This is Just Exactly Like You (21 page)

Hen’s got a ballpoint pen Ernesto’s given him, so the ride is punctuated by the slow click of the pen in and out of the barrel. Jack feels light-headed. Just off the teacup ride at the amusement park. Things are surely seeming less fine now. He puts on the news. Bombings in Iraq, bombings in Indonesia, a car bomb in Chechnya. Things are less fine everywhere, which makes him feel a little less alone. The market is down thirty points. A congressman resigns from Ways & Means. Tonight it will drop down into the mid- 60s. Tomorrow will be the hottest day of the year so far, 90 with thunderstorms. The forecast track for Ashley has shifted a little bit, the radio woman says, and rain from that storm could be here by the weekend. He loves her voice. She’s British, or South African. Her vowels are beautiful. While she talks, he wonders what would happen if he let the truck slide off the road, let it ride out across the tobacco fields and the scrub, let them coast to wherever it is they’d stop.

Hen says, from nowhere, “I like Ernesto. I think he is my friend.”

“What?” Yet one more miracle.

“I think Ernesto is my friend.”

He sounds so
sure
. “Why do you think that?”

Hen says, “Why do you think that?”

Jack says, “I think he’s nice to you.”

“I think he’s nice to
you
,” Hendrick says, and Jack can’t tell any more whether this is a conversation, a real conversation, or if Hen’s just playing with the way the words sound.

“He is nice to me,” says Jack.

“
Que bueno,
” Hen says. “
Que bueno, que bueno, que bueno.
” He repeats it for a while, barely audible, touching his finger to his thumb for each syllable.

Jack tries something. “Hen, what’s this?” He points at the door of the truck.

“
La puerta,
” he says, “
y la ventana.
” Then he goes back to
que bueno, que bueno.
Jack’s pretty sure that’s right,
puerta
and
ventana
, pretty sure he remembers those words. What he’s got left from high school is basically low-end language-lab-tape ability. Where is the library?
¿Donde esta la biblioteca?
Or is it
el biblioteca?
He could start a band under that name. He and Rena could start it up, maybe put Butner on bass. Ernesto on rhythm guitar. Beth and Canavan on backup vocals, on shiny matching tambourines. Hendrick on endless repeating triangle, or ballpoint pen. They’ll tour the country. Get a bus.
Good evening, Pasadena. Please give a warm welcome to El Biblioteca.
And the crowd goes wild.

About halfway to Mebane—they’re taking the cypress to Mebane—they pass a man standing on the concrete median, beating a yield sign with a chain.
Que bueno,
Hen whispers. This is precisely, exactly what Jack’s life looks like these days. He should hire someone to follow him around, take pictures of everything, document all the signs and signals.

What happens to him at Kinnett College is this: Somehow it gets back to his chair, Alan Sherrill, that he has kissed his student Sarah Cody in the parking lot at Gubbio’s. One of Alan’s advisees is Sarah’s roommate. No one else, apparently, knows, but the roommate has told Alan for reasons that escape everyone. Because she’s pissed off, because it offends her religion, because she’s twenty-one and bored and wants to rattle shit around. Jack sits in Alan’s office, which is full of maps of the Pacific Ocean—his gig is Naval Warfare—and listens while Alan says,
You know, Jack, even absent these, ah, revelations, you haven’t got your doctorate, and you’ve taught the four years full-time. Wouldn’t it just be easier, really, for everybody, if.
The conversation is about how they wouldn’t have had a place for him anyway, how they’d only have been able to give him one more year, tops, about how Jack shouldn’t worry, how Alan intends to be discreet and professional about all of this. Jack watches it happen to him like he’s watching it happen to someone else.

