Special Topics in Calamity Physics (6 page)

Me llamo Azul.

My name is Blue.

El jardinero, Mellors, es una persona muy curiosa.

The gamekeeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person.

iQuiere usted se ducirme?
;Es
eso que usted quiere decirme?

Would you like me to seduce you? Is that what you're trying to tell me?

Nelly,soy Heathcliffl

Nelly, I am Heathcliff!

I waited in vain for Pablo Neruda's
Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair
(1924) to be returned to the library. (The Girlfriend Who Wore Nothing But Tight Tank Tops had checked it out and lost it at the Boyfriend Who Should Shave Those Gross Hairs on His Chin's.) I was forced to steal a copy from the Spanish room and fitfully memorized XVII, wondering how I'd ever find the courage to do The Romeo, publicly proclaim those words of love, shout them so loudly that the sound had wings and carried itself up to balconies. I doubted I could even handle The Cyrano, writing the words on a card, signing someone else's name and covertly dropping it through the cracked window of his truck while he lounged in the backyard reading
jHolal
under the rubber trees.

As it turned out, I did neither The Romeo nor The Cyrano. I did The Hercules.

At approximately 8:15 P.M. on a brisk Wednesday night in November, I was upstairs in my room studying for a French test. Dad was at a faculty dinner in honor of a new dean. The doorbell rang. I was terrified and immediately imagined all kinds of wicked Bible salesmen and bloodthirsty misfits (see O'Connor,
The Complete Stories,
1971). I darted into Dad's room and peered through the window in the corner. To my astonishment, in the night-plum darkness, I saw Andreo's red truck, though he'd driven clear off the driveway into a dense cluster of violin ferns.

I didn't know what was more gruesome, imagining The Misfit on my front porch or knowing it was
he.
My first inclination was to lock my bedroom door and hide under the comforter, but he was ringing the doorbell over and over again—he must have noticed the bedroom lights. I tiptoed down the stairs, stood for at least three minutes in front of the door, biting my fingernails, rehearsing my icebreaker
(Buenas Noches! \Qué sorpresal).
Finally, hands clammy, mouth like half-dry Elmer's glue, I opened the door.

It was Heathcliff.

And yet it wasn't. He was standing away from me by the steps, like a wild animal afraid to come close. The evening light, what little managed to hack its way through the branches crisscrossing the sky, cut into the side of his face. It was contorted as if he was screaming, but there was no sound, only a low hum, nearly imperceptible, like electricity in walls. I looked at his clothes and thought to myself he'd been housepainting, but then I realized stupidly it was
blood,
everywhere, on his hands, inky and metallic-smelling, like pipes under the kitchen sink. He was standing in it too—around his half-laced combat boots were mudlike splatters. He blinked at me, his mouth still open, and stepped forward. I had no idea if he was going to hug me or kill me. He fell, slumped at my feet.

I ran to the kitchen, dialed 911. The woman was a hybrid between person and machine and I had to repeat our address twice. Finally, she said an ambulance was on the way and I returned to the porch, kneeling next to him. I tried to remove his jacket, but he moaned and grabbed at what I realized was a gunshot wound in his lower left side, under his ribs.

"Yo telefoneé una ambulancia,"
I said. (I called an ambulance.)

I rode in the back with him.

NO STOP NO GOOD STOP PAPA STOP

"Listed va a estarbien,"
I said. (You're going to be fine.)

At the hospital, the paramedics raced his gurney through the smudged, white double doors and the nurse in charge of the emergency room roster, petite, perky Nurse Marvin, handed me a bar of soap and paper-towel pajamas and told me to use the bathroom at the end of the hall; the cuffs of my jeans were splattered with blood.

