A Good Day for Seppuku

A GOOD DAY FOR SEPPUKU

Tommy Sutter rides his bike along Maple Ridge Road from Wood’s End to the college. It’s precisely twelve miles from his house on Lincoln Street to the campus and he’s ridden this road thousands of times

Sometimes he passes Professor McCarty and waves. Professor McCarty teaches at the College of Northern Pennsylvania and only wants to talk about bicycle construction, the intractable stupidity of his students and books. Has he read Catcher in the Rye yet? What about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? His wife, Patricia, comes out on the porch to announce that they’re retiring to Florida. Tommy nods and pedals on.

He has an affection for the campus. It’s an outpost where the forest is tamed and paved paths lead to known and predictable destinations. The four-story brick buildings rise at measured distances from one another, asserting order, the unquestionable triumph of the scientific method, and the value of geometry.

He enters through the main gate, where a twelve-foot-high marble statue of Galileo stands on a granite pedestal. An inscription detailing his life is engraved on a bronze plaque. Tommy’s memorized it, but he feels the act of reading it justifies his presence.

He watches football games — he’s seen Penn State, the Nittany Lions from Altoona, and the Pittsburgh Panthers. The college has an ice-skating rink, and a chess and science club. He’s a member of both. He enjoys the sense of other people, their accidental jostling and sudden random clusters, how strangers brush arms or legs, then suddenly splinter into distinct smaller tributaries. It’s like a chemical reaction.

Tommy Sutter’s boyhood is solitary. His father, Joshua Sutter, is the Wood’s End veterinarian. Everyone calls him Captain. There are constant emergencies. His father’s suitcase is packed and he can disappear in minutes. Cows cough with respiratory disease and yellow mucus leaks from their eyes. They have stillbirths, lesions on their teats, infections and parasites. Horses come down with influenza and tetanus, pulmonary hemorrhages, and colic. They get leg fractures, skin cancer and encephalitis. Sheep have bloat, meningitis, fungus and fevers.

The country folk bring Dr. Sutter deer and lamb meat, chickens, and bags of corn, tomatoes and carrots. They bake breads and blueberry pies. When they come to town, they stop by the clinic with baskets of eggs, jars of applesauce and milk in gallon jugs. It isn’t payment for services rendered, they’re all in debt, but token offerings acknowledging his father as intrinsic to Wood’s End. The clinic is part of the spine of the town — necessary as JJ’s General Store, the sheriff’s office, United Methodist, St. Stephens, and the post office.

His father gives the meat to Sheriff Murphy. His mother doesn’t want flowers and she refuses to make stews. She’s a vegetarian. The storeroom is littered with Mason jars of decaying Irises, and Lavender and Mint are buried beneath the acrid smell of alcohol, Betadine, astringents and pipe and cigarette tobacco. Ivermectin for the horses is a subtle and insistent musty scent like apples in mud. Pink antibiotic leaks from gallon bottles and looks like bubblegum.

The clinic storeroom is off limits. His father smokes cigarettes in secret there and paces in circles. He keeps his files on the floor and can immediately locate what he needs. He’s memorized precisely where each case is — baskets of roses gone stiff, foul eggs and collapsed tomatoes form a perimeter along the back wall. There’s one oak cabinet and it is locked.

Then there’s an outbreak of bluetongue that could kill off half the sheep in the county and his father leaves for a week. Goats stop eating, get infested with worms and turn mean from arthritis. The fields are actually composed of wounds, abscesses, dysentery and viruses, foot rot, liver flukes and lesions.

His father picks up his doctor’s bag and dozens of keys sway between his fingers. They’re held by a large bronze disc. It’s the Governor General’s Gold Crescent Award. His father drilled a hole in it to accommodate all his keys. He has keys for the clinic and storeroom, the locked oak cabinet, the house and Buick, and numerous small silver and gold keys in odd shapes he doesn’t recognize. Tommy assumes they’re for camouflaged doors his father keeps hidden. The tiny keys are delicate and look designed to fit jewelry boxes and dollhouses. Or mailboxes in other counties.

Sometimes his father has to go to the horse farm outside Harrisburg. He’s signed a contract, after all. They have seventy thoroughbred racehorses and need him to examine a new arrival. Two horses are shivering. One is limping and off his feed. There is blood in the barn.

Sam Markowitz often telephones from Erie. He’s scheduled twelve surgeries in three days, and he’s desperate. He begs his father for help. Sam is seventy-nine. He has glaucoma and his hands tremble. Latex gloves give him hives, he wheezes and can’t breathe. Poor Sam can’t retire. His wife has cancer and Sam has to keep up their insurance. His father can’t refuse. Then he might drop by Cornell for an emergency conference on rabid red fox and rabid raccoons. A frat kid got bitten and the trustees funded a research grant six hours later.

“All frats are naturally rabid,” his father observes. “This kid’s a business major with a room temperature IQ. I wouldn’t give him a tetanus shot. Truth is, I wouldn’t give him a tourniquet.”

Joshua Sutter has a reputation as a man of fierce convictions. When he makes up his mind, it doesn’t change. Some consider him arrogant and stubborn. But it’s generally agreed that he’s smart in an uppity way, and he has steady hands.

His father is 6’5” but seems larger. He uses his whole body unapologetically when he speaks. He bends his knees, and his hips move side to side as if performing a two-step. He spreads his arms wide for emphasis and his limbs punctuate the air.

Joshua Sutter has a melodious voice and a deliberately slow delivery. His movements are calculated and languid. He wants to be certain you see him coming. His father rarely raises his voice. He’s committed to the discipline of modulation. He claims it’s part of being professional.

His father’s red hair is long, past his neck, and falls around his face in ropey tendrils like kelp. Tommy thinks his father’s hair is a distraction — like the red cape of a matador and the misdirection of magicians.

Joshua Sutter is given to overly nonchalant entrances and exits that conceal quiet flourishes. His father actually has a repertoire of sly moves. He’s sleek and subtle and travels inside shadows. His Buick is the color of winter. It has 300,000 miles on it, and a bumper sticker that says Make Love Not War.

His father is always getting in or out of the Buick, humming “Tambourine Man” and “The Times Are A-Changing” with a corncob pipe jammed between his teeth. His riverboat gambler’s hat seems to float on top of his red hair, perched like a large nesting bird. His hat is ivory and made from shantung straw. Its wide brim conceals his forehead and bends at an angle, permanently shading his brow and left eye. He has black, red and white hatbands. Sometimes he wears his red and or black, triple-rose brocade vest, and has an entire drawer just for his sleeve garters.

His curls tangle and swirl like ocean waves he doesn’t bother to brush. He carries his doctor’s bag and suitcase in one hand, and presses a bottle of scotch to his chest with the other. Keys dangle from his middle fingers and a hundred dollar bill is folded into a little square in his palm. When they shake hands, the money transfers to Tommy’s palm and adheres to his skin.

“Keep yourself in feed,” his father says. “Have a problem, call 911.”

Just before he drives away, with the engine already running, his father motions him closer. This is the conclusion of their ritual. His father reaches in his pocket and presents him with a silver dollar. “Buy a lottery ticket,” he advises. Then the car is gone.

Tommy believes his father can will himself into invisibility. He’s magical and his doctor’s bag and big brown leather suitcase are somehow suspicious. His father is a circus with rings of acrobats, clowns, strong men and limping horses smelling like rained-on apples. He’s the grand master. His suitcase must be filled with confetti, ready to burst in a storm of gold flecks, and silver sparkle fireworks that could escape and resound like ricocheting bullets. Then plumes of purple smoke would pour through the house and into Lincoln Street. He has miniature missiles in his suitcase, and milk snakes coil in his folded brocade vests and sleeve garters. His father invented the universe. Time didn’t exist until he devised watches and clocks.

Tommy thinks his father can pull rabbits and lambs from his special riverboat gambler’s hat. He can extract water buffalo, mammoths, and make golden eagles fly from his hands.

Tommy frequently examines the Buick. He’s disappointed when nothing is added or subtracted. He knows precisely what’s in the trunk — remnants of a tool kit, a parka, card decks, playing chips from the Flaming Arrow Indian Casino south of Altoona, a Frisbee, and two bottles of scotch. In the glove-box his father keeps chocolate bars, two cartons of Marlboro 100 cigarettes, and his expired driver’s license.

Tommy watched his father install a cassette player. But he didn’t buy anymore cassettes. He only plays three tapes —The Best of Bob Dylan, The Best of Frank Sinatra and The Best of Cream. On a recent reconnaissance, Tommy realized his father doesn’t have a single map in the car.

“Maps are for people who care where they’re going,” his father said, corncob pipe in his mouth, hat covering his forehead. Then he’s walking out to the gray Buick that’s so identical to the gray air, it’s camouflaged.

