My Roadmap to Fatherhood Is an Impenetrable Maze
An excerpt from Only Son by Kevin Moffett
Father and son loading the car at dawn. Father loading the car, son in the passenger seat wedging a pillow against the window in hopes of salvaging a few more minutes of sleep. Father notices a red-tailed hawk in the park across the street, strutting in the grass, scrounging for bugs like some common yardbird. It fills him with a muddled feeling he isn’t sure what to do with. Bury it then, pray it stays in the ground. Mother in the window waving goodbye.
The morning air smells liked burnt fruit. Fire danger: extreme. Traffic: backed up near Azusa by a jettisoned mattress. News helicopter: stalled aloft like a dragonfly in a jar. The mountains glow orange as if lit from within. The effect of the morning light on the mountains, the glow, is called alpenglow. Father can’t remember if he’s told his son this. Should he now? Should he point it out as if he’s never told him, or phrase it like a question, or make a joke of it? Well, son, you’ve reached the age when you’re ready to know the German words for things. Seems like only yesterday when my own father sat me down and told me about the zeitgeist . . .
Son slumps in the passenger seat, earbuds in, eyes closed. He stirs awake every few minutes and types something into his phone. Father wants to imagine him keeping a detailed log of what he’s thinking and remembering but he’s probably texting his ex-girlfriend how much he misses her already.
The blitzkrieg? The schadenfreude?
Who is this? son says, removing one of his earbuds and nodding to the radio. Father tells him the Kinks. Sunny Afternoon. It was one of the son’s favorite songs when he was very young, before he had favorites of his own, but father knows it’s tedious to remind sons how much they used to love certain things.
Sounds like circus music, he says, replacing the earbud.
You used to love this song, father says.
They’re driving to Los Angeles. After Los Angeles they’ll head north, like father’s father did forty years ago, following his path, city by city, step by step.
I probably used to love clowns too, son says.
Between them in the center console sits the gray book, palm-sized with a laminated cover and lined paper yellowing at the edges. Father’s been the keeper of it since that night in Kentucky when he and Rusty parted with a clumsy hug and he read it under the dome light in his rental car and again in the motel.
March 1978. His father flew from Florida to Los Angeles alone, drove up the coast, waded in the ocean, visited a castle, drank beer, met people, ate dim sum, went to Alcatraz, and returned eleven days later. The gray book is a record of that trip, a letter from the grave in meticulous block letters.
A letter from the grave? That sounds promising! It’s full of advice then? And fatherly wisdom?
No, neither. The notes are cryptic, perfunctory, repetitive, obsessive about driving times and how much things cost. The father—the son, that is, the father’s son . . . I mean me—I can’t even decode a lot of it.
Landed in LA. Haze. Thrifty, Ford Granada, $116. Pear in the GC.
I’ve had it three years. I’ve shown it to family and friends hoping they’ll see something I don’t. They leaf through it and hand it back with a shrug. I asked my mother about it. I brought it to my creative writing class. I read the first entry and asked, What’s the story here? No response. What can we deduce from his notes?
A man flew to Los Angeles, a student said.
And rented a car, another added. For a hundred and sixteen dollars.
A torpor fell over the room. Spontaneous protective hibernation. It happens when they sense that my point is not going to be worth the work it takes to arrive at it.
The pear in the GC? I said to the only student looking at me. Thoughts on the pear?
No one had thoughts on the pear. Then Jimmy Escalera raised his hand to tell us that his grandfather kept a journal in Vietnam. There were Bible verses and parts of it were written in code. Certain pages had tally marks at the top and these, Jimmy was pretty sure, stood for the people his grandfather killed.
Vietnam, secret code, tally marks. Everyone agreed there was a story here.
When you can’t decipher a sound you move closer to it. That’s my thinking. Plus my son leaves for college at the end of summer. The road is where fathers and sons bond. It’s where they stare meaningfully into the horizon and think things and say them.
He sits around all day watching cartoons, Jimmy Escalera said in class. Without the journal we’d never know he used to be a killing machine.
