I winked back. There was no way I could convince anyone that I was just lonely and that traveling with the girls was innocent fun. Before we left for Lisbon, I went to see Don Bias, the doctor, and got some drugs for a miserable cold I’d picked up. Doc gave me a bottle of antihistamines. I took two pills and we jumped in the car and left.
I made one stop before Portugal. I had a beer and took another pill. We drove into Portugal around sunset. Going around a turn, fifty miles later, I blacked out. I remember going into the turn, then nothing, then the sight of the sharp ditch rushing at me, crash, then nothing.
It was like one of those mornings when you can’t seem to wake up except I had no idea where I was.
I didn’t remember any shooting.
I thought this was a quiet LZ.
I heard the girls sobbing behind me and remembered I was in a car. “Bob,” one of the girls said, “can you open your door?”
It felt like my eyes were open, but I couldn’t see anything. I blinked for a while and saw a ruby glow. I said “Sure” and pulled the door handle and pushed on the door. I passed out.
The car shook. I woke up. Portuguese voices chattered all around us, but I couldn’t see anything. The door was yanked open and hands reached in and pulled me out. They held me up and my vision cleared. I watched them pulling the girls out; they had lots of cuts. The hood and the trunk of the car stood straight up, all the glass was broken out. The car was a crumpled mess two hundred feet from the road. “You rolled and flipped all the way,” said one of the men. “Can you stand?” I said yes. They let go. I collapsed. When they tried to get me up, I said no, it’s okay here. The grass on my cheek felt as soft and smooth as cool silk. I wanted to sleep. They helped us into their cars. One of the girls and I sat in the backseat of a very clean car, bleeding like stuck pigs. We looked at each other. She was covered in blood and scared to death. I’d carried so many bloody people in my helicopter I felt almost at home. I told her she’d be okay.
I had crashed on a simple ground mission to Lisbon, and my passengers had gotten hurt. I had really screwed up. Something was odd about my face. Experimenting with my tongue, I discovered I could stick it through a gash under my lower lip. I could also touch my nose with my tongue because it had moved down.
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.
My dad flew over and came to the hospital. They said I could leave if I could do a deep knee bend. I did a shaky approximation of one, seeing stars. Fine, the nurse said, you can go. Dad contacted the three girls and offered assistance, but they said they were covered—traveler’s insurance. It was the first news I had of them since the accident. They were in another hospital, battered, but more or less okay. I was relieved; ashamed.
I gimped out of the hospital on crutches, feeling faint. Dad had never been to Europe before. He took me to his hotel and then out to dinner. I said I wasn’t feeling well enough to eat or even sit up, but he insisted—can’t heal if you don’t eat and aren’t active. Besides, how many times did he find himself in Lisbon, after all? Let’s have fun! I sat at a table, my head propped on the heels of my hands, watching him eat, feeling sick. He offered me whiskey; I almost barfed. Water. Only water. That night, I woke up every time my father got up to slug down a drink—full glasses of straight whiskey that would kill most people. Surprised: my dad was a drunk, too.