Trinity

"Uh-huh. Where? Not here, I assume?"

"No, not here. We do limited chemo, but I do mean limited."

"So? Where?"

"I assume going home is out of the question?"

"Yup."

"You could go to Creel, but..."

"Yeah...no buts, please. I guess that means Mexico City?"

"Oh, yeah, of course, but there's a good medical school in Chihuahua and the hospital there has a decent radiology department."

"What would you do, Patty?"

"I'd wait until I had the pathology report, 'Gene.'"

He grinned. "You know, I was thinking when this blows over about heading over to someplace like Sudan or Ethiopia, joining MSF and maybe working over there."

"Really? Why?"

"Something about practicing medicine in the states bothers me, I guess. Maybe it has for a while. When I joined the group I was working with I was told we were a volume business, that the aim was to spend just enough time with each patient to get a handle on the exact medical problem, then get 'em in and out of surgery as fast as possible. I guess within a year I felt like I was flipping burgers at MickeyDs, and I didn't know my patients, not one. It was like go into the OR and see a patch of skin already draped, get in and get out and go to the next OR for the next case, then off to the office for exams before heading back to the hospital for rounds. Pretty soon I realized I couldn't even remember one patient's name from the last couple of years."

"Flipping burgers," McKinnon sighed, shaking her head in disbelief. "That's a good one. I'll have to remember that."

He looked out a little window and nodded. "I think I felt useless." He looked around the room then back at her. "Maybe I'm tired of feeling useless."

"Do you have any idea how many times you say 'I' when you're talking?"

He turned and looked at her. "What...a little too much narcissism for your taste?"

"Just curious," she shrugged, "but was someone holding a gun to your head when you decided not to get to know your patients?"

"Yeah. A fire breathing dragon called the office manager was, and the partners were pretty nasty, like out of a Dickens novel..."

"Really. My-my. So, it's off to Africa you go where, guess what, you won't speak the language so there'll be no way in hell you'll ever get to know anyone..."

"And I sure won't be part of another volume enterprise, will I?"

"What's that got to do with medicine? You were treating sick people, right? I mean, isn't that the point?"

"I don't know that there is a point anymore."

"Ah. The heart of the matter. You've lost your way."

He looked away again and took a deep breath, but finally he nodded his head just a little.

"So...you think you'll find your way back from the wilderness by going to deepest, darkest Africa? Sound about right?"

"I don't know what I'll find..."

"Yeah? But isn't that the point?"

"What?"

"The point, Gene? To find yourself?"

"You make it sound so...trite...?"

"Hey, if the shoe fits..."

"You like kicking people when they're down, don't you?"

"Like it? No, not really, but sometimes people only really listen to you when they're face down in the mud. And who knows, if you're lucky maybe you'll finally listen to that little voice in the back of your head."

His eyes blinked a few times and he nodded. "Anything else, Doc? Any more words of compassion and wisdom?"

She hooked up a syringe in his line and shot in something. "Get some sleep, okay? We'll operate as soon as the cutter looks over the images."

"What about my things?"

"I'll take care of it."

His eyes suddenly felt full and very heavy, and later, sometime in the dark he felt gloved hands running a catheter. More strange voices came and went and at one point someone drew blood, then he was aware of being lifted onto an operating table and then the strangest thing of all; he seemed to be aware of a mask sliding down over his mouth and nose -- followed by an all consuming stink that was not at all enjoyable...

+++++

"Well, Dr. Frankenstein, it lives," he heard someone say as he opened his eyes.

"McKinnon? That you?"

"Yes, it is, Dr. Harwell. Can you rate your pain for me?"

'She knows my name,' the scared little voice inside Gene Harwell's head screamed. 'What else does she know?' He strolled along her razor's edge with ambivalence on one side of the blade and utter fear on the other, all while trying to think of how to reply to this simplest question.

"Let's just say I'm still deep in the land of I don't give a flying fuck, and let's leave it at that."

"Okay, we'll call that a nice, fat zero. Know where you are, by any chance?"

"In the wonderful land of Oz, and I'm about to pull back the curtain."

"Memory intact. Sense of humor sucks," she wrote out loud on her chart. "Know who the president is?"

