by Daniel Kraus
When Harnett one day settled in Wisconsin, it was Elroy Gatlin who split his door with an axe. A year later in Michigan, it was Wentworth Gatlin who shattered his windows, hollering for justice. Then it was other sons and other grandsons, spread across vast stretches of time and geography. Sixteen years would pass until the day I arrived at Harnett’s door, and though Bloughton had served as his best hiding place yet, he was confident that the Gatlins would one day be the end of him. It all made sense now: the cabin’s disarray, the refusal to engage in a community. For a decade he’d expected every day in Bloughton to be his last.
No one could track like Boggs. He loved Harnett, and Valerie, too, but if he could not be part of a family, there would be no family at all. It was just a few weeks after the Rat King’s discovery that Boggs was able to lead the Gatlins right to them. Harnett and Val were sleeping in a barn when the ambush came. Three attackers, shouting the Gatlin name and swinging shovels and picks. Harnett was terrified. Not because they could kill him but because they knew what he had done. Seeing the Gatlins with raised tools? For Harnett it was like looking in a mirror. He didn’t think about Val. He didn’t think about the baby inside her. He thought only of himself, and when one of the Gatlins swung a shovel, he ducked. The blade ripped through Val’s ear. It sounded like a rubber band snapping. Then Harnett heard the blood. Even then he didn’t move to protect her. He ran. When Val pulled herself up, the Gatlins, perhaps not expecting a woman, were startled and backed off.
My mother had saved Harnett, not the other way around, and now that it was spoken aloud it didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the depth of Harnett’s regret and the tsunamic force of his love, which had not only survived sixteen years but threatened to usurp even my own. Everything about him, every impressive quality, every deplorable routine, stemmed from his failure to save the one person who had saved him.
“Forgive,” Lionel gasped. “Yourself.”
The world had ended. The sharp salt odor made me sick. We were perched above the beach on an outcropping. I staggered to the edge. Sand coated my tongue. The bleeding razor of sun healed to smooth gray tissue. I sank to my exhausted knees and let the pounding waves become the blood in my veins. The image of my injured and bleeding mother was more vibrant than any I’d had of her in months. I stretched until I was flat on my stomach. Icy patches of grass adhered to my cheeks. Something even colder met my outstretched fingers.
It was a single tiny gravestone reigning quietly over the entire Atlantic. The engraving promised a fittingly anonymous end to the life of a Digger:
LIONEL MARTIN 1923—
Harnett’s voice: “Lionel, no.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t show me this.”
“Don’t turn away from it.”
“You can’t go through with it.”
Lionel’s voice was proud. “Your beliefs are not mine.”
“A burial, after everything you’ve seen?” Lionel managed a smile. “What a spot. What a world. Look at it.”
I drew myself up and did what he said. Lionel was right; it had been worth the long and painstaking trip, and I felt a debt to these men for taking me so far. Moments later I knew how to repay it. Lionel had insisted that this spot was important; Harnett had asked me that morning if I could specify at will. So I forced open my eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and fingers, and leaned backward until I fell onto the soft blanket of Lionel’s future bed, the thick ocean my sheets, my every sense dreaming with exquisite detail—
—the split oak forking overhead—
—the capillary universe of leafless treetops threading the horizon—
—cursive alphabets invented by our footprints—
—the fibula of beach lying hard and gleaming below—
—the bilious curdle of surf—
—rock scatterings that drew invisible pentagrams between points—
—the shape of the outcropping itself: a fallen maple leaf of stone—
—all of it fading now, fading, darkening, darker, dark.
7.
LAHN WAS MAYBE TEN years younger than Lionel and said very little. Words, however, were unnecessary—the older man knew by the rap of knife against cutting board which dish Lahn was fixing. Despite his exhaustion, Lionel rhapsodized about Lahn’s Vietnamese cuisine, and made us partake in his sweet-and-salty noodles despite Harnett’s suggestion that we just grab a couple of onions for the road. Lahn declined an invite to join us, instead smiling and bowing and leaving the room.
