1. Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, my father Went to the moon.

He was not the first man from Maple Rock to go there; he only followed the others on what seemed to be an inevitable trail. My uncle John was the first to leave.

The last time we saw John, we were in the parking lot of the Black Lantern, the bar on Warren Avenue where my father and his friends did their drinking. I was there with John's wife, my aunt Maria, and their son, Nick. It was the first day of June, just before midnight. I suppose I should remember if the moon was in the sky that night, but I honestly can't recall. The moon was not yet important. The bar owner, a big Greek named Spiros, had simply called my aunt and said she should come and take John home. Nick and I had been hanging around watching a movie, and she made us come with her.

When we got there, a half circle of men stood in the parking lot, all of them wearing grease-stained work shirts or rumpled dress shirts and loose ties. In the middle of the circle was John, standing with his shirt off in a weary boxer's stance. He was soaked in sweat and his face seemed to be darkened with bruises or dirt. He had not been home for a few nights.

My father, too, was there. Across the crowded lot, I saw him under a streetlamp, still wearing his tie, two or three pens in his pocket. He looked green in the weak and forced light, as if he might be sick.

Across from John was an enormous man, red-haired and fat-faced. He was wearing coveralls and his skin was dark with grime. He had a crescent wrench in his hand.

My uncle reached into his pocket, and then I must have turned to look at my father again, because the next thing I knew the crowd was screaming and laughing and John had on a pair of brass knuckles. The red-haired guy was on the pavement. He had wet himself. People started to scatter.

My uncle, in the chaos, disappeared. By the time the police came, he and his truck were gone.

"Does anybody know who the assailant was?" an officer yelled at the crowd, which was jeering at him.

Just as my aunt was reaching out to the officer, about to wave her hand and say something—I don't know what—a woman wearing a red halter top and black cutoffs came forward. She was barefoot, and some men whistled at her as she walked in front of the mob. She turned to the crowd and flipped them off, then turned back to the officer and said, "I know him. He's my boyfriend."

My aunt Maria walked away. We followed, because we had been waiting for a way to retreat without cowardice. We were too young to join in the fight but too old to flee from it.

 

FOR A FEW WEEKS that summer, Nick and I positioned ourselves around the city and waited to run into my uncle. We went to the Black Lantern for lunch and sat for three hours, picking at a plate of nachos, looking at the face of every man who came into the bar. We sat outside the mall and drank frozen orange drinks most of the evening, watching girls and waiting for John to walk by eating an ice-cream cone, a shiner darkening each eye. We rode our bikes around the parking lots of motels, strip bars, and movie theaters, looking for his rusted Ford truck, the one with "Kozak's Sun & Snow: Quality Pool Maintenance, Lawn Care, and Snow Removal" hand lettered on each door.

Uncle John didn't come home. The speculation was that he'd gone off to hide somewhere, maybe Canada, perhaps because he thought he had killed the fat red-haired man in the parking lot. But he hadn't. That man simply got a row of stitches and went on his way.

It was a few weeks later that Walker Van Dyke's father left for a fishing trip, muttering something about killing the President, and didn't come back. J.J. Dempsey's dad, who had worked at the night-light factory, tried to rob the Ukrainian Credit Union the week after the factory went down. He left town directly afterward. Michael Pappas' father, Gus, owner of the recently bankrupted Gus's Coney Island Restaurant, left too.

Our neighbor and my father's best friend, a pipe fitter named Norm Nelson, whose son Jimmy was about my age, also vanished. His Corvette, which his wife had been trying to get him to sell since he'd been laid off, was found wrapped around a tree in Hines Park. Norm was nowhere to be found. There was no blood in the car—it was as if he'd vaporized out of the driver's seat and floated away just as the car wrecked. My father went over and showed Mrs. Nelson how to start the lawn mower, change a fuse, set the thermostat. I went with him, and Mrs. Nelson kept looking at me and laughing, saying, "Isn't it silly, Michael, that a grown woman like me doesn't know how to do a goddamn thing?"

