Read Ernie's Ark for Free Online Page A

field.
    “Oh my God Daddy oh my God Daddy,” my daughter is calling, and then the sound of the revving motor fuses with the first downward chop of a bat on the hood and my daughter’s high-pitched squeal. The fog lifts and lowers, lifts and lowers, and I see them in pieces—a frayed shirttail, a tuft of hair, a twisted lip. I see a raised arm, the rounded tip of a bat, then hear the splintering of one six-hundred-dollar headlight. For a few moments there is nothing but sound, an enraged battering, high cries inside the car and low grunts and murmurs outside, the nails-on-chalkboard grind of the engine, which my daughter is trying to turn over and over, not realizing it’s already on. She is banging on the console, engaging the wipers, the locks, the air-conditioning, as the windows rise and fall. Finally there is silence. The men stop. My shrieking daughter turns the wheel and the men stand back with no more passion than if we were a taxi pulling away from the curb.
    They broke only one headlight. They creased the hood in such a way that the engine was not damaged. They pleated the sides and roof and trunk, but not enough to spring the doors. They left the tires alone. They gave me plenty to get home on, plenty else to think about. They damaged me in such a way that I would not be apt to tell. I believe they mistook my daughter for a girlfriend, a prize package I picked up at an awards dinner or theater opening; their intention was to compromise my manhood, not my fatherhood. It is then that I see what I have on my hands, that my predicament will last longer than I thought, that I am up against not the nobility that my daughter will insist on recalling after her hands stop quaking and we are well on our long way home, butrather the bone-deep stubbornness of men with only one path up against a man who appears to have many.
    “I thought they might kill you,” my daughter says as we cross the border back into New Hampshire and feel safe enough to search for a motel. We are tired, it is dark, I have long since taken the wheel.
    “No,” I assure her. “They were making a point.”
    “I’m sorry, Daddy. I had no idea.” She wipes her eyes but they keep gushing; she has always cried this way, like her mother, in rivers. “I thought they were going to kill you, Daddy. Really. I thought they would pull you out of the car and kill you and I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop them.”
    I pull into the parking lot of a decent-looking motel, the kind with an attached restaurant that specializes in fried fish and kiddie plates. “Garrett and I broke up,” she says, reaching over me to turn off the ignition. A chuffing sound beneath the hood can portend nothing but trouble. “And I dropped out of my program. No doctorate for me, Daddy.” She looks at me, her eyes shiny in the neon reflection of the motel sign, expecting something that I am uniquely unable to deliver. I find myself hoping, God help me, to deliver accidentally. “I can’t get over Mom, is the thing,” she continues. She looks up, eyes brimming. “Garrett got tired of this.”
    My daughter waits as I grope for something to say. “He should have helped you,” I manage.
    She unbuckles herself and picks up her purse. “He didn’t cherish me. No man has ever cherished me.”
    “Well, he should have. He certainly should have.”
    “He didn’t. So I’m telling you. There’s a hole in my life that I’m falling straight through. I’m in trouble, Henry, and you’re all I’ve got.”
    My name sounds flat and sad. She grimaces in such a way—a twist of her soft mouth, smooth, elegiac—that I lose a little breath.
    “You’re it, Henry,” she says. “It was either call you or check myself into a hospital. I’m really sorry.” Just when I think I’m close to understanding what she’s apologizing for, she adds, “You should’ve produced that sister I wanted. Then you’d be off the hook and she’d be on.”
    I look into her shiny,