If Jack's in Love

by Stephen Wetta

  He flicked a half-finished cigarette into the water and pulled the box from his pocket. Only this time, using his thumb and forefinger as tweezers, he brought forth a white-wrapped stogie and dangled it in the air with the satisfied expression of a surgeon displaying a diseased kidney.

  “Grass,” he said.

  I didn’t understand what he meant.

  And then it dawned on me.

  “Is that a joint?”

  He nodded, very seriously.

  I gaped over my shoulder, half expecting the cops to come crashing through the brush behind us. Drugs were an entirely new social malady at the time, more a rumor than a reality. Stan was probably the first person ever to bring pot into El Dorado Hills.

  “Where did you get it? Let me see.”

  I flipped it back and forth in my hand.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I have my sources.”

  Now I knew why he’d been hitchhiking downtown so much of late. I understood the muttered phone conversations, the hanging up whenever someone came into the room.

  “Have you tried it?”

  “Of course. In fact, I’m going to smoke this one. Now.”

  “No!” I hollered.

  “Relax, it’s not what they make it out to be.”

  He took a few tokes while I glanced about in alarm. I remembered what had happened the last time he’d brought me to the woods, when he had picked up a rock and brained a squirrel with the same dead-on accuracy he used to deliver sucker punches. I’d gotten all flustered and pained by that and yelled at him to quit. I hated squirrels as much as the next guy, but I couldn’t see any point in killing them. And then he whipped out his knife, sawed into the creature’s legs and tail, and, using a few rusty nails that he yanked from some moldy boards lying in the brush, he hung the amputated appendages like strips of hairy meat to a tree. What kind of psycho did things like that? And why on earth did I get stuck with him as a brother?

  Smoking the joint took forever. He closed his eyes, held his breath and spat air. Seeds were popping. The very burning of the weed was sinister.

  When he finally smoked it to a nub, he dropped the roach into the Marlboro box.

  “You save them?” I said.

  He just grinned.

  “Are you hooked yet?” I asked.

  He burst out laughing and stared at me with his silly eyes. Which pretty much answered my question.

  What would be the next calamity to befall the House of Witcher?

  “Let’s go home,” I told him.

  “Are you crazy? I can’t face Pop in this condition.”

  “You better watch it, you’ll be addicted in no time.”

  This well-meant warning brought forth another peel of drug-addled mirth. He wavered his hands like a spook and taunted me: “Look out, I’m stoooooned.”

  How quickly was I learning the futility of reasoning with a hophead. I turned away, depressed.

  “Hey, come on, I wanna show you something,” he said.

  He put his sunglasses on and leapt across the creek, and I followed. We climbed a slope, shooing away briars until we came to a narrow ridge. After that the ground sloped downwards. We shoved through some branches and leaves and wound up at the other end of the woods; and then we got in a hunkering position and surveyed the newly cleared plot of land upon which Thurston and Lovey had built their palatial homestead. We were staring directly into their back yard.

  “Her name is Anya,” my brother said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I was here yesterday. I heard the old lady calling her from inside the house.”

  “The girl was in the yard?”

  “Yeah, she was sunbathing, wearing a bikini.”

  “Were you high?”

  Stan laughed and pushed me over.

  We sat cross-legged. It was a hot day, but there was a lovely breeze and everything was peaceful. We watched the large, inclined yard. Close to the house the ground leveled out, and that is where Thurston and Lovey had placed their swimming pool, surrounding it with a green slatted fence. Stan told me the pool hadn’t been filled with water yet. At the far end of the yard, near the garbage cans, stood piles of empty boxes and discarded padding material from the move.

  “What kind of name is Anya?” I asked.

  “Pretty, huh?”

  We heard a door whoosh open. She stepped out to the yard, laden with empty boxes she intended to haul up to the garbage area. The moment she stepped outside, Stan’s nose jutted like a pointer’s. He watched as she marched through the yard in her sandals and white shorts. His nose was quivering.

