Any Deadly Thing

by Roy Kesey

  Paul clicks through half a dozen shots, and promises to send plenty of copies. A splash of rakija is poured into each glass. After a toast to family the meal starts. Everyone takes the meat in their hands. There isn’t much talk. Soon the lamb is gone, and the salad and potato dumplings, and all that’s left is wine.

  Asunción

  IT IS A BEAUTIFUL CITY: flowering jacarandas, old yellow streetcars, Sunday afternoons in the plaza rich with heat and birdsong. It is also an excellent city in which to be mugged. By this I mean that on the whole the muggers here are extremely inefficient.

  I have been the intended victim of five attempted muggings thus far during my three years in Asunción. Though my Spanish is perfect and most of my clothes are made locally, muggers note my pale skin and the lack of grace in my straight-backed walk, and they know immediately that I was born elsewhere, in a country where salaries are high and jobs are plentiful, where the streets are swept and the air is clean. Do they resent this? Do they rage at my good fortune? I don’t believe they do. I believe their only thought is this: here is another foreigner, another soft victim.

  Blanco—it means both Caucasian and target, among other things. But there is a difference between spotting a target and hitting one. I have never been mugged successfully because I am far stronger than I appear, and because I am not afraid.

  They do not like confrontation of any kind, these criminals. When they work in groups it is generally in groups of four. Two thieves will start an argument in front of you to distract your attention, a third will push you from behind, and a fourth will tug violently at your purse or briefcase. If you do not let go, they will often scatter.

  Of course there is also the possibility that they will stand their ground and puff out their chests and demand that you give them what they have tried and failed to rip from your hands. In this case, you should puff out your chest as well. If you do, they will most likely slink away—slinking, it is precisely what they do, the slinking of dogs that have been kicked—and you will be left alone, sweaty and victorious.

  But of those few who do not run at the first sign of confrontation, there is a small percentage who will likewise not slink away once you have puffed out your chest. Instead they will smile. When you meet a mugger such as this, you must swing as hard as you can and you must pray not to miss. If you miss he will pull a knife from his belt, will stab you in the chest, will kill you. That is the only rule.

  I detest all muggers, but there is a constant roil inside of me, the struggle between acid and base, perhaps, the latter seeking to neutralize, the former to overwhelm: I was taught as a child to love the sinner and hate the sin. I have never been successful at this, but now at least I know that it is possible. This last scenario, wherein you are accosted by one of the very few muggers who smile and do not run, it is how I met the latest great love of my life.

  I was only a few blocks from home, striding back from a job through the dense summer dusk, the heat at last relenting. A young woman was twenty or thirty yards ahead of me, walking in the same direction, and the moment I saw her I began to speed up. It was not that I wanted to speak to her, to compliment her eyes or her smile, to undress her slowly and spread her across my bed. I wanted only to be close to her for a moment. This is something I have felt so many times, man or woman or child, it is all the same, the need to be close. Sometimes it is all that one requires.

  This was not the first time I had seen the young woman. That night she was dressed neither poorly nor well, but cleanly: pressed black trousers, smooth white blouse, low black heels that clicked as she walked. She smelled of jasmine and moved through her own quiet music as I closed in.

  Then he came from the side, he was slender and lithe, and he went for her purse but she held to it just long enough for me to reach them. I shoved him in the back, and he sprawled. She gaped at me, her mouth ever so slightly open.

  –Just go, I said. Go now, go quickly, fly.

  She nodded, turned away, turned back. The thief was getting to his feet. I stepped toward him and he raised both hands. The woman turned away again and started walking, faster and faster until she disappeared around the far corner.

  If the man had gone after her, he could have caught her in the space of two or three blocks. I would have followed, would have arrived soon enough. But he did not pursue her, not at all. Instead he squared his shoulders and puffed out his chest.

  –Your wallet, he said.

  I puffed out my chest as well, and he smiled. It was a beautiful smile. I knew that it was time, time to swing as hard as I could, praying not to miss. As long as I didn’t miss, one punch would have been sufficient. But his smile was so beautiful.

