The Hero's Body (27 page)

“I unbuckled the helmet strap and told him to hang on,” the husband said, “told him that help was on the way.”

“That means a lot to us,” I said.

I did not ask:
Was he alive then? Was he breathing then?
And I did not ask about the blood that must have been on the fingers of both hands after he unbuckled the strap. I don't know why I didn't ask:
I'd arrived at this spot in hope of discovering such information, and yet when the time came to know it, to hold the facts, I could not.

“Anybody would have done it,” he said. “It's what a person does in a situation like that. What was his name?”

“William Giraldi,” I said. “The third.”

He looked at his wife, then back at us.

“Our son was the third William, as well,” he said. “He was killed, five years ago, on April 7, just one month earlier than your father. Same day, though, the seventh. Someone shot him in the head. Only thirty years old. We never did find the killer, though we tried. God knows we tried.”

My uncles, brother, and cousin were uneasy now, I could see. They didn't want this reconnaissance to turn maudlin, were highly suspicious of the mushy, and I hoped that, whatever else he did, this husband would not start sobbing on our necks right there in the road.

“It's a funny thing,” he said. “Both of them William, both of them dying on the same day.”

My brother glanced at my cousin, then my cousin glanced at me, and both of my uncles weren't sure where to glance. They only nodded, maybe in agreement of some kind, their own ilk of understanding, and they nudged around some stones with their sneakers. I couldn't see the husband's eyes behind his mirrored glasses, and for some reason I thought that he might not have eyes at all, just two black holes, a hellish vision out of Lovecraft.

“There was an old man here at the crash,” I said. “An old fella in a pickup truck?”

“Yes,” he said. “He wasn't happy. When the other guys arrived, he kept screaming at them, saying, ‘See what happens? See what you did?' At one point he wanted to drag your father out from underneath the guardrail, get the bike off him, but I said not to do that. Said it was best to wait for the paramedics.”

Get the bike off him
. Then the bike was
on
him. How did the bike end up on top of him if he'd been flung over it?

“This old guy was very concerned, though,” he said. “His hand was crippled, very strange.”

“A crippled hand?”

“Yes, a crippled hand. He unloosened your father's jacket to give him some more air. There were some others here too. Some motorists who'd stopped. Everybody was very concerned.”

“That warning sign is too close to the turn,” I said, gesturing behind us to the crest.

“It's way too close,” he said. “There's an accident here at this guardrail once a month, at least. We've petitioned the county, a couple of times, to have it moved farther down so people have time enough to slow, but they won't move it. I don't know why.”

I wanted to interview this couple, ask them the specifics they remembered, what they saw and felt, how it all seemed: colors, scents, tastes, the sound the wind made through the boles. But I couldn't do it just then, not with my family there. The husband gave me his telephone number and said I could call him whenever I wished. We had this weighted thing between us now, this affiliation of hurt: his son, my father, both named William, both dead before their due, killed on unlucky number seven, their deaths tinged with unknowables, without completion, without condolence. I never did call him, and I'm not sure why—because although I wanted facts, I didn't want too many of them?—and I can't call him now, sixteen years later.

Mike hammered the wooden cross into the soil, and as I squatted near him at the guardrail, I thought this:
What did you expect at the other end of that crest, at a speed I cannot guess, the trees a blur on both sides of you? My hours will be ravished by wonder, seeing these Pennsylvania paths of asphalt and your color gashing through the countryside. Your death is black and red, bright white and chrome. Now my own
life shrinks and swells on this road, at this spot, this right-angle right turn you didn't see until much too late. Where are we now? How can our planet expend the energy to spin? I want to sink into this spot that claimed you, to see for myself in hope of knowing. I can see you now, lying here broken, life leaking from you. Perhaps a lone thought survives long enough to let you know: this Sunday will never end, and the race is under way. The ruin in the wake belongs to me, not you. Who will reverse the heart and allow our blood to run backward? How can I choose to live in the hypothesis of reverse? Dad—what did you do?

Before we departed that afternoon, I made a point of locking within my memory everything about that road and its surroundings: the shallow rock-filled brook, the broad-leaf trees, the furrowed farmland, the nearby pond, the costly homes set back on acres of coifed grass and shrubs. That day was the only time I've ever been there, though the place appears periodically in my dreams. That's one of the pastimes of the dead: bored invigilators, spying sprites, they breathe on us while we sleep.

Two years later, Mike returned to Slifer Valley Road, and when he did, the middle-aged couple once again came to the road to greet him. It must have been a necessary hobby for them, to sit watch over that right turn, no doubt remembering their murdered son, praying—they seemed like the beseeching sort—that another motorist wouldn't mangle himself in sight of their home. The cross Mike had pounded into the spot of our father's crash was still there, although altered in an unexpected way: a swan had built her nest and laid her eggs against it, so that only the top, the T-section of the cross, was now visible. Mike's initial thought was that sacrilegious landscapers had been heaping their sticks and cut grass onto the modest monument to our dad's death, but then the wife told him about the swan.