After I changed, I left a message on the machine for Dad and then sat quietly on a pastel plastic seat in the waiting room. I sort of dreaded Dad's inevitable appearance. Obviously I loved the man, but unlike some of the other fathers I observed at Pappy-Comes-to-School Day at Walhalla Elementary, dads who were shy and talked in cottony voices, my dad was a loud, uninhibited man, a man of resolute action with little patience or innate tranquility, more Papa Dop in temperament than Paddington Bear, Pavlova or Petting Zoo. Dad was a man who, due to his underprivileged background perhaps, never hesitated when it came to the verbs
to get
or
to take.
He was always getting something off the ground, his act together, his hands dirty, the show on the road, someone's goat, the message, out more, on with things, lost, laid, away with murder. He was also always taking charge, the bull by the horns, back the night, something in stride, someone to the cleaners, a rain check, an ax to something, Manhattan. And when it came to looking at things, Dad was something of a Compound Microscope, one who viewed life through an adjustable eyepiece lens and thus expected all things to be in focus. He had no tolerance for The Murky, The Blurry, The Hazy or The Soiled.

He charged into the emergency room shouting, "What the hell is going on here?
Where is my daughter?"
causing Nurse Marvin to scuttle off her chair.

After ensuring that I too had not suffered a gunshot wound, nor had any open cuts or scrapes through which I might have been fatally contaminated by "that Latino son-of-a-bitch," Dad barged through the smudged, white double doors with the giant red letters screaming AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY (Dad was always electing himself an AUTHORIZED PERSON) and demanded to know what had happened.

Any other dad would have been cursed, expelled, expunged, maybe even arrested, but this was Dad, part Pershing missile, part People's Prince. Within minutes, various excitable nurses and the odd redheaded intern were scurrying around the major shock-trauma unit, working not for the third-degree burn victim or the boy who'd overdosed on ibuprofen now weeping silently into the crook of his arm, but for Dad.

"Well, he's upstairs in surgery and he's stable/' said the odd redheaded intern, standing very close to Dad and smiling up at him (see "Bulldog Ant,"
Meet the Bugs,
Buddie, 1985).

"We will have some more up-to-date information for you as soon as the doctor comes down from surgery. Let's pray it'll be good news!" exclaimed a nurse (see "Wood Ant,"
Meet the Bugs).

Shortly Dr. Michael Feeds appeared from Floor 3, Surgery, and told Dad Andreo had suffered a gunshot wound to his abdomen, but was going to live.

"Do you know what he was up to tonight?" he asked. "From the look of the bullet wound, he was shot at close range, which could mean it was an accident, his own gun maybe. He could have been cleaning the barrel and it accidentally discharged. Some semiautomatics can do that. . ."

Dad stared down at poor Dr. Mike Feeds until Dr. Mike Feeds was cross-sectioned, positioned on a spotless examination slide and firmly clamped to the specimen stage.

"My daughter and I know nothing about that human being."

"But I thought—"

"He happened to mow our lawn twice a week and did an inadequate job at that, so exactly why in Christ's name he chose to
drip
up onto our porch is beyond my comprehension. Of course," Dad said, glancing at me, "we understand the situation is tragic. My daughter was more than happy to save his life, getting him proper treatment or what have you, but I will tell you quite bluntly, Dr. . . ."

"Dr. Feeds," said Dr. Feeds. "Mike."

"I will tell you, Dr. Meeds, that we are of no relation to this individual and I will not involve my daughter in whatever it was that got him into such a predicament—gang warfare, gambling, any number of those insalubrious activities of the underworld. Our involvement ends here."

"Oh, I see," said Dr. Feeds softly. Dad gave a curt nod, planted a hand on my shoulder, and steered me through the smudged, white double doors.

That night in my room, I stayed awake imagining a humid reunion with Andreo surrounded by Philippine figs and peacock plants. His skin would smell of cacao and vanilla, mine of passion fruit. I wouldn't be paralyzed with shyness, not anymore. After a person had come to you with his/her gunshot wound, after his/her blood had been all over your hands, socks and jeans, you

were tied together by a powerful bond of human existence that no one, not even a Dad, could comprehend.
jNo puedo vivir sin mi vidai  No puedo vivir sin mi alma!
(I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!)

He ran his hand through his black hair, oily and thick.

YOU SAVE MY LIFE STOP ONE NIGHT I MAKE YOU COMIDA CRIOLLA STOP But such an exchange was not meant to be.

The following morning, after the police called and Dad and I made a statement, I made him drive me to St. Matthew's hospital. I carried in my arms a dozen pink roses ("You will not take that boy
red
roses, I draw the line," Dad bellowed in the Seasonal Flowers aisle at Deal Foods, causing two mothers to stare) and a melted chocolate milkshake.

