by Liam Durcan
Before, a humiliation like that would have sent him, spray can in hand, to wreak havoc on the walls of Le Dépanneur Mondial, but now her judgment only had the effect of sanctifying his infatuation, spurring him to redouble his efforts to be worthy of her.
Even with Roberto’s threats and Celia’s indifference, Patrick still felt at home at Le Dépanneur Mondial. Marta García was mysterious, her attentions always divided between the book in front of her and the other world with its hazards and complications. And although she smiled at him, in those first few weeks Patrick knew she still had her suspicions, even more so after he asked to stay on and became part of the growing non-García staff contingent. And if the atmosphere in those early days ranged from indifference to low-grade hostility, Patrick reasoned it wasn’t anything he couldn’t live with, but he knew that something drastic would have to change for anyone but Hernan and Nina to like him. So when Gerry Delaney, a well-known small-time (meaning largely unsuccessful) criminal, showed up in Le Dépanneur Mondial late on a Tuesday night in August with his hands in his pockets and a furtive look in his eyes, Patrick’s first impulse wasn’t to call the cops but to watch and wait, sensing this could be an ideal opportunity for character rehabilitation. He crouched down behind some shelves and glided closer to the cash, the Pro-matic industrial mop like a javelin in his hands. The first, skittish strains of the overture from The Marriage of Figaro sang out from the speakers. Patrick poked his head up to see Gerry loitering around the front of the store, waiting for the final customer to leave. When the chimes above the door finally died down, Delaney looked up and subtly manoeuvred himself to the register, where Celia’s attention was focused on a magazine she was leafing through. His jacket pocket bulged, a non-specific shape and size; a ruse, Patrick assumed, as Delaney had a reputation in the neighbourhood for big talk and see-through bluffs. But then his two hands fluttered and in a surprisingly deft motion, he pulled a black ski mask over his face. The act was an unexpected kick-start: countless biologic cylinders fired simultaneously, throwing Patrick forward like a man electrified. The mask energized Gerry Delaney too, turning him from zigzagging crab to a truer predator, lunging at the counter and shouting at Celia to empty the cash. Patrick remembered Celia’s face, that terrible fright and what it aroused in him, a feeling outside of anything he’d felt before, not just the need to intervene or to seem a hero to her, but the snarling, primordial need to defend family.
The Pro-matic industrial mop is rightly famous for its solid design. It weighs in at more than thirteen pounds, bone-dry, right out of the manufacturer’s wrapping. Add another couple of pounds for soaked-up water, and raising the mop above one’s head is a formidable task. But in those first few moments the mop was a butterfly net in Patrick’s hands; the true heft and momentum of the mop became apparent only in mid-flight, as he was propelled forward, trying to hang on to the suds-soaked battle-axe aimed at Gerry Delaney’s masked head.
“You could have killed him,” Hernan said later, when he sat Patrick down and read him the riot act in the wake of the mop-swinging incident. After the way the story was featured in all the papers–a photo of Celia and Patrick staring into the camera from behind the shattered counter with the accompanying story of a young hero acting to prevent a robbery of the store he himself had once vandalized, all under the headline “Forget the cops, grab the mop!”–Hernan’s anger caught him by surprise. Hernan made it clear how upset he was about the risks Patrick had taken. Gerry, it turned out, did have a gun and for once, according to the cops, had managed to load it correctly. Celia could have been shot. “You could have been hurt,” Hernan said. Only years later did Patrick understand how Hernan must have dreaded the publicity, the cops and reporters crawling around Le Dépanneur Mondial, taking down everybody’s names. He could have killed Gerry Delaney too. The mop head did land, stoving in the counter with a wicked, splintering force, but it missed Delaney by a mile. It shocked the assailant, though, and as he recoiled, he slipped on the trail of soapy water the mop head had left on the floor and he fell, breaking his left hip. Patrick remembered Celia’s scream twinning up with Gerry’s alto yelp, calling out against Mozart’s overture to Figaro, and then sirens, sirens, sirens. In someone else’s fantasy, Patrick would be cool in the aftermath, he would have walked over to Celia and taken her in his arms but, in reality, Patrick was scared and shaking and instead, he turned his attention to Gerry. He knelt down to hold Gerry’s clammy hand, hoping it would make the injured man stop screaming until the ambulance arrived.
