Call Me Home (4 page)

“What if your dad sees you?”

“Mom – he's not going to.”

She pulled at the hem of her shirt, touched her new blonde hair, watching herself in the mirror. “Just be careful,” she said.

“Jack,” Lydia said. She didn't say anything else, just leaned down to blow on his toes. Jackson sat up and put his arm around her. She was little for thirteen, with sharp elbows and knees, and her hair was cut in a blunt little bob. Her face was delicate, though. Her eyes were close-set but they made her look smart, he thought, like she was concentrating hard on something. If he got a job he'd help her get some new clothes. Cute things that would help her make friends in the new school. It was stupid, but it mattered.

“Please be careful,” his mother said again, and he nodded.

RANDY HAD PICKED
him up on Fourth Street in Marysville. Marysville was adjacent to Tulalip, “the big city,” Jackson's mother called it. Home of the famous water tower, a dozen sluttish girls. Randy was a senior, the no-friends, pasty variety. He liked a radio
call-in program – what was it called? It was local, AM radio with a temperamental bandwidth. Callers described weird occurrences, the paranormal. Things that happened right in their own homes. A ghostly fingerprint in the butter. A wife gone missing – all her clothes still in the closet, even her shoes. Jackson didn't mention that this was exactly what his mother had done the first time that they left his father. Randy was Jackson's best friend. In fact, if Jackson were to count the top three friends he'd ever had, Randy was first in a race that included a retarded boy from preschool and his middle school locker partner.

Randy had a car. He made money in some suspicious way, something with his computer. “Dude,” he said. “Are there hot girls in Everett? I bet the school's fucking huge.”

“I haven't been to school yet,” Jackson said. “I guess I'm just going to skip for a while.” Would he even graduate? Probably, if Sharon had anything to do with it. She was the kind of guidance counselor who looked at her delinquent charges with weepy, Precious Moments eyes. “Your potential,” she would wail. “You could have it all.” Jackson imagined his potential like a sickly man in the back of the room who coughed a little harder every time Jackson fucked up. Skipping school to sit in the chlorine smell of the pool watching Chris knife through the water?
Cough.
An eight ball of cocaine the weekend before the PSATs?
Cough cough.

“Sick,” Randy said. “Wish I could do that.”

“Yeah,” Jackson said. Jackson knew his friendship with Randy had something to do with Jackson being a fag and everyone assuming that Randy was, too, but he and Randy never talked about Chris, or about Jackson being a fag, for that matter. Randy talked about girls and seemed not to notice or care when Jackson didn't join in.

Randy brought Jackson from the bus station to his little house near the high school. The fields flipped by. It was still early spring but it might as well have been the dead of Washington winter. Still green, but dark green. Black-green. A living lake bottom, a mildewed constitution.

The house was boxy and collapsing, rain-beaten. Randy had the basement apartment to himself. It was cold like a tomb, damp and snaky. There was a brick and board shelf of books on the paranormal, and a radio with the antennae covered in tinfoil – presumably, Jackson thought, so he could catch the radio program even ten feet underground. Two milky fish tanks. “Looks good in here,” Jackson said, and Randy grinned. The only lamp had a cloth thrown over it, making the whole place seem underwater.

Randy wanted to show him some computer game that Jackson didn't understand – didn't try to understand. They sat in the aquarium light of Randy's room until six or seven, and he watched Randy maneuver a guerrilla fighter through a dark forest. Randy bit his lip and pounded his fist on the desk when the guerrilla was ambushed. A saucer of ash and resin clattered to the floor. “They rig it,” Randy said. “They rig the fucking thing so you can't actually get to the eighth level without paying somebody for a tip. There's a call line and everything.” He wiped his hands on his pants, glanced at the clock, and stood up. “AM 530,” he said. “Man.” He went to the radio and flipped it on. Static, a distant, low voice. A woman was saying, “The refrigerator just keeps opening on its own.”

