As If The Birds Are Free parts 1&2

North Pennsylvania black and white backwoods. A barren palette of trees rose huge from the snowpack into a woven canopy naked against the gray sky. Eight years old I huddled over a log with a hunting rifle and squinted through the steam rising from my breath. Put the wooden butt to my shoulder and tried to steady my pink shivering hands.
	"If you hit this I'll give you two thousand dollars," Scott said. He is my father.
	I found the target. A half can of Shasta Cola perched in the fork of a tree down the slope, brilliant red against the grayscale landscape. An aluminum cardinal. I followed instructions and breathed in then breathed out and in the breathless pause before the next inhale centered the iron sights on the can and pulled the trigger. Rifle rocked my shoulder. The shot echoed down the valley. A hint of smoke in the air.
	"Ha, shit. I think you hit it," he said.
	Our boots crunched in the ice glazed snow. Way downhill we found the can on the ground with a bullet hole through the edge.
	"Good shot."
	"So do I get the money?"
	He laughed.
	I pouted from what would be a short lived misunderstanding of money and class. I was lucky to have been born and raised while my father was a paramedic for the Philadelphia Fire Department, a job that gave us enough financial security to have leisures like a week of hunting and camping.
	We walked back to camp and I thought about what sort of restaurants I could eat at with that much money and how they would all be heated and I imagined the Pepsi or the Coke pulled bubbling up my straw as I leaned back in a padded booth in whatever kind of super-diner that kind of cash could pay for. But then our ramshackle camp in a level patch at the top of the ridge. Transcendentalist fortress of scarcity. Open side revealed a mud courtyard with brush shelters, one on either side of a bonfire. Hung between them making a wall opposite the opening was a thick green tarp to block the wind and hold in the heat. It shuddered and slapped. Cold sounds. With wind chill factored in the temperature was something like twenty below. My dog Ginger was curled on top of my brother John, shaggy cinnamon brown mutt keeping him and herself warm.  John within his sleeping bag entirely with rocks that had been warmed in the fire then wrapped in towels to make small vessels of heat that didn't burn. My father and I went around collecting wood and building up the fire to squat beside it. The heat drew moisture in spectral pirouettes from our layered sweatshirts and boots and blue jeans. Then the denim on our legs would swelter and we'd step back into the greater freezing evil for a moment. Hatred of cold numbed by awe for the novelty of this suffering, for the woods and the mountains, basest demands for food and warmth lifted to the beautiful and terrifying humility of enthusiastic human cooperation wherein we understand at least inevitable death and are only bothered by it enough to laugh it away from the edges of camp.
	John crawled out of the sleeping bag and brought his Gatorade to the fire. Blue and frozen like ice from a deep glacial cave. He warmed it into a slushie and drank. We sat quiet for some time. Then the three of us left camp single file to some farther part of the woods. Passed exposed faces of limestone and slate where waterfalls hung paralyzed and silent against the rock. Through groves of deep green coniferous giants heavy with snow, the bare ground snowless under their needley skirts and matted with moss and pinecones. To a steeper ridge littered with trees felled in storms where we found a place to sit among those logs and the new growth rising through their corpses. We watched the marshy valley below. A stretch of woods sloping downwards into yellow grass and cattails standing tall on either side of a frozen white creek. We waited for an hour or so with faces clenched in bored pain. I breathed into my hands to warm them and rubbed my feet to warm them. Constant movement of numb fingers and toes, prying the fear of frostbite from them.
	"There, see it?" Scott whispered.
	John and I shook our heads.
	"Squirrel, down there, on that tree." He raised the rifle to his shoulder and shot.
We went down and after some searching found it dead and nearly cold. A bit of browned blood on the snow. Took it by the tail and took the walk single file back to camp the way we'd come, following our own footsteps. As we walked I caught glimpses of the animal swinging limp and thought vaguely about its death.
