There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.
—ELIZABETH LAWRENCE
We lived in four houses in Greenwich before I was twelve. As my father’s drinking and depression augured downward, my mother was forced to go to work as a secretary in a publishing company—what was called a “girl Friday”—to pay the bills and keep food on our table. My mother grew up in a wealthy and highly regarded family on Long Island. Only a few years earlier, she had been touted in British tabloids as one of the most beautiful American women on the London social scene. Now she was a personal assistant to a publishing executive.
It’s hard to refute Darwin’s theory of natural selection after you meet my mother. The poor guy who hired her had no idea that he had just hired his replacement. It was only a matter of time before she would have his job. With some income flowing in, our financial condition began to stabilize, if not inch up. It would be a long time before we could sing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” but one or two green shoots were peeking up through the dirt.
In fourth grade we moved to Havemeyer Park, a subdivision built in the 1940s. Gene Tunney, the world heavyweight boxing champion, was one of the developers. He named the streets after famous military heroes, supposedly to appeal to men coming back from the war. We rode our bikes and played kickball on Halsey Drive, Nimitz Place, Amherst Road, and MacArthur Drive. On some roads the houses were identical, small Cape Cod–style homes on tiny square lots. Tunney was long on athleticism but short on imagination.
The adult residents of Havemeyer Park could have been used as a sample group in a fertility study. The streets were teeming with kids. Every time we yelled “Olly, olly oxen free” to end a game of hide-and-seek, five or six kids we’d never seen before would come out from hiding. I’m surprised the Census Bureau didn’t go door-to-door to beg our parents to slow it down so they could get an accurate head count.
We lived in the last house on the street. It was a 1950s ranch-style home with a yard that swagged around until it backed up to the several acres of woods and wetlands that lay at the heart of Havemeyer Park. The woods were striated with a maze of paths carved by generations of kids whose pounding Converse All-Stars had worn them smooth. On summer mornings, groups of us would walk to the edge of the woods and shush each other as we strained to hear the sounds of friends playing deep in the thicket and trees. Once we had a bead on their location, we would tear off in the direction of their voices, making the earsplitting, high-pitched yodel that all kids make to let other kids know they are coming. If an adult were to attempt the same ululation, his larynx would explode.
Time found no purchase in the woods. No one wore watches. Cell phones didn’t exist. We told time by the sun and by our stomachs. We would vanish into the woods in the morning and not appear again until shadows, cast long by the waning light, made it too difficult to see where we were going in the dark stands of trees.
Near the edge of our property, high on a hill, was a large rock outcropping. It stood twenty feet above the forest and was marked by a gaping fissure that cut through its center. Kids imagined they could drop oversized slices of lemon into the yawning gap, where they would be crushed into lemonade by the opposing rock faces. Thus its name: the Lemon Peeler. The top of the Lemon Peeler was large and flat enough for several kids to stand on with room to spare. It was like an ancient stone altar, the kind archaeologists find on remote islands in the Hebrides and wonder what pagan religious ritual people used it for. It was a perfect vantage point for looking out over the expanse of woods below. It was also the site of my first taste of glory.
Rummaging around our basement one afternoon, I came upon a carton filled with junk rescued from the trunk of one of our cars before it was sold. Mixed in among the old jumper cables, oily rags, and wheel lugs at the bottom of the box, was something wrapped in old newspapers and twine. I carefully opened the twine, and the contents of the package fell at my feet—a dozen roadside flares rolling across the basement floor. Their outer wrapping was red and waxy. Each stick had a nail sticking out the bottom so it could be jammed into the ground. I thought the nail was a nice touch. There were warnings written in blurry letters along the side about the fatalities sure to occur if the flares were used for any purpose other than as roadside distress signals. They all but had my picture on the side with an admonition under it to put them back immediately.
There is a feeling that comes over eleven-year-old boys when they stumble on such treasures. Their faith in God trebles. I knew deep in my soul that Jesus himself had blessed me by letting me find these incendiary devices, and that they were to be used to advance his purposes in the world—namely, my social rehabilitation.
