Call Me Home (26 page)

“Oh!” she smiled, pleased. “Good things, I hope!” Her enthusiasm wasn't to cover anything, he realized. It was just being shy,
being hopeful. A godforsaken kitten. A Christmas pageant angel. He was the worst piece of shit that ever lived.

Eliza had her hands up around her face, picking at something that wasn't there. “You're so young,” she said, and for a moment his stomach lurched with fear, with excitement – maybe, maybe she did know – but then he thought better of it, again; her face was open to him, she was looking at him like he was a child; she was earnest and happy and he was nothing, he was no one to her. “It seems like you should be in school, not out here.”

“I'm alright,” Jackson said. New voice, new man-voice, curt and quick. Alright. Justfine. Grababeer. Or twelve, and then a handful of Randy's prescription painkillers. Sleep for a week. Sleep until spider webs stitch over his mouth. He nodded at Eliza, took a drink of his coffee, nodded at Don. And somewhere after the nod, in the static cotton air, they were gone, following Mary to a table by the window, pulling out their chairs, settling themselves. The bell was ringing at the door; a family walked in, the clatter of plates and the chatter all around him. They were six, ten feet away, opening their menus. He thought he might throw up. Mike Leary shook his shoulder once, like
Hey
.

Jackson didn't explain it to Leary, just left a handful of dollar bills on the counter and left, the bell on the door ringing again as he went out into the wet wind. He made sure not to look at Don and Eliza sitting together at their table.

And now, he thought – what now? He didn't want to think about Don's face, about any of it. He studied the cracked pavement, the dark leaves beneath his boots. He hadn't imagined what would happen today because he knew – somehow, somewhere – that it might not. That he might spend the day alone in the cab drinking hotplate coffee, reading the mystery books he'd taken out of the library. But even then, he had believed, stupidly, that Eliza might fight Don, that she might refuse to leave, but that he would tell her. That eventually she would leave town, weeping but resolved. Jackson concentrated on the street in front of him. The shuttered up businesses, the cafes, the bars with fogged windows. There was a
pay phone outside of the gas station and he made his way there, used the creased phone card from his wallet to call his dead cell phone and check his messages.

Randy was the only one who had the number. Jackson had bought the phone the day before he hitched to Portland, and Jackson had called him, figuring someone should know where he was; now there was a single message from his one friend: “Hey, man, just wondering how you are, where you are, give me a call, worried about you but you're not missing much.” Jackson knew it didn't make sense but he couldn't help a stinging disappointment – some hope that his mother or Lydia had somehow tracked him down. That he might dial up his voicemail and hear one of them, tentative – “Jackson? Are you there?” But there was just Randy, good old Randy.

Randy was his only real friend since they both took the long bus ride around Lake Goodwin, down Firetrail Hill, into Marysville and Marshall Elementary. Pots of paste, the rubber letterpress, a tiny bathroom in the classroom he'd been terrified to use because the other kids might hear him pee. The same class of assholes from kindergarten through the year he'd left high school. Jacob, Megan, Brianna, Alyssa, Ryan. Andrew with the fucked up legs. Mariah, who lived in a trailer on Firetrail, too, and hers was worse, but her dad didn't hit anyone. Randy. He was weird all the time, even as a kid, but you can be weird for a while when you're a boy. Ham radios and aliens. In the sixth grade, Randy wore a long black duster, and rain boots, and tinfoil bracelets. He built his own radio from a gem kit or something. Maybe it was just that he had a rock tumbler and the radio came later. Jackson rode the bus home with Randy and they sat in his dad's pickup with the CB turned on, listening to any snatches of conversation they could pick up. Randy would send out words he'd picked up somewhere and wait for a response. “Going double nickels, boys!” Jackson liked to watch Randy get so excited, the trembling way he waited, adjusting the dial. There was a world full of intrigue out there, according to Randy, and even though Jackson didn't give two shits about the far-off grunt of a trucker
over the radio, he cared that Randy cared. Details like that killed Jackson. He found so much sorrow in the tiny joys that people had – they seemed so small, so unambitious.

