"This Is My Rifle; This Is My Gun. This Is for Fighting; This Is for Fun."

After years of steady "No's," I finally caved to the boy's constant pressuring for his first toy gun. It's not a Red Rider BB gun with a compass in the stock, so at least he won't shoot his eye out. His new piece, an overpriced, malfunctioning, cap smoking pistol from Tweetsie, is dubbed the "Doc Holiday." I keep trying to get him to say, "I'm your huckleberry," but he has other ideas for this extension of his manhood. The boy strapped the holster on, shoved his piece in it, and slung it around to rest between his legs before engaging in a series of pelvic thrusts.

"Daddy, this is probably unappropriate," he said, smiling proudly. (And, for the record, I do realized the correct word is "inappropriate.")

"I'm pretending my gun is my willie!"

R. Lee Ermey would've had his ass. I just laughed my ass off.

"Dad...You Wanna Have a Catch?"

I don’t even have to watch the whole movie. I can aimlessly scroll through the channels and if I happen to hit Ray Kinsella asking John—Dad—if he wants to have a catch, then a saline solution quietly seeps from the corners of my eyes. That scene kills me.

Here’s why: I had the best father a young man could ever imagine having. The older we got, the stronger our relationship became; he was my best friend, someone I talked to every day, about everything. But, when I was a boy, we both missed out on a lot of those moments Ray and John shared at the end of “Field of Dreams.” My father was never absent, like John in the fictional film; he provided for his family, and satisfied my every want and need save for one. Games of catch were few and far between, and I am sure this fact was as hard (perhaps much harder) for him as it was for me. My father, then an All-American athlete on a football scholarship at Carolina, contracted polio when he was 18 years old. Despite a death sentence from his doctors, he won the war against polio, but his body forever bore the battle scars. My dad was a month shy of his 40th birthday when I was born, and by the time I was serious about baseball he was walking with a cane. Two metal braces, strapped to his thin thighs, snapped in to his specially-made shoes to steady him. His right shoulder, frayed from years of helping do the work his atrophied leg muscles refused to do, ached from the Nerf football tosses my mother shunned in the house. And we weren’t more than ten feet apart.

So it was a rare treat, for me at least, when, balky shoulder and broken body be damned, he gave into my constant requests for a game of catch. The routine was always the same. I snatched my well-worn Rawlings mitt and my best baseball, no matter that we would be playing catch in the driveway and it may get scuffed—this was a special occasion. Richie Zisk was not exactly a household name, but he was in my house, as his cursive signature was branded into the palm of my glove. I dragged the aluminum folding lawn chair from the carport, where my dad’s blue whale of an Oldsmobile 98 was taking a break from guzzling gas, its rear bumper jutting out into the driveway. I unfolded the chair and set it in place, buttressed against the pole of the adjustable basketball goal my dad would always promptly replace when my friends and I got big enough to dunk it.

He soon ambled out, feeling his way to the chair with his cane. Dad’s plaid, short-sleeve cotton shirt clashed with the orange and green woven nylon as he unlatched his braces, allowing the knees to bend, and collapsed into the chair, a little winded from a diaphragm weakened from polio and a paunch that extended a little further over his beltline each year. He was in his late forties, but when he sat his pants climbed to the heights of a much older man, revealing the blue wool dress socks he wore to work every day. The metal of his braces caught the sun and shone like the chrome from the Olds.

I don’t even remember if he wore a glove, but, owing to his leather-helmet era toughness, I seem to remember him shunning the protection of a mitt, snatching my pre-adolescent fastballs with his bare hands. Fortunately for him, I never had much of an arm, but thanks to my immovable target and the pressure of not wanting to screw this rare game up by short-hopping him in the shins, I developed pretty good command. Tired-armed coaches from little league through high school would later call upon me to throw batting practice, which was both a blessing and a curse. I was valued for my ability to consistently throw strikes, giving my teammates ample opportunity to take their hacks, but my rubber right wing would never be seen as anything more than a batting practice arm. Oh how I longed to pitch in a game.

Most of my childhood pitching dreams—protecting a one-run lead in game seven of the world series, bases loaded, two outs, a 3-2 count on the batter in the bottom of the ninth—were played out alone in the driveway, a tennis ball in my hand instead of cowhide. I gave a running play-by-play to my audience of bushes: “With two strikes on the batter, Schmidt inches back a step at third. Sandberg has a foot in the outfield grass at second. Sanders is set; he delivers…” It would’ve been nice to get strike three just once, but the brick wall of our house that served as my backstop predictably bounced a one-hopper back to me, and I tried not to bobble it before recording the last out and getting mobbed by imaginary teammates. Looking back, even if those dreams had come to fruition, they could never measure up to the satisfying smack of leather into the leather of my father’s strong hands. He would give me an enthusiastic “strrrrrrikkke threeee!” before a flick of the wrist lobbed the ball back to me. I never wanted to let him go. Damn the darkness. Damn the dinner bell.