By August, as Detroit stewed in a steamy layer of ash and grit so toxic that breathing made you feel stoned or delirious, many of my friends' fathers had disappeared, and as we played baseball or hung out at the bike racks near Wonderland Mall, all of a sudden, some kid would blurt out, "My dad's gone."

Some men left in the traditional fashion, slipping out at night, a note left behind. Sonya Stecko, my sometime girlfriend, said her father wrote a rambling sixteen-page letter before he left, in which he affirmed that he loved her, her mother, and her siblings, and in which he offered advice about marriage, money, and other subjects. It was as if he planned to miss the next thirty years of her life.

Some men left in broad daylight, giving goodbye kisses to their children in the driveway as their wives watched from behind the curtains, furious and brokenhearted. We watched Sharon Mills give her father a kiss goodbye as her mother threw pots and pans at his truck.

Peter Stolowitz's father owned Sol's Shoes on Six Mile Road. One day he left the store unattended, the front door propped wide open with a rock. Across the front windows he had lettered FREE SHOES in huge strokes of brown latex paint. He'd taken all the cash from the register and the safe and left a note: "I'm going to the moon," it said. "I took the cash."

Everyone in town went and helped themselves to a new pair of sneakers. We opened the boxes in the stockroom like it was Christmas, tossing lids aside, tearing out white tissue paper. Some people left their old shoes behind: a formidable pile of castaway footwear grew by the fire exit. Old men took home shiny wingtips, young women took high-heeled sandals. Nick and I helped ourselves to some Converse high-tops.

I was friends with Peter Stolowitz. I stood there in my new shoes as he walked into his father's store, holding his mother's arm. She wailed and he wept. "All that we worked for," his mother sobbed. "All that I worked for."

Peter glared at Nick and me. I pointed to the FREE SHOES sign and shrugged. The gleam of the white sneakers was too much to resist. I left with the shoes.

After that, other men began using Mr. Stolowitz's line. "We're going to the moon," they'd say, walking away from us. "I'll be on the moon," they'd say, their eyes staring through us.

 

ALL OF THE DISAPPEARED men were from Maple Rock, a working-class suburb tacked onto the southwest side of Detroit. Our little neighborhood was made up of Poles, Ukrainians, Greeks, Italians, and other ethnic groups that came from Europe after the Second World War. The disappeared all knew each other, from church or the Black Lantern or bowling league. Our fathers did not golf. They did not wear pressed khakis or docksiders. They knew how to throw punches, and they did throw punches when a situation called for it.

Most of them had facial hair, beards, or at least a mustache. Most of them were not raised by English-speaking parents. Some of them had been in Vietnam, but few of them ever mentioned it. They liked to fish and hunt and left the city for long weekends in Michigan's vast and sandy north. Many of them were out of work.

The factories seemed to vaporize in Michigan, big factories, small factories. With the factories gone, engineers, sales reps, and marketing specialists lost their jobs too. Newly unemployed men hung around their children's schools, working as crossing guards and cafeteria monitors, chaperoning field trips and driving buses. I could remember Ronald Reagan appearing on television when I was very young, saying, "We face an economic calamity of epic proportions." By 1990, we still hadn't recovered in Maple Rock.

George Callas had been a factory rat. After he was downsized, he became our health teacher. Most of the time, Mr. Callas would talk about lifting weights (a good thing) or smoking (a bad thing). One time, he showed us a film about domestic violence that featured a lot of unfocused shots of women in shadows, looking out of rain-streaked windows while Roberta Flack sang "Killing Me Softly." Mr. Callas, a darkly handsome, powerful-looking man, cried through the whole thing. When the film ended and the lights flipped on, he hid his face and told us we could leave early.

By far the most disturbing disappearance was that of our parish priest, Father Walter Gorski of St. John's Ukrainian Catholic Church. He was last seen late on a Saturday night, in his clerical collar and black smock, buying a carton of cigarettes, a case of beer, and three hot dogs at a 7-Eleven on Middlebelt Road.

