The Book of Maps: A Novel

By Ernest Thompson

In the summer of 2002, Brendan Tibbet, a filmmaker whose luck has run low, takes his ten-year-old son Brenlyn on a raucous road trip across America. Following a 1930s travel guide Brendan purchased at a yard sale, the two-week trek from LA to New Hampshire covers 16 states, hitting the iconic stops along the way, Yosemite, the Great Salt Lake, Yellowstone and Mt. Rushmore and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, replete with wild exploits both hilarious and perilous, but it’s the interior journey that is enlightening, deeply poignant and life-changing.

Brendan assures the boy that each state will be an adventure, and on the second day proves it, seeing the kid washed away in fast-moving rapids, then foolishly putting them both in danger by refusing to back down to the massive black bear invading their campsite. That’s Brendan, impetuous and foolhardy, inciting trouble wherever he goes, a man with demons and bubbling angst. But neither of those missteps, or the many and scarier ones to follow, can begin to compare to the threatening storm cloud hanging over the expedition: the father’s struggle to find the perfect, worst time to reveal to his son the news that will break his heart and affect everything to follow.

Ernest Thompson’s debut novel is a skillful, magical piece of 20th-century fin de siècle writing depicting a United States that, even in the aftermath of 9-11, seems almost innocent contrasted to the horrors and divisions, racism and rage challenging us now. The Book of Maps, with its powerful father-son relationship and one man’s relentless albeit unintentional quest to evolve into the better angel we all aspire to be, will capture the imagination of readers and leave them wanting to relive this mad, irresistibly moving, ridiculously funny, reflective and inspiring cross-country odyssey again and again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Global Collective Publishers
• Release date: Oct 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781954021969

Book preview

Ernest Thompson

The Book of Maps

First published by Global Collective Publishers 2022

Copyright © 2022 by Ernest Thompson

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-954021-95-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-954021-96-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Ernest Thompson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Publisher Logo

For two of my favorite writers:

