Jernigan (15 page)

I pointed to her and called out, “Take it!” As if to a jazzman.

“This probably isn’t a great time to make it official,” she said, “but since we’re all here and since everybody knows anyway that we’re going to try to make a go of this together, you know, as a family, we thought it would be a good idea just to make clear what the rules were.”

“Rule One,” I said. “No hard drugs.”

“Peter,” said Martha, “I don’t think—”

“No hard
drugs,”
I said. “Going to be zero tolerance around this house. Simple as that. Rule One.”

“What do you mean, hard drugs?” said Danny.

“White powder,” I said. “Simple as that. Don’t get Jesuitical with
me.”

He looked down at the tabletop.

“Two,” I said.

“Peter,” said Martha. “Enough. Really.” Just in time, too: I had no idea what the fuck Two was going to be. “I’m sorry, kids,” she said. “All I really wanted to say was that since we’re all going to be living here together we’ve got to be as considerate as possible and each of us pitch in when something has to get done, okay?”

“Fairness,” I said, “is the keynote.”

“I’m putting him to bed,” said Martha, getting to her feet. “Then I’ll drive you to school, okay?”

“Christ,” I said, “don’t always be saying
okay
. It’s like you’re asking for their
approval
. You don’t need their fucking approval, what
is
it with you?”

“Come on now,” she said, trying to sound patient. I knew better. “I know better,” I said.

“It’s all right,” she said, getting me to my feet and leading me by the hand out of the kitchen. “Let’s put you to bed now.”

“No fucking, though,” I said as we walked down the hall.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. Not in a nice way.

V

1

The woman who’d sold us the house on Heritage Circle was so long gone from Century 21 that no one in the office even knew the name. A Mrs. Edmondson, which I remembered by thinking of Uncle Fred and the whole Edmund Wilson thing. So they turned me over to an Amy Somebody with a nice husky little phone voice.

When I’d been put to bed that morning after our family conference, Martha had gone out to one of her thrift stores and had found me a cowboy jacket. A garment for the lighthearted: white with black vines and blossoms embroidered all over and black arrowheads marking the
ends of the pocket slits. Interesting who brought the peace offering to whom.
(Rusty sort of gave me a taste for that.)
“H-Bar-C Ranchwear,” she said, holding it up by its shoulders and turning it from side to side in such a way that the arms made marching movements. “They obviously didn’t know what they had.”

I wore it to go meet this Amy, Martha waving approvingly from the open kitchen door, but as soon as I got to the stop sign I pulled over, wriggled out of the thing and draped it around the back of the passenger seat, as if dressing a mannequin. Felt nervous: me and a beautiful girl going alone to a deserted house in the middle of the day. I suppose I was picturing her like Amy Irving, that would have been true to form: hear a name, make an association. I must have thought it was okay to have this discrepancy between your thoughts and what was actually going on, that you could just keep the two going side by side, no problem.

When I got to Heritage Circle, a little Ford Escort or something was already parked in front of the house. And in the driveway, an old black Cadillac, maybe mid-’70s. Long after tail-fins, at any rate. One side of the rear end sagging, rocker panels rusted, vinyl roof peeling. What was this shitheap doing here? A woman in a tan trench coat—she must have thought it made her look dashing—got out of the Escort. (I’m just going to go ahead and call it an Escort.) Clearly Amy. Running shoes on. The kind of stern black horn-rims you only wear if you think you’re so beautiful you can get away with it, except that she wasn’t especially beautiful. She stuck out a hand, and just for an instant there I forgot why people did that. Then I remembered, and gave her my women’s handshake, which wasn’t really a shake. Handtake.

“Amy O’Connor Century 21,” she said. “Sounds like you’ve got a party going on.”

“I sure as hell better
not,”
I said. But it sure as hell sounded like drums and shrieking guitar. “I imagine that’s my son and his friends,” I said. “I can’t quite believe he would play hooky, but.” I headed for the breezeway, Amy ducking into her car for a clipboard, then following. A dated expression like
playing hooky
wasn’t going to cut much ice with this Amy, who wasn’t really pretty enough for me to want to cut ice with anyway. I opened the kitchen door and music hit me,
physically, in the chest. A female voice howled off-key above everything else. The noise was obviously coming from the living room, but even here in the kitchen it hurt my ears so much that I didn’t dare go nearer. Like a force-field on
Star Trek
. I held up a palm to Amy, signifying Wait Here, and opened the door to the basement. I trotted down the steps and crossed under whomping bass notes to the breaker box. I pulled down the main switch and in about one second the drums were playing alone. Then the drums stopped and some kid called, “Hey! What the fuck
happened?”

