Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“A totem pole,” said his mother. “Oh for cute.”

She was sitting on the bed, stitching up a pair of his shorts that had split at the seam. He was a plump child whose clothes suffered routine outbursts, though as an adult, he would be thin, his childhood pudginess retained only in his hands. He handed his mother the totem pole, which she set on the sill of the open window. Each time Aaron awakened that night and saw it outlined there, wings spread, he could not help but feel that his mother had given it the option to flee.

The next morning, she packed their suitcases while his father sat on the bed and hurried her along, and then they walked across the road to a diner called Freddie’s. Aaron was allowed to have pancakes, which they rarely had at home because his father hated them. They recrossed the road, and as his father loaded their suitcases into the trunk, his mother prepared three washcloths, wetting them and rolling them up inside a bread bag, which would be stored in the glove compartment for emergencies. She had done this the previous morning also. His father came in whistling and carrying a paper bag that the motel owner had told him to fill with the apples that lay scattered and rotting outside their cabin. The three of them gathered half a bagful, and while Aaron and his father waited in the car, his mother went back into the cabin, leaving the door ajar so that Aaron caught glimpses of her as she bent to peer under things. His father drummed impatiently on the car’s roof, his thumps growing more thunderous when she finally appeared. She got into the car holding a matchbook wrapped with black thread left over from mending Aaron’s shorts. His father, weighing the delay against this bit of nothing, snatched the matchbook and flung it out the window.

The car was filled with the waxy, overripe scent of the apples and the smell of his father, who had not bathed at the motel because the bathroom had only a shower and he preferred a tub, where he could stretch out while Aaron’s mother shampooed his hair and scrubbed his back until it turned red. His father gnawed steadily on the apples as he drove. Aaron tried to eat one, but his stomach was weak from the heat and the car’s motion, and he managed just a few bites. He closed his eyes and pressed his brow against the window.

“Look!” he heard his father cry out, and he pulled away from the window and opened his eyes. His father’s right arm was stretched awkwardly behind him, back over the top of the seat; in his hand, clutched like a baseball, was a half-eaten apple. Aaron thought that his father was offering him the apple, but as his eyes focused, he realized his father was showing him something: a worm that he had bitten in two, the half still in the apple wiggling frantically, the other half presumably doing the same in his father’s stomach. Aaron did not know which half — the one he could see or the one he was forced to imagine — caused what happened next. His body convulsed, and then his father’s arm was covered in vomit, his vomit, the pancakes and bacon and bits of apple all vaguely identifiable. His father took his eyes from the road to look at his arm as if he too were trying to sort out the ingredients of Aaron’s breakfast.

“Jerry, pull over so we can get you cleaned up,” Aaron’s mother said, staring forward, as though reading the words from a sign up ahead.

His father veered onto the shoulder, braking with such force that the keys jangled in the ignition. He climbed out, holding his soiled arm away from him. As Aaron’s mother worked to retrieve the wet washcloths from the glove compartment, jiggling its tricky latch, he yanked open Aaron’s door and leaned in.

“Eat it,” he said, mashing his arm hard against Aaron’s mouth.

Aaron clenched his jaw, but the vomit leaked back in between his lips. He tried not to move it about with his tongue, but he could taste it, sour and bitter like a rotten walnut, and beneath that was the faint sweetness of the syrup and the bacon’s clear salinity. He told himself that it had all come from him, but this realization only made things worse and he vomited again.

Then, his father was gone, replaced by his mother, who handed him one of the washcloths. “Clean yourself up,” she whispered.

He pressed the cloth to his face, taking in its musty smell, and scraped it hard across his tongue. His parents were behind the car, and he boosted himself onto his knees so that he could watch them through the rear window. “See if I give a shit,” he heard his father say, but a semi hurtled by, taking his mother’s reply with it. At last, his father held out his arm and let his mother run a washcloth along it, the vomit piling up like snow before a plow. They drove away in silence, the washcloths in a heap beside the road, the remains of their emergency.

* * *

For two weeks they drove, his father staring at the road, his mother at maps. Aaron did not find maps appealing. “They’re wonderful tools,” his mother said, which made him think of hammers and drills and noisy activities like those in which his father engaged in the basement, activities that Aaron found as unappealing as maps. “You know,” she added, “we couldn’t make this trip without a map.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, because we need the map so we know where we’re going.”

It had not occurred to him that his parents did not know where they were going.

The trip was marked by statues: a large otter in a park in Fergus Falls; the Happy Chef, who warned them to stuff cotton in their ears because he felt like singing; and Mount Rushmore, which featured the faces of very important men called presidents, whom he would learn about in school his mother said. His father held up a dollar bill, and Aaron was surprised to see that it bore the face of the man on the left, George Washington. His father said that George Washington had wooden teeth, as though this were the most important thing to know about him.

Bookending the trip were the Paul Bunyan statues, the standing one in Bemidji and the sitting Paul Bunyan in Brainerd, their final stop. It was there at the sitting Paul Bunyan’s feet that something happened, a small thing that had nonetheless offered Aaron a glimmer of hope about his potential as a son. In the photograph that remained of that day, he was standing beside Paul’s big, brown boot. He liked to imagine there was something unusual in his stance, defiant, though the look on his face was clear panic, the result of having been made to stand in line with the other children to meet Paul Bunyan while their parents waited to the side, eyeing them like 4-H calves at the fair.

He had watched as two girls in matching yellow bonnets approached the statue. “How old are you?” bellowed Paul Bunyan, and the older girl, her arm firmly around the other’s shoulders, said, “I’m seven. How old are you, Mr. Bunyan?”

“Have you seen Babe, my blue ox?” asked Paul Bunyan, not mentioning his age.

Aaron tried to prepare for his turn by thinking back on what he had learned from the tall tales, but as the line moved forward, he realized that Paul Bunyan did not respond to any of the questions put to him. Finally, when only one child stood between him and the uncooperative giant, he began to sob. The slow simmer of his fear gave way to full-blown panic — like a teapot whistle shrieking inside him — and he leaped forward and kicked Paul Bunyan.

Immediately, he was sorry. “Did you feel that, Mr. Bunyan?” he asked in a voice meant to suggest contrition.

The only response came from the parents, in the form of enthusiastic laughter and clapping. A man in plaid shorts called out, “Knock ’im again. Bust his kneecaps,” and as the parents cheered, his father pushed forward to stand beside him. More than anything else about the trip, Aaron remembered the warmth of his father’s hand on his head.