Among the Missing (28 page)

And I knew that there would be the part where he talked to me, as I stood at the refrigerator in the darkened three
A.M
. apartment, eating carrot sticks.

“Listen,” he said. “Doesn’t that sound like something someone who was suicidal would say? It’s just—too classic, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you should call the police.”

“Oh, man,” my father said. “He’d never forgive me if I called the cops.”

“That’s true,” I said thoughtfully. “Well … maybe you shouldn’t?”

“I don’t know, Harry,” my father said solemnly. “I don’t know what to do.”

But the truth was, despite my father’s story, Stu didn’t kill himself the next day. I remember the incident, and I know that it was months before Stu died. The two of them had a number of conversations after the “eaten by wolves” call, talks full of trivia and inconsequence, and the truth is that on the night Stu killed himself my father went to bed early, after watching
The X-Files
and the news, with not a glimmer of anxiety or presentiment.

But he liked to make his story dramatic and tragic, and in that way he was not unlike his brother, who sat naked on a craggy rock in the hills and put a shotgun in his mouth. My uncle
lay there dead for a few days before they found him, but as far as anyone knew not a single animal touched him. That’s the way my father liked to end his tale. No wolves. No coyotes. Not even a mouse.

The next day, my father thought it might be fun to go driving around. There weren’t many people to visit anymore, but there were various graves and monuments. I put on a cap and a long-sleeved shirt to protect us both from the stares of people who might be alarmed by tattoos or piercings, and my father put his arm around my shoulder cheerfully, despite the fact that he looked terribly hungover.

“You’re a good kid, Harry,” he said. “Do you know that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a mess,” he said. “I’m going to try to be happier, okay? I want us to have a good time.” I just nodded.

“I guess your Aunt Lois is going to get some people out to the house later this week. Some of the cousins and such,” he told me as we drove. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve seen them—” He listed a few names that had only blurry associations for me. Most of them I remembered only as children; a couple I couldn’t picture at all. He told me that my cousin Monte was already married and had a daughter, though he was only two years older than I.

“Wow,” I said. “I can’t even imagine.”

“Oh, no?” he said. He wiggled his eyebrows.

“Not for a long time, Dad,” I said. We were joking, but sort of not joking, too—he got oddly quiet for a moment, and I watched as he lit a cigarette.

“Well,” he said. “I hope you have a kid before I die. I think it would be really interesting to have a grandchild.”

“So don’t die for a while, okay?” I said. I reached over and took the cigarette from between his fingers. “Give me a few years to work on it.” He didn’t say anything as I poked the cigarette out in the ashtray. “Cut back on the smoking, for example,” I said.

What a weird little exchange that was, I thought. We lapsed into silence again, and I stared out at what I used to think would make a good set for a science fiction movie—those enormous metal skeletons of electrical towers lined up along the gray-green rocky hills, the grasshopper oil wells like robot insects, and no houses anywhere to be seen. I didn’t know how to even begin to understand what was in his mind, what we were supposed to be talking about.

As we’d driven west from New York, he’d spoken sketchily about wanting, someday, to move back here—after he retired, he said. Back home, he said, though he hadn’t lived here in twenty-five years, and most of the people he’d once known were dead or gone or radically changed.

I thought I understood this, I really did. But I didn’t
understand
it, if you know what I mean. It just wasn’t part of my concept of life. Not to say that I didn’t appreciate my family—my dad in particular—but it wasn’t as if I felt some empty hole because I didn’t know or like my mother very much; it wasn’t like I had some burning urge to connect with her little mannequin children, any more than I felt some warm sense of belonging here with Lois and Dick and their stories of dead old relatives
I’d never met. It wasn’t the key to my existence, and I didn’t quite see why it should be for my father, either. After all, he chose his life: He was the one who moved away and hardly ever visited, he was the one who picked a career—first as a tech writer, then in PR—that would keep him in cities, far away from all of them. He’d done the right thing, I thought, getting away from these dysfunctional people and this empty place, making a new life for himself. He’d done an honorable job, I thought. He was a good dad and a lot of the time he was happy. All this obsessing about his old home and the people he grew up with didn’t make a whole lot of sense, if you thought about it, and I’d imagine, sometimes, that I could just grab him by the collar and shake him out of it. He was a smart person, after all.

