The Sleepy Hollow Family Almanac

by Kris D'Agostino

  << 18 >>

  He gets a new gun.

  This time, a smaller, more compact version. A snub- nosed .38.

  My father’s love of weaponry has always intrigued me. When I was a child, he went on frequent hunting trips with his friends. They’d venture up to the Catskills wielding .22 rifles. They fancied themselves outdoorsmen. He was in shape then. He swam three times a week. He ran every morning. As he grew older and all three kids needed his attention, he had less time to spend on his hobbies. He gave up the outdoor adventures. He gave up exercising. He grew a belly. The cancer brought back his survival instincts, his obsession with a rapidly approaching apocalypse. The assumption that if he dies, so would the world.

  I steal my father’s gun. Or rather, I borrow it for an afternoon. I don’t know why I do this. I’m in the TV room. I see it resting on the coffee table in front of the couch where he is fast asleep: The flat-screen, the sectional couch, him in his bathrobe, snoring. Baby pictures of Elissa, Chip, and me on the walls. A newly framed black-and-white shot of Emma. Against this grand tableau of white suburbia, the gun. Metal and cylinders and bullets. I sit down at his feet quietly, trying not to wake him. He snorts loudly as the weight of my body comes to rest on the couch. His breathing quickens and then relaxes, returning to a steady rhythm. He snores on. I reach a hand out and place it over the gun. I feel the coldness of it. I’m not holding it, but I feel its heaviness. I pick it up. So many connotations. So many meanings for such a small thing. I look at my father’s face. The only time he seems at peace is when he is asleep. I look at his mustache. I stand and tuck the gun into the waistline of my jeans. I feel stupid doing this, so I take it out and put it in my back pocket, where it bulges like an inflated wallet.

  I PICK WALLY UP. We drive out to the woods. We are sober—no pills, no weed, nothing. It feels good to have my wits about me. My head is clear. I roll the windows down and let the air rush in, filling the car with sound, tossing my hair in every direction.

  “It’s getting hot these days,” Wally says.

  “We’ll head to Island Pond,” I say. “Go swimming.”

  “Definitely,” Wally says. He reaches into his backpack, pulls out a BB gun, an old pump-action, the kind that fires a single pellet at a time. “We can shoot some cans,” he says, stroking the gun, pleased with himself.

  “Cool,” I say.

  I pat the .38 in my pocket. I am filled with a sense of manliness because of the gun. It throbs against my hip, separated from my body by only a thin layer of really dirty denim.

  We drive seventeen miles west of Tarrytown, over the bridge. We pass the mall in Nyack, the ice rinks in Monticello. We count signs for Harriman State Park. We pass the dairy farm boasting the world’s greatest mozzarella cheese. We pass the hot dog stand just off the Thruway. We park at the edge of the woods and enter, full of hope.

  Shafts of light cascade down through gaps in the foliage.

  “This is truly God’s kingdom,” Wally says as he rushes through a patch of tall, swaying grass. He runs his hands across the tops of the blades. “It’s amazing we don’t enjoy this place sober more often.”

  “I can feel the insects around us,” I say.

  “See what I mean?” he says. “If we had real lives, we’d have to give this up.”

  “Would we?” I ask.

  “It wouldn’t be the same,” Wally says. “When you have responsibilities, you’re always thinking, What should I be doing right now?”

  “I think that all the time as it is,” I say.

  “Then stop,” Wally instructs. “Let it go.”

  “It’s not that easy,” I say.

  “Your sister fucked up,” Wally says. “You’re father is fucking up by not snapping out of his funk or whatever. You didn’t do anything wrong. You don’t have to punish yourself. You don’t have to stay there.”

  I’m looking at the back of Wally’s head as we hike, really trying to study his posture, the slant of his body. I’m trying to figure out what he’s really saying to me. Do I know this person at all? What common bond brought us together as friends? Does it still exist?

  We listen to the breeze. We reach the pond. We swim. We leave our clothing on the rocks. I am careful not to let Wally see the .38. Not yet.

