Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist

should receive medals of honor. We put on scrubs and went to work.
    â€œIs this still going to count as vacation when we get back?” I kept asking.
    â€œProbably,” Dean said. “Don’t talk, David. Just help me move these beds. We have to get these patients to higher floors so we can medevac them when they bring the helicopters.”
    Except, as everyone knows, the helicopters didn’t come for two more days and when they came there weren’t enough of them and the hospital next door had to send their patients to Tulane on rowboats including people who were dying and women with babies only hours old and so many other things I could not tell it all if I wrote all night. I’ll say this for Charles. He dug in and did the work. He carried forty people up six flights of stairs in the dark. He slept on the roof when he slept and he got eaten alive by mosquitoes which is the main reason we broke into the Walgreen’s on our way back to the Cabildo later the second night. We wanted to get a change of clothes and some food and we wanted Cortisone cream for the bites. We were in Charles’s pirogue which a man who works for his family had brought to the hospital for us to use for patients. A pirogue is a flat-bottomed boat used for duck hunting in the bayous. We paddled the pirogue to dry land and then pulled it up on a sidewalk and looked around for a place to store it until we got back from the apartment. It was night but there was a moon and we had one flashlight we had borrowed from the hospital.
    There it was before us. A drugstore, an almost new Walgreen’s that had opened in the French Quarter a year before. “I didn’t know there was a drugstore so near,” Charles said. “I say we go in and get supplies. I say we replenish the hospital’s supplies. I say we get me some insect repellant and cortisone cream.”
    â€œI say yes,” Dean answered and before I could voice a vote Charles and Dean had dragged the pirogue across the dry street and were battering the Walgreens windows with the paddles. When that didn’t break a window they grabbed the pirogue and turned the sharp end toward the window and rammed it through. We went inside and headed straight for the drugs. Dean used to run the pharmacy at the hospital and we knew what to get and where to get it. I went to the hardware section and brought back some tools.
    An hour later we were headed back to the hospital wearing new clothes and carrying a boatload of sterile needles, tetanus vaccine, antibiotics, pain killers, muscle relaxants, antihistamines, sterile bandages, first-aid kits, and two ice chests full of ice, plus a case of bottled water. Dean and I were paddling, Charles was sitting in the prow putting flashlight batteries into flashlights and guarding the drugs so they didn’t get wet.
    Needless to say we were greeted as heroes by the staff at the Tulane Medical Center and sent back for more. We made two more trips before we were forced to desist by the presence of several policemen and about forty men and women helping themselves to the rest of the supplies in the store.
    Dean’s cousin, who is dean of the University of Nevada School of Law, says there is no way we can be prosecuted even if the police figure out we’re the ones who broke the windows. He said he will represent us himself if they try.
    Other things we took include reading glasses for workers who were struggling to read patients’ charts while we carried them to the roof, boxes of diapers and formula for children, and several boxes of Hershey bars with almonds.
    During the emergency I lost ten pounds, Dean lost seven pounds, and Charles is so elated by his service to mankind that he is thinking about going back to practicing law. “Think of the lawsuits,” he said. “It will take twenty years to begin to settle with the insurance companies. I’ll represent both sides. Maybe I’ll become a