I Knew You'd Be Lovely (4 page)

Fetterman and Derek had been in the car for an hour and a half. Derek had yet to speak. He sat in the backseat, surly in his headphones, practically a caricature of teen angst. If Fetterman hadn't put away his pencils for good, he might have been inspired to try to capture the embattled disinterest on his son's features. He stole furtive glances in the rearview mirror: Derek had no nose piercings, no Mohawk, no black eyeliner, no trench coat. His face was so nakedly defiant, it was as if he didn't need the props.

It was not an unattractive face. As an infant, Derek had been the most beautiful baby. Everyone remarked on it. And so placid; he seemed to possess an otherworldly calm. “That boy is a Rembrandt cherub!” said a barista with horn-rimmed glasses the first Saturday Fetterman and Carla took him out into the world. That Derek had been such a well-behaved, delightful baby was one of the most painful ironies of their current situation. Carla had once gazed into his eyes the way a woman who has lived
her whole life in the mountains would gaze at the sea. Now she'd started taking five milligrams of Valium every morning, and still it didn't stop her hands from shaking.

“Jesus!” said Fetterman, swerving just in time. A deer was standing in the middle of the road. In the backseat, Derek remained unfazed. They rounded a curve and passed a deer warning sign. “Little late now,” Fetterman muttered. He'd always thought deer warning signs had a lot more artistry than other road signs; the deer were rendered in much greater detail than humans. Derek took off his headphones, and Fetterman seized the opportunity to ask him a question. “Do you know why deer graze so close to the road?” he said, regretting that his earnest attempt at conversation sounded like the setup to a joke. Derek ignored him, made a minute technical adjustment, and put the headphones back on. Fetterman answered anyway. “Because the grass is saltiest there, especially in winter,” he said, a fact he'd learned in his defensive driving course. “It's the foie gras of grass.” He could hear the metallic screed of what sounded like a symphony of Bessemer converters. There were still two hours to go before they reached Lockett Meadow, and he suspected they would spend it in silence.

By the time they passed the first sign for Flagstaff, Fetterman was already wondering if the trip was a mistake. He hated outdoor activities and tried to avoid them as much as possible. Once, when he and Sonya were first courting, she'd invited him on a ski getaway with two other couples. Fetterman had pointed out that skiing combined three things he loathed—extreme cold, extreme height, and extreme speed—but agreed to go anyway. He
spent the majority of the weekend in a foul mood, watching stand-up comics on HBO while Sonya and her friends donned Thinsulate and tested the strength of their anterior cruciate ligaments. He figured he had only himself to blame: He should have said no. Bad things happened when you followed the crowd. Maybe he would say that to Derek at some point over the weekend, tell him that he agreed in principle with wanting to strike out on your own, rebel against everything, find your drummer, but it was possible to do so in a less destructive way. In his head, he searched for phrases that wouldn't sound pedantic and square. Then he tried to imagine what would have happened if his own father had ever said such a thing to him.

Fetterman had been a wayward teenager himself—
Who wasn't?
he liked to ask, when telling stories of his youth—and had never really connected with his father, who worked in radio and died shortly after Fetterman went to college. In fact, the closest he'd felt to him was an experience that took place when his father was absent. It happened on an afternoon in the summer of 1977, when Fetterman was seventeen. He'd just had a blowout fight with his girlfriend and had gone for a long walk on the jetty in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He thought he was alone, but then he spotted an old man fishing by himself at the end of the pier. The old-timer had a radio with him, and when Fetterman approached, he looked up at him with watery blue eyes. “Elvis is dead,” he said. Fetterman's first instinct was to run home and tell his father the news. His father had worshipped Elvis, had gotten his first job in radio in the 1950s after seeing Elvis on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. But by the time he got home,
Fetterman realized, his father would already know. If he didn't know now. He looked at the old man sitting alone, and suddenly he understood: His father
did
know; he could feel it. “Elvis is dead, Pop,” he said, staring across the wide, churning surface of the ocean. His father died of a heart attack the following year.

Fetterman needed to use the bathroom and fill the gas tank. He got off at a rest area in McGuireville, stepping out of the car with one hand at his lower back. The rush of heat took him by surprise. Twenty years in the desert, and most days he still felt like a Yankee. He opened Derek's door and a strange smell spilled from the car that he hadn't noticed while in it.