  He whistled between his teeth.

  “Quit it, we’ll get in trouble.”

  “This ain’t their property, we can sit here all we want.”

  The hippie girl dropped off the boxes and headed back to the house. Stan whistled again and she stopped. We were behind sparse brush, partially obscured.

  She smiled and came over.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Peace,” Stan said. He gave her the peace sign.

  She kept craning her neck. This time her hair hung in ringlets. She came to within three feet of us.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “Peace,” my brother said.

  Anya laughed and gave the peace sign back. “What are you supposed to be, a hippie?”

  “We’re the Welcome Wagon.”

  “You are not,” she protested blithely, in an accent more southern than ours.

  “Where you from?”

  “Dallas. We just moved in.”

  “Dallas, Texas.” Stan nodded familiarly, as though Dallas were a place he’d been to a hundred times. “You must need someone to show you the town,” he said.

  “Doesn’t strike me there’s a lot to see.” She nudged her chin at me. “Who’s this with you?”

  “He’s my bodyguard.”

  Anya found that funny. She gave me a flirtatious wink.

  “Hi, Cutiepie, how old are you?”

  I scowled.

  “Do you smoke grass?” my brother asked.

  She tossed him a look. “Now I think you’re being impertinent.”

  Her use of the word “impertinent” made me nervous. It demonstrated clearly that she outclassed us. I could handle “impertinent,” but Stan didn’t possess my scholastic talents and he resented it when people put on airs. I looked to see what he was thinking, but he only stared at her from behind his sunglasses.

  “It’s just a question,” he told her. “If you smoke with me I was thinking we might have some fun.”

  “You haven’t told me your name,” she said.

  “It’s Gaylord.”

  Why did he say that?

  Anya laughed, unwilling to believe anyone would be named Gaylord.

  Suddenly a voice called from the rear door.

  “Anya, what are you doing?”

  It was Lovey!

  “Nothing, I’m talking!” she shouted over her shoulder.

  “I have to go,” she told us.

  “Meet me tomorrow at the creek,” my brother said.

  “What creek?”

  “Just cut through. It’s on the other side of the hill.”

  “Anya, who are you talking to?”

  “I have to go.”

  “I’ll be at the creek at three,” Stan said.

  She walked off in her sandals and tight shorts and my brother watched her from behind with his low-class insolence.

  I wanted to get out of there. Lovey was on the back porch standing on her tiptoes so she could see us, and here was my brother in possession of marijuana. And no doubt Reedy was at large, poking his nose into everyone’s business. What if Lovey went inside and called him?

  We returned to the creek and hung out until my brother came down some.

  I was monitoring his high with great anxiety. He made me promise not to tell Mom and Pop he was on drugs. And I didn’t tell them. But I wanted to. And the next day he went witho
ut me to the creek. He was there at three in the afternoon. He waited for a while, and just when he was about to give up Anya came brushing through the woods from the street side. She told him that if she’d entered the woods from the yard her mother would have seen and called her back.

  Stan passed her a joint and she toked on it like she’d been using drugs all her life.

  He told me about it that evening. After they got high they made out for a while and he felt her breasts.

  I was stunned. I figured my brother had been setting himself up for a fall. I thought he was making coarse, untrue assumptions about Anya, and about girls in general.

  I was wrong.

  7

  MY BROTHER HAD PICKED UP some of the new hippie expressions, like “far out,” “outasight,” and “dig it.” A few of these had already gained wary currency in our neighborhood; others were provided by the groovier television shows. Only recently Stan had hollered, “Sock it to me, baby!” and dashed across the room to sweep my mother in his arms. “Give me a hug, foxy lady! Come on, you sexy chick, hug me tighter!”

  I marveled at his brazenness. Who else ever told their mother she was sexy? I mean, wow. The boy had charm—sometimes. (Poor Mom would accept flirting wherever she found it, except from Mr. Harris at the Ben Franklin.)

