Free Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee

grandfather.
    “All day long people insult him and he doesn’t kill any of them.”
    Rezvan sometimes skipped work and came with me to the fields. He’d ride in the back of the truck, standing up, so that his head was above the cab, the wind pouring over him. He wanted to know all the details of my job. He became better than I was at some things. He could spot poor field drainage from far away. He loved to point out the signs of it—the mint, the rushes, the wiregrass, the willows.
    For lunch we stopped in the towns along the way at small, fragrant home-style diners. Almost all of them were run by Ukrainian women. Each one adored Rezvan. He would kiss their hands and speak in his strange accent—part British, part Romanian—and they would serve him free platefuls of food, one after another, hovering over him as if he were a long-lost son from the old country.
    One afternoon, while we were driving back to the city from a little town called Yellow Grass, I fell asleep at the wheel. I woke up after the crash to see Rezvan crumpled against the passenger door. I felt myself rising then, far above the car, far above even the tree line. From there I watched myself crawl out of the wreck and drag Rezvan out onto the grassy shoulder. And then, instead of watching my own body run down the long charcoal highway, I stayed above Rezvan. I watched the trees bow in the wind toward his body, listening for his heartbeat.
    Later that night, when I entered his hospital room for the first time, I expected him to refuse to speak to me. Rezvan smiled, though. “In my country,” he said, “you could work for Ceaus’escu. He has been trying to do this to me for years.” I started apologizing then, over and over. Rezvan just motioned me toward the bed and then put his arms around me. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said. “Don’t cry. This is America. This is what is supposed to happen. I will sue you, and your insurance will give us money, and we will go on a trip. To California, a vacation. I am so happy.”
    I wiped my eyes and looked at him. His head was cocked to the side. A thin white bandage was wrapped around his forehead, and blood was still matted in the black curls of his hair. One side of his face was torn apart. His leg was suspended in a sling. Still, he looked at me incredulously, wondering how I could be crying when this was such a stroke of luck.
    For the next few months he had a cane, which he loved. He liked to point at things with it. The scars settled into faint but permanent tracks down the left side of his face. He liked that, too. We saw the movie Scarface over and over again. When he discarded the cane, he still walked with a slight limp, which gave his gait an easy rocking motion that seemed strangely to suit him. He never once blamed me; I don’t think it ever crossed his mind.
    REZVAN AND I STAYED engaged for two years. He seemed to think of engagement as an alternative to marriage rather than as a lead-up to it. I didn’t mind, actually. I just wanted to be with him. Life with Rezvan had a sort of gloss to it always. He passed quickly from emotion to emotion, from sadness to gratitude to arrogance, but he never fell into depression, ever.
    Perhaps because I was so happy with Rezvan, I did not notice what may have been obvious signs. But, oddly enough, the signs indicating that a man is in love with another woman are often similar to the signs of an immigrant in a new country, his heart torn in two. He wrote long letters home; he hesitated to talk about the future; during lonely nights he seemed to be murmuring as he fell asleep, but not to me.
    Nearly a year passed before I even noticed anything, or admitted to myself that I noticed anything. Then one day Rezvan received a phone call at four in the morning. I didn’t understand a word of it, since it was in Romanian, but in my half sleep I could hear him mutter the word rila again and again, sometimes insistently. And when he hung up, after about an hour