Standing outside of the Silver gas station now, Jackson thought about calling home – but it wasn't his home, not anymore. His father's house. What did he want to know? If someone else, some other woman, would answer the phone?

Instead he hung up, pocketed the phone card. There were dark clouds like tall buildings assembling to the east, and he hoped it wouldn't rain. It meant he could burn as much as he wanted to, but it also meant slogging through the mud, rainwater filling the holes that he would need to refill, the trash sodden and the damp seeping through the cracked soles of his boots. He knew it was true without knowing it – his father, in the arms of some smoky, tattered barroom girl. His father was nothing alone, worse than nothing. He propped himself up with anyone who would have him. Maybe he'd never seen it firsthand, but Jackson could picture it. He knew it without evidence. Another girl would be swept in, probably already had, until his father ruined it all, until she was sent out into the world of caseworkers, garbage bags, the Starlight. Even now, he thought of domestic violence as a cheap motel.

He bought a bottle of tequila at the package store. No one gave him two looks about his age there, but Eliza thought he should still be in high school. He walked with the bottle back to the semi cab, had it open before he was even at the door. It was one in the afternoon and he didn't care. His little home – the narrow bed that had only known Don that one time, that quick fumble one afternoon when they'd wrestled around and Jackson had felt his own cock pushing up against the waistband of his underwear and then they'd gone out and sat watching the sun over the ironworks. He lay back on the hard little pillow and drank.

He thought about Randy's message again. “Hey, man. Worried about you.” Randy was lonely; that had been his big shtick, his main quality all through middle and high school, and there was a time when Jackson had liked to imagine Supermanning his way
right into Randy's lonely little world, whisking him away from his drunk dad and his damp basement hovel. Some nursemaid fantasy; harmless, really. The smell of pencil shavings and moldy textbooks came rushing back at him, thinking of school. A brief regret, for not having finished, just to say that he did.

But here he was, mad at Don, lonely as hell. He kept thinking about calling Randy. He'd never had a friend like that, someone you could call, ask for something – company! How sad was that? He didn't know if Randy would even come out to Silver.

He thought of his father. Jackson had revered him as a child, even though his father had been always stern and often cruel to him. He remembered his father calling him names, calling him a girl, a fag, a little prick, and how Jackson had ached for approval. When his father occasionally paid him attention, warmth would spread through Jackson; it was like he was standing in sunlight.

Right now Tulalip would be the same as Idaho: summer being driven steadily out by the cold, wet wind. The mildew creeping up the edges of the mobile home. The dense green underbrush. The Northwest. What had brought his father there except to secret them away where only the sinking ground and deep wet woods could see or hear? The corner of Tulalip where Gary had set down his tiny demagogue's empire, his kingdom. Gary had known from the start, Jackson thought now. From the moment he had left Texas, he had known what a misery he was going to make of his wife's and children's lives. Jackson looked around the cab of the old truck.

He was getting drunk.

He thought now of the summer when he was thirteen, when there had been a chill between his parents, worse than usual, an eggshell frost. It was the burning fuse, the long wait. Something was coming, and he wanted to be far away when it did. Lydia was eight and full of the world. She liked to play detective, to know every secret. He devoted that whole summer – the summer before Randy, when things were still not just about his own pitiful heart – to Lydia. He gave her the forest and all of its attendants: the abandoned rowboat. The narrow creek. Stands of huckleberry, each branch dotted
with berries like hundreds of delicate pursed mouths. Seed pods helicoptering around them. It was all the world they'd needed.

At the same time, lying in bed drinking in the middle of the day, sick at Don, at himself, at the world – he could see now how it was – how pathetic, and wrong. Everything they'd done then had been because of his father. He'd taken Lydia to the forest because his father had forced them there, pushed them out of the house with the force of his own selfishness, his cruelty. Everything they'd done had only had the illusion of freedom. The moments that they had thought they were in control were the same moments when his father had truly succeeded.

