When I tell you this story, remember it may change: My father was a collector of garbage that piled in our backyard and toward the sky. He knew the value of discarded things. He’d tell me stories. “I found this one on my way home from work,” he’d say. “This is one of the first microwaves ever made.” You could find him rummaging through the trash or scavenging along the banks of the river where bottles floated to the shore.
II
We were boys growing up along the Genesee River with backpacks full of stuff, trophies taken along the way. Some days we’d walk along the railroad tracks behind the zoo and collect rocks and Indian arrowheads. We’d chase one another, throwing moss and mud - and when the winter hit, snow. I always liked to think we were explorers or soldiers. We went to the woods because we felt safe there. Or, we went because we didn’t.
III
I heard the river talking to me sometimes. Do not come near me, it said. Or sometimes it said, do. There are so many secrets hidden in the water. As a child I was afraid of the river. I swam in it only once, in the spring when the water was still cold and the current had just begun to pick up. I was no swimmer, but I thought I could make it from one bank to the other. I believed in my capabilities as a boy. I only made it halfway and was lucky to turn around and come back. The current dragged me down river and I returned to my friends very wet.
IV
I was wrong. There was a second time, when I was fishing with my father and he threw me in. It was the summer, and I had on a life vest and he told me to just put my feet down. “Stop flailing around and stand up,” he said. I remember the way the floor of the river felt: the muddy surface oozing between my toes, how cold it was despite the warmth of the water and the summer sun.
V
Hidden beneath the surface: carp, walleye, catfish, bottles of Pepsi and Coke and Genny beer, and bodies, of course. The body of Tristen’s mother. The body of my friend Pony who jumped from the walking bridge. And the bodies of less fortunate swimmers.
VI
When we were boys we believed in monsters. The real kind. Frankenstein and Dracula and ghosts too. Boys believe in monsters.
VII
All I am is a boy who believes in the possibility of monsters. Let’s say I made everything else up, It is all a lie: my father never collected things; I never swam the river; and they never found Pony’s body, his long sand-filled hair stinking of the Genesee. All I am is the son of a janitor, a man who wears clothes with holes in them, who tells stories, who comes from a place that knows only stories and the retelling of them. The collecting is about story, about staying close to the ground, holding oneself in place. And this is about finding some use for the things other people have thrown away or lost. My father’s collecting is a form of grief. He wears old military issue glasses; he drinks coffee by the pot. Occasionally he even tries to get our mother, his ex-wife, to go out to dinner with him. My father was a solider and he knows that a good story grows with each telling. Knows that stories belong to no one. Tells us that stories should be told over a beer on a hot summer day, over fishing, while walking on railroad tracks.
VIII
Walking on the tracks you’d hear someone say: “How do you know?” Or, “It didn’t happen like that!” Stories are only powerful if you have the authority to back them up, show your credentials, verify the facts. We talk like we were all there when they pulled Pony’s body from the water, but we weren’t. Bit by bit we remember it like that.
IX
Standing out on the bridge late at night, we drank and threw things in, listening for the sound of the river calling back. We imagined how Pony jumped from that bridge or what it was like under the water. I could see his dark green eyes blinking and opening again. I could make out his pale, freckled skin, before he disappeared into the water. “Seems like it would have been a rush.” We sit, all of us imagining it, the wind through our hair, the water and the things in it. Once he hit, the sound of traffic on the memorial bridge overhead, the current drawing him toward the bottom. “Pony,” we called him, because he was the runt among us. This is the only way to craft a story that will bring him back.
X
Maybe that was misdirection; maybe this story is really about my father, about the syrup factory he comes to live in years after he throws me in the river or the high rise he lives in after that. After all, they both border the river; they are both pieces of a memory that swirls around it. My father parted with all of his junk when he moved out of our house. He no longer had room for it. He sent it back to the curbs it came from.
XI
Sure we believed in monsters. That’s the way I remember it. But maybe some of the details have changed. Maybe it was a serial killer who inspired our belief and not the movies. Maybe it wasn’t Pony’s body at all but the body of Tristen’s mother, her long black hair soaked in river water and reflecting the flashes from the crime scene cameras. Do you remember how that killer went after women? Do you remember how young we were and how Tristen heard it in the hallways and got made fun of? Maybe Tristen knew, years before, while he was being breastfed or walking home from school that it was coming. Maybe he was even there the night that man killed her. The abandoned tugboat we grew up on passed through town that night destined to become our hideout, our place for stashing memories. I remember his mother’s tanned skin, and the way she smelled, and how we’d always say to Tristen, “Your mom is so hot!” But do you remember Tristen? How he asked that girl who came to visit our class why she wore a hat even though the teacher told us not to because she had cancer and had lost her hair to treatments? Do you remember how the teacher nervously explained that Tristen had just lost his mother, murdered, how he was a wild kid, and how he couldn’t control himself? On the playground he sat alone or chased girls or never got picked for dodge ball.
XII
All those memories are at the bottom of the river where that tugboat finally sank the summer I turned 21 or 26 or maybe it didn’t sink, but is going down right now. My father and I ran into Tristen years after that day in grade school. He looked just like the boy I remembered sitting alone, his curly black hairlike his mothers, and his hazel eyes. I thought I’d buried that memory. But there it was, that snapshot, standing at a cash register waiting for me to checkout.
XIII
How do you tell a good story? How do you tell it so it seems honest? What is a story but a set of calculated moves headed toward an end? Is it all right to go and make things up? Is it all right if it’s mostly but not wholly true? You remember it your way and I’ll remember it mine.
XIV
If I drag it up from the bottom of the river, if I dig deep into that muddy floor and pull it up, even if I get most of it wrong, do I own this story, is it mine to tell? Pony is dead and Tristen is gone, and my father’s collection has dwindled down to the few things he could fit into his minivan. All I have are scraps from the pile.
XV
Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory. A) How cold that water was. B) The smell of it, the river, when you’re passing over with the car windows open. C) What we’ve thrown into it that will never come up and what we’ve seen sink to the bottom.
XVI
I am sitting at my father’s apartment having coffee. He wants me to tell him a story, one that is not about him. “Perhaps it can be about monsters or the river,” he says. “Start with ‘once upon a time’ and let it go from there. One of the ones you told me when you were a kid or liked me to tell you.” I tell him that I don’t know where to start. All I have are pieces. I’ve given up on monsters and maybe even on story. “Do you want the truth or fiction?” I ask. And he says not to worry about story, not to worry about fact or fiction. “Just give me the pieces,” he says. “I’ll find the story and that will be truth enough.”