waited, then added, “And I’m sure it would be red.”
From the look on his face, I could tell that the young man in the starched white shirt and plain gray tie had decided to do everything he could to help me. Something exciting had unexpectedly come into his life, and as I looked at the eagerness I could see building in his eyes, I wondered if I had been like him on that day Rebecca had first arrived at the offices of Simpson and Lowe. Had I been nothing more than a clerk with a clerk’s long day looming before him? Was that the secret of my fall? Was it no more than the flight from boredom that had killed my wife and son?
I thought of my father, too, the way he’d trudged up the narrow aisles of his hardware store day after day. I saw the listlessness in his eyes, the weary rhythm of his gait, and it struck me more powerfully than ever before just how dangerous a man may become when he suddenly feels no compelling reason any longer to live as he has always lived.
The clerk nodded. “And you want me to help you find him?”
“Yes,” I said, then added, “I have reason to believe that my father crossed the border into Mexico.”
The clerk smiled. “Then let’s start in Mexico,” he said.
And so we began there, going back through the stacks of sales invoices that stretched toward the present from the distant year of 1959. With a continually deepening level of engagement, we stalked the passing years. It was the clerk who found the first hint of my father’s new abode. He pulled a single sheet of paper from the file. “Could it be this?” he asked.
I took the paper and looked at it. The order was dated March 17, 1962, and it was for a single red Rodger and Windsor bike. It had been received from a bicycle shop located in a small town on the western coast of Mexico. The man who’d signed the order had used the name Antonio Dias. There had been other orders from other places, of course, but this was the only bicycle shop that had ordered only one Rodger and Windsor, and that had specifically stipulated that its color must be red.
During the next twenty years, as the clerk discovered, this same Antonio Dias had ordered thirty-two red Rodger and Windsor bikes. The shipping invoices showed that during that same time he’d moved to nine different towns, each time farther south until he’d finally reached the border of Honduras.
In 1982, the orders had abruptly stopped. For the next three years there were no orders from Antonio Dias. Then, in November of 1985, one appeared again. This time, however, it had not come from Mexico, but from far more distant Spain, from a town about the size of Somerset, but located on the Mediterranean, and which bore the exotic and romantic name of Alicante. At the rate of nearly two a year, the orders had continued to arrive over the next seven years. The last one had been received only two months before.
The clerk looked at me significantly. “If this Antonio Dias is your father,” he said, “then my guess is, he’s still in Alicante.”
And so I made my plans to go. I renewed my passport, then waited in my hotel room for it to arrive. During that time I watched no television nor read a book. I wrote no letters nor read any that I received. I didn’t want to be distracted. As the days passed, I sank deeper into my own closed world. I no longer nodded to people on the street. I didn’t answer when they spoke to me. The days passed, and my world grew smaller. At last, I shrank into a small, dark seed.
The passport arrived, and I bought a ticket to Madrid. From there, I took a bus to Alicante.
It was nearly midnight when I arrived. A foreigner, with no knowledge of the language, I took the first hotel room I could find and stretched out on the small, narrow bed to await the morning. Through the night, I thought of my father, of how near I sensed he was. I tried to imagine his face webbed in dark wrinkles, the sound of his voice as it spoke in a foreign language. But he remained as elusive as always, still as remote and towering as he had been the day he’d stood on the veranda and silenced all of us with nothing more commanding than his gaze.
I awoke very early, just after first light. Across from my bed, I could see a small sink, a wrinkled towel that hung limply from its bare metal rack, and a battered armoire. They didn’t look the same as in my escapist dream, however. Nothing was the same. Outside my window, where light blue, rather than white, curtains lifted languidly in the warm morning breeze, there were no tiled roofs or dark spires. There was only a sprawling modern town gathered around a much older one.
It was still early when I left the hotel. Across the street was a large market, decked with bright-colored vegetables and row upon row of sleek, silvery fish. Pointing first to one thing, then another, I bought a piece of bread and a cup of coffee, eating as I continued on my way.
I’d written the address to which the last Rodger and Windsor had been sent on a piece of paper, and for nearly an hour after leaving the market, I moved from person to person, showing each the address, then following an array of hand signals, since I could not understand what was said to me. Block by block, turn by turn, I closed in on my father, moving deeper and deeper into the old Moorish quarter of the city. Perched on a high hill, a huge fortress loomed above me, its massive yellow walls glowing in the sun.
At last I found the street I’d been looking for. Madre de Dios it was called, Mother of God. It curled near the center of a warren of other narrow, nearly identical streets, and at its far end, half hidden in the shadows, I saw a sign. It was carelessly painted, and hung at an angle, the way I knew he would have painted and hung it. It read BICICLETAS.
I approached the store slowly, with a sensation of shrinking, of returning to the size of a little boy. I felt as I had felt that night I’d gone down the basement stairs, hesitant, unsure, eerily afraid of the man who stood behind the large black wheel.
And so, once I reached the shop, I found that I couldn’t go in. Through a single, dusty window, I could see a figure moving in its dim interior, moving as he had moved, haphazardly from place to place, but I could not approach it. Each time my hand moved toward the door, it was seized by a terrible trembling, as if I expected the shotgun still to be cradled in his arms.
After a moment, I turned abruptly and walked across the street, standing rigidly, unable to move, while a stream of men and women, some with children at their sides, casually went in and out, ringing the little bell he’d hung above the door.
There was a small, dusty plaza just up from the store, a place of scrubby trees and cement benches. I went there and continued to watch the entrance of the shop. As the hours passed, I remained in place, my back pressed up against the spindly gray trunk of an olive tree. To the right, a gathering of women, their faces hung in black scarves, talked idly while young children scrambled playfully at their feet. At the far end of the square, old men in black berets tossed wooden balls across a dusty court, their faces shaded beneath a canopy of palms.
Time crawled by, minute by minute. The sun rose, then began to lower.
