Copy Cats consists of 7 short stories and one extended novella, and takes as its themes issues of identity and alienation. The story "Kopy Kats" concerns itself with a world of false images and doubles, as its protagonist--a man who works in a hectic copy shop--seeks authenticity in his life and finds only more and more imitations. "Retreat" deals with the intersection of mental illness and art, as two characters attend an art camp for people with nervous disorders. "Click" dramatizes the life of a middle-brow photographer as he tries to record the life of a part-time prostitute and drug addict; but his increasing identification with his subject moves him away from his own tenuous sense of self.

The Boston Globe has compared Copy Cats to the work of short story masters Andre Dubus and Richard Yates.

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Morta Infinita | Slide Up

On the last Halloween Kristen spent with her father they dressed as vampires, and when he hefted the rock that would shatter the Eisensteins' bay window and send their dog yelping into the woods, he smiled a sad vicious smile, and his face became the face of a vampire too.

"There are two kinds of people in this world," he said. Then he side-armed the rock, and the street exploded in noise, and she was running and he was not. He just stood there in his cloak and black shirt and white Converse All-Stars, as if he were not afraid at all, as if he were not even visible to anyone but her. As the rock left his hand and arced over the neat lawn she suddenly remembered what he had told her a few days before when picking her up from detention. "We all have to suffer the consequences of our actions," he had said as he opened the passenger door for her. "And sometimes we have to suffer the consequences of other people's actions too."

That was Saturday, five days before Halloween and two days after her mother had left for Florida. There was a horror movie festival playing downtown, so that's where they headed, and as they pulled away from the school, Kristen gave the gray building a single-finger salute. The principal was deep inside, his head bowed over paperwork, and her dad was saying something about the forces of social control. She wondered if he even knew the specifics of her crime. "I spit at him," she explained after a while. "I didn't hit him though. He sidestepped it like a matador."

"Who?"

"Mr. MacEllan," she said. "The principal."

"Your principal is your pal," he said with a laugh, pulling into a space near the theater. Even lately with her dad's eyes grown bloodshot they loved to watch horror movies together. In the dark of the movie theater Kristen could feel him next to her vibrating with emotions some people would never, ever feel in their entire white-bread lives, and she felt herself vibrate too, because she carried 50 percent of his biology in her blood.

She knew what would happen. The screen would go dark, and her father would lean over and whisper something funny about the titles or the music or the fatheaded guy in front of them, and then they would be quiet except when they gasped with joy as the villain made his first appearance. Whether it was Vincent Price staring into the eyes of a skittish dinner guest or some skin-masked, ax wielding psychopath chasing down a girl in cutoff shorts, Kristen was on the side of the devils. In horror movies freaks and ghouls were the clever ones, the fascinating ones. "The heroes are boring," she told him once as the screen glimmered with violence. "The monsters are the only ones who do anything interesting with their lives."

She liked to change his words around a little and speak them back to him so that she could watch him smile and nod at their wisdom.

"I can't go in," he said, looking into the rearview mirror at the theater marquee. He smiled tightly without taking his hands off the wheel, as if they were still driving down the road. "I can't go in there with those people. I just can't." He was crying. He leaned back his head, let out a deep breath, and said, "Oh boy."

She pictured the inside of his head as a labyrinth where he would sometimes get lost. The houses he designed were smooth and made with lots of glass, beautiful and transparent and cold and not at all the kind of place most people would want to live. She wondered if his brain was too full of these beautiful buildings, variations of shape and form and function and strange angles like a whole other neighborhood that existed and did not exist. That was where he spent most of his time lately.

Her mother--she resided in sunnier climes.

* * * * *

When little Edward Eisenstein introduced Kristen to Morte Infinita that Halloween--the Halloween her father lifted the rock and smiled as if he were the daddy of all vampires--well, it was a revelation, what her father would have called the opening of the mind to new frontiers. On the 29th of October her mother had called from Florida, and for two days Kristen had searched for meaning in each one of her father's pinched expressions. But then on Halloween afternoon in the Eisensteins' furnished basement the haze lifted, and it was like, oh yeah, man. It was like before and after pictures in the back of comic books.

"This is the kind of movie even your dad wouldn't let you watch," Eisenstein explained before hitting the play button. He didn't know that her dad wasn't up to watching movies these days, not since the aborted horror festival. Her father just sort of stumbled around at night, wandering like he was a ghost in his own house, while her mother sexed it up in Key West with her new boyfriend. "He's got this dark tan," her father had told her on Saturday as they sat outside the theater. "It's the kind of tan a certain kind of person likes."

Kristen had never met Stephanos, but she could imagine him through her father's eyes as a man blessed with looks and decisiveness and not enough goodness or evil to get him into much trouble. "I bet he does sit-ups in the morning," her father had told her. "He seems like that kind of person. I bet your mother wakes up to the sound of him grunting from the floor." This alone was reason enough to dislike him and his stupid ponytail and rubber flip-flops and the numberless cigarettes he smoked on the bow of the boat and then dropped into the sea. He did not own a boat himself but worked sailing the boats of the rich and lazy. Did these lawyers and doctors know what kind of man they were trusting with their most prized possessions?

Her mother had never sailed in her life, but when Kristen thought of her, she imagined her on a boat, white sail taut in the wind. She had been gone for five days when she called on Tuesday, and she wore new clothes in the three pictures she had e-mailed. None of them featured Stephanos, who must have been the person holding the camera. There was a conservative hint of a smile on her face--a hesitant, shameful smile--but her skin was darkening in the sunshine, and she looked healthy. She was changing, blending into her new environment like a chameleon. Kristen was changing too. Everything was.

Well, not everything. Her father wasn't getting worse, not really, and that's what Kristen told her mom when she asked her about him. She said, "He's doing great. We're having an amazing time. We saw a movie festival." She laughed nonchalantly like they were in Paris. And by saying that, it was like they were in Paris or at least someplace as exotic as Florida. Neither of them brought up Stephanos. Her father had said Kristen wasn't supposed to know, that he had figured it out himself only a few weeks ago. So Kristen said, "What are you doing?" and her mom said, "Just hanging out with Aunt Clair. We're heading on a little road trip tomorrow. I'll be home on Thursday next week. Can the laundry wait until then?" They talked about Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Goofy--losers, every last one of them--and Kristen said yes and no and maybe and then handed the phone over to her dad like it was something smelly. He lifted the receiver to his ear, put on his best, most calm voice, and said, "Hello, dear." He nodded and then turned to Kristen and said, "Would you mind going upstairs for a little while? Your mother seems to think that we need to keep secrets from you."

Upstairs Kristen lay flat on her bed and listened. Her dad was meek as he pleaded with her mother--for what exactly Kristen didn't know--and then loud again in a rushed jumble of sentences, and Kristen stopped her own breathing to listen harder. "I just told you what I want," he said, and for a second Kristen imagined him gripping her mother by the shoulders and shaking her, although she was hundreds of miles away. Then something metallic hit the wall and clattered to the floor.

"Sometimes people feel guilty because they should feel guilty," he yelled into the phone. "We're only a little club because you left. That's why we're a little club." His voice became mock childish and keening, and he said, "She loves me more than she loves you." Kristen pushed her face into the pillow and tried to brain-nap because tomorrow she had tests in two subjects. But she couldn't close her eyes for more than a minute, and when she came downstairs her father grinned at her from the sink. "Hey, kid," he said. "Just tidying up a little."

"Looks good," she said. Sometimes she wanted to kiss his forehead softly. She had seen her mother do that once when her father was in bed, still wearing his coat and tie.

He said, "Let's do something fun. I'll make it up to you for the festival thing. I still feel bad about that." She looked at him. He knew what she was thinking, boom, like telepathy. "I promise to forget about work if you promise to forget about school," he said.

They drove through town slowly, past the large sprinkler-soaked lawns, and he talked more about Stephanos, although he did not mention his name, just that there was someone else and that this person did something exotic and manly like sail boats or run a hot dog stand. Had her dad forgotten that she knew the man's name, his profession, the way his hair curled around his ears? Kristen felt like she could pick him out of a lineup.

She said, "Don't worry. It's okay. It'll be all right."

As he headed over to the south side of town, where Kristen was not allowed to ride her bike, he talked about the pressures of his job and the responsibilities of marriage. "In sickness and in health," he said. "That's a very important part of those vows." She wondered what they would be learning or not learning in her second-period history class. It seemed like her mother would never come back, although everybody was still using the word vacation.

"Watch out for that cat," Kristen said.

"I'm difficult to live with," he said. "I know that. Times have been rough lately. The last few years. But I thought we could work it out."

"What did she say?" she asked. "Tell me."

They passed people raking leaves and putting up Halloween decorations in the fading afternoon. Occasionally he waved or beeped the horn in greeting, but he was close to tears and his voice was breaking. Kristen wondered if she should be driving. She said, "Let's go home, Dad. We don't have to do this," but they continued their tour, heading east now toward the abandoned factories along the river, where bar bands rehearsed heavy metal songs and kids shattered beer bottles on the sidewalk. They drove by buildings the opposite of the kind her father designed, squat and old and tired.

Then her father glanced over at her and grinned like someone was going to snap his picture. "You know, I can take the rest of the week off. You don't want to live in Florida, do you?" And then, "No. No. Of course you don't. It's the land of make-believe. I went there once, with your mother when we first married, to visit your aunt. It's full of crocodiles and the elderly. Did you know that crocodiles were around in the Jurassic age? They're pretty much dinosaurs."

Kristen looked out the window at the restaurants sliding by and said, "I'm so hungry I could eat a dinosaur. I could eat a rock. I could eat a minivan." She laughed and put both sneakers on the dash. If her mother had been here no way would she have been able to get away with that.

Her father pulled into the parking lot of the Great American Pancake House, and she smiled because she loved this place most of all. They often came here together after going to a movie, and in the vinyl-seated booth he tried to explain that the films were like society's subconscious and that the seamless narrative arc of body-body-body-body-end was beautiful in its own naturalistic way and that she should brush her teeth twice a day and none of this waving the toothbrush around in her mouth like it was a magic wand. By just putting on his turn signal her father had made today like those other days. By the time he stopped the car and opened the door, Kristen decided that her mother was at home reading the New York Times on the couch.

Kristen told the waitress she wanted pancakes and waffles both, two each, and a big glass of milk, and sausage on a separate plate, and a side of mashed potatoes with gravy. The waitress smiled at her like she was the source of all cute in the world, like her existence made having a suck-ass job a wonderful experience. "You have a darling daughter," she said as she filled his coffee mug. It was like they were driving cross-country or something. The car was packed with camping equipment and a cooler full of 7-Up. That was the kind of thing fathers did with their daughters, right?

"Thanks," her dad said. "We're very close."

"I can tell," the waitress said.

He gave Kristen's hand a conspiratorial squeeze. "We're practically family," he said, and the waitress laughed. So did her father. If there were people at the next table they would have joined in. It was a comedy routine.

"You're happy, right? You're content?" he asked her when the waitress had gone. He smiled and sniffed at something bad in the air and his expression hardened. "That's the chief aim of everybody around here, isn't it? To be content? The Thorstons are content. The Eisensteins are content. Your mother is doing everything she can to be content."

They sat in silence for a while, looking out the dirty window at an elderly man shuffling across the parking lot. It looked like the poor guy couldn't find his car. He stopped and turned around in the twilight, turned around again, and then his hand moved slowly to his unshaven cheek.

"So you think Mom is happy?" she asked.

The food arrived with a nervous clatter. When the waitress headed back to the kitchen, Kristen asked the question again and felt like she was jabbing him with something small and sharp--her fork, her sticky knife. "Do you think Mom is happy?" He didn't answer. He was still watching the man in the parking lot, where the streetlights were finally coming on. "What about you?" Kristen asked. "Are you happy?"

He was smoothing his mashed potatoes down with the curved back of his fork like he was petting a kitten. "It's all very primal, what's happening right now. Very, very primal. But the people around here wouldn't understand that. I mean, look around. Just have a conversation with somebody. Try to get past oh, what a nice day and nice weather we're having." His voice trailed off. She swore she could hear the people at the other tables chewing, but maybe it was just him. Her mother said he was always in a hurry, that he chewed his food like a shark.

The guy in the parking lot still hadn't found his car. He looked feeble and helpless, the kind of person who would get it between the fifth and sixth ribs in the first ten minutes of one of the movies they loved so much. She looked over at the next table where little kids were fidgeting in their seats and sucking on straws and giggling, and she realized it hadn't been long ago when she had been that ignorant. Her dad was talking about death and divorce and the depressing sound canned tomato soup makes as you plop it into the pan. "It's the little things that will bring you down," he said. "Happiness requires a certain--I don't know--indistinctness of vision. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be careful. That's not what I'm saying. Remember what Kierkegaard said. 'The torment of despair is not to be able to die. To be sick unto death is not to be able to die.'"

That was the way he spoke to her, as if she were forty years old and four years old, making references to philosophers with names like curses and explaining that ice cream was really bad for her. It was like he couldn't get a bead on the place in the universe she was right now. He shot too long or too short--at various future and past selves--and he could never find his true target: a thirteen-year-old girl with braces who just a few days before had slapped a freckle-faced boy on the side of the head and then spit at the school principal when he tried to break it up. What had her mother asked her the night before she left? "Kristen, are you angry?"

Kristen had a new idea, and she tried the thought on for size the way she sometimes tried on ugly clothing at the mall--just to see how bad it looked. Her mother had died from a horrible illness. It was one of those devastating dark age kind of diseases, a dawn-of-time pestilence sort of thing. Her father sat across from her, simmering in his grief, which was natural, even kind of noble, and Kristen had to be strong, because his love had made him weak.

But halfway through the second waffle she felt the first waffle hardening in her tummy, and she pictured her mother embraced by brawny sailor's arms--the arms of the hero--as if this were the end of a Hollywood movie and the credits were about to roll. But it was not the end. It was the beginning, right?

* * * * *

"The name of the movie is Morte Infinita," Eisenstein said two days later on Halloween afternoon as they moved around the side of his house to the cellar. They let themselves in--the backdoor was unlocked--and he popped the tape in and clicked on the tv. Kristen pushed a square of cardboard against the nearest window to block the sunshine. Children and parents would be roaming the darkened streets in a couple of hours, and then they would return to their houses and take off their costumes and be in bed by ten o'clock. The next morning it would be sunshine and morning newspapers and kisses on the cheek, but right then the ground was beginning to break open like something ripe. Zombies. Foreign zombies. The tv was full of them. "Is that Spanish?" Kristen asked.

"It's Italian," Eisenstein said, and then he pronounced the words with relish, Morte Infinita, as if he were pronouncing the name of a complicated Italian dish. She reached into the bag on the cushion between them. The cheese snacks left orange dust on her fingers. She sucked them clean, one at a time, as she leaned forward. The zombies scrambled over shattered bricks and along the banks of dried-up rivers. Without people to kill they were sad and lost and innocent as babies. She was reminded of her mother's voice on the phone a couple of days before. At the time it had seemed normal. But after the fact, in her memory, it sounded desperately hopeful, like the voice of a person on a game show trying to figure out the right answer. "I needed to get away for a little while," she had said. "I hope you understand. Your father will take care of you. He will. Is he taking good care of you? He's not good at much, I guess, but he's good at taking care of you. Sometimes, I think, better than me. But I'm sure you don't think that. Is he there?"

When the prettiest woman in the cast was killed twenty minutes in, Kristen knew she was in for something special. When the sliver of wood penetrated the eye of the local doctor and the camera zoomed in and held the shot and the music swelled as if something romantic had just happened, Kristen felt her heart beating strong and fast. When a zombie in a tattered priest's robe took a chunk from the hero's neck and he was lost in a sea of rotting corpses, well, God bless Anthony Fentana, the director of the movie and writer of the screenplay, a man who was probably dead himself in an Italian cemetery. The disjointed plot, the graininess of the film, the detail of the gore, all of it confirmed something. "That was amazing," she said as the screen turned black and then sky blue.

Eisenstein said, "What did I tell you? There's nothing like the Europeans when it comes to zombie movies." He took off his black-framed glasses--he wore them only when watching television--and Kristen could see from his tentative toad-lipped expression that she had been called here for other purposes. The week before, he had tried to put his arm around her while they were watching The Angry Red Planet, and she had bent forward and laughed. It wasn't like he was a jerk or anything, or that repulsive even, although he had a weak chin and greasy, feathered hair. But there was something about him that would probably make girls laugh until he was middle-aged, and Kristen guessed he knew this too. "Kristen?" he said.

"Yes?"

"Do you love me?"

"Of course not," she said. It was enough to make her smack him. Jesus Christ.