Back upstairs I found Danny flipping wall switches, and Clarissa moaning “Bummer” as she sank into the couch. A wiry kid in a tank top, with platinum hair like Clarissa’s, sat behind an array of drums and cymbals, lighting a cigarette. An overweight boy, his white Dacron shirt bulging over black suit pants, was still walking his fingers over the neck of his silent bass guitar. He had glasses like Amy’s, and short hair neatly parted and combed. Did he use hair tonic? Did they even
have
hair tonic anymore? A quarter of a century ago, he would have looked like a normal, studious fat boy.

I whistled and four heads turned. Danny stared at me, then past my shoulder at trench-coated Amy.

“This lady,” I said, “is here to go through the house. I trust there are no surprises for her in any of the bedrooms?”

Four blank looks.

“I’m going to go turn the power back on,” I said, “so you’ll kindly turn the machinery off. And when I’m done showing her through, I would like to have a little chat with the two of you.” Pointing a two-finger fork at Danny and Clarissa.
A little chat
, for Christ’s sake: talking like a high school principal. I imagined this Amy wasn’t too impressed, either. “Sorry about all this,” I said, as I walked her down the echoing hall, bare hardwood floors, bare eggshell walls, to point out the bath over here, master bedroom right next door, linen closet.

“Day’s work,” she said, not that graciously.

Basement.

“Workbench stay?” she said, pen poised.

“Sure, why not. It was here when I got here,” I said. “Tools I’m taking, obviously.” I’d truly intended to use this workshop. Bought a yard-sale table saw, and a brand-new router after reading in some
handyman magazine that its uses were “nearly limitless.” I liked the name of it: rout your enemies. I ended up using the thing only once, to make a little bookcase for Danny’s room. Instead of the shelves resting on cleats or whatever, I routed grooves in the sides and back. Just slide the shelves in and there you were. After the first year or so here, I didn’t do much more than sharpen the lawnmower blade on the bench grinder. Not that it needed sharpening, really: that lawn was a pretty well-tamed piece of nature.

“Washer and dryer?” she said.

“Come again?”

“Do the washer and dryer stay?”

“Well,” I said, “let me think.” Should I cart them over to Martha’s or was she already equipped? My God, I’d been staying at her house how long now? Middle of July, say, to middle of October? Three months? Well, hell, she had to have a washing machine: she was always putting clean clothes away in drawers, right? But all I could remember in the basement were the cages and the haybales. “I don’t know,” I said. “Yeah. Yeah, leave ’em.”

“You’re saying they stay here.”

“Yep,” I said. She could be testy, I could be testy. “Ah, listen, screw it. Let the tools go too. I’m just going to take a couple of screwdrivers and wrenches and shit. Got a table saw here, bench grinder, the router I bought new, what else, good bench vise.…”

Now she was looking worried.

“If you really have no use for them,” she said, “you’d be better advised to sell them privately. They’re not really going to add to the value of the home. Generally buyers who want these things tend to already have them.”

I saw what she was saying, though literally it made no sense: you can’t
want
what you actually
have
, right? I mean, look at the old usage:
Thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting
.

“I see what you’re saying,” I said. “But they sort of go with the house, you know? Whoever buys the house can do what they want with them. Same with the lawnmower, all the shit in the garage, string trimmer, whatever’s out there. They’re buying the whole life, okay?”

“Well—”

“Dishes,” I said. “Dishes, silverware. All the”—the expression escaped me—“the linen. Household linen. Right? The Mr. Clean under the fucking sink.” I had said fucking. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You have to excuse me.”

Silence.

“I understand this can be upsetting for people,” she said. Finally. “Then, I take it, the kitchen appliances as well?”

“Poof,” I said. “Gone. Like a cool breeze.”

“I don’t think I need to trouble you any further,” she said. “If you’ll come by the office this afternoon, we can get things moving for you right away. You’ll be seeing our Mr. Pagliarulo.”

