Jernigan (19 page)

“I knew we’d get a time check sooner or later,” I said. “Would you mind very much if I take my coat off and sit down? And get myself a drink? This has not been a pleasant evening.” At least she’d gotten it warm in here. I took off my coat and draped it over a chair. “I trust
you
had a delightful time, whatever it was you saw fit to do.” I got the gin out of the refrigerator and—in deference to Martha’s sensibilities—a peanut butter jar out of the dish drainer.

“I saw
fit,”
she said, “to go to work. As you know.”

“What do you mean
as I know?”

“We had this conversation yesterday morning, Peter. I can’t believe that you’ve forgotten.”

I shrugged. “So refresh me.”

“Peter,” she said. “Yesterday morning. You were sitting right here”—she pointed at what had become my chair at the kitchen table—“and I told you that I was going to be gone nights because I was back
working at Alexander’s. For the holidays. You’ve heard of holidays? You know, Christmas? Or is that just all beneath your notice? And as a
matter
of fact we talked about it again this morning, because I said I wasn’t going to be home until really late because we’re open till midnight and what were you going to do about supper? Right? You don’t remember this?”

I went back over to the sink. A little water in with the gin might look less compulsive. More debonair. I stirred with my index finger. “Yeah, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so.”

“You honestly don’t remember.”

“Yeah, right, I do remember now,” I said, sitting down at the table. I had no idea what the fuck she was talking about.

“Now what happened tonight?” she said.

“Where to begin,” I said. “Okay, first of all I had one of Danny’s little friends tell me he might be suicidal.”

“That
Danny
is?” she said. “Or the friend is?”

“Please,” I said, holding up my hand. “This is not the time. So first I find this out—no, actually, first I find out this friend of Danny’s has taken up residence in my house.
Then
I find out Danny is suicidal.”

“I wasn’t making a joke, by the way, Peter. I was honestly confused. Sorry if I’m so
stupid.”

“Then,” I said, ignoring this, “I get back here, where I find your daughter in the midst of having a bad acid trip and screaming to be taken to the emergency room. Where we have just finished spending an edifying several hours cooling our fucking heels and finally getting in to see a doctor and getting shot up with tranquilizers. Plus a little interrogation about the living arrangements around here. Just for good measure.”

“Oh my God,” said Martha, looking toward the hallway. “What happened? Is she all right?”

“How the fuck would I know?” I said. “I mean, you saw her. She walks and talks. Whatever they shot her up with put a stop to the screaming meemies at least. Which believe me is no small boon.”

“Oh my God.”

“But what I particularly wish you’d been around for was when they were giving her the shot and she tied herself off with her belt. That was really attractive. You know, to get a vein up? You should’ve seen
the doctor taking
that
in.” I stopped for a swallow of that gin. Pissed me off that I’d watered it down. “You told me Clarissa had once had a little drug problem,” I said. “You never told me she was shooting up, for Christ’s sake.”

“What did you
think
I meant, that she was taking too many aspirin?”

I took another swallow. “You should have told me.”

“Right,” she said. “So you’d look at her like a freak. And me like some welfare mother. She needs to be treated like a normal child, Peter. It’s part of her recovery.”

“Right,” I said. “Some recovery. She’s recovered so well that all she does anymore is drop a little acid now and then and jump out of her fucking skin.” What I didn’t add was that it was a friend of Danny’s who’d given it to her; this didn’t really fit into a rant about Martha and her daughter. “Jesus,” I said, “some fucking situation I got myself into
this
time.”

“Well,” she said, “you didn’t
use
to mind it.”

“I didn’t use to know what it
was,”
I said.

“The rate you put
that
stuff away,” she said, “you’re in a really great position to be making judgments on Clarissa.”

“Whoa,” I said.
“Touché
. Too fuckin’ shay.
I’m
fucked up, right?
I’m
the fucked-up one.” Jabbing a forefinger into my chest. Then I had to laugh. “God, I sound just like Ralph Kramden,” I said. “Did you hear it?”

She stared. “Is there some particular time of the day,” she said, “when you might be sober enough for us to actually talk? I think we could really use it.”