  We wear only our underwear. The water is warm. Occasional pockets of frigidness erupt from unknown depths. There are things living beneath us. Dark things I don’t like to think about.

  Wally wants to swim out to the tiny island in the middle of the pond. It takes us ten minutes and I make most of the journey on my back.

  “I’m doing the reverse doggy paddle,” I say through a mouthful of scummy water.

  The island is maybe twenty yards in circumference, ringed by rock outcroppings and a few scrawny trees. Wally climbs out of the water and stands triumphantly on top of the island’s highest point. He startles a flock of white and gray herons resting in the brush. They flap violently into the air, squawking and confused. I scamper up to dry land, clawing at rocks, and hoist myself onto a flat stretch of limestone.

  “We’ll call this Bird Island,” I say.

  I stand. Water runs off my body onto the rock. The sun dries it up as I watch. The pond stretches out before us. The spot where we left our clothing seems a mile away.

  “Man, we swam far,” Wally says, holding a hand to his forehead, warding off the glare.

  “We’re fools for never having done this before,” I say.

  “Fools,” Wally says.

  After a time, we swim back. We laze about on the mainland rocks, drying our frail bodies in the sun. There is no one else around. I feel as though we are completely isolated from the world. It is a good feeling and for a second I am enjoying myself. I am enjoying the moment as it unfolds, trying not to think about anything else.

  “Let’s shoot the BB gun,” Wally says. He puts his jeans back on and ties his T-shirt around his head like a turban.

  I fashion my shirt in a similar way and check to make sure the pistol is still secure in my pocket, and together we wander off along a faint trail. It leads up around the pond to an area of the forest we have never been to before. A broad canopy of trees looms overhead, and here it is cool and inviting, lush sounds all around.

  Wally loads a pellet into the BB gun and pumps air into the chamber.

  “Hello!” he calls out. Nothing stirs, only the ever-present sound of leaves. He raises his gun and fires at a nearby tree. With a dull sound, the pellet embeds itself in the soft bark.

  “Check it out,” I say. I take the pistol out of my pocket and hold it awkwardly, not gripping it by the handle, but rather letting it lie flat in my palm.

  “Who’s is that?” Wally asks.

  “My dad’s,” I tell him.

  “Someone would hear,” Wally says, looking around.

  Branches crunch beneath our feet.

  “There’s no one out here,” I say. I’m not convinced of this, but I say it anyway. I want to fire the gun. “He does it all the time,” I say. We stand for a while, my arm outstretched, the gun sitting in my hand, neither of us moving, our breathing getting quick and choppy. Slowly I bounce the gun and then take it in my hands, curling my fingers around the handle. I put my back against a tree and raise the barrel. I pounce forward, swinging my body, bringing the gun to bear on the empty forest before me.

  “Lemme hold it,” Wally says. I hand the pistol over to him. “What kind of gun is this?”

  “Snub-nosed thirty-eight,” I say. “He took it to the movies last week.”

  “Will he be pissed?”

  “Probably,” I say. “It’ll be good for him. Keep him on his toes. If anything, me taking the gun will only further convince him that no amount of readiness is going to help.”

  A rustling in the near distance catches our attention. About a football field away, as if magically conjured on cue, a deer is toeing through the brush. A small thing, bowing its head to the ground.

  “A doe,” I say, quiet, hoping not
to scare it off.

  The deer takes a few hesitant steps forward. I’m not sure it has seen us yet.

  “Check it out,” Wally says. He smiles. He pops out the cylinder of the revolver and empties the six bullets into his hand. He takes one and reloads the gun with a single round. He spins the cylinder and slams it home.

  “I’m gonna find out what this deer knows,” Wally says.

  He raises the gun, so nonchalantly it’s like he’s merely pointing his finger. The dead click of the hammer.

  “Let me try,” I say.

