Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

His father turned then and walked calmly away. At home he might have shouted or smashed a bottle on the floor, but he did not believe in being a spectacle, in providing strangers with that pleasure. Aaron was familiar with his father’s stiff back, with the way his hands dove deep into his pockets and his feet kicked forward with each step, keeping an invisible can in motion, just as he recognized the way that he and his mother stood side by side, dazed by how quickly things could go awry. Only minutes earlier, his mother had turned to them, revealing a clot of yellow mustard on her ear lobe, a leftover from the hamburgers they had eaten while squeezed together on a bench. Aaron and his father had burst into simultaneous laughter, a rare occurrence that had encouraged all three of them, nudging them toward giddiness.

“Dolores,” his father said, “were you feeding that hamburger to your ear?”

They laughed again while his mother dabbed at her ear with a tissue, using Aaron and his father as mirrors, asking, “Is it gone? Jerry? Aaron? Did I get it all?”

Years later, when Aaron thought back on that day, trying to see his father’s anger as something predictable, he began here, hoping to understand the slow build of his rage, but when he remembered the way that his mother had giggled and spoken their names, he knew that she had been enjoying the attention, that his father’s tone had been free of reproach. And so Aaron, too, had been happy. It was that simple and that treacherous.

Aaron and his mother waited, without speaking, for his father to return, and when it became clear that he was not coming back, they spent the afternoon at a free storytelling event about the life of Paul Bunyan. The storyteller — an old man dressed in a plaid lumberjack shirt — fidgeted as he spoke, his right hand rubbing the wrist of the left as though it had just been freed from handcuffs. He regarded the audience eagerly, too eagerly, when he thought he had said something funny. At the end, everyone rose and filed out of the hot room quickly.

“Stay put, and don’t talk to anyone,” Aaron’s mother said, and she left too.

The storyteller regarded him nervously. “Young man, did you know that when Paul was just one week old, he was already so big he had to wear his father’s clothes?” He chuckled. “Can you imagine?” Aaron thought about his father’s shirts, which smelled of sweat that had worked itself deeply into the fibers. Even after his mother washed them, the odor remained, requiring only the heat of his mother’s iron to rekindle it. Aaron smiled at the storyteller. It was not his fault that he thought Aaron might be intrigued by the idea of wearing his father’s clothes.

The man shuffled out, and Aaron was by himself in the room. It was the largest room he had ever occupied alone, and the empty space gave freedom to his thoughts. What he imagined was his parents getting into the Oldsmobile and driving away without him, returning to their house in Moorhead (because his imagination was not equipped to send them elsewhere) while he established a new life here, sleeping under Babe’s stomach when it rained and spending his days listening to the tall tales.

Into the room came two boys. He could still recall the shock he had felt as he looked at the boy on the left, taking in the severely upturned nose and knobby, receding chin, the blue eyes and unusually short lashes, and then saw the same configuration of unfortunate features on the other boy. They were around twelve, the age at which threatening younger children offered both pleasure and a way to subvert their own feelings of vulnerability. They spoke loudly and swaggered up to Aaron as if he had stolen something of theirs that they aimed to get back.

“Hey, asshole,” said the boy on the right.

The other snickered and kicked Aaron’s chair hard. “My brother’s talking to you, asshole,” he said.

“My mother told me not to talk to anyone,” Aaron replied, his voice soft and overly polite. When he used this voice with his father, it only made him angrier.

The boys sat down behind him. “I heard that Paul Bunyan had a pecker as big as an oak tree,” the one directly behind him said. He kicked the back of Aaron’s chair, jolting Aaron forward.

His twin laughed. “Yeah, and nuts like basketballs.”

The first boy leaned forward, his voice loud in Aaron’s ear. “I heard a train thought his asshole was a tunnel — went in and never came out.”

“Paul Bunyan was a fag,” his brother said, and the boys slammed backward in their chairs, yelping like puppies.

Aaron’s mother returned and glared at the boys. “We’ll wait in the car,” she said to Aaron, which meant that she had not found his father.

They left the park and walked up and down several streets, his mother pausing at each corner, giving careful consideration to all four directions. Her tendency, like his, was to leap to the worst conclusion; he felt her fear in the way she squeezed his hand tightly one minute and flung herself free of him the next. They rounded a corner and there was the Oldsmobile, the driver-side door open, his father’s legs jutting into the street.

“It’s about time,” his father said when he saw them. “Four o’clock. What have you people been doing all day?” He called them “you people” when he found their actions as inexplicable as those of strangers.

Aaron and his mother got into the car. They said nothing because they knew that silence was best in the aftermath of his father’s anger. Aaron fell asleep against the car door, too tired to worry, as he usually did, that it might spring open and send him tumbling into the road. When he awoke to the cessation of motion, he discovered that they were in front of a motel consisting of cabins and an office shaped like a wigwam, a VACANCY sign lit up in pink neon over its door. When his father got out of the car, the smell of rotting apples wafted in. He went into the wigwam and came back with a key, which he used to unlock one of the cabin doors, and they went inside. His mother quickly opened the windows, letting in the smell of the apples, which mingled with the smell his mother had been trying to air out, a sour odor not unlike the one that came from his father’s feet when he sat in his recliner after working all day and ordered Aaron to pry off his shoes.

“Bed, Aaron,” said his mother. He followed her into the bedroom, where she produced his pajamas and toothbrush from a suitcase. He’d felt such pleasure at seeing his possessions appear in these unfamiliar surroundings. They spent two nights there, hot, sleepless nights during which Aaron clung to the edge of the bed he shared with his parents because his father had not wanted to pay extra for a cot. The sickly sweet stench of rotting apples had intensified daily, its source an overly burdened tree that shed its fruit in a wide skirt outside their bedroom window. His father liked the smell, and the windows remained open.

The first morning, his father took him inside the wigwam, showed him a shelf of souvenirs — beaded necklaces, T-shirts, and miniature totem poles with eagle wings flaring out from the top — and instructed him to choose one. He considered each item while his father chatted with the old man behind the desk. When the old man shuffled over to a postcard rack near the door, passing gas with each step, Aaron’s father turned to glare at Aaron as though expecting him to do something shameful, laugh perhaps.

“Did you find something, son?” he asked. He called Aaron “son” when there were other people around.

Aaron held up a beaded pouch shaped like a canoe with a zipper running from bow to stern. His father examined it. “That’s what you want?” he said. “A purse?”

Aaron turned and grabbed the totem pole with eagle wings, mumbling “thank you” when his father paid for it, and they walked back to the cabin.