T
HE NEXT NIGHT, THE SNOW BEGAN FALLING
. It was the first snow of the season, and it fell with perfect timing, for Christmas was approaching, and the snowfall, for that, seemed a civic gesture entirely in keeping with the town fire department stringing lights, the stores at the local strip mall bannering their windows with big sale signs, and the festive feeling of an approaching commercial apocalypse. I drove home from work, parked outside in my driveway, and for a moment, rather than go inside, I sat in the car while the aerial rivers of light, dry-seeming snowflakes pattered against the windshield.
For reasons I wasn’t entirely sure of, the conversation with my father, as unsatisfying as it had been, had also been directional: it had steered my mind inevitably toward thoughts of my own sons.
Given the current situation at home, I hadn’t been nearly as attentive to Dwight and Will as I would have
liked over the past weeks or months, and I knew it. It ate at me to think that I might in some way be installing between us that same uphill grade I’d had to climb to meet my own father, growing up. At the same time, strangely and for the very first time, I had the nagging thought that my recent detachment was producing an opening or opportunity of a sort for someone else. I began believing that, as regarded my sons, this aloofness of mine, especially given how ambivalent Lucy seemed of late, might be encouraging—was it possible?—a potential rival.
I got out of the car and entered the house, determined somehow to right the situation. During dinner that night, spying on my family from behind the mask of my own affability, I studied all the subtle ways in which Lucy bound the children to her—ways, I told myself, that had nothing to do with the more obvious attachments of motherhood. It was the warm, nutritive comfort of her gaze as it swept over them, rounding them up into a collective overseen entirely by her. It was that way she projected a fitted love-utopia, unique to each of the boys. It stung me that they turned to her on reflex when they skinned a knee or barked a shin. It hurt that inevitably their jokes were hatched looking gleefully into her face for a first response. I asked myself if things had always been like this, or was I noticing it for the first time. Along with that question came the painful insight that truly, on a certain level, I was in the dark about their shared inner lives. They had their own fixed universe of values, my wife and children, their own intricate star charts and navigational devices evolved over thousands of intimate hours, and while I rolled in and out of that universe, a dependable satellite
returning home each night, it was their planetary system, not mine.
When dinner was over, and I had done the dishes alone, I went down to the boys’ room. From the other side of the door I could hear the muffled thumps of music. I knocked, and there was no answer. Instead of knocking again, I simply pushed open the door.
They were lying on their adjacent beds, indifferent to the rock and roll thundering from their boom box, playing with foot-tall robotic plastic superheroes called Bionicles. Will was holding Brutaka the warrior and Dwight was holding Nuva. They were tilted at forty-five-degree angles from each other, about six feet apart. As I watched, Dwight pressed a button on Nuva, and a small flying saucer wobbled through the air.
“I’ve got your Fantom disk on homing radar!” he cried.
“Yes,” screamed Will in the faintly transistorized voice he used to speak Robot, “but you haven’t reckoned with my handheld ion cannon!” He pressed a button and a tiny foam-tipped stick mostly fell from his Bionicle’s shoulder.
“Who’s winning, guys?” I cried, striding into the center of the room and turning down the stereo. I did a little boxing thing to break the ice, punching the air fast with both hands, and doing my modified Ali shuffle. Usually this draws at least a happy snort of laughter from the boys. But this time they both looked at me and then looked at each other.
“Hi, Dad,” Will said levelly. Another glance crossed between them.
My potential rival might have been faceless, but no less
real for that. I could nearly feel him, suddenly, in the air of the room. In an adult voice I said, “No, go on, and play, boys, I just want to watch.”
Without saying another word, both of them slowly put the toys down.
“What’s wrong, guys? Go on and play, c’mon!” I picked up one of the small plastic robots, admiring the slickness of the manufacture, the smoothness of the injection molding, and remembering with a certain nostalgia the keyhole accuracy of the mind of childhood, when a single toy could exactly represent a whole world. Swallowing hard, I said, “Yo, dudes, why so quiet?”
They both stared at the ground, saying nothing. Finally, with a kind of sorrow, Dwight began to speak.
“Dad,” he said, shaking his head, “the Bionicles cannot be interrupted during a final showdown.”
“Daddy, we
told
you that. We told you,” said Will.
“The Vanu-Grall rules say ‘only uninterrupted battle.’ Otherwise, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t mean,” echoed Will.