"I know," he said, and they listened to the video rewind.

"Kristen?" he said after a while.

"What?"

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Don't worry about it." She reached out and touched him on the shoulder and thought about how young he seemed in his spindly puberty. She saw him as a different species altogether, something slow moving and amphibious and sensitive to light. His father was a big man with a truck driver's body, but he worked as a consultant for insurance companies, making spreadsheets and graphs and giving presentations about the statistical likelihood of people dying from this or that or the other thing. Little Eisenstein would probably end up doing something similar.

"I wish there was something I could do to help," Eisenstein said.

"Help with what?"

"Everything," he said, and the crack in his voice made her want to wrap her arms around him and squeeze. He said, "My dad was talking about having you stay at our place until your mother comes back."

The window shades were down day and night, but their lives were still on display as if they lived in one of her dad's glass buildings. She said, "Your father also said that the Red Sox were going to win a pennant last year. I remember him telling us that. Do you remember that?"

"Yeah," he said.

She said, "Did your dad mention anything about Stephanos? Is he coming back with her?"

"Who?" he asked, and she told him never mind, and then she made her hands into fists and played drums on her knees, and they were quiet except for the music she made on her body.

"I'm just trying to help," he said finally.

"If you want to help then just sit quietly." She sounded like his mother or teacher or some stupid thing. The idea of her needing Eisenstein's help made her feel small, like he could lift her up in his hands. Her father was not a big man, but he was bigger on the inside than the outside, as if he followed some extradimensional logic. She was the same way. They could handle this together. They always had, right down the line.

"But Kristen," Eisenstein said. His voice was whiny with love and goodwill. She cut him off with a shush, and then they were quiet. It was a perfect moment.

Then she said, "Let's watch the movie again." He found the remote and the opening music began to play, plodding piano chords like something shambling and aimless. She watched Eisenstein's face, poor lonely Eisenstein with the 125 IQ and nervous stutter. She turned back to the tv and said, "The blood looks real."

* * * * *

The night her father threw a cloak around his shoulders and told her that they were going trick-or-treating, Kristen had raced against time to be with him. She had taken the short cut from Eisenstein's house. Her bike crashed through the woods, and as she peddled faster she gave out a yelping howl of delight and rage that she hoped people might confuse for something other than a girl of thirteen. It had been a week since her mother left for the airport, and yes, maybe her dad wasn't doing so great, maybe he was in pain, but who gave a shit if he mowed the lawn? And it was wolf pain anyway, the kind of wound that made you smarter and sharper and keener and hungrier and just plain better when everything was done and you were on the other side of it. Leaves and branches snapped against Kristen's face as she sped downhill, and she imagined herself as something dark and mysterious, a one-of-a-kind animal that occupied a solitary ecological niche and was only now deciding to enter the foolish world of mankind.

Her father was in the hall sitting at the desk, writing with the long black feather pen he kept there. "I'm trying to cultivate as many affectations as possible," he sometimes said when using it. She remembered her mother laughing at that joke, the way she threw her head back. Her head was back now too, in bed, Stephanos grunting between her spread legs, his mouth against her shoulder like it was an apple. Kristen had seen her father and mother locked in that pose a couple of years ago through the crack in the door.

"Hey," he said, straightening up and looking through her as if she were invisible. "Who goes there? Is that my faithful servant?" That joke again. She knew what was required.

"No," she said.

"It's not my faithful servant?" Mock panic rose in his voice. "Oh, dear. Who then can it be?" He was an effeminate character in a story by Edgar Allan Poe, and she was some deceased relative returning for revenge, dripping water from the pond where she had drowned. She smiled in the dark, and her love became a kind of light by which she could see him clearly.

"No, it's me," she half yelled, and she was suddenly outrageously happy. She wanted to tell him about the movie and the sick, wonderful mind behind it and the blood that looked real and the burning church and the endless body count. She wanted to relive it through his senses. He could show it to her in new ways, open it for her like a book.

He said, "And who are you?"

She said, "You know who I am." She looked at the desk and said, "What are you doing?"

"Writing out a check to the credit card company. It's amazing how expensive your mother's tastes are." With a flourish of his pen he was finished. He cleared his throat and said, "Well, you ready?" She did not know what he meant until he stood up, and she realized he was dressed in the black cloak. "Trick-or-treat," he said. Then they walked downstairs together.

Ghouls and freaks and superheroes smiled at them as they emerged from the house and made their way through the neighborhood. Two Batmans walked side by side toward them. "Neither of them wanted to compromise," their mother explained, and Kristen's father nodded as if he understood. The kids frowned back at Kristen, clutching tightly at their bags of candy. This was serious business. They knew that. Monsters moved in solemn processions of three or four. There was something mournful in the way they walked, as if they were all lost and searching for their homes.

"Here, take these," her father said. He handed her something. Plastic fangs. She was dressed in a black T-shirt and shit kickers. She put the teeth in her mouth, and abracadabra, she was a vampire. "Your mother never enjoyed this kind of thing," Kristen's father said as they walked across the street holding hands. "She was always so afraid that someone was going to get hit by a car."

He was talking as if her mother was dead. For a ridiculous split second Kristen wondered if he had read her mind in the diner when she had considered the same thing. "Dad?" she asked.

"Yes?"

"How did Mom meet what's-his-face?"

His lips pursed slightly. He was thinking.

"Dad?" she asked.

"Yes?" he said.

"You're in a lot of trouble, aren't you?"

"That's a hard question to answer," he said. "I'm not sure." He squeezed her hand a little more tightly. They walked past a brightly colored spaceman holding a plastic K-Mart bag. Her dad made a sound like he was eating candy, a soft sucking noise, but he didn't say anything else until they reached the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Then he stopped and bent down and looked in her eyes the way a softball coach might before a batter goes to the plate. He said in the most steady and reasonable-sounding voice she had heard from him all week, "Your mother and I met sixteen years ago. I was thirty-three, and she was twenty-two. That's a big difference. That's almost your whole life, kiddo. You don't just throw that away because someone's hit a rough patch." He put his fist to his mouth, as if he was about to clear his throat. "Let's just say there was no other guy involved in this mess. Just me and you and your mother. That still wouldn't be an excuse. Especially in this day and age. There are medications. There's all sorts of crap. Analysis and stuff. Aromatherapy, for Christ's sake." He began to laugh, and he rubbed the top of her head with two knuckles. "We live in an enlightened age, after all."

She did not want this. She wanted an answer. She would keep looking into his eyes until he gave her one. She said, "Dad, are you getting better?"

He looked at her as if she had just said something super cute and amusing. He said, "You wouldn't remember, but she did this a couple of times when you were this big." He held his thumb and finger apart an inch, as if he was holding a bug or a screw or some small thing that could be lost if you let it go. "I wouldn't be surprised if things were back to normal by next week," he said.

She remembered again her mother's craned neck through the crack in the door, head tilted back as if posing for a painting, her eyes shut tight. She thought of their conversation a few days before, her father's pleading voice. How many things like this had Kristen missed--moments when the door was closed or the words were exchanged late at night when she was sleeping? For each she had seen there must have been a hundred that had slipped past her. "What about Stephanos?" she asked, and there was a sharp edge to her words. Her own voice startled her.

Her father scowled as if he had forgotten this important part of the equation, and then he said, "Don't worry about him. He's just a fling. That's all he is." Then he straightened up, smoothed out his cloak, and headed up the steps to the front door of their destination. He knocked three times and stepped back, raising both arms in the air ready to strike.

Mrs. Van Dyke seemed surprised to see them, but she opened the screen door and smiled. "We're supposed to be vampires," Kristen said quietly, and she opened her mouth to show off the teeth. She was too old for this.

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Van Dyke said, and she handed her an apple and a Snickers bar. They thanked her and walked away, back down the steps, Kristen feeling the woman's farsighted eyes on her back.

A few houses were dark, and Kristen wondered what was inside them, behind the window shades, down their cellars. Most, though, were lit up with orange light, or decorated with paper witches and ghosts. A few played eerie music from open doors or recordings of people screaming and evil laughter. Two big beefy kids passed by wearing hockey masks as costumes, and although Kristen vaguely recognized them, their real faces were hard to remember. The same with the skinny Darth Vader who ran up Mrs. Van Dyke's stairs as they were heading down. Was he from her homeroom?

"Don't eat the apple," her dad said as they walked away from the house. "I don't trust that Mrs. Van Dyke. She could snap any minute." He took the apple and bit into it with a little growl. "How is school going these days?" he asked between chews. "That hillbilly kid, is he still picking on you?"

"A little," she said.

"He only does that because he likes you."

"No, he hates me," Kristen said. "He wants to stomp me into mulch. I can see it in his eyes." She didn't mention that he had also insulted her dad, calling him a mental patient. That's what had made her rain punches on his gross freckled face and then spit at the principal when he had interfered with what was really a question of honor.

"That's just his way of showing you that he has a crush on you," her dad explained.

She stopped and spit her teeth into her hand so she could speak more easily. "The costumes suck this year," she said. "Maybe it's just that I'm getting older."

Nobody came to the door of the next house, although the porch light was on and she had seen other eager people receiving candy there. Her dad tapped on the window with his knuckles, threw his coat around his shoulder in a gesture of exaggerated indignation, and walked down the steps. She followed him to the Eisensteins' house, where she knew sad little Eisenstein was watching Morte Infinita for the third time. She popped the teeth back in her mouth and nudged them into position with her tongue.

"We're vampires, Charlie," Kristen's father said to Eisenstein's dad when he opened the door. "Don't invite us in, for God's sake. Put garlic in your windows and get a cross. We've come for you and your wife and son, but especially for your wife."

"Very funny," Mr. Eisenstein said. "Do you want to come in, or do you just want some candy?" He was holding a bag of mini 3 Musketeers in his hand. Kristen could hear the television playing in the living room, some voice talking about a helicopter disaster. She didn't know where or who or how, just that it had happened. She looked at her father, who was smiling tightly, the way he had that day outside the movie festival.

Mr. Eisenstein said, "Do you want a beer?" and moved back from the door.

"No, thanks," her dad said, "but I bet Kristen wants some of those delicious 3 Musketeers." They stepped into the house.

"I bet I don't," she said. She was looking around for Eisenstein himself peeking around a corner or something, but he was probably in the cellar. She saw evidence of him, though, in the little black sneakers in the entranceway. She hadn't realized his feet were so small.

"I'm surprised to see you here," Eisenstein's dad said to her father.

Kristen's dad smiled and looked around the room, at the photographs of their dog and brothers and grandparents and great aunts--their entire history on display. "Yeah, well, that's the way it is with vampires. We rely heavily on the element of surprise."

Eisenstein's dad made a sound like he had something stuck in his throat, and for a second Kristen thought candy was lodged down there somewhere, but then he said, "Are you treating her well?" He didn't look in her direction, but Kristen knew he was talking about her, and she had the momentary feeling that her body was back home and only her spirit was here as an observer. She wondered what part of the movie Eisenstein was watching and what he meant when he said he loved her. Her mother had used that word many times and so had her father. Kristen loved her father and loved Morte Infinita, and she wanted to be alone with one or the other, not standing here listening to Mr. Eisenstein. "She looks skinny," he said. "She looks like she's getting thinner."

"Vampires are thin," her dad said and then, "Have you talked to my wife lately, Charlie? Does she deign to call you from paradise?"

"Paradise?" Mr. Eisenstein said.

"Just a little joke."

"I don't get it."

"Does she call you?"

"She called me once, a few days ago. She was concerned about you. She said you sounded funny." There was something apologetic in his voice. "I'm sorry. You're putting me in a difficult position here."

"My wife knows a lot about difficult positions," her dad said. "And she's still my wife, you know. And Kristen is still my daughter." Then he laughed as if something funny had been said on the television, but the announcers were still going on about the helicopter accident. She wondered if someone famous had been killed.

"Come on," Mr. Eisenstein said. "Let's not start."

Kristen's father was looking at a magazine on the coffee table. The cover of the magazine showed a smiling young woman dressed in a bright sweatshirt and little yellow shorts. She was touching her toes and smiling. From the expression on his face, Kristen's dad looked as if he had suddenly recognized this woman and was now remembering something awful she had done to him once. He went to the table and picked up the magazine. Leafing through it he said, "Don't pretend you know what's good for her. That's all I'm saying."

Closing the door Mr. Eisenstein came and looked at the magazine as if he wanted to read it next.

"I thought you were doing okay," he said. "I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. I really did."

"I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt too," her dad said, his voice high and mocking, "but I'm pretty curious why you're protecting her. I've seen the way you two flirt. Don't pretend you don't."

Eisenstein's dad laughed then, arms folded across his chest. He looked down at the floor, at his shoelaces, at the zigzag pattern in the carpet. "This is ridiculous," he said.

"Are you fucking her?" Kristin's dad said. "Or do you just want to fuck her?"

Kristen thought of her mother walking hand in hand with her new boyfriend on some stoneless beach and wanted to believe it because it was what her father had told her. She looked at him turning the pages of the magazine, his body draped in black, and loved him so fiercely that she wanted to tear at his clothes and dig down into those hidden places and find the darkness there and grab it like a tumor. Mr. Eisenstein said, "You're going through some tough times. I understand that. But turning it into a performance piece is only going to make it worse."

"I don't think you understand," her dad said. "I didn't make it into theater. You made it into theater. Cheryl made it into theater. You're the ones who put me on stage. Do you think I wanted that?"

Kristen knew she had left his mind, his imagination. She was invisible, but there was no power in that.

"She was worried," Mr. Eisenstein said. "So she made a goddamned phone call."

Her dad dropped the magazine to the table and looked at Mr. Eisenstein in the same way he had been looking at the girl on the cover. "She's worried about herself. That's who she's worried about."

"About you too. And Kristen."

"Which is why she left."

"You were wearing her down. You know that. She needed a break. Jesus, you're wearing me down, and we've only been talking for five minutes."

"It's my problem," he said. "Not yours. Not hers."

"That's just stupid," Mr. Eisenstein said. "You think you could keep it private? It's like you're living in a fantasy world."

"Well, I'm sorry about that," her dad said, "but I like it here," and he laughed again. Kristen moved over to the window and looked out at the street, where a few more mermaids and Tinkerbells and cardboard robots were coming up the sidewalk. Why did they all look mad?

Mr. Eisenstein said, "You may be unwell, and that's fine, but you're also a prick. Get out of my house."

Her father smiled and took a step toward Mr. Eisenstein, and Mr. Eisenstein flinched the way his son sometimes did in the schoolyard. Even though he was bigger than her dad, even though it was his house they were standing in, he was the one who was afraid.

Kristen wanted to tell him to cut it out, that it was just her dad, her dad who dreamed about buildings and never hurt anybody.

The doorbell was ringing. One time. Twice. Three and then four times. Her father laughed and pulled his cloak in front of himself in the manner of Bela Lugosi and took another step forward, but his movements were exaggerated. They were funny. It was Dracula as played by Groucho Marx. It was definitely not Morte Infinita or even Nosferatu. "You see, you see, you see," Kristen wanted to say. There was no danger in him.

The two men looked at each other and then turned away.

"Mom doesn't have a boyfriend, does she?" she asked as they were walking down the steps back to the street.

He turned his back to her, hunching his shoulders, and she thought of the first horror film she had ever seen, years before on late-night cable. At the end of the movie the villain had spun away from the crowd and staggered off into the shadows, trying to hide his acid-scarred face from the stares of his loved ones. But her father didn't move.

She listened to him make muffled baby sounds, and after a few moments she took him by the hand, and they walked across the lawn. Mr. Eisenstein was watching them from the window. Then the curtains closed, and the porch light blinked off, and she thought of Eisenstein down in the basement and then of Stephanos, the imaginary man who had been so vivid to her. Her father had hexed him into existence with some sleight of hand--a bunch of words was all it took.

And if he did not exist, then in a strange way her father did not exist--at least not the person she thought she had known. She looked at him, one hand rubbing his reddened eyes, the other gripping her hand, and was surprised that she loved him even more. She gripped him back, but he stepped away from her and picked up the rock. "There are two kinds of people in this world," he said, and he grinned his Dracula grin. And he was right. She wanted him to be right.

Two kinds of people in the world. You were either a vampire or a zombie, and just like in the movies, the zombies were many, many, and the vampires were few and far between. And although the zombies had the numbers, the vampires had class and skill. They lived on the margins, peeking in from time to time when it suited them or pretending they were not vampires at all. She wanted so much to believe.

