Jernigan (31 page)

“Oh come on,” I said. “So she didn’t change the name.”

“Danny
don’t!”
cried Clarissa.

I turned and there was Danny pointing the little pistol and Clarissa reaching for him.

“Clarissa get the hell
away
from him,” I said. She moved. “Danny. What do you think you’re doing?”

“I want him to get out of here,” said Danny.

“He was just about to leave,” I said, giving Rusty Ronson a look. A steelier look, I must say, than I’d dared give him before. “Now put that thing up.” Danny didn’t move.

“Hey,” said Rusty Ronson, “I like this Danny Boy.”

“I don’t like
you,”
said Danny.

“Danny
enough,”
I said. “He’s on his way. Now put it down now.” I took a step toward him and he moved the gun so it was pointed, wavering, at the space between Rusty Ronson and me.

“Dad,” he said. “I’m really serious.”

Rusty Ronson laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Beautiful. I’m outta here. Okay, partner,” he said to Danny, “now all’s I’m doing, I’m just going in the other room get my coat—”

“Clarissa,” said Danny, not looking at her, “go in get him his coat, all right?” He moved the gun so it was pointing back at Rusty Ronson, who put his hands up cowboy-style.

Clarissa brought in a stinking leather Eisenhower jacket.

“Okay, I’m just putting on the jacket,” said Rusty Ronson. He put on the jacket. Then he moved toward his bag. “What I’m doing now, I’m just getting my bag off the chair, right?” he said. He slung it over his shoulder. “Danny?” he said. “Been a pleasure. Clarissa? Don’t forget your old man now.”

He saluted, wrist limp, fingers straight across the eyebrows, and then he was out the door. Clarissa ran into the living room and up the stairs.

“You
, boy,” I said to Danny, “are fucking crazy.” I heard Clarissa’s door slam. “You give me that thing immediately.”

“He knows he’s not supposed to come here,” said Danny, heading for the door. “He was watching the house until Mrs. Peretsky left. She’s got papers on him.”

All news to me.

“Now, enough,” I said. I stood with my back against the door. “You don’t know what you’re getting into. He’s on
drugs
, this man, he could have a
gun
for all you know, he might be
waiting
out there. I’m calling the police.”

Outside, a car engine started.

“That’s
not
a real great idea, Dad,” said Danny. “All he’s going to do is say I was pointing a gun at him.” I turned around and, with my index finger, parted the calico curtain that hid the panes of glass in the top half of the door. I peered through and watched red taillights recede. They winked and vanished over the crest of the hill.

“He leave?” said Danny.

“Sure,” I said, letting the curtain drop, “for
now.”
I went over and
grabbed the receiver off the wall: dial tone in my ear. Danny sprang at me and clawed the cradle down: dial tone stopped.

“Please, Dad, just
forget
it, okay? He’s not going to come back. All the cops are going to do, they’re going to come here, they’re going to probably find the gun, then they’re going to search me and Clarissa’s room, and—you know.”

Well, now I did.

Danny opened the door and walked outside, long-legged cowboy swagger, as far as the street. I watched him standing there, his head sweeping slowly, all the way left, all the way right, all the way left again. His skinny neck. A couple of snowflakes came down. Then a few more. The way he stood there reminded me of his first day of real school. 1977. And him, six years old, standing at the end of the driveway, lunch bag in hand. Even then he knew lunch boxes were strictly for kids. Judith and I watched him from the living room window: he never turned around.

He came back in and laid the gun on the kitchen table. “Dad,” he said, “could you do something with that, put it somewhere? I don’t think it’s that great of an idea for Clarissa to know where it is tonight.” Then he went upstairs. Neither of them came down again.

