“It’s okay,” Jess said. “There’s room on your side.”
She eased the car forward, angling around the moose’s projecting bulk. The animal’s massive head swiveled, dark eyes focused on the vehicle. The front wheel slipped on the steep grade of the spillway. Branches raked the fender and windows.
“God, Jess. We’ll tip over.”
Jess’s heart fluttered—it felt wonderful. “We’re okay.”
She inched the front bumper ahead, tapping the gas. The moose’s head dipped, nose pressed to the driver-side window. Jess’s face was separated from the moose’s by a thin pane of glass. Beads of moisture ringed its sockets, a thickly sloped nose and teeth the hue of old bone, a corona of horseflies buzzing around its head. She felt a kinship with the animal—an illusive kinship, the kind that sometimes occurs when strangers lock eyes passing in cars headed opposite directions. The creature expelled plumes of steam through nostrils the size of teacups. Flecks of mucus sprayed the window. Its tongue, black and a foot long, licked a diagonal slash across the misted glass, as though it wished to learn of this strange shiny creature by its taste.
Jess edged the car back onto the road. They stared out the rear window as the moose flicked the huge leathery funnels of its ears at the maddening flies.
“That,” Herbert said softly, “is its own kind of magic.”
They arrived in Thessalon shortly after noon. The main drag conformed to an archaic model, with stores long since wiped from the metropolitan topography—Woolco, Stedman’s, Saan—hanging on thanks to stubborn small-town consumers. The streets and trees and shops were bleached out, town suffocating beneath a blanket of low, dark clouds.
Their father’s house stood at the end of a block shaded by the knitted branches of maple and walnut trees. The squat one-story was utterly nondescript and bordered on sterile; Jess had known bums to decorate their cardboard hovels with more flair. She thought of the exotic locales her father could’ve disappeared to: the white sand beaches of Pago Pago, the African veldt, the caldera of a dormant volcano. But no, he’d abandoned them for this shoebox less than five hundred kilometers away.
They climbed the cracked brick steps and Herbert rang the bell. Jess peeked through the slitted drapes: an ancient stereo with dual cassette player and turntable, a swayback sofa, a stack of newspapers propping up an overflowing ashtray. Dust motes hung in the air, turning over and over.
“He’s not home,” a woman’s voice called out through the shutters of the house next door.
“Do you know where he is?”
“Try the bowling alley.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure!” The shutters snapped shut.
PARKWAY BOWL-A-DROME was a corrugated-tin building in the shape of an airplane hangar jutting from the back end of the Leonard Hotel, the two structures fused into one grisly unit. Farmland stretched for miles behind the alley.
Stepping through the front doors, Jess was assaulted by an odor peculiar to bowling alleys: an amalgam of cigarette smoke, grease, shoe deodorizer, whatever they used to polish the lanes. Herbert gazed up and down the bustling hardwood floors, the mica-flecked balls spat from return chutes and gaudy red-and-white shoes stacked in cubbyholes, the insectile hum of the ball-buffing machine, thinking his father wouldn’t set foot in this place on a dare.
The man behind the counter tried to guess Jess’s shoe size. “Size eight wide.”
“We’re not here to bowl, but yeah.” Jess unfolded the sheet of newsprint with their father’s photo. “Looking for this guy. Know him?”
“Who’s asking?”
Jess showed her badge. The counterman smiled wisely, as though unsurprised to see their father’s misdeeds had finally caught up to him. “Lane eighteen, officer.”
The man pushed a small white button in the center of the teardrop ball return and rubbed his hands together over the dryer. On the inclined scorer’s table sat a rosin stick, a talc pouch, a deck of Players, and a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The man sunk three fingers into a jet black ball, took two strides, launched the ball in a tight spiral; it flirted with the gutter before curving to strike the one pin. He marked it off on his score sheet, pulled a cigarette from the deck, lipped it, and said, “So. You found me.”
Herbert and Jess sat at the horseshoe of molded fiberglass seats ringing the lane. Their father wore tan pants and a beige sweater. His dark hair had thinned and grayed; a widow’s peak gave his face an elongated equine aspect. Though age and wear had blunted the sharpness of his features, his emerald eyes still shone.
