Danger is everywhere - by Anne Will

When he was young my father shot out his best friend´s eye with a gun. That is what he told us. "One foolish moment Anne and, Jesus, if I could take it back, I would". He was shaking his fist as if it held a rattle. "It eats me alive", he said. I mean to tell you that it absolutely tears me apart".

On one of my summer visits to his hometown in Köln, my father took us to meet this guy, as shoe salesman whose milky pupil hugged the corner of his mangled socket. I wacthed the two men shake hands and turned away, sickened and ashamed by what my father had done.

My father had received a gun for his twelfth birthday and accepted it as a personal challenge to stalk and maim any living creature: Sunbathing cats, sparrows, slugs and squirrels - if it moved he shot it. Every time I thought of my fathers gun, I saw his half-blinded friend stumbling forth with an armload of apples. What would it be like to live with that sort of guilt ?

While wacthing television one afternoon my brother stabbed me in the eye with a freeshly sharpend pencil. The blood was copious, and I rode to the hospital knowing that if I was blinded, my brother would be my slave for the rest of his life. Never for one moment would I let him forget what he´d done to me. There´d be no parties in his future, no football games or carefree laughter, not one moment of joy - I would make sure of that. I´d planned my vengence so thoroughly that I was almost disappointed when the doctor announced that this was nothing but a minor puncture wound, located not on but beneath the eye.

"Take a look at your sisters face", my father said, pointing to my bandage. "You could have blinded her for life! Your own sister, blinded, is that what you want ?". Martins suffering eased my pain for an hour or two, but then I began to fell sorry for him. "Every time you reach for a pencil, I want you to think about what you´ve done to your sister", my father said. "I want you to get on your knees and beg her to forgive you".

There are only so many times a person can apologize before it becomes annoying. I lost interest long before the bandage was removed, but not my father. By the time he was finished, Martin couldn´t lift a pencil without breaking into tears. His handsome little face assumed the characteristics of a wrinkled, grease-stained bag. Seven-years old and the boy was broken.

Danger was everywhere and it was our fathers lifelong duty to warn us. Attending his birthday celebration at a Kölner golfclub, we were told how one of his military buddies had been disfigured for life when a handgrenade exploded in his lap. "Blew his balls right off the map", he said. "Take a second and imagine what that must have felt like!". I watched Martin, racing to the farthest edge of the golf course, with his hands between his legs.

Fireworks were hazardous, but thunderstorms were even worse. "I had a friend, used to be a very bright, good-looking guy. He was on top of the world until the day he got struck by lightning. It caught him right between the eyes while he was fishing and cooked his brain just like you´d roast a chicken. Now he´s got a metal plate in his forehead and can´t even chew his own food, Anne! Everything has to be put into a blender and taken through a straw".

If the lightning was going to get me, it would have to penetrate walls. At the first hint of a storm I ran to the basement, crouching beneath a table and covering my head with a blanket. Those who watched from their front gardens were fools. "The lightning can be attracted by a wedding ring or even the fillings in your teeth", my father said. The moment you let down your guard is garanteed to be the day it strikes".

In pre-gymnasium Martin signed up for a wood class, and his first assignment was to build a napkin holder. "You´re not going to be using a table saw, are you Martin ?" my father asked. "I knew a guy, a child about your size, who was using a table saw when the blade came loose, flew out of the machine, and sliced his face in half". Using his index finger, my father drew an imaginary line from his forehead to his chin. "The guy survived, but nobody wanted anything to do with him. He turned into an alcoholic and wound up marrying a Chinese woman he´d ordered through a catalog. Think about it, Martin". He did.

Martins napkind holder was made from found boards and, once finished, weighed in at close to four kilograms. My bookshelves were even worse. "The problem with a hammer", I was told, " is that the head can fly off at any moment and Anne, let me tell you, you´ve never imagined pain like that".

After a while we began to wonder if my father had any friends who could still tie their own shoes or breathe without the aid of a respirator. With the exception of the shoe salesman, we´d never seen any of these people, only heard about them whenever one of us attempted to deep-fry chicken or operate the garbage disposal my father had received from an English friend who was handicapped. "I´ve got a friend who buys a set of gloves and throws one of them away. He lost his right arm doing the excact same thing your doing. He had his arm down the drain when the cat rubbed against the switch to the garbage disposal. Now he´s wearing clip-on ties and having the restaurent waiters cut up his steak. Is that the kind of life you want for yourself ?"

