by John Smelcer
James knelt to look at it closer.
“I think you knocked yourself out, Little Fella’,” he said softly.
He watched it for a minute. He could tell that it was breathing, and the eye facing up tried to open a few times.
“I can’t leave you here while you come to,” he said in a sing-song fashion. “Something might eat you.”
James gently scooped up the small bird and carried it in the warm cup of his hands, occasionally stroking its tiny head with a fingertip and speaking to it, comforting it. By the time he was almost home, it was clear the bird had died. With his bare hands James dug a shallow grave in the dirt at the edge of a parking lot and buried the little bird, placing a handful of dandelions atop the mound.
When he arrived outside his house, James could hear his father shouting from inside the living room. He crept beneath an open window so he could hear.
“I was supposed to be something!” his father yelled, and then James heard a loud crash, like something being thrown against a wall.
“I wasn’t supposed to sell insurance all my goddamn life!” he screamed.
James heard another crash.
A moment later, James heard his father’s heavy footsteps going down the stairs to the front door. He dashed around the side of the house and hid, peering around the corner. He saw his father slam the front door, stumble on the cement steps to the driveway, and climb into his truck, slamming the squeaky door. His father started the engine and slammed his fist against the dashboard before backing out of the driveway hurriedly, then screeched the tires on the pavement as the truck vanished around a turn in the street.
James went upstairs and saw the mess his father had made. All of his father’s trophies were on the floor. Pieces of wood and silver-and-gold-gilded plastic were everywhere. Little figurines of poised quarterbacks lay faceup and facedown, some still with the football in hand, some without. Empty beer cans were strewn amid the shattered trophies.
For the next half hour James cleaned up the mess, placing all the broken pieces in a box.
THE PLAN
Friday, June 5, 1980
THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL AT Latham High School was like the last day at any high school: students cleaned out their lockers, returned their textbooks after removing the well-marked, ubiquitous brown-paper grocery bag covers, signed year books, exchanged phone numbers, hugged, shook hands, and said goodbyes for the summer. Boyfriends and girlfriends made promises to stay together no matter what. Not one student looked back at the school building after dashing out the wide-open doors into the springtime day.
That evening, Sebastian’s mother showed him the article in the local newspaper listing the students who had earned a 4.0 GPA. The list was small for a school of over a thousand students. She had circled Sebastian’s name.
With an expression of pride, Sebastian showed the article to his father, sitting as usual in his recliner watching the nightly news. His father glanced at the paper for an instant before handing it back to his son.
“So what? You wanna medal?”
A look of disappointment replaced the previous hopeful expression.
“No, I just thought you’d, you’d . . .” Sebastian tried to get the words out.
“What? Speak up. Quit mumbling. You got mush in your mouth?”
“I thought you’d be proud of me.”
His father grabbed the newspaper from Sebastian’s hand and flung it across the room, the pages separating in midair, fluttering all over the room like a fistful of dry leaves.
“What’s there to be proud of? Huh? Because you got good grades at school? You’re supposed to get good grades at school. Do you think anyone puts my name in the newspaper every time I do something good at work?”
“I just . . . I just, just tha, tha, thought . . .” Sebastian stuttered the way he sometimes did when he was nervous or agitated around his father.
“Stop stuttering! You sound like a damn imbecile.”
Sebastian should have known better. Only a couple months earlier, he had broken a world record in weightlifting for his age and weight. There had even been a story in the newspaper with his picture and everything. But when Sebastian showed it to his father, the man crumpled it up and tossed it into the fireplace. Sebastian watched as the paper burst into flames, vanishing as quickly as his sense of accomplishment. More than anything, a boy wants his father to be proud of him. In their myriad and desperate attempts to win their father’s approval, many sons try to be like their father. Some eventually become their father, for better or for worse. Some break the cycle of abuse and crushing indifference; some become yet another link in the long chain forged by years of abuse—an unending legacy passed down from father to son, like a grandfather’s pocketknife or pocket watch.
Sebastian promised himself that if he ever had children, he would tell them how much he loved them every single day of their life. He would never do the terrible things to his children that his father had done to him. He would build them up, not tear them down.
Try as he might—an overachiever extraordinaire—Sebastian was coming to realize that nothing he could ever do would be good enough for his father.
“You think you’re better than me?” his father had said as the paper burned. “Listen to me, punk. You’ll never amount to anything! I’m ten times the man you’ll ever be.”
That night, Sebastian’s mother came into his room before bedtime with the newspaper. She had cut out the small article listing those students with straights As.
“Here,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and handing him the small piece of paper. “Keep this in your yearbook. It’s part of the story of your life. I’m sorry your father is so . . . harsh,” she said, after thinking of the right word.
Sebastian took the clipping, looked at it, and then looked at his mother.
“Why don’t you help us?” he asked. “I mean, why don’t you do something?”
His mother looked him in the eyes.
