themselves were black. The trees were the woods and the woods were a cave out there past the fence. The woods were a dark, grinning mouth.
Why had the girl Althea gone in there? Those first few weeks in the fall Alex was sure one day he'd be playing in the yard and she'd come wandering out of the trees and across the field and stand at the fence, confused and lost. But she would like him - they were both Als. She would feel safe with Alex and he would take her inside his house and make her hot chocolate. He would call her family and tell them she was okay - or an ambulance, or the cops. But Alex didn't think those thoughts now. He thought instead of Althea's body, frozen and blue, appearing under a snowbank when everything thawed in the spring.
Alex's eyes followed the shadows of the trees, stretching now in the red cleft of sun all the way back across the field, toward the house, past the fence to the square patch that was his family's yard. And then he looked down, directly down, to the space behind the house where the snow fort now lay in ruins. Beside it were the girls.
With the light deepening they seemed too defined, too real, as though someone had cut their pictures from a magazine and laid them down there, one by one, side by side. Their faces were turned up toward the house although they couldn't see Alex, he knew, framed in his bedroom window. It was still too light outside and too dark in his room. So Alex stood there watching them, unseen: four girls on their backs in a line, making angels in the snow.
THE FILM WE MADE
ABOUT DADS
IN THE FIRST scene of the film we made about dads, we caught them as children, well before they became dads themselves, when their own dads were full-on capital-D Dads-withmoustaches who had been in the war. We got some great shots of the dads at age eight swinging from the monkey bars in the schoolyard playground. Afterwards, we interviewed them about their goals. The answers: astronaut, fireman, psychiatrist, florist, psycho killer, Oscar Robertson. We asked them, "Describe your dad in one word." The unanimous response was: "Mean."
NEXT WE FOUND the dads at sixteen, getting hand jobs on the couch. The cameras were rolling. The dads were oblivious and said nothing, just rolled over on top of their lovers and, fully clothed, humped away until something damp oozed through their jeans. "Can you edit that so I look better?" wondered the dads, wiping themselves down in the bathroom. We smiled, keeping our distance, and told them we'd see what we could do.
IN COLLEGE THE dads grew beards. They bought cars and one night tried acid. We had run out of funding and couldn't shoot. "Remember this," we encouraged the dads, who were giggling at rain.
A FEW YEARS LATER, we received a grant and resumed filming. By then the dads were done college and had found wives to marry. At the altars, the dads said, "I do," and the wives said, "I do," and the dads kissed their new wives and the wives kissed back and then they ran out of the church while people threw rice at them and cheered. The dads and their wives went to Niagara Falls, where they stared silently into all that water and thought, Hmm, and later fell asleep with their shoes on. "Maybe edit in some love," we told the post-production crew. "Okay," they said.
THE DADS AND wives bought houses. The wives taught grade school and brought home children's drawings that they pinned to their fridges with magnetic fruit. The wives looked at the drawings and said, "Aw," in a pointed way. The dads were stuck in middle management; they built workshops in their garages. "That's my workshop in there," they told the wives. "That's my space." We went out into the garages and panned over the workshops, over the workbenches in the workshops, and the tools that would rarely get used. "This is golden stuff," we said to one another. We were making a film about dads.
THERE WERE MOMENTS we didn't get. The dads told us about nights of laughter with their
Why had the girl Althea gone in there? Those first few weeks in the fall Alex was sure one day he'd be playing in the yard and she'd come wandering out of the trees and across the field and stand at the fence, confused and lost. But she would like him - they were both Als. She would feel safe with Alex and he would take her inside his house and make her hot chocolate. He would call her family and tell them she was okay - or an ambulance, or the cops. But Alex didn't think those thoughts now. He thought instead of Althea's body, frozen and blue, appearing under a snowbank when everything thawed in the spring.
Alex's eyes followed the shadows of the trees, stretching now in the red cleft of sun all the way back across the field, toward the house, past the fence to the square patch that was his family's yard. And then he looked down, directly down, to the space behind the house where the snow fort now lay in ruins. Beside it were the girls.
With the light deepening they seemed too defined, too real, as though someone had cut their pictures from a magazine and laid them down there, one by one, side by side. Their faces were turned up toward the house although they couldn't see Alex, he knew, framed in his bedroom window. It was still too light outside and too dark in his room. So Alex stood there watching them, unseen: four girls on their backs in a line, making angels in the snow.
THE FILM WE MADE
ABOUT DADS
IN THE FIRST scene of the film we made about dads, we caught them as children, well before they became dads themselves, when their own dads were full-on capital-D Dads-withmoustaches who had been in the war. We got some great shots of the dads at age eight swinging from the monkey bars in the schoolyard playground. Afterwards, we interviewed them about their goals. The answers: astronaut, fireman, psychiatrist, florist, psycho killer, Oscar Robertson. We asked them, "Describe your dad in one word." The unanimous response was: "Mean."
NEXT WE FOUND the dads at sixteen, getting hand jobs on the couch. The cameras were rolling. The dads were oblivious and said nothing, just rolled over on top of their lovers and, fully clothed, humped away until something damp oozed through their jeans. "Can you edit that so I look better?" wondered the dads, wiping themselves down in the bathroom. We smiled, keeping our distance, and told them we'd see what we could do.
IN COLLEGE THE dads grew beards. They bought cars and one night tried acid. We had run out of funding and couldn't shoot. "Remember this," we encouraged the dads, who were giggling at rain.
A FEW YEARS LATER, we received a grant and resumed filming. By then the dads were done college and had found wives to marry. At the altars, the dads said, "I do," and the wives said, "I do," and the dads kissed their new wives and the wives kissed back and then they ran out of the church while people threw rice at them and cheered. The dads and their wives went to Niagara Falls, where they stared silently into all that water and thought, Hmm, and later fell asleep with their shoes on. "Maybe edit in some love," we told the post-production crew. "Okay," they said.
THE DADS AND wives bought houses. The wives taught grade school and brought home children's drawings that they pinned to their fridges with magnetic fruit. The wives looked at the drawings and said, "Aw," in a pointed way. The dads were stuck in middle management; they built workshops in their garages. "That's my workshop in there," they told the wives. "That's my space." We went out into the garages and panned over the workshops, over the workbenches in the workshops, and the tools that would rarely get used. "This is golden stuff," we said to one another. We were making a film about dads.
THERE WERE MOMENTS we didn't get. The dads told us about nights of laughter with their
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