The One-Eyed Man Read online

  “The fuck is this,” he said, “Publishers Clearing House?”

  “No,” I said.

  “May we come in?” Claire asked.

  “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “We’re here to give you one hundred thousand dollars,” I said, turning the giant check around so he could read it.

  “Which should be reason enough to let us in, don’t you think?” Claire said.

  “Damita, I could die in my sleep tonight,” Eduardo said. “Money don’t mean as much to me as you think.”

  “You could die a lot sooner, you keep smoking with that oxygen on,” Claire said.

  “Who asked you?”

  “No one,” Claire said. “I have a habit of speaking even when not given permission to do so. I know it’s unseemly, in a lady.”

  Eduardo stared at her for a moment, his eyes rheumy and malevolent. Then he took two steps back into the apartment and said, “Come on, if you’re coming. Don’t let the cat out.”

  The cat in question, an orange tabby with a pendulous furry flap of a belly, darted in front of Eduardo as he made his way back into the living room. He unleashed a stream of obscenities at the beast for nearly tripping him, and we followed in the wake of this tirade.

  “So what’s the catch?” Eduardo said as he plunked down in a worn recliner and arranged the oxygen tank beside him. “I ain’t never been lucky. So there must be a catch.”

  “Do you mind if we sit?” I asked.

  “Sit the fuck down, already. What do you think this is, a state dinner?”

  We all took a seat. The fat orange tabby leapt into Eduardo’s lap, and he stroked its back and whispered profane endearments. The cat arched into a parabola and kneaded the leg of Eduardo’s pants.

  “You asked about the catch,” I said.

  Eduardo looked up. “I knew it.”

  “Simple,” I said. “Reconcile with your son, and the one hundred thousand dollars is yours.”

  Eduardo’s hand faltered at the base of the cat’s tail. “My son,” he said.

  “Correct.”

  “Arnulfo.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He scoffed. “That little fuck wouldn’t dare show his face here.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “He’s going to be at your front door in approximately six minutes.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “We shit you not, sir,” Claire said.

  Eduardo looked from Claire to me, then back to Claire. “What the fuck is this?” he said finally.

  “We just told you,” Claire said.

  “May I ask you a question?” I said.

  Eduardo, still glancing back and forth between us and trying to decide whether he thought we were for real, didn’t answer.

  “Why do you hate your son?” I said. “I mean, I’m sure the reasons are myriad and complex, as they tend to be with family. But if you could maybe give a synopsis. Or else just tell me the one thing about him you hate the most.”

  “He’s a filthy little faggot whose mouth is only good for two things: smarting off and chugging dick.”

  Claire glanced at me, eyebrows raised. She still held the balloons.

  “That simple enough for you?” Eduardo asked.

  “I assume that when you say ‘filthy,’” I said, “you’re not referring to his hygiene, which to me seems at least above average. Excellent, even.”

  “I’m referring to him letting people put their bicho in his ass.”

  “And bicho means ‘penis’?”

  “It means ‘dick,’ you dick.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I just wanted to establish that your use of the word ‘filthy’ is a value judgment, rather than an assessment of Arnulfo’s actual cleanliness.”

  Eduardo turned to Claire. “He always this dense?” he asked.

  Claire held out one hand and tilted it back and forth. “Más o menos,” she said.

  “It’s not that I’m dense,” I said. “It’s that you’re communicating imprecisely. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t blame me for your shortcomings.”

  “You can’t do what Arnulfo does and be clean, cabrón.”

  “Actually, it’s my understanding that most gay men are meticulous about keeping themselves and their households clean. But that’s neither here nor there, because really, what you mean is that the sex acts your son engages in are not literally dirty, but rather unnatural and therefore deserving of scorn and condemnation.”

  Eduardo snuffed his cigarette out in a beanbag ashtray and lit a new one. “You think it’s natural for two guys to suck each other off?” he asked.

  “Perfectly so,” I said.

  “You ain’t alone, these days,” Eduardo said.

  “But unlike most of those other people, my feelings about homosexuality are not informed by emotion, or ideology, or dogma. All I’m interested in are facts. And it’s an objective fact that homosexuality is natural.”

  “You have anything to drink around here?” Claire asked.

  Eduardo stared at her for a moment, then hooked a thumb back toward the kitchen. “Beer in the fridge,” he said.

  Claire stood up and disappeared into the kitchen, the balloons bouncing off the ceiling behind her.

  “According to Arnulfo you’re an insect enthusiast,” I said.

  For the first time since we’d entered the apartment the fear of death fled from Eduardo’s eyes. Deep seams around his mouth, carved by decades of smoking, disappeared as if sandblasted, and I caught a glimpse of what he’d looked like as a young man: darkly handsome, imperious. “He told you that?”

  I nodded. “He did. He said that if you hadn’t been such a drunk, entomology could have been a profession instead of just a hobby.”

  Eduardo shrugged. “Not much point talking about ‘if,’” he said.

  Claire returned with a bottle of beer in her nonballoon hand.

  “Actually,” I told him, “that’s what Arnulfo said, too. He told me that wishing you hadn’t been a drunk was as pointless as wishing the Earth didn’t revolve around the sun.”

