Better You Go Home Read online

  “I hear you’re a doc,” Waters says to Milada after apologizing for not having time for a proper welcome. “Want to do the exam?”

  Carrie looks skeptically at Milada, who’s wearing her waist-cut Italian leather jacket and ruby lipstick and ankle boots with spiky heels, hardly Northwest barn dishabille. Also, no doubt, Carrie wants this one. But Milada is accustomed to taking charge. She separates one wing from the thrumming little torso and stretches the wing over the diaper as though she were trained to this purpose. “Try closing your eyes,” Waters advises. “I don’t know about you, but my fingers see better than my eyes.” Excited volunteers crowd near the exam table. “Run your fingers along the humerus up to the shoulder. You’ll feel when something’s wrong.”

  The lights suddenly dim. A generator starts up with a loud rattle. The tiny owl shivers. “That goddamn machine!” Waters turns to a volunteer. “Get somebody to oil it.” Then to us, “We’re getting more and more of these damn power outages.”

  When Milada probes the shoulder joint, the supine bird suddenly cocks its boxy head. The black pupils in their pumpkin orange orbs snap to attention.

  “Nothing broken,” Milada says. “A bruised shoulder.” Then, emboldened by Waters affirming smile, “Some rest should cure. I think this one will soon be again free.” She swaddles the northern owl in the diaper to keep it calm.

  Waters promises to follow us after she finishes the new patient’s chart. We head out to Isis’ cage. En route we watch crows pester the Barred Owl from the week before, a graduate passing his final test in the flight cage. Waters soon joins us. She grinds out her cigarette beneath the pointy toe of her boot. To her credit, she picks the butt out of the bark and tucks it into an empty cigarette box in the pocket of her lab coat.

  “Vypadáš nějak smutně,” Milada says, stooping, peering in, observing Isis close up. She tucks her fingers into her jacket pockets and does that pinched thing with her shoulders. “Isis tolerate his cage because he has grown used to it.”

  “You think? You don’t think he desperately wants out of there?”

  “He is afraid. Anyone will see.”

  “Good. Fear is good. When they lose that they’re done.”

  She says nothing at first, just stares at Isis, then suddenly, petulantly, “I want to go. I do not like staying here.”

  Wondering what could have caused her to react this way, I peer at him over her shoulder. With no one in his view but Milada, Isis has quit jiggering. For the first time with a human near, he is calm. His hooded eyes are alert, but he is as still as though he’d fallen into a deep meditation.

  “Look at that,” I whisper to Waters. She nods, she sees it, too.

  “We need to talk,” she says to Milada. “He’s never been calm like this around anyone but you.” Waters excitedly repeats her plan to give Isis a week in the flight cage, then take him downtown for a grand release on the Washington Mutual Towers. “That would be a cause for a celebration. I can see you now. There you are, shouting, ‘Back to the free life!’ ”

  “There will not be time for Isis I am afraid. I only can stay some few days. I must return to Prague after weekend. But you …” She looks at me, challenging.

  “Let me have a private chat with her,” I tell Waters, and then add, after Milada walks away, “The rafting trip is Saturday. Let’s talk after that.”

  It’s a warm Indian summer afternoon. Even late September in the Northwest offers plenty of evening light. We say goodbye to Waters and leave Sardis and on the way home we detour east on Highway 20 into the Cascade foothills to have a walk along the Skagit.

  Brambles and Oregon grape and salal and huckleberries and ferns and devil’s club and skunk cabbage fill the undergrowth. The yellow in the taller poplars indicates that the fall nights have already turned cold up here. The air is crisp. I’m excited to tender my idea of looking for property, but Milada only wants to talk about me hurrying back to Prague as soon as my business is finished with Blue Cross. I let it drop and enjoy watching her scramble barefoot—she ditches the heels—over nurse logs down to the rotten salmon smelling riverbank where she waves at me to join her. “Fantastic,” she cries out. “Fantastic.” I’m already shivering. These days I have a hard time warming up once I get cold, but this is a good sign. A very good sign indeed.