He was sure of it, and he promised himself then, in the truck cab, and in his deepest heart, that he would never see his father again.

HE CALLED RANDY
the next morning from the phone at Mary's. He was full of a gray feeling from the tequila. He was
sick
– but inside; he wanted to peel off his own skin. He couldn't smoke a cigarette if he tried, even though he thought it might make him feel better.

He ordered toast and asked about the phone; Mary brought the whole receiver and cradle out to him on a long cord. He was missing work. Was he going to be in trouble? Did Mike Leary know? He tried to imagine Don leaning in toward Mike Leary, his voice low. “Kid's a little upset. You see, I told him I was going to leave Eliza, you know, but Christ, Mike, you know how it is.” Leary, keeper of the secrets of men. More likely, Don had told it so Jackson was the sad little fag: “He got a crush. I mean, I'm not going to give him a hard time about it, I could, you know, but I'm not that way. Poor little guy. Let him lick his wounds for a day or two.”

Randy's phone rang six, seven times – “'Ello?” Randy had something in his mouth. Or he was very, very stoned.

“Randy?”

“Who's this?” Randy's dopey voice. Jackson felt better.

“It's Jack,” he said. “Hey, man.”

The cook had mixed up an order, and Mary flipped it down the counter to Jackson. “Eat,” she mouthed at him. He smiled gratefully.

“Jack? Hey!” Randy's voice was high and excited. It was his ghostchaser voice:
Listen, they're gonna play that tape and no one was in the house, but do you hear those clicks those are Morse code, if you ignore that first minute
– “Oh, man, you've missed some lame shit. Graduation, all of it – finally! The worst years of your life. Where the hell have you been? I tried your phone –”

Jackson hadn't spoken to Randy since calling him once from Eric's, lying in that pretty wedding cake of a bed one morning while Eric ran out – to go to the cash machine, Jackson knew. “Portland, just hanging out, staying with some friends,” he'd said. Randy had wanted to visit then, but Jackson had put him off.

“I'm in Silver, Idaho,” he said. “South of Coeur d'Alene. Close to Montana.”

“Is that where the old silver mines are?” Of course Randy would know about the old silver mines.

“Sure,” said Jackson. “I got a job on a construction crew. Building houses on a little manmade lake.”

“No shit.” Randy giggled. He sounded like a baby. Randy even looked like a baby, he thought – chubby and soft with short arms and a child's haircut. Thinking about that bad haircut made Jackson miss him.

“So what are you doing now that you're a free man?”

A weedy cough from Randy. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I'm leaving here soon. I don't know where for. I saved some money. I want to check out some places, man.” Jackson imagined the Stonehenge of Texas, Midwestern haunted houses, footprints in the butter. Randy on a trail chasing them up and down the little roads between the highways. “Hey, I want to come visit!” Randy said. A rush of relief – why had he been so afraid to call? What was the big deal about having a friend? “What's it like out there?”

Jackson looked around Mary's. There was an elderly couple in one of the three booths, eating hard-boiled eggs out of little
silver eggcups. There was a man alone at the other end of the bar drinking coffee with the same shaking hands that Jackson had this morning. Down at the lake, the crews would be well into the day. Would he even be missed? His stomach was sour. “It's okay,” Jackson said. “I'm living in the cab of an old truck. I work five days a week. It's a bunch of guys …” Did that sound the way he thought it did? “It's up in the mountains, kind of. You'd like it.” He took a bite of the abandoned breakfast and it was good. “You should visit.”

“Hey, man, I could come through Idaho on my way out of town,” Randy said. “Seriously, you should come with me. You're already out there seeing the world.”

“When are you leaving Marysville?” Jackson asked. He felt a little disappointed that Randy couldn't just come now. He didn't want to be alone.

“I don't know. A few weeks. I'll call you. Can I call you?”