Chapter One - Richard Lewis

wall were posters on nutrition and basic health care. On a wooden counter was a kerosene
stoves and burners. Another counter held utensils, where Naniek was preparing
ingredients for a cooking class.
Her eyes widened as she caught sight of him, bare-chested, holding a bloodied
shirt to his face.
"I stopped to relieve myself and my foot slipped on a loose rock," Reed said. "Fell
into the ditch and cut myself. I don't know how bad."
She pressed down his fist and the wadded shirt to expose the wound. "To the
bone," she said. "You'll need stitches."
To the bone. Jesus. He blinked, suddenly woozy-headed.
Naniek took his elbow and guided him to the clinic's examining bed. "I'll go get
Parwati," she said.
A minute later, Parwati loomed over him. She inspected the wound and said
curtly, "Go to the government clinic."
"To be honest, I'd rather not. Can't you sew it up here?"
She thought about that. "All right."
Thus it was that Reed became the object for an impromptu lesson on how to clean
and stitch a cut. The women stood around the bed, young housewives and old matrons, a
few of them holding handkerchiefs to the nose and wincing. Desak the salt-maker's wife
clutched a pamphlet on pregnancy and nutrition. Was she pregnant? He was vaguely
surprised. He thought her middle-aged, beyond child-bearing age, but he realized now
that it was only the hard struggle of daily life that had aged her, carved those lines in her
face and coarsened her skin.
Naniek cleaned the wound, her fingers cool but not gentle, swabbing the harsh
antiseptic. It stung like hell.
"Ow!" Reed said. "You're hurting me on purpose! Just because I'm a Yankee
nekolim imperialist."
The women laughed. Naniek smiled, the first full smile she'd given him. He felt
light-headed with the simple pleasure of it, and then Parwati loomed back into view with
a syringe of local anesthetic. The needle descended, filling all of Reed's vision, and his
light-headedness accelerated until none of his mind was left.
When he came to, it was with the sensation of something sharp tugging on his
skin. Parwati, with a needle.
"You fainted," Naniek told him.
"Just like a woman," Desak said as the others laughed.
When the cut was stitched and bandaged, Parwati brusquely declined any
payment but told him he'd have to get his own antibiotics.
"I'm no condition to drive," Reed said. "Can I stay here for the night? I have a mat
in the back of the jeep I can throw down anywhere."
Parwati sighed sharply but didn't say no. She told Naniek to get Reed settled in
the corner shed behind the carport. Naniek pushed open the shed's tin-sheet door, holding
high a coconut oil lamp. Between shelves stacked with odds and ends was a clean cement
floor big enough for Reed's mat.
"Is there a man anywhere in this house, or is it all women?" Reed asked.
"Bapak works for the railroad in the Java," Naniek replied, referring to Parwati's
husband.
100