Brock Clarke - Exley

“Listen,” I say, “I’ve seen the guy in the VA hospital.”

“You saw T.?” she asks. M.’s mother cocks her head, and her eyes get wide. For the first time, it seems possible that she might be able to believe that I could be telling the truth about M.’s dad. “You’re sure it was T.?”

“Well, I didn’t actually get to read his ID bracelet before the guards kicked me out of his room,” I admit. “But it certainly might have been M.’s father.” M.’s mother closes her eyes and shakes her head, and then when she opens her eyes they are small and black, and once again she looks like a woman who doesn’t believe anyone is capable of telling her the truth about anything. “If M.’s dad isn’t in the VA hospital,” I say, “then where is he?”

“Who knows?” M.’s mother says. “He’s probably in another town, in another bar, watching another football game.” Before I can say anything to that, M.’s mother says, “Good-bye,” then throws her briefcase onto the front passenger seat of her car.

“What can I do to make you believe me?” I ask.

M.’s mother turns to answer. Her face is blank, impassive; she looks like someone who doesn’t care, or like someone who very much doesn’t want to care, or like someone who very much wants you to believe she doesn’t care. In any case, M.’s mother looks at me the way you look at someone when you don’t intend to see him again; she looks at me, I’m certain, the way she looked at her husband ______ months ago, when he said he maybe should go to Iraq, too. She looks at me in a way that people probably looked at Exley right before he got drunk so he could forget the way that people looked at him, or the way they looked at him right after he got drunk so he could forget that people looked at him that way.

“Nothing,” she says, and then gets into her car and heads toward home. I watch as her car turns onto Washington Street. The moment it is out of sight, I feel drunk — too drunk, considering that I haven’t had any vodka in ______ hours, but not nearly drunk enough, considering how drunk I need to be.

Yardley

It was seven thirty. I was sitting in the kitchen when Harold knocked on the door. I let him in. He was holding a library book; I could see the tag on its spine. The book went bang when he dropped it on the counter. I picked it up and read the title on the cover: Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley . I knew it was something I wasn’t going to want to read. Harold knew it, too. That’s why he wasn’t talking: he was going to let the book do all the talking for him.

“Shut up, Harold,” I said. And then he hit me! Harold actually hit me; he reached over the counter and punched me right in the mouth, with his fist! I couldn’t believe it! I tasted blood, and so I put my hand over my mouth and spat and then took my hand away and saw that I’d spat out a tooth. I ran my tongue around and found a space where my left front tooth used to be. The space felt fleshy and weird against my tongue; it felt like I was putting my tongue someplace where it wasn’t supposed to be. I couldn’t believe I’d finally lost my tooth. I’d waited so long to lose one. Even before I’d been promoted to seventh grade, I’d been the only one in my class not to have lost a tooth. Now I didn’t see what the big deal was. The tooth was so small, too small even to be gross. It didn’t look like anything anyone would give you money for. It made me sad to look at it. So I tossed it in the garbage. Then I looked up at Harold. But he was gone. That made me much sadder than the tooth. I had other teeth. But Harold had been my only friend for so long, and I knew now he wasn’t anymore.

After a few seconds I looked at the book again. It was written by someone named Jonathan Yardley. I sat there and read it cover to cover. This is some of what I learned: Exley had written two other books after A Fan’s Notes , books I’d never heard of and books that this Yardley guy (and everyone else, apparently) didn’t think too much of; he had two sisters, and a brother who was dead, and he also had two ex-wives and two daughters, not sons; his mother had died not too long ago and had been buried next to Exley’s father. As far as I knew, all of that could have been true. Yardley also claimed that Exley was a drunk and a moocher, which was probably also true. But there was at least one thing in the book that wasn’t true: that Exley was dead. When Yardley wrote on page xx of the prologue that “Fred died at age sixty-three,” I assumed it was a typo and, after the initial shock, didn’t pay it much attention until I reached page 249, the second-to-last page, on which Yardley wrote, “At nine thirty in the morning, June 17, 1992, Fred died.”

I closed the book, then went to my dad’s study and opened the window seat. According to this Yardley, the two other books Exley had written were called Pages from a Cold Island and Last Notes from Home . My dad probably had a dozen copies of A Fan’s Notes stashed in his window seat. I pulled them out, one by one, and looked for the titles of these other two books. I couldn’t find them in the first seven copies. But then, when I opened the eighth, I found them listed on the very first page:

Also By Frederick Exley

Pages from a Cold Island

Last Notes from Home

So Yardley had gotten that right. I wondered why my dad had never mentioned these two books. Maybe he didn’t know they existed, either. Or maybe he knew and had read them and didn’t like them any more than Yardley did. I also wondered why they weren’t mentioned in the first seven copies of A Fan’s Notes that I’d looked at. I went back and looked at them. As far as I could tell, the books were all the same edition. It didn’t make sense that they would have different pages. I went back to the copy that had that page and then pulled on the page, just a little, and it came right out of the book. I knew then what had happened: I knew then that my dad had torn that page out of the other books. He’d probably just forgotten to tear the page out of this one. It made me feel a little sick to think that Exley had written books my dad hated so much he couldn’t stand to look at the page their titles were written on. I was glad I hadn’t heard of Exley’s other two books before now; I was glad I hadn’t read them and hated them, too.

Anyway, then I went to the phone book and looked up F.B., one of Exley’s sisters. Yardley had claimed she lived out on Washington Island, on the Saint Lawrence River. I didn’t find F.B.’s name in the phone book. But I did find an I.B. who lived on Washington Island. I., according to Yardley, was the name of F.’s husband. So Yardley got that right, too. My stomach started flipping and flipping, and I thought I was going to throw up. I wondered where the special pot was. Mother always put a special pot next to my bed when I was sick, in case I needed to throw up in it. I didn’t know where she kept it. But it probably wasn’t near the rest of the pots she cooked food in. While I was thinking about this, I actually did throw up, right on the white pages. When I was done, I chucked the whole soggy, gross mess in the garbage. Then I went to see Exley.

EXLEY WAS DRUNK. I mean really drunk. A chair and a couch had been overturned and pushed, or kicked, to the edges of the room, and there was broken glass everywhere. The only thing still standing was a desk. There was one empty vodka jug and one nearly empty one on the floor; Exley was lying on the floor next to the bottles and singing. Exley had said in his book that he was a good yodeler. If that was true at one time, it wasn’t true anymore. I couldn’t tell what song he was supposed to be singing. But I could tell it wasn’t the Erie Canal song. I’d learned that song in second-grade music. I knew so many books from beginning to end. But the Erie Canal song was probably the only song I knew, beginning to end. That probably would have made me really sad if I’d had time to think about it.