	Scott used his arm to sweep snow off a flat boulder of slate and lay out the squirrel there on the wet black rock. He took the knife out his pocket and showed us how to skin the animal. Made a cut below the tail and then held the legs in one hand and pulled the tail with the other and peeled its coat of fur off almost in one piece. Then gutted the hairless rodent. Pierced the underside with the blade point and pulled down along the length of it so the insides spilled out in a cloud of steam. With the knife scooped out the intestines and stomach and anything else inedible balanced briefly on the flat shining edge then put into neat little piles of gore on clean black slate. He put aside the heart and liver and the rest of good meat into an edible pile.
	"Look at this," Scott said. He pulled back the fur around its groin and poked its testicles with the knife and said: "Ow ow ow."
	John laughed in honest childish bursts and my dad followed his example. I walked away and cried burning tears and hated myself for it. I cried for the squirrel but I don't think I cried for its death or the use of its body for jokes. But the clench in my throat remained regardless of what I thought so I cried. Neither my father or brother said anything to me. No undue condemnation or praise. They brought the slices of squirrel meat to the fire where I sat and we cooked them on forked sticks. Before we ate my father had us sit silently and think about where we were in the forest and thank the squirrel for dying so we could eat it. Surely some fictionalized American Indian spirituality he had gleaned from old cowboy movies, but I think the sentiment was sincere.
	The meat was gray when cooked and chewy and mostly flavorless but not bad. The night descended quick from the gray sky and we built the fire up with our massive pile of firewood and my dad summarized a fantasy novel he was reading and told us war stories from his time as a sniper in Iraq and Bosnia and the Congo and made up a ghost story. Dried the fur out by the fire and made a hat out of it. Ginger ate some of the squirrel meat and staked out a field mouse den under the snow. Before we went to bed we saw her pounce on it and she ate that too and happily shook the white powder off of her before coming in and lying between John and I.





__________

	I got home from Peru, exhausted and generally shaken, about half a week before I started as a freshman at Susquehanna University. I was stomach sick from weeks of eating one dollar rice and chicken platters and I had brought bed bugs back with me. So I spent the first day and night cleaning and spreading anti-pest powder and taking the mattress out to the curb and tying everything into plastic bags and putting them in the backyard to heat up and kill any bugs and eggs left.
After the first night of paranoid scouring for parasites I fell into uncomfortable and exhausted sleep on the couch around four in the morning. Then woke up at seven in the morning to the dogs barking and a cop at the door. We knew each other. My family had been robbed three times within a month earlier that year. Liam, one of my younger biological brothers, had his lockbox full of money stolen, including my six hundred dollars that made up half my savings. This cop came when we got robbed and the first thing he does is ask us if we did this ourselves. We got tense and said of course not so he interrogated us in our own living room asking if we sold drugs. Then he sat there in front of us in our house with his other cop buddies and joked about beating on the homeless. He said he liked when they didn't want to leave on their own and they laughed and mimed swinging down on someone.
I opened the door.
	"Good morning," I said.
	"What day is your trash day?"
	"What?"
	"You heard me. Your trash day," he said.
I was tired and honestly confused what he was so upset about.
	"Uh, I think Monday."
"You think?" he stuck his foot in the door.
	"What the hell are you doing? You can't do that."
	He pushed open the door further as I tried to close it on him.
	"What the fuck are you doing, get the fuck out."
"Why don't you calm down and step back where I can see you." His hand on his gun. He was sneering.
	"No, get the fuck out! You can't just come in here!" I was tired and sounded as frustrated and small as I felt.
	"Oh yes I can. I got no way of knowing you aren't a squatter. You didn't know the trash day, how am I supposed to know you live here?"
	"Fuck you! You fucking scum, you sack of shit!"
	"Uh huh." With the hand that wasn't on his gun he took his radio and called for back-up. Old Ginger limped out of the living room where I had been sleeping and began to growl.
	I said, "What are you doing? What the fuck is wrong with you? You think this is okay? What the fuck do you want?"
	"Why don't you stop yelling for your own sake. The neighbors called because you have all that garbage out front and it's not trash day. All I was doing was coming to let you know that and you have to give me an attitude."
