This book is for

—who else?—

the mothers, daughters, and sisters involved:

Barbara, Leslie, and Melanie

The author would like to thank the editors of the following magazines, in which these essays first appeared:

sound in Puerto del Sol

brothers in The Antioch Review

royal crown: i and royal crown: ii (originally as royal crown) in Creative Nonfiction

zebulun in New Letters

atonement and mornings in The Chicago Tribune

first names in The Seattle Times

LEARNING SEX in The Notre Dame Review

JACOB in The Gettysburg Review

HUGO in The Bellingham Review

ALLEGIANCE in The Iowa Review

All the rivers flow into the sea, Yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, There they flow again.

Ecclesiastes 1:7

.

This is the last room: the garage.

We've been in the new house more than a month already, each day thus far filled with putting away all we own, each day filled with trying to find order in chaos. This is our dream house, after all, the one for which we bought the lot, the one we helped design, the one we plan to see filled with our lives and our children's lives here in South Carolina, so putting things in their just and proper places once and for all seems only right.

We—Melanie, my wife, and our two boys, Zeb, age ten, and Jacob, age seven—live a five-minute walk from the tidal marsh along the Wando River, where these spring evenings we can stand and watch the sun set behind Daniel Island, the sky above us reflected on the river to form a wide and shimmering band of blue and red and magenta, and where we can watch slender stalks of yellowgrass and saw grass and salt-marsh hay sway with the movement of the tide. A ten-minute bike ride takes us to the clubhouse, perched on the edge of the Wando.

and the swimming pool there, and the marina, where on a quiet morning you can hear the breeze off Charleston Harbor gently rattle the halyards on the sailboats, the rhythmic metal tap on the masts like some impatient dream of open seas, full sails billowing.

Already there are three forts in the surrounding woods to which the boys can retreat; already there is talk of signing them up for the club's swim team. At breakfast we've seen out the bay window everything from pileated woodpeckers to Carolina wrens; yesterday morning, when I took the dog out to get the paper, there stood a doe in the empty lot next door, only to dart, at the sight of our Lab, for the woods at the end of the street.

We're home.

But the garage. No matter how crisp and ordered the inside of the house, no matter how many empty and flattened boxes piled up outside the kitchen door, a house is not a home, at least in my mind, until the garage has been put together. It's only a rudderless ship set for sail, a freshly waxed and gleaming car up on blocks, a perfectly detailed map with no true North. That's what I think, anyway, though I know that if I were to tell this to my wife, she'd only shake her head, let out an exasperated sigh.

"Men," she'd say.

1 sit on the bottom step of the stairs down into the garage and survey it all, this endless mass of material goods we've accrued: a two-car garage piled haphazardly with boxes, yard tools, Zeb and Jake's outside toys and sports equipment; and the camping equipment, recycling bins, bicycles, lawn mower, more boxes. A thousand items, all ready and waiting for me, and though I

2 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

have no clue as to where to start, still my heart shines at the prospect of the job before me, as though by putting it all away I will become a better husband, a better father, a better man.

My father, I know, would have thrown as much of it out as he could. His garage was always a lean, pristine place, and it seems now, on this Friday I've cleared for the express mission of setting up the garage, that throwing things out is the way to begin. Separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

I stand, go to the mounds of our belongings on the left side of the garage, and pick up the first victim: an old and holey garden hose I've been meaning to repair for the last year or two. But now the truth rises in me, ugly and incriminating: I'd rather just buy a new one than seek out the pinhole leaks and replace the hardware at either end, and so I toss the hose out the side door, the one that leads off into the backyard. So begins, if in a heartless way, my association with my garage.

My father was a man of few words, and even fewer tools. What I remember of the first garage I ever knew was that it was a dark and windowless place: tar paper and bare studs, open rafters above. This was back in Buena Park, California, in a tiny stucco tract house where we lived from the time I was two until I was nine, and I can remember, too, the small Peg-Board above the workbench at the back of the garage. On it hung one hammer, one hand saw, and two screwdrivers, a Phillips-head and a flat-head. That was it.

Sure, there must have been other stuff somewhere in there, but back then garage paraphernalia wasn't important to me. What was important was that after Saturday yard work, we three

boys finally done pulling weeds along the fence in the backyard, my dad would hose out the entire garage, giving the concrete floor a slick sheen, a temptation too great for us. Brad, Tim, and I had no choice but to take turns running as fast as we could along the asphalt driveway, then jumping flat-footed onto that cement, blasting from pure California Saturday morning sunlight into the black garage to slide barefooted as far as we could, arms out like surfers' for balance.

And of course my mother forbade our doing this, hollering from the front porch each Saturday about broken arms and concussions. But my father only shook his head at us, gave what we supposed was a smile, then set about sweeping out the water, his garage once more pristine, every item in its place, we boys sliding and laughing and falling and laughing again.

But when I was nine, my father was transferred, and we moved from Buena Park to Phoenix, a place so strange and alien it might have been another planet: saguaro cactus as decorative landscaping, snakes sunning themselves on warm driveways at daybreak, coyotes rooting through the garbage cans.

And nobody had garages.

Instead, we all had carports, open-air structures under which you simply parked your car. Gone overnight was the sense of mystery about the garage, the dark and cool of it, the bare studs and tar paper replaced with eight painted wooden posts holding up a roof.

Though there were still weeds to be pulled, there was no grass to be mowed; instead people had gravel yards, and my father had us out there every Saturday morning raking the gravel

4 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

into careful, thin lines while he swept the driveway. Gone were the days of slick and wet concrete, the hose replaced by a push broom. This was the desert; hosing down the carport was a frivolous waste of water.

We lived there until I was sixteen, seven years that saw momentous changes in the life of our family: We three brothers entered our teen years and splintered up, Tim, the youngest, following in my dad's footprints, raking the gravel in a manner that would, later in my life, remind me of Japanese rock gardens; me, the middle boy, burrowing into books and band; and Brad, the oldest, falling in with the wrong crowd, turning rebel, finally dropping out of high school his senior year to join the navy.

I can't help but think that, somehow, this loss of a garage had something to do with it. Back in California, we three boys used the garage as a haven from Mom and Dad, built extravagant forts of blankets and chairs and the grille of our '62 Dodge once Dad got home, the engine warm and ticking beside us. In that garage we rode our bikes in endless figure eights all summer long, passed time in the cool dark; in that garage we gave each other practice swats with the Ping-Pong paddle, the three of us having put on two pairs of pants and three pairs of underwear apiece, all in anticipation of what was to come once Dad got home and Mom told him of how we'd raided the garage refrigerator, had eaten every Kool-Pop and Fudgsicle and even the watermelon that afternoon.

It was in that garage that we became, it only occurs to me now, brothers.

There is no there there in a carport, no sense of place other than one to park the car in; instead of riding bikes in the cool dark of a garage all summer long we stayed indoors, where it

7k ^U £/**wv^e 5

was air-conditioned, and watched Gilligan's Island reruns until we could guess the episode before the opening credits were over. We took our swats without the luxury of practices with the Ping-Pong paddle, forced to gauge solo how many layers to wear, Mom too nosy and poking her head into our bedrooms whenever we attempted mock tribunals. We tried building our forts in the living room, but the lack of the engine's tick and the absence of the dangerously sweet smell of gasoline revealed to us the sad truth of our improvised architecture: Here were only chairs, here were only blankets. No wonder, then, we each broke for our own lives.

By the time my father was transferred back to California when I was sixteen, we brothers were as good as strangers: Brad somewhere in the South Pacific on the first of his three SEAPAC cruises, Tim attending the new high school, Shadow Mountain, me the old one, Paradise Valley, this split a result of overdevelopment of the area and the opening of a new district. I was first tenor in the jazz ensemble, Timmy a hack tuba player. We three bore nothing in common, though I suppose, of course, it was inevitable, this splintering up; all of us, for better or worse, grow up and away.

Then, literally overnight, there we were, once again in a stucco tract home in Southern California, though this one was bigger, closer to the ocean. More importantly, we had a garage once again.

Saturday mornings we two remaining boys helped with the yard: Tim with a religious fervor that would later find its release in the opening of his own landscaping business, me with the

6 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

begrudging attitude of the unjustiy persecuted. I was a sixteen-year-old who only wanted to live back in Phoenix, where his friends were, no matter the carports or gravel yards. While my dad, oblivious as far as I could tell, only hosed out the garage.

I was a hayseed from Phoenix dropped square in the middle of the surf capital of America: Huntington Beach, California. Timmy was now at the same school with me, though I acted as though I didn't know him, a freshman. I still wore bib overalls and flannel shirts just like everyone else back at Paradise Valley, even when I was surrounded by longhaired blond surfers, male and female alike, wearing Hawaiian shirts turned inside-out, corduroy shorts, and thongs. Timmy took on that disguise with ease, shucking his overalls for colorful rayon hula girls and those shorts in a move that further distanced him, the traitor, from my peripheral vision. Finally band, my refuge back in Arizona once we boys had made our split, turned its back on me: I couldn't even make the band at Huntington Beach High because, the director quietly explained to me my first day there, their jazz ensemble was going on tour the next month, and everyone had had to sell cheese in order to go, and since I hadn't sold any cheese I couldn't truly expect to be included in the trip to Modesto, now could I?

So my days were spent inside a funk of the first degree, me silent save for the muted grunts around the dinner and breakfast tables, a shorthand of squelched anger at my parents, at my little brother, even at Brad. Nowhere to be seen, he was somehow nonetheless implicated in my getting shafted by the world.

Then one morning a month or so after we'd moved, my father of few words nudged me awake in the predawn dark oi my bedroom, and I opened my eyes to see him above me, a

silhouette against the light from the hallway, there, in his business suit, briefcase in hand, faceless for the dark. As every weekday morning of my entire life, he was dressed and ready to walk out the door before daylight, and I remember sitting up in my bed, rubbing my eyes, then looking up at him again, wondering what the heck had made him wake me.

"Read this," he said, and handed me an index card.

I took it, then reached with my other hand to the desk beside my bed, put on my glasses. I blinked a few times, held the card so that I could read it in the light from the hallway behind him. On the card was typed the words, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

"Someone gave it to me at the office," he said. He was quiet a moment, then said, "He heard me talking about you to one of the guys. Thought you'd appreciate that." He paused again, then turned, headed for the hall. He stopped once he was out there, and now I could see his face, could see his eyes on me, his middle son.

He was the man who'd looked at us three boys lined up on the living room couch in our protective layers of clothes that day we'd raided the garage refrigerator, only to pierce us each with his eyes and say in a voice so strong and solid we'd had no choice but to obey: "Boys. Don't do that again." He was the same man who parked the Dodge just so, one or another of us directing him into the garage like a ground-crewman for a DC-8, him setting the brake and smiling, shaking his head while he climbed out of the car, we three already setting up the chairs, unfolding the blankets.

8 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

He was the same man who, on Saturday mornings, worked the hose inside our garage, the man who seemed to smile while our mother hollered, we boys having no choice but to run for the cement, blast from pure California Saturday-morning sunlight into the black garage, then slide barefooted as far as we could.

I looked at the index card, then back at him. I said, "Thanks." I paused, shrugged, a little stunned at this moment of help offered by a man of so few words. "Thanks," I said again.

He gave again what I supposed was a smile, then headed down the hall to the stairs, turned out the light. I lay back in bed, heard a few moments later the slow groan of the garage door as my father pulled it open, a sound I almost never heard for the fact I was usually stone asleep this time each morning. I heard the car start, heard it back out. Then came the same slow groan, the cold twist and strain of metal springs, as he eased the garage door closed.

We have survived. Brad is a carpenter in Sequim, Washington, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters. Tim designs and sells wooden playground equipment, those huge structures you see in city parks all over the country, and lives with his wife and son and daughter not three miles from our parents' house in Huntington Beach. And I am a writer in South Carolina, a land so alien to Southern California and Phoenix, Arizona, it might as well be another planet. I'm still stunned at a deer in the yard next door, at woodpeckers and wrens out the

breakfast-nook bay window, at yellowgrass and saw grass and the shimmering face of a river at sunset.

And now, at a little after two on a Friday afternoon, the garage is finished. It's a different garage from that one in Buena Park, the walls here Sheetrocked and painted, the two windows that look out on the front lawn filling the place with light, no tar paper, no bare studs. To the right I've stacked a box filled with bats and badminton rackets and the volleyball net, another packed with baseball gloves and various Nerf balls, Rollerblades, and radio-control cars. Above it all I've nailed a metal rack for yard tools: two shovels, two spring rakes, a push broom, and an edger.

To the left are the boxes of gardening paraphernalia, my wife's obsession: hand shovels and garden hose fixtures, sprinklers and sprayers, fertilizers and insecticides and empty terracotta pots, all waiting for her gentle hand. Next comes the electric blower, next to that my Weedwacker, next to that the lawn mower. There sits my toolbox, the small gray plastic one; inside it a couple of screwdrivers, a tape measure, a small socket set.

That's it for my tools. Like father, like son.

I'm planning on building a workbench in here, planning to hang a Peg-Board above it to give a home to those tools. Eventually I'll build shelves in here, too, and place these boxes on them so that on Saturday mornings, after the lawn is done, I can hose the place down and teach my boys the finer points of garage sliding. But not before I buy that new hose, the one to replace the holey one buried beneath the discard pile outside, a pile so high I know I've done my father proud.

It's time now for me to pick the boys up from school,

10 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

Melanie having gone for groceries, and I step out of this pristine garage, this newly waxed hot rod finally off the blocks, this map of my life finally given its own true North. Time, too, to make some phone calls this evening: one to Washington to talk to a carpenter, one to a man who designs toys for kids like my own. And one to a man of few words, even fewer tools.

I stand back from my garage, hands on hips, to survey it all, then reach to the garage door above me, take hold the handle, and pull it closed.

<^CTU*VcL

Sunday mornings I got up at five for the paper route, put on cutoffs and a T-shirt, tennis shoes with no socks, and went outside. Monday through Saturday afternoons I delivered the Phoenix Gazette, but Sunday mornings it was the Arizona Republic, thick and heavy. In the afternoons I could do the route—sixty-three stops—in one trip, my paperbags filled and hung over the handlebars of my bike. But the Sunday paper took two or three loads. I'd inherited the route a year before from my older brother, Brad, when he'd decided he was too old for it. He was thirteen then. I was eleven.

