The Dark Path (2 page)

“David,” says my mother, “eat your mashed potatoes. You love them.”

“Say,” clucks Father Anselm, “did you see that AC unit Skip Gibson donated for the raffle? It's a dilly!”

I look at the priest.
Don't say “nifty,”
I command him with telepathy.
Don't say “dilly.”

My father leans toward me. “What's the matter?”

I look at him and think,
This guy is talking wrong. He is too bubbly-safe. He's not telling the truth.

“Nothing,” I say. I take a bite of mashed potatoes.

•   •   •

ON A HOT
August night a month later, I go to the girls' water ballet show at the club pool. I sit in a folding chair near the rest of the audience. Our chairs are set up around the pool, a ways back from the water's edge. Stars are wheeling in the night sky and there's a breeze pushing around the branches of the three-story pine trees that ring the pool. Underwater lights are making the pool glow blue.

Twenty girls line up and strike poses along the deep-end edge for the opening number. Barry Manilow's “Could It Be Magic” comes over the speakers and lights spangle off the girls' matching black and silver swimsuits. Lesley Hendrik is third from the left.

Scott sits beside me. He whistles under his breath. “This is gonna be gaaayyy.”

I can hardly hear him. All I see is Lesley, her sweet brown eyes, her braided hair. The music swells. When Lesley dives deep and then surges back up through the brilliant otherworldly blue to breach the surface, I'm sure that she
has
come from another world—Atlantis or Middle-earth—and has been sent just to me. My heart pounds. Is she looking at me? She is, isn't she?

David—
I seem to hear her say
—I know that you suck at Little League and that You Strike Out EVERY FREAKING GODDAMNED TIME, like your coach yells, but I love you anyway. And even though Tommy Marzipretta, who always hits home runs, has been hanging around me lately, where is he tonight, David? He's not here for me, but you are.

“Correction,” whispers Scott. “This is
extremely
gay.”

Lesley does a perfect tuck and roll in the water and comes up smiling. There's pressure behind my eyes and I scamper out of my chair.

“What's up?” says Scott, but I hurry away from the show. I cross the parking lot alone and run behind the greenskeeper's garage, onto the path.

A question the size of the Milky Way is in my heart.
Are you my wife, Lesley Hendrik? Are you?

I get to my spot and stare into the woods, the shadows under the trees, below the fireflies.

Is she who I'm meant for?
I ask the shadows.
Tell me, Lord. Tell me what I'll be.

•   •   •

EACH NOVEMBER AFTERNOON,
boys from Twin Circle Drive and Raven Road play football behind Washington Irving Middle School, which is nearby. Almost all the guys are Italian. There are the three Langini brothers, the two Barella brothers, Tommy and Tony Marzipretta, and Matt Argento, the oldest kid on Twin Circle Drive, who will play football in college someday, or so I am constantly told.

Most afternoons I'm on the path or home watching
Batman
reruns or wishing I had Atari. But I join the football games often enough not to be a tard. I am a generally tolerated member of the group when I show up. One Friday I stand in the huddle. Matt Argento is quarterback. It's Matt and I and the Barellas against the Langinis and Marziprettas.

“Minghia!” says Matt, smiling and rubbing his back. “They tackled me good on that last play.” He claps his hands in the huddle. “Okay, let's go flea flicker. No, fuck that, let's go play action. Okay, break.”

Since I never watch NFL games, I have no clue what he means. I just try to do what Scott does. At the snap the ball ends up in my hands and I run. I don't know how to juke or flick a flea but I get pretty far down the field considering the Marziprettas are both hanging off me. I have no moves, but I'm strong and fast like my father and I move forward as far as I can.
Schicklers aren't easy to knock down
, he has often told me.

“Minghia!” shouts Matt Argento now as we gather for another huddle. “That wasn't bad, Schickler!” He claps my back and I proudly memorize where his hand hit me. I will tell my father about this.

Tommy snorts. “Schickler's a Kraut pussy.”

“He got thirty yards on your dago ass,” says Matt.

