The sound of gravel crunching beneath our tires. We cruised through the campground, scoping out the sites, then we rolled through a second time and claimed one. Time to breathe. Dad killed the ignition, the Chevy’s engine roaring and wheezing and subsiding restlessly. He shot me a look and we both climbed out. Doors slamming in unison. We made for the back of the truck, propped the canopy lid, dropped the tailgate, and broke out the tent. Without words, the tent went up immediately: obvious. That initial chore out of the way, it was time to “take a load off,” as Dad put it. We dripped ourselves into the canvas seats and gazed out at the forest, the lake, and finally at each other with satisfied, serious expressions, he lighting a cigarette, me drinking a pop and gnawing on a stick of jerky.
We set up the cook gear and fixed a meal of dogs and beans and ate in a kind of nature stupor. After cleaning the gear and packing it away, we did a little exploring—hiked the trails, wandered the water’s edge, took a swim, scoped fishing spots. When the sun began to slide behind the trees, we made our way back to camp and got another meal in before Dad stuffed all our food and cook gear into his old army rucksack and hoisted it by a length of cord over a tree branch, out of reach of any itinerant bears that might happen by and get curious.
This was Dad’s prologue.
The sun started fading, and he started getting fidgety. The darker it got, the more nervy he got. Pacing around, picking up objects and clunking them down, chain-smoking. Inevitably, he let out a long breath of pent up mental exhaustion, and recited his current variation on “I’ve got a bit of business to get to. Shouldn’t take too long, maybe a couple hours.” His disappearing act. “If you get hungry, make sure you re-hang the bear sack when you’re done,” he added thoughtfully. That’s what he called it: “the bear sack.” Then I observed him cycle through his standard finale of neurotic camp-supervisory rituals, avoiding eye contact, before he climbed into the truck and roared off in a dusty blur.
He’d done this every camping trip I could remember since I was seven or eight. On this trip I was thirteen, and the immediate sense of helplessness still made my lungs implode. Plus, I had teenage resentment to chew on, about the unfairness of parental abandonment, something I hadn’t had a clear understanding of in the general confusion of early childhood but which now curdled my nerves like standing at the edge of a great height.
Dad liked to remind me that grizzlies could smell food fifty miles off if the breeze was right. I didn’t know if there was any truth behind the claim, but just his saying it made it believable enough. Also, according to Dad, the only thing that could bring down a grizzly was an elephant gun. Just a friendly word of caution. What this meant to me at thirteen—since I didn’t have an elephant gun and Dad left me there anyway—was that I should consider myself lucky to survive a single night unprotected in the world. Welcome to Real Life, where staggering uncertainty reigns.
I removed the gas lantern from its case and lit it the way Dad had taught me, first pumping the canister full of pressure, then twisting the valve until I heard the hiss, and finally sticking in the lighted wooden match. I coaxed the twin mantles to a white-hot glow and sat at the picnic table and watched the sun desert me completely, slowly displaced by the expanding gauze of night.
The cold crept in, along with the mosquitoes. I crawled into the tent and wrestled into jeans and a sweatshirt, convinced that my rummaging would attract a restless man-eater. While changing, I held my breath intermittently, listening for sounds of approach: rustling brush, panting; chuffs and groans. I knew the tent provided about as much protection as a paper bag. Outside I might at least see my attacker and run, or yell, or throw things, or curl up into a ball—whichever it was that supposedly saved people from being eaten. I burst out of the tent, still zipping and buttoning, greeted only by the zany whine of mosquitoes.
To kill time, I had a deck of cards. I played solitaire in the brisk hush, acclimating myself to the rhythms of the night, hoping to hit a lull where my thoughts snapped shut and I could crumple into my sleeping bag. I longed for sleep like I never did back home. Unconsciousness seemed a far better option than this futile vigilance, all shivers and heartbeat, eyes scouring the void beyond the lantern halo where the ragged shapes of brush and trees stabbed in. The sooner I got to sleep, the closer I’d be to daylight. But my will was no match for the primal impulse that kept my interior light flickering, like a tiny hamster relentlessly running its wheel in the core of my brain. The slightest turn of air set me on edge. Hunkered in my camp chair, harrowed by mosquitoes and biting flies, I felt like a shank of meat with a bow on it.
I did get hungry, but I did not take down “the bear sack.” I imagined untying the cord and the sack falling to the ground, as heavy as me, and no way to get it back up. Maybe I’d have time to scarf down some crackers and cheese before my one-ton executioner arrived to chomp on my skull. I looked at the rucksack hanging there like a body, wondering as I had a thousand times how tying it up in a tree protected me in any way. Was the bear supposed to show up hungry and curious, see the sack out of reach, shrug its shoulders, and mosey off? The logic eluded me completely. The sack seemed like bait.
Eventually, solitaire achieved its boring mercy. My anxiety flattened out into a hazy tedium, breaking like a fever and collapsing my imagination into a shapeless puddle. Ambient sounds merged into a calming patter, and my inner-hamster petered out. I switched off the lantern and fumbled my way into the tent. No man-eaters came for me, at least none that I was aware of. They say that by the time you ever see a mountain lion, it’s been stalking you for hours, maybe days.
Some time in the night, I was awakened by the Chevy’s grumbling return. Door creak and slam. Dad’s feet scraping and crunching across the earthen camp, then a flashlight beam thrown through the mesh tent fly on my face. “Henry?” he rasped, alcohol fumes pouring in. Metallic reek of cigarette smoke wafting from his jacket and stubble.
“Yeah,” I acknowledged.
“Still here, huh?” he joked, unzipping the flap and jostling into the tent. He wrenched off his boots with a lot of huffing and nagging, then wrestled into his sleeping bag, fully clothed. His snores started up before my eyes could readjust to the darkness.
As usual, in the morning there was no mention of the previous night’s disappearance. Dad awoke energetically in the dewy briskness, shivering and grunting his way out of his “fart sack” (his name for his sleeping bag), replaced his boots, and climbed out of the tent. He tried to let me sleep, but I was attuned to his restlessness and couldn’t fall back unconscious—though I teetered on the edge for an hour or more before the sun turned the tent into a sauna. I crawled free of the stifling interior to find Dad sipping coffee from a battered tin cup, coffee he’d brewed in a percolator of similar condition. “The roustabout emerges,” he remarked on my belated entry into the world, grinning. “Little Bear returns from hibernation.” Breakfast time was about the only time Dad approached cheerfulness. He instructed me to grab a seat while he cooked up a mess of pancakes, eggs, and bacon on the camp stove. Nothing in his manner indicated the slightest compunction about his mysterious absence. Answering for himself was not Dad’s style. After breakfast, we cleaned up, hoisted the bear sack once more, gathered our gear, and went off to enjoy our day outdoors.
