Jernigan (21 page)

“Why?” he said. “So I won’t kill myself like Dustin?”

“Good,” I said. “You know, you’re really beginning to show some promise there. Keep it up and by the time you’re my age you might be just as big a prick as your old dad.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Martha.
“Both
of you. You make me want to cover my ears. Danny, why don’t you give your father a chance? And Peter. Stop being so
ugly
. You might as well take a strap to him. At least that would be
clean.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Sorry, Mrs. Peretsky,” he said.

“Listen,” I said, “it
is
a long way up there and everything. We don’t really have to have such a major expedition. It was just a thought.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t care.”

You sullen little son of a bitch
, I almost said.

“Well,” I said, “how about Saturday, then? Leave good and early, get you back in time to do what you want Saturday night—what do you say?”

He stared extra hard at his toast, his brow crumpling with the smile of relief he was suppressing. “Yeah, if that’s okay with you,” he said, in a deep voice that wasn’t quite his own yet. In that moment I loved him so.

And pitied him for what had been done to him, and for the long road ahead. Oh, not the road to Connecticut, I was just using a worn-out metaphor. Though not too worn-out, apparently, for the likes of Jernigan. Because I really did picture Danny, under a featureless sky, on a featureless road heading for a vanishing point, as in
Jon Nagy’s Television Art Book
. Which Santa had brought me one year. My father’s friends always used to come over for Christmas—most of them didn’t have kids—and when I clawed the paper off and held it up they all laughed and cheered.

4

I laid Martha’s ax on the floor in the back seat of the Datsun and got behind the wheel. Danny slumped in the passenger seat half asleep as I bustled, the cowboy jacket over his knees. “Guess we better take the scythe along too,” I said, as if he gave a fuck.

“For what?” he said, then yawned. It was eight in the morning, bright blue sky, fierce sun, frost still on the grass.

“Case we have to clear any brush to get at the tree,” I said. “Don’t want to snag your ax when you’re trying to swing it.” I swung a hypothetical ax to show him. “You want to leave plenty of room around you.” We were talking about things that mattered to men. I had already had three cups of coffee.

He stretched as best he could in a cramped car—more of a squirm really—and settled back down.

Well so of course no matter which way you turned it, the son-of-a-bitching scythe wouldn’t go. God damn little shitbox foreign cars anyway. I ended up having to find a wrench and take off the blade; the snath had to go lengthwise, one end of it up between the front seats.

“How are we supposed to fit a tree in here?” said Danny.

“O ye of little faith,” I said. “We’re not going to try. Going to tie it to the roof. Like a deer.” He didn’t seem to understand what I meant about a deer. It got me thinking, though: if this went all right and we had a good time, why couldn’t Danny and I start going hunting together? Couple of deer rifles, go upcountry and bring home some
real
meat instead of your God damn pissy little rabbits. Meat enough to last us.

When we finally got under way, he took the Walkman out of the dash first thing. I mean, he did ask if I minded, but of course he had you there: if you said you did mind and would rather talk, what the hell kind of a tone did that set for any conversation you were going
to have? As we crossed the GW, I turned my head for a glance at the skyscrapers on such a clear day, and there he was, head resting on the window glass, eyes closed, mouth open. Fleeting thought about which hospital was closest (but not some Bronx one) before I saw his shoulder rise, then fall, then rise. I reached over and locked his door.

Just below Hartford, he suddenly sat up and took off the earphones. The thing had long since clicked off, but he’d slept on through the silence. “How much longer?” he said.

“Forty-five minutes?” I said. “Little more, maybe.” I didn’t want to say another hour.

“Mmmf,” he said.

“You have a good sleep?”

“Had this weird dream,” he said. “You and Mom were in it. It was like I really thought it was real, you know. Like even after I woke up I still thought some of it was true.” He tossed the cowboy jacket into the back seat and did his squirming stretch.

“What did you think was true?” I said.

“I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to explain. Where are we anyway?”

“That’s Hartford,” I said, pointing.

“Are we gonna go past the Colt factory?”

“Right,” I said. “You remember that?”

