Jernigan (30 page)

Clearly nobody in the house, whatever time it was. You could tell by the feel of things, not that I really believe in the feel of things. (And if things
did
have a feel, who less apt to feel that feel than Jernigan?) I mean, for all I know the kids were up in their room lying spent after the noisy fuck that I hadn’t realized was what had awakened me. Cold as hell in here, maybe
that’s
what I meant by the feel of things. Rick’s card still unopened on the night table. What could he possibly have written that I’d want to read? (How about a ream of typed pages—some in prose paragraphs, some in verse, like Jack Nicholson’s
opus magnum
in
The Shining
—saying over and over again I
forgive you I forgive you I forgive you?)
Most likely all it said was what last year’s said:
Thinking of you
. Fuck a bunch of being thought of. I took it with me down to the kitchen and threw it in the garbage, still unopened. Let the good wishes go biodegrade themselves.

On the kitchen table I found a note, on a sheet torn from a spiral notebook, with ragged perforations along one side.

Peter and kids
,
I went over to Tim’s to pick up our presents. If you wake up, there’s o. j. all made in the fridge and some English muffins and REAL BUTTER!!! Merry Xmas
.

—M

The clock said like twenty-five of one. Wasn’t she afraid of interrupting Tim and the girlfriend as they lolled? Though I was forgetting the girlfriend had a child to get back to, there’s something I remembered, so no lolling probably for old Tim this Christmas morning. Wasn’t there a pitcher named Tim Lollar?

I polished off the last little bit of gin in the old quart—must’ve been
a hell of a rest of the night, boy—and opened a new one. More economical to buy half gallons, I know, but that was too alcoholic. (It was also alcoholic to worry about whether things were too alcoholic.) So I’d kept buying quarts, but two at a time so as not to have to go back so often. And another day began. I reminded myself to look out the window. Out of touch with nature: hell, that was probably, what, a good two percent of the problem right there. Bright outside. Sun seemed to have melted most of the snow—now there was another thing I remembered, snowstorm last night—except for what lay in the shadows of the tree trunks. I thought Hey, white shadows, how about that.

Well, so now we knew where Martha was, but what about the kids? What the hell kind of kids, more to the point, would absent themselves on Christmas morning? True, they couldn’t have had high hopes, but. Maybe everybody’d simply gotten tired of waiting for old Dad to roll out, and decided to go ahead and have their Christmas just the three of them. I went into the living room and looked: all the shit was still under the tree. So. Big mystery. And of course so very interesting to think about.

I seemed to have burned up everything in the woodbox last night, so the first thing to do was put on shoes and a coat and go out and get some logs in. Et cetera. Upstairs I heard the tv go on. Maybe they’d just been waiting to hear me moving around so they wouldn’t disturb my sleep. (Little joke.) It was probably more like, We know you’re up now so this is just to let you know we’re in here and you can go fuck yourself. Maybe old Martha had the right idea, sit in the car and run the heater—one more thing I remembered from last night. (Shit, it was all going to come back if I just relaxed and didn’t think about it. The old Zen archery.) So I went and got dressed, put on overcoat and gloves, jammed the big new gin bottle into the big side pocket and went out to the car. Took another good belt and slipped the bottle under the seat, figuring fuck all this soda-can bullshit: if you can’t even tell whether there’s a cop car around or not, you’re not in any shape to be driving anyway.

So I cruised around town for a while with the heater blowing, that and the gin warming me up nicely. The sky was already starting to cloud over again. And I just didn’t want to go back to that God damn
house. So I ended up driving all the way up to Paterson, and then east to the GW and down into Manhattan. Got off the West Side Highway at 96th Street and drove up to 102nd. I double-parked and looked up at Uncle Fred’s windows. Nothing to see. Then down to 72nd and Broadway, to Gray’s Papaya. It was illogical—fuck, it was
hypocritical
—to find it depressing that Gray’s Papaya was open on Christmas. Had a hot dog and a piña colada, which I fucked up by dumping a bunch of gin in it. Cleaned out the car while I was parked there, got rid of all the Diet Coke cans and McDonald’s bags and shit in a trash basket. That fucking cowboy jacket too. Laying it on top where some shivering derelict might see it. So that was about all she wrote for the world’s greatest city.

