Chickenhawk: Back in the World

The Portuguese drove us to an aid station at a small town where a doctor bandaged us and stopped the bleeding. He snapped the loose skin on my face together with nylon staples, which did not hurt a bit. Other than feeling like a criminal because I’d hurt the girls, I felt fine. I noticed that the bystanders watching us on the stretchers looked aghast when the attendants carried us out to three ambulances. When I asked where they were taking us, they said Lisbon. Lisbon? Three hours? I lay in the ambulance, completely free of pain, and knew I was in shock. I had seen grunts lying in the back of my chopper, pale, dying, serene, and now I understood. I felt very sleepy. I might not wake up. I slept.

When I woke the shock had worn off. My chest and pelvis were on fire. I lay on a gumey in a madhouse. People were screaming in Portuguese, white coats whisked by, rushing. The girls were gone. White coats stripped me naked and rolled me into a room and X-rayed me. Then someone I couldn’t see rolled the gumey down a dim hallway filled with moaning and crying people and loaded me onto a table against the wall. Pain raged through me. People begged, shrieked, wailed for help all around me. I was engulfed in a chorus of agony. I could not raise my head, but I could roll it to the side. A bandaged man across the hall waved a stump of an arm and just kept saying, “Please. Please.” I said, “Okay, they’ll be back, don’t worry.” He said, “Please. Please.” I told him this was a hospital, not to worry. He kept pleading. An old woman on a table next to me sobbed and moaned. I ask her what was wrong. She cried louder. I was stoic. I was not a panicky fool like these. Be patient. White coats will be back in a minute.

Hour, wait.

Heard myself moaning. Came naturally, part of the symphony. No one noticed.

Morning. Frosted windows bright. Watched two men twist the sheet around the head and feet of the old woman like she was a carpet going to storage. Dumped her on a gumey and rolled her away. Dead. Died alone, afraid. Mouth dry. Pain like fire. I coughed—fucking cold. Electric pain. Something very wrong with my chest. Couldn’t cough. Gurgled.

Evening. Windows dark. Talking along with the others. Couldn’t tell what I was saying, but it fit. Delirium? I’d watched grunts mutter while they died. Where was this? Reality? Dream? Had to be some kind of dream. I was talking, but I couldn’t understand what I was saying. Happens in dreams. I heard: “English?” coming from a head leaning over me. I blinked. I was not English. I spoke.

“American.”

“What are you doing here?” the head said.

“Huh?”

“You look terrible.” The head shook its face. “I’ll take care of it,” the mouth said, walking out of my field of view. Dream was getting detailed as hell.

A few minutes later, two white coats came and put me on a gumey and rolled me into a room. Not a dream. Doctor was sewing up my face. For a hundred stitches, he muttered about how this should have been taken care of as soon as I’d gotten here, but that it was a bedlam of a hospital with many more people than they could care for.

After stitching me up and washing off the blood, they put me in a ward filled with about a fifty men. I had a bed and a promise that someone would come give me something for the pain. A guy in the ward held up a newspaper. “You the American in here?” he asked in Portuguese.

“What are you talking about?” I croaked in Spanish. When you speak Spanish as poorly as I do, it doesn’t matter much whether you’re talking to a Spaniard or to a Portuguese, either can figure it out.

“American businessman and three Canadian girls? What a scandal, eh?”

The men in the ward laughed knowingly. Brightened their day.

The pain never subsided. Totally exhausted, I could not sleep, not for a minute. This was, I decided, an engineering oversight on the part of God. Pain is certainly useful to warn you that you’ve damaged yourself or that you are exceeding some biological limit like tying your finger into a knot. But what the fuck good was pain now that the damage was done?

The next evening, a woman doctor gave me a dose of morphine and asked me if I wanted to go to the British hospital, where I would get a little attention. Thank you, yes. And (my, oh, my!) thanks for that morphine.

Four days after the wreck, I called Patience from the British hospital. She was in a panic. She had leapt up out of sleep four days before, sure that I’d been hurt, the same moment I had run off the road. Patience is a psychic. She can tell when I’m cheating and when I have car wrecks. I told her where I was and what was wrong: My face was a mess. My ribs were cracked. Something was wrong with my right hip—I couldn’t walk.