Last Bus to Coffeeville

by J. Paul Henderson

  Even when Laura grew to the size of a house, the reality of becoming a parent never really hit home for Jack; fatherhood forever remained an abstract. He hoped that once the child was born, the mantle of paternity would slip naturally over his shoulders – but it never did. Laura gave birth to a healthy boy and Jack felt nothing. He held the child in his arms and still felt nothing.

  As Conrad grew, Jack found himself actually starting to dislike the child. One evening when Laura was working late, Jack sat in the den watching over Conrad and Laura’s cat, Perseus. The room was silent. Conrad played with his toys on the floor and occasionally looked up at Jack and glared. Perseus, whom Jack believed to be responsible for most of the neighbourhood’s knife crime, stared at him from another corner of the room. He looked from Conrad to Perseus and back to Conrad, trying to figure out which was the creepier and more sinister of the two. How could a father feel this way?

  In truth, Laura had never given Jack any encouragement to feel anything different. She monopolised the child. It was she who’d chosen the name Conrad, she who’d fed him and her who’d insisted on changing his diapers. She took him with her wherever she went, and discouraged contact between him and his father. They had secret conversations that ended abruptly whenever Jack walked into the room. On the day of his fifth birthday, Conrad had even approached Jack and told him he would never speak to him again – even if he lived to be the age of twelve! Laura simply laughed.

  Jack felt hopelessly trapped, not just in his marriage but also in his job. Weather forecasting had proved to be the unfulfilment of his professional life. Not only had the television executives failed to inform him that he’d only be presenting the weather and that his name would be changed to Jack Green, they had also forgotten to mention that as weatherman, he would also be expected to be the punch line for all the dumb jokes that came out of Phil and Mary Margaret’s mouths. It was the same tired format employed by all local television stations in America – and probably around the world.

  It was bad enough being the object of Phil and Mary Margaret’s prosaic wisecracks, but Jack took especial umbrage at having to be the butt of Troy Robicheaux’s ridicule. (Robicheaux was the station’s sportscaster, and regarded by Jack as the most stupid person he’d ever met.) Jack, however, played the game: he forced smiles that caused his jaws to ache, and acted like a good ole boy having the time of his life with his best buds.

  Ed Billings had also encouraged Jack to be a panellist on game shows, and guest on daytime cooking and lifestyle programmes. He was invariably introduced to the studio audiences as the city’s favourite weatherman, which was code, Jack now knew, for the city’s favourite fool. As Jack’s popularity and bank balance grew, so too did his dignity fall into the toilet. By the time Laura announced she was pregnant, Jack had already reached breaking point and was on the verge of resigning. Laura’s news, however, changed this, and job satisfaction once more took a backseat to money. It seemed that Jack would be weather-forecasting now until the day Conrad graduated from college.

  The day Jack discovered Conrad wasn’t his child, therefore, was one of the happiest days of his life.

  The sequence of events that led to this realisation started with a daytime repeat of a popular medical drama, whose main character – unlike Doc – was a misanthrope. This television doctor derived satisfaction from curing patients of obscure ailments, but never any enjoyment. His only enjoyment was telling patients, or the families of patients, that they or the people they loved were about to die. He was an unhappy man who took heart from other people’s pain and sadness. Oddly, the viewing public loved him.

  Jack was home that day, eating lunch and reading through bank statements. He was only half listening to the programme until something he heard caught his interest: the doctor started to discuss cleft chins. The boy with the mysterious ailment, the television doctor told his fawning colleagues, couldn’t possibly be the son of the man who claimed to be the child’s father, because the son had a cleft chin and the supposed father didn’t. ‘Goddamn!’ Jack exclaimed, ‘Conrad’s got a cleft chin!’

  Conrad did indeed have a cleft chin, and a marked one at that. Jack had once joked to Laura that Conrad looked more like Kirk Douglas than he did either of them, and what had Laura said to him by way of reply? ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid, Jack!’ At the time, he thought her response uncalled for but, thinking about it now, maybe understood it better. Laura didn’t have a cleft chin and neither did he; Laura’s parents didn’t have cleft chins and neither did his. In fact the only person he knew with a cleft chin was… ‘Goddamn!’ Jack exclaimed for the second time: ‘Phil Wonnacott’s got a cleft chin!’