I couldn’t sleep last night. I never can before a trip. I lay in bed trying to arrange my feelings into something like a viewpoint as coyotes yipped and yawped outside. My wife tries to temper my expectations. Focus on him, she says, meaning our son. Keep it fun. Don’t get all impatient or morose. Her advice is reasonable. This isn’t a quest. I have a route, hotel reservations, six apples, my son in the passenger seat. I have ideas, cobbled from movies and books and pharmaceutical ads, about road trips, fathers, sons, the ocean, self-discovery, messages, buried in notes and letters, hidden for years. I fell asleep charting our route, conceiving scenarios sentimental enough to make a pig blush. Standing atop a cliff in Big Sur and hearing his voice, driving up the coast and finding closure, et cetera. I dreamed of running through the woods toward a faraway light. I woke up before reaching it. Cotton-mouthed, legs sore from the idea of running. I studied myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth: droopy eyes, sharp nose. Face of a steamed turtle. Still hazily devising scenarios: touring Alcatraz and realizing things, eating dim sum and coming to terms. Yearning for something big and decisive, knowing it’s a deluded feeling and yet feeling it strongly.
Santa Anita: infield passes, pond oysters. Drunks from Phx. Mutual man says GR way up.
My son reads this aloud as we approach the exit for Santa Anita Park. We pull off and drive along streets lined with towering palms and into the racetrack parking lot, which is empty. The gates were supposed to open a half hour ago. I flag down a woman in a golf cart and ask her what’s going on. She says she isn’t sure. She has no connection to the track, she’s just driving her golf cart through the parking lot.
On his phone my son discovers Santa Anita closed after the twenty-seventh horse died this racing year. People are sad, people are angry, but no one can agree on why the horses died. It could be simple negligence. Or drugs. Or rainfall from an atmospheric river that flooded the turf. It could be a man named Felix Concepción, who trained eight of the fallen horses.
That place sucks, my son says as we merge onto the highway. I hope it stays closed.
I make affirming noises. I tell him people are predicting the death of horse racing. Like dog racing and indoor smoking and the set shot in basketball. I imagine my father, ninety years old this year, sitting in his faux-leather recliner, watching the things he knew so well wink out of existence. I know horse racing is inhumane, unnecessary, and I doubt I’ll ever visit another track again, but I’ll be sad to see it go. Tolerably sad, like when you find out someone you thought already died has died.
I tell my son what I remember about the track where my father worked: gamblers and their morning cigars, shredded bits of money on the floor of the betting windows, from cashiers pulling the rubber bands off the bundles. My father gave them to me. Old pennies too. I collected pennies and torn bits of money. It sounds like a Depression-era childhood. Your grandfather fell in love with horses and numbers in college, I say. It’s where you get your talent for math.
What’d he do with numbers? he asks.
Calculated odds, I say. Or payouts based on the odds. He calculated something.
Didn’t they have calculators?
You know, it’s possible he didn’t calculate anything, I say. Maybe he just liked being around them. Numbers.
A few years ago I found out my father needed just one elective class to graduate from college but never ended up taking it. I tell my son this and he says, That’s cool.
You would’ve liked him, I say. Another bland, untrue thing. I want to strike it out the second it leaves my mouth.
What’s seventy-seven times seventeen? I ask a few miles later.
I’m tired, Dad. Then, a minute later: One thousand three hundred and nine.
I was five when my father flew to California. I have no memory of him being gone. I shouldn’t be surprised that he doesn’t mention me in the gray book. What would he have written? There wasn’t much to me at age five. I liked garbage trucks. I liked candy. Most of my dreams were about animals.
He doesn’t mention any trees or birds or premonitions or songs. Or his wife. So I shouldn’t be surprised. But it bothers me. I’ve flipped through the book a hundred times and I still catch myself hoping to find something that’s not there.
GP Observatory. James Dean, planetarium. Barely see Hollywood sign. Oxygen balloon, stepped in gum.
That’s it? my son says after I read the entry. We’ve parked and walked up the hill and are standing outside the Observatory.
Yeah, I say. That’s all he had to say about Griffith Park.
Basic, he says.