That night, after the meeting, when he tells Beth that—but not why—they’re not renewing his contract, she’s not surprised. They’ve been at enough department meetings, heard enough times what the hiring situation would look like long-term. And she’s been on him lately to get back to his degree, worried that it would catch up to him eventually.
Take the year,
she says,
finish your dissertation, and then look for something local for a year or two.
They can live, she thinks, for the next year at least, on her salary, their savings. Hen will still have insurance through her, through the school. Jack can find
something.
Community college. High school. When and if her tenure decision gets made, they can talk about going on the market together. She’s not planning on staying at Kinnett forever. If she’s tenured here, she’s more attractive somewhere else. This will be good for him. Send him back into his book about the Viaduct and the New Jersey Turnpike and the Ted Williams Tunnel under the Boston harbor. Possible titles
: Great Conveyances of the East.
Or:
Life Is a Highway.
They’ll be fine, they’ll be OK. And right in that first moment, he believes her, believes he could take the year, pick it all back up again. That this might all wash off. They make Hen some dinner, get him into bed. Beth finds some junk on the TV and says she’s going to wind down for a little while. Jack pours himself a big drink, takes Yul Brynner out onto the porch—the rented house in Burlington, their old front porch—and sits on the steps, a man with no job and a busted son, somebody guilty of standing in a parking lot and kissing a kid. He comes pretty quickly back to the idea that things might not, actually, be all that OK. He’s never been fired before. It feels like a medical procedure gone wrong.
Sir, while we were in there, we found something else.
He sits there with the dog and drinks his drink and works on just what it is he might be supposed to do with himself now.

Hendrick flicks the pen. They drive toward Mebane. Canavan’s in bandages up to his hip. Jack’s got six yards of cypress behind him. His entire life, just about, is sliding around underneath him. It’s been eleven days. He has no plan. He reaches out the window to pick at the edge of the magnetic sign on the door, PATRIOT MULCH & TREE, just to make sure it’s still there.

Hen loves the hydraulic lift on the truck. Always has. Loves the sound, loves to see the bed lift off the frame, loves to see the gravel or dirt or mulch come spilling out the back into a neat pile. He stands off to the side while Jack dumps the cypress in a bare spot of lawn directly behind the basketball goal. Nobody’s home. He’s called back to the yard three times, has waited half an hour in the driveway—the woman called that morning, told them please not to dump it without speaking to her husband first about where he wants it—but no one’s home. The number she left for them in case her husband wasn’t there, Butner says, calling Jack back, turns out to be a science museum in Raleigh. There’s no one who works there with the name she gave. But they’re paid up, in cash, and Butner says into the phone,
I swear, boss man, I’d just find somewhere out of the way to drop it and come on back.
If they weren’t paid, Jack wouldn’t put it down—customers angry about eight-foot mulch pyramids in their driveways tend not to pay—but it’s past noon and getting hotter and Hen needs lunch and Jack’s head still hurts and he’s getting hungry, too, so: What the hell. He gets the back of the bed just past the goal, gets Hen out of the way, works the control levers on the box on the side of the truck. Hen claps and lifts his right leg up and down in time to who knows what piece of music it is that’s strung through his head right now.

It’s always a little ghostly delivering to houses where nobody’s home. Signs of life everywhere: Basketball goal, a basketball or two in the grass behind. There’s mail in the mailbox to the right of the door, flowers on the patio with puddles of water underneath, a piece of a bicycle leaned up against the garage. And a bicycle pump. Coffee mugs on a glass-topped table on the deck out back. A dog-house, a couple of chew toys in the grass. It’s as though the house itself might be alive, as though it’s the house that has carelessly left these things out. The family has been whisked away, winked into another time. There’s a shovel next to the A/C compressor, and Jack takes that, sticks it in the mulch pile, tapes the invoice to the handle. That’ll do. “Hen,” he says. “You want to come bring the bed back down?” With the bed up in the air, the truck looks like Yul Brynner trying to take a shit.

Hen walks over, saying, “The Sleep Number Bed, so you can choose your mattress preference, your Sleep Number.”

Jack hands him the control box. “That one right there,” he says, pointing out the right button. “Remember?”

