David Gates - Jernigan

He was warm, this rabbit. A mammal like me. I searched for the right word and came up with lapsarian. Marsupial is what I was trying to think of. Although rabbits, according to the dictionary here, are not marsupials. I probably got lapsarian from lapin . I carried him into the death chamber, sat us both down on a haybale and, holding him with my left hand, sneaked the pistol out of my pocket with my right and put it next to my right hip. With both hands I lifted the rabbit, sat him down on the other side and pressed him firmly against my right thigh, my left hand gripping his shoulders, cruelly now, as I took the right hand away. He tried to squirm out of my grasp but I had him too tight, and I picked up the pistol with my right hand, jammed the muzzle between his ears and jerked the trigger, hoping to God a haybale was really dense enough to do the trick. The gun went snap and the rabbit gave a shiver and just turned to meat.

5

By the time Danny and Clarissa rolled in, maybe a quarter past ten, Martha and I had had our dinner and done the dishes together. (She washed, I dried, though she said not to bother.) Now I was pretty well into the bottle of Gordon’s gin I’d gone out to get special. Store-bought liquor tonight, boy. I was looking forward to Star Trek later, which I’d come to think looked less cheesy in black and white. Not that I minded its looking cheesy, that was part of the appeal. Oh what a sense of fun.

“Hey guys?” said Martha. “You do something about dinner? You’re hungry there’s some pretty dynamite bunny à l’orange left over.”

“Dynamite,” I said.

“We ate already,” said Clarissa.

“Hey Dan?” I said. “I know it’s late and you do have school tomorrow, but you and I need to have a talk, okay?”

“What about?” he said.

“Relax,” I said. “I’m not after you about anything. What it is, I actually need your advice on something.”

“Like what?”

“Ladies?” I said. “You’ll excuse us? We’re going to have a man-to-man here. The old mono a mano , whaddya say?” He probably didn’t even know it didn’t mean man to man, that’s what kind of a quote unquote education he was getting at that God damn school of his. He looked at Clarissa and she looked at him. Like a scene out of fucking West Side Story . “Dan,” I said. “Dan my man. What do you say we go out for a ride, bud?”

He shrugged. “You okay to drive?”

“Nice mouth,” I said. “What is this, the Contract for Life or something? Trust the old man.” Not remembering, of course, that he might be just a leet-tle sensitized to parents’ getting behind the wheel drunk.

Chilly outside. This reminded me. “You over at the house all this time?” I said. “You remember to turn the heat back down to forty?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

“How’d you get home, anyway?”

“Dustin gave us a lift.”

“Dustin,” I said.

He didn’t seem to understand I was asking him a question.

“Is Dustin the one who plays the drums?” I said. I opened the car door for him.

“Bass,” he said.

“Bass is what I meant,” I said.

We got in and I started up the car. He just sat there. I felt like taking him by his uninformative little throat. “So how did your practice go, Dan?” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “So what did you want to talk about?”

I backed the car out and started up the hill.

“Lights,” he said.

“Okay, tiger,” I said, turning on the headlights. “Just testing to make sure your head was in the game there.” He tugged to tighten his shoulder belt.

“So,” I said, “are you and Clarissa getting along okay?”

“I guess so. Why?”

“You guess so.”

“Look, Dad. If this is about AIDS or something—”

“Oh Christ,” I said, “I’m fucking this whole thing up here. Listen, all this is about, Clarissa’s mother and I have been talking about all of us sort of moving in together. And we’re concerned that, I don’t know, that it might turn out to be weird for the two of you. You know, say you two broke up or something and your parents were still, you know, everybody in the same house sharing the bathroom and everything. Or, I don’t know, even if you didn’t break up it could be weird. And I just thought it was something we ought to talk about.”

“Is Mrs. Peretsky talking to Clarissa about it now?”

“I assume so. Though I don’t frankly know.”

“Do we have to move away someplace?” he said.

“No. No, our plan — I mean, to the extent that it’s a plan at all, you know? I would imagine that we’d just keep living in their house and that we’d put our place up for sale, and that was one of the things that I thought we needed to talk about. See, I found out today that they’re letting me go at work, and—”

“You got fired?” he said. “Dad. Why did they fire you?”

“Apparently thing was in the works quite some time,” I said, as if it had been an answer.

“What are you gonna do?” he said.

“Listen,” I said, “you want to go sit somewhere have a Coke?”

“If you do.”

I took Nottingham over to Oakdale and made a left, heading for Hamilton. Same way I’d walked this afternoon. The headlights picked up leafpile after leafpile, spreading out into the street. I could’ve sworn they hadn’t been there earlier. (But a whole neighborhood just happening to rake their leaves the same evening? Not likely. More plausible explanation: Jernigan on a disconnect.) The tires crackled through the leafpiles’ outermost reaches. Huh: they’d called it Oakdale and it actually had oak trees, assuming these were oak trees. Those were the days, boy.

“Getting pretty nippy nights,” I said, rolling my window the rest of the way up. Danny had no comment. “That pizza place down on Hamilton probably open this hour,” I said. “Suit you okay?”

He considered. Probably judging the chances of being seen by friends when he was out with a father. “I guess that’s okay,” he said.

“Anyplace you rather?” I said. Push push push.

“It’s all right , Dad.”

The pizza place was a low cinderblock building with PIZZA in the window in angry red neon. Fluorescent light inside, stained-plywood booths with coat posts. We took possession of the one farthest back, then I went up to the counter and brought back a can of Diet Pepsi for Danny and a coffee for me.

“How about a slice while we’re at it?” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

I went back to the counter. “Couple slices,” I said. “Just regular.”

“Two?” said the kid. He looked like the kids who scared me when I was Danny’s age, their faces all stubble and pustules. A cigarette smoked away in a round aluminum ashtray next to the ivory-colored plastic bucket of shredded cheese.

“You got it,” I said. This was how you had to talk to get by in places like this. The kid lifted out two triangles from the pie sitting on the counter — not the two biggest, I noted — flopped them onto a pizza pan and thrust it into the oven.

I went back to Danny. “Anyhow,” I said.

“So you’re going to sell the house?”

“Well,” I said, “that’s something we have to talk about. You know, it’s not just my house. I’d always thought of it as something that someday, you know, would probably come your way when I was out of the picture.”

“That place?” he said.

“So you should’ve picked a Rockefeller for a father,” I said. As if he even knew what a Rockefeller was.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. He didn’t elaborate on how he had meant it.