Jernigan (20 page)

I jabbed the O. Somebody better know what to do.

VI

1

The people here are getting sick of my bullshit.

What
is
this document you’re writing? they want to know. Just a simple
list
, we told you: you write down the people you’ve harmed and what you did to them, period. Then you get started making your amends; that’s how the program
works
. But up to now they haven’t really been able to nail me. I’m still trying to sort this stuff
out
, I tell them. You know, what I
did
to people: is it really just this straightforward deal where, pow, you do something shitty and, thud, somebody
feels
shitty? I mean, take Judith. Please. (Little joke.) On the
one hand, this is someone who actually
died
because, bottom line, I made her miserable, right? But then there’s all this stuff about how people are responsible for their own feelings—I mean, I’m responsible for
my
own feelings, right?—so therefore did I really
make
her miserable? They have a name for this kind of talk: the Retreat Into Confusion. Getting befuddled, they say, is one more strategy for avoiding the real issue. No, I tell them, it’s just the
opposite
. What I’m after, I tell them, is a little clarity here, about what
happens
in this world: is that not a real issue? They say writing all this stuff down is only a strategy to gain time. (Or lose time, if you want to think of it that way.) And that makes them feel smart, to think they’ve really got old Jernigan’s number. Which isn’t to say they haven’t. You have to bear with me a little on this, I tell them; I’ve got my own way of doing things. Right, they say, that’s what got you here.

Though of course I almost
didn’t
get here, which is a story outside this story really. More Uncle Fred’s story than mine, anyway: he was the one who called the police; I was only the mumbling thing carried out of his trailer. (I do remember at some point looking down at the bandaged hand and thinking the shape of it looked wrong. But that must’ve been later, in the hospital.) I gather from what Uncle Fred tells me that the hospital and this place have eaten up all the money from selling Heritage Circle and then some. I’d thought a couple of times about health insurance after I got shit-canned, but. At any rate, Uncle Fred says I’m not to worry about any of that now. He says that handling all this stuff has only taken him a couple of vacation days; I know
that
has to be bullshit. And he says it was really Danny who saved my life: by calling him when he did, to say I was headed for New Hampshire in bad shape. He’s the one you ought to be thanking, Uncle Fred says, not me. I tell him, Fuck it, let’s talk about fucking
sports
, man. How about those Islanders? How about the Pittsburgh fucking
Penguins?
But he’s lost his sense of irony or something.

All I remember of that story is what was supposed to be the end.

As the first stars came out over Studebaker Hill, I left the trailer and trudged back up to my car, taking the same roundabout way so as not to defile the open snow. I drove to the state store a couple of towns over—at New Hampshire prices, I had enough money left for
a whole quart—and when I got back, I kept going on past the camp and parked by the frozen pond a mile farther up the road. I took the rubber hose out of the trunk, paid it out into the gas tank until it hit bottom, knelt and sucked until I got gasoline in the mouth, and then laid the end of the hose down so it would keep pissing into the snow. In fact, I thought about swallowing that mouthful of gasoline, but I didn’t know enough about what would happen. Staggering around in the snow, blind and puking, that was no way to go out. So I spat, then picked up handfuls of snow and sloshed them around in my mouth. The walk back to the camp was mostly downhill, but it still takes it out of you to walk in that kind of cold. Only one car passed by, and I saw the lights coming from far enough away so that I had time to crash through the snowbank and hide behind a tree. From the place where you left the plowed road and went down to the trailer I broke new trail, even deeper in the woods and farther from the open field. I could have saved energy by walking in my old footprints, but that wasn’t the idea. The idea was to get there on something like my last legs. Inside, in the dark, I didn’t bother with the stove anymore. I lit a match long enough to locate what blankets there were, blew it out, pulled the blankets over me and got going on that bottle. One of the last things I remember is getting up to go outside and piss, and being pleased to find I couldn’t walk straight. I’d been doubting that the gin was taking hold the way it should, half inclined to blame the bargain price. But now I was lurching in the heroic style, stumbling into one wall, bouncing off it and hitting something else, probably a different wall. I couldn’t really feel the impact. When I finally did get to the door I no longer saw the sense of all this hoo-ha and figured Fuck it, might as well just let ’er go in your pants. It felt warm (though only briefly) and oh such release.

