Jernigan, page 12
“Amy O’Connor Century 21,” she said. “Sounds like you’ve got a party going on.”
“I sure as hell better not,” I said. But it sure as hell sounded like drums and shrieking guitar. “I imagine that’s my son and his friends,” I said. “I can’t quite believe he would play hooky, but.” I headed for the breezeway, Amy ducking into her car for a clipboard, then following. A dated expression like playing hooky wasn’t going to cut much ice with this Amy, who wasn’t really pretty enough for me to want to cut ice with anyway. I opened the kitchen door and music hit me, physically, in the chest. A female voice howled off-key above everything else. The noise was obviously coming from the living room, but even here in the kitchen it hurt my ears so much that I didn’t dare go nearer. Like a force-field on Star Trek. I held up a palm to Amy, signifying Wait Here, and opened the door to the basement. I trotted down the steps and crossed under whomping bass notes to the breaker box. I pulled down the main switch and in about one second the drums were playing alone. Then the drums stopped and some kid called, “Hey! What the fuck happened?”
Back upstairs I found Danny flipping wall switches, and Clarissa moaning “Bummer” as she sank into the couch. A wiry kid in a tank top, with platinum hair like Clarissa’s, sat behind an array of drums and cymbals, lighting a cigarette. An overweight boy, his white Dacron shirt bulging over black suit pants, was still walking his fingers over the neck of his silent bass guitar. He had glasses like Amy’s, and short hair neatly parted and combed. Did he use hair tonic? Did they even have hair tonic anymore? A quarter of a century ago, he would have looked like a normal, studious fat boy.
I whistled and four heads turned. Danny stared at me, then past my shoulder at trench-coated Amy.
“This lady,” I said, “is here to go through the house. I trust there are no surprises for her in any of the bedrooms?”
Four blank looks.
“I’m going to go turn the power back on,” I said, “so you’ll kindly turn the machinery off. And when I’m done showing her through, I would like to have a little chat with the two of you.” Pointing a two-finger fork at Danny and Clarissa. A little chat, for Christ’s sake: talking like a high school principal. I imagined this Amy wasn’t too impressed, either. “Sorry about all this,” I said, as I walked her down the echoing hall, bare hardwood floors, bare eggshell walls, to point out the bath over here, master bedroom right next door, linen closet.
“Day’s work,” she said, not that graciously.
Basement.
“Workbench stay?” she said, pen poised.
“Sure, why not. It was here when I got here,” I said. “Tools I’m taking, obviously.” I’d truly intended to use this workshop. Bought a yard-sale table saw, and a brand-new router after reading in some handyman magazine that its uses were “nearly limitless.” I liked the name of it: rout your enemies. I ended up using the thing only once, to make a little bookcase for Danny’s room. Instead of the shelves resting on cleats or whatever, I routed grooves in the sides and back. Just slide the shelves in and there you were. After the first year or so here, I didn’t do much more than sharpen the lawnmower blade on the bench grinder. Not that it needed sharpening, really: that lawn was a pretty well-tamed piece of nature.
“Washer and dryer?” she said.
“Come again?”
“Do the washer and dryer stay?”
“Well,” I said, “let me think.” Should I cart them over to Martha’s or was she already equipped? My God, I’d been staying at her house how long now? Middle of July, say, to middle of October? Three months? Well, hell, she had to have a washing machine: she was always putting clean clothes away in drawers, right? But all I could remember in the basement were the cages and the haybales. “I don’t know,” I said. “Yeah. Yeah, leave ’em.”
“You’re saying they stay here.”
“Yep,” I said. She could be testy, I could be testy. “Ah, listen, screw it. Let the tools go too. I’m just going to take a couple of screwdrivers and wrenches and shit. Got a table saw here, bench grinder, the router I bought new, what else, good bench vise.…”
Now she was looking worried.
“If you really have no use for them,” she said, “you’d be better advised to sell them privately. They’re not really going to add to the value of the home. Generally buyers who want these things tend to already have them.”
I saw what she was saying, though literally it made no sense: you can’t want what you actually have, right? I mean, look at the old usage: Thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting.
“I see what you’re saying,” I said. “But they sort of go with the house, you know? Whoever buys the house can do what they want with them. Same with the lawnmower, all the shit in the garage, string trimmer, whatever’s out there. They’re buying the whole life, okay?”
“Well—”
“Dishes,” I said. “Dishes, silverware. All the”—the expression escaped me—“the linen. Household linen. Right? The Mr. Clean under the fucking sink.” I had said fucking. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You have to excuse me.”
Silence.
