Daniel swallowed, still tasting ozone and ashes from his dream, and watched the quiet stillness of the water, broken only by the ripples from their boat, the sounds from the small motor, and his Uncle’s brash voice. He loved his Uncle, especially with all that the man had done for Daniel in the past seven odd years since Daniel’s father —Uncle Tim’s younger brother— had disappeared. And especially after taking Daniel in after being released? Daniel was grateful and didn’t argue. Losing his Dad had already damaged Daniel, but within a very short space of time —barely three years after his Dad had disappeared— Dan’s mother had simply left.
Whereas his father literally disappeared without a trace —leaving behind his wallet, his glasses, his blue Dodge pick-up still running with the keys in the ignition and the truck door wide open — Daniel’s mother left a note that simply said, “I’m sorry.” The woman’s purse and a small yellow suitcase were gone from the hall closet. An eviction notice and an overdrawn letter from the bank sat beneath the woman’s house-keys on the kitchen table beside the note. The rattling blue Dodge pick-up was gone from the driveway. It was three days before Daniel’s high school graduation. No one blamed Daniel’s mind for tuning out like a bad cable connection. When Tim and Judy didn’t see Daniel or his mother anywhere on the field that had been set up for the Tottenville High School’s Class of ‘80 —and when Daniel didn’t appear himself when his name was called during the ceremony— Tim and Judy immediately left the ball-field and drove to Daniel’s house. They found him huddled in a ball on the kitchen floor. He was muttering something about dark stars and kept repeating something nonsensical about a missing king.
Tim thought the boy was talking about his father. Judy thought the kid had been listening to Elvis. They knew Daniel had had a hard time after his father had vanished, but until they spoke with Dr. Peterson in the weeks that followed Daniel being admitted to the Willowbrook State School, they had no idea just how rough a time the boy had been having. Dr. Peterson confessed that Daniel’s mother herself had tried getting Daniel into some kind of treatment because, according to her, the boy had been having what she called “weird fits.” It was a shame she hadn’t followed up, deciding that walking out had been her only option. The only thing neither Tim nor Judy nor Dr. Peterson nor even the cops that came to fill out yet another missing persons report could determine was where the three dots of blood on the kitchen table, actually on the eviction notice, and the inch long smudge of blood on the handle of the closet door had come from. Judy had volunteered that Daniel’s mother had probably had one of her infamous nose-bleeds, or maybe it was her monthly gotten out of hand. Daniel was in no shape to give any possible explanations and it was simply chalked up as something Daniel’s mother would have to explain when she came back.
But she never came back and they never did get an explanation.
Uncle Tim adjusted the boat’s drift just above a choice clam bed. Just twenty minutes prior, Daniel and his Uncle were moored at the Lemon Creek dock, at the end of Bayview Avenue, an old country road that housed some of the clammers while in season. It had still been dark as they tacked their way around the bay to their family’s clam and oyster beds. Tim tossed the anchor into the grey-blue the water of Raritan Bay, which divided Staten Island and New Jersey, just as the first light of dawn began turning the sky into a vivid, vicious pink. While his Uncle had muttered about bad weather coming, Daniel had used the pinkish light to scribble out last night’s dream —well, his last dream from only an hour or so since— while it was still fresh in his mind.
Raritan Bay had had a long history of oyster and clam harvesting dating back to the early Lenape Indians that had first inhabited Staten Island and, for a quite few generations, Daniel’s family had been interwoven into that history. As far as Daniel could remember, most of the male members of his family had all been clam and oystermen. After Daniel’s father had disappeared, Uncle Tim had taken over his younger brother’s boat and, when Daniel got back on his own feet, Tim hired his nephew as a roper. As a roper, Daniel was responsible for hauling up the clam rake that sat on the end of a twenty-foot aluminum pole. After a time at the bottom of the bay, the rake would be dragged up and dumped on deck where they would then sort the harvest. Tim knew it was hard work, but he also knew Daniel needed some thickening up. The boy was as pale and as thin as one of the sheets of paper that he had been writing on. His long, reddish hair didn’t help matters. Daniel did, after all take after his father and Tim’s brother had been what their mother called “a ginger.” The color was a cross between a tarnished penny, Ronald McDonald’s horrible mop, and their old ginger tomcat. Tim hated that cat and he hated Ronald McDonald. He didn’t hate his brother, or his nephew, but as his mother had said— gingers didn’t run in their family. The color made Daniel look thinner, more sickly. Tim shook his head and blinked away the sting in his eyes. Hauling the clam rake for a few days here and there, in addition to learning the orderly’s subtle arts of tackling, subduing, and tying down patients at Willowbrook where Daniel now worked, would build up Daniel from a walking stick figure to something more manly. Maybe the sun would bleach down that hair too, make it a little more tolerable. Shrugging and clucking his tongue slightly, Tim eyeballed the rake lying along the deck, midship. They couldn’t start until they had their morning ritual.
