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Authors: Paul Bowdring
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himself, had seen him fall and quickly pulled him out of the water.
On Fogo Island, Rodney had also survived an industrial-strength jolt of electricity. He climbed over a ten-foot-high chain-link fence to get inside the compound of an electrical substation, then up a sixty-foot steel tower, from the top of which an electrical charge hurled him unhurt to the cushiony moss below. In a voice quivering with gratitude and disbelief, Mrs. Murphy described these escapes to my mother. Rodney had lived nine years up to that point, every one of them a life, and now, at ten, had one up on the cat.
Though we were the same age, I wasnât allowed to play âalone with Rodney,â as my mother anxiously put it. I didnât really mind, for he was a tough little bugger, cruel and tough, with that stereotypical pretty-boy disguise: golden curls like a laurel wreath crowning a blue-eyed, small-boned face. But he would knock the wind out of you or punch you in the kidneys without any provocation whatsoever, or, if you did provoke him, during a baseball game, for example, with something as impersonal as a home run, he would kick you in the shins with a workboot as you rounded the bases, then stomp on your foot for good measure in the next inning when he went around. Alone with Rodney, I might have been left behind and burned to a crisp like Mrs. Foleyâs children, while he scravelled like a rat out the basement door.
I slept in my motherâs bedroom that nightâmy father had been dead four yearsâwith what I imagined was the smell of burned flesh in the room. I could still see Mrs. Foley struggling and shouting, screaming out the names of her children. She was sure she could see their faces in the windows of the burning house. For months I would run past that black ruin after dark, the brick chimney still standing in the middle like a tombstone. Her terror is now set like an alarm in my bones, though as a child, of course, I couldnât even have imagined the intensity of it. Itâs just as hard to imagine for a childless man.
Even now, lying awake late at night, I sometimes can smell smoke even when there isnât any. But on the third night of Antonâs stay, the smoke was real, and it had sent me running to his room and banging on the door. I opened it before he had a chance to answer, only to find him stretched out on the bed in his undershorts, reading a book and smoking a pipe, a nightly routine he was not to break for the entire nine months of his stay.
Iâve never liked getting up in the middle of the night. Objects, things, seem more manifestly
there
, sharing your house, your home. In the bathroom, Antonâs brown-stained partial denture, immersed in a glass of water and half a glass of undissolved baking soda, was very unvainly displayed on the vanity for my viewing pleasure. I moved the glass and the teeth shifted and settled in the soda like an ancient artifact in the molehill sand dune of a display case. Anton is very informal about personal hygiene. Like a tomcat, he sprays all around the toilet bowl and forgets to flush what gets inside. He leaves a mess of toothpaste, mouth sludge, and razor hair in the sink, body hair in the tub, nail clippings on the floor. He thinks nothing of using my hairbrush and leaving it choked with hair. He farts cathartically and clomps about the house in his wooden slippers and underwear after a shower looking for a T-shirt heâs mislaid. He is totally unselfconscious about his body. It is not the same with his feelings, which he usually keeps to himself; but complete strangers whom he meets in bars or cafés spontaneously open themselves up to him, pour out their dark and painful secrets, as if he were a brother or a husband or a very close friend.
Usually, he brings home just the stories they tell him, but once in a while, the storytellers as well. One day I came home from work to find an elderly woman sitting on a lawn chair in the front
On Fogo Island, Rodney had also survived an industrial-strength jolt of electricity. He climbed over a ten-foot-high chain-link fence to get inside the compound of an electrical substation, then up a sixty-foot steel tower, from the top of which an electrical charge hurled him unhurt to the cushiony moss below. In a voice quivering with gratitude and disbelief, Mrs. Murphy described these escapes to my mother. Rodney had lived nine years up to that point, every one of them a life, and now, at ten, had one up on the cat.
Though we were the same age, I wasnât allowed to play âalone with Rodney,â as my mother anxiously put it. I didnât really mind, for he was a tough little bugger, cruel and tough, with that stereotypical pretty-boy disguise: golden curls like a laurel wreath crowning a blue-eyed, small-boned face. But he would knock the wind out of you or punch you in the kidneys without any provocation whatsoever, or, if you did provoke him, during a baseball game, for example, with something as impersonal as a home run, he would kick you in the shins with a workboot as you rounded the bases, then stomp on your foot for good measure in the next inning when he went around. Alone with Rodney, I might have been left behind and burned to a crisp like Mrs. Foleyâs children, while he scravelled like a rat out the basement door.
I slept in my motherâs bedroom that nightâmy father had been dead four yearsâwith what I imagined was the smell of burned flesh in the room. I could still see Mrs. Foley struggling and shouting, screaming out the names of her children. She was sure she could see their faces in the windows of the burning house. For months I would run past that black ruin after dark, the brick chimney still standing in the middle like a tombstone. Her terror is now set like an alarm in my bones, though as a child, of course, I couldnât even have imagined the intensity of it. Itâs just as hard to imagine for a childless man.
Even now, lying awake late at night, I sometimes can smell smoke even when there isnât any. But on the third night of Antonâs stay, the smoke was real, and it had sent me running to his room and banging on the door. I opened it before he had a chance to answer, only to find him stretched out on the bed in his undershorts, reading a book and smoking a pipe, a nightly routine he was not to break for the entire nine months of his stay.
Iâve never liked getting up in the middle of the night. Objects, things, seem more manifestly
there
, sharing your house, your home. In the bathroom, Antonâs brown-stained partial denture, immersed in a glass of water and half a glass of undissolved baking soda, was very unvainly displayed on the vanity for my viewing pleasure. I moved the glass and the teeth shifted and settled in the soda like an ancient artifact in the molehill sand dune of a display case. Anton is very informal about personal hygiene. Like a tomcat, he sprays all around the toilet bowl and forgets to flush what gets inside. He leaves a mess of toothpaste, mouth sludge, and razor hair in the sink, body hair in the tub, nail clippings on the floor. He thinks nothing of using my hairbrush and leaving it choked with hair. He farts cathartically and clomps about the house in his wooden slippers and underwear after a shower looking for a T-shirt heâs mislaid. He is totally unselfconscious about his body. It is not the same with his feelings, which he usually keeps to himself; but complete strangers whom he meets in bars or cafés spontaneously open themselves up to him, pour out their dark and painful secrets, as if he were a brother or a husband or a very close friend.
Usually, he brings home just the stories they tell him, but once in a while, the storytellers as well. One day I came home from work to find an elderly woman sitting on a lawn chair in the front
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