“So,” Herbert said after a minute, “you’re bowling now.”
“Bowling’s wonderful. It makes the heart merry.” He looked his children up and down. His fingers rose to his face, tracing his lips and cheek as though searching for correspondences. “It was that newspaper article, wasn’t it? I told that damn reporter no pictures.”
Jess couldn’t believe his lack of emotion. Part of her—a very large part, it seemed—hoped he’d cower like a Nazi war criminal brought to justice. But there was no shame, no contrition. It was as though he’d stumbled across a couple of old, not especially close acquaintances, and was struggling to make polite conversation.
“Don’t you have anything to say? Don’t you feel the least bit guilty?”
“Jess, please …”
“I’m too old to feel guilt, and besides, it’s a wasteful emotion. If that’s why you searched me out, you may as well leave. Excuse me a moment.”
He bowled a strike, then turned to his son and palmed the scorekeeper’s pencil up his sleeve. “Still got it, don’t I?”
Herbert dug a coin out of his pocket and sent it skipping along his knuckles, then palmed it with deft precision. He opened his mouth to show the coin glinting on his tongue.
“I saw you slip it into your mouth,” his father said. “Good, but not quite perfect.”
Herbert didn’t say anything. It didn’t matter his father was wrong, as Herbert had slipped the coin into his mouth earlier, anticipating the opportunity; nor did it matter he was infinitely more skilled, his movements clean where his father’s were clubbish; the fame and women and wealth—none of it mattered. At that moment he was a child again, the boy forever trying to please but always falling critically short, shamed and confused before his father.
“Why’d you do it?” Jess cast her eyes in a conspicuous arc: scuffed lanes, a glass case full of cobwebbed trophies, everything overhung in a haze of bluish smoke. “Was this worth it? For all this … splendor? ”
“You always had a smart tongue, Jessica. I knew Sam would take you, we talked about it obliquely, and that was a better fit.” A strain of subdued pride underlay this pragmatism. Jess got a sense he considered himself somehow herculean, holding on as long as he had. “Your mother wanted children. Never a goal of mine. I sent money when I could—didn’t Sam tell you?”
“You abandoned us.”
“Didn’t throw you to the wolves, darling.”
Jess realized that, over the years, her father had been crafting his most brilliant illusion: he’d tricked himself into believing what he’d done was justified. She’d always considered him a confused man who’d made a bad choice—and perhaps, half a lifetime ago, that had been the case. But the man she now faced was completely devoid of remorse. This wasn’t an act or a smokescreen; this was self-delusion distilled to its purest essence.
“It was the other magicians, wasn’t it?” Herbert said. “Fallout from the book.”
“I shouldn’t have written that thing. People trusted me with their secrets and I sold them out. Foolish, but I had something to prove.”
“Was it magic, then? A search for real magic?”
Jess caught the note of desperation in Herbert’s voice. For him, it all hinged on justification: the idea of their father leaving to pursue a higher goal was something he could live with.
“Real magic? No such thing. Please don’t tell me any of that foolishness we talked about wh
en you were a child lingered on. It was all … bunk. I was entertaining you; they were pleasant fictions, fairy tales.” He squeezed the talc pouch anxiously. “I never told you the tooth fairy didn’t exist, but I never felt badly for it. I just supposed the truth would dawn on you sooner or later.”
“The truth. Right. Of course.”
Herbert’s body was trembling. Had he actually believed this would end with hugs and kisses and promises of Sunday dinners? Twenty-five years dismissed and everything reverting to the way it once was, father and son driving to some dustbowl town in the summer twilight, talking of magic?
“He’s everything you lacked the courage and ability to be,” Jess said. “You see that, don’t you?”
Her father’s gaze narrowed, then skipped across the surface of the lanes. “Anyone can become successful if their passion becomes an obsession. Set yourself to a single life task, how can you help but become a success?”
“But isn’t that what you did, abandoning us to pursue—this? ” Jess heard the desperation creeping into her voice. “Jesus, was it really so awful?”
“I was miserable.”