I took Dad’s disappearances the only way I knew how, really. That he was teaching me a life lesson, some transference of special wisdom from father to son having to do with isolation and exposure. The fact that I didn’t understand the meaning behind the lesson seemed to be an essential element of the lesson. All I could do, really, was proceed with my eyes and ears open for signs.
The thing about Dad was, he was a drinker. It wasn’t a secret, nor was it meant to be. He kept gallon bottles of Kessler, Canadian Mist, and Gilby’s in the cupboard beneath the kitchen counter, and he drank nightly. Unapologetically. Skillfully. So, there was no reason for him to sneak off somewhere to get his buzz on, if that’s what he was up to. Unless, of course, he wanted to be alone. Maybe he found his escapes necessary, to disappear for just a few hours those rare nights—to where he could finally, briefly, excavate his interior mysteries.
It was hard for me, even at that age, to blame him. Back home there wasn’t a lot of breathing room. We lived in a by-the-month motel, crowded by just the two of us. The place was pretty much a dungeon, the interior walls cinder blocks painted shit brown, the carpet mossy green shag stretched over slab concrete. Out the front door was a swamp.
We supposedly got a deal on rent because the motel was owned by one of Dad’s “associates.” It was located about a mile out of town, down in a gully, on the banks of a marsh clotted with bullfrogs and perch, lily pads, and a florescent green skin called “duckweed.” There were six units total and no staff. The occupants—a fellowship of addicts and ex-cons and their dogs—did their own housekeeping and general maintenance. For a quiet man like Dad—a man impossible to picture ever having been a boy; a man whose essential aspect was some measure of fatigue; a man whose history was a shadow place he seemed disinclined to revisit—living in that tiny, cold, murky space with me must have felt like the final bottom to a steady succession of descents.
He was fifty-three, janitoring at an old folks’ home. He’d had countless jobs over the years, but nothing substantial, being a high school dropout. Before the old folk’s home he’d worked in a lube shop until he got fired for “accidentally” pouring brake fluid into a griping customer’s engine instead of motor oil. He was not one of those drunks portrayed a thousand times onscreen: all calamitous features of clowns and tyrants knotted up in a vibrating mass of brutal, roaring incapacity. He spent most nights in front of the television, in his recliner. He’d come home from work, reeking like a chemistry experiment sweating cigarette fumes, and pour himself a drink, which he’d sip while watching the nightly news. He might ask how I was doing, he might not, as he filled his glass to the rim. After the news, we’d eat microwave dinners. This always at the tiny dining table, three feet apart, neither of us talking as if the food was a blessing that required hushed breaths. Afterward, Dad might say a word or two about some rumor he’d picked up around town, or some tidbit he’d heard on the radio—more thinking out loud than conversation. He’d pour himself another drink, and shuffle back to the recliner.
In the wild, Dad was different. He took on a different aspect, though the change was barely recognizable. Just a subtle realignment, as if his internal radio had been tuned to a clearer signal. His gaze remained long, but not in the detached, disengaged way I witnessed daily. Rather, freed of the airless torpor of civilization, he seemed to generate his own rhythms, eyes intent, senses assimilating the terrain like a hound snagged on the scent of some mythic bird. Outwardly he was the same person, but his nature changed. The difference, I understand now, was the distinction between oppression and freedom.
We spent the day fishing, which was less a sport for us than a form of meditation. You see the guys on the fishing shows whooping and jabbering, playing to the notion of it being a spectator sport, but it’s just not. That’s strictly television perversion, trussed up in thick advertising—which is to say, all talk, feverish, fitful, and chainsaw-like on the mind. Fishing is about silence and baring your senses to their rawest condition, letting go the convolutions of civility. We picked out a nice shady inlet, breaking occasionally to swim. Our method was cast and reel, which caught us a number of 12-13 inch rainbows. Late in the day, I had the idea of climbing onto a massive boulder above a deep hole and dropping my line to the bottom and just letting it sit. Just to test my own patience. The line went down, down, down, maybe thirty feet, maybe forty. The waters here were very deep and crystal clear, fed by mountain springs and glacial runoff. Dad kept up his long casts and slow reels below. He used a spinner, but I went the unsophisticated route of a nightcrawler on a hook. Maybe he thought I was wasting my time, but he didn’t comment and I just sat on my sun-warmed boulder and waited. My guess is he was locked into a zone, his own special headspace.
After a half hour or so, Dad proved his luck had run out, losing two lures to submerged logs in the process. Suddenly my pole sprang to life, bouncing and flailing. If I hadn’t been sitting on the handle, it would’ve been yanked right out of my hands. Dad ran up onto the boulder to coach me (“Keep the end up!”; “let him play a little”; “release some slack”). I followed his commands, flung at me frantic and barely coherent, with grave intensity. When it became clear the beast was beginning to tire, the fight all but burned out of him, Dad and I climbed down from the boulder and coaxed him to the shoreline. I reeled him in and Dad scooped him up in the net. It was a legitimate lunker, a 23-inch brown trout. “Jesus!” Dad bellowed, giving me a hard squeeze on my shoulder. He was beaming like I’d never seen. “That is one hell of a fish!” he proclaimed, as if I’d genuinely accomplished something.
This was the good part of camping: the brilliant moment, albeit fleeting, where we discovered our common grain, our sublime connection revealing itself in the wilderness. Sometimes I imagined that if I had a mother, she would’ve supplied that connective tissue.
After landing the lunker, which I named Hank, Dad and I packed it in. We cleaned the mess of fish at the lake’s edge, casting the heads and guts into the water for scavengers feeding along the bottom, and headed back for camp. Dad pan-fried Hank for us to share and put the rest of our catch into a cooler we brought along just for that purpose.
The sun began to go down, and I could see Dad working up to his routine. He hoisted the bear sack into its tree, and began restlessly examining objects around camp. He smoked a cigarette and lit up another with its dying cherry. I could see the pressure building in him as he struggled to contain his impulses. Finally, he picked up the fish cooler and lugged it toward the truck, to lock it up in the canopy. Which I understood to be his last move before excusing himself.
“Dad?” I called.
