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Show -266 "You look like a fool," I said. "other kids' fathers don't wear things like that. You're making fools out of all of us. All the kids in town laugh at you." My seventeen-year old voice always got shrill; I shoved the nearest wooden Indian-it rocked backward and forward but didn't fall-and I felt my eyes get hot and wet. Family feeling can be like getting caught in the break of a big wave-the thing turns you upside down and pounds your head into the sand and holds you under until you think you're drowned, then lets you go when you don't expect it. "Jacob, do you think I look like a fool?" my father said. I could tell he was hurt. "Of course not." Jacob was twenty-five, commuting to law school in Eugene and dressing like a judge, in three-piece suits and black knit narrow ties. Seen together my father and my older brother looked like some sort of low comic act. "Children always find something to laugh at," Jacob said. "It doesn't mean anything." I was trying to explain this to Carlo ten years later; he listened carefully. Above us the seagulls circled and cried, soaring in the updraft from the cliff, banking and veering on their oddly-articulated wings. "Is that when you threw the hammer?" Carlo said, His black eyes flashed anxious stubbornness-he wanted to know. I could guess why. |