  There was movement, one hand flitting to his belt, still the smile, still I could not swing, the smile, my hands at my sides, but something failed, something caught, he pulled and tugged, his smile waned and I was free of him. I set my feet and drew back my fist, something flashed at his belt and I swung, the blow starting in the strength of my legs, surging up through my back and chest, through my shoulder and arm and into my fist, his hand was rising and again the flash as I hit him and he flurried and collapsed facedown across the curb.

  I waited for him to rise, but he did not. His body trembled in that low light. There was a farther movement then, and I looked up, saw the young woman standing at the corner. I motioned, and my motion was unclear even to me, it meant for her to stay or to go, I have no idea.

  When she disappeared again I stepped to the mugger and flipped him over, thinking to kick him in the face, to show him that mugging is wrong, that it makes an already hard world still harder. As he slumped onto his back I saw his hands held tightly to his stomach. I saw the blood that bubbled up through his fingers. I saw that what had flashed at his belt was a knife now buried to the hilt in his abdomen.

  I bent over him, the knife, his thin chest heaving, his kind and delicate face. One of his eyes was swollen nearly shut, and there were scrapes across his forehead, a gash at one temple. I could have walked away and been done with it, but he looked up at me and smiled again, that smile. His one open eye was a wonder, long black lashes, a warmth of brown. And at that moment I began to believe he could be taught, to hope he could be saved.

  Rafael is his name. We were very fortunate: his airway was clear, his breathing shallow but unlabored, and though his last act before losing consciousness was to pull the knife out, the bleeding was not excessive. I sealed the wound with the flat side of a credit card, held it tight as I carried him to my apartment and set him on my bed.

  I removed his shirt and trousers, ran gauze thick across the cut, covered the dressing with a towel taped in place. I used pillows to elevate his legs, and lay a blanket across his body. I hurried to a pharmacy, and now we were lucky to be in his country rather than my own. Here, prescriptions are rarely requested and never required—certainly not for antiseptic cream and skin adhesive, not for antibiotics, not even for narcotics and sedatives.

  Home again, I rinsed and cleansed and closed the wound. He woke as I was putting a new dressing in place. I explained what had occurred, bathed his scrapes, daubed cream on the smaller cuts. I confirmed that his tetanus vaccination was up to date, gave him antibiotics and pain medication, told him precisely what would happen if he were not very careful in the near future. He nodded, and went unconscious, or perhaps only to sleep.

  At first I fed him only liquids, then my own meals blended until smooth. I brought him cups of warm herbal tea whenever he complained of thirst. I changed his dressing twice daily and attended to the wound’s debridement. I noticed that the ringing of the telephone often disturbed his rest, so I had it disconnected. And on the morning of the third day, as he lay sleeping I called a locksmith, who came and put locks on the windows, the interior doors, the kitchen drawers.

  I try to think only the best of the people I meet, but there is no sense in taking unnecessary risks.

  I sat with Rafael each afternoon as heat richened the air and the cit
y went still. I tried to amuse him with stories of scandal in Brussels and Baghdad, Bombay and Buenos Aires. Always he turned his face away.

  Then for nearly a week a fever came and went. Hallucinations took him, and he sobbed in Guaraní. When he woke from his frothing fear I asked what he’d seen. He claimed not to remember. Slowly I cured him, and he began to reveal himself to me, but his stories came in fragments—the name of a cousin he hadn’t seen in years, the title of a book his mother had once read aloud.

  Through all of this, the fever and shards of past, each dressing I removed was cleaner than the one before. There came a day when the tape peeled back from his smooth brown hairless skin, and the dressing was as white as when I had applied it. We had a small celebration: champagne, strawberries, candles. Our first kiss. He struggled against it, but not, I think, with much conviction.