Kristen was a vampire--she knew that now more surely than ever before--and as she ran down the street, the faces of ghouls and Raggedy Annes and blue-skinned Smurfs and superheroes all turned in her direction. Faces of parents too, holding hands with transformed daughters and sons and suddenly shocked alert by the breaking of glass and the yapping of the Eisensteins' Labrador retriever. They were all zombies really, and she despised each and every one of them almost as much as she hated her mother and her imaginary boyfriend. She hated them for not being what her father called on them to be. She hated them the way she hated the victims in horror movies, and herself, for running so quickly without thinking about whom she had left behind.

Remembering the movie. That's what brought her around the house to the bulkhead, where she rattled the double doors. She could hear yelling from the front of the house. Eisenstein said, "Who is it?"

"It's me," she said, but the doors did not open. She tried to picture herself as a vampire and Eisenstein as the innocent victim struggling to resist her. She wanted to hold him and bury her face in his pale neck and swallow and swallow until she felt better--until his innocent blood mixed with her own. "Open up," she said in her most confident singsong voice, but it came out wrong. It sounded afraid and frail and as human as human can be, and for a second she did not recognize it.

People were running up the street toward the window her father had just shattered, and Kristen tried to think of her mother on her sailboat, but all she could see in her mind's eye was the rock on the Eisensteins' shag rug. She banged on the door until her hand hurt. She tried to make her clatter a match for the noise on the other side of the house, where her father must have been doing something else to make people yell. She spit her teeth into the grass. She gave the door a kick. "It's me!" she hollered.

"Who?" Eisenstein said.

"It's Kristen," she said. "Just Kristen," and the door opened and she stepped inside.

the end

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Andre Dubus III, Author of the best-selling House of Sand and Fog, says of The Man Back There, "In this virtuoso collection of stories, David Crouse guides us directly to where the shadow lies - the disorienting loss, the surprising heartache, the forgotten wound - those inevitable areas of the psyche we all share and through which only truth, illuminated with a such a light touch here, can deliver us; The Man Back There and Other Stories is the work of the real thing."

In her introduction to The Man Back There, Gaitskill writes simply, "I chose these stories because they made me feel. . . ." The reader of David Crouse's collection is bound to agree, but the reasons are not easily explained. Crouse crawls inside the heads of a collection of male protagonists and tells us how they think. They are not always likeable. They are often losers-their thoughts hurry ahead or dawdle behind, disconnected from what little action occurs around them.

And yet, somehow, we wince for the dog-catcher who crashes his ex-wife's Thanksgiving dinner in "The Castle on the Hill." We sympathize with the latch-key kid who pillages toys in a dead boy's closet in "Show and Tell." And in "Posterity," we find it hard to condemn a ninety-two-year-old senator trying to salvage his career after his ex-wife publishes a scandalous tell-all book about his life.

In this deceptively quiet collection, the truth is something that simmers up through what is not said. A hero is a man who saves himself from himself, who placates his temper with self-awareness and, most importantly, self-forgiveness. The Man Back There is a feat of empathy and razor sharp vision.

Buy this book from Powell's Books

Buy this book from Amazon.com

Buy this book from Sarabande Books

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Show & Tell | Slide Up

The Decapitated Android

Someone has twisted off its head.

This had once been a pretty great toy, but now only a small rubber stem extends from its stump of a neck. If a head were placed there—the correct head—and turned and screwed and elbow-greased hard enough into position, the thing would be just like new. The joints at the elbows and knees are still strong, the cool-ass silver paint unscratched, and a small switch in its back, when pressed, reveals not one, not two, but a row of three machine guns hidden in a panel in its beefed-up, no-nippled chest.

That first time Heineken brings you into the walk-in closet, this is the toy you see, this is the toy you have to have, because even though it's broken, ninety percent of it is the fucking neatest thing you've ever seen. You reach for it, hold it in your hand, imagine that the head is around there somewhere, in one of those old boxes, and that you're going to find it and make it whole and when it's healed you're going to stuff it under your shirt and tell him you have to get going. You've never stolen anything bigger than a pack of gum in your life, but your animal instincts kick in, and you want it with a greed that surprises you. It's just that slick.

Heineken pushes shirts out of the way so he can climb to the back of the room. It's more like a room than a closet, you realize, as the shirts part and you can see the length of it. It has a small window at the far end that looks out onto their large yard. He looks out the window, then turns and slides down into a crouching position. "This is where she put all his stuff," he says.

His nickname is Heineken because he once drank one of his dad's Heineken beers out behind the school, in broad daylight, during school hours, or least this is the story he told you when you met him at the beginning of the summer, at the scrub-brush baseball diamond at the end of your block. He was wearing the same shirt then that he is today—a yellow T-Shirt with 'Star Wars' written across it in space-aged block lettering. You often lie awake at night wondering why you’re the only person in North America who hasn’t seen this movie. But you're not about to beg your brother to drive you. You just lie. You say you have seen it four times, one less than Heineken, who repeats the storyline enough that you sort of feel like you really have seen it.

"If she knew we were fucking around in here she would go ape shit," he says, as he wipes the back of his arm across his nose.

When your grabbed Kool-Aid from his fridge just an hour ago, you noticed that there were Heineken's there in the vegetable crisper, four of them placed end to end in rows of two, like batteries. "Yeah," you say, even though you have never seen his mother, know nothing about her temper or why this place is off limits. That comes later.

"It's hot in here," he says. "I'm sweating like a pig."

You make a sound like your brother sometimes makes, deep in the back of your throat, halfway between a burp and a snicker. It's a sign that you have better things to do, even though you don't. You have discovered another secret about the android. The machine guns are hollow and fire real projectiles, little slivers of plastic with red rubber ball ends. You find one on the shelf, slide it into the barrel, cock the switch in its back, and hear the click.

It is the kind of thing little kids swallow. They fire it into their open mouths. Then you read about them in the newspaper.

Cool.

Satan's House of Horror

This is missing its cover but you know it is issue twelve because you've read the fine print. All the secrets of the comic are written in the box at the bottom of the first page in type so small it feels like a joke at your expense: the year it was printed, the address of the publisher, the subscription rate for the comic in the United States and Canada, and the words no similarity between any of the names, characters, persons, and/or institutions in this magazine with those of any living or dead person or institution is intended, and any such similarity which may exist is purely coincidental.

Above these words, a brightly colored splash page shows a devil peering down at hordes of people stewing in a gigantic vat of molten lava. The Satan-figure has raised its pitchfork, because maybe one of these people might try jumping out of the lava and scrambling away to safety and it needs to be ready to spear that person through the heart. The rest of the comic has nothing to do with this image—it's a compilation of three boring, badly drawn ghost stories—but this one page rocks. The devil is smiling like crazy. You've never seen anybody so happy.

And then the creepy thought occurs to you, the so-scary-it-makes-you-proud idea. There are so many people in the vat that a lot of them probably do look like real people, despite the tiny words proclaiming that any such similarity is purely coincidental.

"He had a shit load of comics," Heineken says. He's watching you as you read. Occasionally he asks if you want to catch some TV, go to the pond and throw rocks, have some nachos, but sprawling on his bed with a stack of his brother’s comic books is ten times better.

"Where is Oregon?" you ask, because that's where Heineken has told you his brother moved when he was sixteen.

"It's on the other side of the country," he says. "It's practically Alaska."

Sixteen seems just old enough to make an ambitious move like that. You're eleven now and in five years you are going to be a completely different person—and not a person like your own brother, who at nineteen slides his feet across the pocked kitchen linoleum like a tired fifty year old. You hear him from your bed when he comes home from work, his feet sliding, his keys clicking on the glass tabletop in the kitchen. The door to the room you share opens and he clicks on the light, then the TV, and you push your face into the darkness of your pillow.

Inside the comic book, a ghost in a black hood is walking down a corridor, dragging chains that create a long sound effect that spirals out of the panel and into the next one, where a man cringes in his bed, listening. This is stupid stuff you are reading, but you need to find out the end. You really hope somebody gets snuffed.

The ghost is passing through the door, arms extended, his hair like smoke trailing from the back of his head. The man is screaming, and something about their common expression—two mouths agape, two sets of eyes bulging, the similar caveman slope in their foreheads—makes it look like they are relatives in an especially ugly family.

You think that anybody could do bullshit like this; you could do it right now if you had a crayon and five minutes.

Stupid Rubber Werewolf

On Tuesday you play with marbles, holding them up to the light like jewels so you can see their shiny hypnotic centers. On Thursday you uncover a box of books—sword and sorcery paperbacks, thick science textbooks, a dog-eared collection of car photographs–and discover his name written neatly on the inside cover of each one. The next day you rummage through the pockets of a dungaree jacket and produce four things: a petrified stick of gum, a quarter, a ticket stub to a Black Sabbath concert, and a small werewolf made from rubber and wire. You bend its hands above its head, its legs into painful-looking pretzel-shapes. Of the three big Hollywood monsters—Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman—the Wolfman is potentially the coolest, but this guy you're twisting around is not very cool at all, and you have no idea why someone would carry it around in a jacket as sleek and dirty-amazing as the one hanging from the wire hanger.

"Want to eat?" Heineken says.

"Sure," you say. Heineken's father works in Boston and his mother works in Lowell and they leave meals for him wrapped in cellophane when they leave for the day. He always offers half of them to you, but you never accept. Instead you open the cabinets, find something familiar—a can of tomato soup—and plop it in a pan.

Heineken watches as you click on a burner and shake the pan above the flame. Your mother waters soup to thinness, or yells at you if you overcook the eggs, so this is good, this is better than the eating itself, and at first you serve Heineken too—a bowl, a spoon, and then a piece of bread taken from the fridge. But he says no, and looks at the soup like he's not sure where it came from. You want to tell him, look, this is yours, but you eat separately—him his sandwich, you your soup—and you're rushing to finish because today is Friday and you’re running out of closet-time. In a few hours you will walk home and you won’t see Heineken until Monday, when once again he will appear at the boring little playground where you first saw him hanging limply from the jungle gym. Then you will head to his house together, Heineken walking slightly ahead, talking loud about what he did with his parents that weekend. This is how it works.

You’ve thought of showing up here some rainy Sunday morning and ringing the bell, but you remember another kid in another city, last year, and the way his head appeared in the upstairs window when you knocked on his door, and then that long wait, the second knock, the stupid shamble back down the stairs and out into the street, where you picked up a rock and thought of throwing it hard at the spot where the face had been just a few seconds before.

The first taste of the soup ignites your hunger, but you rest the spoon in the bowl and let your appetite stand. "What did William do?" you ask, trying out the name from the inside cover of the books. It does not feel that unnatural on your lips, especially with one of his quarters in your pocket and the werewolf on the table.

"Who?"

"William."

"Billy," Heineken corrects you.

Then he goes back to chewing like this is some kind of answer.

Giant-Sized Super Spectacular

There's at least one lesson to be learned from every object, and then something to learn when objects are put together in combinations of two or three, like the Matchbox car you found hidden inside a plastic submarine, but for the most part these lessons are beyond words. And the simplest lessons, the ones that appear in sentence form in your head, are as unsatisfying as your mom's mottos about people making their own luck and respect being earned and not given and sometimes, when she is especially tired, tomorrow being a new day. For instance: Supervillains are always trying to take over the world. Superheroes are always trying to stop them. That's the lesson in the comic book you are reading.

It seems like the millionth time these characters have fought, but there are no other issues before this one that help to explain what's happening. Why do The Lightning Dynamo and The Boomerang Kid dislike each other so much? The villain with the lizard skin keeps mentioning revenge, but revenge for what? It makes you think of September, that sick-stomach feeling that comes on you when you walk down the hall for the first time and everybody else is calling each other by name. You're this close to crumpling the stupid thing up, but you like the drawing, and one of the villains is sleek like a cat and has claws for hands.

"What does he do out there?" you ask. You are thinking that he maybe draws these things, comics like the one spread on the living room floor.

"Where?" Heineken asks. He's reading too. A boy scout manual.

"Oregon," you say. "Your brother."

"He's a boxer," Heineken says, and his eyes do this screwy thing they've never done before. They look up and off to the right, into the far corner where the ceiling meets the wall, and for a second you think he's heard a car in the driveway. You're ready to bolt down the stairs and out the back, into the thick woods behind their house. "A professional boxer," he says, limply, and your leg muscles relax.

You imagine him, hard and shiny-wet, throwing punches at the air. It is like a scene from an old movie except there is no plot, no dialogue, just the empty ring, the one mysterious character, and the sandpaper shuffle of his feet.

"It's going to rain," you say, but you stay where you are, flipping the pages of the comic back and forth without really looking at them.

You walk home through a light drizzle that makes the blacktop of the road glisten. You take the long route past the train station, and when you finally arrive at your front door the little house is dark except for a light in your mother's bedroom. So you head in through the back door and make a peanut butter sandwich by the light of the open refrigerator. When you finish you close the door with your foot and eat the sandwich standing in the dark. Your mother calls something out and you answer with a mumbled hello as you chew. Then you wipe the crumbs off your hands above the sink and head into the bedroom. You could have sworn you put the headless android under your bed, but there it is leaning against the lamp on your nightstand, standing at attention like it’s been waiting up for you. Its head stem spears a small note, which you grab and ball up, think about throwing on the underwear-littered floor. But you open it and find your brother's scribbled handwriting. Are you going through people's trash now? Show some self respect. Love, Gerry.

You'll have to hide the comic books somewhere better.

Broken Water Rockets

Two long rockets with hollow ends that can be filled with water from a plastic hand pump. A drawing on the box shows a rocket flying into the air and droplets of water exploding through the sky. Two smiling cartoon kids look up from the ground, waving their hands like they're saying good-bye.

You are getting too old for this.

You love it though. Your own toys—the bag of plastic solders, a machine gun that goes clack clack clack when you pull the trigger, even your plastic bat with duct tape wrapped around one end—they’ve all gone unused since you moved here in May, but Heineken's brother's toys are special. You want to keep digging. And anyway, the summer is a little secret between you and Heineken. In the fall things will be different. You know that. You're pretty sure he does too.

"Damn it," you say, when the rocket spurts up half a foot in the air and falls to the driveway blacktop. You pick it up again, begin pumping the stupid pump again, and then swear again when it still doesn't work. "Damn it to hell."

You've developed a habit of swearing like a sergeant in the war movies your brother watches late at night when he comes home from his new job at the 7-11. It's his third this summer, and your mother is already talking about moving again. She says there are jobs in Florida, and the weather there is beautiful year-round. She has mentioned Washington state too, which you now know from a quick glance at a map is not that far from Oregon, but you're guessing it's a lot of baloney, like the time she wanted to go to Greece to check up on some old rich relative who probably doesn't exist.

"Your brother sure bought some stupid crap," you say, as you think about your own modest toys.

"Shut up," he says. He's not even looking at you. He's kicking at the grass near the two-car garage, trying to find June bugs. This yard is so different from the small square of dirt behind your own house. Sometimes you see a family of rabbits huddled around the back porch, or a single deer staring at you from the safety of the woods, and you watch them for as long as you can before they scramble away from you.

You’re sick of the sight of his big flat face, his shirts with the little alligator on the chest, his pale little legs. You do some quick math in your head, trying to guess at how old he was when his brother left home, but you come up with nothing. The facts don't seem coherent yet. It's still like a bedtime story, something sleepy and faraway. "What was it you said before about the boxing?" you ask, and he shrugs his shoulders. He seems to do that more and more as you get to know him, although maybe you're just noticing it now. "You're a God damn liar," you tell him.

"Yeah, well, you're a God damn thief," he says.

You pick up the rockets and hold them while Heineken fills them with the hose.

The Other Robot

This one is not nearly as good as the headless android, but it's kind of fun to smash with the hammer you find in Heineken's cellar. It's lower jaw is larger then its upper jaw and as the hammer comes down on its chest, it seems to be frowning at you like the little Buddha your mother keeps on the dashboard of her Chevy Impala. When your brother drives, he talks to it like it's a passenger, asks it where it's headed, then answers with a high, I'm-so-funny voice. "Canada!" it says back. Or, "Arkansas!"

You imagine the hammer accidentally coming down on your thumb and turning it blue. You sort of hope it does; then you would have something to be mad at Heineken for, because it is his hammer. But your swings come down hard and precise, in the same spot every time, directly on the chest, which has fractured open to reveal a little clockwork mechanism.

"What are you doing?" Heineken asks from behind you.

"Fixing something," you say, without breaking the sharp upward swing, the downward slam.
He turns and heads back into the living room, where he will probably sit in front of the TV and watch Donahue push a microphone into the faces of his studio audience members.

It doesn't feel like you're lying. There's something important inside, a little system of interlocking teeth and tiny rubber bands, and you want to see it as completely as you can. But as you break it open you are also smashing it flat. When you stop, Heineken comes back, but he doesn't say anything. "What?" you ask. You're breathing hard through your mouth.