“Mean?” I asked.
“It’s over,” said Dwight, with an adult sigh of sadness. “We’d been fighting for a half hour and now it’s no good.”
“Oh, c’mon,” I said, “that’s just crazy.”
“We’ll have to start over, and now it’s too late. Momma said we have to brush our teeth and go to bed. The planet Zamax is ruined.”
They looked at each other, and as I slowly, even tenderly put the Bionicle back down on the bed in the silence, first Will, then Dwight, burst into tears.
The next day—a Saturday—I awoke determined to somehow address this feeling that the fine-grained sand of my own relationship with my children was slipping through my fingers. Was crazy old Shirley Castor right that boys come into the world for their mothers? We’d see about that. On the spot, I made the executive decision that I would take them to an indoor archery range. I broached the subject over breakfast—not asking, but telling Lucy in clear, calm terms that I was going to be taking the boys shooting. She looked at me with an alert flare of interest—not certain, I imagine, whether to be pleasantly surprised or suspicious.
Upper New York state, where we live, is a strange part of the world. A physically beautiful zone of valleys and rolling hills, it’s also honeycombed with some of the most surprisingly redneck folks in the world. Monarch is a kind of spa in this setting, with its own civilized middle-class ambience, and its vaguely British commons and town square. Consulting the map, I noticed that the archery range was a half hour away, in a fairly wooded area I’d never been to before. I was a little bit concerned, but kept it to myself. Lucy waved good-bye from the door in perfect emulation of a happy spouse. It was only while I was backing the car out that I happened to glance at her again and saw the hard, etched, angry look come back over her face.
As we drove, my sons, indifferent to the looming domestic avalanche, made happy noises in the backseat. Sometimes I think all of boyhood can be reduced to lip, nose and hand noises. They were excited by the idea that they’d be shooting real weapons, and to keep them com
pany, I tried to recall my own hunting bona fides. I did so by talking of that brief interval, about six months after my brother’s death, when I was overcome by bloodlust, and took advantage of a pump-action BB gun to lay down a swath of murder from my parents’ living room windows. At least a half-dozen times, I explained, I pressed the trigger, heard the spuft! of expelled air, and then rushed onto the back lawn and came upon the tiny body of a starling, still warm, blood beading on the breast feathers in minute duplication of its bright, fading eye. Then I sobbed, inconsolable. Then, seeing another bird fussing in the branches, I did it again. About a dozen times, I said, this same pattern repeated itself of prey ruthlessly hunted down, and then mourned with heartrending sorrow. After not too long, thankfully, this phase of life passed. “Boys,” I said, “that was the end of one kind of hunting and the beginning of another, oh yes. I discovered girls, and nothing was ever the same. And you can bet your bottom dollar, hotshots, that the exact same thing will happen to you!”
For the second time in twenty-four hours, in response to a joking overture, my sons said nothing at all.
The archery range was called Into the Wild. It was a long, low Quonset hut–style building set deep in the woods. I followed the directions and then parked and shepherded the boys in the front door. A big surly-looking man in a buckskin jacket turned to face us at the cash register. “These little cowboys would like to do some shooting!” I cried, with far too much jocularity, as Dwight rolled his eyes, embarrassed. But the man behind the counter merely nodded, and said, “Sure thing. We’ll get ’em suited up and on the range in a jiff.”
“Dad,” Dwight said disgustedly as we walked toward the range, “cowboys didn’t shoot bows and arrows.”
“They didn’t shoot them,” Will affirmed, shaking his head.
“Momma told somebody on the phone you’re weird,” said Dwight in a fierce whisper, and both the boys laughed deeply.
The range was lined with big rubber targets in the shape of animals, along with the more traditional bull’s-eye targets set on huge rolling bales of some kind of plasticine packing material. When last I’d shot a bow and arrow, it was a simple curved piece of wood with a string, and the arrow a painted stick. But boys, even young boys, now use “compound” bows fitted with elaborate pulley and sighting systems, and carbon-fiber arrows designed specifically to cross space as fast as possible and impale themselves with terrifying impact. I was a little shocked—it was like discovering that box kites now came equipped with Hellfire missiles—but said nothing as the proprietor kindly fit the bows to the boys, and then showed them how to place their hands on the nock, or part of the string where they should pull the arrow back. “After firing your arrows, do not move until the word ‘safe’ is called, up and down the range, ya hear?” he asked them, squatting down to their height.