	"Fuck you you slimy fucking asshole," I hated him and I wanted him to know but I guess I still knew better than to make an open threat of violence. Backup arrived with baton in hand and came up our overgrown front lawn. I wondered how this situation was going to end. Maybe this policewoman coming up the lawn would be more reasonable. Maybe they'd kill me and I wouldn't have to worry about it. Arrogant dreams of martyrdom, a suicidal impulse. As backup reached the door my mom came down from her bedroom terrified and went right to cleaning up my mess the only way that really works with cops, licking their asshole and hoping they like your color and aren't in too bad a mood. My mom's good at it because she isn't even faking. She actually believes the cops are mostly good guys and I'm sure she actually believed what she said to him about what my problem was.
	"I am so sorry he was causing you trouble, his father is very sick, he's going through a lot. I am so so sorry, how can I help you, what's the problem?" And when he explains, still hostile, why the neighbors called, she said we would pull everything in and she apologized for me again and again and I sat there and boiled. And he got to saying,
	"Yeah yeah he remembered me from last time with the robberies how about that, yeah he had an attitude last time didn't he, he got all upset, how'd that turn out with those robberies?"
	 And my mom said, "Oh you know we put these cameras in and a security system in."
 And he took a look at that camera above the front door and said,
	"Well everything seems to be in order, sorry for the misunderstanding. Just bring that trash in." And then he and the other cop left.
All the trash the neighbors called about was a single bed bug infested mattress sitting at the curb. I pulled it in to the side of the house by the garage and smacked my clothes, afraid I got any bugs on me. I did that for a while then gagged thinking about if I broke them back inside and got reinfested. I'm not really easily disgusted or anything but I can't ever fuck with parasites —  ticks and lice and bedbugs are hell.
I glared at the neighbors' properties. Tree lined street and SUVs outside modest suburban houses. They were mixed stone and white vinyl houses, bay windows and big neat gardens. These houses followed a hill with a slight curve up to a baseball field and Boyle playground, named like so many things around the far Northeast after a dead cop. The green of the trees was muted in the sunlight and the sky was as gray as anywhere else in the city. It was really hot already that morning.
	That was the neighborhood I lived in through high school after my parents decided to get the family up and out of Philadelphia. So we moved to that suburb, technically within far Northeast city limits so my dad could keep his job working for the city. When we moved in the neighbors smelled the city on us. Mold and smoke and chemical runoff. We received a letter sent anonymously from 'the good people of the neighborhood' requesting we get our act together or move back to the ghetto. They would call the cops on us for things like our trash cans overflowing or the garage being open, just to keep the pressure on. We later learned from a friend of my little brother that on the neighborhood watch Facebook page they warned against associating with us and fabricated a rumor that we sold drugs out of our air conditioner unit. When news got around that my father had lost his paramedic job and faced charges for heroin addiction the neighbors were glad to have been right about us. Years of welfare and my mother always working and my father losing on three fronts to addiction and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Gulf War Syndrome followed.
	Third day home from Peru and I laid in my hot and empty bug-proofed room. I still had the shits from the cheap chifa rice and eggs we ate our last five days in Lima after nearly running out of money. The air conditioner rattled in the window and I laid on a new mattress and periodically lifted it up and checked the seams underneath in a paranoid search for bugs that weren't ever there. Then I got this phone call from my mom sobbing saying my dad broke out of the Veteran's Affairs mental hospital downtown.
She tried to hold on to him she swore she tried but there was that look in his eyes and he wasn't there anymore, and she told me now he was being chased by the cops down Girard Ave and she said she was afraid they were going to kill him. It was a sunny day. My room bare and gutted but for a pile of airtight plastic garbage bags. Nothing to do. I went out to the driveway where John and Liam were working on his sky blue 1977 Datsun beached there behind our working car, a red Chevy Cobalt. Liam bought the Datsun for two thousand dollars on the internet. I was skeptical but he convinced me sure that's a lot for a car that doesn't run but he had a good engine to put in it and he knew he could fix it up so it was a bargain.
	"You hear about dad?" Liam said.
	"Yeah." I said.
He just shook his head and went back to working on the car. I hung out there in the driveway and sat in the open garage and talked with them and watched them work on the engine for a couple hours while they turned it over on some contraption and pried into its guts. Grease and bolts and metal parts clattered onto the floor. Then from outside the garage there was a crash of glass and tires screeching and we ran out to the street and saw the red Cobalt pull out and make a sharp turn out around the corner.
