a gentle reminder / baby teeth / the toast is burning / there are crumbs in the coffee
I’ve made my bones a neon altar / i’ve inhaled the glass / quieted the trembling moon / our
fingers are dark with the ashes
every god you’ve danced with wants / an eye / an egg / an unread palm / to make a wrinkle / to
leave a crease /
did you know / that the body becomes lighter / when it cleaves the soul

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My brother understands the flocks
that embroider the sky
above the highways I travel,
and he knows what can be known
about how they find their flyways.

One hour from home
is Lourdes, an auspicious name
and steeple for an Iowa town
with just a bar, the church,
and a baseball diamond.

No miracles here.
No miracles,
just hospice meetings
and miles of 2-lane highway.

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sure the good times roll without a sound but those are city miles
sourdough winters drinking a hole through the rug in Cass County
where the water always tastes like the river's high
might could cut me out of drywall there
might could inhale then find my trace sample twenty years out
this body I suspect of cancer and what's more addiction
blousing happier like rhubarb in the dark both sweeter and red
again with frigging my hip on the counter
bruises in the shape of a city someplace else I don't remember
death rebirth and the potential for each friend
when you're back on the bare hook of being a person
here's the kingdom—you'll get the keys in the mail

you'll get a cracked windshield you'll get a flaming wooden torch
you'll get a wish on an eyelash you'll get a little pill

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We were sitting out back; you were having a craft beer from some local brewery, and I, a dram of bourbon. We were sharing a bowl of small, round, imperfectly perfect sweet red cherry tomatoes you’d harvested from your small garden earlier that afternoon. The green stems were still attached; we plucked them off before popping the tomatoes in our mouths. Our area was experiencing a heatwave, and dusk didn’t bring much relief. Between the warm glow from the drinks—and the lights you’d strung around the perimeter of your deck—the cicada’s song and the dampness of the air, the evening was ripe for conversation that extended beyond surface pleasantries.

You leaned back in your chair, raising the front two legs off the ground just a bit, and you said, “I never knew my daddy.”

You said, “I know his name, and I know where he is, but don’t know who he is.” You said, “I don’t know if I laugh like him, if he is allergic to peanuts too, if he prefers tomato-based barbecue sauce to vinegar-based.” You said, “I think I’d like to find him.”         

You shared the puzzle pieces you’d gathered. I listened and sipped and marveled at the tiny, delicious explosions the cherry tomatoes made when I bit down on them. We talked about the mechanics of this quest and turned over the possibilities. You talked about this hole in your history, and how it still impacts your present.

I listened. Over the cicadas, I heard you whisper what you did not say: that you’ve always carried this hole. That it sits in the center of your chest. That at points in your life, people you’ve encountered have shared information about him, dumping small shovelfuls of satisfaction into your hole, but never enough to make it any smaller, any shallower. I heard you whisper that what you’d never known was still missed, still longed for, still needed. I was astonished by how you could so deeply miss what you’d never had. The depth of the hole and the ache it caused took me by surprise. I considered asking you to tell me more, but did not.

Instead, the conversation twisted and turned as late-night conversations tend to do, and we found ourselves talking about our children and their paths. Present mommies and daddies, not missing ones. One of us glanced at a phone, the clock on it telling us that it was late, and time for me to go.

Just as surprising as those cherry tomatoes, and just as satisfying and sweet, that conversation served as the preamble to a litany of others like it, all full of depth and honesty. They were steady and consistent, without feeling overwhelming, and I was grateful for the friendship and appreciative of your presence in my life. We talked on back porches and over bottles of wine, through text messages and the occasional telephone call; the exchanges were frequent, but never taken for granted. And though we never again revisited that first conversation or the hole you carried in the same detail, I knew that you still carried it with you, along with the dull ache that type of longing brings.

