3

I woke up in the cold, in gray light. So the fire had gone out while I’d slept the day away, on the floor, in this musty-smelling shithole of a trailer. I took my hands out of my armpits and put them over my cold face, cold nose especially. All that accomplished was to make the hands cold too. Left hand still hurt like a bastard, plainly not healing at all, and now that I was awake enough to think a little, I wondered if it wasn’t the pain that had finally awakened me, and not the cold. Although it could also have been the other pain: the headache going in like a drillbit above the right eye. I threw off the blankets, squirmed back into my cold overcoat and got to my feet so as to be up off that cold floor. Better drag one of the mattresses in here; make a good little project for later. I switched on the floorlamp next to the sofa, but the son of a bitch didn’t go on. I lifted the shade and tilted my head: oh, there was a bulb in there all right. I pulled the string hanging from the fluorescent ring on the kitchen ceiling: that wouldn’t go on either. So no power, apparently. On the kitchen counter I found a kerosene lamp with a couple of fingers of kerosene in it. The wick was all fucked up, but I didn’t feel like hunting around for scissors that I’d end up not finding anyway, so I just lit the thing and it seemed to do okay, considering. I located the bottle of Pamprin in my overcoat pocket. Only four left. I swallowed all of them, fuck it. Except then they got stuck in my throat and I could feel them caught down in there. So I went out the back door and knelt by the woodpile and ate snow until I felt the sons of bitches break loose and go down. I looked up and saw a last pulsation of sun behind Studebaker Hill: then it was gone and instantly the air got even colder although I was probably just imagining it. I brought in another few armloads of logs and finally got the stove roaring again.

Then I didn’t know what to do next.

I tried sitting in different places: the stinky sofa, then a red-painted wooden dinette chair, then the stinky easychair covered in some kind of old brownish fabric with flowers or shrimps or something. The problem was, I didn’t know how to be still. I got up and walked down the hall to the room that used to be Diane’s. She’d gotten married to somebody years ago and they’d built a house on some island near Seattle where they still are for all I know. Or fucking care. There was a pinstriped single mattress, the old kind with buttons, still on the little maple bedstead. I hauled it off the bed by its handles and walked it back down the hall to where the stove was and flopped it down on the floor, puffing up dust. I lay down on it, still in my overcoat. On my side. On my back. On my other side. On my stomach. So much for the possibilities. But I couldn’t get myself to where I felt like I was lying flat enough. I got up again and went looking for something to read. The table at one end of the sofa turned out to have books on its bottom shelf. Books that years ago Mr. and Mrs. Warriner must have thought of as light weekend reading for the country: Thorne Smith, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, single volumes containing three Ellery Queens apiece. Unless of course this was more of the Uncle Fred touch, books he’d chosen to parody the idea of light weekend reading for the country. So I took the P. G. Wodehouse over to the easychair. To sit in this trailer and be able to fix your mind on Blandings Castle — hey, if only.

Well, I could stay with P. G. Wodehouse for about two sentences.

Then I got afraid the telephone was going to ring. It was the old kind you can’t unplug. Not modular is what I’m trying to say. I picked up the receiver to check, and the phone was dead too. I mean, use your head: would Uncle Fred have left the phone hooked up, for Christ’s sake, so people could break in, not even break in for Christ’s sake, and call places and he’s stuck with the bill? The power either. People coming in with, I don’t know, electric space heaters or something.

I thought about trying to find a saucepan and melting some snow on top of the woodstove, as if on an Everest expedition. Now there’s the real world for you, real factual information about what people do on Mount Everest. God damned good and tired around here listening to all this shit about how Jernigan only lives in his own head.

Thought, too, about trying to find some paper and writing to my son, asking his forgiveness. Oh, not for anything all that specific. It would be the thought that counted. Except what were you going to say after asking forgiveness? Pledge to do better? Right, I can see you now, doing better.

And then I thought about prostrating myself right that minute on the floor and just praying to be subsumed, if they were still subsuming people these days. The old Not my will but Thine, 0 Lord, be done. What I imagined I was hanging on to at that point I can’t imagine. Same shit probably that I’m hanging on to now. The people who run the program here say I have to give it up. But as a matter of fact, I already — though I haven’t told them this — I already made that surrender once, years ago. Sort of made it. The last time I found myself drinking a quart a day of whatever there was. Danny was two, screaming his head off about everything, and the walls of that apartment on Barrow Street were falling in on me, and an old friend of my father’s took me to his AA meeting. Sculptor. He’d once suggested, years before, taking my father to one. (You can imagine.) At any rate, I’d apparently broken into this guy’s studio and passed out on the floor. I was willing, at that point, to give anything a shot. Partly because it scared me that I really couldn’t remember how I’d gotten into his studio. And partly for Danny, who hadn’t fucking asked to be born. They said, Keep coming back; it works. I did. It did. So there I was holding hands with everybody standing in a circle and saying the Lord’s Prayer, which I’d never learned as a child because Francis Jernigan was enlightened and my mother was an old party-line lefty. Well so of course I immediately loved the Lord’s Prayer. But later it began to scare me what I was praying for. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us? I could hear an “insofar” in there, the catch calculated to keep me forever unforgiven. And was I really ready for God’s Kingdom to come? I kept imagining a nuclear shit-storm. And of course eventually I became less keen on being led not into temptation. I finally got the thing down to Our Father who art in heaven, give us this day our daily bread and deliver us from evil, amen. And then I suspected there might be a catch even in that, that God could take it literally and you’d get nothing but bread. Anyway, by this time I was already telling myself Fuck it, you’re on top of it again so so what’s the big problem? I started having a beer once in a while and nothing terrible happened. So why don’t you just keep your mouth shut, I told myself, and hope you squeak by.

They hate this kind of thinking here.

But who isn’t just hoping to squeak by? Uncle Fred? Fine: let me tell you about Uncle Fred. This is Midsummer Acid Idyll Part II, okay? We’re up all night tripping and so forth and so on and we get back to the trailer in the morning and so on, this part you know. So we go into Uncle Fred’s room. Starting to come down, but hours from being able to sleep. And as the birdies sing outside the window, Uncle Fred explains to me exactly how he’s going to kill himself. He’s going to come up here in the wintertime, walk into the woods far beyond human earshot, chain and padlock himself to a tree and then toss the key away into the snow. He’s got the chain and padlock there under his bed! He lifted a corner of the blanket and dragged them out to show me. So just remember that the next time Uncle Fred greets somebody by saying Stand and give the password. Or any of the rest of that hearty horseshit.

And in case you think that was just adolescence, here’s another Uncle Fred story. Two summers ago I was up at the camp for a weekend. Or three, I don’t know. I know it was when Judith was still alive, because I remember how quick Uncle Fred and Penny were to accept my bullshit explanation of why she’d decided at the last minute to stay home with Danny. At that time Uncle Fred had added a boombox to the amenities, and a bunch of Merle Haggard and George Jones tapes. Country music for the country: you’d have to know Uncle Fred to see that what he was doing was parodying the whole idea that things fit together. Except that he’d also started to like country music. Penny had gone to bed and we were sitting outside drinking Jack Daniel’s under the bug-zapper. No other light but its purple glow, and a crescent moon just above the hilltop. Stars. We’d brought the boombox out, and Merle Haggard was singing a song about how a shrink gives him a Rorschach test and the inkblots look like broken hearts — kind of strained, I thought — when Uncle Fred announced that he, Uncle Fred, was an apostrophe. I thought that what he meant was apostate and I asked for some clarification on that. “It’s like I’m what’s there to show that something’s missing,” he said. Then he leaned forward and vomited. When he sat up again, he wiped his mouth with his hand and begged me to get a shovel and cover over the vomit so Penny wouldn’t know in the morning. Which of course I did.

Well, the boombox didn’t seem to be here now. Either thieves had gotten it or Uncle Fred had taken it back to the city. But sitting down on the sofa again I felt something and I reached under me and found the empty plastic case for Serving 190 Proof. It made me want to hear Merle Haggard’s voice. I had my Walkman here somewhere, unless I’d left it back in the car. I thought about getting up and starting to lift sofa cushions and shit, looking for the tape itself. But the point is, here I was wanting one more fucking thing. And I could see that after that I was just going to keep wanting the next thing and the next thing and the next. Imagine thinking this was the end.

4

I woke up in my chair. On the screen, that commercial was going where the dogs’ jaws flap open and they sing, “Lies! Lies!” The idea being that their owners can’t bullshit them into eating inferior dogfood. A song Danny will always know as a dogfood commercial, just as I’ll always know that waltz tune — whatever the hell it actually is — as Think of Rheingold Whenever Y’Buy Beer. I had my usual thoughts about everything being debased.

What had awakened me, apparently, was the kitchen door slamming — was the ballgame over? — because in came Danny, who gave me a pitying look right out of his mother’s repertoire. “You fall asleep again?” he said.

I picked up the remote control and hit MUTE just in time to avoid hearing the strongman bellow, “I’m not gonna pay a lot for this muffler!”

“Maybe you work too hard,” Danny said, without a lot of conviction. There I was, stubble-faced, shoes off, stinking t-shirt, and beer bottles all over the floor. Which really gave an unfair impression, although there it all was. On the screen, something that looked like a Fourth of July sparkler was welding a muffler in place, and I could hear the God damn Meineke Muffler March in my head even with the sound off.

“You been out?” I said, still looking at the screen so as not to miss the thing where they show the Meineke logo with the pronunciation: Mine-a-key.

“Just over Clarissa’s,” he said. This was the girlfriend. A depressed little dyed-platinum blonde who only came up to about here on him; you saw her in black jeans a lot, and a denim jacket with Grateful Dead patches. I didn’t know if that still meant you were an acid head or what the hell it meant anymore. I remember seeing a thing in the paper not too long ago about some asshole who made his living tie-dyeing Grateful Dead t-shirts; he said the skull meant we were all the same under the skin. I couldn’t imagine whether or not I would have understood that when I was fourteen, or whatever the hell this Clarissa was. Assuming it made any sense to begin with. At any rate, she was obviously a piss-poor influence on Danny’s schoolwork and general attitude. So what could you do. I wondered sometimes if they talked together, and if so what about. In addition to the obvious things to wonder. She was pretty, this Clarissa, in a brutalized kind of way.

“Hey Dad?” said Danny. “Wake up, okay?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Listen,” he said, “do you want to come over?”

“Come over,” I said. When I repeat something that way, it means What do you mean?

“Clarissa’s house. Her mom said you could. She’s real nice and everything. She’s having this party in the backyard.” Backyard party on the Fourth of July, and even that didn’t seem to be reminding him. Well, hey, fine, more power to him.

“Kind of party?” I said. “Kids, grownups?”

Danny shrugged. “Whoever wants to,” he said. “It’s not any big deal or anything.”

“Sounds like it’s about my speed,” I said. “She told you to invite me?” This sounded like a pretty casual way of doing things for someone who was an adult and a parent, sending a message through the kid. We were in the phone book, for Christ’s sake. I mean, I was in the phone book. No: come to think of it, we were still in the phone book. One of a bunch of things I hadn’t had the heart, if that’s the word, to see about.

“Sort of,” he said. You could see him thinking. “It was like, Clarissa and I asked if you could come and she said sure.”

“Very gracious,” I said.

“Come on, Dad,” he said. “You’re not doing anything.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” I said. “Yeah. Well. Why not. I suppose it’s time I met this alleged woman.” Not to be outdone in graciousness. “When does the gala event get under way?”

“Right now,” he said. “Or whenever you want to come. It’s real casual.”

“Sounds real inviting,” I said. I was giving him shit about the way he talked, but either it went right by him or he was being tolerant. “Can you wait’ll I take a shower and put on some clean clothes?”