She would never learn why her father left. The only power he held was the magician’s power of secret knowledge, and to relinquish that was to yield whatever slim command he still held over them. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, he could take his pathetic secrets to the grave … but she did care, and for a moment saw herself as a young girl in that dirty wash of alley light, squinting into the darkness, wondering what did we do wrong?
“You don’t believe in magic?” Herbert said. “Come outside, then. I’ll show you.”
“Herbert, don’t do this. Please.”
“Stop talking nonsense. I won’t watch you make a bloody fool of yourself.”
Herbert’s hand clutched his father’s sweater. “Damn it, I’ll show you. It’s not nonsense!”
“Take your hands off me. You’re making a scene.”
Jess took Herbert’s wrist, trying to pry his fingers loose. Her father beat at his son’s arm as he shook the sleeve. Although Jess never shared Herbert’s vision of a joyful resolution, she had not imagined a tug of war in a Bowl-a-drome.
“Goddamn you, let go! ”
“It’s real! I can show you—real! ”
“Knock it off down there!” the counterman hollered.
“Let ’em go at it,” a bowler with a limp walrus mustache called back. “About time someone gave it to the old bastard.”
Herbert gave a final furious tug, tearing the sweater, tumbling onto the floor with a swath of angora clutched in his fist. Herbert, Sr., fell back, bony backside impacting a fiberglass bowling chair with a thump. His son stood carefully. Softly but with utter conviction, he said, “I know what’s real. Whether you believe or not makes no difference anymore.”
Herbert walked out of the alley. Their father sprawled in the chair, heaving. His torn sweater sleeve hung between his legs, nearly brushing the floor. The collar was stretched out of shape, baring a pale clavicle.
“I wasn’t … lying,” he panted. “They were just … fantasies.”
Seeing him like that, a tall frail man with a torn sweater, the harsh light of the scorer’s table showing just how deeply his eyes had retreated into their sockets, Jess realized this was a man who’d never really stepped out of that tea chest he’d entered many years ago. Exited physically, yes, tripped the hidden latch and vanished; but the way that body sagged, the defeated slouch of those shoulders, was the same posture she’d seen in men handcuffed in the backseat of her squad car. An imprisoned look.
THE SKY WAS A DARK BOWL quaking and crashing with thunder. Jess scanned the parking lot, then dashed to the car. Rain pelted down in stinging wires. She peered through the window, but he wasn’t inside. She called his name and wind snatched the word from her mouth.
Squinting into the driving rain, she saw him standing along the fenceline bordering the fields, fenceposts dark with creosote and the rusty stitchwork of barbed wire. Shirtless, trousers plastered to his legs, hair stuck to his skull. Eyes closed, he swayed slightly.
Jess stood in the lot, one foot mired in a pothole rapidly filling with rainwater. A vein of lightning split the sky, bathing the fields in rippling white light. Rain poured down her cheeks. Herbert swayed side to side. His face was serene. He looked so young, a boy. Jess laughed at the craziness of it all, the beautiful absurdity. “You’re nuts!” she shouted, laughing harder. She saw a figure standing in silhouette behind the alley’s smoked glass. Herbert swayed, his ears tuned to an unheard harmony, the rhyme of the wind and rain and sky. His hands held out, palms flat to the earth, as though seeking an elusive balance. Lightning creased the sky, whitening his body.
Her breath caught.
For the rest of her life, she will always wonder—did it happen? Perhaps it was a trick of the light, a fleeting disorientation. Later she will think her mind played a trick: she wanted so badly for it to happen that she willed her eyes into momentary belief. She will never speak of it, yet one night many years later will wake from a dream of that faraway afternoon, the wind and rain and the sense of something in the air, a quivering pressure in her eardrums, an odd taste beneath her tongue—not magic; she will never quite bring herself to so blunt an admission. Something feathery and alive that all those years later seems so unreal and yet the vision persists undimmed by time, a vision as bracing as it was during those fleeting heartbeats when it happened, and she will sit bolt upright as a cool night breeze plays through the open window and starlight curves upon the brass buttons of her police uniform hanging in the bedroom closet, and, in a voice so low and tremulous her husband does not stir, she will whisper, “He disappeared.”
