‘Click-Snap-Splosh’—“Twenty-eight!”
‘Click-Snap-Splosh’—“Twenty-nine!”
‘Click-Snap-Splosh’—“Fuck me, that’s thirty!”
Then I saw him, Eddie, outlined in shadow, on the far side of a moss-covered hummock. His gun was pointed downward, the front sight and muzzle no more than two inches above a big puffy bullfrog. Guts oozed from a hole in the frog’s back and a reddish-brown goo rolled down its still shining lime-green skin. The frog’s left eye was half-open, blinking slow and lazy. It was still alive.
‘Click-Snap-Splosh’—“Thirty-one!”
Now it was dead.
Eddie grabbed the frog by its legs and tossed it into a slop-pile of green and red and guts. Thirty-one frogs lay dead in the swamp at his feet, some submerged just beneath the muddy water, their final breaths bubbling to the surface and popping, others lay limp and lifeless atop the pile just above the water line.
I took one step back, one step closer to my home, one step closer to the music that was now silent, one step closer to my family, my brother and sister, mom and dad, all of them waiting for me at the dinner table and that’s when the ground tried to swallow me.
My left leg plunged deep into the saturated earth and I gasped and Eddie’s shadow spun around and his eyes bulged out like a cartoon and his BB gun pointed at my mid-section and I tried to lift my leg from the muck but it sunk deeper.
“Motherfucker!” he yelled.
“What the hell, Dave!”
He lowered his gun and laughed.
“Goddamn, you scared the shit outta me!”
Eddie grabbed my arm and pulled me from the ground. A wet sucking sound followed me from the depths and my sneaker was devoured by the deep dark muck and it was not until I started wiping the grime off my leg did I see that the ground got my sock too and my leg was black with muck and looked part of the earth.
“There ain’t no end to ‘em, Dave.”
He pointed his gun at the pile.
“Viscera is what you call it, see?”
He poked the gun muzzle at the pile of guts.
“Go ahead now, it’s your turn. Goddamn—just look at ‘em.”
He shoved the gun against my chest. My arms lay limp at my side.
“Don’t be such a pussy.”
I turned away, looking back to my home.
“You’re such a chicken shit.”
Eddie pulled the gun close to his chest, the butt tight against his left shoulder. He looked down and took aim and pulled the trigger.
“Thirty Goddamn Two!”
He slapped the butt of the gun against my palm.
“Take it, Dave, take it, shit, it’s incredible, you have no idea, Jesus, oh man, come on take it, wow!” Eddie seemed to be levitating. “There, there!” he shouted, “Shit, that’s a big one!”
I don’t remember taking the gun but it was tight in my hands and aimed down at the swamp with Eddie pointing to the big one.
“Give it to me, you chicken shit!” Eddie tried to grab the gun, but I tightened my grip on the stock. I’d shot a BB gun before, over at my friend Tony’s farm. We shot stuff like targets and tree trunks and put tiny holes through dangling leaves. But I never killed anything before, not like Eddie. He liked to kill things, small creatures mostly, birds and rodents. He once shot Mark Leonard in the ass for being too fat. He once shot the front door of the Levy’s house because they were “Jews.”
“Jesus oh Jesus, look at what you done! You got that son of a bitch good.” Eddie slapped me on the back. He was giddy. I felt a warm surge but it vanished quick as I looked down and realized I’d murdered a bullfrog for no good reason.
I loved the sound, deep from the belly, like a foghorn sounding its warning. I never dared close my eyes until I heard the sound of the bullfrogs.
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I’d hear them at night when I was in bed, the bullfrogs calling in the swamp. I loved the sound, deep from the belly, like a foghorn sounding its warning. I never dared close my eyes until I heard the sound of the bullfrogs. Outside my window there was stretched out everything I ever knew, twenty-five acres of swamps and streams, hills and valleys, pines and cedars, scatterings of birch, and the old barn and the dirt driveway as long as two football fields and the huge green baseball field between the driveway and barn that we lined and mowed every Wednesday and Saturday. But at night it all disappeared, swallowed up into the relentless dark, leaving a vast emptiness to be filled with the conjurings of a little boy’s mind. But when that first bullfrog called out, a deep familiar rumble, the conjurings vanished and I could drift peacefully.