  Stan had the longest hair in the neighborhood, maybe in town. Hair length was a contest among the boys in the neighborhood; most lost out when their parents lugged them to the barbershop. But Pop, he was indifferent to the controversies other dads raged about. He just didn’t care that much, and Stan’s hair kept on growing. When you saw hair as long as his it was on garage band record covers or maybe on the hippies out in San Francisco. It wasn’t typical in our town, and it drew stares of disapproval whenever we passed by in our smashed-up Ford. “Doesn’t that just show you,” the old folks would say. “You can’t expect people with a car that looks like that to control their teenagers.”

  During the course of the year Stan grew his hair so long he almost wasn’t allowed to graduate, even though the principals were eager to get rid of him; but after he threatened to turn it into a constitutional issue, they decided not to press the matter. It was dawning on people that the war against long hair was over. Soon they would give up on rock and roll and drugs. After that it would be Vietnam, civil rights, homosexuals, pornography. The news kept arriving through our television screens. The world was happening out there, if not in El Dorado Hills: drugs like the planet had never seen, orgiastic music, interracial shenanigans, crazy long-haired gatherings—flowers and dancing and girls blowing bubbles!

  Not so long ago, maybe eight or nine months back, my brother had been bawling his eyes out over Courtney Blankenship. That mad affair had lasted one brief season, long enough to scandalize the neighborhood and cause Mr. Blankenship (he of Ahoy, Mateys) to seek professional counseling for his daughter. For three breathtaking months the romance between Stan and Courtney was the talk of El Dorado Hills. Courtney lost many of her best friends, and didn’t seem to care. What in the world was she thinking? Perhaps El Dorado Hills had been too negligent of my brother’s sinewy physicality and Jim Morrison curls. Maybe. But after I saw him bawling over a girl he didn’t seem so tough. Actually, it gave me a little heart, seeing my brother vulnerable and crying. But that period passed, and now he scorned Courtney Blankenship for being plastic, square and uptight. Derisively he sneered when he heard her name. He called her “Suzy Creamcheese”—a cocktease, a whore, “the slut goddess of El Dorado Hills.” When he learned Gaylord Joyner had already broken up with her he laughed out loud. Not that it softened him towards Gaylord. On the contrary. It was as though Gaylord’s sole purpose in pursuing Courtney had been to break his heart, and that was a crime he would never forget.

  What this meant was, I couldn’t talk to my brother about Myra. Joyners were Joyners, and he hated them all. Besides, he’d grown too cavalier about love to sympathize with romantic feelings. “Let me tell you about chicks, they want it as much as guys but they can’t admit it. When they find out they like it, it freaks ’em out, see? Especially when they like getting it from a hippie dog like me. Chicks around here can’t deal with their instincts. That’s why I dig Anya, she knows exactly where it’s at.”

  Profane talk like that made me hesitate to utter Myra’s name in his presence. When had he become a hippie dog, anyway?

  There didn’t seem to be a soul I could confide to. Mom had been burned too many times to think any good would come of love. Her hope was that I’d find some nice ugly girl, after I turned thirty. As for my going with Myra, that would be reaching for the stars, and she’d never encourage such overweening vanity. Which left two potential confidants: my only friend, Dickie Pudding, and Pop. Dickie Pudding was out, because it would be all over town faster than a telegram if I breathed a single word to him about Myra Joyner. And Pop was too manly to have much regard for feelings. So I locked up my dreams and walked alone.

  One afternoon I strolled to the Ben Franklin to see if Mom would loan me a dollar (she wouldn’t). As I was leaving the store I decided, on impulse, to visit Gladstein.

  Gladstein was the only person who knew about Myra and me—Gladstein, of all people. How had it come about? And yet I was still a little timid around him.

  I stopped before his shop window, pretending to browse his display. When I casually raised my eyes, I saw him behind the counter, grinning like a demon and waving me in.

  The prissy bell above his door tinkled when I opened it.

  “How’s it going, little Witcher?”

