David Gates - Jernigan

“Hold the phone,” I said. “What I’m hearing is that you and Mitchell are using this as an excuse to close up shop because you’re afraid to tell Clarissa she can’t sing.”

“Bull shit.”

“Look. Danny. I realize these things aren’t easy. Obviously Clarissa’s going to get her feelings hurt. I don’t blame her. There’ll probably be a big scene. On the other hand, do you want to give up your music just to avoid a confrontation?” Me and fucking Robert Young, boy.

“I’m not giving it up,” he said. “I’m going to still practice guitar and everything. All I have to do is just make it through the rest of this year and then senior year, and then I can do what I want to anyway.”

“That’s a long time,” I said.

He looked at his watch. “Tell me about it,” he said. “Dad.”

“Am I also hearing,” I said, “that things aren’t going so well with you and Clarissa?”

“I think she might be a little crazy,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I could just, like, get out of it, you know?”

“Can’t say I’m surprised to hear it,” I said. “Particularly after our little soiree at the emergency room.”

“Except I really like Mrs. Peretsky, you know? Hey Dad?” he said. “Listen, I’m going bonkers without a cigarette, okay? I mean, you know I smoke, right? Do you mind if I have one? You can even lecture me about it if you want, but I’d really like to have one.”

“What the hey,” I said. “Haven’t you figured out by now that I’m one of those permissive parents?”

You never saw cigarettes come out of anybody’s jacket so fast. So he’d moved on to Camels.

“Thanks,” he said, fumbling for matches.

“Just crack your window,” I said, “so you don’t hasten the old man’s inevitable whatever with passive smoke, right?”

He opened his window a crack and blew a great cloud of smoke at it. It smelled wonderful.

“Well, I knew this whole deal was a mistake,” I said. “I absolutely knew the minute we sold the God damn house we’d be sorry.” (Don’t you love the “we”?)

“I guess so,” he said. “But it would’ve been weird anyway to go back there after Dustin, right? And, you know, what happened to Mom and everything.”

“There’s an argument to be made,” I said, “that the thing with Dustin wouldn’t have happened if we’d been in our own house where we belonged.”

“Is that what Mr. Sanders said?”

“No,” I said, “I thought of it all by myself.”

He looked at his watch again. “So how much longer?”

“Half an hour?” I said. “Assuming you mean to Woodstock. So. I guess maybe we should start rethinking this whole arrangement, the two of us.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I should just shut up. I feel bad because you’re like really into it. Getting a Christmas tree and everything. And before, you were sort of drinking a lot. I mean, I guess it’s not all that bad.”

“At my age,” I said, “that would be a ringing testimonial. At your age it doesn’t sound like something you should have to settle for.”

“It’s okay. Really.”

“Exactly how crazy is crazy?” I said. He looked puzzled. “You said Clarissa was kind of crazy.”

He inhaled so deeply I imagined I could feel it in my own chest. Then he let it out. “You’re not going to get mad, right?”

“I hadn’t planned on it,” I said.

“Okay, this sounds pretty weird, all right? But you didn’t, like, do anything to her, right? Like the night she was freaking out?”

“Say again?”

“I knew you’d get mad.”

“I’m not mad,” I said. “I’m just amazed. I mean, actually I’m not even amazed.” Better tell the story. “She was pretty out of it, and at one point when I was trying to get her to the hospital, I had to stop her from taking her sweatshirt off. Now, what does she think was going on?”

He shook his head. “She’s got stories about a lot of stuff,” he said. “Like she says her father used to make her do stuff. At first I used to be really sorry for her.”

“Do stuff,” I said, meaning Explain .

“You know,” he said. “But I mean Mrs. Peretsky wouldn’t have ever let anything really happen.”

“Ho, brother,” I said.

The farther we got from Hartford and the river, the hillier the country and the fewer the houses. All the trees bare, and the last tinge of green draining out of the grass. You could see the different shapes of the different kinds of trees: some squat with branches like antlers, some straight and slender. It amounted to a moral failing not to have learned the names of trees. A moral failing, too, that this landscape looked dead and tattered to me, instead of sternly beautiful. In this part of the world, if you couldn’t see a leafless tree as sternly beautiful you were in deep shit half the year. And probably pissing away the other half worrying that it was transient.

We got off the interstate at the familiar exit. I hadn’t been back this way since my father’s funeral. It still looked like the country, even though there was a new house here and there, if I was remembering correctly. Five years. The white colonial with the swayback roof was now chocolate brown, with staring modern windows in place of the old six-over-six, a red plastic three-wheeler overturned in the front yard. We took the shortcut, the back road from Westford into East-ford, coming out by the General Lyon Inn, then left on 198 up toward Woodstock Valley. The place across from the post office, I remembered, had been a hippie house. One summer day, years ago, I’d driven past and seen a little wedding party posing for pictures on the lawn. A pretty blond-haired bride, a long-haired groom, a capering mongrel dog. Where were they anymore, and what had happened to them in all this time? Not here, I imagined, and nothing good.

A new house now sat at the corner of my father’s road, in what used to be an overgrown field. They’d left the stone wall up and put a blacktop drive through the barway. Not a house, actually, but a double-wide trailer with a Florida room. A lamppost beside the flagstone walk. They did seem to keep the place up. Crew-cut brown grass, suggesting they hadn’t lost the old vim as fall came on. Me, I’d always skipped what should have been the last couple of mowings, and settled for having my eye affronted all winter by lank dead grass.

“Strike one,” I said to Danny. “Used to be tons of little evergreens in that field.”

“What field?”

I flipped my thumb at the trailer. “Used to be a field,” I said.

“I don’t remember it too much here,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “It’s a shame. Your grandfather didn’t really know how to deal with kids, I don’t think. After I was grown up he and I finally got to be sort of buddies, but before that …” I took one hand off the wheel and wiggled my fingers to suggest iffiness.

I pulled over to the side of the road. This was where the house had been. Two noble old maples — a tree I did know — one at each side of the cellar hole. Some kind of shitty little saplings now growing up out of it. I turned off the engine: sudden, profound silence.

“Well, let’s check it out,” I said. Too loud, too hearty. “I seem to remember some little pine trees or something up behind the house.”

We got out and Danny stretched, holding fists aloft on stiff arms. “Might as well leave the tools here for the time being,” I said.

“Who owns this place now?” he said. My God it was silent up here.

“Got me,” I said. “Bank still, for all I know. Be a nice spot for somebody.”

We walked through tangled dead hay that had been the front lawn, and stood at the lip of the cellar hole. A jumbled heap of bricks down there, once the chimney, and the charred end of a beam sticking out from the carpeting of brown and yellow maple leaves. The tops of the saplings growing up out of the old dirt floor were level with my knees. I led the way to the right, around the right-hand maple tree and into the side yard, where the old lilac stood in a waste of brier and burdock. “That was the studio,” I said, pointing to a rectangle of low brick wall, mostly tumbled down, adjoining the old stone foundation. Here, too, saplings grew out of rubble, and I could make out a half-eaten elbow of rusted stovepipe.