The boys nodded, solemn.
I sat behind them on a bench. I ate a mint and watched them emulating the derring-do of things glimpsed perhaps on television, or studied in their history classes, and as I did so I dwelled with a strange kind of relieved pride on our physical similarities. Will was identifiably my child,
visually. The nose, the way the hair lay flat near the crown, the eye color, and more subtly, the walk and gait and slouch. Dwight, the younger, took more after Lucy, with her delicacy, her curling, dextrous fingers, her edge. He was the artist, clearly. And yet both of them had received from me those billions of genetic checks and twizzles that had produced a mimic cleft to the lower lip; an internal chemistry that affected the smell of their sweat and breath; an unnatural sensitivity toward light; and more subtly, a way of looking at the world, a slant, a struck chord, an essential lattice of identity.
I watched with joy in my heart, loving them their miniature replication of myself and the way their personalities expressed the differences thereof.
This buoyant feeling stayed with me all the way home. My elation, however, began to curdle fast as I watched the boys, at the entrance to the house, turn away from me, rush to Lucy, and, completely forgetting me in the process, begin overwhelming her with stories of the day; their valiant slaying of targets, the mythic heroism of it all. This sudden eruption of invisibility on my part was infuriating, and, it seemed to me, not accidental. Lucy would have told me that all this was entirely my doing, and the fruit of my own self-involvement of late, but I didn’t buy it. She was clearly involved in my estrangement. I had submitted to the indignities of Purefoy. I had cooked and cleaned and come to her open armed and openhearted, in the spirit of reconciliation. But what she was doing now, as the boys yipped and hooted around her, and I looked on feeling my smile stiffening on my face, read to me as manipulative and nasty. I tried not to visit that particular salt lick
of woundedness that, when touched, produced in me a fresh flare of outrage. I wanted, still, to plant love in the ground of my marriage. But when I looked at my wife, the certainty remained that she was showing pleasure not only in the attention paid her, but a joy as well in the knowledge that despite her husband’s attempt at tilting the balance an inch the other way, the balance had remained entirely intact.
H
OMICIDE TENDS TO MAKE RIPPLES IN THE
human pond. Twenty-four hours after he’d committed murder, the first waves of Rob’s act began to wash into our lives. It was the morning after our bender with him in New Russian Hall, and we were still drinking our coffee and massaging our pounding temples when the phone calls began to arrive, many of them mentioning that “something’s up with Rob.” They were from friends of friends who knew people who knew people. As the afternoon deepened, the calls turned more specific, and ominous. They were from someone’s cousin who was a stringer for the AP who said there was a “buzz” about Rob. They were from a distant relative of the state police who had heard “bad stuff” about “that writer guy.”
On the local afternoon news, the lead anchor opened with a quick national roundup, and then said, “A breaking story apparently involving one of Monarch’s own, the
writer Rob Castor. Monarch police chief Dick Striebel will be holding a press conference this afternoon, at four thirty, to be carried live, on this station.” He then shook his head, as if in sadnesss, and threw it to the weatherman.
All over town, we sat back on our couches, stunned. This sudden ratcheting up of seriousness was too fast, too real, too
out there
in the public world to be easily digested. There was a confusion of velocity and scale between the gaunt, muttering person glimpsed the night before at New Russian Hall, and the blazoned event taking place a half day later on television. We called each other on the phone, confused, and spoke about the developing situation. Danger made us masculine, and in bursts of terse, bewildered feeling, we compared notes, and in the most elliptical terms possible admitted we felt strangely close in our shared distress.
Without ever exactly saying so, we all agreed we would watch the news conference together. And so, at about four
P.M.
that day, we began straggling in to New Russian Hall. It was the height of late summer and we wore flip-flops and cargo shorts. We dressed in loafers and khakis, and at least one of us in bib overalls with nothing underneath. We were men of early middle age in a confraternity of muddled feeling and hangover, concerned for a dear friend. Muted conversations rippled up and down the bar, having mainly to do with our regret, thinking back on it now, of not having been more solicitous of Rob the night before. We’d feted him as a great old pal of distinction. We’d piled on the accolades and bought him drinks. And yet in the interim since seeing him and hearing the rumors, nearly everyone had come to the conclusion that his sub
dued behavior was actually a sign of great distress, and that we should have recognized it, addressed it, somehow intervened. That knowledge made us sober. We ordered seltzer and prepared for the worst.