You can imagine, then, the hole that you left in me when you chose to disappear. You can imagine, then, my longing when my calls went unanswered and there was no reply to my texts. I tried to fill the hole through excuses for you: perhaps you were just busy, perhaps you needed to focus on your family and had no time for these conversations, perhaps you were ill, perhaps your fingers fell off and your tongue fell out and you simply had no way to communicate despite your strong desire to do so.

Perhaps.

Perhaps you were initially just really busy and as time went by, you didn’t know how to reengage, so you simply did not.

Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Perhaps I offended you and something said or unsaid silenced you and cut the string that I thought so tightly connected us.

Per. Haps.

I checked social media and casually mentioned you to in-common friends to make sure you had indeed not lost the use of your fingers or tongue. That you were not dead. You have not lost the use of your fingers or tongue. You are not dead. So, you’re a ghost. And like one who lives among ghosts, I look for you when I enter rooms. The shadow of the you that used to be there. From time to time, when I see something that makes me think of you, I send you a text to tell you so, never expecting a reply (but still hopeful for one.) I send you these texts for the satisfaction of knowing that even if you walked out on our friendship, I did not. I sit with your ghost, your shadow, and I wonder about the hole you carry. I wonder if you’re still trying to fill it—how someone with such a hole can create one in someone else. I wonder if our holes can be filled, and what will happen to my hole if, one day, you answer me or reach out. I wonder how many shovelfuls it will take to fill it. 

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Every night, starting upstairs in the bedrooms, Brian closes the blinds before the moon comes out. A calendar with the day’s sunset hangs on the fridge. He tries to build in enough time to make it to every window, but this time of year requires extra diligence. The moon comes out before the sun’s gone, competing with daylight and winning out. Tonight, he finds the moon sitting in a glass pane above the kitchen sink. It’s shaped like a clipped fingernail that missed the bin, sailed across the room, and hung itself in the sky.

On the window ledge, a small photo of a boy in the driver seat of a car looks up at him. Brian looks past it at the splintered moon, thinking about the broken things he’s fixed. That he’s tried to fix. The cracked radiators, the worn valves, the people he stands across the hood from, listening. He pulls the cord, releasing the blind. Light from far away presses against the shade, trying to get in.

In the morning, a man pushes a black sedan up off the street into the lot. Brian opens the hood while the man tells him that he thinks it might’ve run its course, that he’d put over 200,000 miles on it. He says he’d gone to the pharmacy to pick up photos he had developed. He got back in the car, thumbed through the pictures, turned the key and nothing happened. The pharmacy is down the street, so he pushed the car straight here.

The sleeve of photos sits on the passenger seat. Brian asks the man about the pictures. The man picks them up, stands next to Brian and reveals scenes of a family reunion. Children playing catch, dogs rolling in grass, grandparents sitting in foldout chairs watching it all unfold. The man says this was just last week, that his family got together for the first time in ten years and how everyone had changed. The only person who was missing, he says, was his partner, a man he’d been with for about that time.

When he talks about Paul, he does so reverently, as if talking in church, as if Paul might come down from the sky. Brian walks around to the front end, looks over the engine, at the parts that make it move. They appear to him as a whole. He sees that without one, the whole would be lost and, really, the whole is all there is.

The man tells Brian that Paul refused to go. He wouldn’t stand next to a man who didn’t come outright with who he was. The man is from central Nebraska, about 150 miles from here. Out there, everyone looks toward horizons. Nobody has the nerve to look within. If they did, they’d see that the vastness around them didn’t compare to this—a space so wide and incomprehensible, they’d never be the same. So, the man did what he saw. He felt things and left them at that. He kept the part of him that most needed to be seen apart from the rest.

Brian checks the battery connector and the drive belt. He tells the man he’s sorry, that he hopes it works out. The engine looks fine, he says, nothing a few adjustments and fluids wouldn’t fix. Brian tells the man that he had one of these same cars. He brought his son home from the hospital in it then passed it down to him when he started driving.

Brian stops here where he usually does, ending with the image of a father and son in the front seat, the boy changing his first lane, dad checking mirrors. But the way the whole of the engine sits in front of him, how it all comes together—he goes on.

