HOW YOU DO STOP NICE DAY STOP WHERE IS HOSE STOP
Every Monday and Thursday at four o’clock, I’d procrastinate working on my French compositions or Algebra III and spy on him working, though most of the time he didn’t work so much as hang out, chill, loiter, loaf, enjoy a laid-back cigarette in a scarce patch of sun. (He always threw the stub in a clandestine place, tossing it behind a bromeliad or into a dense section of bamboo without even making sure it was extinguished.) Andreo really only started working two to three hours after his arrival, when Dad came home from the university. With an array of showy gestures (heavy panting, wiping his brow), he’d then push the lawnmower ineffectively along the forest floor, or prop up the wooden stepladder on the side of the house in a futile attempt to hack back the canopy. My favorite observation was when Andreo muttered to himself in Spanish after Dad confronted him, demanding to know exactly why the knotted liana was still creating a Greenhouse Effect on the back porch, or why a brand new crop of strangler figs now lined the back of our property.
One afternoon I made sure I was in the kitchen when Andreo slipped inside to steal one of my orange push pops from the freezer. He looked at me shyly and then smiled, revealing crooked teeth.
YOU DON’T MIND STOP I EAT STOP BAD BACK STOP
In the Howard Country Day library during lunch, I consulted Spanish textbooks and dictionaries and taught myself what I could.
Me llamo Azul.
My name is Blue.
El jardinero, Mellors, es una persona muy curiosa.
The gamekeeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person.
¿Quiere usted seducirme? ¿Es eso que usted quiere decirme?
Would you like me to seduce you? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?
¡Nelly, soy Heathcliff!
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 ¡Hola! 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 nightplum 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 sorpresa!). 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
“Usted va a estar bien,” 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.