Driving the Flies

Free time and car keys were ours.

Our stomachs full of our favorite barbeque, The Boy and I piled up for a tour of the old stomping grounds. There were hours to kill.

Curiously, as we drove and I pointed out the sites, I found myself in censor mode. I was in college then, and there are things he does not yet need to know, like this is where I was so stinking drunk I climbed up the front of the building like some demented Spider-Man, or this is the street where I tied a rope to the back of Hoyt’s Vega and skiied behind it through the snow. The closest I came to anything exciting was an admission of grabbing serious air on my motorcycle off the railroad tracks. Even that was tinged with dad-ness, as I reminded him that my friends and I were experienced riders, though I made no claim to controlled circumstances.

So the tour was noticeably, to me, curtailed, and we both got tired of me leading off sentences with, “there used to be…” and the thirty years have done their damage to the places of my memories.

“Let’s go in here,” I said as I pulled along the curb. He followed me through the door and stopped, blinking, his head swivelling, and I couldn’t help but grin.

The books were everywhere, floor to ceiling, little hand-lettered cards and directions stuck here and there, and from wall to wall, and between were tiny corridors that asked for a cool suspension of your personal space if you came across another person.

Behind glass, I caught site of an early edition of In Cold Blood, and my eye consumed the view of hard-loved bindings, gold leaf lettering, the very properness of this book shop, and it’s important that this stay a shop, not a store even though it says store on the window, because a store means corporate offerings and generic blandness, the touch of the accountants, but a shop still means love, an obsession with the book as a token of hope and dreams, reverence for the written word.

The Boy is a reader, God bless him, a gene I’m proud to have passed on, and his eyes took it in as his fingers gently touched the many spines almost unconsciously. We paused in a doorway, up two steps and I reached to place my fingers on his shoulder to get his attention for a moment. “When you hear me speak of heaven,” I told him, with a small gesture of inclusion, “this is what I mean.”

He planted himself in science fiction while I roamed and peered, a stiff eighty bucks for a Winogrand I’ve coveted that went back on the shelf, and I got stuck between Walker Evans and David Douglas Duncan, finally choosing neither and the little voice in my head that sounds a lot like my wife told me we were short on funds, the trip itself eating the bulk of our current budget. I looped through this grand labyrinth, thinking I’d live there if they’d let me, and I remembered one night, when were watching a movie, and one of the scenes began with an establishing shot of the interior of a home, and there were piles of books and overflowing shelves and no flat surface not occupied by books, and The Wife said to me that is what our house would look like if she left it up to me, the truth of it echoing through my heart.

I could not deny The Boy, though, when he asked to buy two books to read on the drive home while I had to content myself with some photographs and a silly memory of our time here together.

The first time I saw the Dewey Bridge was on a drive with Eddie. We were in his truck, along the back way from Cisco to Moab, camera gear piled in the backseat and the radio scratching out gospel wails.

The highway hopped and hugged the muddy Colorado, and we studied the light on the rolling wild as we waited for the lowering cut of the river through the rising cliff faces. In a town that’s not there anymore, there was the Dewey Bridge, white and stark against the open cerulean sky, like the skeleton of a geometric cloud.

I’m sure I have a photo of it the way it was, clean and angular over the boiling brown of the river, but that was in the film days and my memories will have to do until I can find and scan the slide.

It was a favorite stop of ours, whoever came along, even when The Wife would roll her eyes as her husband and her father both jumped out of the truck and set off for yet another admiring examination of its sturdy wooden presence, lens caps popping off, and we couldn’t explain it to her. The best we could do was that we enjoyed it because it was here. You never know, we said. It could be gone tomorrow.

This is what it looked like the last time I saw it. Eddie was home in bed with the tubes and drugs and infections that would kill him. The Family and I had tents and sleeping bags and a vague itinerary, but I wanted to visit the bridge to see the damage caused by one little boy playing with fire.

The Boy, our boy, not the little boy who burned the bridge, had just been designated the official matchstriker for our campfires on the trip, so I also wanted to take advantage of this opportunity for teaching respect for the flames.

When Eddie died, there was some struggle. Not just with his death, which was difficult enough. He and The Wife’s mother had been divorced for many years, and his wife, who The Boy had come to think of as his grandma, had evidently harbored some resentment for Eddie’s daughters from his first marriage.

The evidence is distasteful and petty, but the end result made it clear that Eddie was what had held the two sides together all these years, and with him gone there is no crossing.

The Boy doesn’t understand, and it saddens him. And really, all I can do is show him this photo and tell him to remember when it was good that Eddie was here.

And that burning bridges is never a good idea.

So the other day I went to retrieve The Boy from school. I entered the office where I have to sign him out, and there is a little girl sitting on the bench next to the sign-out sheet. She says Hi and I return her greeting and then I hear this familiar voice behind me that says Hi Dad.

I turn around to see The Boy perched on a chair in front of the afterschool director’s desk. This is never a good sign.

-Are you busted? I already know the answer.

-Yes.