Some summer mornings there would be a snake on the driveway, sleeping there since the night before, when the concrete had still been warm. I'd get a broom from the storeroom I around to the side of the house, back behind the carport, then move slowly toward the snake—it was never a rattlesnake, always just some brown snake lying flat on the driveway—and poke it with the handle, push it into the river rocks that lined

the drive. Sometimes it'd wake up, squirm away through the rocks and across the gravel front yard. Sometimes it was dead.

Winter mornings the sky was still dark out, not even a hint of dawn coming, only cold desert stars, and I'd have to put on a sweatshirt and coat and hat and gloves and two pairs of socks. The rest of the house slept, winter and summer; this was my job, nobody else's. Unless it rained, when Mom drove me in the station wagon.

There at the foot of the drive were five or six bundles: the news sections and the inserts. Sometimes I did the right thing, put the inserts inside the news sections so that the papers read in order. That way my customers could see the world the way it was intended, from the black square box in the front page upper left corner listing something called Casualties, inside it strange abbreviations—SSgt, PvtlC, Lt.jg.—right through to the classifieds buried in the insert.

But most times I just put the insert, with its comics and Sunday magazine and entertainment sections, on top of the news section, folded it, put the rubber band around it, and laid it in one of the loose and empty paperbags on my handlebars. Then I'd make my first trip, the filled paperbags so heavy I could only point the bike down the street and hope I didn't lose control and steer into a cactus in somebody's front yard.

We lived at 2802 Victor Hugo Avenue, and I rode down the street, threw first to Cameron Haney's house—the kid from a place called Queens whose dad worked for American Airlines as a mechanic. Cameron had red hair and wore shorts with five or six zippered pockets, each filled with rocks the right size for throwing. My dad called him Randy, for a reason none of us could figure out, but my dad didn't call any of our friends by

14 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

their right names, only made up names and called them that from then on. Cameron ate Cheerios with ketchup poured over them. Tim, my little brother, had seen him do it.

Eric Stine's house was at the bottom of the street, where Victor Hugo curved to the left and ran into Joan D'Arc. Eric was one year older than me, and in Troop 226 with Brad and me. I made certain to get the paper on the porch there, because I liked Eric Stine. When we played BB-gun wars, he took good clear shots, didn't cry when he got hit. And Mr. and Mrs. Stine tipped me a dime each week.

I then turned left onto Joan D'Arc, threw papers on up the street. The development we lived in sat next to a small mountain, sharp black Arizona rock poking up off the desert floor. A small hill sat to one side of the mountain, and the ground leading up to the mountain and hill was part of where I delivered papers. The route in this area was a matter of coasting and throwing, pedaling hard and throwing, coasting and throwing. By the time I made it up to the corner, where Joan D'Arc hit 28th, my shirt was sweated through, my glasses sliding down my nose.

I turned left onto 28th and away from the mountain, threw all the way down to Bell Road, where I turned right and threw a couple houses, then right again and back into the tract, the streets flat and straight down here. I threw to Mr. Morrow, the editor of the local weekly, Valley News and Views, his son Tom the one to deliver it every Thursday; I threw to the Machmers, who'd spray-painted their gravel 'iawn" a dark green, as if we'd all be fooled into believing it was actually grass in their front yard; I threw to Mrs. Bland, Tim's second-grade teacher, an old woman who had a loud cocker spaniel and who wanted her paper inside the carport on the step up to her kitchen door. She

tipped me a quarter a week, so that was where she found her paper, even early Sunday mornings.

By this time my paperbags were empty and I'd head up Captain Dreyfuss, turn left onto Emile Zola, hit 28th again, pedal to Victor Hugo, and coast down to the pile of folded newspapers on my driveway, the breeze I made as I rode cooling me down. In summer the sun was up by now and lit the desert in a yellow light. Victor Hugo was the last street in the tract, behind our house three or four miles of empty desert sloping south and away toward Squaw Peak; beyond that row of mountains, Phoenix itself; and though we'd lived here for almost three years already, I still couldn't believe we lived in the desert, a place where snakes slept on driveways, where people had gravel front yards, cactus instead of trees.

We'd moved there in 1967, my dad given the job of sales manager for Royal Crown Cola by the owner of the Phoenix franchise. He'd been a route supervisor for RC in Los Angeles, had worked for them since 1953. One August evening he came home from work to our house in Buena Park, went to the refrigerator, and pulled out a can of beer. He had on a white short-sleeved shirt and a black tie loose at the collar. He had on black-and-white checked pants, the black horn-rimmed glasses he'd started wearing not long before. He'd played football in high school, had driven trucks for RC before he was made a salesman. The glasses made him look funny to me, him with his big arms and thick neck. I'd been wearing my own glasses, plastic horn-rims that looked like redwood, for two years already.

He stood with the refrigerator door open, that can in his

16 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

hand, and said to the room, "How'd you like to move to Arizona?"

We four children were in the kitchen, the three boys having followed him in from the street, where we'd been playing 500 with the Walker boys and Steve Jensen and John Steinwand, who was too old to be playing with us and stayed at bat for as long as he wanted. We followed Dad into the house most times he came home, unless we were in trouble and my mother had warned us we'd be getting the belt when he got home. My sister, Leslie, stood on one of the dinette set chairs at the kitchen sink, washing dishes with my mother.

We boys looked at him, at each other. We had our mitts in our hands and only stood there. Leslie, four years old, hummed some tune while she dipped her hands into the bubbles in front of her.

My mom wiped her hands with the dish towel she'd had on her shoulder. "Bill?" she said.

He said, "Phoenix," and smiled, went to the silverware drawer, pulled out a can opener, and popped open the beer. In this manner, our moving to Arizona had been settled.

Now we lived in a house painted the same color as the gravel in the front yard. A twenty-foot saguaro grew in the backyard. Coyotes sometimes dug through our garbage. We wore cowboy boots to school. We regularly climbed a mountain not a block from our house, a mountain that filled the kitchen window when we stood at the sink.

I had a couple of flat streets left to throw before Pd have to go up onto the streets that contoured the hill and mountain:

the upper parts of Victor Hugo and Joan D'Arc. Those would be last on the route, and then I could coast home, park the bike in the carport, go back to bed.

I threw the rest of the houses on Captain Dreyfuss, on Emile Zola, and along Bell. There was the Browns', and the two Great Danes in their fenced front yard. I'd used to collect from them only once a month or so, always just stood out on the street, the huge dogs barking, until Mrs. Brown came out in her bathrobe and paid me. Then one day I put my hand to the chain-link fence and touched the nose of one of the dogs. The dog sniffed my finger, then slipped his tongue through the fence, gave my hand a big lick. Now I stopped and petted both of them, even on these Sunday mornings, and collected every Thursday night.

There was the Stahls' house; the two boys who lived there, Wade and Cody. Wade was a friend of Tim's, Cody about Leslie's age. Mr. and Mrs. Stahl were friends of Mom and Dad's, and they all got together every other week or so. She was a nurse, he worked for Motorola, and we couldn't understand why they let both Wade and Cody say things like "damn" and "shit" and "hell" right there in front of them. If we said anything like that we were grounded.

And there was the Funks' house, the horse they had in a small corral next to the place. I always pulled oddball desert grasses and weeds from along the foundation of their house when I came by, and fed them to the horse. Then I petted its nose, scratched its forehead, and headed home for the last load of papers.

18 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

The last stop on Victor Hugo was the house farthest away, all the way to where it hit Bell. This was the Polks' house, and the first time I collected there, it'd taken Mr. Polk a good ten minutes to answer the door.

"Coming!" he'd hollered out; then, "Just a minute!"—nowhere any anger or impatience in his voice. Just words to let whoever it was know he was on his way.

Then the door'd swung open, and Mr. Polk staggered into the doorway. He had heavy leather and metal braces on both legs; his face was wet with the work of getting to the door. He smiled, leaned out the door, and put his hand out for me to shake, introduced himself. He tipped me a dime every week, and he didn't have to ask me to put his paper on the porch. Some afternoons when I delivered he'd be around to his side yard, where he had a glider swing set up, and I could hear him whistling. He whistled more beautifully than I'd ever heard before, vibrato and all, and I'd sit on my bike in his driveway, taking a break from riding and delivering in the afternoon sun, and just listen.

By this time Sunday mornings the sun would be in full swing, that yellow light gone already to dry white, though it wasn't even seven yet. Then I'd push my bike up from Bell onto Joan D'Arc, the street highest up the mountain, and I'd start coasting. All the houses were on my right, the steep mountain to my left; so I didn't have to throw across the front of the bike, had only easy throws down driveways to houses whose roofs were only a little higher than the street. Sometimes a roadrunner would cut across in front of me, or a line of quail, or a ground squirrel, but I didn't slow down: I was almost done.

I threw to the assistant scoutmaster's house, Mr. Penru

and to the accounts payable manager for RC, Mr. Van Hoof, whose daughter Paula I had been in love with since fourth grade. I threw to Mark Beck's house, and Rick Graham's, where lived the only dog I'd ever been bitten by, an ugly dachshund I'd put my hand out to one day not long after I'd made friends with the Great Danes. The dog, Bitsy, drew blood.

Then I was at the top of Joan D'Arc. Behind me was the mountain, below me the steep drop of street I saved for last. This stretch of Joan D'Arc lasted about a quarter mile, almost flattening out when it hit 28th down near where I'd started the route. I had four papers to throw on my way down; then, when I hit 28th, I'd turn right, trying not to slow down at all, then go the hundred yards along 28th to Victor Hugo, turn left, and coast right on into the carport, and home.

I pushed off, felt the wind on my face, my eyes creased nearly closed for it, even though I had glasses on. I leaned over the handlebars, fished out one of the last four papers, threw it to my left onto a driveway, the slope down growing steeper, my bike going faster. I reached into the bag, got another paper, threw it to my left, to Steve Noeding's house; then got another, threw it to the right to Mrs. Maranger's house, a widow who tipped me a dime a week and gave me five dollars at Christmas.

The wind grew, whistled in my ears, the handlebars lighter than anything I could imagine after having been so full so long. The bags ballooned out with the rush of air into them, and I reached down, took out the last paper, threw it to my right to the Thomases' house, the last one on Joan D'Arc; and now I was already off the steep street and onto 28th. I sailed my bike to the right and along the road, no cars out this early, my last paper delivered.

20 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

Then I leaned left onto Victor Hugo, went down two houses on the right, and pulled into my driveway, braked hard as I headed into the carport, the newspaper bags empty. The plastic strips that held the bundles together, the brown pieces of paper the sections'd come wrapped in, lay on the curb, but I just took off my shirt, wiped the sweat off my arms and face and neck, and went inside. I went to the refrigerator, opened it, took out a bottle of RC like I did every time I finished the route, and downed it. I stood at the kitchen sink, tipped the bottle up, and closed my eyes, felt the cold pop burn down my throat. I brought the empty bottle down, looked out the window at the mountain in front of me, and belched.

The last thing I did each Sunday was wash the newsprint from my hands in the bathroom sink, and I marveled every time at the black rinsing through the soapy water, the gray sheen left in the sink when I was done.

Then I went to my bedroom, pulled back the sheets, and lay down, still in my cutoffs, still sweaty. I shared the room with Tim, the two of us in single beds that'd been bunk beds for Brad and me in California. On occasion Tim might roll over, say something in his sleep. One Sunday morning in January, when I was back in bed before the sun had even cleared the mountains to the east, I'd had an entire conversation with him about a rope ladder he saw hanging from the ceiling. But usually he'd only snore quietly, the sheets bunched and pulled out around him, his face buried in the pillow.

My sheets were always cool, and I pulled them to my chest, placed my hands behind my head, and stared at the ceiling. Only then did I hear the sound. Only after I'd soared down Joan D'Arc and thrown the last Sunday paper and downed sixteen

(^«yt**v*C 2 1

ounces of RC and watched black newsprint wash around the sink, then settled back in bed, did the sound rise up around me.

It was what I waited for, something I thought even more mysterious than a snake on the driveway, than a shooting star above me while I folded papers on a winter morning: the high-pitched and constant flow of sound in the room, right there in my ears, a sound so loud, the house quiet, my body whipped by the work of delivering all those papers, that at times I thought my head would burst with it, and I had to sniff or cough or hum a song just to make sure the world wasn't drowning in all that sound.

I lay there in bed listening to that sound, wondering where it had come from, why it was here, what purpose it served; and imagined that perhaps I was the only one on earth who ever heard it. I thought maybe it was because of all the sound I'd just listened to: the wind shouting in my ears down Joan D'Arc, that sound overwhelming me, so that now I heard the smallest sounds, the highest pitches, like what only dogs could hear, and I wondered what a dog whistle really sounded like.

Sometimes, then, I fell asleep. But most times I only lay awake, waiting for what could happen next, that sound passing through me and swallowing me whole, me that much alone in the world.

Ten years later I would be married to a woman who was ten years old on those summer Sunday mornings in 1970, a girl living in a state named New Jersey, a place I couldn't imagine. Ten years later my father would be vice president of Royal Crown Cola back in Los Angeles, and would be fired for polit-

22 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

ical reasons that mystified me, then hired by Dr. Pepper within a week.

Ten years later I would be fired from RC myself, where I was a route merchandiser, because people were leaving RC to work for my father. "So I told DeSantini, 'Go ahead, fire him,' " my dad would tell me ten years later, after his old boss had threatened him by saying he'd take my job away. "I told him, 'He's a big boy.' You are," he would tell me. And I would be fired.

Ten years later a dime-a-week tip seemed nothing.

And ten years later I knew what that sound was: I'd read somewhere it is the noise blood makes rushing through one's head, and I knew, for better or worse, that there really was no mystery. A snake or shooting star was, perhaps, what I should have held in awe all along.

