Among the Missing (29 page)

I nodded as he brushed dirt away from the squares of cement. “Weird,” I said. I looked out at the line of horizon, that
strangely distinct division of sky and land that made it look like there was a bowl scaled over us.

“Well,” I murmured. “Progress marches on, I guess.”

But he just looked up at me vaguely, smiling as if I’d said something funny. I watched him pick up a rock from the edge of the road. “You know a strange thing about getting older?” he said. “It’s very strange, because you start to realize that all these people were once your own age. It takes a while for it to really sink in. But then it becomes kind of fascinating to think about. To try to put yourself in their place.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, and nodded as if I, too, thought it would be fascinating.

Driving back to Lois and Dick, my father wanted to talk about Delano. He wanted to talk about the sweep of time, the passing of generations, the terrible swiftness of it. “Your great-grandma was raised in a sod house near Delano,” he told me. “She came there as a pioneer, in a covered wagon. Can you imagine what that must have been like?”

“Sort of like
Little House on the Prairie
,” I said. “I imagine.”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose.” He thought for a moment, trying to think of a story. “She met your great-grandpa at a dance in Delano. Your great-grandfather Mooney was a fiddler in the band that was playing there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” It was another story that I’d heard a number of times—something that was supposed to connect my interest in music with the people of the past.

“Hey,” I said lightly. “Do you know what the name of the band was?”

He looked stern, because this question had never occurred to him, or me, before. “Ah,” he said, and thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know whether bands had names then like they do now. I do know that he studied music for a while, at Oberlin College in Ohio, before he went West.”

“Oh,” I said, and I tried to add this to the store of trivia I already knew. But we grew quiet. I didn’t really think it was possible to imagine the people of the past—to understand the mind-set of someone who had lived in my great-grandfather’s time. Why would you go West, I wondered, to such a barren place? And why would you stay there, why would you try to build a town that would rise up and vanish within less than a century? What could you have been thinking? It must have been something very different, I imagined—and I thought of the cities I would be touring: Tokyo, and Seoul, and Bangkok. What would such cities make of a place like Delano? Of the tilted, crumbled sod houses, of the abandoned gas station on Highway 30, which looked like some ancient ruin?

But my father didn’t say anything. I watched as he tipped his sunglasses over his eyes. He drove into the sunset, as his pioneer ancestors must have done, following a two-lane highway that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, passing through these shriveled little villages, these outposts built by pioneers. What an odd sense of progress they must have had—what hopeful vanity and stubbornness. Which they had passed down, I thought. Though it didn’t do my father any good.

When we got back, Lois was cooking, and Dick was sitting in the garage, drinking beer and watching flies stick themselves
onto the helixes of flypaper that hung from the rafters. “Howdy, howdy,” Dick called as we got out of the car, and the barking dogs converged on us once again. Though we’d been there for days, they still behaved as if they’d never seen us before, every time we drove up.

“You dogs!” Dick yelled. “Shut up!” And we moved sheepishly toward the lawn chairs where he was sitting.

“Ye gods, Harry,” Dick said as I followed my father into the garage, with Maple behind me, her muzzle snuffling the seat of my pants. “I can’t get over it,” Dick said. “You’re turning into a giant!” He appreciated this for a moment, gazing at me, and then he shook his head at my father. “I never would’ve guessed,” he said.

I don’t know what they once thought of me. My impression is that I was considered tiny and sprightly and funny. A “character,” in the way kids sometimes are without knowing it themselves. My father used to tell his girlfriends stories about me, and one of his favorites, which he told again to Lois and Dick that night, was about how I had behaved at my grandfather’s funeral. I was six, and didn’t seem to know that anything bad had happened. My father described me as skipping along through the milling crowd of funeral well-wishers at the house after the graveyard services. I tasted from various pies and relish trays and covered dishes, humming to myself, completely self-possessed. He remembered standing there, comforting my grandmother as she wept, watching as I sat in a chair with a boiled egg yolk up to my eye like a monocle.

“Look at my beautiful golden eye!” I said to no one in
particular. “I can see the future!” I waved the yolk through the air as if it were flying, then bit into it. “Arrgh!” I cried. “I’m eating my own eyeball!—It tastes—good!” All the while my grandmother continued to cry against my father’s shirt and people filed solemnly past me as I chattered away.

