“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, Buddle, 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.
¡No puedo vivir sin mi vida! ¡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 ed.). “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.)
I slipped after him, so I could find out it wasn’t him but only someone who looked like him with a flat nose or Gorbachev birthmark. Yet, when I reached the aisle of TVs, as if he was in one of his restless, drowsy moods (exactly why he’d never tended the Neptune orchids), he’d drifted out the other end of the aisle, seemingly headed toward Music. I darted back the other way, slipping past the CDs, the cardboard CLEARANCE display of Bo Keith Badley’s “Honky-tonk Hookup,” but, again, when I peered around the FEATURED ARTIST OF THE MONTH sign, he’d already disappeared into the Photo Center.