  Wally surrenders the gun to me. I spin the cylinder. Take aim at the deer. I pull the trigger. The forest erupts in sound, the report echoing out like thunder cracks. The deer looks at us and then falls into the dirt, its legs kicking about.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I say.

  We run to the animal. It is in the midst of intense death throes. There is a lot of blood. The deer is violently twitching, its legs flailing this way and that way, leaves stirring up in the ruckus. It snorts loudly, again and again.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” I say.

  “Fuck you, Cal,” Wally says. His voice is altered now, panicked. “You killed a living thing here. What are the fucking odds of this happening?” He looks at me with pleading eyes. He looks at me like a child who knows he has done wrong.

  “One in six,” I tell him.

  “No, really,” he says. “I mean, it has to be like one in a thousand or more.”

  “No matter how dumb you are,” I say, “the math doesn’t change.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Wally says.

  “It’s not dead yet,” I say. We watch the deer. Its gyrations lessen, and one of its eyes points straight up at the trees, blinking rapidly. The deer snorts loudly one last time and for a while nothing happens.

  And here, if I really think about it, is evidence of something I’ve been looking for ever since my return to the family homestead. Of course, it was a thing administered by chance, the killing of the deer, but wasn’t I in control of that chance? Sure, the deer had to be there at precisely the right moment. The bullet had to be in the chamber. The wind or tides or tilt of the earth, or whatever, had to align just so and guide everything home. Yet, wasn’t it my hand wielding the gun? Squeezing off the round? In part it was chaos at work—the chamber could have been empty. All right. But it wasn’t. And now that it’s over with, I can’t seem to imagine any other outcome. I’m not able to summon any possibility other than pull trigger, fire bullet, kill deer. It’s all laid out in a divine plan from start to finish. So simple. Luck and chaos and uncertainty are part of it, but ultimately I set the thing in motion. And why not carry that over to everything else in my life? Why not link everything I want together into my own plan and then see it through to completion? We expect the same, if not more, out of the retards. We ask them to attempt to learn in the face of almost overwhelming natural instincts to be idiots. If they can be better, I can be better. The seesaw swings up and I see a clear path to good things. The family keeps the house. I contribute what little I have to contribute, and when the time is right, I leave, I get my own place. I get everything I want. Everyone is happy and alive and without sadness. The way is so clear.

  “This is an important moment,” I say.

  “We’re murderers,” Wally says.

  “We’re men,” I say, and I put the gun back in my pocket. It is hot. So hot, in fact, I feel its burn against me, alive.

  Clearly I have moved on to some other level of life, a place where Wally has not followed. I see now a gap between us. His inability to move forward. His insistence on staying put without any thought about the future. I’m closer to figuring my life out. I’m trying. Baby steps, I think, are the way. Baby step #1: Don’t spend so much time with my friends. Baby step #2: Less weed. Baby step #3: Love everyone. Baby step #4: Save money. Baby step #5: Give money to family. Baby step #6: Move out. Baby step #7: Start life.

  “We have to get out of here,” Wally says, moving away from the deer. “Someone definitely heard that. This is what happens when I don’t get high.”

  We return to the car without incident. Wally tries to forget what we have done, but I hold it close to me. The deer died because I was in control. We aren’t as helpless as we seem. When I get home, in an effort to test my theory of control, I find a reasonably priced home appraiser in Tarrytown and schedule an appointment for the following week. If we are going to lose the house or be forced to sell it, we might as well be armed with as much information and as much foresight as we can gather.

  << 19 >>

  As May draws to a close, I can see the end of the academic year at the John W. Manley School. Special children need special care, so there’s no real summer break to look forward to. School officially ends the last week of June. The kids go back out into the world. They sit in their parents’ backyards for a brief two-week intermission, floating blissfully in inflatable pools, smearing ice cream all over their faces. Then they return to us, and the process continues through eight weeks of “camp” until September rolls around and the academic calendar starts up again. The only difference between real school and camp is that we aren’t required to collect data on the children over the summer. I do not have to chart Arham’s progress.