	"Fuck!" Liam said.
	"Was that your dad?" John said.
	"I think so. Yeah." Liam said.
	"How do you know it wasn't the same people that broke in before?" I said.
	Liam shook his head.
	"How do you know? He was all the way downtown just a couple hours ago, that would be fast as shit to get up here."
	"Is there a camera pointing there?" John said.
	"No." Liam said. "I think it was him. I don't know. I think it was the way he drives."
	Liam called our mom and told her about this and I tried to avoid hearing that conversation. Then Liam called the cops and I argued with him about that because we both knew they would show up and take notes and give us a hard time and end up not doing anything to help us, but he said they need to know this is going on because otherwise they might try to stop him and he might kill a cop. I said I really don't care if he does. I thought that seriously and felt an excited catharsis for that conviction. But Liam said dad would never forgive himself if he killed a cop and anyway they would just kill him back and of course he was right about all of this. But John and I were pacing and not looking forward to the cops showing up so we got into John's black junker 1988 Supra and sped around up and down Bustleton just to do something. When we got back the cops were there sitting around taking notes and making calls and John and I went inside and got drinks and watched TV.
	That night I had come down from the adrenaline and was sitting around and took a walk down to Wawa for a hoagie as I often did when I was trying to finish the day and get my thoughts together. I was feeling alright, it was a cool summer evening good for walking. What I did like about living there was all the trees in that neighborhood meant good clean air, and I liked that it was safe to walk around listening to music at night. I was looking for something to listen to on my phone. Turned the corner at the end of the street and there was my father crouched military style behind a hedge. His face shadowed. I don't remember at all what I was thinking besides a vague wonder at how cinematic his stance and movements seemed.
	"Dad?" I said.
	I walked up to him and he started to crouch walk away like I didn't see him, he hid his face and slinked across those well tended lawns. He broke into a half jog and started going down the sidewalk and I chased him.
	"Dad! Dad!" I said.
	He didn't answer and we kept running. We went down the street and between parked cars. He kept running and I kept pace just behind him on a dark and tree lined stretch of road. There the road passed next to undeveloped convent land where a single nun lived in a big victorian mansion on top of a tall hill. I lost sight of him. I took a chance and ran through a line of decorative pine shrubs and hopped over the fence and through some more bushes. A shadow slipped up the hill by the pond. I followed and called out again and he didn't answer and we kept running. I chased him across the convent field and hill and parking lot and out the trees on the other side into the William Penn cemetery. He seemed winded and began to walk but I called out again and he flinched and looked back and started jogging again.
	"Dad! Please stop! Dad, it's Quinn, your son, I'm your son, it's okay, please! I'm not going to hurt you! Scott! Scott McGarrigle! Dad!"
	He spoke with an ethereal slur, "Why do you keep calling me that, I don't have any kids, I never heard that name, I'm Grip, my name's Grip, get away, leave me alone, I'll hurt you, get away, if you come closer I'll hurt you."
	I followed him into the cemetery. Gravel roads ran through it but we cut through the tombstones as he tried again and again to hide behind them. Briefly through an intersection of gravel roads and the tree at the center where he had taken me to look at stars when I was little and where he had told me the plot of the Red Badge of Courage like it was an ancestral memory. Back into the gravestones.
	"Dad, please!"
	He turned and saw me through a mask more terrified than mine. I saw profound confusion and frustration and despair, a pale and tortured face more like the ghost of my father. The dark leafed canopy over the graveyard muttered in the humid wind. Everywhere leered faded graves the color of that dead moon looming full and scratched with its own meteoritic etchings hanging in my confused perspective just above where my father watched me horrifically. I remember the clarity of thought in recognizing the alignment of these things. The moon dangling from an astral diorama, the impossible narrative cohesion.
	He pounced at me quick and aggressive and I stumbled back behind a tombstone and got up ready to run but when I looked back out he was sprinting away. I jogged after him but stayed farther behind as I got out my phone and called the cops.
	"Hey, hey, I'm on Bustleton headed towards the intersection with Byberry, my father's having a dissociative flashback, I need help, he's a veteran, he has special forces training- what?"