  The seams returned to Eduardo’s face, and the shadow to his brow.

  “Do you regret drinking so much?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘regret’?” he said.

  “You don’t know the word?” I asked.

  “Of course I know the word, asshole,” he said. “I just don’t regret anything. A man doesn’t regret.”

  “Only liars and psychopaths claim to have no regrets,” Claire said. “And you may be a hateful bastard, but you’re no psycho.”

  Eduardo laughed and adjusted the cannulas in his nostrils. “I can’t decide,” he said to me, “if I like her a lot, or don’t like her at all.”

  “I get that sometimes,” Claire said. She swigged from the bottle of Heineken.

  “Arnulfo told me you were particularly fond of beetles,” I said to Eduardo.

  “So?” he said.

  “He said you had a collection of beetles that would be the envy of any natural history museum. In fact, he said the only thing you ever did together when he was a child was kill and mount beetles.”

  Eduardo nodded as he dragged on his cigarette. “That was before he went queer.”

  “He said he still loves the smell of the nail polish remover you used in the killing jar.”

  “If you’re trying to make me all emotional, ain’t going to happen.”

  “I bring it up because, for a man who was otherwise a brutal narcissist, it’s a surprising pastime,” I said. “Contemplative. Precise. Requires an outwardly directed interest and focus.”

  “I was better with bugs than I was with people, probably.”

  “That sounds like regret, to me,” Claire said.

  “You gonna regret coming here, you keep it up.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Claire said, and drank again from her beer.

  “Do you happen to have a specimen of Tribolium castaneum?” I asked Eduardo. “Common name
flour beetle?”

  “I know the Latin,” Eduardo said. He glared at me and stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “Flour beetles are only three millimeters. Almost too small to mount. I never had the equipment.”

  “In any event,” I said, “you might be interested to know about the sexual habits of the flour beetle,” I said.

  Eduardo looked at Claire. “Honey, you want to fetch me one of them?”

  “I don’t fetch, babycakes,” Claire said. “But as long as I can have another myself, yes, I’d be happy to get you a beer.”

  Eduardo nodded assent, and Claire went back into the kitchen.

  “Did you know that the male flour beetle regularly engages in homosexual acts?” I asked.

  “That supposed to blow my mind?”

  “I just didn’t know if you were aware,” I said. “I just found out myself, after doing some reading on the plane.”

  Claire came back in with two beers.

  “Of course I know flour beetles are maricóns,” Eduardo said, taking one of the Heinekens from Claire. He tilted the lip of the bottle toward me. “Do you know why they fuck each other?”

  “Other than the usual reasons?” I asked.

  Eduardo drank from his beer. “Turns out,” he said, “that when one male beetle comes on another one, and the one that got came on goes and fucks a female, there’s a chance that the female will get pregnant from the sperm of the first beetle.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “Whose mind’s getting blown now?” he asked.

  “That’s brilliant, really,” I said. “So having sex with other male beetles is an evolutionary strategy.”

  “You got it,” Eduardo said. He set his beer down, shook another cigarette from the pack of Merits, and lit it. “So unless you can tell me about some faggot getting a woman pregnant by coming on some other faggot’s back, flour beetles ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

  I thought about this a moment. “Let me ask you another question, then,” I said. “Do you think the only purpose of sex is procreation?”

  Eduardo sat back and exhaled a geyser of smoke. “So where’s that rat fuck son of mine, huh?” he asked.

  “He may have been delayed,” I said.

  “He may have chickened out,” Claire said to me.

  “Can you answer my question?” I asked Eduardo.

  “You simple bastard,” he said. “I know what Arnulfo does is wrong before God. Dance around it all you want, but you ain’t gonna change my mind.”

  Before I could respond there came three brisk knocks at the door. In his lounger, Eduardo stiffened visibly. He lifted the cigarette to his lips, and I could see he’d pinched the filter nearly flat between his thumb and forefinger.

  The oxygen tank hissed.

  “Don’t bother getting up,” Claire said.

  She went into the kitchen, threw the locks, and a moment later Arnulfo stood in the living room of his dying father’s walk-up. Gone was the fantastical outfit he’d had on when we met him; now he wore faded jeans, snakeskin boots he must have purchased in the boys’ department, and a T-shirt that read I WAS A GAY COWBOY BEFORE IT WAS COOL. Far from seeming afraid, Arnulfo emanated a dignity that cut through the cigarette smoke like light parsing clouds on the cover of a hymnal. He made a sort of offering of himself, arms relaxed at his sides and legs slightly apart, barely taller on his feet than I was seated. His eyes shone bright and clear, empty of any of the emotions one might expect to see from a man reunited with his tormentor.

  He was beautiful.

  “Hola, Eduardo,” he said to his father.

  Again, the terror of one who is slowly suffocating fled from Eduardo’s face, replaced first by disbelief, then by an elemental fury. He transformed into a miniature Cronus right in front of us, sitting there with his cigarette and beer, tubing from the oxygen tank wound all around him. He would have eaten Arnulfo, if such a thing were possible. Instead he had to settle for rising from his old lounger and tottering forward one step, then glaring at his son with a bony fist cocked at his hip.