Harnett looked different to me, especially when the dinnertime conversation veered back to my mother. With each word I saw cords of pain pull at the corners of his eyes and carve at his forehead. These markings, previously unnoticed by me, lent his features a startling vulnerability. For the first time, I felt the urge to put my hand to his back and feel how similar his shudders were to my own.
“You hold her too high,” Lionel said. “You’ve made her out as an ideal, and that’s dangerous, Ken. Dangerous to you.”
“What am I supposed to do?” he said. “I remember how I remember.”
Lionel pointed a knotted finger at me. Under his nails, dirt. Grave dirt, my mind thought automatically. His own.
“The world’s foremost authority is right here! I bet he knows stories that would make you think you never knew her at all. All you have to do is ask. Go ahead.”
Harnett narrowed his eyes. “Why would I want to do that? Think that I never knew her? That makes no sense.”
“No, what you’re doing now makes no sense.” Lionel scooped up rice and tucked it inside his mouth. “Tell us something about your mother, Joey.”
“Like what?”
“Something not-so-good. Even bad.”
Harnett clanged his fork to his plate. “The kid doesn’t want—”
“And what’s with this ‘kid’ and ‘Harnett’ business? It’s not natural.”
Harnett shut his mouth and chewed. Lionel nodded at me in encouragement. Various scenarios presented themselves—my mother elbowing with unrepentant force a parent who was talking during my trumpet solo; unleashing a cyclone of expletives when refrigerator magnets succumbed to the weight of A-plus papers—but none of them fit.
“See, he’s got nothing,” Harnett said.
“No!” I opened my mouth and waited for words to fill it. “When … before seventh grade … I was just about to start seventh grade.” The details of the story were foggy, but I kept going, uncertain of where I was leading myself. “And she took me to the store to buy school supplies. Folders and pencils and that kind of stuff. But I was starting gym that year—”
I broke off. This was an embarrassing story. But Lionel was waiting, and even Harnett was unable to conceal his curiosity. I took a breath and continued.
“And we had to buy a jockstrap. For gym.”
Harnett swallowed. “You needed a jockstrap for gym?”
“Well, no,” I said. “Not really. But I didn’t know that. It was my first year in a real gym class. A jockstrap was on the list. I thought I’d get in trouble or something if I didn’t have everything on the list. So once we got done buying folders and stuff, we got to the jockstrap part and she goes back to the sports section and finds them, except she doesn’t know what size to get. So she takes out a size small and stretches it out in front of me.”
Harnett was looking at me like he didn’t get it.
“I mean, there were kids everywhere! We were right in the middle of a store! People were staring! She flipped off like three of them!”
Tears were brimming from Lionel’s eyes as he tried not to choke on his rice. Harnett, meanwhile, knitted his brow. Finally he nodded curtly.
“She had to gauge the size of your manhood,” he concluded.
“My manhood?” I appealed to Lionel. “Who talks like that?”
Lionel pounded the table with a fist, flecks of rice shooting from his lips.
Harnett squinted at me. “And you found this embarrassing.”
&nb
sp; “You are an alien!” I shouted. Harnett frowned. I shook my head helplessly at Lionel and found that I was laughing, too. I gave in to it and laughed until my back hurt. Lionel groaned and wiped his eyes with a napkin. Harnett shrugged, picked up his fork, and resumed stuffing in noodles as if the two of us weren’t there.
“Sounds like Valerie,” Lionel sighed. “Just as soon kick your ass as say excuse me.”
We adjourned to the living room. Lahn toyed with a power strip and I caught my breath: Christmas lights. Bulbs of red and green and gold gave the otherwise shaded room a cozy holiday hue. Moments later I heard the unmistakable tinkling of the only Christmas album my mother could listen to without pretending to retch, A Charlie Brown Christmas. The combination was too much; still weakened from my laughing fit, I had no defense to the tears that smeared my vision. I rubbed my face and looked away. Lionel pretended not to notice and extended a hand so that Lahn, squatting upon an ottoman, could massage his knotted digits.