By then the sky had darkened except for a fissure in the west where the sun was going down. Couple flakes of snow. On the GW again, pretty adequately fuzzed by this time, driving into that sunset, the golden glare ahead inviting me just to close my eyes and be absorbed. Thinking about Judith again. There must have been a nanosecond there when she went
Oh my God
and then
Oh all right, fuck it
. I had another headache. Or more of the same headache. From squinting. From that God damn hand hurting. From worrying about how bad I was being, disappearing for hours on Christmas Day, drunk, the presents still unopened.

Parked in front of the house was a red Suzuki Samurai. Shiny. Probably some snot-nosed little friend of Danny and Clarissa’s. Well, fuck ’em, maybe they’d all go off drunk driving, or whatever kind of driving, and leave me in peace. This was, in effect, wishing your son dead.

In the kitchen, a black leather shoulderbag hung from one of the chairs. It stunk: that new-leather stink. I looked through the doorway into the living room. Danny and Clarissa were on the couch, at least a foot of cushion between them. Clarissa staring, as usual, at her black Reeboks. Danny smoking. Nobody talking. The visitor was in the Morris chair. From the doorway you could see an acute angle of leg: a cowboy boot, heel worn down, sticking up into acid-washed denim. Danny looked up at me and gave his head a little side-to-side shake. I gave him back a jaunty salute, meaning
Fuck you too
, and went to
the dish drainer for a jelly glass. You don’t just put the bottle to your mouth in front of company.

When I turned around, a man in the kitchen was saying, “You Jernigan?”

Taller than me by the worn boot heel. Thick hair like some politician trying to look Kennedyesque. One of those mask faces, skin way too tight. The face might have passed for younger than mine if not for those breastlike bags under the eyes. Smiling, or at least showing teeth. Black cable-knit sweater. Jeans tight on him. Daylight between his thighs.

“Rusty Ronson,” he said.

Rusty sort of gave me a taste for that
.

“Ronson?” I said.

“Hey, change my luck,” he said, “you know what I’m saying? Let
her
have Peretsky, she’s such a victim anyway. Fuck a lot of good it did
me
. Pah-RET-sky.” He began to sing his name to the tune of “The Bowery”:

Pah-ret-sky, Pah-RET-sky
He says such things and he does such things oh Pah
RET-sky, Pah-RET-sky
I’ll never be him anymore
.

I held up the bottle and the jelly glass level with his eyes. “Drink?” I said, figuring it would either smooth him out or not.

“I think we need to get to know each other first,” he said. He worked his wallet out of his hip pocket and handed me a business card: on it, a Rolls Royce radiator with the RR emblem, and beneath it, in gothic typeface,
RUSTY RONSON ENTERPRISES
.

“You in the car business now?” I said, being oh so casual. Not scared.

“Car
business?” he said. “That’s what she told you? Shit.” He shook his head. “Promotion business,” he said. “Independent promoter. So tell me one thing. What kind of freak show you got going in my house here? We know you’re fucking my wife. That’s been established. You touch my daughter?”

Behind him, in the doorway, I saw Danny.

“Hey Dan?” I said. “Why don’t you take Clarissa out for a walk, okay?”

“I asked you something.”

“What is this about?” I said.
Pulling sweatshirt over head
. “Of course I didn’t touch your daughter.”
White breasts
.

“She says different.”

I looked at Clarissa. She looked at me.

“I didn’t,” she said. “Mr. Jernigan, honest. Daddy’s playing one of his weird-shit games.”

“Kayokayokay,” he said, waving his hand back and forth as if erasing a blackboard. “I’m allowed to test you, right? My responsibility, right? As a parent. As a motherfucking
parent
, man. I am now fully satisfied that Danny Boy here and Danny Boy alone is putting the boots to my daughter. And I believe I
will
have that drink.”

“I think we’re out of tonic,” I said. “Water do you okay?”

“Out of tonic,” he said, shaking his head. “Old place
has
fallen to shit. Half a mind to come back and get things straightened out a little around here. Kick a little
ass.”

I filled the jelly glass a third of the way with gin. “How much water?” I said.

“Whatever
you
think,” he said. “You’re the man of the house now.” I went to the sink, topped off the glass with water and stirred with a knife out of the dish drainer.

