbled across the sky, winter thunder full of an eerie green light, but Tortuga remained fastened to the earth, sleeping its winter sleep. I looked at it for a long time, then I slept again … saw the ring of girls dancing by the lime green of the river, felt Ismelda take my hand … gave myself again to the illusion which had become as real as the pain of the bed.

  I slept a long time, then a voice whispered my name and I opened my eyes. I blinked, looked sideways and saw Mike sitting by the side of the bed.

  “I’m sorry, Tortuga,” he whispered, “dammit I’m sorry—”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I answered. It hurt to talk. My lips were cracked and blistered and my tongue felt like a swollen wad of dry cotton. The door was open and I could hear shouting in the hall and the sound of running feet.

  “I should have known better!” he cursed. “It’s just that I thought they had kept you up front in one of the isolation rooms. Sometimes they keep new arrivals up there, for observation, then this morning on my way to therapy I passed Dr. Steel and asked about you and he said you were in the ward … Everybody knows what happens in this ward, so I knew you were lost … I came as fast as I could. The nurses are coming, and Steel’s on his way too—”

  “Do me a favor,” I answered, “my legs feel like they’re broken off … Can you rub them a little.”

  He nodded and pulled the sheet back. The stench made him wince. “God,” he groaned, “it’s a mess! A goddamned mess. You’re bleeding—Nurse!” he shouted over his shoulder and began massaging. Reviving the circulation sent stabs of sharp pain through my numb legs.

  “Coming! Coming!” someone shouted. The room began to fill with kids. Ismelda appeared behind Mike’s shoulder. She looked at me and at Mike rubbing furiously while he cursed the nurses and she shook her head. Her eyes told me she felt my pain. She helped Mike massage my legs, working slowly to get the blood going, saying nothing.

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed the first nurse to enter the room.

  “The shit’s going to hit the fan now!” Mike swore.

  “They never checked him in! I swear they never checked him in!” she cried. Other nurses and aides and kids followed. One of the nurses stuck a thermometer in my mouth. I spit it out and asked for water.

  “He needs a drink! Not a gaddamned thermometer!” Mike shouted. His curses made them panic. One of them pulled out the dirty sheet beneath me and tossed it aside. Then she began making the bed. A straw touched my lips and I sucked warm orange juice which turned to acid in my stomach. Around me the room continued to fill with kids, all asking questions. Dr. Steel pushed his way through them, a worried look wrinkling his brow. He put his thermometer on my chest, calmly gave the nurses orders, asked, “How do you feel, Tortuga?”

  “He could’ve died!” Mike cursed. The other kids picked up the refrain. “He could’ve died!” “They tried to kill him!” “Damn, just wait until the committee hears about this!” “Yeah, they can’t kill Tortuga and get away with it.” “Oh my …”

  “Okay …” I answered as the thermometer reappeared and rested on my swollen tongue. I tried to push it away, but the nurse held it. I looked at Mike and Ismelda massaging my legs and tried to get their attention. “Looka mah toez,” I mumbled.

  “Nurse, get the kids outa here!” Steel snapped.

  “Everybody out! Everybody out!” the nurse shouted. Nobody left, the confusion was great. A couple of kids had put bedpans on their heads, another one beat a urinal, all complained that the committee would hear about this, that a report would be made and the nurses fired. I didn’t know what the hell committee they were talking about, I only wanted to get their attention so they could tell me whether or not my toes were wiggling when I told them to wiggle. Ismelda wiped my legs with a cool, wet cloth, and when the nurse pulled out the thermometer and read 101 degrees I caught her attention.

  “My toes …” She and Mike looked at the same time. I strained as hard as I could, shut my eyes, groaned, sank deep into my shell and found the one live ember, blew on it softly, squeezed it, held it in my hands for Ismelda to see, and then it exploded and went flowing down my arms and legs, spastically jumping over dead nerve endings and numb muscles, flipping open long dead circuits, moving through the dark channels inside my shell, making me cry with pain as the energy of the relit fuse churned inside my stomach and jerked up my balls as it filled my groin and thighs with a warm, electric liquid, a liquid which buzzed as it flowed through my bones and dry tendons and finally exploded at the tip of my toes.

  “He moved!” Mike shouted and turned to grab Steel.

  “Two cc’s,” Steel ordered and I felt the prick of the needle in my arm, felt the syrupy heaviness spread quickly.

  “Oh Tortuga,” Ismelda smiled, worked her way around the nurses and touched my forehead.

  “Water …” She held the straw to my lips and this time the water was cool and refreshing.

  “Look, doc! Look!” Mike shouted.

  “Just a spasm …” Steel said. He pushed up my eyelid and shone a light into my eye. “Get the kids out,” he said again.

  “Everybody out!” the big nurse shouted.

  “Keep the sheet cold … bring down the fever … he’ll be all right …”

  “No! No! Look! He moved! Tortuga moved!” Mike shouted and pulled at the doctor.

  “Tortuga moved!” one of the kids shouted and they rushed to the window to see if the mountain was indeed moving. Dr. Steel turned, looked, cautiously, cynically.

