Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,28

Austin and Mandy were. In fact, she didn’t particularly like him. Not only had he been making fun of her height from the moment they’d met, he was an asshole in general. Moreover, as a registered nurse, she had become used to seeing sickness, disease, and injury.

Just last week there had been a mentally disabled man in the ER with an infected stasis ulcer in the back of his calf. The necrotic tissue around the black eschar had been gnawed away by maggots that were still in residence in large numbers. During debridement surgery the man decided he had to urinate and could only do this standing up, so he got off the operating table, bleeding and dropping maggots everywhere, and peed in the middle of the floor.

And then there was old Ray Zanetti who had cancer to the mandible. Cherry had been his primary caregiver, and pretty much every time she checked in on him he would be looking in the mirror and peeling away pieces of his flaking skin. By the time of his death his face had all but fallen off.

Situations like these were grotesque and sad certainly, but they didn’t faze her anymore. They were simply part of her job, what she experienced on a daily basis. All in a day’s work, so they say.

Nevertheless, Cherry had never questioned her career choice; it had provided her a new life, literally. She had been born in Davao, in the Philippines. Her family had been dirt poor. Her father didn’t work, while her mother was a housecleaner, mostly for Western ex-patriots. She earned two hundred pesos, or approximately four dollars, a day. This went to support her husband, Cherry, and Cherry’s two siblings. They lived in a cinderblock house with a corrugated iron roof and no running water. They battled lice and rats on a constant basis, and they wasted nothing. Her mother often told her how disappointed she was with her Western employers, whose refrigerators were always full of expired food and spoiled vegetables.

Most of Cherry’s friends dropped out of high school to work at McDonald’s or one of the big malls. These positions didn’t pay any more than her mother made cleaning houses and apartment units, but you got to hang out with your friends and spend the day in an air conditioned environment out of the stifling tropical heat. Cherry, however, had greater ambitions. She wanted to get a university degree and work in a call center. She would have to work night shifts to compensate for the different time zones in the UK or US or Canada, but the money was decent and, in the eyes of other pinoys, it was a highly respected profession.

However, when Cherry heard about a friend of a friend who had become unimaginably wealthy as a registered nurse in the US, she promptly changed her degree to nursing. Her mother, starry-eyed at the prospect of having a daughter who could lift her family out of poverty, offered to sell the carabao—water buffalo—to help pay for Cherry’s schooling, but Cherry refused. She began working at a massage parlor servicing Western expats because the hours were flexible and could accommodate her classes. The company exploited her shamefully, paying her twenty-five cents each massage she gave, regardless of whether it was one hour long or two. Even so, they turned a blind eye to “extra” service. Cherry was raised Roman Catholic, went to church every Sunday, and was conservative by nature, but money was money. For her, a hand job was a service, nothing more, and depending on how cheap (not poor—Westerners were never poor) or generous her client was, she could make anywhere from ten to fifty dollars for a few minutes of work. She could have made even more by offering sex, for which she was often propositioned, but she would not cross that line. She was not a prostitute.

Once she completed her BS in Nursing four years later, she passed the US licensure exam, applied successfully for a green card, and was offered an entry position with New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn. She’d been there for three years now, had a mortgage, a car, and enough money in the bank to send hefty sums to her family in Davao on a regular basis, making them the envy of all their friends.

Cherry pulled her eyes from the ground and glanced at the others, relieved to see they had settled down somewhat. Austin was pacing again, but he no longer