The ground had shivered beneath eleven-year-old John’s feet, the dragon-like skip loaders gouging into the earth, swinging around abruptly as if tapped on the shoulder, and then emptying the soil into dump trucks to haul away. For almost a year, since his father came home with an expensive bottle of champagne and celebrated with his family the final go-ahead on the new hospital, the cornfield alongside old Holt Memorial took on the relentless bustle of a life-sized ant farm.
Young John was not conscious in the slightest of the ordeal leading up to this: the fevered pursuit by his father and his doctor friends to get the project approved, the tension between his parents as Larry’s commitment to his patients and the new hospital left his mother feeling abandoned and overburdened in raising their sons. John just knew whenever he was allowed to come by the construction site, burly men in hard hats and the musky funk of BO and cigarettes treated him like a prince.
Scores of local laborers earned top union wages bringing the new hospital to life, and the public grandstanding of Dr. Lawrence Husted throughout the project’s evolution made him a hero to those now prospering as a result of his efforts.
Johnny Husted, who hung timidly at his father’s side and recoiled at the bone-shaking clamor of heavy industry, was welcomed by men on the construction team who were so unlike his crisp, well-spoken father. John was lifted up into the cabs of cranes and bulldozers and allowed to shift the levers, and escorted down into the enormous hole in the ground that would one day house the new hospital’s boilers and generators.
Standing below ground, the din up above muted by the cold, moist denseness of the earth, John was handed a flat rock by a squat crewman with a lazy left eye. “It’s an arrowhead,” the man said with dramatic flourish. “Finding ’em by the dozens down here. You hang on to that, for good luck.”
John did, for years. Over the subsequent decades, he would sometimes see a short, rough-hewn old man with a go-funny eye around town and wonder if it was the same guy. If getting your father back from the dead counted as good luck, John figured that had to have been some kind of arrowhead.
Once, John’s fifth grade class came to the work site for a tour. For an hour or so he was a celebrity, the kid who not only helped get their class sprung from school for a whole morning, but who was hailed by workmen who greeted him by name. Even Kelly Hogan, for whom John longed with a chaste desire so all-consuming that he worried something was wrong with him, stood close to him at the lip of the new hospital’s pit for fear she might fall in.
Later that day—and in silly, unprovoked bursts of memory that announced themselves intermittently well into adulthood—John wished he had produced that arrowhead that was never out of his pocket.
“Here,” he could have said to Kelly, telling her the story of the Indians who once lived there, embellishing the tale with the fertile imagination that had already begun sending transmissions. He could have offered it to her with a somber flourish, and she would have accepted—how could she not? And in the transaction, her fingers would have brushed his hand. That indefinable something that overnight seemed to be radiating from pretty much all girls, but in great, woozy ray gun blasts from Kelly Hogan, would be exchanged skin to skin. There would have been a connection.
And as they passed each other in the hallway, the next week and maybe here and there up through senior year, maybe she’d give him a glance. Maybe just a look of acknowledgment, a remnant of the moment they shared at the edge of the great hole in the ground. Something none of the other plain boys in the hall got.
John could have built upon the arrowhead moment. A week or so later, he could have found himself passing her in the hallway. He could have caught her eye, and he could have asked, “So. How’s that arrowhead doing?” But something much more clever (“How’s that arrowhead doing?”???). Something delivered with a sly, loopy wink. Like Bill Murray in Meatballs.
“Hey!” John could have begun with mock urgency. “The school is surrounded by Navajo, give me back that arrowhead or we’re doomed!!!”
The fantasy version of her, who would love all things about him if she would only give him a chance, would have laughed. And that might’ve been it. A laugh, and she’d move on. But now they had reaffirmed the arrowhead as something they shared, just the two of them. It was the grain of sand in the gullet of the oyster of love. Who knows how it might evolve?
Another year, and now they’re in junior high. And they’re in a class together, maybe two or three classes. And that sometimes cruel tyranny of alphabetical seating would deliver Kelly Hogan to John Husted with the same glorious inevitability it had throughout grade school. Years later, John would wonder about that. Was that all it took to be swallowed up by that first, all-consuming crush? Proximity? If she had been Kelly Zipperer, would she have meant nothing to him? Was love really that random when you were eleven?
Who cared? She was Kelly Hogan, and the back of her head was his to gaze upon obsessively for the whole school year. He would stare at her long, black hair—impossibly black, like an infinite void that could consume men’s souls—and fixate on the mole on the back of her neck that would be exposed for tantalizing seconds when she tossed her hair this way or that. It was just a little brown fleck—prepubescent John couldn’t begin to understand why it transfixed him so—but it was a secret about Kelly Hogan he convinced himself no one else possessed.
Least of all Kelly Hogan.
Who knows what the back of their neck looks like? John reasoned incisively. As he charted the back side of her upper torso and head throughout seventh grade science—during which he learned alarmingly little science—he came to believe that at least in this very specific instance, he knew Kelly Hogan even better than she did. And while even John was wise enough to know this was an avenue of seduction never to be attempted (“So, um, did you know you have a mole on the back of your neck?”), it was information he held tight to.
Eric Arndt, stuck there in the first row between fat Carly Abdul and Rich Baderstein, didn’t have a clue about what Kelly Hogan had going on, mole-wise. This was the bond John and Kelly shared.
And they could have had the arrowhead. He should have given her the arrowhead.