“Sure,” he said. “I wasn’t
that
little. The horse on top.”

“So what was this dream?” I said, obliged to ask, dreading to hear. The last time I’d heard him mention Judith was the day we’d moved the last stuff out of Heritage Circle. I’d come out of the house with a box of books in time to catch him flipping a thumb at the driveway and saying to Clarissa, “Right there’s the place where my mom bought it.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, “except that you and Mom were both in it and we were doing something. Do they still make guns there?”

“Got me,” I said. “For all I know, they made it into condos now. Colt Condominiums,” I announced in a Don Pardo voice. “All the comforts of home, and none of the horseshit.”

He laughed, probably not so much at the very small joke as at his father saying
shit
to him. Oh, we were doing fine now.

“So,” I said. “You still think a lot about Mom?”

He shrugged. “Not a lot.”

I waited.

“Sometimes I think it’s sad that I don’t think about her.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling,” I said. “You just have to remember that it’s natural, and that it doesn’t mean you love her any less. It’s just that as you go along, your life fills up with new things,
and
people, that need your attention.”

“It just seems like I’m going on and leaving her back there alone,” he said. He began to cry. The first time I’d seen since the funeral. Not that I would have been likely to see. Maybe this was cathartic for him, if there was such a thing as catharsis.

“Danny,” I said. “However it is, I don’t think it’s like that. That people are just left alone somewhere.”

“Well how do
you
think it is?” he said, taking rough swipes at his cheeks with the back of a wrist. “How do
you
know so much?”

“I’m not claiming to know anything,” I said. “I’m only telling you what I think.”

“You think it because that’s what you
want
to think.”

“Could well be,” I said. “This is stuff that to be honest I really can’t help you with a lot. If this is something that’s really troubling you, you could …” Yeah, he could what? “I mean, there are people, you know, priests and so forth, who really, you know, in all sincerity believe they have answers to some of these things. I guess what happened with me is that I just sort of indefinitely put off trying to decide about any of it.”

“But how can you stand not knowing?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You know, most of the time it’s just not what you’re thinking about. Not that I’m recommending the unexamined life, mind you.” I jerked my thumb at the window. “There’s your Colt factory.”

A fluted blue dome, elevated on a circle of white columns. Atop the dome, a golden ball. Atop the golden ball, a rearing golden horse.
Colt guns are better than anything in the world:
that much of the symbolism I understood. The rest of it suggested the thing where the turtle’s resting on the back of whatever it is, back of an elephant. Or the other way around, elephant on the turtle. Some literalist had defaced the ideal blue of the dome with gold stars.

“Dustin used a Colt,” said Danny. “Colt forty-five automatic.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“That’s what Mitchell says.”

“Mitchell’s talking through his hat,” I said. I hit the brakes and shifted down to make the sharp right over the bridge. “It was just some crappy little twenty-two pistol, Danny. Little Mark David Chapman fat-boy special. What, are all the kids romanticizing this thing now?”

“You mean like what Mrs. Peretsky has for the rabbits?”

“So you know about that,” I said.

“Clarissa showed me.” He shrugged. “Pretty weird.”

I pointed again. “Connecticut River, by the way.”

“I
know
, Dad.”

“So,” I said, “have you and Mitchell been thinking about a replacement for Dustin?”

“You can’t replace Dustin,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

“I’m not kidding,” he said. “I mean, it was all his songs and everything. We just sort of tried to play what he told us. He could play guitar as good as me any day. He just played bass so he could sing. You know, nobody else could even
sing.”

“What about Clarissa?” I said. “Wasn’t she singing that day I walked in on your practice?”

“Clarissa?” he said. “She’s a joke.”

I looked over at him.

“Dustin had her sing on a couple things because I think he sort of felt bad for her,” he said. “But she was really just image. You know, we sort of started out with her and then we didn’t know how to tell her it wasn’t happening. I mean, in a way, if this had to happen …”

“Hold the phone,” I said. “What I’m hearing is that you and Mitchell are using this as an excuse to close up shop because you’re afraid to tell Clarissa she can’t sing.”

“Bull
shit.”

