This is Just Exactly Like You (3 page)

The dog, Yul Brynner, gets up, clicks his way down the hallway, stands in the kitchen and asks to go out. Another country heard from. He’s got a wide bald scar on his forehead from where he was hit by a car when he was a puppy. Or so said the shelter people, anyway, when Jack got him. He predates Beth by two years, which makes him ten. He’s aging a little, going white through his muzzle, slowing down just enough for Jack to notice. What he’ll do when the dog dies, he has no idea. Evenings, after he gets Hen down, he’s been taking Yul Brynner out on the porch and listening to the radio, listening to a call-in show run by a woman who keeps saying that
everything happens for a reason
. It’s a break-up show. Jack sits there with the dog and drinks beer and women call up and say
I just want to dedicate “Keep On Loving You” to my boyfriend Bryan, and I just want to say, Bryan, I really mean it, OK? I’m going to. We were meant for each other. I just know it.
And the woman who runs the call-in will say
That’s right, Stephanie. You just keep on going the way you’re going. You take care of Stephanie first. He’ll be back. And if it doesn’t work out, then it wasn’t meant to be. Am I right?
Stephanie always tells her she’s right. Confession, absolution, REO Speedwagon.
Brought to you by
. Sometimes Jack thinks about calling in, thinks about what he’d say. Yul Brynner, for his part, lies there and waits for Jack to get near the end of his beer so he can lick the bottle.

The dog heads out into the yard, finds a good spot, shits, smiles while he does it. He pants and squints into the sun. To be that happy for ninety seconds in a row. Then he comes back in the house and settles down next to Hendrick, who is, of course, still working the cabinet door. Open, closed, open, forehead, closed. Jack tops off his coffee, starts in on Hen’s breakfast, on their day. Beth at Canavan’s house: Alexander Haig, Alexander Haig.

Getting Hen into the car—getting him anywhere—goes like this: Get him dressed. In anything. If he’ll pick out clothes, let him pick out clothes. Shorts and flip-flops in December? Doesn’t matter. Whichever combination of shirt and pants and shoes does not in any way matter so long as he will let you put a shirt and pants and shoes on him. Get him dressed, and then get him whatever it is that has become the sacred object of the week or month. Whatever it is that holds Most Favored Nation status. Right now, it’s the glossy 300-page catalog from Lone Oak Tree Farms that turned up in the mail at PM&T. Jack gets vendors of all stripes asking him to carry specific kinds of double impatiens or faux terra-cotta urns or bagged river rock. The Lone Oak people sell serious trees, trees that come in on flatbeds. Jack has no room for that kind of thing. The trees of Patriot Mulch & Tree are fruit trees in five-gallon buckets. But the Lone Oak operation seemed impressive, so he kept the catalog, and Hen found it, loves it. He’s read it cover to cover and back again so many times that the edges of the paper have gone soft and grimy. He carries it with him to the grocery, to the bathroom, to dinner. He sleeps with it. Always and forever make sure that you have the catalog.

And do not, under any conceivable circumstance, leave the house without the Donald Duck sunglasses. The Duck. Without The Duck, there is disaster. Without The Duck, as soon as he registers he’s outside, there is the immediate walking around in small, tight circles, the repeated touching of the eyes with the first two fingers of each hand, the noises.
Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup
. What generally follows is that he’ll throw himself down onto the ground, cover his eyes with his full palms, start screaming in earnest. The books say autistic kids have
increased sensitivity to light
, but that’s not all it is. He just loves the sunglasses. Once he wore them three days in a row, inside the house and out. Jack sometimes isn’t sure how much of any of this is
on the spectrum
, and how much of it might simply be Hendrick being maybe more human than everybody else, more sensitive to his own cravings.

Jack gets The Duck and gets Hendrick dressed and out the door and aims him toward the dump truck—since Beth’s got the wagon, he’s been driving the truck, a custom hydraulic bed on a heavy-duty Chevy pickup frame. He puts him in his booster seat, belts him in. There’s no backseat, so the front has to do. Beth gets on him about this, but there aren’t any airbags, either, so they’re safe. Hen starts saying
certified AMS meteorologist Lanie Pope with weather
over and over.
SuperDoppler 12,
he says
.
In his glasses, white plastic with Donald Duck on the edge of each lens, he looks like a tiny Elton John. Jack gets in over on his side, and Hen stops talking, holds his left hand out in the air. He pinches his thumb and forefinger together, sticks his other three fingers out to the side:
A-OK
. “What’s that you’ve got there?” Jack asks him.

“A dust,” Hen says, and for the moment, there he is, looking dead at Jack, a six-year-old kid like any other. “I have got a dust,” he says again.

Jack holds his own hand out in the same way, pinches at the air below the rearview. “Me too,” he says, but Hen’s already back down and in, playing with the glove compartment. Anything that opens and closes. These are the flashes they get, where it seems like he’s in there for sure, like he’s capable of registering any single thing in the whole damn world. And then he’s gone again.

Jack cranks the engine and backs down the driveway, out into the street a little too far, clips the mailbox over at the auctioned house with the back of the truck. It makes a good-sized bang. He’s leaned it over about halfway. This is good, he thinks, pulling back forward. On balance, this is good. Something to fix one of these nights when he gets home. Bag of cement and the post hole digger and a beer or two. Something to fill up his evening. He’s been having trouble filling his evenings. He aims the truck for Whitsett, for Canavan’s house, for PM&T, adjusts the windows so the air blows in the way Hen likes. Get it right.

