Missing its mark, it swam in confused circles, cried out as the current slowly took it toward Long Island’s Great South Bay, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean. In October my mother offered me twenty dollars to clean the garage she and my father had filled with junk—warped plywood and dull lawn-mower blades, a mask my father bought when he was in Africa making artificial limbs for So-and-So’s troops, lampshade-less lamps and nozzle-less cans of WD-40, rusted tools, a rock-hard bag of rock salt, shovels and broken bicycles, an outboard engine with a spider web for a gas cap. I moved this here and that there, swept out leaves and folded blue tarps until I found a molding cardboard case of unopened Rheingold beer cans. I carried it behind the garage and buried it under leaves, hid it away like a fat squirrel and waited for my winter. In November my father’s mother died, and in December he got himself drunk and tried to sleep in a tree. He fell out. You know what they say about apples.