“That’s cool. You know, if you even feel like coming,” he said. Then I got it: he was being too casual. So this was obviously a command performance, for whatever reason. Well, I was game. Well, maybe not game, but I did recognize my duty when I could no longer ignore it.

Clarissa’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac off Maple Avenue. You went down into a little hollow and there it sat among a lot of trees, with only one other house in sight. Fake Tudor, two-story, stucco, which meant probably ’30s or ’40s. It had obviously been the only house on the street for years. Most stuff around here was built after 1960; Heritage Circle went up in I think ’64. At the time I was born, this house must have been sitting here alone in its little dell like Snow White’s cottage. Sort of. The gray paint was peeling now, the stucco was cracked, the picket fence was missing pickets the way cartoon hillbillies are missing teeth. But at least this house had something to it. Though maybe I mean therefore instead of but. That a house with character could produce a little girl as bombed-out as any kid from a split-level shitbox like mine made you wonder if you could ever make anything right.

I parked next to a faded mustard-colored VW bus, if you can imagine, and in front of a blue Reliant, doing my best to get so I couldn’t be blocked, and Danny led me across the crumbling blacktop, through the gate in the picket fence, around the house and into the back. He was right about this being no big deal. I counted six people, three and three, my age pretty much. Two women in shorts and t-shirts, one in shorts and halter top; two men in jeans and t-shirts, one in cutoff jeans and t-shirt. Then a couple more men and another woman came out of the house laughing about something. The women were still looking okay; the men had begun their bellies. Two of them had beards, which of course didn’t tell you anything anymore. A net was stretched between a maple tree and a clothesline pulley attached to the frame of the kitchen window; a volleyball sat in the grass, which needed cutting. In a galvanized washtub, cans of beer and Diet Pepsi; the necks of screwtop wine jugs sticking up out of the icewater. Taco chips in a wooden bowl, guacamole in an earthenware bowl. Two stereo speakers, each on a metal folding chair, the wires leading back into the house through another window. “My Guy” by Mary Wells bravely playing out of them. My kind of scene all right.

“She’s probably inside,” said Danny.

He led me into a kitchen, then into a living room. Funky in a way you wouldn’t mind sitting around in. Big oatmeal sofa, bottom sagging. A Morris chair, for Christ’s sake. The tv covered up by a white tablecloth with a pattern of red cherries. Even an old woodstove, which looked as if it got used. A woman in shorts was down on her knees, bare heels denting her buttocks. She was flipping through a red plastic milk crate full of LPs, going at it with both hands like a dog digging. Strong arms, strong legs, maybe a little overweight. But not unpleasingly. Her t-shirt had shrunk, or she had bulged, so you could see below the shoulder the — what would you call it? — that arc of skin, that ridge beyond which lies the armpit. I wanted to see what she was like in the face, now there’s a crude way of putting it. “Mrs. Peretsky?” Danny said, touching her shoulder. “This is my dad.”

She turned her head. Wide, pretty face. Eyes farther apart than I liked. She got to her feet and came toward me, tugging down one side of her shorts.

“Peter Jernigan,” I said.

“Martha Peretsky,” she said. Hands went out. As I do with women, I clasped firmly but did not shake. (With men I pump up and down.)

“Clarissa’s in her room,” she said to Danny, and he started upstairs. It hurt me that this house was so obviously familiar to him. “I think my daughter is part vampire,” said Martha Peretsky. “It’s like if sunlight touches her …” Cracking rubber letters on her t-shirt read DAMN I’M GOOD.

From upstairs came a quick blast of rackety music that was not “My Guy” by Mary Wells, then a door slammed and you heard “My Guy” by Mary Wells again. Martha Peretsky shrugged. “I don’t even want to know what they do up there. At least they’re not glued to the tv. Clarissa and I are at a little impasse these days — I won’t buy a color tv and she won’t watch black-and-white.”

“What do they do up there?” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She seemed to remember that I was an interested party. “Not drugs or anything, I don’t think. Danny’s been very good for Clarissa in that respect. You knew that she — I mean, we both did, but Clarissa in particular went through a very hard time when her father left.” First I’d heard, of course, about any of this.

“Now when was that?” I said. I meant it to sound like a keep-it-rolling kind of thing. I could hear that I sounded like a cop grilling somebody. (That cop. Grilling me. One year ago today.)

“Was it two years ago?” she asked herself. “I was — Clarissa was twelve. So it’ll be three years in October.”

“This coming October,” I said, getting it absolutely nailed down. I mean, who gave a shit.

“Right,” she said. “Time flies when you’re having fun. Listen, would you like a beer? Soda?”

“Beer’d be good,” I said.

She smiled, a nice combination of open and sly. “Follow me,” she said, and kitchy-kooed with her index finger. I didn’t mind. I wondered what her breasts would look like. I mean, decent-sized, obviously. But specifically. Except for one throwaway fuck about two months after Judith died — a woman client I’d gotten drunk with; I never called her afterwards and the sale never went through — I’d seen no breasts in a year.

Back outside, I plunged my hand into the icewater and came up with a can of Old Milwaukee. Made my hand ache to hold it. I ripped open the top and was brought over and introduced to the friends. There was a Jerry with a j and a y; another, unattached to him, was a Gerri with a g and an i. Much merriment over this. Also a Dave and a David: the two beards. And a Tim who didn’t look timid, with rimless glasses. So it was Rimless Tim. See, I’m bad at names; shit like that is how I try to keep them straight. This Tim had the Gerri and another woman laughing and laughing. He was one of those men with a pointed nose and a wolfish grin. So you could think of a timber wolf. I sat down in a lawn chair whose seat and back were made of crosshatched wire about the gauge of a coathanger. I’d seen these chairs on sale at Caldor’s; this Martha Peretsky had actually bought them.

She went over and said something to the Tim person. He said something back, and they both laughed. Then she came and sat on the grass beside my chair, gave her knees a hug and looked up. “You really are nice,” she said. Based on what? On my saying that a beer would be good? “Danny said you would be. We’ve become great friends, Danny and I.”

“Well,” I said, “always nice to hear. That your kids, you know, think you’re nice.”

“God, I always say the wrong thing,” she said. “Say what you mean, Martha. What I mean is, I am a nice person too, and I think the nice people in this world should stick together. Because bro-ther.”

“To the nice people,” I said, raising my beer can from collarbone level to chin level. But not actually drinking. To have taken a belt right then would have been crude, wouldn’t it? Suggesting this world was so awful that we should all immediately get drunk. So I just raised the beer can and lowered it, as if crossing myself. Then, after a couple of seconds, I went ahead and took a belt, as if someone had changed the subject.

But we were still on the subject, apparently.

“Actually, Danny didn’t need to tell me you were nice,” said Martha Peretsky. “He’s so nice himself, I knew that he had to have been raised by—” and here she hesitated, for reasons she must have hoped weren’t obvious. “I mean, a boy that nice, his father had to be nice too.”

To the human intellect, I felt like saying. And its capacity to reason shit out. “Yeah, I’m proud of Danny,” I said, looking over to make sure I could see my car from here. I was slow today, boy: how could it have taken me this long to see that she was absolutely shitfaced and trying to keep it together?

“That’s what I mean,” she said.

“To meaning,” I said, and took another good belt. So why not get shitfaced myself?

She narrowed her eyes. “You’re very bright,” she said. “I am not doing a very good job of establishing that I’m bright too.”

I tried to think what to say. Finally I went with, “Is that important?”

“If we’re going to be friends, yes, I think so,” she said. “I would like very much to be friends with you. Oh God am I losing it. Martha ma chère, why don’t you just taisez-vous for a change, n’est-ce pas?” She shook her head; her straight blond bangs, in accordance with some principle of physics, wagged in the opposite direction from the way her head was going. I got interested in the way that looked. To avoid, I suppose, having to pay attention to the chatter.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry sorry sorry. See, I have to tell you. Or else you are going to think the absolute worst of me. Clarissa gave me this pill. Because I was getting nervous? With people coming over? And she warned me not to drink on top of it and I’m like give me a break here. What is a fourteen-year-old going to give you that you couldn’t have a beer with?” She shook her head. “Whew.”

“How long ago did you take it?”

She shook her head again. “Before everybody show up. Show-da up. Couple hours ago?”

“Well look,” I said, “just don’t have anything more to drink and I’m sure it’ll wear off pretty soon.” As if I had any idea what the hell her kid had given her. “You like to go for a walk?” I said. “Walk it off a little?”

“Feel like lying down,” she said. “So maybe I should walk. Boy oh boy oh boy.” I stood up, she raised her hand like a student who has the answer, and I pulled her to her feet and we walked. The way we worked it out about the hands made me think there were possibilities: each kept holding the other’s hand for longer than necessary, then each let go as if we’d counted one two three. This Martha Peretsky must be very wise in the body, I thought, if she could manage this while drunk and stoned on what was obviously some powerful downer. I felt a jolt of heat to the penis. Machine that I was.

We went through the gate and up the street, avoiding potholes as if they were puddles. Which of course they must be when it rained. “I wonder are there any frogs,” I said, which couldn’t have made much sense to her.

“Mmm,” she said.

We got as far as her nearest neighbor’s house, a gabled box, probably early ’60s, with windows wider than they were tall. Like mine. “Ugly,” I said. I was criticizing her neighborhood.

“Ugly people live there,” she said. Then she said, “I’m deserting my guests.”

“Not your favorite guest,” I said, old smoothie. I sort of remembered now how you did this.

“You,” she said. She smiled a pacific smile and took my arm. I considered considering where this was all heading, but found I didn’t feel like considering. On one beer? I must have wanted not to feel like considering.

“This is a little crazy,” she said. “What are we doing?”

“Taking you for a walk,” I said. “Ostensibly. But I don’t see that anything beyond the ostensible would necessarily”—smoother and smoother, boy—“be so crazy. I mean, okay: we have our kids in there doing whatever they’re in there doing. Which does not mean—”

I tried to think how to say what it didn’t mean.

“But there isn’t any music,” she said.

I dislodged my arm, assuming this was her trite way of saying she was having second thoughts.

“Better get back there put some music on,” she said. “You can’t give a party and then neglect it. Any more than you neglect your own child.” She seemed much in earnest about this.

“Are you in any shape to deal with your party right now?” I said.

“Dealing with my party,” she said, “will get me in shape to deal with my party.” She took my hand and pulled. “But you have to come help.”

It was the first husbandly duty laid on me in a year. In exactly a year. To the fucking hour. Give or take. And clearly I was the first husbandly help this Martha Peretsky had had for a while too. I thought about her kneeling by that crate of records. Trying, unadvised, to come up with the song that would get things going.

4

But the next morning, hauling myself up the steps of the train with a headache going above and behind my right ear, I’d lost what zest I’d had for all this. It was clear this morning that I had gotten myself involved with another crazy woman: this time, a crazy woman who shot rabbits in her basement. And who would shoot me if I now tried to extricate myself. Who would shoot my son. Shoot herself. Through inattention, through indifference, through — shall we for once just cut the crap? — through deliberately looking away from a father’s responsibilities, I had first let Danny become involved with this crazy woman and her damaged daughter, and had then allowed myself to be pulled into their delusional world.

I nestled between two men in charcoal pinstripe suits, each reading the Times C section. The theme was Home: today, therefore, was Thursday. Like The Mickey Mouse Club. Tuesday, Guest Star Day; Wednesday, Anything Can Happen. I opened up Northanger Abbey.