And while the true mechanics of heroism were, in his case, distressingly banal, even inadvertent, they were dutifully ignored by all. He was a hero, celebrated by the community and, more importantly, by the Garcías, and allowed to revel in that tight-lipped, aw-shucks modesty that all heroes exude. Once Hernan got over being angry, he found it impossible to suppress a smile every time he looked at Patrick. Marta began calling him by his full name, Michael Patrick. Roberto let his wariness slacken and, along with Nina, started calling Patrick “Mop.” So did Celia, which hurt a bit. But Patrick preferred it to what she had called him before.
By his second month at the store, he had assumed all the duties of stocking and cleaning up, inheriting most of the other jobs that Roberto balked at. He felt increasingly comfortable handling customers’ questions about the produce, occasionally venturing an opinion on the quality of the mangoes, and in a pinch, he’d even be called on to operate the cash. And when the day was over and the front door of Le Dépanneur Mondial was locked, he ran deliveries on a ridiculously antiquated bike with a seat so uncomfortable he preferred to stand on the pedals and pump up and down the streets of NDG like a Tour de France domestique.
But above all, he was an anthropologist dropped into Le Dépanneur Mondial, permitted for a time to observe the Garcías and all their rituals. They weren’t a perfect family, which made them more fascinating to watch; in their moments of raised voices and slammed doors, during the times when Hernan and Marta García didn’t get along or when Roberto seemed to take pleasure in testing his father, Patrick only came to see them as more authentic, and more authentically happy. He understood that even though Marta was bored working in the store, the book she kept with her was not a mere diversion but a source of pleasure, her concentration returning to it as soon as the door closed on a customer.
With time, the Garcías began to reveal themselves. Hernan, who would go about his work and not say anything for hours, began asking Patrick questions about his family or about school. And, perhaps understanding that his teenage employee was less inclined to ask questions, volunteered facts about his own life. He confirmed what Marta had already confided in Patrick; he had been a doctor, a cardiologist, before coming to Canada. Years later, Patrick would ask himself why Hernan would choose this bit of personal information to tell him. It couldn’t have been boastfulness; Patrick suspected Hernan knew how much he admired him already, nor did he need to prove his credentials to a sixteen-year-old in order to give advice to the arthritics and asthmatics who frequented Le Dépanneur Mondial. The only answer that made sense to Patrick, at the time as well as retrospectively, was that as some people enjoyed discussing sports or politics or the weather, Hernan García truly loved to talk about medicine.
Patrick’s medical education–not just the acquisition of facts but the realization that he was an able and eager student, the first dangerous primings of an autodidact’s pump–began that summer under the auspices of Hernan García. While only one of the refrigerated sections in the store was dedicated to meat, this did not stop Le Dépanneur Mondial from occasionally taking delivery of a beef heart, an organ immediately commandeered by Hernan and taken into the back for an impromptu anatomy lesson. Celia and Roberto, perhaps having witnessed these back room demonstrations too many times before, would find other things to do when this occurred, relieved their father had another potential pupil to call on. And while Patrick wanted nothing more than to impress Hernan, he became squeamish and dizzy at
the thought of watching a dissection–the high school ritual of splayed frogs and rats came to mind, anything worth learning lost amid the hilarity of jocks hiding animal parts around the classroom. But he composed himself, hammering down any qualms, suppressing the nausea that seemed to arrive from nowhere. When Hernan peeled back the pink butcher’s paper and exposed the heart on a table in the back, he swallowed hard and stared at the bloody mass, unblinking. Hernan took the heart in one of his hands and felt its heft. Patrick shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It occurred to Patrick that the back room was an odd place to conduct this sort of business, dark and cavernous, adding creepiness to the encounter. Hernan must have sensed this, and told him that the first anatomic dissections of humans were carried out in secrecy, in rooms much like the one they were in, as the act was forbidden by church law. “It was considered an indignity,” he said, “but over the centuries dissection has become part of what every doctor has to do. It is tradition.” Patrick remembered the authoritative first cut in the dissection of the organ, the thick, deeply red flesh sliced open to reveal the chambers of the heart and the stringy webs around the edges of what Hernan explained were the valves. Hernan would describe the orderly lub-dubbing of valves in the heart as a choreographed action of door closings, of ushering a crowd through the rooms of a house. The tone of his voice lifted and his arms acquired extra gestures to ease his points home. “Do you understand?” Hernan would ask in such a way that no one could ever doubt his sincerity.
