The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  Stop the wheel. Look at Scott. He is lying in his bed ten days ago, holding Kate in his arms. Even as he is caught in her twisted web, he is lost in nostalgia for that first perfect love, that innocent adoration of youth. All he wants is something pure. He will remember Sally when he is a paunchy, beslippered man in a broken rocking chair wishing he could take a decent shit. Some things you never forget. Stupid, isn’t it? She was just a little girl. It was just a fleeting desire, a hummingbird of romance, tiny, unborn, and yet it lives in his mind like a hermit in a forest, building a shack, writing a manifesto of loss.

  He gets off the subway at Astor Place, walks west. It’s not too late to see a movie. He could head over to the Quad or down to the Angelika, but he doesn’t. Instead he crosses Broadway, takes Eighth Street all the way to Sixth Avenue, passing head shops and record stores, T-shirt emporiums and cheap shoe outlets. He is a man on a mission.

  The night is the temperature of the chill you get when someone walks over your grave. His coat is thin and he has no gloves, no scarf. There are only his memories to keep him warm. He takes Waverly to Eleventh Street. He is heading for his childhood home. It is like a beacon calling to him. He crosses West Fourth, passes the Bleecker Playground, where he used to play when he was a kid. An hour from now his brother, David, will stand on this very spot, waiting for his common sense to kick in, drawn downtown by the pull of his secret life. How strange that both brothers will come to the same spot on the same night. Perhaps they are more alike than they realize. Scott crosses Hudson, past what used to be an A&P. The memories are so thick now, they are like a veil hanging between him and the world. He remembers being eleven and standing on this very corner waiting for the light to change, and then, just as the cars started coming, yellow cabs gunning in at speed, he took off, racing across four lanes of traffic. It was a challenge, a dare.

  And yes, yes…there used to be a concrete boat in the playground and a tower that, if you stacked two garbage cans, could be climbed. Standing there, fifteen feet above the sandbox, you could take in the neighborhood, cast your eyes like a king over the broad expanse of Hudson Street, staring down at Abingdon Square Park, and the turnaround where Hudson hits Bleecker. You could stand on the lip of the tower looking down at all the other kids frozen in awe, pimpled across the concrete boat with its central, cabin-like interior, its thin moat of sand, and defining outer wall—back in the days before rubber mats and ergonomic climbing structures, back when a kid could still, in the course of ordinary, everyday playing, crack his skull on a wall or tumble from a rusty metal jungle gym to the hard concrete below. Before lawsuits and wheelchair ramps, before local news exposés and consumer protection reports. You could, hovering fifteen feet above the sandbox, live in the thrill of that moment before the jump, fear and elation coursing through your veins. It was for many kids the first time in their lives they ever took a risk, and that feeling—the electric threat of it—would live on in their minds well into old age. Every time they hovered on the verge of something dangerous, they would remember this moment. It was inherent in every thrill, just as your first kiss is embedded in every kiss that follows. Scott remembers standing on top of that concrete tower looking down. David was knees-down in the sand, staring up, mouth agape. He was two years older than Scott, but he never would have dared to climb the tower, never would have risked injury or death just to have a feeling. Scott remembers standing there, his palms still raw from where he’d pulled himself up on the concrete. His mother was at home. His father was at work. They had no idea that their youngest son was about to jump into a filthy sandbox, to leap and hang weightless over a maze of sharpened concrete. If they’d known they would have run screaming. Imagine all the things that can go wrong—the limbs broken, the fractured skull—and yet isn’t this the very heart of childhood? Those moments where you stand outside the realm of good sense, ready to do the unthinkable on a dare?

  It was a cool November day. Below him the traffic lights changed from green to red. He took a deep breath and jumped.