He halted midway to the truck, and turned to see what was the matter, as if he might have forgotten to take care of something. He set the cooler at his feet and looked to the bear sack dangling securely from its branch, then to me. “Yeah?” he said.
“You want to play some cards?” I asked. I removed the deck from my sweatshirt pocket and held it up. He paused, his face darkening with a kind of remote apprehension as he mulled over the question. “Umm. Maybe when I get back we can play,” he said. “How about that?”
“Like in an hour or two?” I pressed.
He stood there, scowling with concentration. I could tell he was having some kind of interior argument with himself. My odds were long. I was absolutely certain as I sat there shuffling the cards that he would turn me down, no doubt with a reasonable-sounding explanation.
Instead, he threw me a total curve. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come along?”
I didn’t know what to do with this idea. For a long time now I’d pictured him going off to find a secluded spot in the woods, parking, and listening to the radio while nursing a pint of whiskey. It was a bleak image, hopeless, restless, and sad. Now I pictured him taking me to that spot, to witness. To share it.
He picked up the fish cooler and nodded toward the truck. “Come on,” he said. “It’ll be all right. It’ll be fun.” He put the cooler into the canopy and closed it and gestured toward the various gear strewn around the site. “Just leave it. If the bears come, they come.” Then he turned and walked to the cab, got in, and waited for me to join him.
Mostly, Dad drank at home. But there were some nights, once or twice a month, when he ventured out—usually to what he called “the hillbilly dance” (“Not my kind of music,” he’d say, “but at least it’s not disco”). He claimed to command an indisputable genius on the dance floor, his singular talent. It was how he’d met my mom, at a community dance. She was fifteen years younger than him, waitressing at the Chicken Shack. According to Dad, his dancing drew the girls to him like moths to a flame. “Flies to honey.” “Hogs to the trough.” Apparently my mother was no exception. I guess I had Dad’s golden hooves to blame for my existence.
Nights he went out, I’d get a precursory whiff of aftershave pouring out of the bathroom, signaling his recreational intentions. He’d emerge, shaved and showered, hair slicked back with pomade. The only other people I’d ever seen this look on were Elvis and Fonzie on “Happy Days.” I wondered if this particular flourish—rooster-like—gave Dad the advantage with the ladies. He was also fond of western shirts, which he’d starch and iron along with his blue jeans, standing at the kitchen counter in threadbare undershirt and briefs—though he was not, nor had he ever been, a cowboy. He accomplished his look with utmost seriousness. Watching him straighten and adjust himself in the hall mirror, finally outfitted for the night, it became clear he thought he’d arrived at something approximating class. “I’ll be back in a couple hours. Don’t get into trouble,” he’d say, then mosey out the metal motel door with a jangling of keys.
Usually, by the time Dad got home from his late-night escapades, I’d already be asleep. My bed was a couch we’d picked up for free at a curbside in town. It was arranged just a couple feet from the motel double-bed Dad slept in. I was a deep sleeper, thankfully, so if there was a woman, I wouldn’t become aware of her until the following morning. The women Dad brought home were always very nice, but lacked the reassuring air of maternal self-possession. Something outcast and undone in them radiated sadness above all else. Loneliness. Desperation. Though some of them did have children of their own. They’d say, gazing through my eyes, through the back of my head, things like, “I wish mine was as well-behaved as this good-looking boy of yours,” touching my cheek, or chin, or hair. They never lasted. Why would they? What kind of world would they have to come from to see our situation as a step up? The cruel truth was, I’m pretty sure Dad and I both would’ve liked having a third person around, permanent. Maybe if we’d just known what to do, if we’d had some kind of instruction. The proper code, the perfect gesture, placement of the key puzzle piece. Simple and impossible.
The camp road snaked for miles through trees and brush, and had a number of offshoots. Any moment, I expected Dad to pull into one of these and kill the engine. Let silence fall in, darkness clarify, and slip into his special zone that maybe took booze and a cigarette or two to enter, then I’d see what it meant to be him through that secret door in the wild. Maybe he’d pass me the bottle, light me a smoke. I knew kids in school who already drank.
But no. We bumped along the camp road all the way out and lurched onto the old county highway, an errant strip of meandering asphalt that might have been the aimless scar of a fugitive steamroller paved over as a governmental afterthought. We entered the corridor, our headlights flaring the roadside brush and tree trunks, pulling them furiously past, as I settled in for what I imagined to be an impromptu road trip of some kind.
But no again. After only about five minutes, Dad began braking, and I sat up to see a log building with a wraparound porch loom into view around a bend ahead. An orange neon sign read, “Mosey’s.” In the gravel lot were a few trucks, and a sheriff’s cruiser. The place looked to be in the middle of nowhere. Trees and asphalt and it. Hardly a prime business location.
Dad steered into the lot, nosed into the row of vehicles, and switched off the ignition. I looked at him, waiting for the punch line. Usually about now I’d be at camp, shivering and mobbed by mosquitoes, awaiting my executioner. “What’s this?” I asked.
Dad gave me a dumb look then pointed to the sign and said, “Mosey’s. I thought you were a reader.” He reached across me and pushed the door open for me to get out. “Hurry up.”
The interior was dimly lit, the walls bare wood. Animal heads hung about, seeming both real and fake at the same time. Deer, moose, bear, mountain lion. A rabbit head with a set of antlers. The dining tables had been pushed against the walls, benches stacked on them, leaving a broad open space on the plank floor. Overhead, two large wooden fans whirled lethargically. A bar ran the length of one wall, with a small cluster of humans congregated at its middle. There were three men and a woman, not counting the bartender who stood at his post, leaning forward, resting his weight on his forearms on the counter, grinning at whatever conversation was passing between the others. One of the men was in uniform: the sheriff belonging to the cruiser outside, complete with hat. As we entered, he rotated on his stool, looked at Dad, then at me, took a gulp from the bottle in his hand. I inched behind Dad’s legs.
The bartender also saw us, his grin changing shape from one of general affability to pleasant surprise. “Hey, Peter!” he called out, giving Dad a nod. The other patrons followed his gaze, swiveling and greeting Dad in magnanimous unison: “Peter!” Even the sheriff joined in.
I rarely heard Dad’s name spoken aloud, let alone cheered. He got a huge smile on his face and I caught myself reflexively smiling along with him. He strutted across the dusty planks to the bar and ordered a whisky, straight. “And something for the kid,” he said, beckoning for me to join them. “What’ll you have, Henry?”