Oh, she did it smoothly, all right, but I’ll bet you one thing: the first old Pagliarulo heard about it was later on, when she got back to the office and said she’d owe him one if he’d take this asshole off her hands.

“Pagliarulo like the baseball player?” I said.

“I don’t follow baseball,” she said.

After seeing her to her car, I went back in and found the fat kid slipping his bass into a bass-shaped black vinyl bag, and the platinum-haired kid lifting a cymbal off a threaded rod. Danny and Clarissa were on the sofa, arms around each other’s waists, the picture of persecuted young love.

“You two,” I said, and nodded toward the kitchen. They looked at each other, got up and went in. I pulled out a chair for Clarissa. She sat. I gestured at another for Danny. He sat. I leaned against the refrigerator.

“So,” I said.

They said nothing. Clarissa stared at the tabletop, her leg going.

“What am I supposed to say?” I said. “You know you should be in school.”

Nothing. Crafty little bastards: if they could keep me talking, eventually I was bound to say something for which they had an answer. Well fuck that. All I had to do was keep the silence going, and one of them would sooner or later blurt out something for which I had an answer. I looked up at the clock high above the sink. It had been there when we bought the place, and I’d always hated the beige oblong son of a bitch. Beige: the oblong of colors. Oblong: the beige of shapes.
The second hand was now on the two. Now a hair after. Then I looked at the kids, who were looking at the roosters on the wallpaper. On one of the days when Judith’s sense of camp was at its most manic, she’d gone to half a dozen places before she found wallpaper with roosters. You could hear the other kids packing up out in the living room. Sizzle of a cymbal, rrrip of a zipper.

After what seemed a long time I peeked again at the clock. Second hand was on the nine. They seemed willing to sit there for as long as I pleased. Probably because they didn’t have much in the way of inner lives. Or maybe they had exceptionally absorbing ones. Or they could have been stoned. The second hand passed the twelve.

“The hell with it,” I said. “You guys want to flunk out of school, it’s your lookout, okay? I’m officially out of the cop business as of right now.” I stood up straight, a free man. “Ta ta,” I said.

“Does that mean it’s okay if we stay here?” said Danny.

“Nice try,” I said, “but I won’t play. If you want to be told what’s okay, go find a guru or something. I am
weary
of the job.” I touched a farewell hand to my head and extended it palm up, Jimmy Durante saying
Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are
, and headed for the door. “See you when I see you,” I said.

“Hey Dustin?” Danny called. “It’s
o-kay
, we don’t have to split. Mitchell?”

2

The next morning I filled out papers with their Mr. Pagliarulo—“Jim!” he cried (meaning himself), and shot out his hand—and by the following afternoon he had an offer of one thirty-five. “I’m obliged to bring this to you,” he said on the phone. “But crash or no crash, I can virtually guarantee it’s going to be no problem you getting at least your one sixty. Not out of these people necessarily. But sooner rather than later.”

“You mean people have actually
heard
about that?” I said. I couldn’t believe this. “And it freaks them out about buying the house?”

“What do you mean have people
heard
about it? What else is even on the news?”

Now I understood that it must be the stock market crash he was talking about.

“Fact is,” he said, “nobody really knows how it’s all going to shake down. My personal opinion, I don’t think it’s going to hurt real estate one iota. Interest rates look like they’re going to stay low, and people who didn’t totally get wiped are still going to need a place to live.”

Three weeks later Jim Pagliarulo called to say the couple who had offered the one thirty-five had come back at one thirty-seven five.

“Do it,” I said.

“I think you might be well advised,” he said.

I pawed around under the sink and came out with an unopened jar of Tim’s moonshine. Any excuse to celebrate, right? It was about two in the afternoon; Martha was out making a dumpster run, kids still at school supposedly. I poured a couple of inches into a jelly glass, topped off the jar with tapwater so Martha would be none the wiser, screwed the lid back on as tight as it would go, and put the jar back where I’d found it. I tried to compose a joke: You’re not losing twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars, you’re gaining whatever. But I couldn’t think what I was gaining. Around three, Danny and Clarissa burst in, singing. “The way you make-a me feel,” sang Danny. “You knock me offa my feet,” she answered, in some other key. If it was a key. Then they saw me in the Morris chair, and that shut them up fast enough.