“Drink!” he yelled. Gaspar, with the strength he had left, bit. But his father didn’t pull away, not even when Gaspar’s teeth opened the flesh. Now Gaspar’s mouth was also filled with blood, and he swallowed it.
When Juan finally let go of him, Gaspar closed his eyes, but a slap in the face woke him up from his faint. His father, now kneeling, was looking at him with unfocused, transparent eyes. His chin was smeared with blood and his lips were red. He didn’t seem to be alone. It seemed like there were people moving in the shadows behind him.
“Go now. Run!”
Gaspar didn’t understand, and Juan dragged him down the stairs by his good arm and pushed him toward the door. He opened it and shoved him out and closed and locked the door, all without a word. Please, Dad, Gaspar said in a quiet voice, and then he looked down at his pants, covered in urine and blood, and his mangled forearm. He got up and thought fast. A taxi, ask someone for help, what time was it? Pablo could take him to the emergency room, a hospital.
He raised his arm to stem the bleeding—he’d been taught that once, when he’d cut his finger on a box cutter at school—but it didn’t work, and he left a trail of blood behind him. As he walked the block to Pablo’s house, he didn’t meet anyone. It was incredible, but the neighborhood was empty.
The sound of the doorbell was constant, as if it had gotten stuck. Coming, shouted Pablo, but the endless buzzing was disconcerting. Who would ring like that, and why? He was alone in the house. His mom had gone to the hospital for her pregnancy check-up—she was just weeks away—and his dad worked all day. He looked out the window before opening and recognized Gaspar’s sneakers.
He was about to say why are you ringing like that, dummy, but he was left speechless by the sight of Gaspar’s arm, his wounded arm: in the bloody cut, so red, the skin and muscle hung down like something edible, like the meat under the display-case light at the butcher’s; he could see the white of bone. The skin of Gaspar’s face was gray and sweaty, and he was leaning against the doorbell because he couldn’t stand up. What happened? Come in, said Pablo, and Gaspar shook his head. No. Take me to the hospital right now on the motorcycle.
Come inside, said Pablo, and he pushed Gaspar toward the living room, then ran to the bathroom for some towels and wrapped the wound. When he did, Gaspar screamed. Pablo’s mother never used the motorcycle; it was his father’s, for weekends. Pablo himself barely knew how to ride it: his dad had taught him a little, but only let him go around the block, or as far as the park on some Sundays, when there wasn’t much traffic. But the hospital was only ten blocks away and he could go straight there along a side street.
“I have to throw up,” said Gaspar.
“Hold it, we’re going. Lean on me.”
Gaspar stood up and let all the weight of his good side fall on to Pablo’s shoulder. The towels weren’t soaked through with blood, yet. He wasn’t bleeding so much. But his pants were soaked, and Pablo had caught a glimpse of a small puddle on the sidewalk where Gaspar had waited for him to come to the door.
Pablo opened the garage door and wheeled out the white Zanella as fast as he could. Gaspar had sat down on the ground to vomit almost silently. Would he to be able to get him up? He got the motorcycle as far as the street and Gaspar walked over as best he could to climb on to the backseat, but his body drooped to one side, then forward; he couldn’t control his dizziness. He’s going to faint, thought Pablo, and then he had an idea.
“Let’s do this,” he said, and quickly put down the kickstand, lifted up Gaspar’s shirt, and pulled the belt from his jeans. He knew Gaspar was wearing one of his father’s very long belts. Pablo sat on the driver’s seat and asked Gaspar to hug him tight with his good arm and to get as close as possible—Gaspar obeyed mechanically, as if listening to orders in a dream—and then he checked to see if the belt could reach around them both, if it was long enough to act as a tether to hold Gaspar’s body against his. It was. Barely. It was very tight, and he struggled, partly because his hands were trembling, to fasten it in the last hole, to close the buckle, to check that his friend was more or less stable on the backseat. Hold on to me and don’t faint, he said. Pablo felt Gaspar’s head on his shoulder, and his soft hair gave him shivers on the back of his neck. He started off.
The ten blocks to the hospital seemed like forty, and the minute-long red light at the crossroads where Zuviría intersected the avenue was so endless he thought the stop light must be broken. He felt Gaspar’s breathing on his neck, and every time his friend’s arm slackened its hold, he adjusted it again. No buses ran on that street, and he was grateful. He asked Gaspar several times what had happened, mostly just to hear his voice, and Gaspar answered, I tripped on the stairs and fell into the window, you remember the window on the landing. Pablo remembered. He didn’t understand how that accident could have happened, but he said nothing.
When they reached the hospital, Pablo parked the motorcycle between two cars and didn’t chain it or lock the wheels. Gaspar had recovered a little and needed less help to reach the emergency room; on the way, he pulled off the towels acting as a bandage by himself. He did it with dry eyes and a deep breath, trembling a little. Pablo thought he would never have been able to manage on his own with a wound like that, he would surely be scared and crying for his parents. Gaspar was scared, he could tell, but he also had a self-control that Pablo found incredible.
As soon as they went in, some people who were sitting on the long bench in the waiting area—Pablo glimpsed a woman caressing the head of a girl with braids, an elderly couple, a man his father’s age but fatter, whose foot was bare and swollen—stood up to make room for Gaspar, and a tall, fat woman pounded on the door to the attending rooms and shouted, “It’s urgent, it’s urgent!” Out came a doctor with gray-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail and a serious expression that said she was used to anxious patients. But when she saw Gaspar, she held the door open and said come in while she led him along by the shoulder. Pablo followed them, carrying the towels.
“Are you two alone? Where are your parents?”
“We’re not brothers,” said Pablo. “They’re all working.”
Of course, Pablo didn’t know what Juan Peterson was doing, since he didn’t work. Or why he wasn’t with his son. Was he in the hospital? He’d been spending a lot of days hospitalized lately. Not here: at a very expensive, exclusive clinic, his mother said, adding, if only I could give birth to your little brother at a classy place like that.
The doctor sat Gaspar on the cot and rested his arm on an aluminum table covered in white sheets. She looked at the wound with her glasses on.
“You’re going to need surgery,” she said. “I can’t just give you a few stitches, it’s very deep.”
Gaspar nodded.
“How did it happen?”
Pablo intervened and explained the accident just as Gaspar had told it to him. The doctor didn’t object and went back to studying the wound. With gloves and tweezers she lifted one of the swollen edges of the wound, revealing the bone. Gaspar stifled a scream and then his eyes did fill with tears, but he brusquely wiped them away with his good arm.