by Drew Perry
What do you mean you left his clothes there? Beth wanted to know, Hen standing naked in the hallway, spinning in circles, making his noises. Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup. She asked him again: How could you just leave them there? He wanted to tell her that it had all been pretty simple, actually, but instead he went and sat at the kitchen table, flipped through the stack of credit card offers and bills: Reward miles and bonus points, the first mortgage payment due across the street. Beth made a big show of piling into the car and then came back in half an hour, mouth set in a thin line that meant victory, holding the clothes, and holding Jack’s overnight envelope, too.
Hen switches into the Patio Enclosures song. It’s his favorite TV commercial right now. Someone you know knows something great: It’s Patio Enclosures. He does it falsetto to match the voice of the woman in the ad. The people in the ad are deeply moved by their new glass sunrooms. Glass sunrooms are the cure for cancer, for erectile dysfunction, for our dependence on foreign oil. All that is missing from your life is a new glass sunroom from Patio Enclosures. Hen sings it again and again. It’s the background music of Jack’s life—jingles, the full texts of radio commercials, state capitals, state birds, state flowers, the entire sides of cereal boxes. All from memory, everything in perfect recitation. Montpelier Montgomery Albany Sacramento Carson City. This is Budweiser, This is Beer. The cardinal, the dog-wood. We’ve gone C-R-A-Z-Y here at American Furniture Warehouse, and then, word-for-word, the monologue that the guy, decked out in his flag tie or his gorilla suit, delivers as he sprints the rows of recliners and daybeds. Hen’s a genius, if a broken one. He could read at two and a half. Getting him to talk to them, though, instead of at them, or at the television—that’s something else altogether. There have been so many doctors that Jack’s long since quit counting, and anyway, they all say the same thing: Hendrick is autistic. Some of them say he’s high-functioning, and some of them don’t. They stand or sit behind their desks in their candy-colored pediatric doctor coats and generally want to talk about where he falls on the spectrum. Autism is what we like to call a spectrum disorder. Jack always finds himself picturing something actual, Hen splayed out on a big blue mat, having fallen onto the spectrum from some significant height. The doctors have cartoon animals on their coats. Baboons. Gazelles. Hendrick sits over by the box of toys and lines up the blocks in identical, regimented rows, probably pointing to true north.
There are good days. There are days when they go to the post office and nothing happens, or not much happens, days where Jack does, in fact, go back to trying to believe in what one of the first doctors told them, a guy with a biggish mole over his lip. Could still be nothing, he’d said, fingering the mole. No need for alarm. He soothed them. Jack sat in the highback chair on the other side of the desk, and Beth sat on a sofa with Hendrick, straightening his hair with a wet finger. They felt soothed. The doctor’s degrees hung on the wall behind him. Boys develop more slowly, he told them. He could still grow right out of it. They nodded along, eager. Language acquisition comes at different times, and in different ways. We’ll see where we are in a couple of months. We can run some tests then, maybe do a little blood work.
A little blood work. It was like they were in a movie about going to the moon, or tunneling to the center of the earth. Any amount of blood work seemed like too much. They waited the couple of months, then another couple. And now he’s six. He’s not growing out of it. This morning, like any morning, Beth gone and impossibly moved in with Canavan or not, Hen is disappeared deep into his secret set of notes, his rhythms and maps, marking time with his forehead on the kitchen cabinets. He could as easily be watching the ceiling fan spin, or reading—he’ll read anything they put in front of him—and touching the same sentence on the same page of the same book again and again for hours at a time. At the grocery store Wednesday night, he started pulling soup cans off the shelves one by one and throwing them down, yelling Alexander Haig! Alexander Haig! as each one hit the floor. He’d been all week in the H encyclopedia. He actually hates Secretaries of State, Jack said to the mothers standing there, watching. He picked cans of Cream of Mushroom up off the floor, put them back on the shelf.