“I’m
ready to talk,” I said. “What. Because I can stand
outside
myself for one second, I’m suddenly not in any shape to
deal
with anything? I was in enough shape to get your daughter to the hospital. You want to talk about shape?”

“I’m going to go check on Clarissa,” she said. “You’ll excuse me?”

“Thank you,” I prompted her.

“For what?” she said. “What are you thanking
me
for?”

“Forget it,” I said. “Go.” I flopped a sloppy-wristed hand to dismiss her. “You might check on Danny while you’re at it.”

“Of course,” she said.

I sat there at the table, in my accustomed chair, head of the family,
and drank off the rest of that watered-down gin. Waste of good gin to water it down, though actually it wasn’t because it was still the same quantity of gin. Well, at least Danny was safe in bed, presumably, so that much could wait. But this whole thing was unbelievable. I felt like just crashing on the couch tonight, but I couldn’t even do
that
because then in the morning the kids would know there’d been a fight. Morning meaning when the alarm went off in a few hours. Some schoolday tomorrow was going to be.

I got up, went to the refrigerator, took a good belt of gin straight out of the bottle, then poured the rest of it into the peanut butter jar, and that was all she wrote for Old Mr. Gordon’s. I sat down at the table again to drink this last inch and try to figure out where to sleep. Go back to my house? While it still
was
my house? Except the God damn fat kid was there. And doing what? Innocently revelling in videos and canned frosting to console himself for not getting into Clarissa’s pants? Or playing a far deeper game? I mean, what if he
hadn’t
simply popped a Pez or some such, and all the time he’d been talking to me he’d been sneakily tripping his brains out, holding himself together while he watched, say, my face disintegrate. Which was probably even more dangerous than manifestly freaking out, like Clarissa. I thought about it in terms of pressure: Clarissa’s freakout had been an ultimately harmless outrush, whereas whatever was building up under that surface that Dustin was using so much counterpressure to maintain—no need to finish the thought. Then I wondered if thinking of the mind in this kind of Newtonian way made any sense. Which was as far as I’d managed to get with my thinking when Martha came back in.

“I guess they’re both asleep,” said Martha, sitting down in her accustomed chair, the one across from mine. “I kind of tapped on the door and all I heard was breathing.”

“Hey, as long as they’re breathing,” I said. “Here.” I fumbled in my pants pocket. “Doctor gave me a list of, I don’t know, places you can call.”

“Places,” she said.

“Places you could get her into treatment,” I said.

I held aloft the piece of paper, let it drop, and shot it across the tabletop at her with the flick of a fingertip. It came to rest against a
plate smeared with dried egg yolk. Fucking thing had sat there since breakfast, and now it was getting on toward breakfast again.

Martha picked up the piece of paper and stared at it, then put it down. “Basically,” she said, “what Clarissa needs is for the last ten or fifteen years not to have happened.”

“So you just throw up your hands, right?”

“So what do
you
propose? Hand the problem back to the experts so you don’t have to deal with it?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Why is this
my
problem?”

“I meant anybody,” she said. “So
one
doesn’t have to deal with it, all right? But actually, yes: you, Peter. Because I actually was stupid enough to think you could’ve been some help. God, from her father to you … I’
m
the one who ought to be locked up.”

I got to my feet. “Believe I’ll put up on the couch for tonight,” I said. “Fascinating as this all is.”

“Uh uh,” she said. “No. I believe you’ll put up in your own house tonight. I don’t want you here. You’re welcome to call a taxi if you’re not able to drive yourself. But I want you gone.”

“I am fully well able,” I said, “to drive myself.” I was man enough, barely, not to plead that an LSD-maddened teenager might be waiting at my house. Behind the door with a knife, say, to cut out my heart to see how it worked. I raised the peanut butter jar, said “Here’s how,” drained the last half inch of gin and wiped my hand across my mouth. “ ‘Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh,’ ” I said. “ ‘The something something something something. The words revolve—’ I don’t know, goes on from there.” I raised an Uncle Fred forefinger. “ ‘Some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.’ ”

“And I can really do without the ironies,” she said. “Whatever they’re supposed to mean.”