  “You call me Papi,” the old man said, “or you don’t call me anything.”

  Arnulfo gave a dismissive click of his tongue. “I don’t think so, Eduardo. You never earned it.”

  “I’d rather my son call me culo than use my Christian name,” Eduardo said.

  “I’m surprised you even think of me as your son,” Arnulfo said. He pointed at the lounger. “Sit down before you fall down, old man.”

  Eduardo took his seat again, slowly, careful not to pull the oxygen tube from his nose. I had a hunch, watching the two of them fume silently at one another, that Eduardo would not be one hundred thousand dollars richer at the conclusion of our visit. At this rate, he probably wouldn’t even get to keep the balloons.

  “What are you doing here?” Eduardo asked finally.

  “It wasn’t my idea.”

  Eduardo scoffed. “See, this has always been your problem, Mijo. Someone put you up to it? Bullshit. You decided to come here. You. It was your choice. So don’t hide behind ‘It wasn’t my idea.’”

  “Fine,” Arnulfo said. “I did it because someone asked me to, and since I love him, I agreed. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that.”

  Eduardo glared at Arnulfo, and Arnulfo held his gaze, but calmly, still emanating that peculiar grace.

  Claire jumped in. “Hey,” she said to Eduardo, “can I have one of those cigarettes?”

  Eduardo continued to stare at his son, then turned to Claire finally. “You talking to me?” he asked.

  “You’re the only one smoking,” she said.

  He shook a cigarette out of the pack and handed it over. “You take that,” he said, “and then you motherfuckers gotta go. This is no good. Ain’t gonna end well.”

  “I had one other question to ask you,” I said.

  “No more talking,” Eduardo said.

  “Arnulfo told us about his cousin,” I said. “Angel.”

  Eduardo started ever so slightly; if I hadn’t been looking directly at him, I would have missed it. “Another goddamn maricón,” he said. “This family’s full of them.”

  “Arnulfo said that when you caught him with Angel was the first time you really gave him a beating,” I said.

  “His mother’s rolling pin,” Eduardo said. “Heavy fucker. Walnut. Clocked him in the neck before he had a chance to pull his pants up.”

  “But why didn’t you give Angel a beating too?” I asked. “After all, he was four years older. In the contemporary view, that’s statutory rape. He’d go to prison.”

  For a minute Eduardo didn’t answer. He very carefully removed a fresh Merit from the pack and used the butt of his old one to light it. He pushed the tip of the expired cigarette into the base of the ashtray, folding the filter over to snuff the cherry. He ground that cigarette out like it owed him money, pushing so hard that it squeaked against the glass. Then he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and bits of ash fell, glinting in the sunlight from the smoke-smeared window behind him.

  The oxygen tank hissed. Otherwise, the room was silent.

  Finally Eduardo scoffed, almost under his breath. “Rape,” he said, his tone dismissive of the very concept. “You can’t rape the willing.”

  Looking back, what happened next should perhaps have been my first indication that this larger endeavor we’d set ourselves on might be a bad idea, no matter how much I wanted to help Claire after getting her fired from Total Foods. That maybe dedicating myself to repeated public refutation of people’s beliefs was, as Eduardo had warned, liable to end badly. Plenty more evidence of this possibility was to come, but now Arnulfo made a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before, unlike, perhaps, any sound that had ever issued from a human being. This sound came from Arnulfo’s chest rather than his throat. It made the hair on my arms stand up, which until that moment I’d thought was just a figure of speech. I didn’t know it could really happen, that one could be spooked enough tha
t the small hairs on one’s body would come to attention. I found myself preoccupied with what possible purpose this phenomenon could serve, even as it became clear that Arnulfo was about to do something bad, something perhaps irrevocable.

  Either way I couldn’t have stopped him, because the sound he made had paralyzed me.

  In the next moment Eduardo’s lounger was flipped onto its back, and Arnulfo had his father down on the carpet. The orange tabby, which had been resting on the windowsill behind Eduardo, scrambled onto the sofa and stared, its eyes wide and wild, poised to run again should further flight seem necessary. Eduardo’s tubing came loose from the oxygen tank, which hissed and hissed, loosing pure O2 into the room.

  Arnulfo straddled his father’s chest and set about slapping him, his hands flying like the blurred combos of a very good featherweight boxer. Eduardo sputtered, squirming under his son’s weight.

  “K.,” Claire said, “don’t you think you should step in? Before he kills him?”

  “What should I do?”

  “I mean, not that I really mind if he kills him,” Claire said.

  Arnulfo began spitting in his father’s face. He held Eduardo’s head still with both hands and spit into his eyes, his mouth. “Did you know, Papi,” he said, “that HIV can be transmitted through saliva? It’s not just for faggots anymore!”

  “Actually,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the din, “HIV isn’t present in saliva in large enough concentrations to be transmitted to another person.”

  “K.,” Claire said. For the first time I’d ever seen, she looked genuinely alarmed.

  Arnulfo gave a garbled scream as he bit down on his own tongue. He closed his mouth and sucked his cheeks in, producing, after a moment, a glistening bloody glob of mucus, which he spat directly onto his father’s nose.