* * *

So now, with no cornfield to plow, I wait, not for the prompt of voices, but for the next generation of father-son catches. The overzealous purchase of a mitt, bought for the occasion of Silas’s first birthday, has languished for years, gradually settling to the bottom of a bin along with the detritus of plastic baby toys. I reserve hope that one day the boy will take an interest in it, and he’ll ask me if I’d like to have a catch. I may have to explain to him that sometimes people cry because they are so happy.

Dog Will Hunt

I passed the remnants of an old apple orchard to the left. The occasional green apple, for whatever reason fallen too soon, crunched under rubber as my tires tried to keep traction on the road that was little more than a rocky runoff from a spring up the hill. Those rocks brought me here; I meant to harvest flat stone to use in one of the dozen or so overdue landscaping projects that may, if ever completed, fulfill my existence. But yard projects just churn on, like this uneven road, grinding and grinding.

I wasn’t alone on this uphill battle. Lina, who bears a close resemblance to her pariah dingo ancestors, and Dude, a golden retriever, trotted amiably along with their designated pack leader, a green, well-worn Honda Ridgeline. Dude takes the riskier path, tight by the truck cab’s driver door unless the narrow width of the sunken road forces him to higher ground. Lina stays a few inches off the back-left quarter panel, just at the rear bumper. I try to keep one eye trained on them, tongues wagging in the July heat, and one eye on the road. When the road allows me to speed up, they speed up; they slow when I slow. Too bad they tug like draft horses when they’re at the end of a leash.

I reached the end of the uphill climb where the road doglegs right over the creek, just past a bent and rusted “for sale” sign, and stopped right there in the middle of the track. Rush hour on this rocky trail is a hunter on a four wheeler passing by maybe once a month, once in a blue moon, so there’s no need to pull to the side, not that there’s much of a side anyway on a path so narrow that weeds clutching the road bank scrape the truck on both sides. A few days earlier Silas caught his first salamander here after it darted from a flat stone I pulled from the creek bank. It was a good spot not just for its easy access to the creek’s rocks, but also because the creek created a diversion for the boy while daddy did his work. But there would be no need for such a diversion today; the boy was at the bottom of the hill playing with a friend whose family rented one of the two still-habitable farm houses among the many old homesteads that dot the expansive property. I planned on steady work.

By the time the parking brake wrenched me in place, Lina and Dude had ambled into the pines that had taken over most of this forgotten landscape and carpeted it with a thick layer of brown needles. Though they quickly disappeared in the woods, I knew they would both reassume their pack position as soon as the engine fired again and they heard the call of rocks grinding under rubber.

Lina hunts and herds. Many a startled chipmunk or rabbit has sent her through the thicket in an impassioned but usually fruitless chase. She’s slow to give up, but eventually heeds my call to rejoin the pack and stands patiently while I pull the thorns. She delights in her power to send cattle on a stampede, or circle them in a tight knot, or at least she does until some angry farmer and his lead puts an end to it. I marvel at her herding instinct, and wonder where in her lineage she picked up the trait, but I don’t want to lose my best friend so I try not to encourage it.

When Lina herds she runs with a low, swift gait, gliding fearlessly but dangerously at the hind quarters of any cows that don’t start running before she gets close. I’ve never seen a rebel buck more than once before falling in line. On the hunt she is a different animal altogether, her wide, pointed ears perked instead of put back, her tail a backwards “C” over her haunches instead of held low. The coat at her withers scrunches forward and stands erect, changing her entire profile, and she bounds off four pogo sticks at her target like a bouncing wrecking ball off its chain. The herd is graceful; the hunt is pure power, or at least as much power as a 40-pound pup can muster.

It was the wrecking ball that broke the steady drone of flat stone thumping the hard plastic bedliner. Lina sawed through thin pine limbs, bounded behind me and across the road before disappearing downstream. I didn’t get a glimpse of what she was after. Dude trailed. I got a look at his expression and it seemed he was running more out of curiosity than sport.

I went for more rocks. This time my work was interrupted by a shrill and distant distress signal. I think now that my mind didn’t know what to make of the sound, so it made it into a familiar sound, a boy crying out. Had Silas followed me up the path and gotten hurt along the way? Did he get trampled by the stampede of dogs?

