My Father's Footprints (14 page)

“I am somewhat afraid,” I say as dusk steals over the forest. “What if the Sheriff of Nottingham and his men come upon us?”

“I have my sword,” he informs me soberly, “and you have your humble staff.”

When he is four, Robin Hood gives way to Hawkeye from
The Last of the Mohicans.
So now I am Uncas, the brother. We are scrambling over some rocks in coastal Maine, role-playing. But the rocks are a little
perilous and the fall to the water is sheer and long. I become nervous and ask him to move away from the edge. He points to
a breathtakingly dangerous series of outcroppings twenty-five feet over a place where waves crash up against the bottom of
a cliff.

“We must go there.”

I put my moccasin down. No. We absolutely cannot go
there. It is an unnecessary risk, and even brave Indians did not take unnecessary risks, because they were in it for the long
haul and understood that Nature deserves a healthy respect, etc., etc.

He lets me finish and then says, slowly, evenly, “Hawkeye would take a chance. To save a life.”

Next it is Batman.

“Let’s walk the dogs in the spooky woods in the dark,” I suggest, one crisp autumn night.

“Only if we wear costumes,” he counters.

“What kind?”

“Batman and Robin.”

“Fair enough.”

We extract costumes from his slightly disturbing collection.

There’s a pretty good Batman ensemble—cowl and cape— that fits me. He gets some Robin stuff. We drive over to the creepy woods
and walk down into them, but even with the costumes and even with the dark, protective bulk of Roy, we don’t feel very safe
or stay very long.

Back in the car, he notices that I do not appear to be driving us home.

“Where are we going?”

“Gotta return some videos.”

“We’re dressed up as Batman and Robin.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“I’m taking my stuff off.”

“That’s your business.”

“Are you going in the store with your Batman stuff on?”

“That’s my business.”

“I’m staying in the car while you go in.”

“You can’t. It’s not safe. What if something saw us in the woods and followed us? What if it’s waiting for you to be alone
in the car?”

We enter the store and he veers sharply away from me, hugging the outer walls.

In cape and cowl, I saunter over to the counter and return the videos.

“Everything quiet tonight?” I ask the crew in blue and gold.

“Yes, Batman.”

“No unusual behavior or disturbances?”

“No, Batman.”

“Very well. You know where to find me if anything crops up.”

“Yes, Batman. Thank you.”

I leave, followed at a reasonable distance by a small scurrying form.

“I kind of like being Batman,” I tell him, back in the car.

“Where’s your Batmobile? Batman doesn’t drive around in a dumb Honda.”

Little boys grow up hopping from hero to hero, like rocks at a river crossing. Next are the X-Men, Luke Skywalker, and after
that, Bruce Willis in the
Die Hard
movies. Now it’s Harry Potter and Frodo and Legolas.

Champion follows champion until one day I find myself at the reservoir, with my father, watching Joey ride his bike.

Jesus, they don’t give us much time here, do they?

The clouds are wolf-gray and roiling with overdue rain.

“It’s going to rain this afternoon,” I tell Joey. “Maybe we should go see a movie.”

Joey is six. This will be our first trip ever up Rattlesnake Mountain. In the years to come we will climb it hundreds of times,
sometimes with friends, sometimes with Thona, but often alone, just the two of us, trying to get close enough to the sky to
work something out. On summer days, he and his friends will walk around the upper ridges, wearing fuzzy caterpillars on their
chests, like a fruit salad of military decoration. On one ill-advised winter ascent, I will tie dog leashes to his waist and
lower him down icy ledges. On gusty March days we will crouch in the lee
of boulders hearing the wind blast around us and puzzling silently over our own problems.

On our first climb, it is November 1. It looks to me like rain.

“It won’t rain,” he says simply. “We can climb.”

He is never wrong about the weather, so up we go to search for the cave of Will Warren, “a sheep-stealer and Sabbath-breaker”
from the early 1800s, according to the local histories. I stuff some Halloween candy and water into a knapsack, and we clamber
up through brush and bittersweet and dried milkweed, past radio towers and into eerie, dense woods.