Nevertheless, he could do very dumb things. He could find intellectual reasons for his behavior, of course—soul-searching, he would call it, and point out some philosophy book he’d read. He could manage to cogitate himself into stupidity.

For example, here we were, pulling down the narrow dirt wheel-tracks that led to the hill where Stu had killed himself. What could the point be? Maybe Heidegger could tell you, but I couldn’t. I sat in the car when he got out, watching him tottering through waves of wind, walking along the jagged, rocky bluffs, his hair blown up and awry like a scared cartoon character. After a moment, he bent down, examining one of the pocked boulders; then he kneeled beside it. I figured that he’d found the bloodstain he was looking for. I watched as he ran his fingers over the surface of the rock, and then, finally, I got out of the car.

“Dad?” I said, and he looked up. For a second, I could see the addled old man he might become—a puzzled, delicate senility that was waiting for him down the road. Then he was forty-two again, and he rose to his feet, sheepishly, the tail of his shirt flapping in another gust of wind.

“Well,” he said, and gestured halfheartedly. “This is the place.”

“Yeah,” I said. I scoped through my mind for something to say, something like, “He’s in a better place now,” only not so corny. Despite myself, I glanced down at the rock my father had been examining, and it made me shudder. “Wow,” I said glumly. Nothing else came to me.

“You know why he did it here, don’t you?” my father said at last, softly. He gave me a strange kind of smile, and I shrugged. “You probably don’t remember,” he said. He pointed down into the valley below us—a barbed-wire fence, a length of wheat field, a patch of high weeds and the tilted, crumbling frame of an old shed. “That’s the old Leatherwood place,” my father said. “I guess Stu thought it would be a good joke.”

“Ha, ha,” I said. “I guess I don’t get it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Stu’s sense of humor for you.” He cocked his head, giving me another impossible smile. “Don’t you remember me telling you about the ghost lights?”

“Oh,” I said, because then I knew what he was talking about, though I hadn’t thought about the old story in many years. It was a local legend. There was a certain patch of highway where mysterious lights were occasionally noted, flickering off to the left of the road, usually along the ridge of hills—the hills we were standing atop, I assumed. My father claimed to have seen them once when he was a teenager. As he was driving,
several clear, bluish, glowing bubbles rolled across the road like tumbleweeds. He almost drove off the road to avoid hitting them. They bobbed over the barbed-wire fence and vanished.

When I was a kid, I’d written a little paper about the lights. One explanation for them, I remember, was ball lightning. Ball lightning was associated with thunderstorm activity but didn’t behave in ways that current physics could understand. Other explanations included phosphorescent reflections, gas emissions, and Saint Elmo’s Fire.

I remembered telling all this to Stu once, when I was about eight or nine, still scrawny and probably a little officious, still kind of spoiled by my father’s doting—that’s the way Stu must have seen me at least, because his eyes narrowed as I held forth. I watched as he flicked his cigarette, leveling a dark look on me.

“Your dad never told you about Old Man Leatherwood, did he?” Stu said, lowering his voice. “I’ll tell you the
real
story about those lights,” he said. “There’s an old farmhouse near there, and that was where Leatherwood lived with his seven sons.” It was late at night, I remember, when Stu told me this story—we might have been camping or sitting out in the yard—but I knew he was trying to scare me. He told me that old Leatherwood had gone crazy after his wife had left him and had lit his own house on fire, splashing the floor and the clothes and the bed with kerosene. All the sons were burned to death, Stu told me, but Leatherwood himself had survived—his face and hands burned and twisted, the skin melted like an old candle. The ghost lights were the souls of the boys who’d died in the fire, Stu told me, and he said that if you followed them they would lead you to their father, who still wandered through the hills, staring, always staring, since his eyelids were burned away.
He would reach out his hands to grab hold of you. “Burn with me,” he would whisper.