Miles south, patches of smog shroud the downtown skyline like scum on stew. Hollywood sign. Planetarium. It’s all here. Even James Dean’s seductive head, mounted to a pillar in bronze. We’re near the spot in Rebel Without a Cause where Plato asks him, You think the end of the world will come at nighttime, Jim? And he answers forlornly: At dawn.
My son asks why my father came to California alone. I wondered the same thing, I tell him. My mother said it was probably a work trip. Plus, she added, families didn’t fly cross-country willy-nilly back then. At least ours didn’t.
Could be he had a second family, he says.
Could be, I say. Oxygen balloon. What’s an oxygen balloon?
He types it into his phone. He scrolls and scrolls, looking for a satisfactory result. He probably meant helium, he says.
He wanders off to the gift shop to buy his ex-girlfriend a souvenir. A young couple asks if I can take their picture next to James Dean’s head and I oblige. I rarely feel as useful as when I’m taking a stranger’s picture for them. I zoom out and zoom in, milking it longer than I need to. When I’m done the man extends his fist, and I bump it with mine and return his phone with the other hand, and our exchange happily concludes.
My son and wife and I used to visit the Observatory once a year. I don’t remember why we stopped—whether we got bored of it or he did. We should’ve continued coming here, I think. We shouldn’t have let boredom stop us.
He returns with a solar system bracelet for his ex-girlfriend. Seeing all those hopeful colored orbs dims my mood.
Nice bracelet, I tell him.
Are we done? he asks.
A lap around the planetarium, another stop at James Dean’s head. A passable likeness but up close I notice he has no eyes. It ended with his body changed to light, says the inscription. I like that. I write it down. I look west. I think about oxygen. I scan the ground for gum. I open the gray book and read the entry one more time. Anything? Anything? Nothing. I might as well try to manufacture a sneeze. I take another lap and head back to the car.
We used to park by the zoo and see the koala before P-22, the wild mountain lion living in Griffith Park, mauled and ate him. Maybe that’s why we quit coming. We visited the koala then hiked up to the planetarium and reclined and watched a light-show rendition of the birth of the universe with disco sound effects. The universe was created in 1977, my wife would say, and I would laugh and he would laugh because I laughed. We’d walk out giddy, veneered with sound and light. We’d eat potpies at a Vietnamese restaurant in Glendale. I don’t know why it served potpies but everyone ordered them. We brought colored pencils with us because the potpies took forty-five minutes to make. He’d draw on his place mat and then ours, whatever heroic figure he was obsessed with at the time: Apollo, Peter Pan, Didier Drogba. He could busy himself for hours conjuring and reconjuring it. We still have giant plastic bins full of his drawings in our garage. And those intricate handdrawn mazes he made after he stopped drawing—he’d give me one and I would work my way in and out of it before realizing there was no solution. Getting lost was the point, or there was no point. The only way to solve it was to turn back around and exit the same way you entered.
We drive in silence, into the smog and stew. I try to quiet my mind. Nature preserve, I say when we pass a nature preserve. Motivate Hollywood, I say when we pass a sign that says MOTIVATE HOLLYWOOD. I point out the site of the hotel where Bobby Kennedy was killed, now a twenty-four-hour gym. There’s Forest Lawn, where Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee are buried. I tell him that the man who built Forest Lawn wanted to make a cemetery like a beautiful park where families would picnic and frolic around their dead loved ones. He thought cemeteries were too sad.
Getting lost was the point, or there was no point.
My son scrolls through his phone. He says it’s true that Michael Jackson is buried there, but Bubbles the chimpanzee is still alive and living in Florida. Is he happy? Does he miss Neverland? It doesn’t say. But you can visit the sanctuary where he lives, about an hour’s drive from where I grew up.
I’m sending Grandmére a link, he says. She loves stuff like this.
Really? I thought animals annoyed her.
Don’t you remember the nest cam? The dolphins behind her condo?
Yeah.
The panda cam.
Okay, you’re right. (I forgot about the panda cam.) She’s an animal lover.
It says he goes totally berserk if he hears a Michael Jackson song. Even someone humming it. It’s too painful. He doesn’t want to be reminded.