I was the school crap magnet. I was small and athletically challenged. My family, like characters in a Madeleine L’Engle story, had fallen out of the sky into a middle-class neighborhood in Connecticut, along with a visually impaired English nanny. How do you explain having a governess to kids whose parents owned diners or worked as airplane mechanics? I was chased home almost every day for using big words or fancy turns of phrase I had heard my father use or had read in the books I had begun devouring. I tried to do all the things I thought would win me some measure of acceptance. The harder I tried, however, the worse things became. My precocious vocabulary made kids feel I was talking down to them. They would tilt their heads and gape at me in silence when I used British words like laurie (truck) or mac (raincoat), then burst out laughing. The previous September, Nanny had packed me off to my first day at my new school wearing a blue blazer and carrying a leather briefcase. These were socially expensive mistakes.
Most of all, I felt like I didn’t fit because my father was so sick. Kids don’t know their parents are human. They think they’re gods. When you’re two years old, you look up the crease of your father’s pants and into his face and he might as well be Zeus. You realize that he can hug you or throw a bolt of lightning through your head. If Zeus happens to be mentally ill and an alcoholic whose irrational and rage-filled outbursts are as predictable as the whims of an active volcano, he begins to live in your mind as something half human and half monster, someone like Darth Vader, only less empathic. You ask God if you should take this personally.
Once I brought a kid home after school to play. When we came in the front door, my father was drunk and unconscious on the floor of the living room. I suspect Nanny had tried to lift him up and get him to his bedroom before we got there, but he was too heavy. The kid took one look at my dad and called his mother, who rushed over to pick him up. I peered through the white sheer curtains that covered our living room windows as Nanny leaned over to speak to my friend’s mom through the driver’s-side window of her car. Nanny was practiced at coming up with excuses. Then I went to the kitchen and ate the cheese toast and tea she had laid out in anticipation of our arrival. I looked at the empty chair and the plate of food meant for my friend and knew in the precincts of my heart that I was a freak. The play date gone wrong had happened months earlier, but it chiseled in stone this thought that I would never find my place in the world.
Then I found the flares. They were my salvation.
Carefully tucking the flares under my T-shirt, I ran into my backyard, my heart thrumming with anticipation. Johnny Gopnik was sitting on top of the Lemon Peeler, idly throwing rocks into the woods below. Johnny was one of the most popular boys in our school. He was everything I wasn’t—a sports god, admired by everyone, and universally feared. Could God have sent a better person for me to share my miraculous discovery with?
Seeing me running up the hill, Johnny stood up. “What are those?” he asked, pointing at the bouquet of red flares in my hand.
I sprinted the last few feet to the top of the Lemon Peeler, then bent at the waist to gasp for air. “They’re flares,” I managed to say. “I found them in my basement.”
Johnny grabbed one and balanced it in his hand to feel its heft. He scraped the side of it with his thumbnail. He sniffed it. He all but licked it. Finally, slapping it against his palm like a cop menacingly playing with his truncheon, he asked, “What are you going to do with them?”
I had not anticipated this question. I possessed a prize of great value but no plan. It was time to wing it.
I shrugged. “Let’s bust them open,” I said.
This was no easy task. Whatever was at the core of the flares that made them combustible was encased in super tightly wrapped cardboard. Johnny and I hit one against a tree, tried crushing one with rocks, and tried breaking a couple over our knees. That the company had made the flares so difficult to break only confirmed what we suspected: there was something inside them of measureless power and value, something the gods didn’t want us to have, and therefore we had to have it, no matter the cost.
I went home and got a hacksaw.
By the time I returned, there were five or six other kids at the Lemon Peeler, passing the flares around. I was becoming a celebrity.
“I don’t know if I would use that saw on them,” one kid said. “It might set them off and catch your clothes on fire.” This was one of those kids who were always wringing their hands.
“What if it isn’t a flare?” another piped. “What if it’s dynamite?” This must have been the hand-wringer’s brother.
“My dad knows someone who messed around with a flare and blew his boat up,” one of the older kids said. “It killed his dog too.”
This last story gave me pause, but I was not to be deterred. I was standing on the precipice of social integration. I got down on my knees and began sawing each flare in two. Cupped around me was a swelling crowd, their attention riveted on me. I sawed faster and faster, lest my audience of potential new friends lose interest and leave.