It’s not just that Canavan would be familiar enough for her, or only that he would be. Canavan also and on top of everything tends to be a generally decent guy, funny, a quick ally at the dinner table. He defends Beth’s wall-to-wall safety placards, explains Jack’s endless projects.
He’ll have the sliding glass doors back up in a week, right?
Or:
What’s so bad about having phone numbers close by when you need them? You’re just organized, is all.
He’s helpful, courteous, cheerful, five or six other points of the Boy Scout Law. And now he’s a prick, too, to go with that.

When Jack pulls up, Canavan’s out in his carport, sitting on a big blue cooler and doing something to a chainsaw. He’s got the arm off the saw and he’s working the blade, link by link, through a ruined white towel. There’s a can of gas next to him, and a little plastic bottle of oil he keeps upending into the towel. He doesn’t look up until Jack cuts the engine off. It’s the first time Jack’s seen him since Beth moved in—Canavan’s sent guys to the lot a couple of days to drop limbs and branches back at the chipper, but he himself hasn’t come by. Hen plays with the door lock. Canavan looks up and waves, and Jack gets out of the truck, and there they are.

“How’s it going?” Jack says. He feels like an idiot, but doesn’t know what else to say. He’s not going to challenge him to a duel or anything—though maybe he should. Limb saws at dawn.

“Good,” says Canavan. “It’s going fine.”

“How come no early job?”

“We’ve got one midday out in Burlington. Big maple overhanging a garage. Delicate. Gave Poncho and Lefty the morning off hoping they’ll be sharp for it. Probably they’ll just be hung over.” Poncho and Lefty is what Canavan calls anybody who’s working for him, no matter how many people he’s got on at any given time. Right now it’s three rail-skinny white guys, tins of chew in their back pockets. Canavan puts his chainsaw down. “Give me a hand a minute?” he asks.

“Sure,” says Jack.

“There’s a header I’m trying to get put up on the toolshed out back. Putting a tin roof on, a little overhang, so I can get the door open when it’s raining. It’s too big for me to pick up by myself.”

“Sure,” Jack says again. He sticks his head back in the truck to check on Hendrick, who’s making his noises and working through the catalog, touching the pictures of Red Oaks, available for sale in various sizes. There’s a Lone Oak Tree Farm employee in most of the photos, a little fat in his tan coveralls, standing next to the trees, presumably to give some idea of scale. The trees are taller than the fat man. That much is clear. Jack tells Hen to stay put, follows Canavan back through the carport to the shed in the back yard, where he’s got two ladders set up. Has he already asked Beth to help him, and she couldn’t do it, or did he know Jack would help, regardless?

It’s simple enough: They get up on the ladders, carry the beam up, and Canavan tacks in his side with a couple of screws. He passes the drill to Jack, who does the same. It’s three minutes, but still. It’s a favor Jack has done him. Another favor. “I can get the rest later,” Canavan says. “I just couldn’t lift the thing on my own.”

Jack comes down off his ladder, then asks him, “Is it dead or alive?”

“What?”

“Your maple. Today. Green?”

“Dying,” Canavan says. “But if we split it sometime later this month, it should still be good by November.” To sell as firewood, a sideline business at the yard. His and Canavan’s, specifically. They went in halves on a log splitter last year. Forty dollars a pallet for stacked and split. They’re partners: Canavan drops off limbs and logs, they split them for firewood. Canavan drops off branches, Jack chips them for mulch. They went in together on the chipper, too.

“How tall?” Jack asks him.

“Eighty or a hundred feet.”

“Good money on both ends,” Jack says, running rough numbers in his head.

“Yes indeed,” says Canavan.

Jack looks at him. “That’s how you talk now?”

“What’s how I talk now?”

“Indeed?”

“That’s how I always talk,” he says, not quite looking at Jack. Or at anything, really. He seems embarrassed to be talking at all, which Jack appreciates, given the situation. Also he seems healthy, seems fit, which Jack appreciates less. He’s taller than Jack by a couple of inches. Skinnier. He maybe shaves a little more regularly. Canavan walks back through the gate, back to his chainsaw project, and Jack stands in the back yard, looking at the back of Canavan’s house, at his patio, his grill and chairs all set up. His grass is too long, and there are seedlings growing up out of his gutters, but the house is in good shape, is pretty well taken care of for the most part, has fresh paint on some of the window trim. It’s a bungalow, a mill house, little easy projects all over the place. Canavan needs to, say, re-screen his side porch. He might think about digging out one or two dying shrubs here or there. Jack needs for the kitchen place to magically get his tile back in stock so he can run it the rest of the way across the floor. He needs a dishwasher in the hole where the dishwasher is meant to go. He needs a new breakfast nook rising of its own accord from the mudpit that’s left from the water line disaster. And then he needs all of that across the street, too.

He goes and finds Canavan in the carport. He says, “Beth’s inside?”

Canavan says, “Beth is inside.”

“How’s that going?”

“It’s going,” he says.

“You guys making each other happy in there?”

Canavan looks down his driveway at the street, then goes back to whatever he’s doing to the chainsaw. He says, “Listen, Jack, you should know that none of this was really my idea.”

“From here it seems like it was a little bit your idea.”

“You know what I mean.”

“What I’m saying is, you look like a willing participant.”

“Well, maybe I am, then. I don’t know. Jesus.” And Canavan’s phone rings and saves them both and he answers and gets up and walks around the side of the house, saying
Yeah, we can do that, we do jobs like that all the time. Now: Let me ask you a couple of questions.
Jack looks up and catches Beth in the window of the side door. She’s wearing a white shirt, has a white mug in her hand. Her hair’s down in her face, a mess of curls, the way he’s always liked it best. His wife: He doesn’t think of her that way very often, tends to think of her simply as Beth. But there she is, his wife, right there. She’s waiting, in Canavan’s house, for him to come up and ring the bell and present her with her son.