At work, a nice hello from Miranda, Kelsey’s pretty secretary, except these days you have to call them assistants, with whom it would never go beyond occasional eye contact. Imagine Jernigan making eye contact: that should give you an idea of this Miranda. Three pink While You Were Out slips on my desk. All business calls; not one saying Martha. Everybody was going to have a normal day here at work.

Except that it turned out to be a disastrous day. I mean, to the extent you could take things at work seriously. Although you do. Especially when people are that angry with you. What happened was this. The week before — I’ll try to keep this brief; a bunch of work stuff is too dreary even for Life of Jernigan—the week before, I had apparently misplaced a decimal point or something while figuring up the cost of ripping out the internal walls in four floors of some building in NoHo. (Not even my listing, for Christ’s sake. I did the numbers as a favor to Coleman, since I’d had a little down time. A lot of down time. But again, whole other story.) With my rough and very much mistaken estimate in hand, the client had gone to his people, and the estimate prompted them to move some money they wouldn’t otherwise have moved. I mean, basically, who gives a shit. But at any rate, today was the day this whole thing came out. So. Big meeting with Coleman and Kelsey and our lawyer. Another big meeting, with the client and his lawyer and Coleman and Kelsey and our lawyer. I sat there like a bad boy, cursing Uncle Fred in my heart. As I had, pretty much every day, for ten years. With his fucking friend Coleman in the fucking real estate business. With his fucking helpfulness. The last meeting of the day was a one-on-one with Kelsey. During which I basically told him mistakes happen and what can you do. Which didn’t seem to fly all that well. I left his office thinking Ten years of this shit. Hey, like they say. Day at a time.

I had planned to take the 5:46, go over to Heritage Circle and mow the front lawn before it got dark. Even this late in the year, the front part grew like a son of a bitch. Watered by a martyr’s blood, I suppose. That isn’t funny. The back didn’t worry me so much: only three neighbors could see it anyhow, and then only if they stuck their neighbor noses right up against the chain-link fence, interwoven with green plastic ribbon. Well, I didn’t make the 5:46. I ran like a bastard through Penn Station and just barely caught the 8:37. That late a train, at least you could get a window: this was the kind of thing you were reduced to thinking was a big fucking deal. I thought about Uncle Fred saying, “What the hey, do it for a year. The worst that can happen is teaching will start to look good to you, and you’ll go back with some money in the bank. Besides, it could be a goof.”

When we came up out of the tunnel and into New Jersey, night had fallen, and all the salmon-pink highway lights were on. I glanced around the compartment. All the men looked like me. Human basset hounds in wrinkled suits. Except they were drunk, lucky bastards, from their after-work stop-off at Charley O’s or something. Ties loosened, breathing through their mouths.

Once I was off the train and safe in my own car, I put the seat all the way back and just lay there, as if in a dentist’s chair, in the station parking lot. Only a few other cars left, in all that expanse. I closed my eyes and pictured the empty house, eggshell walls. Put the seat back up straight, finally, got the car going and went left on Hamilton Avenue. Instead of taking the right, which was how you got to Heritage Circle. Heading for Martha, however crazy she was.

“Hey, stranger,” she said, opening the door. “It was getting so late I didn’t know whether to expect you.” Thanksgiving smell in the kitchen — sage and onion? — and Martha’s breasts swelling under a forest-green reindeer sweater. One of her thrift-shop jobs, I imagined. It must have been her idea of an autumn thing to wear, and I found myself touched by the way she did the best she could. “Danny’s in watching television,” she said. “And Clarissa’s upstairs sulking. We didn’t wait supper, but there’s some macaroni and cheese left. Or if you’d rather, I just finished a stew for tomorrow night. It’s actually better if it sits for a day, but.”

“Macaroni and cheese,” I said. Not ordering it up, but in wonderment.

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Danny insisted,” she said. “Apparently they had something on tv about Mom Food. You just going to stand out there?”

“Macaroni and cheese, please,” I said. “But could I have something else first?” Jernigan, being oh so winning.

These were still the days when, if we could, we’d spend a couple of hours in bed. I mean, a good part of why I was there in the first place was just the weird novelty of having sex again. Something I’d pretty much given up on. Embarrassing as hell even to think about it now, but we’d gotten into this business where she was pretending to be a one-woman harem, working permutations on her name to match what we were doing. Martha>Marty>Martina>Tina. Sullen Marty was the boy, meaning I was to turn her over; bossy Martina was the lesbian, meaning I was to go down on her; reluctant Tina meant straight missionary, her arms at her sides. Whatever that was about. One afternoon we had experimented with Mr. T (Marty>Mr. T), which was her fucking me with a finger. When she got the second knuckle in I squirmed away, and her growls gave way to giggling. “Okay, okay,” she said. “We had to try it, right?” Meaning she had had to try it.

Tonight was particularly intense.

“So what’s it like, Mr. Jernigan?” she said when I absolutely couldn’t do any more. “Having your own little private cathouse at your disposal? Is it nice for you?” Dabbling a finger in the sweat on my chest.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Though I do sometimes wonder where it all leaves Martha, you know?” As polite a way as I could think of to say that I was no longer sure that some of this might not be a little over the edge. Apparently Peter Jernigan had come to believe in edges.

“Oh, fuck Martha,” she said. “She’s a drudge and a drag. Who cares, you know? The world is full of unhappy women.”

4

Against that cobalt-blue sky, the leaves looked morbidly colorful: the hectic yellow, orange and red stages of a wasting disease. You were supposed to think they were beautiful. I hadn’t even noticed them this morning while walking to the car, or driving under the arching trees all the way out to Hamilton Avenue. Oh, completely my own fault: simply having a job needn’t numb you. Obvious example: Wallace Stevens. Any deadass drudge can feel even worse about himself by thinking about Wallace Stevens.

At least this much was clear: to move into Martha’s house with no job and no other place to go was to lose power, imaginary hundred thousand dollars or no imaginary hundred thousand dollars.

If even that much was clear. I mean, if at some point you wanted a job, then fine, go get a job, right?

Though like what? And how would you explain when they asked you what you’d been doing for the last year or whatever?

Which in turn was a whole other question: what would you do with yourself all day long?

Though on the other hand, just getting some job merely to avoid having to figure out what to do with yourself all day long — Christ. This hand, that hand, the other fucking hand.

I walked left on Maple, went a block and took Nottingham over to Oakdale. This part of town beat the hell out of Heritage Circle. Big old one-and two-family houses, mostly wood-shingled still, though more and more with new aluminum siding or brickface. Big old trees in the strip of earth between street and sidewalk; their roots, swelling and swelling through the years, now tilted up every third or fourth square of concrete.

On the sidewalk up ahead, a woman was pushing a baby carriage toward me; stroller, I should say. Thing where the kid has to sit there with the world coming at him. Young woman, green colleen sweater for a fall day. A little plump, as a mother ought to be, now what kind of a thing is that to say? Pale, pretty face, straight reddish bangs. Map of Ireland, if Jernigan’s any judge. Still a bit of a flirt, it seemed to me, but now only occasionally wheedled into sex, as is proper for a mother. I can’t believe it’s Peter Jernigan coming out with this stuff.

It bothered me that I really knew nothing about the neighborhood except that it looked like it was still 1953. Which seemed pretty irresponsible, to change your life (to say nothing of your son’s life) without even looking into stuff like that. Well, here comes your chance: a totally disinterested party.

“Hi, excuse me,” I said, and then didn’t know how to go on. Having trouble deciding what tone to try to strike. I’d been going to ask if she lived around here, but that was patently a rapist’s question. I also thought about asking her if she was Irish and noting that I was Irish too. That might sound deranged, but not rapisty.

She stopped, glanced down at her baby, then gave me a quick smile, off-on-off, apparently a sign of attention.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m sort of new to the neighborhood here, and in fact I’m actually thinking of …”It seemed weird to say moving in permanently, because what would that mean to somebody who didn’t know the situation? Absolutely nothing. “Thinking of buying here,” I said.

Boy, never lie: do you see what a mistake this was? New to the neighborhood implies you’re already in the neighborhood; thinking of buying implies you’re not. What was she supposed to assume, that I was renting? Oh, probably it all just sounded to her like friendly gabble.

“But what I was wondering,” I said, “I assume you live around here”—sneaking the rapist’s question by her—“and I was just wondering if this is, you know, a good place to be.”

Her eyes were narrowing and narrowing. “You’re talking about safetywise?”

“Well, sort of,” I said. “I mean, not just that.”

She looked over her shoulder, then said, more quietly, “You mean is it going black? I would say not at all.”

It had taken, what, ten seconds to find the ugly place in her? Probably she was nice on the whole and this was just something that was being discussed around here a lot. So now I would have to manage some way of not embarrassing her for having said a racist thing without being complicitous myself.

“I guess not so much that,” I said, “as just, you know, is it okay in general?”

“I wouldn’t really know what you’re talking about,” she said, reaching down and adjusting the baby. “Christopher sit up. Excuse me?” And she pushed past.

I would have called “Sorry” after her, but what for? To acknowledge openly that I’d given her the rebuke she already knew she’d been given?

Well, so much for checking out the neighborhood. Not that a bunch of thoughtful pros and cons wouldn’t have been even less helpful. I mean, at least I’d found out that this was a neighborhood where blacks weren’t moving in, however you were supposed to feel about that. Uh-oh, no cultural diversity. Though in fact all I’d really found out was that this was a neighborhood where people didn’t want blacks moving in. However you were supposed to feel about that. Uh-oh, be coming after me next.

I kept going on Oakdale in the direction of Hamilton Avenue (east, I guess it was, though I’d never entirely gotten my bearings anywhere in New Jersey), thinking I really ought to check out how long it took to walk to the nearest shopping. In case I lived to see gasoline go up to ten dollars a gallon, I suppose. After walking for fucking ever I finally got to the E-Z Mart, just around the corner from Hamilton Quik Dry Clean. It was quarter to four, which told me absolutely nothing since I hadn’t looked at my watch when I left. I went in and bought a Diet Coke I didn’t want.

I was obviously going to do this crazy thing. Why Martha, rather than some other woman? Because she was there in front of me. Although I was probably refusing to acknowledge some dark psychoschmycho thing, probably having to do with my mother. What else did anything have to do with? I’d probably just decided to think it could be made to work, since basically anything could be made to work if you took it a day at a time, so why not this.

Probably not the most caring decision I ever made in my life. If you could call it a decision.

Back at the house, I found Martha down in the cellar feeding her rabbits.

“Listen,” I said. “Before I really say I’m going to do this I’ve got to talk things over with Danny. He’s in this too, you know?”

“Oh, absolutely. I wouldn’t expect you not to. Here, babe,” she said to a piebald rabbit. “C’mere, hon.” She picked him up and he burrowed his head into her armpit. “This guy feels about ready,” she said, stroking him. “Easy, buster. You know, it’s funny, but I’d sort of come to think of Danny as part of the household already. Easy, babe.” She put the rabbit back in its cage.

“So when is his rendezvous with destiny?” I said, turning a thumb toward the rabbit.

“Next couple days, I think. The cupboard’s pretty bare, and he’s ready to roll. Much bigger than him and I don’t think they’re quite as tasty.”

“Then look,” I said. “Why don’t we celebrate tonight and make him guest of honor?”

“Sounds reasonable,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs, I’ll get us both a drink, then I’ll come back down and do this and we’ll just — do it. Okay?”

“Listen,” I said, “would you like me to? I really wouldn’t mind doing it, and it seems to me the guilt ought to be spread around a little here. I’ve been eating enough of these guys.”

“My, you are going the whole hog,” she said.

“Hey. Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

“It’s nice of you,” she said. “But really. I’ve sort of got it down now, and I’m used to doing it.”

“You hate it,” I said. “Why don’t you let me for a change?”

