Jernigan (32 page)

I stood up.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she said.

“Speak to Danny,” I said. “If it’s all the same to you.”

“No, what I mean is, where are you going
to go?
When you leave. I mean that’s what this
is
, right?”

“That’s what this is,” I said. “We’ve been offered a place to stay. Up in New Hampshire.”

“Offered,” she said.

“A friend of mine,” I said.

“Oh, there’s always a friend, isn’t there?” she said. “New Hampshire, though. Very cold in the winter. But nothing lasts forever, right?”

“Spare me,” I said.

It was weird being on my feet. You know, after sitting. But I walked okay.

“I,” I said, very dignified, hand resting on the newel post as in
It’s a Wonderful Life
except the newel post didn’t come off in my hand, “am going to speak to my son. You might want to take the opportunity to do the same.” What I meant was, speak to her daughter. I must have thought I sounded Johnsonian or something.

She got up and followed. We were like a couple of parents going up to talk to the kids.

Star Trek
or no
Star Trek
, I couldn’t do one more night of this.

I knocked. No answer. Just the tv going. Then Danny called, “What?”

“Hey Dan? I hope I’m not interrupting, but I badly need to talk to you.”

I heard the bolt snap, then the tv got louder as the door opened the width of a face. Danny’s face: his eyes level with mine. The stink of reefer. “Badly?” he said. “Super bad?”

“Are you in any shape to talk?” I said.

“Are
you?”
he said.

“If you’re together enough to be impertinent,” I said, “you’re together
enough to talk. Would you get your things on, please, so we can take a walk?”

Impertinent
, yet. Really increasing the old word power tonight, boy.

“A walk?” he said. “Dad, it’s
snowing
out there.”

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “You’re sixteen years old. It’s
fun
to walk in the snow. You know: trippy.”

Big teen-martyr sigh. “Okay,” he said. “Give me a minute, all right?”

I went down and had a couple more slugs of gin, and stuck the bottle in my overcoat pocket. Outside, it had gotten so cold that dry snow squeaked under our feet. Danny trudged along, the hood of his parka thrown back, ungloved hands in his pockets. Christ, it was winter: did he even own a pair of gloves? Sixteen years old, what was he going to do, buy them for himself out of his allowance? Snowflakes alighting on his hair.

“I’m sorry to drag you out here,” I said. “I just didn’t feel like we could talk about this in the house. I didn’t think it was”—it took me a second—“proper.”

“That what was?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I remember your saying that time we drove up to get the tree, that your situation, you know, vis-a-vis Clarissa, was getting weird.”

He said nothing.

“I mean, it’s not—if you remember—that I disagreed. It was just … I don’t know. But after this thing today—I mean, I just think you and I need to maybe, you know, step back. I think we rushed into this whole situation very very precipitously.”

“So?” he said. “We’re here now, right?”

“We’re
not,”
I said. “I mean, we
are
. But we do have options.”

“Yeah, like what?” he said. “You don’t even have a
job
anymore.”

“We just sold a whole house for a hundred thirty-seven thousand dollars,” I said. “We’re not exactly helpless.”

“So what happens when you go through that?”

“We’ll worry about that when it happens,” I said.

He stopped walking. The streetlights here were making the snow look pinkish. On the pink snow, black specks swam past us: the shadows of snowflakes.

“I
knew
you were going to just spend it all,” he said. “Bye-bye Berklee, right?” Where had he ever heard of
Bye Bye Birdie?
Maybe they’d had it on tv. Assuming the pun was intentional.

“Look,” I said. “We’ve been offered a place to live rent-free. I can easily get some little bullshit job and we’ll never even have to dip into the money.”

“What place?”

“Uncle Fred’s place up in the country.”

“You mean we’re supposed to live in a trailer in New Hampshire?” he said.
“Da-ad
. That’s crazy. Where would I even go to school?”

“They do have schools in New Hampshire,” I said. “It’s still the United States, you know?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, “schools for farmers. We don’t even know any people up there.”

“So you make new friends,” I said. “We didn’t know anybody here either, when we came from the city.”