We arrived for Mass the next morning, sat straightbacked in our pews, prayer books ready, the choir standing at attention, waiting for the altar doors to open, for the smell of incense to fill the sanctuary, for Father Walt to emerge in his robes.

We sat for fifteen minutes. No one moved. No one said anything. Finally, it was my aunt Maria who cried out, "No, God! Not him too!"

The next morning, the archbishop had the police looking for Father Walt. Cops skulked around the neighborhood looking for clues, but this was old hat for them already, looking for men who would not be found. A few cops had even disappeared that summer—Slim Kowalski, Jim Owesko, Big Teddy Lukens.

We heard that a clerk at 7-Eleven told police that Father Walt had offered him a ride.

"I don't even know where you're going, Father," the clerk had said.

"The moon," Father Walt had said, leaning in closer and winking. "You know, the moon."

***

AFTER FATHER WALT'S disappearance, we stopped going to church. Another priest was brought in to replace Walt, but my mother said she no longer wanted to sit through Mass every Sunday morning. If all these men could simply go free, could let go of their social and cultural obligations, then why couldn't she?

So instead, on Sunday mornings my mother would play her violin. My mother may have been the most educated and cultured woman in Maple Rock. Very few of the women in our neighborhood had been to college. My mother had a B.A., spoke three languages, had studied Russian literature and Latin and music. As a young woman, she had played in orchestras around the city. She had also played backup at Motown studios on some marginal albums of that era. One Sunday morning my mother played "Eleanor Rigby" and "The Great Pretender" while my father sat at the kitchen table, tearing apart the newspaper, tears streaming down his face.

My mother stopped playing and tilted her head at my dad.

"I need a job, Eva," he said. "I lost mine."

My father had been a draftsman, and his job was considered a good secure one.

My father said he'd been out of work for three weeks, and instead of going to work, he'd been spending time at the Black Lantern or the bowling alley or the mall.

The admission seemed odd from him, because he was a slight man, known more for reading science-fiction novels and watching nature documentaries on PBS than for drinking and bowling. My father was always more refined than his friends in Maple Rock. He did not waste his time drinking one-dollar taps, throwing a sixteen-pound ball down a wooden lane. He did not fit in well with his peers. Most of the time he looked the way I had seen him that night outside the bar—shaky and green, nervous, like he might be sick.

After my father made his announcement, he took his newspaper and went into the bathroom, and my mother began to play her violin again. I did not yet realize the tears in his eyes were not for what had happened to him but for what would eventually happen.

My little brother, Kolya, was in the room. He was nine years old, and his belly hung over his belt as if he were a man in his fifties. He looked very somber all the time and was not prone to talking. He stood, always, with his hands in his pockets.

I looked at him that morning to see if he had any idea what was going on, to see if the idea of unemployment and marital discord had any effect on his small brain. It did. His face was shadowed with sadness, and his eyes appeared so faraway and pensive that it seemed like he could see the future better than any of us adults. He stood, hands in pockets, looking at me, his blond hair sticking up like matted straw.

 

THE VERY LAST MEN LEFT, it seemed, out of a sense of duty. For a while, you'd see them in their garages on Saturdays, puttering with old car engines, dragging old toilets to the curb. Some of them still had work; their lives were following a plan and a purpose, and their horizons, if not bright, were certainly visible. Still, it was almost as if by hanging around, they were obstructing the natural order of things. They were like robins that wander stupidly through the snow in January.

And so they disappeared.

Later my mother said that all men have it in them, the capacity to leave behind, at a moment's notice, the world they know. My mother said that the last men left because they felt they had to, because they had to prove they were capable of acting on that buried impulse as well as any other man. My mother said she'd like to take me to a doctor and have my synapses reconfigured, lest someday the abandonment impulse would fire up inside of me and then I too would be gone.

