Call Me Home (5 page)

“Where you been staying?” his father asked. “Someplace safe, right?”

“It's safe,” Jackson said. He looked down into his beer.

“I hope your mother hurries up and heads home,” his father said darkly. “You better leave her number here. We should chat, Amy and me.”

“No, Dad.” He looked at a spot on the wall, where a picture had been. A hazy not-there mark. The news had gone off and there was some crime show playing.

His father was quiet for a while, watching the fuzzy picture on the television. Jackson shook one of his father's cigarettes from the pack on the coffee table and lit it. L&Ms. His father raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything. The smoke curled up and then hung like a veil around the yellow lamp. The beer was making him sleepy, and he knew he shouldn't be here, but at the same time it felt like the only place in the world he knew. There had been times when they'd been happy. He and his father and his mother. Less when Lydia was born, but that was only because things were harder. Money was tighter. Where had it gone? To shoes and food, according to his father. To Christmas presents.

His father opened another beer and handed one to Jackson. There was something on the television – the crime show, the victim had been camping. “Do you remember when we went camping?” his father asked. “When we used to go?”

Jackson remembered a river, wide and brown, moving slowly. It couldn't have been Washington, or at least not the western half of the state. His father's shorts rolled up around his thighs, the languid air, the water warm and torpid. All evening the moon
had wallowed in the oily water and his father had played the guitar while his mother sang, mournful, laughing. Jackson was small but still he was allowed to stand sunk to his neck in the river.

They had slept there on the bank, on camp mats, the mud bank strewn with crockery and beer cans. All night long mosquitos whined in his ears and bats swung across the sky. They had lost a suitcase in the water and found it days later, shored up in ragweed and briar. And there had been a motorbike – before? after? – and then a summer rain, and his father had driven, and his mother sat on the back, and Jackson fit between them so he could see only narrow lines of sky and ground above and below his mother's grasp. The water had come so quickly. He felt his mother's hands pulling him closer, and his cheek was against the soaked cloth of his father's shirt. He pulled his feet higher. He could see nothing, not the lights up ahead, not the trees washing free from their webbed roots, not the ground slipping away.

Jackson burrowed into the sunken couch cushion. He felt a relief that he'd spend the night in his own room, his tiny bed. His father had built bunks for him and Lydia, and then, four years ago, he'd taken a chainsaw and split them apart, shoved Lydia's half into the study. Jackson had carefully decorated his room, finally free of the schizophrenic décor: his music posters, her stuffed bear in its pink overalls. Not that his music choices weren't on the nelly side – at thirteen, he'd hung a poster of Reba McEntire, in her big hair days, and then that picture of Kenny Rogers from the cover of
The Gambler
, staring straight ahead, laying his money on the stacked poker table while a crowd of burlesque dancers and socialites crowd around him. There was something about that – the beard, the steely gaze, the vest. Jackson had nursed a long fantasy starring Kenny Rogers as a kind bachelor, a plane crash that tragically takes his parents' lives, his ultimate adoption by Rogers.

The adoption fantasy didn't start until the fighting did – or at least until he knew about the fighting. He didn't remember any problems until after Lydia was born, but maybe that was just because there was no one else to watch out for.

Jackson was aware, after a while, of his father looking at him. He felt uneasy. A few minutes later, his father flipped a beer cap across the room. It hit the wall and bounced off onto the carpet. “I saw that faggot friend of yours,” he said. “What's-his-name.”

Chris. Where had his father seen him? Had he said anything? Jackson felt a sick anger at himself, thinking of that lock of hair. Why would he do that? Then anger rose at his mother in the Starlight with that slutty haircut. Jesus Christ.

“Yep,” his father said. “I saw him. Looked like shit.”

Later, Jackson wouldn't understand why the idea of Chris and his father made him angry at his mother. And still – he'd sat on the sofa and thought about how she should be sorry for all of it – sorry that he was sitting here in the house they couldn't come back to, and why couldn't they just fix it up like adults, act like
grown-ups
, for Christ's sake, instead of his mother dragging him and Lydia off to another shitty one-star motel to start another shitty one-star life, when this one was bad enough already?

