Jernigan (16 page)

“Just be a sec,” she said to Danny, and headed off to the bathroom.

Danny said “Hiya Dad” and went upstairs. Came back down with his guitar case. He stood looking out the window, as if he gave any more of a shit than I did about what was out a window. It was another astonishing fall day for those in the mood to be astonished by fall days. Sky such a pure blue that it bothered me. Because here I was, sulking and spurning yet another gift from the Creator.

“I’m going to give you forty thousand dollars,” I announced.

“Yeah, what’s the catch?” said Danny, still looking out.

“No catch,” I said. “Somebody bought the house today. And I’m
setting aside forty thousand dollars off the top for your college. Probably put it in CDs. But it’s going to be in your name.” This made him turn around, at least, though probably because he thought I was talking about forty thousand dollars’ worth of compact discs. “Now ten thousand a year,” I said, “is not going to buy you a hell of a lot anymore, but it’ll buy you
something
. Basically what it will buy you is enough of a degree someplace so you won’t have to work in a factory. Provided your grades are decent enough so you can get in somewhere, and then provided you work hard enough so you don’t flunk out.”

Not much of a pep talk for college, I suppose. Useless anyway. I couldn’t imagine Danny ever being capable of even the modest effort it took to get through your average college these days. The guitar was the only thing I’d ever seen him buckle down to—
buckle down to
, now there was an old-fart expression—and what the hell was that, the guitar? This was stuff I didn’t think much about, because it made me so afraid for him. Christ, these days he’d be
lucky
to end up in a factory. No factories anymore to end up in. And he wasn’t what they used to call good with his hands, so plumbing or fixing cars was out. He would end up on the drug shitheap.

“Listen, Dad?” he said. “You mind if we talk about it later? We’re late to practice.”

“Sure, why not?” I said. “I know how intensely
boring
it all is.” It was not true that I got mean when I drank.

The toilet flushed and Clarissa came down the hall, seeming to wander from one side to the other. She saw me looking and started walking straight, watching her feet.

“We don’t have to stop using the house yet, do we?” said Danny.

“Use away,” I said. “Closing probably isn’t for another month.”

“So when do we have to get our stuff out?”

I shrugged. “A lot of it we might just as well leave,” I said. “The girls seem like they’re pretty well equipped. Any of the furniture or anything that you’re particularly attached to?”

“Nah,” he said. “I might give a lot of my stuff away. Like to poor kids or something.”

“It’s your stuff,” I said. Now, a mean drunk would have said, This so-called
stuff is stuff I
bought you.

Clarissa took Danny’s hand. “Daniel?” she said.

“So you’re off to practice,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Danny. “We better do it.”

“Come up with a name yet for your band?” A mean drunk would’ve been keeping this up just to watch them chafe to be gone. What I was, was an interested father.

“I don’t know, sort of,” said Danny. “Dad, we have to get going, okay?”

“And what were you thinking of calling it?”

“I don’t know. Dustin wants to call it Naked Movie Star.”

“And what do
you
think about that?”

“I don’t know. I guess it’s pretty cool. Hey Dad? We’re gonna be late.”

Clarissa was looking at the floor.

“And what about you, Clarissa?” I said. “What do
you
think about Naked Movie Star?”

Her pale face got red. So after all these years, the word
naked
still had the old sockeroo.

And they made their escape, like Hansel and Gretel from the horrible gingerbread house. I sat there and tried to think why Naked Movie Star rang a bell. Then I got it. McMartin Preschool. The twistos who were making the videos of the little kids. At least according to the little kids. So one of Danny’s friends must at least watch
60 Minutes
or something. Now which one was Dustin again?