2

But. As I say. Whole other story.

My immediate response to the Dustin business wasn’t to get pants-pissing drunk. Quite the reverse. I decided to consider it a sign, just as I had back when Danny was two and I woke up on somebody’s floor among marble obelisks, and it turned out to be the studio of a man who hadn’t had a drink in twenty years. But that was a self-generated sign, or so I assume: I must have wanted, deep down, to get to a place where I could be saved. Dustin’s killing himself was a sign from outside. I mean, it wasn’t anything I’
d
done. It told me I’d been making a loveless hell here, and that to stop drinking was only one of a bunch of things I had to do. Why wasn’t I using my gifts, such as they were, to serve others? Okay, you’re not a doctor. But you could damn well work in a soup kitchen. Or volunteer in a nursing home. Go to some hospital and hold unwanted babies before they died of not being held. Simply physically held: you could do it with an IQ of twenty. If you were lucky enough to be able-bodied, you dropped your self-absorbed bullshit and you went out and got any job you could get to keep yourself alive so you could help those who weren’t able-bodied. I mean,
anybody
knows this.

But Jernigan is no life-changer. Though willing enough to lie back and let it happen. So I ended up simply resolving to limit things to maybe a beer once in a while but really just
a
beer, and to do better with the little daily stuff. A smile of greeting, a thank you after a meal—oh believe me, I know how
Reader’s Digesty
this all sounds—and really listening to what loved ones are saying instead of finding ways to let them know that you wish they’d leave you the fuck alone. I thought: Martin Sanders’s family is shot to shit, but
you
still have a family. Or what might yet be made to approximate a family. And you’ve been sinking down and down and down into yourself and taking no care of it. Now that was going to stop. I was going to be part of
this household again: take my turn doing dishes and feeding the bunnies. Death-chamber duty too. Danny was going to have a mother and Clarissa was going to have a father and Martha and I were going to have a sex life again and we were going to get a set of friends and everybody was going to do things together. I was going to look into health insurance and so on, and sock away that money from the house in some kind of a good bank thing so it would be there for Danny. I was going to start wearing that fun cowboy jacket. Christmas was only two weeks away, and we were going to have a tree and people over and things in the windows.

I mean, I
say
Dustin’s death was none of my doing, but I should have picked up the clues he’d taken such pains both to drop and to disguise. When he said kids who talked about suicide were crying for help. When he said he would have felt bad if he hadn’t tried everything. When he said it was when you were alone that things got weird. On the other hand, he’d been a devious little fuck, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to
know
how guilty everybody was going to feel afterwards. It wasn’t just me, as I found out. He’d told Danny that the
other
kid in the band, the feral one with the tank top and the platinum hair, was talking suicide. Then there was the kid from the community college—some good police work on this, I have to say—who’d been selling him drugs and who had soaked him a hundred bucks for that twenty-dollar pistol. Dustin had foxed
him
by claiming he’d been getting threats from a gang of Vietnamese kids at the high school because he was giving drugs away to their paying customers. Except there
weren’t
any Vietnamese kids at the high school.

And then there was the father.

I never found out just what the trouble there had been about. But I did sit with the father in their living room the day after the funeral to tell him what I could tell him, though he’d already heard it secondhand from the police. And to explain why I hadn’t called him to say his son was staying in my house and was that okay. A medical emergency that evening, that was the way I put it. That the quote unquote medical emergency was
also
his son’s doing—not that he’d had to twist Clarissa’s arm, probably—didn’t seem like anything the poor bastard needed to know at this point. Jernigan and his lonely burden.

