Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (3 page)

"What will we do when we find them?" Kyle said.

"Kick the shit out of them," Nick said. "And then drag their asses back home so they can take care of everybody the way they're supposed to, the cocksuckers."

I stayed awake, sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket, picturing a sandy lot on a small lake, a lot covered with a rainbow assortment of small tents where our fathers slept under the stars, the sounds of nature lulling them into dreamless sleep. And now—this is stupid—I started to tell Kolya about it: Oh yeah, Kolya, they fish for their supper there, they wear deerskins and make fires for heat. Oh yeah, they have a nice time, and at sunset they sing all the Ukrainian songs, the ones Grandpa used to sing to us. Man, Kolya's eyes were about to fall out of his head. He kept standing on his tiptoes to see out the window. It was too dark to see, though, so I kept up the stories about this place we were going to be at by morning.

Kolya laughed so hard he nearly wet himself. I turned a coffee can over and emptied out the nuts and bolts, then let him pee in it. He thought peeing in the can was hilarious, and I saw a joy in his face I hadn't seen for a long, long time. Of course, he was nine, and he'd had a whole can of beer. But I didn't see that. I just saw myself as the best big brother in the world.

It was almost dawn when we arrived at the cabin. Nick hadn't remembered the directions perfectly, and we drove down a number of wrong roads, curvy tree-lined gravel roads with small animals darting across them. Kolya fell asleep.

The driveway to the cabin was rough and narrow. Those of us in the back of the van half stood, looking out the windshield. The sun was close enough to the horizon now that even coming down the driveway we had enough light to see nobody was there.

Somebody suggested that we might as well get out and swim in the lake for a while, but nobody else wanted to do that. It was late October and cold, a strain of winter hung tight in the sky, ready to snap through with ice and wind. We turned around and went back home. Kolya slept through the whole thing, curled up on my down hunting vest like a cat. I didn't wake him until we got home, and then I told him it was all a dream.

NICK AND I HAD NOT
been going to school much that fall. We did this partly because we wanted to spend our time working and making money, but mostly because, by missing first period, we could begin drinking in the mornings at the Black Lantern. I was shaving daily and had the first markings of a serious stubble. Nick didn't shave much yet, but his curly hair had grown long and frizzy; he chain-smoked Winstons like a movie star.

We ate bacon and eggs every morning and scarfed down fast food for dinner. We put on weight. Our faces grew fat and square. We kept ball-peen hammers and thick chains under the seats of our cars in case there was trouble. Once, I watched Nick take a hammer to a man's face.

Then, in late November, Nick and I and some friends went back up north to Camp Kiev to hunt deer. We figured, having gone to all the trouble of finding it in the first place, we could at least take it over and make it a hideaway of our own. We loaded our cars with coolers and guns and blazeorange hats and coats. We were all smoking and drinking coffee. Our mothers watched us get in and drive away. We knew what they were worrying about, and we knew that the week we were gone, they would stand staring at the moon, wondering if we'd disappear too.

I had always been a good shot, though my father was one of the few men in Maple Rock who did not hunt. I learned how to hunt from Uncle John, who'd been manic in his pursuit of venison for the winter. I had shot bucks before, though I was in no mood to do it that season. Nick, however, was on fire with determination.

The first two days, he sat in the woods for ten hours or more. He'd come back to camp after dark, dehydrated and empty-handed.

On the third day, we were walking back to camp around noon when we heard a shot. Then a buck came tearing across the path and seeing us, froze. Nick lifted his gun. The buck was easily an eight-point, maybe ten. I didn't want Nick to kill it. I almost yelled to scare the buck away, and I should have.

Nick lifted his gun and fired two shots. The buck staggered and fell.

I do not know how to explain what he did next, but it hangs in my memory as something sad and hopeless and sick. Seeing the buck fall, Nick let out a howl as shrill and eerie as the call of a wounded coyote. He ran down the path to the deer. He spit on it and kicked at its back legs. Then he dropped to his knees, yelling and screaming and began to punch at the deer with his fists. Blood covered his knuckles. "You're mine, you bitch," he yelled. He yelled and yelled it, over and over. Like his father, Nick had large hands, and as he punched the deer, you could hear tendons and bones snapping, and the dull thud of flesh pounding flesh echoed off the trees. It must have carried for miles.