August, the best traveling companion

a man could ever have,

And Kerrin, my lodestar, my homeward angel,

my destiny

Contents

Prologue

CALIFORNIA

1. Angels in the City

2. The Not So Freeway

3. Down the River

4. The Rescue

5. The High Country

6. The Bear

7. Weightless in the Water

8. The New Sheriff in Town

NEVADA

9. The Speed of Sound

10. The Pits of Tartarus

11. Angels in the Mountains

UTAH

12. Tabernacle Choirboys

13. Chicken Shit

14. The Fix

IDAHO

15. Idaho, Alaska

16. Twice Blessed

WYOMING

17. Old Faithful

18. Collateral Damage

19. Something Rotten

20. Ride a Cock Horse

21. Hadley

MONTANA

22. Peace on Earth

23. Goodwill to Men

SOUTH DAKOTA

24. The Presidents Men

25. Tom and Huck

26. And Bad Word Jim

MINNESOTA

27. The Land of 10,000 Lakes, Give or Take

28. Blue Earth

29. Geoffrey of Monmouth

30. Fireworks

31. And Other Acts of Godlessness on a Summer’s Night

32. Inset a

33. Toxic Fallout

34. Inset b

35. Time Served

36. Inset c

37. The Getaway

38. Inset d

39. The Love You Lose

40. Inset e

41. The Investigation

42. Bad Dog

WISCONSIN

43. The Bridge

44. Inset f

ILLINOIS

45. Public Enemies

46. Extra Credit

INDIANA

47. Kool-Aid Social

48. Run for Your Life Naked

OHIO

49. Now We Die

50. Inset g

51. The Father Hall of Fame

52. Busted

PENNSYLVANIA

53. Inertia

54. Inset h

55. The Lesson

NEW YORK

56. The Power and the Glory

57. The Gospel According to Alby

VERMONT

58. Everything at Once and Nothing

59. The Deadline

NEW HAMPSHIRE

60. Home Sweet Farm

MASSACHUSETTS

61. Gaining Altitude

RECAPITULATION

62. And then Some

63. Inset i

64. Missing Pieces

65. Back to School

66. No Surrender

67. Inset j

68. No Retreat

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Prologue

America, one summer, belonged to Fat and Slim Chance, it was conquered by The Not-So-Great Escape Artists, and claimed for the Crown by Sir Lunch A Lot and Moron the Magician; the names would blur, the winking inventions of two wise guys’ punishing wittiness, passably amusing to themselves if to no one else, and frequently forgotten as soon as the handles had been adopted, depending on the hour of the day that the Bandit Wagon crossed the next state line and parked by the Welcome sign and new identities were chosen and mug shots taken, surreptitious middle fingers raised, flies unzipped, eyeballs buggy in feigned drunkenness or road-weary delirium. The license of the getaway driver, a small-town crime reporter could easily ferret out, was assigned to one Brendan Ball Tibbet, born November 6, 1949, making him fifty-two the summer of the crossing; his accomplice, his Woodley, New Hampshire, birth certificate would reveal, was also Tibbet, Brenlyn Allan, Brenlyn an amalgam of his father’s name and his mother’s, Lynsay, not a kind gift to saddle a child with, condemning him to a lifetime of correcting the spelling for the understandably perplexed.

Blynk, Brendan’s moniker for the boy—not a fan of the poor kid’s portmanteau—didn’t want to take the trip; that was made clear the afternoon after school when Brendan opened The Book of Maps he’d bought at a yard sale and introduced the notion. The frontispiece unfolded like a concertina, crinkled on the edges, the reds and blues of its highways blanched, the Rockies a dungy brown, the Mississippi and the Ohio and other mythical rivers, the Great Lakes and the Great

Salt Lake and Lake Tahoe and other majestic bodies of water pale and translucent, but all of contiguous America filled the kitchen table, from sea to shiny sea. There was no state of Alaska when the book had been published and no Hawaii. That’s us, Brendan said, a finger on the Pacific coast. And that’s where we’re going. He traced a jagged path from LA to New Hampshire.

That’s a long way, the kid said.

Yeah, must’ve sucked for the settlers in their Conestoga wagons, huh? And they didn’t even have McDonald’s, monitoring the boy’s scornful expression, trying to calibrate its severity. Come on, we’ll have a blast. And you’ll see the country, you’ll see sights none of your friends ever has and we’ll camp out and we’ll hike and go skinny-dipping and drink beer and go to cathouses and rob banks. Who wouldn’t want to drive across America with his dad?

Blynk raised his hand. It sounds boring.

Does it? Well. All of life is boring. Unless you fill it with things that aren’t and that—who knows?—you might love.

Letting that sink in, gauging the impact it had. And anyway, you don’t have a choice. I outrank you.

It wasn’t as simple as that and everyone knew it. The neighbors surely did; they’d heard the midnight ruckuses, the slammed doors and screeching tires. The movers arriving with two trucks, one voluminous, one a minivan, wouldn’t have to be told why they’d been hired; how many marriages had they packed up the remains of and hauled in opposite directions? It wasn’t a fairy tale, a boy and his dad about to set out on the adventure of their lives. What it was, the father knew and the boy didn’t want to but may have suspected, if he’d dared connect the clues, was an unspoken eulogy, a swan song to a family in the final stages of disrepair.

We’ll leave the week that school gets out. You can help me plan the route. Brendan tapped The Book of Maps, as if all the secrets of the continent lay within its tattered covers, ineffable possibilities, neglected back roads and heart-stirring passes over the Rockies, traversing the Great Plains, through cities and towns and the immense landmass of forests and deserts. As if it could lead them somewhere mystical and healing.

Yeah, I don’t think so, Brenlyn said and left the kitchen, his father staying at the table, carefully turning the brittle pages of The Book of Maps, one by one, state by state.

CALIFORNIA

The Golden State

1

Angels in the City

Brendan wanted to drive the Porsche. What a way to fly, top down in the southern wind, Route 66 from west to east, even if it had ceased to exist as it brilliantly had in The Book of Maps, co-opted now by the interstate raceway, the speed limit seventy-five in some states, the ghosts of Brendan’s TV heroes waving from their Corvette, in black and white on his parents’ RCA, Steve McQueen on horseback— Wanted, Dead or Alive! —and Johnny Yuma and The Rifleman and other western warriors whose iconoclastic bravado was seared on the brain of a boy from the ’50s, and movie legends, too, Henry Fonda and his brethren Okie nomads in pickup trucks and, a generation in the future, Henry’s son Peter on a Harley, Jack Nicholson riding pillion. What a riot it would be.

You’re not taking the Porsche.

You’re not keeping it.

I don’t want it. It’s stupid. It’s a stupid car, driven by pathetic men with something to prove, which only proves how pathetic they are.

