I remember it differently from Mom and Dad. Of course, they weren’t around all the time like I was back then. Even Mom had started working again, after I had shown her that I wasn’t one of those hyperactive kids we always saw in the supermarket, running down the aisles yelling and screaming as though war had just been declared. Being an only child had something to do with that, I think. I was so used to living out of my own head I had no reason to cause trouble for anybody. And the times were a little different back then, too. The towns were a little smaller. You could leave a kid alone in the house for an afternoon without one of the busybody neighbors calling the police and reporting you. But Cutty was also living with us by that time, so I wasn’t exactly all by myself.

He was my Dad’s younger brother, but he didn’t like for me to call him “Uncle.” He said he felt old enough as it was. He must have only been in his mid-thirties at the time, which most people would say is not very old at all, especially me now that I’m pushing forty myself. But to my eyes then he seemed only slightly younger than my dad, who I’d always considered to be the oldest living man on the planet — my grandparents having died before I got a chance to know them.

Cutty had lost his job and Dad agreed to let him stay with us temporarily until he found something new. That was the exact word he used: temporarily. I could tell Dad was bothered by the whole situation, even though I didn’t understand why. It was Cutty who’d lost his job, after all, and if anybody should’ve been bothered by anything I thought it would be him.

So Dad put him up in the garage instead of letting him stay in the house with us. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded, though. Dad was an electrical engineer and had rigged the garage up with heat, radio, TV, even air conditioning in the summertime. He used it as a kind of office instead of a place to put his cars in. Cutty set up a cot and arranged what few bags he had on the floor underneath it. I stood watching him from the doorway. His head was shaved as though he’d been in the army, but when I asked him if he ever had been, he just smiled at me and said, “Nope, sport, I haven’t.”

He told me he’d never fight for a country that couldn’t keep its own citizens employed. I was only seven or eight years old at the time and didn’t really understand what he meant by that. Maybe that’s why I liked him so much. He talked to me as though I could understand, but I see now that it wasn’t like that, that he was just talking to me because I was there, and if I hadn’t been there he’d just talk to himself, or maybe say nothing at all. But for a while it made me feel like I was pretty important, and even though I wanted him to find a new job, I didn’t really want him to leave us either.

I stood by once and watched him as he shaved his head. I thought it would take a long time, but there seemed to be nothing to it. He just took the razor out of his bag — an old Conair like the kind barbers always used — and began swiping it back and forth across his head. The shavings fell and collected on a sheet of newspaper he had spread out on the floor. “Your dad would throw a fit if he found my hair all over his nice carpet, wouldn’t he?” he said, winking at me. I probably just stood there with my mouth hanging open. When he finished he ran his hand over his skull like I’d seen some people do to bowling balls before they rolled them down the alley. He bent forward and showed me the top of his head. “Wanna feel?”

I remember going up to him and timidly running my fingertip across his shaved scalp, which made me think of fine-grade sandpaper. I laughed and pulled my hand away. Cutty, grinning to himself, packed his razor and mirror back into his bag.

“So then why do you do it?” I asked.

He didn’t look up from what he was doing. “Let me tell you something that you’ll probably learn on your own someday. If you don’t get your hair cut you are considered a freak by society. So doesn’t it make sense that a haircut should be free to any person who wants one? If a society wants to support a cleaned-up, unified image of itself then it should do whatever is necessary to help its citizens maintain that image, even if that means,”— he zipped up the bag and tossed it on the floor — “giving jobless people like me the opportunity to get themselves cleaned-up for free, don’t you think?”

Cutty was looking at me now, his eyebrows raised like he was expecting an answer. I didn’t know what to say, though, so I just shrugged and looked down at the basketball I was tossing around. He seemed angry, but not necessarily with me. Whenever Dad got angry I knew enough to stay out of his way. He never laid a hand on me, never tried to hurt me in anger, but I always got the sense that there was something bad in him just beneath the surface, something that would explode if I pushed him too far. With Cutty it was different. With him I imagined that all the bad in the world was pushing toward him from the outside, smothering him, and that it might someday swallow him up completely.

He nodded at the basketball. “Let’s go out and shoot some, sport.”

The basketball goal that Dad had set up next to the driveway was small-scale, built for someone my age, but Cutty still acted like he really had to try and make his shots go in. He showed me how to do a lay up, and helped me with my free throws. Before long we were both sweaty and out of breath. Dad pulled into the driveway around 5:30 and got out of his car.