  At Greenwich Street he turns right, walks one block to Bank. Halfway down the street he can see the house, the brownstone he grew up in. It is a worn brick building, concrete stoop out front leading up to a weathered wooden door. Why does he come here? What brings him back? He is like a pigeon returning to the roost, a golden retriever walking a hundred miles to find the family it has lost. Every time he returns to New York he comes here, stands on the sidewalk staring up at the windows that used to be his. It is reassuring somehow, this revival, this return. The ghosts are all around him. They played stoop ball on this stoop. It snowed eighteen inches and he went outside and his foot came up without his boot. Why does he remember these things? What point is there in memory? Everything recedes. This is the nature of time. Now Sally Embrecht’s face is just a blur. She is a shape, a shadow on his brain. He remembers the feeling but not her face. What is the point of all this memory if the memories fade? How ridiculous to find something so important that you would hold on to it, cherish it, only to have the memory crumble in your hands. How maddening.

  This time, however, Scott has come for a reason. It is time to unbury a secret, to make things right. He stares up at the brownstone, three stories tall with a basement level. A duplex, with one apartment upstairs and one down. He crosses the street, stands staring up at the darkened windows of his childhood home. They played baseball in his bedroom, busted lightbulbs with fly balls, slid feetfirst into bases that weren’t there. He can close his eyes and picture every detail, the way the doorknob felt in his hand, the sound of his father’s knees cracking every night as he climbed the stairs, having cleaned up the kitchen, turned off the lights. It seems ridiculous, but the sound made him feel safe, the percussive cartilage pop of each knee on each stair. He remembers stifling August nights, the windows thrown open, all the city sounds pouring in, the ebb and flow of traffic mixed with the angry cries of grown men and women going insane in the heat. He had his first erection in that room, his first orgasm. Scott stands on his old front stoop remembering how in third grade he stopped on this very step and wet his pants after running home from school. His mother couldn’t answer the door fast enough. How delicious it felt, the warm wet spreading across his lap, running down his leg. He feels dizzy with the memory. He hasn’t eaten since breakfast, has flown three thousand miles today. His mother is asleep in her hotel room, a bottle of wine by the bed. His brother is who knows where. (Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue and closing in fast.) His father is a bag of ashes in his mother’s luggage. He rubs his hands together for warmth, jams them into his pockets.

  It’s been twenty years since Scott was last inside, but he can still picture the upstairs apartment as if it were yesterday. What he’s looking for is not inside, though. It’s in the tiny backyard.

  He goes around the corner to Bethune. There is a gate there, and through it he can see the back of his childhood home. This is where the Frisbees used to disappear, the footballs and tennis balls. Boys playing on the pitted macadam, stoop ball and stick ball. Foul a ball off and it disappears over a roof or through a window and you have to run like hell. He stamps his feet, trying to stay warm.

  The Halloween parade used to go right by here, back in the ’70s. It started at Westbeth and took Bethune to Bleecker. Every year they would stand on the corner and watch it go, his mother, his father, his brother. He remembers the huge papier-mâché heads, the giant puppets operated by five men at a time. It was an amazing conglomeration of artists, drug addicts, and sexual deviants. This was back when freaks were rumored to put razor blades in apples, the city hovering somewhere between beneficence and cruelty.

  His friend Matthew Gruber would come and watch the parade sometimes. Matthew’s parents were divorced and his father lived in a town house on West Thirteenth Street. He was the author of the novels Great White and Killer Bees, which had both been made into B movies. Matthew and Scott were at that age, twelve, thirteen, when puberty is just starting, a rush of wakeful
ness as the engine of maturity turns over. Matthew’s father had a girlfriend, what Scott now recognizes as a trophy girl, beautiful and buxom and given to sunbathing topless on Matthew’s father’s patio. Scott remembers her breasts in the sunlight, the gentle brown slope of her hair. It is his first true sexual memory. Matthew lusted for this woman, who was not his mother but who shared his father’s bed. What a strange twist on the Oedipal myth. What an unsettling thing to suddenly recognize your father as a sexual being, and see yourself in his shadow, stalking the same unsuspecting woman. One day after school Matthew showed Scott the walkie-talkie he kept in his room. Its mate was taped in the on position to the underside of Matthew’s father’s bed, where it would broadcast, loud and clear, the sounds of his father’s fornication.

