Extras

Mrs. Burbank can feel it on the first ring, knows it is her son calling long distance from half way across the country to talk to her. She knows because it is too late for any of her friends and too late for telemarketers who her husband might yell at, and she knows because it is too late for her husband, her son Aiden’s step father, to be awake, which is why Aiden would be calling now. She also knows that it is going to ring until she answers because a) Aiden knows someone should be home and he hates being ignored, or b) Aiden suspects she is out and aims to let it ring until his step father answers and then he’ll hang up, or c) which is the worst choice, that it is not Aiden but someone calling about him, someone calling to tell her that she has lost her youngest son, the only one left, that she has now lost her first husband and her oldest son and Aiden too. Ms. Burbank wants to answer the phone, her son is away working for the summer at Yellowstone National Park, needed to get away from his friends and the city after his brothers death and she wants to know that he is doing well, that he still intends to come home in September, but then there is a part of her that worries that he may not be doing well, that he may not come home in September but will be swallowed up and gone away. She always tells Aiden, “If you don’t like the answer then don’t ask,” and she is thinking maybe this, maybe not answering the phone is sort of like that. If she pretends that the phone is not ringing, that her oldest son Michael, Pony to his friends, is not gone, if she slides over close to her new husband and imagines him the old maybe that will be the life they’ve all come to live.

The phone stops ringing and the remnants of it seem to echo throughout the house. There is a pause before the answering machine picks up, before her sons voice, like a broadcaster, comes on and reports that: “You have reached the Burbank’s, no one is home, or no one who lives here wants to talk to you. Please leave a detailed message and we will call back if we like you and what you’re peddling.” It reminds her of old photographs of her sons playing in puddles, riding piggyback on their father, reminds her of Thanksgiving dinner, the gluttony and napping in front of football on network television and guests leaving late, snow on the ground, and her carry one of her sons upstairs to his bed and her husband carrying the other.

Ms. Burbank reaches over and picks up the phone before Aiden can say anything to his voice asking him to leave a message, before he can warn her about what he is, in his own words, peddling. This phone call is years of unspoken grief and anger and love and other those other things unsaid that lay and wait like the last of winters snow, hidden in shaded places, trickling bit by bit back to water. This call is Aiden and his guilt about his older brothers death, suicide, which he feels should have been prevented, predicted, overcome by forces that he has still not put his finger on. This call traveled across more states then years having passed since Pony’s death. Is answer to how are you, and how is the weather, and how have you been sleeping, and is confession about missing home, own bed, friends, bad beer, heat and then snow and more snow, and possibility of snow. This conversation which is about to unfold, gain momentum like the melted water seeping into the river— where Aiden’s friends are drinking tonight, throwing things in and toasting to their friend and the hope that he will return soon, the hope that none of them will leave though a number of them have made short term disappearances like this current vacation their friend is on; the river that held the body of their lost friend Pony and the sunken tugboat they once congregated at, where they are all afraid of the other nameless bodies pulled from it. This phone call is obligation like paying bills on time or returning borrowed goods, is the type of promise made between parents and children. And Ms. Burbank’s finally answering is how she sees herself and the other mothers of the boys who her son hangs around with. It is her frustration that mothers must do this, that these mothers, who work full time jobs and cook meals and do the laundry must also tend to their boys who need reassurance and medical care and advice about girls and need someone to baby them while they are puking up beer because all of them were drinking when they were fifteen and thought that this sort of thing was fun. This call between mother and son is about fathers who are gone, some, like Aiden and Bear’s fathers, dead, or some just gone off into their own sorts of worlds, divorced and remarried, playing with toys, cameras and kayaks, and time off for tennis buddies or old high school friends. This phone call is what she has left to give her son, who is lost like all boys in their twenties who have lost friends or brothers or even fathers, who need sometimes to move away from the city they love so that they can do whatever it is boys think they will do when they leave and come back, find something, which is perhaps just finding out that there is nothing out there to find but realizing that finding things is not always about journey and still, as his mother, she’ll tell him that everything is alright, that his bed is ready and waiting for him, will tell him that she misses him and that no matter the outcome—because father’s never seem able to say it— he will be loved.

Katie and Paul sit in the living room, blankets draped over the entrances to the dining room and front hallway, trying to keep the room cool. This is the only hope of getting any use out of their small air conditioner. Paul is dressed for work. He has his patrolman’s uniform on, his hat resting in his lap. He polishes his badge while he watches television. Katie thinks he looks cute and boyish reclined like that, working on his badge, in his uniform. He looks like a cub scout or a kid dressed up to play cops and robbers with his friends. He is so much a Smyth boy, she thinks, her face right up against the air conditioner. His grandfather was a cop, his father, his older brother even. This is one of the reasons, though she would never tell Paul, that she hopes the baby inside her isn’t a boy.

The television is tuned to R News, the local news channel broadcast on a loop and updated every hour on the hour. It is four o’clock. Katie wishes Paul would change the channel. She hates the news, especially the local news, because nothing about it ever changes and sometimes that makes her feel trapped. At least they don’t live right in the city, she thinks, not even on the outskirts of Rochester anymore. But they are just barely out of it and even here they are not far enough away from the news.

Katie talks into the air conditioner. “Can’t you just call in tonight?” She flips a page in her magazine, Modern Art. She is studying up on the new artist they are bringing in next month to the gallery. She is the resident art historian and feels obligated to know everything, especially now that she is going to miss time with the baby.

“Dearest wife,” Paul says. “I can’t hear you when you talk into that thing.” He sips at a cup of iced coffee Katie set out for him. This is ritual. He naps, he drinks coffee, and he watches the news before he drives into the city. He took the swing shift so Katie could work once the baby came, so they could both work and be a part of this child’s life.

She turns toward him. “Dearest Husband,” she says, “Don’t go to work tonight.” Katie doesn’t do this often. She knows Paul loves his job. He is proud of his work and despite the few things he gripes about—pay, hours, people—he wouldn’t be Paul without this job.

He picks the hat up off his lap. “Not tonight, love.”

It’s not that she’s worried about him, there is always that, but that alone is not enough or she’d never be able to let him go. He’s safer now than he ever has been with Mayor Duffy’s increased patrols. And she can’t remember, not during her husband’s time, the last cop who even got wounded. It’s the heat and the baby and not some fear of him getting hurt, but a fear that he is going to come unhinged. “A man can only take so much,” her father-in-law always says. She can see that, can feel it in Paul’s muscles when he comes home at night, or when he talks about “the clientele” he deals with.

“How does the hat look?” Paul asks, putting it on his head and shooting Katie a smile.

“You’re such a boy,” she says, smiling back at him. “Walk me down to the creek, Mr. Officer, before you leave?”

Katie likes the creek, how it reminds her of the river she and Paul used to go to with their friends. She knew then that he was going to be a police officer. She liked that about him. She liked how protective he was when they were in the cattails and woods at night along the river. She liked how scary it felt being that close to such a powerful body of water, and being young, and being in a place maybe they shouldn’t have been.

The air conditioner gurgles and Katie jumps. Paul takes off his hat. “You mind if I finish sports first?” he says, putting the badge onto his uniform and running his hand over the stubble on his chin.

Katie gets out of her chair, her tiny feet and red nail polished toenails leading the way. Paul grasps for the hem of her skirt as she passes. “A kiss goodbye,” he says.

“You’ll have to come get one after sports,” she says, pulling the strap of her tank top over her shoulder and blowing him a mock kiss as she disappears behind one of the blankets and into the front hallway.

*

Katie is sweating as soon as she’s out the door. It’s a quarter mile down to the creek, which is mostly a trickle this time of year. But she’ll sit there with her feet in it, under the shade of one the weeping willows and read her magazine until Paul leaves for work.

Katie can taste the heat and feels its weight as she crosses the yard and comes upon the willow. In the cornfields beyond the creek, on their neighbor’s land, the heat hovers over the corn in waves. She laughs, thinking it might be hot enough for the corn to pop. Maybe that would be enough to keep her husband home or a nice story for the news. Once she gets to the creek Katie sits on the bank. The water flows steadily over pebbles and sticks and swirls around Katie’s pale feet. It’s refreshing, the water and the shade, though it is hotter out here then in that little living room.

By the creek, Katie feels like a kid again. It reminds her of her parents and the trips they’d take to Boston and Baltimore and Dallas to visit aquariums because for a long time Katie thought she’d study science thought she’d be a biologist or zoologist. On these vacations Katie would press her face against the glass and examine the fish, holding her notebook and taking notes as she identified different spices. Even then, with her notebook full of names and characteristics, eraser shavings on every page, Katie liked the order of life inside these artificial worlds. She liked how everything had a name and function.

A slight breeze runs across the creek and through the trees. A few helicopters are shaken loose and Katie raises her hands, lets the helicopters fall over her arms and hair. Leaving her magazine by the tree, she walks into the water. Katie rests her hands on her stomach, thinking of her baby safe inside its dark aquarium. She imagines the girl she was, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and falling in love in the woods. She misses the way things were absolute.

Katie is in the middle of the creek now. The water is up to her ankles. She sits down in it, soaking her skirt and splashing water up onto her tank top. The water is cold. She lays back, her whole body in the water, her short brown hair floating around her cheeks and pointing downstream. This creek, as small as it is now, runs all the way to the river, widening and getting deeper as it gets closer and closer to the city. Katie lies there, thinking of her unborn child and of the river and the nights she spent there. She lies there waiting for her husband to find her.