I could never figure out why he found this so hilarious or memorable, or even what the point of the story was, exactly. I didn’t remember the event at all, but that was true of most of the stories my father told about me. There was a version of me that he held in his mind, one that I didn’t quite recognize.

The next day was the day the cousins were supposed to come out to visit us, but things began to fall apart as the day wore on. Cousin Monte phoned in the early afternoon to say that he wouldn’t be able to make it—some family problems, he said, as my father and Dick were busily pounding in stakes in the backyard, preparing for a game of horseshoes. Then another, around three: Jared, who worked for the electric company, had been sent out to fix a downed wire, and didn’t think he’d make it until later, if at all. About an hour later, Cousin Arleen called to beg out, too, and I kept my eye on my father, thinking this might send him into a decline. But it didn’t. He and Uncle Dick were going beer for beer pretty steadily, and Aunt Lois was drinking gin and cranberry juice, and they all seemed blissfully unfazed by the news that the cousins were standing them up.

“They’ve never been reliable,” Aunt Lois said as we sat around the kitchen table. “They’ve done this to me before, and you know what? I don’t really care. That Monte, he always got on my nerves,” she said, and took a sip of her drink. “His wife,
she’s a Sioux from up to the reservation, and you know what those people are like. Very standoffish.”

“More food for us,” Dick said.

“Damn right,” Aunt Lois said. “Harry, do you want me to fry you up a second steak? I’ve been noticing that you don’t eat all that much for such a big boy. But these are good steaks—thick and marbleized, right off the cow!”

“Well,” I said, and my father grinned at me humorously as he dealt another hand of gin rummy to Uncle Dick. “Well,” I said. “To tell the truth, I’m kind of a vegetarian.”

“Oh,” Aunt Lois said solemnly, taking this in. “I didn’t know that!” She turned to look at my father, uncertainly. “Is that religious?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s just something, you know …” But it didn’t seem appropriate to go into the whole thing.

“Oh, they all do it now,” my father said, looking at me from over the tops of his cards. He laughed, as if he were telling them something outrageous. “All these kids his age, none of them eat meat!”

“Huh,” said Uncle Dick. He glanced at his cards, then stared at me for a minute, stunned by the news of this fad that was sweeping the youth of the East. “As big a muscles as you’ve got, I would’ve thought you’d eat three steaks!”

“Well,” I said. “I just work out, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, as long as you don’t have any problem with me having my steak, you go right ahead and eat your salads and greens and such. If you lived out here where you got some decent beef, you’d probably change your mind.”

“Maybe so,” I said, and smiled. If I lived out here, I thought. Then what? They seemed so foreign to me. I used to
tell my father that they all seemed vaguely like country singers, like the type of people they sang about in country and western songs, good timing and hard lucking and honky-tonking people. “No, no,” my father said, wrinkling his nose, and I knew that I was presenting him with a cliché. But still, here was Uncle Dick with his cowboy boots and his chestnut-colored, leathery skin and dyed black hair; here was Aunt Lois with her tight Western-style blouse and enormous breasts and large pouf of gray-blond hair. I had heard of the large parties when my father was a child, where everyone drank, and danced, where someone played the fiddle and another played the harmonica or guitar and another sang. I don’t know whether someone played on a washboard or a Jew’s harp, but it seemed likely. It was always hard to picture my father among them, let alone myself. I understood why he’d left.

Still, he seemed very comfortable and jolly, despite the fact that the rest of his relatives had blown him off. He and Lois and Dick gossiped about the absent cousins, and weather, and the crops. Then they remembered again for a while—stories of my grandparents, of my uncle, and the rest: a fishing trip where Uncle Dick and my grandfather had danced around the camp-fire in their underwear, singing old navy songs; the way my grandmother used to whistle when she wanted her children to come home, putting her index fingers in her mouth, and you could hear her for miles; the way Uncle Stu would always get up on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons, drinking beer and eating cereal, never marrying or even dating a girl.

I ate a salad and a baked potato and a sliced tomato from Dick and Lois’s garden while they feasted on their steaks.

