Dark Water (11 page)

“I have a
le
date,” he said.

Robby was not a person who dated. He was a person who received phone calls from girls and never returned them, not even if they were honor roll, flute-playing girls from Advanced Orchestra class who wanted to practice the “Shepherd’s Lament” for the state competition in Sacramento, and I would have thought he’d like those girls.

“Please tell me it’s not MBF,” I said. I was listening to what I imagined were Amiel’s feet compressing layers of sodden leaves, never turning his face to the car where we sat, his body intent on grove work. I pictured him leaning down to open the water valves, seeing the letter in the plastic bag, picking it up.

Robby said mildly, “Okay. It’s not MBF.”

My mother came rushing out of the cottage with her commuter cup, purse, and keys, and off we went, past the avocado grove, through fog that obliterated people and things. I went to school without knowing whether Amiel had found my letter, but I felt pretty sure it was MBF that Robby was dating and that Robby had moved beyond the comic-book adventures of Tintin and his little dog Snowy into a weird father-son triangle of doom.

The note said these things in Spanish:

I didn’t sign my name but drew a little oyster holding a pearl—a code I’d been using with Greenie since fourth grade.

Midway through first period I became convinced that Esteban would find the letter before Amiel arrived and show it to my uncle. In second period, I imagined my uncle walking through the grove with Amiel to show him some problem or another, and they would get to the water valve and my uncle
would see the bag with the note in it and pick it up. It would look much worse than it was:
nothing to nobody
. As if there was something big to tell.

All the time that I was thinking this and failing to write, correctly, the initials of the noble gases or compare and contrast, coherently, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” with “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Amiel was walking through the cathedrals of the grove, picking one hard green fruit after another, the heavy canvas bag rubbing his shoulder, the mass of it when filled with avocados as heavy and hard as a human body. He was also holding my letter in his back pocket and knowing exactly one more language than I thought he knew.

English.

I
’ve always been suspicious of those who say,
Things happen for a reason
and
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
. Things happen all the time for no reason at all, and what doesn’t kill you scares you witless.

I got a ride home with Hickey that Friday afternoon because my mother had to stay late for a meeting, and tired of being my Siamese twin all week, she said I could go with him. “But you’d better be there when I get home at five,” she said. “With dinner prepared and the house tidied up,” she added.

Hickey and Greenie were going to a movie in Temecula and I was glad, almost, that they had an excuse not to invite me.

“Just drop me here,” I said at the bottom of my uncle’s grove. Hickey didn’t insist, and off they went, leaving me by myself at the fence. The chain link was too high to climb
while wearing a backpack, so I went to the nearest locked gate and took a chance that I knew the combination. That’s how I surprised them.

Two or three Hispanic guys, none I knew by name, were sitting on wooden crates and drinking from paper cups. Not far away was an RV that one of the workers lived in with his wife and two little boys, both of whom were sitting on the steps, watching Amiel. Amiel had drawn a circle in the dirt, and in the center of the circle he was juggling four balls, and the men were saying, “
¡Más! ¡Más!
” and longer words I didn’t understand, though they seemed to be cheering him on. The little boys were smiling, and so was their mother, who stood just inside the open door of the RV.

Amiel bounced the balls on his chest in sequence and caught them one by one, then reached in his pocket. He held out two more balls and bowed, which made the little boys clap madly. The woman noticed me just then, and her gaze made the men turn their heads, and soon everyone, including Amiel, was staring at me.

“Hi,” I said.

“
Hola,
” one of the workers said, and I could feel them all wondering what I was doing here and what I would say to my uncle. It was three-thirty, and I had a general sense that the workday started at seven for everyone, since that’s when it started for Amiel. There wasn’t anything wrong with what they were doing after hours, but I didn’t know how to say that.

One of the men started to pick up his crate and go, but the little boys were shrieking, “
¡Más! ¡Más!
”

Amiel made a gesture to the man, as if to say, “Sit down,” and then he said to me, in a scratchy sort of English, “You can stay.”

