You Could Always Hope

The morning was all right. Watching the light come slowly, you could always imagine that today you were finally over it. It was quiet in the morning, and still cool, and it was fine to watch the sun come sliding up over the edge of the world, past the coral reef. There was even a taint breeze. You never had fever in the morning.

Of course, there was the smell of the Navy pilot. He was almost completely burned, and they brought him in naked except for a thick yellow grease, and most of him, and all of his head, was simply raw meat under the grease. There was no skin at all on his face and his eyes looked like the eyes of a trout you have roasted on a stick over coals. You lay there, smelling him and his grease, waiting for the next hour after dawn.

The next hour was always bad. The sun would melt on the tin roof and the bare canvas of the cot would grow sticky with sweat, with white rings of salt forming at the edges of the spreading dark wet. The lagoon became a shifting sheet of white light, and you could no longer look at the lagoon, nor at the white coral. You closed your eyes and felt the heat gathering around you and inside you, and the room would start to sway and then tilt so that you had to clutch the sides of your cot to keep from falling off.

You hung onto the cot as well as you could while you rose and fell and tumbled through an insanity of heat until you heard the orderlies talking to you.

Four of them would be holding you down, and your throat was scraped raw and hot from the shouting. They had you wrapped in blankets. It would be 120 degrees in the ward, which was nothing but an open shed with a hard dirt floor and a tin roof, but they had you buried in blankets, and you could not stop your teeth from chattering with the cold, and they had to hold you down to keep you from shaking off the blankets.

The fever and the chills left you weak as sand, lying on your soaked-through, salt-rimmed cot, waiting for the next round. But before the next fever came, and before you had much of a chance to hope -- and every morning you did hope -- that perhaps that had been the last attack, that now, perhaps, you could begin to recover, the orderlies would jerk straight as if pulled up by wires, and shout "Attention!"

You were supposed to lie at attention when the chief medical officer came through the ward making his morning inspection. That is, the badly wounded were supposed to lie at attention. If you were lightly wounded, or if you were merely sick with jaundice, malaria, syphilis, dengue fever, amoebic dysentery, or any combination of these and other endemic diseases, you had to get out of your cot and stand at attention if you did not happen at the moment to be thrashing in delirium.

You remained waving weakly at attention until the medical officer, who was a full colonel, left the ward. He never gave the command "Rest," because he took the view that all who were not dying were shirking, and he conveyed the impression that he thought those who were dying were trying to cheat him. One of the orderlies said the colonel wanted it understood that there was a war on, and that the hospital, by God, was going to be just as rough as combat for goldbrickers who, if discovered goldbricking, would be returned to combat forthwith, but stripped of whatever grade they had when they came in. All right, what the colonel said does not make sense, but there is reason to believe that the orderly was quoting the colonel accurately. At any event, it was certainly clear what the colonel thought of the sick and wounded, and when you were convalescent, you pulled KP every day until they sent you back to combat.

Standing or lying at attention was part of your punishment. The colonel took the view that if you were wounded, it had no doubt largely been your own damned fault, and he -- and the Army -- maintained that if you had read the field manuals and had followed your orders, you could not possibly have contracted malaria, or syphilis, and those who so unfortunately did contract these diseases lost their pay for that time they were in the hospital and were returned to their units stripped of any rank they might have held. Stripped was the colonel's word for it, and he used this word whenever he could.

After the colonel had marched out, and you collapsed again on your cot, the chaplains came mincing through the ward. They were a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew, and you did not stand for them. They were the three blind mice. Chaplains were a sort of unfunny joke in the Army, and you never trusted them, because they were officers. The chaplain always was supposed to be on your side, but he never was, and you knew damned well that he never was.

The Red Cross man was a fairy. He was forever putting his hand on your shoulder, asking what he could do for you, and no matter what you asked for, he was always sorry that he didn't happen to have it. Like the colonel, he was always reminding you there was a war on, and this was why the thing you wanted was unobtainable at the moment. You did not believe in the Red Cross, any more than you believed in chaplains. You believed in the Salvation Army, but you never saw those people in the hospital, because the hospital was too far behind the lines, and the Salvation Army was always at the front. You also believed in the Army nurse. More than that, you were in love with her.

She would come in after the second round of fever and chills, and when you came out of it, there she was, big and blonde and sort of blowzy, with a wide-mouthed smile and an odor of perfume and her fingers cool on your wrist, wiping all the rest of it away and bringing you the morning back again. You knew she was making ten pounds a night, Australian, and that she would sell only to officers, but she was frank about it, and it was good to see an honest whore. It was not that you really wanted her; it was just that it was good to be reminded that there were women, and you loved this one in a (continued on page 163)You Could Always Hope(continued from page 87) general way until the morning they brought in the Navy pilot who stank.