•   •   •

The night wore on, and I sat listening as they talked, watching as they raised cans of beer out of a cooler full of melting ice, smoking cigarettes. I sat in my lawn chair, fading in and out, thinking of what it would be like if my dad got lung cancer, or cirrhosis of the liver. I thought of various ways that he would possibly kill himself, after I left, imagining a number of horrible scenarios in detail. When the talk turned to me, I hardly noticed.

As I tuned back into the conversation, I realized that my father was trying to explain the concept of moshing to Lois and Dick. He had been to a few of my shows, had stood back by the bar, observant and out of place in his button-down shirt and khaki pants.

“They get quite a crowd around the stage,” he was saying. “People dancing. And some of them climb up on the stage and just sort of … dive into that mass of people. And the people catch them—all these hands come up and then the divers pass along on the hands, like they are riding a wave. It’s really kind of pretty to watch, in a way.”

“I’ll bet,” said Aunt Lois, observing me with polite alarm, and I ducked my head, blushing.

“We haven’t ever heard you sing yet, Harry,” Uncle Dick said. “Are you going to do us the honor?”

“I actually don’t have my guitar with me,” I said. I gave my father a pleading look, but he only smiled hazily. “I’m not really a singer,” I said. “I’m just a bass player, you know, and backup vocals.”

But Uncle Dick was already out of his seat, headed into
the house. A few minutes later he emerged with an old, cheap, six-string acoustic guitar, which he handed to me. He showed me his harmonica, putting it to his mouth, playing a quick glissando. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll play with you. Maybe Lois will climb up onto the tool counter and jump off onto your dad.”

I took the guitar, a little uncertainly, and strummed it. “I don’t know any songs really,” I said. “I’m a terrible singer.”

“Bullshit,” said Uncle Dick. He rubbed the harmonica across his lips, making a sad, train-wail sound. “Play me a song, damn it. Any song. I’ll follow along.” He put his hand on the counter for balance and I looked over to my father, who was watching expectantly.

I strummed again. “I know a few folk songs,” I said. “Do you know ‘I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound’?”

“Play it,” Uncle Dick said.

“Play it,” said my father, and I began to pick at the strings.

“ ‘It’s a long and dusty road, and it’s a hard and heavy load …’ ” My voice felt raspy as I sang, awkwardly formal, but my uncle began to play his harmonica as I sang the chorus. “ ‘Lord, I can’t help but wonder where I’m bound, where I’m bound,’ ” I murmured, and I could see my father nodding along, expectant and serene. For a moment, my voice—which had never been very good—seemed to come from somewhere else, humming perfectly with my uncle’s harmonica, and a chill went up my spine. For a minute, it seemed beautiful.

•   •   •

“Walk with me,” my father said, much later. Dick and Lois had gone to bed, but he and I were still up. “Walk with me,” he said, and Flossie and Maple followed us down the driveway, out to the road. This had been a kind of town, once upon a time, though it was bordered on all sides by fields and edged, in the distance, by hills. The houses were mostly abandoned, turned into sheds or shacks, but people had lived in them once. We walked, and the moon shone down on us.

“I think I’m going to move back here,” my father said, and tripped for a moment along the edge of the ditch. I caught him by the nape of his shirt, steadying him. We had come to the little house where he’d grown up, where his family had lived, where his mother, and then his brother, had spent their last days. The dogs clicked their black nails delicately on the dirt road in front of us, and my father put his hand hard against my neck. “We could stay here,” he said. “We could make a new life, Harry. You could play your music—you could start a new band here, you know. I own this house.”

“Dad,” I said, but he didn’t let go of me. We stumbled together into the yard of the house where he grew up, and the darkened windows stared at us, the bats dipped down from the branches of the apple trees, the dogs grew alert and rushed out after some prey. His fingers dug into my arm as if he were falling.

“Dad,” I said, and the sky was full of more stars than I’d ever seen before, the long strip of the Milky Way above this empty place.

“Don’t leave me, Harry,” my father said in a soft voice, with an intensity that made my spine stiffen. “Please don’t go. We
can stay here. I know there’s something we can do together, you and me. We can … we can … you know! We can work it out.”