3

I woke up on the sofa. From a “nap.” Quarter to something, probably seven, according to the greenish hands of my watch, glowing feebly in the murk. Darkness at a quarter to seven, if that’s what it was a quarter to, argued that it must be p.m. I padded to the kitchen in stocking feet. So apparently I’d gotten my shoes off before passing out. God takes care of drunks and whatever the other thing is He takes care of. Fools? Madmen? Children? Damn it was cold.
Rest of
November, December, January, February and most of March
, I said to myself, flicking out fingers:
five more months of this
. Five months was half the year, just about. Hey, one day at a time, right? Thing to do now was fire up the woodstove. Which involved: crumpling up the paper, sticking in the kindling, waiting for that to get going, and then and only then adding the first logs. Right, and
then
sitting right in front of the fucking thing for a half hour until the room warmed up. So the thing to do really was just reach up and crank the old Honeywell and get the oil burner going. Right, and then have Martha go on a fucking rant about the cost of heating oil.

Not much in the old refrigerator. Eggs. Skimmed milk, which everybody now seems to call skim. Back when Danny was learning to read, I used to take a magic marker sometimes and caret in
MED
on the cartons. Back when I gave a shit. (Speaking of which, shouldn’t “stocking feet,” see above, be
stockinged?)
A dumpster cantaloupe, just one moldy spot, which would have been the most appealing thing in there if you hadn’t had to cut the son of a bitch open and scoop seeds. White box of generic bran flakes, kept in the refrigerator because of the mouse problem. Which Martha, mass murderess of bunnies, refused to solve with d-Con. D-Con: deconstructor of the innards of rodents. “Do you know how that stuff
works?”
she’d said when I proposed it. “Do I care?” I’d said. But she had carried the day, by dint of sheer moral earnestness. Huh, dint. Dint dint dint. Like you get in your shield, isn’t that another meaning? Dint in your shield, from a truncheon or something.

So really the thing to do was to put your shoes back on and get your coat and go drive someplace in the car so you could run the heater. Go eat at McDonald’s or something, to make it all seem purposeful. There was a McDonald’s on Hamilton, someplace along that strip out past the mall. And another on Route 17. We’re a two-McDonald’s town, Jack.

Now, usually I don’t trust the Drive-Thru at McDonald’s. Not the Jernigan style, I know, doing business face-to-face, but too much can go wrong with the Drive-Thru: miscommunication through a scratchy squawkbox, holding up a line of cars while you complain. Tonight, though, it was so cold I stayed right in the car and just kept that heater pumping it out and the Drive-Thru worked like a well-oiled
machine, just boom boom boom and you were out of there. Then I drove maybe another mile out Hamilton, to Seaman’s Furniture, closed at this hour, and parked in front, facing the traffic. Thinking I guess of Wild Bill Hickok with his back to the door, which is where you get the expression Dead Man’s Hand, unless I’m really off the beam here. I sat there with the lights off and the engine running, heater still blowing out warm, invisible clouds around my shins. Got startled for a second—thought somebody was suddenly sitting there in the passenger seat—but it was just the white cowboy jacket. I nursed the small fries to make them last two cheeseburgers, then stuck all the wrappings back in the bag, crumpled the bag and stuffed it into the empty milkshake thing, put the plastic lid back on to keep everything neat and put it on the floor in the back, among the Diet Coke cans and styrofoam coffee cups whose lids had little triangles torn out of them.

The usual bloat and disgust.

The only thing to do was to drink more. Not that drinking more was really going to do it either, but. I checked the old wallet: a five and three singles. Enough either to get a fifth of Gordon’s at the discount liquor place, or to get a pint and enough gas to keep driving around, sneaking sips when headlights were far enough behind and listening to the Walkman. What I did for music these days was just keep a Walkman and a few tapes in the glove compartment; that way they might still break in, but they wouldn’t know they had a reason to. So I checked to see what tapes were on hand, as if that would help me decide. Assorted Beach Boys, good for either cheap irony or actual enjoyment, or for some condition veering back and forth between the two. Assorted George Jones (a gift from Uncle Fred). The Webb Pierce tape Martha had made me. All white people’s music today. So maybe that would give me a safe frisson, driving around some ghetto-y part of Newark listening to white people’s music and sipping from a pint of white people’s liquor.

On the other hand, wasn’t a pint going to leave me just a smidgen short of where I wanted to be?

And then I remembered there was still a bottle of gin—and not some God damn crappy little fifth, either, but a whole big sturdy welcoming quart!—in the kitchen cabinet at Heritage Circle. At least
half full, if the kids hadn’t gotten into it. Which wasn’t likely: I’d put it on the top shelf, behind a cylinder of Quaker Oats. Well all
right
.

