by Drew Perry
And who’s in Truckville now? Fucking the goddamned mayor of Truckville? That’s what plays on a loop in Jack’s head through the weekend, a little louder each time she comes to pick Hen up, each time she brings him back, to where Monday night, after the girls tear off in their minivan, Jack decides he’s got to do something other than sit here on one or the other of his porches. Because he’s earned that much, hasn’t he? A change of scenery? That’s all he wants. A little half-assed escape for a few minutes. He gets up, goes across the street, looks in on Hen. He’s left him alone before—quick runs to the grocery, to the bank. It’s not like he’ll be anything other than right damn here when he gets back. He puts the TV on mute, though, on The Weather Channel, just in case. If Hen did get up, he’d camp out in front of that, no problem. Jack pats Yul Brynner on the head, tells him to keep an eye on things, tells him good dog, and sneaks out his own front door, even lets the truck coast a few houses down before he turns the ignition. He’s out and gone.
He can hear her no problem: Alone? You left him alone? Are you out of your mind? But here’s what she doesn’t get, won’t get, even with her safety magnets, her phone numbers: Nothing’s going to happen to him that hasn’t happened to him already. He’s not going to jump off the roof, because he’ll never make it out there. Instead, he’ll stand in front of the window, throwing the lock back and forth for seventeen hours. She thinks she can help him, can fix him, by treating everything like it’s an emergency. By being prepared for any possible situation. They have two fire extinguishers. Smoke alarms in four different places. They live two hundred miles from open water of any kind, and last fall she made them a hurricane kit. It’s in the front hall closet, in a waterproof box. Batteries. A radio. Granola bars. Pop-Tarts for Hendrick, the only thing he’ll eat some days. Jack told her she ought to put a few miles of extension cord in there, a toaster oven, some fish sticks—Hendrick’s favorite meal. I’m serious about this, she said. Jesus Christ, he said. I can see that. He should call her up right now and tell her where he is, where Hendrick is, see if she calls out the State Patrol or the National Guard. He makes a couple of turns. What he ought to do first is see where she is right now, check in on things. So he aims for Canavan’s house. Not to go in. That’s for assholes. He’s not going in. He’s just going to drive by, to see what he can see. And after that, who knows. Whatever he feels like. He rolls down his window, finds the bluegrass station that comes in from Galax if the weather’s clear, rides east.
He shuts the engine off at the top of Canavan’s street and coasts down in front of the house, because now he’s James fucking Bond. They’ve got the lights on out back. Which means they’re probably out there under Canavan’s spanking new tin roof, sitting in chairs on the little concrete stoop in front of his workshop, listening to some music. Canavan’s proud of his record collection, owns vinyl pressings of obscure concerts, pays a hundred bucks a pop to buy these things off the web. It’s where he spends his money. When they’d be over there for dinner, he’d make a big show out of choosing the right records for the right night. Jack can’t quite see Beth going for this part of his personality. But what the hell does he know? Maybe she gets off on his forty-five minute speeches about the difference between the way they recorded bebop in New Jersey and New York. Maybe she wants to have the conversation stopped so she can listen to that right there. You hear that? You hear that? Or maybe right now she’ll take anybody who’s not Jack.
He picks at the steering wheel, jingles the keys. It’s not oysters and champagne and strawberries back there. He knows that. They’re probably not fucking each other on a handmade quilt while the last known vinyl copy of a session at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1973 spins on the turntable. It’s probably just chairs they’ve dragged over from the patio. Canavan’s got a few beers in a bucket of ice. Classy. They’ve had dinner, or they’re just finishing up a late one. She’s on adult time again. Not one part of her evening rigged toward getting Hen his fish sticks by 6:45 so that he can eat them one by one and be done in time to watch the seven o’clock rerun of Murder, She Wrote. They don’t know how he found it, or why anybody would still be showing it, but there it is, every night, Angela Lansbury putting the pieces together one more time. When it’s over, he reads the encyclopedia, and then he goes to sleep. By eight-thirty or so, you get your own life back for a while.