“How am I supposed to make friends with farmers?”

“Sell drugs,” I said. “You’ll make friends.”

He bent down, formed a snowball with his bare hands and threw it at the stop sign. The snow was so dry it disintegrated in flight.

“Assuming you’re so totally lacking in social graces that you can’t make friends any
other
way,” I said, “you’ve got your music, right? Some band up there is probably going to fall all over themselves to get somebody like you for a guitar player.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Playing Willie Nelson farmer music.”

“Anyhow,” I said, “I’m not talking about moving up there forever. I just meant until we could get things figured out a little bit.” I was totally winging it on this part. “We go up there where it’s quiet, we cool out a little, and sort of go from there. I mean, basically we have the wherewithal to move pretty much anywhere we want. I mean, if you can think of a place you want to be, let’s do it. Or at least let’s talk about it.”

“I
am
where I want to be,” he said. He bent down and tried another snowball. “Stuff won’t hold together,” he said. He stuck his hands back in his pockets.

“Want to walk over to Oakdale?” I said.

“If you do,” he said.

“Dad?” he said, when we’d walked another block. “Was there someplace
you
wanted to be?”

You don’t tell your son
Dead and in heaven
.

“Trying to figure that out,” I said. “That was one of the reasons Uncle Fred’s place kind of appealed to me. You know, nature, quiet—all that Wordsworth kind of shit. Very nineteenth-century of me, I’m sure.” I can’t imagine who I thought I was talking to. He probably thought the nineteenth century was the 1900s. “You know,” I said, “Thoreau or something.” Silence. “Huck Finn,” I said.

“So why don’t j
ust you
go?” he said.

“Well, I’m certainly not going to leave
you
here.”

“Why not?” he said. “I’m okay.”

“You’re
not,”
I said. “I mean, even before all this shit today you were telling me how it was too weird around here. Today you have to run your girlfriend’s father out of the house with a
gun
. This is not the way I’m going to have you growing up.”

“He’s just crazy,” said Danny. “It’s not that big of a deal.” Up ahead, a branch crested with snow hung low over the sidewalk. Danny made a run at it—I took the opportunity to get the bottle out quick and have a good big gulp that made me cough and gag—and leaped, right arm high, as if going in for a lay-up. Snow showered his bare head. He waited for me to catch up, hand moving backward and forward across his hair, stirring up snowflakes that sparkled in the streetlight. Judith and I had made this beautiful boy.

“Danny,” I said. “Nobody has to live that way. I mean unless they live in fucking Beirut.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess what I mean is, things come with stuff attached, you know?”

I hadn’t thought Danny capable of discerning, let alone enunciating, a general truth. Even in so inchoate a form.

“That’s very linear of you,” I said. Oh, it didn’t matter: he never knew what the fuck I was talking about anyway. I mean, if he could sit still for fucking Megadeth, for Christ’s sake, he could sit still for me.

“Clarissa says he did this before a couple of times,” he said. “One time she like tried to stab him with a pair of scissors and everything. He was grabbing at her or something and she just—yah!” He came
at me like Mother in
Psycho
, mouth wide open, eyes bugging, imaginary knife raised.

“And you think this man isn’t dangerous,” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Coming from Clarissa, it might not even be true.”

“Either way,” I said, “this is a freak show, and
we
are getting the hell out of it.”

“It’s okay most of the time, it really is,” he said. “It’s better than living in some trailer.”

“Well, fortunately or unfortunately,” I said, “it’s not your decision to make.”

“How come?” he said. “I thought we were having this big democracy.”

“To put it at the very crudest level,” I said, “you are a minor, and you will do what I say.”

“Dad,” he said. “Don’t push it. You can’t back it up.”

“You just try me, sonny,” I said. Knowing he was right.

We trudged another block, to absolutely no point. Danny stopped at the curb: obviously the place he’d told himself he was going to turn and make his stand. “Dad,” he said. “My feet are getting cold. I’m going back.”

“Mine too,” I said. They probably were. We turned back and walked into our footprints as they filled with snow. The farther we went, the fuller they got. Hey, I thought, just like life.

