by Dan Chaon
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.
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.
