Stay Awake (16 page)

In general, Pierce thought, Jesse wasn’t a bad kid, and there were a lot of things that he actually really liked about him. He was an entertaining liar and a natural-born thief, which had proved useful, and he was always eager to please. It hadn’t taken any persuasion at all to get him to turn on his mom, to show where she’d hidden her money and her drugs, and then he’d cheerfully climbed into the car with Pierce and driven away.

He was an impressive acrobat, too. He could walk on his hands just as naturally as if his palms were the soles of his feet, and he could climb up a tree and in through the window of a house with the ease of a monkey.

But Pierce wasn’t sure what to do with him. Jesse had recently taken to calling him “Dad,” even though Pierce obviously wasn’t his father, Jesse was only twelve years younger than Pierce himself. But what could you do? His mother was a nasty piece of work, very neglectful, a temperamental drug addict with a meth lab in her basement, and Pierce assumed that the kid had never learned right from wrong or good from bad and probably didn’t have a clear concept of what the term “Dad” even meant.

Pierce had been mixed up with Jesse’s mother for over a year. She had been a regular at the bar where Pierce had worked, and at first, honestly, he had been flattered by the attention of an older woman, he’d been impressed by her apathy and amorality, which had at the time seemed very worldly and cool. She had been a drug addict for as long as he’d known her, but in those last few months she’d somehow tipped over the line that separated an interesting, sexy druggie from a boring, nasty one. Honestly, it seemed like she’d become less and less human—her teeth had begun to fall out and she got these strange, measlelike bumps on
her face that she couldn’t stop picking at, and the tendons on her neck stood out as if she were always straining to sing a high note. Though she was only twenty-seven, she had begun to look like a little old lady, and he pictured her as a zombie, a dead thing clambering out of a grave with a femur clenched in her teeth, her eyes glazed.

It was almost a joke, by the end. When Pierce and Jesse would see her come stumbling out of the bedroom, hunched and moving her tongue around in her gap-toothed mouth in that slow, lizardy way, the two of them could barely keep from laughing. How repulsive she was, Pierce could hardly believe it, and at first it had made him feel happy to think that not only was he rescuing Jesse from her filthy household, but he was also shafting her at the same time. He loved imagining the tortuous inner debate she must have gone through, trying to decide whether to call the cops out to her house. To go into the police station, maybe. How enraged she must have been! The idea had tickled him.

Still, he hadn’t really planned ahead—he certainly hadn’t imagined that Jesse would still be with him, his responsibility, all this time later.

But what to do with him? How to dump him? He was a liability, he called attention to himself with his odd, hyperactive behavior, he made people look at them and ask questions. And remember their faces.

Pierce rose up out of bed and padded down the hall. Jesse was there in his old bedroom, facing the full-length mirror that was attached to the door. He was saluting himself and marching in
place with a look of fierce triumph, like a soldier tramping through the streets of a smoldering enemy town.

Pierce paused and regarded him for a moment until he stopped moving and put his arms to his sides.

—What’s up, Pierce said.

—Nothing.

—Well, you better think about getting packed up, Pierce said. We’re going to leave pretty soon.

The boy looked at Pierce in that blank, fake-innocent way that he had, glancing sidelong at the mirror again, as if his reflection were an old pal he shared some little secret with. It had occurred to Pierce recently: Jesse was the kind of person who could betray his own mother.

—Can we steal some stuff? he asked.

Pierce gave him a stare.

—It’s my house, Pierce said. You can’t really steal from your own house.

—Hmm, he said, and he bent down and picked up a feathered Native American headdress, which Pierce guessed he must have dug out of a closet or a drawer, some old souvenir that Pierce’s father had once bought at some long-ago roadside attraction or another. The old room was still full of this kind of stuff from Pierce’s childhood, junk, Pierce thought, that his dad hadn’t ever bothered to throw away.

—I guess I can keep this, then, Jesse said.

He was a real pack rat, this kid, Pierce thought. Every motel room they stayed in, Jesse made up a collection of the free soaps
and shampoos and lotions, and sometimes took along the television remote for good measure. And then there were the houses he and Pierce had broken into.