Brian tells the man that his son was driving on a county road out west. It was dusk, one of those dusty, early fall evenings, the time when deer run. One cut out of a field in front of the car, sending it off the road into a concrete pylon. The boy, he says, didn’t suffer, or so he was told, and so he tells himself. Brian says that out of everything that night, he remembers the moon. Big winds off the prairie, cicadas far off, a moon not quite whole. It was like someone had scrubbed at the edges with a cheap eraser. He could see the faded ink left behind. He could see what was missing, overshadowed by the brilliance of the rest.

In a far corner of the lot behind him, two barbed wire fences come together. Empty oil drums stack high and the remnants of a black sedan set there in a pile, the front end pushed into the back seat. The man tells Brian he’s sorry, that he can’t imagine.

Brian opens the driver door, puts the car in neutral. He walks to the back end, starts to push the car toward the garage. The man takes his place next to him. They get it moving, gaining momentum, until it goes along on its own, the two of them just following behind.

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My wife and I make love each night on my grandparents’ floral loveseat, which stayed with the house after they died. We wash the chinaware after tea, draw the thin linen curtains, diffuse the late summer light and the neighbor’s view. A vase is filled with fresh sunflowers, their huge heads turned toward us, and the piano is played just before and immediately following climax.

From the loveseat, we look out at a large, century-old oak tree framed in the window. It stood over my parents and my father’s parents as they conceived the next generations in this house, and stands erect before us as we endeavor to do the same.

Across the living room, two velvet Victorian chairs swivel in place. Pale, pastel shades of ochre, they’re occupied by a psychoanalyst and his wife. They sit upright, legs crossed, each holding a notepad and stopwatch. The court-appointed specialists are here to get to the root of our procreation problems. They observe our behavior and integrate our fears, dreams, and desires into the intercourse. The sessions begin with a discussion on the imperatives of conceiving before we remove our clothes, pull up nude-colored compression socks, forcing vital blood up to the center of our bodies.

We’re instructed to use props, so we build forts using the loveseat’s armrests as a foundation, stacking throw pillows up for exterior walls, mortaring them together with blankets. We run two support beams down the center using the seat cushions from the Victorian chairs, leaving the psychoanalyst and his wife on springs. We plank the loveseat’s floral back cushions across the top, making a roof of flowers. We slide through the entrance and on top of each other, finding that the tight quarters make it impossible to conceive without bringing the structure down. The psychoanalyst scribbles feverishly in his notepad.

We come back to it, day after day, refortifying the shelter in new ways, using heavy quilts, footrests, and, eventually, cement blocks from the basement. We bring in 2x4s to reinforce the walls and wire the place for electricity. We hang a door knocker. The psychoanalyst and his wife look for holes in the structure to observe what’s happening inside: the two of us naked mind nude socks, holding each other within the mass of our making.

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I was seven when my father picked me up from the Sunday school parking lot with a garbage bag of new long johns and camo gear. He had a plan for the following morning that was almost too perfect to believe. We would wake at an ungodly hour, playing hooky to drive out to public land in Virginia where 1,800 acres of dense forest teemed with white-tail deer. My mother would be starting her twelve-hour shift in the Emergency Department and my sister hadn’t been born, so there was nothing to worry about except for the cooler on the truck bench and the rattle bag in the flatbed.

October was nearing an end and acorns were dropping like rainfall from the oaks. More importantly, the rub lines from the bucks had gone cold and the rut had begun. Hunting meant hours in the amphitheater of a sloping valley, enforced solitude and the snapped-twig scurrying of forest critters. The prospect thrilled me for the same reason I loved the thirteen-minute car ride to Catechism lessons at Trinity Church: time alone with my father. I loved all of it except for the act of shooting. There’s a harshness to firing a gun that I never became accustomed to, something raw and visceral that felt better suited for the Redcoats in my elementary textbook than twentieth-century citizens. Thirty foot-pounds of recoil shunted on the shoulder joint. Fingers slick with sweat and residue. But worst of all was the blood. I’m still squeamish but was deathly so as a kid, bad enough that the sight of a 6-point buck strung up at the weigh station a year before had spiraled me into hours of retching on the side of the road. My father had grinned, his gold incisor glinting. “You’ll get used to it, bud.” But I didn’t.

