MY FATHER ROSE at 5 a.m., shuffled his calloused feet to the bathroom and slid open the pocket door. After a brief coughing fit, he hocked into the sink. The exhaust fan rattled. A fart kick-started his long piss. Then he blew several quick, hard blasts into his handkerchief. Pocket door slid open, down the stairs, wood creaking and popping, sandpaper hands rubbed along the banister. Muted Weather Channel's blue glow. Silverware drawer, running water, coffee pot. Back up the stairs, bathroom, mug placed on the permanent coffee ring on the sink. Sparked a Winston, let it burn like incense on the wicker shelf. Shower. Scraped his jaw line with a razor, slapped Old Spice onto his cheeks. Down the stairs, checked the weather, coffee cup thunked in the sink. Into his Chevy, first gear, second, third, and I didn't see him again until four in the afternoon, when he coasted the Chevy back into the driveway, tossed his bloody white apron over his shoulder, and carried the scent of nearly forty years of tobacco and coffee and cold cuts inside.
Seven a.m. My mother officially rose, though she'd been awake for hours, tossing, turning, mumbling. Shuffled out of bed in her pink nightgown. Into the bathroom for a bout with IBS, expelling yesterday's swallowed air. A sigh. Tossed my father's burnt Winston filter into the trash, down the same stairs, same Weather Channel, same coffee pot. Sparked a Marlboro Light. If she were cleaning houses, she took her rags from the dryer in the basement, packed them into a canvas tote, then collected the rest of her supplies: Windex, Lysol, an all-purpose spray called Simple Green, which she swore by.
Perhaps these were her yacht club years, and instead of Windex and rags, she loaded a rectangular plastic bin full of restaurant checks, an enormous printing calculator balanced on top. Or she was a secretary for the dermatologist, so she'd been up since six, showering, blow-drying, ironing, heels clicking on wood, then tile, wood, then tile. Perhaps arts and crafts, wedding albums with thick cotton covers and lace trim, or something called poofs: little, flower-shaped puffs of satin with a metal clip glue-gunned to the back that one could attach to shoes or blouses or use to cinch a pony tail. Or the beauty parlor in the basement, fully-equipped hair-washing station and spaceman dome, which she assured me was for drying the hair of the strange women who entered our home and not for transforming them into a Jetsons character and blasting them into another galaxy.
Maybe this day she worked two or three jobs, loaded all of her equipment into the car, took a final sip of coffee and burst off the porch like Superman from his phone booth, returning hours later for a quick costume change before shooting back out into the world once again. A different role. A different identity.
When I was in elementary school, my father would sometimes let me go to work with him. I sat on the edge of the tub at 5 a.m., stealing sips of bitter coffee in his mug while he shaved. The residual shower steam swirled with his cigarette smoke like the off-shore storms we glimpsed on the Weather Channel. As my father splashed water on his face, I watched the exhaust fan suck the tiny hurricane through its golden grate and wondered what happened to the storms off the coast of Florida or Cuba that never touched land.
"Chilly willy today, boy," he said, tossing me one of his wool hats, which smelled like everything else he owned—Winstons, coffee, gasoline, a hint of Old Spice, a whiff of bologna. I pictured him on a billboard, straddling a dusty horse, cowboy hat tipped over his face, leather reins clenched in his left fist and in his right a small bottle of amber cologne. Work by My Father.
As he finished his routine, I watched the thick exhaust pouring out of his Chevy in the driveway. He dug his old sneakers out from beneath the couch. He held his shoelaces between his callused fingertips, and as he tied, I could almost feel his rough skin guiding a heavy hammer or a baseball bat in my hands. The deli took a piece of almost all his fingers, the flesh slivers ending up "in somebody's ham sandwich, I guess."
He sparked a Winston in the driveway, told me to tie my shoes and hop in the truck. The Fox kicked on: Bob Seger's "Still the Same." My father jiggled the shifter into reverse, and we were off.
We stopped at 7-Eleven, where my father bought a coffee for himself, and a hot chocolate for me. He always peeled off the lid on the walk back to the truck and took several quick sips, as if there were some secret ingredient, something more than caffeine that satisfied him. My hot chocolate was sweet and made me feel like a little kid, which I was. As we pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the Expressway, I timed my sips with my father's.
A few miles before our exit, my father jerked the wheel right and skidded to a halt on the side of the Expressway. My hot chocolate splashed out of my cup and onto my jeans.