Nobody at home to tell that story to. He and Hen came home to their plywooded, half-tiled kitchen, and made dinner, two men in the house. Macaroni and cheese for Hen, a little thin steak in the pan for Jack. Can of beer. Beth had already been gone three days. What spooks him is that it’s starting to feel familiar. He’s getting to the point where he’s not looking for her in the bed when he wakes up. At work, Butner and Ernesto can’t believe she left Hen with him. It doesn’t make any sense, they say. She’d at least have taken him with her. Jack tries to explain that actually it does make a kind of sense. That it’s fucked up, but it makes sense. That yes, she’s always been the paranoid one, and yes, she’s the one who’s got the CPR for Kids and The Pediatric Heimlich placards stuck up on the fridge. She’s plugged the primary and backup numbers for emergency rooms and urgent care centers and the Ear, Nose & Throat guy into their speed dial. She’s put poison control magnets on every metal surface in the house, she’s covered over all the sharp edges on everything, she’s filled every outlet with the little plastic protective tables—but the thing is that Hendrick, for all of that, for all her readiness, has never really been hers. If he’s ever been anyone’s, he’s been Jack’s. It’s Beth who finds and drags them to special parenting classes, and it’s Beth who records the afternoon talk shows any time there’s going to be anyone on there with a special-needs child, but Hen chose Jack, or he chooses him—smiles, when he smiles, at Jack, aims his few brief cogent moments generally in Jack’s direction. It rubs at her every, every time. She doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know why she can’t be the one to unlock him, or why he can’t be unlocked—and then she hangs another choking hazard list on the pantry door, sticks another awareness bumper sticker on the back of the car.
For his part, Jack wants none of the peripheral bullshit that arrives with the autistic child, has never wanted it: He hates the passing sympathies he gets in the stores, the caring looks, the whispering. He doesn’t want anybody else feeling like they get to weigh in on the subject. No ribbon magnets. No Differently-Abled. No special summer camps with psychopathic overstimulated teenagers running on about how Y’all, I’ve just always felt so called to help the less fortunate, you know? We are so blessed for this opportunity. We are going to have a super-fun time. None of it. No more magazines, no more pamphlets, no more instructional videos. He just wants Hendrick, wants to be with his son without being told by sloganeers how to feel about it. He does not want to have to hear any more human interest stories on NPR. He doesn’t want to listen to somebody’s soft, caring voice asking somebody if it’s hard. How hard is it? Is it so hard? It cannot possibly get any harder.
He’s never wanted anyone, under any circumstance, to reach out to him, or to be there for him, and the way he’s got it working in his head is that Beth must have finally started to feel that way, too. That it maybe got to the point where even she couldn’t, in all her freaked-out glory, record one more show about kids in helmets. That what this has to be for her is a vacation, a sabbatical. She’s checked out of it for a day, a week, for however long this is going to take. Just checked out of her marriage, of her son. Because she can’t be over there at Canavan’s going through her same routine, watching Oprah walk somebody through the stations of the cross one more time. And when did you know for sure that your son was different from all the other children? He can’t picture her over there surfing the web obsessively, trying one more time to find the right diet combination to sync Hen’s mouth back up with his brain. He can easily enough, though, picture her over there fucking his best friend, which makes him want to drive nails through his own shins. That’s another thing they can’t believe at work: That of all people she’d have gone to Canavan instead of somebody from the college, or somebody from another part of her life, or anyone else from anywhere else. And he tries to explain that,
too, to them, to himself. That even that part might make its own sick sense. Because of course she’d end up with a friend. Even an old boyfriend would have been too strange for her, too unfamiliar, someone too much from another time. There would have been too many things to explain. How much easier to land with someone, even if it is Canavan, who already understands about Hen, about her, about everything. Right?