Tommy Sutter spends his boyhood in the vast green chambers of the forest that begins at the backyard gate. The forest is an inland sea with wind currents the texture of waves. He’s disguised and protected here. Trees are mysterious and practice their own forms of sorcery. They communicate with gestures revealing their intentions. They are agile mutes and natural mimes. Their language evolves seasonally. Branches sway suggestively to one side, offering a deer path he follows, zigzagging to the creek beneath stands of sepia and glazed young oaks.

He jumps the creek to ridges of brazen scarlet and vermillion maples. They’re a battalion of renegades. He calls that Revolution Hill. Low slopes are intricate displays of leaves turning cinnamon, cordovan and oxblood. They remind him of the leather and high- ceilinged rooms at the college. He names this path Library Road.

Some maples look dipped in wine, burgundy and sherry. A good chemist could take the separate elements of autumn and distill them. The first chemists were alchemists. A superior chemist could put them in a bottle and drink it. That’s the hazard of maples and the lure of clarets and grenadine.

Oaks are sturdier. Their strewn leaves resemble buckskin, pelts, leather patches and gourds. He could gather them, and devise clothing and weapons. Or he could graft them on for hands. Tommy is certain he could survive winter.

The forest is an engine, a wind-fueled orchestra. Oaks are anchors and provide a steady rhythm. On the banks of 5 Eagle Creek, the maples are younger and subdued. When dry, their leaves rustle like tinny castanets. That’s Gypsy Ridge. The west-facing slopes go brown and brittle early. He can step on them for percussion. He calls this section Death Row.

He knows where he is and rarely encounters anyone. It’s his forest and he can orchestrate it.

Tommy was angry. The week began with a rare family discussion about his request to join Boy Scouts. He needed twelve dollars for dues and a uniform. His father said no.

Tommy offers to clean cages in the vet clinic. He’ll wash the storeroom floor.

Betadine and iodine leak from ten-gallon jars and fall in streaks like stalled creeks polluted with rust. Pink antibiotic drips thick like spit-out bubblegum. The floor is encrusted with what fell and lodged between the layers — pens and keys and business cards, cotton balls, swabs, gauze and coins are permanently laminated. Each year the county health department cites the clinic for multiple violations.

“That’s my Sargasso Sea,” his father said. “I like it as it is.”

Tommy rarely has a specific desire that he can articulate. He doesn’t want a Walkman, a Star Wars video or a guitar. But Boy Scouts is an urgent necessity. He must make fire from sticks and the movement of his wrists. He wants to learn Morse code and how to send smoke signals. For an astronomy badge, he’ll identify constellations and the Pleiades meteor shower in August when the troop camps out for a week at Hamilton Mountain.

Tommy doesn’t know how to say he longs for companionship. He can’t recognize his loneliness, how remote and distant he is, how stranded. He’s sympathetic to the moon, barren, pock-marked and futile. Rogue asteroids excite him. They’re fearless delinquents without rules. When satellites lose orbit, and are condemned to fall back to earth as incinerated pieces, he mourns their fiery extinction. He has no idea why.

During their formal family discussions, he talks in a rush about knots, lassos and securing boats at docks. The principles of aerodynamics are demonstrated by archery. He mentions badges for cooking and house repair. He’s nervous and passionate and senses defeat. He wants to dig for arrowheads and fossils in amber, and recognize archeological sites from Indians and wagon trains.

Tommy is trying to create a dialect in which he will be fluent. Perhaps it’s a language of ropes, flints, canvas tents and sticks that transform into flames. He’s small like his mother, with thin wrists and ankles, and doesn’t play sports with his father. He isn’t chosen for teams or after-school football. He is trying to survive.

“Your thoughts are so primitive and generic, I can’t process them,” his mother says, taking off her apron.

After dinner his mother goes to clay class or a lecture at the college. Woman’s Circle meets once a week and she’s taking another sewing class. Democratic Club is mandatory. The county has never voted democratic, not even for Roosevelt. Of course the cause is futile. That’s why it’s so important, his mother tells them. She’s president and has to open the door and start the coffee pot. She has the only set of keys.

“Uniforms and saluting lead to Idi Amin, the shithead Shah of Iran, and that bastard in Iraq,” his father says. He stands up. “I can’t support that.”

Tommy feels betrayed. He rides his bike to the college, barely noticing the rain. No one is outside, not on Lincoln Street or Maple Ridge Road. Campus is deserted. As usual, he reads the plaque on the marble statue of Galileo. Then he rides home in the dark.

It’s the cusp between fall and winter and he’s uneasy. The zone of transition is like a frontier where there are no rules and the unpredictable is constant. Wind rips random paths through the forest and maples’ leaves fall in the shape of broken hearts, mouths, and twisted upended shells. The sun thins as if strained through a colander. Tommy knows the architecture of November. It’s an anatomy of edges and pebbles, gravel-mouthed thunderstorms, and abandoned nests finches left. In the planet’s shift, he has the sensation he may fall off the world.

He’s surprised to find Captain waiting for him. “What have you got in that backpack?” he asks.

Tommy takes out his compass, flashlight, buck knife, matchbooks, and paperback copy of On the Road that Professor McCarty gave him. He doesn’t like it and isn’t reading it.

He places the items on the table near his father. He doesn’t have a canteen. He drinks from 5 Hawk Creek below a colossal maple. It’s one of the oldest in the forest and invariably turns a bold magenta. Its leaves stay on as if somehow attached past the first freeze. The bark is thick and complex, a sort of Braille he tries to read with his hands. There are epics beneath his fingers, formulas and footnotes. Puncture such a tree and the history of the world pours out. Cut it down and time stops. He calls the place where he drinks Cistern of the Sage.

Under the lamplight his tools are a paltry assembly. They’re squalid and starkly inadequate.

Captain examines the contents of his backpack. He picks them up one at a time and evaluates them.

“A substandard Cro-Magnon could rule the planet with this gear,” his father decides. Then he opens a statistics book.

Tommy can’t translate his emotions into intelligible sentences. He recognizes his father is wrong, but he can’t go further, can’t say You’re an unreasonable, selfish man. He believes he’ll someday navigate back through time, return to precisely this moment, and say, You’re a bully and narcissist. Give me the money. He doesn’t yet know that what is lost cannot be retrieved.

His mother is gone the next day. After school he finds a recipe card taped to the refrigerator. Under the list of necessary ingredients for banana bread, she’s written Going to New Mexico.

“Dad, we have to call the sheriff,” Tommy says. It’s past dusk when he rides to the clinic, holding the recipe card in his hand. “File a missing person report.”

“Jimbo’s an asshole. Give it a few days,” his father replies. “She’ll come back when she wants.”

His father hasn’t spoken to Sheriff Jim Murphy since the problem with the PETA brigade from Pittsburgh. Tommy chanced to be at the clinic when the delegation arrived. He watched six women get out of a van and enter the clinic.

They have a list of requests. They want his father to board stray dogs and cats in his storeroom until they’re adopted. ‘Rescued’ is the word they use.

His father is flabbergasted. They’re inundated with strays as it is. At spring break, students from the Con drop off kittens and puppies on the clinic grounds. They throw cats out of car windows, and kick puppies from cars. Sometimes they drag dogs to their front lawn in Wood’s End.

“I’m an innkeeper for strays?” His father is infuriated. “Not in this life.”

His father calls Sheriff Murphy. Jimbo drives his patrol car to the clinic. His father demands Jimbo arrest the delegation from Pittsburgh. The sheriff glances at the women in pastel suits and high-heeled shoes. They aren’t whores or white trash passing bad checks and selling dope. They aren’t hippies bad-mouthing America and whining about Salvador. They look like high school principals and doctors’ wives and smell like Reagan and golf.

‘What for?” the sheriff wonders.

“Trespass, conspiracy to intimidate, harassment, and monumental stupidity,” his father informs him.

“Hold on, Red,” the sheriff cautions.

“Call me Red again, I’ll knock your lights out,” Dr. Joshua Sutter threatens. He makes a fist.

His father has extraordinary hands, long and wide, and his fingers are monumental, graceful, sculpted and purposeful. The bones are clearly articulated like mountain ridges on old globes.

“Kids in the hollows eat paint chips and bark. Vets sleep in bushes beside highways.” He waves his big-as-branches arms up and down, and in a diagonal implying lightning. Then he spreads his arms apart suggesting the wingspan of an eagle or a flying dinosaur.

“Can’t do much about that,” Jimbo decides.

“We’re mass killing peasants in Central America. And they have bleeding hearts for kittens? You kidding me, Jimbo? These folks,” his father pauses and glances at the Pittsburgh delegation, “have the St. Vitus of the 80s. It’s highly contagious.”

“Can’t help you there, either,” Jimbo says.

Tommy waits a week. They eat frozen dinners, canned soup with crackers, and have Papa Paulo’s pizza delivered. His mother used a battered Betty Crocker cookbook. Wednesday’s meatless lasagna passes, Thursday’s fried chicken with wild rice, and Friday’s tuna casserole. His father reads a book about differential equations and makes notations in the margins. Periodically, he briefly glances up and says something about the sheriff.