“Get the thermos Dan,” Tim instructed his nephew while he scrabbled around in an orange nylon drawstring bag for two camp-style mugs.
“Sure thing, Uncle Tim,” Daniel responded gently, rummaging around in his own bag. Pulling out the battered silver thermos and cracking the cap, Daniel had to admit he loved this part of the day. Despite his Uncle’s coarse manner and vulgar demeanor, Daniel did love spending the day outside with the brazen old salt, but this literally was his favorite way to start the day. The aroma of a strong Columbian dark roast pierced the air as Daniel poured the brew into the two dull aluminum cups his Uncle held as steadily as possible on a rolling boat at sea. The sun was rising and, despite the scarlet fingers reaching across the sky, the two men clanked their cups together in gesture to a good day. They sat upon the slick deck, wet from splashes of the Bay’s frothy water two miles off of the wooded south-eastern shore of Staten Island, sipping their steaming cups. The tanned beach on the Staten Island side began to glisten as the sun’s first rays illuminated the high cliffs and oak trees that lined their crest. Upon the opposite side of the bay sat Perth Amboy, New Jersey, which bore dilapidated factories and abandoned buildings, themselves bearing years of graffiti. The New Jersey side at their backs was ignored by Daniel and his Uncle as it only emanated an aura of filth and rottenness.
Daniel was grateful to be in the open air even though it was midsummer —not his favorite time of year. Since being on the work-release program, when Daniel wasn’t in treatment with Dr. Peterson, either one-on-one or as part of one of the good doctor’s cherished group sessions, Daniel was indoors, as an orderly at the old Willowbrook State School. Daniel couldn’t quite bring himself to call Willowbrook anything other than Willowbrook, despite it’s newly rebranded title of the Staten Island Developmental Center. As an orderly, he attended to the needs of the medical staff and, as Willowbrook went through its reorganization, as an orderly, Daniel was assigned routine tasks that were of no risk to the patient. Yet, dealing with psychiatric patients, Daniel did have to physically handle and restrain the disorderlies, just as he himself remembered being restrained while a patient himself at Willowbrook. It was strange being on the other side of the restraints, so to speak. Dr. Peterson had recommended Daniel for the pilot work release program and since Daniel wasn’t technically insane, had no verifiable mental conditions, and had a high school diploma, being trained as an orderly was a sight better than being assigned to work in the institution’s laundry, kitchen, or as part of the general maintenance staff. Dr. Peterson had even suggested that if Daniel made the decision to continue onto college, psychiatry or psychology were two excellent fields to study, seeing how Daniel
had already had some relevant life-molding experience.
When the clamming season began in May, Dr. Peterson allowed Daniel different work hours in order to rope for Uncle Tim. The mornings were spent on the bay and his afternoons were split between work and therapy. Daniel looked forward to this time of year, being away from the Center and its associated conditions. Before he had been committed, throughout high school, Daniel had spent one or two odd summers with his Uncle’s other crews, not roping—he was too young and too scrawny—but he had helped the men sort the catch, measuring, bagging, and tagging the littlenecks and cherrystones to make sure they were an appropriate size authorized by the great State of New York. Before they got on the truck for shipment to the plant in Long Island, the state required all bags get tagged. Daniel had loved being on the boat, even if it meant slicing his hands every so often on the razor edge of an aggravated clam. His memories of his father doing the same work were so clouded as to be nonexistent, except for that one time, just a few days before the man disappeared, that he had taken Daniel on the boat. Because Daniel was so wiry, despite being fifteen, his Dad figured Daniel couldn’t handle roping; instead of clamming, they had brought lines to fish and a wicked looking little cage to dredge behind the boat and pick up crabs. That night they had a clam-bake and Uncle Tim had brought the clams.
