“Hey!” I shouted, “slow down!”
“Dad!” he was calling. “There’s a guy!”
“What?”
“There’s a guy in the creek.” He was gulping.
“What are you saying?”
“It’s like he’s stuck under the bridge. He’s not moving.”
He led me on his bike back to the park. I didn’t call out to anyone to follow us. I think, like many others, I resist being alarmed until there’s no other choice.
He was fifty years old, perhaps a little older. Everything that would have been ordinary on a living person looked extraordinary now. His Adidas were still laced and tied in the bows he had made. His wrist watch had dark green weeds tangled around the band. He was on his side, his neck twisted, and his face turned into the ground. Somehow the current had begun to pull his sweater off. One of his arms was half out of its sleeve, and this gave him the appearance of a small boy tangled in his undressing. His back was naked except for streaks of mud like brush strokes across his white skin.
I climbed down to the concrete foundation of the bridge, which was slimy from the recent high water, and then stepped into the mud and stones where he lay. I touched him in that place just below the neck and between the shoulders that commonly collects life’s tensions. His flesh was cold and spongy from being in the water so long.
Neil stood on the bank above, his hands held out tensely at his sides, as if waiting for directions from me.
“I have to call the police, Neil,” I said, as I climbed back up the bank. And he turned to follow.
“No, you should stay.” I put my hand on his shoulder, and for the first time since he had come to get me, I looked directly into his face. His mouth was agape. I could see his top teeth. There was a knit in his forehead. “I’ll send one of the neighbors to wait with you. Right away,” I assured him. And then his face became smooth in the way all my children’s faces look, even the youngest, when they surrender to do what I ask.
I regretted leaving him before I had even gone. But it felt wrong to leave the body alone. What seemed most important was to set into motion all that needed to be done: the police could begin to find an explanation; the man’s family would know; a rescue squad would come to carry him out of the creek. It was as though a hole had been ripped in the day and I had to mend it.
The neighbors, one by one or in groups, were gathering by the bridge. Each one that heard the news would tell someone else. Like playing hot potato, they could barely hold what they knew before they needed to pass it on. It seemed a while before the police came, and during the wait, questions circulated through the gathering about the man. Everyone wanted to know as much as they could—a way, I think, of being responsible about something that you can otherwise do nothing about.
The younger children were turned away. My eleven-year-old, Brian, arrived on the scene with two of his friends and their bicycles. “How’d you know he was dead?” he asked me, still perched on his mountain bike and flicking his hair out of his eyes with a flip of his head, a new habit that I found particularly annoying. “You touched him?” he said, scrunching his face at his friends. His friends also scrunched up their faces, but more politely, probably in deference to me. They were all wearing T-shirts with the word Buckers written on the front in black marker.
They walked over to where Neil was standing with one of his friends. They were out of earshot, but I could see Brian nudging Neil, and then some general jostling amongst them and smiling. Neil smiled slowly and blushed, stretching the sleeves of his sweatshirt over his fingers as he held his arms out at his sides. He seemed to be glad to have this sudden admiration and relief from the tension, but there was also a restraint, as if he were aware these were probably not the right emotions for him to be having.
A woman nearby, still holding a garden shovel in one hand and both of her muddy work gloves in the other, tilted her head in my direction and said to her friend, “Ask him about it.”
Then the police arrived, and I felt relieved that she didn’t have a chance. People, one after another, pointed out the location of the body. One of the officers, who had been talking over his hand-held radio, probably notifying the ambulance, started to slip on the round stones of the creek bed as he climbed down. There were little gasps and some “Watch its!” from the crowd above him.
One officer put his finger to the man’s neck, checking his pulse, and the other unbuttoned his back pants pocket and pulled out a wallet. They looked at his identification; then they conferred with each other.
“Who was it that called us?” the officer with the wallet stood and asked.
Neil looked over at me. But it was Brian who shouted that I had.
