This is Just Exactly Like You (8 page)

And who’s in Truckville now? Fucking the goddamned mayor of Truckville? That’s what plays on a loop in Jack’s head through the weekend, a little louder each time she comes to pick Hen up, each time she brings him back, to where Monday night, after the girls tear off in their minivan, Jack decides he’s got to do something other than sit here on one or the other of his porches. Because he’s earned that much, hasn’t he? A change of scenery? That’s all he wants. A little half-assed escape for a few minutes. He gets up, goes across the street, looks in on Hen. He’s left him alone before—quick runs to the grocery, to the bank. It’s not like he’ll be anything other than right damn here when he gets back. He puts the TV on mute, though, on The Weather Channel, just in case. If Hen did get up, he’d camp out in front of that, no problem. Jack pats Yul Brynner on the head, tells him to keep an eye on things, tells him
good dog
, and sneaks out his own front door, even lets the truck coast a few houses down before he turns the ignition. He’s out and gone.

He can hear her no problem:
Alone? You left him alone? Are you out of your mind?
But here’s what she doesn’t get, won’t get, even with her safety magnets, her phone numbers: Nothing’s going to happen to him that hasn’t happened to him already. He’s not going to jump off the roof, because he’ll never make it out there. Instead, he’ll stand in front of the window, throwing the lock back and forth for seventeen hours. She thinks she can help him, can fix him, by treating everything like it’s an emergency. By being prepared for any possible situation. They have two fire extinguishers. Smoke alarms in four different places. They live two hundred miles from open water of any kind, and last fall she made them a hurricane kit. It’s in the front hall closet, in a waterproof box. Batteries. A radio. Granola bars. Pop-Tarts for Hendrick, the only thing he’ll eat some days. Jack told her she ought to put a few miles of extension cord in there, a toaster oven, some fish sticks—Hendrick’s favorite meal.
I’m serious about this
, she said.
Jesus Christ,
he said.
I can see that
. He should call her up right now and tell her where he is, where Hendrick is, see if she calls out the State Patrol or the National Guard. He makes a couple of turns. What he ought to do first is see where
she
is right now, check in on things. So he aims for Canavan’s house. Not to go in. That’s for assholes. He’s not going in. He’s just going to drive by, to see what he can see. And after that, who knows. Whatever he feels like. He rolls down his window, finds the bluegrass station that comes in from Galax if the weather’s clear, rides east.

He shuts the engine off at the top of Canavan’s street and coasts down in front of the house, because now he’s James fucking Bond. They’ve got the lights on out back. Which means they’re probably out there under Canavan’s spanking new tin roof, sitting in chairs on the little concrete stoop in front of his workshop, listening to some music. Canavan’s proud of his record collection, owns vinyl pressings of obscure concerts, pays a hundred bucks a pop to buy these things off the web. It’s where he spends his money. When they’d be over there for dinner, he’d make a big show out of choosing the right records for the right night. Jack can’t quite see Beth going for this part of his personality. But what the hell does he know? Maybe she gets off on his forty-five minute speeches about the difference between the way they recorded bebop in New Jersey and New York. Maybe she wants to have the conversation stopped so she can
listen to that right there. You hear that? You hear that?
Or maybe right now she’ll take anybody who’s not Jack.

He picks at the steering wheel, jingles the keys. It’s not oysters and champagne and strawberries back there. He knows that. They’re probably not fucking each other on a handmade quilt while the last known vinyl copy of a session at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1973 spins on the turntable. It’s probably just chairs they’ve dragged over from the patio. Canavan’s got a few beers in a bucket of ice. Classy. They’ve had dinner, or they’re just finishing up a late one. She’s on adult time again. Not one part of her evening rigged toward getting Hen his fish sticks by 6:45 so that he can eat them one by one and be done in time to watch the seven o’clock rerun of
Murder, She Wrote
. They don’t know how he found it, or why anybody would still be showing it, but there it is, every night, Angela Lansbury putting the pieces together one more time. When it’s over, he reads the encyclopedia, and then he goes to sleep. By eight-thirty or so, you get your own life back for a while.

