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Love Takes Flight

By Lee Carver

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CHAPTER ONE
A child’s scream pierced the Brazilian jungle night, wrenching Camille from the tendrils of a nightmare. The wail soared through the trees again, long and desperate. She rolled out of her hammock and stumbled on numb legs, gripped the supporting rope, and got her bearings. The humid night vibrated with fear and confusion, in time with her pounding pulse.

Nearby, a mission team member hit the floor with a thud, emitting the forced unh! of having the breath knocked out of him. She could run to him or toward the shriek that woke them.

Shouted questions stabbed the moonlight and flashlights snapped on at odd angles. The child howled a Portuguese word Camille didn’t know, but she couldn’t miss the desperation.

Focus. Reacting with her nurse’s training and passion, she slipped on flip-flops, grabbed a flashlight, and dashed off the open platform in the direction of the pitiful cries. In this jungle, she and Dr. Flavio were the only ER.

“Sucuri! Sucuri!” The word rang throughout the village more like the name of a beautiful bird than the vicious anaconda.

She ran to where villagers converged on the wide footpath in front of the stilted houses. Raised machetes flashed as muscular brown arms brought knives down hard. Shouting and groaning, men hacked at an enormous snake curled in the baked red dirt.

Camille pushed into the circle of defenders and found a young boy under attack. The snake writhed, dying but not giving up its prey. A final cut severed the snake’s head from its squirming body. Blood squirted on the clay clearing and the people. Snake blood and boy blood.

Camille recognized Pedro as a ten year old from the previous day’s medical clinic. He cried, but no longer with curdled terror. She knelt in the dust to examine his wounds and her guts twisted. She had to get him somewhere she could treat him.

Pedro’s young father picked him up as if he were a broken doll. Another man supported the snake’s severed head with teeth still embedded in the boy’s thigh. Camille trotted beside them to the thatched, open-sided platform where they slept and also conducted a fly-in clinic. The mission team cleared the last of their hammocks.

The men laid the victim on a roughhewn table. Conscious and trembling, lips curled in revulsion, Pedro pushed at the dismembered snake head.

His father pulled his hand away. “Não. Espera.” No. Wait.

Camille glanced around. Where was Dr. Flavio? She’d have to start without him. Faced with the responsibility, her mind wanted to freeze. Stop the bleeding. Compression. Disinfectant.

Camille spotted Jessica, the blonde fourteen year old who assisted in the dispensary. She would have the keys to supplies or know who did. “Jessica, get me some disinfectant—alcohol, Betadyne. Lots of it.”

In the jerked-awake village, the missionary team shuffled about looking for a way to help. Luke Strong, one of the pilots, jumped into action. He started the pungent gasoline generator and turned on a bare bulb dangling over the table.

A native woman bustled up the steps with cloth strips.

Camille grabbed the longest one and applied a tourniquet above the injury. Pedro winced, but didn’t cry out.

A suffocating group of men surrounded the table, jabbering and pointing to the embedded teeth. They parted for Dr. Flavio as he hurried through the crowd pulling on surgical gloves. A bloody bandage taped on his forehead identified him as the one who fell out of a hammock when the screams began. She didn’t ask.

Camille took a half step away from the patient and, lacking words, mimed a questioning expression to the doctor.

Late forties, bearded and squarely built, Dr. Flavio epitomized professional concern as he bent over the boy. The gentle bear took Pedro’s wrist, checked his pulse and pupils before examining the nasty wound.

Pedro’s pregnant mother, standing with other women on the ground nearby, wailed and moaned.

Jessica ran up the steps with a liter of Betadyne, and Dr. Flavio splashed the amber disinfectant generously on the boy’s leg. He spoke to the father. Camille understood none of the Portuguese, only their urgent waving and pointing.

The doctor muttered, motioning with his fingers how the bite bent into Pedro’s leg. Onlookers nodded and chattered. Big, bad teeth curved into soft, young-boy flesh.

Dr. Flavio scattered the spectators away with orders and gestures. Reluctantly, they jumped off the platform of the community room but stayed close. This was the only show in town.

Doctor and father grasped the anaconda’s jaws and pulled carefully. The vice of back-slanted teeth didn’t give up. Even in death, they locked into the child’s flesh. Dr. Flavio motioned to the jaw, and someone in the crowd below offered his bloody machete.