They’ll have Canavan’s freezer-burned ice cream for dessert: It’s fine, she’ll say to him, and it is, sort of. It tastes old, but it tastes like ice cream. They’ll finish that off and have one more beer, or a martini, maybe, Canavan producing an antique shaker and making some show about the first martinis of the summer. Cheers, he’ll tell her, and then bounce up again and switch the record to something else, something he finds in the closet, blows the dust off of. I haven’t listened to this in forever, he’ll say. Perfect. And she’ll be sitting there, not thinking about what any of this means, not thinking of moving her things in. She will just sip her martini, which will have too much vermouth in it. Outside of her lunches with Hendrick, she’s in some alternate universe, somewhere she can basically cease to exist for a while. She’ll go in and teach Summer I and then come back home. She’ll sit under Canavan’s new roof. She’ll sip her drink and say to him, Listen to this. I had some kid use the term “escape goat” in an essay today, and they’ll laugh about that, and they’ll go inside, and they’ll go to bed. Jack’s plenty jealous of Canavan in all the ways he knows he’s supposed to be, wouldn’t mind it if something fell on him or if he caught leprosy, but the kicker is that it turns out he’s getting jealous of Beth, too. It is Monday in her life. She hasn’t had to make a single decision about anything.
She’s up for tenure in the fall, and she’ll get it. Which means they’re here forever, which means he’s tied to PM&T. Which is fine. He’s proud of having made something, of having dropped a fully functioning business onto a gravel lot. Soon, the two of them will be making enough money to where they’ll be able to pay the bills without having to keep close track of the bank accounts. He’ll sell the house across the street. He’ll go to work. Pine needles, pine bark, chipped pine pallets. Christmas trees in December, fruit trees in the spring. Marigolds, impatiens, pansies. Yes, we deliver. Yes, we’ll be sure not to block the driveway. Maybe they’ll hire a third guy, someone who can manage the greenhouse. Someone who can grow the bare-root mail-order stuff, send their profit margin through the roof. Mulch for the rest of his life. And Beth will end this thing with Canavan, will come back home. She’ll have to. Everything will work out perfectly, perfectly fine.
Jack cranks the engine, drops it in first, and edges the truck up onto Canavan’s lawn. What’s called for here, he’s suddenly pretty sure, is something on the order of the grand gesture. You can’t just sit in your truck in front of your wife’s boyfriend’s house. You have to do something. You have to be a man of action. So he drives across the yard, cuts the wheel, and rumbles slowly along the front of the house, taking out the line of shrubs Canavan’s got planted there. Azaleas and boxwood. A couple of hydrangeas, which he feels a little bad about. But he puts it in reverse, backs up to make sure he got them all. If he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it right. The branches snap under the wheels. It doesn’t take long. He’s careful not to hit the house itself. Vandalism only. At home, Hendrick’s probably dreaming the list of Deputy Secretaries of Housing and Urban Development, or of prime numbers spooling endlessly across reams of paper. On his way back out, looking for something extra, a grace note, Jack lines up the mailbox, drives right over the top of it, over the top of the garden Canavan’s got going there. No lights come on in the house. No one comes flying out the front door. No one starts in yelling at him, asking him what the hell he thinks he’s doing. Nothing happens. Jack, his wife somewhere back there in Canavan’s back yard, drives away. He’s done what he needed to do. He puts the truck through its gears and heads for 70, for a little bar out there that’s on the way back into Greensboro. After all this hard work, he�
��s pretty sure he deserves a cold beer.
The Brightwood. It was the old roadhouse and inn back before the interstate came through. A low-slung brick building, a gravel drive they’ve got the contract on. Thirty yards of crushed gravel every eighteen months. Six or eight trips in the undersized dump truck. There are two dead Pontiacs, one on blocks, off to the right of the door. Roosters live, seemingly, loose on the property. Neon sign on the roof, all caps: BRIGHTWOOD. A smaller one hangs on the brick front wall: SIZZLING STEAKS.
