By David L. Engelhardt

Along the interstates that returned me to the working-class blocks of my birth, truck stops displayed American flags that were too massive to snap to attention in the stiffest breeze. They hung limply on poles taller than any building between Harrisburg and Allentown. Just before reaching the Delaware River, I exited into the little borough where generations of my family once lived. I was returning to help my father settle into an apartment after my mother divorced him. On my way to his new address, I parked at the curb in front of the narrow half-double where we lived for my first thirteen years. I saw in the fading dusk that the string of lights around the front window would not be celebrating Christmas Eve. Every bulb was either shattered or burnt crisp. There were two Big Gulps on the sill inside the window. Between them, a little boy pressed his nose to the glass and puzzled over the stranger who was slouching on a fender and surveying the old block.

In sunnier times, front porches screamed with children crowded around games of Chinese Checkers and Nock Hockey. Girls played hopscotch on the sidewalk in patches of shade thrown by young maples that the borough planted one year in honor of Memorial Day. The memory raised my eyes toward the mature crowns that should have been right there, where I saw limbs hacked back to stubs in accordance with the local custom of stunting growth for fear of attracting pigeons to dirty the sidewalks.

Dust from the iron foundry was settling like black snow on the hood of my Mustang. To local boys like me, muscle cars were not meant to roar us out of town, as every rock’n’roll song advised, but to bind us to our rightful places, which were in the shade beneath propped hoods in the alleys behind the sheds that occupied most of the tiny lawns. Until we were old enough to work on hotrods, the alleys served as Whiffle Ball diamonds and football fields. Whenever a local greaser forced a timeout in the day’s big game by rumbling slowly through our gawking ranks, we called out his ’rod’s presumed resources of speed and handling. Fastback with bucket seats. Side pipes and double four-bangers. Mag wheels and a Hurst shifter. When I bought my GT in the weeks after finishing law school, I gave it a fully boxed frame, Ford Racing suspension, cold-air intake, and wide-open throttle body, with Hooker headers on order. I would never admit to anyone back home that I paid a speed shop to do the work.

***

I squealed away from the old place on summer slicks that I should not have been rolling in December’s cold. I bought my Mustang in mockery of the dead-ass land-yachts that surrounded me along the partners’ row in the garage beneath the building on K Street, where we stacked lawyers twelve stories high. My father’s building stacked the recently divorced only three stories high. It was located on the borough’s once-grand boulevard, directly across from St. Jane’s Catholic Church, where the nuns lined me up for my First Confession in spooky light radiating from glass stained by a human sacrifice. In the shame of having nothing truthful to confess, I told jaunty lies about hijacked liquor, unstamped cigarettes, and other luxuries enjoyed by elders who dazzled me with tales of a guy who knew a guy who had the best prices in his trunk. The priest behind the darkened screen coughed to cover a chuckle and assigned me the penance of one “Hail Mary.” It felt like a measly score for a solid effort, especially when the priest told me that lying was the likeliest of all the sins to blacken the soul of a clever boy, which meant I turned a complete fabrication into a genuine threat of Hellfire.

In those days, we entered one another’s homes without knocking and called out for ball players. If no one was home, we might look for something good in the fridge. In the winters between football and baseball, when epic snowball battles bloodied our lips and soaked our dungarees, we would warm ourselves inside an unlocked car, where we fooled with the lighter and pretended to share a pack of cigarettes like soldiers in a movie. The days of unlocked doors were long gone. Cars parked on the boulevard looked as if every resident should have confessed to coveting his neighbors’ hubcaps. The television that I was delivering from my basement to my father’s apartment might not have been worth as much as a stolen hubcap, but it was old enough to have antennas, and they would save my father the cost of cable. When I pressed the button next to his unit’s number, he stuck his head out of a window on the second floor. In the streetlight, he was as bald and bright as the moon. He assured me that I could manage the TV up the stairs without him. I hoped he was trying to rest his heart, because the attack was only two months prior, but he lit a cigarette before closing the window.

He lit another while fiddling with the rabbit ears. Before he attained picture or sound, there was a knock on the door, followed by, “Dave? It’s me, Dave.” He gave me a look that said he didn’t hear anything, followed by a shrug that swore he never knew her. He turned his good ear to the retreat of high heels, then hustled us down the stairs, across the boulevard, and down more stairs into the Republican Club, which leased the basement beneath the store that offered trinkets bearing the Pope’s likeness, starting with shot glasses that were convenient to nightly devotions. My father was not a Republican, or even a voter, and many of the men in that joint were simultaneously members of the Democratic Club, on account of the weekly special on cheeseburgers, but everyone liked to smoke a pack, and that made a good night.