My wife had to talk him into coming on this trip. I didn’t hear the conversation but I can imagine—I’ll spare you the reenactment. I don’t blame him. I haven’t been good company lately. I’ve been fretting over my own extinction again. Blood tests, midnight trips to the emergency room, the whole opera. One of my tumors turned out to be a sinus infection. Another was a hernia. I can hardly look my doctor in the eye anymore. There’s pity in her gaze, sure, and something truer and meaner, beneath pity.
I see what she sees: craven insoluble fear. I can marinate in it or try to dull it with a glass of wine or two, usually two, maybe three, rarely four, sometimes four, never five, almost never, and how much is a glass anyway?, it’s an arbitrary measure, and then I’m playing photo roulette on my computer again—think of a date then find a picture as close to it as possible—January 25, 2006, deep winter, Iowa City, our son and a friend bundled up on a freezing train ride by the river, him in his tiny red snow boots, studying the picture then spelunking into the garage through plastic bins to find the boots, I want to hold them for a second, and my son opens the garage door with the remote to pull the car in and sees me, playfully taps the horn, and says, What are you doing, bro?, yes, here he is in the flesh, out of the car, taller than me even though he’s two inches shorter than me, and I feel so chaotic and stilted around him sometimes, like now, and I say, The garage is filthy, bro, and he heads inside without us saying a single meaningful thing to each other, I know I can’t go on like this, and I keep looking for his boots but can’t find them. Instead I content myself with his Peter Pan costume. I don’t caress it against my cheek with tears in my eyes or anything. I’m not a sociopath. I just look at it. I’m spiraling. I have to do something. Which is as close as I have come to a plan. Stop spiraling, do something. So something is exactly what I’m doing.
My reenactment involves my wife detailing all the reasons why he should join me, then offering to pay him, and him holding out for more money. I have no evidence, just a gut feeling. Something about how he sits next to me in the car, biding his time like he knows the meter’s running.
My mother calls. The phone rings in a different language when you know you’re not going to answer it.
Why aren’t you picking up? he says.
My mother cut back on her drinking in her seventies, read a book a week, went to New Zealand, gave away any possession she didn’t use at least once a week except for a grapefruit spoon and a black clambroth marble that reminded her of one she had as a girl. She started fostering retired racing greyhounds. She fostered three of them until she realized it made her too sad. Not parting with them but the dogs themselves, their spindly bodies and meek sensitive faces, which seemed to exude judgment by withholding it. They were like hobbled horses, pinioned birds. She bought two feeders instead, filled them with nectar, hung them on her back porch.
She entered her eighties bright and lucid but now, four years on, she’s begun to flicker. She’s drinking in the mornings again. When we talk on the phone, especially after she’s had a few glasses of wine, we end up arguing over some stupid point of fact. The specifics aren’t important, she tells me when I correct her for confusing the recent past and the distant past. I know I should stop correcting her. She still has her hair done once a week. She still gets annoyed when someone doesn’t bless her after she sneezes. And recently she met a man in the retirement home. His name’s Elias Parker. They eat dinner together every day, then watch old movies in the TV room. She thinks they’re in love. She says they went to high school together, but he looks about ten years older than her and has a vaguely Hungarian accent.
The other day she called to ask if I remembered the girl who lived next door. Not next door to the town house where I grew up but next to the beachside duplex where my mother grew up. Beautiful jet-black hair down to the small of her back, she said. Her father punished her by cutting it off. Remember? Remember how we all cried?
When I read to her from the gray book or ask her about some name, she tells me to quit interrogating her. He’s been dead longer than he was alive, she says.
Not yet, I tell her. Four more years.
See, I don’t think it’s normal that you know that. She no longer thinks about him like she used to. She allows herself to remember him while waiting for a bag of popcorn to finish in the microwave. Three minutes and forty seconds, she says. The perfect amount.
Hollywood Blvd.