When he went into the kitchen to get me a cup of coffee, I looked around at all the right angles of chrome, glass, stone, black leather. I was the only shapeless thing here. Martin Sanders was thin and looked like a mean son of a bitch. Glasses like Gloria Steinem’s. He could never have had even the minimal flair required to name a kid Dustin. It must have been the wife. Hard, too, to imagine him with a secret collection of videos like the one they found at the house, which sure as hell hadn’t come from Bedford Falls Video. No it wasn’t.

He handed me a black stoneware cup and sat down empty-handed.

“This is my wife’s idea,” he said. “She’s asked me to ask you about it, so that I can then tell it to her. She didn’t seem to feel she could talk to you personally at this point.” He wasn’t doing too well himself. Off came the glasses and out came a white handkerchief from the pocket of the gray wool slacks. When he finished with the handkerchief you could see two little white ovals where the glasses dug into his bony nose.

“It’s the first thing she’s asked of me in God knows
how
long,” he said. Then he said, “You don’t need to hear this.”

“Please,” I said. “If you need to talk.”

“Let me rephrase myself,” he said. “What I mean is, it’s none of your business. And I want you the hell out of my house as soon as I’ve heard what I need to hear. Is that a little clearer?”

3

It was right around this time, gearing up for the holiday season, that we had the closing on the house. Danny and I brought the last couple of carloads of stuff over the day before, and Clarissa came along on one trip to help him go through his clothes. Most of what we brought was boxes of my books, including the Britannica eleventh edition I’d never unpacked since Barrow Street. Another precious legacy to my son. (Little joke.) The rest of his records, some extra blankets (Martha’s request), a few towels. And the color tv, which went straight up to
the kids’ room: in Clarissa’s eyes, my high-water mark as stepfather. Hey, if the kids wanted to think that sticking to the old black-and-white was one more sign of my unselfishness, who was I to enlighten them? Though Danny must’ve known me better.

After signing the papers and handing over the keys, I took the whole family into the city for dinner and a movie. It was going to be dinner and a show but none of the shows sounded any good, big surprise. Martha picked the Russian Tea Room and I said fine. I mean, it could have been Mamma Leone’s. (That was uncalled-for.) We brought a
Daily News
in with us so we could look at movie times, but there weren’t even any movies anybody wanted to see all that much. So after dinner we just walked down to Rockefeller Center and looked at the tree and the skaters and it turned out to be a good family thing to do and then we went back to New Jersey like probably thousands of other New Jersey families that night.

“Dan, what do you say?” I asked him at breakfast the next morning. (Another thing: I was going to be making it to breakfast from now on. And not because I’d been up all night drinking, either. It would be because at bedtime I would have fucked Martha and then gone right off to sleep.) “You busy this weekend?”

He considered this, obviously wondering what a
no
would let him in for. “I don’t know yet,” he said.

“Well, here’s what I was thinking. Why don’t you and me hop in the car and drive up around where Grandpa Jernigan’s old place was and get a tree.”

“What do you mean get a tree?”

“Christmas tree,” I said. “You know, ho ho ho?” Forgetting I wasn’t going to be sarcastic anymore. Okay, so just breeze on past it. “I thought we’d cut our own this year,” I said.

“Isn’t it going to end up costing you just as much in gas anyway?” he said.

“Probably,” I said. “Viewed purely in crass economic terms, it’s undoubtedly a washout. But viewed as a father-son bonding ritual? This could be more precious than diamonds. More lasting than fucking bronze.” I couldn’t help it: he was being willfully stupid.

He stared down at the peanut butter melting into his toast. I wouldn’t have known what to say, either.

“Anybody for more coffee?” said helpful Martha. Danny looked up at her. Clarissa, of course, just sat there twisting platinum hair around a black-nailed finger.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to be such a prick, pardon my French.” This for Clarissa’s benefit. “I’d just like for us to spend some time together, and I thought this might be a nice way to do it. Go off on a little mission.”