David Gates - Jernigan

But Christ, I just got the God damn stove going.

True, but you’ve still got your coat on. And now that the sun is over the yardarm you could work the old Diet Coke can trick with some gin, make the drive to the mall into a little adventure. All that old sun-over-the-yardarm shit, that’s the way your real drunks talk.

I was proud to have remembered how to talk like that. I mean, it was all just an impersonation.

So let’s hit it.

The vast lots around the mall had parking places galore. Even the video game arcade just inside South Entrance was deserted except for a black teenager wearing a turned-around Mets cap, his nose to the screen, and a girl sitting on the floor beside him, hugging her knees. Sunday before Christmas. Either I’d hit it just right or the stock market thing really had hurt business.

Now, the thing to do was keep it simple. Obviously you had to spend more on Danny than on Clarissa, though Clarissa’s gift must still be substantial, because. So: fifty-dollar gift certificate at Record Town for Danny, fifty-dollar gift certificate at something like Benetton or The Gap for Clarissa, and maybe a hundred-dollar gift certificate at Sam Ash Music for Danny, assuming Sam Ash Music did that and why wouldn’t they. And then maybe a few little crappo things so they’d have stuff to open, though I couldn’t think what. Hickory Farms might have some kind of food. Well obviously. What I mean is, maybe the kids would like sausage and cheese and shit to eat in their room. Or some kind of silly toys from someplace. Puzzles where you had to roll BBs into holes, or one of those water-filled things where you had to spear drifting rings with a swordfish’s nose. I mean, since they were in there getting stoned anyway, right?

Which left Martha. What might she like? A box of.22 shells? That was ugly, scratch that. I thought she’d said something once about Margaret Drabble, unless it was Margaret Atwood. Or Iris Murdoch. So maybe Waldenbooks was the best idea, except wasn’t giving her books a way of saying, Keep your face in these and leave me the fuck alone? Although when things were in this kind of shape, any gift short of crotchless panties pretty much said the same thing.

It wasn’t really much of a stand against disorder, I know, but I did do a good job of organizing my stops: getting the gift certificates first and saving the heaviest things to lug around, the books and all, for last. I found the perfect place for Clarissa, better even than The Gap: this place Mandee. You see their ads sometimes, where slutty girls talk in rhyme. Probably all her girlfriends went to Mandee, if she had any girlfriends, and she felt left out because there was never any money. The thought of it made me sorry enough for her to kick her gift certificate up to seventy-five. With Danny’s hundred at Sam Ash Music plus fifty at Record Town, that was saying she was half to me what Danny was. Hey, Christmas, right? After I got the gift certificates squared away I went looking for the little toys. Couldn’t find one of those swordfish deals, but they did have an underwater penguin standing before a sylvan backdrop. (Why a penguin among green trees? Why, for that matter, green trees under water?) Five little plastic rings that you had to get over the penguin by tilting the thing just right. Also a sliding-squares puzzle that, when slid together correctly, showed Superman in flight. And two decks of Bicycle playing cards and a paperback Hoyle. Oh, not that I really pictured our little family learning canasta together, but at least the stuff would be on hand if things should ever get straightened out. Hey, if nothing else, it would be evidence that everything had been tried. Then on to Hickory Farms. I might as well admit that, due to the disposition of the stores, this rational and orderly scheme of going from lighter burdens to heavier in fact required going back and forth and back and forth. So again and again I walked past Bedford Falls Video, with old Entrepreneurial Steve probably in there radiating disapproval of me, and past the exhibit of snowblowers out in the center of the mall, where a salesman in a maroon blazer sat behind stacks of brochures. Through a bullhorn he prophesied an early winter.

At Hickory Farms I bought a shrink-wrapped box the size of a Monopoly set, with summer sausage and assorted cheeses. Cheshire and I forget what else. It was probably all the same Wisconsin cheddar with different food dyes. Right, the kids were really fucking likely to know the difference. Then back all the way in the other direction to Waldenbooks. By that time I was about ready to bag it. There wasn’t any Iris Murdoch, and there really was a difference between Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood, though I couldn’t have told you what, and I would probably pick the wrong one. When the only Jane Austen I could find was fucking Pride and Prejudice , I figured, Hey, end of expedition. Get Martha a gift certificate too, and you’re out of here. Hundred dollars, bringing her main gift up even with Danny’s, though his fifty at Record Town still put him ahead. So: Danny one fifty, Martha a hundred, Clarissa seventy-five. Plus the small stuff. I hoped this all made the right statements. Though of course the overarching statement was that I didn’t know these people. As I walked back to South Entrance the snowblower man was putting his brochures away in a cardboard box and stores were shutting off overhead lights. At The Gap a salesgirl ducked in under the half-lowered metal-link gate.

Back at the house, I hid the toys and the Hickory Farms box under the bed, then filled a water glass halfway up with gin and worked away on that until I “fell asleep” on the sofa, I think sometime during Star Trek . Before Martha rolled in, at any rate. The Star Trek was the Joan Collins one, where Joan Collins is the pacifist back during the Depression who has to be hit by a car and die so that all subsequent history won’t be changed. See, if Joan Collins lives, America doesn’t enter World War II and so forth and so on. It’s the one where Bones is on some drug that makes him crazed, which is how the whole problem gets started in the first place, and they all jump through the time portal.

I woke up with a nightmare. Robert Stack was in it, and when the terror let up enough I tried to think why Robert Stack. It actually took me a couple of minutes to get The Untouchables . Oh for Christ’s sake, I thought, tell me something I don’t already know. The tv had been turned off, and the tablecloth draped back over it. I had a wicked headache, of course, and my hand was throbbing like a bastard. I went into the bathroom, pissed and took five Advils from a brand-new bottle — she’d noticed we were out — then went to the kitchen and drank some cold water out of the refrigerator. Mouth dry. Of course. I swore I wasn’t going to drink tomorrow, tomorrow meaning whenever I woke up again. I went into the bedroom and found Martha there asleep, or pretending to be. And then I was asleep again too, though I can’t imagine how. What with the hand and the head and, always, the thoughts going.

2

I woke up at noon or whatever the hell it was and she was gone again. On the way back from the kitchen, where I’d put water on for coffee, I looked over and saw the tree had been trimmed. Cruddy bunch of ornaments: metallic plastic with a line down the middle where the molded halves had been joined. Although it was cruel to judge her taste harshly just because she couldn’t afford better. Or maybe it was just lousy taste. Certainly she’d used too God damn much tinsel. Unless one of the kids had done it. (Little joke.) I picked off maybe a third of it — any more than that would’ve been obvious — and hid it in a generic cornflakes box I found in the garbage. Another thing I didn’t like was grocery bags on the kitchen floor for garbage, although because it wasn’t your kitchen you couldn’t say so. Then I rearranged the garbage to get a dripping can on top of the generic cornflakes box. By this time the water was boiling. Say, what a day this promised to be: everything just going snap snap snap. I chose the blue cup instead of the white one and spooned in my three spoonfuls. Blue suggested the sky and, therefore, transcendence. Though white also suggested transcendence, so there you were.