  Jack put his unfinished sandwich to one side and went to get his laptop. He keyed in cleft chins and paternity and clicked the search button. Unsurprisingly, there was no shortage of information on the topic but, disappointingly for Jack, none of it as hard-and-fast as the declarations of the television doctor. A cleft chin, he read, was more likely to be inherited from a parent or grandparent than just happen – but it might also just happen. Jack decided, however, that probability was on the side of genetic determination – or certainly this is what he hoped – and started to look through the phone directory for the number of the private investigator Ed Billings had used at the time of his divorce. He spoke with a secretary and arranged to meet with the detective.

  The detective’s name was Tommy Terpstra, and his office was three floors above a Laundromat in the city’s downtown district. Tommy was an ex-cop but looked more like an accountant. He had a slight build and a slight lisp, as if his tongue was too large for his mouth, and mannerisms that were overly exaggerated. He grasped Jack’s hand and shook it firmly, indicating with a flowing gesture of his left arm that Jack should take a seat. ‘How can I be of help, Jack?’ he asked.

  Jack spelled out his reasons for doubting that Conrad was his son. He started with the mumps and ended with the cleft chin. He then mentioned Phil Wonnacott’s cleft chin and the weekends Laura had spent away from home in the months leading to her pregnancy. Terpstra listened intently and made notes with an old-fashioned lead pencil, heavily chewed at one end and now only half its original size. When Jack finished talking, Terpstra sat back in his chair and tapped the pencil against his cheek.

  ‘Weirdest thing about cleft chins, Jack, is they get such a positive press. Men pay plastic surgeons good money to have them implanted. They think it makes their features look more chiselled, stronger, while all the time a cleft chin is a failure of nature. Both sides of the lower jawbone are supposed to fuse together – right here,’ he said, tapping the pencil against the centre point of his chin, ‘and when they don’t, you get an indentation, a cleft. The only example I know of man glorifying a cock-up.

  ‘Anyway, there’s a sure way of finding out if you’re right about this, and it’s fast too. It’ll save me a lot of legwork and you a lot of money.’

  ‘DNA testing?’ Jack asked. Terpstra nodded.

  ‘What I need from you, Jack, are samples from you, Conrad and Wonnacott. You’re easy enough. I’ll take a swab from your cheek once you bring me samples from Conrad and Wonnacott. We’ll get them sent off to the lab at the same time and we should have the results in three days. My advice is to get Conrad’s toothbrush, but make sure you replace it with an identical one: no point in arousing any suspicions. Getting a sample from Wonnacott might be trickier, but I’m guessing you’ll have access to his dressing room at the station. Strands of hair or a used razor would do the trick, a toothbrush would be ideal. You think you can do that?’

  Jack took the samples to Terpstra two days later. Terpstra then swabbed the inside of Jack’s cheek with a Q-Tip, and called a courier service to take the samples to the testing lab. Terpstra then took a bottle of bourbon and two glasses from a filing cabinet and poured two single measures. He handed one to Jack.

  ‘You look like you need this,’ he said. ‘What will you do if Wonnacott does turn out to be Conrad’s father?’<
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  ‘I’ll divorce Laura, for sure. Probably leave the station too. I’ll tell you something, Tommy. For the first time in years I feel hopeful, like I’m on the verge of getting my own life back. Can you understand that?’

  Labor Day weekend came and went. Jack spent it with Laura and Conrad, aware that this would be their last holiday together. He’d known for a week that Phil Wonnacott was Conrad’s father, but had revealed nothing of this to Laura. He couldn’t explain why.

  The news that Wednesday evening was unusual only in that it was slower than usual, and therefore demanded more off-the-cuff filler from the presenters. After a studio discussion on anorexic pets and an interview with an eighty-four-year-old weightlifter, Phil introduced the final story of the evening. It was a longer than usual piece recorded by Mary Margaret earlier in the week, and dealt with the station’s very lifeblood – grand tragedy on the local scale.

