The television wasn’t working, you say?
Could it be because there was somebody under the floor right exactly there? Not because he wanted to hear that show better but because his youngest son was sitting right in front of that screen.
Indians, we don’t have guardian angels—if we did, they’d have been whispering to us pretty hard when some certain ships bobbed up on the horizon—but we do have helpers. I think usually it’s supposed to be an animal.
Maybe when you need more, though, maybe then you get a person.
Maybe then your father gets special permission to come back, so long as he stays hidden.
So long as nobody tries to rat him out.
Meaning, yes, it was me who’d killed those four dogs. It was me who laid that torn-in-four black dishcloth over their eyes.
And it was my fault the cartoon wouldn’t play without static.
Just for luck, I dug up one more dirt clod, a big flat one, and aimed hard, slung it as hard as I could into the side of the propane tank.
It exploded exactly as I’d wanted it to: a big dusty cloud, billowing out and thinning.
Then that plume took on a dim glow.
I stepped one step up the back stairs, my hand to the knob of the door, and then I saw the glow for what it was.
The neighbor’s back porch light.
He was home from jail.
Instead of asking the deputy sheriff over for dinner right away, like all the cop shows said would happen, the deputy sheriff drove me and Dino to school the next three days. He’d heard what happened at the bus stop.
I just stared out the window on my side. I was playing the prisoner. I was being transported to my next holding facility. An armed guard was transporting me. He was under orders not to talk to me. Not that I was going to try.
On the way back from school, in the big empty space before you got to our clump of houses, he let Dino flip the switch that fired the sirens up. Later, while Mom was warming spaghetti and then forgetting she was warming spaghetti, I told Dino to shut up so I could hear the television. He was playing with his trucks in front of the couch and making siren sounds with his mouth.
Dino did stop, and then I had to watch the show I hadn’t even been watching.
I just picked at my burned spaghetti.
That night when I was standing at the window, I was in my pants, not just my underwear. I was watching for the deputy sheriff’s truck, now. To do what? I had no idea. Just to prove it to myself, I guess.
I tried not to blame Mom. She didn’t know Dad was back, and she wouldn’t believe me if I told her, and if I told her, it would make him leave, anyway. So, all I could do was watch.
I fell asleep with my head leaning against the glass and the wall, and when I woke, I jerked around, to try to see a shape just stepping past.
The living room was empty.
But you’re supposed to be getting more solid, I said inside.
Not more invisible.
Nothing invisible could have done that to the four dogs.
And—and Dino. He hadn’t had a seizure for days now.
I pushed away from the window to go to bed, because nothing was working, because everything was stupid, and I nearly had my eyes pulled all the way away when I saw motion out front.
I’d thought the wheel at the base of the tetherball pole was going to be a truck with a thrown rod.
What I saw now told me maybe it was—that maybe the truck hadn’t been dragged down here, but parts of it had come down all the same.
The wheel, maybe.
The football was going around the tall pole.
I smiled.
Because the front door squeaked and squealed—Mom said it was the best alarm—I went out the back door, by Dino’s room. He could sleep through anything.
The football was just tapping into the pole by the time I came around the side of the house, having to test each step for sharpness before giving it my weight.
I let the football hang there for a few breaths, and then I picked it up, handed it around and around the pole until I had to walk it around.
It was my turn.
“Watch this,” I said, and flung the ball at a spot in the dirt maybe six feet in front of me. The string grabbed it in a perfect parabola, flung it high and around, so I had to fall away from getting hit. I kept on falling, too, caught myself on my elbows.
That was why the headlights didn’t spear me in place.
I stayed down, turned over onto my stomach.
The truck was just coasting, not turned on.
When the headlights turned to wash across the front of our house, they cut off just in time. Just the brake lights flaring in the barely there dust the tires had coughed up.
The sheriff’s deputy.
Mom stepped out onto the porch, didn’t turn the light on.
The sheriff’s deputy guided his door shut, just one click deep, and followed her back inside.
I told my dad not to look, not to listen.
No lights glowed on in the house.
I rolled onto my back, stared straight up.
The football just hung there on its string.
I understood. Lying there then, I patted my pocket for the superhero I was just remembering, from the day all the dogs died. It wasn’t there, had been too long, and these were the wrong pants anyway.
What I’d wanted to do, it was hold it up against the backdrop of all the stars so its silhouette could fly back and forth.
Except I wasn’t a kid anymore.
I was the man of the house, at least until Dad got solid enough for Mom and Dino to see him too.
I stood, my hands balled into fists by my thighs.
I walked back to the house, my line taking me to the front door so I could open it, let it squeak and squeal, but then I stopped at the sheriff’s deputy’s truck.
The driver’s side door opened easy, with no sound at all.
I sat there behind the wheel, my hand cupped over the dome light.
There was the siren switch right there.
I smiled, was slow-motion reaching for it and all the excitement it would bring to this night when I remembered how the sheriff’s deputy had guided Dino’s hand there, instead of to the glove compartment Dino had been going for, because, in our car, that’s where Mom let him keep his road toys.
After checking the front door and all the windows again—nothing—I opened that glove compartment myself.
Tucked way back there was a short little revolver.
I held it in wonder, careful of where the barrel pointed, and then I looked to the front door again. And then I went in through the back of the house, testing each step again, because I was one pistol heavier now, plus however many shells it held.
This time I didn’t have to be asleep, or just waking from it, to see Dad.
I’d had the pistol held low, pointed at the ground, and had only looked in Dino’s room to be sure he was there, and not shaking under the covers.
What I saw nearly made me pull the trigger, shoot my foot off.
Dad—my years-dead father—he was leaned over Dino, had maybe been listening to his heart or whispering into his mouth. His fingertips were to either side of Dino’s sleeping shape, and he had one knee on the bed, one foot on the ground. And he was looking across the room like an animal, right into my soul. His eyes shone, not with light but with a kind of wet darkness. The mouth too—no, the lips. And curling up from them was smoke. From the cigarettes and ashes I’d funneled behind the skirt.
My breath choked in my throat thinking about that, that taste, and I wavered in place there in the hall, caught between a scream and a fall, and when I sensed a body behind me, in the back door that was just a doorway because I’d left it open, I knew it was because I’d looked away from Dad in Dino’s bedroom. That I’d broken eye contact just long enough for him to step around the rules of the physical world come out here with me for a little father-son discussion.