  “Move it again!” Mike shouted. The kids shouted, beat bedpans, tripped over each other to get to the window.

  “Damn little bastards!” the nurse swore under her breath.

  “Don’t cuss us, we’ll report you to the committee.”

  “100 degrees,” another nurse called, flipped the thermometer and stuck it back in my mouth.

  I groaned, found the thread again, the thin light which had been gone for so long and which was now responding to my call, a fine gossamer thread burning in my brain, pounding in my heart, acrid-wet with electricity, and I said move and it moved, jumping the long-dead relays, sizzling like the rivers of fire and water deep in the mountain, it went careening through my dark flesh and withered tendons.

  “See!” Mike shouted. “See!”

  “Yes,” Ismelda whispered and wiped the sweat from my forehead.

  Dr. Steel turned and looked at me. “I don’t believe it,” he said, “I want to but I don’t. Can you do it again? I’ll watch.” “I can do it again,” I answered, “I can do it all day long,” and I smiled and pushed the switch again.

  “Doctor, the fever’s down … perhaps an enema …” a nurse suggested.

  “Oh my …”

  “Yeah! It’s moving!” the kids at the window shouted. They were looking at poor old Tortuga changing colors and groaning as the new
storm gathered over it, and they saw it move … ancient dreams, reptilian flesh, cold as ice, now moving to a new found melody.

  “Sharp or dull,” Steel asked as he poked along my legs with his needle.

  “Some sharp … I think …”

  “Yahoooo!” someone shouted by the door.

  “Algo es algo, dijo el diablo!” Mike responded and grabbed my leg and shook it. “It moved!”

  “Nurse, get the kids out …”

  “All right! Everybody out!”

  “Down to 99 degrees—”

  “Good … good,” Dr. Steel nodded, straightened up, stood there with his stethoscope still dangling from his ears, shook his head, said, “I don’t believe it,” but he did, and he looked at me and winked.

  I relaxed for the first time since I started straining and when I did my guts seemed to tear loose and a hot, frothy mess spilled on the bed. Gas rumbled through my empty stomach and exploded. The nurse who had just finished cleaning the bed groaned, pulled out the dirty sheet and started again.

  “Dull or sharp?”

  “Sharp … yes, I’m sure …” I tried to nod, felt the restraint of the cast, felt weak from hunger and pain.

  “He farted!” “Damn!”

  Tortuga, Tortuga, two by four

  Couldn’t get to the bathroom door

  So he does it on the floor.

  “On the bed!” “Yeah.” The kids laughed, drummed their bedpans and urinals louder and louder.

  “At least he’s moving.” “Yeah.”

  “Out!” the big nurse shouted and grabbed at a young man with a harmonica who was leading the singing. “Out! Right now.”

  “Mike, get them out,” the doctor said. “He’s okay now. He just needs to rest, something to eat …” He turned to the nurse and told her to clean and powder the bedsores. Mike turned to the kids, repeated what the doctor had just said and they all began to file out quietly.

  “Tortuga needs to rest … That’s all, just rest …”

  “Poor ole Tortuga …”

  “Yeah, poor ole Tortuga …”

  They went out singing:

  Poor ole Tortugaaaaa!

  He never got a kissssss …

  Pooooor ole Tortuga,

  He don’ know whad he misssss …

  “I’m sorry,” Dr. Steel said and folded his stethoscope and put it in his pocket, “this won’t happen again … Will it, nurse?” he asked the big nurse.

  “No, sir! No, sir! But it was the night nurse who was on duty, sir.”

  “I don’t care who’s on duty. You run this ward, and I’m saying this won’t happen again. Clear?”

  “Yes sir,” the nurse nodded, turned and looked at me with a scowl on her face.

  “Look!” one of the aides pointed.

  “What?”

  “He’s peeing …”

  “Whad they say?” someone asked from the hall.

  “Nothing,” Mike laughed as he went out, “they just said he’s peeing, that’s all, just taking a good old healthy leak.”

  “Peeing turtle pee, I bet.”

  “Yeah,” they laughed.

  “Oh my.…”

  They all laughed, even the nurse who had to pull out the sheet again and start over.

  “It’s a good sign,” Dr. Steel winked and walked out.

  “98.6—”

  “See you later, Tortuga!” Mike called from the hallway and the rest of the kids repeated, “Yeah, see you later, Tortuga!” “Try using a urinal!” one of them added and they all laughed.

  The nurses finished cleaning me up by powdering the bedsores. Somebody brought me something to eat, which I gulped down with shut eyes because the drug in the shot was already pulling me into sleep … Then they turned me on my stomach so the talcummed sores could dry. Face down, buried against the bed, I fell asleep, dreaming I was a turtle slowly clawing its way across a wide desert … towards a cool, northern mountain lake.