“I’m going for the doctor’s tools. The whole kit.” Jessica dashed into the darkness.

Camille rested her hand on the boy’s bare chest and spoke, hoping he would understand her meaning if not her English. “We’re here to help, Pedro. You’re so brave.”

She touched his thick, black hair and smiled her compassion. He had been a diarrhea patient. Maybe the snake seized him at the village outhouse. She couldn’t even ask him how this happened.

When Jessica, aided by Luke, returned with the instrument kits and armloads of supplies, Dr. Flavio isolated the dirty wound. He spoke to Camille, and Jessica translated. “Be ready with sterile gauze and more antiseptic.”

Camille rubbed on hand sanitizer, popped on gloves and ripped open gauze. She willed her fingers not to tremble. She pulled up all of her ER experience, but she had never seen or studied an injury like this. The boy needed her to be professional.

At the edge of darkness, the missionary team formed a circle. With arms overlapping, they bowed and prayed. Camille tried to believe that the God who allowed an enormous snake to capture a boy and drag him toward the river would now move miraculously to save the child’s life. Although a life-long Christian, her hopes and God’s actions didn’t always agree.

Dr. Flavio and Camille strained a tool between the locked jaws of the anaconda, and something snapped in the snake’s head. Pulling together, they extracted the curved teeth from Pedro’s raw muscle and skin.

Camille’s worst fear came to life—oozing of the femoral artery despite his tourniquet. He might bleed out in seconds.

Sterile technique was impossible. She gathered a handful of gauze and pressed hard on the wound. Dr. Flavio tightened the tourniquet. He looked directly at her. “Cirugia.”

She recognized the word “surgery” and nodded.

Eyes wide with terror, Pedro’s small, lean frame went rigid. He remained silent.
The kid was brave. He twisted his head toward his crying mother but said nothing.

No general anesthetic. No ether. No morphine. Camille loaded a syringe with Novocain, hating that it would sting Pedro like a wasp until the area went numb.

Dr. Flavio inserted the needle over and over and pointed to the vial. She filled another syringe.

Surgery on a wooden table with a dim bulb and not so much as old-fashioned ether for an anesthetic. What a story she could tell when she returned to Alabama, two weeks and one century away.

The doctor probed for the artery cautiously but wasted no time.

Camille caught Jessica’s eye. “Get the strongest flashlight you can find. Stand on the other side, and hold it close without getting in his way.” She hoped the young missionary kid wouldn’t faint. This was a hard test for a girl trying to decide if she wanted to be a nurse.

Dr. Flavio squinted into the wound. Perspiration beaded his brow and glistened in his thick beard.

Camille dug in the kit and held a magnifying glass above the surgical site. The doctor gave an appreciative “Ahh.”

Pedro relaxed as the Novocain took effect. Or else he was going into shock.
Keep the patient warm, spoke her internal memorized voice. The temperature hadn’t dipped below eighty for days, not even overnight. These people didn’t have blankets, and if they did, they would be filthy. So much she wanted to teach them, to lift them above this existence.

Camille needed more hands. “Jessica, can you hold the flashlight and the magnifying glass? I need to get suture material together for the artery.”

The teenager, seeing the injury without fainting, leaned closer to manipulate both. Her father Alfredo, the other pilot on the mission, stepped up. He took the heavy flashlight and held a steady beam on the surgery.

Camille laid out materials ready for the doctor’s use.

Sweat streamed down his face. The kit carried no masks or skull caps, so Camille mopped his brow with gauze. If sweat dripped into the wound, the kid would have infection soup directly in his bloodstream. She shivered at the thought.

Dr. Flavio needed a retractor, but their basic supplies were never intended for jungle surgery. He positioned Camille’s gloved index finger to hold back Pedro’s swelling tissue. She shut down normal responses of revulsion and fear. She would be the assistant he needed to save Pedro. Head to head, they worked together without a common language, each complementing the other’s moves.

Nothing was sterilized. Not the loose instruments in the kit, not the surgical field, nothing. God, if you’re going to work a miracle, make it a big one.

