Among the Missing (27 page)

The skeleton of the bridge is already in place. She can see it as they walk toward the slope that leads down to the creek. Girders and support beams of steel and cement stretch over the valley that her father tells her was made by the creek—over hundreds of years, the flowing water had worn this big groove into the earth. They have cleared earth where buffalo and Indians used to roam, he says, and then he sings: “Home, home on the range.”

She is only vaguely interested in this until they come to the
edge of the bridge. It
is
high in the air, and she balks when her father begins to walk across one of the girders. He stretches his arms out for balance, putting his one foot carefully in front of the other, heel to toe, like a tightrope walker. He turns to look over his shoulder at her, grinning. He points down. “There’s a net!” he calls. “Just like at the circus!”

And then, without warning, he spreads his arms wide and falls. She does not scream, but something like air, only harder, rises in her throat for a moment. Her father’s body tilts through the air, pitching heavily, though his arms are spread out like wings. When he hits the net, he bounces, like someone on a trampoline. “Boing!” he cries, and then he sits up.

“Damn!” he calls up to her. “I’ve always wanted to do that! That was fun!” She watches as he crawls, spiderlike, across the thick ropes of net, up toward where she is standing, waiting for him. The moon is bright enough that she can see.

“Do you want to try it?” her father says, and she hangs back until he puts his hand to her cheek. He strokes her hair, and their eyes meet. “Don’t be afraid, babygirl,” he says. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you. You know that. Nothing bad will ever happen to babygirl.”

“I know,” she says. And after a moment, she follows him out onto the beam above the net, cautiously at first, then more firmly. For she does want to try it. She wants to fly like that, her long hair floating in the air like a mermaid’s. She wants to hit the net and bounce up, her stomach full of butterflies.

“You’re not afraid, are you?” her father says. “Because if you’re afraid, you don’t have to do it.”

“No,” she says. “I want to.”

Her father smiles at her. She does not understand the look in his eyes when he clasps her hand. She doesn’t think she will ever understand it, though for years and years she will dream of it, though it might be the last thing she sees before she dies.

“This is something you’re never going to forget, babygirl,” he says. And then they plunge backwards into the air.

A
fter my Uncle Stu killed himself, my father started to go downhill again. He gave up on his vows about not smoking in the house, and then he started to drink late into the night. He was writing poetry, he said, though I thought he’d gotten past that phase years ago. He had a filmy gleam in his eyes when he talked about it, and that worried me. But I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t as if I could sit down for a heart-to-heart and ask him: “Dad, now tell me honestly. You’re not thinking of harming yourself, are you?” It wasn’t as if I could just drop it into conversation: “Oh, by the way, please don’t commit suicide while I’m out. That would upset me.”

Instead, I had the idea that we should take a trip together. “Why don’t we drive out to Nebraska before I leave,” I said, and he got enthusiastic for the first time in a while. Nebraska was the place of his birth, and his remaining relatives still lived there. He had the kind of sentimental attachment to Nebraska that some immigrants have to their mother country, and I think
he was touched that I had thought of it. “It’s a nice gesture,” he said.

He knew that I wouldn’t be living at home for much longer. I played bass in a band—The Flagrants, we called ourselves—and in a few months we would be leaving for a tour of Japan and the Far East, after which we were scheduled to go into the studio to cut a full-length CD. I didn’t know where I’d end up after that, but it was pretty clear that I wouldn’t be living with my father again.

It was a three-day drive from New York to Nebraska, and I sat there as we hurtled down the interstate in the gray Volvo, trying to think of the sort of conversations fathers and sons might have at such a point in their lives. But I couldn’t think of anything—silence spreading through Pennsylvania and Ohio, sleeping through Indiana, listening to demo tapes on headphones through Illinois, since our lead singer, Zed, had yelled about my missing two weeks of sessions, fingering along to the various songs as my father watched me surreptitiously with those tired, blank eyes. I gave him a smile and pretended to jam on my imaginary guitar.

He wasn’t having a very good life. He was forty-two years old, and recently, his second marriage had fallen apart. His wife, Josie, had left him in January, taking their three-year-old daughter, my half sister Meredith, with her to Guam, where Josie had a new boyfriend. My own mother had run off at a similar juncture, when I was four, though she’d left me with my dad. Eventually, she’d pulled herself together, ending up in California where she married a balding, overly sincere guy who had something
to do with movies. She had two young children (more half siblings) but I didn’t have any feelings for them. Mostly, I saw them in pictures, where they looked like props—posing in front of Christmas trees and national monuments, always smiling confidently. We would get these photographs from time to time, and my father would study them as if he had just failed an important test. Where had he gone wrong? he wondered. What had happened to his nice life?

He always got a certain bright look in his eyes when he was punishing himself. He was energized with it, you could see that. The last time we’d been out to Nebraska, he’d gone through a big transformation, some kind of epiphany. That was five years ago, at his mother’s funeral, which was the cap to a long line of deaths—some uncles and aunts, a car-wrecked cousin, his father. There had been a traffic jam of them during my childhood, it seemed like two or three a year, every year—one of those inexplicable things.

But it did something to him. I was fourteen when his mom died, still half a kid, still goofy and out of it, but he gripped my arm. “I have to do something, Harry,” he said. “I’ve got to get in control of my life.” And he drank up a storm. Less than a year later, he was married to Josie, and she was pregnant.

We talked about it a little, as we drove through Iowa. He told me that he’d thought he was starting anew, and I had to admit that I’d known from the beginning that things wouldn’t work out with Josie.

“You never liked Josie, did you?” he said, and lowered his eyelids thoughtfully.

“I liked her,” I said. “It was just sort of obvious that she was really insecure and unstable. I thought so, anyway.”

