The Hero's Body by William Giraldi

Author:William Giraldi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

In the closing weeks of the following summer, I returned to New Jersey to attend Drew University. My father helped me sardine my stuff into his work van, the same van my brother and I would clean out the week of his death. He then drove me the forty minutes north to the town of Madison and we toted crates of books and clothes into my dorm room, a garden-level double I’d have to myself. I could see from his face that he was delighted for me. “Not bad,” he said, inspecting the closet, the bathroom, the desk drawers. “Not too bad.” Out in the cul-de-sac where we’d parked, he passed me a hundred-dollar bill, and we embraced there, stiffly and manfully, in the August afternoon.

The last photos I’d ever take of him would be in that same cul-de-sac, two years later, on a Sunday in mid-spring, just a month before his fatal motorcycle crash. He stopped to visit me on his new bike, a Yamaha R1, wearing full racing regalia, and the photos show him as he was about to leave: pulling on his gloves, strapping on his helmet, tightening his boots. In one shot, taken before he zipped the suit to his throat, there’s something I only recently noticed, something I’d forgotten: tucked against his chest is my first story publication, a glossy magazine that has long since been shuttered. He’d spotted copies on my desk and asked to have one. There’s only a sliver of the magazine visible, and in all the hours I’d spent looking at these photos since his death, I’d mistaken it for his T-shirt. Whether or not he’d read the story in the month he had left to live, I cannot say. But he’d made that gesture for me, that show of interest I imagine must have been genuine.

I watched him pull away that afternoon, glide slowly from the cul-de-sac and through the wooded lanes, the bike’s chrome-throated growl fearsome and majestic in the Sunday calm of campus. When I could no longer see him, I could still hear the engine as it approached the front gate. I waited there, my breath quickened, and when he made it to the main road, he hit the throttle, and I listened to the air-slicing wail, the aluminum song of his rising through first gear, through second, through third, his sublime screaming toward the highway that would take him home.

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