The driver was gone. Through the entranceway, she saw a pair of headlights drive up the rutted road and disappear.
She got to her feet and began pulling the pallet closer to the wall, away from the flow of traffic through the hallway, the splinters tearing her flesh. She got on her knees and pushed, working the pallet an inch at a time into the shadows, between two other patients, away from the faces of frightened children in the flashlight beams, a nurse trying to squeeze through with an overflowing bedpan.
“There,” Ruby said to Ishmael, even though his eyes were closed. “That will do for the time being. I promise I’ll get us out of this. There are patients on either side of us. No one can step on us now. Can you hear me, Ishmael? Open your eyes. Please. Say something.”
He did neither. She shook the person on the pallet next to Ishmael’s. “Who’s in charge here? Give me a name. I don’t speak Spanish. Can you understand me? What is the name of the man in charge? I’m sorry to bother you, but you must wake up. Does no one here speak English?”
Then she realized she was addressing herself to a Mexican woman whose facial wrinkles were dissolving into the bloodless and pale and featureless anonymity of the dead. For a moment she thought she would weep.
Someone shone a light on Ruby’s head. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” a man’s voice said. He was bald and potbellied and wore a white smock stippled with blood. “Who gave you permission to put that man here?”
“No one did. He’s my son. He needs help.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He has shrapnel wounds all over his legs. Maybe they’re infected. Maybe something is broken. He was beaten at the carnival.”
“Move out of the way,” the physician said, shining the light on Ishmael’s face. “You shouldn’t have put him here. All these people are contagious. Hold this.”
He stuck the flashlight in Ruby’s hand and knelt down and felt Ishmael’s throat and lifted one of his arms, rolling back the sleeve. Then he unbuttoned Ishmael’s shirt and trousers and felt his ribs and pulled the trousers lower and probed his abdomen and examined the bandages on his thighs. He took the flashlight back. “He smells like a distillery.”
“Don’t you dare talk about him like that. Half of Texas smells like a distillery. The half made up of Baptist hypocrites.”
“You brought him to the wrong place. Get him out of here.”
“He was wounded fighting for his country.”
“This entire neighborhood will probably be quarantined. Do you want to spend the next six months inside this clinic?”
“We’re already here. You have to help him. We have no other place to go.”
“If you don’t get him out of here, I will.”
“No, you won’t. If you try to eject him, I’ll gouge your eyes out, and you’ll have to perform your next surgery by touch. I pulled murdered children out of the cellar at Ludlow. Don’t tell me your troubles.”
The physician stood up and clicked off the light. She stood up also, her face no more than a foot from his. A nurse jostled against him and kept going. The physician didn’t take his eyes off Ruby’s. He removed a pair of scissors from a pocket in his smock. “Start with the bandages. I’ll bring you a pan and a washcloth and some alcohol and iodine. Who beat him?”
“Ginks with badges. They said he started a fight. That’s not true. He’s a gentle boy. One of the ginks had an ax handle.”
“I’ll be back shortly. Don’t touch the woman lying next to you. She may have had typhoid. I believe you’re a brave woman, madam. But every night is Ludlow here.”
For the next half hour, Ruby peeled strips of adhesive and gauze, yellow and stiff and crusted with salve, from Ishmael’s wounds. Surprisingly, they were free of blood. She washed him all over as best she could in the semidarkness, stroking his brow, rebuttoning his shirt, reassuring him even though he seemed unconscious. The smells of ether and carbolic and iodine and an odor like woolen clothes that hadn’t been hung in the sun for months began to feel natural, the way fog was, the way the hospital tent at Ludlow had been, the way the huddled masses carried with them a level of suffering and courage that few understood.
She had been self-righteous and too hard on the doctor, and she knew that if it were not for his kindness, the world would be much worse off. Still, she could not free herself of the collective face of the crowd who had watched her son’s degradation inside the cage at the carnival. Didn’t they understand who the enemy was, the ones who gave them bread and circuses and kept their attention directed elsewhere while they despoiled the earth and cheated and robbed the treasury and kept working people poor and uneducated? Why did the human race band together to participate in its own victimization?
Sometimes she wanted to dash her fists on the faces of the people she served. Was she more of an elitist than she thought? There were moments when she believed her social causes were manufactured, that her anger had more to do with her abandonment by Hackberry Holland than the suffering of masses. What a joke that would be. Years of devotion to a self-manufactured illusion, all because of a man. What would Emma Goldman have to say about that?
But as always, when she fell into self-destructive introspection, she had to remember an old lesson she had taught herself. People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered.
Three feet away, a small boy was crying and holding on to his mother, who lay on a pallet, her lips congealed with a dry, gelatinous film. The mother was moaning, her eyes bright with fever, straw clinging to her hair and clothes.
“What’s wrong with your mother?” Ruby asked the boy.
“She don’t have water,” he said. “There ain’t no water.”
“That’s silly. Of course there’s water. I’ll watch your mother. You go ask the nurse for water.”
“There’s a big line at the faucet in the back. I ain’t got a can.” In spite of his tears, his face was dry, like a baked apple. He wore shoes without socks and a man’s cap and two long-sleeved shirts instead of a coat.