Sightings

by B. J. Hollars

  “Son, I’m glad you asked that,” Dad smiled, pulling a pair of black shards from his pocket. “It would be my pleasure.”

  He began slapping the flints together, reaching for a few nearby geography tests for kindling. Mrs. Powell started a round of applause to signal the end of his performance, though my father missed the majority of his praise – far too preoccupied showering sparks to the pages.

  “The damn . . . things . . . just won’t light,” he grunted, continuing his flicking. “What kind of paper you use here? Won’t work if it’s not pulp based, you know.”

  But apparently it was, because a moment later a slight crackle began curling at the edges of Jimmy Goings’s D-. Jimmy began to cheer, then put his pinkies in his mouth and let out a wolf whistle.

  Mrs. Powell reached for a nearby squirt bottle, extinguishing the flame prior to setting off the fire alarm.

  “Now why’d you go and do that for?” Dad asked, scratching his head.

  “All right then,” said Mrs. Powell. “Let’s give one more big thank you to Max’s father.” The class shouted a rousing thank you (especially Jimmy) as Floyd Fowler sauntered away.

  “Well, you’s all take care now,” Dad called as he left the classroom, tousling my hair as he passed.

  The school year wound down, and much to my surprise, at closing ceremonies I received a commendation for physical fitness. I didn’t win the actual award, but I was commended for almost winning the award. When my gym teacher, Mr. Dorchester, called my name, I rose unsteadily, accepting my certificate and verifying that the name on the paper matched my own. Dad gave me an embarrassingly long standing ovation, shouting, “Now that’s a Fowler for ya!” until Mom yanked on his sleeve enough to settle him.

  That night, I placed the certificate on my desk, but Dad insisted we get it framed the following day.

  “No way in hell we’re leaving a trophy like that unprotected from the elements.”

  “It’s just a certificate, Dad . . .”

  “Yes sir, my son the athlete,” he said, holding the certificate at arm’s length, admiring it from a distance. “Say, maybe we should sign up for the games this year?”

  “What games?”

  “What games? Hell, the Pioneer Games. In Weston. At the reenactment. Just a month away, you know,” he said, tapping my head with his finger. I did know. Dad had highlighted the weekend of June 25th–27th on the calendar sometime last December.

  The Weston Wagon Train reenactment had become a family tradition over the past few years, by which I mean my family traditionally endured it. The Pioneer Games, however, was one portion of the weekend from which I always kept my distance.

  “We can start some kind of high intensity training regimen, if you’re interested,” he explained. “I’ve been watching the games over the last couple years. Mainly, it’s just a lot of wood chopping and knot tying, the basics. Things you’d be good at.”

  I doubted it.

  “So? Are you interested?” I said probably not.

  “Probably,” Dad repeated, replacing my certificate on my desk. “Well, we can certainly work with probably.”

  In an effort to buoy my interest in the Pioneer Games, Dad began leaving less-than-inconspicuous stacks of wood scattered around the lawn. And also, an axe. And also, knotless ropes.

  “Honey,” Mom started in on him, “I just don’t think it’s safe to leave an axe lying around like that. What if one of the neighbor kids chopped off a foot?”

  “Then the neighbor kids would learn a valuable lesson on trespassing, wouldn’t they?” he countered. Dad had grown grumpy as a result of my unwillingness to be a contender and was apparently taking it out on the feet of our neighbors’ children.

  “You just have so much natural talent,” he often reminded me. “Pioneer blood and everything.”

  In the mornings, while he went off to his managerial duties on the tire line, I wandered around the neighborhood and met up with friends so we could wilt our days away in pools and malls and everything unrelated to a life of hardship and tuberculosis.

  But over breakfasts of scrambled eggs, Dad would regularly shove a fork into the food and announce the countdown until the Weston Wagon Train Reenactment.

  “Twelve days,” he’d say, then point a fork at me, sputtering eggs as he spoke. “It’s not too late to start training.” I’d nod, then excuse myself to the day’s activities – more pools, more malls, less cholera.

