Fitz (2 page)

He’d be working on a math problem, trying to figure out the area of some polygon, or he’d be talking to Caleb about some new song the two of them should try to work up, but all the while he’d be thinking about his father, planning his next spy mission. The real drama of his life had become secret, had gone underground.

At some point, watching was not enough. He was no longer satisfied being a spectator. He wanted to get off the sidelines, to get in the game. If seeing his father was a drug—sometimes it felt like that, mood-altering—he needed a stronger dose. Like the man in the Edgar Allan Poe story obsessed with the old guy’s vulture eye, after a long period of secret watching, he felt compelled to action. That feeling in his gut when he saw his dad—he needed to do something about it.

This was his logic. He wanted to spend some time with his father, what was the phrase?
Quality time
. He wanted to spend some quality time with his dad. It was time to get acquainted. But his dad wasn’t interested. After all these years, that much was obvious. It wasn’t like he was going to respond to an invitation. Fitz figured he needed a convincer.

Fitz touches the gun
he’s got jammed in his jeans. It feels solid and reassuring. It has weight. It makes Fitz feel substantial. “This is a serious piece,” that’s what the kid who sold it to him said. They were standing on a playground after dark, underneath monkey bars Fitz used to climb. Fitz has known this kid for years—Dominic Rizzo. He calls himself the Dominator, but there really isn’t anything dominant about him. Nobody much likes him. In elementary school, he stole things from other people’s desks, worthless things—a dirty eraser, the stub of a pencil. He has a pinched, ratlike face and smells like an ashtray. He’s been to juvie more than once.

But if you want to buy something—pills, weed, an ID, you name it—Dominic is your man. The playground is like his office. He sits on the tire swing, wobbling slowly back and forth, a cigarette cupped in his hand. When Fitz came by one night and told him he wanted to get a gun, he didn’t seem all that surprised. He didn’t ask questions. “I’m not going to shoot anybody,” Fitz said, and tried to laugh. “I just want to make a point.”

Dominic didn’t seem to care. “Whatever,” he said. “You want a dummy?” he asked. “A piece of crap? Or a serious piece?” Fitz told him he wanted the real thing. “Okay,” Dominic told him. “Two hundred bucks. Be here Sunday night.”

Fitz had a wad of money stashed in his desk. He’d been saving for a new bass—the thing he played was some rebuilt, no-name Frankenstein he’d found at a flea market. Sunday night Fitz told his mom he was going for a walk and brought his money to the playground. Dom took him into the park and retrieved a bag from behind some bushes. “Here she be,” he said. “Thirty-eight snub-nose, the Chief’s Special.”

Dom showed him how to push the latch release forward and open the cylinder. He gave it a spin. He explained that the gun held five rounds and that he was giving him that many. “There’s no safety,” Dom said. Fitz knew what that meant, but somehow that phrase, those words—they made it seem as if Dom were telling him something bigger, more ominous.

“You’re packing now,” he told Fitz. “You got some serious street cred.” Dom was making fun of him, Fitz was pretty sure, a law-abiding kid like him buying a gun, but he didn’t really care. He needed to get his father’s attention, and this would do the trick.

Now, with his hand on the gun, he feels like a serious person. Someone to be reckoned with. There have been times in the past couple of weeks when watching his father made Fitz feel small and insubstantial, unimportant. The feeling of excitement and purpose slipped away at those times, and he felt just like a nothing, a nobody. Easy to ignore, easy to blow off. Fitz is preoccupied
with this man, who clearly gives him no more thought than he does the cable or electric bill or any other monthly obligation. Fitz is a witness to a rich and fascinating life that doesn’t include him. He is on the outside looking in, his nose pressed against the glass.

Fitz understands that puny boys love their violent video games so much because playing them makes them feel big, powerful, dangerous. That has never been his thing. But now he has to admit it—his piece, this steel he’s carrying, it makes him feel confident. Today his father is not going to blow him off. Today Fitz is going to make himself visible to his father.

The door to the building
opens and a man steps out. Curtis Powell, Esquire. Partner in the firm of Plunkett and Daugherty. JD, cum laude, St. Paul College of Law, whose practice involves a balance of employment and complex commercial litigation, recipient of the Advocates for Human Rights Award. His father.