“Jimbo’s a coward and fool. He got his purple heart for shooting himself,” his father reveals. “Dropped his .45 on his foot and it discharged. What a dick.”

Tommy stays in his room. He doesn’t have a single arrowhead or fossil trapped in amber. Amber is how history punctuates itself, assuring that some specimens don’t disappear. It’s like an exclamation point.

“Dad,” he begins.

“Don’t call me Dad.” His father closes a text book and looks directly at him. “Dad is for whiners. It diminishes and offends me. I’m not just your dad. I have other aspects. Other facets.”

“What should I call you?” he wonders.

“Call me Captain like everyone else,” his father instructs him.

“Where do you think Mom is?” Tommy asks.

“No idea,” Captain says. “At least a million women disappear every year. Could be more. Police find their cars on back roads. The FBI discovers their suitcases at airports and bus depots. Women vanish like smoke. Poof.”

His father draws out the word, poooofff, and waves his magician’s arms toward the ceiling. It’s a gesture meant to imply the infinite universe with its inexplicable laws and paradoxes — its force fields, dark matter, black holes, sudden blindness, spontaneous combustion and vanished mothers.

On Sundays when his father is gone tending to sheep and cows, Tommy walks to Madison Street where three churches in a row occupy the whole block. Covenant Baptist, then Central United Methodist and All Saints Lutheran. He makes himself inconspicuous and watches women pass in their special church clothing. They wear big floppy hats, their good shoes are polished, and they have their dead grandmothers’ rhinestone pins on their coat.

When they are close, almost brushing him, he breathes in their skin. This is what fascinates him, not the singing or sun beating itself against stained glass, but the powdery floral dust rising from the necks and hair of discreetly perfumed women. It’s this muted citrus and tea rose he wants to breathe, internalize and own. This is what he must analyze and possess. It has nothing to do with religion.

On his 14th birthday, Captain presents him with a color TV. Sheriff Murphy carries the over-sized 40-gallon aquarium from the display window of Peter’s Prize Pets. He has a bucket of water with guppies, neons, red barbs, butterfly rams and angel fish. There’s a bag of coral and gray pebbles and a small wooden box with a ship to sit on top of the gravel bottom. The ship runs on batteries and sends out distress signals in what might be Morse Code. Jimbo produces two birthday hats, candles and a cake from Brenda’s Bakery. Jimbo impales candles in the icing and Captain and the sheriff sing Happy Birthday. They’re out of tune. Tommy blows out the candles and doesn’t make a wish.

Later, Captain helps him set up the aquarium. They rarely have a project together and Tommy is disoriented by the thrill.

“What’s your major?” Captain asks. “Austerity and solitude?”

“Biochemistry,” Tommy answers.

“Sit alone in a lab with tubes in racks and shakers? Count how many molecules can disco on a pin?” Captain returns with a glass of scotch. “Don’t make the mistake I did. I hate my job.”

His father loathes being a veterinarian. Animals bore him. They’re too predictable and the stakes are too low. Sheep or cats, horses or dogs, mice or mammoths. Captain often threatens to quit. After all, he has other facets.

“Go to medical school, Thomas. Nothing serious like surgery. Dermatology is the best bet. It’s an overlay.”

Tommy doesn’t go into the forest in winter. Trees thin to sticks embedded in deep snowdrifts. Hills resemble the aftermath of an atomic blast. Their nudity is obscene. It’s a sacrilege. His birthday gift TV only receives two channels. The news from Scranton or Philadelphia, and preacher shows. The fish die one by one. His sunken ship no longer sends out distress calls in a smart sequence of three quick red beams every fifteen minutes. The batteries are dead.

Tommy suspects distress calls fail to lead to search and rescue. There’s the matter of encryption and current conditions. His ship is in the Mariana Trench and nobody is listening.

When he was in second grade, he realized his parents didn’t actually speak to one another. They only appeared to inhabit the same house on Lincoln Street. But they broadcast on separate frequencies in encrypted codes that changed every day. That’s when he recognized the futility of distress calls. There’re actually posthumous messages. By the time you say May Day May Day it’s too late.

Six months later, his grandfather, Horace Bowen, telephones. The Captain and Horace aren’t on speaking terms.

“Well, son,” Horace begins. There’s a pause, as if his grandfather is taking a deep breath. “Seems your mother got a touch of malaria in Africa. She called me for money. They flew her to Germany. She’s OK now.”

So she didn’t go to New Mexico after all, Tommy is startled to realize. She joined the Peace Corps instead and they sent her to Arusha in Tanzania. She was teaching girls to use sewing machines in a village called Mosquito Creek. They were making aprons with Mt. Kilimanjaro stenciled on the front. They’d sold 231 at the airport when she became infected.

His grandfather, Horace Bowen, has a northern accent with rolling a’s that are languid but defined, like smooth sandstone boulders slowly sliding down a hill. He lives in an Amish village in Manitoba, Canada. That’s where his parents are from. They grew up on adjoining farms. His mother won the Governor General’s Gold Crescent and was going to Berkeley, California. But she had somehow detoured and married Captain instead. She was sixteen.

“Is she coming back?” Tommy asks.

He hasn’t spoken to a relative before. He doesn’t know what the boundaries are. Should he tell his grandfather that his heart is broken and his father ignores him? And they just eat pizza and canned soup? Should he say he needs his mother with her Democratic Club, clay classes, and stained Betty Crocker cooking book with the pages falling out?

Everything is unfathomable and abstract. Manitoba. Tanzania. Germany. And suddenly a man who is his mother’s father has appeared.

“Is she coming back?” Tommy asks.

“She didn’t say,” his grandfather tells him.

“Why did she run away?” he wonders.

“That’s not for me to know,” Horace Bowen replies.

“Did she have a message for me?” Tommy is urgent.

There is a pause in which his grandfather seems to make a decision. “It was a short call and went by fast,” his grandfather says. “Bad weather here. I have to go.”

It’s the second Christmas since his mother departed. Tommy no longer believes she was kidnapped by a band of marauding killers, or struck with a rare amnesia. Nothing fell on her head from the sky. She wasn’t stolen or abducted by extraterrestrials. He recognizes that she deserted him.

Over a million women disappear every year. It’s a phenomenon. Sometimes cars with wallets and passports and antique bracelets are found on abandoned country roads. Suitcases with nightgowns, photographs, wedding rings and ski jackets are discovered in airports and bus stations.

It’s possible to triangulate location from accidental remnants. A red taffeta dress with ruffles, hoop earrings and castanets wrapped in tissue paper next to a book titled Spanish Basics suggests a certain trajectory. A wedding gown, flannel baby blankets and a two-hundred-year-old lace communion dress made in Belgium indicate other possibilities. But his mother didn’t leave a trace.

Tommy is stunned. He realizes history isn’t absolute. It’s flexible and offers competing narratives subject to editing and deletion. He has trouble falling asleep. He hypnotizes himself by deriving rudimentary mathematical theorems that can be solved and replicated. This is the prayer that works. This is grace.

Tommy finds the Christmas decorations in the attic and brings the boxes to his father. Captain has appropriated his mother’s bedroom for a study. He’s moved in a desk and bookshelves, a new sofa, his stereo and TV. He’s put a lock on the door. Tommy has to knock.

Captain doesn’t look at the box he’s holding. Strands of green and red bulbs and his mother’s childhood ornaments are inside — the miniature gingham dolls with yellow yarn braids and brass button eyes, the cotton snowflakes, each distinct in size and embroidery and the fifteen angels with her name rendered in pink thread. One for each Christmas. Someone who loved her sewed her name in twig-like stitches. Tommy senses they intended to impart a further message in a deliberate script like hieroglyphics.

“Let’s give it a rest,” Captain says.

They don’t put up the Christmas lights or drive to Mike Moretti’s lot with its hundreds of freshly cut trees that are fragrant with some dusty, distilled essence of pine. They don’t buy a Christmas tree for his mother’s ornaments or put a wreath on the front door.

Captain closes the clinic just after Thanksgiving and doesn’t plan to reopen until mid-January. He pauses on his way to the Buick and counts out five crisp hundred dollar bills. He indicates the table where ten silver dollars are arranged to form a squat pyramid. His suitcase and doctor’s bag are already in the car.

His father hasn’t cut his hair since his mother left. It’s so long he ties it in a ponytail with a rawhide string. Wind knocked off his ivory shantung straw hat that hides his forehead and part of his left eye. His father doesn’t want anyone to see what he’s thinking.

Tommy has retrieved the hat and his father puts it in the cardboard box he’s carrying toward the Buick. The hat rests on top of packages wrapped with rows of inordinately festive reindeer tied with pink and blue bows.

“I’ve got bloat and colic from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg,” his father says. “I’ve got Grass Fever and Nile Fever and widows and orphans in 12 counties. Ho ho ho.” He doesn’t smile.