He was gone.

"Disappeared from his room 'round five this morning," reported Nurse Joanna Cone (see "Giant Skink,"
Encyclopedia of Living Things,
4th éd.). "Ran a check on his insurance. The card he gave was a fake. Doctors think that's why he hightailed it outta here, but the
thing is"
Nurse Cone leaned forward, jutting out her round, pink chin and speaking in the same emphatic whisper she probably used to tell Mr. Cone to stay awake during church, "he didn't speak aworda English so Dr. Feeds never got outa him how he got the bullet. Police don't know either. What I'm thinkin', and this is just a hunch, but I wonder if he was one of them illegal aliens who come to this country to find steady work and a good benefit program with disability and unlimited sick days. They've been spotted in this area before. My sister Cheyenne? She saw a whole slew of them in a checkout aisle at Electronic Cosmos. Know how they do it? Rubber rafts. The dead of night. Sometimes all the way from Cuba, fleeing Fidel. You know what I'm talking about?"

"I believe I have heard a few rumors," said Dad.

Dad made Nurse Cone call AAA from the Recovery Unit desk, and when we returned home, Andreo's truck was being towed. A large white van, discreetly marked Industrial Cleaning Co., was parked under our banyan tree. At Dad's request, ICC, specializing in the sanitization of former crime scenes, had driven the half hour north from Baton Rouge to attend to the trail of Andreo's blood staining the walkway, the front porch and a few maidenhair ferns.

"We're putting this sad incident behind us, my little cloud," Dad said, squeezing my shoulder as he waved to grim-faced ICC employee Susan, age 40-45, wearing a blinding white slicker and green rubber gloves that extended beyond her elbows to her upper arms. She stepped onto our porch like an astronaut stepping on the moon.

The appearance of Andreo's blurb in
The Howard Sentinel
(FOREIGNER SHOT, VANISHES) marked the end of The Verduga Incident, as Dad called it (a minor scandal that had only briefly tarnished an otherwise spotless Administration).

Three months later, when the allspice and cassava plants had successfully quarantined the lawn, when twisting liana had choked every porch pillar and gutter and begun its murderous designs on the roof, when rays of sunlight, even at noon, rarely had the nerve to trespass beyond the understory to the ground, we still knew nothing about Andreo, and in February, Dad and I left Howard for Roscoe, Michigan, official homeland of the Red Squirrel. Though I never said his name and remained silent in supposed indifference whenever Dad mentioned him ("Wonder what ever happened to that Latino thug"), I thought about him all the time, my stop-spoken gamekeeper, my Heathcliff, my Something.

There was one more incident.

When Dad and I were living in Nestles, Missouri, immediately following my fifteenth birthday celebration at The Hashbrown Hut, we were loafing around Wal-Mart so I could pick out a few birthday presents. ("Sundays at Wal-Mart," said Dad. "Parkies feasting for an afternoon on a football stadium of spectacular savings so the Waltons may buy an extra château in the south of France.") Dad had gone to Jewelry and I was perusing Electronics when I looked up and noticed a man with shaggy hair black as an eight ball. He was moving past the display of digital cameras with his back to me. He wore faded jeans, a gray T-shirt and an army camouflage baseball cap pressed way down over his forehead.

His face was hidden—apart for a bit of tan, unshaved cheek—and yet, as he rounded into the aisle of TVs, my heart began to pound, because instantly I recognized the showy sigh, the slouch, that slow, underwater movement— his overall sense of Tahiti. No matter what time of day or amount of work to be done, someone with Tahiti could close his eyes and the reality of moody lawnmowers, scruffy lawns, threats of termination of employment would recede and in seconds he'd simply be in Tahiti, stark naked and drinking from a coconut, aware only of the percussion of the wind and girlish sighs of the ocean. (Few people were born with Tahiti, although there was a natural proclivity in Greeks, Turks and male South Americans. In North America, there was prevalence amongst Canadians, particularly in the Yukon territories, but in the United States it could be found only in first- and second-generation hippies and nudists.)