They’ll have Canavan’s freezer-burned ice cream for dessert:
It’s fine,
she’ll say to him, and it is, sort of. It tastes old, but it tastes like ice cream. They’ll finish that off and have one more beer, or a martini, maybe, Canavan producing an antique shaker and making some show about
the first martinis of the summer. Cheers
, he’ll tell her, and then bounce up again and switch the record to something else, something he finds in the closet, blows the dust off of.
I haven’t listened to this in forever,
he’ll say.
Perfect.
And she’ll be sitting there, not thinking about what any of this means, not thinking of moving her things in. She will just sip her martini, which will have too much vermouth in it. Outside of her lunches with Hendrick, she’s in some alternate universe, somewhere she can basically cease to exist for a while. She’ll go in and teach Summer I and then come back home. She’ll sit under Canavan’s new roof. She’ll sip her drink and say to him,
Listen to this. I had some kid use the term “escape goat” in an essay today
, and they’ll laugh about that, and they’ll go inside, and they’ll go to bed. Jack’s plenty jealous of Canavan in all the ways he knows he’s supposed to be, wouldn’t mind it if something fell on him or if he caught leprosy, but the kicker is that it turns out he’s getting jealous of Beth, too. It is Monday in her life. She hasn’t had to make a single decision about anything.

She’s up for tenure in the fall, and she’ll get it. Which means they’re here forever, which means he’s tied to PM&T. Which is fine. He’s proud of having made something, of having dropped a fully functioning business onto a gravel lot. Soon, the two of them will be making enough money to where they’ll be able to pay the bills without having to keep close track of the bank accounts. He’ll sell the house across the street. He’ll go to work. Pine needles, pine bark, chipped pine pallets. Christmas trees in December, fruit trees in the spring. Marigolds, impatiens, pansies.
Yes, we deliver. Yes, we’ll be sure not to block the driveway.
Maybe they’ll hire a third guy, someone who can manage the greenhouse. Someone who can grow the bare-root mail-order stuff, send their profit margin through the roof. Mulch for the rest of his life. And Beth will end this thing with Canavan, will come back home. She’ll have to. Everything will work out perfectly, perfectly fine.

Jack cranks the engine, drops it in first, and edges the truck up onto Canavan’s lawn. What’s called for here, he’s suddenly pretty sure, is something on the order of the grand gesture. You can’t just sit in your truck in front of your wife’s boyfriend’s house. You have to do something. You have to be a man of action. So he drives across the yard, cuts the wheel, and rumbles slowly along the front of the house, taking out the line of shrubs Canavan’s got planted there. Azaleas and boxwood. A couple of hydrangeas, which he feels a little bad about. But he puts it in reverse, backs up to make sure he got them all. If he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it right. The branches snap under the wheels. It doesn’t take long. He’s careful not to hit the house itself. Vandalism only. At home, Hendrick’s probably dreaming the list of Deputy Secretaries of Housing and Urban Development, or of prime numbers spooling endlessly across reams of paper. On his way back out, looking for something extra, a grace note, Jack lines up the mailbox, drives right over the top of it, over the top of the garden Canavan’s got going there. No lights come on in the house. No one comes flying out the front door. No one starts in yelling at him, asking him what the hell he thinks he’s doing. Nothing happens. Jack, his wife somewhere back there in Canavan’s back yard, drives away. He’s done what he needed to do. He puts the truck through its gears and heads for 70, for a little bar out there that’s on the way back into Greensboro. After all this hard work, he’s pretty sure he deserves a cold beer.

The Brightwood. It was the old roadhouse and inn back before the interstate came through. A low-slung brick building, a gravel drive they’ve got the contract on. Thirty yards of crushed gravel every eighteen months. Six or eight trips in the undersized dump truck. There are two dead Pontiacs, one on blocks, off to the right of the door. Roosters live, seemingly, loose on the property. Neon sign on the roof, all caps: BRIGHTWOOD. A smaller one hangs on the brick front wall: SIZZLING STEAKS.