Along the bar, a dozen men pinned their cash beneath glasses of beer and lit cigarettes on the ends of their cigarettes. They blew smoke toward a fan that spread it equitably around the room. Peanut shells crunched underfoot as I worked around a pool table that barely fit in any direction. A chafing dish offered free hot dogs warmed by sheeny water. A la Carte was pre-painted on the chalkboard that listed half a dozen items that cost two bucks apiece. Beneath the French words, a jokester chalked, “Try English.” Cue Ball, who was known as Kerbaugh until he lost his hair, was working the taps and barking food orders into the kitchen behind the curtain.

My father mounted a stool and pointed out the pretzel crumbs I needed to brush off the stool he had saved for me. He ordered us two beers apiece, because it was only quarter-beer night till seven, and a Kennedy’s Head after that. He told me I was buying, because I was a complete shit about refusing to represent him in the divorce. I pinned a ten-spot in the foam beneath one of my beers. It was another measly penance, performed so close to the scene of the disappointing “Hail Mary.”

A television was hanging on snow chains at the other end of the bar. To my surprise, it was not showing football, but It’s a Wonderful Life. During my first Christmas break from college, I watched that film past midnight with my newly widowed grandmother. When the final credits rolled, holiday cocktails gave her the courage to ask me whether studying philosophy meant I was “on the dope.” A snappy “nope” made me laugh inside my head, but I forgot to say it out loud, because I was so high on a frat brother’s homegrown, the film’s secret message was finally revealing itself: Any bright boy who finds himself in Jimmy Stewart’s predicament should jump off a bridge, unless his small town happens to be set inside a Christmas movie, and even there, he would need a dopey angel to convince him that his life was not the complete waste that he knew it to be. In the bar, the film could barely be heard over the clacking of billiard balls. Only one man was turned intently to it, while drinking heavily and mouthing the dialogue by heart.

The greasy sizzle of pork roll frying behind the curtain smelled like my grandmother’s kitchen. She would peel the burlap off the roll of salted pig fat and fry thick slices black in butter to serve on airy bread that liquified in the grease running down my chin. In the corner booth, an underinflated Santa had a cigarette taped to his droopy face and a lighter taped to a hand that lacked the air pressure to heft it, as if one of the club’s reddest faces gassed out a couple lungs short of Christmas spirit. Leaning on the backbar, Cue Ball wore red gym shorts with white trim to honor the holiday. He shook a Marlboro from the pack in the pocket on his T-shirt and asked me, “Where you bin all these years?”

I shrugged, “Away.”

“You musta bin in the Army. Because everybody served his country. Right?” He waited. I did not answer. He said, “Guess not.” If he had two hairs on his head, they were cut and brushed per Army regulation, and that was good authority to give me shit, even if he was never more than a mess cook in the National Guard. He looked me over for something to say next. “Now you have meat on your bones? Which I coulda used for Pee Wees, instead of watching you get trucked every time I told you to tackle somebody for once in your life.” He coached both football and baseball, and was duly credentialed to predict a useless future before I turned twelve: What could I lift and carry for job and money if I could not block and tackle for team and town? He reached across ashtrays and foaming glasses and into the pocket of my white Oxford, which might have been more crisply starched than required by the prevailing dress code. “You come to my bar without a pack of your own? Like I never taught you anything?” He laughed, then pointed a thumb at my father. “This one tells me you coach baseball. I bet you put the ball on a tee because none of those snotnoses should feel bad about themselves, even when they stink on ice.”

“We only use a tee till they’re six. Then it’s three strikes and they’re out, same as here.”

“But he lets girls on the team,” my father said, “and gives everybody those – whaddaya call’em?” He knocked on my head to see if the word was in there, but I kept it to myself.

As he did at so many of my games and practices, my coach turned his back on my father, this time to arrange bottles that did not need arranging. He was likely to be pissed at any man who could not remember to condemn participation trophies by name. Or maybe the affair that got my father divorced also ruined the life of a man on Cue’s bowling team, and the poor bastard couldn’t break 200 for a month. Then again, my father’s transgression might have had a moral dimension, like welshing on a ticket to the game on Thanksgiving morning. Whatever the reason for the snub, my father retreated to Santa’s booth and freed the cigarette from the droopy hand. He said, “I never liked your Goddamned Marlboros, Cue, so I’m smoking this one strictly for spite.”

Before I pushed away from the bar, two meaty paws thunked my shoulders, and a voice from memory spoke over my head. “Hey, Cue, why you picking on the little guy again?” I tried to turn to face the speaker, but the paws locked me in place. The voice asked Cue if he was looking so good because his new diet had him down to four hot dogs before his pork roll platter most nights.

Cue said, “I’d pound you through the floor if you weren’t the best player of your generation.”

“How about ‘of all time’?”

“That was your old man, God rest his soul.”

“You push a blocking sled five feet, I’ll have to dig you a hole next to him.”