"Sorry," he said, staring out through the windshield.
The white line cut through the middle of its body. The head and paws stretched onto the highway. Its legs and tail lay in the breakdown lane. Cars rushed by, shaking the truck and whipping the gray and black fur. My father looked in his rearview mirror and stubbed out his cigarette.
"Hang here for a sec."
He stepped out; I locked my door. The sun was rising, but the highway was still dim and damp. I looked over at the rusty guardrail splattered with tar, never having been this close before. My father stood between the headlights. His long shadow cut across the breakdown lane and stretched into the pine trees.
The animal lifted its head. Slowly moved it side to side. One paw stretched further into the highway, then pulled back, back, back. My father knelt beside it. The animal lifted its head again and looked as if it were chewing, working something from behind its back teeth. Then it stopped.
My father walked past my window and reached into the bed of the truck. He came back with a short metal shovel. The metal scraped the pavement, and a large black part of the animal fell out and slapped the ground. Heat rising like smoke in the cold air.
When he brought it closer, I saw it was a raccoon. I continued staring at the animal until my father dropped it into a black garbage bag. As we pulled back onto the Expressway, I watched the black bag slide from one side of the truck bed to the other.
"What's in the bag, Don?" said a man stocking shelves as we entered Waldbaum's supermarket.
"Special delivery, Tommy. Mind your business." My father smiled.
He carried the black garbage bag down the empty aisles of gleaming linoleum, past orange signs proclaiming deals on Doritos, Entenmann's cookies, Cheerios. Kicked open the scuffed saloon doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, passed through a series of heavy plastic strips hanging in the doorway, just like the carwash, I thought.
My father set the raccoon on a stainless steel table, then tied his apron around his waist. He grabbed another apron from a milk crate beneath the table and tossed it in my face. I slipped the neck loop over my head and tried to tie the strings around my waist but ended up knotting them around the middle of my thighs. Then he put on a paper hat; I put on a paper hat. He put on his name tag; I put on a name tag. My new name was Jesus— "a shit-bag part-timer who banged in sick Super Bowl weekend." I looked down at the name on my chest, thinking about all the times I pretended to be sick, tricking my mother into letting me stay home from school. Technically, I had "banged in" sick to school today, but I believed that because I went to work with my father, I wasn't doing anything wrong. We'd tell her later.
"Okay," he said. "Let's get this guy squared away."
He carried the garbage bag over to the walk-in freezer. The large metal handle was coated with frost. My father yanked it open; cold fog billowed out, carrying the sulfuric scent of freezer burn. Frosty steel shelves held piles of carcasses and animal parts: cow ribs, chicken breasts, lamb shanks, pig's feet. We walked past all the other animals, to the back of the freezer. My father picked up a canvas tarp and placed his raccoon beside a frozen deer head wrapped in cellophane—eyes caught in permanent headlights, specks of black tar clinging to its fur.
I spent the rest of the day watching my father slice bologna or make roast beef sandwiches. He gave me a look when an elderly customer requested 1/16th of a pound of low-sodium turkey breast, or when a man asked if my father could slice his ham thin. No, thinner. A little thinner, buddy.
"Perfect," the man said, accepting his order with a toothless grin.
He gave the male customers funny nicknames: Rocko, Charlie, Butch, Guy, Chief, Boss. The female customers he called Toots, Hun, and sometimes, Miss. But as the day went on, the nicknames dwindled, until it was three o'clock, a half-hour before quittin' time, and my father called everyone the same way: "Next!"
Earlier that week in school, an overzealous guest speaker had come to our class to teach us about fingerprints. I believed the man to be a private investigator or secret agent, but most likely he was a criminal justice major from one of the community colleges. He distributed ink pads and pieces of paper which had a box for each one of our prints. Fighting the urge to smear each other's faces or leave a permanent high-five on a friend's back, we listened to the man identify the loops and whorls and arches, explaining that each one of us has a unique print unlike any other person in the entire world. He told us about desperate criminals slicing off their fingertips in hopes of eluding the law.
"But," he said, holding up an inky finger, "they always grow back."
"How long does it take?" one kid asked. We all nodded, anticipating an expert's response.
The man paused. "Not as long as you'd think."
I wanted to ask more questions, but, as usual, I kept quiet, my face burning for answers. How many times can you slice your fingers before you alter your prints? What if this guy was wrong? What if my father's whorls have become loops, arches into whorls, or if now there's nothing at all, no unique markings, the skin as smooth and common as sausage casing?