  * * *

  Saturday morning, a converted school bus, painted with a mural of an Orca leaping from frothy waves, shuttles fourteen volunteers, including the two of us, along with two river guides and two fourteen-foot inflated self-bailing rafts, upriver to the Goodell Creek State Park campground put-in. We don wet weather gear and life jackets. It’s heavily overcast. A morning mist hangs in the valley, but the river is running clear and only four feet deep in the shallows.

  Leaning on a riprap boulder and waiting for the rafts to launch, I can’t help but notice how shapely Milada looks in her form-hugging gear. During a walk along the ship canal by my townhouse the other day, she slipped a hand onto my shoulder, asked me to lean down, gave me a moist kiss on the lips and said, “Please, say nothing, I am just so enjoying to be here with you.” She’s been staying in the map room.

  Last night, when I came out of the bathroom after brushing my teeth, she was in the hall wearing only a tee-shirt that didn’t cover her hips. “Lovely,” I said, unable to restrain the impulse.

  Unsentimentally she said, “I considered to come to your bed, but I decide I do not want to complicate …”

  I told her I understood. I did, but I didn’t. What did she want? What did I want? We had never declared having feelings for each other. This morning early, packing for our river outing, there was a palpable awkwardness, as if each of us had admitted to a desire that had no plausible future.

  The river bottom stones, ground smooth by sediment, sing a hollow tune as they rub together in the racing current. The salmon have attracted a few dozen bald eagles, most of them likely to overwinter, but Waters can be heard fuming from the other raft that we got such a late start we won’t get an accurate count. Leaning over the front of our raft, Milada spots a Chinook the size of a small log nosing upstream. Closing in behind it is a dark shadow she mistakes for a river otter. She screams excitedly. In fact, it’s a hungry harbor seal that has swum this far upriver.

  The seal gains inexorably on the exhausted Chinook. I ask Milada if she’d consider doing a residency in Seattle so she could get a license to practice medicine here. Sponsorship for a green card wouldn’t be an issue of course. “Where you will put your sister?” She’s cheering for the probably doomed salmon. Cheering for the ambitious seal, I reply that my sister will take the map room, and she could share my room. Realizing that I’ve been too forward, I apologize and assure her that there are no expectations, it’s a gratis offer.

  “I think you are hungry like this seal,” she says, laughing. The seal chews off his lunch, the bloody culmination of the hunt. The rest of the salmon drifts into an eddy to become eagle fodder.

  That afternoon, we leave Waters and her disappointed crew warming up over beers and a late lunch at the Rockport tavern. We shed our dry suits and walk across the bridge, hoping to find privacy so we can finish our talk. Midspan, we stop and look down. The water is running crystal clear. The rocks rubbing together on the bottom whistle in minor-key notes that remind me of the children chanting prayers in the cathedral.

  “I would be concerned for my sons,” Milada muses. Her oldest is out of the university and working as a music critic in Prague. Her second is at the university. Only Martin remains at home, but next year he will be off to a music college where he will learn to make orchestral instruments, a practical skill that her wild son will need. “He is crazy for Seattle grunge. It would be for him fantastic to come here.”

  A baldy we’d failed to count, its white head and corn-yellow beak unmistakable in the dusky cedar towering over the south end of the bridge, is disturbed by our chatting and flies complainingly across the river. In its calm season, the river is narrower by a
good margin than the Vltava in its Prague bend.

  If Milada is a species indicator, Eastern European women don’t share our puritan sense of modesty. Milada hurries across the bridge, slips down the bank and clambers through salal and ferns and skunk cabbage and over a nurse log to a stranded pool. She sheds her clothes as though it were the most natural thing in the world, though, I notice, she leaves her bra on. The current only looks calm, I call out to her. Her lean bottom flushes pink in the raw fall air. Despite having born and raised three boys, she still has the small-hipped, sinewy figure of the athlete she used to be. She laughs and beckons excitedly for me to follow. “Way too cold for me,” I yell back. Moments later, she is hoisting herself out. The water truly is cold. Wisps of steam spirit from her dripping shoulders. Leaving her clothes strewn over the nurse log, she runs, laughing, into that same stand of alder she’d run into once before.