Medical science was trying to save his life, perhaps to prove a point. So there he was in his coat of grease. He was supposed to receive God knows how many millions of units of penicillin every half hour, and they had stuck pipes into him here and there, and they brought in the nurse you loved and told her what to do.

She took the hypodermic and looked at that raw ooze wrapped in yellow grease, and bent toward it.

She recoiled so fast she smashed into the rack with the plasma bottles, and you could see the fluid in the needle spurt up in a little golden stream like a puppy wetting as her hand clenched. The orderlies came running in when they heard that first scream, and it took two of them to grab her and wrestle her out of there, and you could hear her still screaming as they took her across the white-hot coral compound, yelling, "Oh, Christ, he stinks! Christ, he stinks!"

All right, he stank. That was all he could do. Maybe he never heard her; maybe he was already dead when they brought him in. Medical science isn't everything; he was certainly dead when they carried him out that same afternoon. He stank all day, and in the afternoon they took him out, cot and all, but you could still smell him the next day, and the smell never left.

You never spoke to that nurse again. The orderlies would not speak to her, either. Every day she would come into the ward, just as you were coming out of the second round of fever and chills, but now she did nothing to wipe out the memory of the morning inspection, the three blind mice, the fairy, or the general hopelessness. She was no longer big, blowzy and good. She was just a sack that the officers had used for purposes of masturbation, and the word was that she couldn't give it away now, even to the colonel. You would turn your head when she took your pulse, but you did not have to do this, because she would be looking away from you herself. Sometimes she would be crying as she came in, and she would wipe her eyes with a khaki handkerchief, and you did not care. She would get through the ward in dead silence, reading the charts, taking temperatures and writing on the charts, moving in light footfalls that sounded like a barrage in the silence of that ward. The only point she ever had was that she was a woman, and now that she had failed at that simple thing, she was dead.

The fever and the chills would return exactly one hour and thirteen minutes after she had checked the chart of Zimmerman, Rudolph A., and when you came out of the fever to find yourself jumping under the hard hands of the four orderlies who were trying to hold you and the blankets to the cot, you knew that you and they shared a kind of love that you could never share with any woman, nor, of course, with the likes of the Red Cross pansy. Perhaps love is just another word for understanding. If so, that was what you realized that only men could share with one another; that when a man is really badly sick or badly hurt, the only one who can help him in any way is another man.

Maybe it was the nurse who made you see that. After they led her away screaming, someone said, "Why the Christ do they bring those goddamn sluts out here?" And since you understood exactly what he meant, and understood that there was no good reason, there was no reason to answer him. You knew he was not really asking a question, but was making a statement.

It is safe to say that no one in that ward ever took a woman seriously again. You could see the contempt in their eyes when the new nurses were assigned to the wards. To be sure, you would talk with the new nurses, but in a cold, cynical way. It was shortly after the new nurses came to the island that one of them was raped -- the only case of rape we'd had up until then -- and sure enough, it had been one of the men from the ward. When they tried him, he said she'd asked for it, and the court-martial believed him. Perhaps they would not have believed him if he had not been an officer, but maybe they would have believed her if it had not been for what had happened in the ward.

The days were all alike. An hour after dawn you were delirious, and then you tottered to attention for the inspection, and then the chaplains and the pansy would set you up for round two, and after it was over, the new nurse would come in to remind you that women had no place in any reality that you knew, and so you passed into round three, and whenever you were conscious, you could still smell that long-buried Navy pilot. Day after day it was the same thing, and your strength emptied into salt-rimmed pools on the canvas beneath you.

But you always had the morning. In the morning it was cool, and you had no fever. You could watch the sun edge up out of the sea and hear the fighters warming up on the airstrip, and you could always hope that this time, today, the fever would break. It was odd how you looked forward to getting out of there, because what was waiting for you when you got back to the squadron was not precisely an improvement.

There were some people in the squadron who hoped the war would end, but that was silly. In the squadron, the only thing you could really hope for was that you would still be alive when the sun went down, and at the end of each day you hoped the sun would not come up tomorrow, because you would be flying if it did. Of course, you flew whether the sun came up or not, but at night you could always hope the weather would really be too bad for flying in the morning.

Perhaps the real reason why you wanted to get back to the squadron was that you knew there would be no women there, and no one to tell you to stand or lie at attention, or to remind you there was a war. At any rate, it was always cool in the hospital in the first light of early morning, and you could always hope that you would soon return to the squadron and to your private appointment with whatever was waiting for you 25,000 feet above the impersonal, turning-underneath-you world.