Jernigan (34 page)

They all obeyed. I thought, If only I could have taken charge of them like this a little sooner. Although this really wasn’t the way to run a family. What you actually wanted was moral suasion grounded in quiet authority. Clarissa was sobbing away; Martha had her in both
arms and was glaring at me, nothing left but contempt. So actually, if you think about it, I was already helping to begin the healing process. Only kidding, folks.

I backed into the doorway, looked at Danny. “Train’s pulling out, big guy,” I said. “Change your mind?” He looked down at his feet.

“Dad,” he said. “Don’t do it, okay? I mean if you’re really going to go, get some sleep now and do it in the morning, okay?”

I shook my head. “No can do, big guy.”

“Listen,” he said. “Dad,
please?
You’re really scaring me. It’s like Mom, you know?”

“Mom was Mom,” I said. “And never the train shall meet.” The train, I said, imagine. “Last chance Texaco here.”

“Danny,” said Martha, taking an arm from around her daughter and laying her hand on Danny’s forearm. “Just let him go.”

“Oh
really,”
I said. “Sick. Very sick. Big guy, piece of fatherly advice. She likes it up the heinie.”

She threw Clarissa off and came at me. I stuck the gun right up in her eyes and that backed her off, you bet, like a cross backing off a vampire. She stood there, her whole body swelling and shrinking as she breathed out and in. An amazing sight, assuming I wasn’t just imagining it. With the gun in my right hand, never taking my eyes off them, I crouched and felt around for my shoulderbag with my left hand. Finally I located the son of a bitch and reshouldered it. This was some midlife crisis, boy, if
that’s
what this was about.

“Want everybody just stay in this room,” I said, backing out the door. “You don’t come out until you hear the car drive away.” I looked at Danny. “Think you can handle that, big guy?” He stepped closer to Martha, then reached out and took Clarissa’s hand. “You’re the man of the family now,” I said.

Wouldn’t even look at me.

“Dad,” he said, “just go if you’re going, okay?”

“Rrrighty-o,” I said, and slammed the door right in their foolish faces.

There was the suitcase, sitting right by the kitchen door where I’d left it, like faithful Old Dog Tray. God’s sustaining mind had kept the son of a bitch there while I was busy making my adieux.

Outside, the snow was still coming down like a bastard. I threw
the suitcase in the back of the car, the shoulderbag onto the passenger seat. Car started up the way it had years ago, when it was young. And then I remembered I still had the God damn gun in my pocket. So one last ethical conundrum: on the one hand, Martha and the kids might need it to protect themselves if what’s-his-name took it into his head to come back; on the other hand, Danny had asked me to put the thing where Clarissa couldn’t get at it. Maybe he’d actually meant where
he
couldn’t get at it.

I got out of the car, leaving the engine running, and trotted back to the house. I burst open the door and there was Danny standing in the kitchen, bottom teeth working away at his upper lip, obviously afraid to come any closer, yet so glad his father had changed his mind and turned around.

“Here,” I said, holding up the gun.

He looked at it.

“This belongs to Mrs. Peretsky,” I said. “You see she gets it, okay?”

“We don’t want it here,” he said. “Could you just take and throw it away someplace, Dad?”

“You really might need it,” I said. “Not going to deprive my own flesh and blood.” And I laid the thing on the table. As a gesture of trust, the way a dog will turn its belly up. And because he really might need it. And because better him than me.

The next thing I remember is fishtailing up the hill, making it over the crest and then not being able to stop at the stop sign and skidding sideways across Maple Avenue. Then being on some highway, I assume the Garden State northbound. I was the only car out; everyone else must have been home safe from their holidays. Snow was coming at the windshield the way stars come at the viewing screen of the Starship Enterprise. And I remember wondering if that might actually have been where they got the idea: old Gene Roddenberry or somebody just driving along somewhere in the wintertime and thinking,
Hey
. At least it was cold enough so the snow wasn’t sticking. That kept the going reasonably good: instead of lying there wet and heavy it blew around, grainy white clouds swirling on the blacktop, making the road look bottomless. Better not look at
that
shit too much.