At four thirty sharp, the bartender, Freddie Rhoades, clicked off the Yankees game—engendering a single cry of protest from a liquored-up out-of-towner—and clicked on the news. The screen was bannered with glary bulletin motifs, and pulsed briefly with staccato danger music, and then the newscaster—our beloved local Lisa Langley—led into the press conference with a few sketchy sentences of background.
The screen quickly flashed to Chief Striebel. He was a balding older man who always looked a bit surprised by how badly he’d slept the night before. Into a silence broken only by the twitchy, repetitive sneezes of motorized cameras, he began to speak.
“I’m here to make a public announcement,” he said, “in a fugitive case that concerns all of us. A former resident of Monarch, Robert James Castor, is currently wanted on suspicion-of-murder charges by the New York City police. Witnesses have placed him at a bar in Monarch last night, but he has not yet been apprehended. Due to the nature of this crime, and the fact that the man is a fugitive, the district attorney’s office has asked that I go public and request the help of the people of Manateague County. This man is armed and dangerous and very motivated to avoid capture. If you see Rob Castor, do nothing. But contact your local law-enforcement authority immediately.”
The screen then filled with a photograph of Rob—younger, beefier, radiant, and sharp looking—taken from
his book jacket. He was posed in front of a tiger cage at the zoo, pointing somewhat subtly to the
DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS
sign.
A frenzied interrogatory baying of reporters was abruptly cut off as the screen filled again with Lisa Langley, sitting at the cramped local news desk. Back at the bar, we looked at each other, shook our heads and blew shocked air through our mouths. For a long moment, we were too surprised to speak and simply stared at the television. Somehow it seemed appropriate, nearly comforting, that it would be Lisa Langley delivering the bad news.
Lisa was a Monarch girl, a former high school classmate who had passed through the same rings of social fire as we and had gradually ascended (as we watched, proudly) the ladder from editor of the school paper all the way up to TV reporter on the nightly news. Her “beat” was local-color stories with a redemptive twist, and if over the years the flawless bone structure of her face had gradually gone round and maternal, and her lean frame filled with empathetic fat, then these elements were part of her essential wholesomeness. It was clear she’d never make it to the national markets, and with her curiously auntish hairdo would retire still softly announcing the latest strike at the Ulster Biscuit factory, or the direction of the shadow cast by Punxsutawney Phil. But that somehow only made us feel closer to her.
Now she was reshuffling the papers on her desk with light little taps; she was raising and lowering her head as if rehearsing the moment of starting to speak. We realized, suddenly, that she was emotionally overcome. Unable to resist the hypnotic suggestiveness of television, we became instantly overcome as well.
Then Ferd Nickles cried out, “Hold on! Hey! Don’t you remember, they used to go out?”
There was a mutter of memory along the bar as we recalled, in fact, that they did go out, Rob and Lisa, and were briefly famous, in the electric territories of high school, for mixing Straight and Hip in such a manner as to elicit a hot wave of disapproval from both their sets of friends. It was, for that, one of those junior-year relationships whose fuck-you value considerably exceeded any affinity the principals might have had for each other.
Up on the screen, having recovered her self-control, Lisa said, “Rob Castor was an essential part of Monarch life. For those of us, like myself, who’d grown up with him, this is an especially sad moment.” Then she looked directly into the camera, and for one thrilling and appalling moment we were certain she was going to address Rob directly. She seemed about to say something. But then the camera cut away to an aspirin commercial, and it was clear that the Rob coverage was over.
There was a sick, long sigh along the bar. I can’t help but feel that in some way it was the definitive exhalation of the end of our youth. It’s not an exaggeration to say we were different afterward; that some final veil forever slipped away from our faces and pitched us forward into a new smallness of vision, a sadder, more baleful take on life. Nearly all of us, I think, took the opportunity, after what we now knew, to train a more penetrating gaze on ourselves. We were not especially reflective, most of us. We prided ourselves on our unshakability. We liked it that way. The modern world was dangerous, squirrely, insidious and weird. Indifference was a firewall and detachment
was a shield. The gift of Rob’s act was to undermine all that and to toss our assumptions into a cocked hat, to start a meter running in each of us, whose ticking would accompany a newly mortal conception of our own selves. Speaking for myself, I can say that his death, although I didn’t know it at the time, would be part of the beginning of my new life.