"That was my brother's," he says.

"It wouldn't work," you say. "I was trying to fix it."

"He won that at the carnival," he says, "just before he left. We won it."

The word the before carnival pisses you off, like there is only one carnival in the entire world and you're supposed to know about it. "It's not like he's coming back for it," you say, but he's already walked away. You lift the hammer and bring it down a couple more times.

The landlord has been calling the house. You pick up the phone in the evening and he asks if your mother is there. You have orders to tell him she is in the shower, so this is what you tell him even though she sitting at the kitchen table scanning the newspaper. She lifts her head and smiles.

"Go tell her it's me," he says, because he's called enough that he's stopped introducing himself.

"She's in the shower," you say.

"I know that," he says, so you hang up the phone.

It begins to ring again. You walk away from it. So does your mother, in a different direction.

Rusted Scimitar

You know this word from some movie you saw just a few weeks before on Heineken's TV, so when you find one at the back of the closet behind some old clothes it's a doubly satisfying discovery.
It makes you feel strong to slide your hands around the grip and lift it, smart to know its real name. What do people call this? Luck.

You are wearing a plastic army helmet you found at the bottom of a box and although the two items do not fit together at first, with a little imagination you can picture yourself as a time traveler who has picked up these odd items on all of his journeys through history. When you emerge from the closet, you feel so tough that you wave the scimitar around and say, "I could chop off someone's head with this."

You suddenly remember the decapitated android. Where did that thing end up, anyway? The last time you saw it was on your brother's pillow. He had pushed an orange down on its stem as a makeshift head, wrapped a napkin around its shoulders as a cape.
"Watch it," Heineken says. "That thing is sharp."
Which it is. You touch your thumb to it and draw a small droplet of blood, which you wipe on the front of your jeans.
You point it at his chest and say, "Was your brother a pirate? Is that what he was?"

"Cut the shit," he says.

You can hear the cars driving up and down the street outside. It's a little past five o'clock—the latest you've ever been here—and the chances of one of those cars being driven by Heineken's mother grows greater every second. You poke the sword forward, move it in the shape of an X. He rolls his eyes. He's bored of this, bored of you, and he wants you to be gone. All summer you've been thinking you're the one who chooses to leave before they get home, but no, you can tell now, he's been the one prodding you out the door. He's ashamed of your dirty Keds and your hungry belly.

"A pirate," you say, because somehow you know this hurts.

"Shut the fuck up about my brother," he says.

There is something tense and dangerous here but you want to keep prodding it to see if it bites back. You raise the sword to his face. It's close enough that you could lean forward and tap his nose with the point, but all he needs to do is step back two steps. You kind of wish he would.

"If he was here right now he would kick your ass," he says.

"A knight," you say. "Your knight in shining armor."

You are putting on your brother's I'm-too-funny Buddha voice and you hate yourself for it. You're almost relieved when Heineken slaps the sword to one side with the flat of his hand and throws a punch at your face. You duck your head and his hand hits the top of your head and then you are in there, grabbing him and pushing him back against the flower-print wallpaper. He grabs you too, in a grotesque little wrestling hold. You can hear him breathing hard. You can hear yourself too.

"Let me the fuck go," you say through gritted teeth.

"You first."

Where is the scimitar? For a scary-fantastic second, you think you have accidentally impaled yourself, that blood is pouring down your back. You are not scared of dying or the hospital, but the idea of staining the wall-to-wall is almost too horrible to imagine, and if Heineken were not gripping you tightly, you would clutch your shirt and try to stop the warm flow.

But the wetness on your back is just your own humiliating sweat. You fumble for a better position, slide your hands down his body. You can feel his ribs, the muscles in his thigh. You could stay like this for a long time, you decide, but he says, “On the count of three.”

"One, two, three," you say. "One, two, three," and you both let go at the same time, step backward, stare each other down. Your shirt is torn down the front in two places. The scimitar is on the floor. It’s not nearly as sharp as you thought it was, although it’s probably heavy enough that the flat of the blade could cause some real damage. Heineken is trying to say something, but he’s breathing too hard, and the words catch in his throat.

You hear the front door opening, or think you hear it, so you run downstairs and out the back, where Heineken's mother is standing, her car keys still in her hand. "Hello there," she says, like she had expected you.

You don't say a word.

"Where did you get that hat?" she says.

"It's a helmet," you say, like a moron.

She reaches out and plucks it off your head and for a second, you think she's going to put it on her own head, but she holds it with two hands against her belly. You remember a funeral in one of the war movies, with a flag draped casket and a captain, the star of the movie, holding his cap that way. She says, "Are you a friend of Bobby's?"

It's like you're trying very, very hard not to exist.

"You were playing in the closet," she says.

"Why do you keep all those things?" you ask.

The moment hiccups as you wait for her to push her face into the correct expression—flat and stern and unemotional. "You're not supposed to be in there," she says, and although she isn't moving, you duck and scamper to your right, running past her and into the woods. When you are far enough away you stop and cup both hands to your mouth. You struggle to think of something to say, anything, and finally you yell out, "He's dead! He's dead!" but not loud enough for anyone to hear but you.

It’s like the game you used to play sometimes. A half dozen kids wandering through the woods holding plastic water pistols and machine guns that made clicking sounds when you pulled the trigger. You’d shoot someone and then yell, “You’re dead,” when he didn’t fall down. He would shoot back and yell too, a mocking echo, and pretty soon you’d be arguing about who had been hit, who had missed. Remembering this, you yell out a little louder, the words part command and part question, but your voice sounds strange—distant, as if someone else is yelling those words at you, from off somewhere in the forest. You lower your hands, spin around and give the trees a once over, expecting to find Heineken there, holding the scimitar. Maybe smiling in a way you’ve never seen before—sinister and confident—or maybe wearing a face like his mother’s when you asked the question about the closet. But of course he is not. Not even a squirrel or rabbit to act as an excuse for that scaredy cat feeling that’s attacking the nape of your neck.

You pick up a good, straight stick and point it at an invisible enemy, mumble the words again like a little curse.

Home-Made Android Head

It’s not really. It’s just a ball of black duct tape pushed down on the stem. You slip an old action hero helmet over it and it looks pretty good, good enough that you think of giving it to Heineken as a gift. But your brother finds it first and he tells you that you're pretty resourceful for a retard and that he's going to donate it to the retard museum. He holds it above his head, tempting you to make a grab for it, but you just chew on your lip until he takes it away.

You guess that this is the last time you'll see it, and you guess right. Years later, when talking to him on the phone, you’ll sometimes wonder what he did with it, if he dropped it in the trash or gave it away or left it someplace you really should have looked if you had just been smarter by two I.Q. points.

But it’s not all bad luck that day, is it? Because your mother comes home red-faced and smiling. She hugs you before she even closes the door and says that she just won the lottery. For a split-second you imagine one million, two million, three million dollars—your mind spins you out of the house and across town and into some brand new life—but it’s five hundred bucks, which is still a lot of money, and you hug her back.

She has lobsters in the car, she says, and you help her bring them inside. Their claws, you notice, are held shut by thick rubber bands. There are three of them, one for each of you in the family, and corn on the cob, and bottles of wine and beer, and strange little multi-colored cookies wrapped in green cellophane. There are more groceries in the trunk of the car than you’ve seen in your life, and you have to take five trips to get them all inside. When you’re finished your mother pulls you into her arms again and tells you to close your eyes. But before you can she hands it over. It’s a baseball glove—somehow she managed to smuggle it inside without you seeing—and she hands it over with a flourish and a small kiss.

She drinks a glass of wine and watches you flex your hand, pound your fist into the base of the glove, and hold your arm out like you're ready to receive a hard pitch. The glove's too big for you, but you make a show of loving it, and she even brings up little league, although by this time she's rambling about all sorts of ambitions and regrets and stupid men and signing you up for little league suddenly becomes one of a million things she should have done with her life.

"Christ," she says, with a little laugh, when she catches herself crying.

That night when she's asleep you lift the lid from the garbage can. You slide your fingers in, push aside coffee grounds and vegetable muck and sharp lobster shells, but it's not there.

You think of walking to Heineken's house in the dark, but even a retard like you is smart enough to know that it would be pointless. When your brother comes in—he was supposed to be home hours ago—you are still awake, lying in the dark. "Where is it?" you say, with as much venom as you can bring up from your gut.

"Where is what?" he says. You can hear him pulling off his heavy shoes, dropping them to the floor. You’d push it a little more, but you know he’ll push back, and you had your revenge anyway, because after waiting for him for an hour at dinner, you and your mother split his lobster between you.

“Forget it,” you say.

“Forget what?” he says, with a snicker.

You are thinking of Heineken's stiff puppet face, the point of the scimitar. His features had been as much a mystery as the objects in the closet, and you wanted to nudge it to see if it would grimace the way you grimaced when you raised that single drop of blood on your thumb. Not even a nudge. A jab at the air and a flinch would have been enough. It would have been like a gift to you if he had just twisted his face to show a little pain. But he didn't do it, so why should you give him the repaired android with its ridiculous duct tape head? You'll have to be satisfied with this odd balance, this double withholding.

You don't know what he feels, though, or what he thinks.

You've never even been in his room.

You tell yourself you won't go back there.

Little Green Soldiers

"Where is he then?" you ask.

"Shut-up," Heineken says

You're standing in his yard throwing tennis balls up onto the roof of his garage. They slide down and you catch them and throw them up again. Sometimes one gets stuck in the gutter, and you poke at it with a broom handle until it pops free.

This is what passes for fun now. You haven't been inside in a week, ever since you held the scimitar in your hands and wore his brother's helmet on your head.

"You don't know, do you?" you say.

"Shut-up," he says. "Shut-up."

The summer is ending and when school starts in two weeks you know you're going to switch allegiances and attach yourself to a group of bruisers, like you did at the last school in Pittsburgh. Spitting, kicking, knotty-muscled kids who live in houses like your house. You are becoming one of these kids. Becoming isn't even the right word. You are one. And after that? In twenty years you will become me, and I will look for you over my shoulder as you scramble along the confused landscape of my history. In a way, you are as mysterious as that small space at the end of the hall, the missing brother. I am trying to rebuild you from scraps—smudged memories, damaged imagination. I guess I am trying to talk to you.

So when you get home you take your own pitiful little army men—the man with the binoculars, the sharpshooter, the captain, and all the rest—and burn them with your brother's naked lady lighter. They move in slow motion as they melt. Their arms curl inward. Their knees buckle. Their heads bow in prayer, and then you bury them in unmarked graves along the wire fence at the back of the yard, stand up and brush the dirt from your jeans.

"It's too late in the year to do that," your mother says, when she comes up behind you and puts her hands on your shoulders. She thinks you're planting seeds.

the end

Slide Up

Small Town News | Slide Up

A few weeks ago, while standing in the produce section of the new grocery store in Dexter, I noticed someone inspecting oranges the way my mother once did, turning them over one at a time in her hand, like a pitcher finding the threads of a baseball. It was not that this woman looked that much like my mother, although she was tall and thin. It was the way she moved--methodically, confidently—and the way she smiled slightly to herself, as if she were remembering something good that had once happened to her. I glanced behind her, expecting to find my father there, sullenly pushing the grocery cart.

For the last six years I’ve worked at a newspaper in Orono, covering school committee meetings in townships too small to support their own papers. About a third of my time on the job is spent driving. It’s the only part of the job that I can say I truly enjoy, and it requires its own set of special skills, just the same as the writing and reporting. I’m good at it. I know where the police hide along the roads, so I can get away with speeding, and because I don’t punch a clock, sometimes I simply disappear. I go for a walk, or read a newspaper in my car—whatever I want. That’s what I was doing when I saw the woman in the grocery store—the woman who reminded me of my mother. I had a few hours free and I had decided to do some errands, and then there she was, and although she didn’t see me, I felt like I had been caught, and I wanted to leave before she pivoted in my direction. Which is exactly what I did do, stranding my grocery cart in the aisle with a few items inside.

This was not a logical reaction, of course. But the sighting possessed the strange logic dreams have, and as with a dream, I wanted to pass it on to someone else before it was forgotten. The only person who would have understood is my brother, though, and he would have pretended he didn't understand at all--he would have just laughed and said, “Cheryl, you think too much.”

* * * * *

I left home at eighteen, for reasons I’m still sorting out, and worked odd-jobs around the east coast for a few years, first in southern New Hampshire; then in New Brunswick, New Jersey; and then in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I accumulated enough cash and motivation to go to school. My brother Robert was fourteen when I left home, eighteen when I saw him again—the same age I had been when I first left. I didn’t talk to my parents or brother much during those four years, and there was a sense—despite my mother’s occasional phone calls—that one more move might separate us completely. But in the winter of my second and last year in college, I decided that I would return to Maine and visit them. Part of my life was ending and a new part beginning, and I guess I thought my family might help me through the transition. I suppose I was motivated by affection, obligation and maybe morbid curiosity, which is another way of saying I was confused, a mindset I often found myself in then.

The weather was bad the night of my return, and it grew even worse during the half hour I waited near baggage claim, watching out the window for a sign of my brother. "It's the damned snow," he said as an explanation for his lateness, and he looked out the row of darkened windows at the fat snowflakes falling onto the airport parking lot, as if they needed to be pointed out to me, so that I wouldn't see his excuse as flimsy. Then he seemed to remember something. He smiled. "How are you?"

"A little tired," I said. He wore what looked like new boots and an unbuttoned dungaree jacket. One of the knees of his jeans had been torn out and I could see the gray-white of his thermal underwear through the hole. He lifted my shoulder bag into the trunk of his car and then we stood facing each other. His hair had been cut too close to his head, so that I could see his scalp. "We better get going," I said. “It’s only going to get worse.”

We didn't talk much on that thirty minute drive out to the house. I remember thinking that he must be concentrating on his driving. The wind had picked up and the snow seemed to chase us down the road, spiraling behind the car in a kind of tunnel. "What have you been up to?" I finally asked.

"Oh, you know," he said, "same-old, same-old." He looked away from the road and met my eyes. "I'm wondering something," he said. I watched the shallow ruts where other cars had driven recently. Snow floated and swirled in the headlight glow. "I'm wondering why you decided to come back."

Did he mean to say that he thought I shouldn't have come back, that he wouldn't have remained if he could have helped it? Did he mean to say that he didn't want to see me, that he was angry for some reason? I gave the knee-jerk answer. "To see you and dad and mom, of course."

He grunted in reply and turned the windshield wipers to high. I thought about how I had changed, gained a little weight, cut my hair too. A new pocketbook rested on my lap, and in it there was a few hundred dollars wrapped in a rubber band, some lipstick, too many pictures of an ex-boyfriend, and half a pack of cigarettes. It felt like I had a lot of secrets in there, although I guess that wasn’t true. “Remember when dad used to take us sledding when we were kids?” Robert said, with a glance over at me.

“No,” I said.

“Neither do I,” he said, “but he does."

My mother had shared many details of their lives during our phone conversations. I knew Robert had found work at a garage, first pumping gas, then helping out on the cars. My father had bought two dogs, pure-breeds, but sold them after a few weeks when their barking kept him up at night. Certain people I had dated in high school married and settled in town. Other people—she called them my friends, I called them acquaintances—moved away. My father built a screened-in porch on the east side of the house. Sitting in the car with Robert, all of these facts seemed insufficient. It wasn't that I thought my mother had kept something from me. She was one of the few people I knew who seemed incapable of deceit. But I also knew she had the ability to ignore things. Looking on the bright side, she called it. I think it was this trait which contributed most to my parents' marriage lasting as long as it did.

Later on, as we turned onto the stretch of narrow access road that cuts through the woods to the house, Robert looked at me. "He's not like you remember him," he said.

* * * * *

I don’t know what my father felt about the life he tried to make for us. He was not the kind of man who talked about his past. That job fell to my mother, and she conducted it discreetly, the way she carried out most of her responsibilities. Sometimes, when Robert and I were upset with him, she would take us aside and talk about the house as a gift my father had given us. “You can’t imagine how hard he worked on this place,” she would say, when she had found me in whatever room I was hiding in, and then I would feel sorry about whatever I had done to make him raise his voice.

I can imagine him back then as a pretty impressive figure—in his late twenties, a good seven or eight years older than my mother. He had inherited land in Maine from an uncle, and for more than two years he drove up there from Revere, Massachusetts with friends on Fridays after work, where they set up tents, drank, and worked on the house, sometimes late into the night. Then they lay sleeping bags on the unfinished floors and slept, rolled them up on Sunday and drove back home. My mother said he often changed his clothes, showered and had dinner at her parents’ house when he returned from those weekends. He told them what he had accomplished—putting up sheetrock in the bedroom, painting a final skim coat, setting down flagstone rag work from the front door to the driveway—as if he was laying the future out on the table for everyone to see. His head must have been full of all kinds of plans he had never been able to act on until then, when the land and my mother both happened into what must have previously been a frustrating life.