I put three holes into that bullfrog. The BBs cut clean through. No blood, no guts, no mess. The thin dark stripes running down its spindly legs looked like levers ready to launch but there was no jump left in this one—only stillness. One of its eyes was shut tight, the other wide open and fixed on me. He knew who broke him. Eddie took the gun from my hands and then he eyed me with a look that took something more.
I heard a warm voice in the distance, my mom calling me to dinner. Eddie slung the gun over his shoulder and walked away. His shadow stretched far behind at my feet. He followed the narrow path that cut between the brush and the pines, heading toward the tree line that separated our land from the village beyond. As he was about to step into woods he stopped and took the gun from his shoulder and pointed it toward the sky. He stood stiff and purposeful, like a monument. I looked up to the sky and saw a tiny black bird soaring high above. Eddie pulled the trigger. The bird’s left wing pulled tight to its body and its right wing flailed loosely and then it boomeranged in the opposite direction and plummeted to the earth no more that five feet from where I stood. Eddie lit a cigarette and walked away, a shadow disappearing into the trees.
I looked down at the bird he shot and the bird was dead.
I looked down at the frog I shot and the frog was dead.
I looked across the sky to the west as the sun completed its set and began the long walk up the hill, back to my home, back to where dinner was warm and waiting. My shadow stretched long and limbless beside me before disappearing into the dying light.
♦◊♦
The bullfrogs were silent that night. But I could always count on another sound to help gentle me to sleep. It was the sound of the TV from the den, a sound that meant dad was still awake. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d get out of bed and walk out to the hallway and hide behind the bookshelf and peer into the den and see the back of my dad’s head and the bright TV screen in front of him and Johnny Carson wearing a turban. I liked watching my dad watch TV, his head bouncing when Johnny made him laugh, and sometimes when he laughed real loud I’d laugh too. Then he’d light one of his Kent cigarettes in a ritual unchanging—the snap of the match, the fiery tip, the blaze and the fade … .
‘Snap-whoosh-crackle’
‘Snap-whoosh-crackle’
‘Snap-whoosh-crackle’
… and the smoke, like a thick fog, caught in the glare of the TV, spiraling upward in slow motion, disappearing. Then he’d snuff out the cigarette, settle back into his old chair, the brown cushions marked with burns and age, and he’d watch and laugh some more and I’d go back to bed and fall asleep in two breaths.
I didn’t leave my bed that night. I knew my dad was out there, in the dark with the TV on and Johnny Carson and the laughing and the cigarettes. I didn’t feel like watching him from behind as he watched those things in front of him that he loved very much; the TV and Johnny; the piano and Beethoven; the Chinese food; his books; and that faraway place that seemed to make him happy. I wanted my dad to get off his chair and turn around and come to me. I wanted him to sit down beside me on the bed and wrap his arms around me and tell me that everything would be okay. I wanted to be with him, for just one moment, in some faraway place of our own.
My dad did not come to my room. He never came to my room. He turned the TV off and walked upstairs to his bed. The night turned soundless. I whispered into the dark,
“Daddy?”
♦◊♦
I’m still at the window, somewhere beyond the moon, my back facing Laura. She asks if I’m okay. I tell her I’m fine. I sit with her on the couch and place my hand over her belly and she rests her hand over mine and smiles. I shoot back a suggestion of a smile that is a lie.
“What’s the matter?” she asks.
I want for her to understand what I’m feeling—I just don’t want to tell her. I look out the window. I watch the moon disappear behind the city.
“I dreamed about Vermont again last night.”
I’d told her almost everything about my dad, how quiet and distant he could be in his solitary interests, difficult to penetrate, that he was sometimes near to invisible, hovering without presence, and that his passivity was his personality.