“Are you sure about this, Peter?”

“Stand aside, wumman,” I said. “And fetch me mah hogleg.”

This got a smile. Which made me realize how inane it had been.

“Seriously,” I said. “It’s a godawful job to have to do, and I’m tired of watching myself slink off while you’re doing it. And then showing up at the table smacking my lips, you know? Now, should this get done right away, or should it wait a little closer to dinner?”

“For your sake,” she said, “I wouldn’t do it much closer to dinner than this. Take it from one who knows.”

“Then go on up and do your preparations, and the deceased and I will join you presently.”

“And you’re sure you know how?”

I pointed to the stairs. “Out.”

“Thank you,” she said.

I went into the death chamber and got the pistol out of the toolchest. Loaded? I popped the little catch at the bottom of the handle and took the clip out. Sure enough. I pushed the clip back in, felt it click home, and stuck the gun in my pocket. I had worn these same trousers to Kelsey and Chittenden this morning, and now there was a gun in them. Went back into the other room and took the piebald rabbit out of his cage. He burrowed his head into my armpit; I stroked his fur and told him Good boy, good boy. Not looking at him much.

He was warm, this rabbit. A mammal like me. I searched for the right word and came up with lapsarian. Marsupial is what I was trying to think of. Although rabbits, according to the dictionary here, are not marsupials. I probably got lapsarian from lapin. I carried him into the death chamber, sat us both down on a haybale and, holding him with my left hand, sneaked the pistol out of my pocket with my right and put it next to my right hip. With both hands I lifted the rabbit, sat him down on the other side and pressed him firmly against my right thigh, my left hand gripping his shoulders, cruelly now, as I took the right hand away. He tried to squirm out of my grasp but I had him too tight, and I picked up the pistol with my right hand, jammed the muzzle between his ears and jerked the trigger, hoping to God a haybale was really dense enough to do the trick. The gun went snap and the rabbit gave a shiver and just turned to meat.

4

Martha’s Reliant was still gone when I got back to the house, but Clarissa’s window glowed yellow. I called, “Hey, anybody home?” from the kitchen, which now felt as cold as out-of-doors. No answer. Holed up as always. Clarissa had one of those oil-filled electric radiators in her room; with plastic over the window and an old blanket over the door, she and Danny could just settle in and everybody else could go fuck themselves.

I put the gin in the refrigerator and went into the stone-cold living room. From in there I could hear the God damn music going. Meaning that Danny either had or hadn’t rolled in. What pissed me off especially was that I couldn’t let myself be pissed off. Instead I had to prepare to talk to my son about whether or not he might be thinking about killing himself. First thing to do was go back in the kitchen and have a couple good slugs of that gin right off the bat, then get that stove going while the gin was taking hold. That way you’d have someplace warm to have your talk in and you’d also be in a little steadier frame of mind. But it was a hell of a thing when you couldn’t even go in your own house and just take your coat off and sit down. Though of course it wasn’t your own house, so what did you expect.

I went in and had about three good belts, meaning five or six, then came back and opened the stove’s clanky iron door. Ashes in there six inches deep for Christ’s sake. So I went back to the kitchen one more time and got the Rubbermaid bucket Martha used for stuff that was going into the compost. I couldn’t think what to use for a scoop. Finally I found a loaf pan. So I was down on my knees in the cold, scooping ashes out of a stove with a tin pan and dumping them in this stinking bucket. And I remembered coming in here the first time, on the Fourth of July, and thinking Hey, nice, a woodstove. When I got most of the ashes out, I packed the bottom of the firebox with crumpled pages of The New York Times, then snapped sticks over my knee, laid them crisscross on top of the paper, lit the corner of page C7, made sure it blazed up okay, and clanked the door shut. Took the bucket of ashes out the kitchen door and through the backyard to the compost pile, leaving dark footprints in the crisped, whitened grass. Not just some rotting heap for old Martha, boy, but a whole big deal fenced in with chicken wire. Stakes here and there in the pile that you were supposed to pull out at some point to let air in. I dumped the ashes on top of withered carrot tops and cantaloupe rinds. And I’d probably hear about that, too. You were probably supposed to put down a layer of grass clippings first. Grass clippings or blood meal, whatever the hell blood meal was. For the nitrogen. No ashes on top of cantaloupe rinds without an intervening layer of blood meal, that was probably the rule around here.

By the time I got back inside, the newspaper had burned away and left the sticks blazing. I thrust in some pieces of scavenged two-by-four, nails and all — hey, give her a little iron to go with her nitrogen when these ashes hit the compost — and dragged the Morris chair over close to the stove and sat down, still in my coat. What I would do was wait until the living room was entirely warm and welcoming: it would be easier explaining to Danny why it was a bad idea to kill himself if we weren’t both sitting huddled in our coats and blowing on our hands. I would open by saying that he seemed down lately. If he admitted it, we were in business; if he denied it, then I’d say that sometimes you could be so down that you didn’t even realize it. What was truly scary about being in that kind of shape, I would inform him, was that nothing was scary anymore. That what might ordinarily be unthinkable started to seem reasonable. Then, once I’d gotten him this far, we could get into why it was a bad idea to kill yourself. Except all I could think of was the usual worldly dog treats. Consent to live and you can fuck more. Listen to more records. He’d already fucked and listened to records; why should he be struck dumb and reverent at the prospect of doing it some more? Better girls! Better records! Oh yeah, and his Art. Forgot all about his Art. Kill yourself and the world will be short one guitar player. No, this was the wrong approach. The way to play this was just to stick to how bad he felt and why, assuming I could get it out of him. And then, probably, life would reassert itself without my feeble help. Assuming it really made people feel any better to talk about how bad they felt and why.

I got up and went into the kitchen again. One more good jolt and then back you go and see if it’s warm enough to take off your coat, and then we get this thing rolling, okay? Assuming Danny was actually home. I opened the refrigerator, unscrewed the cap of the gin bottle and took a good mouthful. Just let my tongue marinate for a few seconds, then swallowed. Then one more, and a last one for good measure. I screwed the cap back on, closed the refrigerator and turned to see Clarissa in the doorway, watching.

“Hey,” I said. That was my new breezy hello with the kids.

“Mr. Jernigan?” she said, though it had been agreed that I was Peter now. “I think I’m in trouble.”

She looked it. I mean, more than usual. Staring. Hair every which way. And I noticed she was barefoot: what that must have felt like in this cold I couldn’t imagine. Shit, I thought, here we go, barefoot and pregnant. So this was what was on Danny’s mind. And here I’d been thinking it was mal de Stècle.

“Come stand by the stove,” I said. I put a hand on her arm, to guide and protect. You should’ve seen her jump.

“You’re not my father,” she said.

“Spared that much,” I said, possibly not loud enough for her to hear. “Clarissa,” I said, beckoning her to follow me into the living room. “Please, sit.” She took the Morris chair; I chose the cold floor beside her. Once you got any distance from that stove, boy, it wasn’t any fucking Dejeuner sur l’herbe in here. “Now, what’s up with you?” I said. “Please tell me you’re not pregnant.”

She shook her head and said, “LSD monster babies.”

“Say again?” I said.

“It makes people have monster babies,” she said. “I think I took too much.” She shook her head. “Whew. I don’t think it’s good to think about that,” she said, then looked around the room. “Whew.”

“Okay, easy,” I said. “Clarissa, are you by any chance tripping?”

“Except I think I took too much,” she said. “I took three because Dustin said it was going to be a real special occasion, but I think three was too much. Because I’m little.” That set her off laughing. “I’m little.”

“Oh Christ,” I said. “Listen, Clarissa? Where’s Danny? Did—” Better go one question at a time. “Okay. Now, where is Danny?”

“All right,” she said. “I heard you.”

“Is Danny here?” I said.

“No, he’s still over Mitchell’s,” she said. “Do you know how far that is?”

“Clarissa. Now, did Danny take some too?”

“He was scared to,” she said. “And then he got real mad at me, and so me and Dustin went to the mall but I didn’t like it there. Could you take me to the hospital?”

“Poor Clarissa,” I said, meaning it. “You’re really having a tough time of it, aren’t you?”

“I think they can give me a shot,” she said. “Dustin said they can give you one. Could you take me?”

“Believe me, Clarissa, I know what you’re going through. It will get better.”

“How can you know?” she said.

She had a point there.

“What I mean is,” I said, “I’ve had this same sort of thing happen to me, and …” And what — just look at me now? “And you do come down and you do feel better. Now listen, can you tell me who else took this stuff?”

“I told you already,” she said. “Dustin. Dustin Dustin Dustin.”

“Okay, easy,” I said. “Whew,” she said.

“Now did Dustin actually take it with you?” I said. “Or did he just give it to you?” The kid had seemed rational enough to me. And we know how much that means.

“How come you want to know so much about Dustin?” she said. “I want to go to the hospital.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “The hospital it is.” Better, I supposed, than trying to deal with this by myself. Old Martha was going to owe me one when this was over. “We’re going to go in just a sec,” I said. “The reason I’m asking about Dustin is because I’m worried that he might be having a bad time too.”

“Dustin can handle it,” she said. “He was driving his car and everything. We went to the mall, but I didn’t like it there.”

“Terrific,” I said. Little shit had probably swallowed a Pez and given her the real McCoy. Not unheard of back in Jernigan’s day. “Okay, I guess we’ll have to let Dustin worry about Dustin.”

This struck her funny. She squirmed around in the chair giggling, then stopped. “My teeth feel too big in my mouth.”

“Clarissa? Try to relax. This is not going to go on forever, and we’ll get you to where they can help you out, okay? Now, why don’t you go get some shoes on, get your coat on, and we’ll go get you some help, okay?”

“Get some shoes on,” she said. “Shoes on, get some shoes on. Whew. I think I’m still getting higher.”

“I’d better give you a hand,” I said, then realized that if shoes on had stopped her, giving her a hand might really sound grotesque. But it just slid by. I thought about being so high that nothing — not a word, not a visual image, not an idea — made any sense or was attached to anything else. In that kind of state, was even terror just one more thing? Clarissa seemed to be getting close enough to send back a report, but of course asking such a question would be a bad idea. And if she was close enough to know the answer, she wouldn’t be able to understand the question. Wouldn’t know what a question was. I stood up and held out my hand; she remembered enough about how things went to take it and get to her feet. It was one of the many processes that, luckily, she hadn’t yet thought to examine. It was possible that Clarissa simply wasn’t bright enough to get herself in serious trouble. No denying, on the other hand, that she was suffering.

I walked her upstairs to her room and sat her down on the bed. “Socks in here?” I said, opening the top dresser drawer. They were. “How about these?” I said, holding up a pink pair rolled together. She lifted her sweatshirt over her head. Nothing on underneath.

“Put it back on, Clarissa,” I said. “Now.” Pretty little white breasts, same size as the pink sock-roll in my hand. “I’m not kidding,” I said.

I picked up the sweatshirt and thrust it at her. I was proud of myself for not being tempted, even fleetingly; apparently there was a point past which even Jernigan wouldn’t go. She just sat staring at the sweatshirt, so I took it out of her hands and located the label inside the neckhole, showing which was front and which was back. Then I stretched open the bottom of the sweatshirt and commanded her to raise her arms. This worked. I got each hand through a sleeve, got her head into the neckhole and pulled the thing down. “Now keep it on,” I said. “And hold still.” I knelt and worked a pink sock on over each foot. One Reebok peeped out from under the bed; its mate was over by the dresser. “Here,” I said, handing them to her. “You can do this. You’re not an infant.” She seemed to respond better to this stuff than to a bunch of I know what you’re going through.

She sat with a shoe in each hand, looking enchanted. “Whew,” she said. “Is this what a bad trip is?”