He pats my back again and I feel even prouder.

The next morning, a Saturday, my father wakes me at four o'clock. I dress in a sleepy haze, get in the car beside him, put my face near the heat vent while he drives. We're driving to a diner in some woodsy nowhere place an hour from my home to meet my father's buddies for breakfast. Then we're all going turkey hunting.

On my grandfather's farm—which was just a mile from Twin Circle Drive before my grandparents gave it up—my father started hunting and trapping at three years old. He would crawl around in the woods at my age, smoking his pipe and trapping mink and fox. Then he'd sell their pelts to a traveling Polish fur trader named Mr. Daklis who had cracked brown teeth and who visited the farm once a month. Hunting-wise, my father still has down-home tricks, like he packs Cream of Wheat powder inside his shotgun shells among the pellets. He tells me that this tightens the spread pattern.

“And why do we need a tight spread pattern?” he asks now as we drive.

I panic, trying to recall previous advice of his. “Because . . . because turkeys' heads are so small? And because a head shot is really the only way to kill a turkey?”

He pats my thigh. “Exactly. You've got all the right instincts for this.”

He is being kind. I have zero instincts for this. I carry a BB gun, but the only time I ever fired it at an animal was in our backyard. I pegged a sparrow in the wing and when it limped off into the bushes, I felt horrible and said a Rosary for it.

When we get to the diner, it is full of other hunters. Two are my father's buddies, and we sit and eat with them. They like jokes and coffee. They whisper about the waitress's ass. They don't think that I can hear them.

“I'd order that ass with hash browns on the side,” one whispers.

“I'd order that ass with biscuits and gravy,” the other whispers back.

My father likes these men—he grew up with them—but he wouldn't be caught dead whispering like they do. The waitress's ass isn't on his radar. He loves the Catholic Church and my mother and us kids first, and then General Motors, and then not too much else.

He is somehow always a man apart. When my mother and her siblings and their friends have parties at our house on winter weekend nights, my father will chat with everyone for a while, but then the socializing will get to be too much for him. Once, a couple hours into such a party, everyone started asking “Where's Jack?” I went searching for him. In my parents' darkened bedroom the guests' thick winter coats were piled on the bed. I walked around this cozy mountain until I saw a peek of his arm sticking out from under the coats. I moved a parka aside and revealed his face. He winked at me.

“How come you're under there?”

“I'm resting. I'm thinking.”

“Is it a secret?”

He said, “Yep, don't tell.” And I snuck back out.

As a problem solver and authority figure, my father is equally unusual. When I was eight, he and I were out sledding one raw winter day on the steep tenth-hole hill of the golf course, and the hill was covered with neighborhood kids. I'd forgotten my face mask and I kept whining that I'd get frostbite. My father pulled out a tube of cherry ChapStick, held my chin, then Zambonied the ChapStick over my face, covering my cheeks and forehead with goop. Bam: problem solved, frostbite thwarted, and never mind that the other kids called me the Red Retard for the rest of the day.

Now, here at this diner, my dad's two buddies are whispering that powdered sugar and maple syrup might be just the things to sweeten up that waitress's ass. Finally my father clears his throat and his pals stop whispering. Problem solved, lewdness thwarted.

A strange man comes over to chat. He knows my dad's buddies. Also he drinks from a flask and reeks like fuel, which is ruining the smell of my fried eggs and ham.

In the car afterward, as we drive deeper into woodsy nowhere, my father asks if I know what was in the man's flask.

“It smelled like fuel,” I say.

“It was gin.” My father winces. “Gin, before the sun's up? Ugh. David, when you get older, never drink gin. Schicklers don't do well with gin. Nobody does, really.”

I nod. My father and I don't always talk much. What we usually do is, he will be in some room, trying to understand and enjoy life, and I will be in that same room near him, also trying to understand and enjoy life, and that is our connection.

Sometimes, though, I pepper him with questions.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Why don't Schicklers do well with gin?”

My father sits up straighter in his seat. He does this when he's ready to teach me something. “Because the juniper berry is the worst kind of berry. The juice of the juniper, which gin comes from, is hard for the human liver to break down. It's like drinking pine resin.”