Had his father asked? The television was still on, but Jackson couldn't hear it and he only barely remembered saying it, but he had, exactly as though it was what he came to do: “Mom's in Everett,” he said. “At the Starlight Motel. Room 121.”

There was a long silence. Jackson stood up, walked to the fridge, and opened another beer. He wanted to drink it all, before his father could. His father turned from the sofa and looked at him. He smiled slowly, that boozy, friendly smile. “You're a good kid,” he said.

That was it. His father went off to bed and Jackson sat staring around the house.

He did nothing – he didn't call the motel, he didn't change the story. He watched his father set out in the morning in the truck, heading south to the Starlight. Jackson milled around the house, waiting. There was a bitter taste in his mouth. He thought about his mother's new hair. The precise penmanship on the job applications, the way she'd said, “Well, that would be nice, a 10 percent discount for employees.” She had looked out the window of
the motel into the parking lot and smiled. Jackson looked out the window now – outside, the ruts that the truck had left in the yard were filling with rainwater. The house smelled of cigarettes and mold. There was nothing here, he thought. Nothing to show that this place was theirs. Just the scuffed-up walls, the broken spine of the couch, his watery reflection in the window. It was a shame, he thought, to have a face this ugly in a place with so little beauty already.

Now, two months later and two hundred miles south, in Portland, he couldn't piece together what he'd been thinking that night, why he'd done what he had. He and his mother and Lydia had almost been free. Instead, he'd ruined everything. His father brought his mother and sister back from the Starlight, and a week later, they left again without him, lighting out to anywhere, nowhere, leaving him in Tulalip with his father. … He couldn't blame them; how could they trust him? He couldn't trust himself. He'd sold them out to the man he hated most in the world, and by the end of the month he was on the streets in Portland. His whole life, small as it was, and he'd fucked it up. His mistake.

Now, when he slept at Eric's on these precious Sunday nights, he curled himself into a ball, the sheets thick and slippery over his face. Tonight, though, he didn't sleep. He'd been thinking about Silver – about this idea of moving on – since he showed up.

Eric kept two thousand dollars in cash in a tin box on one of the polished wood tables. The box had a picture on the front in Technicolor – a row of peach trees, bright green leaves, blush cheeks of fruit. It was a test, Jackson knew. Eric knew that Jackson knew it was there, and if he were to take it the illusion would be broken; they would become the strangers they were. For now they could exist like this – in this world they'd made, where Jackson materialized once a week and then faded back to nowhere again. If the money was gone, it would all disappear.

He'd only taken one thing from Eric in the last two months, a necktie from a row of them that were looped over the closet rod. It was maroon and navy, striped diagonally. He put it in his pocket
just to be able to take something from that world and carry it back to the other.

He must not have slept. He was awake when the alarm went off. The room was still dark because Eric had the kind of heavy, expensive curtains that could blot out the sun. Eric was in the shower, and Jackson opened the box so easily. In five minutes, or ten, Eric would step out of the shower, lie on the bed damp and flushed. There were hours still before Eric's afternoon meeting, and they would fuck and then eat breakfast in bed, chichi pastries that Eric had bought the day before and strong coffee.

Jackson slipped the twenty hundred-dollar bills into his boot. He knew what it meant – he couldn't see Eric again. He had an idea about his life, a way it was supposed to be. He imagined that somewhere else, if he was truly living in another life Eric and this part of himself might die off easily. The peaches like globes of perfect sunshine, smooth and covered in sun. Even the wood of the box felt warm. His mother had loved to drink peach nectar. She would buy a little carton of it and drink the whole thing alone. It saddened him, but he couldn't say just why.

The shower shut off, and Jackson could hear Eric humming to himself. “Turn on the espresso machine, would you, Jack?” he called. “I'll be right there.”

“Sure.” Eric's money was a hard wedge in his boot. Jackson walked to the kitchen and flipped on the shiny chrome espresso machine. He went down the hall quickly and quietly, let himself out the front door and was gone.