  Only later, when my ankles itch miserably, will I realize that I’d been standing in Devil’s Club. A rousing copulation is said to consume up to five-hundred calories, like a good run, if you stay at it and climax. I’m not convinced this is even remotely what she has in mind, but just in case, I prepare a carb load. I swallow half of the Snickers bar I keep with my insulin kit then follow her into the alder.

  When I catch up to her, she is leaning against one of the sturdier mottled alders. She eyes me questioningly. You must be cold, I tell her. She says no. “Here, touch. My skin burns.” My hand on her hip confirms that this is the case. She asks permission to unzip my jeans. “Do not worry,” she says. “It will be to give to you pleasure. You will enjoy.” She stoops and rubs until I’m erect and then continues with her mouth. There’s no denying anymore what we both want. She braces against the mossy side of the alder. Her lean bottom inclines toward me. With one hand, she makes herself wet. We’re not teens; it takes more work at this age. “I am so open for you,” she says. I place my hand over hers. She brushes my hand away, I’m distracting her. I enter her and soon I hear her breathing grow rapid.

  “Don’t stop,” she says just before collapsing against the mossy alder.

  “Thank you,” I whisper, breathing in the earthy scent of the damp woods.

  Her face is pressed to the moss. “I feel so wild and free.”

  The chill does set in. We retrieve her clothes from the nurse log and clamber back through the undergrowth up to the bridge. Early evening shadows have knit across the river. Waters and the Sardis crew must be wondering what happened to us. It wouldn’t even surprise me if the bus had already left to return the equipment—didn’t they say something about reconvening at five?

  In this pre-crepuscular light there isn’t enough contrast for me to see the rounded rocks on the bottom, but that haunting whistle I hear well enough. It was on this same bridge, when we were taking a walk in February, that she said, “One day maybe you will find your freedom here in cabin, why not?” It seemed like a wild fantasy at the time. Now anything seems possible.

  Mistaking my exuberant mood for something else, Milada soberly pats my cheek. “You must not put on show of love. This was only pleasure.”

  Who would want to imagine a future with a man in my position? Besides, no small thing, she has a husband, a family.

  The tingle of our lovemaking faded, the usual worries flood back in. Looking upriver, not at me, Milada says, “Your sister has been seen.”

  “Where? Why didn’t you say so sooner?”

  “A woman was one night coming from abandoned orphanage. This woman, maybe she is your sister. This woman was calling for stupid barn cat. Who would do this? Maybe some vagabond? I do not think is so. Your sister was known to be very fond of her cats.”

  Her mayor friend says it’s urgent that we find Anežka and get her out of there. More memos have surfaced. These newest memos proscribed a particularly nasty torture known as “nose to wall.” More than ever her mayor friend is certain he will have enough of a case to at least embarrass Jungmann et al sufficiently that they will go into hiding rather than face prosecution. There could be some collateral damage along the way.

  We cross the bridge in the gathered shadows. She takes my hand. “You will need year for recovery. I have changed my mind about kidney in Prague. You have good medical team here. Your sister is trained nurse. If she will live in map room, she will help with recovery. I will visit of course.”

  I shiver. With the sun gone, chill and loneliness descend over the river.

  Monday morning, before Milada catches her flight back to Prague, my friend, the one who negotiated the contract for the municipal employees union, patches us through on a conference call to his contact at Blue Cross. Milada does the talking on my behalf. They mistakenly believe she’s part of my medical team. She doesn’t disabuse them of that notion. She informs them that my sister’s blood type is known to be compatible so she’s a good donor prospect. After much impassioned explaining, she convinces Blue Cross to agree to a ten-day extension. I have until a week from Friday to be back for the risk assessment, at which time my name will go on the active list and I will claim my beeper. It can take a couple of months to process the tests for a live donor, should I be so lucky. Meanwhile it’s in my best interest to proceed as if I have no live donor.

  If for some reason I’m not back in time? My case will be denied. It takes, I am sternly warned, a year, minimum, to process an appeal.

  I book an early Thursday flight, the soonest I can leave and still get everything in order. Milada will conscript my cousin, Josef, the one family member my sister might trust, into joining the search. Friday morning, we will drive east to my father’s village. The search will fan out from there.

