An Autobiography of the Doctor’s Son in a Shipbuilding Town

The cowboy beside me at the Wyoming bar stared like a buffalo and I too tried out this stare, but the dingy mirror failed to reflect me—a mystery, I thought, considering that to show you your own soul, as a mirror cannot do, artists embalm sharks and flush urinals and crucify Jesus upon a penis. Art, they say, is a special kind of mirror. The bar’s was spectacularly fractured. Lines vectored from an ancient bullet hole, knifing the low winter light. It was beautiful, but I watched the television above, projecting football. A record iii million other people were staring too, including my retired father, watching from a couch beside the Kennebec River, yelling out the score, muting the sound of ads to more easily concentrate on his reading of the New York Review of Books, shelling unsalted peanuts, drinking a dark, stout, grown-up beer.

I drank my hypoglycemic pint quickly and ordered another. The run from my childhood home had left me parched. I’d been running steadily for 10, maybe 20 years and was by now at a pretty good remove from Maine, where my older brother and I, pretending our hammocks were horses, swung between birches, robbing banks and tomahawking Indians and collecting the scalps of cowboys like the one sitting beside me. Even his wet lips had cracks like fast dried mud. He could have hung on the walls where a stuffed and dusty and bejewelled West presided. The heads of ungulates, bears, lions. Guns and pickaxes and nooses. Wanted posters. Billy was wanted. I’d been a sharp kid, I told the cowboy, just making small talk. When I made patterns with my pattern blocks, I was exceedingly proud to have my father bestow that word, “sharp,” upon me and as cleverly as one can only be in dreams, I smashed my exhausted pint glass, lifted the unlistening cowboy’s big brim and, with a keen shard, jettisoned the top off his skull. He didn’t even flinch. He took another gulp. His lips shone and his brain glowed gold.

When he touched his hat, I attempted to ape the gesture, but failed, being, as I was, hatless. As a kid, to possess a brimmed polka dot cap like the shipbuilders wore had been a tingling fantasy. My dad had a sort of purple velvet French beret with bells and yellow stars. I had given it to him and when he donned it he became an invincible magician, an orchestrator of disappearances and appearances on the scale of the 17,000-ton all-steel Aegis destroyer, the vessel built in the windowless warehouses stretching further than I could run along the streets and the river. Inside the warehouses were the hatted men. But what were they doing, exactly? What did men do? I don’t know. I never went in. I never saw. My father, the doctor, was adamant about weeds. He paid one cent for every invasive I dug from the lawn, though only if the pale carrot root was intact. If you didn’t get the root, you didn’t get the weed, he said. Sometimes my friends dug with me. My father, gin and tonic in hand, would count out the weeds in our buckets and count out the change in his pocket. Then we rode our bikes to town and bought oil for our chains and Blizzards from Dairy Queen and then we biked across the big bridge to watch the pennant-fluttering launch. Except for the towering red, white, and blue cranes topped with lit trees at Christmas, shipbuilding happened invisibly. It was miraculous when the sharp ships, arrayed with the lines of suited men at attention, bristling with guns and radar and unnamed spiked technologies, rolled slowly into the river. We went mad with cheering and managed to cartwheel from the bridge and into the Kennebec where we treaded water until the incoming tide floated us upriver to my house. There we emerged from the slow brackish flow, turned, whooped, and dove back in, scattering the reflections of the...