He was an amateur carpenter, and friendly, and these two things helped him get all sorts of inexpensive cull—bargain-priced two-by-fours, piping, bricks. He built up debts along with the house, especially for electric and plumbing, which he contracted out, although these hardships, my mother explained, were nothing insurmountable to a couple of strong young people, especially when land in interior Maine was a cheap investment. I think she drew as much solace from these stories as we did. She talked about that time as if it were a fairy tale, but of course I was a young girl then, and every story was told to me as if it were a fairy tale.

“Remember those stories she used to tell about him?” I asked Robert, as we drove slowly up the access road. The car’s headlights moved across the trees and then the house. We had arrived.

“Yeah,” he said, but I wasn’t sure if he was listening.

Although the porch had been finished, it hadn't been painted. It was good-sized though, at least twenty feet square, with rows of jalousie windows. The addition gave the house an off-balanced appearance, and instead of making the whole appear larger, it drew attention to the smallness of the rest of the place. Robert dropped me off and told me he was heading out to his girlfriend's place, that he would see me that night or the next morning. I watched the car make a sloppy three-point turn and head back out where it had come from. No one came out to meet me. The only light glowed from the cellar. It looked as if nobody was home, or that my parents had gone to bed.

Just behind the house I found four thick posts in the ground with chicken wire stretched around them: my father's dog kennel. The farthest side had a window-sized circular hole near the bottom, a flat board next to that. It was like my father come up with an idea and not follow it through, then leave the evidence lying around. At least that was the father I knew—not the man who had built the house, but the man who had driven these four posts into the ground one Saturday on a whim. I wondered what had happened to the dogs.

When I knocked at the side door, nobody answered, so I tried the knob. It was open, and I kicked off my shoes before going in, heading down the stairs, moving in the dark. I had expected the basement to smell like the rest of the house—my father's cigarettes mingled with my mother's cleaning products—lemon-scented soaps, wood oils and aromatic sprays. But the room smelt heavily of smoke and dampness.

My father was sitting in his easy chair watching television with the sound off. When I told him that Robert had dropped me off and gone to see his girlfriend, he laughed and said, "Really? Which one?" He had gained some more weight, lost more hair, but overall he looked healthy, and more or less the way I remembered him. He waved his cigarette at the television, making circles in the air, as if he were waving a wand. "Would you mind straightening that antenna?" A scotch and ice rested next to him on the arm of the chair, the ice something new for him. "Your mother's in bed. She wanted to stay up, but she has a cold, and she was practically falling asleep standing up. I told her no martyrs." He shook the ice around in his glass. "Want anything to drink?"

"No, thank you," I said. I swept ashes and wrappers into my palm, looked around for a trash can. "Let me clean this up."

"Jesus, Cheryl," he said, "if you want to make yourself useful, start by filling this back up." He held out his empty glass. "And you can get one for yourself." He crushed some ice between his teeth. His smile spread wider. He winked at me. "Damn, it's good to see you." His general attitude made it seem as if he had just told me a secret, the wink his acknowledgement that I would not tell. Maybe sharing a drink with him would have been that secret.

A pool table sat flush against the far wall, the brown-green top covered by pale chalk dust and a couple of stray car odds and ends, an old muffler, a car battery. Something orange had been spilled on the couch. "When's Mom going to clean this place up?" I asked him. I set down my purse, lifted a spark plug off the table, and turned it over in my fingers.

He laughed. "Your mother? I don't let her in here." He held out the glass for me to receive, fill and then return to him. "This is my private room, you know? My special boys-only clubhouse, I guess you could call it. Which means I must really love you to let you in here, into my I'm-fucking-fed-up-and-want-to-be-alone room." He jingled the glass. "Oh, waitress."

I could picture my mother moving softly around the rest of the house, almost floating, moving this vase, dusting that table, then disappearing into another room, like a spirit. But she would always stop at the threshold of this room and turn back, because my father had said so. I set down the plug and tried to change the subject. "What's up with Robert?"

"What do you mean?"

I rubbed my head. "You know. Everything. His hair."

He ground his cigarette out, still holding his glass with the other hand. "Robert's full of ideas, about traveling, about the army and the air force. He wants to enlist and I guess the haircut's part of that. You should see his room. All posters of fighter planes and guns." He moved forward in his chair, closer. "But you know what? He doesn't really want to. He just wants me to think he's going to." He stopped smiling, and he seemed older all of a sudden. I could see the lines at the side of his mouth and across his forehead as he concentrated on what he was saying. "He's not like you, Cheryl. He's all over the place. I got him that job at the station and every day he talks about quitting. And every day I tell him, 'If you quit that job, you're out of this house.'" The smile came back, wide as ever, and he laughed loud enough that I found myself smiling too. "You should hear us. Either I'm going to break his neck one of these days or he's going to break mine."

He was caught in that state between complete drunkenness and sober lucidity; one more drink and he might be yelling angrily about something, two and he'd be asleep, but right then, with the empty glass in his hand, his words were almost meditative. "He's not like you in that way either. I raise my voice to him and it scares him a little. That never worked with you."

"Water under the bridge," I said.

"I'm glad to hear you say that, Cheryl. That's exactly how I feel."

I looked to the doorway. "What room am I sleeping in?"

"Life's too short," he said.

“Dad,” I said, more forcefully.

"You know, there's work to be found around here," he said, looking straight ahead at the television. "You know that." I walked across the room and took his bottle off the pool table. I handed it to him and watched him pour, the tip of the bottle tapping the edge of the glass, then took the bottle back. I screwed the cap on and set it near his chair. "Thanks," he said, "I knew you couldn't hold out forever."

The fold-out sofa upstairs was made up with fresh sheets. On the pillow I found a note written in my mother's wide-looped handwriting. "Cheryl. Hope you had a good flight. Your father's watching television in his cage, but he'll be asleep by the time you get in. Turn off the television if you happen to wander by. Come and wake me and we'll talk."

* * * * *

This is my favorite part. I’ve just left the office after meeting my deadline, which is about eleven o’clock, since it’s an afternoon paper. The roads are empty and I’m hovering in that moment between having just completed something and having to complete the next thing. There’s a city council meeting that night, so I have time to kill. I stop for an Italian Ice at a roadside Ice Cream stand. Not a single person knows where I am or even cares to know. I could drive to Bangor and see a matinee movie, or head somewhere for a long, sprawling lunch, but I decide to stay right there.

But as this moment is happening, as it's sort of unfolding, it’s also unhappening. It’s moving away from me, and I’m looking out ahead of it, when I’ll be sitting in my usual folding chair at the city council meeting, writing my usual notes, or even when I’m home that night, brushing my teeth and spitting into the sink. Would it be stupid to say that I miss that little nothing moment as it’s happening, that I’m already pining a little? I guess it would, but these were always valuable to me.

As a child, I loved rare moments of peace and quiet, when the world seemed to have stopped. Since my father worked construction, the money came in more or less seasonally, and winters were especially hard on all of us—on our mother because that was when she went to work at Sears part-time, and I think my father expected her to still complete all the housework while working twenty hours a week; on my father too, because he felt guilty and inadequate. He didn't tell me this but I knew he must have felt it.

When I say this, I don't mean to place blame on one person. All I mean is that this type of winter was difficult, and I think we would have done just about anything to avoid it. My father worked as much overtime as he could during the summer, sometimes to the point where he all but vanished from our lives. My mother babysat the children of nearby families, kids who called her by her first name. They sold off two acres of land and used some of the money to fill the oil burner. Robert and I even gathered together my father's beer bottles and cashed them in at a liquor store in town.

It was during these winters that my mother sometimes left the house and headed to her sister’s apartment back in Methuen. “I’m going on one of my vacations,” she would say, and then the suitcases would make their appearance in the front hall, and the next day our aunt would appear in her blue Impala, idling at the side of the house while my mother said her good-byes. I remember watching from the window as she her carried her suitcases, one in each hand, my father, barefoot and coatless in the snow, yelling something at her back. Eventually my father came inside, his face and arms red from cold. I'll always remember what he said to me then. He said, "Don't forget that your mother didn't just leave me. She left you and she left Robert. She left all three of us. You keep that in mind."

While she was gone from the house, I sometimes talked to her at the Sears jewelry counter or at her sister's apartment. She took my hand and said things like "It's tough on Robert and you, I know." But then a customer would come in or her sister would bring something to eat out of the kitchen or my mother would just change the subject. Eventually, she would return, and we’d stay up late eating and telling stories. My father would make jokes we didn’t understand, but we’d all laugh anyway, and my mother would talk about how difficult a person her sister was, and how glad she was to be back. "The house looks a little wild,” she’d say, looking around, “but I kind of counted on that. I would have been hurt if it had been otherwise."

I thought about her small escapes when I made my own at eighteen, and her returns when I made my way back that Winter. The morning after my plane ride into Maine, I woke to hear her in the kitchen, the gentle clatter of silverware being sorted into a drawer. It was still snowing, and the horizon was hazy, but I could see the tree line where our land became state property from the window. I wondered if my father was planning to sell off a few more acres. There were another five acres behind the house. I pictured him as a man on an island with the tide coming in.

Downstairs, Robert stood at the living room window, watching something. I came over and watched too. It was my father. He wore a green army parka, the color of a faded dollar bill. He had pulled the hood up and zipped the front of the jacket to his neck, so all I could see was his nose and eyes, and those not very well. He had a sled in his hands, one of those plastic disks kids use, and was loading it into the back of the truck. "He wants the two of us to go up on the hill with him," Robert said. "He just put an inner tube and a toboggan in the truck too."

I smiled. "Sounds like fun."

"Not in this weather," he said. "In this weather, it's just a pain in the ass." He put his hand gently against the window and said, “I’m going to tell you something they don’t want you to know.”

The wind hadn't died down from the night before, and the snow slanted out of the sky, which had grown white with diluted sunshine. I could feel the cold through the window, and if I had placed my fingers against the glass—at the point where Robert’s hand rested—I probably would have felt the pane shudder. My father was having a difficult time moving through these gusts; he held his arm just above his face and looked at his feet as he walked. A snow drift piled against the truck had managed to cover the front driver's side tire. Other parts of the ground had been blown almost bare—just a thin layer of ice and snow. Robert said, “He thinks he’s going to die soon, Cheryl. Why do you think mom was bugging you so much to come back?”

“She wasn’t bugging me, Robert,” and I felt stupid for saying it, for saying anything, when what I should have been doing was listening.

“Yeah, well,” he said, and he laughed again, a small noise, resigned, as if he were chuckling at some joke he had heard before, and then he bent down and slid a razor across the sole of one of his boots, making deep cross-hatches. "What's that?" I asked.

"Traction."

"No. The laugh."

"Just like mom," he said. He was ignoring me now, and I turned to the kitchen door.

My mother's hands were deep in the sink, her back to me. Her hair was still mostly dark, although I noticed thick strands of dignified gray. Other than that she appeared almost unchanged. She was still shapelessly thin—boyish, I guess—and taller than me, almost my father's height. "I'm mad at you," she said, as she turned around. "You didn't wake me up last night when you got in."

"Well, you didn't wake me up this morning," I said. "What time is it?"

She smiled and looked me over. "Come here," she said, and pulled me close for a brief hug.

“Is dad okay?" I asked.

She folded her towel and looped it through one of the handles on the cupboards. "Your father is like one of those tour guides who has to keep things moving all the time. That's his pace."

“That’s not what I mean,” I said. That had always been my mother's method of dealing with him, using her generosity of spirit as a kind of concealment. It was almost heartening to see it in action again.

“He’s fine,” she said. “Everything’s okay.”

“I think he asked me to move back here last night when we were talking."

"You can't listen to him when he's that way. You know that."

"I know. But he seemed serious."

"He's never serious. Especially not lately."

The door in the other room opened and I could hear Robert and my father talking. I softened my voice to a whisper. "He was last night."

"Don't get upset."

"I’m not upset. I’m not upset at all. But you lied to me.” I caught myself raising my voice again and took a deep breath. “You’re lying to me.”

“I didn’t lie to you. Everything’s fine." I opened my mouth to say something—I’m not sure I knew what—but she pulled me a little closer and spoke into my ear. "It’s just a little problem with his kidney, but he’s going to dialysis. He’s on some waiting lists. It’s going to be fine.” She let that settle in, and when she continued, she had changed the subject. She let go of my arm, although she still held me with a hard look. "When he asked you that last night, about moving back, what did you tell him?"

That's when Robert interrupted to tell me my father was waiting in the truck, and that we should get going.

It was easy to see that my mother’s life was difficult, and that my being there might make things more manageable. For the first time since I had left I thought of myself living under that roof, not just staying there for two or three days, but living there as a part of a family again. I could see the deliberate habits I had built up acting as counter-balance to my father's moods. My composure might offset Robert's anger, and I could probably bolster my mother when she wavered. Dad would get better. Things would be different.

In the time it took to reach the driveway, I had dismissed the idea. That's her way of thinking, I told myself.

* * * * *

The three of us traveled thigh-to-thigh in the truck cab, my father driving, Robert at the other window, and me between them. When we arrived at the hill, he pulled up into a turnaround driveway used by maintenance people, parking as close as he could to the footpath that wound up through the woods to the top of the hill. He nodded at a thermos at my feet. I twisted the cap off and sniffed the familiar rum smell. He had a drink, and then he pulled his hood up over his head and stepped outside. "He seems okay," I said to Robert, and then, “What are your plans?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

My father rapped his knuckles against the driver's side window. "Hurry up," I heard him shout, or something like that. Robert slipped on a ski mask, so that I could only see his lips and eyes. Then he stepped out into what by this time had become a genuine blizzard. I noticed he had left another ski mask on the seat for me, and I rolled it up and put it on like a hat. When I stepped from the truck, my boots slipped deep into a snowdrift. Maybe it was the shock of the cold, but for the first time that day I was afraid. I could hear Robert’s voice off to my right, cursing the weather or my father or both, and something metal shaking in the distance, and I did not understand how I had come to be there.

We moved up the hill, our feet tilted a little sideways for traction. We marched in the same order we had sat in the truck, my father ahead of us by at least fifteen paces. He dragged three sleds behind him on ropes. By the time we got to the top, he had slipped open his jacket and was taking a drink from a plastic bottle. He smiled through the bits of snow in his beard. The wind made it difficult to hear, so the three of us didn't say a word. We just stood in a triangle, looking down the hill, the stretch of trees, the road beyond that. Twigs and bare branches stuck out of the white like skeleton hands. My father leaned forward, holding both of us by the shoulders and pulling us down toward him on either side, a quarterback in a huddle. "Who's first?" he said. He was grinning. It was hard to think of him as a sick man.

Robert picked up his sled, a red plastic wedge, and walked away from us, lifting his legs at the knee. After seven or eight steps he dropped the sled. The wind caught it like a kite, and it skidded away. He stepped after it while my father laughed. He finally caught it by a tree, shouted something, and then began his walk back to the edge of the hill. I looked at my father, the expression on his face. He grinned and clapped his hands together twice when Robert grabbed the sled. His eyes widened when Robert almost fell, but when Robert recovered his balance, he smiled again. He seemed proud of my brother, as if Robert were a baby learning to walk. Robert sat cross-legged on the sled, pushing himself with his hands, lurching forward a foot at a time. I looked again at my father, who was zipping up his jacket. When I looked back Robert was gone. I followed the line of the hill to an inlet of trees, expecting to find him there. Nothing.

My father had picked up his own sled, an under-inflated black inner tube. He stepped once, steadied himself, then took another step. In this way he proceeded to a tree, which he gripped for balance while lowering himself into the tube. He pushed off and skimmed into the white dust, fading into the storm the way Robert had. It was my turn now. I nestled the runners of the sled in the snow, moving it back and forth. Then I pushed off, and ice spattered up in front of me. The nose of the sled rose up in the air, then slammed hard against the ground. My teeth closed on my tongue and I felt a rush of warmth in my mouth. I reached the steepest part of the hill, and I tried to hold on, although not well enough. The sled skidded ahead of me and I sprawled flat on my stomach, snow down the front of my jacket.

I rolled over, breathing hard, and I lay there, looking straight up, a dull ache across the back of my neck. The snow cascaded down in large flakes, melting on my face. I couldn't see the sky, or any clouds, just snow falling. It had been a long time since I had seen a blizzard from that perspective, and for a second it seemed as if I were moving upward through the snowfall. The sky revolved above me. I thought, just stay here, but instead I sat up, cleared my throat, and spat. A red stain formed on the ground, vanishing as the snow covered it. I spat again, counted to two, and watched it disappear.