But those mornings in 1970 I knew none of this, the biggest mystery me and what I heard, the mystery of the feeling of flight as I tore down Joan D'Arc before the world was awake, the mystery of the silence of our house those early mornings, and the angle of the sun in through our bedroom window as I lay-there, wondering, filled with what I couldn't know was the sound of my own blood.

f^ts&ttv&ts*

This much is fact: There is a home movie of the two of us sitting on the edge of the swimming pool at our grandma and grandpa's old apartment building in Culver City. The movie, taken sometime in early 1960, is in color, though the color has faded, leaving my brother Brad and me milk white and harmless children, me a year and a half old, Brad almost four, our brown hair faded to only the thought of brown hair. Our mother, impossibly young, sits next to me on the right of the screen. Her hair, for all the fading of the film, is coal black, shoulder length, and parted in the middle, curled up on the sides. She has on a bathing suit covered in purple and blue flowers, the color in them nearly gone. Next to me on the left of the screen is Brad, in his white swimming trunks. I am in the center, my fat arms up, bent at the elbows, fingers curled into fists, my legs kicking away at the water, splashing and splashing. I am smiling, the baby of the family, the center of the world at that very instant, though my little brother, Tim, is only some six or seven months off, and

my little sister, Leslie, the last child, just three years distant. The pool water before us is only a thin sky blue, the bushes behind us a dull and lifeless light green. There is no sound.

My mother speaks to me, points at the water, then looks up. She lifts a hand to block the sun, says something to the camera. Her skin is the same white as ours, but her lips are red, a sharp cut of lipstick moving as she speaks. I am still kicking. Brad is looking to his right, off the screen, his feet in the water, too, but moving slowly. His hands are on the edge of the pool, and he leans forward a little, looks down into the water. My mother still speaks to the camera, and I give an extra-hard kick, splash up shards of white water.

Brad flinches at the water, squints his eyes, while my mother laughs, puts a hand to her face. She looks back to the camera, keeps talking, a hand low to the water to keep more from hitting her. I still kick hard, still send up bits of water, and I am laughing a baby's laugh, mouth open and eyes nearly closed, arms still up, fingers still curled into fists.

More water splashes at Brad, who leans over to me, says something. Nothing about me changes: I only kick, laugh. He says something again, his face leans a little closer to mine. Still I kick.

This is when he lifts his left hand from the edge of the pool, places it on my right thigh, and pinches hard. It's not a simple pinch, not two fingers on a fraction of skin, but his whole hand, all his fingers grabbing the flesh just above my knee and squeezing down hard. He grimaces, his eyes on his hand, on my leg.

My expression changes, of course: In an instant I go from

26 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

a laughing baby to a shocked one, my mouth a perfect 0, my body shivering so that my legs kick even harder, even quicker, but just this one last time. They stop, and I cry, my mouth open even more, my eyes all the way closed. My hands are still in fists.

Then Brad's hand is away, and my mother turns from speaking to the camera to me. She leans in close, asking, I am certain, what's wrong. The movie cuts then to my grandma, white skin and silver hair, seated on a patio chair by the pool, above her a green-and-white-striped umbrella. She has a cigarette in one hand, waves off the camera with the other. Though she died eight years ago, and though she, too, loses color with each viewing, she is still alive up there, still waves, annoyed, at my grandpa and his camera, the moment my brother pinched hell out of me already gone.

This much is fact, too: Thumbtacked to the wall of my office is a photograph of Brad and me taken by my wife in November 1980, the date printed on the border. In it we stand together, me a good six inches taller than him, my arm around his shoulder. The photograph is black and white, as though the home movie and its sinking colors were a prophecy pointing to this day twenty years later: We are at the tidepools at Portuguese Bend, out on the Palos Verdes Peninsula; in the background are the stone-gray bluffs, to the left of us the beginning of the black rocks of the pools, above us the perfect white of an overcast sky. Brad has on a white Panama hat, a collarless shirt beneath a gray hooded sweatshirt. His face is smooth shaven, and he is

> 2~

grinning, lips together, eyes squinted nearly shut beneath the brim of the hat. It is a goofy smile, but a real one.

I have on a cardigan with an alpine design around the shoulders, the rest of it white, the shawl collar on it black here, though I know it to have been navy blue. I have on a button-down Oxford shirt, sideburns almost to my earlobes. I have a mustache, a pair of glasses too large for my face; and I am smiling, my mouth open to reveal my big teeth. It isn't my goofy smile, but it's a real one too.

These are the facts of my brother: the four-year-old pinching me, the twenty-four-year-old leaning into me, grinning.

But between the fact of these two images lie twenty years of the play of memory, the dark and bright pictures my mind has retained, embroidered upon, made into things they are and things they are not. There are twenty years of things that happened between my brother and me, from the fistnght we had in high school over who got the honey bun for breakfast, to his phone call to me from a tattoo parlor in Hong Kong where he'd just gotten a Chinese junk stitched beneath the skin of his right shoulder blade; from his showing me one summer day how to do a death drop from the jungle gym at Elizabeth Dickerson Elementary, to him watching while his best friend and our next-door neighbor, Lynn Tinton, beat me up on the driveway of our home in a fight over whether I'd fouled Lynn or not at basketball. I remember—no true picture, necessarily, but what I have made the truth by holding tight to it, playing it back in my head at will and in the direction I wish it to go—I remember lying on my back, Lynn's knees pinning my shoulders to the

28 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

driveway while he hit my chest, and looking up at Brad, the basketball there at his hip, him watching.

I have two children now. Both boys, born two and a half years apart. I showed the older one, Zeb—almost eight—the photograph, asked him who those two people were. He held it in his hands a long while.

We were in the kitchen. The bus comes at seven-twenty each morning, and I have to have lunches made and breakfasts set out—all before that bus comes and before Melanie takes off for work, Jacob in tow, to be dropped off at the Montessori school on her way in to her office.

I waited, and waited, finally turned from him to get going on his lunch.

"It's you," he said. "You have a lot of hair," he said.

"Who's the other guy?" I said. I looked back at him, saw the concentration on his face, the way he brought the photograph close, my son's eyes taking in his uncle as best he could.

He said, "I don't know."

"That's your uncle Brad," I said. "Your mom took that picture ten years ago, long before you were ever born."

He still looked at the picture. He said, "He has a beard now."

I turned from him, finished with the peanut butter, and spread jelly on the other piece of bread. This is the only kind of sandwich he will eat at school. He said from behind me, "Only three years before I was born. That's not a long time." I stopped, turned again to him. He touched the picture with a finger. He said, "Three years isn't a long time, Dad."

But I was thinking of my question: Who's the other guy? and of the truth of his answer: / don't know.

Zeb and Jake fight. Melanie and I were upstairs wrapping Christmas presents in my office, a room kept locked the entire month of December for the gifts piled up in there. We heard Jake wailing, dropped the bucket of Legos and the red-and-green ho! ho! ho! paper, ran for the hall and down the stairs.

There in the kitchen stood my two sons, Jacob's eyes wet, him whimpering now, a hand to his bottom lip. I made it first, yelled, "What happened?"

"I didn't do it," Zeb said, and backed away from me, there with my hand to Jacob's jaw.

Melanie stroked Jacob's hair, whispered, "What's wrong?"

Jacob opened his mouth then, showed us the thick wash of blood between his bottom lip and his tongue, a single tooth, horribly white, swimming up from it. "We were playing Karate Kid," Zeb said, and now he was crying. "I didn't do it," he said, and backed away even farther.

One late afternoon a month or so ago, Melanie backed the van into the driveway to make it easier to unload all the plastic bags of groceries. When we'd finished we let the boys play outside, glad for them to be out of the kitchen while we sorted through the bags heaped on the counter, put everything away. Melanie's last words to the two of them, her leaning out the front door into the near-dark: "Don't play in the van!"

Not ten minutes later Jacob came into the house, slammed shut the front door like he always does. He walked into the kitchen, his hands behind him. He said, "Zeb's locked in the

30 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

van." His face takes on the cast of the guilty when he knows he's done something wrong: His mouth gets pursed, his eyebrows go up, his eyes look right into mine. He doesn't know enough yet to look away. "He told me to come get you." He turned, headed for the door, and I followed him out onto the porch, where, before I could even see the van in the dark, I heard Zeb screaming.

I went to the van, tried one of the doors. It was locked, and Zeb was still screaming.

"Get the keys!" he was saying. "Get the keys!" I pressed my face to the glass of the back window, saw Zeb inside jumping up and down. "My hand's caught," he cried.

I ran into the house, got the keys from the hook beneath the cupboard, only enough time for me to say to Melanie, "Zeb's hand's closed in the back door," and turn, run back out. I made it to the van, unlocked the big back door, and pushed it up as quick as I could, Melanie already beside me.

Zeb stood holding the hand that'd been closed in the door. Melanie and I both took his hand, gently examined the skin, wiggled the fingers, and in the dull glow of the dome light we saw that nothing'd been broken, no skin torn. The black foam lining the door had cushioned his fingers, so that they'd only been smashed a little, but a little enough to scare him, and to make blue bruises there the next day. Beneath the dome light there was the sound of his weeping, then the choked words, "Jacob pulled the door down on me."

From the darkness just past the line of light from inside the van came my second son's voice: "I didn't do it."

i

I have no memory of the pinch Brad gave me on the edge of that apartment-complex pool, no memory of my mother's black hair—now it's a sort of brown—nor even any memory of the pool itself. There is only that bit of film.

But I can remember putting my arm around his shoulder in 1980, leaning into him, the awkward and alien comfort of that touch. In the photograph we are both smiling, me a newlywed with a full head of hair, him only a month or so back from working a drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. He'd missed my wedding six months before, stranded on the rig, he'd told us, because of a storm.

What I believe is this: That pinch was entry into our childhood; my arm around him, our smiling, is the proof of us two surfacing, alive but not unscathed.

And here are my own two boys, already embarked.

32 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

It begins with a game: Each boy is given a bottle of soda—RC or Diet Rite or Nehi or, if we are lucky, a huge quart bottle of a Par-T-Pak flavor—and the cap is popped off by our dad, standing there in the dark garage with the three or four cases of returns he's accrued this past week, bottles delivered to his customers cracked or half-full or murky for whatever reason and given back to him for credit on their invoice. He told us once, the story legend in our hearts, as good as a ghost story at a midnight campfire, of how one time a customer gave back a bottle of Diet Rite in the bottom of which sat a drowned mouse. Truly.

We hold the bottles with two hands at the neck so as not to drop them, then run across the asphalt driveway and across the front lawn to the curb, where we kneel, carefully tip the bottles, and pour out the soda.

Here is the game: Who can empty- his bottle fastest and be the next to receive another bottle from Dad? or, Who can take

the longest to empty his bottle without stopping the stream of soda? or, What color will Nehi Grape and Par-T-Pak Lime and RC Brown make?

We watch the sodas swirl down the gutter, watch the colors collide and move and mix, watch the carbonation—though we do not know this word, carbonation, call it instead fizz —swim up as the soda hits the concrete, colors swirling in this Saturday-morning sunlight in Buena Park, California, colors moving down the gutter toward where, we know, it will finally dribble into the storm drain at the corner six houses down, a trail of colors and fizz that starts, as always, in front of the Lotts' house.

Now the bottles are empty, and we stand up, amazed each time at just what has taken place here: the miracle of all this color—Par-T-Pak and Nehi Orange and Cherry and Grape and Lemon-Lime; the deep, rich brown of RC and Diet Rite—and the fun of doing something that seems illicit: pouring out soda on the ground just to watch it happen.

And the final product: We'll each hold in our hand two cents, a nickel if it's a quart Par-T-Pak bottle, once we take them down to the Alpha Beta for the deposit.

We run back across the lawn, across the driveway, into the dark garage, where we place our bottles into a wooden case there beside our dad, who waits with three more bottles, the caps already off.

It starts as a game when we are boys, my dad's sales route Long Beach and San Pedro and Bellflower and Lakewood, one part of his job to pick up returns from customers along the way, give them credit back on their invoices.

And by the time I am twenty-one, Tim nineteen, Brad

34 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

twenty-three, we all work for Royal Crown Cola: me a salesman, Tim a driver's assistant, Brad on the table-set crew.

There is no way for me to write about my life without writing of RC; our childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood all centered on Royal Crown Cola, its logo pervasive in our lives: We played with RC Frisbees, lay out on the beach on RC towels, listened to transistor radios shaped like cans of RC Cola. We wore RC T-shirts, rode bikes emblazoned with RC Cola stickers, decorated our rooms with RC posters. We told time by RC wristwatches, made decorative wind chimes out of RC bottles and our Ronco bottle and glass cutter, caught RC baseballs with blue RC baseball gloves.

But beyond that logo and all these RC toys that filled our lives was the truth of its role: RC was my father's job, the one that had him out of the house usually before we were even awake and had him pulling up the driveway past dark most nights— my father beat, his route run, his trunk filled with those returns and the accompanying equipment every RC man had to have: stacks of Point-of-Purchase material like Day-Glo carton sniffers, long narrow strips of paper printed with prices you stuffed into six-pack cartons; bottle hangers, Day-Glo pieces of paper precut to slip over the tops of bottles, these, too, printed with prices; shelf strips, those narrow pieces of plastic printed with the product logo that slipped onto the shelf, identifying where the product sat. There were rolls of stickers, all Day-Glo, printed with prices, or with the RC or Diet Rite or Nehi logo. There were always two or three feather dusters back there with which

to clean the shelves and bottles, along with a garvey or two, the metal-and-ink contraptions used to mark prices on bottles or cans.

Nothing but toys, as far as we could tell; and when he opened the trunk each evening to pull out the returns, we boys grabbed up the feather dusters, the stickers, the garveys, and had at it with one another, stamped purple ink numbers on each other's arms or hands or foreheads, shook filthy dusters in each other's faces, peeled off sticker after sticker and slapped each other on the back or took them inside to put on our notebooks or bedroom doors or anything else we could think of.

Toys.

There seemed adventure in this endeavor of our father's as well, as one or two Saturdays a month, once the yard work had been done, and once those returns had been emptied, we piled into the Rambler, his company car, and went to one or another of his stores. There he would park, and we would stand and watch as he loaded what he needed from the trunk into the cardboard case he carried with him into each store: all that P.O.P., a garvey, a few cardboard trays to fill out a display. He pulled out his feather duster, poked the handle into his back pocket so that the feathers gave him a tail. Then he turned to us, gave us each a duster, and told us to follow him. Of course we all put our dusters into our back pockets, too, the flamboyance of the feathers like an emblem of manhood, when we were only a trail of three boys behind our dad.