There was that little place in Champaign-Urbana, the occupants away for the weekend, where Jesse had carefully combed through their CDs for stuff he liked: Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Shins, Young Jeezy. In another place in Wisconsin, a vacation house on a lake, he’d been crazy for the tackle box and the little plastic worms and frogs with hooks in them, the metal spinners with pieces of feather fluff attached, the weights and bobbers. Then there was that farmhouse outside Des Moines, where he’d been so enchanted by the collection of figurines on the shelf in the living room—little china elves and fairies and dwarves and goblins and such—that he hadn’t even seemed to notice the fact that the house was occupied. Pierce went into the bedroom, looking for things to steal, and was surprised to discover that there was a little old man asleep in the bed, his gaunt head sticking up out of the covers and his mouth open, drawing small breaths.

Maybe I should kill him
, Pierce thought, but he wasn’t quite ready for that kind of thing yet. He backed out, slowly, closing the door quietly behind him, and Jesse was busily packing the knickknacks into his already overstuffed duffel.

—Let’s go, Pierce whispered. I thought I told you to check the bedroom. There’s
people
in here, you fuckin’ jag-off.

—Wait a minute, Jesse said, in his high, nasal, rat-boy voice. I’m not finished! He spoke stubbornly, loudly, and Pierce couldn’t help but think,
Jesus Christ, this kid is going to get me sent to prison
.

—Shh! Pierce said, but Jesse only looked at him, his eyes gleaming. He held up a little knickknack knight, holding its sword aloft.

—This is so awesome! Jesse said. Can you believe this?

Still, all that plunder they’d gathered was as nothing compared to the treasures he was finding in Pierce’s old bedroom. Jesse’s eyes were wide with excitement and greed. A shoebox full of plastic dinosaurs and farm animals, another of Matchbox cars, yet another with plastic robot dolls that Pierce and his brother had both loved. It was hard to believe that all of it was still here, Pierce thought, untouched for years, and of course he couldn’t help but feel kind of sad to see it all spread out once again in the open air.

Back in the day, they had been a pretty nice little family—Pierce, his brother, and his father—and actually, when you thought about it, it didn’t make sense that they hadn’t turned out better. Pierce’s dad had been a housepainter by trade, which meant that he could arrange his schedule to be around whenever they needed him. He was always taking them to school in the morning, or picking them up after basketball practice, or making dinner so they could eat together, the three of them. He didn’t make any kind of big mistake that Pierce could remember, he didn’t do anything wrong, but the kind of familial attachment that you read about or see on TV, that didn’t stick. For whatever reason, they just didn’t love him that much. When he had died, Pierce and his brother had both gone on with their lives—Pierce’s brother was in Seattle, managing a restaurant, and Pierce
himself had quit his job as a bartender to spend more time with Jesse’s mother and her meth lab in southern Michigan. It was impossible to take time off for a funeral, too expensive and too far away and so on.

The cremation ashes arrived by parcel service a few weeks after his death, and one Sunday afternoon not long later, stoned and feeling kind of ceremonial, Pierce took them out on a boat and poured them into Lake Erie. He peered down at the surface of the lake as the ashes soaked up the dark-green water and slowly dissolved. That was it. There were a couple of exchanges of emails, but, as it turned out, neither Pierce nor his brother ever managed to get back to St. Dismas to clean out the house and put all their things to rest. There wasn’t anything of value in there, and even the property wasn’t worth the cost of the upkeep and yearly property taxes.

So mostly their home was still here, just as they left it, a delinquent house that maybe the county owned now—Pierce didn’t know for sure. Maybe nobody owned it now, and it was just going to melt into rot and ruin and vanish into the soil.

Out in the garage, Pierce found the shovel neatly stored among the tools where it had always been, and he took it out into the backyard to look for a place where possibly a hole could be dug. The garden was high with weeds, and flocks of grasshoppers flicked themselves ahead of him as he walked through the old plot. When they were growing up, Pierce’s father was proud of his tomato plants. They had pumpkins, zucchini, radishes, potatoes. None left, of course, but the soil was still soft enough to dig a hole into.

• • •

Jesse was still sitting on the floor of Pierce’s former bedroom, wearing that crown of Indian feathers, sifting through another box, and he didn’t even look up as Pierce stood there in the doorway.

Jesse had found a little trunk under the bed, and Pierce guessed that the kid thought it was going to be something really special—pirate’s treasure, gold doubloons and necklaces of jewels; who knows what he imagined. Pierce could picture the greedy look that Jesse’s mother would get, hovering over her little Baggie full of clear, chunky meth crystals.