Addict on sidewalk
Lady with dummy
Chinese preacher
Sax player in diapers
Met people
The Vietnamese restaurant in Glendale is sorry but it’s closed for repairs. We go to Philippe’s instead where my father might well have eaten forty-five years ago after he went to the Observatory. He might’ve met people here. We order French dips from a guy with a carving knife, who deftly slices meat onto a hoagie roll. We sit at a long table and eat without talking, father, son, and meat. Next to us two old men are talking about something one of them read in the newspaper. A mall Santa in Upland claims he visited the hospital room of a boy whose last wish was to die on Santa’s lap. He held the boy in his arms and described how nice heaven will be, and the boy died right there in his arms. That’s what the man alleges. But now no one in the hospital can corroborate his story. So wait, says one of the men in the restaurant. Did Santa Claus kill that boy?
Hmm, my son says, scrolling as I drive.
What? I say.
Nothing.
Tell me. I’m bored.
Ian posted an old picture of a bunch of us at Poods and Benji commented.
The casket kid?
Nobody calls him that anymore. We look at the world once, in childhood. That’s what Benji wrote. It’s probably from a song.
It’s from a poem. The rest is memory.
What?
That’s the next line.
Yeah. Benji’s pretty fried now. He usually just comments with fire emojis. Beach picture, fire emojis. Your dad died, fire emojis.
I bet he enjoys the ambiguity.
Benji forgot his own birthday last year, he says.
When he scrolls through his phone his face bears the expression of someone in love.
Twelve miles west of Burbank, I try to figure out a way to initiate conversation that isn’t burdensome or annoying. Combing my brain for scraps of poems to recite and remembering only the one about your mum and dad fucking you up. They may not mean to, but they do. Realizing that the degree to which they fuck you up can be measured by how often you think about them once you’ve left home. Something just north of never is ideal. Parents are booster rockets, I think, necessary for takeoff but a burden at higher altitudes. I’m starting to wish we were following our own path. Retracing my father’s is too literal, like in movies when people talk to tombstones. A high school quarterback in West Texas who just won state wants his father to know, so he leaves the game ball next to the tombstone and says, I hope you’re proud, because dead fathers are able to hear you only if you’re within five feet of their graves, and sons can’t celebrate with their teams like normal sons when there’s a dead father somewhere to commune with.
I could ask him to look up what happens to them after takeoff, booster rockets. How are they retrieved, reused? I could ask him to look up the Challenger explosion, Russian space dogs, the Golden Record.
It’s the earbuds. If earbuds weren’t plugging his ears I could remind him how we used to drive around with him in his car seat until he fell asleep and one time as he nodded off a pair of fire trucks overtook us, sirens blazing, and he stirred awake and my wife followed them for miles and when she lost them he said again, again, which he always said when something pleased him or amused him. Once was never enough. I could ask if he’s seen any good movies. I could point to a red Triumph Spider Coupe and say look. It wouldn’t be like talking to a locked door, fashioning sentences into keys.
Then he takes out the earbuds and nestles them into their charger. The silence abides. We could talk about the guys in Philippe’s arguing about the boy who asked to die atop Santa. I could ask him if he remembers when he realized Santa didn’t exist.
He was seven. He read Santa’s letter thanking him for the cookies and noticed it was in my handwriting. He almost admitted he knew but stopped himself and feigned belief for two years because he thought we’d be disappointed he found out. I want to remind him but I won’t. He thinks my wife and I mythologize his childhood—we’ve built a shrine out of only what is sweet and pleasing to us. We forget our experience of his childhood is secondary to his. We have our bouquet of salient moments and he has his. The winter the whole town froze over and I dropped him onto the ice. He swears it’s the first time the world came into focus for him. After that he started having dreams I was a werewolf, which he only recently told me. He had them for years. He said he never actually thought I was a werewolf, but I did act strange sometimes. More like an older brother. Those pressure points you taught me? What was up with that?
The Shah? The Crab Claw? You loved it.
Not really. You told me you knew one that would make somebody instantly shit themselves.
I never said that.
You did.
I probably said crap themselves.
It was weird, Dad.
Those were fake. I made them up.
I know.
I took you fishing. Camping. Remember? Trips to skate parks. Managing your soccer team. Typical dad behavior.
Okay, okay.
Parent-teacher conferences. Career day. Thanksgiving fun run.
I’m not saying you were a bad dad.
But.
But . . .
But what?
