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