“Time to do your business,” he said, not hearing until the words had left his mouth that this was language usually reserved for dogs. Derek continued to stare angrily at nothing. “I'm going to use the men's room,” Fetterman said, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops. “This may be our last chance for a while. Care to take advantage?” Derek yanked the door shut.

Outside the men's room there was a warning sign about poisonous snakes and insects; the drawing pictured a coiled rattler and a scorpion. An oddly placed reminder that there was no escaping danger, even during the most banal activities. When he was reading up on campgrounds, Fetterman had learned how to deal with an aggressive mountain lion—wave your arms, throw rocks, but
never run
—and that kangaroo rats were so efficient at recycling the fluid in their bodies that they sometimes urinated crystals. What exactly was a kangaroo rat? He wasn't sure he wanted to know. The tone of some of the
writing had surprised him. In addition to the vermilion cliffs and house-sized boulders described at Toroweap, it also said that the Colorado River was only thirty seconds away—“a 30-second, 1,200-foot free fall, that is!” Ah, the old gleefully-awaiting-the-Apocalypse approach. Fetterman marveled that he had once found this attitude amusing.

When he returned to the car, the door handle lifted flimsily; the door remained shut. Derek had locked him out. “Unlock the car, Derek,” he said, sighing heavily, regretting that he'd left the keys in the ignition in case his son needed some air. Without making eye contact, Derek gave him the finger. You'd think they'd beaten him as a child, or made him shovel feces in a hundred-degree factory from dawn to midnight. Instead he'd had the most comfortable middle-class upbringing imaginable. Where did it come from, the sea of rage within? “I'm serious,” Fetterman said, pulling repeatedly on the impotent handle. “We need to get going so we can make it before dark.” As it was, it was unclear how much time he'd need to pitch the tent and set up camp. Fetterman had been ready to leave at two, but Carla, a physician's assistant, had insisted on putting together a homemade first-aid kit, and spent twenty minutes showing him how to make a proper tourniquet.

Aside from giving him the finger, Derek was unresponsive. Fetterman gathered his thoughts and tried to keep a lid on his frustration. He knew from tech support that solutions always presented themselves sooner or later; the trick was not to lose your head. Instead of supplying Derek with whatever reaction the child was trying to provoke,
he'd just wait him out. He sat down on the pavement, not a good idea—that must be what fiery brimstone felt like—and immediately stood up. It was so hot the soles of his sneakers were tacky against the asphalt. “Open the door!” he yelled, just as a mother heaved herself out of a Buick station wagon that had pulled in beside him. She had a gaggle of kids in the back; there must have been five or six, all under the age of sixteen.

“He lock you out?” the woman said. Fetterman nodded, and her face curled as if the act of defiance had been performed by one of her own brood. “I tell you, what that child needs is a good whupping. Open the door, you little shit!” she said, slapping the window. Her kids gathered around the car with their bruised shins and neon flip-flops. “Open the car, you little shit!” one of the girls shouted. She kicked a tire while one of the older boys hit Derek's window again. Then a different boy slapped the rear bumper, and before Fetterman knew what was happening, they'd all joined in, chanting: “Open the car! Open the car! Open the car!” while they rocked the vehicle and pounded on the glass.

“That's enough!” Fetterman shouted. All of them stopped at once. “This is between us. I'll take care of it.” The mother sniffed, and the pack headed for the 7-Eleven, but their energy didn't change, it only shifted, and they walked away pinching and pushing one another.

You'd think there would have been some gratitude for the rescue, but if anything, Derek became more intractable than ever, and still wouldn't unlock the door. Fetterman removed his cell phone from a holster attached to his belt.

“Derek, I'm going to call Triple-A now, and I'm going to tell them that I'm locked out of my car. They will tell me they'll be here within half an hour, and then they will come, and unlock the door, and you will have to sit there while they do.” Derek didn't seem to care. Fetterman dialed and made the report. Two minutes after he hung up, Derek rolled down the window and hurled the keys at the pavement. Fetterman called Triple-A back and told them their services were no longer needed. Then he picked up the keys and got in the driver's seat. He spun around to face Derek.

“Talk to me,” he said, putting his hand on the boy's knee.

“Just leave me alone!” Derek was close to tears. “All I fucking want is to be left alone!”