Randy sat in a torn-up armchair and pulled out a bag of weed. He rolled some loose leaves into a crooked joint and lit it. “I don't know about the appliance stuff,” Randy said, “I'm out on a limb about it.” He took a long drag of the joint and held it, blew it out in a long trail of smoke. “Too many variables. Too many technological flaws.” He handed the joint to Jackson.

The announcer was soothing. “How disturbing.” How disturbing, thought Jackson. His head felt a little swimmy. The eggs are ruined again. The mayonnaise has turned. “Have you had any other problems in the house? Anything out of place?”

Randy leaned back in the armchair and crossed his arms. “That's the real test. It's like diagnosing a disease when you have to have a certain number of symptoms.”

Jackson nodded. The woman said that the arms of her coat often appeared to wave at her from their hangers in the dark. The
announcer made a low noise of interest. Jackson liked Randy's basement room. He always liked places where no one else came. The back of a warehouse, the cab of an abandoned pickup. Anyplace where no one would know. He thought of the empty locker room, of Chris.

Their whole thing – that was what it was, a
thing
– was muted in his memory. The bat sounds of swimmers underwater, interrupted with an occasional hand job. He wanted Chris to like him, desperately, but he couldn't say why. That was the bigger problem. Chris
didn't
like him desperately, but Jackson was willing to pour himself into whatever vessel it took to make himself wanted or wantable. He would lay everything out on the table in front of Chris – a desperate banquet of need. And now what did it even matter? Chris was out there, standing under the locker room shower, kicking off his Speedo, throwing it down against the tiles, the water beating against the broad of his back, running down the roads of muscle, and Jackson was going to be stuck in Everett, in secret, alone.

When the announcer faded off for the commercial break, Randy turned to Jackson. “What's going on with your dad, man?” He was looking very intently at crumbs of weed, trying to herd them onto another rolling paper. “I heard it was bad.”

“What did you hear?” Jackson asked.

“Ah – nothing, really,” Randy said. “Just that he … you know. Hit her a bunch. Broke the windows.”

Jackson picked up a paperclip from the table, bent it open, twisted it. “Yeah, well, don't believe everything you hear,” he said.

The announcer came back on and they sat in silence for a while. “All of my sheep were gone, a man said. The whole farm, lifted up in the night.” The announcer said gravely, “This is not as uncommon as you may think.”

He ditched Randy at eight. “Dude,” Randy said. “Are you sticking around? You staying with your old man?”

“Yeah,” Jackson said. Later, he wouldn't know why he'd said
it, why he'd come to Marysville at all. His life – and his mother's life, and Lydia's – pivoting on that stupid “Yeah,” accidental, inevitable.

“You want a ride?” Randy's eyes were bloodshot. His T-shirt was torn a little and a patch of his soft chest was showing.

“Yeah,” Jackson said. “Thanks, man.” Randy led him out of the cave of the room and followed him into the wet air.

The pool was a mile from Randy's, and it was seven miles after that to his father's house in Tulalip. His father's house, his mother's motel. Jackson hoped Lydia wasn't worried about him. Chris always practiced at the pool from four until seven. One night Jackson had shown up at the pool just around closing, and they'd hid in the locker room until the janitors had locked up. Chris lifted Jackson up onto his shoulders, naked, and threw him over and over again in the shallow end. It was dark and he had to keep clambering over Chris's head, clutching at his hair. They didn't talk about it, just kept laughing and doing it again. He could have done that forever. They hadn't even slept together – they never did, not really, but he didn't care. He would have done that for the rest of his life. The short flight through the air, the lukewarm water, again and again.

Randy slowed by the pool under the sodium lights as though he knew. There were no cars in the parking lot. Of course not. What had Jackson thought, that because he was there, the pool would suddenly stay open? That Chris would be slicing through the water or sitting on the pool deck waiting? He had the feeling of someone having come back to see an empty house, someplace he used to live. He wanted to feel what he used to feel, but there was nothing. His whole night was already mapped out – Randy's aquatic basement, the empty pool, his father. He knew he would go and he went.

