At least it's free - Short Story

Literary Review, Fall, 2002 by Laura Albritton

The tube of the IV disappears into his arm like a subterranean tunnel. The jackass didn't think nearly drowning, dehydration, too much sea water, the works, was enough. He had to go and gulp some pills one of his friends, a hotel porter in a monkey suit, brought to the hospital. Valium. A waste of good sedatives. It took trading five boxes of gauze with the cute male nurse at Hospital La Habana Libre to get the bottle of charcoal to save the patient's worthless life. Then the kid complains about the taste. Sometimes she should just let them die, and see how they like it. See if what they say is really true, that the devil's hell is no competition for the hell of this place.

Cachita checks her watch. Evelio will be outside her apartment just now, probably with some offering of black market flour or razors for her stubbly legs. He'd promised her dinner at one of the new paladares, and if she knew him, the kind of thorough fucking that made her legs finally relax, that would let her sleep without the constant twitching.

There is paperwork still to fill out, for the hospital records and la policia who turned up in the emergency room before even the doctors could reach the patient. When the kid wakes up, he'll wish he had drowned off the Malecon. No matter how desperate his life had been before, it's nothing compared to the rehabilitation if not jailing the state will have in mind for a companero who wanted to get away so bad he tried to swim off the island. Si, they will look very dimly on that. It's just the kind of story they fear reaching the papers in Miami.

The new doctor, Humberto, sticks his head in the room. "No problems?" he asks.

He knows there are no problems, vitals normal, the kid will sleep it off. Humberto thinks his stethoscope will charm her like a talisman. One of these days she'll have to let it slip that she's not going to spread herself open for a man who makes the same shitty salary as herself.

Cachita catches sight of her face in the reflection of the bedrail. Circles under her eyes like small, stagnant lagoons. And still the doctor hounds her. If he saw her Saturday night, in the black dress that barely hides her crack, and her cheap, waxy lipstick, he'd go into coronary arrest and have to perform some kind of medical miracle on himself.

Evelio will only wait so long, stuck in the street outside her building, that mournful look of the dog on his face. And at the end of her shift, she still has obligations. A house call. A favor for an old friend who promises her in return a bottle of rum that he'd stolen from an official function. By the time she is finished, Evelio will be gone with a bent pride that she may not be able to re-erect, and then the only night's pleasure will come from a bottle. And she had been really looking forward to the fuck. Too long without fucking and it was like her body started to cave into itself, her shoulders hunching over her chest, the swing in her walk replaced by an old lady shuffle.

Outside the hospital her legs rebel at the effort to pedal her bike. The bike is Chinese. Sometimes she imagines herself in a neat Maoist jacket and cap, pedaling with the party faithful to their pressing meetings to discuss new bureaucratic ways to disguise the utter disintegration of their system.

It's not a bad ride to her friend's place in El Vedado, if she had the energy to absorb the breeze off the palm trees, the smear of stars clearer because of the blackouts. The thing about this goddamn place is that sometimes you get too fired to even appreciate the bits and pieces of beauty, which at least are free. Her friend Rodrigo told her a house call, urgent, no details over the telephone. There are only a few things she can think of to make him act so cryptically: suspicion of HIV, genital warts, or even some kind of amoebic dysentery that's gotten so bad he couldn't make it across town without losing control of his bowels.

Cachita hoists her bike over her shoulder, and climbs the stairs to Rodrigo's place, lurching under the weight. His place has electricity; she can see a light from the window.

"Cachita," he says. He's opened the door before she could even knock. Her friend envelopes her against his chest, his sweat rubbing off on her hospital smock.

"Come in the bedroom," he says, pulling at her hand.

"Ay, viejo, you're not even going to offer a glass of water?"

He's already striding across the cracked linoleum of his floor, throwing open the bedroom door so the hinges squeal angrily.

Cachita pokes her head inside. A girl's writhing in the sheets, bunched between her legs. The lump of pregnancy is small, but very much there.

"Tu novia?" she asks.

"No, I found her on the streets. Well, I almost ran her down with my car. She's been staying with me for a few days."

"And you couldn't just take her to the hospital, like a normal person?"

Rodrigo pulls strands of black hair from his ponytail. "She's a gringa, she outstayed her visa. If la policia don't give her problems, her own government will."

Cachita sits on the rumpled bed and takes her pulse. Too fast. Feels her forehead, too hot.