Josie and Jack (3 page)

“And you’d rather have what?” Raeburn said. “A cigarette?”

“Maybe a good heavy rock,” Jack said. He reached down and picked up the compass again. “Or a gun.”

Raeburn sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Try to understand. There is a greater philosophical issue at work.” My father, I knew from old photographs, had once been as good-looking as my brother. Sometimes I could see Jack’s face in his, particularly when he was scornful or annoyed. He looked very like Jack now.

For a moment the three of us sat in silence.

Then Raeburn said, “Fuck this. I’m tired of wasting my time. I’m tired of you. Get out of my study. Go away.”

He didn’t have to ask us twice. As soon as we were both standing in the hallway on the other side of the closed door, the soft voice of the radio announcer began to speak behind it. One of my most enduring memories of my years on the Hill is the calm, tuneless drone of news radio.

There were two miles of forest between our house and our nearest neighbors. When we were younger, when Jack was eleven or so and I was around nine, we spent most of our time playing in that span of woods. We climbed trees, we built forts, but mostly we played a game called Run. Jack made it up. The theory was simple: I ran. Jack, in my memory all knees and angular elbows, chased me. We did try it the other way around once, but I lost heart too quickly.

But Jack could, and would, chase for hours. The game ended when he caught me, which was usually when I was too tired to run anymore; and then we would retrace our steps back to the house. As we walked, he’d say, “You could have hidden under this branch, in the hollow here. Or, look, if there were leaves on that tree I wouldn’t be able to see you from the ground. How would you get up there? See, you could climb this little tree, and then jump over on that branch, and then—”

Now, after all these years, I still couldn’t walk in the forest without looking for hiding places. The rain stopped just after we left the house, and the forest was beautiful, all gray-green and sparkling with raindrops. So when Jack said, “What do you think,” I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

“What do I think about what?” I said, and he scowled and said, “You haven’t heard a damn thing I’ve said for the last five minutes, have you?”

“Sorry. I was daydreaming.” My toe caught a hidden rock and I stumbled.

“You’re still daydreaming. Watch where you’re going, will you? I’m not carrying you back to the house if you break an ankle.”

“I’m not going to break anything,” I said, but I watched my feet more carefully.

Soon Jack veered off to the left, straight through the undergrowth. I followed him as best I could. It was hard to see the ground through the thick weeds. After a few minutes of hiking through the rough, we found ourselves standing on a narrow path beaten through the brush, choked off by the high bushes growing on either side of it. It was the only path to the pond. Nobody else knew it was there. We were sure of that, because we’d made it.

Jack walked in front of me. Watching the way his shoulders moved beneath his T-shirt, I stumbled again.

“Okay?” he said without turning around.

“Yes. Jack?”

“What?”

“I don’t see why we need that drugstore kid.”

Jack pushed his way through the undergrowth, held a branch aside so that I could pass, and then we were at the pond.

What we called the pond was deep enough so that Jack could jump into the deepest part of it without hurting himself, but too small for us to get any kind of a race going from one side to the other. The soft mud on the bottom rose steeply to the shore on either side, so all that the pond was really good for was crouching in. On hot days, that was enough. But the mosquitoes could be awful.

Now, though, the sun was bright and warm. The mosquitoes had retreated to the still, shady places in the shadows of the trees, and the air had a fresh, damp feel to it. There were rocks on one side of the pond, where the spring was, and they caught the sunlight in the late afternoon. Jack took off his T-shirt. There was enough room on the flattest part of the biggest rock for the two of us to sprawl out, side by side.

Jack flicked an ant away and said, “It could be useful to have a reliable source for real drugs. Think about it. When was the last time you saw a doctor? I haven’t seen one since I came to live here, and I don’t think you have either. One of us could get sick. But that kid could get us antibiotics, painkillers—hell, birth control pills, even,” he said.

I rolled onto my stomach and pulled my T-shirt up so that the warm sun hit my back. I turned my face away from him, toward the pond. The sun was beginning to turn the warm gold of late afternoon, and the shadows of the trees were long across the surface of the water.

“Admit it,” I said. “You want a new way to get high. All of this antibiotic, birth control stuff is a cover. You want the good stuff.”