  It was humid and tomblike in the shop, and it smelled subtly of linked meat.

  “Did you give her the ring?” He waited happily, his grin parting the bristles of his goatee.

  “No sir, I tried to but she wouldn’t take it.”

  The grin vanished and he fingered his whiskers. “I don’t get it, it’s a nice ring.”

  He pulled the drawer over his lap. “Let’s see what else we have.”

  “I can’t buy another ring, I don’t have any money.”

  “So trade that one in.”

  He had piles of jewels in there, rattling and jingling, and he kept waving his hands over them. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a turbaned muscleman had appeared and granted me three wishes.

  “She said she won’t take a ring from me. My pop beat up Mr. Kellner and now our name is mud.”

  “Like the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth, his name has been Mudd ever since.”

  Gladstein let out a hoot of laughter, but I got the joke only later, when I thought about it.

  His face grew serious.

  “Why did your father beat up Paul Kellner?”

  “Kellner said Pop tried to hit his dog with his car. But it’s not true, Rusty ran in front of it. He’s kind of a dumb dog.”

  Gladstein nodded. “That’s a serious charge, trying to kill a dog.” He owned three white mutts, Peek Shoos, Yatzis, some name like that. I’d observed them yapping through the rear window of his Continental many times. Otherwise I didn’t know a thing about his domestic arrangements. I didn’t even know if he had a wife.

  “Boy, you know, I don’t know what I’d do if someone tried to hurt my dogs. I just don’t know.”

  “Pop didn’t try to hurt anyone’s dog.”

  “Of course not, I’m just pondering human motive. Well, Witcher. We have to do something about you and Myra Joyner. Have you kissed her yet?”

  “Oh no. She would never let me kiss her.” I asserted this solemnly. “All I want is to talk to her. Maybe I can kiss her later.”

  “No-no-no-no-no-no,” Gladstein said. “First you kiss her. You have the rest of your life to talk to her.”

  “I don’t know about that, she hasn’t been that friendly to me since Pop beat up Mr. Kellner.”

  I trailed my finger across the counter. He was a weird guy, but at least he let me talk about her.

  “Witcher,” he said, “look at me.”

  Unwillingl
y I met his eyes. He held them on me for a long time, making sure I understood their gravity. They tended lugubriously downwards, hanging above pendulous bags of flesh.

  “Do you want to kiss her?”

  “Yes,” I said. The sibilance I placed on the trail of the word took me by surprise. Do we know ourselves? Are we privy to our own impulses? All I had wanted up to that moment was to spend time with Myra, to speak with her. That’s all.

  “Listen to me. If you want to kiss her you can’t think of anything else. Imagine kissing her. Form a picture in your mind. Meditate on it and it will come true.”

  He turned to the trinkets in his drawer and ran his hands through them. He was muttering, speaking…. I think he was talking to his jewels.

  I popped my knuckles, looked around.

  By and by he returned to me.

  “You have to learn how to use your mind. Anything you want you can have. It’s all in your power, you just have to want it.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Don’t ‘Yes sir’ me. Listen to what I’m saying.”

  “I am listening.”

  “But you aren’t believing. Do you have the ring?”

  “Yes sir,” I said. It was in my pocket. (It never left my pocket.)

  “Give it to me.”

  I did, and Gladstein replaced it with a golden band that had a ruby-red stone glinting in its middle.

  “What’s this for?”

  “It’s a trade. Take it instead. Give it to Myra.”

  “You sure it’s okay?”

  “Witcher. Listen. Picture the girl in your mind. Don’t let that image go away. Stay focused. And keep this ring in your pocket. It is magic. When you give it to her she will let you kiss her.”

  Filmy sweat had covered me. The smell of linked meat grew stronger. I remembered the red demon on the sausage can. I couldn’t meet Gladstein’s eyes.

  Tiny whimpers came from the rear of the store, breaking the tomb-quiet spell.

  “My babies are waking up.”

  “Your dogs? You bring them to work?”