Did I think my father was immune? My father was only human. How could he not leave?

My father was in the driveway when I came riding up on my bicycle. Nobody else was home. It was a Saturday, and my mother and brother were out shopping. He was loading a few duffel bags and a box into the trunk of his Oldsmobile. He wore a blue Oxford shirt tucked into faded jeans, and he was red-faced and puffy-eyed.

"Dad," I said, standing at the edge of the sidewalk, "where are you going?"

He stared back at me, squinting and tight-lipped, as if my head had suddenly burst into a ball of fire and the brilliant light was blinding him, as if my voice were the voice coming from a burning bush.

He drove away at a crawl. His speedometer must've not even reached ten miles per hour. Every few seconds I could see him glance in his rearview mirror and then avert his eyes quickly, as if my head were still behind him, burning and flaring up into the sky.

I stood alone in the driveway, throwing sycamore pellets down the wide, empty street. They sailed over the concrete and then bounced and landed, exploding into fluff like crashing birds.

When my mother and brother came home from shopping, I said nothing.

At dinner, my mother set out meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and gravy. She called my father. "Roman! Dinner!"

He didn't come. Kolya and I sat and watched each other, waiting. Kolya seemed to know the score. He didn't look worried or confused, just sad. My mother went to the fridge and took out a bowl of tossed salad, a bottle of Italian dressing, and a jar of pickles.

"Roman!" she called. "Dinner, honey!"

She went back to the counter, got the salt and pepper shakers. She went to the fridge and brought out some butter and some slices of Wonder bread; she called again. When he still didn't come she went to the fridge and got mustard and ketchup, some leftover macaroni and cheese, some lunch meat that she arranged on a paper plate. She called again. She brought to the table a jar of beets, some olives, a bottle of vinegar, and a jar of mayonnaise. "Roman, come on, honey! Dinner!"

Her voice trailed around the house and floated up the stairs where nobody was waiting to hear it. She brought out honey, marshmallows, and chocolate sauce.

She smiled. "For dessert," she said.

Kolya and I started eating. The meat loaf was getting cold.

Mom kept setting out food until everything in the fridge and freezer and pantry was on the table.

I sat between a bag of frozen corn and a box of crackers. Kolya shoved aside a can of sliced peaches and drank from his glass of milk. He put a bag of frozen peas on his head and we both laughed, and then felt bad for laughing.

My mother left the kitchen and opened the door to the garage where my dad's car was missing. She looked at me hard, for fifteen or twenty seconds, then I nodded, and she left the room instantly. Kolya started to put the food back where it belonged and I sat still and listened to our mother play her violin—"Norwegian Wood" and "I Am a Rock" and "Penny Lane."

 

BY SEPTEMBER, the heat began to give a little bit, and the summer wilted and yielded to a far-off breeze and jet streams and cold fronts. Broke and bored and without better options, my friends and I went back to school for our senior year. My mother was so pleased that I was going voluntarily that she took me to Wonderland Mall and bought me some new clothes with a Penney's charge card. In a pair of stiff, clean Levi's and new brown hiking boots, I wandered through the halls with Nick and Tom Slowinski, noting what was new and what was the same. Maple Rock High had launched a "Success for All" campaign ("Sex for All" became the too-easy nickname) which, as far as I could tell, meant only that we started school a week earlier than most other public schools, and that our hallways were decorated with a few murals urging us to REACH FOR THE STARS and DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM.

A guidance counselor or someone must have decided that the school's color scheme could help relieve the gloom of economic recession and the widespread abdication of fatherhood, because during our sad and muggy summer break, somebody had painted the hallways and classrooms a deep canary yellow. Under the fluorescent lights, the new color scheme turned our faces muted and soft. We looked jaundiced and puffy, like alcoholics. With the buzz of the lights, the teachers' rolling monotones, and the smells of Lysol and stale coffee that pervaded every room, school felt more like a drying-out facility than a place of education. It was appropriate. Nick and Tom and I would drink beer in the janitor's room in the basement. Sometimes Big Tim the janitor, who was only a few years older than us, would come in and drink too. He said, "Why should I care if you guys go to class? Then you go to college and become the kind of assholes I have to spend the rest of my life working for."