The emergency room doctor — when we were finally vouchsafed an audience — was a tall, horsey woman my age. Snaggle-toothed smile and wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. You couldn’t help but think of the woman on The Beverly Hillbillies. Banker Drysdale’s secretary or whatever she was.

“Clarissa?” she said. “I’m Dr. James. Would you like to come with me? Mr. Peretsky, it might be helpful if you came along too.”

“Jernigan, actually,” I said. “I’m her stepfather.”

The eyes narrowed, the wrinkles deepened. Either because this was no time to be setting the record straight about what my name happened to be, or because a stepfather meant it was more likely something creepy was going on. Of course she might simply have smelled my breath.

The doctor sat her down on the paper-covered examining table; gently, just fingertips under the chin, she got Clarissa to look into her eyes. I felt suddenly unwelcome. Right, she’s tall, has no wedding ring and, most damning of all, does something useful in this world, and right away you assume. Dear God, I thought, please let her keep her fucking mouth shut about the thing with the sweatshirt.

“Clarissa?” said the doctor. “Can you tell me what you took, and how long ago you took it?”

Clarissa burst into tears.

The doctor turned to me. “What has she told you?”

“She said three tabs of acid,” I said. “Or actually all she really said was that she took three of something, but I’m assuming it was acid.” Babble babble. “I don’t know how long ago she got hold of it, but I don’t think it was probably before three or four this afternoon.” What I’d have liked to get hold of was that fat little fuck of a Dustin.

“Clarissa,” she said, “do you have any more of what you took? So I could look at it?”

Clarissa shook her head.

“Can you tell me what they looked like?”

“Green,” said Clarissa. “They were so little, you know?” She was staring down, now at one hand, now at the other, as they cupped her knees.

“About this big?” said the doctor, holding up thumb and forefinger.

Clarissa nodded.

“No,” said the doctor. “Look at what I’m showing you. Were they this big? Or were they smaller than that?”

Clarissa looked. “That big,” she said. She looked back down at her hand and wiggled the fingers. Each fingernail was painted black. “Whew,” she said.

“Were they a bright green?” said the doctor. “Or kind of pale green? Did they have little specks?”

“Yeah,” said Clarissa. “Wow, did you take some too?”

“No, honey,” said the doctor. “Don’t worry, you’re going to be fine. We’re just going to give you a shot and it’s going to make you feel better.”

She walked over to a tall gray metal cabinet. Clarissa, unbidden, began rolling up a sleeve of her sweatshirt. “At least we know what we’re dealing with,” the doctor said to me. “We’ve been seeing this green stuff since the summer. From what I’m told, three would be more than enough to take you to Disneyland. I’d love to know who thought it was a good idea to bring this stuff to town.”

“You and me both,” I said, hypocritical son of a bitch. Uncle Fred and I had once bought fifty caps of what the guy had said was purple Owsley, sold enough to break even and gave away the rest to people in the dorm. One kid, then pre-med, now lives in Maine, doing scrimshaw. Uncle Fred saw him when he was up there a few years ago. Makes a decent living at it, apparently.

The doctor was poking a needle through the rubber seal of a small bottle of clear liquid. Clarissa, meanwhile, had taken off her belt and wrapped it around her upper arm; she had the end of the belt in her teeth and she was pumping her fist. The doctor looked at me, then touched her fingers to Clarissa’s shoulder. “That’s not going to be necessary,” she said. “This is an intramuscular injection.”

Clarissa looked up at her, teeth still bared. Then over at me. Then she loosened the belt.

“Have that sleeve up a little bit more?” the doctor said. “Now this might pinch for just a second, but I’m not going to hurt you.” She swabbed Clarissa’s shoulder with a piece of cotton, and I turned away.

“Okey-doke,” she said, after a few seconds. “Now Clarissa, I’d like you just to lie back on the table for a bit, you can hold that piece of cotton for me, and very soon you’ll be feeling better.”

“Okay,” said Clarissa, her voice small.

“She’s going to rest for a few minutes,” said the doctor. “May I speak to you?” She nodded toward the doorway. I followed her into a small office.

“This child has problems,” she said, seating herself behind her desk. “What are you doing about it?” There was a chair beside the desk, but she didn’t invite me to sit. So I stood there like a bad boy. “Move a little to your left, please?” she said. “I need to keep an eye on her.”

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “this is all a bit of a revelation to me. See, I’ve only known her mother for a short time and …” And what?

“I thought you were her stepfather.”

Careful.

“Well,” I said. “Sort of de facto. We’re not actually married, but her mother and I have been living together more or less since, oh, let me think, August. So at this point, stepfather is just sort of always, I don’t know, the least confusing.”

“And where is Clarissa’s mother?”

“She’s — I mean, she’s here. She just happened to be out tonight when all this started happening.”

“Mmm,” she said. She had picked up a clipboard and one of those pens whose other end is a letter opener. She began tapping the clipboard with the letter-opener end, looking past my shoulder. In this small space, I tried to blow my boozy breath out the side of my mouth. It must’ve looked like I was making faces.

“Well,” she said, “at the very least I should think Clarissa needs counseling of some sort. I can refer you to a couple of very good programs.”

“Would you?” I said.

She looked at me. “Yes,” she said, “I would.”

Back in the car, Clarissa sat with her hands folded in her lap, as I cursed, quietly as I could, twisted the key and pumped the gas pedal. This was only November, for Christ’s sake; what was I supposed to do in January?

“Could we have the radio?” she said when I finally got the God damn engine to turn over. “Oh yeah, and the heater?”

“Heater we can do in just a second,” I said, backing out of the parking space. “Soon as the car warms up a little. Have this jacket over you if you want.” I held up a sleeve of the cowboy jacket, still draped over the passenger seat. But she was looking at something out the window. “Now for music,” I said, “if you’ll check in the dashboard there, you should find a Walkman and all sorts of tapes.” She shook her head, still looking out, as if despairing of being able to listen to any sort of tape I might have.

The hospital was on Division Street, and I realized that all you had to do was go all the way out Division, cut through the mall parking lot and, bingo, you were on Hamilton Avenue. We’d come here by way of JFK Boulevard and it had probably taken an extra five minutes with all the lights. So if you wanted to believe that something good always came out of everything, this was what you could point to tonight: a new shortcut.

“How you feeling?” I said.

“Really excellent,” said Clarissa. “Have you been watching the moon?”

“No, I’ve been watching the road,” I said. Now that the crisis seemed to be over, I could go back to being a prick and a put-upon.

“Look,” she said, and pointed out her window.

I leaned forward, chin beyond the steering wheel, and looked up and to the right. White disk of moon hanging there with a face in it. “Yeah,” I said, sitting back, “full moon.”

“Could we just drive around or something?” she said. “I’m really not freaking out anymore, and it’s just so excellent.”

“I think we should get you home,” I said. “Enough adventure for one night, n’est-ce pas?”

“That’s cool,” she said. “Whatever. I’m just kind of sorry for you. Like you’re missing out.”

4

I laid Martha’s ax on the floor in the back seat of the Datsun and got behind the wheel. Danny slumped in the passenger seat half asleep as I bustled, the cowboy jacket over his knees. “Guess we better take the scythe along too,” I said, as if he gave a fuck.

“For what?” he said, then yawned. It was eight in the morning, bright blue sky, fierce sun, frost still on the grass.

“Case we have to clear any brush to get at the tree,” I said. “Don’t want to snag your ax when you’re trying to swing it.” I swung a hypothetical ax to show him. “You want to leave plenty of room around you.” We were talking about things that mattered to men. I had already had three cups of coffee.

He stretched as best he could in a cramped car — more of a squirm really — and settled back down.

Well so of course no matter which way you turned it, the son-of-a-bitching scythe wouldn’t go. God damn little shitbox foreign cars anyway. I ended up having to find a wrench and take off the blade; the snath had to go lengthwise, one end of it up between the front seats.

“How are we supposed to fit a tree in here?” said Danny.

“O ye of little faith,” I said. “We’re not going to try. Going to tie it to the roof. Like a deer.” He didn’t seem to understand what I meant about a deer. It got me thinking, though: if this went all right and we had a good time, why couldn’t Danny and I start going hunting together? Couple of deer rifles, go upcountry and bring home some real meat instead of your God damn pissy little rabbits. Meat enough to last us.

When we finally got under way, he took the Walkman out of the dash first thing. I mean, he did ask if I minded, but of course he had you there: if you said you did mind and would rather talk, what the hell kind of a tone did that set for any conversation you were going to have? As we crossed the GW, I turned my head for a glance at the skyscrapers on such a clear day, and there he was, head resting on the window glass, eyes closed, mouth open. Fleeting thought about which hospital was closest (but not some Bronx one) before I saw his shoulder rise, then fall, then rise. I reached over and locked his door.

Just below Hartford, he suddenly sat up and took off the earphones. The thing had long since clicked off, but he’d slept on through the silence. “How much longer?” he said.

“Forty-five minutes?” I said. “Little more, maybe.” I didn’t want to say another hour.

“Mmmf,” he said.

“You have a good sleep?”

“Had this weird dream,” he said. “You and Mom were in it. It was like I really thought it was real, you know. Like even after I woke up I still thought some of it was true.” He tossed the cowboy jacket into the back seat and did his squirming stretch.

“What did you think was true?” I said.

“I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to explain. Where are we anyway?”

“That’s Hartford,” I said, pointing.

“Are we gonna go past the Colt factory?”

“Right,” I said. “You remember that?”

“Sure,” he said. “I wasn’t that little. The horse on top.”

“So what was this dream?” I said, obliged to ask, dreading to hear. The last time I’d heard him mention Judith was the day we’d moved the last stuff out of Heritage Circle. I’d come out of the house with a box of books in time to catch him flipping a thumb at the driveway and saying to Clarissa, “Right there’s the place where my mom bought it.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, “except that you and Mom were both in it and we were doing something. Do they still make guns there?”

“Got me,” I said. “For all I know, they made it into condos now. Colt Condominiums,” I announced in a Don Pardo voice. “All the comforts of home, and none of the horseshit.”

He laughed, probably not so much at the very small joke as at his father saying shit to him. Oh, we were doing fine now.

“So,” I said. “You still think a lot about Mom?”

He shrugged. “Not a lot.”

I waited.

“Sometimes I think it’s sad that I don’t think about her.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling,” I said. “You just have to remember that it’s natural, and that it doesn’t mean you love her any less. It’s just that as you go along, your life fills up with new things, and people, that need your attention.”

“It just seems like I’m going on and leaving her back there alone,” he said. He began to cry. The first time I’d seen since the funeral. Not that I would have been likely to see. Maybe this was cathartic for him, if there was such a thing as catharsis.

“Danny,” I said. “However it is, I don’t think it’s like that. That people are just left alone somewhere.”

“Well how do you think it is?” he said, taking rough swipes at his cheeks with the back of a wrist. “How do you know so much?”

“I’m not claiming to know anything,” I said. “I’m only telling you what I think.”

“You think it because that’s what you want to think.”

“Could well be,” I said. “This is stuff that to be honest I really can’t help you with a lot. If this is something that’s really troubling you, you could …” Yeah, he could what? “I mean, there are people, you know, priests and so forth, who really, you know, in all sincerity believe they have answers to some of these things. I guess what happened with me is that I just sort of indefinitely put off trying to decide about any of it.”

“But how can you stand not knowing?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You know, most of the time it’s just not what you’re thinking about. Not that I’m recommending the unexamined life, mind you.” I jerked my thumb at the window. “There’s your Colt factory.”

