clearly and succinctly what I knew about Jose Garcia. Once or twice he nodded, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. While he was examining Jose, the blood count had come back. His hematocrit had dropped by 6%.
“He needs to go to the OR,” said Hank looking at me haughtily. I could put up with the surgeons’s egos, but not those of the emergency room doctors.
While he did, I called the police station. I asked to be transferred to the desk sergeant. After introducing myself, I told him that the surgeons thought Jose Garcia had some internal bleeding. “Exactly what did happen when the officers brought him in?”
“Well officers Peterson and Martinez brought him in quite intoxicated. He had handcuffs whose ends were joined at his back. At the desk, he mouthed off to them. They tightened the bracelets that were behind his back. When he mouthed off again, they took him outside and talked to him. About a half hour later he was complaining so much about belly pain that we sent him your way. He was crying and moaning like a little kid who’d been in a fight.”
“He was,” I reported to the desk sergeant. They beat him up enough to cause internal bleeding. He’s in surgery right now.”
“There were no questions on the other end of the line. The desk sergeant just hung up on me.”
They finished surgery at about nine-thirty. Hank called me when they finished surgery on Jose. He had one omental and two mesenteric bleeders in his belly. He might well have bled out in the emergency room. I related what the desk sergeant had told me.
In the morning, I went by the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. I always dreaded going in there. More likely than not, Martin Gittes, who was the surgeon in charge of the ICU would throw you out of the unit if you were not a surgical resident. He detested internal medicine residents who had the temerity to encroach on his territory. Hank reassured me that Jose was doing relatively well. To see him through surgery, the surgeons administered four units of blood.
On Monday morning, just as we were finishing with rounds, I pulled Pete Anderson aside before he went to sign off on all the charts. He was my attending physician that month on the wards. I told him Jose’s story. I asked what I should do. There had been a spate of protests against police violence ever since I had been an intern. He said, stroking the fluff of mustache surrounding his mouth, “I wouldn’t mention anything about it. It wouldn’t hurt to tell administration and let the hospital attorney know.
I went up to the administrator’s office, to meet Barbara Hawkins, the hospital’s attorney of record. As I was ushered into her room, she told me that she could give me five minutes of her time. As I spoke, telling for the umpteenth time the story of the unfortunate Jose Garcia. “So your question is what,” she said rather pointedly.
“It seems like I have some place in protecting the patient and bearing witness to this clear physical violation.”
“Listen to me, Dr. Saunders…”
“It’s Spencer. What if it was your brother?”
“It wasn’t.” She shuffled some papers on her desk. “Well for now, just don’t say anything. If anyone from the press approaches you, you refer them to me. Now I need to finish up some loose ends.” Taking the cue I left her office. I didn’t even bother to thank her. It was people like Hawkins who allowed this absurdity of police bleeding to go on.
Each day he was in the hospital, I went by Jose Garcia’s room. He had no recollection of me, so after he had been in the hospital for about four days, I quite going by. When the day came for him to leave, I left him my phone number.
He never used it, though. I have no idea why he didn’t. He would have gotten a good settlement from the city and by my reckoning, would have rid the police department of two bad cops. But he didn’t. I’ll never know why.
It wasn’t a month later that I was in the UNM ER when the ambulance brought in an unconscious patient. He had been arrested for some reason. Using their billy clubs, the arresting officers struck him so hard over his head that he had a depressed skull fracture.
But Jose would go home. Never had I cared for the police in Albuquerque. This did little to change my mind.
Billy Yazzie
Slithering like a leopard through the defiles of the canyon west of town, the freezing waters of the Shoshone River, gathering as tears of moisture that descended from the snow-clad spine of the Continental Divide in the surrounding Absaroka Mountains, poured through western lip of Cody. There they encountered the sulfurous hot springs that sluiced into its cataracts. When the wind was stiff out of the north and the northwest, the sulfurous miasma of the hot springs spread over the town as if it was some hidden portal to the gates of Hades. Inured to the smell, just as he was used to the smell of horse piss and cow deng, Billy almost delighted in it. For him, it was the happy sweet-sour smell of freshly attained manhood. Palpitations erupted just at the smell of it all, as his body flushed with adrenalin. The decaying scent of the excrement and the cauldron odor of the hot springs reminded Billy why he was there and just what his quest in life was; to ride the rodeo. Every night between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Cody hosted a rodeo event at the Cody Fair Grounds. Those summer nights, young men haling from all over North America (though mainly from the western states) drew their rides, be they broncos or be they bulls, each rider attempting to win enough points to qualify for the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association – for the big-time rodeos that they where they hoped to perform.
For as long as Billy Yazzie could remember, he dreamed of them – of riding the horses, steam pouring from their flaring nostrils as they bucked and gyrated, jumping and swirling, in their punishing pirouette before a rapturous crowd. His first contact with these larger than life creatures was in the family paddock, he would sit in the saddle with his father when he was barely two years of age. He continued riding his horse with his father and uncle in the saddle. when, only a few years later, while he was in elementary school, his father had him feeding their three horses, and mucking up after them. Later, when he recalled the smells of his youth, he recalled the smells of his mother’s food, but that recollection was scarcely more than the odors of the horses in their pen. Born under the endless blue dome of the high plains and plateaus of northern New Mexico, in the heart of the Navaho Reservation, the horse, to his mind, was the only beneficent gift the Spanish Franciscan friars brought with them when they violated the land of the Diné on their explorations centuries ago. Born a half hour west of Crownpoint by pickup, well within the confines of the Reservation, his first fantasy of the noble beasts were of god-like creatures. Not even the gods could run faster that the horses his father kept. Now, no longer in just his dreams, now old enough to ride the bucking broncos, he saw them up close, as graceful creatures who suddenly convulsed when spurting out of the bucking chute, their tense muscles tugging like steel cables as they exploded out of the bucking chute and into the rodeo ring – as angry as a state patrolman, discovering an alcoholic driving with a suspended license – dancing right, then left; coiling, curling and unfurling, rising and falling, his arm aching to muster all the strength he had to hold onto the surcingle attached to the leather halter about the animal as tightly as one would grasp a lifeline tied to a trawler in a typhoon at sea. But during the eight seconds of his ride, while he held on to the surcingle, to the halter that held it on, he was at one with the beast.
Born under a wandering star, The Blessing Way for Billy did not embrace the life of a traditional Navajo way in him. For him, the desire to make it on the rodeo circuit began on the sand and shale formations of the vast reservation as large as the state of West Virginia, where as a young Navaho living in a traditional hogan in the inhospitable desert of the Great Southwest was ordained as a cowboy at a young age, when he was given the thankless task of feeding and mucking up after the horses his father and brothers kept in more of a lean-to than a barn. Besides the lean-to, there was appended a hogan, its door facing east, and a clapboard house that his father and his father’s brother had built over the course of a year when he was still too young to walk.
While in high school on the reservation, Billy joined