Jernigan (2 page)

We go back, in other words, to before he taught himself all that bluff Uncle Fred bullshit he does nowadays, where you can’t get a straight word out of him. Oh, I can see the appeal: even during the drug years, he was still impermeably Uncle Fred. For which you had to envy him as well as hold him in contempt.

Right, how he got the name. Freshman year he and I took the train up to spend Christmas break with his family in Connecticut. That
was the year my father was in Mexico. (My mother, of course, was out of the picture by then.) At Bridgeport I think it was, this little kid and his mother got on the train and the kid came running wide-eyed up to Michael yelling “Uncle Fred! Uncle Fred!” His mother couldn’t talk him out of it. She had a Kelly green coat with big buttons. I remember her as a weary middle-aged lady, although I suppose, in retrospect, that she wasn’t as old as I am now. You remember that song,
She was common, flirty, she looked about thirty?
It’s like the difference between what that meant then and what it would mean today.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “He thinks you’re his Uncle Fred.”

“We’d gathered that,” I said, snotty college kid.

“Timmy,” she said, “this man is
not Uncle Fred
. See, his Uncle Fred”—she mouthed the word
died
. “We tried to explain it to him, but he doesn’t get it. You know, he sort of gets it and he sort of doesn’t.”

“Time,” said Michael. “In time these things become clearer.” We were both pretty smashed.

“That’s the thing of it,” said the woman. “I don’t think they really get it until they’re a little older. When they’re older they actually can get things. But a little kid?” She shook her head; he shook his head too. Big agreement reached about human nature. So it was Uncle Fred from then on.

The summer after freshman year, Uncle Fred and I and a kid named Kenny Angleton got a seventy-dollar-a-month apartment on East 10th Street. Angleton wore round wire-rim prescription sunglasses indoors and out, and always dressed in black jeans and black turtlenecks. No matter how hot it got—and this was a top-floor walk-up, right under the roof—he never rolled up the long sleeves that hid the tracks he didn’t have. The day we moved in he went to 14th Street and bought a pair of ankle-high pointy-toed boots with Cuban heels. The heels were made of what looked and felt like cardboard, and they wore down in a week. So one night, about four in the morning, he bought a jar of Skippy at the all-night bodega and threw it through the window of the store where they’d sold him the boots. Or so he said. We’d all been up snorting methedrine and he came back in trembling, asking us if your fingerprints could be traced if you’d never been fingerprinted. Not long after that he managed to get hold of some works,
which he just took out and looked at for a week or so while snorting up as usual. The first time he tried to shoot himself up I watched until I got sick to my stomach, thinking if he could get it happening I’d maybe try it too. He tapped and tapped with his fingertip, trying not to hurt himself, then got impatient and howled when he jabbed the thing about half an inch in.

Although Uncle Fred and I never said so to each other, it was mostly to get away from Angleton and the people he’d started bringing around that the two of us went up to Connecticut to spend some time at his parents’ house. Guilford had country roads to drive, in Uncle Fred’s father’s Buick, playing the radio loud: this was the summer of “Hanky Panky” and “Wild Thing.” Not the “Wild Thing” they have now, where the guy just talks in rhyme the whole way through, but the real “Wild Thing,” where he thinks she moves him but he doesn’t know for sure. Woods to trip in, a village green to circle and circle and circle looking for girls, the beach at Hammonasset a couple of exits up the turnpike, New Haven with movies and Cutler’s record store a few exits down. And Uncle Fred’s fourteen-year-old sister always there when we got home: pretty enough to keep me stirred up, young enough not to have to do anything about.

We were still there when Uncle Fred’s father got a four-day weekend because he’d had to work over the Fourth of July. He was going to spend it at their camp up in New Hampshire, putting up a lean-to to keep firewood under. (Right, same lean-to, same green fiberglass roof.) Mrs. Warriner said he’d do better to get going on the bathroom, and that all that hammering would give her a sick headache, and that she’d just as soon not go shacking all over Robin Hood’s barn. Maybe Michael and his friend would like to go up and give a hand, and she and Diane would hold the fort and have a regular old hen party.

“Oh
man,”
I said to Uncle Fred when I got him alone. We were supposed to have been getting together that weekend with some girl he knew from Clinton and some friend of hers whose parents were supposed to be away.