Inside we owned the place, our towering father leading us down the aisles, certain of where he was going, why he was here.

36 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

He nodded at assistant managers, stock clerks, exchanged words on the Dodgers or Lakers or Rams, the grown-up manly banter we saw at home only when Mr. Jensen or Mr. Peterson, neighbors of ours, came over. This was our father, an adult, a man; and this was his job: to come into a store and talk of sports.

Once we made it to the soda-pop aisle we stopped, Dad surveying and straightening, making notes on the back of a carton sniffer as to how many cases of what he would need to fill out the facings on the shelf. While he wrote we dusted off the product and the shelves. Then, of course, we made the inevitable turn toward one another, and the duster wars ensued.

Without a word our dad would head away from us and toward the rear of the store, we three falling in line behind him, ready for what came next: the back room. Here was pure mystery, pure delight: Once past the steel double doors, doors like those we saw in cowboy saloons on TV, we were in another world. Gone utterly were the lights and shining colors and pleasant smiles of the grocery store outside, replaced by this dark cavern of boxes and boxes, by these bare brick walls and stained concrete floors, by these shouted curses from the same smiling stock clerks who'd winked at us out on the aisle.

Still we followed Dad deeper and deeper into the heart of the back room, wove through and along and around toilet-paper boxes and stacks of empty milk crates and pallets piled high with sacks of dog food and boxes of bleach, until there before us stood the rows of product: cases of RC stacked five and six high, towers of bottles as tall as Dad; rows of product, between each row a narrow aisle only wide enough for one person to fit. The danger of it—all this glass stacked so high, ready to crash down on us—made the adventure even sharper, even better, and we

played hide-and-seek inside these dark crevasses, or played tag, or banged the handles of our feather dusters against the bottles to make weird music back there in the darkness, while our father took down case after case, piled them onto a hand truck he'd rounded up from somewhere, then checked off item after item on his carton stuffer, until, finally, he leaned the loaded hand truck back, turned, and headed toward those saloon doors.

Back out on the floor, we squinted at the lights above us and followed him to where he'd left the box of P.O.P. on the soda-pop aisle. Then the work began: As Dad loaded in six-packs and single-quart bottles, filled the shelves, set straight the facings, we dusted and dusted, slipped those hangers over the Par-T-Pak bottles, a hanger on every other bottle, and stuffed carton sniffers into every six-pack, there in the slot for the center bottle.

In this manner we learned the science of sales, the importance of P.O.P., what all this work really meant: fun.

My first job was a privilege, I was led to believe, and did believe. A couple of years after we'd moved to Phoenix in 1967, my father having been transferred and promoted from sales supervisor to plant manager for RC, Brad, Tim, and I started spending one Saturday a month at the plant in South Phoenix to wash trucks. We were given ten dollars per truck washed, which seemed a ton of money, even when we split it three ways. Of course there was no even split whatsoever, Tim still only nine, me eleven, Brad thirteen; as a consequence of our ages and abilities, Brad and I each got four bucks, little Timmy, whose job amounted mainly to hosing out trash from the empty bays, left with only two.

38 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

These were delivery trucks, twenty-bay trucks; we had to climb up ladders even to wash the windows of trucks whose cabs were littered with empty RC bottles, wadded-up cigarette packs, cellophane off Little Debbie cakes, wax-paper Whattaburger wrappers and chewed-up gum and anything else a driver might dump inside during the month. The cabs themselves lifted up from the back and folded out and down over the grille to reveal the grime-shrouded engine, there like the giant dead heart of some huge monster. We only saw them this way if one of the mechanics happened to be in on Saturday and working; otherwise, no matter how hard we whined, pleading with Dad to haul back the cab for us, he would not do it. "You'll cut off your arm if you're not careful," he told us every time, this assessment of what could happen making the idea of tilting the cab forward even more desirable.

In order to wash the trucks we had to climb them, sit on the hood or roof with a bucket of soapy water and a worn-out bath towel from home—and I can remember sitting there, up what seemed three stories high, Timmy an ant below me trying to spray me down, me throwing the wet and heavy towel at him, Brad then picking it up, starting in with a keep-away game, me stranded on the roof. No different from feather-duster wars, from stamping a forehead with a garvey.

And at that moment here would come Dad, busting out from inside the dispatch office, taking long strides toward us across the empty asphalt parking lot, fists clenched. "You cut that out!" he yelled, me already with my towel returned. Brad with a Brillo pad, hunched at the wheel he'd been scrubbing, Timmy with the hose in a bay, hosing out and hosing out. "You cut that crap out," he shouted, "or I won't let you come down here anymore. You hear me?"

"Yes, sir," we said together without looking up. A privilege, he led us to believe; and we believed.

The plant was a series of four or five huge warehouses and the bottling line itself, parking lots for the trucks and salesmen and linemen, all of it stretched over a couple acres or so in the industrial part of town. The buildings were painted a washed-out green, the warehouse roofs were corrugated tin, every square inch of ground had been paved over in asphalt that melted in the summer so that there were permanent ruts left where forklifts and delivery trucks had driven.

Inside the warehouses were pallets of stock four and five high, on each pallet six layers of eight cases, so that the stacks I'd seen in grocery store back rooms back in California were nothing compared to this, were only the big memories of a little kid; these glass towers rose a good twenty-five feet high, almost touched the tin roof. The bottling line Was in a building attached to one of the warehouses, and was a complex of machinery into which empty bottles were fed and then washed, sterilized, filled, labeled, capped, and cased up.

Here, in the burning light of Phoenix summers, I had my first real job. If the stacks of soda in a grocery store back room seemed childishly small after standing inside the warehouse, so seemed the job of washing trucks once I was thirteen and was handed the job of sweeping the lots at the plant.

Lot sweeper. The job title, of course, explains itself. I was given a push broom, given a lot, and given ten dollars a day plus all the RC I could drink. Mostly what I recall about that job are the blisters on my hands even in spite of the work gloves

40 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

I wore, blisters the size of quarters there between my thumbs and index fingers; and the heat, and the melting asphalt. One morning my father would assign me the parking lot next to the sales office, which was a shack beside one of the warehouses painted that same ugly green; the next morning I was given the truck-loading lot, the trucks gone already, even when we arrived at six in the morning; the next morning I was given the inside of warehouse 1, then warehouse 2, and 3, and 4. Then the sales lot again.

By eleven o'clock I'd have gotten some work done, my shirt already soaked through, three or four RC's downed, only to have my father scout me out wherever I was and instruct me on proper push-broom technique: "It's not a pull broom," he'd say if he caught me trying to rake trash or dirt or what-have-you from a corner, "it's a push broom. You push it." He'd take the broom from me then, give it a few strokes across the pavement—careful to give it, too, the obligatory clap on the ground once he'd pushed it away from him, this to loosen the dirt and debris caught in the bristles so that he wouldn't drag dirt right back to where he'd swept.

This was my job, the subtleties of sweeping. I knew it was a push broom, I knew you didn't pull it. I knew to clap it on the ground; knew, too, that my dad must've had better things to do with his life and career than to come out here in 105-degree temperatures to direct me through all this. I took the broom back from him once he'd shown me his skill, my eyes never meeting his, my head tilted to one side, me breathing out a sigh as only a thirteen-year-old shown the obvious by his all-knowing father can sigh.

I dogged it out there, certainly, especially in the truck and

sales lots, those outdoor skillets where the heat up off the pavement burned through the soles of my boots, where sweat dripped down into my eyes all day long, where somehow trash and dirt accumulated each week as though only to torment me, malevolent drivers and salesmen, I imagined, emptying ashtrays on the ground each day just to watch the boss's son die. Like any kid would, I took my share of soda breaks: leaned the broom against a wall and headed in to the bottling line, where I plucked a cold RC from the endless single file of bottles shuffling along toward the casing machine, the stuff bottled at exactly 42 degrees for whatever secret-recipe reasons. Then, once I'd downed that bottle, I had no choice but to head back out to whatever lot I was working, pick up that broom again, and have at it, waiting all the while for my dad to come out, instruct me yet again.

Yet still, even inside that condescension I felt from my father, even inside all that heat, that sweat, there remained the old feel of adventure, the old whisper of the mysterious in it all. We were the men of the house, Dad and I—Timmy only eleven and running the paper route I'd handed down to him, Brad already a lost cause by then, a runaway twice. He'd shown up this time at my mother's parents' house in Artesia, California, broke and crying, certain only that he would not return to Phoenix. After the summer working with my grandpa as a janitor at Consolidated Film Industries in Hollywood, he came home still the druggie in hip-huggers toking up in his bedroom, still the Jethro Tull and Black Sabbath fiend, still the smart-ass teenager my mom and dad'd hoped letting him stay in California with my grandparents might solve.

We were the men of the house, my dad and I: Each morning he came into my room at five-fifteen, called out my name in the

42 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

dark, then said, "Time to get up"; we rode in to work together, stopped first at the donut shop on Cave Creek Road, where Dad got a maple longjohn and coffee, me a bear claw and a milk; then drove through the small range of jagged mountains that separated where we lived in Paradise Valley from Phoenix proper, the rocks and sagebrush and saguaro cactus all a deep purple in the pale dawn twilight so that it seemed in those few moments before we fell down into Sunnyslope and north Phoenix as though we were on some alien planet, my father and me tooling around on one of those lunar vehicles we kept seeing that summer on TV.

The adventure was here, too, in the oddball jaunts my dad took me on some afternoons, usually merchandising calls at which we did the same sort of work as when we lived back in California; only now we both had hand trucks and there was no play of duster handles on bottles, no games of hide-and seek, only stocking shelves, putting up P.O.P., marking the bottles with our garveys. No foreheads. Men's work.

One afternoon when I was sweeping clear the sales lot my dad slapped open the sales office door, his hand at his collar, : working loose his wide blue RC tie, and called to me, signaled me to follow him into the warehouse. "Going out to Pueblo Grande," he said over his shoulder, the two of us moving past the stacks of pallets, my eyes trying hard to adjust to this dark • after the white-hot sky outside. "Truck broke down and we got to cover his last stop." He wadded up the tie, stuffed it in his pants pocket.

On his voice I heard a certain edge I couldn't name; he wasn't angry, I believed, though the situation seemed one about which he couldn't be happy: Td been to Pueblo Grande before,

had been camping out there with the Boy Scouts, and I knew it to be nothing more than a desert outpost, a long drive into nothing and back again.

We made it through the warehouse and out to the truck lot, where a truck waited for us, only two bays filled with product, the thick black rubber cords that held the product fast stretched and hooked across both bays. Without a word we climbed up into the cab, and I watched as my dad started up the truck, gave it the gas a few times, that huge engine right beneath us rattling me in my seat, the gear shift between us shivering as he gave the engine the gas again. He checked his side-view mirror, then looked past me to the mirror out my window, said, "Pull it in a little."

I looked at him a moment, not certain what he was talking about, me still trying to take in this scene, something I'd not seen before: my dad settled into the driver's seat of a truck, settled there like he did this every day of his life—and only now do I know what the sound had been in his voice, that edge: My dad, plant manager, was joyful at being back in the cab of a truck. My dad, back in the saddle, where he'd started all the way back in 1953, driving for the company in California. The old days.

But in 1972 I didn't recognize this joy in him, only wondered at why he seemed to be smiling when all we had before us was a long trek into the desert, the only things to look forward to a hot freeway wind in through the windows, the promise of a cold RC once we got to wherever that stranded driver's last stop might be.

"The mirror," he said, and cut his eyes at me.

"Oh," I said, and turned from him, tugged at the tall mirror until it popped a quarter of an inch or so.

44 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

I turned back to him, saw him look at the mirror, move his head a little back and forth, sizing things up. "Good," he said.

He put it in gear, pulled off the lot—leaving behind us, I knew, fresh ruts in the asphalt—and I resolved in that moment to clean out the cab once we got back. I didn't want the trash in here—more Whattaburger wrappers, more wadded-up cigarette packages—dumped on my parking lot.

After work we were united, too, for the drive back home. Every evening we went to a drive-thru liquor store a couple blocks from work, where my dad got a Coors in a freeway bag, and a sack of Commits, me a sack of peanut M&M's to go along with the RC I'd pulled off the line on our way out. I was hot, I was tired, I was drenched in sweat—my hair plastered to my forehead and neck—and it seemed some illicit pleasure, that same sort of pleasure I'd known dumping soda onto the ground back in California, simply to let drop into my RC a single M&M at a time, watch it foam up, then take a sip at the bottle, draw the candy into my mouth, chew it up, while beside me sat my father working on a beer, tossing back Commits, on the radio Tammy Wynette or Porter Wagoner or Buck Owens or Dolly Parton.

I wasn't a kid anymore, I knew. These secret rites that'd passed between us—longjohns and bear claws, beer and M&M's—had ushered me, along with a job paying ten bucks a day, into manhood, even though I was only thirteen, even though I hadn't yet started high school. It seemed a good life, all this cash, all this RC.

But here were those blisters, I remembered, the cold bottle in my hand some small comfort on the white, dead skin, the

tender flesh beneath it. And still each day Dad told me how to sweep, felt compelled for some reason to reiterate the numbskull knowledge obvious to me, as though somehow I'd forgotten overnight how to push a broom.

The next summer I graduated to sorting bottles for the line, each morning a couple hundred cases of empties stacked inside the warehouse and waiting for me to sort RC with RC, Diet Rite with Diet Rite, Par-T-Pak with Par-T-Pak, 16 ounce with 16 ounce, quart with quart. When trucks delivered product to stores, they brought back with them these empties; sometimes the stores had sorted them, many times not. That lowliest of line jobs was left to me, the job that involved standing and bending over and simply matching bottles with bottles so that, once they were sorted, the right bottles would be loaded onto each bottling line; no Par-T-Pak botdes filled with Diet Rite, no RC bottles filled with grape Nehi. Each day consisted of sorting a good two hundred cases of bottles, a thankless job and a lonely one—the only person I talked to was the line foreman who tooled around in his forklift all day long, choosing to drive the lift rather than walk twelve feet to attend to some task. On occasion he stopped and admonished me to move faster, but most often only showed up once I'd filled a pallet with empties.