Camille gave her germ anxiety to the Lord and concentrated on Pedro’s leg. Together they sutured the torn artery and repaired muscle as much as possible. An intense space of time later, they added antibiotic salve like a sacred blessing and stitched cuts of the skin made by the anaconda’s teeth. Pedro had survived the snake attack, but she feared non-sterile surgery would be just as lethal.
* * *
Camille and Dr. Flavio prayed with Pedro and his parents in their rough-board home. Not that Camille understood the words, but she figured God spoke Portuguese too. They shuffled from the two-room house into dawn’s glow, rolling their aching shoulders and necks.

Doctor and nurse slapped a tired high-five. With a satisfied nod, she moved off to a quiet place.

Camille dropped onto a fallen tree trunk near the red dirt bank. Head in her hands, vision bleary, she watched a trail of carpenter ants carry away a bush, bit by leafy bit, and turned her mind out to pasture. No class she had ever taken prepared her for this event.

A chance to serve as a nurse for isolated people, an escape from Brad, a stab at the Great Commission. Not bad for a two-week trip to the Amazon.

Last night, Alfredo had shown the film about Jesus and talked only a few minutes. Nine people professed faith in Christ. She couldn’t speak a word about God to any of them, but she felt part of their soul-awakening.

I’m not worthy, Lord. You know how unworthy I am. But thank You for letting me share in the glow of leading hearts to You.

Despite fatigue, her head cleared. Getting away from Brad was a wise move. These two weeks began their break, and all she had to do was stand firm when she returned. If only he had been honest about being married.

She tracked Luke’s agile movements down on the amphibious mission plane tied to trees at the riverside. He walked on the floats, ducking under the wing. Swinging around the struts, hauling heavy bundles, he possessed strength enough to work gracefully.

He looked up and waved. “Bom dia. How’s the kid?”

“Okay for now.” Tall hardwoods dampened her shout.

He hopped from the float to the shore and climbed the bank toward Camille.

As Luke approached, she added in lower volume, “If he doesn’t die of a plethora of infections, and if the artery holds, he’ll live and most likely walk again.”

“These Amazon villagers are tough. There was a guy not far from here who got into a fight and took a knife in the side. He didn’t even get infected. Showed us his scar the next time we came on a mission.”

“Amazing.” Her voice flattened. She didn’t know if she believed his story.

“Reckon breakfast is ready?”

“Prob’ly.”

His light brown hair flipped carelessly in the heavy humidity, just enough curl to look boyish against his strong build. An easy grin and Tennessee accent charmed even a woman as exhausted as she.

He nodded toward the cooking area. “Ready for some coffee?”

“What is it with the coffee? It has something thick in it.”

“They stir in some tapioca. River folks like it that way.”

“We have about five forms of ground manioc root every morning. Most of them I like. Or at least they’re interesting. I’d really rather not have it in my coffee though.”

“We eat what they eat.” His smile came with a shrug. “They’re giving us the best they’ve got.”

“I do appreciate that. Don’t mean to sound ungrateful.”

He braced his legs in front of her and offered his hands.

She took them and pulled up, making good use of the charge of energy transmitted by his touch.

He backed to a proper distance, and she appreciated his discretion.

His clear, blue eyes caught hers and held them. “You were awesome last night.”

“’Scuze me?” Not that she hadn’t heard him, but she wasn’t sure how to take the comment.

“The way you jumped in and treated the kid. You were awesome. How did you learn to do that?”

She judged him to be sincere. It wasn’t a pickup line. “They didn’t teach us how to treat a jungle boy with a leg torn up by a snake. I had to stop the bleeding. It was just the sum total of everything I ever learned.”

Stricken with a rare case of shyness by his unabashed admiration, she turned her head. “I’m still in the running shorts and T-shirt I slept in. Do you think it would be safe to take a dip in the river before breakfast?”

“Sure.” He looked up. “Jessica would probably go in with you. Here she comes now.”

“It would be okay, I mean, about the—”

“Piranhas? Yes. If you don’t have any blood on you. In fact, you’d better scrub with soap and rinse from the bank first.”

She waved at the teenager who approached them. “Hey, Jessica. I’m coming too.

I’ll get a towel and change into my swimsuit. I can’t open the clinic smelling like this.”

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