And, as is the case for any hungry self-learner, what Patrick was not given, he took. This meant, in addition to asking Hernan more and more about signs and symptoms, diseases and cures, he took to spying on Hernan, observing how he dealt with the customers who came for advice, how he would sit and say nothing as their sagas of swollen ankles and sore backs were laid out before him. When he had something to say he leaned in and lowered his voice, then leaned back and invariably nodded when the response came. Hernan had endless patience, perhaps because he knew it was often all he could offer.
“Do you miss medicine?”
The question caught Hernan off guard–they were in the back of Le Dépanneur Mondial, installing new fluorescent bulbs in the refrigerated produce shelves. Hernan was speechless. For a moment Patrick thought he had pushed too far, but then he could see that Hernan was considering his answer. Rather than being angry at what could have been seen as an impertinent question, he seemed surprised that anyone would ask it at all. Holding the long, fragile tube in his hands, he looked at Patrick with an expression on his face that was legible even to an emotionally illiterate sixteen-year-old.
“I miss it terribly,” Hernan said, and then leaned over to place the bulb in its socket.
Patrick had never heard anyone speak about their working life, current or former, with any sentiment other than resignation or outright dread. When he had his medical school interview years later, he was asked the standard question of when he first thought about pursuing a career in medicine. Patrick chose to tell the interviewers gathered around the table that he had come to the decision slowly–skipping any mention of Hernan and the back room anatomy lessons–believing that the interviewers would view a description of a reasoned, deliberative process more positively than the story of an epiphany in a refrigerated produce unit. But that was the first instance, when something about Hernan’s dignity and honesty and the sense of loss that he conveyed made Patrick consider what he wanted to be.
In August of that summer Patrick’s parents announced that they were going away to a rented cabin up north. Having had thirty summers’ worth of family holidays, first with his two older sisters and then with Patrick, his parents were now weary of any vacation requiring much in the way of planning or activity. Both parents had hinted broadly that an ideal vacation for them meant that Roger would fish and Veronica would play solitaire in a different kitchenette for three weeks. And that was okay with Patrick; he was of the opinion common to teenagers and their parents that extended family trips were a variation on a hostage-taking, with each party assuming themselves, at different times, to be the victim. And in that spirit, his parents’ vacation plans were presented to Patrick on the understanding that, while he was invited, he probably wouldn’t want to take them up on the offer. He was given the phone number of the cabin for emergencies. Everyone was relieved and no one’s feelings were hurt.
When the Garcías found out, they weren’t so much appalled as incredulous that a sixteen-year-old could be left alone for three weeks. Their concern struck Patrick as charming and old-fashioned, and probably best explained as a Latin American close-knit family thing, a new-immigrant-family-paranoia reaction. Hernan and Marta voiced their worry for Patrick’s health and safety. “How will you eat?” Marta had asked as he mopped the floor near the cash register. She was even more shocked when Patrick shrugged in response. Roberto regarded him with newfound respect. Patrick had absolute freedom–even if it was temporary, even if it was likely to be wasted–something that would elude him until he was out of his parents’ house. Celia was steadfast in her indifference, but Patrick hoped that she secretly shared her parents’ alarm and pity. He did play it up, too, doing little to dispel their notion of his abandonment, happily accepting their invitation to dinner. He was sure they would think less of him had he told them how relieved he was not to spend three weeks pickling in the boredom of a cabin in St. Donat.