Hen says, “Remember?” He takes the box, which looks huge in his little hand. He holds his index finger out, but can’t quite figure out how to work the buttons and hold the box at the same time. He keeps dropping it. It bangs down onto the driveway, chipping a fingernail-sized piece up off the concrete.

“Here,” Jack says, trying to hold it for him, but that’s no good. Hen starts making his noises, thinking Jack’s trying to take it from him. “No,” Jack says. “Look. We’re doing it together.” Which makes it worse. Hen lets go of the box completely, starts screaming and hitting himself in the head with the heel of his hand. “Come on, buddy,” Jack says, trying to calm him, “please now, come on. Let’s do it together.” Hen’s turning in circles, grunting, hitting himself. Jack gets behind him, gets both his arms circled around him, holds the control box right in front of Hen’s face. “Here we go,” he says. “OK? Look.
Look
.” And Hen bangs his face so hard into the box that even before he checks, Jack knows there’s going to be blood.

The impact stops him cold, though: No more circles, no yelling, no hitting. A trickle of blood starts down and out from his left eyebrow. Jack holds onto him, holds onto the box, pulls the hem of his shirt up to pat Hen’s face dry. Hendrick reaches one finger out, pushes the green button, holds it a second, lets it go. The bed comes down a foot, maybe less, stops. Hen pushes the button again, and the bed bounces down a few inches more. He laughs. He laughs while he’s bleeding from his goddamned face. He pushes the button a third time, a fourth, and the bed comes down a little more, a little more. Jack holds his shirt against the cut. Put this in
Extraordinary Parent Magazine
. One of Beth’s subscriptions, one of the Bibles from which the scripture readings come. He’ll send in a letter.
Our child really tends to come around when he concusses himself. Sharp edges seem to work best.

It can’t be good for the truck hydraulics, dropping the bed down a foot at a time, but what the hell. Butner can fix that, too. Jack holds onto Hen, can feel the warmth of his little body through his shirt while he pushes the button, pushes the button. A car pulls in behind him, a diesel. Mercedes, from the sound of it. Low metallic rumble. This is the woman, or her husband. Has to be. He dabs at Hen’s eyebrow again: It’s a tiny cut, nothing more than a puncture from the control box. It’s putting out enough blood, though. The truck shudders every time the bed drops down.

It’s the husband. He gets out, stands in his driveway, looks at his pile of mulch. “We’ll be out of your way in a minute,” Jack says. Hen bleeds.

The guy’s wearing a coat and tie. “I guess that’s as good a place as any,” he says.

Jack says, “We tried to pick some place out of the way.”

“I’m gonna put it along the house, here, up front,” the man says. People are forever telling Jack what they’re going to do with the mulch, like it’s some kind of test they have to pass with him. They’ll stand on the yard at PM&T, let a handful of mini nuggets slide through their fingers, and they’ll say,
I think this’ll probably do for underneath the swingset out back. Right?
They need their choices ratified by experts. People tend to look desperate around mulch.

The bed whines its way finally down onto the frame, and the man stands behind them, watching. It hits with a hollow bang. Jack takes the control box, fits it in its spot on the back of the cab. Hen’s got a thin stripe of blood running down his jaw, like war paint. He says, “Sawtooth Oak.”

The man says, “Do you guys need a bandage or something? Is he OK?”

“I’ve got Band-Aids in the truck,” Jack says, knowing Hen’ll never let him put one on. He hates sticky things. “It’s just a little nick in his eyebrow. He bumped his head on the box.” Jack points at the box. He’s got to look like some sort of child abuser here, like someone should be called about this, but the man just nods.

“OK,” he says, and loosens his tie.

“Sawtooth Oak,” Hen says again, and the man takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, wipes Hendrick’s face. He lets him. Another rule that’s null and void, apparently.

“You like trees?” the man asks.

“Sawtooth Oak,” says Hen.

“Switchback Oak,” says the man. “One of my all-time favorites.”

“Chestnut Oak,” Hen says.