The morning of the hunt, we staked out thirty yards from a rutted trail, inside a brush line. We climbed up into our tree stand and settled in. The setup wasn’t anything fancy. A large plywood platform was situated fifteen feet off the ground, enough that when we climbed we were granted a line of sight down a wooded funnel. I scrambled up to the perch and watched as he made his way up the ladder after me, moving like a man twice his age. Between the splitting migraines and the titanium rods holding together his leg, my father couldn’t work, not since he’d come home with a Purple Heart following a year of flying trash hauls in Da Nang.

He couldn’t do much of anything, really, besides laze in the recliner in our study where the light shone at an angle from above like church windows. He sat in that recliner day after wasted day like some overripe fruit rotting in the sun, spent endless hours watching Orioles games with a can of Schlitz clutched in his big hand. During the baseball offseason, he’d watch military documentaries with the volume turned off. “You weren’t there to see it, but I’ve done more for you than you can imagine.” He was fond of saying this when he didn’t want to help me with social studies homework or play catch in the driveway. I didn’t understand until many years later that he was referring to his service, that his twelve-month tour of duty weighed so heavily on him as to excuse him from parental or civic responsibility in perpetuity. “That’s who I was up against,” he’d say, aiming his remote at grainy footage of North Vietnamese rolling through Saigon. “And that’s not the half of it.” 

We waited for the rustle of leaves as the deer slunk away to their bedding areas after long nights of feeding. But there was nothing to see between our tree and the ridge crest two hundred yards below, not even after rattling antlers and scattering persimmon bait to draw out our targets. By sun-up my father began to work through a six-pack, pissing from our perch onto the forest floor, while I prayed the day would pass without having to fire a single round.

“Sip?” He wrestled the last can from the plastic ring and tossed the drink into my lap. “Better here with your old man than somewhere else.”

I picked up the can, turning it in my hand. I wanted to throw it into the thicket of ferns, somewhere he couldn’t find it. Then maybe he’d sober up and we could have a regular conversation. We could talk about my school projects, or the Yukon Golds that would be ready to harvest from the backyard in a week. Mostly, though, I tried to talk about things he liked. Replays of my twice-weekly coach-pitch practice, how I was doing my best but needed help with my throwing form. I wanted little more than to impress him. I fantasized about earning trophies and accolades, accomplishments so striking he had no choice but to pay attention, to kneel eye-to-eye and tell me he was proud. But I was skinny and pigeon-toed and unathletic. “Maybe later,” I suggested.

“The thing you need to understand,” he said, shaking his head, “is that other people won’t have your best interests in mind the way I do. They’ll start making decisions for you. Then you’re not writing your own story.” The liquid fizzed when he popped the tab. “One sip. With your old man.”

I never thought he was a bad person. He drank too much but he didn’t seem to understand any other way of life. What bothered me was the way he seemed to retreat inside of himself in my presence. I wanted his full attention. Sometimes I liked to imagine him when he was younger. He told the story of his accident with gusto, like one of those megachurch pastors. The smell of petrol as the bullet-riddled fuselage sent his transport helicopter into a tailspin. How the rotor blade sliced open six inches of flesh between his cheekbone and jaw. How they plunged into the grove of tamarinds and hurtled through the canopy, the hardwood knocking loose an incisor and mangling his leg. Ninety seconds that spelled the end of Airman Gene Cauley as he once was. Not that he’d ever been ever known for his bubbly personality, if you listened to his church buddies. He fancied himself after the Rough Riders he read about, Roosevelt and his pack of mustachioed cowboys charging into battle with a Cuban between their lips. But I can’t help thinking that the accident changed him, turned him further inward like some dark magic.