Amusing myself at his expense. Pretending I had a second family in Baja California. Going down to Baja, I’d say when I left the house. Embarrassing him accidentally. Embarrassing him on purpose. Standing with other fathers on the touchline of a soccer field, dispirited by the proprietary way they watched their offspring. Praising each other by praising each other’s sons. He loved soccer but hated running. He loved the idea of soccer. Sometimes he’d stop playing altogether to stare off at something only he saw.
A father in a pristine salmon polo kept calling him dude: Get back on defense, dude. Win the ball, dude.
A tidy jolt of rage each time he said it. At halftime I asked him if he played. He said, Soccer?, and I shook my head and pointed to the polo logo on his shirt. His tongue darted in and out of his mouth as if it were a separate creature, something trying to hide and advertise what was inside.
My son was mortified when he found out. He told me to try to be like other dads: happy, neutral, normal. He said whenever he looked over at me watching him play I was always scowling.
That’s just how my face is, I told him.
Being too rigid and too lenient. Saying one thing and doing another. Telling the truth. Telling lies.
Stuck in traffic I think about the graffiti we saw in Oslo: You aren’t in traffic. You are traffic. I want to adjust it into a mantra. I’m not in line. I am line. I’m not in Taco Bell. I am Taco Bell. My son’s at the wheel. I admire his driving style: periodic glances at the rearview and side mirrors, earnest grip on the steering wheel. Because he’s driving I feel like I can say anything, so I’m babbling. That’s the Greek restaurant where Mom talked to Tom Hanks while in line for the bathroom. Huge asshole, I say.
Because he’s driving I feel like I can say anything, so I’m babbling.
Really? he says.
No, just making sure you’re listening. There’s Moonshadows, where Mel Gibson got hammered before his anti-Semitic tirade. That’s where we met the real Gidget.
I ask about the game he and his friend Justin used to play in the car. Where they’d wave to people and try to get them to wave back.
Oh god, he says. Sweet and sour.
If they waved back you’d say sweet. If they didn’t you’d say sour.
I remember.
I wave to a woman with hair the color of antifreeze, who glances over and then stares rigidly ahead. Sour, I say. I wave to a man in a red Toyota. Sour, I say. To a man in a delivery van. Sweet.
Are you going to be like this the whole trip? my son asks.
I’m not sure, I say. Possibly. I wave to a woman on the back of a motorcycle, who waves back. Sweet.
How does that other poem go. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost . . . houses? Cities? Keys? I should’ve memorized more poems when I was younger. I should’ve learned Sanskrit and cultivated an aura. I’m thinking about poor Benji: seventeen years old and already fried and wistful for childhood. I drove him home from the skate park years ago. He seemed like a sweet kid. His parents ran a mortuary business out of their house, or they lived in an apartment connected to the showroom. I asked if he ever got spooked being around so many coffins. Coffins? he said. What’s a coffin? He’d never heard the word in his life. My family sells caskets, he said.
Los Angeles to Santa Barbara: about 100 miles. Free ice.
Yes, Father, you are correct, the distance between LA and Santa Barbara is about one hundred miles. What about the ocean? Cliffs curving and jutting over violet water? Velvet mesquites, wild bougainvillea? Firepits and rainbow-patterned umbrellas? Any messages from the grave? Thoughts on the future? What about your wife at home drinking afternoon wine with her friend Bunny, wistfully reading out itineraries from cruise brochures, all those ports of call they’ll never see?
She calls me ten miles outside Santa Barbara. I let it ring. I’m thinking about a friend whose father taped a list of rules to their refrigerator. No singing in the house was at the top. My mother made no rules or demands. When I behaved badly she would say in an aggrieved voice, You need to act like somebody. She never said who. Again she calls as we’re entering city limits. I pick up this time. Finally, she says, fumbling with the phone. She waits for me to say something. How’s it going? I ask. Not good, she tells me. She’s in the lobby of the wound clinic waiting to see a doctor. How come you didn’t return any of my calls? she asks. Everyone’s hiding from me.
I ask why she’s at the wound clinic but all she wants to talk about is Elias Parker. Why hasn’t he called her back? What’s his problem? His niece thinks I’m after his money, do you believe that? Guess what she does for a living?
