Читать книгу A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son - Sergio Troncoso - Страница 9

NEW ENGLANDER

David smashed the sledgehammer onto the logs from his woodpile. The logs fell like small torsos on the black asphalt of his driveway. Each blow split a log in half, or jammed the heavy black iron wedge deeper into the oak with a groaning crack. His body and mind seemed to sing as he worked. His hands trembled. Even in the autumn chill of early November, sweat dripped behind his ears and released little shivers up his neck. His heart thumped inside his chest. Mid-swing, David sometimes imagined a bobcat lunging at his throat or a black bear rearing on its hind legs behind him. The trunk of a dead maple not far from his backyard was deeply scratched by a bear. Those scratches were at least three years old. In the forest, he and Jean spotted the “bear maple” the first month after they bought the nine-acre property in Kent, Connecticut.

This was David’s first house, thousands of miles from his birthplace in the American Southwest.

Two hours before, Jean had driven to the Costco in Danbury to get ready for Thanksgiving. The boys would be coming back from college, for the first time with their girlfriends. The plan was to go hiking at Mt. Tom’s State Park. Fifty-five-year-old David liked to hike even steep climbs. He was in good shape for an old guy. He promised himself he would be a good sport and allow his sons to stay in their rooms with their girlfriends and give them privacy. Last week, he had bought new Bemis toilet seats at Home Depot and threw out the cheap soft vinyl ones at the Kent Transfer Station.

As he split more logs, David remembered and was astonished that he had been only a year older than his youngest son when he and Jean met junior year at Harvard. After a few dates, David was shocked when Jean so casually invited him to her room. That startling impression never left him: the easy relationship with her body, that hopeful smile she flashed at him, her big blue eyes asking but not asking. David was a poor Mexican-American kid with a Torquemada Mexican mother from Chihuahua and a father who embraced a mixture of socialism and Catholicism. David shuddered to think what his parents would have done to him if they had discovered him with a girl in his room at home in dusty Ysleta. For many years he felt weird and defective in the Northeast.

It was Jean who helped him believe in himself. It took years of Jean loving him—this still svelte and gracious woman—for David to abandon his self-hate. After graduate school, Jean pursuing him and knowing exactly what she wanted, they married in Massachusetts. When Jean was diagnosed with breast cancer, the children toddlers, they fought together to survive. David bestowed upon her the toughness she loved in him. She in turn gave him enough love to make him whole, despite his in-laws, who feared he would whisk Jean of Concord back to El Paso. But why would that thought ever cross his mind, to go backward in his life, instead of forward, to leave this forest that woke every sense in his body? Connecticut was where he belonged now.

A scholarship boy at Harvard, David leaped beyond his father’s construction projects on the Mexican-American border to become a professor at Rutgers just outside of New York City. After decades in a co-op on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, David and Jean leaped again, beyond the City, escaping to an early retirement in Kent, to gardening and chopping wood and occasionally visiting friends after a night at Lincoln Center. David Calderon, a North Face jacket over a flannel shirt, lugging the cut logs into his four-bedroom Colonial, was now a New Englander. An avid reader of Emerson as well as Borges. A weekend craftsman who could just as easily fumigate his basement as affix a bright new American flag to the frame above his forest green front door. David had traveled a long road to Kent. Still, there was so much to do, so many more books to read, and so many more days and nights with Jean.

David picked up the last load of logs from the driveway. Panting puffs of little clouds around his head, he half-stumbled into the garage to place the logs in the black metal firewood rack Jean had bought for him from L.L. Bean. As he bent down to pick up the metal wedge and sledgehammer, he noticed a lone figure walking up his long driveway, a small gravel road just less than a fifth of a mile off Route 341. That was a feature of this house David loved: it was hidden from the main road amidst the trees, and nestled deeply in a valley of hundreds of acres of gently sloping hills. But during heavy winter snowstorms, he did not like paying $80 each time his Brazilian landscaper plowed his driveway. And Jean did not like the occasional feeling of isolation.

In Kent, Jean’s visits to the True Value Hardware store for milorganite, the Davis IGA for groceries, and the small town library—all of this reminded her of growing up in Concord. A top-notch Belgium chocolatier at the town center turned this small New England town into a jewel.

David marched quickly into the garage to place the wedge on a work shelf and the sledgehammer in the corner where he kept his growing stockpile of tools, the chipper/shredder from his in-laws, a Husqvarna chainsaw, a new weed-wacker. He walked out to meet the stranger coming up the driveway, but the man was already waiting for him on the black asphalt in front of the garage.