"Snidely Whiplash, esquire."

"Good one. I'd never have thought of that. Think you could handle some water?"

"If it comes out of a bottle, maybe."

"Good situational awareness, too. Okay, five by five, Harwell."

"You got a path report yet, smart ass?"

"Diffuse seminoma and teratoma in the left testes, no cells in the cord so no radiation needed."

He felt a roaring surge of relief and then a few tears running down his face, so he cleared his throat before he spoke. "Thanks, McKinnon. I think I love you."

"No problemo, Gene. Oh, Quintana is okay with things, he says to just lay low for a while and he'll be in touch. And Martin is bringing your stuff over tomorrow."

"How long you going to keep me here?"

"You could go home today, but..."

"...but, right, I got no home to go to. I think I got that."

"I've got a spare room at my place if you want to bunk out there for a while. There are plenty of places to rent around here, too. Like three, maybe four."

"Ah. So, any port in a storm, huh?"

"How's the pain now?"

"I'm feeling it now. Versed is wearing off."

She picked up a syringe from a bedside tray and hooked it up to his IV and sent a little morphine down his line. "That'll take the edge off for a while. You have any trouble taking Oxy?"

"Yeah. I don't take it, period. You got naproxen?"

"Sure."

"That'll do."

"You want me to get my spare bedroom cleaned up?"

He nodded her way, then grinned at her green eyes: "Yeah. That'll do."

+++++

He started easy, riding a few miles around local roads, then a few mining trails, but his groin still hurt when he pushed too hard. He worked three weekends at the hospital before he decided he'd had enough domesticity in his life. It wasn't that McKinnon was hard to take, either; in fact, the opposite was true. She was bright as hell but should have gone into psychiatry, not general medicine, and her constant psychoanalyzing had grown stuffy and was often downright obtuse. Even after a couple of weeks with her she seemed to alternate between voracious horniness and bouts of moodily introspective self analysis and he never really felt like he belonged there.

Probably because he didn't like moodily introspective analyses of his situation. And maybe she knew that too, but it didn't keep her from pushing him to look at his choices.

But he'd liked the way Batopilas felt, and something about the place still seemed to pull at him. Maybe it was the steep-walled, tree-lined valley, or how the town was clinging precariously to a ledge just above the edge of a roaring river, or even how the tiny village was defined by narrow cobbled lanes and brightly painted stucco walls topped with sun-dried red-tile roofs, everything surrounded by overhanging trees and the roar of the rushing water just below. He wondered what it would feel like to stay in a village like that and yeah, maybe write about the war and to call a place like that home. Maybe he could buy a house and open up a little clinic there, too...

Yet when he told McKinnon he was thinking of leaving she seemed to come undone.

"You've got to be kidding," he said. "I haven't been here a month..."

"But I've had this feeling about you since the moment I saw you," she said, coming on hard. "Look, I don't want you to go."

He shook his head. "Yeah, I get that and yeah, I like you too. I've enjoyed spending time with you..."

"Then stay!"

"And what happens when I decide to head to Africa? What then?"

"We both go."

"Simple as that, huh? You just pack up and head out?"

"Yeah. Simple as that. I've looked into it, I know what we'd have to do and we'd be a perfect team. Medicine and surgery...I mean, they'd be nuts to turn us away!"

"Patty, doesn't it bother you that I don't love you?"

"No, not really. You're a guy and guys are like that. I do know that we fit together, that we'd be a good team..."

"And what about you? What about love?" he asked.

And she shrugged away his indifference. "We haven't been together long enough for that, Gene, not really, but the thing is -- when I'm around you I'm happy. And it's like I can't imagine being happy ever again unless I'm around you, and I don't know what else you call that..."

"Infatuation, maybe?"

"But I'm not a teenager, Gene," she said, though perhaps a little too defiantly -- like maybe she'd had 'daddy issues' once upon a time and still didn't like being told how she felt. Still, he had Quintana to worry about, because if he bolted on the cartel now he might as well hang it up. He knew too much and they'd never let him go without an understanding of some kind.