Instead, on that day so long ago, as she moved away from the hole in the ground and toward him, John moved away from her. Not in full, she’s-got-cooties retreat. Just an instinctive keeping of distance, as if something desperately desired and now unexpectedly within reach could contain unseen peril if one weren’t careful. Best to stay a few paces away to size up all angles before committing to a plan of action. That felt safe.
The moment passed; Kelly Hogan moved on. Life played out from there.
* * *
Staring now at his father for hours in his hospital bed, John strained to remember if he ever tried to confide in him about Kelly when he was a kid. His dad had been there in the same house during those years John ached for her, and moped over a dropped fly ball in Little League, and had his consciousness expanded by the sheer awesomeness of The A-Team when it came on in ’83. He just had no recollection of sharing any of it with his father.
Which was not the experience he knew with his own daughter. Before Katie started withdrawing as a teenager, John seemed to be privy to every scant fluctuation in her existence: teacher conferences were never missed, soccer games were attended ritualistically, friendships and their bitter breakups (followed by immediate reconciliations) were reported upon by their daughter in long, breathless accounts.
Robin was more likely to hear about boys and crushes and looming puberty vexations, but John’s head sometimes spun at the amount of insight he had into his daughter. What he didn’t get directly from her, he picked up in carelessly left open social media pages or overheard cell phone conversations or mistakenly forwarded text messages. With way too little effort he knew way too much about Katie. Lately, it was becoming a curse.
But in those fragile few years before Larry died, when John crept up on puberty and started driving himself inward, John couldn’t imagine his father knowing in the slightest what was going on in his son’s life. The man worked all the time, and when he was home he worked some more or seemed irritated by being kept from it.
When Walt Bolger told John about his father’s sense of humor, about how moments before being struck down he declared himself down with Daffy Duck over Donald Duck, John felt betrayed. The father he knew was distant and stern and rarely fun. Turned out he saved that for others, outside the home.
In the early eighties John and his grade school friends were fixated mostly on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, but there were quantifiable differences between Daffy Duck and Donald Duck. John had opinions on this subject. If he had thought it remotely possible that his father did, too, this is something they could have talked about.
Having come to consensus on Daffy as the superior cartoon duck, maybe John would have felt comfortable opening up about his mortifying lack of athleticism. And how the growing meanness in Mike was making him sad. And about a girl at school with a mole on the back of her neck.
Maybe Larry wanted to have those conversations with his young son, but John’s introversion turned him away. Quite possibly Larry tried, but John kept things bottled in and Larry stopped trying.
The trauma of Larry dying had blacked out much of John’s childhood; maybe he and his father were closer than he recalled. But he doubted it.
* * *
For decades, John clung to smudgy recollections of the one extended experience he shared alone with his father. It was the summer of 1979, when John was seven and Larry had committed to sharing Cub Scouts with his son. It was a sincere fatherly gesture only occasionally followed through on, but Larry did his best to attend a camp weekend scheduled for late August.
The Cub Scout camp took place over two nights; Larry and John made it for just the second. While all of John’s friends and their fathers gathered on Friday and drove up in a caravan that inspired tales of boyish goofery that John would hear about for weeks, he and his father weren’t going to get there until Saturday.
That one night in the wilderness, though, was magnificent. There was hiking on stony mountain paths, and swimming in the lake, and Frisbees and belching and almost assaultive laughter to the point of light-headedness. A picture of John and his father taken that Saturday, the two of them posing with mock machismo beside the four-inch sunfish that Larry reeled in, sat on the shelves of his mother’s living room for decades. It was the first thing John brought with him to his father’s room in the dead hospital to add to his collection of family memories.
Later, as fathers and sons sat up late around the campfire, toasting marshmallows and listening to ghost stories, John felt a trance-like calm come over him as an uproarious day folded into the dense muteness of night.
He still held memories of his father, glimpsed through the smoke of the campfire, showing a relaxation John would never see again. As the men drank beer and passed around a silver flask, Larry unwound, laughing easily and sharing stories John spent years aching to remember.
When the hour got late and the wooziness of being up way past bedtime kicked in, a guitar appeared. The boys were obligated to hoot derisively as their fathers started to mangle Elvis Presley songs of their youth, but John watched in fascination as his dad joined in. He was shy at first; John watched his father’s lips quietly recalling every word as he held himself back. But as the night got longer and the Pabst kept flowing, Larry ended up belting out those corny old songs as loudly as anyone.
* * *
The fathers finally shooed the boys off to their tents, and the men remained around the fire for another hour. Drifting in and out of sleep in the heated embrace of his sleeping bag, the day’s activities having depleted him, John still recalled straining to listen in on the adult male voices whispering and laughing amidst the crackling of the dying campfire and the crisp hiss of opening beer cans. Which voice was his father’s, buried in the soft murmur just outside the tent? Was it something Larry said that caused the others to laugh too loud, disrupting the silence of the slumbering campground? Was this the father he got to take home with him the next day, or would the serious and stern front draw back up by the time the weekend ended?
John was still awake when his father crawled unsteadily into their small tent. In the near total blackness lit only by the moon pressing through the trees, John watched as Larry slid into his sleeping bag and emitted an exultant sigh of contentment that seemed to unburden his soul. Father and son lay side by side, face-to-face. In the dark, through half-squinted eyelids, John studied his father’s shadowed face. He reeked of beer and smoke and sweat and the pungent funk of teeth he failed to brush.
Larry’s breathing was deep and satisfied. He seemed to drift off to sleep almost immediately. Or perhaps he lay there humming an Elvis song to himself.
Maybe the two of them, lying there inches apart, didn’t know the other was awake and available to talk. For just a few moments, before they both drifted off to sleep.