  A few days later he tried to escape. My downstairs neighbors called me at work to say that it sounded as though some kind of animal were trapped in my apartment. I came home to find claw marks on the inside of the bedroom door, a broken window, blood smeared along the ledge to where he sat staring at the street twenty stories below, paralyzed with fear at the height. I repaired the window, painted the door, and punched him once, as hard as I could. Then I kissed him, his forehead and cheeks and eyelids, his soft and bloody mouth.

  It is difficult to know how much is enough. For a week I kept him bound and gagged in my bedroom. The neighbors complained once or twice of thudding sounds coming through their ceiling, but I calmed them with stories of construction.

  The last few days of that week there were no more complaints, and from the depth and gentleness of his gaze each time I entered the bedroom, I came to believe that he understood. I removed the gag, unbound his feet and hands, massaged his wrists and ankles. I told him of my apartment’s many comforts, and promised he would learn them all.

  The following day a cough took hold in his chest. I went back to the pharmacy for decongestants and more antibiotics. The cough grew hollow and deep, bronchitis or pneumonia. It was almost a month before he was healthy again, and in that time I grew ever more certain I could trust him and his love for me. Sponge bath and hot compress, mentholatum and lemon tea, and bit by bit he told me all I wished to know. His home in Bahía Negra on the bank of the Lateriquique, and the brothers and sisters he’d left there. The fortune he’d come looking for and now knew he’d never find. The garbage he pawed through for food, the bridges under which he slept, the alleys where he laid in wait.

  He told me so much, and when the sickness burned itself out, I gave him keys to all the doors of the apartment. He had earned them, I thought. That evening I came home to find him waiting on the living-room sofa. He presented me with gifts: a gold watch and a beautiful leather briefcase. They were stolen, of course, and I beat him unconscious. There is no point in making a hard world still harder.

  We had no further problems for the next several days, and on Sunday afternoon I took him to the plaza. We watched the old men sipping their tea, the ornate cages at their feet filled with canaries and finches. Rafael begged me to buy him a songbird, and I let him choose. The old man set an unreasonable price, but was not difficult to persuade, and Rafael and I walked slowly home, carrying the cage between us.

  Though the canary was a female, Rafael insisted on naming her Teodoro. He cared for her with great tenderness, and she sang splendidly. When I returned from a job four days ago, I found him leaning over her cage, whistling something pleasantly serene, a folksong of some kind, perhaps in the hope that she would learn it.

  I came to stand beside him, asked if the words to the song were in Spanish or Guaraní, and Rafael turned, kissed my mouth, held me. He drew back and something flashed at his belt and this time I was not quick enough. Love slowed me, I believe. The knife hit me where his knife had hit him on the day we met, or very nearly so. He must have spent hours sharpening the blade, or it would not have slipped in with such grace, such warmth.

  I have been lying on the couch since then. The pain is only a nuisance. Far more troubling is the manner in which Rafael left me. As I slid down the wall he kissed me again, the softest kiss. He drew my wrist to his face and kissed my hand. He stepped over me, and walked to the door. Do you see? Instead of setting Teodoro free, he left her caged, and in so doing sent me a message. But what does the message mean? There is precisely one way to find out.

  Rafael should not be too hard to find. As soon as I am well I will begin my search for him, in the alleys and under the bridges. If he has left Asunción I shall track him, to Esteros or Villarica, to Horqueta or back to Bahía Negra. He may even have left the country: Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina. It will make little difference.

  I will find him lying in a hammock beside a slow jungle stream, wild parrots eating guava from his hand; or in a shack above the treeline in the mountains, rain thrashing at the roof; or in a small dirty house on the outskirts of some major city, cinderblock walls, a poster of the Virgin curling up at the corners. I will find him and take him in my arms. I will trace his lips with my fingertips. I will teach him the indefatigable strength of love, the rippling force of forgiveness.

  Wall

  ERNIE PUTS THE TWO backpacks in the trunk, takes off his gloves and tosses them in too—it’s not quite as cold today. He smiles at Lauren as she comes down the stairs, waits for her to get in. And now they’re off, slowly, the car balking its way up the bike lane as the engine warms up.

  –Fast as a herd of turtles, he says.

  She looks at him.

