David Gates - Jernigan

I mean, I say Dustin’s death was none of my doing, but I should have picked up the clues he’d taken such pains both to drop and to disguise. When he said kids who talked about suicide were crying for help. When he said he would have felt bad if he hadn’t tried everything. When he said it was when you were alone that things got weird. On the other hand, he’d been a devious little fuck, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to know how guilty everybody was going to feel afterwards. It wasn’t just me, as I found out. He’d told Danny that the other kid in the band, the feral one with the tank top and the platinum hair, was talking suicide. Then there was the kid from the community college — some good police work on this, I have to say — who’d been selling him drugs and who had soaked him a hundred bucks for that twenty-dollar pistol. Dustin had foxed him by claiming he’d been getting threats from a gang of Vietnamese kids at the high school because he was giving drugs away to their paying customers. Except there weren’t any Vietnamese kids at the high school.

And then there was the father.

I never found out just what the trouble there had been about. But I did sit with the father in their living room the day after the funeral to tell him what I could tell him, though he’d already heard it secondhand from the police. And to explain why I hadn’t called him to say his son was staying in my house and was that okay. A medical emergency that evening, that was the way I put it. That the quote unquote medical emergency was also his son’s doing — not that he’d had to twist Clarissa’s arm, probably — didn’t seem like anything the poor bastard needed to know at this point. Jernigan and his lonely burden.

When he went into the kitchen to get me a cup of coffee, I looked around at all the right angles of chrome, glass, stone, black leather. I was the only shapeless thing here. Martin Sanders was thin and looked like a mean son of a bitch. Glasses like Gloria Steinem’s. He could never have had even the minimal flair required to name a kid Dustin. It must have been the wife. Hard, too, to imagine him with a secret collection of videos like the one they found at the house, which sure as hell hadn’t come from Bedford Falls Video. No it wasn’t.

He handed me a black stoneware cup and sat down empty-handed.

“This is my wife’s idea,” he said. “She’s asked me to ask you about it, so that I can then tell it to her. She didn’t seem to feel she could talk to you personally at this point.” He wasn’t doing too well himself. Off came the glasses and out came a white handkerchief from the pocket of the gray wool slacks. When he finished with the handkerchief you could see two little white ovals where the glasses dug into his bony nose.

“It’s the first thing she’s asked of me in God knows how long,” he said. Then he said, “You don’t need to hear this.”

“Please,” I said. “If you need to talk.”

“Let me rephrase myself,” he said. “What I mean is, it’s none of your business. And I want you the hell out of my house as soon as I’ve heard what I need to hear. Is that a little clearer?”

3

It was right around this time, gearing up for the holiday season, that we had the closing on the house. Danny and I brought the last couple of carloads of stuff over the day before, and Clarissa came along on one trip to help him go through his clothes. Most of what we brought was boxes of my books, including the Britannica eleventh edition I’d never unpacked since Barrow Street. Another precious legacy to my son. (Little joke.) The rest of his records, some extra blankets (Martha’s request), a few towels. And the color tv, which went straight up to the kids’ room: in Clarissa’s eyes, my high-water mark as stepfather. Hey, if the kids wanted to think that sticking to the old black-and-white was one more sign of my unselfishness, who was I to enlighten them? Though Danny must’ve known me better.

After signing the papers and handing over the keys, I took the whole family into the city for dinner and a movie. It was going to be dinner and a show but none of the shows sounded any good, big surprise. Martha picked the Russian Tea Room and I said fine. I mean, it could have been Mamma Leone’s. (That was uncalled-for.) We brought a Daily News in with us so we could look at movie times, but there weren’t even any movies anybody wanted to see all that much. So after dinner we just walked down to Rockefeller Center and looked at the tree and the skaters and it turned out to be a good family thing to do and then we went back to New Jersey like probably thousands of other New Jersey families that night.

“Dan, what do you say?” I asked him at breakfast the next morning. (Another thing: I was going to be making it to breakfast from now on. And not because I’d been up all night drinking, either. It would be because at bedtime I would have fucked Martha and then gone right off to sleep.) “You busy this weekend?”

He considered this, obviously wondering what a no would let him in for. “I don’t know yet,” he said.

“Well, here’s what I was thinking. Why don’t you and me hop in the car and drive up around where Grandpa Jernigan’s old place was and get a tree.”

“What do you mean get a tree?”

“Christmas tree,” I said. “You know, ho ho ho?” Forgetting I wasn’t going to be sarcastic anymore. Okay, so just breeze on past it. “I thought we’d cut our own this year,” I said.

“Isn’t it going to end up costing you just as much in gas anyway?” he said.

“Probably,” I said. “Viewed purely in crass economic terms, it’s undoubtedly a washout. But viewed as a father-son bonding ritual? This could be more precious than diamonds. More lasting than fucking bronze.” I couldn’t help it: he was being willfully stupid.

He stared down at the peanut butter melting into his toast. I wouldn’t have known what to say, either.

“Anybody for more coffee?” said helpful Martha. Danny looked up at her. Clarissa, of course, just sat there twisting platinum hair around a black-nailed finger.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to be such a prick, pardon my French.” This for Clarissa’s benefit. “I’d just like for us to spend some time together, and I thought this might be a nice way to do it. Go off on a little mission.”

“Why?” he said. “So I won’t kill myself like Dustin?”

“Good,” I said. “You know, you’re really beginning to show some promise there. Keep it up and by the time you’re my age you might be just as big a prick as your old dad.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Martha. “Both of you. You make me want to cover my ears. Danny, why don’t you give your father a chance? And Peter. Stop being so ugly . You might as well take a strap to him. At least that would be clean.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Sorry, Mrs. Peretsky,” he said.

“Listen,” I said, “it is a long way up there and everything. We don’t really have to have such a major expedition. It was just a thought.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I don’t care.”

You sullen little son of a bitch , I almost said.

“Well,” I said, “how about Saturday, then? Leave good and early, get you back in time to do what you want Saturday night — what do you say?”

He stared extra hard at his toast, his brow crumpling with the smile of relief he was suppressing. “Yeah, if that’s okay with you,” he said, in a deep voice that wasn’t quite his own yet. In that moment I loved him so.

And pitied him for what had been done to him, and for the long road ahead. Oh, not the road to Connecticut, I was just using a worn-out metaphor. Though not too worn-out, apparently, for the likes of Jernigan. Because I really did picture Danny, under a featureless sky, on a featureless road heading for a vanishing point, as in Jon Nagy’s Television Art Book . Which Santa had brought me one year. My father’s friends always used to come over for Christmas — most of them didn’t have kids — and when I clawed the paper off and held it up they all laughed and cheered.