But when Jesse opened his treasure chest, there were only blocks. Wooden building blocks—red rectangles, blue squares, green cylinders, orange triangles. Jesse picked one up out of the trunk and examined it. Smelled it. He began to sift through the wooden pieces, thinking that there was something better underneath.

Pierce shifted a little. Of course, he knew what was in that little trunk, but he was surprised at how vividly a memory arranged itself in his mind.

He had an affection for blocks as a kid—he didn’t know why. You have the soul of a carpenter, Pierce’s father told him once, but his father was wrong about that, Pierce thought, as he was with most things he imagined he knew about Pierce’s soul.

In fact, there hadn’t been any particular artfulness or skill in the constructions Pierce made. That didn’t really matter to him. Still, standing there at the edge of the room, listening to the xylophone rustle of wood as Jesse sifted his way toward the bottom of the trunk, Pierce could picture the game he used to play with them.

It was something to do with making a city, Pierce remembered. For a moment Pierce could distinctly recall the feeling of being alone in the center of this old room. Stacking blocks into skyscrapers. Clustering the skyscrapers into cities. How good it felt to be alone, stacking blocks. That’s what came to him again, a kind of weight solidifying in his chest: how much he had loved to be alone—to be outside of his own life, a giant, sentient cloud looming over his imaginary city, hovering above it. There was a certain kind of blank omniscience that felt like his true self, at last.

But then his father stood in the doorway, peering in at him, and he looked up. The feeling flew up out of him like a startled pigeon.

—What are you making? Pierce’s father asked. He was smiling a little, hopefully, imagining his son with the soul of a carpenter, his son the builder, the architect, but Pierce’s shoulders tightened and his eyes grew flat, that joy of aloneness ruined.

—Nothing, Pierce said. His hand moved, as if innocently, and the skyscrapers came down easily, spilling over into a scattered pile of disordered shapes.

—Oops, Pierce said.

I should just kill him
, Pierce thought.
That would be the simplest thing, if I was smart
, he thought. He imagined the gangster-type people you saw on TV; they probably would have put a bullet in the back of Jesse’s head right then, while he was kneeling there, pawing through the blocks. It would solve a lot of future complications.

• • •

Jesse must have heard the car start, because he came running out of the house just as Pierce was turning out of the driveway. Pierce had nearly forgotten the sort of dust plume that a car pulls up on those old dirt roads, and he could see Jesse in a cloud behind him, waving his arms.

—Hey, Jesse was yelling. Dad! Pierce! Come back!

It was the kind of devotion that Pierce’s father would have been moved by. The kind of devotion he had deserved. How Pierce’s father’s heart would have broken, to see one of his sons wailing with sorrow, tears streaming, calling after him as he drove down the driveway.

There was about five miles of dirt road up ahead before Pierce got to two-lane blacktop, and then another twenty miles or so to the next town, another grain elevator tower rising up out of the prairie, with a little scattering of little houses around it, and then eventually the interstate and some cities and something. He could picture himself from above, from a distance. The landscape a series of geometric blocks. His car no bigger than a flea, and Jesse even smaller, running and shrinking, running and shrinking.

The baby dies and there is a little funeral. Okay, try to insert yourself into that moment. Stay calm, stay cool, stay sane. No one else is crying. Everyone probably thinks it is for the best. After all the tortuous debates—abortion or no abortion, adoption or no adoption, marriage or no marriage—now suddenly everything can go back to the way it was. Meg is an ex-mother and you are an ex-father and she can go to college like she’d planned before she got pregnant and you can do whatever it is that you’re going to do. That’s right.

Through your sunglasses, you can look at Meg privately; you can observe the solemn congregation, your basketball buddies with their hands folded in front of their groins like they’re posing for a team photo, your mom with her jaw set, some of Meg’s relations. It’s hard not to imagine a guilty sense of relief rippling across all their faces. You can see it as they bow their heads, and you clasp your hands in front of you. “Of dust thou art,” the preacher intones, and Meg looks at you for a second, the kind of glazed look of someone who has just been startled awake, and then your younger brother, Dooley, who is all bloodshot and damp-faced, staring at you with his mouth quivering. You turn your head away and there are the waves of July heat flickering like holograms over the alfalfa fields beyond the cemetery.