I approached the group of smiling adults, their eyes all pulling at me. “I guess, an orange pop?” I said.
“You heard him, Mose,” Dad said to the bartender.
“Sure thing,” the bartender answered, moving toward a cooler and clunking open the lid. He brought the soda, cracked the top, and set the bottle on the counter next to Dad’s whisky.
“So this is the future astrophysicist, huh?” asked the woman, giving me a wink. She had raven hair and hazel eyes that spread warmth along the tops of her cheeks when she smiled, as she was doing now. Her eyes locked onto mine, and I glanced toward the floor, studying the bolts that held the barstools in place.
“Nah,” said the stout, orange-haired, jowly, pointy-nosed man perched on the stool closest to me. “This here’s the future President.”
I took these comments to be a kind of good-natured smooth talk aimed at putting me at ease, and probably Dad too. The attention had the opposite effect on me, though, compounding my confusion about our arrival at this hinterland oasis with a bunch of strangers mooning over me like a long lost nephew at a family reunion. I would have rathered they just treat me like an accessory to my father.
“Henry, huh?” said the sheriff. His name patch read “McNutt.”
I nodded, mumbled, “Uh-huh.” I waited for him to turn on the icy authority and toss us out. By now I had a pretty clear sense the place was not a regular restaurant. Especially considering that no one was eating. It was a roadhouse bar, like I’d seen on TV countless times, and I knew I was not supposed to be inside it.
Instead, the sheriff stuck out his hand for a shake. “Well, good to meet you, Henry,” he said, giving my arm a sharp sociable yank. “I’m Dale. Your Dad’s bragged you up pretty swell. Seems you’re on track to be the pride of your generation. This here’s Virginia, that’s Thor, and over there’s Gary.”
Thor was the short fat redhead on the stool beside me. On the other side of him, Gary best approximated an old cowboy, weathered and scruffy, western shirt and hat, boots, and string tie. He touched two fingers to the brim of his hat in salutation. They all tilted their glasses and bottles to me then drank.
“Never mind Mose,” said the sheriff, shooting the bartender a theatrical grimace. “He’s just a public servant.”
“Unlike yourself,” countered Mose. “More like a public nuisance.”
“That’s why they give me the hot car with the pretty lights and loudspeaker. Keep the natives on their toes.”
“And off the sidewalks,” Virginia chimed in. They were performing for each other, the way adults often do in close quarters. Amplification of character. So obviously counterfeit, this mode of loud-mouthed posturing, it seemed designed to strain the credulity of an adolescent. I responded with a lobotomy smile, which seemed to pass for shyness. Virginia kept staring, like she was looking deep into parts of me for evidence of something significant. All attention anchored on me, including Dad’s, a rare smile stretching his face, prideful, as though presenting to the world a project he’d been working on for years in his basement workshop.
The silence was interrupted by a loud clack that sounded like two rocks being struck together. It came from a room I hadn’t noticed beyond the bar. In it were three pool tables. A girl about my age stretched awkwardly over the green field of the farthest table, steadying her cue for a tough shot. She squinted with concentration, balancing shakily on one leg, her other leg splayed wayward into space behind her. Her dog, a shepherd mix, monitored her technique with shivering restraint.
Virginia caught me looking and said, “Why don’t you go ask Felice for a game?” My instinct was to stick close to Dad, but Virginia nudged me. “She won’t bite, I promise.”
“Felice?” I said.
Virginia nodded. “My daughter.” Then she announced to the room, “It was a tossup between that, Chastity, and Prudence.” The men all chuckled, though I couldn’t guess why. Virginia went on, “All through school, my paperwork, you only had six boxes to fill in for your name, so I was ‘Virgin’ all the way.”
“I’d buy that for a dollar,” clowned Thor.
“Just keep drinking,” Virginia shot back to the chubby redhead. “Don’t overheat yourself.” She adjusted the shoulder straps to her top, hefting her breasts slightly, tilting forward just enough to put Thor’s nose in direct line with her cleavage. His eyes fell down the expanse and he took a long pull off his beer, punctuating the burlesque ritual.
Virginia turned back to me, grinning at her own power. “Go on,” she commanded. “Go talk to her.”
“But I don’t know how to play,” I protested.
“So learn. Felice’ll probably let you win once or twice. Look at her there, playing all by herself. Doesn’t it just break your heart?”
The men all plastered smirks on me like they smelled a fart coming from my direction. Dad was grinning too—still. All I could do was comply. Plus, I was all too happy to remove myself from the spotlight. I took my orange pop from the bar and made my way back to the pool room.
The dog gave me a quick once-over but the girl didn’t look up for ages. When she finally did acknowledge me, it was with a magnificently executed non-reaction. Just a glance while she walked the table, champing a wad of gum, surveying her shot options. She wasn’t pretty—nothing I’d notice under normal circumstances, anyway. About my height, with a round, plain face and snarls of curly brown hair sprung harum-scarum from a knob at the back of her head. She decided on a shot and leaned in, sighting along the cue and gauging the physics of the thing with casual expertise—aiming, snapping the cue ball, whomping her target ball into the pocket. The dog appraised the girl’s nonchalant grace, grinning, tongue lolling. She backed away from the table with a fair swagger. “Did you come in here to challenge me?” she said.
“Challenge” was not the word I’d come in with. “Not really,” I said. “I’ve never played before.”
“You’ve never played pool?” she gawked, tucking the stick against her neck. It was as if I just told her I had a third arm growing out of my back.
“I’ve seen it on TV,” I shrugged. “I saw a movie about it.”
She just looked at me hard a moment then bopped her head decisively, navigating toward a plan of action. “No time like the present,” she declared. “What’s your name?”
“Henry.”
“Hi Henry. I’m Felice.” She thrust out a hand, which I took and got a light squeeze in return. She blew a bubble and bit it. “That’s Oscar Wilde,” she said, pointing to the dog. “She’s particularly clever for her species and a bit eccentric.”
“I see,” I said, thoroughly clueless.
Felice showed me a couple ways to hold the cue and laid out the ground rules for nine ball. The trick to pool, she explained, was to hit the cue ball so that it behaved the way you wanted. She demonstrated a few techniques, then we took turns hitting the balls around the table, she going for all-but-impossible shots and coaching me on the easy ones.
We played for an hour or so, and I managed to sink a few shots, some even on purpose. We warmed to each other quickly. Felice had a playful, teasing way about her, a kind of streetwise humor that fairly obliterated my social defenses. I admired her brazenness, taking it for bravery. Occasionally we’d hear laughter erupt from the other room, in response to what sounded like my father’s voice. It was an amazing sound I’d never heard before.