Lynsay wasn’t the first woman in history to assert such a sentiment, nor the first to attempt to apply common sense to a castle-in-the-air proposal from her husband, even one on his way out.

Okay, that’s not me. I was a happily married man when I bought it. After begging for my wife’s permission.

As I said. Lynsay was kneeling in a graveyard of boxes, divvying up the spoils.

I’m taking the Porsche.

You’re not driving a ten-year-old at one hundred miles an hour all the way to New Hampshire. I thought you were camping.

We are camping.

Where’s the tent going to go?

In the trunk.

Where are your clothes gonna be then? And Brenlyn’s?

In the other trunk. It was a Boxster; it had two trunks, each slightly larger than a bread box.

In what, a baggie? Get real, Brendan. You’re taking the truck. You can sleep in it when it rains.

She was a practicalist, was how he characterized her; she always had an answer; Brendan found it annoying. But he wasn’t taking the truck; it wasn’t a truck; a truck was an optic he could live with, the middle-aged soldier of fortune rambling into some rough-and-tumble frontier settlement, fired up, in his mind anyway, to have it out if it came to that. Yeah, yeah, if some boozed-up gringo gives me shit about my undersized sidekick. I’ll show you who’s undersized. The vehicle in question was a Lexus. It was a Lexus SUV, which he called a truck to delegitimize its Soccer Mom implications. It was a splendid vehicle with state-of-the-art quadraphonic speakers, a smooth ride, not cheap and not a dread, sliding-door seven-seater, but also not a car he’d choose to be caught dead in. He was taking the Porsche and that was that.

He took the truck. She was right: there was barely room in its cramped cargo compartment and laid-flat backseat for the glut of camping gear and foul-weather gear and sports gear, the football, basketball, volleyball, lacrosse sticks and tennis racquets, flippers and Boogie Boards and Frisbees. Are you going camping or going to camp? Lynsay asked, but he wasn’t speaking to Lynsay. He had an image of how the cross-country expedition would be conducted and he was loading the truck accordingly. Unassisted. Blynk was cleverly not on-site.

He’s at the Y, Lynsay said.

And maybe that was true, maybe Lynsay had dropped him off with any of the remarkable coterie of best buds and fellow basketball players and Magic Card collectors Brenlyn had assembled in the family’s year in Santa Monica and whom he’d now become emotional about saying goodbye to, a day in the gym, shooting hoops and holding breath-holding contests in the pool and going for pizza, but where Brenlyn really was was in denial. He was in rebellion, declaring how vehemently he didn’t want to go. And who could blame him? He’d been uprooted from the known world of sleepy Woodley, New Hampshire, and transplanted to the by comparison teeming metropolis of Santa Monica and force-hybridized into a hedgerow of classmates interwoven from kindergarten onwards, their cliques impermeably established, no room for a newcomer. It was a vision Brendan would carry to the pearly gates of hell: the kid on the sidewalk on day one of school, hesitant to cross the street and into his new horizon, a mournful glance at his dad idling in the yard, his protector, Benedict Arnold. But he did it, the boy did it. By the second week, he’d infiltrated the maze and made friends and uncovered things to do in the neighborhood, playground handball and trading Pokemon cards and bingeing on Sponge Bob marathons and Brendan would observe in envy and wonder why it seemed so effortless at ten and so difficult at fifty to reconstitute oneself and start anew.

Truth be told, Brendan was reluctant to leave, too. Shutting the door and skipping town, a labored kiss-off from his soon-to-be-ex-wife, wasn’t a formality; it was a conclusion; it would mean a cease-fire, yes, a suspension of hostilities, yes, and yes, the scene had taken on the air of inevitability, amply back-storied and justified, and yes, he had momentum now, onshore breezes filling his spinnaker, but, still, the move was irreversible and the weight of that fact felt suddenly too cumbersome to stow in a Lexus passing itself off as a truck and convey across the country.

Weren’t you due to be gone by now? It’ll be midnight by the time you make Yosemite. Lynsay was at the door to the pool shed, Brendan’s makeshift office for the year they’d lived there; a safe house, a self-sentenced prison cell, an asylum. She appeared never more beautiful, as wives tend to at first glimpse and oftentimes, most cruelly, at the parting one, drying their tears in court, last rites read, a last awkward handshake, culminating in a last hardy hug for auld lang syne. She was draped on the frame, in her Marlene Dietrich kimono, the summer sun fading, refracted by the water in the pool and glittering in her hair. And he was thinking, interesting, that’s interesting, she only lets it loose when she’s heading for bed or has an agenda.

