by Jacob White
Company
A condo in Gastonia is no place to receive your son for the weekend after forgetting his birthday the weekend before. I had prepared a gracious speech but just in the door he wiped off his mother’s kiss with a uriney “Jesus!” and I saw I couldn’t give an inch.
“Your mother says you been hollering at her.”
“She’s a hypochondriac.”
“Well, go easy. What’s wrong with your shorts?” Beneath the aqua corduroy shorts hung a good two inches of plaid boxer.
He made a show of sparing me the withering pits of his eyes. “Dad, this is how Mac McBride and I wear them.”
“I see. Well, I’m a little out of the loop lately. Grab a coke.” I went back to my bedroom and returned wearing yellow swim trunks over a pair of plaid Bermudas. My son was kneeled in the den setting a CD carefully in the tray of a nasty little NAD stereo system I had and which, along with the fifteen-inch Cerwin Vegas hulking in the corners, I’d soon pawn for alimony. He barely glanced up but there was a satisfying face drain. “Jesus, what a gooner.” Only ten and all these Jesuses.
“What are you putting on?”
He frisbee’d the jewel case at my chest so I had to fumble at it like a fogy. “Gigantigrit,” I said, turning the thing over. “What is a Gigantigrit?”
But he’d sunk into the couch, his head already stooped with a cool impersonal list, like he might fire up a joint, and I saw the connoisseur had a lesson for me and I should assume a listening attitude, basically shut up. I hung an elbow off the entertainment cabinet and tipped my head and let my eyes coolly disconnect, aping him as he aped someone whose company is at a premium. “Mac McBride give you this?”
“Shhh!”
And in tumbled a tenor drum with some nuts loose, followed by a creaky upright bass, both bungling along like two autistic hobos and occasionally overlaid by toneless slabs of distortion, maybe two chords in all. The reluctant singer, cartoonishly parched, came legging in and out of the junkyard noise with goofy-hinged quatrains, singing much as I imagined a tarantula might.
At the bright sound of my half-sixer tugged across the grating, my son glared into the kitchenette. “Jesus, what are you doing! Just chill out for once!”
I shot up my arms, a man condemned to egg shells, and strolled back around the breakfast bar to my listening post at the cabinet—suckling down half a can on the way. “Hell, if you’re going to play it, play it.” I flicked the volume and the Vegas sawed us in half. He jerked fetal and clamped his skull and seemed to be saying Jesus again. I held to the entertainment cabinet with one arm, nodding placidly to each car-bomb concussion and trying very hard to keep it together. I then exhibited a loose druggie jog, rolling my head back and closing my eyes and saying, “Yeah, man, yeah . . .”
He went for the stereo but I hipped his skinny ass aside. He went for it again and I bumped him again, and then he bumped me and our bumping became the dancing. Or at least for the brief minute we thought we were in a movie about ourselves and before we each got a good image burn of what the other looked like, which no moviegoer wants to see and which bucked us from the thrall into a private, distracted shambling like that of two boys shambling around the bed of some kind of scary group sex, each trying not to look like he is looking for his clothes.
I can’t describe the noise. Imagine a four-inch hex bolt jammed into each ear and crackling with voltage and a lot of bright and brutal damage, stroboscopic flaming tints exploding into your eyeballs. I had neighbors, dozens of them, to say nothing of the arborist, who I somehow knew was just sitting over there in the dark taking it, suffering the noise as just another of the periodic cave-ins of the ditch he’d dug himself. The rest were already pounding at my door probably, my indignant Jewess, Dale at the fore, shirtless and deputized. Another bad apple in 1032. I didn’t care, I was a little silly with having my son to myself tonight. It hadn’t been a hot year at school. He was “displaying.” He was thin. He swung the fat volume knob back and forth as fast as he could to simulate an embolism. “Don’t do that, you’ll blow the”—but he was off, frogging around the room. He stood before a speaker ramming his groin at it, an innocent spaz-out, or not innocent. No cokes, she’d told me. Not under any condition. Not even on the premises. “Don’t do that,” I hollered, and my son spun and leered at me from his toxic adolescence. I was leaning on the back of the couch, breathing and withstanding, the noise boiling blood against my face and kicking my heart out of sync. I shook my head. We were doing permanent damage and we were doing it in four pairs of shorts.
“When’s the next song?” I yelled.He was on his back now, dragging himself in slow circles with his legs—boring into the carpet. “There isn’t any next song. It’s just the one. It goes the whole way.”
“Epic.”
“It’s desert rock.”
“It sure is.”
It was Neptune to me, and he didn’t much get it either, but we bobbed our heads and bit our bottom lips, let our eyes coolly disconnect—gooners out of the loop or something worse, something blinded and banished and searching for the correction, while thirty miles away Mac McBride sat in his half-million-dollar bedroom never guessing what motley ghouls danced around his name out here in the desert.
14. Episode Before Putting on Pants
Do you need more time? Were you not given enough time?
Given enough time. That’s how you begin all your sentences at thirty-three. Given enough time, you could get your wife out of the slums, hit the freeweights, improve your posture, leash train the dog. Given enough time.