The cry definitely sounded human, but each time I called out for Silas the intermittent scream went silent. If it was Silas, or anything human that was hurt, and it had the lungs to muster a wail at regular intervals, then surely it would answer my shouts. My call should have elicited a response, not silence.

It was definitely animal. What did Lina sound like when she was hurt? I’ve seen her try to catch bumblebees in her mouth, all the while getting stung by the nest she disturbed, without ever so much as a flinch. Once I heard a little whelp when she twisted a paw wrestling with Dude. But what if she was really hurt? What if she was caught in some hunter’s trap? Would it sound like this?

I called for her. Again the distress signal faded away at the sound of my voice, only to pick up again after a moment of silence.

I kept calling as I worked, maybe another minute or two, filling the bed until the black of the bedliner floor had almost been rubbed out by rock. The cry was calling me, but the pull of uninterrupted work is strong when you have a boy out of school for the summer. After my initial panic, the voice of reason kept telling me it was nothing. Keep working.

Then Dude came back. Alone. Lassie he ain’t, but when I asked him, “Where’s Lina?” he turned back into the pines and I followed. It was hard to match his pace while performing the difficult eyesight balancing act of looking down for snakes and poison ivy while looking ahead to steal the first glimpse of what was making that foreign, forlorn noise. I tried to stay amongst the pines; closer to the creek progress was slowed by stream-fed weeds that have marched unchecked for decades.

The cries faded out as we drew closer. Dude dropped down the creek bank and Lina popped up downstream, just far enough away not to startle me but close enough to see she was fine. But it wasn’t Lina that Dude was taking me to. It wasn’t a kid. It wasn’t a dog. It was a deer, old enough to have outgrown its dappled days, but still elegant and fragile as the neck of a swan.

Bambi’s big sister was on her side, legs outstretched and motionless in the water. Her neck curled upward, allowing her tiny mouth to stretch out for air just at the stream’s edge. She breathed steadily. It wasn’t labored. Her black eyes showed a trace of fear; otherwise, I might’ve convinced myself she was reclining in the stream to shake the heat of this humid afternoon.

Dude went to her first, licking her ears and neck with what seemed like affection. Then he stretched out beside her and drank, between pants, from what I hoped wouldn’t be her watery grave. Lina stayed on the bank, as ordered, as I approached. When I got close, all four legs twitched as if to gallop, but she didn’t get up, she didn’t get away.

I made for the truck, less careful this time, briars gripping and ripping my ankles as I ran up the hill. I had left my phone sitting on the dash. Her lifeline. But the wildlife commission simply told me to let nature take its course. And when I got back to the creek bed, it had.

With one hand I brought her back hoofs together and lifted her from the stream to keep the imminent decay from contaminating it. Blood stained her white underside as a pair of fresh wounds, unplugged when I lifted her off the sandy creek edge, flowed anew.

I’ll never know what exactly happened. Was the deer injured in the chase? Had it already been hurt, and the dogs stumbled upon it after their earlier chase concluded? Was the deer in the clutches of a bobcat or panther, and Lina and Dude chased the cat off, causing it to abandon its prey? Not likely. The evidence suggests that Lina caught it and killed it, likely breaking its neck or severing its spine once she got her teeth dug in. I think I feel near equal parts pride and sorrow that I sleep with a killer.

* * *

On the ride home Silas asked me what that noise was.

“What do you mean, ‘that noise’?” I asked, playing dumb. I am sure I will never forget "that noise," and I am not surprised that he heard it too.

“That screaming noise from in the woods.”

My first instinct was to tell him that it was probably just an animal who got lost from its mommy, and that its mommy would be back soon to save it. But that seemed like a rotten thing to tell a kid whose mom left him when he was twenty months old, so I told him the truth.

You've Got to Crab Before You Can Walk

I'm not one to hold on to things. Mind you, there are likely multiple science experiments underway in the refrigerator at this very moment. Some people have poor hygiene; I have a poor housekeeping gene (though I suppose one could argue that the two are related). I have no sentimental attachment to the jug of greenish, curdled milk tucked behind the cavity-causing Juicy Juice in the back corner of the fridge. The leftover mystery meat, on a greasy plate covered with ill-fitting plastic wrap and an impressive layer of bubbling white mold, is not something I feel like I just can't part with. When I do hold on to things too long it's likely due to that defective gene, not to mention a severe case of being time-management challenged, but it does not owe to a sense of nostalgia. My collection of keepsakes could fit in a frozen pizza box (which reminds me that I need to throw away some leftover frozen pizza as soon as I can find the time).