  4

  The nurse came in and checked my blood pressure and took my temperature every hour. She was a silent woman, cold and precise, so I said nothing but I felt better. The fever was gone, I was eating everything they brought, and the pain from the bedsores was better. But most exciting to me was that I could control the muscle spasms. They weren’t spasms anymore, they were actual commands I could send down to my legs and they obeyed. It was an excitement I hadn’t felt since the initial paralysis. Then I had tried so hard to make my legs move, and finally I had given up and withdrawn into resignation.

  Now there was movement, slight and feeble, but with it returned a sense of hope. I looked out the window at the mountain. I thought of Filomón and what he had said. I thought of my first night at the hospital and the woman in the dreams, Ismelda, the woman who had led me to the springs where we entered the mountain. And Mike? How had he found me? Why? How were they working their way into my new life? In the other hospital I couldn’t remember faces. Many people had come to see me, and they had gathered around my bed, looking at me with silent, sad eyes, praying they could lift the paralysis with their pleas to God … and my mother, growing gray before my eyes, hers was the only face I remembered. But nothing they could do or say had cut through that numbing weight of the paralysis as had these strange powers that worked their way at the foot of the mountain …

  “You’re doing fine, just fine,” Dr. Steel said when he checked me that evening, and he went out shaking his head, making his rounds.

  Other boys who lived in the ward dropped by to say hello. Most were my age, polio victims, cripples of every sort, but some were just kids, ten or twelve year olds who lived in a world of their own, raised hell whenever they could but quickly settled down when Mike spoke. He seemed to be the leader in the ward. He was bunking with two other boys, Jerry and Sadsack, and he was trying to get me moved to their room where there was an extra bed. In the meantime I waited, lying alone in the bare room, listening to the rush of sounds that filled the ward in the morning and which settled down as the kids went swimming or to physical therapy or to the classes that were held for those who cared to attend.

  There was also a lull during mid-afternoon. I lay quietly and listened to Franco strumming his guitar and singing western or rhythm and blues songs. Somebody told me he looked exactly like Elvis Presley but that he had lost his legs to an incurable disease, so he kept to himself in his room, roaming the halls only at night in his wheelchair, taking old songs and changing the words to tell his story.

  He had already composed a song for me. I lay thinking and listening to the words which drifted through the stale, antiseptic air of the ward.

  Tortuga was a wounded turtle

  Cast in a lonely shell

  He thought of heaven

  And he dreamed of home

  But he had come to hell …

  Then Danny came in. “Psst. You awake, Tortuga?”

  “What do you want?” I asked. After our first encounter I didn’t trust him.

  “I just came to see how you are,” he said and moved into my sight. He stood there for a long time, looking at me, mulling something over in his mind, and I felt sorry for him because he was a pathetic kid, dressed in an oversize hospital shirt and holding his withered hand up as if he had to keep it in sight, had to keep asking himself why the hand was drying up and dying on him. His pale yellow eyes darted back and forth, from me to his hand to the window which held the mountain framed as a still life.

  “You’re lucky,” he said finally, “the doc knows what’s the problem … I heard your legs moved … you’re lucky.” He looked at the mountain and cursed. “Goddammit, nothing works for me.” He held his hand in front of me, close so I could see the dry wrinkles and scabs which covered it, and I smelled something rancid and dying.

  “At first it was only my fingers … They got numb and I couldn’t move them … then they began to dry out. I came here, and they brought all sorts of specialists to look at me, and not a one of them could tell me what was the matter … and the curse
kept spreading, now it’s my whole hand … like cancer, but it ain’t cancer, it’s just dying … Sonsofbitches can’t do nothing for me! But you,” he glared at me, “you listened to those crazy stories Filomón tells about the mountain! And you believed him! Is that why they put you in a shell? Is that why you moved your legs?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe it was—”

  “Bullshit!” he cut me off. “Don’t go getting a holier than anything idea about those crazy stories. That nurse is going to fix you. She’s going to transfer you to Salomón’s ward!”

  “Where is that?” I remembered the boy who told the story in my dream.

  “That’s where they keep the hard core polio cases,” he laughed. “Listen, there’s just about every kind of cripple in this place, freaks all of them. They’re either bent and twisted with polio or MD or club feet, pigeon toed, curved spines, open spines, birth defects, broken backs, car wrecks, under-nourished kids who can’t even stand up, even VD cases, kids that were smashed by their parents, looney cases … every kind of gimp you can imagine is here, somewhere. But in Salomón’s ward are the vegetables. Every other kid has a chance, like you, and who knows, hell, they might even find a cure for me … at least I can get around. But back there, that’s the end of the line, and that’s where you’re headed.” He laughed crazily, as if he was glad that I was being transfered, as if some future punishment for me would alleviate his pain, and he walked away before I could question him further.

  The rest of the afternoon was very quiet. I slept. The day was warm, the fragrance of the desert filled the room, as if the earth was thawing, and then the sun fell towards the rugged mountain range to the west and everything froze again. A haze from the fires burning in the homes along the river settled over the valley. Tortuga lay frozen and stiff, weak saffron rays glanced off his tired back, but he did not respond to my presence … he did not acknowledge my being.