It was refreshing, grounding, and cleansing to be on the water now. It was not just out of duty to his Uncle, or the pay, but the exposure to the open water, clean air, and the tangential connection to his father that made sense to Daniel. He couldn’t imagine ever going back to school to learn a task that would keep him cooped up inside a place like Willowbrook for the rest of his life. Being on the water had a freedom that that place never could have.
“So,” Tim grumbled while sipping the hot coffee. Daniel had been too deep in thought, his eyes fixed on Staten Island’s tree-line, to notice how steadily his Uncle had been watching him. “Tell me, nephew of mine, how’s the old snake pit?” Again the grizzled man made the grating bark that sounded more like nails on metal than a proper laugh as he stole the appellation for Willowbrook made popular by the likes of Geraldo Rivera and Robert F Kennedy way back in 1965. “They still using old sparky? You have to lobotomize anyone lately?” He barked again, slapping his knee so soundly he spilled a bit of his coffee.
Daniel closed his eyes, sipped his cup and tried not to remember the sounds —or the smells— of Willowbrook when he had been a resident. As compared to ten years earlier, though? Daniel had it good when he was there. For one, he had clothes. Well, a jumpsuit by way of a uniform. And three solid meals a day, only one of which could be considered gruel. It was a gloppy porridge that was supposed to be oatmeal, but tasted like wallpaper paste. The crowded, filthy, unsanitary conditions the patients had been accustomed to throughout most of Willowbrook’s history, along with the questionable medical experiments conducted in the past, had all been exposed in Rivera’s documentary and through Senator Kennedy’s crusade. By the time Daniel had been admitted to Willowbrook, a change had already begun. Most of the developmentally disabled children had already been sent to other facilities. The adults, the criminally insane, and many older patients, however, still called Willowbrook home.
The fact that despite all his Uncle knew Daniel had endured, the man could sit there, look Daniel evenly in the eye and crack wise about electroshock therapy —something Daniel had been given scant weeks before being released to the outside world, something Daniel still had nightmares about, something Daniel himself had to prepare current patients to receive by way of restraints and rubberized mouth guards— should have been enough for Daniel to throw the remaining coffee in his Uncle’s eyes, to smash that weather-beaten smiling face into a bloody mess with the thermos, and to savage the man with the fiendish little clamming knife winking at Daniel on the deck from its orange plastic sheath. But Daniel didn’t move, other than to sip his remaining coffee in silence, blinking slowly as he watched the red dawn set the water and the shoreline ablaze in a riot of color and light.
Tim reached out and slapped his nephew squarely on the shoulder. “You’re a good kid, Dan. Got no sense of humor, but you’re a good boy. You’re Uncle Tim is a sick bastard, but you’re stuck with me. How’s the room? Being a basement, it’s not the height of fashion —but it’s a sight better than sleeping on the fold-out sofa in the living room, am I right? And, about the windows… sorry that they’re more like a prison with all that caging and wire we had to string up, but we had an issue with squirrels and the homeless last summer.”
Daniel nodded, holding his head high, inhaling the last lingering aroma from the coffee as he drained his cup. “No worries, Uncle Tim. It’ll work. The windows are a little high up and, yeah the sun and scenery is obscured but—” Daniel sighed.
“Obscured?” Again the bark.
Daniel cracked his neck, swallowing his vexation and the sudden feeling he was being insulted. Ashes and dust. He tried taking another sip, to cover the sooty taste with the bitter brew, but his cup was empty.
“Ok mister fancy pants. Your scenery is obscured.” Tim made a little flourish with his free hand, doing a sort of seated half-bow that was more like a deranged curtsey. “What scenery do you really get to see beyond those windows, now? You don’t spend a whole helluva lot of time staring out since it’s mostly nighttime when you are home to stare out them windows —do you?”
“Not really, but some nights, when it’s not too late, or on the odd day off,” Daniel made a small strangled sound that could have been a chuckle, but Tim wasn’t sure. “I do like the woods out back, behind the house where my room looks out. So, I don’t stare out too much, but I do like the closeness of the trees and shadows that play upon the ground. It’s a comfort at any rate,” Daniel sighed.