A few weeks earlier, I’d found an Amberg box filled with old Polaroids and letters tucked behind a pile of worn-in loafers in the back of my parents’ closet. Snapshots of monotonous war, of tropical jungles, of my father’s life before he was a father. I’d been tucking one of the photographs in my back pocket wherever I went, a sun-flared moment at Cam Ranh Bay, my baby-faced father decked out in green army fatigues and toting a leather valise down the Pan American’s blue plywood ramp. He was young with a shit-eating grin. In the tales I spun to my classmates, my father’s stoicism emanated from fighter plane gunning and Viet Cong butt whooping. GIs were as good as superheroes to a seven-year-old. The handsome, loose-cannon archetype you might find commandeering a fighter jet in Top Gun or hunting Nazis in a Spielberg film. While I carried it, at least, that’s what I thought I saw.

***

When the black bears came up the ridge later that day my father nudged me awake with the toe of his boot. At first, I thought we were packing our things to leave and so I stood up, stretching my arms overhead. Then I saw the cubs.

“Might not harvest a single deer,” he said, “but at least we’ve got some entertainment.”

There were three of them, a few hundred feet upwind, play-fighting in the wet leaves by the creek. I surveyed the surrounding timber, scanned the riverbank. But their mother was nowhere in sight. I’d seen a segment on the morning news no less than a week before about a wayward hiker who was mauled when he left out the gristle from a camping stove overnight. I thought about the beers and the piss and suddenly sweat was pricking my palms. I hoped my father would know what to do if we ran into trouble but he was so Zen I wondered whether the alcohol had rendered him catatonic. Or maybe his mind was somewhere else entirely, back piloting a Hercules over the Mekong Delta.

That’s when the wind shifted. A flick of my father’s head indicated the black mound charging through the undergrowth, making a beeline for our stand. “We’re square between the sow and her cubs. Nothing but a threat to mama right now. Stay calm and we’ll be fine.” A flock of mallards squawked overhead, flying due south. He lowered his rifle barrel, lifted his eyebrows. “Capiche?”

I knew killing the beast was out of the question. Illegal, at least. Immoral, most likely. Bear hunting season was restricted to a six-week period in early autumn. The Department of Natural Resources published an entire treatise on the topic that I read in its entirety on the drive north from Maryland, preferring to bury my head in the document than endure the charged silence hanging between us. But the bear was at the base of our tree, its claws scrabbling on bark, and at that moment I didn’t care about federal authority or getting sent to hell. My father saw me squirming and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Deep breath, bud. In and out.”

The quarter-ton sow shot up the trunk, close enough that I could see her nostrils flare, flush with our scent. We had no bear spray, no air horn. My father dragged me out into the woods and I felt he’d left me defenseless, that he didn’t care enough to lift a hand. It made no difference to me that nonintervention was the right thing to do. I was terrified and wanted protection, wanted to be made safe. I snatched the sidearm from his shoulder holster and scrambled away from him. I needed both hands to lift the gun. He held out his palm, his voice a low rumble. “Put the gun down before I take it from you.”

“She’s not leaving.” I could’ve reached out and touched her snout. Held my hand to her throat and felt the rumble of her warning grunts.

“She’s just curious.”

“Or maybe she wants to eat us.” I disengaged the safety like he’d taught me.

“I’m not asking you for a second opinion.”

But I was already looking through the peep sight. One shot through the upper chest and we’d be safe. The shot rang out in the valley. I’d aimed ten feet over the bruin’s head, a warning shot out into the overstory. Almost instantly she scampered back down the tree, lumbering off to round up her cubs.

My father exhaled and snatched the Magnum from my hands. He managed a grin as he pulled the cylinder latch and emptied the chambers. “Suppose that’s your lesson for the day,” he said. My ears were ringing and I could taste ammonia in the back of my throat.

In the years after I would wonder if I was obeying his orders or was simply scared. Either way, the muzzle flashed.

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