Bear has just announced his engagement. Everyone else is busy tonight, working or out with girlfriends or celebrating birthdays or anniversary’s with their families. It is just Bear and me celebrating with a 30 pack of Busch.

“This is the happiest day of my life,” he says, handing me a beer and toasting to his fiancée.

Bear’s been seeing this girl for four weeks and she lives six hours away in a city so close to the Northern edge of the New York border that she is practically Canadian, but she is his first real girlfriend and he is her first real boyfriend and there is no talking him into waiting or thinking it through. I raise my beer to my lips and feel the cold, cheap liquid touch them and I am genuinely happy for my friend.

“I’m moving down there in December,” Bear says, “when the lease on my mom’s apartment is up and she can find some place cheaper to move. She says she’ll let me leave then.”

We are sitting inside the aqueduct downtown, traffic passing by overhead. We came here because neither of us had money to drink at a bar, Bear collecting $140 a month from unemployment and me home for the summer from college and jobless. Neither of us wanted to stay in watching TV or staring at walls so we came here instead.

“Will you come visit?” he asks.

I tell him I will. I tell him everything I know about marriage and about family and about being prepared for the worst, which I’ve learned from watching my parents, who are divorced. Bear says he is isn’t like that, that this is going to last forever and that he isn’t ever coming back, not for his little brother or his mother who takes $120 of his unemployment check and uses it for groceries, not even for his friends, which he sounds unsure of, but I don’t question him.

“You want to hitch out to the drive-in this weekend?” Bear asks me.

I stare out at the river moving not thirty feet below us and listen to it pour over the water fall about one hundred yards behind and say, “Sure. What are we going to see?”

Bear looks at me like I am stupid because we both know he only goes to the drive-in for the horror flicks and because I am not a big horror fan and am going to go no matter what is playing just to get away and celebrate some more with my friend who is moving away.

“Why do you like freaking horror movies so much?” I ask.

Bear tells me how horror movies are predictable and sort of safe despite the impending threat. Not like leaving home and your friends and everything you know. “You know what I mean?” he says. “Plus, I like being scared.” I think I know what he means, though I don’t say so. I know I’m as scared to leave this city as he is. I know that there is no place like this, with the river and Kodak, and all the places, like the aqueduct, that we’ve come to know. I don’t think, sitting there on a technology that the city hasn’t used for over a hundred years, that either of us can imagine leaving even though we both intend to. We believe somehow in the magic of this city, in the stories we were told about waterfall jumpers and photography, in the myths we were told when we were kids.

We don’t say anything for a bit and in the silence we hear someone yelling. A cop is looking over at us from the street running adjacent to the aqueduct screaming out, “Hey you. You two, get out of there.”

“You don’t think he means us?” Bear asks.

“No.,” I say. “Anyhow, one great thing about horror films are the titles,” I say.

“How do you mean?” Bear asks.

“Well, I mean I think we could have a good time coming up with alternative titles for movies that already exist.”

Bear looks down at the river and thinks on it for a bit. I know he is combing his mind for his favorite movies and thinking of titles and thinking of new ones that he can offer up. The cop yells to us again. “Get down from there now or else.”

“Why do they always say or else?” Bear asks. And we tip our beers to the cop as if he’s just said something complementary or funny. “Let’s hear one,” Bear says.

“Okay,” I say, “for example ‘Night of the Living Dead’ could be ‘Horrible Zombie Movie You’ll Never Watch Again.”

“Oh, come on. That’s not fair,” Bear says.

We laugh, and sip our beer.

The cop yells one more time and we ignore him. He starts heading back toward the end of the street where he will have to climb down a dark and crumbled stairwell, where he will have to walk over fallen shopping carts and through the stench of garbage, just to come make us leave the aqueduct. Knowing that brings both of us, Bear and I, a little pleasure. We look over at him and smile to one another. It’s the kind of thing we’ve come to love about Rochester and its hideouts and even the police who get bored occasionally when there are no murders or drug deals to breakup. It’s rare to be harassed by a city cop, but its kind of reassuring at the same time.

We sit there, waiting him to show up, winded and pissed off, our legs dangling over the concrete side, drinking our beer, me riddling off titles and Bear telling me why I am so wrong.

“A river flowing in its channel is a source of energy which acts on the river channel to change its shape and form.” A way to understand motion, flow, undertow. Another way to confuse what we control and what we know.

Better to come to terms with the river and what is lost to it. Best when studied on rainy days. Boats destined for the port of Rochester.

Cannot accurately describe how cold the water is, or how muddy, how fishing poles and lures are lost to it. Cannot eat more than one fish per month if it has been pulled from the Genesee River.

Did my friend, who drowned in the river, who killed himself by jumping from a bridge, die on impact? Did he change his mind once he hit the water? Did the current carry him under, deeper and deeper until he came to the bottom?

Enough with confession. Enough with secrets and trying to make sense of them. Enough with talk of ghosts and illusions to them.

“Flooding is a natural part of a river's cycle.”

Gods of lost things. Gods of a city when it is covered in snow and no one else is out on the rode.

Home of Kodak and Genny and trash plates and Wegman’s. Home of Fredrick Douglas and Susan B. Anthony and George Eastman.

Is all this history a credential, a way of making this place salvageable? Is the river really as deadly as I’ve made it out to be? Is there science enough to make sense of the water or must we rely on myth?

Just a place to kill time, or runaway from home, or swim, or hide from authority figures. Just a scapegoat.

Keeps us from having to think about our own acts of attrition. Keeps us safe, so long as we’re on one side of this river. Kept me occupied as a boy. Kept coming back to me when I remembered or longed for home.

Leftovers from another season. Limbs flailing for the surface. “Line distance from the beginning to the end of most rivers is about one third their actual length.” Line drawn between here and there.

“Most of the major cities of the world are situated on the banks of rivers.”

Never swim in the dark. Never swim when it is hot because the pollutants multiply, beer cans and wrappers from hotdogs and hamburgers and bottles of ketchup and mustard. Never go to the water alone. Never leave this city.

Outdated technologies. Outdated language, means of transportation, form of grief.

Preparation for sinking. Preparation for rainy season and overflow. Public outcry over crime, over bodies found in the water. Public broadcast in which I confess that I am coming back to this city, have no intention of leaving, where I admit all my darkest secrets or the secrets I’ve collected.

Questions about navigation. Questions about current and speed at which the body will be swept under. Questions about authority when documenting this.

“Rivers have been used as a source of water, for food, for transport, as a defensive barrier, as a source of power to drive machinery, and as a means of disposing of waste.”

Slime from touching fish. Slime from gutting the fish and the eggs that we take from them for bait. Slime covering boats left in the water for too long. Soaked to the bone and the water oozing from our shoes as we climb onto the banks. Soaked after a hard rain or after falling from the pier.

“The first one to the far bank wins.” “The last one out is a rotten egg.” The longest I’ve ever held my breath. “The water within a river is generally collected from precipitation through surface runoff, groundwater recharge and release of stored water in natural reservoirs, such as a glacier.”

“Usually larger streams are called rivers while smaller streams are called creeks, brooks, rivulets, rills. But there is no general rule that defines what can be called a river.”

Vaccine against loneliness, fear of water, loss, poverty, currents and their ability to overcome us.

What we mean when we say fear. What we mean when we talk about drowning or disappearing or when we say deep-sixed. What about the water mesmerizes? What was it that drew us to its banks?

X-ray revealing broken bones. X-ray revealing the future. X-ray, a sort of code, or index all its own.

Your need to apologize. Your way of understanding the world. Your friend at the bottom of a body of water. Your feeling that you are responsible, not for him, but for all of it, for the water and the way it moves, the way you sometimes get caught starring into it. Your way of telling the story.

Zeus reminding us that we are, all of us, given over to the power of something.

The summer heat is heavy, like an omen of something, though Helena can’t put her finger on it. She leans against the automatic doors waiting for the stock boys to leave. Tomorrow is inventory and she’ll be here late tonight, with two other managers, finishing last second things before returning here too early to observe the official counting. She feels how long the day has already been in every muscle, can taste it as she lights her Marlboro and inhales the smoke. She knows she’s been her too longing when she sees her short blonde hair, frizzed and uncombed, reflected in the glass door as she leans against it, exhales. Her nails are chipping. She hasn’t had a manicure in weeks. It’s not easy, she thinks, being the only female manager in a world of men, where boys stock shelves and women run cash registers, where she has to allow her male employees breaks for football and homerun derby in the backroom, because the male managers do. She has to be harder then them, has to raise her voice, sweat more, move faster just to prove that she is as good, better, to be feared, which she is. If she cries or lets them know she’s tired, talks about men or love, she’ll be susceptible, she thinks, to some sort of revolt. She doesn’t want to be an assistant manager for the rest of her life. She wants a store of her own. She wants to prove that she is tough enough, all five foot two inches of her, to brave the customers and the lazy employees and the work. She’s not going to be some broken housewife like her mother, who’s hands were always wrinkled from dishes or switching over laundry, bathing the kids, and cleaning vegetables for her husbands dinner.