Inside, the place is small, shotgunned, smoky, a rectangular room that runs front to back with the bar set along the right-hand side. A TV hangs off a mount that drops from the ceiling at the far end, tuned to one of the forensic crime dramas where things get solved because someone sneezed and forgot to cover his mouth. A pube on the carpet, the half-moon of a fingernail. This is how they’ll get him for Canavan’s lawn: A single fiber from his shirt. There’s another room on the other side, a dining room, from the days when the Brightwood was a supper club. It’s closed down now, tables stacked on their ends. There are pictures everywhere on the walls. Lieutenant Governors, baseball players, Elvis—signed. And back behind the bar, on built-in shelves that run the length of the room, more pictures: Sears store family portraits, school pictures of kids in braces. Alongside those: Incomplete sets of china, stuffed animals, dolls, scaled NASCAR die-cast models, crystal wine glasses, decorations from all the major holidays. An electronic Santa that’s always on, always waving. A few bottles of liquor crammed into a corner. Souvenir shot glasses. Baby spoons from national parks and monuments. Beth gets uncomfortable in here, says the craziness of it makes her nervous. Jack loves it.

There’s a couple in the round booth in the corner, smoking, holding hands. She’s in a yellow tank top, drunk, skinny, laughing at everything her date says. Two women are sitting at the front of the bar, heavily made up, mid-forties, maybe fifties, drinking something orange out of stemmed glasses. He’s the only other person there. He sits down a few seats away from the women and far enough away from the TV so the sound doesn’t feel like it’s in his skull. The bartender, an older woman, short, the same woman who’s been here every time he’s ever come in, brings him a menu and a napkin, says, “What’ll you have?”

“A Miller’s,” he says, thinking of his grandfather, who called all beer, regardless of brand, a Miller’s.

She nods, purses her mouth, reaches into the cooler and then opens his beer for him, something he’s always liked. She sets it on his napkin. “Anything to eat?” she says.

He’s earned himself a snack, he figures. He orders a cheeseburger.

“We make all our own ground beef,” she says. “Right here.”

“Yes ma’am,” he says. She leaves to put his order in, and he watches the TV. The crime scene is poolside, the suspects girls in white bikinis. The detectives are swabbing the bikini girls’ mouths with Q-tips. There is shock and outrage and surprise and the cops look serious, vigilant, preternaturally beautiful. Jack sips his beer, considers the facts: Canavan’s probably out in his lawn by now, assessing the damage. Beth’ll be telling him all about how this is why she moved out in the first place, because Jack’s
nothing more than a goddamned overgrown child
. She’ll be telling him to go and get his log splitter off the lot at PM&T. She’ll be saying
he’s crazy, he’s crazy.
He’s not crazy. He was just stopping by, leaving a note.
Sorry I missed you.

The show goes to commercial. When it comes back on, the action has shifted to other bikini girls at another pool. One of the ladies at the end of the bar is explaining something about a house fire to the bartender. Something about money burning up, about having kept money in coffee cans in the house. “You just don’t ever know,” the woman says.

“I know,” the bartender says.

Jack orders a second beer when his cheeseburger comes out, and a third, eventually. He watches the end of the cop show. It was one of the bikini girls. Long shot of the bikini girl in the back of a cruiser. Justice. The ladies down the bar are talking now about somebody’s son who has to go to jail for a month. The local news comes on. The anchor’s name is Neil McNeill, which has always seemed impossible, but there it is.
That can’t be his name,
Beth said, the first time they saw him.
Why not?
Jack wanted to know.

I don’t know,
she said.
That just can’t be his name.

She’ll hold onto things like that, worry them through. She wants to push at the world. It’s something he likes about her, something he admires—that she feels she’s owed some kind of explanation. Jack’s often enough content just to drive the truck over the top of Canavan’s landscaping, see what happens.