Pharmakon (47 page)

The stoners joined the jocks, the applause echoed as they began to stamp their feet, whistle, and hiss “Zeeeeeeeeee.” Everyone believed what they wanted to believe, including me.

The headmaster entered “What Goes Up Must Come Down” in the state high school journalism contest. Worse, it won first prize. My self-loathing peaked when my father put the trophy I received on the same mantle that held all the cups and bowls Willy had won for running. My father, being an academic, took more pride in mine than he did in all Willy’s combined. For I had won not with heart or body but with mind.

A psychiatrist I went to once years later told me that writing that article was an incredibly hostile act. And though she pretended not to judge, I could tell she loathed me. As she pulled cat hairs off her skirt and dropped them in an ashtray one by one, she told me it was hostile to my father, and to my friends, and to the headmaster who had given me a break and not expelled me for the cherry bomb incident, and, most of all, it was an act of aggression toward, and showed profound disrespect for, myself.

I told her, “You’re missing the point. I wanted to get caught.”

“Did you think you needed to be punished?”

“No. I just wanted to start fresh. Confess.”

“Did you make any attempt to tell your father the truth about your drug problems?”

“Once.”

“What happened?”

I didn’t mind her sitting in judgment of me, but I could not bear to have her pass psychological sentence on my father. “Dad was preoccupied.”

“You sound angry.”

“That’s the sort of thing my dad used to say.”

“What was your father preoccupied with?”

“Let’s get into that next session.” Our time actually was almost up. She gave me a prescription for Paxil, even though I didn’t ask for it.

After a week or so, my journalism trophy began to mock me from its sterling position of honor on my parents’ mantle. I could almost hear it whisper to me as my breath tarnished its glow, “None of it’s true.”

I was high that Saturday morning when it all became too much, and I suddenly willed up enough shame and courage to shout out, “Mom, Dad, I’ve got to tell you something you’re not going to want to hear.” My parents knew I only used that expression when I had fucked up big time.

I braced myself to be echoed back with shouts of “what’s wrong, what have you done now?” Until I realized there was nobody home but me.

Looking beyond the trophy through the big picture window that faced west, I could see them in the distance, walking with Alfie. Alfie was a giant poodle with caramel-colored hair and a long, undocked tail that curled up behind him. My sister said my mother got him because she missed Willy now that he’d left home to go to Princeton.

I knew if I waited for them to finish their walk, I wouldn’t go through with my confession. The lie had me feeling sick to my stomach. I felt like it was poisoning me.

It was May outside, the sky was a surreal blue like a Magritte, except the clouds were as big and white and airy as loaves of Wonder Bread. Morning hadn’t yet burned off the dew, and my sneakers were soaked through before I had crossed the lawn. I followed the path my parents had taken with Alfie through our old apple orchard in bloom, with the song of golden finches and the buzz of worker bees.

Mother, father, and dog were on their way to the river as I cut across a field fallow with lavender and did not stop to pick the wild strawberries that passed beneath my feet. My father had put down his fly rod and stopped to fix a gate that wouldn’t stay closed. He grimaced as he struggled to bend a length of barbed wire into a latch. My mother was up ahead of him, walking the edge of three acres thigh-high with feed corn, throwing a red rubber ball for the dog. The corn was just high enough so that the poodle’s head appeared and then disappeared with each stride he took after the ball.

I called out to my father, “I need to tell you something.”

“I’m here.”

“I need to say it to both of you.”

My tone distracted him. The barb of the wire cut his knuckle. He cursed softly, licked away the blood. “Well, then, I guess you’d better go get your mother.”

She was a hundred yards away, holding the ball up over her head. The poodle was balanced on his hind legs, tongue lolling, jaws snapping, as she held the ball just out of reach. She talked to Alfie with the same voice she had used when I was a little kid. “How’s my big boy . . . ? Oh, yes, you are a ferocious thing.”

“Mom,” I shouted, “I need you.”

She waved and threw the ball back toward us, and Alfie sprang after it like the beast he was. My father and I were walking toward her and she toward us. She was looking at me and smiling, pushing her hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand because her fingers were muddy from holding the ball. She was about to say something when her expression suddenly changed. She saw something that jerked her head around and drained the color from her face. As the wind gusted across the feed corn, rippling its surface like water, we saw it, too.

There, standing at the edge of the field, still as stone, was a deer. Tan, sleek, and female, its nose and eyes and hooves dark as the shadows cast from the overhang of dogwood that grew up out of the stone hedgerow, it was hard to see her. Life was so cleverly camouflaged, it was a long moment before our retinas could sort out the puzzle enough to see that a few feet away was her fawn, dappled with white and flecks of darker brown, two days old at most.

The dog was running straight toward them, cutting diagonally across the rows of corn like a shark. My mother shouted his name, “Alfie! Come here! Alfie!” The dog did not listen. The fawn was oblivious to the danger. Its mother was paralyzed by it.