The officer climbed up the bank with his notebook. He was slight with blond hair parted at the side.
“It was really my son.” I motioned to Neil.
Neil was wearing what Claire calls his stranger’s face, a passive, almost dull expression he tends to hide behind when he encounters someone new.
“What time would you say you found him, Neil?” the officer asked.
“‘Bout an hour.” Neil’s face was red. “I think he drowned.”
“It’s okay,” I said to Neil. He seemed guilty, as though the police believed he was somehow at fault.
After the ambulance had come, the other officer joined us. “You get all their information?” he said to his partner, giving us only a cursory glance, and I had the impression that without knowing what we had said, he already considered it insignificant.
“Do you know anything about him?” I asked.
The larger officer had hair even darker than mine, a black mustache, and heavy black eyebrows. He looked down at his notebook and almost imperceptibly turned his body toward his partner. In this way it seemed that he was slightly conferring with him. He pushed the brim of his cap up with his pen.
“He fits the description,” he said, “of someone missing in St. Louis Park.”
Maybe he was making this allowance to me because I had gone to the trouble of calling.
“We thought it was crazy,” his partner said.
“His wife made the report,” the dark officer said. “The culvert in front of their house clogged up during the storm Thursday night. There were so many leaves—they probably got thick and created a sort of dam. The driveway was flooding, so her husband went out with a pitchfork to work on the jam. It was rushing hard through the culvert when she went out—she thinks it carried him right through.”
As I tried to imagine this, Claire came home.
“There’s Mom!” Neil shouted, even though he was right next to us.
The larger officer turned in the direction of our house. The walkie-talkie resting on his hip was spitting static and the in-and-out announcements of the dispatcher. “You live right on the corner,” he said.
Claire was helping little Maggie out of the car. She’d bought three large pumpkins at the farmer’s market, one for each of the children, and she was setting them on the edge of the driveway. Claire’s movements are deft and graceful, no matter what she does. She has the kind of blond, straight hair that all the girls wanted when we were teenagers. She wears it to her shoulders now, and as she leaned down to take Maggie’s hand, it was falling around her face. We were all watching her, as if pulled out of the context of time, as if we had the leisure to do so.
“Don’t call her right now,” I said to Neil.
It must have been painful for him to watch her unload groceries from the car, unaware that we were standing there with the police in the middle of a tragedy. I was already saying in my mind the things I would tell her: “He must have slipped in the mud,” I would say; or, “When he had finally freed the blockage, an enormous rush of water knocked him down and carried him through the tunnels.…Like a damn piece of wood,” I would tell her.
“He looked a lot like Mr. Ferber.” Brian was comparing our neighbor to the man in the creek.
We were eating pizza on paper plates in the
middle of the living room floor. Claire had put a bed sheet over the carpeting to serve as a sort of picnic blanket. I was setting up Karate Kid on the VCR.
“I don’t know about that,” I said to Brian.
Maggie had fallen in love with her pumpkin and insisted that it be by her side all day. Claire or one of the boys or I would lug it around for her. Brian had drawn a face on it with a black felt-tip. And now Maggie was holding a piece of pizza up to its mouth and telling it to eat.
Neil was cross-legged on the floor, chewing his pizza seriously.
“Neil, didn’t he look a lot like Mr. Ferber?” Brian asked.
Neil had a little tomato sauce on the corners of his mouth. He was trying to bite through a slice, but the cheese slid off in one piece and was dangling down his chin.
“Good job!” Brian laughed.
Neil leaned over his plate and let the cheese drop from his mouth while he giggled.
Brian was bent forward, laughing with Neil. “Did you see that guy’s arm?” Brian was primed, he wanted to really make Neil laugh. “It was all twisted around, like it was on backwards, like a GI Joe doll’s or something.”
Neil put his hand over his mouth, holding in a laugh.
Little Maggie got caught up in the enthusiasm, naturally thought it had something to do with her. Laughing, she lifted her piece of pizza in the air.