The only other visitor, of course, was my father, who stopped in once a day and bent over the empty cases before me, showed me proper technique: how to hold eight bottles at once, fingers spread, and how to arrange the cases around me so that I could more efficiently fill them with empties. He worked feverishly those few minutes he was with me, his face flushed with

46 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

the effort, the tie he wore tight at his neck, his hands moving quickly.

That summer Brad was arrested twice for possession and totaled my mom's '63 Buick LeSabre. He claimed the guy in front of him hadn't put on his blinker, and so when Brad passed the guy he'd had no idea the asshole would turn left into him. At the end of that summer he dropped out of high school and left for the navy, my parents signing the papers that said their seventeen-year-old son could join. Timmy still had the paper route.

When Dad finished with my daily instruction, his few moments with me like some sort of RC devotional, he stood up, face flushed, and dusted his hands. "Hurry it up, now," he said each time, and nodded, satisfied.

The next summer I moved up the corporate ladder a rung or two, started out my ten weeks off—the last two weeks of each summer were reserved for marching-band practice at PV—with the prestigious job of loading those empties onto the bottling line itself. There I worked in the cool of the bottling-line building, fluorescent lights above me, people to talk to: Manny, Red, Gonzales, Marvin, a host of others whose names I cannot now recall. I stood at a pallet and loaded those empties into a machine, my old job filled now by a kid named Harlan, the mechanic's son, who knew no other language than that of motocross.

But here I was, fifteen years old and communing with men, all of us working together to accomplish a single goal: Get these bottles washed and clean, get them filled with product, get them

capped and labeled and sent off to the warehouse, where they'd be delivered up to those stores who sent back empties to be sorted the next day. It seemed to make sense, this endeavor; seemed, even, fun: I loaded cases onto a short conveyor belt that moved the bottles only a few feet away from me, where a huge machine with arms equipped with suction devices, twelve or twenty-four to a case depending on which product we were bottling, descended upon the botdes, pulled them up from the cases, then brought them to the mouth of the machine, where they were shuffled into a single file and disappeared into the raging depths of the next machine down, the washer.

Here the men laughed, here they joked and cursed and spit and cursed and laughed some more. And here I was, my father nowhere to be seen except when he was passing through on his way somewhere else. No more instructions, no more intervention. I was on the line now, couldn't be interrupted with instruction. Here it was do-or-die. So I worked at loading empties; worked, later, at the labeling machine, loading stacks of gummed paper into a round machine that wet each label, slapped it onto the rilled bottle passing through, then brushed at the paper, securing the label. I hosed out the floors when told to do so, swept up the glass when a bottle exploded, kept the empties coming. And still my dad did not talk to me.

At lunch I went with the other men to a cafe on the other side of the railroad tracks that paralleled the RC plant, a white cinder-block place with a flat gravel roof and two waitresses about whom the linemen made jokes every day. Every day I ordered country-fried steak, french fries with gravy, and RC, and paid for it with my own money.

Now I was truly in the ranks, I knew, because of this matter

48 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

of money: I punched in on a time clock, had my own card, was responsible for not being late back from lunch, and for signing the card. I was making $2.25 an hour the whole summer long, and because my dad stayed so many hours late, the two of us finally rolling home at dusk each night, just as he himself used to come home in the Rambler back in California, I worked more hours than most of the men there.

Each Friday we received our paychecks from the line foreman, who sat on the seat of his forklift, called out our first names, and handed us the white envelopes printed with that RC logo on the top left corner. This ceremony was followed by our obligatory bitching and moaning about how much money we made, and I can remember one Friday in particular when Red, a pale, skinny lineman with a snatch of red hair and a sparse red mustache—a man, I knew, who had a wife and three children at home—pulled out his paycheck and shook his head, in his face loss, somehow, or perhaps disbelief. His eyebrows were up, his mouth barely open as he spoke.

"Seventy-two dollars and sixteen cents," he said, and let out a breath. "Now how the hell am I supposed to live on this?" he said, then folded up the check, put it in his back pocket.

There I was, in my hand a paycheck for S90.73.

Something about this seemed all wrong then, seemed a sham in some way I could only identify as me being here inside the circle of men whose lives depended on this check. I was only a kid, fifteen, whose dad ran the place. I was only a kid and could lay no claim, really, to this huge wad of money in my pocket. I was saving money for a car, was saving money for pizza after football games this fall, was saving money for a new sleeping bag for Boy Scouts. But this man had less than me,

and had it only for his family, had it only for food and clothing and shelter.

Once my dad had stopped at the liquor store, the old man at the window just nodding at us, handing through to my dad his beer and Commits, my M&M's, I told him.

"Red made less money than me last week," I said.

He handed the man the money and then popped the beer, but held it to his lips a moment before he took a sip. He pulled out from under the awning to the street, looked both ways. He didn't look at me.

"What the hell, is everybody showing their paychecks around?" he said, his voice, we both knew, too loud for inside the car. He pulled out onto the street, headed for the freeway.

"No," I said. "He just said how much he got." I hadn't yet opened the M&M's, for some reason not sure if I even ought to. But I could see something in my dad, knew he saw in what I was saying what I felt about the whole thing.

Finally he shrugged. He took another sip, placed the beer between his legs; his wrists on the steering wheel, he tore open the Commits. "Just don't tell him how much you made," he said, quieter. "Just don't let him know." He paused, tossed back a couple of Commits. "That's private," he said, and it seemed in the way his voice had gone quiet, in that shrug, and even in the way he paused before taking that first sip, that he'd seen how I felt, this notion I'd not encountered before: work, the truth of a job. This wasn't fun, but a job. How you lived.

I never complained about paychecks after that, only slipped mine into my pocket on Fridays, opened them after I made it home.

50 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

LA^vcLe-

The story goes that my father and his older brother by two years, my uncle Lynn, hated each other.

Uncle Lynn has told a million times the story of how he could gauge precisely how far my dad could throw (a) a stick, (b) a pinecone, or (c) a rock, and how he used to lead my dad through the Mississippi woods, taunting him, calling him names, egging him on just so Dad'd throw something at him there in the forest.

And every time my dad got mad enough and frustrated enough to play along with his brother's game, the game ended the same: The pinecone or the stick or the rock would land at my uncle's feet, only to be followed up with more taunting, more egging on, my uncle turning and leading my dad even deeper

I into the woods, hoping he'd throw something just so he could see my dad frustrated, a little boy surrounded by kudzu and wild grapevines and live oak, face red, mad.

Uncle Lynn laughs every time he tells this story, his laugh an open-mouthed one, all his teeth showing, his eyebrows up

and high on his forehead, eyes open wide, as though in stunned amazement at how funny this all is. We all laugh, too, when we hear it, we sons of Wilman: Brad, Tim, and me. We laugh when we see in our imaginations our dad red faced and pissed, frustrated. Our dad as a little, angry boy. That's a good one.

The end of the story, though, is the one you hear from my dad: One day, after years of the same old game, my dad smacked his brother in the shoulder with a rock. He'd started growing up, growing bigger, stronger—he would, finally, eclipse my uncle in both height and strength, landing a football scholarship to Ole Miss—and in my mind I see my uncle rubbing his shoulder, stunned into silence not by pain but by progress, by the fact that his little brother, that little fart he thought he'd known, could throw farther than he'd reckoned. This is the story my dad tells. And this is where he gets to laugh. It's the same sort of laugh: open mouthed and loud. The Lott laugh, I guess. But my dad's is sweeter, of course: He gets the last laugh.

My dad was the youngest of three brothers. There were six kids in all: Billie Jean, the oldest, then James, Burton (who would later be renamed Lynn by his pals at the muffler shop where he worked once he'd moved to California), then Wilman, Anne, and Brenda. Brenda was born with Down's Syndrome, and as a consequence my dad's mother, Myrtis, gave her life over to that daughter, made her her favorite not out of choice but love and duty and faith.

My grandma Lott recently passed away, and after the funeral all the family members went back to her house—a bun-

52 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

galow, really, in Redondo Beach. I am curious by nature— nosy would be a truer word—and decided to start poking through her belongings, not to try and rustle up something valuable I could lay claim to, but simply to see what my grandma thought to keep of her life.

The first thing I found in the top of her closet was a small wooden box with a metal clasp, and I brought it down, opened it up. In among receipts for electric bills and report cards for Billie Jean and James and letters of reference from the banker and lumberyard foreman and principal of the elementary school, all from when they lived in Mississippi, was a neatly folded square of paper, written on it Important, beneath that the word Keep.

I unfolded it, the paper brown and worn and creased, to find the following poem in my grandmother's hand, a testament, I believe, to how she felt about having to single out one of her children as a favorite because of matters out of her hands:

ODE TO MY BABY

Myrtis Purvis Lou

You're my morning's blessing and my night's care.

You're my laughter and my tears, my sunshine and rain. A bit of humanity thrown from the hand of God to fill my days with love and care. You're my everything, a blessing !• in disguise.

My other babies I turned loose— and let go.

But you will stay with me always to brighten and sadden my later

years. My everything— my baby, be of good cheer. We will live, pray and love till God comes.

Brenda, then, was her special one, always her baby. But of the rest of the children, it was my dad, the youngest of the boys, who was the chosen one—which, of course, engendered no end of resentment and hostility toward him, to hear my dad tell it, and no end of special treatment, to hear Lynn tell it. James, the oldest of the three, seemed not quite to enter things, just enough years older to be kept out of the fray, except for the time Lynn stuck him in the leg with his penknife on the school bus. Just to see what would happen, Lynn tells it. Other stories involve peeing on one another from upstairs windows, trying to drown one another in the lake near where they lived, even, later, stealing each other's girlfriends away.

But my dad, for instance, got to ride up in the cab of the pickup truck my grandfather drove, while the rest of the kids sat in the bed. He got the first pick of the meat at dinner, got new clothes instead of hand-me-downs. This sort of thing.

Fights, of course, resulted.

In other words, typical brotherly activities. Brad, Tim, and I fought each other in our pool in Arizona, held each other under

54 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

water for as long as we could; we wrestled in our living rooms, wrestled until we were so sweaty and red faced and angry that Mom or Dad made us stop just when it seemed I might break that half-nelson Brad employed, or just when it seemed I might have perfected that half-nelson I held Timmy in; we had BB-gun wars in the desert: I once shot Timmy in the back of the head from about twenty feet for no good reason other than that I wanted to see what would happen; and we all had to duck when entering Brad's bedroom, for fear he might be shooting X-Acto knives from the barrel of his BB gun rifle at the back of his bedroom door, as was his custom; Brad pinned down my shoulders with his knees and gave tittie-whistles, pinching my nipples hard and not letting go until I whistied; I pinned down Timmy's shoulders with my knees and gave a series of small, rapid slaps to his stomach, hollered out, "Pink belly, pink belly," until he cried; Timmy told Brad, who pinned down my shoulders, gave me tittie-whistles. Etcetera.

When I was given my first route with RC Cola, my uncle Lynn rode with me. He was an account manager then, in charge of selling at the corporate level to Vons and Albertson's. My dad was the vice-president. Lynn and I rode together for a week straight, the two of us hunched inside my Datsun B210. He spent the entire week lecturing me, but it wasn't the kind of lecture you groan over, the kind you hope not to be subjected to for hours on end. The kind your father might give.

"I urge you to sow your wild oats right now!" he exhorted me our first morning together, him seated beside me in his three-piece suit, me in my RC uniform. "Do it now, my friend," he

said, "because there's going to be a day when you won't have the opportunity or the ability to do so." He'd lost the two middle ringers of his left hand on a machine press when he was a teenager, and it was at this moment he raised that hand and pointed at the air just above the dashboard in emphasis, though he wasn't actually pointing; it was just the fact he was missing a couple of fingers that made it appear so. "Only through concentrated effort," he said, and jabbed that hand at the air on those last two words, concentrated effort, "can one achieve one's goals. Sowing wild oats should be one of your goals." He jabbed that hand one more time, just to make the point. Here we were in a Ralphs parking lot in Costa Mesa, the sun just up over the palm trees that lined the lot, my uncle telling me to have sex early and often.

"I tell you what I would do if I were a man of your considerable talents and commendable looks, not to mention fine hygiene skills," he went on. He loved to use words, I came to see during that week, and articulated each one so that it sat by itself for a fraction of an instant between us before the next one arrived, that hand once up, up for the duration, cocked like a gun and ready to emphasize. "I would find the most interesting and arresting female individual I might encounter while out running my sales route and endeavor to see what might happen were I to ask her out." He paused, got this grin on his face. Then he winked, said, "Yes-sir-ree," and nodded. "Concentrated effort."

Not what my dad would say. Were he to say anything.

I think it important to note at this point that, while my father had three boys, my uncle had three girls. No boys, and

56 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

I think he believed this opportunity to spend a week with a nephew his one moment to dispense all the father-son wisdom he'd been denied dispensing his entire life. So driving between stops was filled with those Boy Stories, the ones about peeing on each other, about drowning each other, about Dad inside the warm cab of the pickup grinning at my uncle through the glass, him huddled with his siblings in the cold while on the way to town.

He told other stories: Once, on a double date, my dad and uncle and two girls all crammed into the cab of that same old truck, my dad had to make a three-point turn on a dirt road in order to head back the way they had come. Dad put his arm on the seat back, suavely, and looked out the rear window to back up. As he gave it the gas, he glanced over at Uncle Lynn, then winked at him over the heads of the girls: Mission accomplished: My arm is in place. Then the rear tires slipped off the edge of the road and onto an embankment. Dad panicked, gave it the gas. The truck slid down the embankment before it rolled once, then twice, on down into the drainage ditch at the bottom.

Another time, when the two of them had summer jobs at an ice-cream plant in Columbus, my father had gotten so hot working at stacking crates of ice cream that he'd had the grand idea of simply licking the ice that'd formed on the walls of the freezer he moved in and out of all day. His tongue, naturally, stuck, and it'd been my uncle who discovered him, crying there in the freezer, Lynn laughing a good five minutes or so before he'd finally gone for warm water.

Uncle Lynn moved out to California in 1951, a year or so before the rest of the family. He simply drove off one day, so certain of himself and what he could do. He got work at a muffler shop in downtown Los Angeles, then sent word back to my grandma and grandpa of how good life out there was.