Fitz has memorized the biography and studied the picture of him on his law firm’s website, a formal studio shot, like a school portrait—the same sort of vague blue background. To Fitz, the man in that picture looks pretty smart. He also looks pretty pleased with himself. He’s pretty much right where he wants to be in life. He doesn’t look at all like the kind of man who fathers a child and then has nothing to do with him for fifteen years other than scratching out a monthly check. But who does? Who looks like that guy?

This morning, in person, he looks only slightly less composed. He comes down the steps squinting into the morning sunlight. Like Fitz, his father is long-limbed and tall—he’s a shade over six
feet. Fitz is five-ten and still growing. He wears size eleven shoes, and his mom says he’s going to grow into his feet like a big-pawed puppy. His father has more meat on him. His upper body looks thick, like he may have done some work with weights, but still he looks light on his feet, quick, graceful even, a tennis player—Fitz has seen a racket in his backseat. He’s wearing a white shirt and dark suit, one of the bright ties he favors—this one is orange. His shoes are black, polished to an impossible sheen. He’s got a black leather briefcase in one hand and his suit jacket slung over his shoulder on a hanger.

Fitz flips up his hood and takes a deep breath. He takes hold of the handle of the gun.

The thought crosses his mind: This is crazy. What am I doing? Kidnapping my own father. He feels himself starting to perspire. Fitz knows he’s probably going to regret it. He’s not stupid. There are going to be consequences. His life is never going to be the same, he feels that, he’s going to put himself in a world of trouble. He doesn’t have to go through with this. He could turn back now, catch a bus, head home, drop the gun in a sewer, crawl back into bed.

His father holds up his key ring and extends his arm toward his car, pointing, an unmistakable look of pleasure on his face—this is mine, his expression says, all this finely tuned German machinery. My beautiful car, my beautiful life. There’s something about that expression that sets Fitz’s feet in motion.

Fitz steps out into the alley. The lights of his father’s car flash, and the locks pop up. His father hangs his suit jacket in the back, takes a minute to smooth it, adjusting it so that it drapes without
wrinkling, sets his bag on the backseat. His father still hasn’t seen him. He’s completely absorbed by what he’s doing.

Fitz has witnessed this little ritual before: his father performs it every morning as he leaves for work and every evening as he prepares to come home. But there’s something about it this time that enrages Fitz. This perfectly starched, self-satisfied man all alone in his well-tuned, tailored, wrinkle-free world—the sight of it makes Fitz wants to smash something.

His father closes the back door and is now getting himself settled behind the wheel. Fitz crosses the alley in a few quick strides, comes up on the car’s passenger side, and pulls the door open. He leans down and peers inside the car. His father has been fiddling with the radio and looks up now, startled. Fitz has his hand on the gun, but it’s still hidden under his sweatshirt.

“What?” his father says. “What do you need?” Maybe he thinks Fitz wants directions, maybe a handout—spare change for bus fare. Maybe he thinks he has a sad story to tell him. That’s when Fitz takes the gun out. He doesn’t so much point it as show it. It’s a visual aid. He wants his father to see it.

“Whoa,” his father says, and raises his hands. “Take it easy.” He’s talking to Fitz, but he’s staring at the gun. “Slow down,” he says. It’s as if he’s talking to the gun. He’s transfixed. Fitz has wanted more than anything else in the world to get the man’s attention and now, he’s got it, undivided.

“You can have my wallet,” his father says. “There’s cash in it.” He reaches slowly into his back pocket and produces a billfold. He holds it out to Fitz, a shiny black leather offering.

“Help yourself,” his father says to the gun. “There’s a hundred
bucks, something like that.” Fitz is still standing, leaning into the car, trying to use his body to shield the gun from the sight of anyone who may drive down the alley. Fitz grabs the wallet from his father. His father hands over his phone and Fitz snatches that, too. Under normal circumstances, he is a polite young man, no grabber, never was, but now it seems, hooded and armed in this alley, he is apparently someone else, someone other than who he thought he was.

