into pewter, but by late afternoon they still couldn’t uproot the fence. Mr. Hutch got the idea of hacksawing the bars as the paramedics had, and for a while the men took turns sawing, but their paper-pushing arms gave out quickly. Finally they tied the fence to the back of Uncle Tucker’s four-wheel-drive Bronco. Nobody cared that Uncle Tucker didn’t have a license (driving examiners always smelled booze on him, even if he quit drinking three days before the test they still smelled it evaporating from his pores). Our fathers just cried, “Hit it!” and Uncle Tucker floored his accelerator, but the fence didn’t budge. By midafternoon they abandoned the effort and took up a collection to hire a professional hauling service. An hour later, a lone man showed up in a tow truck, attached a hook to the fence, pressed a button to make his giant winch revolve, and with a deep earth sound, the murdering fence came loose. “You can see blood,” Anthony Turkis said, and we looked to see if the blood that hadn’t been there at the time of the suicide had arrived after the fact. Some said it was on the third spike, some said the fourth, but it was as impossible as finding the bloody shovel on the back of Abbey Road where all the clues proclaimed that Paul was dead.
None of the Lisbons helped with the fence removal. From time to time, however, we saw their faces blinking at the windows. Just after the truck pulled the fence free, Mr. Lisbon himself came out the side door and coiled up a garden hose. He didn’t move to the trench. He raised one hand in a neighborly salute and returned inside. The man lashed the fence, in sections, to his truck and—getting paid for it—gave Mr. Bates the worst lawn job we’d ever seen. We were amazed our parents permitted this, when lawn jobs usually justified calling the cops. But now Mr. Bates didn’t scream or try to get the truck’s license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips—they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn’t give a damn about lawns.
After the truck drove away, our fathers gathered around the hole once more, staring down at wriggling earthworms, kitchen spoons, the one rock Paul Little swore was an Indian arrowhead. They leaned on shovels, mopping brows, even though they hadn’t done anything. Everyone felt a lot better, as though the lake had been cleaned up, or the air, or the other side’s bombs destroyed. There wasn’t much you could do to save us, but at least the fence was gone. Despite the devastation of his lawn, Mr. Bates did some edging, and the old German couple appeared in their grape arbor to drink dessert wine. As usual they wore their Alpine hats, Mr. Hessen’s with a tiny green feather, while their schnauzer sniffed at the end of his leash. Grapes burst above their heads. Mrs. Hessen’s humped back dove and surfaced amid her swelling rosebushes as she sprayed.
At some point, we looked up into the sky to see that all the fish flies had died. The air was no longer brown but blue. Using kitchen brooms, we swept bugs from poles and windows and electrical lines. We stuffed them into bags, thousands upon thousands of insect bodies with wings of raw silk, and Tim Winer, the brain, pointed out how the fish flies’ tails resembled those of lobsters. “They’re smaller,” he said, “but possess the same basic design. Lobsters are classified in the phylum Arthropoda, same as insects. They’re bugs. And bugs are only lobsters that have learned to fly.”
No one ever understood what got into us that year, or why we hated so intensely the crust of dead bugs over our lives. Suddenly, however, we couldn’t bear the fish flies carpeting our swimming pools, filling our mailboxes, blotting out stars on our flags. The collective action of digging the trench led to cooperative sweeping, bag-carting, patio-hosing. A score of brooms kept time in all directions as the pale ghosts of fish flies dropped from walls like ash. We examined their tiny wizards’ faces, rubbing them between our fingers until they gave off the scent of carp. We tried to light them but they wouldn’t burn (which made the fish flies seem deader than anything). We hit bushes, beat rugs, turned on windshield wipers full blast. Fish flies clogged sewer grates so that we had to stuff them down with sticks. Crouching over sewers, we could hear the river under the city flowing away. We dropped rocks and listened for the splash.
We didn’t stop with our own houses. Once our walls were clean, Mr. Buell told Chase to start cleaning bugs off the Lisbon house. Because of his religious beliefs, Mr. Buell often went the extra mile, raking ten feet into the Hessens’ yard, or shoveling their walk and even throwing down rock salt. It wasn’t odd for him to tell Chase to start sweeping the Lisbons’ house, even though they lived across the street and not next door. Because Mr. Lisbon only had daughters, boys and men had gone over in the past to help him drag away lightning-struck limbs, and as Chase approached, holding his broom over his head like a regimental banner, nobody said a word. Then, however, Mr. Krieger told Kyle to go over and sweep some, and Mr. Hutch sent Ralph, and soon we were all over at the Lisbon house, brushing walls and scraping away bug husks. They had even more than we did, the walls an inch thick, and Paul Baldino asked us the riddle, “What smells like fish, is fun to eat, but isn’t fish?”
Once we got to the Lisbons’ windows, our new inexplicable feelings for the girls came to the fore. As we slapped off bugs, we saw Mary Lisbon in the kitchen, holding a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. She appeared to be contemplating whether or not to open it. She read the directions, turned the box over to look at the vivid picture of the noodles, and then put the box back on the counter. Anthony Turkis, pressing his face to the window, said, “She should eat something.” She picked up the box again. Hopefully, we watched. But then she turned and disappeared.
Outside it grew dark. Lights came on down the block, but not in the Lisbon house. We couldn’t see in any better, and in fact the glass panes began to reflect our own gaping faces. It was only nine o’clock, but everything confirmed what people had been saying: that since Cecilia’s suicide the Lisbons could hardly wait for night to forget themselves in sleep. Up in a bedroom window, Bonnie’s three votive candles glimmered in a reddish haze, but otherwise the house absorbed the shadows of night. Insects started up in their hiding places all around, vibrating the minute we turned our backs. Everyone called them crickets, but we never found any in the sprayed bushes or aerated lawns, and had no idea what they looked like. They were merely sound. Our parents had been more intimate with crickets. For them the buzzing apparently didn’t sound mechanical. It came from every direction, always from a height just above our heads, or just below, and always with the suggestion that the insect world felt more than we did. As we stood charmed into stillness, listening to the crickets, Mr. Lisbon came out the side door and thanked us. His hair looked even grayer than usual, but grief hadn’t altered the highness of his voice. He had on overalls, one knee covered by sawdust. “Feel free to use the hose,” he said, and then he looked at the Good Humor truck passing by, the jingle of the bell seemed to trigger a memory, he smiled, or winced—we couldn’t tell which—and returned inside.
We went with him only later, invisibly, with the ghosts of our questions. Apparently, as he stepped back inside, he saw Therese come out of the dining room. She was stuffing her mouth with candy—M&M’s, by the colors—but stopped immediately on seeing him. She swallowed an unchewed chunk. Her high forehead glowed in the light from the street and her cupid’s lips were redder, smaller, and more shapely than he remembered, especially in contrast to her cheeks and chin, which had gained weight. Her eyelashes were crusted, as though recently glued shut. At that moment Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with, and he reached out in order to meet her for the first time. He rested his hands on her shoulders, then dropped them to his sides. Therese brushed the hair out of her face, smiled, and began walking slowly up the stairs.
Mr. Lisbon went on his usual nighttime rounds, checking to see that the front door was locked (it wasn’t), that the garage light was off (it was), and that none of the burners on the stove had been left on (none had). He turned off the light in the first-floor bathroom, where he found Kyle Krieger’s retainer in the sink, left from when he’d taken it out during the party to eat cake. Mr. Lisbon ran the retainer under water, examining
