Then he held open a library book and pointed at a black-and-white photo: an Iron Age man in the course of excavation, my father explained, removed from nine feet of peat, his head covered by a pointed skin cap, around his waist a hide belt.
"The book says he got murdered two thousand years ago," he said, exhaling bourbon-breath.
So I propped on an elbow, blinking tiredly, and studied the well-preserved remains of the boney Bog Man, who was stretched on damp soil as though sleeping, the arms and legs curved, his chin inclined. His face displayed a benign expression-the eyes gently shut, the mouth puckered.
"They killed him?" I said.
"Hanged him and stuck him in some bog in Denmark. You’re looking at someone deader than dirt."
"Who killed him?”
"Who knows," he said, slapping the book shut. "But let’s hope we’re in that kind of shape in two thousand years. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
Then he gave me a sloppy kiss on the forehead, saying I’d better go back to sleep, otherwise my mother and all the bog men in the world might get upset. And as he reeled from the room, I asked for the light to stay on.
"Sure, baby,” he said, "you got it.”
But the light didn’t help much. The picture had spooked me, and I couldn’t rest for hours. .
Several nights later, I dreamt the Bog Man materialized in my bedroom and tried suffocating me with a pillow. A noose encircled his neck, drawn at the windpipe, coiling like a snake on his chest. And as he bent forward with the pillow, his wrinkled brow and pursed mouth carried a look of affliction. I suppose the nightmare made me shout out, because when I stirred, my father was stooping over me, brushing hair off my face, a length of which I’d somehow sucked back into my throat.
"What’s all this?” he said, half-whispering. "Got the creepers?"
Then he lifted me from the sheets.
I wrapped my arms about his collar line, buried my head against his T-shirt, and he carried me to where my mother slept. And I remember thinking there wasn’t a bog man alive who could mess with my father.
But at the farmhouse, the map wasn’t the only thing that recalled the Bog Man -- it was my father’s stoic face, all creased and furrowed, unflinching, as if preserved from antiquity in a jar. His long black ponytail, fastened by a rubber band, draped across his right shoulder and hung down the front of his tank top. At sixty-seven, almost forty years older than my mother, his body was lean, his arms brawny and taut. In the stillness of the living room, it was easy to conjure an Iron Age man in his image: frozen in a leather chair, excavated intact, the pupils behind those big sunglasses locked forever on a map of Denmark’s geognostic conditions.
"Let me tell you two something,” he said one morning during breakfast, speaking in his slow Southern drawl.
My mother and I were sitting with him at the dining table, a rare occasion when the three of us were awake at the same hour.
"A secluded and private life in Denmark is where we’re headed. I’ve got it into my head."
After performing all night, playing two different clubs in West Hollywood with his band The Black Coats, he had arrived at the apartment holding a bag of bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits from McDonald’s.
With a grimace, my mother lowered her biscuit, saying, "What’s in Denmark? When you ever been there anyway?" She glanced at me and said grumpily, "Where does he get
these crappy ideas?"
It was a question not meant to be answered, so I kept eating in silence.
Half-frowning, he said, "I’m just thinking we could move and get a place without a phone. Nobody would know we was there, so if somebody wants to hound me, they won’t find me or you or Jeliza-Rose."
"I won’t go," she said, swallowing her last bite, "so don’t bother trying. It’s stupid.”
"Hey, whatever you want,” he replied. He didn’t look at her, or at the uneaten biscuit on his plate, but stared straight at me and winked. "Guess me and Jeliza-Rose will make the trip. How’s that, huh?"
I shrugged and smiled with my mouth full.
She pushed her chair back.
"Noah, you and the shit-critter can go whenever you like. I don’t care."
Her robe fell open as she stood, so she shrugged it off, letting it drop to her feet. And the chunky whiteness of her naked body quivered when she left the table.
My father leaned forward and whispered, "Your mother is the Norse Queen Gunhild, King Eric Bloodaxe’s widow. And King Harald promised to marry her, enticing her to Denmark, and so she went-but on her arrival she got drowned in a bog instead. Not very nice."
"No,” I said, "not very nice."
"Think she deserved it?"
"No."
"No," he said, considering his biscuit, "I suppose she didn’t."
His shoulders went slack and his stubbled chin wavered above his plate.
The day my father and I finally escaped the city, he said we were headed for Jutland soil. In his backpack was the map, which he’d torn from a library book. And as we began traveling east on a Greyhound bus, watching palm trees and apartment complexes skim by our tinted window, my father produced the map and flattened it on his legs. With a shaky finger, he pointed out our aim -- the western jutland, where bog men slept under great, unbroken plains.
Then he carefully folded the map, returning it to his backpack, and said in an abstracted murmur, "I see before me these dark banks, decorated with the creator’s most beautiful flowers, Danish men and women, greeting the May sun as it rises to the east. I hear them greet it with songs, with freedom’s folksongs. The Danish beech, the Danish waves echo the jubilant tones.”
And I knew he was about to fade out, as he usually did after taking his Fortral tablets, a painkiller that kept him walking -- or so he liked to say. But I didn’t care. I was glad to be going somewhere else. I was happy Queen Gunhild couldn’t make the journey, even if Texas, not Denmark, was our final destination.
On the first evening at the farmhouse, I put myself between my father and the map on the wall, asking, "Daddy, is Jutland like Texas?"
But he was gone, so talking became pointless. His breathing had grown shallow. And I was sleepy.
Going from the living room, I pictured myself as Alice, growing tired as she dropped down, down, down the rabbit-hole. It was my favorite part of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! Haw brave they’ll all think me at home!
I often asked my father to read that section again and again, and he’d make his voice higher, sounding somewhat like a girl, saying, "Dinah’ll miss me very much tonight, I
should think!”
"Dinah was her cat,” I told him.
"I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah, my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very much like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?"
"And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way-"
"Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?"
"And sometimes-"
"Do bats eat cats?"
"For, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question,” I said, having memorized every word, "it didn’t matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and was saying to her, very earnestly-"