“It’s cool up there,” he said. “It’ll be cool, promise. The old man just farts around and doesn’t know
what’s
happening.” As if I’d had any choice anyway. My father had sold the house in the Springs—I think he let it go for twenty-five—and he’d sublet the place on Barrow
Street to somebody while he was in Mexico. So it was either stick with Uncle Fred or go back to 10th Street with Angleton sitting crosslegged on his mattress all night fucking around with his works and smoking Camels and scratching himself and jerking his head to the soul music on WWRL.

Late on a Friday afternoon, we bumped down the rutted track, kicking up a dustcloud, then straight across the big field, milkweed and goldenrod on both sides as high as the car windows. Right around the trailer itself the grass was kept down with a lawnmower, less grass really than dandelions and fuzzy pale-green lamb’s-tongue. It was a plain old white house trailer, sitting out in the middle of things at the far end of the field. (It didn’t get painted blue until years later, after Mr. Warriner died and Uncle Fred got the place.) A cinderblock for a doorstep. Behind the trailer the woods began, and above the treetops rose a hill shaped like the side view of the old Studebaker Grandpa Jernigan used to drive: a round peak, left side sloping away gradually, right side dropping steeply like the windshield of a car that was moving from left to right, the direction of time. Such a hill, I remembered from eighth-grade Earth Science, was called a
roche moutonnée:
that is, a sheep-shaped rock. Years later, when Judith and I had taken over the place on Barrow Street, we came in with groceries one afternoon and found the kitchen counter alive with cockroaches. “Well well,” I said, always lightsome, “a roach matinee.” She didn’t seem to get it. And I thought, Oh well, so one more little thing.

But we’re jumping all around here and losing track. Not that I mind losing track, far from it. But.

The camp had no electricity then: just kerosene lamps and an ice chest. An outhouse, since the bathroom in the trailer wasn’t hooked up to anything yet. I was given Diane’s tiny room, and I remember quietly sneaking her bureau drawer open and looking at her underwear and then feeling ashamed of myself. When everybody went to bed, I got stoned in there all alone, knowing it was piggish not to share with Uncle Fred. I was careful to light up by the window and blow the smoke out through the aluminum screen. Then, in that soft yellow light, I tried to read the Wallace Stevens book I’d brought, until the name Wallace started to sound funny: Wallace Wallace Wallace Wallace Wallace.

The Warriners had a croquet set and an aluminum rowboat you could put on the roof of the car and take to the pond a mile farther up the town road. And an old lever-action Winchester, the kind of rifle on tv westerns. They just left all this stuff there: no problem in those days with anybody coming in and stealing. Saturday afternoon Mr. Warriner knocked off work on the lean-to and we all drank beer out of the ice chest and shot the Winchester at the empty cans, each shot just echoing and echoing again off those hills. He turned out to be a great guy, Mr. Warriner, and not the Nazi I’d expected because he worked in a machine shop. That night he took us to a bar, a small cinderblock building with a big gravel parking lot, where they had a country-western band and didn’t card me and Uncle Fred. The two of us by ourselves probably would’ve gotten in trouble because of our hair, but Mr. Warriner looked like everybody else in there with his burr haircut and his green work pants.

We got back to the camp drunk and Mr. Warriner went right to bed. Uncle Fred and I went into my room and took apart the last cap of the acid we’d brought from the city, divided the powder with a matchbook and washed it down with a beer from the ice chest. When the acid came on we prowled in the scary woods and walked what seemed to be miles of dirt roads under the full moon, the dirt still warm to our bare feet. Then the sun came up and we were swimming naked in a muck-bottomed pond somewhere and mist was rising from the surface. I thought of my breast-stroking arms as wings, and the water as viscous air through which I flew in slow motion. At some point I left Uncle Fred alone in the water, knowing in one part of my mind—I also knew it was a bad idea to think about your mind too much—that you shouldn’t leave somebody alone in the water on LSD. I walked, naked, in the dewy grass, hoping it would feel like a dawn-of-man thing but actually shivering and worrying that the radiation in early-morning sunlight, slanting through the atmosphere at a special penetrating angle, would wither my dick or that some buzzy insect might sting it. Then I panicked about Uncle Fred drowning and went running back to the pond. Which turned out to be about ten steps away: the music I’d been listening to all this time, which I’d been assuming was just a pleasant hallucination, was actually Uncle Fred singing arpeggios—ha ha ha HA ha ha ha—slapping his palms on the
surface of the water in rhythm and marvelling at the echoes. Of which there were many, many. I told Uncle Fred—and I wasn’t trying to flatter him at all—that it was the most incredible music I’d ever heard, more incredible than, like, Mahler. Don’t ask me why Mahler. Then we found our way back to the trailer, with the sun making jewels of dew in the grass, and managed to stay pretty much out of Mr. Warriner’s way until we’d come down enough to get to sleep, which wasn’t until fairly late that afternoon.