As I remember, the flares were filled with a sticky, yellowish-white cake. It had the consistency of powder laundry detergent when it gets damp and clumpy. I carefully scraped the cake off the side of the wrappings of all twelve flares with a stick, until it formed a pyramidal mound that stood a foot high on a flat part of the Lemon Peeler. When I was finished, the congregation stepped back a few feet and gazed at the pile of phosphorous in worshipful silence.
The sky was darkening, and a light breeze brushed against our faces. Johnny Gopnik came and stood next to me. “Now what are we going to do?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the mound of cake.
Johnny Gopnik had said we. I was drunk with belonging.
The crowd had now grown to fifteen or twenty boys, along with a few five-year-old sisters peeking out from behind their older brothers. In the distance I could hear the sounds of other kids yodeling and running down trails toward the Lemon Peeler. Word was spreading that something big was about to happen. It was late in the day. Soon mothers would be calling kids home for dinner. The clock was ticking. I was in a race against time.
I stood up straight and thrust out my chest. “I’m going to light it,” I announced.
The assembly gasped.
“Are you crazy?” Johnny said. “What if it blows up? What if you burn the woods down?”
I turned away from him. “Anyone got matches?” I asked, my chest swelling with boldness and bluster.
Instantly I was handed five packs of matches, a metal flip lighter with a green jumping trout etched on its side, and a magnifying glass in case we got desperate and had to use the sun. In those days, no self-respecting eleven-year-old boy would leave his house without the basic tools of an arsonist.
I bent down, took a deep breath, lit a match, and held it to the base of the powder tower while turning my face away. Angels and children held their breath, but nothing happened. I lit one match after another, but the yellow cake didn’t even smolder. In the distance I heard the sound of a mother calling her kids home. Soon other moms would start hollering as well.
“This is stupid. Give me back my matches,” one boy said.
“Shut up, you freak,” Johnny said. No one moved. Gopnik had spoken.
I figured out that in order to ignite, the powder needed sustained exposure to an open flame. I clicked back the top on the lighter, lit it, and gingerly laid it on top of the pile.
We waited for eternity.
The only man who could have appreciated what happened next was Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project team that built the first atomic bomb. I did a project on him for my third-grade science class. I made a crinkly papier-mâché replica of the first atom bomb, painted it dark brown, and placed it next to a poster board that I had filled with pictures of angry red mushroom clouds hurtling into the air, and aerial photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they had had been leveled by the weapon code-named “Little Boy.” I stood next to my presentation on science fair night in our school cafeteria and explained to small groups of interested passing parents and grandparents what would happen if one of these suckers got dropped on New York City, only thirty-five miles away from us by land and only a few miles from us across Long Island Sound. First, the paint on the sides of their houses would bubble and melt from the heat emanating from the fireball. A second or two later, a blast wave called a “Mach front” would roar across Long Island Sound and blow their split-level homes off their .15-acre lots as if the avenging arm of God himself had swiped them off their foundations. Everything and everyone they ever loved or cherished in this life would be vaporized.
Not everyone stuck around to the end of my presentation.
I learned that as Oppenheimer watched the first test of the bomb at Los Alamos, he recalled the verse from the Bhagavad Gita, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” Now I knew what he must have felt. The initial flash and heat impulse of the powder’s ignition blew me onto my butt, and I scurried backward like I was going for a land speed record in a crab race. Everyone else broke into a chorus of “Holy Crap” (the favorite hymn of prepubescent boys) and scrambled to hide behind trees and rocks, lest they be consumed in the blast. Just when I thought the light from the phosphorus ziggurat couldn’t get any brighter or bigger, it quadrupled in luminescence and size. It became a five-foot standing wave of colors, pulsing white to red, vermilion to orange. It burned temporary blind spots into our retinas, but we couldn’t take our eyes off the pillar of fire. It was terrible and wondrous to behold.
Once we determined that the inferno wouldn’t kill us in the short term, the now sizable mob inched toward it, as though tiptoeing toward a burning bush. By now, the tower was roaring so bright that the coming night was as bright as the day. When it hissed and spit sulfurous sparks, we jumped backward and shielded our eyes and then approached it again. Thick columns of smoke pushed into our faces by the light winds made our noses and throats burn.