Cue raised his middle finger and went back to arranging bottles. The paws spun me around, and after two blank beats, I recognized my old friend Pete, son of the legendary Big Pete, and last seen in eighth grade. He said, “I bet I can still turn you upside down.” He wore the old smile that looked as if he’d eaten a stolen pie. His hands rested heavily on my bones to remind me of the strength that lowered me headfirst into the fourth grade’s trash barrel. I resisted his demand for an apology at the risk of tasting pencil shavings until my stubbornness and his temper passed into a mutual hilarity that spread so wildly across the room, pencils, erasers, wads of bubble gum, and one rather desirable Hot Wheel came flying at us from every desk, and the entire room lost recess for a week.

I said, “That was the hardest I ever laughed.” I did not mention the lesson I learned at the bottom of the barrel: In any small town like mine, verbal intelligence is a mysterious stranger to be policed by bigger, stronger boys. I got dunked in trash because I hooted, “You keep gobbling down so many Tastykakes, yours will be worth a try,” one beat after Pete told me, “There is not one chick with a titty worth squeezing around here.”

I often wished I could trade a smart mouth for a strong body. When my first-grade teacher called the house one evening, I heard my mother ask, “How bad?” Then, “That can’t be right.” And finally, “What’s a percentile?” Whatever I scored on my first standardized test, my mother cried all the way down the block to her mother’s house, where she bawled that I was getting a fancy job and moving away someday. In third grade, I tested to a ninth-grade proficiency in math, and the boys decided that my brain was burning the food that my muscles needed for football.

Pete said, “We had the best times ever. And then you were a ghost.”

We never visited one another after my family moved two miles outside the borough and into a different school district. Maybe moving away was better than growing apart while sharing a homeroom. In our last year together, varsity coaches had Pete lifting weights a year in advance of freshman ball, while our teachers sent me to independent study. The decades since three-a-day practices in August had restored Pete’s baby fat. Coke-bottle lenses of the kind he needed since kindergarten made perfect circles inside his perfectly circular face. He was alert to every wisecrack along the bar, ever ready to join the laughs, while I was calculating how far my mouth could go before I ended up in another trash barrel.

A plate of fries came sliding down the bar, followed by a plate of onion rings that moved more briskly on the preceding grease. I invited Pete to join Santa and my father in their booth. I put the plate of rings atop the fries and nodded to Pete to carry the pitchers that Cue was banging down. My soggy ten-spot would tip him one buck. If I left more for him, he would have accused me of trying to big-time him.

My father lit a Pall Mall with the Marlboro that he stole from Santa. “Haven’t seen you in ages, Pete. How’d the deer treat you this season?”

“Awesome as ever.” Before reporting that year’s buck, Pete reminded us of our first hunting season, for which every boy received a rifle on his preceding birthday, and with it, the promise of seeing the world, whether from a one-room cabin, three-sided lean-to, or Army-surplus tent. While telling my father of the first kill made by any boy in seventh grade, Pete doubled the number of points on the “trophy rack” and placed the bullet perfectly through the heart. During the original telling in the school’s cafeteria, his face got sloppy as the tracking of blood through a mile of briar was leading him and his table of jealous listeners to the gut-shot bleed-out that Big Pete was forcing him to see, so next time, he wouldn’t miss the heart “by a whole fucking foot.”

For each rack now mounted in Pete’s basement, we heard the length of the shot, the challenges posed by the day’s light, and the density of brush that could foul the truest aim, which was why he still carried the .35 that nearly kicked him flat when he fired it on his twelfth birthday. My father tapped his temple to assure us that he was a .35 man himself. Pete advised that it was also smart to avoid the bladder when you cut the gut open, because there was something about deer piss that spoiled meat if you wanted to eat it. But don’t be slow in there, because hundreds of ticks will be fleeing the cooling hide for the warmer one that is up your sleeves. My father reached across the pitchers to tap my temple, to impress knowledge that better sons passed to luckier grandsons.

Pete put an elbow in my ribs. “Didn’t you say you gave it up because your toes got cold?” He smiled until every dimple emerged in the thick flesh. “You missed a lifetime of good eats, is what you did. This year, I’m making jerky out of everything.”

My father thought that statement was a bit too bold. “No stew meat? Ground meat?”

“Jerky.”

“Roasts? Steaks? Sausages! Everybody makes those.”

Pete lowered his cigarette to detail the slicing, spicing, and dehydrating of “the whole damn buck.”