  Despite the enthusiasm gap between us, Dad maintained a grueling pace for his own training regime. In the wee hours of the morning, I’d sometimes catch him donning underwear and a t-shirt, rehearsing his Floyd reenactment in the basement where he thought we couldn’t hear.

  “We in the wagon train,” he said, pacing about, glancing at himself in the mirrors, “we’d form circles around the fire at night, then put men on watch to protect us from the savage Blackfoot Injuns. They was known for their cruelty, ya know? They was even known,” he started, then held a dramatic pause, “to scalp!”

  I’d stand at the top of the stairs and listen to these lines repeated again and again. And I wondered, optimistically, if the addition of pants and a smock might add validity to his words.

  According to some sources, the Donner Party weren’t the only pioneers to resort to cannibalism. In fact, at a family reunion a few years back, Great Aunt Gloria mentioned having heard of Floyd’s own “crimes against nature” (recounting the tale in full while devouring a chicken leg). However, even after Dad received partial confirmation from our hearing-impaired Great Uncle Frank (“Who ate the what now?”), he was always careful to omit that part of Floyd’s sordid past from his reenactments.

  “Look Maxy,” he said prior to beginning part two of his Circle of Life lecture. “Whether it’s true or not, we all make mistakes, you got me?”

  I nodded, he nodded back, and as far as he could tell, there was no need for further discussion. “Good. Well all right then,” he said, placing his rough hands on my shoulders. “So let’s not try to judge too fast or say too much, huh? It’s not good to spit on skeletons.”

  Dad carried around his secret knowledge like a weight, the possibility haunting him. Sometimes, I’d find him dozing in the computer room, the words “cannibalism” and “Westward Expansion,” placed side by side in a Google search bar like two very distant cousins.

  This information prompted Sam and me to revise our Oregon Trail strategy. When we found ourselves out of ammo early on, we’d usually just starve ourselves so we could restart and begin the hunt anew. We’d watch our food supply dwindle, allowing those in our wagon train to die off one by one.

  “You know, you could always just eat the kids,” Sam whispered, cupping her hand to the pixilated people onscreen. “It seemed to work for Floyd Fowler.”

  WESTON, MISSOURI, 1846

  It is not 1846, though for the weekend, we pretend it is.

  Dad drove the station wagon the one hundred and twenty miles to Weston, and then, on arriving just outside the city, insisted we get into costume at a rest stop near the park.

  “When we roll up there with all the others I want to look authentic,” he said, stressing the word as he walked anxiously toward the bathroom, his arms loaded down with his costume.

  In total, there were eight Conestoga wagons at the Weston Wagon Train Reenactment, along with eight families to fill them.

  “We have been selected,” Dad was always sure to remind us. “It’s really quite an honor.” Yet somehow, despite the rest of our family’s utter disinterest, we kept getting selected again and again. A local ox herder loaned the reenactors the necessary oxen, and although Friday night was spent privately by those of us “selected” to be a part of the wagon train, Saturday was devoted to the spectators, with activities like the Pioneer Games, crafts, the wagon pulling demonstrations.

  The only benefit of the Weston Wagon Train Reenactment was that it allowed my sister and me to see fanatics far more fanatical than our father. Like Stu Callahan, rumore
d to have recreated the entire trail in a covered wagon back in 1989. He’d written about it in American West Quarterly.

  Stu greeted us before we could even unbuckle our seatbelts, shoving an authentically dirtied hand through our automatically rolled down window.

  “Floyd,” he smiled. “Glad to have ya join us on the trail.”

  While we were there, everyone always called our father Floyd. And much to our horror, the more people called him that, the more he grew into the part. By Saturday morning he’d already started wielding his gun and volunteering to take the first shift of guard duty to “ward off any of those injuns that might come a’lurkin’.”

  Ron Carter pulled up behind us in his truck and trailer – he and Dad spending much of Friday night in private talks in which our father tried recruiting him into becoming a “regular” in the “reenacting game.”

  “There’s no other rush quite like it,” Dad assured. “Not even drugs.” And then, an afterthought: “Or sex.”