“What about me?” Tommy asks. He expects his father to tell him to dial 911. That’s what he said last Christmas.

“Something happens, I expect you to take care of it,’’ Captain said. “Time you man up.”

Caroler’s from St. Mary’s and St. Stephens United Methodist offer an unenthusiastic truncated version of “Santa Clause is Coming to Town.” As if sensing the desolation within, they quickly move on through thickly falling snow. The porch light is burned out and the only illumination in the house is the lamp in his bedroom. When the carolers arrive, he turns off the lamp.

The house is a black hole on the street. It’s a mouth with the front teeth knocked out and it’s snowing hard.

Mrs. Riggs, the mailman’s wife who lives two houses down Lincoln Street, brings him plates with leftover dinner — sometimes it’s turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy, ham and cornbread, or beef stew and biscuits. When the pharmacist’s wife, Mrs. Sissick, bakes, she sends one of her sons to deliver pieces of pie and bags of ginger snaps.

Sheriff Murphy passes in his pick-up and issues a blizzard warning through a bullhorn. Then he parks and walks in through the front door. Tommy hadn’t realized the sheriff had a key.

“Got a bulb?” Jimbo asks. “It’s creepy dark. Probably scared away the preachers. You hiding?”

The sheriff puts in a new bulb on the porch. Then he opens kitchen cabinets and counts soup cans.

“No tree?” the sheriff observes.

“Mom’s got the best ornaments, too.” Tommy says. “The snowflakes and dolls.”

“And the angels with her name in pink thread? I loved them,” Jimbo says. “Hey, I’m looking for power lines going down. Maybe people trapped in cars. Want to help out?”

Tommy shakes his head no.

“It’s your civic duty. I’ll deputize you,” Sheriff Murphy offers. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Tommy follows Jimbo over snowdrifts with a flashlight. Just outside town proper, a power line is dragging in snow, partially buried and emitting sparks. Jimbo hands him a fire extinguisher and tells him what to do. They find Mrs. Rossington in her car in a snow bank and dig her out with shovels. The sheriff wraps a blanket around her shoulders and calls paramedics.

Tommy hasn’t seen the Christmas decorations in town yet. They stop and walk to the square. The Christmas tree is thirty feet high and encrusted with sparkling lights, large red balls and extravagant layers of tinsel. An angel sits on top.

“Want a beer?” the sheriff asks.

He shakes his head no.

“Hot chocolate?” Jimbo offers.

Tommy accepts hot chocolate and stares at the tree. He’s forgotten what Christmas decorations are. Their elegant, fierce sparkle is fearless and assured. Holidays are a punctuation, too. They’re a pause or semi-colon in the winter, a flare promising the possibility of spring.

When the phone rings, he assumes it’s an ambulance or hospital. The governor declared a state of emergency and Sherriff Murphy closed the highway in both directions.

“Now, son, your mother’s had some trouble in Chicago,” his grandfather Horace begins. “Seems she burned her underwear. Got arrested for indecent exposure. I bailed her out. Don’t know where she went.”

The snow outside is four feet deep, almost halfway up the lampposts. He likes the way Grandfather Horace calls him ‘son.’

“Why did she do that?” he asks.

“Some women’s liberation protest,” Horace Bowen says.

“Why do I have to call dad Captain?” Tommy wonders.

“Well, son, he believes he’s gambling on a riverboat in a past century,” Horace reveals. “Truth is, he was born bad. Forty-six hours in labor and eleven pounds, ten ounces. Nearly killed his mother. She ended up dying at thirty-one.”

“Did she have red hair?” he wants to know.

“Nobody in six generations of this colony had that hair,” his grandfather assures him. “Born like that, he was. Full head of crimson curls. Whole scalp covered. Some thought it disturbed his thinking.”

Tommy is blond like his mother, small-boned and blue-eyed. His father has a mutation that interferes with his judgment. It’s a form of plaque barricading his syntactical flow like a dam in a creek. It’s a genetic heresy animals sense. In fact, Captain’s antipathy to the limited animal repertoire may have a more complex source. Maybe he’s receiving encrypted signals from another galaxy. When he’s a biochemist, he’ll analyze this abnormality.

“He didn’t file a missing person report,” Tommy tells the man who is his mother’s father.

“She’s not exactly missing, son,” Horace replies. “She was in Cook County Jail last week.”

School will be closed tomorrow and the roads impassable. Tommy knows he’ll be inside all day, scooping up dead angelfish with a ladle and eating canned tomato soup. His mother used the a Betty Crocker cookbook and he knew what dinner would be when he woke up. Meatloaf on Monday with beans and mashed potatoes. Wednesday was lasagna and raison and carrot salad.

“Maybe I could visit sometime,” he offers, cautiously. Tommy is shy and frightened and trying to man up. He’s in a cross current and has the sensation that he may fall down. He has frequent episodes of vertigo that he doesn’t mention to anyone. He’s grown five inches this year and feels his bones straining. His voice has changed, and he barely recognizes it. He may look entirely different when school resumes. Maybe he can assume an alias and start his life over. Or maybe he’ll be invisible.

Tommy knows he’s a compendium of accurate observations, but when he tries to assemble them, they collapse as disassociated images. Maybe he has a touch of his father’s contagion. That’s why Captain didn’t want him to join Boy Scouts and get an astronomy badge. In Boy Scouts he might have stumbled on Captain’s mystery with a telescope.

He wonders what his grandfather Horace Bowen thinks about the Heisenberg Principal of Uncertainty and reincarnation. What exactly is human nature? Do the Amish believe in Jesus and eternal damnation? Are they pacifists like his parents?

Tommy’s perceptions are vivid but contradictory. He believes in the scientific method and also the surreal and fantastic — charms and spells, demons and the afterlife, voodoo and the curses of shaman. In this plateau of overlapping riptides, he’s afflicted by alternative selves diverging and reappearing with clarity.

He’s convinced some can foretell and move objects with their thoughts. It’s a sensitivity some are born with like perfect pitch and eidetic memory. He wonders if the Amish believe in ghosts, vampires, evolution and a flaming hell. Who qualifies for punishment? Do they support capital punishment and hang the guilty? Do they cut off the hands of thieves? Is there a hierarchy of transgression? What about mothers who run away from their sons?

Tommy exists in spasms of sharp insight and overwhelming grief. He’s so many ages at once, he entertains the notion that he’s living his incarnations simultaneously. Galileo recants but gets house arrest anyway. Leo Szilard crosses a London street in 1922 and invents critical mass. He patents it and doesn’t get a dime. Copernicus’s books are banned and burned. Marie Curie is enraged and demands the return of her hands. At White Sands, Oppenheimer chants, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” in Sanskrit. Teller calls the FBI and rats him out.

“I know a lot about bluetongue and colic, abscesses and bacterial infections,” he finally offers.

“Sure you do, son,” Horace says. “I’ll think on it.”

His grandfather telephones the following summer. Tommy is observing pink finches with binoculars. They’ve constructed nests in the eaves of the porch between twisted branches of Wisteria his mother planted. There are blue finches, too, and huge raucous blue jays. A pack of grackles stayed a noisy week and flew away. Robins with burnt orange breasts search for worms on the lawn. A pair of small cardinals keep crashing into the front windows.

“Kamikazes,” his father says, walking out to the Buick. Captain has a particular distaste for birds. “Somebody dares bring me a parrot or canary, I’ll eat it.”

Tommy has read the biographies of physicists, chemists, biologists and astronomers. Many began as naturalists. Science is about observation. He has a book titled Birds of Pennsylvania with photographs and descriptions he finds confusing. He can’t establish an absolute border between black and charcoal gray. It depends on the sunlight, passing clouds and sight angles. The question of how they are flying is ambiguous. He’s watches nuthatches, Carolina wrens, and chickadees. If he’d joined Boy Scouts, he’d instantly recognize raptors. Their wings flutter and ripple as they fly. Are they hawks or turkey vultures? Captain is in a poker tournament at Flaming Arrow. Last month, he finished third.

“Your mother got in some trouble in Tucson, Arizona, son,” Horace Bowen tells him. “Seems she was sleeping on a golf course. They charged her with trespassing and vagrancy. Dragged her away in cuffs.”

“Is Mom crazy?” he finally dares to ask.

“More like scratching an itch with a blowtorch,” Horace says. “She used to chase lightning. Didn’t play with dolls. Wouldn’t touch them. She treated them like poison. She was barn building at 10. Then she wins the Gold Crescent. First time a girl won. Just turned 16. She had a perfect score. They couldn’t deny her. She had scholarship offers from Harvard and McGill. She was packing her suitcase.”

“Where was she going?” he wants to know.

“Berkeley, California.” Horace says.

“What happened?” Tommy asks.