At first he acted like he was going to go straight into the house without saying anything to either of us. But then he stopped at the front steps, and Cutty went over to him, still holding the basketball, and they talked for a while in voices just out of my range of hearing. Dad was wearing his work clothes — a short-sleeved checkered dress shirt and dress slacks — and he stood talking to Cutty as if he was still at the office: tense, businesslike, authoritative. I didn’t have a brother, but this seemed an odd way for brothers to talk to each other. After a few minutes Dad went on inside. Cutty came back over and handed me the basketball, then started walking toward the garage. “Sounds like your dinner’s about ready, sport.”

“Aren’t you going to eat with us?” I said.

But he just kept on walking and didn’t say anything else. When we sat down to dinner I turned to my dad and said, “Why isn’t Cutty here?”

“He’s your Uncle Cutty, sweetheart,” my mom said, spreading butter on a roll for me and putting it on the side of my plate.

Dad was busy shoveling food into his mouth but then he stopped and just looked down at his plate for a minute. “Has your uncle been here all day?” he said.

I shrugged. “I guess so.”

A look came over his face, not anger exactly, but more like he’d been hurt by something on the inside. “Your uncle is going through a tough time right now, and it’s important that he spends his days trying to get back on track.”

“Eat your food, sweetheart,” my mom said to me.

Dad looked up at her, and he seemed to be thinking about something. Then he looked over at me. “Was it your idea to play ball, or his?”

I started to get the idea that Cutty was in trouble with my dad, but that somehow I was the one getting blamed for it. I must have looked nervous because suddenly Dad reached over and ruffled the hair on top of my head.

“Just stay out of his way, okay kiddo? He needs to look for a new job. That’s why we’re helping him out, and he can’t do that while you’re distracting him. Deal?”

I nodded and ate my dinner, even though I wasn’t very hungry after that. I kept thinking about Cutty sitting alone out in the garage, looking at the small ads in the back of the newspaper and making circles around certain ones with a red felt-tip pen.

After dinner I walked around outside for a while. This was during the summer and whenever I couldn’t think of anything to do I’d go outside and start walking, hoping something would catch my attention. I didn’t like to watch TV, especially with my parents. I’d always look over at Mom and Dad sitting in their chairs, or slumped against each other on the couch, the pale glow of the TV screen flickering across their white faces, and for no reason at all a wave of panic would come over me. I liked the outdoors much better. We lived in a wooded area near the crest of a small hill, and down below ran the main road toward town. I knew the trees all had specific names but I didn’t know what they were, so sometimes I just gave them names of my own. Admittedly it was a boring life, even for a kid, but not necessarily an unpleasant one.

Cutty came out of the garage and stretched, as though he’d recently been napping. I didn’t think he saw me — I was standing farther down the slope of the hill, near the road, and from that angle he almost looked monumental to me, like a man standing at the prow of a ship. He was staring off into the distance. I began waving at him to try to get his attention, but just then the sun caught one of the windows of Dad’s car — he and Mom were pulling out of the drive to go somewhere — and temporarily blinded me with light. I turned away to massage my neck and clear my eyes, and when I looked back Cutty was gone and Dad was honking his horn at me from the roadway.

* * *

It was hard to stay out of Cutty’s way. For a young kid like me, he had a kind of magnetism, almost a gravitational pull of some kind. I often found myself hanging around near the garage, bouncing the basketball, hoping to draw him out like a rabbit from its hole. But he was gone much of the time, having taken his car into town to see about those jobs whose ads he’d circled in the newspaper.

He was an artist. By trade he worked for places that needed creative people, but there weren’t many of those around. I guessed that was why he didn’t have a job anymore. I didn’t really understand it, especially after seeing what he could do. Dad had asked me to stay out of the garage when he wasn’t home, but I’d go in sometimes anyway. I don’t know why. I wasn’t really curious about anything in there, only that some days I’d start wandering, like any kid would do, just to see where I’d end up. Sometimes I’d go in and look at Cutty’s things, the empty cot, the half-open bag of clothes. One day I found his sketchbook over on the side table where he’d been working, and flipped it open.

I didn’t know that much about art. I read comic books in my spare time and always thought that was as good as it got. But his pictures were different from anything I had ever seen. Based on what I know now I’d probably give my right arm to find out where that sketchbook is today. From what I know now and what I remember seeing on those pages, I could only have been looking at the modest beginnings of real genius, of a true artist at work.

