Into the Great Wide Open (25 page)

Even in front of her mother, in the middle of anger and tears, Junie had said that she loved him.

His own child was growing in her belly.

This terror of the future, the wreckage, the weight.

This end of things: through the narrows, the birth, beginning. He had no business being out in public. He kept reminding himself that this was a mistake, a misdemeanor, but a primitive joy kept breaking through: you’re mine now, you’re mine for life. Not to possess her but just to have it settled: to be constant in love, to be loved in return. The things that only fools hope for. The high-priced wisdom that came at the ends of novels: everything fails, everything changes. He thought of Mrs. Connolly and wondered what she would tell him. Told himself that he had given his heart, and now it was up to Junie, because his heart was all that he had; thought it sounded fine. Then remembered that he had kept his life to himself, that he was selfish. Too many ideas at one time; and most of them wrong, this primitive joy, the hunter at the kill. He looked down at the dull lives in the cars surrounding him and he felt sorry for them. Kenny had the pure flame, even if it was burning him.

Wentworth’s car was out in front of Boy’s house, and Kenny sat in the car for a minute, wondering if he should go in. He had no business being out in public, he knew it; and there was this joy in his chest, he was afraid to kill it, even if it was the wrong thing to be feeling. You’re mine now.

Finally there was nowhere else to go, and he didn’t want to be alone; didn’t above all else want to have to talk to his father about it:
ASK ELVIS!

“Jesus,” Boy said. “I thought we’d never see you again.”

“First the school lesbian and now the English teacher,” Wentworth said. “What?”

“Rumor has it,” Wentworth said.

“You were seen,” Boy said. “We have witnesses.”

It had been a mistake to come here but Kenny didn’t see any way to gracefully leave. The boys were being cruel; he had hurt them by not coming around, by neglecting them, he saw that. Not that either of them would admit it. Meanwhile his own heart was doing tricks inside his chest like a circus pet. I’m a man, he thought; looking at the other two. Not that it was anything to be proud of necessarily but he had crossed the divide. He was past the baby steps. This was real trouble.

“How did you pull that one off?” Boy asked, grinning. “I mean, a teacher. Home run. Touchdown. Three-pointer.”

“It wasn’t anything,” Kenny said.

“We have witnesses,” Boy repeated. “You were seen to accompany Mrs. Connolly off the campus and spotted later on coming out of a bar.”

“It was
Bennigan’s
,” Kenny said. “Like a shopping mall.”

“A place where alcoholic beverages are sold and consumed,” Wentworth said. “A bar. We have a question for you.”

“We’ve been wondering all year but we thought we’d never find out: is there a Mr. Connolly?”

“I didn’t ask,” Kenny said. “She didn’t say.”

Impolite disbelief. Boy rolled a joint and lit it and passed it to Wentworth and Kenny came third and last; a reversal of the natural order in which Boy came first, at least in his own house, Kenny came second, and Wentworth third. Wentworth was fat, after all. His parents were liable to intervene at any moment, though they were mostly indifferent. While Kenny and Boy could do what they wanted, most of the time. Kenny saw that he was losing his place here without finding a place for himself anywhere else.

“She’s been spotted before,” Wentworth said. “She was at a concert, no evidence of the husband.”

“Which one?” Kenny asked.

“Stray Cats,” Boy said. “Dave Edmunds. One of the English vermin.”

“She was
dancing
,” Wentworth said.

He couldn’t think of Mrs. Connolly now; she was part of a different archaeology, a future that would never happen now. Men and women, Kenny thought, boys and girls. He said, “She hasn’t been back?”

“You ought to know,” Boy said.

“She’s gone,” Wentworth said. “Are you coming back?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What are you going to do?”

The question hung in the air while the joint came around to Kenny again. He took a hit and listened to the bubbling sound of the aerators around him, the spicy green smell of Boy’s bud—always the best bud, never less—mixing with the dirt smell and the lizard shit.
Fecund
, Kenny thought. You could grow shit on the air alone in here. And what did he plan to do next? He thought about it as he exhaled and saw illegal dreams, things he could never tell: true love and children, a small respectable life. A
man’s
life.

“Beats the hell out of me,” Kenny said.

“It’s a shame,” Boy said. “The undisputed pussy champion of the whole school and he retires at the moment of his greatest glory. Somebody ought to call the sports pages about it.”