“He came back on a motorcycle. Claimed he bought it for twenty dollars. He’s wearing a black silk cape and top hat. Looks like he’s going to a party with the royal family. He’s moving like a feral cat, fast and balanced and graceful-like. So tall, you have to look up to see his face. It sets an attitude. Everybody’s craning their neck and he’s acting like nature exalted him. Big as a hill, he is, and a certified veterinarian. Talking all lofty about Woodstock and stopping the Vietnam War. He’s waving his arms around like an orchestra conductor. Few years before, he won the Governor General’s Gold Crescent, too.”

“I know,” Tommy says.

“Her score was better,” Horace informs him.

“Why did you let them stay?” he wonders.

“They were purified by sincerity,” Horace answers. “Two wildfires, they were. We thought they’d put each other out naturally.”

“What happened?” Tommy asks.

“Wind changed direction,” his grandfather replies.

There is a pause. It expands like accordion suitcases with concealed compartments with zippers and flaps that snap shut. You could put the forest past 5 Eagle Creek inside, all of Revolution Hill, Gypsy Ridge and Cistern of the Sage. But if the wind abruptly stopped, the suitcase with the forest would drop through the ground. A tunnel would open and you might fall to the core of the Earth.

“Can you make her come back?” his voice has wavered, then cracked.

“I surely cannot,” Horace immediately replies. He’s surprised.

“We can get a private detective. He’ll find Mom and bring her home.” He’s absolutely certain Sheriff Murphy will go with him. They’ll track her down, leap out and grab her. Jimbo can put her in handcuffs and carry her back.

“You can’t pluck somebody from their destiny,” Horace tells him. It’s a chide. “You can’t walk on water or raise the dead. He can call himself Captain. He can say abracadabra. He can dance with a bear. But we each have our own destiny. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Tommy replies.

Captain is preoccupied and rarely speaks. It’s as if words have failed him. He doesn’t eat for days, then devours all the soup in the kitchen in one night. Tommy picks up twenty-three cans from the floor and the wrappers from two boxes of crackers. His father has taken to going to Brenda’s Bakery and buying a dozen donuts. Pink boxes of glazed, jelly and old fashioneds with white icing are stacked next to the soups and scattered on the floor of his study.

His father parks the Buick near the clinic, plays his Best of Dylan cassette, but can’t force himself to get out of the car. He explains that his legs feel like wood and won’t respond to his commands. He goes to a physician in Philadelphia and returns with a bag of medicines. Later he claims he’s allergic to them.

“It’s like dipping my head in a bucket of cement,” Captain says.

His father says he wants to take a shower, but there’s an abnormality with the water. Days aren’t washing off like they should. There’s a thickness to the water, a sense of stained inks, the skin of the drowned, and what’s leaked from gutters. It’s the run-off from ruined lives in apartments with storm clouds in them. Lovers shout insults in a patois implying punishment and exposure. Outside, trees shudder, seized with vertigo, and Cancan in the nervous breeze. Constellations vanish as they scream. Captain says he needs to investigate the pipes for corrosion and rust, or something worse.

His father goes to another doctor in Boston. Captain walks in circles in his study for hours, often all night. Tommy hears his pacing even when Captain is barefoot.

Captain has an entire shelf of medicine bottles. One morning he throws them against the wall, gathers the scattered pills and tosses them in the trash. He can’t fall asleep and he can’t wake up. Then he cuts clinic hours to afternoons only. Blue circles form under his eyes and he’s pale as a toad’s belly.

They don’t celebrate holidays. No one visits and they aren’t invited anywhere. It’s as if they’ve also vanished. Occasionally, they watch football on his father’s TV. They go trout fishing twice.

“I hate all God’s fucking critters,” Captain often says as he passes, humming “Tangled Up In Blue.”

Tommy is torpid and becalmed in his bedroom. Captain claims he won’t extricate himself from Lincoln Street. His father thinks he’ll just carry his bag of dead guppies and the stain of no merit badges into a future he’s already despoiled.

Captain makes it clear that medical school is mandatory. Or else he’ll end up an assistant professor in a make-shift lab with teenage assistants. They’ll break the minimal equipment and he’ll have no budget to replace it. Tommy’s going to put himself in prison with a 25-to-life sentence.

“Studying for the priesthood?” Captain asks, staring down at him. Tommy sits at his desk and feels miniaturized and incompetent.

He checks the mailbox every day. Tommy is convinced a communication from his mother is coming. Logic dictates an exchange of addresses and photographs, and Christmas and birthday cards. She will provide a detailed explanation. At the least his mother will send a postcard.

Tommy wonders if she considered what would happen to him on Lincoln Street in the barricaded late evenings when Captain anchors the Buick and returns from a twelve-day prowl. Captain makes the house shake when he walks in, stamping ice from his boots. His hat, sprinkled with snow, is barely attached to his kelp-red tangle of hair, and his father’s head almost brushes the ceiling. Captain doesn’t say hello. He may fast for days or devour all the soup in an hour. He claims his head is encased in bricks. Then he goes into his study. He closes and locks the door.

Tommy is certain his mother will come to his high school graduation. That’s why he cut his hair short and bought a three-piece suit he can’t afford. That’s why he’s valedictorian.

Tommy stands at the podium on stage and surveys the auditorium row by row, memorizing family groupings and searching for solitary women. His mother is thirty-three. It’s spring and she’ll wear a pastel suit with high heels dyed to match and pearls around her neck. She’ll have a short stylish haircut and a square hat like Jackie Kennedy. She’ll smell like Hyacinths and blueberries.

“Joining the Marines?” Captain comes up behind him. “You all dressed up for Mommy?”

Captain slaps the back of his new pin-striped suit as if he wants to leave his handprint on the fabric. His father wants to soil and brand him. There’s nothing friendly about it.

“She’s not coming, Thomas. She’s not sending birthday gifts or Christmas cards. No postcards, either. Just like I told you.” Captain smiles.

It’s ambivalent and unconvincing, Tommy decides. His father is afraid she might actually appear. Then he’d be accountable. His father’s face is the wrong postcard.

Captain is wearing his riverboat gambler’s hat, and his one sports jacket. He hasn’t taken it to the cleaners for years. It’s covered with cat and dog fur, and stained with sheep urine, cow pus and blood. Streaks of Betadine resemble skid marks from a collision that permanently scarred a highway. Yellow paint-like smears encrust his sleeves. It’s mucus that leaked from the eyes of sick cows. Hay protrudes from his pocket and sticks in the brim of his hat. Captain doesn’t own a tie. His father calls it a statement.

“I’m going to Cal,” he informs his father.

“You’re never getting off Lincoln Street,” Captain replies.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Jimbo offers. He’s wearing his dress uniform. It’s obsidian black and trimmed with gold. The buttons and braid on his cap are like lanterns. He’s polished his shoes and he’s wearing white gloves. They’re stark against his black uniform and seem pasted on and detached from his body.

“Where’s Cal at?” he asks.

“Across the bay from San Francisco,” Tom tells Jimbo.

“Sounds like he’s leaving town.” Jimbo glances at Captain. “Getting the 49ers, too.”

“We’ll see,” his father says.

During Tom’s senior year, his grandfather telephones on a warm late afternoon in spring. Redwoods in an accidental row form an uninterrupted dark green fence in front of his bungalow. Their bark smells like wharves and cinnamon. There’s no wind and the bay is a pale blue devoid of whitecaps. It’s asleep. The only motion is seagulls passing.

“She’s done it this time, son,” his grandfather begins. His tone is weary and distant. “Seems she’s been sleeping on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Been there a while, too. Living in derelict hotels and camping under a pier. They charged her with vagrancy, illegal use of public lands, and selling without a vendor’s license.”

“Selling what?” he wonders.

“Seems she had a stall on the boardwalk. She’d find shells and driftwood. Make necklaces and such.” Horace tells him, “I had to get a lawyer.”

Tom envisions his mother wearing an apron with Mt. Kilimanjaro stenciled on the front. She’s sewn on dozens of extra pockets. She’s in the tide line, collecting what’s fallen from cargo ships. She’s found paper umbrellas printed with pink peonies and cranes, and a piece of fuselage from a plane thought lost off Zanzibar. Once she found a swallow’s nest with six undamaged scarlet eggs. She won’t talk to cops. She’s taken a vow of silence and they wouldn’t believe her anyway.

During his graduate school summers, Tom drives to Los Angeles, finds a hotel on the beach, and walks for days searching. He picks up tiny top shells and small-ridged clamshells and carefully places them in his pocket.

In late afternoon, Tom sits on the pier. He recognizes that all ports are mythical and primal. It’s the beginning of time and oceans don’t have permanent names. It’s before the Silk Road. Women are routinely abandoned near wharves. They’re collateral damage from an intrigue gone astray.

His mother wasn’t born in Manitoba. She came from a village on a delta where fields are fertile with sunflowers. Barges brought spices, statues of new gods, perfumes, mirrors, and capes made from the feathers of jungle birds. His mother became a woman of the wharves. When they’re hungry, the women rip barnacles off pilings with their hands and eat them raw. They knock their teeth out and their fingers bleed.

