If Jack's in Love (32 page)

Snead was being real friendly whenever he saw me. One day he came over with his second-oldest son and they scraped and painted the house. Snead said he couldn't stand seeing that word TRASH peeking through the cheap paint Stan and I had coated on. Which was right nice of him. All he charged us for was the paint.

The other major change was my school. After my first week back, the principal and other functionaries had a meeting with my mother and suggested it might be less traumatic for everyone involved if I were discreetly placed in a school in the next district. I had already passed Myra twice in the halls and both times her lower lip had started blubbering, so to my way of thinking this wasn't such a bad idea. We lived on the border between the two districts, and the new one wasn't any farther away than the old one. As a matter of fact, I liked the new school. The name Witcher didn't mean anything to the students there, although it eventually got around that my brother was wanted for murdering a boy. Which was a plague on me in many ways. There were moments, fleeting moments, when I would feel a young boy's unreasoning happiness, the kind you might feel on an autumn afternoon when you remember that the world is huge and full of girls and you have your whole life ahead of you. And just like that the sharp blade of a shadow would cut through my light and I would see Gaylord's grimacing image and accept his violent demise as a curse on the race of Witchers forevermore.... Not that I was tempted very often by joy. I would kill it whenever it threatened me.

Just before the school year began Mom came in my room and gathered up my dirty clothes for the wash. While she was going through the pockets she found Myra's ring.

“What's this?”

Of course, I'd already informed her about the ring I got from Gladstein. Now she examined it curiously.

After a while she gave me a little peek. “Can I wear it?”

For some reason that pleased me. It seemed like the perfect ending for the ring.

“Sure Mom, you'll be my steady girl now.”

 

 

ONE DAY LATE IN OCTOBER, as she came home from work, she was met by two men clambering out of a small car with a big 6 stenciled on its side. One of the men, with a dimple in his chin, was holding a microphone. The other, less telegenic, was bungling about in the background with a huge camera. They wanted to record for posterity Mom's bemused reaction to the news of the arrest, in Portland, Oregon, of Stanley Witcher for the murder of Gaylord Joyner.

She had heard nothing about it until that very moment. She said, “What was he doing in Portland, Oregon?”

That didn't satisfy the man with the microphone.

“How do you feel to learn your son has been arrested for murder?”

“Not too good, this is the first I've heard of it.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“Did what?”

“Committed the murder.”

She began to murmur something low and the man thrust his microphone forward to catch what she was saying. That only flustered her, and she quit.

“Would you mind repeating what you just said?”

The man with the camera was angling around, trying to get a better shot.

“I was praying.”

“For your son?”

“No, it's just a thing I do. You go into the cloud of unknowing and ask for help. That's all you ask for, is help. I got that out of a book I read.”

The man lowered his microphone.

I guess her reaction didn't have enough human interest to satisfy the station, because she didn't make the news that night; but if you ask me the reporter missed a splendid chance to run a provocative story on The Praying Atheist of El Dorado Hills.

That very evening Stan phoned from Oregon; I was listening from the next room. “Stan,” I heard Mom say, “I want you to tell me the God's honest truth. Did you kill Gaylord Joyner?”

She was silent awhile and then she said, “I see.”

When she hung up she told me Stan claimed he didn't do it; he said the cops were after him because he had long hair and had attended antiwar demonstrations when he was in San Francisco.

We never said another word on the subject.

Certain esoteric procedures were undertaken so that my brother could be extradited to our town to stand trial. A week later he was transported to the county jail in handcuffs. I saw it on the news. The man with the dimpled chin was covering his arrival.

From time to time a phone call would come in from the jail and Mom would take a taxi so she could visit her incarcerated son. I never went with her. I was out of touch with the Witcher men, although sometimes she would tell me, “Your father says hello.”

To contact Pop you had to dial a service station across the street from this motel where he was staying and speak with some guy named Jeff Davis and then you'd have to wait for Pop to call back, which might take hours. I spoke with him a couple of times and he said he wanted to get together, but he never acted on it.

I wasn't interested anyway. I had taken up stamp-collecting.

 

 

SHORTLY AFTER MOM'S APPROPRIATION of Gladstein's ring, she came in my room and gave me a look. It was a school night and probably I was studying for a test. Or maybe perusing a philatelic volume.

“What?”

“I need to ask you something.”

She gazed all around the room. It was mine now. I had found an old 45 record player in the attic and placed it on top of the desk where Stan's stereo used to be. My taste in music ran to the 5th Dimension and Dionne Warwick.

“How much did you pay for this ring, you never told me.”

“I didn't, I traded another one in for it.”

“But you got the first ring from Mr. Gladstein too.”

“Yes ma'am.”

“So how much did you pay for the first ring?”

“Fifty cents.”

Mom was sitting in the desk chair. Her hands were in her lap. She wasn't wearing the ring, she was rolling it between her fingers.

“You know, ever since I found this I've been having doubts about it. I've been looking and looking at it and thinking, ‘Something here isn't right.' Well, today after I got off work I took it to the jewelry store at Dogwood Downs so I could have it appraised. And do you know what the jeweler there told me? He told me this is a genuine diamond.”

“You're kidding. Let me see that, Gladstein told me it was fake.”

“Well, he wasn't being truthful, although God knows why.”

I held it to my eyes. “Maybe he didn't know.”

“He had to, he's a professional jeweler.”

The thing was sparkling luminously between my fingers as it never had when it was mere crystal. I lowered it and gazed at my mother in amazement.

“How much did the guy say it was worth?”

She shook her head. She wouldn't tell me. She reached out and I handed the ring over.

“We have to take this ring back to Mr. Gladstein,” she said.