“I see,” he said. And for the next four hundred miles, we were quiet.

And so we arrived. Here were the dirt roads that led to the small village where he’d once lived. Here was his grandparents’ house, the one by the railroad tracks, now inhabited by violent-looking roughnecks. Here were the stubble fields, the ditches full of pigweed and sunflowers, here was the old home place where he’d grown up, the house his mother had died in and where his brother Stu had been living before he killed himself. We drove past silently, and then here was Great Aunt Lois’s house, at the end of a row of empty buildings. The entire town took up no more than two blocks, and she was at the edge, living in the most recently built home, a ranch house that looked like it was waiting to become part of a suburb.

As we drove up, the dogs converged on the car, barking fiercely, baring their teeth. They were two plump Brittany spaniel bitches, Flossie and Maple, who had once been my dead uncle’s hunting dogs, and who, after my uncle’s death, had passed on to my aunt Lois. The dogs raised their muzzles, baying in alarm at our arrival, bringing Lois out of the screen door of the porch, clacking lightly in her thongs, to greet us.

“Howdy, howdy!” she called as we emerged from the car, gingerly, amid the barking of the dogs. Her smile stayed fixed, but I saw her eyebrows lift as she took us in. My dad was much balder since she’d last seen him, and he’d gained about forty
pounds, bur of course ir was me she was looking ar. Sometimes I forgot how I looked. I wasn’t prepared for people’s reactions, though I should have been by then. I tried to gauge what she was registering: the tattoos on my forearms, the piercings in my ears, my nose, my eyebrows; my shaved head, the tattoo on the front of my scalp—a bar code, which even my father thought was funny, though he wished it weren’t on my body. There was also the fact that I’d been lifting weights for several years and had bulked up considerably. I could see in her eyes, the way they took all this in, that my father hadn’t warned her. The last time she saw me, I was still skinny and small for my age, lost in those oversize comic book T-shirts and my slope-shouldered posture, still flaccid and mopey.

“Oh, my God!” Lois said brightly. “Harry, you’re a punk rocker!”

“I guess so,” I said, trying to smile as a growling dog pressed her nose to my crotch.

“Flossie!” Lois called. “Quit that!” Then she yelled over her shoulder. “Dick! Get out here! You have to see this kid!”

These were the people my father had grown up with, or what was left of them. Lois and Dick, his favorite aunt and uncle from the days past. Oh, the happy days of extended family! Uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins. Great aunts. Great-great grandpas, even. They began to talk about it almost as soon as we got in the house. Beers were offered and cigarettes were lit, and here they were, the missing and the dead, the scattered and the lost. I just stood back. There had once been a different world: I knew only through stories that there was a time when all of them were within miles of each other, these huge holiday
gatherings at the old home place, and no one ever went away. My father had a great aunt who had never seen a city, except on TV.

I remembered some of this, vaguely—playing Ghost in the Graveyard with cousins in the summer, the adults playing cards; Christmas shut-in snowstorms at my grandma’s, the smell of cooking and stranger-relatives drifting through her house. But it didn’t seem real to me. Let’s think about the Family as a concept, I wanted to say to them. Let’s think about it as a
construct
. It’s a dying institution. It doesn’t even make sense in the modern world—it’s like having a village blacksmith, or a milkman, or passing the farm on to the firstborn son. A kind of storybook idea.

But my dad’s face looked saner as he fell into this conversation, so I kept my mouth shut. They passed through a catalog of relatives, most of whom I didn’t know. I picked at a bowl of mixed nuts. Oh, the happy days! They passed, and then it was the story of my uncle, which I had heard before. It was already hardening into a story for my father, and I guessed that was a good thing, that he was getting a little distance on it.

“He called me the night before, you know,” my father said. “I should have known something was wrong,” he said. “I thought about it.”

Dick and Lois were silent and respectful, but I had already heard the story several times, how Stu called in the middle of the night, very drunk, how my father had awakened groggily. It was a few days after my father turned forty-two, and at first he imagined that Stu was calling to wish him a belated happy birthday. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, he wanted to tell my
father about his new idea. “Listen, Carl,” Stu said. “I have this great idea. I know exactly what I want to do for my funeral. I’ve got it all planned out.”

“Stuart,” my father said. “Stu, it’s two-thirty in the morning!”

“Just hear me out before you start talking,” Stu said snappishly. “Listen, because this is important. When I’m dead, I don’t want to be embalmed or put in a coffin or
nothing
, okay? I just want you to take my body out to the edge of a clearing or out to the hills and leave it there, all right? Just leave it for the wolves.”

“Stu,” my father said. “There aren’t any wolves anywhere near you.”

“Screw that!” Stu said. “I don’t care what it is. Wolves, coyotes, badgers, wild dogs. I don’t care. I just think it’s a cool idea. All I’m saying is that I want to be part of the food chain. Promise me that you’ll do this. No phony crap.”

“I don’t even think it’s legal,” my father said. “Besides which, you just woke me from a sound sleep.”

“I don’t care,” Stu said belligerently. “I just want you to remember what I’m telling you.” Now he was mad. Drunkenly offended.

“Okay,” my father said. “Don’t get bent out of shape.” But Stu hung up on him.

I don’t know whether my father had a photographic memory, but he told this story word for word the same, every time. It’s like that with a lot of his stories. It’s as if he has a book of them in his head that he recites, verbatim. After a while you
begin to feel the shape of his stories the way a blind person knows the layout of his house. You don’t even have to listen.

So I knew, for example, that the next part of the story would involve him sitting up after the phone call, unable to sleep. After a time, he’d try to call Stu back, but the line would be busy.