At one point I knocked the cue ball into what looked like an unreachable position. “Nice leave,” Felice jeered. “But not impossible.” She sprawled forward to get at it, instructing, “The rule is you have to keep one foot on the floor.” Which she did, shakily, her big toe making the barest contact, her other leg clamped hard against the tabletop. As she struggled with the shot, her tank top inched up, exposing a triangle of lower back where an ovoid patch of purplish flesh rose above her jeans waistline.
“What’s that?” I blurted without thinking. Felice flubbed her shot, sending the cue ball spinning wide. She turned and followed my gaze down to her abdomen, our cheeks flaming up in unison. She slid off the table and straightened herself, tugging her shirt down hard. Her self-assurance appeared to evaporate, leaving her skinny and small and speechless. After a long moment of out-of-body floor-staring, she recovered, her eyes glazing over in dramatic, aloof, zombie fashion. She leveled the bored-to-death reply, “It’s my power stripe.”
“Your power stripe?” I said, dubious. For one thing, the mark was more of a sprawling blotch than a stripe.
“I’m tired of pool,” said Felice, and clattered her cue down on the table.
“Yeah, I’m not too good,” I said, letting the subject drop.
But Felice hopped back up onto the rail on her butt. “This,” she said, touching the blotch through her tanktop, “is from when I had cancer.”
She said it in a hush and stared deep into my eyes. I had no idea how to react, so I just stared back.
“When I was a kid,” she went on, “my whole body was riddled with cancer. The worst case they’d ever seen. Worse than most adults, even. The only thing that could save me was this totally experimental therapy using lasers and radiation. It was horrible. All my hair fell out. I got super skinny, like a skeleton. I looked like an alien.” She lifted her shirt a little, showing me the red spot again. “This is the scar,” she said. “It goes all the way up the left side of my body.”
Cancer was a complete abstraction to me. I vaguely associated it with old people, smoking, and shuffling toward death. It went with white hair. So, the gravity of Felice’s explanation didn’t come across to me so much as the sense of triumph from having overcome incredible bad luck. But even more than that, what I took away from her story was the condition of strangeness she communicated. I had my own knowledge of alienation, played out in a thousand awkward social situations. I understood the impulse to invent something meaningful from otherness—ways to be seen as special instead of just odd.
“Why do you call it a power stripe?” I asked, trying not to sound too suspicious.
“Because it has super powers.”
Now I felt justified in my hesitation. There were subversive angles here that needed further investigation.
“It was one of the side effects of the treatment,” reported Felice. “The combination of lasers and radiation melded together to change my chemical makeup.”
Her earnestness undermined my skepticism. I half wondered if she believed what she was telling me. “Super powers, like what?”
“I can see people’s auras,” Felice said. “And it also made me hollow, like an empty bottle. I bet you could even pick me up.”
I ignored this last comment. “What’s an aura?” I asked.
“It’s a special light everyone emits, but most people can’t see it. It radiates around your body. Everyone’s has a particular color, depending on the condition of their soul.”
“So what color is mine, then?” I challenged.
She leaned back on her elbows and squinted, taking a long hard look. I held my breath. Finally, she reopened her eyes and sat up. “Pink,” she said.
“Pink?”
She nodded. “And sometimes brown.” She snapped her gum. “It sort of fluctuates.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s hard to say. It could be good or bad. I’m not an expert judge yet, I’m still getting used to it. You might be a good person. You really might be.”
“Are you saying I might be bad?”
“Probably not. I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure it’s fine. Look, you’re probably just in a transition period.” Satsisfied she’d gotten under my skin, she leaned forward, exposing the scar more. “You want to touch it?” she offered.
There was no way I was going to pass up this once-in-a-lifetime invitation. Felice pulled her shirt up more and leaned back to give me access. Touching other people was not an experience I was familiar with, other than the casual pushing and nudging, playfully and not, of friends and enemies in public rivalry. Even Dad and I kept to our own space. My hand reaching across that short gap awakened nerve-endings at the frontiers of my being, excited particles in the immediate atmosphere. Contact itself turned out to be cooler than I’d expected, the skin patch a little bit tough and slick and fake, like plastic. Like something poured over her real skin and cured into a film. I slid my fingers up and down it with rapt fascination.
“Crazy huh?” she said, eyes widening. She tugged her shirt down, pushing my hand away and hopped off the table. “Come on. I’ve got something better we can do.” Music roared to life in the bar—something twangy and whiny—and I turned to see Virginia through the doorway leading Dad out to the dance floor. I hesitated, dazed by the vision of my father’s outright weightlessness, his beaming face.
Felice called to me, already at the far end of the room, waiting with arms crossed. She stood under an Exit sign. It was the backdoor of the building and opened on complete darkness. No outdoor lights. We stepped through the void, accompanied by Oscar Wilde, and the door clunked closed behind us.
I could hear the purling of a nearby river. Above at high angles, the ragged silhouette points of trees punctured the starlit sky. Felice took my hand and led me away from the building and toward the river sound. The earth was hard under our feet, littered with pine needles and loose rocks. A breeze swept through, lifting my hair and whuffing my ear.
After about a hundred yards, the ground began to slope downward. “Here,” Felice chirped, “sit down.” She pulled me down beside her onto the lumpy ground. The air was silent down low. Somewhere out of sight a three-quarter moon cast a bluish hue in shattered angles through the trees, giving us a ghostly sense of our surroundings. Oscar Wilde lay down on the other side of Felice, thoroughly at ease. Felice pointed to the sky. “Look at the stars.”
There were no clouds and the darkness was spectacularly ornamented with a net of brilliant pinpoints. “They’re so bright,” I thought aloud.
“We’re in the country,” said Felice. “Stars are always brighter in the country.”
The view was hypnotic. Some of the stars actually glistened, while others seemed to pulse. As my eyes adjusted, more and more popped into existence. Felice pointed out the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion’s belt. Then something streaked across the firmament and disappeared. It happened so fast it barely registered on my senses, leaving no sign whatever of its passage. My breath caught with the same anticipation of an outfielder gauging the arc of a fly ball. Waiting… Waiting… “Did you see that?” I whispered. Another one streaked through, brighter and spanning multiple constellations.
“Uh-huh,” said Felice. “That’s what I wanted to show you. Falling stars.”