-What did you do?

-I, uh, accidentally…

-ahem, says the director.

-Well, not really accidentally, but I sort of crashed into Clinton and he sort of crashed into the window–

-oh, Lord…

The director spoke up: We have stopped the bleeding.

-You pushed Clinton through the window?

I could imagine Clinton impaled on some huge shard of glass. Bloody and traumatized. Hospital bills and apologies to Clinton’s folks. Awkwardness at Scout meetings.

-He didn’t go through the window, Dad. Just hit his elbow on something sharp.

-But still…

-He may need stitches, added the director.

All the way home I’m at the top of my Dad Game: Blah blah blah, you had been asked to stop, blah blah, could have killed him, blah blah blah, stupid decision, blah blah, I walked to school in snow, blah blah, Peter Frampton killed rock and roll, blah blah blah, consequences of our actions, blah blah, monumental stupidity,and so on.

He was properly cowed, contrite. I was seething.

Then that night, I was watching My Name Is Earl, and when Earl and Randy were shooting bolts from a crossbow straight up in the air I was laughing hysterically, because I remember that time DG and I spent an afternoon when we were about The Boy’s age climbing up on the roof of his house with his bow and one arrow, the one that didn’t have a tip on it, and we’d pull the string back, both of us, as far as we could, and we’d launch that arrow into the neighborhood, just in random directions, and we’d watch until we couldn’t see it, and then we’d go looking for it.

This was how bright we were.

It was years before I realized that what we were doing was Really. Fucking. Stupid.

But, you know, we didn’t kill anyone. So, um, it was funny.

And then of course a bolt came back down and hit Earl, and I thought this was even funnier, because it brought home how really lucky we had been, and reminded me of other adventures we’d had, and how they’d frequently led to somebody bleeding or some neighbor on the phone to the police, and man oh man, boys will be boys, won’t they? Hahahahaha.

And when I stopped to catch my breath, I heard this familiar voice: What’s so funny, Dad?

The Boy is an able traveler.

He is accustomed to the lift-offs and landings, the terminal dashes and loopy scheduling. He carries a book, some games, and the security of experience; We’ve lost count of how many times he’s flown somewhere with us.

He is also accustomed to traveling with his mother, who comes prepared with maps showing the location, and likely the GPS coordinates, of the bus stop for the shuttle to the Amtrak station. She will also have in her backpack a print-out of the schedules for both the shuttle and the train, auxiliary information on alternate means of transportation, coupons for local restaurants, and for all I know the home numbers of various hoteliers.

Hard copies of everything there is to know about the destination, options for entertainment, schedules of theaters, reviews of plays/movies/tours; All of these travel with The Wife, along with EPA gas mileage estimates for rental cars, schedules and fudge factors, tidal charts- if applicable-, and a score of other bits and bobs to ease the oddity of being outside the comfort of home.

Traveling with his dad- yr humbl svt- is different. I have a camera bag on my back, and in my pocket I carry flight numbers and wherever we’re supposed to sleep that night, written on the back of an ATM receipt with a highlighter.

It is an adventure, I tell him. Plus, it makes your mother really nervous. Bonus.

And this is my role, the Carrier of Uncertainty. (Not to be confused, by the way, with Delta Air Lines, the Air Carrier of Uncertainty.) Traveling with me is counterpoint to his mother’s total preparation, an enjoyable art of not knowing.

Home is knowing. It is the same seat and the same tv shows, the same meals and the same math homework, the same views from the same windows, the same corrugated rippling of the same wind blowing through the tyvek in the construction on the hill.

Travel is, or should be, not knowing. It is awakening from a routine-induced coma, a sudden decrease in the white noise of the mundane, a slight quickening of the pulse as we realize we’re sitting at the wrong gate, but laughing as we trot to where we’re supposed to be.

He takes it, both literally and figuratively, in stride, his eyes seeking out the ticket machines and the metro maps, wondering if we take this or that train, and are we on time, and can we have a snack, and do I have time to get out my book? He sits on my legs on the overcrowded bus and watches the sun-washed new pass the windows, and remember when we got that minivan you hated, Dad?

I did, and I do. Just like I remember his first time in the surf, and when the change in air pressure made him cry, and us running from the mosquitoes, and the ten thousand games of air hockey while we waited for Mom, and I remember the pressure of his head against my shoulder at the end of a long day of flights and rides and not knowing.

But when we’ve finished our trip, what I will hold most dearly, more than the miles and the steam engines and the little planes and the ferries, more than the gallops through the nameless crowds, the bumpy flights and the silly games to make the lines more tolerable, even more than being the carrier of uncertainty, is that I was blessed to have The Boy along with me.

hey Dad, he says

yo

I’m trying to cram the last of an overdue John Le Carre novel into my eyes while the telly blasts away.

what’s erectile dysfunction?

(cough)

well, son. It’s a, um, medical condition that, um, near as I can tell from seeing the commercials, is, um, caused by lengthy marriages.

really?

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yup.

k, thanks.