“I understand this can be upsetting for people,” she said. Finally. “Then, I take it, the kitchen appliances as well?”
“Poof,” I said. “Gone. Like a cool breeze.”
“I don’t think I need to trouble you any further,” she said. “If you’ll come by the office this afternoon, we can get things moving for you right away. You’ll be seeing our Mr. Pagliarulo.”
Oh, she did it smoothly, all right, but I’ll bet you one thing: the first old Pagliarulo heard about it was later on, when she got back to the office and said she’d owe him one if he’d take this asshole off her hands.
“Pagliarulo like the baseball player?” I said.
“I don’t follow baseball,” she said.
After seeing her to her car, I went back in and found the fat kid slipping his bass into a bass-shaped black vinyl bag, and the platinum-haired kid lifting a cymbal off a threaded rod. Danny and Clarissa were on the sofa, arms around each other’s waists, the picture of persecuted young love.
“You two,” I said, and nodded toward the kitchen. They looked at each other, got up and went in. I pulled out a chair for Clarissa. She sat. I gestured at another for Danny. He sat. I leaned against the refrigerator.
“So,” I said.
They said nothing. Clarissa stared at the tabletop, her leg going.
“What am I supposed to say?” I said. “You know you should be in school.”
Nothing. Crafty little bastards: if they could keep me talking, eventually I was bound to say something for which they had an answer. Well fuck that. All I had to do was keep the silence going, and one of them would sooner or later blurt out something for which I had an answer. I looked up at the clock high above the sink. It had been there when we bought the place, and I’d always hated the beige oblong son of a bitch. Beige: the oblong of colors. Oblong: the beige of shapes. The second hand was now on the two. Now a hair after. Then I looked at the kids, who were looking at the roosters on the wallpaper. On one of the days when Judith’s sense of camp was at its most manic, she’d gone to half a dozen places before she found wallpaper with roosters. You could hear the other kids packing up out in the living room. Sizzle of a cymbal, rrrip of a zipper.
After what seemed a long time I peeked again at the clock. Second hand was on the nine. They seemed willing to sit there for as long as I pleased. Probably because they didn’t have much in the way of inner lives. Or maybe they had exceptionally absorbing ones. Or they could have been stoned. The second hand passed the twelve.
“The hell with it,” I said. “You guys want to flunk out of school, it’s your lookout, okay? I’m officially out of the cop business as of right now.” I stood up straight, a free man. “Ta ta,” I said.
“Does that mean it’s okay if we stay here?” said Danny.
“Nice try,” I said, “but I won’t play. If you want to be told what’s okay, go find a guru or something. I am weary of the job.” I touched a farewell hand to my head and extended it palm up, Jimmy Durante saying Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are, and headed for the door. “See you when I see you,” I said.
“Hey Dustin?” Danny called. “It’s o-kay, we don’t have to split. Mitchell?”
2
The next morning I filled out papers with their Mr. Pagliarulo—“Jim!” he cried (meaning himself), and shot out his hand—and by the following afternoon he had an offer of one thirty-five. “I’m obliged to bring this to you,” he said on the phone. “But crash or no crash, I can virtually guarantee it’s going to be no problem you getting at least your one sixty. Not out of these people necessarily. But sooner rather than later.”
“You mean people have actually heard about that?” I said. I couldn’t believe this. “And it freaks them out about buying the house?”
“What do you mean have people heard about it? What else is even on the news?”
Now I understood that it must be the stock market crash he was talking about.
“Fact is,” he said, “nobody really knows how it’s all going to shake down. My personal opinion, I don’t think it’s going to hurt real estate one iota. Interest rates look like they’re going to stay low, and people who didn’t totally get wiped are still going to need a place to live.”
Three weeks later Jim Pagliarulo called to say the couple who had offered the one thirty-five had come back at one thirty-seven five.
“Do it,” I said.
“I think you might be well advised,” he said.
I pawed around under the sink and came out with an unopened jar of Tim’s moonshine. Any excuse to celebrate, right? It was about two in the afternoon; Martha was out making a dumpster run, kids still at school supposedly. I poured a couple of inches into a jelly glass, topped off the jar with tapwater so Martha would be none the wiser, screwed the lid back on as tight as it would go, and put the jar back where I’d found it. I tried to compose a joke: You’re not losing twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars, you’re gaining whatever. But I couldn’t think what I was gaining. Around three, Danny and Clarissa burst in, singing. “The way you make-a me feel,” sang Danny. “You knock me offa my feet,” she answered, in some other key. If it was a key. Then they saw me in the Morris chair, and that shut them up fast enough.
“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.
