Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Hello there, what’s your name?” Paul Bunyan shouted, his voice echoing from the area of his lap, but nobody was paying attention.

Aaron’s father steered Aaron past the other parents, nodding at them casually, as if to suggest that his son provided such amusing fare daily. A burly woman with a large wooden cross riding atop her bosom called out, “You’re a regular little David, aren’t you?”

“My name is Aaron,” he replied, and even this made people laugh.

The morning they left on the family vacation, Aaron’s father had set his coffee cup on the table as he went out the door, triggering the usual response from Aaron’s mother, who wanted to wash it right then, an argument that his father won by threatening to leave without her. When they returned two weeks later, the dirty cup sat where his father had left it, calling his parents to battle, but they averted their eyes and kept silent. In the days that followed, the truce established in front of the sitting-down Paul Bunyan hung over them, its fragility palpable. They sat at the supper table each night, afraid to speak, the hope that they had carried home settling on them like a yoke.

This went on for eight days. On the morning of the ninth, Aaron’s father fell off a parade float and died. Aaron witnessed the whole thing, beginning with his father perched on the back rail of the float with three other policemen, waving and tossing candy, and ending when the tractor pulling the float lurched into a higher gear and his father tumbled backward, landing on his head in the street below. It looked so natural — his uniformed father rolling through the air like a scene from Adam-12 —that Aaron thought it had been planned, until the float crashed to a halt, the Shriners in their go-karts veering wildly to avoid his father, their fez tassels going limp as horsetails. One of the other policemen leaped from the float, put two fingers to his father’s neck, and, with something approaching awe in his voice, announced, “By God, Englund’s dead.”

It was not the first time Aaron had heard the word dead, but when he asked his mother exactly what it meant, she told him that dead was “a state, a permanent state.” Flustered by her inability to make death clearer, she added, “ Permanent means forever, Aaron.” This made no sense, for when she went to the beauty shop, she got something called a permanent, which lasted just a few months, the curls uncoiling week by week. There was also the dead he associated with cold winter mornings, when his father would stomp back inside the house to pull on gloves, muttering, “The damn battery’s dead.” From the window, Aaron watched him lift the hood on his squad car and back the Oldsmobile out of the garage, attaching cables from its battery to the squad car’s battery. Minutes later, his father drove off, the squad car’s dead battery resurrected.

At the funeral, his father’s colleagues gathered awkwardly around Aaron and his mother. They pressed pennies into his hand, which he slipped into his trouser pockets, alternating between left and right. That night he emptied the pennies into a bowl. As he dressed the next morning, indeed each morning, he redistributed the coins in the same way, enjoying the even weight of them. He came to think of death as this, the steady tug of pennies holding him down, keeping him balanced.

Technically, his father had died in the line of duty, and the funeral reflected this. At the cemetery, Aaron closed his eyes, enjoying the dizziness that overtook him as he stood above the gaping hole that would soon hold his father. The gun blasts, however, had come as a surprise and he wet himself, a warm sensation in his suit pants passing into his consciousness just as the echoes of the gunshots faded. In the days afterward, he and his mother rose and ate and slept, a routine punctuated by the sound of his mother crying in a room where he was not. One night just after the funeral she appeared with a framed photograph of his father, which she set on Aaron’s night table in the spot where she usually set a glass of water. “He looks like this because he was squinting into the sun,” she said, pointing at his father’s small, scowling face.

His father glared at him as he lay in bed each morning, dry-mouthed, waiting for his mother to come for him. He always waited, a habit that had once been a simple function of age, though on his fifth birthday in March, everything changed. He had awakened early that morning and crept down the hallway to his parents’ bedroom, planning to surprise them with his newfound independence, but standing in their half-open doorway, he witnessed a terrifying sight: his father, dressed in his police uniform, had his mother, his naked mother, pressed face-first against the wall, her legs apart, arms reaching upward. “Please, Officer,” his mother said. As Aaron watched, his father handcuffed his mother. He knew what would happen next. He had heard his father run through the drill dozens of times. His mother would be put into his father’s squad car, into the backseat, which was reserved for criminals, and taken to jail. He would be left alone with his father.

He went back to his room and lay with the covers pulled up to his chin. He stayed like that for what seemed a very long time. Finally, his door opened, and his mother peeked in. “Come on, sleepy boy,” she said. “Time to get up. We have a birthday to celebrate.” She held her index finger to her lips, the signal the two of them used to indicate collusion against his father. “Once your father’s gone, we’ll make pancakes.” When she leaned over to pull back his covers, her body gave off a strange almond odor.

* * *

One morning, Aaron opened his eyes to find his father still staring at him from the nightstand. His mouth felt drier than usual, perhaps because he had been dreaming about the iron ore mines, which they had visited near the end of their vacation. They had stayed with Uncle Petey, who was twelve years older than Aaron’s mother. Petey spent his days at his kitchen table sorting buttons for his wife, Charlotte, who was a seamstress. She was German; they had met when Petey was stationed in Germany after the war. Charlotte was so thin that you could see the bones of her spine beneath her cotton shirt as she bent over her sewing machine. Aaron’s mother said she had always been this way, that she could not control her nerves except by smoking, and so, possessed of just one mouth, she had sacrificed eating. Everything in their house smelled of smoke.

Uncle Petey had once worked in the mines, but his mine had stopped producing and become a tourist attraction, which Aaron and his parents toured one afternoon. In the car on the way over, Aaron’s father said that there was more to it than the mine closing, that Petey had stopped working even before that. “He woke up one day and he was afraid of the dark,” his father said, chuckling as he usually did when discussing other people’s fears, while Aaron’s mother stared out the window.

The tour was led by former miners, who spoke to one another in a language that was not English. “Damn Finns,” his father whispered. “They run this place.” It was dark in the mines and wet, and when his father said “Finns” like that, Aaron felt as if he were underwater with everything closing in. He gasped for air.

Halfway through the tour, the group stopped walking. The Finns began ushering people over the edge of what appeared to be a drop-off, but as Aaron got closer, he saw that they were actually stepping onto a ladder and disappearing into the darkness below. Soon, only he and his parents remained at the top, along with one of the Finns. Aaron’s father swung over the edge and onto the ladder. “Let’s go,” he called to Aaron.