  Jackie and Ferris Wheeler were the type of young couple that made people proud to be American. They lived in a gated community in a large six-bedroom house and had a five-year-old son called Skip. Ferris owned a small electronics company and Jackie stayed home looking after Skip and playing golf.

  One Thursday afternoon, Jackie was standing on the teeing ground for the fourth hole waiting for her friend and golf partner, Kristy Birdsong, to complete her shot. Kristy sliced the ball and let out an expletive. Despite her headache, Jackie couldn’t help smiling at her partner’s reaction. She then carefully placed her own ball on the tee and looked to the distant green, where the flag flapped in the day’s gentle breeze. She positioned her feet carefully, adjusted her grip, and swung back the golf club. Jackie hit the ball full and square, and then dropped to the ground dead as a doorknob. Unaware that it would never be hit by the same person again, the golf ball continued along its target line and dropped neatly into the cup on the fourth green.

  Initial coverage of Jackie Wheeler’s death focused on the bizarre nature of its circumstances and ran along the lines of: ‘Dead Woman Hits Hole in One’. Mary Margaret, however, saw an opportunity to tell another story: the story of a young widower coming to terms with grief and struggling to raise a child on his own. Shortly after the funeral – and for what passed as a sensitive period of time at a news station – Mary Margaret arranged to interview Ferris.

  The footage of Mary Margaret’s film was accompanied by a suitably melancholic soundtrack designed to tug at the viewers’ heart strings; it was also intended to show her and the station in a caring light. After the report had finished, the studio camera honed in on Phil and Mary Margaret’s sad faces, magically capturing Mary Margaret dabbing a tear from her eye. There being a full three minutes of airtime left to fill, Mary Margaret and Phil embarked upon their inevitable chat about the story.

  ‘That sure was a sad story, Mary Margaret. I know my heart goes out to Ferris and Skip, and I’m sure the hearts of all our viewers do, too. I know a round of applause is never suitable at a time like this, but I wish there was some kind of equivalent.’

  ‘Right, Phil. I know exactly what you mean. The most poignant part of the story for me was listening to the way Ferris explained the situation to little Skip. While I was there, Skip asked his daddy where Mommy was, and Ferris had to explain to him again that Mommy was gone, that she was dead. And when Skip asked him to explain what ‘dead’ meant, Ferris put it in the sweetest of ways. He said: ‘It means we’ve got to start cooking for ourselves, son.’

  ‘Boy, that really says it all, Mary Margaret,’ Phil said. ‘We’ve got to start cooking for ourselves. Hmmm.’

  Mary Margaret agreed. ‘And what’s so peculiar about Jackie’s death, Phil, is its symmetry. It starts with a stroke on the tee and ends with a hole in one on the green. It’s so ironic.’

  ‘I think you’ll find you mean iron,’ Phil corrected Mary Margaret, ‘Probably a 3 iron is my guess. That’s what my wife would have used for such a hole.’

  When the glance Mary Margaret gave Phil looked as if it might kill him stone dead too, the producer of the show hastily told them to bring Jack into the conversation. Jack had been listening to their exchanges disbelievingly, and despite the seriousness of the piece couldn’t help smiling. When the camera turned to him, he looked, somewhat inappropriately, like the happiest man on the planet.

  Jack had filled time successfully on many an evening. He’d talked about tsunamis, the El Niño effect, global warming, blizzards and the differences between tornados and cyclones. What Jack really liked to talk about, however, was fog and clouds. That he rarely got a chance to do so became a running joke at the station. He would be told through his earpiece that there was time for him to talk about fog for two minutes, and after maybe getting four words into the subject then told by Phil they were out of time. Mary Margaret would laugh, and Jack would have to stand there grinning, pretending to enjoy the joke: ‘You guys,’ he would say shaking his head. ‘Got me again!’

  This time, however, there really was plenty of time left, and Mary Margaret fed him a great line. Could he explain to the viewers the difference between nimbostratus and cirrostratus cloud formations? Jack took the bait. He’d been speaking for barely twenty seconds before he started to hear titters of laughter from the studio floor. He looked at the monitor that showed the picture viewers at home would see on their TV screens, and there were Phil and Mary Margaret pretending to be fast asleep, bored out of their skulls by Jack’s enthusiastic explanation. Jack stopped mid-sentence.

