Please Don't Come Back from the Moon Read online

  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 fl
ooded. 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.