Tough

It was the summer of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King, of Allan Shepard and Yuri Gagarin. But most of all—for a ten-year-old kid—it was the summer of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, when they fought to beat Babe Ruth’s record for most home runs in a season, a record that had stood since 1927. Maris was my man. Maris could do it; 61 in ’61. The coincidence gave the event the aura of mystery, like Maris himself. The truth is, I didn’t know much or care much about baseball. I was not a baseball fan. Not even, really, a Yankees fan. I was a Roger Maris fan. I preferred the dark brooder to Mickey Mantle’s talky, cheerful I-can-’cuz-I-think-I-can. Maris was silent. Maris was deadly. Baseball’s Montgomery Clift. You could never get under the rock of his mystery. He was like my dad that way.

My dad was a family legend, a navy frogman, a Raider who’d won a medal for “pre-assault hydrographic reconnaissance” at Inchon. And like all legends without a beach to hit or a harbor to clear, he was a little lost among the coffee cups and dirty socks of daily life.

Every time he’d come home on leave, he’d spend the first few days just staring at me as if he weren’t quite sure what to make of me, the way you’d stare at a patch of ceiling mold. Now where in hell did that come from? I felt like the child of gypsies, spawn of the devil, my mother’s dirty trick.

After awhile, he’d spend the days at the picture window, staring out at the mostly empty street. Eventually he always hauled down the brown leather case that held his great grandfather’s Queen Anne box-lock. For a while he’d just sit there with the case in his lap, sometimes for hours. Then he’d lay it open, lifting the twelve-inch pistol from its compartment, disassembling it, cleaning and oiling each part, then reassembling it. Sometimes the process took days. When he’d finally fit it back together, if he was in a good mood, he’d show it to me, the inlaid silver scroll-work, the demon’s face embossed on the butt. Once I looked up from my homework to find him sighting me along the twelve-inch barrel. He said, “Shoot she may but shine she must.”

Some nights he woke me by tapping my shoulder with the butt, his words a sharp whisper between clenched teeth: “You’re in deep ground, mister!” Other nights I’d wake up to him standing beside my bed, his dark eyes wet with tears. “Things just haven’t went my way.”

Toward the end of every leave, he’d start carrying the pistol everywhere he went, even to the bathroom, talking to himself, arguing. In Latin, I think.

When my mom complained, he said, “‘Si vis pacem, para bellum.’ ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ That’s what the Romans believed. That’s what I believe.”

“But Les,” she said, “what good did that do the Romans? They’re gone, extinct, fallen.”

“Makes no nevermind, Janice. I take my family’s safety very seriously. You never know—any minute the Russians could come over the hill.”

“What hill? We live in Indiana. It’s flat as a frying pan around here.”

He cradled the box-lock like an injured bird and shook his head as if she’d gone simple. “I just want to make sure nothing happens to my family is all.”

My mom brought her hand to her forehead and squeezed her temples, closing her eyes as she spoke. “Les, you’re what’s happening to your family.”

He noticed me then, watching from the dark hallway. “You get in the kitchen and take out that trash, swabbie, and no mistakes or you’ll learn the meaning of hard duty.” He led me with the barrel of the gun.

Mostly when my mom wanted me to do something, she...