I felt like an idiot for never giving serious thought to the sky, something so obvious, right there, just look up for more than two seconds. “What’s happening?”
“The Perseid meteor shower. It comes once a year and lasts a couple weeks.”
Felice lay down fully on the ground and I lay down too, our heads resting on the springy latticework of pine needles, and we watched the sky for a long stretch without talking. The minutes filled up with our stifled breaths as we waited, like fishermen hypnotized by the surface of a favorite fishing hole. Suddenly, a massive orange light flared out of the void and blazed sideways across our view, trailing a wide streak behind it like a crayon smear. We both let out ahhs in unison. I heard Felice gulp. I felt my own heartbeat in my ears. The trail lingered above us as if challenging us to disbelieve what we’d just witnessed.
“Wow,” said Felice. “That’s the biggest I’ve ever seen, I bet.”
The seconds began to line up between us again as the vision imprinted on our imaginations.
“Do you live out here?” I asked, finally.
“Ten miles away or so.” She said she and her mom lived in a single-wide on an old horse pasture of her uncle’s. Her mom was a waitress at Mosey’s, so Felice ended up hanging out here a lot. I was impressed. The idea of living out in the wilderness seemed exotic. Enough fishing, hiking, and exploring to fill up a life. When I asked about her dad, she said she didn’t have one. “Obviously someone donated his sperm to the cause, but that was the extent of our acquaintance. He lives out in L.A. I guess. I think he works at a celebrity fitness club or something. Totally lame. My mom and him only went out for a couple months. He doesn’t even know I exist.” She seemed to be unmoved by this idea, her dad’s total obliviousness. “It’s always been just Mom and me.”
“Yeah, it’s the same with me and my dad,” I muttered, mirroring her detachment. Felice and I were a pair of bored spectators of our own insignificant lives. I told her about my mother dying when I was a year old, of a viral infection so rare the doctors were clueless. They sent her home with a bottle of cough medicine. That night she went from coughing to wheezing, and within a day she was gone. Of course, I only knew what had been told to me. I had no memory of that time—of my mother, of the apartment we lived in, briefly, as a complete family. There were pictures. Her name was Beth.
Felice went quiet for awhile. Another big sparkler shot the sky, chased by two smaller ones seconds later. I realized I might have made her uneasy, talking about my mom. People don’t know how to respond to other people’s tragedies. I didn’t even really mean it that way, since to me my mother’s death was only an abstraction. Maybe Felice was thinking about her own mom, what life would be like. I attempted to lighten the mood. “I think it would be awesome to live out here,” I said. “In the country.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool,” breathed Felice. “Unless you ever want to do anything or have anyone to do it with. My school is about five miles from our house, in the closest thing to a town. There’s only six classrooms, so different grades have to share. My class is fourth grade all the way to eighth. Only two girls that go there are my age, and they’re Jesus freaks. There’s not even a movie theater.”
I told her my life was pretty boring too. I described our gloomy street on the outskirts of town, inhabited by the terminally poor, the ex-cons, addicts. Not even a neighborhood, really. A handful of rundown houses and our place. No kids at play. The kids at school were either stuck up or pissed off. When I went into the details of the motel and the swamp, I expected her to be grossed out, but instead she thought it sounded pretty cool. “You must catch frogs and salamanders and snakes and stuff all the time. Are there bullfrogs?”
“It’s not like that. It’s just a gross stinkhole.”
“Are you kidding me?” She slipped into a rural twang. “You dumbass. I bet you if I went down there, I’d come out with bucket loads of the little slimy buggers. I can’t believe you. You have to catch those frogs and pollywogs. What’s wrong with you? All you do is you go down to the edge and start poking around. Flip over bits of wood and leaves. You gotta be quick, though. If I lived in a place like that, I’d be down at the pond every day. All we have around our place is a big field. It takes me almost an hour to hike to the creek. You come all the way out here to go fishing and you don’t even catch frogs in your own back yard? Sorry, son, nothing can be done for you, you’re a goner.”
She was right, of course, though I wouldn’t know it until a couple days later when I explored the area for myself. I had just assumed the pond was a basin of wastewater, toxic and fecal and fetid. The truth was, despite the decay, it was hopping with life, literally, and I would end up spending many summer days exploring it.
We got back to stargazing and a conspicuous hush developed between us, my breathing throttled in a narrow space at the base of my throat. I had the sense that our silence in such close proximity was a form of communication, and the longer we lay there the more intense the feeling became, until it grew into a kind of numbness—all of which had something to do with Felice being a girl. I began to have second thoughts about her looks, that there was something compelling about her small features, a kind of beauty even, from certain angles. The quiet went on for some time, until I began to feel that my body was just a piece of old deadwood and I was a ghost trapped inside it, my nerves screaming with constrained momentum. What I really wanted to do was touch her. But at the same time, I didn’t want to touch her at all. The urge had no direction. The sensation was like standing at the end of the high dive staring down at the pool with everybody watching: you can’t go backward, you can’t go forward, but something has to happen.
Then Felice did the easiest thing imaginable. She reached over and took my hand. It was like she felt my anxiety boiling over and knew the antidote: contact.
It worked. The tides in my head reversed and I was at once comforted and transported. Neither of us spoke. I just let my hand be held, warmed by hers. My breathing became shallow, my back relaxed against the earth. I hadn’t even realized how tense I was.
The feeling of intimacy expanded through me, and I indulged it completely. I imagined myself flattening and spreading out like a puddle. The two of us lay there like that, counting the blazes streaking the blackness overhead, in lost time. Our only talk was to try to point out falling stars before they burned away. It became a game. A bit of pointless competition—of seeing. I announced my count at thirteen, and Felice squeezed my hand and said, “Henry?”
“Yeah?”
“I never had cancer. I made that up.”
“Weird,” I said. Making up cancer seemed even more farfetched than actual cancer, which was insane enough.
“I know. It just came out, I don’t know where from. It just sounded good.”
“Actually,” I said, “it sounded kind of unbelievable, but I didn’t know you well enough to know when you’re lying or not.”
“But you just went along. I thought you’d call my bluff.”
“It doesn’t mean I believed you had super powers. I’m not an idiot. You have that mark, whatever it is. How should I know where it came from?”
“I know. I’m sorry. I was just teasing you to see what you’d do, and you didn’t do anything. So, I guess you did call my bluff.”
We were still lying on our backs, talking to the sky. “So how’d you get it then, the mark?” I asked.