A fluted blue dome, elevated on a circle of white columns. Atop the dome, a golden ball. Atop the golden ball, a rearing golden horse. Colt guns are better than anything in the world: that much of the symbolism I understood. The rest of it suggested the thing where the turtle’s resting on the back of whatever it is, back of an elephant. Or the other way around, elephant on the turtle. Some literalist had defaced the ideal blue of the dome with gold stars.

“Dustin used a Colt,” said Danny. “Colt forty-five automatic.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“That’s what Mitchell says.”

“Mitchell’s talking through his hat,” I said. I hit the brakes and shifted down to make the sharp right over the bridge. “It was just some crappy little twenty-two pistol, Danny. Little Mark David Chapman fat-boy special. What, are all the kids romanticizing this thing now?”

“You mean like what Mrs. Peretsky has for the rabbits?”

“So you know about that,” I said.

“Clarissa showed me.” He shrugged. “Pretty weird.”

I pointed again. “Connecticut River, by the way.”

“I know, Dad.”

“So,” I said, “have you and Mitchell been thinking about a replacement for Dustin?”

“You can’t replace Dustin,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

“I’m not kidding,” he said. “I mean, it was all his songs and everything. We just sort of tried to play what he told us. He could play guitar as good as me any day. He just played bass so he could sing. You know, nobody else could even sing.”

“What about Clarissa?” I said. “Wasn’t she singing that day I walked in on your practice?”

“Clarissa?” he said. “She’s a joke.”

I looked over at him.

“Dustin had her sing on a couple things because I think he sort of felt bad for her,” he said. “But she was really just image. You know, we sort of started out with her and then we didn’t know how to tell her it wasn’t happening. I mean, in a way, if this had to happen …”

“Hold the phone,” I said. “What I’m hearing is that you and Mitchell are using this as an excuse to close up shop because you’re afraid to tell Clarissa she can’t sing.”

“Bull shit.”

“Look. Danny. I realize these things aren’t easy. Obviously Clarissa’s going to get her feelings hurt. I don’t blame her. There’ll probably be a big scene. On the other hand, do you want to give up your music just to avoid a confrontation?” Me and fucking Robert Young, boy.

“I’m not giving it up,” he said. “I’m going to still practice guitar and everything. All I have to do is just make it through the rest of this year and then senior year, and then I can do what I want to anyway.”

“That’s a long time,” I said.

He looked at his watch. “Tell me about it,” he said. “Dad.”

“Am I also hearing,” I said, “that things aren’t going so well with you and Clarissa?”

“I think she might be a little crazy,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I could just, like, get out of it, you know?”

“Can’t say I’m surprised to hear it,” I said. “Particularly after our little soiree at the emergency room.”

“Except I really like Mrs. Peretsky, you know? Hey Dad?” he said. “Listen, I’m going bonkers without a cigarette, okay? I mean, you know I smoke, right? Do you mind if I have one? You can even lecture me about it if you want, but I’d really like to have one.”

“What the hey,” I said. “Haven’t you figured out by now that I’m one of those permissive parents?”

You never saw cigarettes come out of anybody’s jacket so fast. So he’d moved on to Camels.

“Thanks,” he said, fumbling for matches.

“Just crack your window,” I said, “so you don’t hasten the old man’s inevitable whatever with passive smoke, right?”

He opened his window a crack and blew a great cloud of smoke at it. It smelled wonderful.

“Well, I knew this whole deal was a mistake,” I said. “I absolutely knew the minute we sold the God damn house we’d be sorry.” (Don’t you love the “we”?)

“I guess so,” he said. “But it would’ve been weird anyway to go back there after Dustin, right? And, you know, what happened to Mom and everything.”

“There’s an argument to be made,” I said, “that the thing with Dustin wouldn’t have happened if we’d been in our own house where we belonged.”

“Is that what Mr. Sanders said?”

“No,” I said, “I thought of it all by myself.”

He looked at his watch again. “So how much longer?”

“Half an hour?” I said. “Assuming you mean to Woodstock. So. I guess maybe we should start rethinking this whole arrangement, the two of us.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I should just shut up. I feel bad because you’re like really into it. Getting a Christmas tree and everything. And before, you were sort of drinking a lot. I mean, I guess it’s not all that bad.”

“At my age,” I said, “that would be a ringing testimonial. At your age it doesn’t sound like something you should have to settle for.”

“It’s okay. Really.”

“Exactly how crazy is crazy?” I said. He looked puzzled. “You said Clarissa was kind of crazy.”

He inhaled so deeply I imagined I could feel it in my own chest. Then he let it out. “You’re not going to get mad, right?”

“I hadn’t planned on it,” I said.

“Okay, this sounds pretty weird, all right? But you didn’t, like, do anything to her, right? Like the night she was freaking out?”

“Say again?”

“I knew you’d get mad.”

“I’m not mad,” I said. “I’m just amazed. I mean, actually I’m not even amazed.” Better tell the story. “She was pretty out of it, and at one point when I was trying to get her to the hospital, I had to stop her from taking her sweatshirt off. Now, what does she think was going on?”

He shook his head. “She’s got stories about a lot of stuff,” he said. “Like she says her father used to make her do stuff. At first I used to be really sorry for her.”

“Do stuff,” I said, meaning Explain.

“You know,” he said. “But I mean Mrs. Peretsky wouldn’t have ever let anything really happen.”

“Ho, brother,” I said.

The farther we got from Hartford and the river, the hillier the country and the fewer the houses. All the trees bare, and the last tinge of green draining out of the grass. You could see the different shapes of the different kinds of trees: some squat with branches like antlers, some straight and slender. It amounted to a moral failing not to have learned the names of trees. A moral failing, too, that this landscape looked dead and tattered to me, instead of sternly beautiful. In this part of the world, if you couldn’t see a leafless tree as sternly beautiful you were in deep shit half the year. And probably pissing away the other half worrying that it was transient.

We got off the interstate at the familiar exit. I hadn’t been back this way since my father’s funeral. It still looked like the country, even though there was a new house here and there, if I was remembering correctly. Five years. The white colonial with the swayback roof was now chocolate brown, with staring modern windows in place of the old six-over-six, a red plastic three-wheeler overturned in the front yard. We took the shortcut, the back road from Westford into East-ford, coming out by the General Lyon Inn, then left on 198 up toward Woodstock Valley. The place across from the post office, I remembered, had been a hippie house. One summer day, years ago, I’d driven past and seen a little wedding party posing for pictures on the lawn. A pretty blond-haired bride, a long-haired groom, a capering mongrel dog. Where were they anymore, and what had happened to them in all this time? Not here, I imagined, and nothing good.

A new house now sat at the corner of my father’s road, in what used to be an overgrown field. They’d left the stone wall up and put a blacktop drive through the barway. Not a house, actually, but a double-wide trailer with a Florida room. A lamppost beside the flagstone walk. They did seem to keep the place up. Crew-cut brown grass, suggesting they hadn’t lost the old vim as fall came on. Me, I’d always skipped what should have been the last couple of mowings, and settled for having my eye affronted all winter by lank dead grass.

“Strike one,” I said to Danny. “Used to be tons of little evergreens in that field.”

“What field?”

I flipped my thumb at the trailer. “Used to be a field,” I said.

“I don’t remember it too much here,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “It’s a shame. Your grandfather didn’t really know how to deal with kids, I don’t think. After I was grown up he and I finally got to be sort of buddies, but before that …” I took one hand off the wheel and wiggled my fingers to suggest iffiness.

I pulled over to the side of the road. This was where the house had been. Two noble old maples — a tree I did know — one at each side of the cellar hole. Some kind of shitty little saplings now growing up out of it. I turned off the engine: sudden, profound silence.

“Well, let’s check it out,” I said. Too loud, too hearty. “I seem to remember some little pine trees or something up behind the house.”

We got out and Danny stretched, holding fists aloft on stiff arms. “Might as well leave the tools here for the time being,” I said.

“Who owns this place now?” he said. My God it was silent up here.

“Got me,” I said. “Bank still, for all I know. Be a nice spot for somebody.”

We walked through tangled dead hay that had been the front lawn, and stood at the lip of the cellar hole. A jumbled heap of bricks down there, once the chimney, and the charred end of a beam sticking out from the carpeting of brown and yellow maple leaves. The tops of the saplings growing up out of the old dirt floor were level with my knees. I led the way to the right, around the right-hand maple tree and into the side yard, where the old lilac stood in a waste of brier and burdock. “That was the studio,” I said, pointing to a rectangle of low brick wall, mostly tumbled down, adjoining the old stone foundation. Here, too, saplings grew out of rubble, and I could make out a half-eaten elbow of rusted stovepipe.

“See, originally the henhouse was over there,” I said, pointing. “Cost him an arm and a leg to have ’em move it and lay that foundation for it. Now the doorway into the kitchen, see, was right there. He’d go down to the kitchen in the morning, get his coffee and go straight in to work. So of course when the studio caught fire, the whole place went up. Hey, only connect, right?”

“I guess so,” Danny said. Doing his best to fake it. As old Dad was doing his best to shut him out by talking over his head. Christ.

“Well, don’t worry, champ,” I said. “Your dad’s not going to get into a big thing here. Let’s see if we can’t sneak up on one of those trees, okay? I think this is the time of day they come out to graze on the side hill.” Not much of a joke, but at least it didn’t demand any fucking erudition.

We crashed through some brush and brambles behind the house, stepped over the little brook that had been the boundary between backyard and apple orchard, sank into mud for a few steps and then found ourselves on solid ground again. Bloated yellow apples lay rotting into the dead grass. We kept the apple trees on our right and eventually struck a path I remembered, leading behind the orchard and up the hill.

“Sure as shootin’,” I said, and pointed at the steep side hill with its outcroppings of ledge and patches of juniper. “Christmas trees galore.” Here and there stood a man-high pine tree, or whatever they were. “Let’s double back and get our weapons, amigo.”

“You’re sure it’s okay to do this?” he said.

“If they take us,” I said, “we’ll go together.”

Back at the car, I got out the ax, scythe blade and snath. “I’ll let you be the grim reaper once I get this thing back together,” I said, feeling around in my jacket pockets for the damn adjustable wrench. “You ever use one of these?”

“I’ve seen guys using ’em,” he said. He must have meant on television.

“Hell is the wrench?” I said. “Christ, I know I brought it.”

Danny patted his own pockets helpfully, though he surely knew there was no chance he had it.

“Scheiss,” I said. “For want of a wrench the scythe was lost, for want of a scythe — here, would you check in the dash?”

He opened the passenger door and sat down heavily on the seat, as I kept thrusting my hands in and out of my pockets like some baggypants comedian. “How about these?” he said, holding up a pair of pliers.

“Saved the day,” I said. “Cannot believe I left the wrench behind. What would Freud say about this? Ist das nicht ein wrenchenslip? Ja, das ist ein wrenchenslip.” He watched me put the scythe back together, probably wondering what the fuck I was babbling about now. It was impossible that he could love me. Although he certainly had no one else left to hang on to. His only other living relative was his Uncle Rick, who’d broken up with his friend Rich shortly after Judith died, and had moved to Eureka, California. I toyed with the idea of asking Danny point-blank did he love me, but why ruin a nice day. If that’s what we were having.

“Okay, bud,” I said, handing him the scythe and picking up the ax. “Over the top.”

The path behind the orchard led into what was left of an old two-rut track that went around the base of the hill, cut through the woods and ended up in what used to be some dairy farmer’s haylot. Shoulder-high brush had now taken over the track, and we kept having to detour around patches of brier.

“Mess,” I said. “Let’s try a little ways up the hill. Looks like better going.”

We climbed up out of the brush into the dry grass of the hillside. “Hey Dad?” Danny called. I turned around. He was pointing to a pine tree just above us. “What about that one?”