The dog, Yul Brynner, gets up, clicks his way down the hallway, stands in the kitchen and asks to go out. Another country heard from. He’s got a wide bald scar on his forehead from where he was hit by a car when he was a puppy. Or so said the shelter people, anyway, when Jack got him. He predates Beth by two years, which makes him ten. He’s aging a little, going white through his muzzle, slowing down just enough for Jack to notice. What he’ll do when the dog dies, he has no idea. Evenings, after he gets Hen down, he’s been taking Yul Brynner out on the porch and listening to the radio, listening to a call-in show run by a woman who keeps saying that everything happens for a reason. It’s a break-up show. Jack sits there with the dog and drinks beer and women call up and say I just want to dedicate “Keep On Loving You” to my boyfriend Bryan, and I just want to say, Bryan, I really mean it, OK? I’m going to. We were meant for each other. I just know it. And the woman who runs the call-in will say That’s right, Stephanie. You just keep on going the way you’re going. You take care of Stephanie first. He’ll be back. And if it doesn’t work out, then it wasn’t meant to be. Am I right? Stephanie always tells her she’s right. Confession, absolution, REO Speedwagon. Brought to you by. Sometimes Jack thinks about calling in, thinks about what he’d say. Yul Brynner, for his part, lies there and waits for Jack to get near the end of his beer so he can lick the bottle.
The dog heads out into the yard, finds a good spot, shits, smiles while he does it. He pants and squints into the sun. To be that happy for ninety seconds in a row. Then he comes back in the house and settles down next to Hendrick, who is, of course, still working the cabinet door. Open, closed, open, forehead, closed. Jack tops off his coffee, starts in on Hen’s breakfast, on their day. Beth at Canavan’s house: Alexander Haig, Alexander Haig.
Getting Hen into the car—getting him anywhere—goes like this: Get him dressed. In anything. If he’ll pick out clothes, let him pick out clothes. Shorts and flip-flops in December? Doesn’t matter. Whichever combination of shirt and pants and shoes does not in any way matter so long as he will let you put a shirt and pants and shoes on him. Get him dressed, and then get him whatever it is that has become the sacred object of the week or month. Whatever it is that holds Most Favored Nation status. Right now, it’s the glossy 300-page catalog from Lone Oak Tree Farms that turned up in the mail at PM&T. Jack gets vendors of all stripes asking him to carry specific kinds of double impatiens or faux terra-cotta urns or bagged river rock. The Lone Oak people sell serious trees, trees that come in on flatbeds. Jack has no room for that kind of thing. The trees of Patriot Mulch & Tree are fruit trees in five-gallon buckets. But the Lone Oak operation seemed impressive, so he kept the catalog, and Hen found it, loves it. He’s read it cover to cover and back again so many times that the edges of the paper have gone soft and grimy. He carries it with him to the grocery, to the bathroom, to dinner. He sleeps with it. Always and forever make sure that you have the catalog.
And do not, under any conceivable circumstance, leave the house without the Donald Duck sunglasses. The Duck. Without The Duck, there is disaster. Without The Duck, as soon as he registers he’s outside, there is the immediate walking around in small, tight circles, the repeated touching of the eyes with the first two fingers of each hand, the noises. Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup. What generally follows is that he’ll throw himself down onto the ground, cover his eyes with his full palms, start screaming in earnest. The books say autistic kids have increased sensitivity to light, but that’s not all it is. He just loves the sunglasses. Once he wore them three days in a row, inside the house and out. Jack sometimes isn’t sure how much of any of this is on the spectrum, and how much of it might simply be Hendrick being maybe more human than everybody else, more sensitive to his own cravings.
Jack gets The Duck and gets Hendrick dressed and out the door and aims him toward the dump truck—since Beth’s got the wagon, he’s been driving the truck, a custom hydraulic bed on a heavy-duty Chevy pickup frame. He puts him in his booster seat, belts him in. There’s no backseat, so the front has to do. Beth gets on him about this, but there aren’t any airbags, either, so they’re safe. Hen starts saying certified AMS meteorologist Lanie Pope with weather over and over. SuperDoppler 12, he says. In his glasses, white plastic with Donald Duck on the edge of each lens, he looks like a tiny Elton John. Jack gets in over on his side, and Hen stops talking, holds his left hand out in the air. He pinches his thumb and forefinger together, sticks his other three fingers out to the side: A-OK. “What’s that you’ve got there?” Jack asks him.
“A dust,” Hen says, and for the moment, there he is, looking dead at Jack, a six-year-old kid like any other. “I have got a dust,” he says again.
Jack holds his own hand out in the same way, pinches at the air below the rearview. “Me too,” he says, but Hen’s already back down and in, playing with the glove compartment. Anything that opens and closes. These are the flashes they get, where it seems like he’s in there for sure, like he’s capable of registering any single thing in the whole damn world. And then he’s gone again.