“Get the fuck back in the garage,” the stranger growled in a gravelly voice.

David’s smile drained away. He focused on the short, unkempt red hair, the steely blue eyes, and the unshaven nubs on the man’s face. He saw a powerful forearm, a tattoo, and a hand gripping a shiny black handgun pointed at David’s chest. “Are you fuckin’ stupid? Get the fuck in the garage, unless you want me to drop you right here.”

“Just take whatever you want.” Get him out of here. Get him away from you.

“Shut up and close the garage door. Now!”

The garage door sputtered closed with its electronic drone. Instead of a buffer between him and the animals, snow, wind, or sheets of rain, the shut door felt like a sealed tomb. David’s heart drummed faster, not tired anymore, adrenalin coursing through his blood and muscles. Wild thoughts spun through his head. Should he lunge at this man and try to yank the gun away? This crazy looked like a hardened townie, wiry, stinking of cigarette smoke and alcohol, his jeans ripped at the knees, what his father would have admiringly called an obrero, a worker. He had a slight Scottish or Irish accent. He was someone you might see at a construction site with a stack of rebars on his shoulders, and certainly not someone with the slightest bit of bluff. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to try to overpower this man, at least not now.

“Get in the house and shut the door.”

“Please just take whatever you want. I’ll help you carry it. Take my wallet, it’s in the kitchen.”

“Sit down and shut the fuck up,” the man said, as he yanked bills from David’s wallet and stuffed them in his jeans. As David stared at the intruder, he thought the man looked like Cormac McCarthy, one of his favorite authors, who was also from El Paso, except this man was thinner, his face more angular, but with that same wide forehead, the arms thick and tanned and freckled, the torso muscular and lean. It was the body of a man who might routinely go hungry for a day or two. David had once been like that at Ysleta High School, more lanky than chubby, but years of college and graduate school and working as a professor had softened David and left him with a slight paunch, an easy smile on his face, and the touch of gray at his temples—the looks of a distinguished older man.

The intruder stared out the window to the backyard, stepped to one side of the kitchen, and glanced out the front window of the cranberry red dining room.

“Please, just leave me alone. My name is David, and I live alone here. Please, take whatever you want.” David thought about how victims should become people to their tormentors, not abstractions. He remembered he had read that in the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday New York Times. He thought: instead of becoming a thing, become a someone. David needed to keep talking to this man.

“Oh yeah, fuckin’ David, so who the fuck is that on the mantel, your girlfriend?” the man said icily, glancing out the dining room window again. “No car, so whaddya do, walk the four fuckin’ miles for groceries into Kent? If you lie to me again, you asshole, I’ll put a bullet through your skull.” Through the open window above the kitchen sink, David heard a siren approaching from the west on 341, a rarity on these country roads. In a few seconds the siren faded and suddenly stopped in the direction of Warren, the next town to the east. A helicopter’s earth-shaking roar reverberated overhead and faded toward Huckleberry Hill. Were state troopers already hunting for this man? The town of Kent was so small, it could afford only one resident trooper, but the Litchfield barracks were not far away. Why did this man keep checking the front windows?

“Please leave us alone. Take whatever you want.” David thought about Jean. How long would she be gone? He could not allow Jean to walk into this danger. He didn’t care what happened to him as long as Jean survived, as long as she was never hurt.

“What’s in the back over there?”

“A creek that leads to Lake Waramaug, I think. Over that ridge is another pond. A small road’s on the other side of the pond, and it leads to the lake.”

“Get me a fuckin’ jacket as good as what you have on. Gloves, boots like yours, a hat.” At once David stopped staring at the black gun in the man’s hand or at his rough-hewn, pockmarked face, and noticed that this man was not wearing a coat and that he had sneakers for shoes. David walked to their mudroom, with a corner of his eye always on the gun behind him, which seemed to float in the air with a life of its own. David handed the man a pair of new Timberland hiking boots he had recently bought at the Sun Dog in Kent, the shoe shop for the scraggly and smelly through-hikers who emerged from the Appalachian Trail alongside the Housatonic River. David slipped off his jacket and handed it to him as well. He thought about El Paso and his mother and father. He thought about his boys, Matthew and Henry. He thought about Jean Catherine. He loved her more than anything else in the world. Whatever happened today, Jean had already saved him. This moron could never take that away. David could not allow this man to hurt Jean.