It’s a little disconcerting, hearing his father’s voice. Fitz has heard it on his office voice mail—brisk and confident, away from his desk but eager to get back—and he’s overheard him making small talk at a cash register—thank you, have a nice day. But now, directed at him, it’s a different thing entirely.

“I don’t want your money,” Fitz tells him.

“You don’t,” his father says. “You don’t want my money.” Fitz expected his father to be something of a fast talker, but right now he is speaking very slowly, choosing his words carefully, the way a rock climber chooses his next step, slowly and deliberately, as if a single misstep would be deadly.

Fitz can imagine what his father must be thinking. The kid seems like he’s on something. He’s jumpy and nervous. He’s sweating. It could be meth, the schools are full of it, he knows that, he reads the papers, kids getting high between classes, even in the suburban schools, especially the suburban schools.

The gun looks genuine. It’s no water pistol, not a cap gun. He has no idea whether it’s loaded. Maybe, maybe not. There’s no way of telling. Fitz sees him still studying it.

“It’s real,” Fitz says.

“Of course it’s real,” his father says. “So is my money. But that’s not what you want.” He sounds irritated. Exasperated with this kid who doesn’t seem to know how to conduct a proper holdup. Of all the muggers in the city, he gets the one who doesn’t understand the object of the game. “What
do
you want?”

Fitz slides his backpack
off his back, sets it on the floor of the car, and slips into the passenger seat. He holds the gun in front of him, not quite pointed at his father. When he imagined this, Fitz didn’t consider he’d be so close, in such physical proximity. He can smell him—pungent and clean, his shower soap, his aftershave, some designer fragrance.

When he was very little, Fitz wanted more than anything to be close to his father. Like all kids, he learned at an early age to recognize and point to the daddies in his picture books—playing peekaboo with their little ones, giving them piggyback rides. He can’t remember when he learned his family was different. At one point he started to call his beloved uncle Dunc, his mom’s brother, “Daddy.” It would have been an understandable mistake. It was Dunc who took him to the library, who peeled his apples, took him to breakfast on Saturday mornings, buttered his bagels and cut his pancakes and poured his syrup, who helped him in the bathroom, who roughhouse-wrestled with him when he came over, who let him strum the strings of his guitar as if he were playing.
But someone corrected him, set him straight. It was his mom. The tone of her voice let Fitz know that it was a serious mistake to call Dunc “Daddy.” She didn’t have to tell him twice. He learned to say “Uncle Dunc.”

Fitz always understood that he had a father, but that his was elsewhere. He was “away”—that’s how his mom put it. She was an expert dodger of his questions.

Where is he?

Away
.

When is he coming home?

Soon
.

Tomorrow? On my birthday?

We’ll see
.

Later he learned that his mother and father hadn’t been married. He learned the name for a kid like him.

“Keep your hands on the wheel,” Fitz tells his father. “Don’t try anything.”

His father obeys. He looks frightened, and Fitz doesn’t mind. There’s a weird power that comes with scaring someone, and right now Fitz is feeling it.

Mostly it wasn’t so bad, he told himself. You get used to anything. It never felt tragic. Lots of kids had it worse. Fitz didn’t feel entitled to feel sorry for himself. It wasn’t like they were poor. He tried not to imagine what his life might be like if he had a dad. He thought if he did try, it might seem as if his mom wasn’t great, which she was. But still. There was a hole. He didn’t talk about it, but it was real.

Sometimes, it was just embarrassing. But over the years, Fitz
developed various stratagems for handling father situations. When, for example, his friends’ parents innocently ask, “What does your dad do?” he’s learned to say quietly, “My dad’s not with us anymore.” He arranges his face into what he believes is an expression of respectful, wistful bereavement, and at those moments, he really does feel something like sadness for a father departed. “I’m so sorry,” the adults inevitably say, a little flustered, and he forgives them their awkwardness, and they move on, and you can be certain that the topic of fathers does not come up again.

“Okay,” Fitz tells his father. “Let’s hit the road. Back the car out.”

“The car?” his father says. “Is that what you want? Because you can have it. Be my guest.”

“You think I want to jack your car?” Fitz says. “Is that what you think?”

“Tell me what you want,” his father says. “Just say the word.”

“Okay,” Fitz says. “I’ll tell you what I want. I’ll say the word.”