Felice was silent a moment, then let loose a long breath, like a balloon going flat, and said, “When I was six, my mom’s boyfriend dropped me in a fire.”
This, I could tell by her tone, was true. The mood dropped right off a cliff, and a wave of revulsion rolled through me. “Why?” I gasped. I was unable to wrap my mind around any circumstance that might result in such a thing. The most unimaginable hate seemed the only motive. Some impossibly twisted form of adult cruelty.
But Felice had an answer, a way I could tell she’d described it countless times before. “It was an accident. We were having a bonfire in the backyard, burning brush. Some dumbass hick-rock song came on the radio and he got all excited and picked me up to dance. Mom thought it was hilarious. They were both totally wasted. I thought it was funny too, at first. Until he lost his balance. Then it was just insane. I caught on fire. They pulled me out and rolled me on the ground to put the flames out. They were slapping all over me like crazy, trying to stop it. My skin totally melted. At first I didn’t feel anything at all. I remember thinking it must not be that bad. Then I passed out, because I woke up in the hospital. My whole left side hurt like I’d been bitten in half, but they had me on these drugs so I could wake up sometimes and not immediately pass out again. Goddamn, it hurt so bad.”
“Wow,” was all I could say. This really was a story, not like cancer. It was exactly a nightmare: being torn from normal and chomped into bits. Felice was obviously practiced at framing it as a long-ago event that didn’t matter anymore. But this time I didn’t buy her aloofness. A movie of it started up in my head immediately: music blaring, mom and boyfriend (longhaired in my vision) caught up in the moment, having just a bit too much of a good time. A frenzy of fun. Then celebration tipping to catastrophe in a flash. It was truly terrifying. Grotesque. It said, be careful who you trust. It said, some adults don’t know how to play safe, so look for signs. It said, there is such a thing as getting totally out of hand.
You don’t come back from that clean. No way. Super powers, indeed.
“I almost died. I was in the hospital for about three weeks, then they let me out with bandages and crutches. When I came home he was gone. Mom said he was careless and dangerous. Which was lame, because when she was around him, she was just like him, and they always had a good time. Me too, until the accident. So saying he was dangerous just seemed like something she was making up to feel better about what happened. I know she was sad he was gone. In her situation, most of the men she meets are awful redneck zombies, either big talkers with nothing to show for themselves or too afraid to open their mouths and let the stupid out. Lonely losers. Tim wasn’t mean, wasn’t boring, wasn’t old. He was fun and funny and could sing and play guitar, and he’d been all over the country and knew something about everything. He was always laughing or joking about one thing or another. He liked to say, ‘Let’s go cause some trouble,’ meaning let’s get out of the boring old house and go be big in the world. To me, that’s a lot to give up for just one mistake.”
“Did they put him in jail?” I asked.
“No, he just left. He didn’t technically do anything illegal. It’s not like he was driving drunk or anything. It was an accident. I don’t know if Mom made him go or he went on his own. But she’s been mopey and lonely ever since, I swear. She tries to put on a happy face. To tell you the truth, I think she thinks he was her last chance. And I think she’s right.”
The “lonely losers” Felice lamented seemed to describe my father perfectly, and I wondered if she was aware of that. Or, maybe guys like my father—duds, by her reckoning—had become so commonplace they didn’t even register in her consciousness. Climatic features. When Dad drank he sank into a marvelous quiet, like a paper boat weighted down with too many river stones. He never went off like a firework, for good or bad. To my thinking there was nothing manifestly lame in that. It was a matter of style. But such complaisance clearly didn’t sit well with Felice; she didn’t want her mom shacking up with the crusty leftovers. In her world, impetuousness beat out predictability by miles. I wasn’t convinced about her mom’s ex-boyfriend being free and clear of criminal negligence, and suspected he might have left to avoid law complications. There had to be official fallout of some kind for raining havoc down on a kid. Adults were meant to protect, never endanger.
But none of those behaviors—of duds and dudes—applied to me, and my attention belonged to the moment. To us. This sharing. The remarkable exchange of sympathies Felice and I had pieced together was, on the male-female continuum, fearless, breathtaking, and obvious all at once. It was no minor thing. I felt as serious about it as I had about anything my entire life. I did not have these vital moments ever, not even with so-called friends. I was grounded entirely in our space and time, fully electrified by each successive, itchy millisecond. I wasn’t going anywhere. And I would’ve stayed like that until starvation set in, if we were never interrupted.
Dad and I would be leaving the next day, and I allowed some absurd scenarios to tiptoe through my head. What if Felice were able to come visit us some time—her and her mom, say? Or, vice versa? I pictured us mucking through the wild together, hiking for miles, catching frogs and snakes and so forth, building forts, climbing trees, playing war—normal outdoor things. Or maybe Dad and I could camp here every summer so Felice and I could meet up over the years. Maybe even she and her mom could camp with us. It could be planned. We could spend a week instead of just a weekend. A yearly reunion. Something to look forward to.
I didn’t speak any of these thoughts. They were just thoughts. Entertainments. Admittedly, I had the impulse to make them known to Felice, just to let her know how I felt. Some people blurt out anything hopeful that crosses their minds, because hearing themselves say it makes it seem more possible. Farfetched promises and plans. I’m not one of those people. Even at that age I understood that being hopeful about the impossible is an inevitable letdown.
The interruption arrived with the doorknob rattling behind us, up the ridge, followed immediately by the sound of interior hoopla spilling its twangy nonsense out into our wide perfect space, attended by loud guffaws and raucous snags of adult banter. Oscar Wilde stood up and gave a muted, anticipatory whimper. Virginia’s voice called out above the jukebox harangue, “Felice? Honey? You kids, where are you?”
Then Dad’s awkward call, “Henry, you out here?”
“Ollie Ollie all come free!” hollered one of the others—Sheriff McNutt, it sounded like.
Felice called back, “We’re down here, Mom.” She didn’t sit up, though she took her hand away from mine. We both continued to lay there, eyes on the sky, as the heavy door chunked closed, cutting off the music, and a troupe of crunching clumsy stomps made its way toward us. As they closed in, Felice cautioned sharply, “Watch out! We’re right here!”
The stomping stopped abruptly near our heads. “Are you on the ground?” came Virginia’s voice, right above us.
“We’re watching the meteor shower,” answered Felice.
“Well, jeez, Honey. We were looking all over for you two. You really had us worried.” I doubted both of these statements. “I guess you’re smart enough not to go down to the river at night. Right, Felice?”
“Totally.”