Inside, the place is small, shotgunned, smoky, a rectangular room that runs front to back with the bar set along the right-hand side. A TV hangs off a mount that drops from the ceiling at the far end, tuned to one of the forensic crime dramas where things get solved because someone sneezed and forgot to cover his mouth. A pube on the carpet, the half-moon of a fingernail. This is how they’ll get him for Canavan’s lawn: A single fiber from his shirt. There’s another room on the other side, a dining room, from the days when the Brightwood was a supper club. It’s closed down now, tables stacked on their ends. There are pictures everywhere on the walls. Lieutenant Governors, baseball players, Elvis—signed. And back behind the bar, on built-in shelves that run the length of the room, more pictures: Sears store family portraits, school pictures of kids in braces. Alongside those: Incomplete sets of china, stuffed animals, dolls, scaled NASCAR die-cast models, crystal wine glasses, decorations from all the major holidays. An electronic Santa that’s always on, always waving. A few bottles of liquor crammed into a corner. Souvenir shot glasses. Baby spoons from national parks and monuments. Beth gets uncomfortable in here, says the craziness of it makes her nervous. Jack loves it.
There’s a couple in the round booth in the corner, smoking, holding hands. She’s in a yellow tank top, drunk, skinny, laughing at everything her date says. Two women are sitting at the front of the bar, heavily made up, mid-forties, maybe fifties, drinking something orange out of stemmed glasses. He’s the only other person there. He sits down a few seats away from the women and far enough away from the TV so the sound doesn’t feel like it’s in his skull. The bartender, an older woman, short, the same woman who’s been here every time he’s ever come in, brings him a menu and a napkin, says, “What’ll you have?”
“A Miller’s,” he says, thinking of his grandfather, who called all beer, regardless of brand, a Miller’s.
She nods, purses her mouth, reaches into the cooler and then opens his beer for him, something he’s always liked. She sets it on his napkin. “Anything to eat?” she says.
He’s earned himself a snack, he figures. He orders a cheeseburger.
“We make all our own ground beef,” she says. “Right here.”
“Yes ma’am,” he says. She leaves to put his order in, and he watches the TV. The crime scene is poolside, the suspects girls in white bikinis. The detectives are swabbing the bikini girls’ mouths with Q-tips. There is shock and outrage and surprise and the cops look serious, vigilant, preternaturally beautiful. Jack sips his beer, considers the facts: Canavan’s probably out in his lawn by now, assessing the damage. Beth’ll be telling him all about how this is why she moved out in the first place, because Jack’s nothing more than a goddamned overgrown child. She’ll be telling him to go and get his log splitter off the lot at PM&T. She’ll be saying he’s crazy, he’s crazy. He’s not crazy. He was just stopping by, leaving a note. Sorry I missed you.
The show goes to commercial. When it comes back on, the action has shifted to other bikini girls at another pool. One of the ladies at the end of the bar is explaining something about a house fire to the bartender. Something about money burning up, about having kept money in coffee cans in the house. “You just don’t ever know,” the woman says.
“I know,” the bartender says.
Jack orders a second beer when his cheeseburger comes out, and a third, eventually. He watches the end of the cop show. It was one of the bikini girls. Long shot of the bikini girl in the back of a cruiser. Justice. The ladies down the bar are talking now about somebody’s son who has to go to jail for a month. The local news comes on. The anchor’s name is Neil McNeill, which has always seemed impossible, but there it is. That can’t be his name, Beth said, the first time they saw him. Why not? Jack wanted to know.
He must have changed it.
You think he changed it to that?
I don’t know, she said. That just can’t be his name.
She’ll hold onto things like that, worry them through. She wants to push at the world. It’s something he likes about her, something he admires—that she feels she’s owed some kind of explanation. Jack’s often enough content just to drive the truck over the top of Canavan’s landscaping, see what happens.
He hangs on for one last beer, for the weather and sports. In minor league action, the Bulls and Grasshoppers and Warthogs all win. Smiles all around the anchor desk. At the round booth, the tank top woman gets up on her knees, pulls her shirt up in the back, shows her date a tattoo. Don’t that look just like a world globe? she’s saying. Don’t it? Jack looks, but not too long. It’s time to go. He pays his tab, leaves a big tip, walks out into the parking lot. He feels better. A burger and a beer. A night on the town, a calling card. He’s feeling better.
