Free After the Parade by Lori Ostlund Page A

stretches in the car, six or seven hours at a time. It was hot that summer, and they rarely spoke as they drove, which had less to do with the heat than with the sort of family they were. Along the way, he learned to read his first words— stop, population, and vacancy —but mainly he stared at the back of his father’s head, bristly with its policeman haircut. He had not realized, until then, how white his father’s scalp was, like the inside of a potato at the moment it’s split open.
    â€œHow much longer?” Aaron could not keep from asking. Prisoners, students, passengers on long sea voyages, children in cars: they all know well the slowing that occurs because their time does not truly belong to them. His mother gave cryptic responses involving hours and minutes, words that meant nothing to him, while his father threatened to pull over and give him “a good spanking” if he did not shut up, which did mean something. It was how his father spoke of spankings, employing the adjective good as though the spanking represented some obvious moral truth.
    After several days of this, days defined by the heat and the sight of his father’s head riding squarely before him, Aaron asked instead, “How many Adam-12 s until we get there?,” referring to a half-hourtelevision program about policemen that he and his father watched each Saturday.
    â€œFour,” said his mother, too enthusiastically, and so the Adam-12 system for telling time was established.
    The vacation started at the Paul Bunyan Park in Bemidji, where cement statues of Paul and Babe the Blue Ox stood beside the shore of Lake Bemidji. The Englunds had visited the park twice before, the three visits merging in Aaron’s memory so that years later he could not remember which time they saw a roller coaster being built or which time his father pointed to a family of four and leaned toward him, whispering, “Look, Aaron, there go some Jews.” In the family photo album, there were three different shots of him standing between Paul and Babe, one to commemorate each visit, the changes in those young versions of himself obvious, despite the fact that whoever took the pictures (he assumed it was his father) had stood far back in order to capture the full height of Paul Bunyan, leaving Aaron an incidental presence at the statue’s feet.
    He did know it was during the last visit that his father became angry at him for refusing to go on the rides. “So you’re just going to go through life a chickenshit?” his father asked as they stood to the side of the Tilt-A-Whirl, watching other children board the cars excitedly. In his pretend-casual voice, his father added, “Really, I don’t see how you’re going to manage in school.” Aaron did not say that he wondered this also.
    His father turned then and walked calmly away. At home he might have shouted or smashed a bottle on the floor, but he did not believe in being a spectacle, in providing strangers with that pleasure. Aaron was familiar with his father’s stiff back, with the way his hands dove deep into his pockets and his feet kicked forward with each step, keeping an invisible can in motion, just as he recognized the way that he and his mother stood side by side, dazed by how quickly things could go awry. Only minutes earlier, his mother had turned to them, revealing a clot of yellow mustard on her ear lobe, a leftover from the hamburgers they had eaten while squeezed together on a bench. Aaron and his father had burst into simultaneous laughter, arare occurrence that had encouraged all three of them, nudging them toward giddiness.
    â€œDolores,” his father said, “were you feeding that hamburger to your ear?”
    They laughed again while his mother dabbed at her ear with a tissue, using Aaron and his father as mirrors, asking, “Is it gone? Jerry? Aaron? Did I get it all?”
    Years later, when Aaron thought back on