“What are you laughing for?” said Danny. Damned if he wasn’t right, too. Little joke must have really struck me funny.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m overtired.”

“I guess you’re pretty smashed,” he said. Not disapprovingly: just a simple explanation for why his father might be walking along in the snow tittering away to himself.

“Look,” I said. “Got another thought. How would it be if I went up there first, checked it all out, got settled in there, check out the schools, so forth, whole place squared away and everything, and then you come up? ’Cause right now, not going to lie to you, probably sort of a mess up there. You know, it hasn’t been lived in or anything. Don’t you think that’s a much much better plan?”

“What is?”

“Danny. What I just
said
. I went up first, took care of some things

No answer.

“You know something,” I said, “for that matter you could probably finish out the school year, you know? And come up weekends.” Still nothing. “Mrs. Peretsky, I mean, whatever she thinks of
me
at this point, I’m sure she’d be glad to
have you
stay. You know, during the school week. And then on the weekends you could sort of come up and check it out. Sort of do it gradually.”

Nothing.

“That actually might be the way to work it,” I said.

We kept walking and the snow kept coming down. Really starting to pile up, boy, really making me wonder how good an idea this actually was, taking off in all this shit for New Hampshire. Though they did say on the news that the snow, the worst part of it, was only supposed to go as far up as Westchester and Rockland.

Danny said, “When would you go up there?”

“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking of driving up part way tonight. You know, I get too tired, just lay over someplace, do the rest in the morning. Or if the snow gets too bad.”

“You have a fight with Mrs. Peretsky or something?” he said.

“Or something,” I said. “Doesn’t affect
you
, really.”

He thought about that. Or about something.

“What does it take you?” he said. “To get up there.”

I shrugged. “Six hours?” I said. “Little more? Listen: what do you say? You want to come along? We’ll be a couple of old beatniks, you know? Play the radio loud all the way up. You pick out the stations for us.”

“You don’t have a radio,” he said.

“Hell with it, I got the Walkman,” I said. “You bring your tapes and the headphones from your Rockman. You got one of those little Y things we can plug ’em both in?”

“Dad.”

“Okay, so
bag
the Walkman. Bring your guitar along. The ole gittar. Or I mean we could always talk. Like sort of a last resort? You know, like the pioneers, man. In the old Conestoga wagon, you know? Like one of ’em would be reading the new, I don’t know, John Stuart
Mill book or something. So they’d have this big talk about Utilitarianism.”

“Hey Dad? Maybe we should talk about this tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” I said.
“What
tomorrow?
Today
, am I right?” I scrunched down and pretended to be playing a guitar, jerking my head. “Wock and woll,” I said. He just looked. “Hell,” I said. “Thought you were supposed to be a free spirit.”

“Dad,” he said. “It’s snowing like a bastard, and it’s already like midnight. And you’re drunk and everything and I don’t even want to
be
up there, you know?”

We were back at the corner. You could just about make out our footprints coming up the hill from Martha’s house.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. No problem. Get you home here, then we do whatever we end up doing.”

We walked down the hill. I was fanatical by now about keeping right in my old footprints—which I could distinguish from Danny’s because he had running shoes on—like a careful child coloring only within the lines. Danny just walked.

“You know,” I said as we passed the next-door neighbors, “I never even knew these people’s names. But they sure do have one ugly fucking house.” And all those Christmas lights didn’t help any.

“The Molloys,” said Danny.

“Jaysus,” I said, “there goes the neighborhood.”

No response. It occurred to me that Danny probably didn’t even know he was Irish. I sure as hell didn’t remember the subject ever coming up. Well, if he ever got curious, which I doubted, there was probably someplace you could look a thing like that up. Looking stuff up, whew. That was way back with John Stuart Mill and hang down your head Tom Dooley. All these things you didn’t think about anymore. Dooley: huh. Tom Dooley must have been Irish too.

Danny held the gate open for me. Snow was burying the lid of the garbage can, which was lying there on the ground because somebody hadn’t cared.