Tom saves the seashells in his box of mementoes where he keeps the card his mother tapped to the refrigerator, the banana bread recipe with Going to New Mexico written in her hand. He also keeps the postcards of where he’s been.

Tom thinks his mother is also walking on boulevards and beaches, examining postcards, studying angles of light and shadow. There are questions of dusk versus sunset, and how to distill the details. She’s not satisfied with a sunset lacerating the sky and the waves below bluffs stitched with palms.

Tom knows there’s a treacherous complexity in sorting stylized images, condensed and tamed. His mother recognizes the conventional but it’s without thrill. It’s overly familiar, simplified and false. When his mother finds the right postcard, the one that explains everything, she’ll send it to him.

He visits laboratories the size of walk-in closets where post-docs sleep on the floor under saddle blankets. Experiments are monitored every three hours. They hire six assistants for each position. They wait to see who survives.

He interviews for a job at a Swiss pharmaceutical. He can tell immediately that he’s not who they want. It’s like a chemical reaction. When he mentions cloning and mapping the genome of a virulent cotton fungus, the men wince.

Captain plays poker with R&D guys from Monsanto and arranges an interview for him. His appointment is at 2. They don’t call him until 4:45. Three men sit at a long mahogany table. The older man gestures to a low metal folding chair. Tom sits there. When he mentions growing protein crystals for X-ray and computer modeling, the two younger men immediately leave the room.

The older man says, “I’ve got to get the phone.”

There is no phone. Nothing is ringing. Tom is paralyzed, waiting for clarification or an explosion. Two minutes pass. His organs are leaking out, and he presses his hand to his gut. Another minute pass. Tom picks up his briefcase and makes his way out of the building.

Captain calls from JFK on his route to Seattle. He has a cell phone but doesn’t use it. He prefers the random and increasingly rare phone booths he finds on highways and on the edges at airport terminals. He’s made the final table at the World Championship of Poker in Las Vegas. Girls in high heels and bikinis carry out trays of cash. He finally won a championship bracelet. Captain has a blog and he’s interviewed on ESPN. Now he’s invited to private games and picked up by limousines.

“I just played some guys from Du Pont,” his father begins.

“Did you win?” Tom is alert. He’s interested. He’s at full attention.

“I got hot cards,” Captain says.

Their conversation is how they embrace. They talk sporadically, and at Captain’s discretion. His father demands thousands of miles of suffocating mist, gutted nests finches left and mountain ranges to form a barricade between them.

“Listen. I talked to their R&D boys. Biochemistry is strictly 20th century. You missed virtual reality and A.I. Better transfer to med school,” Captain advises.

He doesn’t congratulate him on his doctorate. He didn’t come to graduation either. Tom’s accomplishments are too trivial for a comment or handshake.

“I appreciate your concern,” Tom manages.

“You’ll wind up an assistant professor at a bankrupt shithole. Broken equipment and no budget,” his father actually raises his voice. “Get off Lincoln Street, kid.”

His father telephones when he has time on his hands. It might be a break in a tournament, a plane delay, or a bout of insomnia.

Between them hay is spooled on the edges of fields of pumpkins. There are roadside cemeteries of corn stalks and piled husks. A bloated post-harvest moon rises and consumes the sky.

His mother goes underground, underwater. There’s a language for this, fluid syllables of rain and thunder and damp chimes. It’s a local dialect of tinny trinkets and obscene bells in corridors of mirrors with lightbulbs that sting and all of it is repeated in glass, in glass, in glass until she is lost.

His father calls back. His plane must be delayed. “I can get you into Cornell. It’s not too late,” Captain tells him, his tone urgent. Then he abruptly hangs up. They must have announced his Seattle flight. Tom feels slapped.

Horace Bowen telephones a week later. “I have bad news, son,” his grandfather says. There is an overly long pause. It’s a silence with lead in it. It’s a metal vestibule. “Captain’s dead. Funeral’s on Friday.”

Thomas doesn’t ask what happened. Maybe Captain was ambushed by rabid raccoons. Or PETA sent assassins. He is still angry.

The cemetery is surprisingly crowded. He instinctively searches for his mother. She isn’t there. He’s found 60 Bowens in Manitoba. None of them have come. But the sheep and goat farmers from the pasturelands are here in their church clothes. And all the dairy farmers, the mayor, and president of the Democratic Club. The head of the county health office and her assistant have brought a wreath. The new young doctor from Colorado, probably working off med school debt with two years of rural service, offers his condolences. Mrs. Rakov, the librarian, asks if he’s seen his mother. She remembers her; of course, no one could forget her.

Thomas recognizes two CON PA lawyers in black suits and red ties taking notes. They’re no doubt on assignment, making sure no student pet abusers are posthumously charged. Men in jeans, baseball caps and sunglasses lean against the fence at the back of the cemetery. Town cars are parked on the street. Thomas assumes they’re poker colleagues.

His neighbors from Lincoln Street stand near his father’s grave. Mr. Brody, the retired math teacher who lived next door, pushes his walker across grass. He pats him on his shoulder. Phil Cossink, the pharmacist, with his added-on sunroom and attic turned into a playroom for his three children has come with his sons. They’re college students now and wear suits. His wife reminds him that she brought him Christmas dinner in a blizzard when he was alone.

A developer places an arm on his shoulder. The stranger has a ruddy face and he’s breathless. His father’s property up to 5 Hawk Creek was sold at auction. The developer plans to build 40 Cape Cod houses with swimming pools on 30-acre parcels.

“I respect natural environments.” He is hearty, almost festive. “I’m not considering blading.”

That means he’s going to chop the forest down. Thomas turns his back and walks away.

Sheriff Jim Murphy, in his black dress uniform and white gloves, stands at his side, their shoulders brushing. Thomas notices Jimbo is wearing his purple heart. He hasn’t seen it before. The velvet is vibrant and George Washington is depicted in the center in gold. No clergy preside. There are no eulogies.

The sky is the brilliant untarnished blue of intelligence, prophecy and magic. It’s the sky of an earlier time when brutality was confined and sporadic. The cobalt sky is naked, not a blue humans know, but the blue of tapestries, epics, and cities still bearing their ancient names. Syracuse, Ithaca, Corinth and Thebes.

Then he chances to look directly at a woman wearing a black hat with a long veil and a black dress past her ankles. She looks like Central Casting sent her for the role of a Greek widow. She slowly approaches and introduces herself.

Samantha Markowitz is from Erie. She has fair skin with freckles that blend in together, turning her cheeks a moist peach. She embraces him and trembles in spasms. Her 12-year-old red-haired twins sob. Then Lillian Johnson is weeping in his arms. She doesn’t have a horse farm. She lives in a brick house half an hour north of Harrisburg. She’s a nurse. Her sons, Joshua and Justin, are red-haired dermatologists in Philadelphia. They’re at least 6’3. They shake hands. His father’s other sons have excellent eye contact and their business cards are linen and embossed.

Samantha and Lillian are sturdy, handsome women, 40ish he guesses, and fleshy. Their voices are soft and their words sparse. Of course, Captain wouldn’t want women who dazzle. The spotlight must remain fixed on him, the narcissist.

“You all squared away?” the sheriff asks.

“Nobody’s all squared away,” Thomas remarks in his father’s tone.

“I hear you,” the sheriff replies.

“See much of him?” Thomas asks.

“Captain got more social when you went to college,” the sheriff says. “That euthanasia crisis dragged on. He knew the clinic was doomed. He expected malpractice suits and he wasn’t ready for the tournament circuit. Made his depression worse.”

Thomas remembers. His father had flown to California to discuss it in person. He shared a house with two other students and his father had ignored them.

“This euthanasia craze gives me pause,” Captain said. “It’s a plank of the PETA doctrine. They’re symbiotic. Point is, the fundamental principles are unsound.”

Tom asked how and why. He enjoyed his father that spring California day. Outside, layers of magenta Bougainvillea embossed the bamboo backyard fence. Four hummingbirds drank sugar water. He poured Captain coffee. His father’s hair hung in a braid halfway down his back. It resembled copperheads and milk snakes he found near 5 Hawk Creek at Cistern of the Sage.

His father wore a new hat, a black Stetson, blue jeans, his size 16 Doc Martin work boots, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. He’d bought one of their cd’s.

“Which one?” Tom was curious.

“The one with Dylan covers,” Captain replied.

Then Captain explained that euthanasia was a terrible death. His father was restless and distracted and his eyes seemed cluttered. He paced, chainsmoked, and stared at the floor as he talked.

“You can’t fool some critter you’ve had for fifteen years. They recognize the carrier and the sight of it induces pure terror. In the clinic, they’re assaulted by the stench of critters in pain. They smell death.”

Captain said it could take him three days to give them a lethal shot. By then, the critters are sick with shock. Their owners don’t realize they’re consigning their pets to three days of abject suffering. In winter, maybe longer.