 

ON A COLD AIMLESS autumn afternoon, Nick and I skipped class and drove out to a mall in Novi to get a gift at Victoria's Secret for one of his girlfriends. I was envious of him, having girlfriends at that level of sophistication.

At the mall, I made Nick go into the lingerie store alone and I went over to the drugstore to look at baseball cards. I wandered up and down the rows of toiletries and stopped near a display of razors. There stood a life-size cardboard cutout of a man with a towel wrapped around him, his face covered in shaving cream, the razor about to touch his cheek.

When Nick found me, I was smelling a bottle of Old Spice and tears were in my eyes. Nick asked me what I was doing. I shrugged, and smelled the Old Spice a little more. Nick stood there, a white gift bag stuffed with tissue paper in his right hand.

"Are you crying?" he said.

"No," I said, my nose still hovering over the bottle of Old Spice that smelled like my father.

"You're crying," he said.

I handed the bottle to Nick. "Try it."

He took the bottle and put it under his nose. He inhaled slowly and deeply, then he recapped the bottle and set it back on the shelf. He walked up and down the aisle, found a bottle of Brut, and inhaled. He closed his eyes, dropped his head, and inhaled again.

The manager kicked us out. "This isn't a 'free smell' store," he said.

 

WITH ALL THE MEN GONE, we boys became men. Suddenly, the week of my seventeenth birthday, in the endless gray dampness of a Michigan autumn, I became an adult male. Nick and I drove to the Black Lantern and ordered vodka shots, and then beer after beer. Around us in the bar, everyone was drinking illegally. Spiros shrugged as he made thirteen-year-old Billy Markovich a vodka martini. "Nobody else is here to drink," he said. "I need to make a living, don't I? If you have money, you drink."

Billy nearly gagged on his olive, but he knocked the drink back and motioned for another.

Other boys of thirteen and fourteen howled wildly, glasses raised, bottoms up. The television was switched from ESPN to MTV. We made lewd comments about the women in the music videos.

We took after-school jobs to help our mothers pay bills. You could find us gutting abandoned houses, cutting lawns, pumping gas, flipping burgers. After work we'd come back to the Black Lantern. Vodka, our fathers' drink of choice, coursed through our veins and through our minds and hearts and finally down to our pubescent cocks, which were alive and on fire. Every sixteen- and seventeen-year-old male in Maple Rock was a commodity that year, and we lost our virginity like it was spare change. I had sex with Mrs. Gagliardi, a large-breasted, dark-eyed Avon Lady in her early thirties, who came to the Black Lantern one Saturday evening, drunk, and led me up Warren Avenue to her house. In the morning, she had me get dressed immediately and leave. She didn't want to see me in the daylight, and because I was young and unskilled in these areas of the heart and flesh, I was hurt by her coldness.

Nick, always more precocious and confident than me, was having sex with half the women who worked at the Kroger where he was a stock boy. His redheaded manager, Sue Parsons, was the best, he said. He said there were rainbows in his eyes when he came. He said he didn't care if the fathers ever returned from the moon.

Older women didn't seem to have the same consistent interest in me, but many nights I did go over to see Sonya Stecko, and we made out in her basement for hours. I pulled off her sweatshirt and she undid the zipper of my jeans, knowing that there was nobody who'd come tearing down the stairs, wanting to kill me for what I was doing with his daughter.

Walking home from Sonya's one night, I saw Nick sprawled out on the front lawn of Tanya Jaworski's house.

He had a puffy eye and blood all over the front of his shirt. He said he thought his nose was broken.

I said, "Is Tanya's father back?"

He said, "No. Her mother did this."