  Meanwhile, Mom tried to make friends with the other pioneer wives who’d been lured into the charade. Sam and I caught her and a few of the other women sneaking to somebody’s car to flip through magazines and trade recipes for lemon meringue pie. Their husbands, too preoccupied with maps and figuring the best hypothetical route to the coast, failed to notice their wives’ transgressions.

  We children, who had become casualties as well, peered at our mothers longingly, questioning one another about the contraband we’d managed to smuggle back into the nineteenth century.

  Friday night, Sam and I joined a few other kids for a swim in a nearby creek. Our fathers approved – it was an acceptable activity given the time period we were trying to recreate.

  Thankfully, our fathers didn’t see what we did there. As soon as we tromped out of sight, a pack of kids (myself and Sam excluded) reached for their cell phones and began chatting casually with their friends from the future. Rampant were phrases like “so lame” and “so boring” and “I’d honestly rather be dead” – words that had no place in 1846.

  Sighing, I took off my authentic leather shoes and dipped my feet in the authentically cool stream. I kept expecting some bird to chirp overhead – this was nature, after all – but perhaps they’d caught wind of the reenactment and wanted no part in it.

  “You signed up for the Pioneer Games?” asked Dennis Parker, dunking his feet beside mine. I recognized him from years past.

  “Naw, I was thinking about it but . . . I just don’t want to do anything that might make my dad proud of me.”

  “Yeah,” he commiserated. “My dad forces me. But this time, if I win, he promised to take us to Orlando next year. My mom’s making him. I think she’s going to divorce him if he makes her wear any more bonnets.”

  “Yeah. Maybe my mom, too.”

  It grew darker, and when we returned to the safety of the wagon train, the cell phones turned silent yet again. We gathered around small fires, watching as our mothers prepared rabbit stew while our fathers set to work constructing the bleachers for the following day’s festivities.

  In his one breach of authenticity, our father – the weekend’s Floyd Fowler – asked for a Phillips screwdriver, and a man begrudgingly handed it over so Dad could tighten the screws.

  While standing alongside the popping fire, I viewed my father in a way I never had previously: as if after taking all the wrong trails, he’d at last landed in the proper time and place. A part of me was almost happy for him. A small part.

  That night, we slept in the backs of wagons. Outside, the fires burned down while Sam, Mom, and I burrowed beneath blankets, using stuffed burlap sacks for pillows. From my place, I could see Dad’s shadow creep along the ground alongside the others. The men chuckled deep into the night, debating issues related to twine and birch bark.

  “I’ll tell ya something about twine, though,” Dad said. “It’s damn near the most durable material you can imagine. Hell, I’d take it over sinew any day.” The other shadows nodded.

  “I mean that,” he continued. “Show me a man with a spool of twine, and I’ll show you one lucky man.”

  Sometime before dawn, I felt Dad climb in beside us, tug on the blanket, and adjust the burlap sack.

  “Did I wake you?” Dad asked.

  I grumbled.

  “Sorry, pal,” he said patting my head. “You just rest up for tomorrow.”

  The following morning, when my name was ticked off the participant list as a “late addition to the Pioneer Games,” I shot a look at my father who was busy pretending to polish his gun.

  Helpless, I picked up an axe alongside boys like Dennis – boys who had things at stake – and at the sound of the whistle, I chopped as fast as I could, the blade sinking into the soft spot of the log. I split that wood over and over again, and even after the event concluded, I just kept hacking, turning it to pulp.

  “Hey man,” Dennis said, keeping his distance as the chips continued to fly. “Hey, we have to go tie knots.”

  I threw down my axe, watching as the other boys lined up, anxious to try out their cow hitch or their double figure eight.

  “Dennis,” I said, wiping my brow and starting toward them, “you think you could teach me a noose?”

  After I lost the Pioneer Games (Honorable Mention), and after Dennis took second, Dad came up to both of us, placed a hand on each of our shoulders, and said we’d given it all we had.

  “And where’d you learn to tie an oysterman stopper knot anyway?” he asked me.

  I refused to look at him.