I heard Jack move behind me. There was a small splash, like a fish jumping, and then I felt him move my T-shirt higher on my back, pulling it up so that my shoulder blades were exposed. His hands were cool and wet with pond water. Slowly, he began to rub my back. I closed my eyes.

He dribbled water down my bare legs and said, “Consider this. Friday afternoon. Raeburn comes home in a foul mood, as usual—snarling and sniping at us, telling us how stupid and worthless we are, ranting and raving and throwing things—and there, in the middle of it all, there’s you and me, Jack and Josie. We dropped a couple Valium a few hours back and we’re feeling no pain. We couldn’t care less.”

“And then he throws a plate at me and I’m too doped to duck,” I said. “Sounds great.”

“I’ll catch it before it hits you. Throw it back at him.”

I turned over. The sun was behind him.

“We could drug his coffee,” I said. “Then he’d leave us alone. ”

“That’s my girl,” Jack said and touched my face with his cool, wet hands.

The morning Jack came back, when the social worker was gone and the three of us were standing silently on the porch staring at one another, Jack gazed up at Raeburn and said, calmly, “Mary says you’re a crazy son of a bitch.”

Jack was obviously repeating something he’d heard from Mary. Even so, Raeburn flinched. But his voice was as calm as Jack’s when he answered, “Your mother was an ungrateful, degenerate slut.”

Young Jack gave him a belligerent look. “You better not be crazy with us,” he said. My six-year-old heart thrilled at being included. Raeburn told us to go away and I remember looking back at him as we left the porch. His eyes were tightly closed and he was rubbing his forehead as if it was hurting him. His hair was thick and dark back then, and he didn’t yet wear glasses. He couldn’t have been more than forty.

It made perfect sense to me then that my mother had taken Jack and left me behind. Jack was incredibly angry, even then, but he was also smart and funny and beautiful, in a savage, hard-edged way. I wasn’t any of those things, but Raeburn hadn’t abandoned me; he had kept me and fed me and taught me multiplication tables and ancient Greek, and if everything he’d done for me had taken more time and determination than love, all the facts seemed to suggest that I really ought to be grateful for what little I’d gotten.

As I grew older, I abandoned this theory. By the time I was sixteen, I knew that even though it was our mother that we called Crazy Mary, both of our parents were mad. My brother Jack was the first person ever to treat me with love or gentleness. He became my world.

By the time we headed back, the sun was starting to set and it was already too late for us to make it home for dinner. Raeburn didn’t like waiting. After we’d battled our way through the undergrowth, though, Jack said, “Wait,” and stopped.

“We should go,” I said. “We’re late already.”

“Smell that?” Jack said.

I did. “Something’s burning.”

“It’s a barbecue,” Jack said. “Come on.”

He turned in another direction, away from our house. We crashed through another patch of brush and found ourselves standing on another path; not as clear as the one we’d made to the pond, this was more of a track. We followed it for several hundred feet and then Jack turned to me and said in a low voice, “Quiet.”

“Where are we going?”

“Show you something,” he said and set off down the track again, moving more quietly this time. I followed him and tried to do the same.

Suddenly I stopped, alarmed.

“I hear voices,” I whispered to him.

He motioned to me to shut up.

A few more feet down the track, there was a huge copse of hemlock like the one that surrounded our house. Jack crouched down and led me between the bushes into a kind of natural den. There was a hole that we could see through in the branches ahead of us. On the other side of the hole was a big house, like ours; but unlike ours, this one was cheerful and well tended. There was even a swimming pool a bit farther down the slope, a blue plastic ring that sat on top of the grass like a discarded toy. A low net stretched across part of the lawn, and two children in bathing suits stood on either side of it, playing badminton with small, brightly colored rackets.

“I won, I won!” cried the girl, who was bigger.

“Didn’t,” the boy said. “I was sneezing. Do-over.”

“Baby,” the big girl said. She picked up the birdie, which looked like a dead parakeet, and hurled it into the air. A neat swipe with her racket sent it over toward the boy, who hit it this time.

On a wide wooden deck behind them, there was a man standing near an outdoor barbecue. A woman pushed the door open with her backside and came out of the house, carrying a plate. As she set it down next to the grill, the man said something to her, and she laughed.