Of course, had you kept things tidier in places you hadn’t thought mattered, things would be, given all your time on this earth so far, better.
Given enough time, even a dog learns to malinger.
You were once a rising so-and-so. You were on your way. And, given enough time . . . well! But now it is late and your medal or whatever has not arrived. You have never seen a medal except once across a room, and because you knew the guy receiving it, and because you were, it had seemed, slipping past those years allotted for medal earning, you’d convinced yourself it was being lowered around your neck, and, convinced of this, began to pant under its weight and finally collapsed, or collapsed so to speak, for even collapsing lies beyond your courage and other people have moved on with life.
Your mother was competent. She said the good movies end facing west. You insisted for a decade on the merit of bad movies that end facing east because, you explained, these are easier to lose yourself in. Then one day you saw a bad movie that ended facing east and understood that it was bad, and that you were lost. You saw the year it was made and wanted only to swat away the curtain of credits so that you could see, if you could see far enough, beyond the hilltops and treetops and through all the grainy miles, your mother, alive still, skiing competently across evening butterscotch, her wet hair flicking and unimportant in the wind.
You thought you were Proust. Or would be, given the time. Then you were given the time. Now you’re a kind of animal looking down its own snout. Irrigating the past requires stamina. You’re burnt out on the future too. Your activity has become a kind of whittling, your whittling a kind of staring. Proust’s million little breaths—you’re whipped by the very idea of it anymore. But you got to breathe, you can’t be just nothing, not like in space. Try being nothing. Give it a little time. You’ll wake up each night to the dull knife at your lungs and the lights in your skull going on-off-on-off-on-off.
Where are you all the time? your wife asks, waving a hand over your face. You’re not even present. But you are exactly present! You are deep in it! Your friend was deep in it. For his wife’s birthday he gutted their bathroom, then realized the old notch-joint beams were twisted in a way that made it impossible to figure out, given all the time in the world, where to start reframing. You were too “busy” to help, so three summer weeks he sat in there holding his head,
boots dangling into the basement, until finally the father-in-law was called out of retirement.
Three hundred miles away, a middling man in jeans lowers tidy toolboxes into the trunk of a Saturn: about to give his time. How does that make you feel?
Your hands are middling, somehow. They remember what you cannot. It is they after all that have been giving the time. It hits you that you have done a lot of manual work and you wish you could remember it so it could stand to your character. Important credentials are being overlooked, competencies—you might have gutted a bathroom for your wife, etc. Let it go. If your hands are middling, you’ve done what you can. Could. You are competent or you are not. The time has been given. Has given out. Only you’re not prepared to outlive yourself. Given the time, you’re not prepared. For the future. Which you still think is in front of you because you are a child. Though all the lessons are over.
You once drew with the hand of a child an outer-space jungle. I am pretty sure you didn’t realize then what a thing you had there—a place where use has no use and there are thick green leaves but no sound and when people talk about “puttin food on the table” or “You got to want it” or “given enough time,” it’s just mouths making melancholy little shapes. Had you wanted to disappear that was the time to do it. Before the debt began to accrue. But even then there was your mother. There was the time she was given and gave. Imagine her looking for you, calling and calling, and finding only the drawing, your name down there in the corner, and a little note beneath: Keep me in your heart!
How does that make you feel?
15. Yardage
A horse saunters up the middle of Hole Four. Atop the broad roan lolls the small figure of a boy, a limp afterthought to the stolid roll of hip and shoulder. It is late on a green summer afternoon, the sky low and mute, the air heavy with the sweet tonic of Bermuda grass.
The boy’s father stands in a buffer of shag just off the green, watching the horse climb the steep fairway toward him. He leans on a chipping wedge, hip boxed out in a pastel contrapposto. The rest of the foursome stand behind the man, strung out uncertainly between the green and the two carts, each holding a club near the head. The father waits for the horse to draw up in front of him so that he does not have to raise his voice. “I hope you break your goddamn neck.”
Rolled up on the saddle behind the boy like something dead is a yellow and green afghan. Two plastic gallon jugs hang across the rump, the father’s expensive half-inch braided mooring line knotted redundantly through the handles. A rucksack cleaves the narrow, slumped shoulders that stir even after the horse has stopped. The boy will not look at the father. He lifts a warm can of Coors from his crotch, sips off the foam, and looks over the men’s heads. He is nine.
“He’s got a drink,” one man behind the father says.
“That animal belong up at the summer camp?” says another.
The first man looks over at the second, then back at the horse. “He got that horse by Jesus from Camp Thunderbird. He took it.” The two guffaw without actually laughing, their blue eyes bright, mouths slack and disgorged of sense. They won’t step any closer.
The third man, decades older than the rest, steps from behind a cart, drops in his putter, and withdraws an iron. He walks past the other two and across the green, stopping behind the father. “Now that thing is divoting the shit out of the fairway, son, you got to get him on off.” He fans the iron tersely over the turf like a metal detector, more corrective than angry. “Kenny, I’m going to walk over to Five while y’all finish up.”
“Kenny, I believe he stole that horse.”
“And somebody’s beer—”
“And somebody’s beer.”
