Born Slippy

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.

Two weeks later, Frank and Dmitry were hanging the second-floor joists, one of those repetitive two-man jobs where you can have a decent conversation, sitting on top of opposite framed walls.

“Trog thinks your father was in the drug business, too,” Frank said. Trog had met Dmitry’s father Edwin in the 1970s, smuggling hash up from Morocco for the English market—Trog was smuggling hash, at any rate, and he suspected Edwin was as well, although Edwin never copped to it, and had a front as an importer of rugs and kilims and antiques, never letting on otherwise. On the ferry between Algeciras and Tangier, Trog could be mistaken for little except what he was, an American hippie drug dealer, but Edwin might have been a schoolteacher, an archeologist, a mining engineer. One day, the bartender in Trog’s local pub in Hackney whispered to him that some very square guy, reeking of Interpol, had been around asking questions. Trog decided it was time to close shop and head back to the hill country of Massachusetts. He packed up his British wife Catherine and a box of books and flew home. He grew a little weed behind his house but was otherwise retired.

“Franky, the simple fact is this: I know nothing about my father,” he said.

Having had a tough father himself, the kind of guy who would beat the crap out of you one minute and give you big hugs (and a sermon) the next, and who died young—his anger, Frank always assumed, causing an aneurysm to burst in his brain before he hit sixty—Frank was completely prepared for the I hate my father talk. And, frankly, where else do you go after I know nothing about him?

“What do you mean you know nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Was he a drinker?” Frank asked.

“No.”

“Angry?”

“No, mild-mannered to a fault,” Dmitry said. “He is like, I don’t know—he’s like the clerk at the shop where you buy your bread, or your auto parts salesman, excuse me salesperson, someone you don’t really take any notice of, a nonentity.”

They pulled the twenty-foot-long slabs of fir into place, their legs dangling into what would be the living room, slipping each board into galvanized hangers, and toed a few 10d