I enjoy tales of any intelligence that resides in a man’s hands, whether they are butchering game, adjusting a turbocharger’s boost, or turning a double play in the beer league, because any conversation that turns to my intelligence will end ugly. There were men in the borough who would not have finished middle school without stealing my thoughts under threat of twisting my arm, then resented me for having thoughts worth stealing. These days, they might buy me a beer for not sharing my professional thoughts on regulatory compact, essential facility, long-tail liabilities of the London syndicates, and a law-school favorite, proximate causation. It was the doctrine at issue on the day when I was randomly called to stand alone for most of the hour among 120 classmates who wanted to see me choke and die up there, as I parsed the day’s fact pattern through dimensions of space, time, and logic in search of the one proximate cause among the many but-for causes that a just society will blame for a given injury.

During college summers, I worked in the iron foundry with some of the boys who stole my homework. Castings shaken from their molds hung on “trees” like the parts of model racecars we used to buy at the five-and-dime. But these trees hissed with orange heat that seared our faces when we lifted them overhead, and for seven bucks an hour, smashed them on the floor to break the castings free, then clapped our gloves to extinguish the flames in our palms. I was earning tuition. Other boys were paying off Camaros that they quit high school to acquire. Muscle cars really did bind them to the borough, as I once hoped for all of us together.

***

Pete never stole my work. He earned his average grades. But they did not admit him to AP classes, selective universities, and a stimulating career in a thriving city. Boys from the alleys behind the sheds have told me that I have become too educated to have a lick of common sense. My lack of sense became apparent during the curious case of Obama’s mother. For reasons I could not fathom, she flew 10,000 miles out of her way to give birth in a remote African village, then flew right back home to induce public officials to commit the felony of faking the birth certificate that would have been her son’s by right, if only she skipped the trip and took the better healthcare. If I offered to pick up a year’s pile of nightly bar tabs for any man who told the crowd on Christmas Eve that it was a damned lie, I would not have gotten a single taker. If I drive up there these ten years later to make the same offer with respect to a dozen equally racist lies that old friends and first cousins have been telling one another lately, they will tell me to go fuck myself.

I did not make my offer to Pete. If I had confirmed an ugly division between us, I would have been powerless to bridge it, precisely because I have read shelves of epistemology, spent years studying the qualities and uses of evidence, and pursued a career that can end on one error of fact or logic. I quietly admired Pete’s pride during his accounting of the legendary feats of the dearly departed Big Pete: He starred at halfback for Wilson High, served on our tiny police force, rode with a motorcycle club, which Pete always distinguished from a gang with lawyerly precision, bought a hotel-bar-and-grill that no one dared call a flophouse, and left the family to live in the apartment above the bar with a girlfriend who showed us the true meaning of a trophy rack.

On summer afternoons, we told our mothers we were going to the public pool, then steered our bicycles toward Big Pete’s Public House for mugs of birch beer foaming from a tap among the real beers, games of darts and eight-ball, and one sighting of the knockout girlfriend, who floored us with a one-two combination launched from inside the robe that she failed to cinch while strolling from bedroom to barroom one day around three, then reached high to rearrange her gloriously disheveled hair while searching beneath our barstools for a single flip-flop that she said she must have left somewhere sometime after midnight. By way of asking us to help her find it, she explained that it looked exactly like the one she was wearing, but for the bare foot.

In Washington, when classmates and colleagues gather for pints and burgers in an Irish pub in the shadow of the Capitol’s Rotunda, nary a tale is set in a motorcycle cop’s barroom during the summer before two lucky boys enter eighth grade. Around here, we tend to begin with a precis of the papers we filed in time for happy hour and conclude with a recalculation of our chances for professional advancement. That Christmas Eve in the club, the work of our lifetimes did not come up until I asked Pete about his, mainly because I was already writing about him in my head. “It’s work,” he said. “What else?” I was pleased to see that the heavy hand tilting the pitcher toward my glass was not tattooed with foundry soot. Whatever Pete did, it was better than knocking castings off trees. His work on Christmas Eve was to put a quarter in the jar on the bar in four different clubs, in token of high ideals, which were said to be mostly unstated, then to sign the register in commitment to another year of good works, which were universally stuck in planning committees that were unlikely to convene during the year in question. We banged our glasses on my father’s toast “to all these lousy old-timers’ joints,” which by my calculation spanned a hundred square blocks and countless generations.

Pete did not invite me to join his rounds, and I did not offer. We scarfed the last of our suds to shake on the last of our tak’er easies. He took the stairs to the sidewalk that led to the next basement of friend, family, and occasional ghost. My father stubbed his cigarette to ask me why, after living in places that some people say are as interesting as London, Boston, and Washington are supposed to be, my only word for a lifetime of whereabouts was “away.”

~~~

David L. Engelhardt took an early retirement from a major law firm in Washington, DC, to write full time. Three of his essays appeared together in Scoundrel Time. One of the three was noted in Best American Essays; two were nominated for Pushcart Prizes; and one received the magazine’s prize for its best nonfiction of the year. A related essay appears in Sunspot Lit. His short stories have been published in The Baltimore Review, Folio, and twice in West Branch.