Then Stu shot out his hands and caught me by the neck, and I let out a little scream. Which tickled him. He bent over laughing. “Gotcha,” he said, and kept snuffling into his hand, his eyes bright and jokey. “I did get you, you have to admit.” He mussed my hair affectionately—in his own mind, perhaps, just a teasing, playful uncle—and I smiled at him wryly, not wanting to seem like a bad sport, not wanting to admit that the story had hit close to home, that I’d have nightmares later, as the son of a man whose wife had left him, a man whose weird moods often scared me—“Burn with me,” I’d think, and I could see my father’s face, his hands reaching out for me.

All this came back to me as we stood on the hill where Stu had killed himself, and I remembered once again the relish he took in the story, his good-natured pleasure in scaring me. His choice of this hill was a joke on me, too, I realized, though I didn’t find it particularly funny.

“Well,” said my father, and laid a gentle hand on my back. “I guess it’s what he wanted. I don’t know what else to say.” He hugged me, briefly, one-armed, welling with tears for his brother and then shaking them off. “I miss him,” he said, and the wind lifted the hat off my head. We watched silently as it flew over the cliff edge of the hill, rising like a balloon for a moment and then swinging down to earth, tumbling out of sight, into the brush and boulders below us.

Sometimes, my father would ask me what I remembered. He had great hopes for my memory, I think—as if someday, I’d be
able to re-create a sort of virtual reality of his past life. As if, someday, I’d want to.

But I hated to disappoint him. I would never admit, for example, that I had hardly any image of my grandmother at all. I remembered her hearing aid, a small pink mechanism that made me think, when I was little, that she was partially a robot. I could picture the way she would stand with her back to the stove, smoking cigarettes. But I don’t know whether I ever had an actual conversation with her. I didn’t recall her voice, or anything much that she did.

But I knew he would hate to hear that. He’d argue with me about it, probably, try to convince me that I really
did
remember, if only I’d try harder. Every day we would get up in the morning and go out for drives, and he would look at me expectantly as we pulled up to one place or another—in town, to park outside the former house of an old girlfriend, where he went into the fine points of rock bands he’d once loved, like KISS and Boston; to the cemetery, where we scrubbed bird droppings and dust off the headstones of various family members, and he told me jokes he’d gotten off the Internet; to a bowling alley that one of his uncles had owned, where we ate microwaved pizza and he told me that some of the poems he’d been working on were set in the bowling alley. Most of the poems were about his “sexual awakening,” he said. He’d been thinking a lot lately of the first girl he’d slept with—she still lived in town, he told me, though he believed that she was married. “Maybe we could look her up, though. What harm would it do?”

“Dad,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Still, he seemed so happy that week, very calm, and I didn’t want to ruin the mood. Even his drinking seemed better; not
less, necessarily, but more festive and less depressed, and it was nice to see him so cheerful and talkative.

So on Friday, when he said, “I’m sure you remember this place, don’t you?” I nodded my head as if I did. “Of course,” I said, though in fact, I hadn’t had any idea where we’d been driving for the last half hour, through anonymous mazes of fields and hills and telephone poles. We’d stopped at an empty crossroads where two gravel roads met.

“Hard to believe,” my father said. “But this is Delano!”

And then I realized that we were at the edge of the ruins of a tiny town—I remembered that much at least, putting together fragments of things he had told me. It was a place from my father’s childhood, the site of his grandparents’ old house, which had disappeared along with the rest of what had once been, long ago, a dot on a map. The little town had been fading away for decades and now, apparently, entropy had taken over completely. My father pointed out the places in the field where there had once been a grain elevator, and a set of houses, and a meeting hall where there had been dances. The last time we had been here, the red brick schoolhouse had still been standing. Now, all that was left was a single dead tree.

“Is this the place?” I said, and watched as he wandered along the edge of the road.

“Of course,” he said, and motioned me to look at a spot in the dirt where he was kneeling, where the cement foundation of the schoolhouse was partially plowed over. “I used to come out here all the time when I was a kid,” he said. “I ought to remember.”