“All right, Dad.” I have no idea what the hell he's talking about—he is a whip-smart chemical and mechanical engineer by training—but I love his voice.

“Dad, what's play action?”

“It's when you set up for a run, but then you go to the air instead.”

Go to the air
. I will write this phrase down at home. I love words and books.

“And what's flea flicker?”

“What's
a
flea flicker. That's when you . . . well, that one would be easier for me to draw for you. Ask me again when we get home.”

“Okay,” I say.

A silence passes.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“How come in the woods at home Scott and I find broken china in the dirt?”

He straightens up again. “The land where the woods are now used to be a huge pig farm owned by the Muellers. Their family knew ours. Fancy restaurants downtown used to have clambakes for rich people, and afterward the restaurants would truck the remains out and dump everything. There were some bits of clams and the pigs ate those, but there were also chipped plates that the restaurant threw out. Now our woods have grown over all that and they're beautiful.” He gives me a hard, proud look.

I come from a dump
, I think.

“All right, Dad.”

•   •   •

SOON IT'S WINTER.
I sled each afternoon with Scott Barella and other Twin Circle Drive and Raven Road kids out on the tenth-hole hill. The sun sets by four o'clock and the only way to see is by the shine off the deep snow. The drifts are white in daylight but at this darker hour the glow off them is a subtle purple vapor that I love. After the other kids go home I trudge to my spot on the path.

Thank You, Lord
, I pray.
Thank You for this odd and purple place
.

One frigid night when I'm standing there, I hear cracks like gunshots in the woods. Ice, somewhere close by, is shearing off pine tree branches. The sound makes me afraid of summer, afraid of the sun coming back. I worry each spring that the months of light ahead will kill the secrets of my dark path.

Instead, summer brings parties. My parents host burger cookouts in our backyard. In advance of these cookouts, my father and I tend our lawn religiously.

The lawn is our strongest bond, his and mine. When it comes to our grass, I do have instincts, and I feel like a farming man's son. I know how to vinegar certain weeds, when to fertilize. If the grass gets blighted or filled with mole runs, I lose sleep. If there is drought and the lawn burns out, part of me burns out, too.

Chewing on wild rhubarb stalks—but never on their poisonous leaves—I steer our John Deere riding tractor over our acre of land once every five days. If I'm not chewing rhubarb, I sing while I drive, usually Bruce Springsteen's “Rosalita,” at the top of my lungs.

One sunny evening after I've mowed, my father is late for dinner. My mother sees his car parked in the driveway. She and my sisters search around. Looking out our back window, they yell and freak out.

“There he is!” hollers Anne Marie.

“He's dead!” yells Pam. “Heart attack!”

I look out the window. Still in his suit and tie and clutching his briefcase, my father is lying splayed on the lawn, limbs everywhere, eyes closed. He looks like a man who took a bullet, but I know that he's just filling his nostrils with the smell of the deep, shorn green around him. He loves our land.

My mother loves people. She is the spark of the burger parties and all our parties. My father is German and his nine siblings are kooky farmer types who rarely see one another. My mother is Irish and she and her seven siblings—the Edds—party constantly. Her five brothers drink Genesee 12 Horse Ale. Their wives roll their eyes at the men and serve salads with strawberries trapped in Jell-O.

My mother is the center of it all. Every joke is funnier when she laughs at it and every baby placed in her arms stops crying. The Sermon on the Mount says
Blessed are the peacemakers
and that's what my mother is, a peacemaker. Actually I'm not sure that she makes it: I think it just comes naturally out of her pores and fills whatever room she's in. I watch her at one summer family party as she pours a glass full of beer and brings it to my great-aunt Clara, who comes up from Yonkers once each summer to frighten me and my sisters. Aunt Clara can barely walk. She is fat and addicted to Bingo and has warts and hairs on her cheeks. When my mother gives Aunt Clara the beer, Aunt Clara complains.

“It's too foamy, Peggy.”