Helena’s cigarette dwindles and she hears the boys coming, running, chasing one another no doubt. She hears the taller goofier one screaming, “Shit, shit!” He must be the one being chased. They’ve, the two boys and the head manager, Tom, been sneaking up on one another for weeks now and soaking each other with water balloons. She finds it funny, their boyishness, but feels compelled to yell at them.

“Hurry up you idiots. I want to get out of here tonight.” She considers her mother. What if, Helena thinks, I gave myself over to something like love.

The boys come barreling towards her. It’s not just the boys but their enthusiasm, their faces that make Helena smile, if only for a second, cigarette held out in front of her, smoke leaking from the corners of her mouth. The boys are a flash, are an image pressed to paper, are parties by the river with beer and bottles of MD 20/20 and dancing with shirts off, guys and girls kissing with tongues and teeth, then sleeping naked under the sky or in tents on the banks of the river.

Helena moves over a step, just to let the boys pass without getting hit by a water balloon. She is surprised by the pressure of a hand on her arm, by the force it is exerting on her and she knows there is a voice but can not hear it over the boys who were just about to break through the entrance. It’s the shifting look on the boys’ faces, the cold suddenly pressed against her head, a handgun, which fills in the words she’d been unable to hear. “Back in,” the voice says. The boy’s halt. “All of you.”

*

This crime that is about to be committed, this robbery, is something that will always be with Helena like a scar or burn. This crime is a moment of weakness. This crime is her mother, who she adored in her own way, though she was and still is afraid of becoming her, though all of her relationships have failed because of that moment when she sees herself in the mirror and thinks “mother.” This crime is the sound of someone weeping through a thin wall and you on the other side thinking, why? This crime is about place— hunger and lack of funding, the cravings of the body, the adrenaline heightened sense that these men will never get caught, the act that keeps police forces roaming the streets and circling the coffee shops, that keeps us focused on safety and security, to prevent acts that may or may not occur, to fill the city with panic and a certain sense of loss. This crime is a flashback where Helena’s father asks her to get him another beer, which seemed playful when she was young, but now is about a man being in control, is the only offense her father ever committed, this being a man, this acting like a man, and how sad she finally thinks it is. This crime is personal, the way she’s made to “open the safe,” “put the money in the bag,” “now bitch,” because—she knows—she is the woman and they fear her less, because to these men, these masked and armed men, she, the woman, is not a threat. This crime is going to change everything, those stock boys and the male managers, and even Helena’s view of her mother, the image of those hands and that dish water, the refrigerator door opening at her father’s request. This crime is about the news and a man who toke hostages at the Xerox headquarters. Who walked into the building with a trench coat on, nothing underneath, with a sawed-off shotgun and two semi-automatic handguns, singing “I’m going down in a blaze of glory,” with a smile, which may be ironic or heartbreaking, or both. This man— angry about the way he’d been treated after being laid off by this company— took hostages, his pecker flopping in the wind, each handgun pointed at a different young secretaries’ head, and Helena thought, when she saw them interviewed later, Stop crying, you weak, weak things. That man A) kept singing his Bon Jovi song and pointing his handguns, ignoring police warnings to “drop your fucking weapons,” and was shot very prophetically to the tune he sang; or B) released the hostages in a sudden fit of exhalation knowing he could get himself killed without them. Helena is remembering that man who took hostages and spent his last seconds on earth in an overcoat, who was shot by police because he did not drop his weapons, or because he winked and they knew that it is was what he wanted from them, this man who is a warning on the five o’clock news, who took control if only for a second, and Helena, sitting in the bathroom at the police station, will curse him and herself because she sees those guns and the women they’re pointed at, where she knows, those stock boys are on the other side of that bathroom door, are listening to her sobs, where she knows that she will never be able to yell at them or make them fear her, where she will now—if only because they’ve made her—love them.

We lived our lives in clutter. And these are the things I remember: bicycle parts piled high, broken panes of glass scattered around the yard. The rotting sides of cinder blocks crumbling like sand castles. A heap of metal stacked dangerously high. A waterlogged couch drying in the August sun…

My father lived his life in the garbage heaps and dispossessed possessions of the neighborhood, on the curbsides between his job as the night watchman and his job as our dad. There wasn’t a pile of trash that could escape him, that didn’t end up in our backyard for review. And he’d come home every morning, “Look what I got. Check this out. You want this lamp for your room? I’m sure I can get it working!” Our garage, capable of holding two cars, had never seen one, and our basement, which had once, prior to our moving in, held a bar, a pool table, and a toy room, had become a series of intricately woven paths occasionally disjointed by the overflow of what was once someone’s toaster oven.

When I was thirteen everything about my father and his piles of garbage made me blush. I already had a girl in my study hall calling me dork like it was my first name and I had glasses that were large enough around to take a swim in. I didn’t need my father’s help.

When we were younger, my brother and I would spend hours just diving in the trash, rumbling around in garbage cans with banana peels and cottage cheese and grass trimmings. Those were the days when I spent more time swimming through the piles—the plump swollen bags of brown and white, their give and embrace as we flopped headlong into them—than I did trying to explain my father to my friends.

“Clutter,” my mother called it, telling him to clean it off the dining room table, the kitchen counter, off every floor. Maybe that’s why my bed was always made, why my messes were neat piles at the height of their chaos. What stuck with me most about my father’s piles was how unworkable they seemed, blending together to become mountainous nothings. Yet, when he needed them the most, he could reach in, pull out an old piece of metal, a forgotten piece of wood, and create.

Though I feared my father’s collections, was embarrassed by them, they occasionally worked for me. In sixth grade he created a model crossbow for my Renaissance Festival with a piece from a vintage bike, a scrap of wood, and a rusty coat hanger. “Now that’s a good looking crossbow,” my father said. If my bike needed new handle grips, or my tires needed new inner tubes, if the trap door on our clubhouse broke, there was always a pile he could pull from to fix it.

As my parents began the processes of moving, my father was forced to move his junk, forced to scatter it to all the corners of his existence, his mother’s house, his brother’s shed, any storage space he could afford, just so he could hold on to it: this sacred act of collecting. I go home now, our house a few months away from being ours no longer, and stare at the white walls, the clean floors, walk through the basement without tripping or having to move anything, and though there are still a few piles, I wonder what I was so embarrassed by. This house has grown so quiet and hollow without: empty perfume bottles, torn apart rubber gloves, five useless vacuum cleaners, a string of broken Christmas lights…

* * *

When I go by the antique store in the morning on my way to class I think of my backyard, my home, and the store we could’ve opened. I found a book not so long ago, displayed at the bookstore where I worked, called Junk Market Style: Repurposed Junk to Suit Any Decor. Each page was lined with ideas about turning garbage into design, creating life from a pile of discarded items. Our memories are like these piles. They are old records waiting to be played again, or a heap of eight tracks without a working eight-track player to play them. On page 31 they’ve taken an old rearview mirror and turned it into a candleholder. On page 46 they’re creating a desk out of an old push cart. I think of my father and every piece of trash he ever collected, every broken microwave he revived, every old tire he turned into a swing and the way we rolled them around when he found nothing to do with them.

* * *

Our backyard, our garage, our basement, the shed, all overflowing with possibility, all covered with other people’s fingerprints and sweat and blood, and these are my memories: the things I ate for lunch in grade school, nap time, the first time I rode a bike, my first kiss, the way it felt when I burnt my skin for the first time, a sip of my father’s beer…

* * *

Every morning, when I was in seventh grade, my father came home from work and took me to school. We’d fly into the parking lot, always seconds from being late, the cab of his truck overflowing with garbage and making loud crashing noises as we pulled in. Empty Pepsi bottles and boxes of nails sliding around the floor at my feet. And he’d smile, his gold capped tooth shinning in the cab light as I opened my door and say, “There ya go, kiddo.”

One morning stepping out I kicked an empty baby powder canister from the floor and onto the sidewalk. I noticed it, the way it clinked and slid around the icy pavement like a loose marble, but I put my head down and rushed forward trying to ignore it as my dad pulled off.

“Hey, you dropped your baby powder,” I heard from behind me.

I turned, pushing my glasses back onto the bridge of my nose, my ears rushing with blood, to see Rebecca Porter standing there. She held the bottle out in front of her, looked at me with her deep blue eyes and smiled. Becca was in high school, the building next to the middle school. She had long blond hair, she was on the field hockey team, she was the type of girl all the high school guys were trying to date and all the middle school guys were jerking off to.

“Oh. Yeah,” I said.

“Well, don’t you want it,” she said. Her hand extended toward me, her lips parted, revealing those perfectly white movie star teeth.

I really wanted to walk away, but I didn’t know how to. My glasses insisted on sliding all over my face, my ears were threatening to burst, blood throbbing, and I reached my hand out toward her, my gloves making my fingers look like a rack of plump sausages, and took the empty bottle. Its sides caved in a bit as I grabbed it, as it slid from her hand. And it was her smile, her long blond hair, her tan that lasted all winter long, which made me want to throw up right there on her feet. But I turned, as confidently as I could with my feet slipping on the ice. I set my back to her giggles, my shoulders slumped, my body covered in sweat, and I walked toward the building, late now for sure, tossing the empty bottle in the garbage before I went in, debating the merits of walking to school.