He knocks some of the mud from Canavan’s lawn off the front tires, climbs up in the truck. Maybe it was a half-stupid thing to have done. Maybe somebody who had it together better wouldn’t have done that. Doesn’t matter. It was at least a fierce goddamned show of force, is what it was. It was an update with scores and highlights. He gets the truck turned around without hitting anything, and drives out past a huge display of mahogany furniture sitting in a mowed field. There’s a long yellow banner that says REAL MAHOGANY. There are tables, some dressers, a four-poster bed, something that looks like a throne. It’s all been out here at least a year. Jack’s never once seen anyone looking at it, never once seen anyone who looks like he might be selling it. It just sits. Furniture in a field. He rolls down his windows, finds what he wants on the radio, drives home with the volume cranked up. On the way by PM&T, he slows down and takes a look. Everything’s still right where he left it: His plants, his office, his piles of mulch.
Beth’s sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee, when he gets home. Shit and shit. Yul Brynner’s out there, too, and the both of them look disappointed. And pissed. Jack hasn’t called about getting him shaved yet. Another failure. It’ll be 95 degrees soon enough, and the dog will lay around panting, miserable. Jack gets out of the truck, reminds himself one more time to call the vet.
The porch light’s on across the street. He moves slowly, buying time, trying to make every move look like he’s doing it on purpose. He does like her back over here, sitting on his porch. Their porch. She’s chewing on a strand of her hair. It makes her seem like a kid. He climbs up the steps, and Yul Brynner watches him. Beth doesn’t. Jack nods at the dog on his way by.
Inside, the house is quiet, but bright, all the wrong lamps on. He checks on Hendrick, who’s sleeping on his side, just like they taught him. First, push your hand down on the bed. Like that. Push and roll. Great, honey, that’s great. That’s perfect. Every new movement had to be taught, had to be broken down step by step. Regular kids don’t have to be taught to roll over. At the yard last week, Butner said, He runs like a goddamn marionette, you know. Jack didn’t know for sure that Butner knew what a marionette was. He grabs the last four of a six-pack out of the fridge, brings that back out on the porch with him. Might as well keep going. Yul Brynner’s staring out into the yard. Beth is, too.
“Beer?” Jack says.
Beth shows him her mug, says nothing.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Jack says, opening himself one. He sets the other three back behind him, up against the house. He scratches Yul Brynner behind the ears. “What’s he looking at?”
“I don’t know,” she says, her voice something dug out against him. “It’s out in the trees. It’s been out there a while.”
Sticks snap in the little stand of shrubs and ivy in the side yard. Yul Brynner starts to shake a little, vibrate, his version of being battle-ready. A possum comes wallowing out from under a bush, sits up, stares at them. It seems anti-climactic. It seems fat. Yul Brynner whines, then barks a couple of times, and it runs away.
“Possum,” Jack says.
“He looked smart,” says Beth.
“Smart?”
“Like he was looking at us,” she says.
“He was looking at us.”
“You know what I mean.”
The dog works his way through a series of more whines and growls. “Good boy,” Jack says, rubbing his ribs. “Good boy.”
“Put him on his lead,” Beth says.
“What for?”
“What do you mean, what for? I don’t want him going down there, chasing after that thing.”
“He’s fine,” says Jack. “Isn’t he?”
Beth gets up, gets the rope from its peg by the door, hooks one end to the porch railing and the other end to the dog.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Jack says, and Yul Brynner promptly gets up and runs for the shrubs, the rope trailing behind him. Beth steps on it some right before it goes taut, slowing him down enough to where he won’t hurt his neck, a trick they’ve learned from enough evenings out here with him. She looks at Jack a long time, proving something. Then she dumps out her coffee, reaches for a beer, pours half of it in the mug. She says, “Jackie, what in the hell is it with you, anyway, do you think?”
“What do you mean?” he says. He knows what she means.
She aims her mug at the truck. “How about this, for starters: What is that all over your tires?”
“Mud from the lot, I guess,” he says.
“Mud from the lot. That’s your answer.”
