Survivor

Survivor

By Suzanne Jones

We were absolutely forbidden to go near the pool, which had to come very deep beneath the rush of water, blue green in its depth. The water was very cold coming out of the pipe, but as it fanned out onto the sand before running inn a little stream to the sea, it was pleasantly cool at the edges, though it smelled like musty straw.

I wonder now at the courage or carelessness of the women, because in the sea there were jellyfish, some of which were very poisonous, and sea snakes which were deadly.

I saw one once, dead and hanging over the compound fence. I thought it was a piece of cable, and I leaped up to grab it. Its body was warm from the sun, and the fingers of my hand left their imprint on it in little curves. It was Cutter who sneered at my screams.

When we were first in camp, the children my age and older had swum out to a raft, anchored in deep water. I swam out to it, but struggled and struggled to lift myself up onto it, scraping my legs in the process. I finally heaved myself up on the canvas-covered boards, and the others, legs flashing white, went diving off the other side, leaving me alone, panting there.

“There’s a ladder on the other side, stupid!”

I’m sure that was Cutter’s high, thin voice.

Survivors. Photo by Elena.

After a few minutes of being all alone on the dark blue sea, my eyes stinging from the salt in the water, I too dived in and swam back to the shore that lay like a clean white ribbon between the water and the jumble of brownish sand and camp buildings that trembled in the distance.

At first the sores were small and mostly unnoticed. They multiplied and became worse, but still I said nothing. I hated doctors so much I think because of all the shots we had to have to come to this place: typhoid, typhus, malaria, cholera, diphtheria, small pox – some of the names I remember. Scores of shots, two a day, with both arms swollen and sore from the day before.

The doctor, the only doctor theere, was named Black and later was judged too incompetent even to tend the Americans in Ras Tanura, and drank himself to death eventually in Abqaiq.

The treatment he prescribed for fungus infection consisted of scraping off the scabs which now covered my legs from ankle to thigh, painting the open sores with Marthiolate, and wrapping them in heavy gauze bandages. Every week.

Week after week.

Mother would pull me screaming into the clinic, and I would sit in the whirlpool bath to soak the bandages off and butt any nurse foolish enough to come near me.

Week after week.

I will say this for Dr. Black. There are no scars on my legs.

My condition, however, served to remove us from the community of active children at a time when I needed to establish myself in my rivalry with Cutter. Because I had to stay indoors, I became friends instead with Nora, whose mother kept heer inside because of the fairness of her skin. Nora, with whom no one was friends.

We played quietly together in the dark house, blinds drawn against the heat. Played very quietly because Nora’s father worked the graveyard shift and slept during the day. After a while we made too much noise, and I was asked not to come back.

Fortunately, my mother had either grown too bored to resist or had become less fearfull of my being on my own, because when I could bend my legs again, I could go down to the beach alone, not to swim, not to go into the sea, but to walk on the hard, wet sand where it was easiest to walk, and shoot the jellyfish with arrows from the bow I had made myslef. I only shoot the ones with a dark bluish-purple spot within like a feathery seed, which I considered poisonous, I would then sling them back into the sea.

As I walked there, Setta often appeared. Setta was my age, had dark hair cut short, a withered arm, and wore a T-shirt wit blue and white bands on it. She had been my best friend in Texas, where we lived next door to each other. There we were together every day, walked to kindergarten together, played in the dust beneath the huge chinaberry tree on the alley at the very edge of her backyard. The chinaberry tree was the largest tree I had ever seen at the time, too large even to climb up into. Beneath it, sunk in smooth gray stones, was the pond in which we sought the goldfish, where I waded in my father’s old cowboy boots, which came above my knees. But they let in the water anyway, cold at my toes, wetting my socks.

(Ellery Queen, Mystery Magazine, September 1993)