Many of the drawings seemed to be from real life. There were hastily sketched, somewhat incomplete studies of people seen through restaurant windows or walking their dogs in the park, and a number of wavy edged figures captured doing nothing in particular, just lounging in chairs or standing in open doorways. They looked fine to me but a little unreal, as though for some reason Cutty wasn’t able to see his subjects well enough to draw them properly.

Then there were these other pictures. At first I didn’t recognize what they were showing, maybe because they were so different from all the others. My mind had some trouble adjusting to them. But there was page after page of these Roman gladiators in battle, wearing helmets and riding horses through the streets of Pompeii, their bloody swords raised high into the air. The horses’ mouths were open and their huge eyes bulged out of their heads as they trampled the bodies of fallen soldiers beneath their hooves. Blood flowed in rivers through the archways and around the crumbling columns. These drawings were more detailed than the others, and seemed to jump right off the page at me. They looked terrible and beautiful at the same time. The gladiators, I had a sense, were heroes, but so were the soldiers lying dead on the ground. I don’t know how long I sat there and stared at the pictures, but when I next looked up Cutty was standing in the doorway of the garage looking at me. I hadn’t even heard his car pull into the drive.

At first I couldn’t tell if he was angry with me or not. He was backlit by all the sunshine outside and I couldn’t see his face very well. I began to feel overwhelmed by something. Not fear, exactly, or even embarrassment or shame. Maybe it was all three put together, making an entirely new feeling, the first of many I’d end up having during the course of my life, the closer I got to Cutty’s own age. Whatever it was went away as quickly as it began, after Cutty began to laugh at me and shout “Busted!” in a high, almost falsetto voice.

He sat down on the cot next to me and began flipping through the sketchbook. “God, some of these are so old,” he said, shaking his head. “I never go back and look at the stuff I’ve done. I hate it. I just find a page that’s blank and start all over again.”

“What about these?” I said, pointing when he got to the pages that showed the gladiators.

He looked at the drawings, not really saying anything. He turned the pages one by one as if seeing them for the first time. His expression was blank except for a slight touch of what I took to be sadness in his eyes. He might have been having one of those feelings like I’d just had, where everything is all mixed up and you’re not sure what to do or say. Finally, without looking up at me, he closed the sketchbook and put it back in his bag. “I didn’t draw those,” he said.

Just then Dad’s car pulled into the driveway and Cutty had to go outside and tell him about the jobs he’d looked into that day. I watched the two of them from the side window: Cutty standing in a kind of slouch with his hands in his pockets, Dad scrutinizing him through the narrow slits of his eyes. At that moment I couldn’t decide which of them I felt more sorry for. In their own ways, they both looked defeated.

* * *

Sometimes, just to get away from my parents and the television, I’d go outside after dark and walk down the middle of the road.

It seemed foolish to me, even then. The number of times I could’ve been killed is probably off the scale. But that’s part of what I liked about it. I could walk down the road for almost a mile in either direction and not encounter a single car, but still feel them all around me somehow. Their scorch marks were on the road, their exhaust fumes hung in the air above the trees. I could hear their engines revving somewhere in the distance, closer to the interstate. But all I ever saw was empty road, quiet except for the hoards of insects making noise in the grass on either side, and brightened here and there by the sodium glow of the streetlamps.

Whatever gave me the idea that I was safe, either there or anywhere? Farther to the west the road twisted around some trees and disappeared, and I imagined all kinds of things coming around that corner and bearing down on me, from cars and trucks to military tanks and stampeding elephants. On nights like those it was easy to make out the stars overhead.

The day in question happened in late August. Cutty had been with us for a month already, and Dad was getting impatient. Cutty admitted that my dad had a way of making him feel like he was already working, only for Dad and not for somebody else. I understood what he meant by that. He also said that Dad was afraid of losing his own job, and that he was only mad at Cutty because he was able to see how bad it was out there, what his own prospects might be like.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It’s true, sport,” Cutty said. He had come home earlier than usual, and Mom and Dad were both gone. We sat on the front steps of the house. Cutty had changed into his normal clothes, not the ones he wore when he went out looking for jobs, and the sun glinted off the top of his shaved head. I’d brought out some lemonade from the refrigerator and we both sat drinking for a while without saying much. Then Cutty said:

“This won’t mean much to you right now, sport. God knows I never listened to anybody when I was your age.” He finished his lemonade and began swirling the ice cubes around in his glass. “But you should be a hell of a lot happier than you are, kid. Believe me, you should be having the time of your life right now.”