But the glory of what we had unleashed was too much for eleven-year-old boys to take in all at once. Think of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the crazy French archaeologist takes the top off the ark of the covenant and looks inside, and his eyes bug out and he screams, “It’s beautiful!” That was us, only our faces didn’t melt off. We were seized by ecstasy. Johnny Gopnik was so enraptured that he kissed me full on the cheek. He began dancing around the blinding fire, throwing his head back and screaming great whoops of joy. Soon, Johnny’s frenzied delirium infected the rest of us. Twenty boys danced around the fire like heathen savages on a South Pacific island, lit up on moonshine, while their little sisters looked on wide-eyed, sucking their thumbs. It was a scene from Lord of the Flies, only innocent and precious. None of us would ever be so beautifully eleven years old again.
Five or six minutes later, it was done. The pillar of fire was now nothing more than a hot white circle of molten residue surrounded by blackened rock. A blanket of acrid smoke lay over the forest floor. It would take days for the woods to lose that rotten-egg smell. A few touched the place where the miracle had occurred. We all agreed not to tell anyone what we had seen, at least our parents.
Johnny Gopnik and I were the last two there. We stood on the Lemon Peeler, the site of our Pentecost. We were filled with gratitude and amazement for the signs and wonders we had witnessed.
Johnny shoved me and laughed. “Cron, that was awesome,” he said.
Like a man regaining consciousness after being knocked out, I was dazed.
“See you tomorrow,” he said, turning and running down the trail toward the sound of his mother’s voice.
“Sure,” I called back.
I sat on the Lemon Peeler for a long time and surveyed the forest below. The setting sun appeared under the outer edge of the overcast sky, announcing day’s end. Getting up, I took a piece of red chalk that we used to draw four-square courts and drew a circle around the place where the fiery pillar had stood and danced for us. I walked down the hill from the Lemon Peeler. My face was radiant.
Forty-five-year-olds aren’t the only ones who feel despondent when they realize that the clock can’t be turned back. Just ask a boy toward the end of August, when the sun begins to set earlier and your mother begins talking about your needing new pants and school supplies. That summer, late August brought cooler nights and a sense of dread.
My father was skating just in front of the cracks. If something didn’t change, he would fall through the ice and be swallowed by his own insanity. He would start drinking at eleven in the morning and only stop to sleep. In their inestimable wisdom, doctors were pumping him with Librium and Valium, making him not only an alcoholic but also a drug addict—so much for the Hippocratic Oath. His depression seemed bottomless. Like one of the ghosts in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, he was becoming insubstantial. His will to live was waning, and it made him almost transparent, as though rather than dying, he might just disappear one day, leaving behind only a vague scent of regret.
I remember things in colors. In 1971, the air in our home was burnt ocher. Nothing like the pure golden sunshine that filled other kids’ homes or stippled the floor of the woods, where I spent more and more of my time. One day while playing in them, I was caught in a thunderstorm and had to make a decision between running to my house, which I could see in the distance, or taking shelter in a pile of boulders and waiting it out. I took my chances on being struck by lightning rather than having to go home. I huddled and prayed as lightning flashed and thunder exploded above my head, startling even the stones and trees.
On the opposite side of the woods from the Lemon Peeler, there was a big hole, about ten feet deep, fifteen feet wide, twenty feet long. We called it the Pit. To get to it you had to brave swarms of mosquitoes as you walked ankle-deep through a marsh of ink-black mud. The air was thick with the pungent smell of skunk cabbage and old foliage decomposing in the water. You had to pass the scant remains of a hundred-year-old farmhouse and clamber over a decrepit stone wall that had once demarked where one farmer’s land ended and another’s began. Finally, you had to pass through a shroud of bushes, saplings, and reeds that had grown up around the Pit, creating a leafy protective curtain.
There were countless theories about how the Pit had come into existence. Some kids were sure it had been created by a meteor strike; others said an alien spacecraft had made a crash landing there and the air force had secretly taken it away in the night; others said it was a mass grave dug by members of the criminal underground. Adults claimed with annoying confidence that it was an abandoned construction site and that the hole had been dug to lay a foundation. This sounded improbable to us.
Despite the mystery of its provenance, this cavity in the earth was a magnet in the neighborhood. You could go there anytime and be certain to run into boys of all ages, killing time by talking, spitting, bragging, and competing to see who could pee the farthest.