* * *

When we were in grade school our father took his bikes, the mass that he had collected over the years, and brought them into a poorer neighborhood not far from our house. Though our family had never been rich we had an easier life, in many ways, than the kids he was going to help. There he set up stations where kids could come to get their bikes fixed or, if they truly needed, where they could get a whole new bike. Imagine now, this goofy looking man with his horn-rimmed glasses and holey t-shirt, coming to your neighborhood with a truck full of bicycle parts, his cab overflowing with tires and frames and seats.

As I remember it, it was a warm summer day, the kind of day no one would want to spend fixing anything in a blacktop parking lot. But my father came home that night soaked in his own sweat and going on about how many bikes he’d fixed. And I imagined him, turning wrenches and filling tires with air, making sure that seats were at the right height and putting chains back on. I could see him, his toothy smile and awkward movements as he asked, “Is that ok, buddy?” or “What do ya think?” It made me happy for him, sort of, though for most of the day I was mad, like I would be for a lot of my childhood, thinking that he was putting other kids before my brother and me. And I see now that we always had new things, new baseball gloves, new bats, new rollerblades or ice skates, even when my father was giving old things away, even when he was fixing people’s rollerblades with our old wheels, or making us help someone we’d never met before. I see him, his hands covered in grease, bruised, one of his fingernails with a dark cloud of blood under it, smiling the whole time, watching as me and my brother played on the grass he’d mowed, on the tire swing he’d set up, or as we climbed into the club house his junk had built.

* * *

On page 64, they’re making an end table with a topless base and a giant book.

On 202, a wire fence chandelier.

On 71 they’ve made a table from shutters.

On 194, a photo hanger from a drying rack.

* * *

There was, of course, more to our father than garbage: the days he took us out and bought us toys, when he dragged us to the high school to play catch, his telling me once—for no real reason—“I’m proud of you.” The kayak trips, the camp outs, the outdoor ice rink at the end of the street that he helped freeze in the cold, supervised so we could play hockey with our friends. And when we were little, the way he always took photographs, the way he loved his camera and the ways he loved us. There are a series of photos where he’d dressed us up, those glasses with the big nose and the mustache, a fire fighter hat, a cowboy hat, our baseball equipment, or a bow tie. There are others, a rainy day at the beach, sliding through puddles and soaking wet, groups of us gathered together in our hockey equipment at the rink. Him always calling out, “Move closer. Jonathan, get down in the front there. Just one more!” I think I remember him having that camera everywhere.

When I look at pictures of my friends and me having a party in the semi-cleaned basement, behind us, in the corners, in the out of the way places, I see rusty nails, a dozen hammers, a porcelain doll without a head, a treasure chest full of paint chips and dried leaves, the chocolate covered cherries we bought him for Christmas every year, the dollar store cashews he shared with us, my first pair of rollerblades, the year we had two Christmas trees, the first time I got drunk, swinging a bat, turning a double play, winning a championship, hitting a homerun…

* * *

…paint cans stacked to the ceiling, screen door missing its screen, twenty useless lamps, a box of broken light bulbs, thirteen jars filled with nails, two lawn chairs without their webbed backs, three incomplete golf sets, a fan without a blade, an empty toolbox that can’t be closed, a rusty fitness bench, dresser drawers without a dresser, twenty old cigar boxes full of washers and screws and bolts, a kool-aid can with spare change, plungers, clip boards, a United States Army uniform, a saw horse missing two legs, a toilet without a seat resting on its side, and a stack of washed out photographs…

* * *

And when my aunt died, my father’s sister: I came downstairs in the morning and asked my mother where he’d gone, assuming that he’d left for my grandmother’s where everyone was meeting. My mother explained that he was in the garage, that he wanted to be alone and that she wasn’t sure when he was going to come back in.

Later that week I dressed in a pair of pants I hated and the dirty old sneakers I loved, lounging in the hallways of every building my family gathered in. There, my brother, my two cousins and I made fun of our fathers while we waited for the service to end so our job as pallbearers could begin. We laughed at how goofy our fathers looked, the two of them with their glasses and old suits, all agreeing that my father had probably picked his from the racks of the Salvation Army or found it, months or years before, on a curb, not intended for this situation, proving its everlasting worth.

Then they came, our fathers, looking composed and serious, but not upset, just making sure we were ready because the service was about to end. And my dad placed his hands on my shoulders where I could feel all the tension in him release. “You ready guys?” And I knew, though I’d been laughing all day, that I was about to do something very important for him. I felt steady when I took the handle of the coffin in my hands, and I looked across at my father who hadn’t shed a tear all day and somehow I was sure he knew that I hadn’t done it for anyone but him.

I wanted so desperately to sneak out to the garage that day to spy on him as he took part in this secret act of men, amongst the piles of caulk guns and two-by-fours, in the middle of the only aisle anyone could walk down. Now I imagine him sitting on a stool, his hands pressed deep into his thighs, his glasses resting folded in his lap, his body quietly convulsing, the only living thing in the heap. I feel sorry for him. I wish he would just come in.

Two weeks before his best friend died I said to my father what I’d been waiting to say for months.

“You’re a selfish fucker,” I said.

The fight had started in the kitchen but I’d moved to the dinning room table so I could eat and compose myself. It must have been about cereal or milk, about him having finished one or the other.

“You have no fuckin business. My marriage has nothing to do with you,” my father said.

My father had moved into his own apartment a few months before we sold our house and my parents divorce was final. Still, he’d come home for meals, always after the night shift, at seven in the morning, he’d return and have three or four bowls of cereal. At five he’d show up just as dinner was being pulled from the oven, and on Friday’s, the day we’d order pizza or Chinese, he’d show up asking, “Where’s my cashew chicken?”

I read the ads in the Sunday paper, hoping they’d calm me, hoping they’d keep my voice steady and keep my hands from shaking. “You come around here whenever you want. You eat whatever you want. But you don’t help out, don’t pay rent, or pay for groceries,” I said. “You’re a leech.”

He got in my face, his large hands inches from me. “You really think shit like this helps? You think you’re being some sort of man?”

I was almost sure he was going to hit me. I tore my eyes from the table and looked right at him. “Why don’t you just leave? Why don’t you go to your place? Go eat your own food. No one wants you here anymore.”

I meant it. I meant it then and for the rest of that day and throughout those weeks before Harold, my father’s best friend, died. He didn’t say a word to me and instead headed out the back door to the garage. I went upstairs. By the time I came back down, five or ten minutes later, he was gone.

* * *

On the morning Harold’s caseworker called to tell my father his best friend was dead I was the only one home. The phone rang ten or thirteen times and I finally gave up on not answering it. There wasn’t much I could say. I’d tell my father, thanks for calling, yes I can make sure he gets there today. Afterwards I couldn’t get back to sleep, and despite the fact that I hadn’t known Harold, I paced around the living room waiting for my father to come home for breakfast, worried about having to tell him. I could imagine my father, driving through the city of Rochester, passing by the New York State Thruway exit and heading towards home.

Upstairs in the shower I sat and wept, not for Harold, but because I could see how painful it would be for my father. I tried to convince myself that there was a way I could tell him, some perfect words for the occasion that might wipe any pain away. It was an odd feeling when I finally heard his car pull-up. In the few seconds it took me to run to the door, those last seconds, I thought I’d decided what I’d say. Part of me wanted him to cry, wanted to see that he was as hurt as I’d imagined he’d be. But then, when the words came, “Dad, a woman called this morning, Harold’s dead,” I realized how harsh they were, how unscripted and comfortless they’d been, and I was relieved when he placed his hand on my arm without breaking his stride, when he poured himself a cup of coffee, when he sat on one of the dining room stools and calmly called her back.

* * *

After the phone calls and the funeral arrangements had been made, my father snuck into Harold’s apartment and found some money that Harold had told him he’d hidden. He came home smiling, his nose wrinkled in joy, his glasses sliding up and down on his face, as he told me and my friend how he’d swooped in and rescued sixty-five dollars from the tax men and auctioneers who were destined to overrun the apartment. In his bubbling moment of victory he took my best friend, Ralph, and me for Chinese, and even though neither of us was hungry, his childish enthusiasm made it impossible to say no.

He took us to the Taste of China, his new favorite restaurant since the divorce, without the energy or will to cook for himself. We all smiled at the huge statue of Buddha next to the door, his sign reading “RUB ME FOR GOOD LUCK.” And as we entered, our attention turned from Buddha to the sign reading: “All you can eat, $5, before 4.” My Father said, “Five dollars for all you can eat. Shit. You can’t beat that.” He handed the petite woman behind the counter fifteen dollars, his torn wallet falling apart in his hands, as he leafed through the bills. “Three-thirty. Made it just in time,” he said.

She seated us, poured us tea, and offered us soup. He’d never been this early, never even realized there was such a buffet, with tea and soup, all you could eat for five dollars.

“So, Mr.C, what was Harold like? Ralph asked. “What did he do for a living?”

I ran to the buffet to get away, to let Ralph go over what I’d already heard. From there I could see them chatting and I knew what my father was saying. I could see Ralph covering all of the important questions, all the stuff my dad needed to say. Over the steaming rice and egg rolls my father’s hands waved furiously in front of him, both of his elbows on the table, his eyes wide open and his mouth moving rapidly.