OF THE GREYHOUND
ride he would remember the wet rock corridor of the Gorge, a long stretch of farmland, and a truck stop in Pasco, where a man was kicked off for buying a tall boy of dishwater beer. The camel color of Spokane and the slow climb toward Silver. Rocky hills, the stands of pines more regal than the ones he'd known, less stunted by washed-out roots. Lake Coeur d'Alene glittering, hiding something dark and sour. He thought of what he'd heard about the white supremacists out here, the queer bashers.
Some kid at Marysville-Pilchuck had a butch sister who had gone to school out here and then dropped out after the windows of her car were smashed and her nose broken by a faceless group in the middle of the night.

The bus drove him fifty or sixty miles into the rocky panhandle. Signs for little towns, broke down saloons, a dirty rim of snow spitting up from the road. The bus let him off in a town called St. Regis, where he waited for several hours at the Travel Stop for his ride. He'd overshot Idaho, but that was what he'd been told to do. St. Regis was built around the Greyhound stop; there was a bar he wished he could drink in and a store full of Western novelties, antler coat racks, and cowboy bathroom fixtures. He spent most of the evening sitting on a wooden bench outside, smoking Camels. All evening, men wandered across the street from somewhere in the vague woods, where he guessed the houses were, headed for the bar. ATVs rolled up and down the road. At ten or eleven, a truck rattled up and stopped, and a man got out. He was broad-shouldered, wearing work boots, dusty jeans, and one of those canvas jackets made for the Rockies. He looked up and down the wooden walk that stretched around the Travel Stop. “You Jack?” he asked, looking Jackson over and lighting a cigarette.

“That's me.” Jackson knew he must be a disappointment. He was a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, pale, his girlish hands.

“Mike Leary,” he said, pushing back the sleeves on his sweatshirt.

“Listen,” Leary said. “I'm beat. And nothing's open in Silver right now, so I can't get you set up. What do you say we just stay here tonight and then head over in the morning?” He gestured toward a dark motel across the street. One letter – T – flickered on and off, but mostly off.

This was something he hadn't bargained for. Was there anything worse than a long evening in close company with a stranger? Jackson looked around quickly. Was there booze? Anything? A restaurant? No, conversation over food was worse than the television.
In a motel room you could pretend to be tired. Jackson followed Leary through the gravel parking lot and toward the saddest motel. The door of each room was cracked plywood. The tiny windows had their plastic curtains pulled tight. It was April but still like winter. Jackson's bag was cutting into his shoulder.

Mike Leary was a generous man, it seemed. He paid for two rooms, side by side, shook Jackson's hand, and wished him goodnight. Jackson closed the door and sat down on the bed. Just another terrible motel – cigarette burns in the bedspread, a picture of a sailboat above the bed. He slid the drawer to the bedside table open and there was the Bible. Poor witness, he thought. Poor thing. He closed the drawer.

And so here he was. Idaho. Well, Montana, and then Idaho tomorrow. In the bottom of his duffel bag he'd shoved a pint of shitty whiskey and he brought it out. What else was there to do? He sat on the bed. Turned the television on, turned it off again.

His life looked more and more like a stranger's. They'd never said that at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, that it was possible to have a life you'd never imagined. One you'd never wanted. A quick prayer for Lydia to any God that might be listening – let her be happy, let her be at a slumber party, let her have friends – then he pushed the thought of her away before he felt sick and drank off of the whiskey instead.

He could hear the shower in Leary's room. He thought of Leary naked. It wasn't a bad thought. He was fifty-five or sixty, heavy around the middle but not fat. He looked like a guy who had a lot of friends. In any other world, Jackson would have been both terrified and aroused by Mike Leary. Correction, he thought, in this world he was both terrified and aroused by Mike Leary. Leary didn't seem at all put off by the fact that Jackson obviously looked like he hadn't held a hammer in his entire life. Jackson knew that Leary must know something about him; how much, he couldn't say. He'd landed here because of Ida, Leary's daughter, and this idea she'd had for him.