Skeleton Crew

'You're getting a mouth problem,' Hal said.

'Let go of me! You tore my shirt, you—' Hal slammed the boy against the door again. 'Yes,' he said. 'A real mouth problem. Did you learn that in school? Or back in the smoking area?' Dennis flushed, his face momentarily ugly with guilt. 'I wouldn't be in that shitty school if you didn't get canned!' he burst out.

Hal slammed Dennis against the door again. 'I didn't get canned, I got laid off, you know it, and I don't need any of your shit about it. You have problems? Welcome to the world, Dennis. Just don't lay all of them off on me. You're eating. Your ass is covered. You are twelve years old, and at twelve, I don't need any... shit from you.' He punctuated each phrase by pulling the boy forward until their noses were almost touching and then slamming Dennis back into the door. It was not hard enough to hurt, but Dennis was scared—his father had not laid a hand on him since they moved to Texas—and now he began to cry with a young boy's loud, braying, healthy sobs.

'Go ahead, beat me up!' he yelled at Hal. his face twisted and blotchy. 'Beat me up if you want, I know how much you fucking hate me!'

'I don't hate you. I love you a lot, Dennis. But I'm your dad and you're going to show me respect or I'm going to bust you for it.' Dennis tried to pull away. Hal pulled the boy to him and hugged him: Dennis fought for a moment and then put his face against Hal's chest and wept as if exhausted. It was the sort of cry Hal hadn't heard from either of his children in years. He closed his eyes, realizing that he felt exhausted himself.

Terry began to hammer on the other side of the door. 'Stop it, Hal! Whatever you're doing to him, stop it!'

'I'm not killing him,' Hal said. 'Go away, Terry.'

'Don't you—'

'It's all right, Mom,' Dennis said, muffled against Hal's chest.

He could feet her perplexed silence for a moment, and then she went. Hal looked at his son again.

'I'm sorry I bad-mouthed you, Dad,' Dennis said reluctantly.

'Okay. I accept that with thanks. When we get home next week, I'm going to wait two or three days and then I'm going to go through all your drawers, Dennis. If there's something in them you don't want me to see, you better get rid of it.' That flash of guilt again. Dennis lowered his eyes and wiped away snot with the back of his hand.

'Can I go now?' He sounded sullen once more.

'Sure,' Hal said, and let him go. Got to take him camping in the spring, just the two of us. Do some fishing, like Uncle Will used to do with Bill and me. Got to get close to him. Got to try.

He sat down on the bed in the empty room, and looked at the monkey. You'll never be close to him again, Hal, its grin seemed to say. Count on it. I am back to take care of business, just like you always knew I would be, someday.

Hal laid the monkey aside and put a hand over his eyes.

That night Hal stood in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, and thought. It was in the same box. How could it be in the same box'?

The toothbrush jabbed upward, hurting his gums. He winced. He had been four, Bill six, the first time he saw the monkey. Their missing father had bought a house in Hartford, and it had been theirs, free and clear, before he died or fell into a hole in the middle of the world or whatever it had been. Their mother worked as a secretary at Holmes Aircraft, the helicopter plant out in Westville, and a series of sitters came in to stay with the boys, except by then it was just Hal that the sitters had to mind through the day—Bill was in first grade, big school. None of the babysitters stayed for long. They got pregnant and married their boyfriends or got work at Holmes, or Shelburn would discover they had been at the cooking sherry or her bottle of brandy, which was kept in the sideboard for special occasions. Most were stupid girls who seemed only to want to eat or sleep. None of them wanted to read to Hal as his mother would do.

The sitter that long winter was a huge, sleek black girl named Beulah. She fawned over Hal when Hal's mother was around and sometimes pinched him when she wasn't.

Still, Hal had some liking for Beulah, who once in a while would read him a lurid tale from one of her confession or true-detective magazines ('Death Came for the Voluptuous Red-head,' Beulah would intone ominously in the dozy daytime silence of the living room, and pop another Reese's peanut butter cup into her mouth while Hal solemnly studied the grainy tabloid pictures and drank milk from his Wish-Cup). The liking made what happened worse.

He found the monkey on a cold, cloudy day in March. Sleet ticked sporadically off the windows, and Beulah was asleep on the couch, a copy of My Story tented open on her admirable bosom.

Hal had crept into the back closet to look at his father's things.

The back closet was a storage space that ran the length of the second floor on the left side, extra space that had never been finished off. You got into it by using a small door—a down-the-rabbit-hole sort of door—on Bill's side of the boys' bedroom. They both liked to go in there, even though it was chilly in winter and hot enough in summer to wring a bucketful of sweat out of your pores. Long and narrow and some-how snug, the back closet was full of fascinating junk. No matter how much stuff you looked at, you never seemed to be able to look at it all. He and Bill had spent whole Saturday afternoons up here, barely speaking to each other, taking things out of boxes, examining them, turning them over and over so their hands could absorb each unique reality, putting them back. Now Hal wondered if he and Bill hadn't been trying, as best they could, to somehow make contact with their vanished father.

He had been a merchant mariner with a navigator's certificate, and there were stacks of charts in the closet, some marked with neat circles (and the dimple of the compass's swing-point in the center of each). There were twenty volumes of something called Barron's Guide to Navigation. A set of cockeyed binoculars that made your eyes feel hot and funny if you looked through them too tong. There were touristy things from a dozen ports of call—rubber hula-hula dolls, a black cardboard bowler with a torn band that said YOU PICK A GIRL AND I'LL PICCADILLY, a glass globe with a tiny Eiffel Tower inside. There were envelopes with foreign stamps tucked carefully away inside, and foreign coins: there were rock samples from the Hawaiian island of Maui, a glassy black- heavy and somehow ominous and funny records in foreign languages.

That day, with the sleet ticking hypnotically off the roof just above his head, Hal worked his way all the way down to the far end of the back closet, moved a box aside, and saw another box behind it a Ralston-Purina box. Looking over the top was a pair of glassy hazel eyes. They gave him a start and he skittered back for a moment,