Claire, staring at the three of them, an initial stage of disbelief on her face, said, “Now, that’s enough!”
Brian was cackling, unrestrained. “God,” he said, “was that strange or what…?”
I was on my knees at the edge of the sheet. I reached over and slapped him on the mouth.
He was kneeling too, sitting back on his heels. He lowered his head immediately, his blond hair falling around his face.
Neil lowered his face and looked like he might start crying, as if I had hit him too.
“Bruce?” Claire said.
She thought I was overreacting, so I gave her a grave look, something to compare the slap to.
Maggie hadn’t caught up with the present mood and was still laughing, playing some animated game with her pizza.
“Don’t you get it, fella?” I said. Brian had his chin tucked into his chest. “That man was dead. He could have been Mr. Ferber. Would that have been funny?”
Maggie was finally aware of the change of tone. She had grown quiet and was looking at us wide-eyed.
Claire reached over and put a hand on Brian’s neck.
I couldn’t look at Neil.
On Sunday, there was something written about the accident in the paper. It wasn’t a separate article, but included under the heading “NEAR-FLOODING CONDITIONS IN TWIN CITIES AREA CAUSE FOUR FATALITIES.” Two of the accidents were due to cars hydroplaning, and one was a car going over a flooded bridge. “Robert Enders,” it was written, “was swept into a city drainage canal and carried seven miles, where he was later discovered by a boy in the west Minnehaha Creek.”
Finding it in the paper made the event into something tiny and unreal, as if seeing it through the wrong end of a telescope. What we had found the day before had been reduced to a minor article, cluttered in with reports of fires and plane crashes. It was humbling, reminding me that tragedy is as random and even secret as the death of stars, how a life can dissolve and drift into particles, with so few even witnessing it. I was comforted knowing there would be others who saw the article, and that each of them would feel their own brief but particular grief about it.
But Neil didn’t recover as easily. “He’s afraid of everything lately,” Claire told me one day as we were pressing putty into the cracks of the sun room windows. We had a view of the boys and some of their friends as they played football in the yard. “I dread taking him in the car with me. He slams his foot down on the floor every time I approach a traffic light. Yesterday, he had all three of us testing our shoulder straps, even Maggie, sitting there in the driveway, lunging forward to see if they would catch us.”
I watched Neil resting the ball against his chest, looking for an open throw. The other boys were closing in on him, but he took his time, made a smooth pass to one of his friends, his arm cleanly following through and dropping to his side.
“But look at him,” I said to Claire.
“You only see what you want to,” she said, and proceeded to scrape some of the old glaze off the glass of the window, making an impatient scratching sound.
Claire is very opposed to greasy food, but every few months we have what is traditionally called “grease day.” It’s my own tradition, and the only time, really, when the kids and I get together to live out what I like to imagine might have been my life-style without Claire. On a Saturday morning in mid-November I put a pot of oil on the stove and fried doughnuts into the afternoon. Claire had conveniently found some shopping to do. The boys stood at the kitchen table press-cutting the rings out of the dough, and Maggie sat on a stool with a dish towel wrapped around her. We’d given her a paper bag full of sugar, and once a batch was cool, I would drop them into her bag and let her shake it up. She was very happy about this.
By three in the afternoon we were finished with the doughnuts, and I started to fry potatoes and fish and onion rings. The boys had set the table with paper plates, napkins, catsup, and large tumblers of Coke. I was pulling the fry basket full of fish out of the oil. I hadn’t let it drip long enough, and when I swung it out of the pan, oil trickled from the basket into a puddle by the flame. The puddle immediately ignited, and the size of the flame was enough to start the side of the pan on fire and eventually the whole pan. Then the mitt I had been holding the fry basket with caught on fire, and though I was quick to throw it off, I could feel that it had burned my wrist. The smoke detector was screaming, and this made Maggie hysterical. I was grimacing in pain, at the same time yelling to Brian to find the baking soda. All I could think was Don’t use water, use baking soda. Once Brian had found the Arm & Hammer, I sprinkled it around the pan—which helped—but the pan itself kept raging. The kitchen was full of smoke. I shouted at the kids to get out. I could barely see them. Then miraculously the flame in the pan disappeared. Neil had found the pan cover and smothered it.