  A fine line divides a person losing their senses from one coming to them, and the exact location of that line is open to interpretation. What many later described as Jack having a mental breakdown, Tommy Terpstra rightly construed as Jack regaining his mind.

  ‘Fuck this!’ he said. ‘And fuck you, Phil! Thanks for fucking my fucking wife!’

  He unclipped the microphone from his lapel and left the building, never to appear on television again.

  A Changed Man

  If not a new man, by the time Jack arrived at Doc’s house there was no doubting that he was a changed man. His on-air resignation from both his job and family had been a cathartic and freeing experience, and emotions that had long been suppressed broke through to the surface and blessed him with an unprecedented clarity of vision. Although his initial words hadn’t accurately reflected the wholesome nature of his reformation, fuck this did give a strong indication of the depth of change that had taken place. The days of behaving like a man whose confidence allowed him only to write in pencil were now behind him. In future, he would speak his mind, confront issues head on and, if necessary, upset people and not care.

  When Jack walked off the news set, he kept walking. He didn’t stop to gather any personal items from his office, but went straight to the elevator and punched the button for the lobby. He walked through the foyer, out of the building and kept walking. He had no intention of going home: he no longer had a home to go to. He tore off the station blazer he wore for broadcasts, shoved it into a garbage can and continued to walk. Ten blocks from the station he checked into a small but comfortable hotel and phoned Tommy Terpstra.

  ‘Tommy, I need a divorce lawyer – a good one. Do you have any suggestions?’

  Tommy had: his daughter, Tina. ‘She’s kin, Jack; I’m not about to hide that fact from you, but she’s also damn good at what she does and her speciality’s family law. What’s more, she’s a woman, and women are always better in cases like this – you ask Billings, if the two of you are still talking.’

  Jack agreed to Terpstra’s suggestion, and Terpstra arranged for Jack to meet his daughter the following day.

  Tina Terpstra was a junior partner in a large legal firm located one block from the hotel where Jack was staying. Jack’s appointment was for eleven o’clock, but he’d misjudged the time it would take for him to walk there and arrived early. He was shown to a seat in the reception area and served coffee. He had a dull headache and wished he’d eaten breakfast. He took in the surrounding decor and noted it was ex
pensive and tasteful. He wondered how much the visit would cost him. Shortly after eleven, one of the receptionists asked him to follow her. She led him to an office at the very end of a long corridor, knocked on the door and entered. ‘Jack Guravitch to see you, Tina,’ she said, and then left.

  Tina stood up from behind a large mahogany desk and extended her hand to Jack. Jack took it, surprised by its firmness, and then sat in the chair indicated. Tina wore a dark pin-striped trouser suit and, although looking to be about the same age as Jack, already had flecks of grey in her short hair. She wore little, if any, make-up, and Jack imagined that from a distance Tina could easily be mistaken for a man. He also noticed that she wore no wedding ring. In his newly-acquired state of mind, Jack came straight to the point.

  ‘Are you gay?’ he asked Tina.

  (Jack had emerged from his epiphany with something resembling a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome, and it took time for him to appreciate that freedom of speech wasn’t a licence for tactless or graceless behaviour: it had its responsibilities. He had to learn to harness and finesse this new freedom, and recognise that remaining true to oneself didn’t necessarily involve smashing another person over the head with a claw hammer. If he wanted to influence people with his words, which he now did, then people would have to feel comfortable around him; if they didn’t, this newly discovered freedom would gain him little.)

  ‘Yes. Is that a problem for you?’ Tina asked.

  ‘Not in the least, Tina. The thought just crossed my mind, so I thought I’d ask it.’

  Tina looked at him, still dubious. ‘I might not date men, Jack, but neither do I hate them. If I agree to represent you, then I’ll be representing you and not your wife. I won’t be taking it easy on her just because she’s a woman, if that’s what worries you. Do you understand this?’