“I stitched it up myself.”
Beatrice leaned over and looked at the bloody bandage. She started removing it.
“It is fine,” said the old man.
Beatrice let out her breath. “It is not fine. My heavens, Father. It is terrible. You need to see a doctor.”
Ferdinand spoke to her in Spanish.
She looked at me. “He says he cannot afford a doctor.”
“Do you know where one is?”
“Yes. “
“Then let’s get him there.”
Jose had come back onto the boat. He looked in at the old man, his eyes wide. The old man spoke to him. The boy immediately began to unload their catch.
“Jose and his brothers will help sell it in the marketplace. Father will give them nearly half of it. They do not deserve half of it. Only the boy went out.”
“He works hard,” said Ferdinand. “His family is poor.”
Beatrice barked a laugh. It wasn’t a happy laugh.
“Father, you are something. Come, let us get you up from there.”
The doctor wasn’t home. I sat on the doctor’s porch with Ferdinand while Beatrice went to find him. It was nearly dark when she finally came back, an old man plodding along beside her.
He looked like something out of a Humphrey Bogart movie. He wore a white linen suit that looked as if he had slept in it. Scuffed black shoes run-down on the sides and a shirt that had been last washed during the Mexican Revolution, and then only because he had been caught out in the rain. He had salt-and-pepper hair and the front of it hung down on his forehead as if it were too ill to consider being combed.
I heard him call Ferdinand by name, then the rest of it was in Spanish, which left me out. They apparently knew each other well.
I helped the old man up. He was stiffer than before. As the doctor came to help me, I could smell liquor on his breath.
We got Ferdinand inside the house. There were clothes piled up and a couple of men’s magazines on the couch with naked senoritas on the cover. One was open to a centerfold and there was a German shepherd in the picture with a lady one could no longer describe as young. In fact, she looked as if she might have been more at home with a horse.
The doctor paused long enough to flip the magazine closed and toss it off the couch.
I glanced at Beatrice. She looked at me and shook her head. We sat Ferdinand on the couch. The doctor disappeared into the other room.
Ferdinand said, “They are not his magazines. He has a very crazy son. He is my friend’s shame. He lives here with his father.”
“The question is,” I said, “does the son have a German shepherd?”
“I do not think so.”
The doctor came back carrying a bag. He pulled up a chair in front of the couch, sat in it, carefully lifted the old man’s leg, placed the foot on the chair in front of him and began removing the bandages.
The injury was pretty bad. You could see where the old man had poured some kind of red stuff over the wound, and it wasn’t bleeding badly, just sort of oozing, but it was too deep and too wide for stitches, though the old man had tried.
The doctor clucked over it for a moment. He got a bottle of whiskey out of his bag and gave it to Ferdinand. Ferdinand unscrewed the cap, took a snort. The doctor took the bottle back, took a snort himself. He offered us some. Beatrice and I declined.
The doctor went away, came back with a pan of water. He went to work on the leg, cleaning it, snipping away the thread where the old man had tried to sew what couldn’t be sewed.
I went out on the front porch. The smell of the wound bothered me. I had smelled far too many wounds in my lifetime. Beatrice came with me.
She said, “He will be out of work now.”
“What about the kid, Jose? Or his brothers? Can’t they work for him? Help you out.”
“They would expect to be paid.”
“If you catch fish, pay them. If you don’t-”
She laughed. “It is so easy for you, is it not. Being an American. There is always money.”
“I don’t know what you think you know, honey, but one thing is for damn certain, I haven’t got any money. Leonard and I own a dime and we let each other carry it from time to time, but heaven forbid we should spend it.”
Beatrice shook her head. “My father owes money, you see. He has to make it back. He will pay the doctor from his catch. Give him fish. We need every fish to make every peso we can. Not only to live, but to pay back his debt.”
“He borrowed money?”
She looked at me with those beautiful, soulful dark eyes.
“He borrowed for me… It is not your business, Hap.”
“Very well,” I said.
She studied me for a moment, as if trying to make certain I wasn’t going to wrestle it out of her. When she decided I wasn’t, she told me anyway.
“He borrowed from a man who adds much interest. He borrowed so that I could go to the United States, to the university. He has been paying it off all along. And I, well, I did nothing with my time there.”
“You chose to come back. You could have done something with your education if you wanted.”
“Let me put it this way. One night I am in the U.S., and I am out with friends, and they order fish. And I am looking at the fish, and thinking, this is what my father does, and he is doing it every day so I can be here. I decided to come home, help him earn the money back. This was more important. I knew he would never pay it off. The debt would be there. It was right for me to assume the debt.”
“What about what you told me before? Being like your mother. Or feeling obligated to be that way.”
“That is part of it too, Hap. If I were smart, I would have got a job and helped pay off the debt. My degree would have helped do that. Instead, I come back and live like a peasant to pay off this big loan by helping him fish. What kind of thinking is that, if it is not the thinking of someone who believes they are trying too hard, and wrongly, to rise above their station.”
“If you’ll forgive me, Beatrice. It’s stupid thinking.”
“I know. But I do it just the same. Let me tell you why I want you to leave tomorrow. My father has a charter. A big important charter. Men who want to fish. They have agreed to go out three days. They will pay a lot for this. Far more than the cost to fish. They are rich Americans and my father has guaranteed them each a trophy fish. There is a place where there are plenty of great fish. My father knows it. If the fish are not there, we do not make as much. And I must be very kind to one of these men.”
“I don’t think I like the sound of that.”
“I am not yours, Hap.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t like the idea of any woman having to be nicer to a man than she wants to be.”
“I have met this man. He is not my favorite. But this money, it could pay off our debt to this other man I told you about.”
I was liking the sound of it less and less. But Beatrice was right. It was not my problem. And she was not my woman.
“What happens if you don’t find the fish?”
“This man my father owes. He is a man with much pride. More pride than the need for money. He can be unpleasant.”
“Jesus, Beatrice. Your father is in to a loan shark?”
“He is more than a shark. He is a school of sharks. One time a man owed him and did not pay, and this shark, Juan Miguel, he had the man killed, the body skinned, boiled, and sold his skeleton to a medical school.”
“That sounds like a story to me, Beatrice.”
