David Gates - Jernigan

I got up, went to the refrigerator, took a good belt of gin straight out of the bottle, then poured the rest of it into the peanut butter jar, and that was all she wrote for Old Mr. Gordon’s. I sat down at the table again to drink this last inch and try to figure out where to sleep. Go back to my house? While it still was my house? Except the God damn fat kid was there. And doing what? Innocently revelling in videos and canned frosting to console himself for not getting into Clarissa’s pants? Or playing a far deeper game? I mean, what if he hadn’t simply popped a Pez or some such, and all the time he’d been talking to me he’d been sneakily tripping his brains out, holding himself together while he watched, say, my face disintegrate. Which was probably even more dangerous than manifestly freaking out, like Clarissa. I thought about it in terms of pressure: Clarissa’s freakout had been an ultimately harmless outrush, whereas whatever was building up under that surface that Dustin was using so much counterpressure to maintain — no need to finish the thought. Then I wondered if thinking of the mind in this kind of Newtonian way made any sense. Which was as far as I’d managed to get with my thinking when Martha came back in.

“I guess they’re both asleep,” said Martha, sitting down in her accustomed chair, the one across from mine. “I kind of tapped on the door and all I heard was breathing.”

“Hey, as long as they’re breathing,” I said. “Here.” I fumbled in my pants pocket. “Doctor gave me a list of, I don’t know, places you can call.”

“Places,” she said.

“Places you could get her into treatment,” I said.

I held aloft the piece of paper, let it drop, and shot it across the tabletop at her with the flick of a fingertip. It came to rest against a plate smeared with dried egg yolk. Fucking thing had sat there since breakfast, and now it was getting on toward breakfast again.

Martha picked up the piece of paper and stared at it, then put it down. “Basically,” she said, “what Clarissa needs is for the last ten or fifteen years not to have happened.”

“So you just throw up your hands, right?”

“So what do you propose? Hand the problem back to the experts so you don’t have to deal with it?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Why is this my problem?”

“I meant anybody,” she said. “So one doesn’t have to deal with it, all right? But actually, yes: you, Peter. Because I actually was stupid enough to think you could’ve been some help. God, from her father to you … I’ m the one who ought to be locked up.”

I got to my feet. “Believe I’ll put up on the couch for tonight,” I said. “Fascinating as this all is.”

“Uh uh,” she said. “No. I believe you’ll put up in your own house tonight. I don’t want you here. You’re welcome to call a taxi if you’re not able to drive yourself. But I want you gone.”

“I am fully well able,” I said, “to drive myself.” I was man enough, barely, not to plead that an LSD-maddened teenager might be waiting at my house. Behind the door with a knife, say, to cut out my heart to see how it worked. I raised the peanut butter jar, said “Here’s how,” drained the last half inch of gin and wiped my hand across my mouth. “ ‘Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh,’ ” I said. “ ‘The something something something something. The words revolve—’ I don’t know, goes on from there.” I raised an Uncle Fred forefinger. “ ‘Some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.’ ”

“And I can really do without the ironies,” she said. “Whatever they’re supposed to mean.”

“You , maybe,” I said. “But as for me.”

I put on my coat and felt around in the right-hand pocket for keys. Good: two bunches; one car keys, one house keys. You could tell the house keys by feel. They were the ones with Powerful Pete on the key ring, unless that was the car keys. Probably not your finest hour, getting yourself kicked out of here before you were able to talk your son out of killing himself.

“Just remember,” I said, hand on the doorknob. “If anything happens to me”—I was thinking Manson murder, but she probably thought I just meant a car wreck—“you’re going to have some pret-ty tall explaining to do to old Danny.”

“I’ll risk it,” she said.

“Famous last words,” I said. Meaning from my point of view.

6

Late as it was, the lights were still on when I pulled into the driveway behind what’s-his-name’s Cadillac. Dustin. And I noticed for the first time — God knows how long it had been there — that the FOR SALE sign had been replaced by a similar sign reading SOLD. A sign, in other words, not to benefit me but to bring in new business. I was giving the fuckers free advertising! I tugged and wrestled it out of the frozen ground, took it onto the breezeway and threw it clattering on the cement floor, a warning to all exploiters. And incidentally to put young Dustin on notice, just in case he was thinking of trying to Manson-murder me, that I was coming in angry and dangerous. The kitchen door was still unlocked. I walked in and took off my coat — the little bastard certainly hadn’t stinted himself on the heat that I was paying for — tossed it on the kitchen table and called “Anybody home?” But he had the tv going. “Is this the place?” a tv voice was saying.

“Of course it’s the place.” James Stewart, boy, you could tell that braying voice. So Dustin had his movie on.

The other voice said, “Well, this house ain’t been lived in for twenty years.”

I went into the living room. Dustin was on the sofa, lying on his side facing the blaring tv. Bert pulled his police car up beside Ernie’s cab. “What’s up, Ernie?” he said. I watched them watch James Stewart approach the ruined house.

“I don’t know,” said Ernie, “but we better keep an eye on this guy. He’s bats.” Bert was Ward Bond, who ended up on Wagon Train .

“Hey Dustin?” I said. Dead to the world, boy.

“Mary! Mary! “James Stewart called. “Tommy! Pete! Jamie! Zuzu! Where are you?”

I didn’t want him finally rousing himself to get up and go into the bedroom and finding me there. Thought I’d better make sure, too, that he wasn’t just lying there bug-eyed and catatonic.

“They’re not here, George,” said Henry Travers. “You have no children.”

I touched his shoulder. “Dustin?”

“Where are you?” said James Stewart. “What have you done with them?”

Dustin didn’t move.

“All right, put up your hands.” I looked back at the screen. Ward Bond had pulled a gun on James Stewart. I didn’t want to miss the scene that was coming up right after this, where his mother is all hard-faced and doesn’t recognize him.

I gripped Dustin’s shoulder lightly, just fingertips, and shook. Flesh felt loose, strangely heavy.

“Bert!” James Stewart brayed. “Thank heaven you’re here.” Then I looked down and saw the stilled trickle of what looked like bright red paint, down across his cheek to the corner of his half-open mouth. It came from a hole in his temple too small to stick a pencil into.

“Stand back,” said Ward Bond.

This was probably a practical joke, right?

“Bert,” said James Stewart, “what’s happened to this house? Where’s Mary? Where’s my kids?”

Then I saw the little pistol on the floor, right beneath the hand drooping over the edge of the sofa: instantly knew it was Martha’s, instantly imagined Danny slipping it to him for protection, instantly saw Danny led away to jail. (It was a 22, but of course not Martha’s; they ended up pressing some kind of charges against the kid who’d sold it to him.) I put the back of my hand up to his nose and mouth, as a flirting lady would to a courtly gentleman. No breath coming out. Then I touched the hand. Never in my life touched anything like that flesh, boy. Soft and cold.