He allowed me to mow the lawn only because he didn´t want to do it himself. "What happend", he said, "is the guy slipped, probably on a pile of crap, and his leg got caught up in the blade. He found his foot, carried it to the hospital, but it was too late to sew it back on. Can you imagine that, Anne ? The guy drove sixty kilometers with his foot in his lap".

Regardless of the heat, I mowed the lawn wearing long trousers, knee-high boots, a motorcycle helmet, and a pair of protective glasses. Before starting, I scouted the lawn for rocks and dog feces, slowly combing the area as if it were mined. Even then I pushed the mower haltingly, always fearing that this next step might be my last.

Nothing bad ever happend, and within a few years I was mowing in shorts and rubber shoes, thinking of the supposed friend my father had used to illustrate his warning. I imagined this man jumping into his car and pressing on the accelerator with his bloddy stump, a warm foot setteld in his lap like a sleeping puppy. Why hadn´t he just called an ambulance to come pick him up ? How, in his shock, had he thought to search the weeds for his missing foot ? It just didn´t add up.

I waited for a long time before taking my drivers licens. Before taking to the road, we sat in the darknened room, wacthing films that might have been written and directed by my father. Don´t do it, I thought, watching the couple attempt to pass a truck. Every excursion ended with the young driver wrapped around a telephone pole or burned beyond recognition.

I drove a car no faster than I pushed the lawn mower, and the instructor soon lost patience.

"That license is going to be your death warrant", my father said on the day I received my drivers permit. "You´re going to get out there and kill someone, and the guilt is going to tear your heart out, Anne".

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to 40 kilometers per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely. For a while.

When I began driving again, I ran over something I shouldn´t have. A cat. "Shit, I whispered to Martin. "Shit, Shit Shit", I whispered, tapping my forehead against the steering wheel. This was a living creature that cried out when caught beneath the tire. We covered our heads against the rain and searched the darkened street until we found an orange cat coughing up blood into the gutter. "You killed me", the cat said, pointing at me with its flattened paw. " My whole life wiped out just like that". The cat wheezed rhythmically before closing its eyes and dying. "Shit", Martin said.

"That could have been a child!", my father shouted. "Think about that the next time the two of you are tearing down the street searching for kicks". He made it sound like as if we ran down cats for sport. "You think this is funny", he said, "But we´ll see who´s laughing when you´re behind bars awaiting trial for manslaughter". I received a variation on the same speech after sidewiping a tree. Despite Martins encouragement, I surrended my permit for a while. My nerves just couldnt take it. It seemed safer to hitchhike.

My father objected when I told him I wanted to move to Berlin and waged a full-fledged campaing of terror when I announced I would be moving to South Africa. South Africa! Are you out of your mind, Anne ? You might as well take a razor to your throat because, let me tell you someting, those South Africans are going to eat you alive." He spoke of friends who had been robbed and bludgeoned by packs of roving gangs and showed me newspaper clippings detailing the tragic slayings of joggers and vacationing tourists. "This could be you!", he said.

I decide to visit my fathers hometown in Köln and I felt my way around the city with a creepy familiarity. I found my fathers old appartment, but his friends shoe store had been converted into a gambling hall. When I called my father to tell him about it, he said, "What shoe store ? What are you talking about, Anne ?". The place where your friend worked", I said. "You remember dad, the guy whose eye you shot out".

"Walter ?", he said. I didn´t shoot his eye out; the guy was born that way".

My father visists me now in Hamburg. We´ll walk through Eppendorf, where he´ll yell, "Get a look at the ugly mug on that one!", referring to a three-hundred-pound biker with grinning skulls tatooed like a choker around his neck. A young man is photographing his girlfriend, and my father races to throw himself into the picture. "All right, sweetheart", he says, placing his arm around the startled victim, "It´s time to get comfortable". I cower as he marches into grocery stores, demanding to speak to the manager. "Back home in Köln, I can get this exact same orange less than half this price", he says. The managers invariably suggets that he do just that. He screams at waiters and cuts in line at restaurents. "I have a friend", I tell him, "who lost his right arm snapping his fingers at a waiter".

"Oh you kids", he says, ( he still thinks of me as a kid. ) I don´t know where you get it from Anne, but in the end, it´s going to kill you".