I would steal cigarettes from my parents or my brothers and go down to the Pit to smoke them. I started smoking early, but five of the seven people living in my home were smokers. If I’d complained about the effects of secondhand smoke, they might have placed me in foster care. By joining them, I was helping keep the family together.
I loved to lie on my back and take huge drags of Pall Malls or Chesterfields deep into my lungs. I liked the punch to the chest every pull on a cigarette gave me, the brief high I felt from the nicotine, and the heightened sense of well-being. I liked to smoke alone too. It’s not that I wouldn’t smoke with my friends, but there was something about smoking alone that gave me solace.
I went to the Pit late one morning and was glad to see no one was there. I’d had a rough morning with my father, who had yelled at me for playing a set of bongos I had been given for Christmas a few months earlier. Anything that made noise drove my father to his wit’s end. The house was beginning to feel like a mausoleum.
Just when I had settled into a comfortable position and was starting to light my cigarette: “Boo!” someone whispered.
“Crap,” I said, jumping and dropping my lighter.
It was Dennis Coughlin. He had been sitting on a big rock across the Pit from me, watching me, leaning back on his hands so that his shoulders nearly touched his ears. He was wearing jeans and a light-green, short-sleeved, button-down shirt with one tail hanging out the front. The curved ends of his thin black hair nearly covered his almost topaz-blue eyes. The hours he had spent in the sun that summer had made the field of freckles under his eyes so pronounced I could almost count them from across the Pit. Billy Dempsey and John Babcock were sitting on the ground next to the rock Dennis was perched on. They were quiet, lumbering ninth graders who followed Dennis everywhere like stray dogs grateful to have someone to tag along after. They were every bit as dumb as Dennis was smart.
“I haven’t seen your sister around,” Dennis said, ignoring my alarm.
Girls thought Dennis was handsome, but moms warned their daughters not to hang around with him. He was alluring, but treated others with an unsettling air of indifference.
“She’s working at a day camp this summer,” I said. I tried to steady my shaking hand as I lit the Pall Mall drooping from my lips. My heart was still beating fast from the surprise.
“What are you doing this summer?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Nothing,” I said. “I went to Camp Monakewaygo for two weeks in July. That was okay.”
“Okay for losers,” Babcock said. He and Dempsey laughed, but Dennis frowned.
He paused. “Does your mom know you smoke?” he asked.
I laughed. “No way,” I said. “She’d kill me.”
Dennis watched me. His gaze was soft.
He grinned and blinked slowly. “Pull your pants down,” he said.
The demand was such a jarring departure from the flow of our previous conversation that my head jerked backward. I felt the way non-native speakers must feel when they are just beginning to learn a language. They hear the words; they vaguely understand their meaning but can’t get them in order fast enough to make sense of them.
I forced myself to laugh. “Right, that’s funny,” I said. I was becoming aware of the pronounced rise and fall of my chest as my breathing quickened.
Dennis slipped off the rock and leaned against it. “You heard me. Pull your pants down,” he said, casting his head to the side to flick the hair out of his eyes.
The smile frozen on my face began to quiver.
Dennis flicked his cigarette into the Pit and spit after it. “Pull down your pants, or I’ll come over there and beat the snot out of you,” he said evenly.
Fear filled my mouth. It tasted like copper. I began to think through how I might escape, but I knew my limitations. I was small for my age, no more than ninety pounds. Dennis was fifteen, 5'10", with the lithe build of a gymnast. There was a rumor that the football coach at the high school had begged him to try out to be a running back for the varsity, but Dennis wasn’t interested. I knew that if I made a run for it, he would catch me and the punishment for disobedience would be awful.
My head felt hot, my scalp started to itch, and there was now a steady ringing in my ears. “Why?” I said.
He ignored my question. “Do I have to come over there and make you?” he asked, motioning to come around the Pit to where I was standing.
The air turned a sickly green, the way it does right before a really bad storm. There was no breeze. A pair of bluebottle flies danced in the air near my head, making the sound you get when you blow a harmonica made from a comb and Saran Wrap. A sour smell I had never noticed before wafted up from the Pit. I had never felt so alone.
I dropped my cigarette. I unbuttoned my pants, undid my zipper, put my thumbs down my loosened waistband, and paused to look one more time at Dennis. I was hoping he would feel satisfied that I was willing to follow his orders this far, and maybe tell me I didn’t need to go any further.