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “It’s a growing experience! You forgive your old man, right?”

  “Sorry, Floyd.”

  For the rest of that day, the bleachers were crowded with people equally as obsessed as my father. Often, when there was no performance or lecture, the audience was invited to participate in tutorials on soap-making, candle-making, even leather work. People purchased cups of rabbit stew from Mom, ate venison jerky, drank cups of fresh pressed cider while the apple skins rotted in thin circles on the grass. Cans of Budweiser were stashed in a cooler behind the wagons, though spectators were asked to drink their beers by the cars so as not to “compromise the integrity of the atmosphere.”

  For much of the afternoon, I ground teeth and cracked knuckles in the back of the Conestoga wagon. I watched men and women in sunglasses and button-up shirts peruse the grounds, ask the reenactors all about the kind of weight a wagon could hold, from what type of wood the axles were carved, the true importance of the yoke. Dad appeared to have the answers to everything and more, oftentimes positioning himself in the center of the circle while he employed his vast tire manufacturing knowledge to tackle any subject.

  “The thing about yokes,” he said, pressing a firm hand to an elderly man’s shoulder, “is that there are two kinds: the bow yoke and the head yoke.” Ron Carter stood behind him, nodding. “Most people don’t know that, and it’s unfortunate because . . .”

  I turned away, watched Sam and my mother dipping candles into alternating bins of hot wax and cold water.

  “Hey there, Max,” Mom said, smiling at me. “Twenty-four hours and we can all go home.”

  “Did you know he signed me up?” I asked. Her smile wilted. She didn’t answer, didn’t say anything. Instead, she peeled wax from her hands, her fingerprints sticking. Sam re-dipped her candle once more.

  “Ta-da” she called, handing me the gift. “For my brother, the honorable mention.”

  As night loomed the crowd settled back into the bleachers, preparing to watch us perform a short play on the hardships of pioneer life. This took much convincing. We kids were supposed to look sad and hungry and tired, and we’d been instructed to fan ourselves with our hands to show the heat we had to endure “day in and day out,” as Stu Callahan, our director, explained. “Think you kids can handle that?”

  I’d chopped wood, I’d tied knots. Yes, I could handle that.

  Dad’s part required him to blather on and on abo
ut the possibility of starvation, how the hunting just wasn’t as good as in years past, how provisions were running low and food was beginning to spoil. It was the largest part and just the part he wanted. Mom’s job was to knit and appear unobtrusive, which was just what she wanted, too.

  The first ten minutes or so went smoothly enough, but then Dad cleared his throat, walked to center stage and began ad-libbing a few lines.

  “Dear God,” he called, arms outstretched before him. “Heavenly Protector! We need food to feed our families. We got lit’uns starving out here,” – dramatic pause – “dying!”

  The crowd gasped, then chuckled.

  He paced to the other side of the platform. “We’re sick and we’re weak,” he said, falling to one knee. He picked up his gun, eying it as if it might be the bringer of food. “Who will be the one to save us?”

  I had a pretty good idea, but I wasn’t going to watch him do it. I, too, was sick and tired, and my spirits were hardly raised by my father’s efforts to upstage everyone else. As I watched him struggle through his routine it occurred to me that Dad wasn’t acting at all; this was just him.

  I walked off the front of the stage, and as Dad continued his speech about the “lack of sustenance,” I mumbled, “You know, Floyd, there’s always cannibalism.”

  My father froze, watched me take a seat in the bleachers alongside old men in American flag shirts. After a pause, he continued his carefully rehearsed lines. As he spoke, he leaned against his gun like a cane, chattering on as if nothing fazed him except, of course, the impending fear of starvation. I made fists, I counted to ten – both failed attempts at calming the pioneer blood within.

  It all became clear much later. How when Dad gave the signal – waving his gun in the air and shouting, “But the Lord will provide!” – Ron released one of his hand-fed deer from the back of a trailer and into the brush just behind the stage. Then Dad really put his theatrical skills to work, and much to the surprise of his fellow reenactors, pointed to the newly arrived deer and raised the gun.