Kenny looked from him to Wentworth, spring sadness on him, the dead brown husks of the winter left behind, everything that came before,
already gone …

“I hate it when that happens,” Wentworth said.

C
oming back from Boy’s house, Kenny had a vision: they would go to Oregon anyway, they would make a way through it. He saw them living in some shingled cabin, the two of them and their unimaginable baby, Aaron or Art or Cyril or Charles. Ray could come visit them, could stay with them while their father came around—to where?—but Kenny knew it was a common fantasy all along. A cunning cottage we can share. And why were his fantasies so regular, so American? What did he want for her, for them, what did he want out of this life? A voice answered:
get through it, that’s enough
. But now he had to ask for more. The tall pine forests and coastal mists of Oregon. He knew he was making it up.

When he did get home, his father was gone.

The empty bed was the first thing he saw, and the dark living room. A sense of panic and of guilt; he was supposed to be here hours ago, was supposed to be taking care. Now his father was lying somewhere, bleeding … Kenny searched the kitchen, the bathroom, calling out to him: “Dad? Dad!”

He wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. The bed was rumpled but cool. The second floor was empty, it had to be, but Kenny checked it anyway. The closets were full of the usual clothes and there was no dead body in the garbage area, no wheelchair tipped over the porch. Nothing was missing: his father kept hundreds of dollars between the pages of a particular book, his household stash, and it looked like it was all still there.

The phone rang and Kenny jumped to get it but it was nobody, a real estate agent trying to find out if their house was for sale. “We rent,” Kenny told him; and then hung up when the agent tried to hassle him for the landlord’s number.

“Fuck all of you,” he said to the empty, lit-up house—including the agent, the landlord, his father, others. The masculine apparatus of assistant principals and cops. Kenny was roped-in, stuck. He saw that he was going on a ride whether he wanted to or not. He sat down in the easy chair, rolled himself a cigarette, and lit it, trying to think of a good possibility and failing. Junie: he wished for her, longed for her. He wanted to turn the lights out again and sit there in the dark and give himself over to the longing. Desire, the dark ride: the subway at night, the lights flashing by in the darkness, gone and then nothing. Deeper and deeper.

When his cigarette was done Kenny got up and stubbed it out in the ashtray on the hall table, ammunition for his father, for a later argument, but in that moment Kenny didn’t care. He had the feeling of somebody watching, a camera in the corner of the room. He had the feeling of his life being played out in a big bare room, fluorescent lights and linoleum floors, like the day room at the last hospital his mother was in—but empty, Kenny alone … Hard lights, hard places, echoing bare walls. A room that was made for the convenience of the keepers.

Should he call the cops?—but they had better things to do, no sign of violence, or theft. The hospital would have forgotten his name by then, except for the physical therapist. No obvious next step.

Finally he went out searching, because the waiting was too hard. Old posters fluttered from the telephone poles:
REWARD! 300 LB. POLISH-AMERICAN LOST NEEDS MEDICATION! HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Kenny zipped his jacket against the damp chill—a raw-edged night, pneumonia, early spring—and walked in widening circles around the house, through the alley, then a block out and another block. Ten o’clock or ten-thirty, the ordinary comings and goings of a Saturday night, the blue light of the TV flickering out of every window.

The lights came to him around a corner, the shadows and reflections of a cop or ambulance strobe, alternating red and blue. Kenny knew he was home. He didn’t hurry.

Grand slam, he thought: a police car, an ambulance, and two fire trucks. His father’s wheelchair was spilled on its side, in the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. His father was lying on his side with his head up on the curb, apparently asleep. They were halfway between the apartment and the avenue and Kenny knew right away that his father was drunk.

“Nothing much to see here,” the cop said, as Kenny approached the body.

“That’s my father,” Kenny said.

The cop was surprised, as if this couldn’t possibly be true.

“How did he get here?” the cop asked. “He’s still wearing his bathrobe.”

“Is he OK?” Kenny asked.

“They’re checking him now.”

The drama unfolding in a pool of bright white light, the EMTs and the fallen body. Kenny stopped at the edge of the light and felt the eyes on him. Neighbors watched from their porches in their television-watching clothes, bathrobes and sweatpants. They stood immobile with their arms folded over their chests, like Indian extras in an old Western.
I’m innocent
, Kenny wanted to tell them; but it wasn’t true. He had not been taking care.