“What do you suggest?” Tom asked. He realized that if the clinic closed, his father would have an awkward transition.

“It’s a town of 3,400 with 8,870 registered weapons. They love that critter for fifteen years, sleep with it in winter, feed it from their plate. It’s their responsibility to end it,” Captain said. “Take the critter out back and put a bullet in his brain. Wait for a pretty day, sun shining. Let him see some robins. In a microsecond, it’s lights out.”

“You don’t have an ethical problem,” Tom ventured. “And who knows? Maybe you’re right. You’re senior faculty, Captain.”

Later his roommate asked, “What’s your father do? Is he a roadie?”

“He’s a vet,” Tom answered, a bit off-balance.

“Gulf War?” his roommate inquired.

“No. He’s a veterinarian,” Tom replied, his tone crisp. “And a professional poker player.”

“So he’s a professional liar,” his other roommate offered.

Tom smiled, uneasy, and rode his bike to the library. He hadn’t thought of his father that way before. A professional liar.

The Con weekly, Galileo, devoted a three-page article to his father. They included Captain’s allegations of conspiracy, and undue and misguided influence from PETA in Pittsburgh. His account of the plague of kittens and puppies criminally deserted by students was vivid. What did they imagine happened to critters dumped out of cars? Some magical intervention? Maybe Jesus would feed them? It was animal abuse and punishable by imprisonment and fines.

“I’m not an innkeeper,” Captain stated. “And I’m not an executioner.” The Galileo quoted him and put his statement in bold.

“That was his finest moment,” Sheriff Murphy says. “It had a kind of grandeur.”

Thomas agrees.

“Captain had a restless nature. He was cursed. Born bipolar,” the sheriff says. “He was lonely. He’d stay here for days.”

Thomas is surprised. “What did you guys do?”

“Smoke pot, watch TV, drink some and talk. He tried to teach me Texas Hold ’Em. I didn’t have the math for it. Plus, Captain was plain out lucky. You have to go the river, he’d tell me. It’s a game of blood. Every hand is seppuku. Captain had the statistics cold, and cards just came to him. Only two outs and he gets one. Flushes, full houses, trips. It was uncanny. But he was obsessed with law suits.”

Thomas remembered the quiet sustained furor in Wood’s Hole. His father closed the clinic a year later. By then he was playing professionally. He was on the circuit with men barely twenty-one, and constantly moving across the county, often by himself. Captain called him from airports. He’d come in second at the Commerce Club in L.A. and was going to Palo Alto next. Then Vegas, Atlanta, Houston and Miami. He’d take off a few days before going up the coast to Atlantic City and Foxwood Casino in Connecticut.

“I talked to Lily and Sam,” Sheriff Murphy says. “Good stock and hardworking. Agreeable. And he sure put his mark on those kids.”

“Accommodating,” Thomas decides. “Easy come, easy go.”

They are driving to the wake at the sheriff’s house. He notices Jimbo has the Governor General’s Gold Crescent on his key ring.

“I wanted a token,” Jimbo says, uncertainly. “You mind?”

Tom shakes his head no.

“Want something? Lawyer in Vegas has documents and keys for you.”

“He ever file a missing person report?” Thomas asks.

“No,” Jimbo says, after a pause. “He did not.”

“Captain didn’t have a single friend,” Thomas realizes.

“I wouldn’t say that,” the sheriff replies.

“I looked around. All I saw were people who paid him,” Thomas concludes. “And the ones with his chemistry. The ones he contaminated. Blood captives and customers.”

“He was a big man,” Jimbo notes. “What was he? 6’5”? 6’6”? Lot of terrain inside. Low lands and peaks and marshes.”

“Ever read Conrad?” Thomas suddenly asks.

“Dennis Conrad?” the sheriff replies.

“Tell me, Jimbo. What did he die from?” Thomas wants to know.

“One 9-millometer to the back of the head. Instantaneous. Robbery. Kid killed him for the poker bracelet,” Jimbo tells him.

Mourners mill around the living room and sit at a picnic table outside. He stands with the sheriff in the kitchen.

“Did you know about them?” Thomas glances in the direction of the living room. Lillian and Samantha sit on the sofa, one child on either side, like human bookends.

“No clue,” Jimbo says.

“Think they knew about each other?” He studies the sheriff’s face. He’s grown a gray moustache that suits him. Sunlight turns it silver. He’s handsome, not distinguished, but a man who’s seen his share. A man with stories, rugged and confident. And worldly.

Jimbo says no.

“Figure there are others?” Thomas wonders.

“I’d bet on it,” Jimbo says.

“Clinic’s a worthless outdated shambles. It’s a tear-down,” Thomas tells the sheriff, and shrugs. His father didn’t have an appetite for money. He ran on some other and more exotic alien fuel.

“I remember when they built it. Just Captain and your mother. I lent them the tools. Your mother enjoyed painting. And she was terrific with a hammer. She did the whole roof,” the sheriff said. “What was she? 17? She carried you in a big blue wicker Easter basket. She sewed the curtains. Went to Philadelphia for the fabric.”

“What were they like then?” Thomas is interested.

“Different. They stood out. Looked like they’d stepped out of a painting. Clothes all velvet and embroidered. Regal. Called themselves beatniks. They were intense. Truth is, they had crazy eyes. Both of them,” Jimbo told him.

Thomas considers their crazy eyes. “What happened?” he asks.

“People were scared. Crossed the street to avoid them. Captain so tall, your mom tiny, but feisty and mule-stubborn. First few years, Captain seemed to take hold. Then he hit the wall. Your mother twisted in the wind. Did a year of nursing school at the Con and quit. Carried notebooks of poems and threw them away. Started the theater group,” the sheriff remembers.

“You were in that?” Thomas is surprised.

“Thought I could meet women,” Jimbo admits. “Can’t meet them in church or a bar.”

The dermatologists from Philadelphia sit on the floor with the twins. They’re playing Monopoly. Lily and Sam have managed to brush their hair and rub rouge on their cheeks. Samantha has removed her veil. They’re going to meet halfway in Briarwood for Sunday brunch. They’re sisters now. Lily passes a plate of cheese and grapes around the room. Sam pours lemonade into paper cups.

Thomas squats beside his half-brothers and half-sisters. He notices the twins have all the hotels on the board.

“See much of him?” Thomas directs his question to the older boy, Joshua, the dermatologist with his father’s name.

“Hardly saw him after he turned pro,” Joshua said.

“We’d watch him on TV,” Justin, the younger brother, offers.

“So what you’d do together?” Thomas wants to know.

“Went to Red Lobster in Oakdale mostly,” Joshua says.

“We went to a movie once,” Justin says. “And we played Frisbee.”

“Maybe twice,” his older brother says. It’s a correction.

Thomas nods and walks back into the kitchen. The sheriff hands him a beer.

“We did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That’s a play by Tennessee Williams,” Jimbo says.

“Right,” Thomas nods.

“After a week, your mother hung it up. Said she didn’t want to live inside someone else’s architecture,” Jimbo remembers.

“What did she mean?” Thomas asks.

“She could see all the pieces. And it lost its meaning. She saw the whole and the ending,” Jimbo explains. “Captain the same way.”

“Was she depressed? Maybe angry?” Thomas wonders. “Just seventeen with a baby? She resent it?”

“Captain was a roller coaster. Your mother started novels and burned them. Then astronomy. Captain went to New York. Got her a real telescope. But she’d see the schematics and get paralyzed. Said her mind was full of corridors with thousands of doors. Open a door, there’d be another corridor of doors. She got tangled in complexities. Said her head was a house of mirrors.”

“Don’t imagine the Captain was much help,” Thomas offers.

“Captain was a complicated man, no doubt,” Jimbo confirms. “But she loved you, Tom. She stayed as long as she could bear. Maybe longer.”

“I thought he was a magician,” Thomas reveals.

“Captain was tricky, no question. Listen. My old man passed two, three years back. Cirrhosis. Never saw him take a drink.” Jimbo glances at him. “You can’t know a father. They’re all magicians. Got two million years of strings and mirrors in their pockets.”

Thomas thought his father had invisible instruments, tiny silver crescent scalpels for scraping off celestial tumors and shined metal tools like amulets for a royal child. He was an alchemist. He invented airports and machine guns, banks and cops, fossils and dinosaurs. He had the patent on arrowheads and missiles. He owned the triangle, scotch and pot and two accommodating women. His father had the license for fire and canons, telephones, vaccines and museums. He could hypnotize and infect you. He carried the contagion under his riverboat gambler’s hat and tucked inside his Doc Martin size 16 boots. Then he slipped into his gray Buick and vanished. He didn’t need a map. He was clairvoyant. That’s how he knew which cards were coming.

“I used to think I could move through time. Go in and out, adjust circumstances and decisions,” Thomas says.

“Maybe you can,” Jimbo replies.

“Captain didn’t even show me how to shave,” Thomas is angry. “He wouldn’t let me join Boy Scouts.”