“Hey, asshole, you’re gonna need one too,” the intruder said, cracking a crooked smile as he slipped his arms into David’s North Face jacket and zipped it up. The man glanced again at the long gravel driveway. It was still empty.

“Please, mister, you don’t need me. Just take whatever you want. I love my wife. I love my children. You don’t need me. I don’t know what trouble you’re in. But—”

“Hey, fuckhead,” the man sneered in David’s face, jamming the gun into David’s chest. For a moment David thought about grabbing it, trying to grab it, but he didn’t. “You don’t want a jacket, then step the fuck out, and let’s take a walk.” The man shoved David into the living room facing the backyard, kicked him in the ass toward the patio glass doors, and shoved him into the doors before David could slide them open. David’s face slammed against the metal frame. His brow was bleeding. For a second he saw stars in front of him as he stumbled onto the wooden deck.

“Over there. We’re headin’ down there.” The man waved his gun toward the little creek, where David had always imagined the bear roamed. The rocky ledges formed small caves with the half-exposed roots of gigantic maples and oaks. They slowly descended the rough stone stairs his Brazilian landscaper had created with a forklift upending the earth and shoving massive stones into the side of the slope toward the creek. Jean had admired the landscaper’s ingenuity. They had originally just asked the landscaper to create an open path to the creek, but he had presented them with the handiwork of these stairs that seemed to have existed in the Litchfield forest for centuries. David took one last look at his house, at what he had worked so hard to achieve, at how he imagined his family would suffer inside that house, at how everything would change forever for his boys, once their father’s body was discovered in the forest. A tear burned across David’s face.

What did this man want from him? They marched alongside the creek, over and around dead logs and meandering channels of water, deeper into a primordial valley of nature’s matter. Sun-bright yellow and cinnamon-colored leaves covered the uneven, muddy floor. Oaks and maples and birches hovered overhead in the spectacle of a New England fall, a fluttery, animate ceiling. Would this man kill him? David had never seen him before, but that didn’t matter one way or the other now. This man, David imagined, breathing hard, was being chased by the police. He was running away. Was David a hostage to keep the police at bay? Should he refuse to go on? Why did this man need him? If he stopped, if David refused to take another step, he would die. But if they lost themselves deeper in the valley toward Lake Waramaug, away from the house, what would stop this lunatic from killing David anyway? What would stop him from eliminating the only witness to his escape?

“Hey, keep movin’!”

“I’m not going anywhere. You don’t need me. Please leave me alone. You’re free. Just leave me alone.”

“Did I tell you to stop? You fuckin’ disobeying me, asshole spic?” the man shouted at David’s face, shoving the gun barrel into his chest again. “Think I can’t guess what the fuck you are? Dominican, Puerto Rican piece-of-shit.” David imagined he was quick enough to snatch the gun from the man’s hand, quick enough to grab the hand with the gun in it and give himself a chance. But the moment came and went, and the man stepped back, grinning, raised the gun, and pointed it at David’s head. “Start movin’ or I’m putting a bullet in your skull.”

“No, please leave me alone. You’re free. Please just go. I haven’t done anything to you. I don’t know who you are. You can go in any direction from here. I won’t be able to tell anybody where you went. There’s five hundred acres of forest all around us.” A sudden revelation flashed through David’s mind: if this man shoots me, they will hear him.

Suddenly, something hard—the barrel or the handle of the gun, David did not quite see what—smashed into his face. A piercing, blinding pain erupted in his head. Blood gushed into his ear, across one eye, and he raised his hands instinctively to protect himself. Another blow came from the other side, with a savage kick to his stomach. David collapsed next to the creek. He clenched his fists, and a horrible, wild anger seized him even as another punch landed against his neck and more blows rained on his head. Stunned and half-blinded, David instinctually grabbed a hand—it didn’t have the gun—and he wrestled with the man who still smashed the black gun barrel repeatedly onto David’s head and shoulders. David was on his knees, and the man struggled to break free of David’s grip. At once David grabbed a thigh, and like a savage bull, shoved his head and shoulders into the man’s stomach. David and the man crashed on top of a pile of leaves hiding an upended tree stump. The man unleashed a guttural scream. David stumbled on top of him and lunged for the hand with the gun. Blood dripped from his face. For a second, he glimpsed the blue flames of the man’s eyes, blinking, as splashes of David’s blood fell on the man’s cheeks. David gripped the gun with all his power, pushing the barrel away from him. He would die if he let go of the gun.