I watched his war celebration for a while from down the path. Then I lifted my gun, took the safety off, and aimed it at Nick's head. I yelled "Hey!" but he ignored me. I yelled three more times and he ignored me. Finally, I shot the gun straight into the air. Nick fell on the ground.

"What the fuck?" he said.

"Get up and leave that buck alone. Quit fucking around. I mean it. Now, or I'll blow your goddamn head off."

Nick had his father's temper. I could see his heart was swelling with the violence of his father, and I could tell that he did not know where it was coming from or what he should do with it. We were angry and young and full of adrenaline and booze and there were firearms in our hands.

Nick stood up and brushed himself off and dropped his hands to his sides.

"Okay," he said. "Help me drag this fucker back to camp."

The anger was what was becoming of us. Don't think for a moment that because we were good, strong boys we could handle all of this: we couldn't. We almost killed ourselves with rage. We would grow up trampling over things, tearing things down, and people would look at us and wonder why we had such violence in our hearts.

Nick and I dragged the buck through the woods. Behind us, the carcass crunched through leaves and snapped sticks. Nick was fighting tears, his hands shaking.

"I feel sick," he said, his voice breaking. "My heart's going a mile a minute."

When we came home from deer hunting, the buck tied to our roof, we smelled of sweat and the woods and blood, and our mothers cupped our faces in their cool hands and kissed us and cried from joy. For a moment, we were all boys again.

DID WE MISS THEM?
We did.

I know the women missed their husbands, but we, the boys, we missed our fathers.

At night, we looked off in the distance for a set of headlights that might signal that one of the disappeared was home. I sometimes imagined that several buses would pull into the parking lot of the Kmart and our fathers would stream out of the doors with baseball caps and pennants, like they'd been away at a game somewhere. Sometimes I imagined aliens would land in spacecrafts and release the men, like the hostage situations you'd see on the news. Our fathers would come down the ramp with their hands on their heads, tears on their unshaven and greasy faces.

Inexplicably, I felt a war was coming on, and for many nights I had dreams that I died in battle. I dreamed of mountains that crumbled and rivers that flooded. My dreams were apocalyptic and savage. I began to fear that I was a prophet and that I would soon be called upon to speak. I waited for God's voice.

By Christmas it was clear that we were not going to see our fathers anytime soon. We roasted turkeys and learned how to carve them alone. Ours ended up in ugly chunks, like a carcass ripped apart by dogs. My mother had become a vegetarian, and Kolya was spending Christmas at Disney World with his friend's family—a richer, larger, father-still-there family that had moved from Maple Rock to Northville. So I was the only one there to eat the bird. I ate turkey for a week, and still there was some I had to throw away.

One night in January, a blizzard dumping snow on metro Detroit, I fought a Serbian guy in the parking lot of the Black Lantern, a guy who said he was nailing Sonya Stecko. He broke a glass bottle across my back, cracking a rib and knocking the wind out of my lungs. Things went black and then things got clear and started spinning in a lovely fog. Finally, when he hit me with another bottle, this time across the back of my head, I passed out. The bottle didn't break.

Nick woke me up in the
empty
lot. He said, "Thank God you have a soft head."

He helped me off the ground. Back inside the bar's restroom, I dusted myself off and cleaned my face.

When I came out, Spiros had poured me a tall glass of beer. I drank the beer and checked my jaw. Spiros, who seemed more and more senile each week, said, "Honestly, Roman, you and John, you get worse each week. I worry about you, drinking so much, fighting, swearing."

In his old mind we had become our fathers. Nick and I didn't correct him. We grinned at each other and drank our beers. I felt fine. I was going to be okay. Please understand—I missed my father, but I was having one of those moments when I didn't want him to come back home. I would survive many things without him and I was capable of doing things on my own.