  Now when he thinks back on those memories, Scott pictures Matthew lying there at night, the odd, urgent, ghostly sounds emanating from the plastic box in his hand. This was what haunted Matthew, not ghosts or goblins, or city freaks, but the specter of his parents’ divorce, the mixed feelings of love and hate he had, and how he was now forced to separate them, to have specific feelings for each parent, as opposed to the commonality of feeling most of us have. He was haunted by his own impending maturity, by his own future relationships and their inevitable failure, by the likelihood of following in his father’s footsteps. He was haunted by urges he didn’t understand, urges that made him bug his father’s bedroom, that made him crouch at the top of the stairs spying on his father’s naked girlfriend splayed out in the sun. And at night he was haunted by her cries, cries he probably didn’t really understand, sounds of passion and pain, a woman, not his mother, grunting, yelling, speaking in tongues, begging for some kind of mercy.

  How does it happen? One day you feel like the world is in your control. You stand on the lip of a tower, a giant, the master of all you see, and then somehow it all gets lost. Somehow you end up a grown man sitting on a frozen stoop wishing it would snow. Wishing that the sky would open up and everything would turn white. Erase it all and start again. This is what Scott thinks as he stands and rubs the feeling back into his legs.

  He puts his hands on the gate, the cold metal sticking to his skin. He can see the tree from here, a New York City oak that has fought its way through asphalt and concrete to stand tall, branches sheltering the yard from heat and sun and the prying eyes of neighbors. It’s icy now, bare, covered with patchy snow. Scott stands at the fence, traces the crossbar down to the lower right quadrant, guided by memory. Even as he does it, he knows that what he’s hoping for is impossible. Twenty years have passed, and sure enough, the spot where he and David cut the fasteners between the chain link and the crossbar has been repaired. But all it would take is a pair of wire cutters and he’d be in.

  A police car cruises past. Scott sees it from the corner of his eye, straightens. His heart is beating fast. Is he crazy? Breaking and entering? And yet the fear is good. The quickened pulse and bright adrenaline sheen across his field of vision. For the first time in weeks he feels alive.

  Tomorrow there is brunch with Cousin Florence and Cousin Alice. And the next day is the memorial, the public good-bye. He has to come back here before then, find the spot and dig. The idea is in his head like a rosary he can’t stop worrying. He has come three thousand miles to lay his father to rest, and he can’t do it without the thing he stole and buried.

  Not for the first time, Scott thinks of his father standing on the side of the road in North Carolina. In the vision, Joe is a young man, younger than Scott is now. The image comes from a story his father once told him about his army days. Joe volunteered for the infantry, left home, and was trained to drive tanks for the Korean War. But they weren’t using tanks in Korea, so he stayed at a base in North Carolina. And one day he got a pass for a little R&R. He took a bus to Memphis. What did he do there? Scott wonders. Did he go with buddies? Was there drinking, fighting, women? Did he eat three square meals a day and sleep until noon? The details are fuzzy. All Scott knows is that when the weekend was over, his father went to the bus station. He stood in line waiting to buy a ticket back to base, but somewhere along the way, shuffling forward, kicking his duffel bag along the linoleum floor, he made a very different choice. Was it hot out, muggy, the heat prickling against his skin, sweat running down his back? Scott doesn’t know the details. What he does know is that when his father reached the front of the line, he bought a ticket for someplace else. He had decided to go AWOL. Scott pictures his dad stepping up to the window. Was there fear in his eyes? Did his voice shake? It is no small thing to run out on the U.S. Army. What was going through his head?

  “Round-trip or one way?” the ticket lady asked him.

  “One way,” he said. “I’m not coming back.”

  His dad took his ticket (to New York or Boston or maybe even California, he never specified) and walked to the bay that held his bus. Did he feel like a ten-year-old boy standing on the lip of a concrete tower staring down at the street? Was there that same giddy, reckless hope? Joe took his seat on the bus, sweat pooling in the small of his back. He was a big man with a crew cut and a tattoo on his left shoulder. It would be years before he met Doris, before he sat on a New York street corner drinking beer and watching her eat ice cream. He couldn’t see it from where he sat now, but he would be happy one day. He would not be shipped off to war, would not die in some Asian jungle. He would not be arrested for desertion, would not spend the rest of his life in a prison cell. None of this was clear to him, though, sitting in a window seat, watching the depot recede as the bus pulled away. The future is the only true mystery we have. All he knew was that he was breaking the rules. All he knew was that he was risking everything to save his own life, to be free.