They came, the family whittled down by then to my grandparents and Wilman, Anne, and Brenda; Billie Jean and James were already married, starting up families of their own. The rest, of course, is history: how my father first graduated from Venice High School, then worked at a moving company with my grandfather, then stumbled into a job driving a truck for Nehi, Uncle Lynn following him there from the muffler shop. Twenty-five years later, there they were: vice-president and accounts manager for Royal Crown Cola. Uncle Lynn was divorced in 1971; my parents just celebrated their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary. Uncle Lynn drives a Yamaha 750, my dad a Buick Park Avenue. Uncle Lynn uses words with reckless abandon, while my father abandons them altogether.

Now my two boys are nephews to my two brothers, the older of whom simply left home one day for the navy, so certain of himself and what he could do, the younger of whom graduated high school, then stumbled into a job driving a truck for RC Cola.

Uncle Lynn felt it his duty to tell me stories, reveal to me a side of my father I'd not seen: that episode with the tongue on ice, that slow and embarrassing roll of a truck into a ditch with a girl in his arms. Things my dad would not, I believe, tell me for fear he'd look foolish.

Because what father wants to look foolish to his children? And what other role, then, does an uncle play except to place

58 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

your father in context, bring him down from on high to reveal to you the red-faced boy with an arm not quite strong enough?

What, someday, I'll tell Brad's children, Allison and Rachel: One Christmas when Brad was about fourteen, he asked for a fluorescent black light to put in his room in order to fully appreciate the Jimi Hendrix and Jethro Tull and Black Sabbath posters on the walls in there. Mom told him not to fear, and told him, too, not to buy one before Christmas. Of course Brad rode his bike to the local hobby shop two days before Christmas and bought the cheapest black light he could find, a little thing no longer than a ballpoint pen, then brought it home, set it up in his room. That was when Mom, furious, disappeared into her room, emerged a few moments later with a wrapped box, and made Brad open it right then, right there in his bedroom.

A fluorescent black light, two feet long and as big around as a baseball bat, mounted on a wood-grain base. Once he'd opened it she put out her hand, and he gave it back to her. "Merry Christmas," she said, and returned it the next day, got her money back on it.

What, someday, I'll tell Tim's children, Clayton and Faith: One summer night not long before school started up—Brad headed for eighth grade, me fifth, Timmy second, Leslie kindergarten —we children were told to try on our new school clothes for Dad. Brad and Leslie went to their rooms, Tim and I to the one we shared. I was quicker on the draw, had on my madras shirt and stiff new jeans when Timmy was still climbing into the pair

he'd tried on at Montgomery Ward just this morning. I was the first back to Mom and Dad's bedroom, the two of them waiting there for us.

That was when Timmy let out a shriek, and I turned, startled, to see him, shirtless and bent over, waddling into the room, his face twisted into lines that made his eyes disappear, his mouth a huge O of pain.

He fell to the bed, still shrieking, and lay on his side, curled up and howling. Mom and Dad were right there, standing beside the bed, leaning over him. "What's wrong?" Mom said, "what's wrong?" and put a hand to his face, tried with the other hand to pull his hands from where he'd jammed them between his legs. "Oh no," she said, "oh no," and I saw her turn to Dad, standing beside her. She was smiling, trying hard to hold back a laugh. "Get some ice," she said to me, but I didn't move.

By this time Brad and Leslie had made it to the room, and my mom called for ice again. This time my dad went for it. "Now lean back," Mom said, "lean back so we can help."

Slowly Timmy leaned back on the bed, sort of uncurled himself, to reveal to all of us the sad fact of his pain: He'd caught his penis in his zipper. "Ohhh, man," I let out, and felt myself shrink.

"Shit, man, that must hurt," Brad said, and before my mom could shoot her eyes at him to reprimand him for his filthy mouth, Leslie, headed for kindergarten in a week or so, said, "Shit, man, that must hurt."

Timmy howled, rolled his head back and forth.

Then Dad arrived with a couple of ice cubes, and they started in, icing the poor kid down so they could more effectively loosen the offending teeth. A couple of minutes later the work

60 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

was done, Timmy released with a newfound caution, one I'm sure he still holds close, even this many years later.

And what will my brothers, my sons' uncles, choose to tell my boys, Zeb and Jake, about me? Most likely one of those stories will have to do with my role in the music program in fifth grade when, bell-bottom clad and tambourine in hand, I had a solo, sang Bobby Sherman's "Easy Come, Easy Go" to a guffawing crowd of elementary-school kids. At least that's the one sticks in my mind. Chances are, though, there are stories they've savored, ones I've repressed, my brothers holding on for just the right day to step into their roles as uncles, spoilers of my paternal authority.

I see my father only once or twice a year now, and each time I see him he's aged a little. I see it in the lines beside his eyes and mouth, the minuscule network of broken vessels across his cheeks. I see the two of them together, my uncle Lynn and Dad, even more rarely; the first time I had seen all three boys together—James, Lynn, and Wilman—in over five years was, in fact, at my grandmother's funeral.

But even on this occasion, the death of their mother, there was still Lott laughter, three men open mouthed and laughing at their own histories, the old stories surfacing again to reveal the same boys they've always been: the penknife, the peeing, the pinecones. The only difference is that now they are orphans, both their mother and father gone, and I couldn't help but feel while watching them laugh in the living room of their mother's

Redondo Beach bungalow that these old stories are what make them who they are and who they are not. Especially in the face of the death of family.

Just as a black light, a rogue zipper, and a Bobby Sherman song distinguish us brothers from each other. Someday Brad will get hold of my two boys, as will Tim. And I'll get hold of their kids, my nieces and nephews, and we three uncles will tell stories designed not just to entertain, but to stake our claim to what little territory we have on this earth: who we are.

62 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHE

RS

cuss,

This story starts five years ago, back before we bought our first house, back when we were renters in a complex of duplexes. I was standing at our bedroom window one overcast afternoon, the curtains open. The window looked out onto our street, a cul-de-sac, and I was there at the window simply because I'd heard Zebulun out on the street, hollering and carrying on. Only a week or so before, my mother and father had visited from California, and for Zeb's fourth birthday they had taken him to one of those warehouse toy stores, everything from Matchbox cars to huge playpools all stacked to the ceilings. My parents and Zeb were there to buy his first bicycle. With training wheels, of course. He'd outgrown his tricycle a few months before, too often borrowed the boy across the street's Big Wheel. It was time, we figured, for his own bike.

I watched Zeb riding his bike off to the side of the street, almost on the sandy shoulder, as the complex had no curbs. Several yards ahead of him was the boy across the street, Aaron,

a year and a half older than Zeb, riding his own bike. More than a year before, he'd outgrown the Big Wheel Zeb so often took over. And twenty yards or so ahead of him was another boy, our next-door neighbor's kid, a boy of about eight. He had on a Cub Scout uniform, bright yellow neckerchief over his shoulders, navy blue shirt. He was riding a bigger bike, this one pieced together: outsized handlebars, front wheel smaller than rear, frame the color of rust.

I watched, ready, as any father would be, for my son to fall or for him to weave out into the street and get hit by a car, though few came through here, the end of the street just a few houses down to the right. I waited for something to happen. Of course, nothing did. The Cub Scout, already three houses down to my left, screeched to a stop, left a skid mark behind him. Then Aaron pulled up, put both feet on the ground. The two of them turned, watched my son.

Zeb was hollering now. I wouldn't say he screamed, though he was being loud enough for that word. But scream makes it sound like he was terrified, whereas Zeb was a four-year-old kid whose body was so filled with energy, with exuberance, with the joy and freedom found in riding a two-wheeled bike just like the big kids', that it had no other outlet. He still hadn't mastered the bicycle; he pedaled it slowly, his feet not quite used to pushing forward and down at the same time. He wasn't used to using his forward momentum to get the thing moving more quickly, and so, though he was doing the best he could to keep up with the other two, older than he and pros at the subtleties of bicycling, he still had this power, this energy, this hollering left in him. Though I could not see his face from where I stood, I knew what it would look like: His eyes would be wide open, the eye-

64 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

brows as far up his forehead as they might go; his mouth would be open in a full smile, most all his teeth showing, from inside him coming this joyful sound.

I hadn't yet decided what they were doing out there, wondered if they were racing or if they were just goofing around. But then, as soon as Zeb came up to the other two, the Cub Scout wheeled his bike around in the opposite direction. Before Zeb had even stopped his bike, the idea of pushing back on the pedal in order to slow the bike down still foreign to him, the Cub Scout shouted, "Okay, now let's have a race back to the end of the street."

He took off. Aaron, a little bewildered—he looked back at Zeb a moment, then to the Cub Scout, then to Zeb again, as if he bore some fragile allegiance to my son—started pedaling away.

By this time Zeb had managed to get his feet to the ground. He stopped the bike, turned it around in the direction the other two had already gone. He put his feet to the pedals, slowly pushed on them, started moving on down the street.

The Cub Scout was the model of efficiency: head down, rear off the seat, legs pumping furiously. The wind he created pushed back his hair. Aaron was in the midst of imitating him, his bottom off the seat, his feet moving not quite as rapidly. He looked up on occasion, to see, I imagined, exactly what it was that older kid did that made him go so fast.

Then the Cub Scout looked behind him, shouted, 'Tm going to win!"

Aaron said nothing, only looked up a moment, bowed his head again.

But Zeb, my son, his brand-new bike beneath him, was

already hollering, already joyful, his feet moving too slowly to let him ever gain on Aaron, much less the Cub Scout. I could see his face now, saw his expression was just as Fd imagined, except that the brown hair down on his forehead was a little stringy, wet with the sweat of exertion in a race he would be doomed to lose every time. In the midst of his shouting, his elation at simply being there and moving, he yelled, "No, I'm going to win!"

By now the Cub Scout was at the end of the cul-de-sac, and jammed on his brakes, laid another skid on the ground. My son was just now coming abreast of our house, still had a hundred yards to go. And he was still hollering, still just as happy, still just as filled with the pure, clear glory of pedaling his new bike, of playing.

What he doesn't know, I thought, and an immense fear came over me, a dread of the future, of that day when my son would realize that, no, he would not win. There would be a day, I saw right then, when he would be riding his bike in a race set by some older, more adept, probably bigger kid—this Cub Scout, most likely—and he would look up from his own furious pedaling, his holler swallowed down to silence, that smile gone, his eyes losing this joy, and he would see up ahead that the race was already over, that he would lose. He would be immeasurably older that day, so that what I felt standing at that window, my first-born child still riding his bike toward the end of the street, where once again both boys were waiting for him, Zeb still yelling, still oblivious to his loss—was grief.

Grief for the death of my child's childhood, me already mourning the day he would truly lose the race. The race he was

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in that day he did not lose, because he hadn't yet recognized what loss was. Someday soon he would, and that was the day I feared. He would grow up.

What was important about this moment five years ago, I knew even then, was that I had seen into the life of my child, into his joy at simple play, joy that someday would cloud over with the knowledge of loss; knowledge that loss could happen, in fact, even though he rode his bike as fast as he could. Even now, in this moment, today, I can see my four-year-old son's face, hear him hollering, know that he is convinced he can win, even though a Cub Scout on a piecemeal bike whips him every time they race, Zeb not yet knowing what loss really is. And I carry this moment of saddened joy with me, knowing that what really happened was perfect.

And, of course, loss came. It has visited my son on many occasions over the last five years, visited him in the hundreds of small and huge ways loss visits us all. We still live on a cul-de-sac, but now we own the house we live in, a tract home only a few miles from the duplexes. Aaron still lives across the street, our families having decided at the same time that this new subdivision would make a great place to settle.

Zeb wins bicycle races now, but also still loses them. He scores one hundred on spelling tests, but sometimes scores in the fifties in math. Sometimes he beats Aaron at Scrabble, and sometimes he storms into the house from playing with Aaron, angry because Aaron wins at the card games he makes up himself, the rules of which are always evolving, always delivering to

Aaron himself just the right number of diamonds or discard piles he needs in order to win. These card games might as well be a bicycle race with a Cub Scout, I sometimes think.

But the loss I believe brought Zeb into the ranks, that loss I'd been waiting for since that day five years back, came only a couple of months ago. This was Zeb's first karate tournament, an event he'd been waiting for for six months. Winners would be chosen. Trophies given out. He belongs to a studio here in town, goes three times a week to spend an hour or so in his crisp white ghi practicing blocks and thrusts and palm-heel jabs and what-have-you. He knows the names for a few dozen moves, can execute them sharp and strong. He's already an orange belt, two belts up from where he started, at white.

This Saturday in spring, as usual, we were late getting out of the house, had to drive the van too fast all the way across town to a middle-school gymnasium already filled with kids in crisp white ghis, parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles all crammed into the bleachers. The tournament was for kids from the five different studios that made up the chain. Zeb had signed up for two events, Sparring and Pinan. The pinan is a series of choreographed moves performed alone before a jury of three adult Masters. Sparring involves two kids with boxing gloves, the two of them kicking and chopping and blocking and doing everything else they've learned in class. This event would also involve, we were pretty certain, pain.

Yet Zeb's instructor, Mr. Mike, a man with a thick south Boston accent and a fifth-degree black belt, assured us after class one evening this event was a no-contact spar; points, in fact, could be taken off if anyone actually hit someone else.

68 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

We made it into the gymnasium, quickly lost Zeb to the swirling droves of kids in white ghis, only to hear his age and belt group's sparring match location announced a few minutes later over the loudspeaker. At any given time that day there were six matches going on, areas on the gymnasium floor roped off and assigned, all these children bowing to each other and then doing battle. Around us were parents we recognized from the studio back home, and parents we didn't. But we were all here to cheer on our children, however well or poorly they did.

Even before we made it to the appointed area, Zeb was there, seated on the floor in front of the bleachers in a group of eight or nine kids, all orange belts, all of them his age. Melanie, Jacob, and I made our way up into the bleachers, stepped carefully between parents and siblings and everyone else already seated, all of us smiling and nodding. Since I'd been given a video camera for Father's Day the year before, it was my job to carry it with me wherever we went; my job, too, to record everything. Today was no different, and I tried my best not to bump with the camera the heads of the people we wormed through. Finally we found a few empty seats, Jacob already complaining about being hungry. He'd spotted the hot dog and soda stand in the far corner even before, it seemed, we'd gotten inside the gym.