My own mother was running now. She had her leash out and was angling into the field, trying to distract Alfie, shouting and waving her arms. “Alfie, don’t you dare!”

Alfie was downwind from the pair. His head disappeared in the corn. He growled and shook something. I thought the worst until he came up with the ball, wet and red in his jaws. He was running back to my mother. I looked over at my father. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head with relief. We’d lucked out, it was going to be okay.

But just as my mother was reaching out to grab hold of our family beast, the wind changed, the poodle’s head turned back, and his eyes rolled. Nostrils flaring, the ball fell from his mouth as he spun away from her. The deer and her fawn thought the danger had passed, that they were safe if they just stood still. But my mother knew that didn’t work.

As Alfie ran, so did my mother. Reaching out, she grabbed hold of the fur on his back as if she wanted to rip his hide from the bone. Alfie felt the sharpness of her nails, felt attacked. He did not understand. The princes of France had bred poodles to run down deer in fields on clear May mornings. The dog had his own chemical memories to listen to.

Feeling my mother clawing at his withers, Alfie yelped, arched his head back, and snapped at her with a growl. My mother called him a bastard as his teeth bit into the flesh of her right hand. My father and I were running to help.

“Stop him!” she shouted.

We were too far away. She was the only one close enough to catch the dog before it reached them. Alfie had lost sight of the deer for a moment. My mother was running right behind him. It all happened within a matter of seconds. And yet, the trajectory of animal instincts that were about to collide were so hopelessly out of our hands, close at hand and yet beyond our reach, it felt like time slowed, like God put it in slomo, as if there was a lesson to be learned from what we were watching.

My mother’s hand was just closing on Alfie’s collar when the fawn moved. She was still holding on as Alfie’s jaws bit down on the baby’s neck. Dog, fawn, and my mother tumbled through the grass. Teeth flashed, and tiny hooves flailed between the sounds of growls and screams.

I had to hit the dog in the head with a rock to get him to let go. The fawn’s throat was ripped open. Except for the blood, it still looked as perfect as a Steifftoy.

My mother was sobbing so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. As my father helped her up off the ground, she screamed, “You bastard!” When she kicked the poodle in the ribs, my father shook her.

“It’s not the dog’s fault.”

Her shirt was torn and splattered with blood. “Whose fault is it, then?” She wailed.

“Christ, Nora, are you crazy? You’re lucky the damn dog didn’t go for your throat.”

My mother didn’t hear him. The mother deer was at the far end of the field now. She had saved herself. She disappeared without ever looking back. My mother looked at the fawn like she was waiting for it to say something. “I couldn’t let it happen again.”

“Alfie’s done this before?” At the mention of his name, the poodle licked my hand and wagged his tail. He was over it, but my mother wasn’t.

My mother looked at my father. “Tell him.” She was both begging and daring him.

“Tell me what?”

“I think your mother’s in shock. She might have hit her head as well. Put the dog in the house, bring the car down.”

I knew my father was worried about her, because even though I didn’t have a driver’s license, he had me drive us to the emergency room so he could sit in the back of the car with her. I watched them in the rearview mirror. He cradled her head in his lap and kept talking to her so she wouldn’t fall asleep.

The doctor said my mother had a slight concussion. That night my father made her soup. I stood in the doorway of their bedroom/ office and watched him watch her eat it. After a few spoonfuls, she took a bite of a saltine. “I’m sorry I got so hysterical.”

We both told her not to worry about it. When she finished with the soup she looked at me thoughtfully. “Your father said there was something you needed to talk to us about.”

“It was nothing important.” The trophy on the mantle suddenly seemed like the least of our worries.

“It didn’t sound like nothing when you brought it up.” My father eyed me carefully.

I didn’t like to look him in the eye when I lied. I stared at the floor and saw a magazine with Pelé on the cover. “I was thinking about going out for soccer next year.”

“But you’ve never played soccer.” Even with a concussion, my mother could be counted on to be practical.

Where I was concerned, my father’s optimism was blind. “That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be good at it. What position did you have in mind?”

“Goalie.”

“Why do you want to be a goalie, Zach?” I couldn’t tell if my mother was being genuinely curious or just being polite.

“I think I’d like the feeling the game was in my hands.”

Eventually, I did get caught, but not for drugs.

I went out for soccer fall of my senior year in the hopes that I could find a way to make at least one of the lies told in our house feel like the truth. I didn’t want to spend my fall afternoons getting high and thinking about what made my mother fight a dog to save a fawn. No matter how much dope I smoked, I could still hear her pleading and taunting my father, “Tell him.” There was no escaping the fact that they had a secret bond. Weighted down with my own deceptions, I did not want to be burdened with theirs. For what I had witnessed the morning of the dead fawn could not be blamed on Casper Gedsic.

When the soccer season began, I was the fourth-string goalie, so limited in ball-handling skills, my presence in the net was only slightly preferable to having no goalie at all. Normally, the coach only carried three goalies. The only reason he allowed me to join the team was because of my public stand against drugs. He had the scrambled thought that I would keep the team straight.