We needed to open all the windows in the kitchen and close its doors. I deactivated the fire alarm, which wouldn’t quit buzzing. We moved the food into the sun room, and when Claire came home, we were all sitting there. Maggie was still crying, as if she’d come to the circular notion that she needed to cry because she was crying, and so on.
Claire took Maggie into her lap, and this helped reduce her sobbing to a soft gurgling lament. Brian and I had stacked the fried food on our plates. We held the plates in our laps, but neither of us had the additional presence of mind to start eating. My hand hurt, and I had wrapped a wet rag around it. We had put food on Neil’s plate, but so far he hadn’t taken it. He sat in a chair noticeably off in the corner, his arms folded on his chest.
I explained to Claire how Neil had saved the day.
“Well, you should be proud of yourself!” Claire exclaimed, still rocking Maggie.
“A fireman showed us what to do in Boy Scouts,” Brian interjected.
“So you know what to do, too,” Claire said to Brian. Claire looked over at Neil. He looked back at her.
“I hate this house,” he said.
“Honey, why do you say that?”
“Nobody knows nothing.”
Claire looked at me. But I was quiet, waiting for the inevitable.
“Accidents happen,” she said. “We’re all right now.”
“No, he was stupid.” Neil stood up. “With a stupid burned hand.” Then he walked out of the room.
I was watching the circle of grease widen on my plate, telling myself this was a natural reaction for him, not to take it too seriously.
“You need to talk to him,” Claire said.
A few days later I’d brought engineering specifications home from my office and was going over them at the kitchen table. Claire
was home from her teaching job. “Bruce?” she said from the kitchen door. I looked up to find her with a bundle of sheets in her arms. I could smell the urine. It was incongruous against her clean, pressed blouse. And immediately, before she even told me what it was about, I wanted to retreat into the clear white lines on my blueprints, convince myself that the assembly of a thermostat, something I knew about, could outweigh anything that might try to confound us in our home life. But I could smell my own boyhood, and I knew, in the way that a memorable smell is like a book you once read, which you forgot you read, but which you will always know deeply, that the sheets were Neil’s and that it meant his life was complicated now.
When I was eight years old, I used to make up reasons why I couldn’t contain myself at night. Because I was allergic to canned pineapple-grapefruit juice, I told myself, which I didn’t like, but which always seemed to be on sale and restocked in our cellar before we’d even gone through the last crate; or because my older brother, my nemesis, must be dipping my fingers in a cup of warm water at night. So I would sleep with my hands tucked under my body.
But the problem persisted, and it became clear that sleep was the culprit. It seemed I was defenseless against it. I fell into it at night, like Alice down her rabbit hole, and I knew that I dreamed, but I could never remember what. I’d awaken in the morning feeling as if I’d been through a horrible struggle, like a hero after his journey, and I’d find the bed wet, and I’d feel that if I was a hero, I was a hero fighting a losing battle.
“What do you want me to do?” I tossed my pencil down, feeling exasperated and humiliated, as if the sheets Claire was holding in front of me were my own.
“I have no problem with talking to him myself—put my degree in developmental psychology to use.”
“You could,” I said, leaning back in my chair, determined that if she was going to look at me like I was a jerk, I might as well act like one.
“But I don’t have something to share from my own experience—something that might be an enormous relief to him.”
She was talking about more than Neil’s bed-wetting. She was talking about why I hadn’t talked to him after the fire. And this brought to the surface something that had been nagging at me all along. I believed if Neil had taken her to the body, instead of taking me, she would have found a way to protect him.
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