Jack cranks the engine and backs down the driveway, out into the street a little too far, clips the mailbox over at the auctioned house with the back of the truck. It makes a good-sized bang. He’s leaned it over about halfway. This is good, he thinks, pulling back forward. On balance, this is good. Something to fix one of these nights when he gets home. Bag of cement and the post hole digger and a beer or two. Something to fill up his evening. He’s been having trouble filling his evenings. He aims the truck for Whitsett, for Canavan’s house, for PM&T, adjusts the windows so the air blows in the way Hen likes. Get it right.
It’s not just that Canavan would be familiar enough for her, or only that he would be. Canavan also and on top of everything tends to be a generally decent guy, funny, a quick ally at the dinner table. He defends Beth’s wall-to-wall safety placards, explains Jack’s endless projects. He’ll have the sliding glass doors back up in a week, right? Or: What’s so bad about having phone numbers close by when you need them? You’re just organized, is all. He’s helpful, courteous, cheerful, five or six other points of the Boy Scout Law. And now he’s a prick, too, to go with that.
When Jack pulls up, Canavan’s out in his carport, sitting on a big blue cooler and doing something to a chainsaw. He’s got the arm off the saw and he’s working the blade, link by link, through a ruined white towel. There’s a can of gas next to him, and a little plastic bottle of oil he keeps upending into the towel. He doesn’t look up until Jack cuts the engine off. It’s the first time Jack’s seen him since Beth moved in—Canavan’s sent guys to the lot a couple of days to drop limbs and branches back at the chipper, but he himself hasn’t come by. Hen plays with the door lock. Canavan looks up and waves, and Jack gets out of the truck, and there they are.
“How’s it going?” Jack says. He feels like an idiot, but doesn’t know what else to say. He’s not going to challenge him to a duel or anything—though maybe he should. Limb saws at dawn.
“Good,” says Canavan. “It’s going fine.”
“How come no early job?”
“We’ve got one midday out in Burlington. Big maple overhanging a garage. Delicate. Gave Poncho and Lefty the morning off hoping they’ll be sharp for it. Probably they’ll just be hung over.” Poncho and Lefty is what Canavan calls anybody who’s working for him, no matter how many people he’s got on at any given time. Right now it’s three rail-skinny white guys, tins of chew in their back pockets. Canavan puts his chainsaw down. “Give me a hand a minute?” he asks.
“Sure,” says Jack.
“There’s a he
ader I’m trying to get put up on the toolshed out back. Putting a tin roof on, a little overhang, so I can get the door open when it’s raining. It’s too big for me to pick up by myself.”
“Sure,” Jack says again. He sticks his head back in the truck to check on Hendrick, who’s making his noises and working through the catalog, touching the pictures of Red Oaks, available for sale in various sizes. There’s a Lone Oak Tree Farm employee in most of the photos, a little fat in his tan coveralls, standing next to the trees, presumably to give some idea of scale. The trees are taller than the fat man. That much is clear. Jack tells Hen to stay put, follows Canavan back through the carport to the shed in the back yard, where he’s got two ladders set up. Has he already asked Beth to help him, and she couldn’t do it, or did he know Jack would help, regardless?
It’s simple enough: They get up on the ladders, carry the beam up, and Canavan tacks in his side with a couple of screws. He passes the drill to Jack, who does the same. It’s three minutes, but still. It’s a favor Jack has done him. Another favor. “I can get the rest later,” Canavan says. “I just couldn’t lift the thing on my own.”
Jack comes down off his ladder, then asks him, “Is it dead or alive?”
“What?”
“Your maple. Today. Green?”
“Dying,” Canavan says. “But if we split it sometime later this month, it should still be good by November.” To sell as firewood, a sideline business at the yard. His and Canavan’s, specifically. They went in halves on a log splitter last year. Forty dollars a pallet for stacked and split. They’re partners: Canavan drops off limbs and logs, they split them for firewood. Canavan drops off branches, Jack chips them for mulch. They went in together on the chipper, too.