I haven’t departed for two specific and valid reasons: a. somebody’s kept me busy all day filling boxes with what I now see is junk of negligible currency, and b. my traveling companion has gone AWOL; it would seem contradictive to embark on a crusade without a full contingent of knights-errant.

You’re picking him up at Max’s. He’s ready to go whenever. And why do you have to make everything a poetry jam? Who says knights-errant? What does it even mean?

That gave him pause. A fair question, but a leading one to ask a writer. The fact was, Brendan typically declined to converse normally. He found it tedious. We’re allotted a finite number of words in our lives and so many sentences to bend them into, why not give them color and shape and musicality? That was Brendan’s philosophy. Why not piss other people off? And anybody who didn’t know what knights-errant meant should renew her library card.

Brendan had crammed his osprey’s nest of priceless papers and notebooks, his stolen bank pens and No. 2 pencils and other paraphernalia into the same battered satchel he’d hoarded most of his résumé in since his teens. Lynsay would take the bed; she’d take the desk, she’d take the lamps and the bookcase and the vintage phone that served no useful function beyond its status as a conversation piece and the bed. The bed. Why was she sashaying to it now and insinuating herself onto it, as if to test the springs, bouncing lightly, a prepubescent girl with braces at a slumber party?

I’ll put this in the studio and then when Brenlyn has a friend over, he can sleep there.

Great. That’ll be great. I’m so pleased for your studio and for Brenlyn’s friends, what a hootenanny that’ll be, sorry I’ll miss it, hope all your cool new gal pals and boyfriend upgrades asphyxiate on paint fumes.

And why was she lying on the bed now, resembling in the dimming light a voluptuous Monet, Impressionable and provocative, Picasso’s Reclining Nude, no, Henry Moore’s, cast in bronze? And why was she giving him that look, the come hither, the what the fuck? What manner of closing night of an unprofitable Off-Off-Broadway run was this? Was there scintillation in the death watch, was finality an aphrodisiac for a woman typically economical in her trigger responses? The answer came in her methodically untying the sash and kicking off her slippers. One for the road? she said.

They’d made love on the narrow bed a grand total of they never had. She avoided coming into his workspace, mostly because he made her feel unwelcome. The bed was for naps and for piling up unfinished scripts and unproduced ones; it was the antithesis of erotic. The squat bungalow was his temple to Minerva. If acts of passion had been committed there, they were solitary affairs, the falling on the sword, the Byzantine word games with the vampires every writer shares his or her stateroom with on the listing ship of what Hollywood sadistically dangles as career incentives. Sail West, young man, and let us bedazzle, harass and neuter you to a death no trapped-in-a-net dolphin should ever suffer, cue the killer whales.

There was no blood on this night. Lynsay was the Lynsay of his fantasies, a woman existing strictly in theory; she was tender and generous, the lover he should have married instead of her doppelgänger incapable of satisfying the quixotic madman she’d indentured herself to. Not that it was a fiasco from the outset; what conditional alignment of warring armies ever is? They’d been the perfect chess mates, facing off on the intimate battlefield of conflicting ideals and aspirations. Lynsay wanted so much of what Brendan could deliver; it was how they’d leapt the daunting chasms, their age disparity and cultural and regional backgrounds instantly rendered irrelevant. It was only later, the next morning, six months in, four years, a baby they hadn’t intended to engender and disagreed on how to rear, that the dull suspicion grew sharper. It’s unfailingly disconcerting to discover how little in common two people with so much in common actually have. For half of Brenlyn’s life on earth, he was the glue that kept the family intact; and what an unwieldy cross of balsa wood it was.

Lynsay, a victim of some inenarrable girlhood sexual infringements she’d eluded coming to terms with, was Brendan’s equal in every way except the nourishing ones. Back rubs and blow jobs were bestowed parsimoniously, peace treaty armaments doled out as strategy, minimal embracing and caressing, no physical solace a defeated boxer could wrap his beat-up torso in. In lieu of lovemaking of the angelic sort, there was lust, yes, there were bacchanals, raw and rigorous, depraved, feral, fabulous; there were menages and serial orgasms and public performances of epochal magnitude, all of them palatable distractions for a stalled writer. But there was seclusion, too. There were anguished nights far more tortoise-paced than a ticking bomb could wait for, there were wee-hour mornings in the pool house, unrequited vigils in honor of the missing in action, the man at the keyboard. Who wasn’t necessarily there at all. He’d be gone, for days, in the Porsche, the knight-errant, the missing-in-action husband, the absentee father, hurtling ever faster toward the dead ends and concrete barriers and steep cliffs, the brakes and reverse gear getting a workout.