“If what you’re asking me is should you do something, like go to California, try to steal the book, my answer is no,” Lionel said. He gave Lahn his other hand. “You know how Baby is. He might have already tossed the thing in a fire.”
“Not this time,” said Harnett. “And the book—Lionel, it was thick.”
Lionel flexed his fingers and smiled at Lahn. “You’re a godsend,” he said. “You’ll come by tomorrow morning as usual? There’s a ham we might as well cook.”
Lahn nodded to Harnett and me before exiting. Lionel watched him go and sighed.
“Baby calls me, you know,” Lionel said. “Somehow he got the number. Sometimes he’ll call, on my birthday or Father’s Day, even, and he’ll sound so happy. He’ll be laughing like a little boy.”
Harnett leaned forward. “He calls you? Here?”
“Then other times, it’s tears. Crying so bad I can’t make out a word. Not that I need to—it’s always the same few things. He wants compliments or attention. Sometimes he just wants money. What he really wants, of course, is forgiveness, but that’s one thing I can’t give.”
Harnett was practically out of his seat. “What else does he say?”
Lionel relaxed his limbs and closed his eyes. “It’s hard, raising boys. They want to become you, but also they hate you. Those are competing desires. Put them together and you have a form of suicide. Think of it. Generations upon generations of men killing themselves over and over, and for what? Because love and hate, both are too powerful, and no boy—and no father, for that matter—can live up to either.”
The music was melancholy. I heard the faint slap of palms to thighs.
“Well,” Lionel said. “Some of us are ancient.”
The cane was dragged across the carpet. Veins in his neck articulated as he brought himself to his feet. Harnett stood but did not approach. The cane gingerly tested the floor as if the carpet might conceal quicksand, and then Lionel proceeded across the room until the two men faced each other.
“Can’t you stay just one day?”
“The kid,” Harnett said. “School.”
Lionel’s eyes took on a faraway look, as if only now recalling. He winked at me.
“Test on the last day of school,” he said. “Must be a tough teacher.”
I cleared my throat. “He is.”
They looked nothing alike, these two men, but I could see how the mighty bow of my father’s back might one day collapse into Lionel’s stoop. There were other similarities, in their arms and hands and in the web of lines spiraling from their eyes. Harnett was becoming Lionel and Lionel was becoming oblivion.
“So long, then,” the old man said.
My father had carried this man from the ocean, across the cemetery, up the hill, through the woods. Now he could not touch him.
“Ice those muscles,” Harnett said. “Stay off your feet.”
“Will do.”
“We’ll be back.” Harnett looked at his feet. “It won’t be long.”
“Sure, sure,” Lionel said, nodding. He inhaled sharply and struck out with his cane. Briefly a hand clutched Harnett’s shoulder.
“You drive safe, now,” Lionel said.
The shoulder was released. The floor shook with the minute trembles of two feet, one cane, two feet, one cane. Gentle ripples disturbed two cooling cups of coffee. Christmas music continued. A distant bedroom door clicked shut. Moments later came the sounds of water hitting a sink, medicine-bottle clatters, mucus risen by a series of violent coughs. In his absence, the colored bulbs revealed everything.
8.
THE CAB LIGHT HAD long since been disabled, but Harnett let me rig the flashlight so it burned directly onto my textbook. The letters of each sentence scattered like insects.
“All those phone calls Boggs made, I know what he really wanted.” Harnett had been edgy since we left. His left knee bounced incessantly. I could see perspiration drying upon the steering wheel. “He wants the treasure.”
As determined as I was to study, some lures are irresistible. “Treasure?”
Harnett smirked, but kept his eyes on the road. “A career like Lionel’s, he could be living in a mansion right now. Two mansions. It’s just not his way.”
“He kept it all?”
