Free Fitz by Mick Cochrane Page B

back to St. Paul to be near him. He wants to hear him say it. He’s tried—what do they call it?—leading the witness, but it’s no good. He’s going to have to try another line of questioning.
    There’s a lot more that he’s curious about. Like, how did his mom even get pregnant? Didn’t they have sex education back then? Nobody took Health? He’s too embarrassed to ask. He doesn’t want to go there. But you’d think they would have known better.
    They slow down on a curve and Fitz gets a good view of a happy little family on the walking path: Mom pushing a stroller, Dad with a yellow lab on a leash. It’s a weekday afternoon, but there they are, strolling in the sunshine. They could be in a public service announcement for family togetherness.
    “So what happened?” Fitz says. “What went wrong?”
    “What do you mean?” his father asks.
    “Something went wrong. You broke up with Mom,” Fitz says. “You broke up with me.”
    Of course, that’s the issue. Not that his parents aren’t together. In his catalog of fathers, there are plenty of divorced dads, several varieties, Caleb’s, for instance. He’s got a stepdad now—that’s a whole separate species—but his dad-dad, he checks in at Christmas and birthdays with gifts for Caleb and his sister. He takes them up north for a week in the summer. When Caleb screws up, gets a bad grade, his dad calls and gives him a talking-to. It’s not perfect—Caleb rolls his eyes about his father’s terrible taste in music, he’s not fond of his new girlfriend—but the man is on the job, he’s in the mix.
    “It wasn’t about you,” his father says. “It was never about you.”
    Fitz feels another quick, hot surge of anger. Your father bails on you, takes a fifteen-year hike, and then says it’s not about you. It’s a good thing probably that the gun is zipped into his backpack. In movies, when someone says something so stupid to a real tough guy, he gets pistol-whipped. Fitz totally understands the temptation.
    They’re on a bridge now, crossing over from Minneapolis back into St. Paul. Below, the Mississippi is shimmering in the afternoon sun.
    “What was it about, then?” Fitz says. He’s looking out the window, staring down at the river. There’s something almost hypnotic about it, it’s calming him down to watch it. “Tell me that.”
    “We were so different,” his father says. “From different worlds, that’s what she used to say.”
    That sounds like another soap opera to Fitz, maybe a romance novel. Now Fitz is feeling not so much angry as exhausted. Maybe it’s his belly full of burger and apple pie. Maybe his father’s lineof bull is making him sleepy. He feels almost too tired to call him out.
    They’re exiting the bridge now, and Fitz turns to get a last look at the river. He remembers seeing the source, on vacation in northern Minnesota with his mom, and there, at the headwaters, in Itasca Park, he and his mom waded across in a few quick steps. It made an impression. Something so modest, a shallow trickle, could become swift and powerful, dangerous even, a force to be reckoned with.
    It’s the same river that flows through St. Louis, where Chuck Berry grew up, where his father lived, all the way down to the Delta, home to the bluesmen that Caleb so reveres and refers to sometimes by first name, as if they are still alive, as if he knows them, as if they are kids from school. “This is how Robert would play it,” Caleb might say, and Fitz knows he’s talking about Robert Johnson, who died in something like 1930. On the other end of this same river is New Orleans, Fats Domino, the Ninth Ward, all those people stranded on roofs and stuck in the Superdome. His mom watched them on television, tears streaming down her face. Somehow they are all connected by it, this river, Fitz and his father and his mom and the folks down there. Fitz wishes he could find a way to write a song about that.

22
    Fitz flips up the hood of his