I reached for Jack’s hand.

Suddenly the little boy shrieked. He was holding one hand to his eye; the birdie lay at his feet.

“She hit me!” he wailed. “She hit me with the birdie!”

“Not on purpose!” the girl said indignantly.

“Let it go, and come eat,” the woman said.

The girl tossed her hair and followed the boy up the steps to the deck. The woman pried the boy’s hands away from his eye, looked, and hugged him. Soon they were all seated around a wooden table on the deck, with plates of food in front of them. In the deepening twilight, we could still hear the sounds of their voices drifting across the darkening lawn.

Jack let go of my hand and pointed back to the trail. My legs were cramped from crouching so long, and raw from the rough rock at the pond, but I made it out to the track, and then back through the brush to the main path. Jack walked behind me.

Raeburn was sitting on the front porch, smoking and listening to his portable radio. He barely glanced up when we came out of the woods. An announcer’s voice was talking about politics: somebody had a meeting with somebody else, and they were going to sign something, and the voice didn’t think they should.

“I’ve eaten,” Raeburn said curtly.

“Sorry we’re late,” I said. It was the first thing either of us had said since leaving the hedge.

Jack pushed past me and went into the house.

Raeburn’s eyes flicked up at me. “I’m listening to this,” he said. “Go clean the kitchen.”

I followed Jack inside and found him standing motionless in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen. I touched his back and said, “What’s wrong?” Then I looked over his shoulder and saw what he saw.

The floor was covered with food. The milk from the refrigerator, the flour and sugar and cocoa from the cupboard, the pasta and the rice from their jars on the counter: all of it mashed into a thick, gooey paste that covered the linoleum. The bread had been pulled out of its plastic bag, slice by slice, and ground into the mess on the floor. The condiments from the refrigerator door, the pickle relish and the mayonnaise and the mustard, had been thrown against the floor in their jars. Shards of glass sparkled like diamonds in the muck. What couldn’t be broken had been dumped. What couldn’t be dumped had been broken.

Jack turned on his heel and pushed past me without a word. The expression on his face was dangerous. I let him go.

Slowly, I picked my way across the floor to the cupboard under the sink, where I found a dustpan and a rag. I used the rag to push the mess into the dustpan. There was an acrid chemical smell in the air, strong enough to make my eyes water, but I didn’t identify it until I carried the first dustpan full of ruined food over to the garbage can and lifted the lid. There were three empty bottles of cleaning fluid lying on top of the garbage inside.

I sighed and found a pair of rubber gloves under the sink.

After a while, Jack came down and helped me. Cleaning the kitchen took us three hours, and the spoiled food filled two big garbage bags.

We were almost done when Raeburn appeared in the kitchen door, red-eyed, with a glass of whiskey in his hand. He stood and watched us for a few minutes.

“You’re thinking now about the nature of my parental responsibility toward you,” he said finally. His words were slurred. “But you’ll soon realize that my parental responsibility is not the issue. Food is the issue. The parental responsibility construct is of no consequence.”

I didn’t look up. Took a rag from the cupboard and began to wipe up the last smears of food on the floor.

“Doesn’t matter whether we’re in Persia or Iraq,” Raeburn said. “You’re still going to bed hungry. Do you understand? Finally, do you understand?”

2

E
VERYTHING IN THE KITCHEN
had to be replaced, so Raeburn left us a hundred dollars on Monday. Jack made me ask him for it. “He won’t give it to me,” he said.

“He won’t give it to me, either,” I said, but he did. I had to plead for it, though. We both knew he’d leave me the money in the end, but he wanted me to beg. When I gave the money to Jack, he counted it and stuffed it into his back pocket.

“And she says she doesn’t know how to flirt,” he said.

I turned away.

The nearest place to eat was a bar that served takeout sandwiches during the day, fat overstuffed things with coleslaw and French fries right there between the slices of bread. We drove to the bar in the clothes we’d slept in and ordered four of them, three fried chicken and one fish, and devoured them in the truck. There was mayonnaise and grease-soaked paper everywhere. I ate one chicken sandwich and half of the fish; Jack ate the rest. They were disgusting. They were wonderful. When we were done, we went back up the Hill and took showers. I washed my hair and brushed it until it gleamed.