End of reminiscence.

3

I woke up in the cold, in gray light. So the fire had gone out while I’d slept the day away, on the floor, in this musty-smelling shithole of a trailer. I took my hands out of my armpits and put them over my cold face, cold nose especially. All that accomplished was to make the hands cold too. Left hand still hurt like a bastard, plainly not healing at all, and now that I was awake enough to think a little, I wondered if it wasn’t the pain that had finally awakened me, and not the cold. Although it could also have been the other pain: the headache going in like a drillbit above the right eye. I threw off the blankets, squirmed back into my cold overcoat and got to my feet so as to be up off that cold floor. Better drag one of the mattresses in here; make a good little project for later. I switched on the floorlamp next to the sofa, but the son of a bitch didn’t
go
on. I lifted the shade and tilted my head: oh, there was a bulb in there all right. I pulled the string hanging from the fluorescent ring on the kitchen ceiling: that wouldn’t go on either. So no power, apparently. On the kitchen counter I found a kerosene lamp with a couple of fingers of kerosene in it. The wick was all fucked up, but I didn’t feel like hunting around for scissors that I’d end up not finding anyway, so I just lit the thing and it seemed to do okay, considering. I located the bottle of Pamprin in my overcoat pocket. Only four left. I swallowed all of them, fuck it. Except then
they got stuck in my throat and I could feel them caught down in there. So I went out the back door and knelt by the woodpile and ate snow until I felt the sons of bitches break loose and go down. I looked up and saw a last pulsation of sun behind Studebaker Hill: then it was gone and instantly the air got even colder although I was probably just imagining it. I brought in another few armloads of logs and finally got the stove roaring again.

Then I didn’t know what to do next.

I tried sitting in different places: the stinky sofa, then a red-painted wooden dinette chair, then the stinky easychair covered in some kind of old brownish fabric with flowers or shrimps or something. The problem was, I didn’t know how to be still. I got up and walked down the hall to the room that used to be Diane’s. She’d gotten married to somebody years ago and they’d built a house on some island near Seattle where they still are for all I know.
Or
fucking care. There was a pinstriped single mattress, the old kind with buttons, still on the little maple bedstead. I hauled it off the bed by its handles and walked it back down the hall to where the stove was and flopped it down on the floor, puffing up dust. I lay down on it, still in my overcoat. On my side. On my back. On my other side. On my stomach. So much for the possibilities. But I couldn’t get myself to where I felt like I was lying flat enough. I got up again and went looking for something to read. The table at one end of the sofa turned out to have books on its bottom shelf. Books that years ago Mr. and Mrs. Warriner must have thought of as light weekend reading for the country: Thorne Smith, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, single volumes containing three Ellery Queens apiece. Unless of course this was more of the Uncle Fred touch, books he’d chosen to parody the idea of light weekend reading for the country. So I took the P. G. Wodehouse over to the easychair. To sit in this trailer and be able to fix your mind on Blandings Castle—hey, if only.

Well, I could stay with P. G. Wodehouse for about two sentences.

Then I got afraid the telephone was going to ring. It was the old kind you can’t unplug. Not modular is what I’m trying to say. I picked up the receiver to check, and the phone was dead too. I mean, use your head: would Uncle Fred have left the phone hooked up, for Christ’s sake, so people could break in, not even
break
in for Christ’s
sake, and call places and he’s stuck with the bill? The power either. People coming in with, I don’t know, electric space heaters or something.