So he stayed. He understood, really understood, that without Quintana's blessing he had to 'stay put' for the time being. And yet, by that point he'd also recognized that McKinnon and Quintana had a bond of some kind, some kind of connection he could only guess about. Like maybe she'd gotten him out of a tough spot once upon a time, and maybe he owed her. Big time. At least...that's what it felt like. On the other hand, he's stashed away money in banks in Mexico City, and over almost fifteen years he'd siphoned away a lot of cartel money, too. Down here he was safely out of reach from both the DEA and the FBI and he had a roof over his head. McKinnon was fun to hang with and all in all he was soon inclined to just go with the flow.

But after a couple of months he missed 'big city' medicine, and he couldn't get a handle on the reasons why. His Spanish, after living in San Antonio for almost ten years, was already more than passable -- but now his language skills were quickly improving because of this immersive setting -- and so he was finally able to talk to his patients without the commercial restraints imposed by corporate medicine. And he liked working that way -- finally. And while it was what he'd always imagined medicine could be like, or should be like, he reminded himself, conditions at the mission clinic were almost, but not quite primitive.

He liked riding around the mountains but he also recognized he was living right alongside the edges of a really hostile environment, too. At medium elevations vast fields of poppies were growing in the meadows he rode by, while at lower elevations marijuana cultivation was in full swing. And everywhere he went he ran into armed guards, in many cases just kids with AK-47s and itchy trigger fingers. Rival clans were staking claims up here in the mountains and some were encroaching on other clan's grows, with turf wars the first obvious result, and that made him think about the role he'd played in this ongoing house of cards.

There wouldn't be cartels without users and all this semi-clandestine production was aimed at supplying the North American market. With almost two thirds of the people in the United States and Canada now being regular users of marijuana, and with domestic cultivation still for all intents and purposes illegal, the cartels had been handed a market so insatiably vast it was almost beyond comprehension. It was no wonder the cartels were paying lobbyists in the U.S. to keep these products illegal, yet the handwriting was on the wall. U.S. tobacco companies had been buying up land in Northern California for decades, and why? Because it was prime land for marijuana cultivation. Not to mention federal taxes on marijuana and related products could crush federal budget deficits. But it would severely limit the profitability of the cartels, and that was the game, the cards as they'd been dealt...

So for the time being riding around these hills was still dangerous. Kidnappings were more frequent, and some kids had been known gun down bikers just to take their motorcycles for a joyride. There were often no repercussions because the cartels owned the cops, and only reason he could ride around the area was because he was under the protection of a capo, one of the Sinaloa cartel's commanders. He was therefore untouchable, so he rode around and kids with AK-47s waved at him as he passed -- though he usually stopped and talked with them. They talked about the things they did out here, about their command structure, and he listened as they talked about their gripes -- and even their hopes and dreams. Most of these kids, he soon learned, had already killed members of rival clans, and Harwell began to feel as though the whole set-up was faintly medieval.

He also found that lots of these kids were working while they were sick as hell, so he started loading up his saddlebags with medical supplies and started taking care of the kids along his route.

People in the smaller villages along his route soon heard about that, too.

So when he rode through these hamlets people waved him down. He learned that most of these people didn't trust doctors, or hospitals, but for some reason they trusted him, and probably because he'd treated their kids and he was under the protection of the cartels. So pretty soon he was treating people along a vast network of tiny villages along dirt roads in the boondocks, and the administrators at the Mission Hospital grew quite interested in his successes. When he ran across a case he couldn't fix out on the road he put the patient on the back of his bike and brought them back to the hospital, and he fixed 'em there. Word spread, too. Harwell was soon a popular man, and accorded saint-like status in many of these villages.

And so pretty soon he began to feel the one thing he'd been missing in his life: a sense of purpose. When he told an old woman that his mother's name had been Mary her eyes lit up and she'd crossed herself while she fingered her rosary.

So almost out of inertia he fell in with McKinnon and soon enough weeks turned into months, and months to a year, and still, at least three days a week he hopped on his bike and rode off into the boonies. He worked weekends in the OR, usually three to four surgeries a day, some days more, rarely less. He stopped caring about McKinnon's perceived flaws and started listening to her hopes and dreams, and her fears, too. Somewhere along the way he started caring for her, too.