Cutty closed his eyes and touched the side of the glass to his forehead. He sighed and moved the glass back and forth, letting the beads of water trickle down his face and into the corners of his eyes. Every now and then a car would pass by on the road down the hill, and its distant whooshing sound seemed to make him think of something. “Because it’s really all downhill from there,” he said.

I sat with the basketball wedged between my legs, but it was too hot outside to play. It was too hot to do anything but sit and drink lemonade. It would be all gone by the time Mom and Dad got home, and I knew that would make Dad angry.

“I mean, what are you doing out here all by yourself? Doesn’t your dad ever take you fishing, or boating or skiing?”

I pretended to think about it for a moment, even though I didn’t need to. We had never done anything like that, at least not that I could remember. “Dad doesn’t like to fish,” I said in a neutral voice.

Cutty snorted and shook his head, as though he had expected me to say that. “Unbelievable,” he said. “A kid should have rights, just like adults. An adult should have the right to work if he wants to, to earn a living, to be a man for God’s sake.”

He began rubbing his forehead with his fingers, which were trembling slightly. Even though I wished things were going better for him in his life, I also thought that might change him too much. I liked the kinds of things he talked about when he got this way, as though he was letting me in on some big secret he had learned but didn’t know what to do with, or about which he hadn’t worked out all the details yet. I wanted to feel sorry for him, but I didn’t feel the way he’d said I should feel: happy that I was this young. He made it sound like I could do anything I wanted, but most of the time it didn’t seem like I could do anything at all.

“Come on,” he said, standing up and putting his glass down on the porch step. We started walking towards the garage, over to where his car was parked in front of it. “A kid should have rights, too. Like the right to have fun while he still can, when he’s still young.”

I sat in the car while he went in to get something. I rolled down the window even though there wasn’t any breeze to speak of. Cutty came out a minute later with his bag slung over one shoulder. He tossed it into the trunk and then got behind the wheel.

“Where are we going?”

“Fishing,” he said, not looking at me. He started the car and stuck his head out the window as he backed slowly down the driveway.

The lake we went to was up in North Forks. I’d never been there myself, but I still seemed to know where it was. Locally the place was known for rain, but North Forks had been dry all summer. Cutty told me the names of the trees along the way. We took the interstate up as far as Hillsboro, then east onto Forest Road for a long winding drive through dense stands of Tamarack larch and Northern white-cedar, and then wide-open grazed fields with nothing but little collapsed stonework walls separating one from the other. From there the road inclined sharply downwards, like a roller-coaster track, and we got our first look at the water off to the right, spread-out and dazzling under the warm sunshine, inviting the tourists out of their motel rooms and roadside lodges for fishing, swimming, or those long early-evening boat rides towards the far end of the cove.

Cutty didn't say very much on the drive up. Whenever I looked over at him his mouth was set and firm, his eyes staring dully forward. I felt vaguely worried, but not really for myself. It was like he was approaching the edge of something, and all I could do was sit there and watch it happen.

He pulled the car into a lay-by that served as a makeshift parking lot and cut the engine. There was one or two other cars nearby, but their owners had wandered down through the willows and cattails that hid the lake from the roadway, presumably to fish. I opened my door and got out, but Cutty just sat there, his head leaning back against the seat, his eyes closed.

“Aren’t we going?” I said.

After a couple of seconds he got out and went around the car to the trunk. He pulled out a small-scale fishing rod and handed it to me, then grabbed his sketchbook out of the duffel bag. I started waving the fishing rod around in the air, getting the line tangled up with the pole, until Cutty reached over and placed his hand firmly over mine.

“I’ll show you how to do it,” he said, taking the rod from me.

We went down to the water. There were a few people fishing on the other side of the lake, but all I could see of them was the color of their shirts. Cutty began pulling up rocks until he found an earthworm, then showed me how to bait the hook. A yellowish pustule bloomed out of one end of the worm as he worked the barb further and further in.

He cast the line in one long, fluid motion and then handed the rod back to me. We sat there a few minutes in silence, Cutty sketching while I waited for something to happen to the bobber. Eventually he stopped and looked out across the water.

“Sport, I won’t be staying with you guys any more after today,” he said. “Maybe you already figured that out.”

I shrugged, but he wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t know what to say. Thirty feet out the bobber rose and fell on the tiny waves that rippled across the lake. Something seemed to be holding it there, anchoring it to one spot in the middle of that huge bowl of water.

“This has nothing to do with your father. He’s a good guy. I just don’t want you to hold anything against him after what happens today.”

Sometimes a car would pass by on the road above us, out of sight behind the tall grass of the slope. It was a lonely sound, and made me feel like every other person out there in the world was going nowhere, or, like us, had nowhere in particular to go.

