David Gates - Jernigan

2

I have Uncle Fred to thank, apparently, for making whatever arrangements were necessary to get me into this place. And for calling the state police, who carried me out of the trailer and rushed me to the hospital. I don’t remember any of that, though I’m supposed to have been mumbling away on the stretcher. They got there too late for my thumb and forefinger — the surgeon almost had to do (meaning cut off) the whole hand — but the essential man was, and is, still intact. Which is the big thing, right, the essential man? Jernigan.

Suppose we start out by explaining that Uncle Fred’s name isn’t Fred and that he’s not my uncle, that should stretch this out some. The name Uncle Fred had stuck because it just fit, though by that I don’t suppose I mean anything more mystical than this: that even in his freshman year he looked like William Frawley on I Love Lucy . Though he used to say Edmund Wilson. I was the only other one on our floor who knew who Edmund Wilson was. Edmund Wilson, in fact, had once been dragged to one of my father’s openings, and pronounced his work fraudulent. Or so their mutual acquaintance later took it upon himself to tell my father. Except the more I think about it the more I wonder if that story wasn’t about somebody else and Edmund Wilson wasn’t some whole other story. Anyhow, at some point in high school I’d bought the old gray Scribner’s paperback of Axel’s Castle and tried to read some of it. So Michael Warriner and I became friends.

We go back, in other words, to before he taught himself all that bluff Uncle Fred bullshit he does nowadays, where you can’t get a straight word out of him. Oh, I can see the appeal: even during the drug years, he was still impermeably Uncle Fred. For which you had to envy him as well as hold him in contempt.

Right, how he got the name. Freshman year he and I took the train up to spend Christmas break with his family in Connecticut. That was the year my father was in Mexico. (My mother, of course, was out of the picture by then.) At Bridgeport I think it was, this little kid and his mother got on the train and the kid came running wide-eyed up to Michael yelling “Uncle Fred! Uncle Fred!” His mother couldn’t talk him out of it. She had a Kelly green coat with big buttons. I remember her as a weary middle-aged lady, although I suppose, in retrospect, that she wasn’t as old as I am now. You remember that song, She was common, flirty, she looked about thirty? It’s like the difference between what that meant then and what it would mean today.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “He thinks you’re his Uncle Fred.”

“We’d gathered that,” I said, snotty college kid.

“Timmy,” she said, “this man is not Uncle Fred . See, his Uncle Fred”—she mouthed the word died . “We tried to explain it to him, but he doesn’t get it. You know, he sort of gets it and he sort of doesn’t.”

“Time,” said Michael. “In time these things become clearer.” We were both pretty smashed.

“That’s the thing of it,” said the woman. “I don’t think they really get it until they’re a little older. When they’re older they actually can get things. But a little kid?” She shook her head; he shook his head too. Big agreement reached about human nature. So it was Uncle Fred from then on.

The summer after freshman year, Uncle Fred and I and a kid named Kenny Angleton got a seventy-dollar-a-month apartment on East 10th Street. Angleton wore round wire-rim prescription sunglasses indoors and out, and always dressed in black jeans and black turtlenecks. No matter how hot it got — and this was a top-floor walk-up, right under the roof — he never rolled up the long sleeves that hid the tracks he didn’t have. The day we moved in he went to 14th Street and bought a pair of ankle-high pointy-toed boots with Cuban heels. The heels were made of what looked and felt like cardboard, and they wore down in a week. So one night, about four in the morning, he bought a jar of Skippy at the all-night bodega and threw it through the window of the store where they’d sold him the boots. Or so he said. We’d all been up snorting methedrine and he came back in trembling, asking us if your fingerprints could be traced if you’d never been fingerprinted. Not long after that he managed to get hold of some works, which he just took out and looked at for a week or so while snorting up as usual. The first time he tried to shoot himself up I watched until I got sick to my stomach, thinking if he could get it happening I’d maybe try it too. He tapped and tapped with his fingertip, trying not to hurt himself, then got impatient and howled when he jabbed the thing about half an inch in.

Although Uncle Fred and I never said so to each other, it was mostly to get away from Angleton and the people he’d started bringing around that the two of us went up to Connecticut to spend some time at his parents’ house. Guilford had country roads to drive, in Uncle Fred’s father’s Buick, playing the radio loud: this was the summer of “Hanky Panky” and “Wild Thing.” Not the “Wild Thing” they have now, where the guy just talks in rhyme the whole way through, but the real “Wild Thing,” where he thinks she moves him but he doesn’t know for sure. Woods to trip in, a village green to circle and circle and circle looking for girls, the beach at Hammonasset a couple of exits up the turnpike, New Haven with movies and Cutler’s record store a few exits down. And Uncle Fred’s fourteen-year-old sister always there when we got home: pretty enough to keep me stirred up, young enough not to have to do anything about.

We were still there when Uncle Fred’s father got a four-day weekend because he’d had to work over the Fourth of July. He was going to spend it at their camp up in New Hampshire, putting up a lean-to to keep firewood under. (Right, same lean-to, same green fiberglass roof.) Mrs. Warriner said he’d do better to get going on the bathroom, and that all that hammering would give her a sick headache, and that she’d just as soon not go shacking all over Robin Hood’s barn. Maybe Michael and his friend would like to go up and give a hand, and she and Diane would hold the fort and have a regular old hen party.

“Oh man,” I said to Uncle Fred when I got him alone. We were supposed to have been getting together that weekend with some girl he knew from Clinton and some friend of hers whose parents were supposed to be away.

“It’s cool up there,” he said. “It’ll be cool, promise. The old man just farts around and doesn’t know what’s happening.” As if I’d had any choice anyway. My father had sold the house in the Springs — I think he let it go for twenty-five — and he’d sublet the place on Barrow Street to somebody while he was in Mexico. So it was either stick with Uncle Fred or go back to 10th Street with Angleton sitting crosslegged on his mattress all night fucking around with his works and smoking Camels and scratching himself and jerking his head to the soul music on WWRL.

Late on a Friday afternoon, we bumped down the rutted track, kicking up a dustcloud, then straight across the big field, milkweed and goldenrod on both sides as high as the car windows. Right around the trailer itself the grass was kept down with a lawnmower, less grass really than dandelions and fuzzy pale-green lamb’s-tongue. It was a plain old white house trailer, sitting out in the middle of things at the far end of the field. (It didn’t get painted blue until years later, after Mr. Warriner died and Uncle Fred got the place.) A cinderblock for a doorstep. Behind the trailer the woods began, and above the treetops rose a hill shaped like the side view of the old Studebaker Grandpa Jernigan used to drive: a round peak, left side sloping away gradually, right side dropping steeply like the windshield of a car that was moving from left to right, the direction of time. Such a hill, I remembered from eighth-grade Earth Science, was called a roche moutonnée: that is, a sheep-shaped rock. Years later, when Judith and I had taken over the place on Barrow Street, we came in with groceries one afternoon and found the kitchen counter alive with cockroaches. “Well well,” I said, always lightsome, “a roach matinee.” She didn’t seem to get it. And I thought, Oh well, so one more little thing.