His father's car was gone when he made it to the house. The mobile home. There was a trash bag taped over the window his mother had sprawled through, a week ago now. A sickening, slow fall that he had watched from the hallway, his throat tight so that he almost couldn't breathe. “Promise me you will never get
involved,” his mother had told him. “It will make it worse.” She'd hung over the side of the frame, at the waist, where his father had thrown her, and then he came up behind her, kicked out the rest of the window, and watched her fall the four feet to the ground. Jackson had taken Lydia back to his room and held her there for the rest of the night. He'd gotten up once to throw up, hating everything, his father most of all.

That was their last fight, the one that had landed him and his mother and Lydia in Everett, and it had started with him. It made him angry at himself, and at his father, and at his mother. He'd said something about moving to Seattle for school, Seattle Central Community College. His mother had smiled. “There's queers up on Capitol Hill,” his father said. “It's where the queers go.” He looked at Jackson, a half smile on his face.

His mother put her hand on his father's arm. “It's a good school,” she said. “And it's a little early to be talking about this, anyway.” It was too early, Jackson had thought, thinking about the weepy guidance counselor and the column of shitty grades on his transcript.

“I'll go where I want,” Jackson had said, and shrugged. And how had it gone from there? The loud confusion, his mother jumping to his defense. The window. Lydia in the back bedroom, chewing on her hands.

His mother sat in a deadly calm for a few days. She listened over and over to a Bellamy Brothers record, which only made Jackson feel more certain that they were about to leave. Let your love flow. Each time before there had been an uncomfortable incongruous quality to the days – “Don't forget your coat,” he remembered her telling Lydia once at noon on a ninety-degree day before they loaded up the car and took off for three weeks in Carnation.

Jackson knew they were going to go, he could feel it, and so he went down to the pool one night and found Chris. “I might be gone for a while,” he said. Chris had barely acknowledged him. Jackson gave him a round wooden box he'd turned on a lathe in shop class. Inside he'd slipped – he couldn't even believe this
now – a lock of his hair. He hated to think about it. There was no way to make it not awful.

He took a beer from the fridge – empty otherwise, except for mayonnaise, a carton of eggs, and an open bag of chips that his dad probably put there when he was drunk. He sat down and turned on the television, trying to pretend he was someone else – a guy at home. Watching a little TV. Drinking a beer. The news was less and less interesting. Someone's tractor had slid into a ditch. There were too many animals for the local shelter. The key in the lock. “Hello?” His father.

“Jack,” his father said. Jackson could see he was drunk. His pants were unbuckled – it used to drive his mother crazy that his father would piss in the yard – and he looked at Jackson and smiled. “My boy.”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Where you been?”

“Around. Came back to see you.”

His father smiled. It was disarming, that smile. He had a shadowy face, eyes sunk deep under his brow, but then that hard, bright smile. One of his ears stuck out and when he smiled it made him seem goofy and disheveled. Jackson felt relieved. He wanted it to be normal, as though his mother and Lydia were just off somewhere shopping or at an appointment. No questions, just easy.

His father took a beer from the fridge and brought another to Jackson. He sat down and put his legs up on the coffee table. He wasn't a big man, but he was tall and strong. His arms were muscled and the table groaned under his heavy legs, his work boots. “Nothing on the news these days but shit,” he said.

“Somebody put their tractor in a ditch,” Jackson said.

His father laughed loudly. “This is good, Jack,” he said. “I'm glad you're here.”

He smelled like sawdust and beer. “How's your sister?”

“Fine.”

“Your mother? How's she?”

“She's fine.”

“Sorry you had to see that quarrel.”

Quarrel, Jackson thought, was not a word he'd ever heard his father use before. He shrugged again and drained his beer. He felt a terrible guilt for a moment, thinking of his mother. Her new blonde hair. She was probably lying on the motel bed right then. Trusting him. Rain spattered against the plastic that covered the window.