He found her breast cancer and he did the procedure. He nursed her through chemo, and he held her hands as her hair fell away. He stayed by her side as she regained health, and he took her to Chihuahua for radiation. They took walks together, short walks in the beginning but longer ones as she got stronger, and her hopes and dreams turned into quiet talks about some kind of a future together, just the two of them. Maybe here in Mexico or maybe somewhere in Africa...it didn't matter to her as long as they were together.

So on a Friday night in April one of the Jesuits at the mission said the words people say when they promise to stay together until death do they part, and standing there in the candlelight surrounded by his new friends, Gene Harwell felt something he'd never really expected to feel after he left his home, and his country. He felt happy, and that even came as a surprise to the DEA agents who'd had him under surveillance for the last two months.

+++++

"Hold your legs up," the Bexar County sheriff's deputy told Harwell, and with his legs shackled the deputy pulled him roughly from the van. Once he was out on the concrete the deputy began pushing Harwell through the sally port to the inmates entrance, but no one noticed rough treatment down here in the courthouse basement -- and no one cared if anything out of place went down. They waited for an elevator with several other inmates and deputies, and when the elevator came they all rode up to the fourth floor holding block, and he was quickly locked-up in a small holding cell.

He'd had a jerk-water public defender who hadn't objected even once to questionable evidence presented at his trial but by then Harwell knew this trial was a slam-dunk, a show trial for public consumption. The DEA had rammed the case through pre-trials and before a trial judge in record time, and from then on he knew he was being made an example of how not to fuck with the Feds, and physicians were the intended audience. The guilty verdict was a forgone conclusion, so he'd just smiled and shuffled off the stage, his performance complete. What had surprised him was Quintana, and how the cartels had simply dropped him like a hot rock. Still, he'd decided on silence as the best course, banking on the cartel having people on the inside who'd keep him relatively safe. And who knows, maybe they'd even be able to keep him alive.

Today's appearance was for sentencing, but by this point he really didn't give a shit. He'd gone from being a physician in a lucrative American practice to taking care of peasants in Mexico's central highlands, and now the word was he was going to spend the rest of his life in a "SuperMax" prison outside of Canyon City, Colorado. Not exactly how he'd seen things working out once upon a time, but what hurt most of all was leaving McKinnon down there, because just before the Federales came knocking on her door she'd told him she was pregnant. He knew the stress would get to her, and he hated himself for what she'd have to go through on her own.

So now it looked like everything he could have possibly screwed up in his life he'd managed to do, because on top of everything else he'd have a kid he'd never know...so in a way he'd have a kid that would experience many of the same joys he had. Then a funny thing crossed his mind: while he was glad neither of his 'parents' had lived to see his fall, he'd never once imagined how his biological mother might have felt.

Why? Was she so unimportant? Had she ever loved him, or had her role been to simply set the stage for all that came next?

But yeah, his prosecutors had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he'd moved the cartel's product for years and years. They'd mapped out his life for all the jurors to see, from being part of an intricately planned and meticulously executed supply pipeline to helping kill DEA informants. He'd been responsible for moving Mexican meth, Afghani heroin, and Chinese fentanyl all around the country, but consider this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: he'd made a shitload of money along the way too, and that was his game, the only one that mattered, wasn't it? Money was only thing that mattered to Gene Harwell, MD. Helping to move product through hospitals where he worked, but he'd also done so in uniform while serving his country in Afghanistan. Not saving lives, mind you. No, this monster had not been caring for his wounded brothers, he'd taken part in a system that created nothing but suffering.

"What sort of stunted creature does this" the prosecutor asked those wide-eyed jurors. If not for a well-placed informant this monster would still be on the loose, moving heroin to school playgrounds in a neighborhood near you! But he'd been fingered! Maybe it had been a very bloody jailhouse confession, but in the end none of that mattered because here he is, ladies and gentlemen, awaiting your judgement. The Mexican 'Federales' and the DEA had scooped him up while he was on the run down in Mexico and now here he is, teetering on the edge of the abyss, waiting for you to pronounce his fate.