“No way! It's mine. I gave it to Myra and she had it on her finger. I can't give it back.” Parting with the ring seemed a heartbreaking prospect, even though I had once tossed it over my shoulder.

But I could see Mom was going to be adamantine about it. She'd put on her Kirby brow, and now she was glowering at me from across the room. “This ring is too valuable,” she said. “You're telling me you paid fifty cents for this, and that is not right. I don't know what Mr. Gladstein was thinking when he gave you this ring, but we can't accept it.”

“What do you mean, ‘we'?”

“I should think I'm involved in this.”

“It's my ring, not yours. I'm the one that paid for it.”

“Fifty cents is not a reasonable price to pay for this ring.”

“How much did the guy say it's worth?”

Mom lowered her head. “He offered a thousand dollars on the spot.”

“A thousand dollars! Give me that ring!”

“Hold on, you just wait.”

“That's my ring!” I shouted.

“It is not your ring, it's Mr. Gladstein's.”

“He sold it to me! I bought it and it's mine!”

I was ready to cry. A thousand dollars!

“It wasn't right of him to let you have this ring for fifty cents.”

“He can do anything he wants with his rings, they're his!”

To me it was pretty cut-and-dried. Mom's scrupulousness was going to cut me out of a fortune rightfully mine, and all because she wasn't a Christian and therefore had to prove to everybody how good she was. I was furious she'd allow her atheistic niceties to come between me and my ring. We argued all night. I accused her of meddling where she didn't belong. And to think I'd been nice enough to let her wear it! She slipped the ring back on her finger, which meant the only way I could get it off was to use force.

My fury was justified, and righteous. I shouted in a way I'd never shouted at her. I cursed her, I called her dirty names. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted her to know the strength of my feelings.

She grew stern and insisted I apologize, and I wouldn't. There was a lot of storm and stress—hollering, slamming of doors, etc. In the end we agreed to take the matter to Gladstein.

It so happened I had been visiting Gladstein's shop after school. He would allow me to sit behind the counter and say “May I help you?” to the customers if they came in. Our friendship had deepened during that period. Actually, he was the only friend I had.

By now he knew all about Myra's returning the ring during our final rendezvous. He had listened to the story with great interest, laughing out loud and energetically lifting his eyebrows. What a rip-roaring tale it had turned out to be, what with my brother bludgeoning and burying Gaylord while Myra and I carried on a forbidden romance. He insisted I should keep the ring forever. He told me to stay open to its power: “Always remain ready, that's the romantic attitude.”

Needless to say, I was counting on him to back me up in my argument.

The next day we went to his store. Gladstein's initial response when Mom challenged him on the value of the ring was to play dumb. She told him about the jeweler at Dogwood Downs, a guy named Bledsoe, whom Gladstein, apparently, knew very well.

“Bledsoe said the rock is real? I'll be darned, let me see that thing.”

He put the knob in his eye.

“Yes...amazing.”

He took the knob out.

“Well, looks like Bledsoe might be right. This does appear to be a diamond.”

“Moses,” Mom said. “Stop acting so innocent, you knew that ring was real.”

“No no, I just didn't look closely enough. These things happen. I must have reached in the drawer and...” He snuck me a quick peek. I remembered perfectly well he had fetched the ring from the safe, but I certainly wasn't going to say so.

Meanwhile Mom was tapping her toe and assessing the diplomatic approaches to deceit altruistically motivated.

“Moses, you must have known.”

“Nah, I just handed him the first thing I came across. He wanted to impress his girl, you know.”

“You mean Myra Joyner, whom I specifically asked him not to associate with.”

“You did? Well, I didn't know that. I'm acquainted with Mrs. Joyner. Knew the boy too, the one that, you know . . .”

Mom said, testily, “I would like you not to interfere in the way I raise my sons.”

“Interfere! I love this kid. I was trying to help, that's all. In fact,” Gladstein bellowed, laughing, “the kid came out a lot better than I did. Right, Witcher?”

I grinned, futilely.

“He didn't come out any way,” Mom said, “because we're returning the ring.”

“Well, do what you want. But the kid paid for it. I mean, sure, I charged the wrong price, but that's my tough luck, that's business.”

“Moses, he did not pay for it. He traded you a fifty-cent ring and I don't want my son growing up thinking life is that cheap. I want him to learn the value of things.”

Gladstein clawed at his goateed jowls while the dogs sniffed at the door.

“I don't think life is cheap,” I said.

“You shut up,” Mom told me.

“How am I going to learn the value of things if I'm not allowed to own anything valuable?” I looked pleadingly at Gladstein.

“What can I do,” he said, “the kid paid fifty cents, it was a legitimate sale. The ring is his.”

“It's not so hard to figure out, Moses. Return the fifty cents.”

And that's what happened. Gladstein deposited two quarters into my palm and Mom steered me out of the store. When I turned to glance back at him, she shoved me along.

“I hate you,” I said, walking home. “I could have sold that ring and had money for college.”

I figured college would fill her with regret.

“That's nice, telling your mother you hate her.”

When we passed the Pudding woods I flung the two quarters out of my hand and heard the faint thud of their falling amongst the trees.

“That was real grown-up, Jack. How old are you? Let me tell you something, you're going to be a lot harder than your father or brother ever were. You'll never do anything wrong, not you. But my God are you going to be hard.”

I didn't know what she meant by that. Her saying it filled me with anxiety.

I tried to reconcile myself to being hard. I even liked the image—me, hard. But then it began to bother me, mainly because she stopped speaking right after she said it. It was as though my future character defects already were filling her with loathing.

For the rest of the evening I followed her around. I didn't say anything, because I didn't want her to believe I was apologizing. Still, I followed her. If she went in the kitchen I followed her. When she went to watch TV I sat nearby. I was waiting for her to take back what she said.