If Jack's in Love

Table of Contents

 

 

 

AMY EINHORN BOOKS

Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Wetta

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wetta, Stephen.

If Jack's in love / Stephen Wetta. p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54785-4

1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 4. Social classes—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: If Jack's in love.

PZ7.W5321f 2011

2011013746

[Fic]—dc23

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

for Julie

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

I'LL NEVER KNOW FOR SURE whether I'd have fought my brother or not. Maybe I might have killed him. The day came and I made the decision. But I will never know.

It was a fated day. Earlier Myra and I met where we always met, in the woods. The woods! There was something daring, even salacious, about the words. Back then, before childhood had grown menaced by television reports, the woods were where kids went to drink and smoke and cop feels. One said “the woods” with a knowing smile. The words could make a thirteen-year-old's heart pump. Yet Myra and I met that day in tragedy. Can you believe it? I was thirteen and already tragic. What my brother did, what he might have done, was enough to start a blood feud between families; and when I left it was with the resolve to bring him down.

I stomped along the neighborhood streets with a pocketknife in my hand. I was going to do it for myself, for Myra, for my mother. The world would be a better place without him. My family, my house, were falling apart, and it was because of him. Probably it was also because of Pop, but I was too young to grasp family dynamics. Then again, maybe my mother might have been less mealy-mouthed when dealing with us. But I didn't want to factor in her responsibility, not just yet.

Rusty, the neighborhood dog, trotted along at my side, worriedly glancing up at my face. He had an instinct something big was about to go down.

I came around the curve and turned on Stanley Street and walked past the Coghill yard. The usual crowd was there, Witcher tormenters, haters, snobs, bigots, jerks, idiots. They lifted their eyes to watch as I passed. I held my head level, walked with dignity. A new day was arriving and I wanted them to know. No longer would they have Jack Witcher to kick around.

When I came to my street I saw the driveway was empty. (Earlier Pop had mentioned an afternoon job interview, which I took to mean he was visiting his bookie.) The Witcher house stood in shambles, overgrown, peeling, weedy, vandalized. A commode leaned against the side wall. A screen on one of the dormer windows had come unhinged and was hanging at the corner. Shingles were missing. The yard was parched. Dog shit formed punctuation marks on bare patches of earth. This was it, my very own Tobacco Road.

I gripped the pocketknife and went in the house.

“Stan!” I called.

No answer.

I stomped to the bedroom (it fortified my resolve to stomp) and flung open the door.

The floor was littered with socks, with underwear, with paper and tissues, with balled-up wrappers. The drawers on the dresser gaped open.

And then I noticed: the stereo player was missing!

We had been robbed! What a development!

I threw open the door to Mom and Pop's room, tiptoed up the hall, checked the bathroom. I held my breath and thrust open closet doors. At the doorway that led to the attic I paused, mounted the steps and climbed higher into the attic heat. When my eyes came level with the floor I gazed around.

No one was there.

The house was empty.

I came down and rested for a moment on the tattered carmine sofa; and then I went to the kitchen phone so I could call the police. But I put the phone in its cradle before I finished dialing.

What was I talking about? We hadn't been robbed. Nothing even seemed to be missing outside of the stereo player.

My brother had flown the coop. That was it. He was gone: running from the law.

Realizing it did me in, and I sank down on the carmine sofa and cried.

Things had been building up so long. It started when Gaylord Joyner disappeared and everyone began to suspect my brother of having something to do with it; but maybe it started before that, like when I was born, or when Stan was born, or when my parents were born. On the other hand, I'm not sure I cried solely because Gaylord Joyner had disappeared, or even because his sister was blaming the Witchers. I'm not sure I actually cried. I had only recently shed tears with Myra and maybe that had drained me. Besides, what if my maligned brother had fled because he was innocent? Then to hell with them. No matter what, my brother's bullying and vandalizing had made me who I was. Better loyalty to my brother than forget I'm a Witcher.

It wasn't a hell of a lot for sentiment to thrive on, but that is what I had: this crummy house, a redneck father, a psycho brother. And now I tried to conjure up a picture of Stan, worried I had seen him for the last time. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited until an image floated before me. And slowly it came.

Gaylord.

 

 

LET ME TELL YOU about Gaylord.

Years ago, Pop would take me and Stan to a wooded area fifty miles north of the city where Civil War battles once raged. History enthusiasts would come out on weekends looking for canteens and minié balls dropped by Johnny Reb some hundred years before, and every now and then you'd come upon them prowling through the woods and the fields with metal detectors. There was a river nearby and the air was swarming with mosquitoes and horseflies and when you were standing by your car that's all you would hear, the insects. Pop liked to go there because he had read, or someone had told him, that UFOs had been sighted in those parts. That had always been one of Pop's dearest dreams, to spot a UFO. Truth is, the Pentagon and the CIA were active in that part of the state, and I think the military might have been testing new spy planes.

Imagine two boys about the same age as me and my brother in that infested air and their pop is waiting by the car and they're walking along the edge of the trees and they come to a swarming field and fight their way into the undergrowth because one of them (the older one) thinks they might find some valuable relics down there. The horseflies are batting their faces, the mosquitoes are sucking their blood, the ticks are biting their legs. And when the smell hits their noses it comes with a stab of fear. But they soldier on because of the occult property of smell that turns vicious odors into seductive perfumes that draw us closer to what by rights should repel us. Wild animals were constantly digging up CSA belt buckles and other metal objects around there, and sometimes we'd hear stories about artifacts unearthed and later sold at auction. No doubt a hundred years ago during the skirmishing some Reb or Yank had lain and died and perfumed the air with his decay, like now. And as the boys drew closer they noticed a discarded shovel (it was stolen from a nearby farmer's porch) and then a shoe and then a hand coming out of the earth and resting there like the root of a tree. Before the younger kid knew what was happening the older brother was hauling ass out of there. And then the younger boy took off after the brother and the two of them ran in a line to the car fifty feet apart, hollering for their pop to come see. As soon as they got there they grabbed their pop and led him along the line of trees to the field and yanked him into the undergrowth with the horseflies and the mosquitoes and the ticks. And as they drew nearer to the smell they pushed their pop forward and he put a handkerchief to his nose and scanned underfoot 'til he saw what they had seen. And out he tumbled, away from the smell, and retched in the brush while his kids looked on and marveled that he wasn't being a man about this. Then he hustled them to the car and drove a hundred miles an hour to the nearest state police office.