“You
, maybe,” I said. “But as for me.”

I put on my coat and felt around in the right-hand pocket for keys. Good: two bunches; one car keys, one house keys. You could tell the house keys by feel. They were the ones with Powerful Pete on the key ring, unless that was the car keys. Probably not your finest hour, getting yourself kicked out of here before you were able to talk your son out of killing himself.

“Just remember,” I said, hand on the doorknob. “If anything
happens to me”—I was thinking Manson murder, but she probably thought I just meant a car wreck—“you’re going to have some pret-ty tall explaining to do to old Danny.”

“I’ll risk it,” she said.

“Famous last words,” I said. Meaning from my point of view.

6

Late as it was, the lights were still on when I pulled into the driveway behind what’s-his-name’s Cadillac. Dustin. And I noticed for the first time—God knows how long it had been there—that the
FOR SALE
sign had been replaced by a similar sign reading
SOLD
. A sign, in other words, not to benefit me but to bring in new business. I was giving the fuckers free advertising! I tugged and wrestled it out of the frozen ground, took it onto the breezeway and threw it clattering on the cement floor, a warning to all exploiters. And incidentally to put young Dustin on notice, just in case he was thinking of trying to Manson-murder me, that I was coming in angry and dangerous. The kitchen door was still unlocked. I walked in and took off my coat—the little bastard certainly hadn’t stinted himself on the heat that I was paying for—tossed it on the kitchen table and called “Anybody home?” But he had the tv going. “Is this the place?” a tv voice was saying.

“Of course it’s the place.” James Stewart, boy, you could tell that braying voice. So Dustin had his movie on.

The other voice said, “Well, this house ain’t been lived in for twenty years.”

I went into the living room. Dustin was on the sofa, lying on his side facing the blaring tv. Bert pulled his police car up beside Ernie’s cab. “What’s up, Ernie?” he said. I watched them watch James Stewart approach the ruined house.

“I don’t know,” said Ernie, “but we better keep an eye on this guy.
He’s bats.” Bert was Ward Bond, who ended up on
Wagon Train
.

“Hey Dustin?” I said. Dead to the world, boy.

“Mary! Mary! “James Stewart called. “Tommy! Pete! Jamie! Zuzu! Where are you?”

I didn’t want him finally rousing himself to get up and go into the bedroom and finding me there. Thought I’d better make sure, too, that he wasn’t just lying there bug-eyed and catatonic.

“They’re not here, George,” said Henry Travers. “You have no children.”

I touched his shoulder. “Dustin?”

“Where are you?” said James Stewart. “What have you done with them?”

Dustin didn’t move.

“All right, put up your hands.” I looked back at the screen. Ward Bond had pulled a gun on James Stewart. I didn’t want to miss the scene that was coming up right after this, where his mother is all hard-faced and doesn’t recognize him.

I gripped Dustin’s shoulder lightly, just fingertips, and shook. Flesh felt loose, strangely heavy.

“Bert!” James Stewart brayed. “Thank heaven you’re here.” Then I looked down and saw the stilled trickle of what looked like bright red paint, down across his cheek to the corner of his half-open mouth. It came from a hole in his temple too small to stick a pencil into.

“Stand back,” said Ward Bond.

This was probably a practical joke, right?

“Bert,” said James Stewart, “what’s happened to this house? Where’s Mary? Where’s my kids?”

Then I saw the little pistol on the floor, right beneath the hand drooping over the edge of the sofa: instantly knew it was Martha’s, instantly imagined Danny slipping it to him for protection, instantly saw Danny led away to jail. (It
was
a 22, but of course not Martha’s; they ended up pressing some kind of charges against the kid who’d sold it to him.) I put the back of my hand up to his nose and mouth, as a flirting lady would to a courtly gentleman. No breath coming out. Then I touched the hand. Never in my life touched anything like that flesh, boy. Soft and cold.

I ran to the kitchen for the phone. Though I might as well have walked. Might as well have let a year go by.

“Look,” said Ward Bond, “now why don’t you be a good kid and we’ll take you in to a doctor. Everything’s going to be all right.”