When the soup arrived they paused, my father still bursting with energy. “Wow, soup, tea, all you can eat. Man, we really got them.” He sipped at the soup, sloppy spoonfuls splashing over the sides before they reached his mouth. Once we were settled the conversation started again as if I’d never left or never returned. “So, yeah. Harold grew up in Oswego where you and Jon went to school.” He looked at the both of us and took another sip from his soup. It was as if he’d needed to catch his breath, to check last second details. I knew before he started, by the way his elbows had dug into the table, by the way he’d put his spoon down, what story it’d be. This smile came to him, the same smile I imagined on Harold’s face when he was telling the story to my father. It was a toothless smile that wanted to turn into a laugh.

“So, Harold’s brother, he used to fly a bomber during World War Two. And one day, the army base in Rome was still operational at this time, Harold’s brother he just comes screaming in diving toward Oswego.” He paused, took a sip of his tea and continued. “Well, everyone in town they start freakin out. They all think the Germans are coming, attacking the U.S., like Pearl Harbor or something. But Harold he knows. He’s sure it’s his older brother just playing a trick, saying hi. Harold, he just laughs at those people. Besides, who’s going to attack Oswego, New York?” Ralph laughed, his spoon halfway to his mouth. I kept my eye on the people around us as I played with my rice. “Harold, man. He was a good guy.” My father was all smiles now. “Let’s try the buffet, buddy,” he said to Ralph. And as they were leaving, my father and my best friend, it occurred to me that all of Harold’s stories had become my father’s, and though I’d heard most of them before, I envied how invested he was in them, how they made him smile and laugh, how he’d always finish them by saying something about the nature of his friend.

It was one of the few times as his son, those days surrounding Harold’s death, where I realized how human my father could be, how he could be lonely and heart broken and more than just my dad. When I was a kid I never wanted him to go for his night shift, I wanted him to stay, to protect us, because when he was there, even if we were already safe, I felt like he’d never let anything hurt me. I thought he was superhuman. But standing outside the restaurant him handing me the keys to his van, handing me a hundred dollar bill, the only money I’d ever remembered him just giving to me, he told me to go get a new mattress for my apartment, and I could see how worn out he’d become. As we drove off, him assuring us he’d be fine walking home, we saw him dip into the bar next door. I imagined him there, at the bar where my friends and I had gone after hockey, where we’d shot darts and discussed, with passion, the outcome of our games. I could see his every move. I could see the meaningless mid-season baseball game on the TV. I could see him looking down occasionally at the regulars playing five-card stud at the other end of the bar. He’d have one pitcher, domestic beer. He’d stare off into the fryers, think about ordering more food, and sip at his drink. He’d just sit there for a few hours and finally let his divorce and his friend’s death and everything else sink in.

* * *

At the cemetery my father, my brother, and I all had on wrinkled dress shirts and dirty sneakers and we stood by awkwardly, our bodies slumped at the shoulders, our hands crossed in front of us, our heads bent, staring into the dirt. There were also the workers from the complex Harold was staying in, the nurse that took care of him, and then those three military men, dressed in their uniforms and shiny shoes, with their gloves and boras, holding the American flag.

I felt out of place. No one belonged, not the ladies who worked at his apartment, not the funeral home director, not even the nurse who’d taken care of him when his legs and lungs and heart got weak. Really, with his dingy pants- what would have been work pants for him- and his disheveled shirt- probably his best- my father was the only one who cared. Standing there afterwards, my father just kept talking about Harold and the dollhouse they’d been working on. He talked about how he’d been doing the detail work because Harold was getting too weak. The women from the apartment told him that some other tenants were taking up the job for Harold and my father was invited to help them complete it.

He talked about how he hadn’t seen Harold in a week and that he’d been planning on visiting; that he’d seen Harold was running out of strength. And he told stories about Harold. He explained that he’d been a Korean War Vet, that for part of his life he’d lived on the streets. He bragged about how smart his friend had been, generous and caring and interesting, and all the women from the apartment, the nurse, the funeral director, they nodded and agreed.

My brother and I sat in my father’s mini-van, resting just inside the sliding door, my brother deciding to skip his cigarette knowing my father might chew him out, talking about Harold and the oxygen tanks and the emphysema, all the lectures he’d given us both thousands of times before. While he was gone we talked about it, about how the flag looked cheap, like it had been bought at Wal-Mart or Kmart, somewhere where you’d go to get the cheapest flag you could find. I couldn’t get over how itchy it looked, how hard it was for the soldiers to fold it into a triangle, the bullets refusing to stay tucked into the corners and ending up on the ground. My brother had been to another funeral a few weeks before for his friend’s father and they gave him a twenty-one gun salute. The flag they folded for him was silky and so colorful that the red stripes looked like blood, looked like they were going to run right off into his wife’s hands when they gave it to her. There were hundreds of mourners there, his kids, his wife, his friends. But all Harold had was my father. And when they handed the flag to him it felt strange. It was odd to see a man taking the flag and it seemed lonely to think that there was no one else to take it for him.

When he got to the van my father told us they’d roped him into volunteer work, that he’d committed to visit the building to help some of the other tenants finish Harold’s dollhouse. His teeth showing as he cracked his toothy half smile, as he laughed at himself for volunteering, as if he hadn’t wanted to, as if he’d been tricked and couldn’t believe how foolish he’d been.

* * *

I tried to imagine the dollhouse, how it looked as Harold and my father designed it and how it might have looked as my father went to complete it. Later, I discovered a book called The Complete Book of Making Miniatures. In it the authors purpose that the love of miniatures, of dollhouses, comes from their awakening in us, “the mysterious and imaginative world of pretend.” And so, as the house began to look more like our own, as the siding was hung and the rooms were completed, I could see my father adding in miniature people. I could see him placing himself and his family carefully.

In one scene his wife would be cooking dinner in the kitchen: pasta from a cardboard box and sauce from a jar with either sausage or ground beef added in, whichever he’d told her when she’d asked the night before. And his sons and all their friends would be in the street. They have hockey equipment spread across the front yard, and they have a goal, with a sheet for netting, in the middle of the road playing ball hockey. He could hear them, their cheering and swearing and cars honking as they passed, from anywhere in the house, but he struggles with where to put his miniature. Perhaps in the window, where, he occasionally watched, smiling from time to time, even though he never liked the game or took part in it. Or, maybe he’d put himself in the kitchen, poking jokes at his wife, “Smells like you’re burning the meat dear.”

And he’d just giggle and move back to the living room to check on his boys in the street.

But the book on miniatures also said something about the miniature being "a microcosm of man's values and lifestyles." Then, my father would place his sons on the front porch, older now, bottles of beer and cigarettes at their feet. And in this miniature world, he comes home from Harold's, sometime after midnight, and he makes coffee, sits in the living room and watches TV. His sons and their drunken friends get louder and louder and argue about the hottest girls and the best hockey players and politics and sex and philosophy. My father has his feet up on the miniature couch, the room lit by the light of the miniature television, but he catches a part of a conversation, the way one of the boys had talked about eating girls out, or something about being an atheist. Before long my father is out on the lawn, lecturing about safe sex or faith, or both.

Imagining him working on his dollhouse, with his large hands which had wrapped around mine and taught me to swing a bat and taught me to catch footballs and showed me how to throw a punch, reminded me of something different about him, something before all the arguments he'd had with my mother, something that replaced all the times I wanted him to leave. And it was the dollhouse and what I imagined he thought about as he delicately put it together that made me understand why he kept coming over for breakfast, why he was always there as dinner came out. It was his needing the noise of his sons, those hockey games, and those drunken nights on his front steps. It was about needing to be around someone, needing some sort of noise, something tangible to remember.

* * *

Right after Harold’s funeral we went back to his place. It was the three of us, my brother, my father, and me. My father held the spare key in his hands as we approached the security desk, him leading us, walking calmly by as if we belonged. My father seemed at home, moving casually and confidently, guiding us toward the elevator like he lived there. When we got to Harold’s door my father opened it and I immediately noticed the smell, the way the apartment reeked of urine. He must have sensed it because he told us, “Towards the end he was pretty sick. He couldn’t get out of bed that well.” He placed the keys on the table, quietly closed the door, and guided us into the living room. And we were drawn right to it, the large window that looked down on the river, at the forest that surrounded it, at the industrial buildings that loomed in the distance. Smoke billowed from the stacks at Kodak and the Genesee River looked less polluted. Standing there in Harold’s subsidized apartment, two blocks from my father’s subsidized apartment, in one of the “rougher” areas of Rochester, the city seemed calm. The “club” protecting my father’s aligning minivan, and the police crowded around corner stores, and all the boarded windows were invisible.

The apartment was small- with the living room we were in, a tiny kitchen, and a bedroom and bathroom. The floor was hard, made of tile, and the walls were white with a few pieces of art scattered across them. I remember thinking how comfortable it was, how they must have looked there, my father and Harold, drinking non-alcoholic beer because of Harold’s liver, and watching football games. This was where my father had come to just be away for awhile. And as I thought about them sitting there I could smell Harold everywhere. Not just the urine but his scent, a smell that must have been distinctly his: Old Spice and shaving cream and spilled beer. It was strange smelling him, because this was my first and last time there.

My father, returning from the bedroom, pointed to the bookshelf. “There should be something there for you,” he said to me. My brother stood, his hands resting against the windowsill, waiting for directions. The apartment wasn’t much but it was ours now and my father took a look around, put down his jacket, and said, “Well don’t just stand around.” He looked at my brother. “Find some stuff you want to take.” For us, my brother and I, there was no moral dilemma. My father was the only person Harold called family and he was his only close friend. What we were doing was a part of an unspoken understanding between two men with very little to take, two men who wouldn’t waste ink on wills or dividing possessions.