“He’s stable,” the medic said. “He have a stroke or something?”

“A few months ago.”

“That’s about right,” the medic said; and Kenny had the crazy feeling of pride, passing the test, coming up with the right answer. “This looks like it might be alcohol related,” the medic said.

“No shit,” Kenny said to himself.

“What?”

“I said it wouldn’t surprise me,” Kenny said, and turned and walked away.

Out of the lights, down the sidewalk, the eyes of the neighbors on him and the eyes of the firemen, big helpful men with mustaches,
they looked like baseball players, beer drinkers, churchgoers. Kenny kept expecting somebody to come after him, haul him back, but none of them did. At the corner he stopped and allowed himself a quick look back and they were staring at him, all of them but the EMT, and his father of course, who was still asleep in the pool of light; the maroon bathrobe pulled over his bulk, a potato lying in the road, a cow. Kenny knew that he wasn’t leaving anything behind; this was still his life, it would always be. He just had other things to do.

Unpremeditated:
for the first time Kenny knew what the word meant, the way that a fully formed idea can suddenly spring into a blank mind. He was 100 percent certain while a minute before he didn’t have a plan at all. Back at the house he piled his cleanest clothes into a duffel bag, raided his father’s housekeeping stash for five hundred dollars, looked at Farrah Fawcett for the last time. He took
On the Road
with him, Mrs. Connolly’s poetry anthology, and the copy of Rilke’s
Letters to a Young Poet
that he had stolen from Junie.

He was seventeen for another month, a difficulty. His fake ID was bad and said he was twenty-four; which would work once in a great while on a stupid 7-Eleven clerk but never on a cop.
AN OBSTACLE IS JUST AN OPPORTUNITY IN DISGUISE
(plaque above the desk in Ralph J. Briscoe’s office). Onward.

Kenny drove out toward the suburbs, out of the diesel and stink of the city, out of the yellow sodium-vapor lights to the new leaves and shady darknesses of Bethesda. It was what?—eleven-thirty by his pocket watch, Saturday night, the party-crowded streets near the popular bars.
Ginful
, Kenny thought. See where it gets you. But his heart wasn’t in it, he had gone beyond judgment. He had obligations. Then into Sherwood, down Maid Marian, and onto her dark street.

Junie’s house was sleeping, silent. Kenny cut the engine and let the Reliant drift the last thirty yards; then sat in the car and waited, to see if anyone heard him. The usual dog, two blocks away, barking at what? The clouds in front of the moon. A passing molecule. He
saw his father’s shape again in the circle of lights: a photograph, a thing that Kenny will carry with him. Usually Kenny had to wait to find out what mattered, it came slowly, like the image materializing out of the developer; but this night was instantly fixed. Whatever happened from here, every minute was important. Junie was waiting for him, whether she knew it or not.

When he was sure the house was quiet, he eased the car door open and slipped out: a raw night, smell of wet dirt. He thought of the Mexican figurine: springtime was coming but not born yet, caught between the thick vaginal lips.
Stillborn
, Kenny thought; then chased the word from his mind. He didn’t need complication that night, didn’t need pessimism. He wanted vim, zip,
Reader’s Digest
, Ralph J. Briscoe, American get-up-and-go.

Tiptoeing around the side of the house in the dark he tripped over the cat and sent her screaming into the surrounding darkness. Stopped, stock-still, and waited for the inevitable light—you idiot!—but none came on. It was strange to be stealing his way into a house where he had been welcome, where he had been taken in; but at the same time it was exciting. My turn, Kenny thought. We’ll do it my way for once.

He slipped in by the side door, which he knew was never locked, and felt his way along the dark hallway in the downstairs, past the door where Junie’s mother was sleeping, the rock walls rough and cool under his hands. He was nervous; something would happen if he were caught, it was hard to say what. Dad with a revolver. Mr. Mustard in the Library with a Candlestick. The wild card was the brother, who was unpredictable in his comings and goings. Kenny sat in the dark of her living room, listening for tires, disturbances. The darkness was alive around him, dark feet and dark wings; and Kenny was a part of it. I am the dangerous one, he thought. I am not going to be done to any longer. I am going to do some doing of my own.