And believe me, it was true: if we became men, our mothers did too. They took jobs. Those who already had jobs took second jobs. Sometimes a few of the mothers came to the Black Lantern and drank with us. They arm-wrestled and hollered and broke bottles for emphasis when making speeches. They were working ten, twelve, sixteen hours a day. Once the police even brought my mother home. I stood there in the living room, appalled, as they told me to get her some aspirin and put her to bed. My mother yelled, "Fucking fascists." The cops simply nodded and said good night. They were thinking, I imagine, what I was thinking. These strong women were doing the best they could. So what if they acted a little out of character, if sometimes they let their responsibilities slide? Their husbands were on the moon. Who could deny them some happiness?

My mother worked two jobs. Days, she taught music at St. John's grade school, and three nights a week she cleaned offices in Plymouth, one of the suburbs to the north where men could still be found on Saturday afternoons, mowing lawns, washing cars, fixing bikes. Meanwhile, our house was in chaos. Kolya and I tried to keep up with the laundry and dishes, but we failed. My mother would come home tired, and soon her face was blank and void of worry thanks to a few beers. On her bed would be a pile of clean laundry I had not had time to put away. She'd crawl into towels and underwear and sleep the sleep of the hardworking under heaps of clean linen, smelling of fabric softener. The next morning, she'd try to get some housework done, but she could do little more than drink half a pot of coffee, shower, get dressed, and drive off to work.

 

THAT DOESN'T MEAN that we gave up hope that our fathers would return. Nick had the idea that he knew where some, if not all, of them had gone—Camp Kiev, an old hunting cabin on forty acres up near Cadillac where his father, and many of our fathers, went a few times a year.

Kyle Hartley was pretty much sober, and he owned an old Dodge work van that had room for almost a dozen of us to cram in the back. My mother was working that night and Kolya was with me, smiling like God's grace itself. I let him have a can of beer as we sat in the back, balancing on paint cans and crates and toolboxes. When we hit the interstate, we yelled and sang and roared, whiskey fires in our bellies. We made Kolya dance. We boasted of the women we planned to sleep with, the jobs we were going to get in places like Texas and Alaska, the houses and cars we were going to buy someday.

Near Midland, people started to fall asleep and it got quiet. Kyle kept driving, Nick in the front seat egging him on, whispering how he knew this was the place—the only place—all those men would have gone.

"What will we do when we find them?" Kyle said.

"Kick the shit out of them," Nick said. "And then drag their asses back home so they can take care of everybody the way they're supposed to, the cocksuckers."

I stayed awake, sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket, picturing a sandy lot on a small lake, a lot covered with a rainbow assortment of small tents where our fathers slept under the stars, the sounds of nature lulling them into dreamless sleep. And now—this is stupid—I started to tell Kolya about it: Oh yeah, Kolya, they fish for their supper there, they wear deerskins and make fires for heat. Oh yeah, they have a nice time, and at sunset they sing all the Ukrainian songs, the ones Grandpa used to sing to us. Man, Kolya's eyes were about to fall out of his head. He kept standing on his tiptoes to see out the window. It was too dark to see, though, so I kept up the stories about this place we were going to be at by morning.

Kolya laughed so hard he nearly wet himself. I turned a coffee can over and emptied out the nuts and bolts, then let him pee in it. He thought peeing in the can was hilarious, and I saw a joy in his face I hadn't seen for a long, long time. Of course, he was nine, and he'd had a whole can of beer. But I didn't see that. I just saw myself as the best big brother in the world.

It was almost dawn when we arrived at the cabin. Nick hadn't remembered the directions perfectly, and we drove down a number of wrong roads, curvy tree-lined gravel roads with small animals darting across them. Kolya fell asleep.

The driveway to the cabin was rough and narrow. Those of us in the back of the van half stood, looking out the windshield. The sun was close enough to the horizon now that even coming down the driveway we had enough light to see nobody was there.