Dennis bugged out his eyes and thrust his head forward. “What are you waiting for, you freaking idiot? We don’t have all day.”
I looked at Babcock and Dempsey. Asking them to intervene was pointless. Independent thinking wasn’t one of their gifts. Besides, there was no upside for them. Who wanted to hack off Dennis? Even adults gave him wide berth.
I bent over, pushing my pants down to my ankles. I paused and gazed at my kneecaps. I didn’t want to stand up straight. Rivulets of sweat ran down my back, and for some reason my legs prickled like ants were swarming all over them.
“Stand up, you freak,” Dennis said.
Slowly, I stood. Dennis folded his arms, nodded, and looked me over, up and down.
“Look; he’s got no hair. He’s bald,” Dennis said, pointing at me and laughing. Dempsey massaged the back of his neck and looked away. Babcock snorted halfheartedly. Dennis looked at them through half-slit eyes. Their increasing discomfort seemed like betrayal.
With his attention briefly diverted, I hunched over to pull up my pants. A rock whizzed by my head and through the brush behind me.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Dennis asked.
I stood up and threw my hands out in a gesture of pleading. “I’m pulling up my pants,” I cried, unable to contain the fear, rage, and grief strangling my voice.
Dennis pointed at me. “No, you’re not. You’re going to stand there until I tell you to do something else,” he said through gritted teeth, then began to pace again, never breaking eye contact.
I pushed my pants down, then waited.
He stopped walking and simply considered me, his eyes vacant and unfeeling. He leaned again on the rock he had been sitting on. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. His first inhalation and exhalation were noisy. “My mom says your dad tried to kill himself,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“She said they brought him into the emergency room, OD’d on pills or something,” he said. Dennis’s mom was an emergency-room nurse.
It seemed strange to be drawn into such a serious conversation with someone while my pants were pooled around my ankles. But this subject was so grave that I began to forget my humiliating circumstances. “That’s a lie,” I said.
Dennis smirked. “My mom says he’s a drunk too.”
Dennis formed his lips into the shape of an O to make smoke rings. I watched the bone and muscle just under his ears bulge out, then snap to shoot the blue ovals forward. They flew out, one after another, each perfectly formed. Then they wafted upward and hung in the still, humid air, eventually changing shape like lazy jellyfish.
My mind began working. About a month earlier, I’d half-awakened in the middle of the night to the sounds of people running around upstairs. The din hauled me up from the depths of slumber like a deepwater fish fighting in a net. I finally settled into the gray waters just below the surface of consciousness. I could hear Nanny and my mother speaking in pressured whispers at the top of the stairs. I was almost certain I could hear the voices of two men as well, official and serious, but kind and reassuring at the same time. Then I noticed the rumbling of a large car or truck in our driveway and blinking red and white lights through the slats on my window shutters, flashing onto the wall. Always a sound sleeper, though, I soon disappeared back into the murk of slumber.
The next morning, I lay in bed and wondered if what I had heard the night before had been a dream or an actual event. This was a reasonable question. In my life, nighttime was when the really strange stuff would happen.
When I was little, I would sometimes go to bed in my house in Greenwich and wake up in the morning in a different place. Once I went to sleep in my own bed, and the next morning when I opened my eyes I was staring up at a tangle of water pipes on the ceiling. This was unsettling. The pipes hadn’t been on my ceiling when I’d gone to sleep the night before. Unless a workman had managed to rearrange the plumbing infrastructure of my home without waking me, then something was wrong. I sat up and looked around, wondering if I had been teleported to another planet, like Captain Kirk and Spock on Star Trek. I was relieved to find my sister sleeping on a blow-up mattress next to me.
Later we discovered that we were in the finished basement at my cousin’s house in New York.
Our being teleported while sleeping happened more than once. Years later, I learned that my father would sometimes go off the rails in the middle of the night, and my mother would scoop my sister and me out of bed and take us to the home of one or another of my aunts. Later in the day, I might vaguely remember being put into the cold backseat of the car and my mother laying a blanket on top of me or leaning me against my sleeping sister. Maybe I’d recall looking up at streetlights on I-95 through the rear window of our Maalox-yellow Dodge Dart as they rushed by, but I was never sure. Sometimes we’d only stay with my cousins for a day; other times we would be there for two or three. No one ever explained why we were there, how we got there, or how long we’d be there before we were beamed home again.