“Remember who we’re talking about. The man used to own the East Coast. You heard him talk about Scotland. His time in Egypt. He could fill a museum.”
“Where is it? Did you ever see it?”
Harnett shrugged. “Occasionally I saw things. Where it all went to, I have no idea. But everyone knows it’s out there somewhere.”
“So he’s just sitting on it?”
“What would you expect him to do?”
“Give it to someone, at least.”
“To who?”
“You.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because you’re practically his—”
The word hung unspoken, tossing in the chilly air like our breaths.
Harnett’s expression, troubled for so many miles, loosened with a mild amusement. “Even if that were true, you’re forgetting that there were two of us.”
The pavement thumped beneath our tires with lulling regularity. Through the windshield, the enduring procession of painted road dashes. Beyond my window, the vacuum of night.
“I took your mother to a drive-in once. The movie happened to be about a cemetery caretaker. We thought it was pretty funny at first. This guy found out that if he put black pins in his cemetery map, the people who owned those plots ended up dying in freak accidents. He’s got all the power in the world: a black pin means death. I didn’t think much of it, it was just some stupid little movie. But afterward Val was quiet, like it really shook her up. She said, ‘Didn’t you see the white pins?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said, ‘There were white pins. He had white pins, too. If the black pins killed them, what do you think the white pins did?’
“She wanted me out of digging. It took some dumb movie for me to see it. If she could, she would give me a million white pins and I would just go scattering them like Johnny Appleseed. After we got away from the Gatlins and got her ear fixed, things were different. She started to not hear things. That included confessions and apologies. There are things I tried to tell her, I swear, only now she couldn’t hear. Or wouldn’t. The injury seemed rather convenient.
“You were too perfect when you came out. It was like you had nothing to do with me. Like you were something molded from the stuff I brought home on the bottom of my boots that somehow got mixed up in our bedsheets and that’s what impregnated her—a million dead men, not me. I know I’m not making any sense. But when I saw you it was like you were a white pin from that movie. You were life.
“She knew it, too. She packed her bags and wrapped you up. She just had that one demand. ‘You give me Chicago as a gift.’ That’s exactly what she said. What else had I ever given her? Or given you? I had to be happy I could give anything at all.”
Boggs had confirmed I can g
et anyone as my father’s slogan, but this, as much as anything, was proof of its falsehood. I could see her so clearly now, alone in an unfamiliar city, clutching a bawling infant and hobbled with a disfigured ear. Why had it taken me this long to recognize the tragedy of her solitude? She had been young and pretty and brilliant, yet to protect me she had gone into hiding. And not just from Antiochus Boggs and the Gatlins; she couldn’t risk landing another Ken Harnett, either.
As we sailed from one interstate to another, the words of the biology text imprinting themselves into my brain like grit into eyeballs, I began to think that my mother’s final act had been something inspired. North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa: by giving me to Harnett, she had released me from our shared reclusion, and now each state I passed through became my home, because home was anywhere with grass and dirt and stone, and my compatriots, my family, were those who waited beneath to greet me.
9.
BACK IN BLOUGHTON, I felt physical whiplash. Here, once more, was the cruel reality of a shabby two-room cabin off Hewn Oak Road, even smaller and quieter now beneath three inches of unblemished snow. It was Monday morning; we had made it back in time. Harnett collapsed into bed. While I changed clothes for school, I stared in disbelief at the calendar on the side of the sink. I had imagined millions of hatch marks and thousands of slashes, but it had only been three days since the incident in the shower room, not several lifetimes.
There was no point in bothering with first and second periods. I sat and washed down an onion with two cups of coffee before finally making that long walk through the snow. I waited until I heard the third-period bell ring and then entered the Congress of Freaks, keeping my head low to avoid the sight of anyone who had ever hurt or been hurt by me, and slipped into the classroom, where the celebratory mood of the rest of the building gave way to last-minute cramming and general disgruntlement. There was only one villain to grapple with today. I took my usual seat near the back.