The skin of Herbert’s chest and arms and head turned opaque as a nearly colorless essence, smoke or mist or fog, rose off his body. For a moment Jess could see the basic structure of his skeleton, the bones of his arms and ribcage, skull gilt with flashing light, then only the arteries and veins pumping blood. When these vanished all that remained were the disembodied trousers standing on their own and the open field beyond. Jess would never forget that Rolex free-floating in the charged air, the dime-sized flash of brilliance as lightning reflected off its face.
Herbert’s body suddenly coalesced, the disparate atoms flooding back and uniting. He toppled into the mud. Jess ran to him.
“Did you see it?” His eyes were alive and on fire. “Did you see?”
“I don’t know what I saw.”
She helped him up, amazed at just how light he felt. A strange smell clung to him, a mixture of singed earth and ozone. She threw his arm over her shoulder and carried him across the lot. By the time she settled him into the front seat, he was fast asleep.
She cast a glance at the bowling alley window. The silhouetted figure was gone.
Recognize that what they peddle as truth is in fact fiction. Look beyond the stagecraft, deception, and sleight-of-hand, and you will always find the truth, which is simply this: there is no truth. It is all a lie. Elaborate and brilliantly concealed, but a lie nonetheless. Never trust your eyes. Be forever skeptical. Learn to spot the tricks I have outlined and together we shall expose these “magicians” for what they truly are: frauds, shysters, and villains!
[7]
Herbert slept the entire drive home. At one point he started shivering violently and Jess wrapped him in sweaters and ran the heater until his teeth stopped chattering. The rain let up, leaving in its wake a pristine clarity.
They pulled into Herbert’s driveway shortly after nine o’clock. Warm southern air was infused with the plankton smell of the canal. Jess woke Herbert, helped him wrangle his luggage onto the porch. He glanced at the stricken tree on his lawn.
“I really should do something about that poor thing, shouldn’t I?”
“Burn it. End its misery.”
“Maybe I will. Plant another in its place. Water and trim it. Take good care of it.”
He reached into his pa
nts pocket and withdrew a small booklet: soggy green construction paper tied up with fraying blue yarn, clumsy scissoring, words written in a spiky hand. For a moment it seemed as if he would crumple it, but he smoothed it out and returned it to his pocket.
“I don’t think he’s a bad person. I think he just … lost control. It could happen to anybody, don’t you think? He’s not a bad man.”
Jess envied his childlike ability to forgive. Perhaps he would never grow up, be forever a man-child lost in a world of mirrors and
brightly colored smoke. This didn’t anger her, where before it had. He came forward, an awkward lunge, hugging her. Jess felt his stiff contours, bone and hard angles, a boy’s body not yet fleshed into adulthood. She remembered a night when they were young, Herbert waking from a nightmare and crawling under the covers of her bed, his body all elbows and kneecaps. He really hadn’t changed over the years: still bony and gangling and clinging to beliefs others had long ago surrendered.
My brother, she thought. Crown prince of Never-Never Land.
“Well.”
“Well. Sam cooks dinner for me and Ted on Sundays. You should come.”
“But, Jess … Sam’s a terrible cook.”
“Come anyways. Come anytime.”
Jess walked to her Jeep. As she pulled out, she saw Herbert standing beside the gossamer-enshrouded elm, laying his hands on the trunk, stroking the black flaking bark.
SHE DROVE THROUGH STREETS wet from a brief night rain, neighborhoods silent in the dark, the clean lawns, the houses low-slung and split-level and modern. Radio tuned to the local station, Chrissie Hynde singing about a picture of you. Moving into the country: the night coolness of low peninsula fields, vineyards and cherry groves, solitary lights of farmhouses and irrigation ditches filled with moonlit water. She thought of the summer she’d picked fruit with a group of itinerant Caribbean workers. They were paid by the basket, and a small Jamaican man with skin so dark it hurt her eyes had shown her how to twist strawberries off the vine so as not to damage the fruit. The Jamaicans shared two old ten-speeds and after the day’s picking would bike to the nearest convenience store with a roll of quarters, calling their wives from payphones, talking of the money they’d made and how they’d spend it.
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