The fridge, at least, is off limits--"That's an adult door!"--but I have a little helper in the collection of considerable clutter in all other corners of our humble abode. The boy must have over a thousand toys strewn in various outposts around the house, some draped in dust and cobwebs. If I ask him if we can get rid of some of his stuff he never plays with anymore, his answer is predictable. Not only does he refuse to yield his stash, he even wants to hold on to each and every spent battery that's popped out of his DC-powered toys. Occasionally I'll sneak something out to the trash if it's beyond repair, or find a place to donate it if the toy might yet pique the interest of another child. He hasn't busted me tiptoeing out to the trash or noticed anything missing yet. I imagine that if I dared look hard enough under his bed, the place where he bulldozes all of his belongings on the rare occasion when he "cleans" his room, it would be like a free trip to the toy store thanks to all the things we would rediscover. Things that, despite not having been played with in months, he would never consider giving away.

I do have a 2T Hines Ward replica jersey to honor the one for the thumb*, but other than that I haven't kept any of his clothes, not even the cute little flannel footed PJs. If I ever did dare a recon mission under the bed and found an old pair of jeans lurking there from the days when clothes were measured in months rather than years, I would hand them down without a second thought. I can guarantee two things about those hypothetical pants. First, they would have an adjustable waistband. The straps, pulled to the tightest setting, would dangle all the way down inside the legs. Noah might've been a better name for the boy. If you put him in pants that actually fit his waist it appears as if he is preparing for a flood. His pants are always cinched up like a Hefty sack, but, as I look down to see how my waistline has expanded in my middling years, I suppose that's not such a bad problem to have.

Nowadays the knees in his pants survive for two weeks, tops. He is fond of building up a bit of steam and sliding across hardwood floors on his knees, and the boy spends the bulk of his day scuttling back and forth on his leg joints overseeing various construction projects (Legos, wooden blocks, train tracks--if you can build it, he will come). But the second thing I can guarantee about that hypothetical pair of 6-9 month jeans from years ago is that the knees will be good as new. When the boy was a baby, he didn't crawl on his knees at all, but rather his hands and feet, thus sparing pant knee fabric from wear and tear. I've heard it called bear crawling and pushup crawling, but to me Silas's style most resembled a ghost crab, the kind beachcombers illuminate with flash lights on midnight strolls. Rather than lumbering to his den like a bear, Silas hurried and scurried about with great speed, like the next toy he was after was the safety of a sandy burrow.

You see those commercials on TV with the parents, trendy new recording device in hand, catching baby's first steps with looks of unimaginable glee on their faces. I had that look. But what they don't show you in those commercials is the aftermath. Junior's increased mobility leads to louder sounding thuds, as junior now falls faster and from further up than he did when crawling. Junior's new perspective also leads to a whole new round of baby-proofing, but the worst side-effect of this walking experiment is that junior is...gone. A few days ago you could set the little booger on the carpet, go hunt the remote or maybe hold your nose while you pull your favorite beverage from the fridge, come back, and there's junior, right on the carpet where you left him. Take your eye off the little booger now and you're putting out an APB. It's like a daddy bird returning to the nest with a nice mouthful of regurgitated worms only to find that the chicks have flown the coop. They don't develop this walking skill to not use it, so just when you think you're past the worst of it--the sleepless nights and all the times your shirt was used as a barf bullseye--baby steps run you ragged.

Silas, perhaps owing to his crab crawl technique, achieved the joyous milestone of walking at an early age. (It was nine months and four days, but who's counting?) He was already on his feet, and it didn't take long for him to start pulling himself upright on couches and coffee tables. All that's left is to let go. During his first "Look dad, no hands" moments, he wobbled like a tightrope walker, arms outstretched for balance. He would take a step or two on those baby bowlegs, then cling fast to the nearest support as he mustered courage for another attempt. He had taken a step or two in this fashion hundreds of times, but it wasn't until he took six full steps, away from the wall he had been using as a crutch, that I considered it his first walk. I was on the phone almost before his rump, cushioned by a mound of ill-fastened cloth diapers (I wrap babies about like I wrap presents--poorly), hit the hardwood floor.

"Silas is walking!" I exclaimed to my dad as the boy sat with a bemused look, legs stretched out in a V. "Six steps without holding on to anything."

The boy pulled himself up and went back to work on walking. I was his destination, so I crept backwards, trying to encourage him to beat his personal best. Eight steps. Thump. Ten steps. Thump. The next day we were off to show the grandparents, and four days later he was running. RUNNING.

And I am forever playing catchup to my little ghost crab.



* For the sports challenged, "one for the thumb" refers to the Pittsburgh Steelers' fifth Super Bowl victory (and the championship ring that comes with it).