Read an Excerpt
The old man picks up his pace, cycling shoes clipped into his pedals, flying down the sidewalk until he gets to the overpass just before Hayden Road.
He turns onto the Indian Bend Wash Path, a bike trail winding through a city park. It’s dark now, and he can barely see the palm trees and pagodas, the faded blue plastic dome-top trash cans. The parking lot behind the CVS, and the red and white lights of the Circle K, they stretch farther behind him now, just some dim lights down Thomas, across from a sleepy La Quinta Inn.
He pedals as hard as he can, then lifts off the seat, coasting along the yellow painted stripe on the path, to the place where a bridge takes him over a creek bed, the bottom only stones and browning leaves and broken glass. Yellow letters painted across the path spell out “SLOW,” but he doesn’t heed the words as he heads into a sharp left turn at full speed. He’s taken this turn a hundred times before.
It’s quiet now, deep in the park, just his heart beating and the babble of faraway city sounds. He lets out a tentative shriek. Nobody can hear him. He’s not bothering anybody, he figures. So, he opens his mouth wider, pushing out a fuller tone. Now he’s screaming, full out, into the dry desert wind.
He gets to an intersection, crosses the road into El Dorado Park, where the bike path picks up again, and he catches himself as he passes the shoddily manicured flowering bushes behind the Continental Villa apartments, NOW LEASING, and the neighborhood watch sign. He still yells, but he tamps down his volume until he’s back in the thick of the woods, whizzing by empty gazebos, picnic tables with benches attached, a volleyball net sagging over a rectangular patch of dirt and sand. Now when he screams, it’s from deeper down, with all the force in his bony old body.
Moans from the vast maw of fatherly loss travel through the air, undulating vibrations of unspeakably shitty times, long lists of medications on dry-erase boards in hospital rooms, late-night trips to the pharmacy for pain pills and cans of Ensure, and worse, the happy times, when he was so stupid, he didn’t even know to take note of them, talking about the 49ers’ offensive line, eating burritos at the Taqueria on Mission Street, laughing so hard when his grown son pinned him, his big grown bear of a child, wrestling on the carpet in front of the couch.
You don’t know when you’re done screaming about your dead son until you’re done. He lets out another wail.
He passes the man-made fishing pond, ducks floating, asleep. The air is salty now, a brine that carries the sound, which is nothing more really than a disturbance of the particles in the air, a disturbance that sets off the transportation of energy from one place to another, moving through solid surfaces and water, the pond and the ducks, a transmission as invisible and mysterious to me as the whereabouts of my brother. It turns out, a cold night is a good time for a father to scream; sound waves are louder and travel farther when there’s a chill in the air. I looked it up, the physics of it, how the speed of sound isn’t a constant, how it changes depending on the environment. The cold slows the molecules, saps their energy, so they’re too still on an Arizona night in early spring to vibrate as much as they do in the warm light of day. The old man’s cries take longer to ripple out than they did in summer, but they travel farther in the cool air, through crisp, sparse leaves, bird nests, the fence along the edge of the bike trail; to the beings going about their business in cars, whooshing toward home, windows up.
I only know about the screaming because he admitted it to me. I still don’t know why, except grief needs a witness, according to one of the grief books in a stack on my nightstand.
“Sometimes, I just start screaming. I’m not bothering anybody. So, I just scream when I’m riding home,” he confessed sheepishly, between innings.
“What do you scream?” Do you scream the name of your dead son, or do you just kind of scat?
“I don’t know,” he answered shyly, looking away at Camelback Mountain way beyond the outfield. “I just yell.”
I wanted to know more, but the game was starting, and I knew that was all I was going to get. If I wanted to talk loss with my dad, it would have to be about Little League baseball.