Every light in the house was on, and the sagging Cadillac was back in the driveway. God damn shitheap parked there meant I had to walk an extra carlength in the cold. Well, I’d live. At least Danny wasn’t just sitting in his room with guitar and Rockman, looping music back into his own head. I opened the car door to the expected shot of cold air but didn’t hear the expected din. Taking a break? To do what? The screen door onto the breezeway was unlocked, kitchen door too. I stuck my head inside and yelled “Hello anybody
home?”
to give fair warning, then walked into where it was warm. And in strolled the fat kid, in stocking feet.

“So,” I said. “How’s it going tonight?”

“Pretty reasonably,” he said. “I don’t believe we were actually introduced.” He stuck out a hand. “Dustin Sanders?”

“Pete Jernigan,” I said, giving the man’s handshake. God knows why Pete: I never went by Pete. Powerful Pete. Some compulsion to be hearty. By which I guess I mean not oppressively parental. “Gang all here?” I said.

“Nah,” he said. “I think Danny’s probably still over at Mitchell’s. And I dropped Clarissa off at her place.”

“You’re the only one here, in other words?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know, we played for about half an hour, and it completely sounded like crap. So we just sort of got depressed and bagged it. I guess we should’ve tried to work through it or something. Did you use to be in a band, Mr. Jernigan?”

“Did I use to be in a band,” I said. “No. No, of the many things I used to be—” Then I decided why give the kid shit. “So now what happened to Danny again?”

“Well, I
think
he’s still at Mitchell’s.”

“Mitchell being?” I said.

“Kid who plays the drums? We went over to check out his new CD player.”

“But you came back here,” I said.

“I hate CDs,” he said. “It’s like you can’t get
away
from it. And my dad thinks it’s cold compared to vinyl. Of course he’s into pretty
much strictly classical. So anyhow, I decided I’d just go get some videos to watch.”

“But what are you
doing
here?” I said. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“You mean Danny didn’t
say
anything? Jeez, what a space cadet.” He bethought himself. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean he was really
spacey
or anything. So this must seem pretty weird to you, if he didn’t say anything. See, he told me I could stay here for a couple days. I hope that was okay.”

“What about your—” I was going to say parents plural, but these days. “Don’t you have another place to go?” I said, meaning to be delicate. Instead it sounded inhospitable, I heard it as soon as it came out.

He laughed. “I’m not a homeless person or anything,” he said. “It’s just a thing where—” He shrugged. “Parents and kids, you know?”

“No, I
don’t
know,” I said. I did know.

“It was like it was going to go critical around there,” he said. “Like when you get too many neutrons bouncing around and then,
balooey.”
He slowly spread cupped hands as if to show an expanding fireball.

“Do people know where you are?”

He thought, then said, “They know I’m
okay.”

“You won’t mind if I call them,” I said. Not a question.

He took a pack of Camels out of the pocket of his white shirt. “Four three seven, seven seven three four,” he said. “Same forwards and backwards. I’ll write it down for you if you want. Or you can just look up under Martin Sanders.” He tapped the end of the pack against a forefinger and the ends of three cigarettes appeared, each a different length, like the pipes of an organ. It made me want one. After, what, more than a year? “If you could try to not give him the address here,” he said, “that would be good. But I guess if he asks you, you have to say, right? Is it okay to smoke in your house, by the way? I could go outside if you’d rather.”

“It’s just barely my house anymore, anyway,” I said. If he didn’t know the place was sold, he must have wondered what the hell
that
meant. “Enjoy. Wish it was me.”

He lit a cigarette and looked around for where to put the spent match. He chose an empty can of Betty Crocker chocolate frosting on the counter. He’d laid in provisions, apparently.

“You’re a quit smoker?” he said. “That’s excellent. After tonight I’m not going to smoke anymore.
Or
eat junk.”

“So you’re having a last fling, huh?”

“A fling,” he said. “Yeah, I guess. Were you going anyplace? Or can you stay and talk for a minute?”