Rising to my feet, groaning, I looked around for the truck or Robert or my father. The top of the hill had vanished, or rather the top of hill had remained and I had vanished, absorbed into the weather. I sucked on my tongue and felt my mouth fill with warmth again, as if I had just taken a gulp of my mother's coffee. I spat, counted, "One, two," and the blood was gone. A vague movement flickered in the cloud of snow. I stepped toward it. The shape moved closer, grew more defined. It was Robert. He held his sled like a shield.

We didn't look at each other—lifting our heads would have speckled our faces with snow—but we knew what had to be done. Robert sliced his sled into the ground, covering it at the base so it wouldn't blow away—a marker. We turned our backs to each other and walked in opposite directions. After fifty or so yards I heard Robert yelling. I turned around, retracing my half-covered steps back to the sled, then further in Robert's direction. I found him, kneeling just past a group of trees and looking out into the clear field. My father was stretched out there on the ground, arms and legs thrown wide, as if he were making a snow angel. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the inner tube skid slowly into the patch of trees. Robert reached him first, put his arm around his neck and lifted him into a sitting position. "I'm not sure if you should do that," I said, coming up behind him.

My father kept saying, "I'm fine. I'm fine," which made a good case for him being injured. "What hurts?" I asked.

He folded his arms across his chest. "Nothing hurts."

"You might have broken something."

"Nothing's broken," he said, and he grabbed my shoulder, lifting himself. His hood was thrown back, and his beard and eyelashes were caked with ice, his features partially hidden, distorted.

He fell, rolling onto his side and hollering. For a second I thought he was joking, but he didn't get back up. Robert leaned over and looked at his foot, more to avoid his eyes, I thought, than to actually find out the extent of the damage. My father kept talking. "I'm perfectly all right." I held out my hand, but he knocked it away with a wild sweep. I held it out again and he batted it away, so hard that my mitten slipped off. I picked up the mitten, shook it, and slipped it on. It was full of snow.

Robert had stepped back and was watching us, wondering what he should do, I guess. I held out my left hand this time, but my father looked away, as if he had been offered something repugnant. "I can do it myself," he said, but he didn't make an attempt. I stood there, kicking at snow until I saw specks of frozen dirt. "Give me a minute to catch my breath," he said. If anything, it was beginning to snow harder. At least it seemed that way.

"I think the truck's just a little ways in that direction."

He winced. "For Christ's sake, stop your badgering."

Robert stepped forward. "We're tired," he said, and he closed his hand slowly around my father's. He didn't grab it really, the way someone might catch a baseball. He just extended his arm and enclosed his fingers around the palm. He tugged, not hard. "Come on. We're sick of this." I could tell my father was seeing how much he could pull away from the grip without actually looking like he was expending the effort. Robert's hand was the smaller of the two, but his grip held. He pulled harder. I thought I should say something.

The mitten came off in Robert's hand, and my father fell backwards. His shoulder hit the ground. At first I thought he might be hurt, but he sat up and wiped snow from his pants. "Oh, that was smart," he said. "That was really smart."

Robert threw the mitten away. He gripped my father's hand again, at the wrist. "Hurry up." He dragged him in the snow for a few feet, then stopped, hands on his hips, breathing hard.

My father quickly pulled his hand to his chest. It seemed to fold inward there, curled like a question mark. His face was deep red, almost purple, around his thick cheeks. "You little shit," he said. "Don't think I'm going to forget this." He stopped, maybe waiting for Robert to yell something back, but Robert didn't say a thing. He kept going, his anger slurring the words. "Don't expect to have a place to sleep tonight. Not under my roof." Robert looked up the hill, then out toward the main road. "And that little job you have, who do you think owns that place? One of my best friends, that's who, prick." He sputtered, looking at the ground. "You prick."

Robert grabbed him by the collar and pushed him back. "You better get up," he said. I knew I should intervene, push Robert away, but I didn't. Robert kept his hold on the collar and hit him on the back with his free hand. Then again. They were small punches, glancing slaps against the bulk of my father's coat. The sound reminded me of my mother beating blankets on the clothesline. My father twisted so that his back protected him.

Robert punched him again, in the shoulder. He fell onto his side and yelled something I didn't hear, maybe not even a word, just a sound. For a second I thought he was going to stand and knock Robert down, but that was impossible. He was an old man, huddled at Robert's feet. Then he said, "Don't just stand there, Cheryl. Pull him off of me."

Neither Robert nor I moved, although Robert's hand hung above my father's back, as if he were getting ready to hit him again. My father coughed. "Cheryl, for Christ's sake, are you just going to stand there and watch this?" His voice grew louder, more shrill. "I was right to kick your ass out. I always knew you didn't give a shit about anyone but yourself. I knew it." He coughed again. "I knew it." He said more, but I wasn't listening, because that's when I took a step, as if I suddenly remembered I could move.

To tell the truth, I thought I was going to help him, offer him my hand again—he would take it now—or calm Robert down. That's why I leaned over him, I think, to help. But I didn't do that. I struck him too, in the small of his back. It must have hurt a little, I think, even through my mitten and his jacket. I felt it, anyway, on my knuckles. Robert slapped him on the back of the head. I threw another punch, then a third. When we stopped, I kicked some snow at him with the side of my boot.

I've thought about that, the kick, the three punches. Of course, I did it to hurt him, and I'm sorry about that. But I think I also did it because I had to. I knew when I landed that first punch, and maybe even before that, when I took a step toward him, that there wouldn't be any room for compromise anymore. It was a decision I thought was irrevocable, and that's exactly what I wanted then—to go back to Massachusetts and start a new life in which I did not have to worry about my father, my brother, and even my mother.

At the hospital I spoke to an intern. He was obviously tired, with narrow, slumped shoulders and reddened eyes. "What were you doing out?" he asked. The question seemed almost rhetorical. No answer would have been sufficient, so I didn't give him one. Neither did Robert or my father, who sat on the bed, jeans rolled halfway up his calf. He clutched his hand, massaging his fingers as the intern indicated the X-rays. "He has a fracture here, of the tibia, and here, of the fibula." He flipped through several more X-rays of the ankle, always indicating the two broken areas. His gestures seemed rehearsed, scripted. So did our attentiveness. When he was finished he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He spoke very slowly and carefully. "We're going to put what we call a Jones Compression Dressing on his foot. When we're finished with that you should bring your father home, get some food in his stomach, and put him to bed." It occurred to me then that each of us, including the intern, had his own reasons for wanting to get this over with as soon as possible.

By the time we got to the house it had stopped snowing, and the world had that smooth, clean look it only has for a few hours after a heavy blizzard, before cars and plows and kids scratch at the surface of it. My father sat in the truck with the door open, crutches in his hands, while Robert and I shoveled the steps to the porch. I didn't think anything of it then, but he was already getting some of the color in his face back, and that slight swagger in his attitude. It was apparent in the way he dangled his bad foot out of the truck cab, impatiently waiting for Robert and me to finish, and in the way he drank from the thermos. Later in the day I would find it, empty, on the floor of the truck.

When we finished shoveling a narrow path from the steps to the truck, we walked along with him, one of us on either side. "Look out for that patch of ice," I said, pointing at the place where he had just positioned his crutch. He moved to the left, found a clear spot where he could see the black tar of the driveway, then took a hesitant step. "There you go," I said. When he reached the stairs, Robert and I put our hands under his arms and helped him up to the first landing. After that, when it was clear he could do it himself, we let go of him, although our hands hovered inches from his back, almost touching him, just in case he should slip. Robert held the screen door. I moved the afghan throw rug. My father hobbled into the house.

Robert put the rug back in its place. He leaned his shovel against the wall. "I thought it would feel different." I didn't say anything; maybe I was still confused by what had happened. I handed him my shovel and he put it with his. "I thought it would make me feel better, you know?"

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I’m going to live here all my life,” he said, and his voice broke. “I know it. Dad is going to die and then I’ll become him. I felt that today when I was standing over him. That’s why I hit him the second time. That’s why I couldn’t stop hitting him.” His voice was soft and dull, but his eyes were red. The sun had reached its height, and drops of water were already dripping from around the gutters. By tonight they'd be icicles. Our winter clothes were strewn around the room, coats on furniture, boots tilted on their sides, small puddles of melting snow around them. My mother was in the other room, pouring my father tea. "The damned sled turned over, and I just fell wrong," he explained as we came into the room, and she patted his hand and stood up as we sat down. She brought out sandwiches, and we ate in silence.

My father did not die that year or the next or even the next. He lived there a long time, in that house. And Robert did not become my father, at least not in the way he expected—in the way he thought he might that day on the snow. He lost his job that spring and joined the army, but left that after about half a year with a dishonorable discharge. He headed to the southwest next—New Mexico, I think—and then Utah. It was difficult to picture my parents alone in that house after he left. Sometimes I talked to her on the phone and asked, "Mom, how are you doing, really?" And she would say something like, "Cheryl, I'm fine," and she'd chuckle at my ridiculous question. I did not talk to my father during this time, except through my mother, and there seemed to be something insubstantial about him, as if he were just one of my mother’s anecdotes. I began to expect the phone call telling me that he was gone.

Two years later, it was my mother who passed away in her sleep, and I returned again, for the funeral, and I ended up staying for more than a year. I had lost my job two months before, and someone needed to take care of my father, who didn't work at all anymore. Was it a favor I did for my mother or for him? I’m not sure. I think that during that time taking care of him, I had never been closer to my mother, although she was gone, of course. What I mean is that I found myself doing the things she did—cooking for him, spending my evenings alone while he shut himself away downstairs.

It took two strokes to kill him, one while he walked through the yard, and another, three weeks later, while he slept in his chair in the cellar. I sometimes notice certain kind of men—very old men with knots of muscle in their shoulders and hard, round bellies. I stand behind them in the check out line of the grocery store as the clerk rings up their beer and lottery tickets, or I walk past them as they sit on park benches. I sometimes talk briefly to them when writing general interest stories about new hockey rinks or the latest election. These are men who might have been my father's friends, who are the right age, the right build, who just have that look about them. I write their words down in my notebook and I smile at them and sometimes they smile back and I think, he would have looked something like this.

There is a gravity that surrounds places and people, something invisible that holds us to them. When I am driving home after work, I sometimes think of my mother driving down that same road for the first time, and what she might have thought when the house—the house I live in now—slid into view from behind the trees. It’s like I know her then, like her anger is my anger. It’s like that morning on the hill with my father, and my hands tighten on the steering wheel. But then the moment is unspooling as it spools, and as my hands turn the wheel I know it’s only my anger I’m feeling.

the end

Slide Up

Still Running | Slide Up

“I want you to guess,” I said. My father's house was in the hands of the realtors, my father was in the ground, and there I was, playing games again.

"Are you okay?" Beth asked. I turned around to look at her, my jacket in my hands, and she stared hard at my face, like there was something wrong with my mouth or eyes. I must have looked tired. I had been through a lot the last few days, more than she knew, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

"Oh, yeah," I said. "I'm fine. I'm fine. Now guess."

“Abraham Lincoln,” she said, with an edge in her voice. “The Virgin Mary. The Wizard of Oz.”

“Leslie McKenzie,” I said, like the answer was obvious.

She grabbed the suit coat from me and slipped it onto its hanger, then reached into one of its pockets and pulled out a balled-up Kleenex. I took some loose black socks from the suitcase. She took those too, and stuffed one down into another, pairing them up. “Who’s that?” she asked.

“This guy I grew up with. I’ve talked about him before, don’t you remember? And he was thin as a rail, Beth. This guy was the fattest thing you've ever seen back in high school and now he's a string bean. He's like the 'after' picture they use in the commercials.” I was grinning like this was the most miraculous thing in the whole world, like it was something to put in the Guinness Book of World Records next to someone with seven foot long fingernails. “The little weasel must have kept at it,” I said, and I imagined Leslie McKenzie chugging down the side of the road in his jogging shorts. How many miles had he clocked up by now? Enough to get clear across the country, I figured, all the way from our hometown of historical Haverhill, Massachusetts. Even though I had been there that morning, when I thought about running those miles instead of flying them, it seemed so far away that it might as well have been Neptune.

Beth had reached the phone first when the hospital called. The ringing had interrupted a real steamer of an argument, and as she put the receiver to her ear, I had decided, in the way a person can decide something quickly and with detachment, that I was going to nudge the fight further along when she was finished her private little conversation. There had been something secretive in the set of her shoulders, the bend of her neck, and her whispered, “Yes.” Unknown to me, the doctor had been telling her slowly and patiently that my father had died.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she said, as I pushed my empty suitcase into the back of the closet.

I shut the closet door, turned to her, and said, “Are you even listening to what I’m saying?”

“I’m listening,” she said.

* * * * *

My buddies and I, we had noticed Leslie was up to something, that first summer when he began to huff and puff around town. I have to admit that our feelings about it were very complex. Why shouldn't they have been? I mean, Leslie McKenzie, all two hundred fifty something pounds of him, running down the side of the road. No, not running, not then anyway. Shuffling, staggering, half-sliding his sneakers through the gutter dirt. Anything, any word, but running. His eyes half-closed as if he were falling asleep, little fists balled at stomach height, the front of his T-shirt darkened with sweat.

Who wouldn't have been surprised and dumbfounded? It was an offense against the natural order of things. It was an offense against us.

We were content that first time to yell something out the window as we drove by. We were heading to the beach, I think, and couldn't be troubled to even slow down for such a thing, but someone—I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me—leaned out his window and yelled something.

Knowing us it was a good insult, but to Leslie it must have sounded like a wordless yell. Just a whoosh of air as the car passed and the sight of our rear bumper as we sped off to the beach, or the lake, or the quarry, or wherever the hell we were going. One place was as good as another.

Leslie would have recognized the car, a 82 Chevy Impala with a long dent in the rear bumper. It pulls out of sight and what does he do? Does he speed up, angry now, using that stupid broken rear bumper, the duck-taped rear window, as a goal, a target? Does he slow down now that nobody's watching? Does he stop right there on the side of the road and double over and take big, rasping breaths? Or does he simply keep running at the same steady pace, eyes half-closed, as if we were never there at all? I've wondered about that.

I know what we did, not because I remember it specifically, but because it's what we always did in that car. We laughed and sang along to whatever song was on the radio, and jostled each other around if we were in the backseat, and we didn't say anything about Leslie. But I think we all knew what we had to do, because Leslie had plans. He had a whole summer, almost three months, and he had obviously hatched some kind of mo-fo scheme to recreate himself.

He had the resources to do it too, if not the motivation. His parents had already probably bought him a set of those expensive weights covered in plastic, the ones that looks futuristic and effeminate at the same time. I mean, this kid had more sweaters than I had I-don't-know-what.

The hunch we all shared was confirmed by other sightings later in the week: the same road, the same time, the same duh-duh-duh expression, the same shirt probably. Henry Eubank's kid sister rode past him on her bike. Erik saw him too. And me. I saw him when driving my father's car to the grocery store to get beer and cigarettes and a few other things for him. I remember because I had a bag of groceries on the car seat next to me: a loaf of bread, dishwashing liquid, two gallons of chocolate ice cream, which was the only flavor my father ate. That's when I had the idea, although I didn't implement it until later, and Erik even took the credit for it for some fucking reason.

So it was definitely confirmed. Leslie McKenzie was planning some kind of image makeover. Lose a few pounds, grow his hair out longer and stop slicking it across the top of his head like a fifty year old bank clerk, get a new pair of thin framed glasses and abracadabra, he was going to expect even more from the world. He had seen his opportunity—nobody was looking—and he was going to go for it, which was probably an expression he was going to end up using eventually, if he had his way.

It really pissed me off. I'm not exactly sure why, except that it seemed like he was trying to pull one over on me, on us. He was being all sneaky and passive aggressive. I'm not saying that we were angels in any way, not at all, but you had to think, what was this kid going to our school for anyway? He lived in that house up on East Broadway that had a rod iron fence around it, an actual rod iron fence, like it was a museum or something. His father, who was a doctor or lawyer, could have afforded to send him to Phillips Andover Academy and then he wouldn't have gotten any shit from us at all, because we never would have even known each other.

Here’s another way of looking at it: our haircuts, the clothes we wore and the cars we drove-our parent's cars, really, other than Erik, who owned the Impala. All that stuff, everything about the way we looked, was so totally connected to who we were inside that the two were practically the same. That's one of the main things I remember from that time, the sheer simplicity of those drives in Erik's Chevy. Those trips were beautiful and almost spellbinding in their clarity.