Nuclear physicist, I say.
She sighs and says, Where do you come up with this stuff? Most people would say teacher. Lawyer. You like putting knots in everything.
What’s his daughter do for a living, Mom?
Niece. She owns her own business. She makes internal organs out of cloth. Little stuffed animals. Except organs.
How would I have guessed that?
You’re supposed to guess something normal, then I tell you what she really does and we laugh. She releases a long beleaguered breath. The niece, she says, weighs three hundred pounds.
I let her vent. My son is asleep in the passenger seat, missing Santa Barbara’s holy afternoon light. Pale gulls drift above the beach. They make flight look like a sad, heavy talent. I tell her I have to go soon and she asks if I’m writing and I say yes, not right this second, but yes, and she says she’s been meaning to tell me that she tried to start a book club at the retirement home as an excuse to get everyone to buy my book—she even promised they could meet the author—but no one signed up for it.
Finally she tells me why she’s at the wound clinic: walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night, she sliced her shin on the planter in her bedroom. That stupid cactus, she says. Why’s it there? Looking at it gives me such a terrible feeling.
I ask how serious the wound is and she says, Serious enough to end up at the wound clinic. Wouldn’t you think a wound clinic would be nice, by the way? This place is not nice. They don’t even have a TV.
Hold on, she says. The nurse is calling me. I’m gonna act like I don’t hear her.
Talk to the doctor, I say. Call me when you’re back. She sighs and says okay . . . but can you please answer my calls from now on?
When Rusty gave me the gray book I read her one of the entries: Below Presidio. Helped dig. Candy. Good egg.
No idea, she said.
Helped dig?
Not ringing any bells.
What about good egg?
Yeah. That sounds like your father.
How?
He always liked eggs.
I haven’t told her about the trip. She’d say the idea of following his route is kind of morbid, or at least bad luck. She’d say why not visit her instead. Florida has two coasts. We could visit the beach where she saw Elvis. We could see a colony of displaced wolves.
My son opens his eyes and asks where we are. He says he was dreaming about skating in a contest. He kept messing up and could hear me in the crowd, sighing. We’re driving up a mountain and I’m watching the road but out of the corner of my eye I can see him staring. Wonder what it could mean, I say. He isn’t smiling. Can’t be mad at me for something that happened in a dream, I say. Right?
I heard you sighing as you were talking to Grandmére, he says. I think I brought that into sleep with me. He asks, not for the first time, if I’m mad at her and I say no. Then why do I sound like I am?
Long story, I tell him, and he says, Longer than this drive?
We pull off at the Cold Spring Tavern, an old stagecoach stop. The air is cool and clear and it smells like creosote or sagebrush, some nice chaparral smell. We share a basket of fries and watch a woman painstakingly tuning a Dobro. A single metal crutch leans on the chair next to her. If we don’t leave now, I say, we’re going to have to sit through at least one song. My son shakes his head and says, I knew you were going to say that.
As a punishment for saying something predictable I make us sit through a song. A man in electrician boots joins her and they cover a song I can’t place—the O’Jays maybe, or the Isley Brothers. The woman has a lovely voice, but my inability to place the song prevents me from enjoying it. I know there’s a lesson here, one I should heed, about dwelling in the now and the potter becoming his pot, et cetera. Instead I let the displeasure fester until I can’t stand it anymore. I search a lyric on my phone and find the song: You Are Everything by the Stylistics. Covered later by Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye. They’re covering the cover. The relief of not having to think about it anymore is close enough to pleasure. I pay our bill and we drive down the mountain.
Late afternoon and the day’s talent fades as we listen to You Are Everything on repeat. I’ve got nothing incisive to say about it except that it’s perfect. Better than Beowulf. Better than key lime pie. My son fiddles with the solar system bracelet in his lap. I remember I used ask him what he was thinking and he’d tell me without hesitation. He scrutinizes each colored orb. After some false starts and throat clearing, phrasing and rephrasing it in my head to make sound as neutral as possible, I ask him why he bought the bracelet for his ex-girlfriend.
Because I love her, he answers instantly.