That he had spoken was surprising, more so that he spoke English, but that both of these things should be on my behalf filled me with a spreading liquid happiness. I sat down on my backpack and hugged my knees and was permitted to belong where I didn’t belong. He juggled the six balls, and when they asked for
siete
, he juggled seven, then
ocho
, then the high-altitude popcorn explosion of nine. He bowed, and we clapped, and after he stowed the juggling balls in a canvas bag, they thought of more stuff for him to throw: avocados, oranges, and finally, long toy swords that the little boys brought from the house.

“
Ay, los cuchillos,
” one of the men shouted, laughing.

Amiel nodded and slowly, with one eyebrow arched, put one sword between his teeth.

The little boys clapped and the men said, “
Andale,
” which I couldn’t translate, and Amiel juggled the toy blades for a while, throwing them high and catching them by the handles. He never missed, and we clapped, and then the woman started bringing out plates of rice and beef and salsa to us. One of the little boys brought Amiel and me cans of 7UP, but the men, I noticed, all drank beer.

The men talked to each other in Spanish while we ate, which was nice, though I caught nothing more than a few words, and when my watch said it was four-thirty, I stood up.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much. I have to go home and make dinner.”

They nodded, and as I walked away, I could hear them laughing and saying, “
¡Dale un machete! ¡No, DOS machetes!
” I knew what a machete was. I had grown up seeing workers cut branches with them like they were cutting butter, but I thought Amiel could juggle anything, so I didn’t even look back.

I
t was my mother who came to tell me one of the workers had cut his hand on a machete, who first saw Amiel holding his bloody hand on the driveway, and who remembered a doctor in town who did urgent care. While she was wrapping his hand with a towel that I brought, my aunt Agnès came out of her house and called my uncle, who didn’t answer his phone. Despite the blood and glaring sunlight and confusion, I wondered where my uncle was and if he was with Mary Beth.

My aunt decided she would be the one to take Amiel to the doctor since she could speak Spanish as well as French and Italian, and when she opened the door of her immaculate Audi and told Amiel to sit on the leather seats that smelled of Agnès’s musky vanilla Frenchwoman’s perfume, she told me, “You come, too, Pearl. You can help me to find the address.”

My mother couldn’t very well say I was grounded, so I sat
down in the front seat and watched the workers who had sat on boxes during Amiel’s juggling show, and who had evidently brought Amiel to the driveway, hang back with their arms folded. I wondered if they had goaded him into it or if he had wanted to impress them.

All the while the blood was soaking through the towel, and as my aunt was closing Amiel’s door, she gestured for him to hold up his arm and said, “
Arriba del corazón.
” “Above the heart.”

I remember, along with my fear and dread, my determination not to say that he’d been juggling and thereby prove my loyalty to Amiel. We reached at last the plain stucco building, the tinted glass door, the receptionist’s pot of fake flower pens, the smell of cooked onions left over from someone’s lunch, and the tall, skinny doctor taking Amiel right back. Agnès told me to go with Amiel while she arranged things in the front office. Her self-possession, her clothes, and her coldness were all working for us now. Whenever Agnès wanted to say that something was “impressive,” she always said it was “impressing.” That’s what my aunt was, too. Very impressing.

When Amiel reached the white-papered bed in the white-shiny room, he started to faint. I was too far back to help, but the doctor must have thought that could happen because he caught Amiel in both arms. He asked me to help Amiel sit down, and when Amiel opened his eyes and stirred his legs, the doctor was unwinding the towel. Amiel’s right index finger swelled on either side of a deep burgundy gash.

“How’d you do it?” the doctor asked him. He spoke
through a wispy brown mustache and studied Amiel through glasses that emphasized his baldness and fine, wrinkly skin. His voice was quiet and he wore a plaid shirt under his white coat.

I was going to say he was working in an avocado grove when Amiel said, in a low, raspy voice, “Machete.”

“I’m going to have to see how deep it is,” the doctor said. The gash was making me dizzy, and I would have liked to sit down on the floor.

“Why don’t you hold on to his other hand,” the doctor told me, so I took Amiel’s left hand while Amiel looked away and, flinching, unwillingly tightened his grip. I looked away, too, once I saw the raw bone.