But here is this guy who wants to open up this gigantic rift between himself-the person he is on the inside-and who he is on the outside. I mean, I shouldn't get angry-it's been years-but I still remember that watch he used to wear, and the shoes, and the smell of something kind of sweet like peppermint from him in gym class. And now he takes up running. He wants to make his own body into some kind of disguise, like he's Batman!

And he wasn't just running. If it was just that, well, I don't know, but there was other stuff going on. Once when I was walking by his house-sometimes I found myself walking by there for some reason-I saw him out on his lawn, lying flat on his back on a lawn chair wearing only swimming trunks and Risky Business sunglasses, fucking sunglasses. Just lying there, all four hundred eighty pounds of him, although by this time it was probably more like four hundred sixty something. And every single pound of it was working overtime absorbing those rays, just soaking them up in a way that seemed almost greedy.

Leave some of that sun for the rest of us, Porky, I wanted to say when I saw him there. I wasn't that angry or anything-I had more important things on my mind-but it did miff me a little. My father was acting all crazy that day, I remember, and I had gotten out of the house and was just wandering around. And then I stumble across this, like I'm stepping in a turd. Well, maybe not exactly, but I'm just saying that there was some justification for what I did.

Sometimes thinking about my father leads me to think about his father, a man I never knew, and then his father, and further down the chain of sullen men with receding chins and a tendency to lose their hair early in life. When I think like this, it seems like there is something I can find if I keep going back and back and back, like this is all just as simple and difficult as digging very deeply into the ground. It’s like there’s something out there, on the edge of history, and that’s the thing I can blame.

* * * * *

“I don’t know if we’re happy,” Beth said. This is how she put it the first time, when she began talking about separating, when she said she was thinking of moving in with her sister and getting her head together. There were a million things she wanted to do with her life, two million things.

Beth wants to be a physical therapist. She wants to take care of the elderly, give them comfort them when they need comfort. I’m supporting her while she goes to school, and paying her tuition, and I like the idea of doing good through her, since that has never really been one of my areas of expertise. I’m a computer engineer, and although I don’t like to talk about my work, I like it when she tells me about what she’s learning. Sometimes she touches my hand and tells me the names of the bones in my fingers. I never would have imagined how many.

“We’re not happy,” she said, and her comment seemed like such a simple and basic thing that I hadn’t even thought about it until she pointed it out. Like breathing or something. Happiness. I was dumbfounded.

“Hey, hey,” I said. “What the hell?”

We were driving for some stupid reason, some soul-killing errand like getting paint for the bathroom or ant traps to put under the kitchen sink. I was listening to a good song on the radio and thinking about nothing except the car in front of me, which was going too slow, and the car behind, which was going too fast, and now we had to begin and end a conversation about the sorry state of a marriage in the ten minutes it was going to take us to get to Wal-Mart. She cracked her window and lit a cigarette.

“I’m happy,” I said. “Look at me. See? Don’t I look happy?” I curled my lips back and held them that way, mouth half-open and gawking. This would be one of the faces I would use to make my children laugh if we ever had any.

“Stop it,” she said.

We drove for a little while in silence. We were almost halfway there now, and I had never thought of this particular store as being such a safe and comfortable place, but there it was, out there in my imagination, like a little beacon of goodwill and dullness. She finally said, “That’s a scary face.”

I thought, she’s right, it would scare them, and I thought of their frightened little lips and eyes. Frightened by me, a person who had never intended any harm to anyone and who was just trying to make a stupid face so that his wife could share a joke at his expense. These are the kind of thoughts that can wear a person down.

Beth had never liked talking about having children. She did not like talking about my father either, my upbringing, as she called it, as if I had been raised at some private school in England and not in a dead little mill town in Massachusetts. I said, “This is a difficult period. I’ve been tense lately,” which opened up another patch of silence in the conversation like I had cleared the words away with a machete.

She said, “It’s more than that,” but we were pulling into the parking lot now. She would be thinking of my upbringing now as we discussed the difference between mustard yellow and orange yellow and yellow yellow, and so would I, and it felt like she had pushed me into that place, like she was putting these thoughts in my head. She was like one of these people who talked about bodily functions at the dinner table. It was inappropriate, is what I’m saying.

I parked the car and turned the key in the ignition and looked hard at her and said, “You know what? You’re right. Do you want to talk about it right now? We can talk about it right now if you want. We’re in no rush.” It was hot out, and the air-conditioner was off because I was holding the keys in the palm of my hand, and we were already feeling it.

“No,” she said. “That’s okay.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “Because there’s no time like the present. This is a wonderful place to talk about it. We have privacy and we have a view.” I looked out the windshield at the neat grids of parked cars and steaming blacktop and errant grocery carts.

“Do you think of yourself as a good listener?” I said. “Because we have a lot to share. As you know, I have a lot to get off my chest.” I smiled again and waited for her reply, but she opened the car door and stepped outside and I decided fine, have it your way, and caught up with her with a few long strides. There were clouds in the sky and I wanted them to just open up on us so that we would have to scurry into the store and get this day over with.

I could see the concerned faces of tired shoppers as they stepped outside with their cut-rate provisions, and I wondered if they were really any better off than Beth and me. They were using the same dish washing liquid, wearing the same jeans, and probably having the same arguments, right? We were all worried about the threat of rain and the cost of bacon and being found out by those closest to us. I put my hand on Beth’s shoulder when we stopped at the door and felt her muscles tighten. “I just want you to talk to me,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if I know you. It’s like you razed your whole history when you met me.”

Which was not completely true, of course. When we met, I had been finishing up my seventh and last year of school, and I had told her how hard it had been. I hadn’t boasted, not really, but she had been proud of me. She had said I seemed like someone who had his act together. I guessed she was probably in the process of reconsidering that now. I think if I had dropped everything right then, and turned and walked back to the car, she would have followed, and we could have driven anywhere. This was two weeks before my father’s death, and I’m guessing that at exactly that moment he was watching television and drinking a beer and thinking about God-knows-what.

I said to Beth, “I love you.” Or at least that’s what I wanted to say. What I actually said was, “Let’s make this quick and painless,” which is what I think she wanted too. I think we were thinking exactly the same thing, which is not something that happens often between two people, especially when those two people are me and my wife.

I wanted to talk then, in the time it took me to grip the door handle, open the door and step inside. I wanted to tell her everything, which, of course, I did not, because we were being greeted by an elderly woman in a blue apron who seemed as much about getting in our way as saying hello. And then, weeks later, with my father in the ground, what did I tell Beth? That I had bumped into an old friend of mine, and man, was I surprised—not just because he looked so good, but to even see him there at all, in that run-down little mill town.

“It seems like you don’t like this guy very much for someone who used to be your friend,” she said. She opened the closet and took out the suitcase and I remembered then that it belonged in the hall closet. We live in a very orderly house, and much of that is due to Beth. I took the suitcase from her and left the bedroom. She followed me. She said, “What happened back there, Gary?” She said, “What happened back there really?”

“I could ask you the same question, Beth,” I said, and my voice rose with mock concern. I couldn’t help myself. “You seem really upset. Did something happen while I was gone that I should know about?” I opened the door in the hall and threw the suitcase inside. I was trying to steer my anger in the right direction, away from her, toward the back of the closet. “Watch the walls,” she said. “We don’t own this house yet.”

“We,” I said. “Is that the royal we?”

“Sometimes you’re a hard person to be around,” she said, and she turned and headed toward the kitchen.

The tone of her voice was not lost on me. It was low and air traffic controller steady, the way I sometimes used to talk to my father, when I had the presence of mind. I could hear water running in the sink. “Christ,” I said. “Don’t you think I know that? I know that.”

* * * * *

The next time I saw Leslie McKenzie I was coming back from the market in my father's car. My father often ordered me out on errands right when he got home from work, partially because he was tired and lazy, partially because he wanted to be alone, I guess. This was fine with me, except that these trips were now kind of synchronized with Leslie's running schedule, which was annoying, you know-driving by him like that-especially because I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of changing my route.

That particular day I picked up Erik and we did a little roaming around, and of course we end up on Kirkland Street with Leslie up ahead of us, chugging away. Now, instead of speeding up, I decide to slow down, because I want to kind of loom behind him. I want him to see our shadow coming, like in some horror movie.

And then I remembered the idea I had the time before, except this time I had someone riding shotgun, so I said to Erik, "Open up the ice cream." My father always wanted me to pick up the same stuff-six pack of Miller, a pack of Marlboro's, maybe some toilet paper-and chocolate ice cream, which I know for a fact that he ate until the day he died. There was a half-empty carton of it in his freezer when I went back to sell his house.

Erik laughed because he must have known what I was thinking. Then he handed me the open container of ice cream. It was one of those square half-gallon containers. And as we loomed up on Leslie I whipped the container out the window and Erik yelled something like, "Eat it up!"

It was a one in a million shot. The container hit him right on his ass and for a second he kept running, like it took a moment to register or maybe he thought he was getting dive-bombed. I didn't see the expression on his face or anything because I was stepping on the gas. Erik yelled something else, some fat joke he had probably used six times before, and then we were gone, leaving Leslie on the side of the road with a half-gallon of my father's ice cream melting in the dirt.

My father was in his chair with his clicker, blundering through the channels, when I got home. He yelled out to the kitchen as I came in. I noticed he had already eaten his dinner. His dirty plate was in the sink, smeared with ketchup. I opened the freezer and scrounged around as he wandered in and peeled the shrink-wrap off his cigarettes. He was still wearing his blue work shirt, so I knew he had had a rough day, and I was about to make myself scarce when he came in and said, "Where the fuck is the ice cream?"

"I forgot," I said. "Sorry." I began to walk to the living room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him fiddling with his change, which I had left in the plastic bag for him the way I always did. He was doing the math in his head.

"Did you buy beer with my money?" he asked, in that voice of his that let me know in no way, shape, or form was I going to pull anything. Not on his watch, as he sometimes liked to say.

"No, I didn't buy beer with your money," I said, sing-songing his words back to him

He followed me into the living room. The sound on the television was all the way down and the stereo was on and turned to the classic rock station. Both of our eyes wandered to the television, where a woman was turning letters on a game show, and for a second I thought the whole thing was a dead issue, but then he said, "How you make it through the day is a mystery to me. What the hell is the matter with you?" It was like a nudge, like, come on, let's see what happens.

"Oh, shut the fuck up, it's just a carton of ice cream," I said, or something like that.

And then suddenly the music on the stereo kind of turned inside out, is the only way to describe it, and my head filled with colors, and the room grew long and narrow, like I was standing down the end of a long corridor instead of in the center of my father's living room. That's when I realized that I had just been cold-cocked. Not a wide, sloppy punch either. No, this was the kind of punch that a boxer throws, a hard jab right to the center of my face that immediately took every last ounce of fight out of me. My legs were just not registering anymore and the top of my head felt warm, like my skull was filling up with blood. This was a punch designed to hurt, and it did, but I didn’t fall.

Instead, I had a vision. A vision caused by pain and shock and not magic or God, but a vision nonetheless. I closed my eyes and felt the blood coming down my chin like I was a baby dribbling food out of my mouth and then it happened. My head filled with light. Light and something else. A vision of my mother, and not my mother as she was twelve years ago, not the mother in the pictures, but my mother as she would have been if she had lived and aged alongside her son and husband.

She was standing in front of me and smiling and there was an expression on her face that I couldn’t read, a mix of disdain and attraction, like I'm some kind of exotic food she didn’t know if she should eat or not. I wasn’t sure why she was there, and in that second that I saw her my feelings moved from happiness to annoyance, because she seemed to be withholding something from me. She had a secret and no way no how was she going to share it with me, her only son and a person who had just been sucker punched by his own father, which is one of those exclusive clubs you don't want to join.

I wanted to tell my mother that I loved her and missed her, of course, but I also wanted to tell her that I had secrets too, just so we were on equal footing, so to speak. The last twelve years of my life, actually, had been one big secret from her, because she was dead and I was alive. And that made me feel strong and sad at the same time.

Then she was gone, and although just a second before her face was so vivid, all of a sudden I had absolutely no idea what she looked like, like I never saw her at all. The next thing I knew I was sitting on the couch and my father was pushing a glass of water into my hand. "Come on, drink it," he said, and so I took it and put it to my mouth.

"You sure have a way of getting under my skin," he said, and I looked up. He was pacing the room. I had never seen him walk that way before, and something about it made him look kind of small and feminine. I got the feeling that if I stood up and just laid into him right there and then, there would be nothing he could do to stop me, but my legs felt real weak, so I just took another sip of water and listened to him talk.

I could build palaces out of the things my father didn't tell me. That's the stuff I remember now as much as what he did say, and that's what he says sometimes when he's pacing around that room in my memory. He tells me about the last year of her life, which must have been difficult, and about his own childhood on a farm in upstate New York, and my mother’s childhood too, in Haverhill, the place he ran away to at eighteen, the place he died at sixty-seven.

He sometimes told me about the job he used to have in Lawrence, and my mother, and he when he talked this way he spoke as if he was still puzzled and even a little amused by their absence. He would kind of make a noise at the back of his throat and say, "Your mother and I used to eat Chinese food in bed," as if this was some habit he had outgrown. It was like a little window would open and close in the same second. But today he looked at me and said, “What are you looking at me like that? Are you waiting for an apology?”

“No,” I said, and there was such control in my voice, like I was walking from here to there on a thin wire. I hoped there was.

“There’s no reason for me to apologize,” he said. “Do you know what I’ve been through? You don’t know.” It was like we were in an argument, an argument he was losing, but I wasn’t even saying anything. He said, “I put a roof over your head. And I don’t ask for much back, do I? What do I ask for?” He looked at me like he expected an answer. There was a pleading quality in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and my face crumpled like I had told him to go to hell. It was like I had hauled back and slapped him. He closed his eyes and tilted his chin up like he was listening to music playing in his head.

He said, “Don’t say that. Don’t you apologize. Please. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“And don’t tell me you understand, okay? I don’t understand you and there’s no way that you understand me. Let’s just agree on that.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay.”

When Beth told me that he had died, I remember feeling that he had tricked me somehow, that he had escaped. I remember Beth repeating the doctor's words to me as she held my hand, and me thinking—not thinking but feeling—that he had gotten away with something.

I'm guessing I showed no sign of being upset, because that's the way I am. It's like I just kind of leave my body, like whoosh, and I'm floating outside myself, like I am alive and dead at the same time, a body on the earth and a ghost up above watching and wondering about these funny little people down below.

She told me that he had died about three hours before, that it was a heart attack (his second), and that he actually managed to drive himself to the hospital, which is only about five blocks from his house (she referred to it as my house because it's the house I grew up in). She asked me if she wanted me to book my flight for me, and I said, no, no I can do it. She looked at me like I'm some math problem she was trying to figure out.

"I'm not angry," I said. She always thinks I'm angry.

* * * * *

I remember telling Erik, “I’m going to hurt him,” but when it came down to it, I only touched Leslie McKenzie once, and that was to help him. I stood over him and rested my palm against the sweat-covered curve of his back and I even asked him if he was okay and you know what he did? He hissed something beneath his breath and pulled away, like I had leprosy. Then he stood up and began to shamble away from me like he was drunk and I knew then that it was over.

For weeks Erik and I had been following him around in Erik’s car. He changed routes, but we always found him. I mean, how far could he go on two legs? When Erik got a job and a new circle of friends along with the job, I used my father’s car when I could. I remember driving up alongside Leslie and sort of veering over to him like I was going to hit him and knock him down in the gutter, which of course I would never have done even if you had paid me. It was just a joke, and if it was a joke that got out of hand, well, we were just dumb kids, and maybe it was a way of bringing balance to his life, a life that would probably soon be full of parties and girls at a nice college. I wanted him to remember me, I guess.

“I want to hurt him.” That’s what I actually told Erik. Not going to, but want, which is a very different thing. We were in Erik's room, where I had been hanging out for a day or two until things blew over at home. We were listening to music and passing a bowl between us, and as we took hits off it, my mouth loosened up and my mind cleared. "I want to hurt him in places he didn't know existed," I said, and I leaned my head back and blew some smoke at the ceiling. I was thinking of Leslie McKenzie's heart, which I imagined as something large and soft and ripe, like an expensive fruit from a tropical country.

Erik took the bowl from me and held it in front of his mouth. It looked like he was staring right into my eyes, right down in my heart, but he was really just looking at my nose, which was red and swollen. He was probably wondering what something like that must feel like. What had I told him? A fall down the stairs? The door of my car? Something like that. One of the many things I said.

He coughed a little and passed back the bowl. I saw his face as a mask of my own, but this was not true. I know that now. He said, “Let’s go see a movie or something.”