In their thirty years of residing in that house, she said, they'd never seen a swan cross Slifer Valley Road to nest away from the
pond. But during the first nesting season after our father died there, a rogue swan built her large bed and laid her eggs directly against the cross, on top of our father's blood stained into the asphalt. Each day when she crossed the road from the pond to reach her nest, she'd linger there in the center, on the yellow line, just before the right turn. As if, the wife said, in caution—a swan warning speeders to slow down.

Slifer Valley Road as my father's swan song, the sound of the bike a music he loved, a rapturous tune for those with ears to hear it. Swans don't actually sing before they die—one species is known to whistle—although you see that superstition at certain spots in literature: in Plato and Euripides, in Cicero and Seneca. Some Greek myths speak of Apollo, the god of music, as a swan. Homer was the Swan of Meander, Shakespeare the Swan of Avon. In
Othello
, Emilia says,
I will play the swan, / And die in music
. In Anderson's famous fairy tale “The Wild Swans,” the swans are heroes, brothers who have been turned into the birds by a malefic witch and who rescue their sister from the executioner.

The wife gave Mike a photograph she'd snapped of the swan in the nest, its question-mark head and neck beside the white cross. When Mike returned that day and showed me the photo, I said, “Please don't tell me you think our father is that swan.” He didn't tell me that, no, although his face said otherwise. The swan, our father, as hero-crooner. That photo is still framed above his bed in Colorado, and every so often his dreams are filled with floating, singing, waddling swans.

In the
months after his death, my father did not appear in the wilderness of my sleep as an apparition or omen. He did not arrive to say “Remember me.” He had no advice, no wisdom or warnings
to impart, no events to foretell. No ghoulish haunting to undertake. He was simply
there
, the image of him projected into my sleep. I maintained the awareness that he was dead, and so his appearance in my sleep seemed a resurrection, and that's what I felt while asleep and dreaming: the awe of this Lazarus act. There he'd be, just standing in whatever room I dreamed I was in, his typically wry countenance, unaltered by burial, comfortingly at ease, with nothing to say or do, no will remaining, and I'd look open-mouthed at him and weep, wonder how he'd climbed from the grave.

And when I'd wake I'd be weeping still on a wet pillowcase, feeling drugged, fatigued by the dream, trying to crawl fully awake, away from its lingering, but also wanting it to last, because I could feel him still, the way scent from a candle stays in the room after you've stanched the flame. The tears were actual, both in and out of sleep, and this merging of one realm with the other—the dead with the living, the unconscious with the conscious—is how our dreams manage to feel so pertinent to whatever quest we're on. In one dream I approached him, in Parma's kitchen as he leaned against the counter, and I held him but he did not hold me back, would not or could not, and I soon woke myself with the shock of that, with the shuddering of sobs.

My brother
and I had the tearful task of going through my father's van, sorting through the many tools, papers, envelopes, sitting in the sawdust and dried dirt. A hopeless junk-food fiend, my father had littered the van with chocolate wrappers and cookie boxes—Snickers, Reese's, Lorna Doone, Fig Newtons—and we grinned at that, though grinning seemed impossible. The letters I'd written him over the years from the various places I was living—from Myrtle Beach, from Boston—and some of the photos I'd enclosed: they were all folded into an overhead compartment.

On one envelope, the back side of a bill, he had written, in caps,
SPEED VISION
, and above that was a telephone number: 1-888-
SPEED
. He was a nostalgic keeper of tiny things, and now I needed to keep everything too, every receipt that held his signature, every square of paper that showed his scrawl. Since my brother lived in Colorado, we agreed that the van would go to me, and I would drive it for the next two years. My brother wanted all the tools, our father's utensils of creation. There was still the mission of going through his clothes, smelling, touching the fabric that had touched him. And then the task of the items he'd stored in blue bins in the basement of the townhouse he shared with his fiancée. Cards and letters, photos and notebooks and pamphlets, medical records and our report cards, sales papers for the motorcycle, keepsakes from wherever he'd been over the years, on vacations, on weekend motorcycle jaunts.

And I remembered this: when I was a sophomore in high school, after my first girlfriend dumped me for a football star, just prior to my discovery of bodybuilding, my father asked what in God's name was the matter with me, when I was going to shake myself out of this doomsday funk. I was miserable to look at, and as a single father with enough misery to brook, he didn't want to be living with a depressed romantic. My mother had been out of our lives for five years at this time.

“Move on,” he said. “You're a teenager. This is called normal life. It happens every day to everyone.”

I clomped upstairs into my bedroom, retrieved the perfumed, rubber-banded brick of love notes the girlfriend had scribbled to me, and then clomped back down to present them as evidence to my inexperienced father.

“Here,” I said, and clapped them into his gut. “Read these notes and maybe you'll get it.”

There at the counter in our kitchen, he unfolded the notes and read a high-school girl's words of eternity. He didn't smirk; he barely
blinked. Very carefully he refolded those fragrant pages—their familiar scent slapping me as I stood there watching him—and he said, “Come on, I want to show you something.”

In our garage, in a cedar chest that had always been with us, my father had stockpiled every note, letter, and card my mother had ever written to him—fifteen years' worth of regal blue loops and dots, beginning when they were themselves in high school.