My father started going through things, his hands touching everything in the way, his eyes swiveling around the room so they wouldn’t miss anything. I leafed through the books, running my fingers over their spines. The Grapes of Wrath, The Far Side, The Wall. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, marked with an old receipt, its blue ink smudged and fading, caught my attention. I opened it because of the receipt, opened it so I could see what Harold had been reading. The chapter heading read: Concrete Relations with Others. I read the back of the receipt, where Harold had written, “He hasn’t changed. He’s always the same.” My brother played with the wiring on the stereo, trying to separate the record player and the speakers from the receiver, fumbling with all the plugs and connections, and my father seemed to be taking an inventory, to be content despite this moment, which was really about saying goodbye.

My father took nothing. Not while we were there. That day, with his sons there, my father just kept moving back and forth between the rooms while my hands moved over the books and my brother shuffled around the living room. There was something more sacred about my fathers taking, something more measured and meaningful. He went back on his own and took the things we’d left that were important to him; I saw them in his apartment, a tribal mask he’d bought Harold at a flea market, a small TV Harold had fixed, a pile of old records they’d listened to together, and stacks of books. We took a painting, two stools and a jacket. I took three old sweaters, and my brother took that set of speakers, and we tried to convince my father to take the frozen food because he was going to need it now more than Harold. We even joked about taking the oxygen tanks and getting high, fought through the smell of urine that hovered over Harold’s bed, and my brother and I listened close as my father told us those same stories again, as he told us he was going to finish that dollhouse, as he told us to take anything we wanted, to take everything we could.

Shaken too hard and blackened in one corner. Underdeveloped. One of your father’s many photographs. You’re there in the flash and far away places. Search the faces, search for your father who is a ghost, an observer outside the scene. Look for your mother. Pay attention to your father’s pictures of her. Let your father’s grief over losing her guide you back east. Know you’re still one of the boys. Know your place in this story. Find pictures of Pony, your dead friend, and find the clues in the background about his impending death. Anything that documents or verifies what you think you know. Any ghosts between the flash and exposure. Press your ear to the glossy surface and listen. Hear the voices of your friends, let them bring you back to Rochester, to the threat of winter weather and salt stained automobiles. Don’t talk back. Don’t ask questions or make demands. Cup the pictures to your ear like a seashell or telephone connecting to a world you can’t see, the distance between who you were then and who you are now. Where you can visit Pony or your mother. Where you’ll find your younger brother who wants you back the most. Listen closely to these photographs. You hold all of these people, friends and family members, in your hand like baseball cards. You write their names on the back and write them letters. These pictures, some of them with too much light, with odd reflections, are like blocks of ice, fossilizing what’s trapped in them. You put these letters and questions down to free them, to thaw them, setting their molecules in motion, so that you can change them, erase them even, or bring them back to life.

The air is thick with heat tonight. Paul Tantillo is sweating in his patrol car despite the air-conditioning. Neighborhood kids, even now at midnight, are playing in open fire hydrants; fishermen line the boardwalk, cooling themselves with cold beer, stretched lifeless in their lawn chairs. Paul wishes the rest of the city were as relaxed as them, their fishing lines bobbing calmly on this August night. He is on his way to the scene of another shooting on Monroe Avenue. He is the second officer on the scene, prepared to stand around, block off streets, interview witnesses. The local paper, The Democrat and Chronicle, reported just this morning that crime is down this year, on pace to be ten fewer murders than the 39 from last year. They haven’t taken into account the spike bound to occur in August, the increase caused by the rising temperature, the closed beaches brought on by the heat and the buildup of pollutants in the lake. If anything, Paul thinks, Rochester’s on pace to pass last year’s numbers.

By the time Paul arrives the victim is dead, his long hair hanging over his face and caked in the blood that’s pooled around him. Paul is certain he can make out sweat still dotting the victim’s forehead and cheeks. Paul stands outside Mark’s Texas Hots all blue uniform and shiny shoes, nothing like the kid he was just five years ago in his twenties, like the kid lying on the ground, who ran to Mark’s for a trash plate after drinking with friends. Some of the gathering crowd makes obvious cracks about bacon and pigs and all other overdone cop jokes, but it is a dependable soundtrack and Paul can’t blame them for trying to laugh at a scene like this. It’s what he sometimes wants to do.

Elsewhere in the city summer crimes are being committed; bikes are stolen, bonfires are starting along the river, underage kids are drinking at the picnic areas near the zoo. These are the crimes Paul dreams of, where there will be pretty girls, beer to confiscate, where he’ll be called a pig, but in a voice that indicates fear and some sort of learned respect, as these criminals—if one can call them that—are younger and don’t yet have the same hate for cops that the crowd on Monroe Avenue does.

Paul walks over to the other officer on the scene. More people are arriving now—police, fire, an ambulance. It won’t be long before there are too many authorities here for Paul to do more than run crowd control or hang crime scene tape. He takes a last look at the victim, the body will be gone soon, and Paul figures it’s the human thing to do. This victim, his slight build and green eyes, remind Paul of another early death. That boy a jumper pulled from the river, his first girlfriend’s stepbrother, Pony, hair filled with sand and seaweed, his body caught on a rope mooring an abandoned tugboat in place. He can hear the boy saying, “They call me Pony ‘cause I’m so full of energy,” and Paul saying, “They call you Pony because you’re a runt.”

Paul starts to imagine, standing in the heat, surrounded by other officers and the forming crowd, the river and Pony’s body. Paul remembers how he didn’t swim in the river when he was a kid, how he was afraid of the water and that reminds him of the famous waterfall jumper, Sam Patch, and Patch’s body found in the lake months after his final jump. Paul fears the water itself, the speed at which it moves, the way it’s said the current can take a person under without warning, the way it drags everything that lands in it: bodies, bottles, lost fishing poles, and spits them out into the lake like it’s delivering garbage to a dump.

When Paul leaves Mark’s it’s two o’clock and his uniform is soaked through with sweat. The restaurant, which is always open, is closed for the first time in a decade. Nothing else will happen tonight. It seems like the city calms after a murder, at least for the rest of that night. Paul decides, because of the heat, to go to the river, which isn’t on his route but is still in his jurisdiction. Maybe, he thinks, it will be cooler there. He only plans to stay for half an hour. He goes to that place, where the abandoned tugboat used to be before it sank last summer, where he and his friends went to drink and where they found that Pony. Paul knows, with the tugboat buried, that no one will be there.

He parks his car on a city street and climbs down the muddy trail. He walks through the cattails, mud splattering up on his pant legs and covering his once shiny shoes. He knows that it is going to be a long close to the summer and this isn’t the last night he’ll be around death. Paul carries the image of that boy, Pony, like a picture, a snapshot. It is the one face for all the faces he’s seen and will come to see. He doesn’t mean to, not at first, but he walks right out into the river, his holster and gun still with him. And he lifts his legs, letting the river wash him clean, letting the current carry him away.

“You know you’re from Rochester when…”

Ralph and I are listing them off, remembering the ones we heard a local radio talk show host, Brother Wease, read as we rode into work this morning. It is dark out and we are at the river now. We’ve snuck onto The Spirit of Rochester, the city’s old passenger ferry, which Ralph says is sinking and has been sitting voyageless in the harbor for the past five years.

“Sinking might be this boat’s only way out,” Ralph says. “You know you’re from Rochester when her ‘Spirit’ is sinking,” he says, sliding over a railing and onto the ferry. I follow, handing him the cooler we’ve brought and the portable radio. He puts them down one at a time holding a flashlight in his free hand.

“How do you know it’s sinking?” I ask, picking up the cooler and following him towards the nearest doorway.

“I just do,” Ralph says. I trust him. He has, for as long as we’ve been friends, more a brother now than anything, always known odd and useless information like this. He is a high school shop teacher and watches The Discovery Channel and follows stories about new and old and failing technologies. We work construction during his summers off with his father and uncle who are both retired shop teachers themselves. It seems, with the boat’s rusting exterior, like a good story, the sinking.

“You know you’re from Rochester when Toronto is about 70 miles away, but it takes four hours to get there,” I say. I’m thinking about the boat’s life, touring lake Ontario, ferrying passengers to Toronto, as we walk through the first door that opens into a hallway cutting down the length of the boat.

“Might have been faster taking this thing,” Ralph says.

“Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of touring?” I say.

“Whatever, dick.”

We’ve come here tonight, nearing the end of the summer to get away from something or to recapture it. I am about to enter the final year in my Masters Degree at Ohio State and Ralph has just bought his first house; his girlfriend of four years has finally given in and is moving to Rochester to live with him. Perhaps we’re trying to relive the lives we had along the river when we were boys, the parties and the makeshift boat races and fishing. Perhaps it is the knowledge that summer is coming to a close and the simple sadness it brings in a place that gets so cold, where snow falls for nine months, coming in off the lake and staying too long into the spring.