Afraid to listen longer to the white noise of wind, tires and engine, I fumbled one-handed in the dash for the Walkman. Then steered
with my elbows to get the things adjusted over my ears. Whatever was already in there would do. What it turned out to be was Webb Pierce, so on we drove with all those songs going—“Missing You,” “Wondering,” “There Stands the Glass,” “Backstreet Affair”—each one such a sad, if necessarily sketchy, story, but at least a story with contours you could hang right on to, thing by thing by thing.

5

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote
.

—STANISLAUS LEC

They wrote this on a piece of paper torn from a spiral notebook and taped it to the wall above my bed. I’d been here a week then, long enough for them to think they’d gotten the hang of me. Hey, no problem, they said when I asked what the fuck
that
was doing there: you don’t want to have it up you don’t have to have it up. Catch was, though, that if you took it down you had to choose something to put up in its place. That’s the rule here. Well, of course I knew better than to get into all that. I considered trying the old IITYWYBMAD routine on them. Probably would’ve worked, too. These people, are you kidding? But after I’d explained that I wasn’t
really
asking them to buy me a drink and we’d all had our little laugh, I would’ve been in for a round of the let’s-talk-about-its. So I just left the son of a bitch up there, radiating its timeless truth. Whatever the fuck it
was
. The waves and particles penetrating the old skull and doing their healing work. I mean, these are people who believe in words.

I do the minimal shit you have to do to keep them off your back. Daily shower, make your bed—surprisingly difficult at first with only one of your opposable thumbs—and go to meals and to group. Resist any of this, I find, and you’re in for the let’s-talk-about-its. Did I already say Uncle Fred has been up to visit a couple of times? He’s
the only one I’ll see. And I don’t have a lot to say, even to him. Especially when he starts with the messages from Danny.

I watch all the tv I can, which they try to discourage, though I don’t see how they could control a fucking zoo like this for two hours without it. Read books and magazines from the little library they’ve got, which is how I’ve been able to stick in those long passages from this and that. (Obviously no one could recall these things verbatim.) So when I say I read
x
on the train or
y
at Uncle Fred’s apartment, you can be pretty sure it was just something I found in the library here and transcribed to stretch this thing out as long as possible. My horror-hand helps too: eight-finger typing, at least in this five-and-three configuration, is probably as slow as straight hunt-and-peck.

But obviously, pad my story as I will, I can’t keep this going much past today. I mean, unless I write a thing where I go,
So I put a piece of paper in the machine and typed the following: “I ended up driving all night. The snow eased off after a while—or, more likely, I’d driven past the edge of the storm—and I just kept going. Stopped for gas where you get off the interstate, then
 …” So today or tomorrow I’m going to have to think up some reason I can’t show this to them right away. Tell them I need to change the names to protect the innocent? See, the problem is, fuck with them
too
much and you’re out of here completely. It’s happened twice in just the time I’ve been here: the guy who wouldn’t go to group and the guy who kept screaming. I just feel I’m getting closer and closer to a real crisis here. Keep harking back to
Jon Nagy’s Television Art Book:
what looks like a road just going and going and going to the horizon is really two lines coming together.

So I do it their way. Mostly.
I’ve found that my way doesn’t work:
boy, do they love it whenever somebody comes out with
that
one in group. Then you see those sober little nods of the head meaning
Better late than never
. Fuck if I’ll go
that
far to keep them happy. And there’s other things I won’t do: one, see Danny; two, shave; and three, buy into this pretense that we’re all little first-name humans here going soul-to-soul. I’m So-and-so and I’m an alcoholic. I’m Such-and-such and I’m a drug addict. I’m Somebody Else and so forth and so on. But when it comes around to you, you have to give them something, if only name and spiritual disease. That’s the rule here. So what I’ve figured out is this. I stand up and say: Jernigan.