The Mission Clinic

The Mission Building with the clinic








“How bad are you hurt?” Lou leans forward to see Ollie’s wound. “Oh shit.” Lou looks back over his shoulder at me, “He’s bleeding pretty bad.”
Jerry speeds up on hearing that. He doesn’t want to get crazy and draw any cops down on us, but we aren’t going to make it back to Ferdi’s without doing a little triage.
“Ollie, lift up your shirt.” Lou was up and over the bench seat. “Tear off some of that shirt your wearing.” He looks back at me, “Now.”
Oh... me. I tear a strip off my shirt and hand it to Lou. He wipes the blood from the wound. “It’s all the way through.” He wipes again, “Ollie, hold this tight.” He takes Ollie’s hand and pushes it down on the bloody wad of shirt cloth. Ollie grunts hard and then holds it tight.
“Jerry, we need a doctor. I know of a clinic in an old mission that is about five minutes from here… on the way to Ferdi’s.”
Lou points Jerry in the right direction. We are far enough away from the business district that I can’t see the buildings any more. That doesn’t mean that we are out of trouble.
Lou directs us to this scary looking mission. It is in the worst part of town, on the edges of the slums the climb up and into the hillsides.
“This place?” Jerry slows and turns in to the courtyard through old rusted gates. “This has got to be from the eighteen hundreds, man, what makes you think there is a clinic here?”
“I know because I was treated here once about three years ago. Coop took me. They don't ask any questions."
“Treated for what?” Jerry stops the car in front of an old wooden door that has “Dispensario” painted in white wash.
“Got stabbed in that bar we were drinking in.” Lou says as he gets out of the car.
“You got stabbed in the middle of the business district?”
“Turns into something else entirely at night.”

We hustle Ollie into the “clinic”. It is really spartan inside, just a couple of wooden picnic tables, a metal table hanging under a bare lightbulb, and an old woman in a nurses uniform sitting behind a barred window in the small office.
“Nos puede ayudar usted?” Jerry calls to her.
She scurries out of the office and directs us to put him up on the table. Ollie has lost some blood, but he is still fully functional. He heaves himself up on the table.
“Qué sucedió aquí?” She asks.
I turn to Jerry who translates, “She wants to know what happened.”
“Cazando el accidente.” Lou tells her.
“Hunting accident.” Jerry tells me.

Lou goes outside to keep an eye on the car and to make sure we weren’t followed. We watch the old nurse clean the wound, first with some type of antiseptic, then she puts some kind of powder in it. Ollie is a tough son of a bitch, doesn’t flinch, even when she started stuffing a long strip of gauze inside the wound.
“Ha atravesado,” she says while she stuffs the gauze in. “Esto lo permitirá curar.”
“The gauze will help him to heal.” Jerry tells me. We watch her dip the gauze in more antiseptic and then stuff more into the whole.
When she finishes, she puts bandages over the entry and exit wounds. She goes into the office and comes back with a small plastic bag with a bottle of the antiseptic and quite a few strips of the gauze. “Cambie su aliño dos veces al día.”
“We have to change the dressing twice a day.” Jerry translates.
Ollie hasn’t made a sound since he realized he had been shot. But he looked like shit, like it hurts like hell.
“Can’t she give him something for the pain?” I ask Jerry.
Jerry turns to the woman, who seemed to understand what I had asked. “Hágale tiene algo para el dolor?”
He puts his hand in his pocket and pulled out a thousand peso note and hands it to her, a little less than a hundred bucks. She nods and disappears into the office.
When she returns she has a syringe and a bottle of Morphine. After sizing Ollie up she draws in the appropriate measure of the drug into the syringe, shows us how much, and then puts it in his arm. The effect is immediate. Ollie smiles widely.
“Gracias, Mama.” He says sleepily.
The nurse smiles and then wipes the needle with alcohol and coveres it with a safety tip. She puts the bottle and syringe in a bag and throughs in a bottle of pain pills of some kind for after the morphine is gone.

It takes the three of us to get Ollie into the car. It is like trying to move a drugged bull into a barn stall. When we finally get him settled, he is snoring up a storm.
Jerry pulls out of the mission and back toward Ferdi’s. It has been two hours since we got in the gun battle. By now they would be looking for us. Jerry had Lou and I get down as low as possible so it looked like there were only two people in the car, not the four they were looking for.
We drive for another thirty minutes and get out into the country, close to Ferdi’s. Just when it seems we are home free, the shit hits the fan.
“Damn it.” Jerry says, taking a quick right when he sees the guns and the uniforms up ahead. He pulls up next to a pond or lake or whatever the hell it is and tell me and Lou to get out and follow his lead.
It is a good thing we drank as much beer as we did, because we all had to piss anyway. While we are taking care of business the cops come flying up in a Bronco and three of them jump out like they caught us doing something.
“And then the bitch wouldn’t even come home with me.” Lou says with a slur.
“That fat bitch didn’t even want to have anything to do with you, eh?” I add. Lou turns to me with that steel cutter look. Didn’t think that was too funny.
“Fuck yerself.” He takes a lazy swing at me and I step back, fall back, and land on my ass. The cops are on us now, “No mueva!”

Jerry turns, “Oye alguacil, nosotros tuvimos que ir, el hombre.” He says to them, then turns to me, “I told them we had to piss.”

The cops take us all back to the car where Ollie is snoring away like a hibernating grizzly. “Usted es un peso tan ligero.” He says to Ollie, who doesn’t stir.

We continue this way for another second or two until the cops tell us to shut up and listen. They want to know where we have been. Jerry tells him that we had gone to the bar to celebrate Lou’s birthday. He tells them that Lou is sixty. Lou takes drunken offense, staying in character, and takes a swing at Jerry and ending up on the ground.
“No más luchando.” One of the Federales yells as he drags Lou up by the collar. There will be no more fighting.
“You are American?” The only cop in civilian clothes asks. He is in jeans and a red and white striped shirt. He has a weapon that looks like it could take down the space shuttle.
“Well, truth be told we haven’t been there in a long long time.” Jerry tells him.
“You were in Mexico City today.” He tells us.
“No, not all the way there. Wouldn’t mind, though, probably would have seen some nice tits and ass instead of that shit we saw at the bar.” He says back.
Red stripe looks in at Ollie, who smells like tequila and armpits. His mouth is wide open and he is drooling. “What is wrong with this man?” Red stripe turns and looks at me.
“It was his idea to go to that bar up the road. Shit place, it really is. But the beer was cheap and the tequila cheaper. He wet himself in the bar, so we had to go.” I thought that was a nice touch.
The other two cops laughed, and it seemed as though we may be getting out of this.
“Hey, man, we’re sorry we pissed in your pond. We had to go, you know?” Lou tells them.
They start to leave, and I ask them if I can take a picture. I tell them I haven’t seen real Federales before. They stand for a second with their thumbs in their belts, and then red stripe orders them back onto the road.
Once they are gone, Lou slaps Jerry on the back of the head, “Sixty?”
We pile back into the car and head up the road. Our three Federales are back on the road and wave us through. Ten minutes later we are on Ferdi’s ranch and safe. We pull up to Abigail and put the bags in the lock up, then head to the ranch house to get Ollie comfortable. It looks like we will be staying the night.