The song finishes and begins again with Marvin Gaye and Diana Ross addressing each other with the blissful intimacy of a couple in bed.
That’s beautiful, I say.
He waits for the punch line. I tell him I’m being serious.
After a while he says, Can you play something else?
Near Santa Maria the palm-tree cell phone towers turn into evergreen cell phone towers. We enter a valley of bone-white turbines. Towering erratic clocks counting wind. At a gas station the clerk bangs a roll of dimes against the cash register and deftly guides the contents into the drawer. The dimes are shiny, newborn. I accidentally open the door to the beer cooler when I mean to open the door to the bottled water. Right church, wrong pew, she calls out. I make a note in my notes app. We head north.
The world’s deadliest animal, he says, looking at his phone. Guess.
Man, I say.
Nope.
Hippo.
It’s not a mammal.
Some type of spider.
Closer.
Wild dog with a toothache.
Not a mammal.
Crow with an ice pick.
Dude.
Cat with the nuclear codes.
Come on.
Just tell me.
Keep guessing.
Mosquito, he says a few miles later.
That was my next guess.
Is this about what you were expecting so far? he asks.
Sure. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m just glad you came. Really.
He nods. Here’s another, he says, by the time a child leaves for college ninety percent of the time they’ve spent with their parents is over.
He shows me the post on his phone: These Fourteen Facts Will Blow Your Mind! Even though I doubt its veracity, it still stings.
I emit a mumbly noise that means that’s interesting and that hurts in my own secret tongue.
The color orange was named after the fruit, he says.
We’ll just make the most of the time we have left, I say.
Sharks are older than trees, he says.
Conversation forensics. Parsing lines like an actor. Mulling volume and inflection. Watching fathers on TV and realizing much of what I know about fathers comes from TV. How they hold the morning paper. How they pause for the laugh track. Realizing all my stories about him are retellings of truer stories. Hearing the ticker ticking. We’re almost at 90 percent. Ruing how gleeful it makes him to be in possession of such a fact, deadly as a mosquito.
Read me another, I say.
Everything’s fine, the other voice says. The quiet voice, the one that rarely speaks unless spoken to.
North to SLO, beautiful country, beautiful hotel called Earl Brown, he blabbed about JC, drunk, elevator door slammed on head.
We search for a hotel in San Luis Obispo called Earl Brown but there isn’t one. So concludes the case of the missing comma. The most beautiful hotel in San Luis Obispo, according to the internet, is the Arroyo Grande. Rooms start at $398 a night so instead we stay at the Madonna Inn, a sprawling stone-and-stucco chalet off the 101. Hundreds of disconcertingly themed rooms. China Flower, Krazy Dazy, Sir Walter Raleigh. Ours is Antique Cars. Some rooms have gold-filigree ceilings and massive sleigh beds and fireplaces in walls of uncut stone. Ours has two double beds side by side and a few paintings of antique cars on the walls.
My son dumps his backpack on the bed and walks off to call his ex-girlfriend. I head to the pool, order a drink, and sit at the edge with my legs in the water. I send my wife the few pictures I’ve taken: scenery, our son biting into his sandwich, the singer’s metal crutch, my legs in the water. Cars whir up and down the 101 and I try to imagine my father staying here, using the ice machine, pouring himself a plastic cup of scotch. Sitting on the end of his single bed, smoking menthols, and watching TV. Calling up Earl Brown. Talking about horses. My father making a mildly clever comment like I don’t like being drunk . . . but I do like getting drunk. Earl Brown agrees with a grunt, then starts blabbing about JC—Jimmy Carter or Jesus—and my father hangs up and goes to pee and at the bowl realizes he’s crossed the line between getting and being drunk, so he walks out into the night, into terrain so unlike Florida it may as well be Mars. Beautiful country, he thinks. He’d like to spend the rest of his life here. He’s forty-five years old. The end is near—he could hear its approach if he listened closely. But he isn’t listening. He’s thinking about astronauts playing golf on the moon, wondering if it happened or if he dreamed it or saw in a movie. He thinks, A day comes when a man is no longer welcome company for himself. Then, Jesus, I’m drunk. He wanders off in the direction of an elevator and I let him go.
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