The man kneed David’s back from behind, shoving his face with one hand. David struggled to stay on top of him and gripped the hand with the gun so tightly his knuckles whitened. He fended off the man’s punches and grabbed the man’s neck with his free hand. The gun exploded. The bullet missed both of them. They rolled on the ground, trying to grab control of the gun. With both hands, David finally pried the man’s fingers off the gun. His back felt as if a vat of acid had been poured on it. The knees against his spine were like hammer blows. A flash of white light blinded him. Like a rabid animal, David bit the man’s fingers, bit into the forearm with the tattoo—the man shrieked—and David yanked away the gun and flung it into the creek. The man twisted his head to find where the gun had landed, but he looked the wrong way and had not seen the gun sink into the creek’s mud. David punched the man’s face, punched until his fists and wrists cracked with pain, punched blindly as he felt the man’s fingernails ripping the skin off his cheeks. The man’s legs still kicked David’s back, but weakly; he struggled underneath David’s weight. David pinned him with his knees and thighs. He grabbed a log and smashed it onto the man’s forehead, raised it and brought it down again, like a giant rolling pin, onto the man’s face until the man’s legs stopped kicking, until the man’s hands dropped listlessly to the ground, away from David’s face. Until the man was just a pulpy red mess of blood, eyes, and teeth.

David, gasping for air, collapsed next to his attacker. Blood was smeared on the dead leaves on the ground; blood covered the North Face jacket the man was wearing. David’s yellow Oxford shirt was soaked in blood. Gurgling noises emanated from the man’s broken nose. Little bubbles of white spume ran down his cheeks. Rivulets of blood dripped from David’s head, onto his neck, into his ears, and for a moment he imagined it was raining blood. His face stung as if it had been whipped.

He stood up shakily. The man was still motionless on the ground. Bubbles had stopped popping from the man’s nose. The man’s chest stopped heaving in spasms. David tried to step away, but half-stumbled into the creek and its mossy and slippery banks. Where did the creek begin and where lay solid ground?

David’s knee collapsed under his weight, and he could not move it. Maybe it was broken. He couldn’t straighten out his back either, and he rolled onto the leaves again. The man was a few feet away, motionless. David didn’t want to faint there, in the middle of nowhere. He closed his eyes and clenched his fists and stood up again, the rage in his brain burning through his pain, snapping his teeth onto nothing but air. Suddenly the world darkened for a few seconds. David wondered if had heard a noise behind him, a rustling in the leaves, a grunt. He imagined a bear, that bear, about to eat him. But nothing happened as he waited on one knee like a statue, for what seemed hours, waited for that black snout to puncture the skin on his neck or yank off the meat on his thigh, waited for the man to get up, like a lunatic Lazarus, and attack him again. For a moment, as David stared at the panoply of leaves again, away from the blood, he thought of Treebeard of Entwood from Lord of the Rings, his favorite book as a teenager. David imagined a giant branchhand scooping him up and carrying him back home. He imagined the shadowy solitude of Thoreau’s cabin. He imagined a black snout, his snout, clashing teeth against other teeth and ripping into a fleshy tongue. But in the next second, the blackness of the forest engulfed him. David passed out and fell face-first onto the muddy ground.

After a few minutes, David woke up with a harsh stinging in his left eye, and again turned his head toward his attacker. The man was not moving. Indeed, a few leaves had settled onto the man’s chest and legs, his body already being claimed by the Litchfield forest. David lifted his shoulders off the ground, with wrists that stung with needle pricks of pain. An unbelievable agony, as if a branding iron had been thrust into his lower back, raced through his body. He could not stand up. After a few more tries in which he succeeded in lifting his torso only a few inches higher than the first time, David noticed his right leg was numb. Was his back broken too? Would he die next to this creek, one hundred feet from his house? David was crippled from the waist down. He raised himself off the ground. Hs arms, although stronger after three years of chopping wood, trembled after a few minutes of exertion. He dragged himself through the forest.