FOR THE MOST PART
, we pictured our fathers sad and alone. We could see them riding in flea-ridden freight cars on bumpy tracks. We could see them struggling to make campfires on a beach as the wind whipped off the ocean and sand stung their faces. We saw them in anonymous cities, dwarfed by skyscrapers, trying to get together enough spare change for a hot dog or a bowl of soup. We saw them climbing desert mountains, muscles tearing and burning with fatigue, tongues swollen with thirst.

True, as much as these desolate images appealed to us, we also pictured our fathers happy. We imagined them with castles and pools and huge wooden tables of food and beer. We imagined them lounging nude in hot tubs and saunas with women half their age, women we'd never seen before, women who maybe were already on the moon when our fathers arrived. We imagined the climate of the moon to be temperate, and we imagined our fathers singing songs in praise of the lives they had there. We sensed that there was music on the moon. Sometimes, we imagined, a man—one of our fathers—would glance down at the earth and feel a vague memory and the sting of loss, but we knew that such moments would be rare. As we grew older and the men stayed away, such images of happiness became stronger and seemed more realistic. We saw our fathers in a paradise. We could not escape these images and certainly we could not escape the truth—men had disappeared, and their sad lives became happy ones.

Sometimes, when we drank too much and such thoughts angered us in the parking lot of the Black Lantern, we threw stones and bottles at the moon, and we imagined that we were tearing the hearts from our chests, sending them hurtling through heaven where our fathers could see them and know this: we, their sons, were below them, bleeding.

I
MISSED MY FATHER'S
cheese sandwiches, the way most nights around nine o'clock he'd go to the fridge, take out two slices of Wonder bread and two pieces of individually wrapped American cheese, and make a sandwich. The process by which he did this was nearly surgical and it yielded a perfect sandwich, square and neat, nothing falling out from the sides. He never left a crumb on the counter. He simply put the perfect sandwich on a clean plate, set a pickle down beside it, and returned to the television, where he was watching, no doubt, PBS or the evening news. Such methodical operations my father sometimes had, and I missed them. I missed the smell of his breakfast in the morning (one poached egg, dark rye toast, Nescafe). I missed the way he folded his newspaper, leaving it, finally, at day's end, open to the crossword puzzle (which he always seemed able to finish, every slot, using a green felt-tip pen). I missed the slippers at his bedside, the smell of cigarette smoke hanging in the bathroom, the cracking of his knuckles, the precise way he folded towels.

Yes, it's true that I missed my father, but in a larger sense, I missed all the fathers. I'd drive into other neighborhoods, neighborhoods with names like Quail Ridge and Oak Hills where people could not even imagine the mass exodus we had experienced, and I'd watch the fathers washing cars or practicing golf swings. In these neighborhoods, fathers could be seen strolling up and down driveways, monitoring the progress of the landscapers and deck-builders and sprinkler-system-installrs. Neighborhoods like this could have been a million miles away from us.

What I missed most was the collective drone of our fathers' lives, their big and clumsy presence. I even missed their cussing and their labored breathing from too many cigarettes. I missed the roar of the sick engines inside the hoods of the hobby cars that would never run quite right. I missed their beer and coffee breath, missed their cheap aftershave that stunk up the church on Sunday mornings. I missed the cranking of their power tools on Saturday afternoons, and the roar of their voices while watching the Lions play on television. I even missed the yelling, the arguments gone over the edge, the occasional sound of a fist going through the door.

Still, in truth, I could remember very little about my father. Already, in a matter of less than a year, his image had grown vague and hazy. I listed the few memories I had in a notebook, afraid they might leave me:

I am three years old, my father is smoking and sweating, swearing at some sort of machine, while I sit on a concrete floor, banging an old coffee can with a screwdriver.

I am four. My father and I are stacking firewood at the side of the house. A hornet swirls around my head and lands on the small log that I am holding. My father says nothing, puts his hand out. I give him the log. The hornet doesn't budge. My father takes his pocketknife, flips it open with one hand, and sticks the blade into the hornet, pinning it to the wood. I hear an anemic buzz and the hornet falls to the grass in two pieces.

Five years old. We are at a wedding. It is late. Ambulances have arrived. Somebody has had a heart attack. Some adult, a mustached man with floppy gray hair, pours beers on my head. I start to cry. My father grabs the beer-pourer by his necktie and throws him to the floor.