  Chapter Five

  Off to Písečná: Friday Morning, First Week of October, 1994

  In the gray Friday morning light, Milada’s concrete, rust-stained panelák looks as charmless as a low-security prison. We haven’t had a chance to talk yet about what we did a few days ago in that grove of alder. I push the intercom button. Their light, by the way, is burnt out.

  My risk assessment is scheduled in Seattle exactly one week from today. I booked my return flight for this coming Tuesday. When I ran my itinerary by Milada, she pointed out that if we do find my sister I’ll need a day in Prague to run tests at IKEM. Sometime today we have to call the airlines to change my reservation to Wednesday.

  “Ahoj!” Eight stories up, her husband pops his head out of the window.

  I wave. “Pravda vítĕzí!”

  He salutes with his fist. “Pravda vítĕzí to you, my American friend!”

  Truth prevails. What did Milada say to him? Too late to worry about that now. We have five days, including today, to find Anežka and get her out of the country on a medical visa. That’s assuming Milada somehow convinces her that this strange American she’s never met could really be her brother.

  Last night, Milada was on shift at the hospital. I took a taxi in from the airport. This time around we arranged for me to rent the remodeled upstairs flat in Yveta’s lovely three-story brick house just a short walk away in an upscale Chodov neighborhood. With knotty-pine paneling and the latest in German plumbing, including an actual shower with running hot water, the three-room flat is impressive enough, but the garden ... enormous. Rows and rows of late fall blooms, a sizeable fruit orchard, pears cherries plums, albeit fruit withered on the ground and leaves falling. The fountain, a bronze boy holding his penis and peeing into a pond, is rank with putrefying algae. The chemo has Yveta too clobbered to work her garden, poor thing. Her two boys charged out with backpacks early this morning to pick flowers for her before catching the bus to school. Their frail grandfather sat on a concrete bench under a knotty old plum tree velveteen with moss. The hominess of the garden appealed to me greatly. It was with much regret I had to tell Yveta that I’m heading back to Seattle in a few days. Her exhausted look gave me pause. I paid her a month’s rent to make sure I’d have a base, just in case.

  * * *

  The wheeze and rattle o
f the elevator is followed by a brisk tap of heels in the corridor. Bang! The security mesh explodes open from within.

  “Ahoj!” Milada slams down her leather travel duffel and wraps me in a hug, but only after looking up to determine that Jiří is not watching. She’s wearing a simple black cardigan over tight jeans. Compact, a piston of iron will. Look out, Anežka! You don’t stand a chance against this irresistible force.

  We carry our travel bags across the street to her shiny black brand-new Škoda, which is parked strategically under a streetlight, though the car has the latest in anti-theft electronics. Noticing my raised brows, she admits the new-car purchase is retribution for him taking on that Russian loan. I remind Milada we have to call the airlines.

  “Jiří a já jsme se hádali, protože jsem si balila cestovní tašku. Jiří and I fight this morning yes? He don’t like I pack my cestovní tašku. My travel bag. He say I must drive back to Prague tonight, leave you in village.”

  “What did you say to him? Does he know …?”

  “I say him it’s not reasonable, so much driving.”

  “But does he know, I mean, what happened with us?”

  “When you are married twenty-three years, some things you don’t have to say.”

  We’ll have to make the call from her father’s house in Písečná. We stow our bags in the trunk along with a food basket and a case of Czechvar beer for her father and I show her my gift stash, token bribes for anyone who might be able to help: a pound and a half bag of Seattle’s Best Coffee that I’ve subdivided into baggies, two hip-size bottles of Jack Daniels bourbon whiskey, a half-dozen yellow tee-shirts sent to me by my sister in Iowa with a logo commemorating the annual “beach” party in Williamsburg. Seeing the tee-shirts, Milada laughs heartily. Sand is trucked from God knows where into a farmer’s field. In the logo, a pink sunbathing pig is sipping a tropical drink. My goth niece, feeling sorry for teens in this “iron cage,” sent along pirated Die Form CDs.