“What is going to happen after today?” I said.

“Nothing that you’ll ever need to worry about. Keep your eyes on the line,” he said.

There didn’t seem to be much going on at this lake. We both stared at the line as if willing it to do something. We knew there were fish here because every so often one of them would come up and splash the surface with its tailfin. But it wasn’t what I’d thought it would be, and I got a sudden feeling that’s how a lot of things would end up turning out, not just now but in the days and years to come.

It should have been no surprise, then, when the bobber started to dance, and in the next instant go under completely, yanking the rod free of my hands and dragging it away through the clear water at the edge of the bank.

* * *

We stayed until it got dark. Cutty was in no hurry to leave, and neither was I. He had jumped up from where he was sitting and grabbed the fishing rod before it disappeared completely under the water, and afterwards said I could have it.

“I don’t have any use for it,” he told me. “Keep it. It’s yours.”

I was so happy that when we got to the top of the slope I stood back and began jabbing the end of the rod toward him like a sword, saying, “Hey! I’m a gladiator!”

He stopped and just looked at me for a moment with a strange expression on his face. It made me feel a little sorry for what I did, but in the end he humored me by picking up a stick and jabbing me back, and when I think about that time now, I seem to remember this image the most: the two of us at the top of that grassy slope, lunging at each other and parrying in mock battle as the sun set behind us and flocks of geese descended in great clouds from the northeast onto the silent, glittering water. I still remember it, more so than the fishing rod Cutty gave me — lost now, dragged under by the undertow of years — or the picture he handed to me on the drive back to the house, the one he drew down at the shoreline while we sat waiting for the first fish to bite. He called it “Portrait of a Boy Fishing.”

* * *

The police were waiting for us when we got back.

At the time I wasn’t even sure why they were there. I was tired, and stared out the car window in a kind of dull trance. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. I thought distantly that something might have happened to one or both of my parents, or to one of our neighbors down the road. But when we pulled into the drive Mom and Dad came barreling out of the house, and a policeman moved in the way to stop them. Two other policemen came toward our car, each with his gun raised. The one on my side yanked the door open and pulled me out, asking me if I was okay, was I hurt, did I remember anything about what had happened. His grip on my shoulder was firm, his face expressionless.

The other policeman had Cutty spread-eagled against the hood of our car. After going through his pockets and handcuffing him, the officer walked Cutty over to the patrol car and eased him down onto the back seat. Cutty didn’t say a word, didn’t try to put up a fight. He had been expecting this all along, I realized, had maybe even planned it in some way.

I stared around at everything. I felt numb, and the strobing police lights were making me feel dizzy and weak. The next thing I knew Dad was carrying me inside and Mom was in the kitchen pouring me a glass of soda. I wasn’t thirsty. I kept trying to look out the front window to see what was happening to Cutty, but Mom wouldn’t let me. She took me upstairs to my room while Dad went back outside to talk to the police officers.

For a while I just sat on the edge of my bed, not thinking about anything, not really feeling anything either. Just tired. I might have even fallen asleep for a few seconds, sitting there alone in the dark, and I didn’t get up again until I realized that I could hear everybody talking outside in the driveway. I could even see them to a certain extent from my bedroom window — Mom and Dad were both talking to the policemen in the front yard, and I could just make out Cutty in the back seat of the nearest patrol car. There was no tension in his face at all. Not a trace of anger or regret. It reminded me of the face belonging to a man about to jump off a diving board. He seemed perfectly calm, as though everything in the world was now just as it should be.

Although I never saw Cutty again after that night, I often wondered in the years since what would cause a man to do what he did. Evidently there had been failures, circumstances piling up on top of each other, things he never told me about and that I'd never understand even if he did. I’m married now myself; my wife, Anne, and I, have three children, two girls and a boy. I can’t say that it’s been easy. In fact, at times it’s been intolerably bad, to the point where I felt like I was suffocating. But I never had the urge to give up the fight, to lay down my sword and call it quits. No matter what happens, I know it can always get worse, and for the sake of my family I want to be around when it does. I don’t expect a medal, or a parade. But I do expect an answer, and I have no doubt that when the time comes, I’ll have one, and I’ll be ready.

It’s funny. The first time Anne ever saw me with a shaved head, she was standing in the kitchen. I came in through the front door and she put her hand over her mouth in shock. Her eyes went wide, and then she started laughing and said, “Oh my god! For a minute there I thought you were someone else.”