The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [214]
My mother watched the news with us, made fun of it without knowing we were involved, and then she walked off to cook dinner while Dana and I sat very, very quietly in the haze of our own wonder. Remember: we were ten. We knew we had done this, but we didn’t believe it. We didn’t know what we had done, but we were proud of it. “Do you believe in UFOs?” I asked her, belief and understanding all jumbled.
My father didn’t want to make people stupider or mock stupidity or celebrate stupidity. When the farmer said, “The shape. The shape is so . . . beautiful, so . . .” and trailed off, my father was right there with him in spirit. I suspect that he wished, of all the participants in this whole enterprise, to be that farmer, to be fooled. My father had given him (and the world) this glimpse of something hidden. He was only dissatisfied to be the giver and not the recipient.
This may be the closest I ever felt to him. Together we had reshaped the world, changed how some people viewed life, the universe, everything. Adulthood, even more alluring to a ten-year-old, was where magic happened, thanks to this superman who was my father. We were an elite. He had chosen and trained us. The judges and jailers were my enemies, too.
It was two weeks before he stole this feeling from me. “Say, listen, Arthur, I know how hard it is to keep secrets. And when you let one slip, you know, it can feel like it won’t go any further, or that it didn’t even really happen. You can almost make yourself believe you didn’t do it.” I immediately struggled to look as innocent as I was, which made me look spectacularly guilty. Despite my father’s history, I was not totally aware what it meant that my best friend at school, Doug Constantine, was the son of Ted Constantine, a prosecutor in the Hennepin County attorney’s office under Gary Flakne. But my father thought he knew what it meant, and he was convinced that I had boasted to my buddy, who told his father, who then contacted the law in Nobles County, who in turn had politely requested that my father pay a call at the sheriff’s office within twenty-four hours. “No one is saying you squealed on us,” he said, though my eyes stung that he was saying precisely that. “It’s just that it must have been hard not to let your pal know about this great thing.”
My denials never moved him, I know. To his credit, even though he thought I had unbagged the cat, he wasn’t obviously angry at me. It was not going to be a big deal for him. He didn’t mind paying the fines, since he did acknowledge that the farmer (“a working man,” he said in one of his expansive friend-of-the-proletariat moments) had lost some money (though not nearly so much as he’d made from tourists paying to roam slack-jawed through our art).
His anger would have been preferable. Being wrongly accused of anything by anyone is bad enough to a boy, and I certainly didn’t like suddenly feeling myself pushed out of my father’s magic circle. But worse was that our wonder-working was wondrously worked into something grubby. All his talk about wizards fell away. He was just a semicompetent conspirator rethinking whom in the gang he could trust, like kids on a playground reshuffling, again, who was in and who was out. My father’s confidence in me (which was the early entry ticket to adulthood) and adulthood itself (a place of wonder-working and pranksterism) now both appeared childish, petty. I wasn’t very good at articulating this anger, other than to tell Dana over and over that he was a jerk.
“He knows it wasn’t you,” she reassured me, adjusting the troll dolls in the tabletop theater he had built