Somebody suggested that we might as well get out and swim in the lake for a while, but nobody else wanted to do that. It was late October and cold, a strain of winter hung tight in the sky, ready to snap through with ice and wind. We turned around and went back home. Kolya slept through the whole thing, curled up on my down hunting vest like a cat. I didn't wake him until we got home, and then I told him it was all a dream.

 

NICK AND I HAD NOT been going to school much that fall. We did this partly because we wanted to spend our time working and making money, but mostly because, by missing first period, we could begin drinking in the mornings at the Black Lantern. I was shaving daily and had the first markings of a serious stubble. Nick didn't shave much yet, but his curly hair had grown long and frizzy; he chain-smoked Winstons like a movie star.

We ate bacon and eggs every morning and scarfed down fast food for dinner. We put on weight. Our faces grew fat and square. We kept ball-peen hammers and thick chains under the seats of our cars in case there was trouble. Once, I watched Nick take a hammer to a man's face.

Then, in late November, Nick and I and some friends went back up north to Camp Kiev to hunt deer. We figured, having gone to all the trouble of finding it in the first place, we could at least take it over and make it a hideaway of our own. We loaded our cars with coolers and guns and blazeorange hats and coats. We were all smoking and drinking coffee. Our mothers watched us get in and drive away. We knew what they were worrying about, and we knew that the week we were gone, they would stand staring at the moon, wondering if we'd disappear too.

I had always been a good shot, though my father was one of the few men in Maple Rock who did not hunt. I learned how to hunt from Uncle John, who'd been manic in his pursuit of venison for the winter. I had shot bucks before, though I was in no mood to do it that season. Nick, however, was on fire with determination.

The first two days, he sat in the woods for ten hours or more. He'd come back to camp after dark, dehydrated and empty-handed.

On the third day, we were walking back to camp around noon when we heard a shot. Then a buck came tearing across the path and seeing us, froze. Nick lifted his gun. The buck was easily an eight-point, maybe ten. I didn't want Nick to kill it. I almost yelled to scare the buck away, and I should have.

Nick lifted his gun and fired two shots. The buck staggered and fell.

I do not know how to explain what he did next, but it hangs in my memory as something sad and hopeless and sick. Seeing the buck fall, Nick let out a howl as shrill and eerie as the call of a wounded coyote. He ran down the path to the deer. He spit on it and kicked at its back legs. Then he dropped to his knees, yelling and screaming and began to punch at the deer with his fists. Blood covered his knuckles. "You're mine, you bitch," he yelled. He yelled and yelled it, over and over. Like his father, Nick had large hands, and as he punched the deer, you could hear tendons and bones snapping, and the dull thud of flesh pounding flesh echoed off the trees. It must have carried for miles.

I watched his war celebration for a while from down the path. Then I lifted my gun, took the safety off, and aimed it at Nick's head. I yelled "Hey!" but he ignored me. I yelled three more times and he ignored me. Finally, I shot the gun straight into the air. Nick fell on the ground.

"What the fuck?" he said.

"Get up and leave that buck alone. Quit fucking around. I mean it. Now, or I'll blow your goddamn head off."

Nick had his father's temper. I could see his heart was swelling with the violence of his father, and I could tell that he did not know where it was coming from or what he should do with it. We were angry and young and full of adrenaline and booze and there were firearms in our hands.

Nick stood up and brushed himself off and dropped his hands to his sides.

"Okay," he said. "Help me drag this fucker back to camp."

The anger was what was becoming of us. Don't think for a moment that because we were good, strong boys we could handle all of this: we couldn't. We almost killed ourselves with rage. We would grow up trampling over things, tearing things down, and people would look at us and wonder why we had such violence in our hearts.

Nick and I dragged the buck through the woods. Behind us, the carcass crunched through leaves and snapped sticks. Nick was fighting tears, his hands shaking.

"I feel sick," he said, his voice breaking. "My heart's going a mile a minute."

When we came home from deer hunting, the buck tied to our roof, we smelled of sweat and the woods and blood, and our mothers cupped our faces in their cool hands and kissed us and cried from joy. For a moment, we were all boys again.