“He was unreasonable.” Jimbo agrees. “I told him so.”

“Know why they came here?” he asks.

“They hitchhiked. Trying to get to D.C. for the big protest. Somebody let them off at the Con. They walked in,” the sheriff says.

“How he’d choose being a vet?” Tom wonders.

“Tougher to get accepted than med school back then.

Captain had exclusive proclivities,” Jimbo points out.

“My grandpa Horace told me Captain died,” Thomas says. “How’d he know?”

“I’m still wired in. I call a constable in Hughes, one town over. We have an arrangement. Amish don’t have phones. Maybe he delivers a note.” Jimbo smiles.

“Were you in love with her?” Thomas suddenly asks.

“I sure was,” Jimbo said. “Still am. Second summer, she organized a Bloomsday Festival. June 16th. That’s my holy day. Whole town and half the country folk came with costumes. She made a dress with white lace and carried a silk umbrella she’d painted Peonies on.”

“She was Molly,” Thomas guesses.

“You bet. She read the last pages and I had to leave. Sat in my pick-up crying.

“She was five foot two and spoke with the voice of an oracle. You don’t expect a woman that size to talk like that, like a senator. She got a certificate of recognition from the Irish ambassador. It’s all framed up in the library. But she didn’t care. It was just another door into another corridor of doors.”

Millions of women vanish every year. They buy wigs and dye their hair. They don’t want to be found. Jimbo hands him a beer.

Thomas walks Lily and her sons to their car. Then Samantha and the twins. They’re going to have Thanksgiving together. He’ll join them, of course. And bring Sheriff Murphy. Thomas nods enthusiastically and watches them drive away.

“Captain said I’d never leave Lincoln Street,” he tells Jimbo

The sheriff nods. Jimbo is a big man, too. Maybe 6’2”. He looks like he played college football. It occurs to Thomas that it’s awkward, just the two of them standing close in the kitchen of an empty house. They’ve unexpectedly exposed themselves as criminals and cowards.

It might be the first epoch of the Quaternary Period, Thomas thinks. It’s the Pleistocene, two million years before the codification of laws and hierarchies, county health regulations and merit badges. Everyone wears mammoth pelts and complains about the cold. There’s no PETA and men have as many women as they can feed.

Thomas is suddenly and inexplicably stiff with shame. He glances at his watch.

“Ever strike you odd? Two Governor General’s Gold Crescent winners in an off-the-grid Amish village? Nothing but prairies, cattle and sunflower fields?” he asks.

“I’d call it statistically impossible,” the sheriff says, unequivocally.

“Mind if I ask you something?” Thomas looks directly at the sheriff.

“Shoot.” Jimbo smiles.

“How’d you get your purple heart?” Thomas asks.

“Toenail fungus in Da Nang,” Sheriff Murphy replies. “My whole outfit had it. Gave us all purple hearts and sent us home.”

“You didn’t shoot your foot?” Thomas is surprised.

“No,” Jimbo admits. “But the truth was embarrassing. I made up a cover story.”

That’s how we live, Thomas realizes. We step on IEDs and our skin peels off. We stumble on, certain an intervention is coming, a reprieve. We invent small fictions like patches sewn over torn cloth. The headlines of our lives are mere approximations of a complexity we could not characterize in the chaos of constantly flowing emotions and circumstances. We are all stars with our events compressed and encrypted. We are what loiters in erratic orbits in the vast ocean of night.

“What was Captain thinking at the end?” Thomas asks.

“He got a kick telling me about who he played with. What their houses were like. Press a button and the living room turns into a tennis court. He’d play with Mark Zuckerman and Bill Gates and the smart boys from Google and such. Lots of hedge fund guys and dudes named Phil,” Jimbo says. “The Captain didn’t give a rat’s ass about gadgets and the future. He was moving to Cannes. Last thing we discussed.”

“Cannes?” Thomas repeats.

It’s the end of an Indian summer afternoon. They walk outside and sit on the backyard grass. The forest is an extravagance of maples in transition. Leaves are yellow as candles purified by prayer, and an unrepentant criminal red like vengeance and adultery. There’s a linear continuity to this, a cause and effect he can almost articulate and arrange like an equation.

Thomas notices a swingset, monkey bars and a sand box with red and blue plastic buckets and small shovels. Vestiges from Jimbo’s last marriage. Was that the third or fourth?

“See them much?” Thomas indicates the swings.

“She up and moved to Oregon. Two hundred miles from an airport,” Jimbo says. “Claims she doesn’t have a phone.”

“Maybe you can get the Hughes constable to ride over,” Thomas offers.

Jimbo laughs. “People tell you everything. They’re social by nature,” the sheriff reveals. “They confess. They put their sins and ambitions on bumper stickers. They show you where the bodies are. But they tilt their words and disguise them. It’s in plain sight if you know how to listen.”

“Do you know how to listen?” Thomas thinks to ask.

“I got a good ear,” Jimbo says. “Good eyes, too.”

“Think she’ll come back?” Thomas asks.

Jimbo looks at his polished back shoes. Then he shakes his head no.

“You believe in destiny?” Thomas suddenly wonders.

“Didn’t use to. But I’m coming around,” the sheriff says. “Here’s an anecdote. Few autumns back, a little girl fell in the Genesee near Hamilton Bridge. Pretty girl, four years old with pink bows shaped like cats in her hair. Name of Amanda Leaf. A pick-up crosses the bridge. Lady happens to look out the window. Lucinda Hopper, forty-six, a homemaker with three sons, spots the girl in the current. George Hopper, fifty-one, hits the brakes. They’re trying to get to Butler but they took a wrong turn. They both jump in the river. Everyone drowns. I recovered the bodies. Point is, they didn’t belong on the bridge to begin with.”

After a while, Thomas says, “Thanks for all this.” He points at the room where the mourners have been and gone. He opens his arms wide, trying to encompass the day the Captain and his mother walked into town, how she painted walls and built the clinic roof, and carried him in an Easter basket. He pauses at the door.

“Hey, Jimbo. Captain did have a friend,” Thomas realizes. “You were his only friend.”

“I appreciate that,” Jimbo says.

Thomas thinks there should be more. He fights an impulse to fall to his knees and beg the sheriff to adopt him. He can rent a room in Jimbo’s house. Or maybe he needs to find a sharp rock or bat. The sheriff’s hunting rifle, an old Remington 30-30, leans against the kitchen wall. Jimbo’s probably wearing his pistol. He’s stronger but Thomas has the element of surprise. Thomas wants to embrace the sheriff but doesn’t. He suddenly wants to put a bullet in Jimbo’s gut and watch him bleed out. They shake hands.

“I’ll call you,” Thomas says.

“You do that now,” Jimbo replies.

It’s not all gone if someone with a good ear is left, Thomas decides. The forests of his boyhood, rinsed with henna and dyes from antiquity, the houses on Maple Ridge Road and Lincoln Street, and the people who inhabited them linger, anchored in a part of the memory no one has deciphered. They’re embroidered into our biochemistry and their words come out of our mouth.

In his room on Lincoln Street, blue guppies with yellow fins and cherry barbs with intricate braded sides float to the surface. His butterfly ram was supposed to live four years but didn’t. Tommy pulls them out with his fingers. His sunken ship gives up on distress calls.

Captain holds his car keys between his long, sturdy middle fingers. The key ring is attached to his Gold Crescent bronze prize. It’s the size of a silver dollar but seems like an artifact from an ancient civilization. He invented the universe, currency and barter. He may devise navigation and counting next. Then geometry, philosophy, and the schematics of how to beat the house.

“I’ve got bluetongue and red tongue and tongues with rows of high-heeled Cancan dancers,” the Captain said, whistling “Tambourine Man.” “I’ve got Nile Fever, Grass Fever and some vile viral nightmare from Cambodia. I got widows and orphans from here to Honolulu. Ho Ho Ho.”

Captain revealed himself, but Thomas couldn’t interpret his code. His father’s choreographed entrances and exits were confessions repeatedly reenacted. He committed seppuku every time he walked out to the Buick. How had he failed to notice?

His red-haired, pre-med, twin half-sisters shake pompoms as they pass. Amanda Leaf climbs out of the Genesee. Her voice is a sequence of miniature azure bells. Her hair is still wet and clouds of sapphire moths circle her face.

The dead and the missing exert a field that doesn’t dissipate. Gestures and phrases have half-lives. Silences are deserted plazas, dusty, throttled by wind where the last goat starves. Omissions are a dereliction.

His mother stands on a sandbank. Kelp stretches out like a henna crocodile. She reaches inside the seaweed and pulls out amber dragon fangs. For you, Tommy. Now I can come home.

The most spectacular and irredeemable crimes have no official designation, no official code number or prison sentence. They’re boulders in the Genesee where little girls drown. They’ll be here when you and your loves and the concept of love itself is gone and there’s no statute of limitation.