The referee—I'm not sure of the proper karate name for this person—explained the rules to the children as best he could over the noise of the gym (all these matches going on, all these

K parents shouting out and cheering): The first kid to be awarded three points would win the round; the match would be a series of elimination rounds leading to a final round, so if you lost a

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round you were out; you would stay inside the cordoned area, use only accepted karate moves; no contact.

The first few rounds were mild affairs, kids kicking now and again or thrusting huge gloves when they remembered to; mostly they circled each other, wary of doing anything that might get them hurt. This was the case with Zeb's first round, a round he won three points to two. I watched it all through the black-and-white viewfinder of the video camera, saw Zeb make a couple of jabs, a kick or two, only to have the round suddenly finish before me, all of it in miniature. There just hadn't seemed much to see.

I took down the camera then, called out to Zeb. He'd already sat down on the gym floor, and when he turned to his name, I could see this smile on his face, his lips closed tight. He was proud of himself, I knew, but didn't want to let it show too much: There were all these people around, his mom and dad (Jacob had found a friend from school by this time, was up on the top row of the bleachers and messing around) a good five or six rows up and waving, crazy.

Next came a few more rounds to finish out the first elimination, and then it was Zeb's turn again. There he was in the viewfinder, listening to the words the referee gave them both. The two kids bowed, then Zeb took up his stance, danced up and back with the boy, neither landing anything. There were moves, forays and retreats, and then the other boy kicked, was awarded a point. Then the boys went back to the center of the area, started again.

That was when Zeb's belt fell down, dropped around his feet. That was when, too, the other boy kicked again, received another point, Zeb still trying to free his feet from the orange

70 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

belt there on the mat. The referee quickly picked up the belt, tossed it to the side, and the round went on.

Zeb lost, two to three.

When I brought down the camera this time he wasn't smiling, and when we called his name he turned to us slowly, his mouth a thin line. He only looked at us, puzzled, eyebrows up, eyes open wide. I gave him the thumbs-up sign, and he nodded, turned back to the next round. It was over, just like that.

But then, a few minutes later, it seemed there might be some piece of hope left, some way to salvage this loss: At the end of the second elimination, the referee called Zeb and another boy up for a round. I leaned toward Melanie, said, "What's going on?"

"Maybe they're letting him do another round because his belt fell down," she said, and I nodded; it was reason enough to give my son another chance to win.

The boys listened, bowed, took their stances. A woman two rows down and a few feet over stood, yelled, "Give it to him, Jason. Give it to him!"

Jason, a kid from one of the other studios, gave it to him. His tactic, it became evident immediately, was simply to rush the opponent, thrash him with his fists, hope to land some points in there. The problem was that the opponent happened to be my son, and the boy's move so startled Zeb that he fell backward and landed on the mat, the boy and his arms still working in Zeb's face while the referee pulled him back, knelt to Zeb to see if he was all right. I was watching this on the video camera, all of it over and done with just that fast. And I was startled, too, to see the referee award the boy a point for a jab.

"Good job, Jason!" the woman yelled. "Focus!" she yelled. "Focus!"

I had the camera down now, was watching what would happen in color, big as life. I forgot to turn the camera off, so what happened next, when we watched it at home on video, was all cockeyed and angled, off balance.

The boy focused, focused so well that this time one of his jabs landed squarely on Zeb's jaw, knocked him to the ground.

No contact, was what Mr. Mike had said.

No contact, was what the referee had said.

Melanie stood, then I stood—Zeb on his bottom on the mat, the boy already pulled away again, the ref already kneeling to Zeb. He was crying, I could see, although he nodded at whatever the ref was saying to him. He sat there, his hands in the gloves in his lap, his face red and squinted up, eyes on the mat. The ref held Zeb's jaw with one hand, said more words to him, words lost on the sound in here, lost in the shouts from the woman two rows down—"Good job, Jason," she was saying, "Keep focusing"—and Zeb nodded again. He took in a few quick breaths, brushed at his eyes with the back of a glove.

He was crying, his eyes wet, we could see even from here, as he finally stood, got up and went to the middle of the area, took up his stance again. The referee said a few words to the boy whose mother was cheering him on, but the boy's eyes were wandering, as though he'd heard all this before and didn't really care. It was only a warning from the ref, his eyes seemed to say.

Zeb was gone now, lost the next two points quickly, cowed by the boy with furious arms and a mother to match. When Zeb came back from the round to take his seat on the floor he only glanced at us, his eyebrows knotted up, teeth still clenched.

72 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

He'd lost, to a kid who landed a punch instead of played by the rules, just as he'd lost to a Cub Scout on a bike who wanted to race kids half his age. But this time it counted somehow. In the glance up at us in the bleachers I think I saw what was to come: During his next event, the pinan, that choreographed dance of self-defense moves he knew so well, moves he performed for us in the family room each night after karate, he forgot himself, stopped dead halfway through, had to start over for the three Masters watching him, and in front of the parents and siblings and everyone else seated in the bleachers watching. He had to start over.

On the way home that afternoon, after aD our hugs and words of praise for how well he'd done, and after we let ourselves berate that Jason for the way he fought—berated his mother, too, for putting him up to it—there still seemed to Zeb no comfort, though he nodded again and again at all our words. Even Jacob, all the way in the backseat of the van, joined in now and again. "That kid was mean," he said. "That kid was mean." But Zeb took it all, I knew, for the hollow words they were, the comfortless touch. At a stoplight halfway home I turned in my seat, looked at him. I saw his eyes, the shine in them; saw the way he sat staring out his window, his mouth still that same thin line.

"Zeb," I said, and he looked to me. His hands were folded in his lap. I said, "I'm proud of you." I said, "You didn't give up."

He only looked at me a moment longer, then shrugged, turned to the window again. I glanced at Melanie, there next to

c?^<.£c4^***v 7 3

me; saw her chin quiver. She'd been the one to stand up first when he'd been hit, and I saw in her eyes the same shine as I'd seen in Zeb's.

"Garrett and me had fun up there on the bleachers," Jacob said. He said, "Can we go to Hardee's for lunch?"

I turned back to the road.

There will be Cub Scouts who want to race you with their bikes everywhere you will ever go, I want both my sons to know. There will be boys who will break the rules just to win fair and square, I want them to know. And still you may lose, I want them to know, too.

Zeb knows this now, though on that day five years ago such an idea was incomprehensible. One thing he doesn't know, though, is the gift he gave his father all the way back then, one of the finest gifts he will ever be able to give: the crystalline picture in my head of him on his bike, his hollering, that joyful noise, ringing in my ears, him pedaling and pedaling, the truth of him winning every time.

But the accompanying picture I now have of him, the one of him looking out the van window on a bright spring afternoon, his eyes glistening, hands folded in the lap of his crisp white ghi, is no less fine and rare a gift. It's a beautiful gift, different only for the other truth it speaks: He's one of us now, a piece of his innocence broken away, lost as we all lose it.

74 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

S^stcr^ejvy&tvt

Then there are days like today. We were trying to get out of the house for karate camp this morning, karate camp being a program for kids from eight o'clock to noon for a week at the studio where Zeb has his lessons. Melanie was already gone for work, and the boys, out in the garage, were ready to go. Except for the reefs, those Velcro sandals I'd told Zeb to put on before we ever got outside.

"But Dad," he said, "we're barefoot in the studio. We don't have to wear them."

Then, for all the various and minuscule transgressions that had already been visited upon me this day—when I let the dog out this morning to relieve herself, she made a beeline to the house under construction next door and the discarded chicken bones the framers leave there each day; Zeb and Jake argued, before a single light had been turned on, about who got to use the bathroom first when they woke up; I had to tell Jacob four times to comb his hair; I had to tell Zeb three times to clear the breakfast dishes; the sink was full of pots and pans from the

dinner party last night; Melanie was already gone—for all these terrible facts of the day thus far, I blew up at Zeb.

I yelled. I shouted. I threw my hands up in the air, ranted about obeying your father; ranted about the fire ants out there on the grass where we park our old VW Bug, those ants just waiting for bare feet and the opportunity to bite; ranted about never listening to me; ranted about and about and about.

I yelled the first ten minutes of the fifteen-minute drive to the studio, my stomach churned up now about how little writing I'd gotten done the day before, in preparing for the above-mentioned dinner party, about the deadline for a book I'd missed by a month already, about the twenty-two-page story I was about to trash because it had died suddenly the day before yesterday. All of these concerns were translated into a language that involved only words about Velcro sandals, about fire ants, about the idea of obeying your father. My world and its woes boiled down to Why can't you just listen and obey me without making me yell?

The last five minutes of the drive we passed in silence, me feeling the stupidity of it all, of my yelling about things that, finally, had very little to do with these two boys. Zeb, next to me, only looked out his window, as did Jacob behind us, the two of them wondering, I imagined, if they dared speak.

But when we parked in front of the studio, Zeb already with his door open, ready to climb out; I reached to him, put my arm around his neck, pulled him to me. I hugged him, said, "I'm sorry I yelled. I shouldn't have done that."

"That's okay," he said into my shoulder.

76 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

"Can we go to Wendy's for lunch?" Jacob said from the backseat, sensing this window of opportunity, his father contrite.

Zeb pulled away, smiling, and I turned, looked at Jacob. He was leaning forward, grinning. "Sure," I said. "Wendy's," I said.

Then I looked at Zeb, standing now and pulling forward the seatback to let his brother out. "Zeb," I said, and he looked at me. "You have to wear the reefs so you don't get ant bites. Okay?"

"Okay," he said, and smiled again. By this time Jacob was out. He slammed shut the door, and they turned, ran along the sidewalk to the glass door of the place, disappeared. Just like that.

There are days like today. Days with no story, really, other than the misstep, the idiot words and gestures, the sincere belief for a moment, however blind, that all this yelling might actually do some good, when the world and Velcro sandals seem somehow malevolently aligned against you. Then the right word, the right gesture. The lunch at Wendy's, atonement after confession. No story, really, other than that of being a father.

/*-\to-*y,4**y<-*>,t 11

jl'tsS't / Wwne5

Each morning we heard his small, thin voice above the static hum of the humidifier in his room. "Mommy!" he called.

We had only the one kid then. We lived in Columbus, Ohio, where I'd gotten my first job out of college, teaching remedial English at Ohio State; Melanie worked full-time as a secretary for Ohio Rural Electric.

Getting up, then, was a job in itself. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and alternating Sundays it was my turn to answer. Those mornings I'd throw back the sheets, slouch to the room across the hall to find Zeb, our twenty-two-month-old, standing in the crib, hair wild, eyes open wide. He stood there, smiling, arms out, waiting for his morning hug. "Mommy! Mommy!" he said.

He was talking to me.

For a long time Zeb knew me as only Mommy, and for just as long I worried over it.

"But I'm his father," I used to say to Melanie, she a few minutes behind me, sometimes still asleep, as she made her way to the bathroom those mornings I pulled first duty, Zeb splayed out on the changing table, his diaper heavy as a bowling ball. She'd rub an eye with the palm of one hand, shake off the night.

"Why not Pop?" I'd say. "Maybe just Dad?"

"It's a blessing," she'd say. "I think it's nice he calls you Mommy."

Sure, he could say Daddy. He usually did, too, those mornings I met with him first. But only after he called me Mommy a half-dozen times, his voice sometimes taking on the squeaky pitch Melanie and I reserved for talk with Baby Bear, his sleep partner. Zeb, newly dusted and with a fresh diaper, would hold the stuffed animal out to me, call, "Mommy! Mommy!" in baby falsetto, just like Mommy and Mommy did each night before turning out the light. Only we'd use his real name: "Zeb!" we'd say. "Baby Bear loves the Zeb!"

So why not Daddy first thing?

He wasn't slow, never had been. Not by a long shot. I remember one afternoon Melanie and I were in his bedroom, folding clothes and putting them in the cardboard dresser, one of those put-together kits we'd found at Kmart—this was straight out of college, remember, when it seemed miracle enough that we even owned a real-live crib. We were discussing plans for worst-case scenario Potty Learning measures. Zeb thought, as far as we could tell, that his training pants were some strange form of socks, happy with them only once he'd gotten them down around his ankles.

In the midst of our words about what actions we might take

80 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

if he hadn't been housebroken by middle school, we heard water running in the bathroom.

Drowned, we thought as we ran from the room, or scalded.

We found him only standing on the toilet, the bathroom cup, filled with cold water, in his hand. He turned off the faucet, took a drink from the cup, then dumped what was left in the sink. He put the cup down, leaned across the sink, pulled his dinosaur toothbrush from his dinosaur-toothbrush holder, and looked up at us. "Toot paste?" he said.

He wasn't slow. Not at all.

Melanie thought his calling me Mommy was nice. But what if it had been the other way around? What if he'd called her Daddy? I didn't dare form the question in real words, though; I knew I'd get an answer quickly, one that would cut: You didn't give birth to him! she'd have shouted. You didn't cry when he was weaned!

But I was there in the delivery room, I would have countered. I coached you, I calmed you, I soothed you. I fed you ice chips.

You told the doctor to turn the mirror the other way so you couldn't see what was going on down there! she'd have shot back. You told him you might throw up!

True. She would have me on that one. But I burped him after you fed him, I would've feebly put in, the argument already lost. / rocked him to sleep nights.

You didn't leak through your shirts, she would have said.

Argument over: She would have won. And his calling me Mommy first thing in the morning still would have been a blessing.

f~C\*t 7 Y«w*v*3 81

He had other words, too, that he made to mean other things. He knew his mother and I were two different people; it was / who had the problem. One afternoon, for instance, we were on our way from the apartment to pick up Mommy from work, and we stopped at a drive-thru teller to make a withdrawal. When I pulled away from the window, Zeb said something, a one-syllable word.

"What?" I said, and looked in the rearview mirror to get a good view of him in the backseat, strapped like some pre-Mercury monkey into his car seat.

"Fries?" he questioned. "Fries?"

I looked away, ashamed, and felt his innocent brown eyes piercing the back of my skull, his word an accusation: More than once I'd been guilty of stopping at the Wendy's drive-thru window on the way to Mommy's office, squandering our hard-earned pay on fries and a Frosty. Of course I'd had to share them both with him each time, too, to keep him from squealing on me.

