“I had a dog when I was a kid,” Susan said. “One night he was out in the yard howling, and I went out to see what was going on. It was fall, a lot like this, and the ground was covered with leaves. By the time I got out there the howling had stopped, but Loofah—”
“Loofah?” said Pierce.
“I like it,” Gillian told her.
“Well, thanks. Anyway, he came to me across the yard, and there was something weird about it, I didn’t know what. So I patted his head and told him to go back to his little house, and like that, he turned around and did. But the weird thing was that his paws weren’t making any sound on the leaves, and from where I was standing he looked like he was hovering about an inch off the ground.”
A moment of silence while everyone took this in. “Creepy,” Pierce finally said.
“I thought it was a dream or something, but the next morning he was dead.”
Nobody seemed surprised. “Poor Loofah,” said Gillian.
Pierce said suddenly, “I used to have a flea circus.”
“No kidding?” Susan said.
“Yep. I was just a kid.” And he began to tell them the flea circus story, the fleas he got through the mail, the books and pamphlets he read to learn how to train them. I knew the story, of course, but there were elements I hadn’t heard, like the middle-aged gypsy woman who sent him letters, thinking he was older and might marry her, and the colony of fleas that simply disappeared in his room during the night without a trace. To my surprise, Pierce was a good storyteller. His timing was perfect. When he got to the tall man’s visit, which I suppose was intended to be the weird part, I listened carefully. He said that he let the man in, showed him the fleas.
“And he totally put me down. I mean, he’d come hundreds of miles to wreck a kid’s day. He told me I was just an amateur and that my fleas were no good, and that I ought to give them to him, because he could really teach them a thing or two.”
“So did you give them away?” Susan asked.
“Nope. I torched ‘em. I took them out in the yard and set them on fire. Tim remembers this.”
“It’s true,” I said.
Pierce shook his head. “It was the cruelest thing I’ve ever done. I was a little Nazi. After that, I swore I’d never hurt another thing again. I still watch my feet to make sure I’m not stomping bugs.”
Afterward, Gilly told a story about how she’d been in a car driven by a drunk kid, and it rolled over once in the middle of the road, landed on its wheels and kept on going, and nobody mentioned what had happened. But I wasn’t listening too carefully. Instead I was thinking about Pierce and the mysterious man. Pierce had revealed, without provocation, one of the great secrets of his childhood, and it turned out to be utterly devoid of the intrigue we had all attached to it. The tall man was nobody, just some guy, probably very lonely and jealous and insulated from the world, who couldn’t stand the paltry notoriety of a little boy, and came to steal that notoriety away. It occurred to me that maybe we had never actually asked Pierce what happened, that we had so built him up in our minds as a mythic, almost magical loner that we failed to recognize that he was just a sad, neglected kid in the early stages of a lifelong sickness. I wondered how many times we had let him stew like that in his own juices, how much we had contributed to his problems later. I was ashamed. I wanted to take my hands off the wheel, lean over and hug him, but of course I didn’t.
We were all silent as the Caddy glided into the Philadelphia city limits. Gilly leaned over the back of Pierce’s seat and held both his hands; in the rearview I saw Susan squinting through her glasses at the hazy skyline. For a moment our eyes met and we smiled twin nervous smiles.
The warehouse stood, dark and crumbling, on Girard Avenue, a wide two-way dissected by ancient trolley tracks. All the other cars looked like ours, but older and less kept up: hulking American tugboats from before the energy crunch. We parked easily, as the spaces were largely empty, or occupied by cars that hadn’t been moved in months. It was chilly, and the air carried the subway smell I’d learned to identify and enjoy, an organic admixture of gear oil, urine and soft pretzels.
“That’s it?” I asked Pierce and Gilly.
Gilly had a thin arm around him. She gave his shoulders a squeeze. “That’s it,” she said.
The building was surrounded by chain-link fence. We stopped at a gate, where a muscular man was listening to a transistor radio. Pierce showed him the key and he waved us through.
They were right: the door was the size of a dump truck. It was made of corrugated metal and fastened shut with a giant padlock and a swivel hook as big as my arm. Pierce stared at it, then at me.
“Will you do it?”
Now? I wanted to say. Shouldn’t we bow our heads or something? Say a prayer? Susan and Gilly stood side by side, several feet behind Pierce, and Susan put a tentative arm around Gilly, in a big-sisterly way. Gilly seemed to appreciate it. For the first time since I’d met her, she actually seemed uneasy, and I was glad that Pierce wasn’t looking at her. “Sure,” I told him, and held out my hand. He put the key into it.
The lock resisted for a second, then gave, and I threw all my weight into unlatching it. The hook groaned in its eye. Then it was open. I turned around: Pierce had stepped back and was holding hands with a newly composed Gilly. “I’m gonna do it,” I said.
“Okay.”
The handle was cool and rough with rust, and I adjusted the position of my fingers, less for a better grip than for the sheer physicality of it, the pleasure in the sensation. I can’t describe how happy I was at that moment, so deeply involved in this adventure with these three people; I felt like I could spend every waking moment with them for the rest of my life, and be perfectly satisfied.
The door rumbled up without the least resistance, practically pulling itself after the first few feet. This was the first indication that my father had spent a lot of time in here, but while this was occurring to me I looked up and saw what was inside, illuminated by the scummy daylight.
“Wow,” Susan said.
I couldn’t help the first thought that came to me, which is that this thing he had made, this monstrous piece of what I instantly recognized as installation art, was bad. Of course my second thought was that the first thought was terribly unfair, but in that brief moment of cruel judgment I saw what a fool I’d been to take on the strip, and how obvious it was that my father knew this all along, and knew I would fall for it too. He must have known I wouldn’t let him change my life, no matter how much changing it needed, unless he was dead, and far out of range for flinging I-told-you-so’s.
Although this thing he’d made, this awful thing was telling me so. It was also apologizing, in ragged, gasping breaths. We walked in, our footsteps seeming to echo this sad fact: Sorry, they seemed to say, sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.
What we saw first were the sloppy fifteen-foot-high Family Funnies figures painted on the walls: Mom, Bitty and me on one side; Bobby, Lindy and Puddles on the other. And on the back wall, my father himself, with two new additions to the FF cast: Mal and Pierce.
Mal and Dad stood on opposite sides of Pierce, each with an arm around him: the son’s two fathers. Mal was rendered with a doting, fatherly air, while my father had done himself with his usual world-weariness, bent, in a neat trick of perspective, out over the floor of the storeroom. Pierce, on the other hand, was a clumsy creation at best, with a cherubic, glowing face that he had never possessed and never would. He had the same ears as Mal, and was wearing a T-shirt Pierce used to have and that I had forgotten, which read, in bubbly black Jersey-Shore-iron-on letters, BLAME MY PARENTS.