Narrator
I am sitting at my father’s apartment having coffee. He wants me to tell him a story, one that is not about him. “Perhaps it can be about monsters or the river,” he says. “Start with ‘once upon a time’ and let it go from there. One of the ones you told me when you were a kid or liked me to tell you.” I tell him that I don’t know where to start. All I have are pieces. I’ve given up on monsters and maybe even on story. “Do you want the truth or fiction?” I ask. And he says not to worry about story, not to worry about fact or fiction. “Just give me the pieces,” he says. “I’ll find the story and that will be truth enough.”
Father
My father touched everything in the apartment, offering it to us. But in front of his sons he took nothing. He kept moving back and forth between the bedroom and the kitchen making sure we were looking at things and building small piles. My father went back on his own. I liked to think of it as a final secret between them, my father and his best friend. My father took the things that were important to Harold. I saw them, days later, in his apartment: a painting of a Vietnam War Vet Harold had done, the books on radio repair and electronics, sweaters and shirts and jackets that barely fit him. I imagined him alone in that apartment that smelled like his friend, and I could hear my father repeating the words he’d said to us, “take anything you want, take everything you can.”
Jeff
Jeff and I were quiet the whole time. The way we knew to be when someone was telling a story. The way we were when we were considering something like jumping into the canal. I took my brother’s silence to mean he was jumping, because he was rarely quiet, was more often a flash of energy like the boys bodies in my father’s action shots, a streak of light. My brother who stood at six-foot four inches. His nose bent from hockey fights and years of my pulling on it when we were kids, who looked, at the right angle and unshaven, so much like our father even without glasses on.
Ruben
You were eight the year your mother was murdered. He’d kill ten more prostitutes over the next two years before they’d find him, The Genesee River Killer. Your father, by the time I’d met you, had remarried. The year they caught that man, we were ten, playing in your basement when you told me. I’d been making a joke of it, the guy who’d killed prostitutes. His capture and confession were all over the news that year. I was saying how it was no wonder—with a name like Arthur Shawcross—he was a serial killer. “My mom was his first victim,” you said.
Aiden
Aiden braces himself against the branches of a tree as he walks down the embankment. The ground is covered with leaves and melting frost, the after effects of a cold November night. He balances himself against the incline, his feet sliding out with the leaves, trying to keep from dropping the twelve pack of Genny Cream Ale he’s brought with him. Looking through the dim dawn light, he sees the mouth of the cave, sees the bodies of dead fish, their carcasses frozen and thawing with the rising sun. When he reaches the cave, he kicks one of the bodies, watches it roll over from one side to the other, its eyes eaten out by birds or decay. He nudges it with his foot towards the water; its body as it once was, returning to the river.
Pony
Pony plays at slipping like he’s going down toward the river, as if he knows he’s headed in, bound for it, sooner or later, now or three months from now. It is early in the summer; motorboats zoom by underneath us carrying women without tops on, fishermen with cases of beer and cans of worms. Pony’s face is all sweat because it’s warm under the bridge and because of the pain in his arm and because of the beer we’re drinking.
Bear
Bear has his pants around his ankles, looking like a middle-aged man with his beer gut and jiggling legs. He has his hands on his hips, the fingernails digging into the flesh. He swirls his torso like a blender, like a tornado, like a toilet being flushed. Bear performs the Macarena, does the Hokey Pokey, falling when he turns himself around, recovers into the Y-M-C-A, starts shaking his ass like he’s working a pole at the Klassy Cat, like he can rewind the past few weeks and months and maybe even years and grind and gyrate back all the people and things that are gone.
Joe
I can tell Joe is looking to hit someone. He keeps bumping up against me, talking to the guy next to us a few stools over. We are at a bar along the river, a place called McGregor’s, a place we only go when one or more of us has a good amount of money to spend. I hear Joe say, “I’m a fucking marine motherfucker,” see him take a drink from his pint.
“I’ll fucking kill you.”
Ralph
We are packed into Ralph’s new SUV, a Chevy Blazer, with leather seats and fancy tinted windows. He got it at auction with a lemon lease on it, and though it is a six-year-old vehicle we think it is the best car we’ve ever ridden in, at least with any regularity. At my father’s we will drink liquor and coffee and beer and we will talk politics and women. My father lives a few blocks from Avenue D, which is infamous for all kinds of things—crime and graffiti and violence—though we all think it’s overblown. The city has a way of becoming myth.
Uncle Dave
“Rass a Sass a Frass,” Dave says. He takes his baseball cap from his head, revealing his dark thinning hair, and pushes his sunglasses down onto the bridge of his nose. He looks at me. His eyes are a deep dark brown. They remind me of the river. I sense the same sort of current in them. “It means, Hooo! Raaa!” Dave says, his glass in the air, a giant full-toothed smile on his face. I know from years past and just because you know when you hear Dave say it what he means.