David Gates - Jernigan

But we’re jumping all around here and losing track. Not that I mind losing track, far from it. But.

The camp had no electricity then: just kerosene lamps and an ice chest. An outhouse, since the bathroom in the trailer wasn’t hooked up to anything yet. I was given Diane’s tiny room, and I remember quietly sneaking her bureau drawer open and looking at her underwear and then feeling ashamed of myself. When everybody went to bed, I got stoned in there all alone, knowing it was piggish not to share with Uncle Fred. I was careful to light up by the window and blow the smoke out through the aluminum screen. Then, in that soft yellow light, I tried to read the Wallace Stevens book I’d brought, until the name Wallace started to sound funny: Wallace Wallace Wallace Wallace Wallace.

The Warriners had a croquet set and an aluminum rowboat you could put on the roof of the car and take to the pond a mile farther up the town road. And an old lever-action Winchester, the kind of rifle on tv westerns. They just left all this stuff there: no problem in those days with anybody coming in and stealing. Saturday afternoon Mr. Warriner knocked off work on the lean-to and we all drank beer out of the ice chest and shot the Winchester at the empty cans, each shot just echoing and echoing again off those hills. He turned out to be a great guy, Mr. Warriner, and not the Nazi I’d expected because he worked in a machine shop. That night he took us to a bar, a small cinderblock building with a big gravel parking lot, where they had a country-western band and didn’t card me and Uncle Fred. The two of us by ourselves probably would’ve gotten in trouble because of our hair, but Mr. Warriner looked like everybody else in there with his burr haircut and his green work pants.

We got back to the camp drunk and Mr. Warriner went right to bed. Uncle Fred and I went into my room and took apart the last cap of the acid we’d brought from the city, divided the powder with a matchbook and washed it down with a beer from the ice chest. When the acid came on we prowled in the scary woods and walked what seemed to be miles of dirt roads under the full moon, the dirt still warm to our bare feet. Then the sun came up and we were swimming naked in a muck-bottomed pond somewhere and mist was rising from the surface. I thought of my breast-stroking arms as wings, and the water as viscous air through which I flew in slow motion. At some point I left Uncle Fred alone in the water, knowing in one part of my mind — I also knew it was a bad idea to think about your mind too much — that you shouldn’t leave somebody alone in the water on LSD. I walked, naked, in the dewy grass, hoping it would feel like a dawn-of-man thing but actually shivering and worrying that the radiation in early-morning sunlight, slanting through the atmosphere at a special penetrating angle, would wither my dick or that some buzzy insect might sting it. Then I panicked about Uncle Fred drowning and went running back to the pond. Which turned out to be about ten steps away: the music I’d been listening to all this time, which I’d been assuming was just a pleasant hallucination, was actually Uncle Fred singing arpeggios — ha ha ha HA ha ha ha — slapping his palms on the surface of the water in rhythm and marvelling at the echoes. Of which there were many, many. I told Uncle Fred — and I wasn’t trying to flatter him at all — that it was the most incredible music I’d ever heard, more incredible than, like, Mahler. Don’t ask me why Mahler. Then we found our way back to the trailer, with the sun making jewels of dew in the grass, and managed to stay pretty much out of Mr. Warriner’s way until we’d come down enough to get to sleep, which wasn’t until fairly late that afternoon.

End of reminiscence.

3

I woke up in the cold, in gray light. So the fire had gone out while I’d slept the day away, on the floor, in this musty-smelling shithole of a trailer. I took my hands out of my armpits and put them over my cold face, cold nose especially. All that accomplished was to make the hands cold too. Left hand still hurt like a bastard, plainly not healing at all, and now that I was awake enough to think a little, I wondered if it wasn’t the pain that had finally awakened me, and not the cold. Although it could also have been the other pain: the headache going in like a drillbit above the right eye. I threw off the blankets, squirmed back into my cold overcoat and got to my feet so as to be up off that cold floor. Better drag one of the mattresses in here; make a good little project for later. I switched on the floorlamp next to the sofa, but the son of a bitch didn’t go on. I lifted the shade and tilted my head: oh, there was a bulb in there all right. I pulled the string hanging from the fluorescent ring on the kitchen ceiling: that wouldn’t go on either. So no power, apparently. On the kitchen counter I found a kerosene lamp with a couple of fingers of kerosene in it. The wick was all fucked up, but I didn’t feel like hunting around for scissors that I’d end up not finding anyway, so I just lit the thing and it seemed to do okay, considering. I located the bottle of Pamprin in my overcoat pocket. Only four left. I swallowed all of them, fuck it. Except then they got stuck in my throat and I could feel them caught down in there. So I went out the back door and knelt by the woodpile and ate snow until I felt the sons of bitches break loose and go down. I looked up and saw a last pulsation of sun behind Studebaker Hill: then it was gone and instantly the air got even colder although I was probably just imagining it. I brought in another few armloads of logs and finally got the stove roaring again.

Then I didn’t know what to do next.

I tried sitting in different places: the stinky sofa, then a red-painted wooden dinette chair, then the stinky easychair covered in some kind of old brownish fabric with flowers or shrimps or something. The problem was, I didn’t know how to be still. I got up and walked down the hall to the room that used to be Diane’s. She’d gotten married to somebody years ago and they’d built a house on some island near Seattle where they still are for all I know. Or fucking care. There was a pinstriped single mattress, the old kind with buttons, still on the little maple bedstead. I hauled it off the bed by its handles and walked it back down the hall to where the stove was and flopped it down on the floor, puffing up dust. I lay down on it, still in my overcoat. On my side. On my back. On my other side. On my stomach. So much for the possibilities. But I couldn’t get myself to where I felt like I was lying flat enough. I got up again and went looking for something to read. The table at one end of the sofa turned out to have books on its bottom shelf. Books that years ago Mr. and Mrs. Warriner must have thought of as light weekend reading for the country: Thorne Smith, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, single volumes containing three Ellery Queens apiece. Unless of course this was more of the Uncle Fred touch, books he’d chosen to parody the idea of light weekend reading for the country. So I took the P. G. Wodehouse over to the easychair. To sit in this trailer and be able to fix your mind on Blandings Castle — hey, if only.

Well, I could stay with P. G. Wodehouse for about two sentences.

Then I got afraid the telephone was going to ring. It was the old kind you can’t unplug. Not modular is what I’m trying to say. I picked up the receiver to check, and the phone was dead too. I mean, use your head: would Uncle Fred have left the phone hooked up, for Christ’s sake, so people could break in, not even break in for Christ’s sake, and call places and he’s stuck with the bill? The power either. People coming in with, I don’t know, electric space heaters or something.