And throughout those first five days, six days, seven days, in Colorado, as the growing list of sick was counted and contacts were relentlessly traced down, and isolation techniques were tightened, and word of some kind, any kind, was awaited from Fort Collins, Carlos Quintana moved through it all like a thin omnipresent wraith, working eighteen-hour days, looking grayer every day and somehow keeping in daily personal contact with virtually every one of the hundred-odd people who were working with him now. He was a ramrod, demanding hard, perfectionist labor, but he was a gentle ramrod, ready with a wry grin or a word of encouragement whenever he sensed the need of it. He wanted results, not fights, and he did not make the tempting mistake of blaming his crew for the steadily climbing count of newly infected cases, up well over 150 in the first week alone and still climbing, including five of his own people. The mortality rate was over eighty-three percent among those first cases, a horrendous figure that only barely began leveling off as they poured in all the antibiotic resources they had available. He maintained to each of his workers the same repeated point, made over and over again, relentlessly: don’t look at the short term, it had a terrible start on us, but we’re surely closing the gap. The work we’re doing now will catch up if we do it well and meticulously and thoroughly, it has to catch up, and the thing will peak and begin to drop off, and new data will help with that when we have it. Keep digging …
Yet through it all there was an odd, fatalistic air about Carlos Quintana that others could sense but not quite identify. True, he breathed confidence that this present battle would be contained sooner or later — but he was clearly under no illusions but that other and worse battles would face them at other times and other places. It was not just his long professional acquaintance with the history of the black killer facing him here; far more, it was his own, personal, deep-grained cultural heritage — an ever-present awareness of the imminent presence of death.
Carlos Quintana came from hardy Spanish and Indian stock, traceable back for well over three hundred years by the omniscient eye of family tradition, although no written records had ever been kept. In the time of the Great Depression his father had been thrown back across the Rio Grande four separate times before he finally managed to evade the American Federales long enough to reach quiet, unpatrolled saguaro desert and walk to Tucson and thence, on foot or swinging aboard ranch trucks, on east to Albuquerque where family friends sequestered him long enough to teach him rudimentary English. At the time, it had seemed an odd direction to go. If Emiliano Quintana had been an ordinary Mexican peasant or farm worker, he would have made his way west to join the California braceros, or northwest to the orchards of Oregon and Washington, or northeast to the big Kansas harvests, and lived in an eight-by-eight-foot box without a toilet and worked for peppercorn wages when work was there and starved when it wasn’t, living only one tiny bit better than any Mexican peasant or farm worker might live below the border.
But Emiliano Quintana was not an ordinary peasant or farm worker. He was a city boy from a Chihuahua slum who had, in his own city, with much hustling and fighting for jobs and reading of manuals, become a singularly excellent seat-of-the-pants truck mechanic. He left Chihuahua only when he could not advance further because the boss’s son, and his nephew, and his son-in-law were all in line for the good jobs — but it was Emiliano who had made the truck motors purr, not those others. In Albuquerque his friends found him a job of sorts, a bottom-rung grease monkey at a truck stop, but soon he was full mechanic, and presently shop foreman. One day his boss, well pleased with a mechanic who could make trucks purr the way he could, and not wishing to have him deported, withheld $100 from his pay, and spoke to a certain man in Albuquerque who quite swiftly produced perfectly legal naturalization papers for Emiliano — and then the boss raised his pay to help cover the cost.
Only then did Emiliano Quintana return briefly to Mexico, to the city of Chihuahua, to formally court and marry a beautiful woman with large, dark eyes, daughter of a respectable Mexican family, and bring her back to Albuquerque with him. With her, muy macho, he conceived three sons — Carlos, Jesús, Ramón — before an endless string of daughters appeared, and all three boys had their mother’s large, dark eyes and handsome good looks, and their father’s patient drive and willingness to work. They were that commonplace anomaly in the Southwest, the totally American family with ninety-five percent Mexican characteristics. Their food, their religion and their mores were straight from Old México. They spoke Spanish exclusively in the home, but never outside it, and the boys all grew up with perfect English. They lived in a small modest home in an acceptable part of the city, and saved money, and celebrated the Day of the Dead with illegal firecrackers and little skull-shaped candies and cookies made with loving care, and like all Mexican families, death was part of their thinking, always nearby, always imminent.
Carlos was the scholar among the boys, bright and interested and energetic, passing through grade school and high school like a breeze, then on to the University of New Mexico to study biology. When the time came for application to medical school, he could not quite meet the academic level of the prime candidates, he had sown too many wild oats in college instead of studying — but suddenly (and inexplicably, to his father, who could not understand such things) his status as a Mexican-American worked in his favor: at precisely the right time, certain government regulations left the medical school at the University of Iowa suddenly, desperately searching for one live Mexican-American applicant, never mind his grade-point average as long as he was breathing — and Carlos went to medical school.
The rest followed naturally. The wild oats were over, and he led his class. A growing inclination toward epidemiology carried him on. An internship in the Public Health Service followed, with work in the Epidemic Intelligence Service — one of the Shoeleather Boys. A job with the CDC came next, and presently a special interest in plague, partly because he was fascinated by the disease and partly because nine-tenths of the cases that appeared each year turned up in New Mexico and Arizona among Spanish-speaking people, and he could speak Spanish. He found a strange satisfaction in his encounters with plague, in unmasking it, fighting it, stopping it, in case after case after case. But always, entrenched in his mind and never far from the surface, was a clear recognition that plague was La Muerte, death on horseback, and however hard you fought it, it was never going away …