The first man bends down next to the cart and sloshes the cooler across the floorboard. “We out, Kenny. See what’s in his sack there—”
“We’ll pay him.” One of them flops a wallet open. The other swats it away and shushes him.
The father says nothing. His eyes are squinted black stars. He won’t look up at the boy, whose fine hair frets and sticks across the pale bulb of brow. He blinks beyond the horse, where the fairway drops and disappears into an emerald valley, then climbs steeply toward the staggered terraces of tees. Theirs were the last carts out. The men are hustling to squeeze in nine. Around the horse’s hooves, restive patches of Bermuda twitch with evening air.
“Hell, Kenny,” says the second man. “Let him rip. It’s the lake on three sides and 49 on the other. Security will get him and he’ll catch hell and you can pick him up later at the gate house.”
“There you go,” says the man’s partner.
“Take your birdie.”
The horse takes a step closer and cranes around to lip the sod near the father’s spikes. He feels a snort up his trouser leg and steps back with a funny high-kneed stumble.
“Where is Betsy?” he blurts. “You were to look after her. She is your dog.”
“I hate that dog.”
“What about your mother, then?”
The boy looks down. He flops the reins from side to side with one hand. His other hand holds the beer can beneath his chin with a soft-wristed sideways fan of fingers.
The father nods and turns away from the boy and the horse. He squats, holding the wedge mid-shaft to sight his shot.
“Return the horse,” he says, his back to the boy—close enough that the horse could kick him in the head. “I’ll see you at the house.”
Were the father to see his own smallness in the boy’s life to come, it would be too much for him. He is seeing it a little now, squatting beneath that horse, and it is a little too much for him. Two days later he will drop dead of a heart attack. The boy has done his work on him, just as the father has done his work on the boy.
The horse is returned, either by the boy or by somebody sent out for it. The day resolves forgetfully. There is likely a talk, though the father has other worries and is on the phone much of the evening. His mother knows nothing of it and puts the boy to bed, stroking his pale temple. She wakes him early for swim practice the next morning. And a day later his father is dead.
For now, the father takes his birdie. Chips it in effortlessly. It is the most effortless thing the boy will ever see: a man in expensive peach pants and pale yellow cotton-polyester golf shirt sticking moist to his back, the tanned forearms knotted at the wrists into an oaky V. The sleeves ripple languidly. And then comes a soft twist of torso, the tap, the ball hopping up stupid and surprised at first, then tracking calmly across the slanted green and gurgling into the cup. Birdie will forever mean this.
The boy used to stand next to the hole, lifting the flagpole from its plug and hoisting it as the ball curved toward the cup, shuffling backward so not to interfere; and only now, as the father retrieves the ball, and walks over to pick up the flagpole—dusk falling all at once, it seems, the yellow flag whips up as if of its own accord—only now does the boy see that the flagpole is supposed to be simply flung onto the green. By some principle this cannot damage the green but walking it without spikes can. He sees from his strange vantage atop the horse how things are done in the world in which he does not factor. And even in the decades that follow, which provide their own vantage, it will be this dusk of the father that circumscribes his days and nights. The horse and the dream it bore are forgotten in time, the blue-eyed ghosts returning to their carts, popping the brakes and whispering through the pines so there is only the vast yardage of Hole Four at dusk, the forest at its edge already dark and chirring as birds turn to bats.
16. The Plantation
Evenings now, he stands in his front door, sipping whiskey. His son left, then his wife, so now he develops new customs. Taking the glass from his lips, he senses very clearly how his life has changed. There is a sadness in this vigil, but it is not all disagreeable.
Part of him has come apart. Part of him has begun.
He thinks
of himself, now, in the thinning penny-flash of evening light, as the father, because only now does he not feel the cloying weight of that occupation. Only as a vestige does he feel his shape as a man. The house has depressurized, breathes through the doorway. Air breaks over his body. Father: it is a word. It is a whimsically grown beard. A silken robe he puts on at night, the house all quiet. The way breezes pulse over him as he stands in his doorway evenings, arm raised against the jamb. I am the Father.
Alone for the first time in many years, he goes through a period of lightness, of seeming rebirth. The days skitter with strange, bright hues. The house feels weightless behind him, the door jamb like balsam in his hand. He tenses his muscles, making sure he cannot pick the house up. It becomes apparent that this period will pass.
He sips only enough whiskey to scare himself.
They left because he was no longer a likeable man. He had begun to complain, in his collapsing rhetoric, of what everybody wanted from him—when it was all too evident they wanted nothing. Realizing this frightened him into a quiet neediness. His wife—this woman for whom he had built a house—suffered the erosion of years as if waiting for their son to bring meaning to their life together. But the boy is twenty now, sleeping on couches in Charleston. A letter arrived this spring from the liberal arts college down there saying he’d withdrawn. The father doesn’t have his number.
When his wife said, “You could drive down there, Fran, find him,” he’d reply with a stare meant to seem patient, fatherly, but which came off as mean and lost.
When the son left, he left his mother and father to each other. Later, in spring, Fran helped her load the trunk under a blooming cloud of dogwood, wintry white petals slipping off their shoulders. Then the boy, Wynn, didn’t come home for summer.