As he slowly inched away from the man and the mass of bloody leaves, David noticed how the world had shrunk to the few feet around him. To the leaves against his back as he hauled himself over the wet earth. To the branches he shoved aside, or the rocks too heavy to roll or lift away from his path along the creek. Water and mud crept into his pants, what was left of his pants. A warm, persistent trickle of blood dripped from the back of his right ear, as if the creek next to him existed also on his head. Certain jerks and shoves of his arms and torso, and an occasional kick from his semi-good leg underneath him, did not elicit the gasp-inducing hurt that shocked his heart. Only when he became impatient, when he attempted to drag himself more than a few inches at a time, or when his head, mistakenly, convinced him he could stand again and stop this torturous micro-movement, did he hurt himself so awfully he had to lie flat on the mud, close his eyes, and recapture his breathing before it fluttered away. Eres muy terco, David heard in his head, his Mexican mother’s admonishing, yet admiring voice. Eres demasiado terco, niño. You are an unbelievably stubborn child.

David dragged himself along the creek. Occasionally he would hear his mother in his head, but more frequently David would hear his dead father. David remembered his father’s stories about being thrown out of the house in Mexico, at eighteen years of age, with a handshake and only twenty dollars because his grandfather had wanted to make a man out of his son. David’s father had often recounted these stories after he sneered at David for his weaknesses as a boy, for loving books and wanting to go to college in the Northeast and expecting financial help, for complaining about working construction for his father for no pay. David remembered how bitterly angry he had felt toward his father, even though his father had often acquiesced to pleas from David’s mother not to turn every Calderon into an obrero. His father, too, had always mailed David checks to help him in college, despite the complaints.

Even if David had not been angry at his father anymore, he had also never forgiven him. For making him feel guilty. For the insults, obvious and imagined. For not ever openly congratulating David on how much he had achieved. Before David’s father died, the father and son had hardly spoken to each other beyond the perfunctory “hellos” and “goodbyes” of an Ysleta Christmas, when David and Jean Catherine returned to his boyhood home in El Paso.

David could see, just around a heavy outcropping of black slate and tree roots, a glimpse of the Brazilian’s stone stairs that led up to the backyard of his house. He pushed and pulled his body with all his might, imagined he had moved significantly, but then realized he had traveled perhaps a few feet in fifteen minutes. David’s head was also woozy. White flashes erupted in front of his face. He blacked out again, only to find himself face-up, staring at the trees, a yellow leaf wafting toward his eyes. His numb leg, he noticed, had ballooned inside his pants. The thumping in his heart seemed to have picked up permanent speed.

David hallucinated about chickens, about carrying them in New England, two crazed chickens in each hand. This was the first job on a rancho near the Rio Grande his parents bestowed upon him as a twelve-year-old. Chickens stabbing at his thighs, chickens shitting in mid-air and on his sneakers, chickens pecking his eyes out, chickens disemboweling him, hungry for his liver, digging for his kidneys… David imagined swinging a sledgehammer again and again to obliterate another wall, trapped in a gigantic maze of his father’s walls, carrying cinderblock after cinderblock until he dropped to his knees—glimpses of his father shaking his head at him and David the teenager with a murderous rage against all the blackness in front of him—working, working, working beyond exhaustion. Eres demasiado terco.

As David dragged himself through the forest underbrush, his mind incanted what seemed like a prayer. My father. My sons. Can’t give up. Will not. God, please help me. Jean Catherine, find me. My father. My sons. Can’t give up, goddamnit. Help me, please. Fight. Will not pass out. Another foot. Keep going, one more. Up these stairs, el gran Pelé at Maracaña. Fight. Dear God. Goddamn Pilgrims. Fuckin’ Aztecs. This earth will not defeat me.

His body half on the first two stone steps to his yard, David vomited onto his bloody shirt and over the stone step scraping his elbow. A blinding white light of pain obliterated his mind. His swollen right leg was twisted in front of him, a useless husk. He passed out for a moment again, in a heavy sweat. When he opened his eyes, David thought he heard another rustle in the brush below him, near the ferns and hostas around the creek. Can’t give up. Keep going. Fuck. Goddamnit, just keep going. David dragged himself up another step and then another, his body now draped on the final stone step. He was panting. Leaves swayed above him. He could see the sun and had the sensation he was underwater. He had pissed in his pants, and blood covered his legs and shirt and face. He imagined the wild thumping inside his chest could only go for so long before his heart exploded into pieces as he lay half on the grass of his backyard and half on the sharp corner of that final step, imagining a sea red with blood, imagining he was like a sculpture sinking to a bottomless pit beyond the sun above him. The trees. He could still see a few yellowish green leaves swaying in the wind. In the wind, a droning. The garage’s door. Can’t give up. Keep going. My father. My sons. Jean Catherine…