When we come to a stretch of dubious handholds and precipitous toeholds, Joe lights up. Uncas’s spidery ascent, his vain,
heroic quest to save the hapless Alice, is alive in his mind.

“You are Uncas, and I am Hawkeye,” he tells me once or twice. He has said it so many times, on so many hikes, that it is almost
an incantation. Today, I search his voice for a new, sour taste, but I don’t find one. This is good. We have been struggling
over his behavior, and there have been some nasty scenes that left cracks in the perfect egg of our love for each other. He
had been watching a videotape of
The Last of the Mohicans,
the Daniel Day-Lewis version, which is probably too violent for cultural anthropologists in their twenties, let alone small
boys. So I’d hide it. He’d find it. I’d hide it better, and Thona would help him find it. (She liked it, too.) Finally I smashed
it with a hammer, which was a brutish and silly way to solve the problem.

“I don’t mind,” he said calmly when I did it.

I don’t mind. It’s what you say to the Hurons to show them you are strong.

Afterward, he fished the tape from the wastebasket and inspected it carefully, as if its guts held some clue to the magic.
I felt like a stupid, awkward father, and I wondered if he would ever forgive me. I come from a land, as you will see, where
things can go deeply, irreparably wrong.

We come to a deep gray rock formation and haul ourselves up and down ledges, real Uncas stuff. We eat Kit Kats on a flat expanse
bumping up against gray, burgeoning clouds.

We feel the cave before we see it. I do, anyway. The outer rock is no different from the rest of the mountainside, but all
through the woods around it there’s a low hum, fraught, ominous.

The entrance is a cervical gash at ground level. We crawl on our bellies to get in. The sheep-stealer and Sabbath-breaker
spent his days reliving and reversing his own birth, apparently.

We linger for minutes only, running a flashlight beam around the walls. But we’re both jittery, and happy enough to get out.

On the hike back, there are some places where he asks that I take his hand as we work down a steep grade. Most of the time,
he resists help.

“Dad,” he says, apropos of nothing, everything, “you are my partner forever.”

Benediction.

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T
his is the first time my father died. It is 1967. The demons and dark places are getting the upper hand, and my family has
drifted from being a charmingly quirky folie à trois to a rogue unit capable of some truly disturbing backcountry operations.

The first hint I get of the strange days to come is a sudden move out of the West Hartford neighborhood where I have grown
up, where I have lived for twelve of my thirteen years. My parents have fallen into a dispute with the management of our apartment
complex. It is never clear to me what the cause is or
who is truly in the wrong, but there is a rather ominous visit from a Hartford county sheriff, serving papers.

My mother sits me down one day.

“We’re moving to Newington. It’s just one town away. You can’t tell anyone about this. Nobody. None of your friends,”
she says.

These are dire circumstances, she explains, and we face terrible calamity if our plans are revealed. From the look on her
ashen face and the stricken tone of her voice, you might conclude that we are fleeing Nazi Germany with minutes to spare before
the Gestapo raps at our door.

She convinces me. I have a circle of about a dozen close friends in the neighborhood, boys with whom I have shared all the
adventures of childhood for more than a decade. I tell none of them. The moving van arrives during the day. The next time
they come to look for me, I no longer live there.

I never spoke a word to any of them ever again. I don’t even know, to this day, who came to knock on my door or how the news
of my disappearance spread. I was too ashamed to attempt any explanation or to contact them at all later, and, as the years
passed, I developed a quiet, perverse pride in having pulled such a gigantic stunt.

It strikes me now that my mother succeeded, unintentionally, in re-creating a peculiar quirk of her own childhood. She grew
up in Dana, Massachusetts, one of four towns flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Her entire childhood lies underwater
now. My grandmother told me of taking a canoe out on the lake and looking down to see foundations and even the occasional
hitching post. It was sort of like life imitating Freud, who understood water, in dreams, to symbolize the unconscious.