This evening though, in the shadows of an endless June day extended, when the stubborn twilight refused to surrender, there was ardor so insistent it could have passed for love. Lynsay, by design or by genuine, poignant longing for what they should have had from the start, was precisely the partner Brendan believed he’d married, and he was hers. Lynsay unchained had been the goddess of fire. It was a miracle the pool house didn’t ignite tonight from the sparks flying. Give me what I want! Brendan. Give it to me, give it to me, why won’t you give me what I need? She shouted loud enough for the neighbors on their block of overpriced houses to hear, out the cabana louvres and over the patio tiles to what, in the ’40s, had been Bertolt Brecht’s American hermitage, the primary inducement for Brendan’s decision to rent it, as if der Meister had stashed in the broom cupboard a litre of schnapps a lesser man could drink from and attain enlightenment. Down 25th Street to Idaho Avenue the moans and wracking grunts went, echoing back to Montana Avenue and San Vicente and Sunset to the Santa Monica mountains; everyone heard her savage scream.

Including Brenlyn, sitting on a chaise longue, his bike propped against the hot tub, furrowed brow reflecting the sorrowful optimism of every young son and daughter who’d rather listen to the strangled and mystifying cries of desire than the rigid silences that precede and follow them when their mothers and fathers have lost their way in the fog.

2

The Not So Freeway

The upside to leaving late was that the commuters were already gone, zoned out at home and curled up in bed, and the Golden State 5 was an exclusive jet stream for Brendan the stunt pilot and his diminutive wingman, sound asleep beside him. Thoughts flitted past like bats, the residual buzz of a door prize from his divorcing wife detoxed by the contrail of chill reality gaining on him, the four-lane skyway straight and forlorn, the muffled quiet sobering, every mile marker a reminder of how far he’d come and what a speck that was in The Book of Maps, an inset of a county seat of a county most sightseers wouldn’t be passing through. The redundancy, desensitizing, the droning wheels white noise lulling him down, down, down, into the Land of Nod.

Brendan struggled to stay awake, fingernails digging into his palms, the chatter on the radio and vibrating in his head doing its part.

Where do you think you’re going? And whom do you think you’re fooling?

Why do you ask?

That could keep a man from dozing off.

It was after two when the Lexus purred into the motel lot. Brendan peered out at the lifeless windows and the neon sign on the fritz and said, Every journey has to begin somewhere. Why not Fresno?

I don’t see any bears, Blynk said, roused by his voice.

They don’t get to town in the summertime.

Why are we in a town? I don’t want to be in a town.

It’s too far to go. And I’m toast. And I’m a fuckup.

This isn’t Yosemite.

It’s a suburb. Fresno is a suburb of Yosemite. Blynk was frowning at him sideways with the exalted impatience of children whose parents, in their eyes, prove insufficient. And it rests upon the parent to bungle on regardless. Regardless of being a fuckup.

Blynk sat on the double bed as his father manhandled its mate to the wall and shook out the contents of his duffle bag. Now what are you doing?

Pitching the tent, what do you think?

You’re pitching a tent in a motel room? I think it’s retarded, that’s what I think. Why don’t we sleep in the beds? Isn’t that why they have beds here?

Well, perchance they’ll give us a rebate if we don’t mess the beds up. Don’t mess it up. And don’t say retarded. Say ludicrous. Or cockamamie, that would be socially acceptable.

It took him forty minutes to assemble the dome tent. But he knew two things: one, it was an essential statement, cockamamie but a statement; a man made a promise, the promise would be kept. And two, it was shrewd to familiarize oneself with the intricacies of tent erection in the privacy of a motel room with only a ten-year-old critic to pass judgment. He pictured expert campers and wizened hunters and gatherers chortling themselves silly at a Yosemite campground. Get a load of that asshole. Can’t put a tent up.

They slept in their brand-new sleeping bags still smelling of off-gassing and Walmart, father and son in their dome tent in a motel in Fresno. The carpet may have been threadbare and embedded with the dried semisolids and other offal it was healthier not to analyze but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the enterprise was underway, they were camping in California.