“What am I supposed to do?” she said sharply. “I can’t divorce him. I don’t have a good job. I couldn’t support us. Where would we live? We wouldn’t have a nice house like this.”
Her brown eyes began to tear up. Sebastian could feel his mother’s sadness that she was unable to stand up for her sons.
“But isn’t our happiness more important?” he asked.
“I don’t have a choice,” she said, wiping her face and standing up to leave. “You boys just don’t appreciate how hard your father works to provide for us. You need to learn to deal with him on your own.”
“Do you love him?”
His mother paused in the doorway, only for a moment, before she walked away without answering.
Around noon the next day, Saturday, the Savage family drove to a nearby park to attend the annual employees’ family picnic hosted by the insurance company where Mr. Savage worked. Even though it was cloudy, James wore dark sunglasses. Their father introduced the boys to Mr. McCready, one of his colleagues who had just moved to town from Seattle a week earlier.
“That’s some firm handshake you got there,” he said to Sebastian. “Your father has been so helpful since we moved here. You’re really lucky to have such a good father.”
Sebastian and James looked at each other, rolling their eyes.
Mr. and Mrs. McCready had two teenage daughters about the same age as Sebastian and James. They were beautiful, with long red hair and freckles. Both girls were tall and slender. During the picnic, the four teenagers sat at their own table, apart from the adults, the brothers sitting across from the sisters talking about school and the classes and teachers the girls might have in the fall. The whole time the brothers flirted with the sisters, asking if they could bring them another soda or a hotdog or a slice of watermelon. They wiped the picnic table seats with their shirt sleeves before the girls sat down.
&nbs
p; “Your dad sounds really nice,” said the older one, whose red hair was longer than her sister’s.
Sebastian and James exchanged glances again.
“Yeah . . . well . . . don’t believe everything you hear,” said James.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Nothing,” replied Sebastian.
James wanted to change the subject.
“So, what kind of movies do you like to see?” he asked the younger sister, sitting across from him. “The Empire Strikes Back is playing at the theatre. Did you see Star Wars?”
Both girls nodded that they had.
When it was time to leave, Mr. Savage came to get the boys. He seemed in no mood to linger.
“Let’s go,” he commanded.
“But, Dad, can’t we stay a little longer?” Sebastian pleaded, subtly nodding his head at the girls.
The girls smiled up at the man.
“Yeah, just a few more minutes? Please?” added James, holding his hands together as if he was humbly praying or begging for mercy.
The youngest girl giggled at the gesture.
“I said now!” the father snarled, seizing both boys by the ear and yanking them gruffly off their seats. He looked around to see if any of the adults were watching.
“You think those girls want anything to do with pathetic losers like you!” he said just loud enough that the girls heard.
After closing the car doors, Mr. Savage turned around and smacked Sebastian with the back of his hand.
“Next time I tell you to do something you better shut up and do it! You hear me?”
Sebastian glared back at his father without answering, biting his lip so hard it bled.
On the drive home, fuming in the back seat and rubbing his cheek, Sebastian whispered into his brother’s ear.
“That’s the last straw. We gotta do something. I can’t take any more of this.”
Back home after the picnic, Sebastian was preparing to wash his motorcycle on the front lawn, where the policeman had stopped the fight with his brother only a week earlier. He had already rolled out the garden hose and turned on the faucet. He had even brought out a radio, an old towel, a rag, and a bucket full of warm, soapy water with an orange sponge floating on top of the white suds. He had just turned on the radio when his brother came out.
“Can I help?” James asked.
“I’m not paying you anything,” replied his defensive older brother.
“I figured as much. I’m bored.”
The early summer afternoon was cloudless and windless. Summers in the interior of Alaska are much warmer than folks from the lower 48 imagine. The record is a sweltering 99 degrees, set in the decade after the Klondike Gold Rush. Both boys wore shorts and tee shirts. It felt good to be outside on such a nice day listening to the radio, which was playing Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” which was topping the charts.
“What are you gonna do this summer?” asked James, while washing the spokes of the rear tire.
“Don’t know,” replied Sebastian, scrubbing the front tire rim. “Work a couple days a week at the grocery store, read a few books, exercise, jog, chase girls. What about you?”
“I got a big nothing. I’ll probably just sleep in ’til noon every day. Maybe mow some lawns and wash some cars for spending money. Mostly, I’ll be trying my best to avoid Dad.” James touched a spot beneath his right eye with two fingertips.
Sebastian looked at his brother’s face, at the black eye from the blow their father had given him on learning about his suspension from school.
The boys were quiet for a few minutes, each focusing on washing the motorcycle, thinking.
Sebastian broke the silence.
“I have an idea about that,” he said.
James stopped cleaning.
“About what?”
“I have an idea of how we can avoid Dad and make him regret he ever called us a pair of wussies.”
“Yeah? What is it?”