Fetterman started the car, wondering why Derek had agreed to come in the first place. “I can't leave you alone,” he said. “I'm your father. I have to deal with you, whether I like it or not.”

Once they were back on the road, the troubleshooting part of Fetterman's brain tried to come up with ways to solve the communication problem. It was true, they didn't talk; Derek never told him anything about his life. All Fetterman knew was that some of his friends looked like hoodlums in training. Derek had been in therapy since he was six, without much success. Fetterman wasn't surprised; he didn't think much of the entire enterprise. He'd once shown his first wife a cartoon he drew, called “Jesus in Therapy.” The psychoanalyst was asking:
What
about
you,
what about
your
needs? Are you going to keep letting people walk all over you like this?
Sonya had frowned and accused him of being passive-aggressive.

Of course, Fetterman didn't tell his son much about his own life, either, but it seemed the boy didn't
want
to know him. One morning at breakfast he'd broken the silence to say: “I used to be in a band.” But then the silence had descended again, and Fetterman felt pathetic—the epitome of pathetic, pathetic's apogee. In fact, Pathetic's Apogee would have been a better name for their band, instead of Hair of the Dog.
We weren't that bad
, he wanted to tell his son, and they weren't. They'd even booked a bunch of gigs, and had a small following. In 1993 Fetterman had played the drums in half the clubs in Arizona.

When Fetterman turned west off SR 89, Lockett Meadow was only twenty minutes away. He passed a slow-moving Subaru with a bumper sticker that read:
I'M ALREADY AGAINST THE NEXT WAR
. Then he passed a pair of hitchhikers. Fetterman had hitchhiked once, after something he said had so pissed off Carla that she took the car and left him at the Lone Coyote. Fetterman had no money in his wallet because he'd already spent it buying her milk-and-Kahlúa cocktails all night. In many ways, Carla and Sonya were perfect opposites. Where Sonya was hyperintellectual, Carla read
In Touch
magazine. While Sonya had cycled through being macrobiotic and vegan and militantly organic, Carla ate McDonald's hamburgers. Even physically, they were reverse: Sonya with her black helmet of hair and sharp nose, Carla with her frosted bangs and Cupid's-bow mouth. Fetterman had thought marriage to Carla would be easy after all
the mind games with Sonya, but all marriages are difficult at times, just in different ways. The most important difference between his wives was that Carla wasn't one for grudges. And she didn't fault him for not living up to some imaginary potential.

He wasn't a complete failure as an artist. He'd had one breakthrough:
The New Yorker
had plucked one of his cartoons from the slush pile. It featured a well-dressed couple sipping cocktails at a fancy restaurant. The man's caption read:
On the contrary, most men's lives of desperation are not nearly quiet enough
. But Fetterman had never been able to make a living at it, and when he had to reenter the dating pool after his marriage broke up, he decided to get a real job and quit cartooning for good. Not because Sonya had screamed: “Everything's a joke to you, even our marriage!” the day she told him she was filing for divorce, but because there comes a stage in life when you have to be more realistic. Not everyone makes it. Or, as his magazine editor friend liked to say: Many answer; few are called.

When they arrived at the campsite, Derek refused to get out of the car. Fine. Fetterman would set up the tent, and Derek could join him if he wanted. If not, he could bivouac in the Nissan. He fished the instructions out of the trunk. Step 1: Find a flat, dry area. Well, at least Step 1 sounded reasonable. He set out in search of a suitable spot, this time taking the car keys with him, after rolling down the windows. In the distance, the San Francisco Peaks loomed like a huge set of problems they hadn't
even gotten to yet. There was the temptation to give up, to say, “We tried our best,” and be done with it. Perhaps it was just as noble simply to let things play themselves out, one way or another. His own father, who mostly interacted with Fetterman through his mother, would never have indulged such disobedience. Rarely a presence at his games, his dad happened to be sitting at the kitchen table the day Fetterman came home with his first Little League uniform. His dad eyed the shirt. “Eighty-eight means hugs and kisses in ham radio,” he said. Fetterman didn't know what to do with this information; it vaguely made him want to trade numbers, but it was too late for that. The comment—not the meaning, but the intent—baffled him then, as it baffled him now. His father must have said other things to him over the course of their eighteen years together, but on some days, “Eighty-eight means hugs and kisses” was all he could remember.