The boat itself is mammoth. On the outside it is mostly white, with leprous patches of rust. On its side in a plain text reads the name and numbers that indicate its port of origin. Most of the windows, and there are lots of them— large square ones in the captain’s quarters and those circular ones on doors into hallways and looking out from rooms—, are in tact. Top side most everything is covered in rust or some sort of early phase of moss. There are some splotches of white paint holding on, but mostly the boat is being slowly eaten away by the river. I imagine the river consuming it. Inside there are two large dance halls, a play area for kids, four restaurants, and a cigar bar. We put the cooler and radio in the cigar bar and search the rest of the boat.

We’re here tonight, meeting a few of our friends to play cards, to spend the night on the boat and talk and drink and laugh until the sun comes up and then sneak off just as the first fishermen are arriving on their boats. It is clear from all the dust that no one has been here in a long time. Ralph has an old blueprint, or so he claims it is an old blueprint, which shows us where everything is— the bedrooms, the engine room, the room where we can see the propeller and the gears and other things that once made it turn.

When we were in grade school we’d tour boats like this, the canal boats and the boat, I forget its name, something like The Maid of the Mist, which took people out to see our less notorious waterfall. We never went on The Spirit of Rochester. Still, seeing it when we were on the river fishing or riding in my father’s motorboat reminded me of those movies where people rode on huge steamboats and gambled and pulled guns on one another. But it was nothing like that. It was a way for people who worked at Kodak or Xerox to escape the city for a few days. Too upscale for my family to fully enjoy.

Now, combing the boat with Ralph’s blueprint as a guide, I am forced to imagine how luxurious it once was because nothing about it seems luxurious anymore. The daycare is a mess of old toys and half-erased chalkboards. In the corner of one of the chalkboards is a game of tic-tac-toe, empty and still waiting to be played. Ralph sits on one of those spine wheels where the base spins as you crank the top. He twirls around, the flashlight flying from his hand and its light whirling around the room.

“I used to love these things,” he says.

“You’re a mongoloid,” I say, and with my own pocket flashlight, play myself in that game of tic-tac-toe. We end up hauling a few toys back to the cigar bar, which will be our headquarters, and then go searching for new rooms.

In the restaurant area we head straight for the kitchen. We assume there won’t be anything left worth eating or taking, but we are curious to see what it looks like, how clean, if the burners still work, if there are plates and pots and other utensils that we might steal for Ralph’s house. All four restaurants meet at the kitchen, as if it is the heart, the hub of the ship. It is large with separate sections for each restaurant and then separate stations within them for soups and salads, entrees, and then deserts.

Ralph and I are mostly quiet while we walk around. We don’t find much, the pots and pans and other kitchen goods are rusted or so dust covered you’d need a brillo pad and bleach to get them anywhere near usable. The refrigerators are empty save a few rotting potatoes and an empty jello mold in the shape of a maple leaf. We take it. The rest of the kitchen is barren; the wine racks picked clean, the reserves of liquor gone, with one exception, which at first, because it is on the floor just poking out from under the bottom shelf, we almost miss. It is a bottle of Canadian Whiskey. Ralph leans down to pick it up, assuming it is empty.

“Nice,” he says, lifting it and feeling the weight, flashing his light over the unopened cap and then over the bottle as he shakes it and the liquid sloshes back and forth.

“It’s piss,” I say.

“Whatever, it’s free booze,” Ralph says.

“There is a reason it wasn’t worth taking,” I say.

Ralph puts down the bottle and picks up the maple leaf, waves it at me. “In Canada we trust,” he says. “Now take that thing,” he says, pointing to the bottle.

I pick it up and we walk on.

When we get back to the cigar bar, arms loaded with our findings, the bottle and jello mold and some old papers and books Ralph wanted, we sit down and pour ourselves drinks.

“A taste of Canada?” Ralph asks.

“No,” I say, “I’ll have some of the gin you brought.”

Ralph works on opening the bottle of whiskey while I get myself a glass of gin. He turns the radio on, which is tuned to the Jazz station his father and uncle insist on listening to while we work. “Welcome to the summer of Jazz,” Ralph said to me during my first day on the job.

I pull out a pack of cards and sit down at one of the dusty tables. Ralph stands at the bar. He drinks the whiskey right from the bottle and spits it out on the floor. I laugh.

“I wasn’t ready for it is all,” he says.

He sits down across from me. He prepares himself, grabbing the bottle with his hand, raising it toward the ceiling and examining it. He hasn’t shaved in a few days and his dark Italian complexion and stubble make him look a touch mad, like a man who has been lost at sea. He drinks, swallowing hard, looking across the table at me with watery eyes.

“Don’t you feel lucky that you got out of here?” Ralph asks.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean being in Ohio, being out of this place,” he says. “Do you feel lucky?”

I take a second to think about it, sip my gin and shuffle the cards.

“I don’t see how I’m lucky. I am sitting here with you at the end of another summer,” I say ribbing him. Though what I mean is something more like affection then mocking. I miss home and don’t understand why other people think my leaving is important or extraordinary. I envy my friend who has stayed here, who has made a life here, though I will never tell him as much.

Ralph looks over at the bar. He looks back at me. He takes another large swig from his whiskey.

“Piss,” he says, laughing.

We’re quiet for a bit. I deal out a hand of blackjack. Ralph says we should bet with shots. Loser has to drink the number that the winner brings in.

“Winner calls shot,” he says, eyeing the maple leaf on his bottle.

“You’re a retard,” I say. “I’m in.”

We play a few hands and come out close to even, both of us having two or three shots of the Canadian Whiskey. Ralph looks across at me as he shuffles the next hand. On the radio a song Ralph and I were mocking at work comes on.

“I love this shit,” I say, talking about the jazz.

Ralph smiles a half smile. “I don’t know how they listen to it,” he says. But he doesn’t turn it. He stands and walks over to get a beer from the cooler.

“Living in a world of change,” I sing along with the chorus.

Ralph sits back down and drinks half of his beer before setting it on the table.

“Do you think my dad is proud of me?” he asks.

I hesitate. I am not sure how to answer that, am not sure he even wants me to. My friend is twenty-six years old. He has a great job. A nice new house. A beautiful girlfriend. I’m not sure, both of us a little drunk now or getting there, why his father wouldn’t be proud of him.

“I guess it just seems like, when he talks about you being in Ohio, when we are on jobs and he tells people that you are in graduate school and working at a university, he is proud of you.”

“What’s so great about what I do?” I say more than ask.

“It’s not here,” he says.

We both sit for some time. I think about what I’ve said to Ralph. I should have said something else. I should have told him about graduate school, about how being there has made me miss this place, this city, my friends, in a way that I have never missed anything before. I could tell him about how much I hate going back when the summer is over.

Ralph has stopped shuffling the cards and I am sipping my gin. Sipping it and putting it down. Picking it up, swirling it, sipping it again. I don’t think his father is more proud or less proud of me. I think he is proud of the both of us. But I also think it is easier to tell your son’s best friend how proud you are, is easier to be outwardly happy for him. This seems part of the way fathers are. My own father has only once said the word proud, but I can feel it when he talks to me on the phone and I hear the same sort of thing Ralph is talking about when my father mentions Ralph and his teaching job and his new house. I don’t know how to tell my friend this, even though I want to. We sit, the light from a kerosene lamp flickering in the slight breeze passing through the room.

“You know they build these things to sink,” Ralph says, looking around the room.

“What?”

“Yeah, they build them to sink. I mean, think about it.” And Ralph goes on to describe how the weight of the boat is distributed, how the life preservation material is laid out, how certain parts of this boat and all the boats like it can be used as floatation devices.

“It’s not like the Titanic,” he says, “where there weren’t enough boats for everyone, where there was no way they would all make it out, no matter where they went down. This boat is built to sink.”

He deals out the cards and puts the bottle of whiskey right between the two of us. As a reminder, I suppose, of what is at stake. He does not look at his hand or even touch it once it is dealt.

“A ship made for sinking,” I say. I smile at the thought of it.

“Something like that.” Ralph says.

I can hear the slight lapping of water against the hull. I sit there and I imagine Ralph dreaming, about sinking, about how this boat is built to save us, how it will not let us become another body lost to this river. Or the boat will be another body lost in the water.

“I’m sure your dad is proud of you,” I say. “I know he is.”

“I know,” Ralph says.

I pick up my cards but do not look at them. I keep them pointed at the table. I imagine Ralph’s father and my own and note their inabilities as men, their inabilities as fathers. I want to tell my friend that there are other ways out, that sinking is not the only way. I want to tell Ralph again that his father is proud of him and I want to tell him that maybe even my father is proud of me, too.

The boat creaks and groans around us. There is laughter outside in one of the hallways. Ralph and I look across the table at one another. Our friends are here, I am sure of this. But still Ralph and I are silent as if we are about to get caught trespassing on this abandoned boat. We hear footsteps and then our buddies burst through the door. They have bottles of beer and flashlights and a radio of their own. They cannot know, when they see us sitting there with a bottle between us, both of us gambling blind, what they have truly stumbled upon.

