Fitz - By Mick Cochrane Page 0,1

It was like going fishing. That same sense of anticipation. In this, Fitz, who can be easily bored and distracted, has patience. He’s willing to wait. After nearly an hour of hanging out here last Saturday afternoon—his mom thought he was at band practice—Fitz saw his father emerge in shorts and a ball cap, and followed him to the local co-op. Watched him fill a basket with organic produce.

Fitz noticed things about his dad, and later, back home in his bedroom, he wrote them down in the notebook where he kept his songs. Long fingers. Likes Granny Smith apples, red grapes. Doesn’t check prices. Wallet full of twenties. It felt top-secret and incriminating, like some kind of CIA dossier.

Gradually, after three or four of these outings, it became something more than a game for Fitz. Once, when he realized he’d missed his dad’s departure from work, he felt such an unexpected crushing sadness. He’d had no idea how much it meant to him, how much was at stake.

He wrote a song about his dad, his building actually. He’d been thinking about the rough touch of those walls, their imposing, impenetrable mass. The U.S. Army built Fort Snelling because it was afraid of Indian raids. Fitz wondered what his father was afraid of.

You’re living in a fortress,

You’re living all alone.

You’re living in a fortress

Trapped behind your walls of stone.

There’s bars on your windows,

Double chain across your door.

There’s bars on your windows,

So scared you don’t go out no more.

Robbers and muggers and thieves,

The bad guys that you fear.

Robbers and muggers and thieves,

Watch out: they’re drawing near.

When Fitz showed it to Caleb, he seemed impressed, as impressed as he ever got. “Not the usual angst,” he said. Caleb played it as a slow blues in A, and Fitz followed along with a little walk on the bass. Caleb read Fitz’s words off his crumpled notebook and sang them in his bluesman’s growl, part Howlin’ Wolf, part Cookie Monster. Caleb once confessed that he sometimes wished he were black, blind, born in the Delta. He is, in fact, white, sighted, and was born in South St. Paul. But Caleb has soul. His voice can sound ancient, ravaged and sinister, like something from a scratchy 78. He sang Fitz’s song with great feeling, eyes closed. Hearing his words sung with such passion, thinking about his father’s building, where he’d stood just the day before touching the rough stubble of the walls, Fitz felt something complicated and jagged working through his insides—not the usual angst, Caleb was right about that, it was something else entirely.

Before long, the crazy cat-and-mouse game with his father became more important to Fitz than his so-called real life. He still went to school, of course, he studied geometry and biology, he ate dinner with his mother and helped load the dishwasher. They talked about their days. He listened to music in his room and texted his friends. He played his bass. He stared at a yearbook picture of the lovely Nora Flynn and tried to think of an excuse to call her. But somehow, that life, that public routine, came to seem like just filling time, going through the motions.

It was a performance. That’s what it was. A one-man show staged for the benefit of his mother, his teachers, his friends. He knew the script and he could pull it off. But Fitz the son, Fitz the student, Fitz the friend—that wasn’t him. It was like him, it was a part of him. It’s just that there was more to him than anyone realized.

He’d be working on a math problem, trying to figure out the area of some polygon, or he’d be talking to Caleb about some new song the two of them should try to work up, but all the while he’d be thinking about his father, planning his next spy mission. The real drama of his life had become secret, had gone underground.

At some point, watching was not enough. He was no longer satisfied being a spectator. He wanted to get off the sidelines, to get in the game. If seeing his father was a drug—sometimes it felt like that, mood-altering—he needed a stronger dose. Like the man in the Edgar Allan Poe story obsessed with the old guy’s vulture eye, after a long period of secret watching, he felt compelled to action. That feeling in his gut when he saw his dad—he needed to do something about it.

This was his logic. He wanted to spend some time with