But on that Saturday morning a month or so before, when I’d gotten dressed and gone to the kitchen, I could smell that something was wrong. One of our dining room chairs was lying on its side, its arm broken. Nanny was in the kitchen, wiping down every square inch of countertop and cabinetry, almost taking the paint off them.
“Where’re Mom and Dad?” I asked, getting orange juice out of the fridge.
“Your father felt sick last night, and they went to the hospital. Everything’s fine,” she said. Nanny didn’t look at me. I knew she had rehearsed the answer.
My father didn’t come home for a few days. When he did, he spent more time in his bedroom than ever. Dennis’s story was plausible.
“Hey, numb nuts—you in there?” Dennis yelled, jerking me back into the present.
I nodded.
“Pull up your pants,” he said, his face relaxing into a catlike smile.
I tried to, but my clothes had become disarranged, knotted and twisted around my ankles and legs. I couldn’t maintain my balance. I fell over.
I lay on the ground, leaves and branches stuck to my pale, naked legs. Dennis, Babcock, and Dempsey laughed.
Then Dennis’s demeanor became serious. He glared. “If you say a word about this, I’ll tell everyone about your father. You understand?”
I nodded.
He threw his head to the side to get the hair out of his eyes again. I hoped it would come loose and fly off.
“Say hi to your sister for me,” he said.
I watched as he disappeared into the woods. Dempsey and Babcock got up and followed him. I listened as the sound of them moving through the thicket diminished until soon I couldn’t hear them anymore—except that every so often, the sound of one of them laughing in the distance punctured the silence.
After they’d left I sat down, cross-legged, near the edge of the Pit and lit another cigarette. My shirt was soaked with sweat; my pants were still unbuttoned, and my boxers were now twisted around my hips. After two drags, I felt nauseous and gagged, nearly throwing up into the Pit. I pulled my knees into my chest and wrapped my forearms around my shins. I was cold.
I knew these woods, yet now they seemed alien and unreal. The surfaces of things were flat, two-dimensional, slightly out of focus. Everything was far, far away, like I was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I shook my head sharply and wondered if my ability to rightly perceive the world would ever return to normal, or if something had shorted inside my head and I would see it this way forever.
Why am I so upset? I asked myself. So what if a psycho made me pull my pants down? It’s not like the whole world was there to see it.
I closed my eyes and sat cross-legged, trying to find a feeling to go with my experience. I had cried when Dennis made me stand in front of him with my pants down, but now I felt vacant and half-alive.
To my right I heard the sudden crack of a twig. Afraid it was Dennis returning, I looked that way quickly.
It was a fawn. He was a tan smudge, thirty feet away, unaware of me. He shook his head to chase away the horseflies swirling around his nose. His legs were spindly, his sides covered with white spots. He was sniffing along the ground, perhaps in search of food, perhaps because another animal had recently passed by and its scent had captured the fawn’s attention. Its ears were comically large and twitchy.
I lay frozen, watching him, for so long that my right leg fell asleep. Eventually the pain of it became unbearable. Little by little, I shifted my weight to get my right ankle out from under my left thigh, but the crack of a dry twig snapping under my bony butt sounded the alarm. The fawn’s tail shot up, revealing its white underside. He crouched down and froze; his legs trembled, poised to flee. I’d spooked him good, but he didn’t run. He looked at me, and gradually the fear that passed back and forth in our gazes dissolved. The fawn’s legs soon relaxed and straightened, and I lay down on my side with my head propped up on my hand. After a long while of looking at each other, our eyes registered agreement. We belonged here and to each other.
The fawn sneezed, its head jerking downward. I blinked and he was gone.
How do we explain these fugitive graces?
On the last day of summer vacation, I made a makeshift altar out of a piece of plywood placed on top of four rocks, and I celebrated my first Eucharist with Hi-C Fruit Punch and a hamburger roll. My congregation consisted of blue jays and ravens, a few puzzled chipmunks, and a rabble of squirrels, all interested in the fate of the bread when I was done. I knew most of the words of the liturgy by heart, and the ones I didn’t know I made up. What inspired a Catholic boy to perform this heresy still puzzles me.