“Look. Danny. I realize these things aren’t easy. Obviously Clarissa’s going to get her feelings hurt. I don’t blame her. There’ll probably be a big scene. On the other hand, do you want to give up
your music just to avoid a confrontation?” Me and fucking Robert Young, boy.

“I’m not giving it
up,”
he said. “I’m going to still practice guitar and everything. All I have to do is just make it through the rest of this year and then senior year, and then I can do what I want to anyway.”

“That’s a long time,” I said.

He looked at his watch. “Tell me about it,” he said.
“Dad.”

“Am I also hearing,” I said, “that things aren’t going so well with you and Clarissa?”

“I think she might be a little crazy,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I could just, like, get out of it, you know?”

“Can’t say I’m surprised to hear it,” I said. “Particularly after our little soiree at the emergency room.”

“Except I really like Mrs. Peretsky, you know? Hey Dad?” he said. “Listen, I’m going bonkers without a cigarette, okay? I mean, you know I smoke, right? Do you mind if I have one? You can even lecture me about it if you want, but I’d really like to have one.”

“What the hey,” I said. “Haven’t you figured out by now that I’m one of those permissive parents?”

You never saw cigarettes come out of anybody’s jacket so fast. So he’d moved on to Camels.

“Thanks,” he said, fumbling for matches.

“Just crack your window,” I said, “so you don’t hasten the old man’s inevitable whatever with passive smoke, right?”

He opened his window a crack and blew a great cloud of smoke at it. It smelled wonderful.

“Well, I knew this whole deal was a mistake,” I said. “I absolutely knew the minute we sold the God damn house we’d be sorry.” (Don’t you love the “we”?)

“I guess so,” he said. “But it would’ve been weird anyway to go back there after Dustin, right? And, you know, what happened to Mom and everything.”

“There’s an argument to be made,” I said, “that the thing with Dustin wouldn’t have happened if we’d been in our own house where we belonged.”

“Is that what Mr. Sanders said?”

“No,” I said, “I thought of it all by myself.”

He looked at his watch again. “So how much longer?”

“Half an hour?” I said. “Assuming you mean to Woodstock. So. I guess maybe we should start rethinking this whole arrangement, the two of us.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I should just shut up. I feel bad because you’re like really into it. Getting a Christmas tree and everything. And before, you were sort of drinking a lot. I mean, I guess it’s not all that bad.”

“At my age,” I said, “that would be a ringing testimonial. At
your
age it doesn’t sound like something you should have to settle for.”

“It’s okay. Really.”

“Exactly how crazy is crazy?” I said. He looked puzzled. “You said Clarissa was kind of crazy.”

He inhaled so deeply I imagined I could feel it in my own chest. Then he let it out. “You’re not going to get mad, right?”

“I hadn’t planned on it,” I said.

“Okay, this sounds pretty weird, all right? But you didn’t, like, do anything to her, right? Like the night she was freaking out?”

“Say again?”

“I knew you’d get mad.”

“I’m not
mad,”
I said. “I’m just amazed. I mean, actually I’m not even amazed.” Better tell the story. “She was pretty out of it, and at one point when I was trying to get her to the hospital, I had to stop her from taking her sweatshirt off. Now, what does
she
think was going on?”

He shook his head. “She’s got stories about a lot of stuff,” he said. “Like she says her father used to make her do stuff. At first I used to be really sorry for her.”

“Do stuff,” I said, meaning
Explain
.

“You know,” he said. “But I mean Mrs. Peretsky wouldn’t have ever let anything really happen.”

“Ho, brother,” I said.

The farther we got from Hartford and the river, the hillier the country and the fewer the houses. All the trees bare, and the last tinge
of green draining out of the grass. You could see the different shapes of the different kinds of trees: some squat with branches like antlers, some straight and slender. It amounted to a moral failing not to have learned the names of trees. A moral failing, too, that this landscape looked dead and tattered to me, instead of sternly beautiful. In this part of the world, if you couldn’t see a leafless tree as sternly beautiful you were in deep shit half the year. And probably pissing away the other half worrying that it was transient.