	"Please calm down." She sounded irritated.
	"I'm sorry, please help, he's going to get away, but tell them to be careful-"
	"Well you're going to have to tell me what he's wearing and what exactly is going on."
	I saw him crossing the street through congested traffic. I hung up the call and ran across after him. Horns blared and people shouted. I ran across the parking lot of a Sunoco and craned my neck to see down the three different streets on the intersection and I didn't see him anywhere. Chose a direction and walked and searched and called out but saw nothing there on the city's edge. The road stretched away from neon strip malled city edge to where columnular streetlights alone held up the night. I called my mom and told her what had happened then I went home and played with Ginger and got something to eat and went on my computer and read a little bit then went to sleep.
	The next day I made sure my mom didn't need me to do anything then I hopped on the southbound 58 bus. Northeast Philadelphia rolled by, a variety of neighborhoods that quickly became Philadelphia proper. Through Rhawnhurst where John and I are from. It's a quiet neighborhood of mostly Russians and Ukrainians with billboards and fur shops and pharmacies that mocked me as a child with their cyrillic text until I discovered I wasn't bad at reading, the signs were just written in another alphabet. I got off the bus at Cottman and walked down towards Longcrest, where the Northeast becomes North Philadelphia. A landscape of rowhomes and African Hair Braiding salons and phone repair shops and halal food carts and Italian restaurants with meaty guys in tracksuits glaring out and obscure denominations of churches and mosques and one Buddhist temple and a diner and a Burger King and a few fried chicken places. It's an hour walk from the 58 stop to my friend's house in Longcrest but it was a nice walk on a nice day and I loved to see everyone out talking and laughing and playing or arguing or walking angry or tired or serious or just stooped out front their houses watching it all or watching their daydreams. Just unashamed to share the beauty and ugliness and terrifying mundanity of the day. At intersections looking south down the streets the downtown high rises shone in the midday sun. Kids playing basketball. Babies crying. Junk cars sputtering. Teenagers trying to tease fights out of each other. On the ground there's newspapers, bottle caps, Black & Mild wrappers, a brown bag stashed under an arched section of sidewalk, a condom, a needle. Beautiful ash trees line the streets with their green-yellow leaves laughing in the wind and their leopard pattern white and silver bark set against the maroon brick rowhomes.
	I got to Ian's house and came right in. It smelled like years of cigarettes and barbeque and spices and coffee. I caught up with his parents. I told them everything was fine and that was true. I was safe and doing everything that I could. Ian came home from somewhere and we sat in his garage where it faces down the alley behind his slice of rowhome.
	"My dad broke out of the hospital yesterday and stole the car."
	"What the fuck?"
	"Yeah. Fucking ridiculous man, that's not all either. That night I was just walking down to Wawa and I saw him just hiding in the neighbor's yard and ended up chasing him around the neighborhood."
	"Was he flashing back or relapsed or…?"
	I shrugged. "He had no idea who he was. I don't know. It was some Rambo bullshit."
	"If you ever want to talk about any of it, man, I'm here."
	"Thanks. I'm good though. Thanks."
	Ian is training to become a professional fighter because he doesn't want to be a day laborer forever. So he left for the gym and Muay Thai training and went to see his girlfriend. I went up into the house and talked with his dad, an old Navy cook who made me some great seasoned chicken and regaled me with his plans of killing congress by blowing up the Capitol Building with Napoleonic era rockets because the secret service isn't looking for those they're just looking for the new shit. Then he laid on the couch and watched anime and chain smoked. I slept down on the futon in the garage where it's comfortable except for the heat. The next day some other friends were over and we were hanging out about to head to the Wawa. I got a call from my mom and took it down the alley and answered.
	"They got him," she said, "he broke into the house in the middle of the night last night, the alarms went off and we ran out the back door, but the cops showed up and they were so good they were safe and gentle, they found him curled up on the living room floor surrounded by pictures of all of us, you and your brothers and John and Ginger, he had them all laying around him and he was curled up in a ball crying and when the cops came in he just kept saying I don't know who I am, I don't know who I am, I don't know who I am, something keeps bringing me back to this house, what's wrong with me, I don't know who I am."