  While public school teachers across the country get two whole months devoid of vacant-eyed stares and temper tantrums, we get two lousy weeks. After which it’s back to my little chair. Back to watching Arham march across the room to his seat in front of me, his little head barely clearing the cubby shelves. Back to Shaynequa and Hendrick and Franklin and the little girl whose name I never learned who keeps smearing her own poop on the walls in the OT room.

  Still, though, summer is summer and we get half-day Fridays as something of an appeasement. I am looking forward to idle time again. I will sit in the air-conditioning of my parents’ house, watching bad movies. I will take my baby steps. I will deal with the frustrations of my family. I will throw myself to their aid. I will figure out how to be helpful. And when it all becomes too much, and only as a last resort, I will attempt to escape boredom by taking drugs. But usually I’m not bored. I have a pretty active imagination, so I’ll just take drugs in an effort to become one with nature. Only I hate the idea of becoming one with nature. That dirt. Those squirming bugs. I will stay inside as much as possible. I will battle the heat. I will reverse my hatred of insects and dirt and embrace nature. I will make frequent trips to the state parks of the region. I won’t turn my back on anyone. I will get close to everyone. I will be all things to all people. Friend, brother, son, lover. It looks to be a wonderful summer.

  “You should get a job painting houses in your spare time,” my father says at dinner.

  “Why the hell would he want to do that?” my mother asks.

  “I did it when I was in high school,” my father says.

  “He isn’t in high school,” my mother says.

  “He can make some extra money,” my father says.

  After the incident with Wally in the woods, I returned the gun to my father’s bedroom. My father never inquired as to its sudden disappearance that one afternoon. Whether he knew I took it and simply chose not to mention it, or he had no idea, is a mystery to me. I never asked him about it.

  I CATCH CHIP in the bathroom in the middle of his bedtime ritual—an insane series of cleansing and beautification treatments of his own design that he has been administering to himself since high school. He is convinced his good looks depend on carrying out this process on a daily basis. He has detailed this regimen to me many times. First he showers, scrubbing his body with different cleansers. He washes his face with an alcohol scrub and then exits the tub, leaving the water running at the hottest temperature. He sits on the toilet for twenty minutes with a towel wrapped around his head. When he has sufficiently “steamed” himself, he washes his face in the sink with three kinds of acne medicine and applies dabs of a tan-colored cream to particularly troublesome spots. He brushes his
teeth, flosses, gargles with mouthwash, and shaves his chest, arms, and legs and trims his pubic hair with an electric razor. He opens the door to let the room cool down. He uses Q-tips to clean his ears and nostrils and puts on aftershave.

  “You know how much water this wastes?” I remind him as I walk by.

  “It’s the price one pays to look this good,” he says.

  I go to my room and lie on the floor listening to Appalachian folk music from the 1920s until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore, at which point I crawl into bed and drift off.

  The next day, when I get home from work, there is a letter waiting for me on the kitchen table. Another invitation to the Hillman wedding. It’s as if by some sadistic courier, some cruel joke, Chris knew I had flushed the first one down the toilet. The worst part about this new invitation is a handwritten note on the back:

  Calvin,

  Hadn’t gotten an RSVP from you yet about the wedding. Really hope you can make it. Feel free to bring a significant other. Just let us know who’ll be coming by July 1.

  Thanks.

  It is signed “Chris Hillman.”

  I go to the garage with my notebook. I count everything there. All the flashlights and matches, the tents and sleeping bags, the cans of beans, rice bags, and lanterns, the batteries and snakebite antivenom, the first aid kits, all the rifles, pots, and pans, the water bottles. All of it. I make a list. I imagine it is not dissimilar to the list my father keeps. The inventory he has made for himself.

  I have long believed my father to be truly at ease only behind the yolk of an airplane. In his healthier days, away on trips to Europe or Asia or wherever, he’d phone my mother frequently to complain about how much he hated foreign countries, how much he hated being away from all of us. His desire to come home. As a child, I would be passed the phone. “Say hello to your father. He misses you.”