“I don’t have the money,” I said, although I had ten dollars in my pocket. It was my father’s money, taken from his nightstand. I had taken it just to hold it, I think, to have it for the night, although when I had closed my fist around it I had been planning to spend it all on a couple of six packs.

“I’ll pay,” he said, which is the first time I had ever heard that offer. He turned the bong to me and said, “Let’s just leave him alone,” and I stood up and left without a word, because how much help had he ever been to me, anyway?

That night I saw him down by the river, running along the boxboard drainage ditch against the flow of water, as if he were following it back to its source. He had been picking odd hours to make appearances lately, early in the morning when the streetlights were still on or later in the day, when the blacktop was beginning to cool. He wore a headband now, black, like he was protesting or grieving or something. My father was asleep and I was driving his car like it was my car, aimlessly, with the radio turned down.

I pulled up next to him so that he was in between the gully and the car and although my window was rolled down, and I could have carried on a conversation with him if I just raised my voice, I didn’t say a word. He didn’t turn his head. He didn’t even quicken his pace. I think if he had just said something, or stopped running, I would have gunned the engine and taken off, but no, he was determined. Although he looked like he was going to cry.

“We’re you headed?” I finally yelled. It was the best joke I could think of. I was drinking of can of Coke, and I picked at the tab and made a little plucking sound. The car was running really nice, as well as it had ever run, and I wondered if my father had worked on it or had someone work on it. If so, that made my problems worse if he found out I had taken it, which he probably would. “Hey,” I said. “Where you headed? Do you need a ride? I’m going to Texas. You can come along if you want.”

It was like talking back to a movie. It was like he was running a real race, and I was just a distraction, and he was going to win if it took everything in him. I glanced away from him and up ahead. The road split away from the ditch up there and headed into town and then back around to my neighborhood. He was going to continue to follow it up the hill to the boxboard. I said, “Why the hell are you running here anyway? This is probably the worst place to run in the whole town.”

It was like I wasn’t even there. I revved the engine, but he didn’t look. He just narrowed his eyes a little, and not even like he was angry, more like he was focusing on something, squinting at it because it was faraway. The road was veering away from the ditch now, splitting into a fork, and I was going to go right and he was going to go left. That’s when I gave the wheel a sharp jerk. The car lurched to the left, right at Leslie, and he dropped out of sight like the earth had swallowed him up. I slammed on the brakes and looked over my shoulder.

There he was. Not under my tires or even in the ditch, but rising to his feet amid a cloud of dust. I pushed the car into park and stepped out and I walked over to him. Blood was coming down his knees and he was covered with little pebbles and dirt. All that gunk stuck to him like glue because of all the sweat, and I think it made him look worse than he actually was, I guess.

I ran over to him and put my hand on his back and for a split second I felt his lungs working as he took a deep breath. Then he was walking away from me, still following the ditch like he was an animal or something and he looked strong and weak at the same time, the way animals become when they’re in pain. I knew that it was over, but I didn’t want it to end, and I knew what was in store for me, because the car was almost as dirty as McKenzie now. It was almost completely dark, and I heard his feet scraping across the dirt as he headed up the hill, and I wanted to follow him wherever he was going.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I told Beth. “Not really.” I had followed her into the kitchen, where she was rubbing circles in a plate. I said, “It wasn’t a good trip, obviously. That’s all. And then I bumped into that guy. And you and I had that stupid phone conversation.” I came up behind her with the intention of drying some of the dishes she was washing, but instead I put my hand on her back. I could feel her muscles moving as she washed the dish, her breath rising and falling. I said, “I think it’s over between us, huh? After that phone call? I think that’s just about it.”

“You said that,” she said. “I didn’t say that. It might be, but I’m not the one who said it. I’m not the one who wants it that way. Not really.”

I took my hand from her back and wiped my face hard, across the eyes. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “I’m turning into a little girl. I can’t stop crying. And the sun is out and everything. You’d don’t need this. You must be up to your neck with this shit.”

“No, this is new,” she said, and she tried to smile. She pushed up against me and I closed my eyes and I could hear the water running down into the garbage disposal. I thought about how nice it would be to take a hot shower with her. We hadn’t done that in a long time. There was something about spooning together after you showered, something virginal. I didn’t want to have sex or even kiss her much. I just wanted to sleep with her, and wake up to a darkened house and make dinner together. I wanted to slip out of this moment and under a particular blanket I had seen folded up in the closet. Beth put her hand to my face and said, “Tell me.”

* * * * *

The afternoon of my father's funeral, I called a moving company and asked them to lug everything in his house into storage. The realtor had told me how a furnished house sells more quickly, and that maybe I should even replace some of the shabbier items with new things, but I didn't care. The moving company said that they could have people over the next morning. It was like a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. It was like, lo and behold, the skies opened up and there was the sun.

I was doubly satisfied with myself, because this was exactly the kind of decisive action that Beth has criticized me for not doing in our relationship. She says that it's my instinct to run down into myself. She says that I don't take action during the critical moment. She says that I have an incredible gift for hiding. I had to fight the urge to call her and talk to her, tell her I love her and see if it surprised her, even confused her. I wondered if I could still surprise her.

Instead, I decided that I was hungry. There were TV dinners in the freezer and I took one out and heated it up in the oven. I sat down at the table and I thought, this must be something like what he had been doing the day he died. The oven was making the little clicking sound it had made when I was a kid, like a stopwatch counting down. The silverware and plates and glasses were all in the same places.

The doorbell rang while I was eating. It was the movers, three of them, looking like they had done this a trillion times before. They took a walk through the house to see what they were in for, looking over the stuff in the kitchen and living room and bedrooms. It struck me then how differently they saw everything than I did. They are looking at things according to their size and weight. Is the kitchen table going to fit through the doorway? How heavy is the couch?

I wanted to tell them, that's the couch I sat in, and that's the chair he sat in, when we ate dinner and watched television. I wanted to tell them, you could build palaces out of the things we didn't say. Ridiculous, really. "I'm sure you guys can handle it," I said, and I walked back into the kitchen to finish my food. I could hear them talking about a football game. One of them had lost some money and one of them had won some money. They were laughing about something as I picked up the phone.

It felt strange calling my number from my father's house, as if I were young again and calling some future version of myself. I half expected that future self to pick up the phone and say hello, it's me, your future self, which gives you some idea of my fucking state of mind, I guess. What could he have told me? A warning would have been nice. I would have appreciated it, and I would have told him something to the effect of, “Hey, don’t worry about it, okay?”

I heard Beth's voice say hello automatically, as if she was expecting a salesman or wrong number. The movers were still talking, and I pictured them sitting on the couch. In a second, they were going to click on the television or something.

"Beth," I said, in a half-whisper, like I was calling from jail. I walked over to the far side of the room, as far away from the movers as I could get and I said, "It's me." Outside, there were birds pecking at a little stone bird bath, and I wondered when my father had bought it, and why he had bought it, and what the hell it meant that he would do such a thing.

"It's me," I said again.

"Gary?"

"Yes," I said, and then, "Oh, God, I'm sorry. I really am sorry about everything. I promise I'll make it up to you."

My teeth were clenched and I was still whispering. My throat felt as if I had swallowed something hard and doughy. My face was hot and my voice didn't even quite sound like my own, but I kept talking. "I'm being honest with you," I said. "I really am. I believe in us. I want to work this out. I really do. I'm so sorry."

“Hey,” she said. “Hey.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tell me about the funeral. What happened? Did something bad happen, Gary?”

“Something bad,” I said. “Something bad.” And I laughed. “I don’t want a divorce,” I said.

“I haven’t asked for a divorce,” she said. “We haven’t even talked about that.”

“We will. We will.”

She was quiet then, and I listened for the movers in the other room, but they weren’t speaking anymore either. I swear to God, I could smell my father’s breath on the damned phone. “You’re the only person who understands me,” I whispered. The movers had come back inside and they were knocking some stuff around.

“I don’t understand you,” she said, and I almost laughed again. I almost hung up. I listened to her breathing and I didn’t know what to say.

“I’ll be home soon,” I said. “There are just a few things to wrap-up here,” and there was like a little click in my head and it was like we were not talking even though she was still talking.

“Tell me what’s the matter,” she said.

“We’ll talk when I get home,” I said. “Now is a bad time.”

I hung up the phone and paced around the house quickly, like I was walking off a sprain. Now that the rooms were on their way to being empty, the place seemed gigantic. Or I seemed smaller, maybe that was it. I stood in the living room and without the curtains on the windows I could see out into the neighborhood in all directions: out across the small lawn that was already overgrown, and at the houses on the other side of the street.

I could see the neighbor to the left of us, who never got along with my father and who had probably moved to another town or was maybe dead too, which would have made my dad happy. I walked around the house some more, moving aimlessly from room to room. Upstairs, downstairs, then upstairs again. I guess I was looking for something, ridiculous as it sounds.

I found it in the cellar, although it wasn't what I expected. On the far side of the room, near the oil burner, there was an old bureau and some other junk not worth moving. It was painted with three different colors of paint, and had gashes across the front like someone had raked it with a crowbar, but seeing it maybe the absence of everything else seem more pronounced somehow, and I suddenly regretted moving the things out.

Not just regretted, either. It seemed like the most stupid thing I could have done, stupid in the way that animals are stupid, moving by instinct and emotion. I saw myself as something shadowy and slippery, something sliding out on the edges of my own perception. In that moment I seemed like both hunter and prey, which is a romantic and fucked-up way of looking at yourself, although also maybe true. I walked over to the deep double sink where my father used to clean his paintbrushes in the early evening. I turned the faucet so I could splash some water on my face, but no water came out.

That's when I remembered the spigot just outside and the length of garden hose attached to it. The fact that I had forgotten about it seemed like more negligence, so I walked to the bulkhead door and opened it to go out into the yard. There were five steps leading up to the bulkhead doors, running across a small space almost big enough to be a small room. Embedded in the concrete floor behind the steps there was a small pump that whirled into action whenever it rained hard, saving the cellar from flooding. I remembered listening to it from my bedroom as a kid. It sounded like an airplane moving overhead, not something lodged in the ground down below me, but something circling the house. I suddenly wanted to tell Beth that story, and explain to her why it was important.

I also remembered that my father had stored things in that little space-tools and rakes and things he didn't want me fucking with. The stairs were held in place by simple slots on either side of the wall, and they could be removed with a tug. I removed two of the stairs, set them against the wall, and climbed inside. It was damp and cool in there, and I decided it was a pretty good place to be on a hot summer's day. Sure enough, there was a set of metal shelves in there, and something else.

He had not left letters or diaries or even photographs, but he had left something, and it seemed like as much a message to me as those other things would have been. It was a small handgun in a wooden slide-top box. I hadn’t known he had even owned one. It looked like he had made the box for the gun. They fit together perfectly, and the corners of the box were sanded and cross-hatched delicately, the way I had seen him make a table. There was only one thing to do.

I slid the gun between my lips and tasted it, and I felt stronger than I had for a long time. Everything had been reduced to one simple decision, and the decision was mine to make. I could hear the mover’s shambling around upstairs and I thought of them finding me down here. When I picked up the gun, I had known that I would not actually pull the trigger. I figured it did not have bullets in it either. I knew my father well enough to be sure about that.

It was like a game I was playing. But now I wasn’t so sure, because had I ever been sure about my father, really? But it was still a game, I guess. It didn’t really mean anything.

The movers were moving something heavy and cumbersome now, not lifting but sliding, sliding across my father’s hard wood floors, and it was funny because I thought that I should complain to their boss. I could hear them giving directions to each other, and laughing again. One of them said, “Easy now. Easy now. Do you want me to put some grease on it?”

I pushed the barrel down on my tongue and then deeper, and then just like that I was vomiting down my arm, and then onto the floor when I crouched down to one knee, and then again when I walked over to the little toilet on the far side of the cellar. I held both sides of the dirty little bowl, stained with thirty years of my father’s shit and piss, and I just let it all go.

The gun was somewhere on the floor behind me. I would have to wash it off, and put it back in the box, and then do something with the box. Put it back. Get it away from me. I wouldn’t check the barrel. Maybe I wouldn’t even touch it again. It felt like I hadn’t touched it at all, like it hadn’t even existed, and that maybe I should just head upstairs right then and stop those guys before they did anymore damage.

“Hey,” someone said. It was one of the movers. He had a lamp in his hand, and was halfway down the stairs. I turned my head away and wiped my face. “Are you all right?” he asked.

* * * * *

I saw him the day after I emptied out the house, in a mall of all places. I don't know why I was even there, except that it was only a year old and I wanted to be someplace without a history. I had a couple of bags of odds and ends with me—candy and some magazines a shirt from Sears and a hammer because I wanted to smack the boards down the cellar back in position. I was in a pretty good mood, if you can believe it, and I was looking forward to sitting on the floor of the empty living room that evening and eating the candy with the magazines spread around me. Naked girls and stuff like that.

But mainly I was thinking how funny it was that just the day before I had slid the barrel of a gun inside my mouth. My very own mouth! It seemed hard to believe, even for me, the only person who had actually experienced it.

I could almost still taste the metal and something else, something black and almost sooty, probably left over from the last time the gun was fired. And here I was walking out of a Sear's department store with a nice new shirt and a bag of those gourmet jelly beans that taste like one hundred million different flavors.

There was an old lady in front of me walking super slow, and baggy-pants clown-kids off to my right giving me the once-over, and I realized then that not a single person would ever-not ever-know about what had happened that afternoon two days before. It wouldn't even require an act of will on my part. It was like it had already been decided.

That's when I saw Leslie McKenzie, and it was especially strange because he was not walking towards me. He was coming out of Sears too, walking abreast of me about fifteen feet over but almost exactly parallel to me. He had a bag too, and for a second it just all seemed too strange to be real.

He was almost thin now, certainly thinner than me, except he had this weird little pot belly and a kind of sag in his cheeks and neck that seemed to be a holdover from the way he used to look. He was wearing glasses and a T-shirt and jeans, and he was kind of moving like he was in a hurry, like he had just remembered he had left the lights on in his Explorer. I glanced over at him and at first I thought, nah, no way, but then I stopped and looked closer. It was definitely him.

"Hey, hey," I said. "This is strange."

He didn't stop or even look in my direction, but I could tell that he recognized me. How could he not? I looked almost exactly the same as I did a decade before, bar a few pounds and a receding hairline.

I almost said something else, but he was up ahead of me now, and I would have really yelled, and not just yelled, but yelled at his back, which seemed pretty stupid and kind of, I don't know, beneath me. I almost did it. To be honest, I kind of wish I had.

Or even better, I just wish he had acknowledged me the very first time. That wouldn't have been very hard for him to do. I mean, it was definitely him.

I know exactly what I would have said to him too. I would have said, "Hey, how are you, man?" And then, after we had talked for a little while I would have said, "Remember that time?" and of course I wouldn't even have to finish the sentence, because I'd see it in his face. He would remember.

"I'm sorry," I'd say. "I'm very sorry." Very calm and even, like I was a doctor reporting some illness that really had nothing to do with me. There would be an awkward silence then, but I'd say, "Hey, it couldn't have been too bad. You look like you're doing pretty good."

He would smile and say thanks and he'd lean forward and speak quietly, like he didn't want anyone to overhear us. This was something that was meant for only us two. Oh, it would have felt real fine for him to do something like that. I can picture it.

He would tell me that he was doing better than pretty good, that he was great. He would talk to me about the good things in his life, right there and then, and how he hadn't been held back by all that other stuff, which was, after all, in the past, and maybe not really that bad at all. He would do all of this just standing there in the mall with people sliding by thinking we were talking about the weather or something. It wouldn't even take that long. Two minutes.

Then he would reach out to shake my hand, but my right hand would be holding the shopping bag, so I'd reach out with my left and we'd sort of clasp hands-not a handshake really, just an awkward touch, like my grandmother used to touch my hand when she slipped me money. He would smile and I would smile and we would let go and as he was letting go he'd see something in the way I was looking at him and he'd say, "Don't worry about it. It's okay."

It wouldn't have been too hard for him to just let me off the hook like that, you know? Just let me off the hook.

“What do you mean?” Beth asks. We are in the bathroom. The shower is running and we’re getting undressed. I’m looking at her jeans on the floor, and then at her naked thighs, then her face, because I’m sitting on the edge of the bathtub. She touches my shoulders. She pulls my T-Shirt off over my head. The room fills with steam.

“It wouldn’t have been too hard,” I tell her again, although I’m not sure she hears me, and I don’t know where this is headed. I am thinking about my father again, facing me across our narrow living room. Could something as simple as words have saved him?

“Listen,” I say, and I try to start over.

the end

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