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She knew about Vermont, the recurring dreams of my childhood. She knew about the twenty-five acres and the hills and the swamp and the trees and the streams and the winter sledding and the summer adventuring and she knew about the kids from the village coming over to play baseball every day and then going home to dinner and coming back at night for games in the dark. She knew about my mom, so patient and loving and tucking me in at night and kissing me on the forehead and the back and forth “I love you’s” before she left the room and how I could share anything with her. And she knew about my dad, that he was a doctor, family practice and that he was old school in his care for patients and they loved him for it. She knew that he was the most intelligent person I’d ever known, a true intellectual, that he was multi-lingual, played piano, read prodigiously, and watched TV late into the night and was usually out the door before I woke. I’d told her almost everything about my dad, how quiet and distant he could be in his solitary interests, difficult to penetrate, that he was sometimes near to invisible, hovering without presence, and that his passivity was his personality. I’d told her about those rare occasions when he’d attempt interacting with his children, a catch with his boys, a conversation with his daughter, and how his heart didn’t seem in it and how wrenchingly uncomfortable it could be.
But there were things she did not know. I’d never told her about that summer when I was nine years old and met Eddie and how completely unprepared I was for a twelve year-old kid who drank and smoked and stole and shot things and tried to teach me how to hate. I’d never told her that following summer break I had to excuse myself from the classroom for the first week of fourth grade so I could hide in the bathroom and cry about something I could not explain. And I’d never shared with her how unprepared my father was for this unprepared boy. I’d never shared with her what I’d come to understand years later—that sometimes a mother’s love and warmth isn’t enough, that sometimes a boy needs his daddy and sometimes just being in the same room with Daddy isn’t enough. Sometimes a boy needs his daddy to look him in the eye and tell him that everything will be okay, that he’s safe. Sometimes a boy needs his daddy to wrap his big arms around him and allow him to disappear into the warmth of his chest and feel the movement of his breath against his body—the lift and the settle, the rise and fall, the up and down.
“What was the dream about?” she asks.
“Same old thing.” I say.
How am I to tell her anything more? How am I to tell her, my wife, she with the twins in her belly, she with the sizzling heartburn surging up her esophageal tube—how am I to tell her that when I think of becoming a father it sometimes feels like tumbling headlong into a narrowing corridor of panic?
We sit silently for several minutes, the four of us.
“You really think I’m going to be a good father?”
“Yes, I really do.”
I want her to be right. I don’t want my children to remember me from behind
Read more Father’s Day stories on The Good Life.
—Photo credit: Joseph Gray/Flickr
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I read this today. It made me want to cry, but I couldn’t cause I was cried out from other Father’s day issues, and why it made me want to cry isn’t actually of issue, save that I think we all have those pebbles of experience in our minds, hidden in pockets some of them, hidden even to ourselves. What I loved was your desire to have her know, without having to say the words because the words are so…useless, they aren’t enough, even here with the brilliance of your words here, inadequate to the actual feeling state, the memory… Read more »
Dave Sanfacon you remind me of an updated, 21st century Albert Camus.
Whew! I was completely caught up in this piece, really stirred my cauldron. This feels to me like what men mentor to each other and to boys: turning over the pebbles of experience to see what’s clinging, what’s hiding, what’s brightly polished, what’s rancid and gooey and a bit scarey, what’s valueable to keep, what’s time to release. In this story, one feels the strength and courage and tenderness of that exploration. Thank you and please keep writing.
Wow. Stunning. What is said and what isn’t. An understanding of the deeper currents running through all of our lives. An ability to say just enough. And a vulnerability, a willingness to fear and hurt and desire. I particularly like this: “It sounded to me what lonesome might sound like if lonesome could whisper.” I know this song. It asks you to ‘go within’ and there finds grace.
You will be an awesome Dad. It has all been a gift. All of it.
You did it again bro. Amazing piece. Thank you.