When Brendan woke up, Blynk was still blithely snoring in one of the double beds. Well, I’ll be, Brendan said from the other one. Time to break camp.

The sight of Yosemite Valley opening its heart to modern-day vagabonds was still as staggering as it must have been to explorers in the 1800s and to their Native American antecedents, the stark grandeur of its peaks and rivers, its alpine meadows and tracts of aspens and ponderosa pine. Even a ten-year-old with an attitude was jolted from his stupor. Whoa, whoa! Dude. What is that?

The Promised Land, Brendan said. What do you say?

Sweet.

That’s such a coincidence; that’s what John Muir said.

Who?

The guy who started a club, called The Sierra, to preserve natural treasures, like this one. He said, ‘this place rocks.’

How would you know that?

"It’s in the book. Of Maps. In 1890, John Muir sent dispatches to the president and got him to designate Yosemite a national park." Brendan had read the Point of Interest entry when Blynk was brushing his teeth in their motel room, anticipating this very opportunity. Stay a step ahead. Anticipate!

What he couldn’t have anticipated but should have, was that the kid was ahead of him; he had the memory of a cat. Benjamin Harrison, Blynk said. Twenty-third president, 1889 to 1893. Between Grover Cleveland and Grover Cleveland.

Got it, Brendan said, as usual somewhere between astonished and humbled that he was raising a kid who could parcel out arcane tidbits of trivia when Brendan was lucky to remember to eat lunch and go to meetings. Brendan said, John Muir came back with Teddy Roosevelt…

Twenty-six. 1901 to 1909. When McKinley got shot to death. By an assassin.

"Roosevelt also got in the act. And set aside other natural wonders, too. Like the Grand Canyon. Also in The Book of Maps. We’re not going there but you should read about it."

I get it, yuk yuk: the place rocks. That’s not funny. It’s cockamamie.

Thank you, well said. You see the biggest cliff, the three-thousand-footer? That’s El Capitan. We’ll climb it after lunch, enjoying the bug-eyed apoplexy on the boy’s face, part religion, part utter terror. Fathers can do that, when they’re hearing their sons’ quickening pace in the backstretch, they can scare the bejesus out of them; it’s a rite of passage, the contemporary rendition of sending an adolescent Shoshone into the prairie.

Don’t come home without a buffalo.

3

Down the River

Lunch was consumed on the shore of the Merced, a river Brendan knew well. His professional debut, as in hack writer getting paid, came in the form of a bad script for a bad TV series shot in Yosemite. The show was all about rescues perpetrated by dashing park rangers racing to the aid of tourists unwise to the ways of the wilderness. Brendan’s magnum opus pertained to saving a family of runaway rafters. It was taxing writing by the numbers— we’ve got a 10-33 on the Merced, bogey 10-14 thrown in for good measure, put that one dot two miles downriver from the Tamarack, eight minutes to the rocks. 10-4. 86, ham on rye, hold the mayo— but it was a job; it earned him union credits and unemployment insurance. And he drove the six hours to Yosemite, primed for a savior’s parade and the huggy gratitude of TV artistes sick of mouthing gibberish and elated to have lines rich with innuendo and japery. What he got in their stead were terse instructions from a paltry production assistant to stay the fuck off the set, an injunction he didn’t heed but regretted that he hadn’t when he heard his melodious lyricism mangled and off-key. A television script, he promptly deduced, held the intellectual cachet of toilet tissue, existing solely to be wadded up, indelicately abused and flushed.

We’ll wade to the opposite bank, he said to Blynk. There’s nobody there, we can have it to ourselves. I’ll carry the cooler, you take the sandwiches. Can you do that? Please. Dangerous desperados tended to be oh-so courteous in the inaugural days of their assault on polite civilization, not yet getting on one another’s nerves. He’d bought sandwiches at a deli in Fresno and the gang members were famished and verging on grouchy.

Why?

Why what? Why did kids ask why?

Why are we getting wet and grimy in a river? We can eat in the car, where it’s comfortable and isn’t gross and we won’t be freezing our gazoobies off.

