By Tony Concannon
I followed people one summer. I followed a woman who worked at the library. She always smoked a cigarette as she walked. I followed one of our neighbors. I followed the man who owned the small grocery store on Main Street. I was thirteen and I was practicing surveillance. I imagined myself a detective. It came from reading the Hardy Boy books all the time.
An old man was the person I followed the most. One evening I saw him sitting on the bench in front of the Town Hall and I followed him back to a rooming house. His name was Jim and he’d been a friend of my father, who was dead.
The next afternoon I waited across the street from the rooming house. Jim paid no attention to me when he came out. He walked quickly and I had to hurry to keep up. He went into the drugstore on the corner of Main Street.
I followed him inside. He was sitting at one end of the counter. I sat at the other end and asked for a vanilla milkshake. I wondered if he remembered me. He’d come to the house once when I’d been little.
The waitress brought him a plate of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and peas. Then she brought me my milkshake. The book I’d read on being a detective had said to take notes whenever you followed someone and I took out a small notebook and a pencil and began writing. After Jim finished eating, he asked for a second cup of coffee. While he was drinking it, he counted out several coins on the counter and handed them to the waitress. I put the notebook and pencil back into my pocket. I’d filled two pages. I drank the rest of the milkshake, paid, and left.
***
My mother rarely asked me what I did all day. She worked at a bank, so she wasn’t home. She must have worried about me but I’d never been in trouble and I got good grades at school. She’d been different since my father had died. She’d started smoking and she rarely smiled. There was only the two of us. It was the first summer I hadn’t signed up for the playground. I didn’t like baseball anymore, which is all they did there. What I wanted to do was play football.
We’d have dinner together every night and afterward she’d sit at the table and have a cup of coffee and smoke cigarettes. Most nights I sat with her. She’d tell me about the people she worked with at the bank or one of our neighbors she’d run into. I listened but didn’t say much.
“When’s football going to start?” she asked.
“They’re going to call me.”
Her cigarette burned in the ashtray. I’d stolen a few from her and smoked them but I didn’t like the taste.
“Your father loved football.”
“He was good, wasn’t he?”
“He was very good.”
***
Jim did the same thing every day. He ate breakfast at the diner and dinner at the drugstore and he sat on the bench. One thing puzzled me. He never ate lunch. Twice I saw people give him a dollar and I wondered if he didn’t have enough money.
He spoke to me once. I was on my way home and I passed him sitting on the bench.
“Your father was a good man,” he said. His voice was deeper than I’d expected.
I stopped. “Thank you.”
He didn’t say anything else.
***
“Do you know what day it is?” my mother asked when we were having dinner.
I shook my head.
“It’s the anniversary of Daddy’s death. A year ago today.”
“August 11,” I said.
“That’s right,” my mother said. “Do you miss him?”
“Yeah. I don’t think of him much, though.”
“I think of him every day.”
“It’s too sad to think of him.”
He’d been a big man and he’d loved to wrestle with me. He’d let me wrap him in a hold before he’d suddenly pick me up and dangle me upside down. When his brother had come out from Minnesota to visit, the two of them had wrestled in the living room.
There were tears in my mother’s eyes.
***
The following week Jim did something different. After he’d had breakfast at the diner, he walked past the Town Hall and headed out of town. I was on the other side of the street so he wouldn’t notice me but it didn’t matter since he never looked back. We reached the top of a long hill and started down the other side. At the bottom, on the right, was a pond. He turned into a path. I crossed the street and trailed after him. The path curved to the right around the water. The growth on the sides was thick. I stopped at the edge of a clearing. Jim was on the other side, staring down at the water.
I didn’t want to get caught and I ran out to the street and hid behind a telephone pole. A few minutes later he emerged from the path and headed back to town. I walked around to where he’d been standing. The water was too dark to see anything. I found a big stick and stuck it in. It didn’t reach the bottom.
That night I got a telephone call from Mr. Rogers, the Pop Warner coach. The first practice was the next evening. I’d never played football before and I couldn’t wait.
I stopped following Jim after that. Football practice was fun. I was the biggest kid and the coaches made me a defensive end. I even had to lose a few pounds to get under the weight limit. Brian Conley, who I knew from school, was on the team. He was friendly with some of the girls in our class and we started hanging out with them. We met up with them in front of McDonald’s or at the ice cream shop. Some afternoons we danced to records in Susan Harrington’s basement. One day, when we were outside McDonald’s, Jim walked by. I hadn’t thought much about him since football had started.
***
I came home on a Friday night and found my mother crying on the couch. Our first game was Sunday and we’d had our last practice.
“Why are you crying, Mom?”
“Do you remember Jim Curran?”
“Who is he?”
“He was a friend of Daddy’s. He liked to sit on the bench in front of the Town Hall.”
“What about him?
“He drowned.”
“Where?”
“In the pond at the other end of town.”
“How did he drown?”
My mother was still crying.
“He killed himself.”
“How do they know that?”
“He told John Lydon last week he didn’t want to live anymore and he was going to drown himself. Then when John didn’t see him this week, he called the police.”
She couldn’t stop crying.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“He was a very nice man.”
That night I read through all my notes about Jim. In the morning I walked up to the pond and took the path to where he’d stood looking at the water. There was nothing to show anything had happened there. I didn’t even know if it was where he’d drowned himself.
***
My mother told me there had been only a few people at Jim’s funeral. That Saturday I rode my bike up to the cemetery. At the rear there were several new graves. For each one there was a short post with a card on it stuck in the ground. On the card was the name of the person. I found the one for James Curran.
In the woods behind the cemetery there were purple flowers growing and I pulled up a handful. I had nothing to tie them with and I arranged them carefully on his grave.
I went back into the woods and pulled up more flowers. Holding them, I rode my bike back up to the front, where my father was buried. I hadn’t been there since his funeral.
I placed the flowers in front of his headstone.