Everything settled out and came into focus, bodies weighted down and gone forever. We were not built like concrete bridges designed to flex with wind and weather. Our skin wore away like salt-stained metal, like rock beaten back by water. Pony, all the ships sank the day they pulled your body from the river. The water level rose and that brown muck from the floor leaked into everything. The river mourned. No one could make sense of what brought you to the bottom. Fish were unable to escape, to find their way to the lake. They swam in and out of sunken boats and congregated near the falls. Turtles floated on the surface, their heads and legs exposed. They were little lifeboats, like islands waiting to be homes. The uncharted land stretched before us. We packed our beer and cigarettes and imagined that we are boys again, climbing on to explore. What did it feel like cutting through the air, splashing into the water? How could we erase it, or settle the past and the things lost to the river? We could tell stories or be silent. Drink or stay dry. Drown or dredge the river until it’s one big sand bar. All of us washed up and mud stained. Seaweed stuck in our hair and in our teeth, there to remind us. I swam toward the bottom, unable to see through the mud murky water. The slimy floor oozed through my fingers. This was familiar. This muck held everything, preserved it, rocks and the bones of animals. This was the first place I went to find you.

There are less than twenty-four hours left before I leave Rochester and move to Ohio. Ralph and I sit on the stern of an old tugboat, stranded in the river years ago, smoking cigarettes and talking about the past. It is a coincidence that a police officer was shot in the head hours before, blocks from where my father lives, but it seems like something we should talk about.

I can't believe a fourteen year old shot him," I say. "Jesus."

You surprised?" Ralph asks. "Nothing about this place shocks me anymore."

I flick my cigarette into the river and listen for the sound of it hissing. An ambulance siren blasts from the bridge a mile down and it sounds like someone screaming into the night.

"Flower City," I say, "what a fucking joke."

I spark another cigarette and hold the pack out to Ralph, who pushes it away.

Normally Ralph would say something about the history of the name, how it used to be flour, not flower, how we were once the world's largest producer, how changing the name is more about convenience than it is about reality. But he's quiet. Maybe it's because there's nothing funny about irony anymore, or maybe it's because the city is like this, violent, unpredictable, has a way, much like the river we are sitting on, of doing things you don't understand right when you think you understand it.

The ambulance is gone now and Ralph reaches for my pack.

"At least the guy lived," he says.

We've been coming to the boat since we were kids, storing stuff here, drinking, fighting, doing the things bored city kids do. We put pictures of ourselves up in the bunks, run electricity off an old car battery so we can have light and a way to play music. We throw all our empty beer cans and bottles into the engine room, which is where the fire started, grounding the boat, and over the course of ten years we've got the room covered all the way across, three feet high, like one of those ball pits you see at McDonalds or Chucky Cheese.

The boat is rusted out, black on the bottom half, blue and white on top. We've stripped it of its sign, Cheyenne II, which I keep stored in a closet at my mother's apartment. The captain's quarters is full of old maps, routes traced out across Lake Ontario guiding the boat back and forth between Canada, across the dirty blue mess of water. The river, which empties into Ontario, is muddy and oily, and in the right light it looks like ghosts, or the faces of people, floating on the surface.

Across the river we see smoke from a fire. Occasionally the kids on the other side scream out their names or the names of the dead. They say things like "Lisa Smith is a whore," or "Matt Magee gave me crabs." They aren't clever but they're funny and I envy them, being younger than me, being home and not yet having to go. Ralph turns to me, pulling a cold Genny Light from his cooler, pops the top and hands it to me.

There are obvious things to talk about, the past, my leaving for graduate school, but we don't. Instead I think about what this new city will be like, how it will feel to be alone. I dream of the girls we didn't bring here, though we wanted to. How we were dorks and drunks and scrappers, the sons of working men, and how that meant we didn't date the popular girls and how, even though we didn't want to, we dreamed we would. And though life is like that, wanting what you can't have, I realize for the first time that I have always wanted to be here that I have never been one of those kids that yearn to leave.

Ralph and I went to college together an hour away but that's rare, people leaving for that and even when they do they go, like we did, down the road and come home when they're done. Most guys leave for war, or maybe for a short stint in rehab, but most everyone circles back within six months or a year.

The night before we left for college we had a going away party on the tugboat and our buddy Pony showed the coastguard his pecker when they came to boot us off. They chased him around the deck before he finally locked himself in the wheelhouse, smoking a cigarette and grinning stupidly. He kept saying, "Get off my boat fuckers. Illegal search and seizure. Possession is nine tenths of the law." Eventually they punched in the window and dragged him out by his ankles. The whole time he screamed about pirates, sunken treasure, the whore who framed him. They arrested him for drunk and disorderly. The next morning we left for school. Three days later Pony killed himself.

Suicide is one way out, the most cowardly I suppose, or I've come to believe. Resentful of my friend's decision. Then understanding. Then angry again. Mostly we are a group of men who work for the biggest employers in Rochester: Kodak, Xerox, Delphi, Wegmans. I myself, prior to leaving for Ohio, had only been out of the state twice. Once when my mother drove us, my brother and me, the 1250 miles because she believed every kid, no matter what, should see Disney. And the other time on Ralph's nineteenth birthday when we drove to Niagara Falls in his 1985 Pontiac Bonneville and got to drink and gamble legally.

Canada was all right because you could walk this bridge and there was a line that marked the exact border between the two countries and you could jump it and be home and then jump it again and be in a foreign country. Ralph thought that was cool. But it was also the only foreign country we'd ever been to or even thought of going to so for us it was a pretty big deal. That and the waterfall. Supposedly the famous falls jumper, Sam Patch, who finally met his death in our hometown had jumped from Niagara and lived. So I was in awe of its power but even more in awe of the fact that it was our river and not theirs that finally ended him.

Beyond that there was a ferry, which made the four-hour drive to Toronto a one-hour boat ride. But that didn't last long and the city lost a shit load of money on it. I rode it once with Ralph and Pony, but the damn thing crapped out halfway across and the coast guard had to send out tugboats to push the thing back to the Rochester Port Authority building. We sat there eating burgers from this joint called Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger, where they take your picture if you can eat a pound of meat or something stupid like that. Ralph did it and puked all over Pony's new Converse All-stars and Pony punched him in the gut and then Ralph puked all over the parking lot. It wasn't such a bad day.

We got to eat for free so that was pretty okay, which is what my father would have said when he picked us up, all of us reeking of grease and puke and the lake. My father just laughed and said we made for a pretty ugly three stogies.

Other than the kids across the river no one is out tonight. The water stinks because it's the height of August and the sun has been going to work on the city, which is why it doesn't surprise us, the news of violence. We measure the threat of danger through a mathematical equation that is directly relational to the temperature. Cattails click together like the bones of dead things.

Ralph and I sit there listening to the sounds of the kids on the other side. We talk about that fourteen year old boy and where he is headed, downstate to Sing Sing maybe, or to Attica, or Auburn. That is if they try him as an adult, which they may. Because as early as the next day the news will be talking about it, interviewing people around town and asking them what they think should be done, how this boy should be punished, what sort of family, and school system has created this person. There are never any questions about race or poverty, about how complex a term like justice might be in a case like this.

Every year there are forty of fifty murders in this city. I've heard we rank high on a national survey based on the number of murders per capita. Sometimes it's drugs. Sometimes gangs. And then other times there is no way to explain it, this dark venomous that surges beneath the skin of the city.

In a few weeks, when that boy goes for his arraignment, every off-duty cop in the city comes to the courthouse dressed in their blues. They stand in two single-file lines that he has to walk down the middle of as he approaches, in handcuffs, the front steps. He is smiling. He shows no remorse, no fear or concern for how serious this is.

Ralph and I talk about how we don't know who to feel sorry for, the cop, which seems like the easy one, or the kid, or probably in a fair world both. There seems to be no winner here, no true bad guy. The mayor will give a speech about duty and honor and courage. But nothing will erase it, nothing will convince anyone that there is a reason that could serve to explain.

Ralph and I throw beer bottles into the river. The sound of them splashing into the water, the current sucking them in, it reminds me of loneliness.

I start to think about leaving. There are things I want to say to my friend but I do not know how.

I will leave and then come back to visit and something about me or about the way people see me will change. One night after drinking with my brother he will say to me, because he is drunk and frustrated, "one of the guys told me 'I don't like your brother.'" My brother tells me this to suggest that I better watch myself, that I am an outsider now, not to the people I am close to but to the people on the outside of our group, that this guy has only showed restraint because he respects my brother or perhaps, because my brother is so big, so hard at times to read, that this other man fears him and so does not do the things he wants to do to me.

But too, I hear it in my brother's voice when he has been drinking. "College boy," he says, and there is certain venom there, a kind of hate that is deep and old, something he might usually exercise through action. After all I have left and the odds are good that I am not coming back. And I wear a tie when I teach. And I am writing, about this city, about the places we have gone and the things we have done. Perhaps what I am doing is breaking a kind of code.

I will stay in Ohio for five years, am still there, and when I drive in I feel like I am headed in the direction I was meant to move, east. It will always be my bearing. Not west to the new cities and prairies, not north or south to the poles. But east, home. I think about that fourteen year old boy and wonder where he has gone, what the world will do with him. The markers pile up, each one drawing me in and propelling me forward: Cleveland, Erie, the rest stop at Angolo, Buffalo. Then the tollbooths and that last stretch of land, where the sky is gray, a kind of gloom that those who are not from here never grow accustomed to. And finally, the skyline: the smoke stacks of Kodak, the three giant tanks of beer in front of the Genesee Brewery, the smell of trash plates, the smell of river water, the high falls, the low falls, the Eastman house, Lake Ave., Park Ave, and lastly my father's apartment and him in it, waiting for me to visit, a few blocks from where that shooting happened on Avenue D.