  –A herd, he says. Of turtles.

  Her mouth smiles, and he nods. He’s got the conversation penciled in for either the highest tower they reach or the slow walk back down the Great Wall. For the car trip itself there’s a stack of new CDs; his original plan called for Guatemalan folk music but he hadn’t been able to find any, had settled instead for the alt-rock they’d listened to in law school. There isn’t much talking, just listening, and occasional hand-squeezes.

  It would be nice if their map corresponded to the world a little more often, but they make good time all the same: the expressway northeast out of Beijing past the turnoffs for ritzy villas, past factories and through winter-burned fields, off onto smaller curvier roads through empty orchards. At one point there are sheep in a field, and Lauren smirks. She doesn’t say it out loud but Ernie’s heard it before—fucking sheep. He shrugs as if in answer, and she looks at him funny.

  –All righty, he says.

  And she looks at him even funnier.

  Guatemala: Lauren was there on a grant, doing research on sustainable agriculture, and Ernie was just dorking around after college. He’d started with a couple of weeks in Mexico, then south across the border, Quetzaltenango and Antigua, a day in Guatemala City and northeast to the coast. In Puerto Barrios he stayed at the old Tarzan hotel, sat in the massive dining room each night, him and a thousand mosquitoes and sixteen waiters in dirty white tuxedos until he couldn’t take it anymore and boarded the ferry to Livingston.

  He’d never been on the Caribbean before, and decided he liked it plenty. Weird vibe, though. As poor as anywhere else he’d seen—flies and roaches, dirt floors and iffy plumbing—but all the kids had nice mountain bikes and hundred-dollar sneakers.

  One night he went into a pizza place, saw a cute gringa crying her eyes out alone in a back booth, and got the bikes-and-sneakers backstory. Six months before, a beat-up Cessna had run out of fuel and crash-landed on a strip of slashed jungle above the town. Everybody rushed up to see what had happened, and the pilot climbed out, American guy, one arm broken and hanging limp, but he wouldn’t let them take him to a doctor or call the embassy, had instead locked the plane and hustled down to the ferry. As soon as the boat had cast off, the locals ran back up the hill, broke into the plane, smiled, and agreed that the pilot had done exactly the right thing.

  The whole town was rich and happy and paranoid for five months, but by the time Ernie arrived everything had been s
norted or sold, and everyone was as poor as they’d always been but unable to summon much interest in sustainable agriculture. Which is why Lauren was crying—Eleven months of my life!—and how Ernie ended up with his arm around a girl who was brilliant, ambitious, and, once she’d cleaned herself up with a napkin, exceptionally attractive.

  Now they’re into the hills—quarry and scrub and outcropping, women selling gourds in every turnout. Past Miyun they hit a bit of fog, and Ernie turns on his lights as they take a still tinier twistier road. Lauren stares out the window; Ernie swerves around tractors and children and goats. A few wrong turns and slow corrections. Finally the town called Simatai, and above it a good stretch of Great Wall.

  The walk across the river and up is long and cold, and Ernie is worried that this won’t at all be right: there’s a cable-car ride to the top, and a number of portly German senior citizens waiting in line. The winding path he and Lauren take instead is bordered by a wall that is not exactly ancient, is not even as old as the cable-car Germans, is in fact being built as he and Lauren trudge past—men in sandals bearing trowels, mules loaded with thick gray bricks and cans of wet mortar.

  Farther along there’s some kind of harness-ride slinging a string of young Brits one by one back toward the parking lot. Plastic flags snap in the wind. A ninety-year-old Chinese woman comes to sell them postcards, stays close even after Ernie promises they’ll buy everything she has when the walk is done.

  The three of them—Lauren, Ernie, Postcard Lady—make one last turn, and there is the Wall up close, running straight up out of the canyon along the very face of the mountain. They climb into the first watchtower and onto the steep walk above. There are patches of snow among the trees to either side, and skittery birds in the bushes. Ernie and Lauren hold hands for fifty yards or so, but then they let go, concentrate on footholds and balance.