  Scott pictures his dad sitting rigid, watching the Southern landscape pass. How long did he sit there? An hour? One stop, maybe two? And then he did something strange. He got to his feet and walked to the front of the bus. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and said, “Drop me up here, will you?” And when the bus stopped he climbed down into the torpid August heat. He stood in a cloud of dust and exhaust watching the bus pull away, taking with it his freedom, his escape. Somewhere in the last five miles he had decided to go back, to face his responsibility. Scott pictures his father standing on the side of the road, waiting for another bus to come, one that would take him back to Memphis, take him back to camp. He imagines his father steeling himself then with a cigarette, pulling the pack of Lucky Strikes from his pocket, setting one between his lips. The sun was like a hammer pounding a nail. What went through Joe’s head at that moment? What had made him change his mind? Scott wishes he had asked. He wishes he could call his dad right now and find out. There are so many things he wants to know. So many questions that will never be answered. So many moments his father lived that Scott will never understand. Where do those memories go when you die? All the things you lived through, all the private moments that no one else shares, do they just disappear? If a thing happens to you alone and you never tell a soul, does it really happen? If, after you’re dead, there is no one left to remember it, do those actions cease to exist?

  Scott’s father told him this story when Scott was ten. He showed Scott his dog tags. They were tarnished metallic wafers on a ratty chain. The only piece of jewelry a real man wears, designed to be torn from his neck after he dies. Scott held them in his hand. They were an object of musty import, a symbol of bravery and adventure and something darker. Death. He studied the faded words embossed on the tags, the acronyms, his father’s name, religion (atheist), and blood type (O positive). They were evidence of a greater service, a magic amulet given to the journeyman at the start of an adventure. Scott studied the dog tags and vowed they would be his.

  Two days later he snuck into his parents’ room when his dad was making dinner. He found the dog tags in his father’s sock drawer, slipped them into his pocket. He knew he would be the most obvious suspect once the tags were discovered missing. He guessed that his person would
be searched, his room. So he put the dog tags in an old coffee can and buried them in the yard.

  Now, crouched on a cold New York street, he pictures his dad standing on the side of a North Carolina road. He had so much life ahead, so many triumphs, but he couldn’t see them yet. All he could see was a dusty road. In the past was a small town, a violent father. In the future was a war. It amazes Scott, the courage it took for him to go AWOL in the first place, but the courage it took to get off the bus, to turn around and face the future, takes Scott’s breath away.

  The night his father died, Scott sat alone in the dark, listening to the silence. His brother had just called to tell him. It was two-thirty in the morning. He remembers David’s voice, the kind resignation.

  “He died,” he said. Just that.

  Scott sat on the floor. He didn’t know what else to do. It was the middle of the night. He couldn’t get a flight out until morning. He had expected this moment for so long, it had stopped being real. The weight of it had hung over all of them for so many years it had become abstract. Death became an empty threat, like the monster in the closet. He paced his apartment. He stared out the window at the late-night traffic lights flashing red. Everything felt too bright with the lights on, so he wandered around in the dark. And standing in his kitchen, he pictured his father on that dusty road, standing in the tall grass, smoking a cigarette, waiting for his bus. Scott wondered if this was what death was, if at the moment of death you revert to someplace you’ve been before, some moment you’ve lived, and maybe this is where you stay forever. Does time freeze when you die? This thought has haunted him for months, the image of his father standing by the side of the road, waiting for a bus that will never come, alone, afraid, running low on cigarettes. He wants a better moment for his father, a kinder eternity. He pictures him sitting in a café on a New York street corner staring at the women he is about to fall in love with, the woman he will marry, who will mother his children. A moment pregnant with possibility, with hope. This is the moment he wants for his father, a happier time when he can throw off the shackles of sickness, when he can slip back into the beauty of a world where anything is possible, especially love. True love, whether you can prove it or not.