 

DID WE MISS THEM? We did.

I know the women missed their husbands, but we, the boys, we missed our fathers.

At night, we looked off in the distance for a set of headlights that might signal that one of the disappeared was home. I sometimes imagined that several buses would pull into the parking lot of the Kmart and our fathers would stream out of the doors with baseball caps and pennants, like they'd been away at a game somewhere. Sometimes I imagined aliens would land in spacecrafts and release the men, like the hostage situations you'd see on the news. Our fathers would come down the ramp with their hands on their heads, tears on their unshaven and greasy faces.

Inexplicably, I felt a war was coming on, and for many nights I had dreams that I died in battle. I dreamed of mountains that crumbled and rivers that flooded. My dreams were apocalyptic and savage. I began to fear that I was a prophet and that I would soon be called upon to speak. I waited for God's voice.

By Christmas it was clear that we were not going to see our fathers anytime soon. We roasted turkeys and learned how to carve them alone. Ours ended up in ugly chunks, like a carcass ripped apart by dogs. My mother had become a vegetarian, and Kolya was spending Christmas at Disney World with his friend's family—a richer, larger, father-still-there family that had moved from Maple Rock to Northville. So I was the only one there to eat the bird. I ate turkey for a week, and still there was some I had to throw away.

One night in January, a blizzard dumping snow on metro Detroit, I fought a Serbian guy in the parking lot of the Black Lantern, a guy who said he was nailing Sonya Stecko. He broke a glass bottle across my back, cracking a rib and knocking the wind out of my lungs. Things went black and then things got clear and started spinning in a lovely fog. Finally, when he hit me with another bottle, this time across the back of my head, I passed out. The bottle didn't break.

Nick woke me up in the empty lot. He said, "Thank God you have a soft head."

He helped me off the ground. Back inside the bar's restroom, I dusted myself off and cleaned my face.

When I came out, Spiros had poured me a tall glass of beer. I drank the beer and checked my jaw. Spiros, who seemed more and more senile each week, said, "Honestly, Roman, you and John, you get worse each week. I worry about you, drinking so much, fighting, swearing."

In his old mind we had become our fathers. Nick and I didn't correct him. We grinned at each other and drank our beers. I felt fine. I was going to be okay. Please understand—I missed my father, but I was having one of those moments when I didn't want him to come back home. I would survive many things without him and I was capable of doing things on my own.

 

FOR THE MOST PART, we pictured our fathers sad and alone. We could see them riding in flea-ridden freight cars on bumpy tracks. We could see them struggling to make campfires on a beach as the wind whipped off the ocean and sand stung their faces. We saw them in anonymous cities, dwarfed by skyscrapers, trying to get together enough spare change for a hot dog or a bowl of soup. We saw them climbing desert mountains, muscles tearing and burning with fatigue, tongues swollen with thirst.

True, as much as these desolate images appealed to us, we also pictured our fathers happy. We imagined them with castles and pools and huge wooden tables of food and beer. We imagined them lounging nude in hot tubs and saunas with women half their age, women we'd never seen before, women who maybe were already on the moon when our fathers arrived. We imagined the climate of the moon to be temperate, and we imagined our fathers singing songs in praise of the lives they had there. We sensed that there was music on the moon. Sometimes, we imagined, a man—one of our fathers—would glance down at the earth and feel a vague memory and the sting of loss, but we knew that such moments would be rare. As we grew older and the men stayed away, such images of happiness became stronger and seemed more realistic. We saw our fathers in a paradise. We could not escape these images and certainly we could not escape the truth—men had disappeared, and their sad lives became happy ones.

Sometimes, when we drank too much and such thoughts angered us in the parking lot of the Black Lantern, we threw stones and bottles at the moon, and we imagined that we were tearing the hearts from our chests, sending them hurtling through heaven where our fathers could see them and know this: we, their sons, were below them, bleeding.