2

I sat and drank more gin. Got out Martha’s Rand McNally Road Atlas and looked at New Hampshire-Vermont. Oh, I knew the way to Uncle Fred’s camp: I just wanted to look at the lone dot and at the red and blue roads like veins and arteries. Then turned on the tv and watched the Channel 9 news. At least we weren’t on it: there was that to be said for the Channel 9 news. I preferred the Channel 7 news because I was hotter for Kaity Tong than I was for this one on Channel 9, whatever her name was, but the Channel 7 news wasn’t on yet. I mean not hot, exactly; just something. Commercial came on and I got up to piss. It was “I’m Not Gonna Pay a Lot for This
Muffler.” In the bathroom you could hear the same commercial going up in the kids’ room. Water pipes maybe carried the sound. Tried to construct a joke around the idea of piped-in music, but I couldn’t see how to set the son of a bitch up.

Martha came in just when they were getting to the sports, except there wasn’t much sports because it was Christmas, although they still had to have the sports guy, who was nowhere near as good as Jerry Girard on Channel 11, Very Independent Sports. So which to confront her with: the Rusty Ronson thing, or where the hell she’d been all day? Ended up going with the Rusty Ronson thing, largely because I really didn’t give a fuck about the other anymore. I mean, I was out of here anyway.

“Had a little holiday visit today,” I said, being oh so sardonic.

“Did you,” she said. Really interested, boy. Well she
would
be, in about one second.

“Do you want to know who from?” I said.

“Do I?” she said.

“Your husband,” I said. “Who is going around saying he still
is
your husband. Which I found pretty disconcerting. Don’t
you
find that pretty disconcerting?” She had enough dignity left not to say anything. “Imagine my surprise,” I said.

She shook her head. Didn’t look at me. “Weird beyond belief,” she said. “I was just—I don’t know, you probably won’t believe this, I mean why should you, but I actually today did get the name of this lawyer that Tim’s sister used. When she got her divorce.”

“Did you,” I said.

“I had a really long talk with Tim today,” she said. “He really helped me.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“But so now there’s this,” she said.

The stove grumbled: something inside shifting and settling. Me in the Morris chair; Martha, feet tucked under her, in the corner of the couch farthest from me. Each of us sitting still, yet voyaging through deep space, as if aboard the Starship Enterprise, where there was no north or south or even up or down, really. On the one hand, I wanted to see this whole deal blow into a million pieces right now, as in the Big Bang theory, and to get in the car and head for New Hampshire.
But on the other hand, I hoped this would be just one more dustup, and over by the time
Star Trek
came on. Maybe tonight, in tribute to Christmas, they’d have the one about the space people Captain Kirk thinks are sun-worshippers but actually turn out to be space Christians who worship the capital-S Son (i.e., of God). Though probably, if they were going to run it, they would have run it last night. Martha and I were really out there, boy. This whole thing was making me remember when Judith and I got married. Most of our friends were there (no family except Rick: she had vetoed her mother, forcing me to veto my father as compensation) and the minister had charged them to “support and defend” our marriage.
Defend
, yet: a minister in touch with his times. What he meant, I imagine, was that when one of us wanted to bag it, one of them was supposed to talk us out of it. Or that Uncle Fred wasn’t supposed to introduce me to women he worked with anymore. But with me and Martha it had been just the two of us: no supporters, no defenders. Not that the supporters and defenders had done me and Judith much good in the long run. But me and Martha: even the kids had cut us loose as soon as they’d managed to get us together. And of course we didn’t even know each other. I looked out the window. Snow really coming down now, boy.

“So this is actually true,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was so wrong not to tell you.”

“Amazing,” I said. “I thought—I mean, you
led
me to think—that I was walking into one situation, whereas I was actually walking into a whole other situation. Which if I had known about—”

“So in other words I was right,” she said. “It
would
have made a difference to you.”

“How can I say from hindsight?”

“Oh Peter, don’t bullshit me. Not at this late date.”

“Well? You’ve been bullshitting
me
, right? You were presenting this thing as this nice regular little American family that just somehow happened to run into a teensy weensy leetle speck of trouble.” I pinched thumb and forefinger to show the dishonesty of it all. “Only later do I find out”—I started flipping fingers up to keep count—“A, that your daughter knows how to shoot up drugs; B, that your husband has been in the slammer; and C, that you’re not even
divorced
from this character. And D, whatever creepy shit went on with him and
your daughter. Plus him hitting you and God knows what-all else that you’re
still
not telling me.”