Dinner, Hernan explained, as he gave Patrick a piece of paper with their home address on it, was the most important time of the Garcías’ day, the only time when all of them would be together outside Le Dépanneur Mondial. It was a rare ninety minutes, a gap in the day when they trusted the operation of the store to Madame Lefebvre.
The night of the dinner, he took a shower so long it ended only when the first lashings of cold water signalled an empty hot water tank. While picking through a pile of clothes on his bedroom floor for the cleanest he could find, he had inaugural thoughts about cologne but finding that his choice was limited to an ancient, unopened bottle of Brut in Roger’s medicine cabinet, he thought better of it. On his way over to the Garcías’, a typical red-brick duplex near the south end of Harvard Avenue, a couple of blocks from the store and not really all that far from his house, Patrick stopped and bought a cake to present to Marta, which he thought would be the sophisticated thing to do.
Patrick expected crossing the threshold of the Garcías’ house would be memorable. He imagined foreign-sounding music greeting him as he entered, a melody rising, a prelude to what awaited. The Garcías lived here. It would be special. The house would be fragrant with flowers that had been gathered and arranged as a centrepiece on the table, the varieties a mystery to him, a sunburst of petals and thick stems bound with string to steady them into a huge earthen vase. He knew it, he’d been able to see it so clearly as he climbed the steps to their front door. He’d be dizzy from the colour, heady with expectation of the meal and eating with the Garcías. He rang the bell.
Marta greeted him at the door. She looked pleased and puzzled as he handed her the box. And then she disappeared, leaving him standing at the doorway to stumble over the pairs of shoes scattered about. He waited, and after no one appeared, he took a couple of steps into the house to find it remarkable in its resemblance to his own. No music, not even the Mozart that accompanied every working minute at the store. The walls of the entryway were bare and there were still cardboard boxes visible at the end of the hallway. He took another step and leaned around a corner to look into the living room, still suspecting that something exotic must lie just beyond. Again, another room. White walls and furniture similar to what he’d just left at home. Nothing special, really. Nothing even different. No colourful decorations, nothing that distinguished the Garcías from any other family on the block. It was a home like his own. He thought he would find something typically Honduran, but was uncertain what that meant, not knowing anything Honduran except for the Garcías themselves. He thought he could hear someone down t
he hallway, but there was still no one in sight. It was hot in the house, and the air was still, and, like in his house on hot days, you could smell the faint scent of wet towels. When he looked down, Nina was at his feet.
Marta returned after putting the cake away to find that Nina had taken Patrick by the hand and was leading him on a tour of the front room. A small group of dolls was assembled on the couch and Nina introduced each one in that way specific to five-year-olds, citing their elaborate names followed by their accompanying emotional frailties, a roll call of dolly psychopathology. Nina then left the support group on the couch to show Patrick the “whale stuff.” Patrick assumed he was on his way to more stuffed animals with bulging eyes and hopefully less dramatic psychological problems and was surprised to be brought before a bookcase. He didn’t recognize the objects on a single shelf in front of him, except that they were obviously on display, arranged in that particular way that suggested someone valued them. Propped against the back of the shelf were two black-and-white photographs, the edges ragged with age, each showing a clutch of houses running the length of a dock. “Nantucket 1853.” “Gloucester 1855.” There was no clue to what time of year the photos were taken, but the blue-tinged seas looked frigid. Five sharp-ended spears lay at one end of the shelf, gathered together like arrows ready for use. Fragmented pieces of what appeared to be yellowed bone crowded the shelf in front of the photos. Patrick wondered why Hernan had collected these things. As he peered closer, he saw the bone was covered in intricate carvings of ships and whales. He reached in and picked up one of the carvings, examining the tiny grooves darkened with grime.