We’re gonna be in the car for fourteen days, we can eat three meals a day in the car, which is what people in LA do, but today, on this day, we’re here, on the Merced River in Yosemite Valley, one of the godliest sites on the planet and all we have to do is walk across it and eat, that’s it. Why are you being such a scooch? Which wasn’t a Brendan word; who says scooch? Lynsay; it was a Lynsay word. She’d say, Stop being a scooch. Look who’s being a scooch. Don’t be a scooch like your father. Brendan was going to say, shit. Why are you being such a shit? It’s day one of a three-thousand-mile enduro; is this how it’s going to be all the way to New Hampshire? I’ll take you home right now.

Which unlocked other portals to other stairways. Why are you being like your mother? for instance. A graphic irremovably etched on Brendan’s scratched retina the night of Lynsay’s most recent birthday, early in their Brecht house tenancy. He’d bought floating candles and launched them in the pool, a flourish he was positive Bertolt, that ornery romantic, would have endorsed. Vas ist das? He could hear the revered dialectic theatre god say. Eine celebration of dein birfday, mut der mutter. I haf bought you candles, be joyful. But Lynsay wasn’t as pliable as their eminent predecessor in the house; for her there was no joy in the gesture, the night air too nippy to dwell on her husband’s largess; she went inside, to her cozy electric blanket and banal TV and he sat solo in the Jacuzzi and watched the candles drift in purposeless geometric patterns until the flames extinguished themselves.

A corollary to why Brenlyn was acting scooch-like like his mother was why was Brendan invoking his own father, dead and gone? This would happen sometimes; he would hear his father’s diatribes, why did you and why were you and what were you thinking, were you thinking? Brendan’s father had transported Brendan and his squabbling siblings and their mother to Yosemite in 1957, a stop on an ill-omened circumnavigation of America, subtitled Five Weeks of Misery in a Volkswagen Microbus. Which led grown-up Brendan to a why of his own: why do the unpleasant recollections, the hurtful, hateful, harmful ones take precedence? Will that be his wife’s everlasting legacy, being too cold-blooded to recognize the magnificence of a candlelit pas de deux when it was glistening in plain sight? Her blood could simmer, too, when it did. There were countless snapshots in the unbound album of their marriage: Lynsay exotic topless in Malibu, Lynsay serenely catnapping, bedclothes cascading to the floor, Lynsay alluring and voracious, Lynsay spit-taking mouthfuls of wine when her husband would wax parodic, Lynsay in love with him. Lynsay in love. Or was it merely more convenient to throw a match on the oil spill that, in retrospect, seemed to burble forever beneath the deceptively tranquil façade of the pool, lake, ocean? River. Five weeks in a Volkswagen van had to have had extemporaneous eruptions of I Spy and Frisbee and flashlight tag and hide-and-go-seek and ice cream sundaes and brisk walks in the San Francisco mist with his brothers and father, soulful colloquies and laughter; didn’t they laugh somewhere on their own map of America? Wasn’t anything humorous? Where are those photos and why hang on only to the negatives?

Bonus questions on the quiz: How could Brendan have found himself in this position, at this crowded intersection of his odyssey? How could he be continually lured into the same snare? And how, after all that he’d fucked up, all the misdemeanors and missteps on his rap sheet, all the deleted paragraphs and pages and incompletely composed chapters of his autobiography, how could it be that Brendan Ball Tibbet, of all people, had been cast in the role of father and sanctioned to carry out the duties and rituals inherent thereto? That was the question to ask. How did he come to be a father, other than the biological accident by which too many babies are created? How could a man scarcely qualified for adulthood at fifty-two be the father of a fidgety ten-year-old was no longer the question. The question was how could he be a better one.

He slogged into the river; Brenlyn was correct: it wasn’t warm; it was icy enough to shrink a man’s gazoobies indeed and make him reassess his lunch plans and the Lexus was looking cushy and dry and clean and Brendan had gotten halfway in, up to his waist, and was on the verge of calling it a bust and retreating, when he realized that Brenlyn was trailing behind him. The water was nearly as deep as the boy was tall, fifty-eight inches at age ten; it was up to his chest and he hadn’t made it to the deepest section yet. Excellent parenting. The boy should have been on your shoulders, you’re the shit, you’re the scooch. But there was no denying Brenlyn. He’d been shamed into the mission; he was staying the course, even if the robust river had other ideas. Brenlyn held the sandwiches high, groping his way with his toes. Brendan lingered in the center of the river, where the current was the strongest, on guard to grab the boy if it came to it. What are you waiting for? Keep going, Blynk said. Brendan kept going, backpedaling, balancing the cooler, keeping an eye on his son, promoting the artifice of fatherly composure.