"Sorry," I said. "No fries. That was the bank." I held up the twenty-dollar bill, waved it at him back there. "See? Money."

"Money?" he said.

His first request.

There was, too, the language he'd learned just from being in the car with me all those times. When he heard a car honk, whether out on the road or on TV, he shouted, "Hey, buddyl" drawing the bud out loud and long, though whenever I shouted it to the clod going eighteen miles an hour in front of me, I didn't give the phrase quite that inflection. Whenever the car stopped, too, whether in traffic or as we pulled into our parking space at the apartment, he hollered, "Cowboy!" This was a

82 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

contracted form of my own "Come on, cowboy," a generic term I used on any given driver who forgot to signal or who stopped to let cars go ahead and turn left in front of us. I used to wonder, too, what he would think a cowboy really was once he got older. What would happen when his friends called for a game of cowboys-and-Indians? Would he climb into the nearest car?

I made the mistake once of talking about this problem of first names in the morning to one of my colleagues in the remedial English department. She was an intellectual—I knew she was one by her coffee mug with the logo and call letters of the local public radio station printed on it. She suggested this problem of mistaken names might have something to do with what she called Primary Words.

"Primary words," she said, "are words that mean many things. Words like—," and she went quiet. She thought. She brought the coffee mug to her lips, took a sip, as though the mug itself might give her the words she meant. She put the mug down, finally said, "Words like, like, cleave. Cleave. Cleave, you see? Cleave is a primary word."

I'm still not sure what she was saying, but I nodded, smiled.

This was my first job, and I wanted to be an intellectual, too.

She was, in addition, the mother of a twenty-month-old, and I

1 knew that if I pressed her for an explanation, asked her what she

meant, she might've shouted, You didn't leak through your shirts!

I guess, though, that I knew all along it was all my fault, his turning Mommy into a generic term. It's a hazard of the new

i

^f-itii ?l<tm« 83

way of parenting, the splitting of lives as evenly as possible right down the middle, even to the point of making certain neither of us prepared four dinner meals two weeks in a row. We took turns cleaning the house, took turns grocery shopping, even took turns washing the car. And we changed diapers, fed him, washed him just this way as well. So why shouldn't he have called me Mommy?

I even remember sweating back then over the whole How-old-is-your-baby question. "Twenty-two months," I'd answer when asked. I know my father would have had to stumble, try to piece together a good answer: "Geez, two?" I can hear him say. "A little less than that? Something." It wasn't that he didn't love me. It's just that, well, things are different now.

For a long time, too, believe it or not, I struggled with the dilemma of what to call him two weeks before or after a month-birthday. What would I say when he was twenty-two-and-a-half months old? Go for broke, say twenty-three? Some ironclad formula seemed in order, though none ever came. And when would I stop counting months?

"How old's your boy now?" I could see someone asking me.

"Oh, he's a hundred and eighty-six months," I'd have to answer. "Taking him down for his learner's permit next week."

He's nine now—109 months, to be exact—and the days of his calling me Mommy are long gone. The sad thing, though, is that I can't recall the first day he called me Daddy when I went into his room. I could make up a story about it, here and now: I could tell you how it was a Tuesday—Melanie's morning—

84 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

and how there seemed something different in his voice as I came up from sleep, the sheets on Melanie's side of the bed already thrown back, my wife slowly rounding the footboard on her way out of the room. I could tell you I closed my eyes then, pulled the sheet up a little closer to my chin, and a moment later she came back into the room, her feet still dragging across the carpet, while my son still called out from his room. The sound of his voice was changed, I could tell you, different somehow as it made its way out his room and across the hall and into my ears, and I could tell you how I felt then the give of the mattress as Melanie climbed back into bed, me turning to her, asking, "What's wrong? This is your day," my eyes still closed.

"Guess again," she would say. "Listen."

Then I could tell you of that word coming to me, his small, thin voice calling out above the static hum of the humidifier in his room: "Daddy!"

The truth is, though, that I can't say any of that happened at all, though I'm certain there had to be a first morning. And now that he's 109 months old, it's not even Daddy much anymore. Just Dad.

But I think I see the blessing that first name was, what Melanie tried to tell me those mornings she was yawning and getting to go to the bathroom first, and maybe what Zeb was trying to teach me, too, all along: It wasn't a word but a person. The one who took care, picked him up, held him. The one who mattered to him.

Melanie. Me. Either one. Both.

flumu 85

oOe^i^u^v^ £?&x

"Boys pupate at around age fifteen," Zeb said, very matter-of-fact, and climbed out of the van, pulled his backpack from the seat. We were in the garage, just home from picking the boys 1 up at school. Jacob, as always, was the first one out, already gone | on his bike, roaming the neighborhood on his daily after-school route.

"What?" Melanie said, already out of the van. She glanced at me, then back to Zeb. She was smiling, and pushed closed her door.

I was at the top of the steps up from the garage, the keys out for the door. "They what?" I said, and turned to him. I was smiling, too. Already I could see Zeb's face going red at our reaction, these words and smiles regarding his scientific assertion.

"Pupate," he said. "Your voice changes. You get hair." He

I paused. "A lady from the Medical University talked to our class today." He slipped the bag onto his shoulder. He wouldn't look at us. It was then I remembered that a little over a month ago

he'd come home and told us about metamorphosis in butterflies, the whole business of spinning cocoons, worms turned into miraculous flying creatures.

That was when, too, I laughed, and I wonder if I'll be held responsible years from now for some complex Zeb will have, traced to me and that laugh: I see a woman, his wife, yelling at me about their sex life, about her husband's penchant for laughter in the middle of things.

Melanie cut her eyes at me, signal enough to stop, though I could see she was holding back laughter of her own.

I took a breath, said, "You mean puberty. They go through puberty.'*'

He looked up at me, smiling himself. He shrugged, said, "Yeah. That's it."

I put the key to the door, unlocked it, opened it up. " 'Pupate,' " I said, "that's good."

"Actually," Melanie said from behind me, and I heard her start up the steps, "that's a pretty good idea of what happens."

"I told you it was true," Zeb said.

True.

Boys pupate, revealing, once it's all over, bigger boys whose voices have changed, who have to shave, who need deodorant and mouthwash and Odor-Eaters for their tennis shoes. And make ready for girls who have recently pupated, revealing themselves to be young women.

Learning about sex, of course, figures in here.

Right now Zeb, at age ten, knows more about sex than I did at his age. I am certain of this, as Melanie and I took it upon

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ourselves last year to have The Talk with him. We decided the summer before he started fourth grade that we wanted to tell him the truth of where babies came from, how they were made—our decision a result of the ugly mutant facts Melanie and I were given around his age, what has always been referred to as "picking it up on the street." But I can't help but think his pointing at hula dancers on the television set one evening while we were watching a National Geographic Explorer episode, then his two-word assessment of what he saw—"That's sex"— pushed us to the brink.

We got out our copy of Reader's Digest ABC's of the Human Body, one of those all-in-one reference manuals you get for three easy installments when you send in your sweepstakes tickets, and set out to set Zeb straight. It's a good book, a helpful one with all the right cross-sectional diagrams and photos, from the chart of the male reproductive system that looks for all the world like a sad map of Florida, to the diagram of the female reproductive system, the names of items in there like a list of planets in a parallel solar system: ovary, uterus, cervix, vagina, clitoris, vulva. Here, too, is the photograph of sperm, hundreds of lost dogs wagging their way toward a home they've never been to before, and the white pinpoint that is the egg itself, in this particular photo "approaching the feathery edges of the Fallopian tube."

We told Jake he could watch TV in Mom and Dad's bedroom, a treat unknown to the boys, one that would assure our privacy in the kitchen. Then we brought Zeb in, had him sit at one of the three chairs we'd pulled out from the kitchen table. "There's some things we want you to know about before you start school this fall," Melanie started in.

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Zeb crossed his arms, looked at the two of us with the level stare he employs when he thinks he's in for trouble: head slightly bowed forward, eyes half closed, lower jaw jutting forward. His look.

"Do you know where babies come from?" Melanie went on, smiling.

"Yes," he said, too quick. He held his arms tighter, let out a quick breath. "I know," he said.

"Where?" I said, and he looked at me. I knew my word had come too abruptly, simply there and aimed at him. I knew he didn't know. So I smiled, tried hard with that smile to soften what had sounded like a cross-examination.

He shrugged.

"We just want to tell you," Melanie said, and leaned toward him, "so that when somebody at school tries to tell you something crazy you'll already know the truth."

He looked at her, his arms held even tighter now, his lower jaw jutting out hard.

Melanie still smiled. "This way you'll already know the truth," she said again.

Then, slowly, she turned to me. "Bret?" she said, and smiled. "Go ahead."

I looked at her. I took a breath, swallowed. I said, "Oh," then turned to Zeb.

He was looking at me, his eyes thin slits. Then he put his hands up to his ears, covered them.

I remember looking at my mom one night at dinner and asking flat out, "Where do babies come from?" This must have been

90 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

back around fourth grade, as best I can recall. Right about the time I picked it up on the street. But I remember asking that question in all sincerity, and I remember, too, my dad's instantaneous reaction, enough to make me flinch: "Hey!" he shouted, and I quickly turned to him, saw him leaned toward me, a fork in one hand, a knife in the other, his forehead knotted up, his eyes right on me. "Hey," he said again, "don't talk like that!"

I am not kidding. That's what he said.

"Bill," my mom said, and I turned, saw her looking at him. She was smiling at him, her head slightly tilted, lips together, the corners just turned up. This was her What-is-your-problem? smile, and I knew she was on my side. "He just asked," she said. I turned back to Dad, waiting to see what he would say.

His eyes flicked from mine to hers to mine to hers. He sat up straight in his chair. By this time all four children were looking at him, waiting. He said, "Well," then put his fork and knife to the pork chop on his plate. "Well," he said again, "this isn't the time or the place. It's rude."

That was it. And even though Mom was on my side, I still didn't get an answer.

I know, though, that I must have asked this question in the fourth grade, because that was when Danny Kortenburg and George Ross showed me where babies come from. They thought, of course, I was an idiot for not knowing, as though they'd been born with this superior knowledge, had owned it all their lives. The two of them, there in the boys' bathroom at Larkspur Elementary School, decided to inform me, this retard, how it was done.

"I can't believe you don't know," Danny Kortenburg said, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. "Just like dogs," George

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Ross said. He had pale blond hair, freckles, what my dad called a snaggle tooth. Danny Kortenburg was about a foot taller, his brown hair buzzed off on the sides, a lock off the top always falling down into his eyes. "You're on the bottom," he said to George, who turned to him, said, "No way, you're on the bottom." The conversation went on this way for the next few minutes, precious recess time lost while the secret of the universe was being kept from me by two boys bickering over dogs and who was on top.

Finally, Danny pulled George's arm behind his back, said, "You're on bottom," and George, his face twisted up in pre-adolescent anger at being one-upped by this bigger kid, said, "Okay."

Then George bent over, put his hands on his knees. Danny jumped onto his back, sort of hopped up and down like he was riding a horse. "This is what your parents do," Danny said, and now both he and George were laughing. "Uh-uh-uh," Danny said, and George straightened up, Danny falling backward and onto the green tile of the bathroom floor.

I stood there, my arms crossed, leaning against the sink. I said, "No way." I said, "You guys are stupid. No way," and started feeling sick to my stomach, imagining my parents doing this weird acrobatic feat; and I wondered, too, who was supposed to be on top, wondered if parents fought over that just like these two guys were doing.

George's face went serious, and he put his hands on his hips. Danny, still on the floor, pushed the lock of hair up from his forehead, touched his glasses. Slowly George nodded, then whispered, "Yes way." It was in this manner I picked it up on the street.

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I wouldn't get The Talk, though, the straight news about sex, for another four years, until I was in eighth grade. I do not now recall what events precipitated my parents' decision to tell me the facts on this particular evening, though I know I didn't point at hula dancers on TV, make pronouncements regarding copulation. By the time I was in eighth grade I and some friends— Mark Beck, Steve Noeding, Jim Loeffler, and Chris Penney, to name a few—had built a fort out in the desert between our tract and the junior high. Where our tract ended, on Thunderbird Road, the desert began; two miles away lay Greenway Junior High; halfway across was a beat-up and discarded couch, two folding chairs, a fire pit, all of it settled beneath a palo verde tree and surrounded by tumbleweeds. Our fort.

There, for what now seems years, we stared at and joked about and huddled around and passed back and forth the same creased and crumpled pages torn out of somebody's dad's issue of Playboy, a blond there with breasts impossibly large, a smile so alluring it seemed to speak to each of us newly each time we pulled the pages from where we'd stashed them in the springs beneath the couch. So when my mom said to me one evening, "You and your father need to have a talk," and when my dad ! looked at her, then at me, swallowed, blinked, and said, "All right, let's go," and headed off down the hall back toward their bedroom, I was already familiar with the terrain of the female body, knew so very much about sex and what it entailed. There'd been some fine-tuning here and there regarding that horseback stuff since fourth grade, and now I wondered precisely what it was my dad would have to say.

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I followed him into their bedroom, the same room in which I'd imagined them not playing piggyback. He stopped at the foot of the bed, turned, pointed at the valet next to the dresser, a small piece of furniture that had a low seat and high back, the top of which was shaped like a hanger, for Dad's suit coats.

I sat down, the seat so close to the ground I had to look up at him as he sat on the bed, facing me. His eyes hadn't yet met mine. He had on a dress shirt and slacks, no tie. He put his hands on the tops of his thighs, lifted them, let them drop, then moved them back and forth.

"Well," he said.

He said, "Okay."

I had him, had him in a way I'd never known before: my dad, powerless, stunned. So, to make matters worse for him, I said, "Go ahead. I'm listening."

He looked at me, finally, his hands still. "Well," he said, and looked back to his hands. "What do you want to know?"

I shrugged, let the question hang in the air a few moments before I said, "I already know."

"Okay," he said, and breathed out. "Good. That's good." Then he laughed. It was a good laugh, a solid laugh, a kind of laugh I hadn't heard or seen before: It was a laugh that didn't take me into account, didn't pretend to cajole me or to praise me. He wasn't even looking at me. This was just laughter.