“Henry,” Virginia said, shifting her tone from instructive to upbeat, “your daddy was in here showing these rednecks how a real man dances. You missed out. The only talent these dudes have is skulking in the corner like a bunch of vultures waiting for someone to go down.” The men all groaned satirically. “So how about it?” Virginia shifted again. “Have you seen any? Meteors?”
“Hundreds,” came Felice’s cool response.
“Well, I don’t mind getting a little dirty,” said Virginia, cheerfully oblivious. She sat down on the ground beside Felice. “How about it boys, shall we watch for falling stars?” They all muttered approval and found spots on the nearby earth to settle themselves. The faint, rancid smell of beer entered my nostrils, along with salty odors of body and breath.
I liked Virginia. She had the uncanny ability to carry a room, to elevate an assemblage of wayward spirits to a point of collective hope. You could feel it the moment she spoke. Her voice seemed to hit all the right notes, and everyone drew together. Whatever her troubles and despite her implied judgment lapses, she possessed that admirable talent.
Everything went quiet again except for intermittent sounds of drinking, shiftings of weight, sighs, and cigarette puffs. I could practically hear the adults’ eyes adjusting to the darkness. Somewhere to my left my dad cleared his throat. A pair of meteors streaked across the sky a moment later, and everybody oohed. One of the men said, “A two-fer.” Felice’s gum popped.
I awoke to my father gently shaking my shoulder and saying my name. We were in the truck but I had no memory of how I got there. No memory of walking or being carried. No memory of even being drowsy. At thirteen, I still had a boy’s body whose energies careened and collapsed with fickle humor, snapping shut in an instant where moments before they’d have been calling for wild adventure. Dad held a flashlight, pasting oblique blobs and cones of light around the interior of the cab. Outside was total blackness. I surmised that we were back at camp. He said, “You’re gonna have to make it to the tent on your own. Your old dad’s too beat to be carrying you around all night. Now get out, come on.”
The air had chilled significantly and bit into our exposed necks and ears as we shambled in the general direction of the tent like a pair of zombies, Dad playing the light over the lumpy earth and shooting it up into the trees to locate the bear sack, dangling unbothered. The flashlight found the side of the tent and soon we were inside, bundled fast in our bags, rigid with shivers.
Normally, Dad would be returning by himself, checking on me briefly to make sure I was alive and intact, then collapsing into snores. I wouldn’t ask any questions. But tonight I felt cheated—out of goodbyes, out of my own full range of consequences and implications. And I knew that by tomorrow morning this would all be water under the bridge. It was our last day, we’d pack up and leave this place, and I’d likely never see any of it again.
“Dad, how do you know Mose and them?” I asked the naked air.
His answer came slow and breathy, from halfway across sleep, but still warmed by drink. “I don’t, not really. They’re just locals. Welcoming committee, Chamber of commerce. Come on in, stranger, drop some coin, set a spell.”
He was trying to drift away on me, but I was determined. “Why are you saying that? They were your friends.”
“Absolutely. That’s how it works. Relative strangers make the best friends.”
“What about Virginia? She seemed to really like you. And she was pretty too.”
“Those are true facts, son. On the money.”
“Do you think you’ll see her again?”
He gave me a condescending chuckle. “She’s in a whole other league, kiddo. She’s not about to waste her time on an old shipwrecked sailor a thousand miles from the sea.” Then, in his own rambling fashion, and I suppose spurred on by drunken stupor, he laid it all out for me—as he saw it anyway, the hard truth. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: people are interested when they don’t know you. They like you when they’re first meeting you. You are, for a short time, everything they imagine you to be. An ideal human person. Until you slowly put the nails in, one by one. Once they’ve heard your five stories, and ten jokes, they have no more use for you. You’re just that guy who looks a certain way, drives a certain car, shows up at certain times, and sits over here or over there. A guy who knows where to find a reliable mechanic, or a decent burger, maybe even a place to lay your head if you’re a certain type of lady on a particularly lonely night.”
My questions were doors he was closing. Talking to me like he’d misplaced who I was in his momentary celestial drift. He was off in some la-la lounge somewhere, commiserating with fellow members of the Lonely Loser Club. Some foggy place where his thoughts exited his mouth. My concerns derived from the probability of rounding out the summer in utter, dull solitude—knowing that I’d be thinking of Felice, and even Virginia, during those coming days. Knowing there was a whole other world out here, populated by personalities specific and rare to my sympathies. Though Dad was now determining to break me of that illusion.
“When you’re young you convince yourself of any number of deceptions to get you through,” he rambled on. “Sex appeal’s a big one. Money, if you’ve got it. Special knowledge. Maybe you’re a mountain climber, or play guitar. Maybe you’ve got long hair or a killer smile, or you wrestle gators, or run naked with the wolves. It don’t matter. Everybody has a leveling. A place you can’t go up from anymore. And once you’ve hit that plateau, everybody can see it on you. More like they don’t see you at all anymore. Some kind of guy hanging around at the edges. Or in the back, behind the main characters.”
“Did you ever do any of that stuff?” I asked. “Play guitar? Or run around naked?” I hoped he hadn’t done the latter. That would worry me.
“Nah. I didn’t get caught up in any of that foolishness. I just had my looks, and that worked for a good long time. And I could dance. A lot of men can’t dance to save their soul. It’s a simple thing.”
“And that’s how you met Mom.”
“That’s how I met Mom,” he confirmed drowsily. “But. Don’t go making too much out of that. It wasn’t so easy. If things hadn’t happened the way they did, your mother would’ve left me eventually. I did not make her happy. And you would have gone with her, and your life would be something else entirely. Probably in a way that makes a lot more sense.”
I didn’t ask him any more questions, and soon I heard him snoring softly. In my mind’s eye, I cycled through the collection of images of my mother. Those photos said she was always smiling, always cheerful, forever young and pretty. Not the extroverted type, like Virginia, but the thoughtful, pleasant, nurturing type. A bit bland, perhaps, but reliable and reassuring—as an ideal mother ought to be. I’d always imagined that if she had survived, the combination of her and Dad would have struck the proper balance. She was the missing ingredient to our perfect family recipe. However things might have turned out—as resided somewhere in the stretches between my and my father’s imaginations—tonight I’d been given a glimpse of the battle line separating theory from fact in the no man’s land where beliefs are forged, and I stepped back to linger awhile in that brief continuum of boyhood no longer accessible to my father. Which necessarily involved hope, even crowded all around by disappointment.
END