“Possibility,” I said. “I don’t know, though. See? The top is kind of forked there. I don’t know what you’d do about that.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” he said.

“Bottom of it’s nice and full,” I said.

“Forget it,” he said.

“It’s a candidate if we don’t run across something better,” I said. It was a lousy tree. Though lousy, I reminded myself, only from our narrow perspective: you couldn’t be too careful what you thought. We trudged diagonally uphill, always making our detours around the junipers on the high side.

“That one?” I said.

Danny looked. “Isn’t that one kind of weird at the top too?” he said. “There’s all that space there where there’s not any branches.”

“So you cut all that top stuff off,” I said. “Cut the top, like a foot of it, right off. And stick your star on there.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Doesn’t pull your trigger, huh?”

“Nah, it’s okay.”

“Hey,” I said. “Let’s find one we can really throw our support behind.” No answer. The political metaphor made me think of a joke. “Presidential timber,” I said. But it might have been too obscure.

We climbed on. Chilly as it was, I was starting to sweat. I could feel my heart going, and I had to make a conscious effort to breathe slowly and through my nose so Danny wouldn’t hear his old man panting. He was just striding along on those long, lean, sixteen-year-old legs.

“Want to take a breather?” I said.

“We’re almost to the top, Dad.” Said with maybe just the edge of an edge. Or was he simply offering me encouragement? I looked back. From up here you could see the ruined foundation clearly, and you could tell that the lawn had been a lawn. Ruins that made sense only from above, like Erich von Däniken’s landing strips for spacemen.

I sat down. “Tell you what,” I said. “Since the old man’s out of shape anyhow, let me have one of those things.”

“Have what?” he said.

“Cigarette,” I said. “Bertie Wooster calls them gaspers. Isn’t that a great expression, gaspers?”

“Dad,” he said. “I don’t think you want to do that.”

“Shows how much you know,” I said. I was surprised that it came out sounding so brutal. I’d been aiming for witty.

“How long have you been off them this time?”

“Too God damn long,” I said, standing up and holding out my hand.

“Dad, I really don’t think you should,” he said. “You’re going to be real sorry if you get hooked on them again.”

“That’s my lookout,” I said.

“They’re my cigarettes,” he said.

I stared at him. A good-looking boy, holding a scythe awkwardly over his shoulder, blade pointing back at his calf. A little taller than me. Gnawing on his lower lip.

“Oh hell,” I said, and sat down again, using the ax as an old man would use a cane. My ass on the cold earth. Danny didn’t move. I looked down again on the place where my father had died.

“Sorry, amigo,” I said, after a while. “I said I wasn’t going to make a scene, and here I am making a scene.”

“I guess it must be weird for you to be here,” he said.

“I hadn’t thought so,” I said. “I guess I shouldn’t underestimate my capacity for having a normal reaction, right? At any rate, thanks for the tough love. You bastard.” I’d meant that to be jocular too. Everything was going off-key. “Ho, brother,” I said.

“Think we should get going?” said Danny.

I looked up at him. “I don’t even know why we’re doing this,” I said. “The whole thing is fucked, right? I mean, are we really going to go through a whole Christmas thing with them, knowing?”

“Dad, how come you’re asking me?” he said.

“I’m thinking out loud, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “I’m not asking you.” If I didn’t know what to do, at least I could be pissy. “You done any Christmas shopping yet?” I said, staring back down at the cellar hole.

“Some,” he said.

“Stuff for Clarissa?”

“Dad, I don’t get why you’re asking me this stuff. You mean if we already bought Christmas presents we shouldn’t let them go to waste or something? I can’t see what you’re saying.”

“I’m just trying to think,” I said.

“Look, we might as well just stay, you know? You and Mrs. Peretsky are doing okay again, and I get along with her really good and I can handle Clarissa okay. I mean maybe she’ll OD or something.”

That got me to look up.

“I’m kidding,” he said. “Dad? It was just a joke. You know. Joke?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess we better get this done.” I got to my feet, leaning again on the ax handle. “Here. What’s the problem with this one right here?”

He looked. “Come on”

“Seriously,” I said. “Take it down and just use like the top six feet of it. It’s got a nice shape up there.”

“You’re going to cut the whole — look, sure, I don’t care.”

“Good,” I said. “Decided. Now let’s clear away some of the little brush over that side, okay? And then we’ll be in business.”

He started just whanging away with the scythe.

“Hold it, hold it,” I said. “Let me show you.” I took the scythe from his hands. “You want to keep the blade level, okay? And …” I demonstrated. “Like so. Short strokes. It shouldn’t take a lot of effort.” I showed him again.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Let me try.” He tried. “Right,” he said. “Works better.”

“Thought it might,” I said, with fatherly understatement. So this was the moment I thought we’d never have together. However I might eventually come to remember it, it wasn’t much right now.

When he finished, I went in and hacked away the tree’s bottommost limbs to give a clear shot at the trunk. “What do you say?” I said. “You want to do the dirty deed?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I handed him the ax and he stood up to the tree as if at home plate.

“Okay, now—”

“I know,” he said. “Cut it like you’re cutting a thing out of it, right?”

“And don’t chop off your foot in the process,” I said.

Danny managed to get the tree down, then I took over the rest of it. Cutting off the top six feet was tricky, with the tree on its side and the trunk way up off the ground and springing back every time you hit it. I got it done, finally. The bottom half of the tree looked sickening lying there, like the body of a deer you’d killed to take the head and feet for a coat rack. We dragged the shapely treetop down the hill and left the rest behind. Not wholly without compunction, at least on my part. Just without compunction that did any good.

3

Uncle Fred brandished a platter of tortillas backhanded, as you would a frisbee. “Better have some more eggs ranchers,” he said.

I waved it away. “Please,” I said, meaning Please, no more.

“Little more of the old Maria sangriente?” Uncle Fred was now a person whose wife served brunch.

I shrugged, and with my right hand twisted my left forearm.

“I thought as much,” he said. “Penny, ma chère. Would you be so kind?”

“You guys,” said Penny, getting up. “I’m going to go hide the lampshades.”

“Hell, better hide your dresses too,” he said. “No telling how merry this is gonna get. But first.” He snapped his fingers twice.

She curtsied, holding out an imaginary skirt, then opening her fingers to let it fall back against her blue jeans. “He’s actually pussy-whipped,” she said, screening her mouth with the back of her hand. “I just do this so I won’t look like a castrating bitch in front of company.”

“Enough girlish prattle, dear,” said Uncle Fred. “You’ll charm us another time.”

She went into the kitchen and came back agitating a cocktail shaker full of something red, but using only her wrists so as not to drop the bottle of Absolut under her arm. The shaker was decorated with tilted martini glasses and modernistic boomerangs. “Here,” she said. “I’m just going to leave you boys the wherewithal. I’ve got to work for a couple of hours or I’m going to be in terrible shape tomorrow. You can talk about broads while I’m in there. Mikey, you’ll clean up, won’t you?”

“Don’ worr’,” he said. “Zio Federico take care ev’ryt’ing.”

“Thanks, Penny,” I said. “It was delicious.”

“You know you’re welcome to stay for dinner.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Let me think about that. Right now, the very idea.” I patted my stomach.

“It’s taken us so long to get you here,” she said, “that we’re not going to let you go without a struggle. Mikey, why don’t you just get him too drunk to drive?”

“There’s a thought,” he said.

“Ciao for now,” she said, wiggling her fingers goodbye.

When she was gone, I said, “You’re a lucky son of a bitch.”

Uncle Fred thought about that. “Yes,” he said.

“You know, I actually like the dining table in here,” I said. “Cozier.” Since the last time I’d been here, Penny had taken the dining room for workspace. Now they ate in a corner of the living room.

“Yeah, I think so too,” he said. He mashed his last few crumbs of scrambled egg into the tines of his fork and ate them. “So what did you really do to your hand?”

“I told you,” I said. “It’s a gunshot wound.”

“Christ, it probably is,” he said. “Fucking crazy bastard.” He lifted the vodka in one hand and the shaker in the other. Those proportions seemed about right.

“Half and half,” I said. He mixed one for me and a weaker one for himself.

“Ice?”

I shook my head. “I try to stay away from that shit,” I said. “Turns to water on you.”

“Hear hear,” he said. He tasted his. “Hmm,” he said. “Not too shabby. So tell me about this Glendora. Did you get lucky?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

We both waited.

“Tell Uncle Fred,” he said. “That is, if you’re in the mood for it.”

“It’s not all that interesting,” I said.

“Fuck a bunch of interesting,” he said. “Is this thing ongoing? Offgoing? On-and-offgoing?”

“As of today,” I said, “I guess it’s ongoing.”

“Although you’re not too happy about it.”

“How does he know these things?” I asked the ceiling.

We waited again.

“So,” he said. “Who do you like for the Super Bowl?”

“It’s a real mess,” I said.

“Who is this person, anyway?”

“Well, see,” I said, “originally Danny was going out with her daughter and he was spending a lot of time over at their house. And they decided, I guess, the kids did, to introduce us. Because she was divorced, and I was, you know, whatever I was.” Widowed. “Which was actually pretty irresponsible, that she and I hadn’t even talked on the phone when the two kids were spending so much time, but I guess you get busy and stuff. At any rate, long story short I ended up with the mother, and now we’re all, like, there.”

“Hmm,” he said.

“Sounds a little weird to you?”

“No,” he said. “No, I’m just sitting here being nonjudgmental.”

“Funny,” I said, “I could’ve sworn you thought it was a little weird.”

“So is it?”

“It’s getting there,” I said.

“Hmm,” he said. “Can you get out? Is that an option? That is, it’s obviously an option, but is it something you’re seriously thinking about?”

“Problems with that too,” I said.

“Danny and the girl.”

“Among others,” I said.

“Do you like this woman?” he said. “She have a name, by the way?”

“Martha,” I said. I thought a little and said, “I guess not really. I mean, I should.”

“Well, then it’s simple, no? Rule One: Don’t be with somebody you don’t want to be with. Bad for you and bad for them. Right? Fuck a bunch of should.”

“Right,” I said.

“Do you think she loves you?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “She’s, I don’t know … Anxious to please.”

“Except you’re not pleased.”

“When did you ever know me to be pleased?” I said.

“There’s that,” he said. He took a sip of his Bloody Mary. Then he set it down and said, “Nevertheless.”

“Look, Danny’s only got another two years of school,” I said. “Year and a half. Then he’ll be off to college or something, and then who knows. In the meantime—”

“In the meantime you’re going to rot yourself,” he said. “Or is that too harsh?”

I took a good gulp of Bloody Mary.

“I’m not trying to be Mr. Work Ethic here,” said Uncle Fred, “but what do you do all day?”

I shook my head. “Think and get into trouble,” I said.

“Your?” he said.

“I do watch some television,” I said.

“I’ll bet,” said Uncle Fred. “You have the money to move someplace else, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Sort of. Not really.”

“Like to clarify that a little for the folks back home?”

“Well, see, there’s the money from the house,” I said. “But a lot of that is for Danny’s college, and the rest of it, if I just stick it in a checking account or something, it’s going to get eaten up in taxes.”

“So where do you have it now?”

“Well, right now it is in checking, but—”

“I’m beginning to lose my stolid patience,” he said.

“Believe me,” I said, “I don’t blame you. It’s not a very edifying spectacle.”

“And don’t glamorize this crash-and-burn shit,” he said. “Not that I don’t know the temptation, but this is your life here.”

“No, you’re absolutely right,” I said. I drank the rest of my Bloody Mary and reached for the vodka. “May I?”