Just as Brendan reached the sandy shallows, Blynk had made it to the midpoint, the water touching his chin. Keep coming, Brendan said, unheard in the chiming of the surf on the stones. Keep coming. Brenlyn was smiling, spurred on by the challenge, or eager to display his mettle. He strained to flag the sandwiches with both hands, on tippy-toes to prevent the paper bag from being splashed, but still the boy was smiling. Check it out, I’m doing it, aren’t you proud?

And then the river had him.

In life, in real life, a real boy in a real river rumbling faster than a father could think. It hadn’t unspooled that horror-movie expeditiously in the bad episode of the bad series; even film and television shoots don’t always stick to the script. In real life, though, in a second, in less than a second, Brenlyn’s legs were kicked out from under him, the eddying water sending him spinning downstream.

Dad? As if he were more bewildered than frightened; how could it be that a small boy could be washed away on the way to a picnic?

4

The Rescue

In the bad TV series, it was four stock characters in a raft they shouldn’t have gone to sea in unsupervised, the father brusque and borderline diabetic, the mother quarrelsome, the bored teenagers, the belligerent son and combustible daughter completing an acetic tetraptych that to the ambitious screenwriter seemed Shakespearean in its overtones, an apperception woefully elusive to the journeyman director and pampered actors who somehow made the perilous device sound soggy in cliché and melodrama.

Help us, help us! Implored the grief-stricken mother.

Hush, woman. We don’t need help, I’ve got it under control.

The son standing defiantly, in ceaseless discord with his domineering father, yelling, He doesn’t have it under control, he doesn’t have a clue to what he’s doing and he doesn’t give me compliments. The daughter, doughy and dense, her soaked T-shirt showing the hint of nipple that could keep the segment within Family Hour guidelines, flirting demurely with the virile lifeguards, admiring their derring-do, and telegraphing by mascara that they could be compensated for risking their lives to retrieve her and her ditsy mom and dad and, if they had to, her cretin brother, too. There was no rescuing Rescue in the Rapids, as the episode was titled. Brendan had tuned in, catatonic, the Thursday night the show aired, seeing his livelihood go down the river with the series, cancelled on Monday.

But now, in 2002, no script to read and disregard, his nonfictional son was a human torpedo, the river gaining speed as it bottle-necked into the bend, the banks contracting, the whitewater below, grumbling for its own lunch. Brendan jettisoned the cooler and sprinted anxiously along the shore, grassy for a hundred yards and then absorbed by the forest. Blynk! Blynk, let go of the sandwiches!

It would have been onerous for an eighty-pound, slender boy to stay above water with two hands; with one it was a losing proposition. Drop the damn sandwiches!

But Brenlyn either couldn’t hear or was too afraid of disappointing his dad. He kept one arm raised, paddling madly with the other, striving to stay face-up in the swells, instinctively grasping that it may be expedient to see the approaching rocks or driftwood tree trunk about to hash a person into fish food. Brendan slowed when he ran out of sand. He spun about in the agony every parent knows, his secluded lunch spot paying dividends of no value; there were no balmy beachgoers to come to the aid of a man in crisis, no fishermen, no passing kayak or rafters, no mighty park rangers riding in on seahorses. Did no one own a television, for Chrissake? Had no one seen the bad episode of the bad series? It was a rescue, there was supposed to be a rescue; that’s what Brendan had drafted. But if there’s no Samaritan onsite to lay his life down, what’s the unscripted plot line? Who is cast to play the protagonist?

The father. The inadvertent father, incompetent and indecisive. Brendan dove in. He pummeled the waves to make it to the depths of the channel where the flow could propel a man as swiftly as the stray branches and upstream jetsam and he swam, he swam as hard as he could, his shorts and windbreaker surplus ballast. Blynk!

The boy had been swept out of sight when Brendan caromed through the elbow the river curved into, upping his anxiety with trying to resurrect the mid-term exam he flunked out of Fluid Mechanics over: Do all objects in a moving body of water progress at the same velocity and why would a balloon travel at 50% the speed of the river but a cedar log at 97%? Support your argument factoring in buoyancy, acceleration and drag coefficient and where is my son? Blynk!

Brendan was executing three-sixties in some caveman variation on the crawl, dipping like a duck, spitting an atheist prayer not to see the kid on the bottom, turning blue.