“You’re a gentleman and a scholar,” he said. “And a pussy,” he stage-whispered. I got another jelly glass out of the dish drainer and filled it with gin. About all I could think of by way of rebuttal.

“So Danny
Boy,”
he said. “How is she, hot and tight?”

“Danny,” I said, looking at Rusty Ronson, “will you please take Clarissa the hell
out
of here now?
And
yourself?” My eyes still on Rusty Ronson, I saw their blurry shapes flit and vanish from the doorway. The gin bottle was in easy reach. Another point in favor of quart bottles: they had a neck you could grab and smash to make a jagged weapon, though I could picture a lot of things going wrong if this was the first time you tried it. Maybe just take and bonk the fucker with it.

Rusty Ronson looked over his shoulder at the empty doorway.
“Good,” he said. “Now we can talk.” He drank the gin-and-water down in a single swallow and set the glass on the counter.

“Let’s talk about what you’re doing here,” I said.

“Hey, holiday visit,” he said, putting up both hands. “When I come, I bring good cheer. Face it.”

“You know,” I said, “I’m sure Clarissa wants to see her father and everything. It’s just that it doesn’t seem to be very, sort of, favorable circumstances, you know?”

“Is that smoke I feel,” he said, “being blown ever so gently up my ass? You’re a fucking
cartoon
. Little cartoon man. Where the fuck do you get off telling
me
I can’t come in my own house? Who the fuck
are
you?”

I shook my head. “I really don’t think this is your house anymore.”

“Bull
shit
. You show me on a piece of
paper
, babe, where it’s not my house. I sell this place tomorrow, man. Out from under
your
ass,
her
ass, everybody’s ass in the fuckin’
place
, man. Which I don’t do because I am a
nice person
. I’m doing the best I can,” he said in whiny-voice, “for my family. Listen, man to man: you want to get high?”

“On what?” I said. Thinking this might give me a clue.

“On what,” he said. “I love it.” He shook his head. “If you have to ask,” he said, raising a forefinger, “you don’t want to get high. That’s what you teach the kids? Just Say On What? Ah, listen, don’t pay any attention to my bullshit. You’re doing a really really first-class job with them, man. Really. I was fuckin’ impressed. Now me, I don’t
give
a shit on what.”

He fished around in the leather shoulderbag and brought out a small white canister. “Heads up,” he said, and flipped it to me. Somehow I didn’t fumble it. It was a plastic screwtop jar: Dr. Daniels’ Summit Brand catnip. Picture on it of a crazed cat perched on a rocky summit with Andean-looking peaks all around. The cat had an outsized bow around its neck, perhaps suggesting it was still a harmless pet even though it was high on catnip. I unscrewed the lid. A delicate spoon half-buried in white powder. “Ronson’s Own Blend,” he said.

“Of?”

He shrugged. I screwed the lid back on, tightly, and handed it back.

“Don’t mind me,” he said, unscrewing the lid again. “I’m sure
you’ve seen this on television.” He put a heaping spoonful up each nostril. Then he did each nostril again. He kept snuffling and rubbing at the underside of his nose with his forefinger. “Rrrighty-o,” he said. “Okay, for ten points, who said that? Rrrighty-o. Famous cartoon.”

I knew it was Felix the Cat, but you couldn’t say anything. Not and keep your dignity.

“As seen on television,” he said. “I
know
you know. And you
know
I know you know. You just don’t want to say because this is serious, right? An intruder right in your h
ome
, man. Which you just found out
isn’t
your home.”

“It’s a little hard to believe,” I said, “that somewhere in the divorce—”

“The divorce?
The
divorce? Oh now
don’t
tell me that my little Martha is going around saying … Listen. Man to man, here: this is a sick bitch.”

“You’re telling me that you and Martha are not divorced,” I said.

“C’mere,” he said. “C’mere c’mere, I’m not going to do anything to you. You want to see it on paper?
C’mere.”

He went right to the drawer where Martha kept the phone books, thumbed around and found the P’s. “Now,” he said, flipping two pages forward, then one back, then running his finger down the column. “Peretsky R,” he said. “Not Peretsky R
Mrs.
, not Peretsky M. Fuckin’
R
, babe.” He tapped his chest. “See, I know Martha, Martha’s great. But she’s always had this problem, man. Like she doesn’t tell the
truth
, you know what I’m saying?”