“It’s not cut, the bone isn’t,” Dr. Woolcott said. “Still, you messed yourself up pretty good. Are you left-handed?”

Amiel looked confused.

“Do you understand English?”

Amiel nodded.

“I just wondered why you cut the right hand.”

“He’s got an injury to the throat,” I said. “He doesn’t talk much.”

Dr. Woolcott accepted this and went to unwrap a hypodermic needle.

I’ve had stitches before, and I’ve had needles of thick numbing liquid eased into my gums like fiery arrows, but I’ve never had anything done to me like what I saw that day. Amiel held my hand because Dr. Woolcott told him to hold it while the fiery needles of pain were thrust into thin bony places, but then, during the black stitches, Amiel dropped my hand.

“What’s wrong with your voice, son?” Dr. Woolcott asked as he washed his hands afterward.

“
Accidente,
” Amiel whispered, using the Spanish form.

“What kind?”

“Esteering wheel,” Amiel whispered, holding an invisible one with his good hand and showing how it had struck his neck.

“Laryngeal fracture,” the doctor said, nodding to himself. “Where’re you from?”

“México,” Amiel said, the
x
that becomes
h
in Spanish softening further in his voice.

“Well, your hand should work okay when it heals,” the doctor said. “Keep it clean. You’ll need antibiotics and something for the pain.”

My aunt, crisp and efficient in white linen, stood up when we approached the waiting room. She wrote a check from her beautiful wallet and smiled at the receptionist, the doctor, Amiel, and me.

“I pay for,” Amiel told Agnès in the car. “How much?”

My aunt said it wasn’t
necesario
.

Amiel insisted in English, and she refused in Spanish, and then they stopped talking.

We drove through downtown in silence, stopping only at the pharmacy to collect his prescriptions, and I tried to imagine Amiel gripping his handlebars with that swollen, stitch-filled finger as he rode his bicycle home. I was worried, too, about how he would keep a wound clean when he lived without a faucet. I knew I couldn’t tell my aunt Agnès, or anyone
else, that we needed to deliver Amiel to his camp on the river, but I couldn’t stop myself from interfering, either.

“Aunt Agnès?” I said. “Doctor Woolcott said that Amiel shouldn’t be alone for the first forty-eight hours. In case something goes wrong. Also, I don’t think he can ride his bicycle.”

My aunt Agnès trained her elegant eyes on Amiel’s reflection in the mirror.

“
¿Vives solo?
” she asked.

Amiel lied. “No,” he rasped. “
Estoy bien.
”

“
¿Dónde vives?
” she asked, so he told her part of the truth, and when we came to Willow Glen, she guided the smooth ginger car down through the narrow corkscrew of the canyon, gliding to the oak-dappled river, down, down, down, as the air-conditioning softly buffeted my face. She told Amiel, in her Spanish, something about her
esposo
, which even I knew to be “husband,” and his
bicicleta
. Hoyt would bring the bicycle, I assumed, but where would he leave it? I didn’t know.

We reached the bright emptiness of the dead end, where the aloe field lay in pale green stripes. Seven rusty mailboxes stood openmouthed in the heat. I couldn’t help seeing them as Agnès did: she believed American mailboxes were disgraceful, worse even than our clothes. At the far eastern edge of the aloe field, you could see a little blue house, quaintly square like a playhouse or a shed, and beyond that, on a ridge, a trim yellow cottage.

My aunt was driving very slowly now, uncertain where to turn.

“
¿Dónde?
” she asked again, and Amiel clicked open his seat belt.

“
Aquí,
” he whispered.

Agnès stopped the car, and the engine ticked expensively at our feet. The sky was the color of birds’ eggs and the river trees were green ink.

“
Gracias,
” I could barely hear him say, and I wondered if it hurt to speak or if he just found it difficult.

“
De nada,
” my aunt said, her expression confused. “I could take you all ways to your house,” she said, bending her head slightly so that she could look through the windshield at the yellow house on the ridge.