He turned up the street, and then I saw his yellow cane as it hung limply from his hand. He placed it firmly on the ground and began to walk slowly up the hill, the cane tapping lightly in the nearly deserted street.
As he moved toward me, I could see that he was still tall, though bent now, his shoulders slightly rounded. His hair was white, and his face was brown and leathery, drier than I remembered it, parched by his long years in the sun. The only thing that remained the same was his piercingly blue eyes.
They didn’t glance in my direction as he headed across the street, then into the little plaza, finally going by me at a distance of no more than ten or fifteen feet. A woman nodded toward him as she passed and an old man waved from the other end of the square, but my father didn’t stop to talk to either of them.
He continued on, his feet plowing unsteadily across the dusty plaza. When he was near the middle of it, I stood up and watched him closely, as if expecting him to vanish magically into the air. In the distance, I could see him moving past the old men tossing balls in the courtyard, the women with their children, his feet raising a little cloud of dust behind him.
He was almost at the end of the plaza before I fell in behind him, trailing him at a distance, the eyes of the people in the square following me almost as intently as I followed my father.
Slowly, with an old man’s gait, he made his way up a narrow street, then, to my surprise, turned abruptly to the right and entered a small tavern.
He’d already taken a seat behind a round, wooden table when I entered the same tavern seconds later. There were other men around him, men at other tables, old men who looked as weathered as he, their eyes deep-set and encircled by spidery webs of dark lines, their skin deeply furrowed. But they were shorter and rounder than my father, who still retained something of the tall, lean figure I remembered from my youth. It was clear that they knew him, perhaps even associated him with the American cowboys they’d seen in movies and on television, the silent, solitary, lethal men whose brave adventures made their dull, familial lives seem small and cowardly and of little worth.
I took a seat across the room and watched as my father ordered his first drink. When it came, I saw that it was sherry, a drink that struck me as quite bland for a man who on a rainy November day had, with the help of “someone else,” taken a shotgun to his family.
Sherry, I thought, my father drinks sherry, and suddenly I saw him as a man of tastes and appetites, an old man who walked slowly through the dusty streets, his shadow moving jaggedly along the flat stone walls. The specter of my youth, the gray figure in the basement, the slaughterer of my family, there he was before me, drinking sherry and wiping his wet lips with a soiled handkerchief.
There he was, but still I found that I couldn’t approach him. And so I watched from a distant corner, my fingers tapping rhythmically against my knees, my eyes moving toward him, then away, as if fleeing a flash of brutal light.
The night deepened hour by hour, but my father didn’t leave his chair. One sherry, sipped slowly, was followed by another. He ordered a plate of sliced ham and a piece of bread smeared with tomato, eating his dinner at a leisurely pace, his blue eyes closing from time to time as he leaned back tiredly against the tiled wall.
From time to time, other men would sit down with him and chat awhile, but my father seemed to greet them distantly, talk to them absently, pay them little mind. As each one left, he merely nodded slowly and said, “Adios,” in a tone that seemed faintly sorrowful, so that even in the grip of my hatred I sensed that there had been a loneliness to his exile, things he had endured, losses he had silently absorbed. For a moment, I was able to imagine the long night of his escape, the flight to a distant land, the constant shifting from town to town, the years of fear and dread. What at 417 McDonald Drive, I wondered, could have been worth such a deep and endless sacrifice?
At around ten, as he continued to sit alone and unmolested, an African trader in black trousers and a billowy purple shirt approached his table. A lavender turban was wound loosely around his head. He smiled at my father and drew several carved figures from a cloth bag, elephants of various sizes, a giraffe. He arranged them on my father’s table. My father glanced at them, then shook his head.
The trader remained in place, persistent, trying to make a sale. My father shook his head again, then turned away, his eyes settling on one of the tile paintings that adorned the opposite wall, the head of a woman wreathed in luscious purple grapes. His eyes lingered on it, the eyelids slightly drooped, the skin wrinkled, but the eyes themselves still luminously blue, the way they’d looked that night as I’d stood, facing him from the third step.
The trader drew a wooden mask from the dark sack. It was crudely carved and sloppily lacquered, a work done without interest and for little pay. He placed it on my father’s table, edging one of the elephants away.
My father didn’t look at the mask, but only waved his hand languidly, refusing once again.
The trader returned the carvings to his bag, then glanced about the tavern, his eyes large and bulging, his black skin nearly blue in the dimly lighted room. He saw no other likely customers and headed for the door.
My father watched him as he walked away, the lavender turban weaving gently through a cloud of thick white smoke. A woman at the adjoining table gave my father a knowing glance, but my father only shrugged and lifted his glass in a faint, halfhearted toast.
As I sat only a few yards from him, I wondered to what it was he might still offer even so weak a toast. Was it to life? To death? Could he toast others, or were they only doll-sized figures on a featureless landscape, things like a wife and children, things he could do without?
It was nearly midnight when he rose suddenly, startling me far more than I had thought possible. I saw him rise and come toward me from the choking, smoke-filled depths of the tavern. He was upon me almost instantly, his shadow moving in a dark gray wave across my table. As he passed, I felt him brush my shoulder. I looked up and saw him glance down at me, nodding quickly, as if in apology, before he suddenly stopped dead and peered at me frozenly. For an instant, I thought he might have recognized me, and I quickly turned away. By the time I looked around again, he’d disappeared.
But he didn’t go far, only a little way down the same narrow street, and into another tavern. It was emptier than the first, and he took a table at the back. I took a table not far away, and watched him more closely, as if afraid that he might vanish once again.
Under the light which hung above him, I could see the dust that had settled upon the shoulders of his jacket. There was dust on his sleeves, as well, and dust on his shoes. As I sat, watching him, I imagined dust in great brown lumps pressing in upon his guts, his lungs, his brain. I imagined his veins thick with dust, a brown mud clogging the valves of his heart. I could even envision a thick, dusty blood pouring from him as I jerked the blade upward, gutting him in one swift thrust.
He leaned back against the wall of the tavern and closed his eyes. I wondered if, at such a moment, he’d ever allowed his mind to return to McDonald Drive. Or did he go there only in a nightmare in which he watched helplessly as a little boy came down the basement stairs, stopped on the third step, and grimly leveled a shotgun at his panicked and unblinking eyes?
His eyes opened suddenly, and I saw that they were aimed at me. He glanced away and didn’t look at me again. His hand lifted to his mouth, brushed against his lips, then drifted back down to his lap.
I could see a torpor in his movements, a languidness which seemed to pull even at the sharp, sudden darting of his eyes. Moments later, when a dark-haired beauty strolled past his table, he didn’t follow her appreciatively, but simply let his eyes drop toward the glass he cradled gently in his right hand. At that moment he seemed quite shy, captured in shyness, almost shrunken, made of straw, himself a weightless miniature.