We punched out. My father slung the black garbage bag over his shoulder, and I followed him out to the parking lot. On the ride home, I dozed off my head knocking against the passenger window. We pulled into the driveway. My father grabbed the raccoon and walked into the house, through the kitchen, into the basement, through the laundry room, beyond his rack of Army jackets with our last name sewn above the pockets. I followed him around his workbench strewn with scalpels, hypodermic needles, and glass eyeballs. As he opened a long, casket-like freezer, I watched him drop the raccoon beside a frozen zoo of squirrels, big-mouthed bass, rabbits, and a hawk.
Mornings sounded painful. Stretching, groaning, shuffling, showering, shot of caffeine, sigh after sigh after sigh—all in preparation for leaving the place you loved, the place you felt comfortable, and venturing out into a dreadful world. I watched television shows where the mothers and fathers sat around a marble island of pancakes and eggs and bacon and fresh-squeezed orange juice, chatting about their plans for the day. None of them swore beneath their breath or paced the house searching for a missing shoe. While I knew these shows were fake, there were parts that felt very real: a science teacher who acted just like mine or a kid who said the same things I did. I second-guessed myself: Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps all of it could be true.
A lot was required to break my parents' routine. When it was temporarily broken for a long weekend or a trip to visit relatives, the first day was spent leaving the routine, the last day was devoted to reentering the routine, and much of the time in between was spent in limbo, neither one sure what to do or how to act. So my mother scrubbed Simple Green on her sister's stove while everyone slept and my father took long walks to 7-Eleven, returning with a 12 oz. coffee cup clutched in his hand.
Our home was an integral component of my parents' routine. They seemed unable to operate at full capacity without first loading themselves inside our home, as if the floors of our house were circuit boards, their morning rituals a computer's processes. While they seemed to need their routines in order to function, I never noticed them deriving any pleasure from these essential habits. Perhaps in my mind I lump together their preparation for work with the work itself, envisioning my mother pacing and sighing through the dermatologist's office or my father breathing Winston after Winston as his fingers work a ham across the slicer. But it's hard not to. I cannot remember my parents ever saying anything positive about their jobs. Work sucks. Work is life.
I once asked my father what he wanted to be when he was younger. He looked at me.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I mean, was there anything you wanted to do?"
He paused. Chewed the inside of his cheek a few times, then raised his eyebrows.
"Not that I can think of."
I believed his animals were alive. The way he handled a freshly-killed raccoon or squirrel was different from how he moved a hunk of ham or roast beef across the deli slicer at Waldbaum's. When he'd work the slicer, the meat was sterile, no hint of life. My father would move his right arm back and forth in a quick, isolated motion, while his left hand supported his body weight against the slicer.
In his workshop in the basement, his technique for handling dead meat was different. He'd flick on his magnifying lamp and hunch over the animal. With a scalpel pressed between his fingertips, he'd gently slice through the fur, then the membrane, careful not to puncture the animal's veins or organs because if he did, the hidden interior fluids, the blood and the bile, would spill out and ruin the exterior.
When I asked my father how he became a taxidermist, he paused for a moment. He squinted, like he does when he's stumped by a piece of music or movie trivia. "Well, I was hoping to take the boiler repair class, but it was all filled up." My father's days off were sacred, so for him to spend his free time doing something and not get paid, there had to be a good reason, but I didn't know what that was.
A rabbit perched on our mantel; a pair of mallards hung from the wood paneling in the living room, a squirrel held an acorn on the shelf above my bed. The squirrel often rode shotgun as I raced my plastic go-cart down the driveway. What could be better than a wild animal sitting patiently beside me, gazing up as if to ask: "Where to next, brotha?" There's a picture of me in sunglasses on our back deck, sitting in my go-cart, wheels angled, raising the squirrel above my head like a trophy.
"It was pretty creepy," my older brother, Don, said. "I'd catch you in the backyard trying to feed Dad's squirrel a piece of your peanut butter and jelly sandwich."
I didn't think it was creepy. Why would it be? My room was already filled with fuzzy dinosaurs and turtles dressed as ninjas. Is a squirrel holding an acorn any creepier than me inserting a cassette tape into the back of a bear wearing suspenders and singing Teddy Ruxpin songs? And if I wanted Teddy's friend—a worm—to sing along, I simply plugged an AV cable into Teddy's spine and the worm wiggled to life.