Tim fixed his blue eyes on his nephew who simply averted his own eyes. “When you’re not watching your obscured scenery, just make sure you don’t go wander into those woods too far. I just don’t want you to go too far out back of the house. Don’t go too far, the grounds aren’t safe beyond my home. Besides, we don’t want you disappearing too, now, do we?” Tim’s voice had become a bit stilted, repetitive, almost artificial in a way that set Daniel’s teeth on edge. Then the grim man barked and Daniel winced. “We’ll handle the windows after the season’s out. On the whole, the entire basement does need some TLC, but you’re making headway on your share of it. The whole fucking basement was a mess before you got out of that place... Still, we managed to get the walls replastered and that damnable crack sealed before you came to live with us. Your Aunt’s laundry room and the boiler area aside, the rest was a fucking disaster area. I mean, we had all that fucking water damage still left from the winter after your Dad—” The man’s voice trailed off suddenly and he had an expression as though he had been slapped. Quickly he poured himself another cup of coffee, offering the thermos to Daniel who declined, opting instead to adjust his orange bib pants and rubber boots.
Uncle Tim didn’t need to tell Daniel about the winter of ‘78. It had been more than bad, and the spring that came after had some areas of Staten Island under more than a foot of water just from the snow melt, easily more than that with all the rain. One storm that February had dropped more than two feet of snow. It was Daniel’s first birthday, his sixteenth, without his father. Instead of brush up his driving skills with his old man, Daniel started having his first nightmares.
Come to think of it, if his Uncle Tim wasn’t still watching Daniel the way a person would watch a stick of dynamite ready to blow, Daniel probably would have taken out his journal to write his recollections down. This was exactly the kind of thing Dr. Peterson wanted Daniel to remember —and to record. Daniel remembered having a dream the night after that sixteenth birthday, right after that storm. In it, he was looking for his father, wading the fields of Mount Loretto in snow that went up to his neck in some places. He actually had been woken up almost a mile from their house, in a field adjacent to the Mount Loretto orp
hanage. How he had gotten there —truly in snow that was up to his waist— wearing his pajamas and bathrobe was a mystery. He had been following his father in the dream. The man had been wearing the horrible yellow t-shirt and cut off jean shorts that he had worn the last time Daniel had seen him, that same summer that all that bullshit had happened at Pouch Camp with cousin Jonathan. Daniel followed the vivid streak that was his father, contrasting against the snow— the deep auburn of his father’s hair pulled back in one of his pony tails, the jarring yellow shirt, the cool bluejeans. Save for his hair, Daniel’s father was very much like Uncle Tim in appearance, stocky, strong, hardened by the sea, but there had always been something warmer, more inviting about his father than his Uncle Tim. Maybe it was the way his hair and his skin, bronzed by the sun, made him look... not yellow, but golden. Except for being so damned tall and pale, like his mother, Daniel was the spitting image of his dad. Daniel remembered the churning desire to catch his father so Daniel could be comforted by one of his dad’s great bear-hugs and one of his heart-warming laughs. In the dream, when Daniel had caught up to his father, as the powerful man turned around to look at his son —the man’s eyes were mismatched and in his calloused hands he held a flat piece of fire-hardened clay that itself sported an intricate design that looked vaguely Native American. Daniel had woken screaming because his father’s eyes had been those same horrible eyes that Daniel’s younger cousin Jonathan had had — Jonathan Martense with the one yellow eye and one eye that shifted like the ocean, sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes grey. Daniel loved his cousin, but why the hell would his cousin’s eyes be staring from his father’s head?
An overnight security guard at the orphanage had seen someone wearing something orange-yellow stumbling out of the woods and down the broad field in front of St. Joachim and Anne Church. The man had thought one of the prisoners from the Arthur Kill Correctional Facility had escaped. Instead he found Daniel wearing a yellow-orange bathrobe and oversized galoshes stumbling toward Hylan Boulevard. The sun was just coming up and it was as though Daniel had dropped from the sky, as there were no tracks behind the boy showing where he might have come from and he wasn’t even chilled. The guard had called the police to deal with the kid because, as the guard told the cops, the boy was muttering some “cock-a-mamey bullshit that don’t sound English,” and as the cops told Daniel’s mother when they brought him home since one of them recognized the boy from having been called to the scene of that business with Daniel’s father, the kid’s eyes were completely black without whites or irises. Despite Daniel not having spoken with either security guard or police officer, he had remembered everything that had happened that night —from the dream to waking. When Daniel had gone to change from his wet pajamas, he had glanced in the mirror on the back of his closet door. His eyes had been glassy, but otherwise his perfectly normal shade of green.
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