“Be my guest,” he said. “In fact, you are my guest. I might add, though, since we’re—”

“Let’s not even get started on that,” I said.

“Fair enough,” he said. “To tell you the absolute truth, I may actually not have all that much of a right to preach to you on that score.” He waited for me to mix mine, then poured enough vodka into his to raise the level an inch. “Boys will be boys, right?”

“To boys being boys,” I said, and we clinked glasses. I stared at the row of Christmas cards on the mantel. “No tree?” I said, to let him know that his marriage wasn’t so fucking perfect.

“You know it’s funny,” he said. “We actually went to the Koreans’ on Broadway and looked at their trees, and we both got really depressed because they shape the God damn things with hedge clippers or something. They’re all like that.” He drew an isosceles triangle in air with his two forefingers. “They look like they came out of a fucking barbershop. Next year maybe we’ll have time to drive up somewhere and get a tree looks like a fucking tree.”

“We got a tree,” I said.

Uncle Fred looked at me. “You’re really in piss-poor shape, aren’t you?”

I raised my glass and drank to that.

“Peter,” he said. “If you need to get away and think about things, you’re welcome to come here. You and Danny both. I know Penny will second me on this. Of course, we’re talking floor space here, but it is at your disposal. Any time. Middle of the night, makes no difference.”

“Shit,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Or listen,” he said. “Another idea. If you want to be someplace and not have us underfoot, think about the camp. Since you’re starting to get that mountain man look anyhow.” He pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger. “Looks good on you, actually. At any rate, my neighbor up there tells me they got a foot of snow already, but if you didn’t mind braving the cold a little, that stove heats up the whole trailer in nothing flat, and there must be two three cords of wood sitting there. Unless somebody made off with it. Now, I drained the pipes last time I went up, but I can tell you how to get the water going again. Hell, you could cart your stuff up there and move in if you felt like it. The place just sits.”

“Sounds like a good fit,” I said. “You know, I mean I probably won’t end up doing anything that extreme, but I do appreciate it.”

“Listen, you’d be doing me a favor by making it look like somebody lived there,” he said. “They’ve broken in five or six times now. You know, local thug kids. One time they stole all the light bulbs out of the lamps. Everything but the God damn books: those they don’t touch. You know when I went up there last time, to close the place up? I found a rubber stuck to the floor. Had to take it up with a putty knife.”

“Thanks for sharing that,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just telling you this so you’ll know I’m not operating purely out of the goodness of my heart. We never go up there in the winter because we neither of us ski or any of that shit. And now it’s getting so we have less and less time in the summer. Or inclination, I guess. The drive eats up half your weekend right there, and then there’s all the stuff you feel like you have to do or it’s all going to fall down around your ears. Did I tell you Penny and I were talking for a while about actually building up there? Not down where the trailer is, but like halfway up the hill there’s this outrageous spot where you can see off for like miles. But — by the way, Penny does not know about finding the rubber.”

“We reach,” I said, and made a diamond with thumbtips and fingertips.

“Good God,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve become a Trekkie on top of everything else.”

“Nah,” I said. “I just watch.”

“So anyway,” he said, “I don’t know what to do. I have all these great memories, you know, going up there with my dad. But the place just seems violated. And the winters are really for shit.” He drank off a little more Bloody Mary, poured in more vodka and stirred with his index finger, which he sucked clean and wiped on his pants. So okay, there was always that about Uncle Fred and me, deep down. I mean, what’s male bonding ultimately about? On the other hand, what wasn’t vile, deep down? Although you didn’t want to think of that as vile but simply as another way of being. The thing was not to look deep down.

4

Out on the main drag, tires had made black ribbons on the white pavement and snowflakes boiled in the headlight beams. When we’d left to come over here, I’d given Martha an argument about taking her Reliant: a vote of no confidence, I thought, in my ability to drive home, whereas in fact I was a better driver when drunk, my concentration more nearly absolute. But now I was glad she’d insisted; her tires were a little less bald.

“How are you doing?” I said.

“Let’s just get home,” she said.

“I’m still not clear,” I said. “Is it stomach or what?”

“I just want to get home,” she said. “Is that a big crime?”

I checked the rearview mirror. Danny was whispering to Clarissa, who was staring at her fingernails.

“Maybe somebody,” I said, lowering my voice, “will kindly tell me what the hell is going on. Stud there announces he’s got a girlfriend, and you suddenly have to go home. Maybe you’d like to tell me what it is, exactly, with the two of you?”

“Not what I’m sure you think.”

“How do you know what I think?” I said. Shifting ground on her.

“Oh, don’t worry, Peter,” she said. “I don’t really know what you think. You’re still as inscrutable as you want to be. You’re not in any danger of anybody getting close.”

She clearly thought this was a home thrust.

“Hey, can we have the radio on?” said Danny. The other thing about the Reliant was that it had an actual radio.

“Not going to be much on but Christmas music, I don’t think,” I said.

“Right,” he said, “that’s what we want.”

I put the radio on, but it was just an AM one and damned if I could find any Christmas music on the whole thing. News Radio 88, Latin music, a bunch of call-in shows. “Big night for the lonely souls,” I said, and snapped the thing back off.

Martha started weeping.

“Fuck,” I said. At least this shut everybody up the rest of the way. After a few miles Martha’s shoulders even stopped heaving.

I pulled up in front of the house and turned the car off. They all just sat there. Without the engine going, it was as silent as it got in New Jersey. Snow hitting the windshield and melting. Finally Danny said, “We’re going to go in, okay?”

I just gave a good big shrug, meaning What the fuck difference did it make what anybody did. This was called not helping matters any.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Peretsky?” he said.

“I’m fine,” she said. “You guys run ahead in.”

That left the two of us.

Martha said, “He was Rusty’s best friend.”

So apparently we were now going to get the story of Tim.

“Like before high school,” she said. “And they both ended up back here after the army. I mean they weren’t like in Vietnam or anything. Tim actually was in the Air Force, and Rusty was in Morocco most of his time. Anyhow, they were sharing this house, and Rusty and I started going out. I was done college and I had my first real job, you know, that wasn’t like waiting tables, and now I had this cool boyfriend. And so eventually I moved in. I was the only one that had a job or anything. Once in a while Rusty would get like a package from Morocco, or he and Tim would go in on a key together and sell enough lids out of it to get their money back, but that was about as far as it went. The whole rent was like a hundred dollars. So Rusty and Tim would just kind of go around scrounging things, like I remember a lot of the wood we used to burn in the wintertime they got following these guys around from a tree service. I think Tim’s dad got him into raising rabbits. At any rate, that stuff gave him the idea to start the magazine, which Rusty thought was crazy. Like Rusty used to call him the PM? Because he was going to be the Publishing Mogul. But I used to do typing for him sometimes after I got done work and kind of generally help out. And I used to do like little drawings to go at the bottom of the pages and stuff.”

I suppose that was my cue to say Oh really, I’d love to see some. Didn’t know she ever did drawings. At this late date it was kind of a so-what.

Snow was starting to stick to the windshield.

“So then when I got pregnant with Clarissa,” she said, “Rusty and I were going to get married and everything, but we were going to all just keep living in the house like before. And then like a month before she was born Rusty sold some weed to an undercover cop and he got sent away for a year. This was, you know, ’72. So anyhow, Tim just stayed and looked after me and Clarissa for that whole year. ’Cause I’d quit my job and everything. For a while he was even pumping gas at night at this service area on the Garden State so there’d be money coming in. And the whole time nothing ever happened, and you can believe that or not.”

“Why shouldn’t I believe it?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Rusty sure didn’t. After he got out and everything, the three of us just kept living there, but he wouldn’t talk to Tim very much. Or me much, either. It like really changed him. I always wondered if guys maybe did something to him there. Though the really weird stuff didn’t start till we moved here and Tim got his own place.”

“The really weird stuff,” I said.

“Well he sort of hit me and stuff,” she said.

Figured.

“At any rate,” she said. “So after Rusty and I split up I started seeing Tim again. I mean, not seeing him seeing him, but we’d get together and talk and stuff, have dinner. So I’m sorry, I don’t know why I suddenly got so weird tonight. I think I’m premenstrual.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Don’t put yourself down.”

“Is that putting myself down?” she said.

The whole windshield was white by this time. You couldn’t see out.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just talking.” Truest thing I’d said in weeks. “It’s cold,” I said. “You want to go in?”

“It’s cold in there too,” she said.

“Unless the kids started the stove,” I said. “Little joke.”

We sat there with my little joke echoing.

“Well, look,” I said. “I’m going in.”

“Would you do me a big favor?” she said. “Could you just leave me the key and go in and start the stove and let me run the heater until it warms up in there? Just this one time? I really don’t think I can stand it tonight going in there and having it be cold.”

“What do you mean can you have the key?” I said. “It’s your car, right?”

“I really appreciate it,” she said. “I’m not going to make a habit of this.”

“Hey,” I said, and opened the door. “Christmas comes but once a year.” Mr. Gracious.

Snow was really coming down. The walkway was completely white, and just a few blades of grass were sticking up out of the white lawn. It was a little warmer inside than out, but the stove had cooled enough to put your hand on. You could hear the tv going in the kids’ room.

I got the stove started and sat there in my coat. First the heat hit my shins. Then I felt it on my face. Then I went out to fetch Martha. The car was throbbing away with the windows fogged up, and one of those impossible things crossed my mind: that she’d got a vacuum cleaner hose from somewhere and hooked it to the tailpipe. So did that mean that I wished her dead, or was it just one more thought?

I helped her up the steps so she wouldn’t slip. She went in and sat down on the floor by the stove, hugging her knees like the woman in that Edward Hopper painting. My father used to have a print of it hanging in the living room, back when I was a kid. Woman sitting on her bed, window open, face full of sun. He’d done such a convincing job of painting harlequin sunglasses on her that I’d grown up thinking that was what the thing looked like. I tried to give myself a gratuitous feeling of awe by thinking about the comparative pinprick of fire in the stove versus the unimaginably vast fire of the sun. But of course your mind can’t really leap magnitudes that way.

“So I guess the presents can wait until tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh shit,” she said. “I forgot to take the presents. He’s going to think I’m terrible.”

“Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,” I said, “He’ll always say, ‘I forgive.’ You want anything to drink?”

She shook her head.

“Well that makes one of us,” I said, and went into the kitchen. “How about to eat?” I called, pouring out a good big glassful of gin. No answer. I’d finished up that bottle of Absolut — waste not, want not — but it didn’t touch the heart the way the old gin-ereeno did.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. She’d worn her denim skirt tonight, probably as a message to Tim that in her heart the 1970s would never be over. She had the buttons undone to mid-thigh. The front of the skirt covered her knees as she hugged them; the back fell away, revealing white thigh down to the underpants. So I had finally gotten there: no desire at all.

She looked up and saw me looking. “You have my permission to get as fucked up as you want,” she said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

“What, me worry?” I said. I considered following this up with a hugh-hugh-hugh goofy moron laugh. But that would have taken things to too crazy a place.

You could hear stuff snapping in the woodstove.

“In case you’re feeling guilty, Peter,” she said, “this actually is not the worst Christmas I ever had. Or in case you’re flattering yourself.” She got to her feet and started for the bedroom.

“I thought you wanted to get warm,” I said.

“I won’t say the obvious,” she said. I got her drift, but how, exactly, would she have phrased it?

I heard the bedroom door close. Just close, not slam. Which made me think about how everything went in circles, just like the Beatles used to say. You started out closing the door, then things got so bad you were slamming the door, and then things got really really bad and all you did was just close the fucking door. Why the Beatles, though? Probably thinking of that song. The one that goes Of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning.

RET-sky, Pah-RET-sky