“I was thinking we could climb Mount Sanford.”
James dropped the sponge and stood up to stretch his legs. Sanford was one of the tallest mountains in Alaska, and therefore one of the tallest in North America. The brothers had talked about climbing it one day, but James had always thought Sebastian meant when they were older, like in their twenties.
“You think Mom and Dad will let us do that?” he asked.
“Of course not. But what if they didn’t know?” replied Sebastian, drying off the gas tank.
“How’s that?”
“We tell them we’re going to some summer camp, like that wilderness survival camp we went to last year. We tell them we’ll even pay for it ourselves.”
“You think they’ll go for it?”
“Think about it, Dufus,” Sebastian said. “What parents wouldn’t want a week or two away from their kids? They could go on vacation or walk around the house naked if they want. We tell them we’re going to camp or something like that, and instead we go climb the mountain. I already got a camp brochure to show them. We already have all the gear. We just need to buy food for the trip. I’ll take photographs to prove to Dad what we really did. He can raise hell all he wants, but the proof will be there. It’s something he’s never done, and I think if we pull it off, he’ll back off. He’ll have to respect us.”
James could see that Sebastian had clearly thought through his plan.
“I like it. It’s devious,” he said with a sly smile. “And stop calling me a dufus!”
Truth be told, the plan wasn’t as rash as it sounded. While their friends were like most teenagers—fearful of getting lost in the woods, always watching television or playing video games, on the phone all day, or hanging out at the mall—Sebastian and James felt at home in the wilderness. Much of their lives, especially the summers, had been spent in the woods. Both boys knew how to climb and rappel, how to survive in the wilds of Alaska.
For years, their father got rid of the boys by sending them to summer camps where they learned mountaineering. They had even gone to an arctic survival camp during the first week of January, when the temperature plummeted to 50 degrees below zero. The wind chill factor drove the temperature down to an unbearable -70 or even -80. From their years of training, the boys had learned how to traverse steep chasms from one side to the other and how to master a rappelling tower. Sebastian had even mustered the courage to learn the Australian Crawl, a technique in which the climber runs face-forward down the cliff wall instead of the more traditional method of facing upward during the slow, backward descent. Only two summers earlier, Sebastian had spent ten days at a climbing and outdoor survival school in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California. He had become an ardent climber, buying his own equipment, mostly used and outdated.
At one camp, both boys had learned how to navigate on glaciers, ice climb, and how to avoid dangerous crevasses and moulins. Both had studied basic first-aid training. More than once, despite their mother’s vociferous concerns, their father had let them go backpacking or hunting on their own for days. Sebastian had shot his first caribou the previous fall when he and James went up into the Crazy Mountains about sixty miles north of Fairbanks toward the Yukon River. Over the years, Sebastian and James had had harrowing encounters with bears and wolves, encounters they would never share with their parents. But most importantly, the only time the brothers ever really got along was when they were out hunting, fishing, or climbing together.
Alaska’s wilderness was the glue that bound the brothers together.
“Mom would have a cow if she found out!” James laughed.
“Then we make sure she doesn’t find out . . . neither of them. When it’s time, we’ll load all our gear into the back of my truck under the bed cover so they can’t see it.”
“There’s only one problem with your plan,” said James, l
ooking thoughtful. “Won’t we need bottled oxygen to climb that high?”
“No, Dillweed. It’s only a little over 16,000 feet. High altitude sickness doesn’t really affect climbers until around 18,000 feet. You don’t need those bottles until you get into the Death Zone.
“What’s the Death Zone?”
“Above 8,000 meters there’s not enough oxygen. The air is so thin that it affects your ability to think clearly, and you feel tired all the time. Your blood becomes so thick that it’s hard to keep warm. A lot of climbers have died in the zone from cerebral edema or pulmonary edema.”
“What’s pulmonary enema?”
“Cerebral edema is caused by swelling of the brain, which causes a loss of mental and motor function, kind of like being really drunk and disoriented.”
James grimaced.
“And pulmonary edema affects the lungs so you can’t breathe. It’s much more common.”
“I hate the stupid metric system. How many feet is 8,000 meters?” asked James.
“Around 25,000 feet,” replied Sebastian, doing a quick calculation in his head. “You’d need bottled oxygen on K2 or Everest, but even then, some people have made it to the top without it.”
James seemed impressed.
“How tall are K2 and Everest?” he asked, knowing his brother would have the right answer, the way he always did in Mr. Betters’ Western Civilization class.
“About 28,000 and 29,000 feet, respectively, give or take,” replied Sebastian.
“How do you know all that crap?”
“Because I read books, Dickwad,” said Sebastian. “You should try it some time.”
James stuck his tongue out in defiance.
“You’re so funny . . . looking,” he replied.
For a few minutes, while Sebastian finished drying the rest of the motorcycle with the towel, the brothers talked about their father and how he was always putting them down for one thing or another.