“You believed exactly what you wanted to believe, Peter,” she said. “Did you actually think there were all these nice wholesome families just ready and waiting for
you
to come along? You’re a drunk whose drunk wife killed herself. And you want to know something really pathetic? You looked good to me.”

“So maybe we’re even,” I said. “You’re disabused, I’m disabused.”

“So I guess I should’ve known,” she said. “That you couldn’t actually be a friend to me without knowing what you were being a friend to. Except I was afraid to tell you because then you wouldn’t want to be my friend. Catch-22.”

“Something happened,” I said. Right over her head.

She nodded. “Danny told you?”

Huh, I thought, so something did happen. Here it comes. “Sketchy version,” I said.

She fetched a sigh. “I really didn’t know,” she said. “I mean, maybe I subconsciously knew, but I really didn’t until I kind of walked in one day and he was—” She hung down her head and cried, like Tom Dooley. Fucking Tom Dooley anyway: years since we thought of
that
, probably.

I must have gone off onto Tom Dooley in order to distance myself.

“And this is the person you’re still married to,” I said. Not often that I found myself in a superior moral position; I wanted to see what it felt like to push it a little.

“You don’t understand,” she said, once she’d pulled herself together enough. “It’s probably, you know, not very understandable. But I did kick him out of the house, and I told the police he’d hit me and been threatening us, which was true as far as it went, and I got a court order for him to keep away from us. And I also got Clarissa right into therapy after.”

“So why is she not
still
in therapy?”

“Peter,” she said. “You see how we live. And Rusty’s always going to send money and then he doesn’t, and then a bunch of other stuff was supposed to have worked out and it didn’t, and it’s just been really really hard. Ever since, really, when they sent him away. Like before Clarissa was even born.”

I shook my head. “There are free places you can go,” I said, based on nothing whatsoever. “There’s the school shrink, for Christ’s sake.” This I did know. Danny had gone a couple of times when his grades dropped so badly. The shrink thought it had something to do with his mother dying. Hey, not for nothing was this guy pulling down twenty-five big ones or whatever it was.

“Right,” she said. “And do you know how many kids he sees in the course of one day?”

This was all getting boring and technical. Plus my hand hurt.

“Why the hell didn’t you divorce him?” I said. “You certainly had grounds. If you’d divorced him, he’d
have
to send you money, or else they’d throw him back in the jug.”

“I was afraid what he might do,” she said. “Really, just going through the thing itself would have been bad enough, plus putting Clarissa through it all again when she was really starting to get past it. But Rusty’s a crazy person.”

“And it didn’t occur to you,” I said, “to tell me any of this?”

“Yes, it
occurred
to me, Peter,” she said. “I don’t know, it’s so stupid. I was afraid you’d run away. Which I guess is what’s ended up happening anyhow. You’re really not going to forgive this one, are you?”

That made me think of the old We forgive those who trespass against us. Like a sign they’d have up, say at the cleaner’s:
IN GOD WE TRUST, ALL OTHERS PAY CASH
. All this stuff was so long ago: hanging down your head Tom Dooley and forgiving those who trespass against us. As if it had been someone else and not me who had known all that stuff and where it fit into anything. About all I could come up with right now was: If you could just get out of here tonight your hand would stop throbbing, maybe. But this was magical thinking. Magical thinking was wrong.

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “Danny and I have been talking for a while now about how we should maybe be thinking about a place of our own.” Well, we did talk about it once. “All this does really is just sort of—” Another thing I was sick of was searching all the time for the words for things. “Like, consolidate it.”
Consolidate
was a word, almost certainly, but was it the
right
word? What about
reinforce?
What about
exacerbate?

“Oh,” she said. “See I didn’t have any idea. I mean I don’t know
what I have the right to say at this point. You know, if I say you kept
me
in the dark, all you have to do is turn around and say I kept
you
in the dark, and …” She stretched out her palm and blew at it, as if blowing away all her claims to be dealt with squarely.