This is Just Exactly Like You (27 page)

And at first, she did. The first week or so. But soon enough she was too tired. Amazing what being tired will do to your ideas about how you’ll raise your kids. Hen on a leash at the mulch yard. The two of them giving in whole hog to the faucet-toothbrush thing, instead of trying to do anything about it.
Engage in various behavior modification techniques.
When was the last time he wasn’t tired? Jack can’t quite remember.

He stands in the dark of his house, waits. Hears it again. The scratching. He’s pretty sure it’s in the closet, whatever it is. He stands still to make sure he’s right. Yes. The closet. He walks over there, carefully,
don’t creak the floorboards
, turns the knob as slowly as possible, opens the door. The sound stops, starts again. Jack reaches up for the pull chain for the light. He pulls it and squints in the sudden brightness and the noise stops altogether. Jack waits, counts to ten. To fifty. And the noise starts back up. It’s down in the corner, by the baseboard. He moves a box. The noise stops, starts. And then he sees it: Two paws hanging over the top of the baseboard, a nose sticking up over the top of a chewed hole that runs between the baseboard and the bottom of the wall. It’s a rat. There is a goddamned rat in his house. Furry, pink nose. Like a pet store rat. Chewing on his house. Right at first he can’t quite process it. He stands there and watches it chew. There’d been noises in the attic last month, Beth after him:
What if it’s a raccoon?
she’d said.
Or a possum? I don’t want a possum in my house.

She’d looked at him like he would never set a trap. He never set a trap. And now it isn’t squirrels. It’s a rat. Can you even have one rat? It’s probably seventeen. A rat in his closet chewing a hole in his house, and sixteen more in the attic, down through the walls, cheering him on.
Go for it! Let us know what it’s like on the inside!
Jack stands there in his hallway and tries to figure out what to do. The house is still except for the chewing, the ceiling fan, a few other creaks and groans as it settles down and down into its foundation. The whole place will fall in on them in the morning. He picks up the first heavy thing he can find, the wok that’s in the closet now, along with most of the pots and pans, because of his fine work on the kitchen. He takes the top off of the wok—thinks it through enough to get the top off—and gets a good hold on the handle with his right hand, grabs the edge of the rim with his left, leans into the closet and just starts banging away at the wall, at the rat. It makes a hell of a noise, the wok ringing like a bell against the wall and the wood floor. He hits again and again, grunting each time with the effort. The rat disappears and Jack stops, stays like he is for a minute, peering down into the hole. It’s pitch black in there. The closet light throws out weird shadows all around him. He is naked and tilted headfirst into a closet, looking into a hole that leads into the crawlspace, hitting a rat with a wok. He stands back up. His hurt toe is throbbing, maybe broken. But the rat’s gone. He has run the rat off. He’s a conquering hero. And then there’s Beth, standing in the bedroom doorway, wearing a long T-shirt, his, something she’s pulled on. She folds her arms. “What are you doing?” she asks him.

Jack does try to guess at what she sees. Her naked husband, wok in one hand and rubbing at his face with the other, two weeks without shaving, half-assed beard coming in around his jaw. He sucks his stomach in. He’s not fat. He’s just not twenty-one. He stands straighter, squares his shoulders. Here stands the brave warrior, etcetera.

“What are you doing?” she says again.

“There was a rat,” he says, pointing at the closet with the wok.

“A rat?”

“Yes.”

“A rat.”

“In there,” he says.

“In the
house
?”

“In the closet.” It seems like an important distinction.

“Great,” she says. “Perfect.” She looks at Hen’s doorway. “He didn’t wake up, right?”

“I don’t think so,” he says.

“I mean, while you were dealing with the rat in our house. In our
closet
.”

“I got rid of it,” he tells her. “It left.”

“You used that?”

“It was what I could find.”

“You’re going to wash it, right?”

“Sure,” he says.

“Jesus Christ, Jack,” she says. She pulls at her hair, at a knot. “I mean, this is just like you, isn’t it?” She turns around, heads back for their bedroom. “This is just exactly like you.”

He stands there in the hall after she closes the door. He turns around and puts the wok back on its shelf, turns out the light, scratches himself. She’s right, is the thing. She always is.

Jack and Rena eat what they can of the rest of the pizza and watch the girls sing songs for each other, for their skinny boyfriends, for Jeff and Aaron. Jeff and Aaron sing a few more by themselves. When Jack and Hen and Rena leave, the place is jammed full, more kids, more girls, plus a few older men, standing at the bar, leering at the girls, looking at their asses. These men sing, too, Jimmy Buffet songs, spill their beers on the ground in front of the microphones, down the fronts of their tucked-in golf shirts. Jack pays the bill, and they go out to the parking lot, where the noise is damped down to the dull thump of the bass line, muted screams when the crowd recognizes another song. Hen’s tired, a little overloaded, but he’s basically fine. Jack gets him belted into his booster seat. In the parking lot, under the green and red cursive Gubbio’s sign, under SATURDAY’S ARE KARAOKE NIGHT’S AT GUBBIO’S!, Rena pushes Jack up against the door of the truck, leans in, kisses him on the neck. He’s surprised enough, the requisite amount, the amount he’s always been when someone’s been willing to touch him on purpose. But what did he think they were doing, anyway? Pizza, karaoke, drinks in the new back yard,
Take me to Gubbio’s
—he’s let it happen, or asked for it, or both. He’s able to look behind her at the parking lot, at the cars all lined up, at cars running east and west out on the highway. The glow of the mall a half-mile up the road lights the horizon blue-white. Jack wonders if Hen’s watching, if anybody else is, what this looks like to somebody who isn’t him. She moves to his mouth. She smells like pizza. Even if he was aiming toward this, he knew, too, that she would have to be the one to come to him, knew he wasn’t capable of doing it. Rena pulls back from him, says, “You’re not kissing me back.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says.

“Kiss me back, you fucker,” she says, and he does what she asks. Her mouth is small. Her teeth click against his. She reaches behind his head, takes hold of his neck. She feels like something metal, something stretched, bent. She pulls away again, sniffs. She says, “I’m not crying.”

“I know,” he says.

“This is not good behavior,” she says. “This is not the behavior of model citizens.”

“I know,” he says. “But it’s OK.” He wants her to keep making decisions. More than anything, that’s what he wants.

“Take me to Mulch City,” she says. “Stop off somewhere and buy us something to drink and take us to Mulch City.”

“It’s not called that,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “Take us there anyway.”

He checks his watch. Not eleven yet. The Shell should still be open next door. He opens the door for her on her side, belts her in, too, and then walks around the front of the cab, running his hand along the hood. It’s a warm night. The weather pattern’s changed. Things have shifted. He’s kissed her back. He takes her to PM&T.

Here’s one set of things he knows for sure: Hardwood. And shredded pallets, red-dyed or black. The black isn’t quite black. It’s more dark brown. Pine nuggets, mini and regular. Cedar for dog runs, or for keeping the bugs down. Cypress won’t float. Wheat straw, pine straw. A live snake once came out of a bale Butner was pulling for delivery. He kicked it out of the truck with the toe of his boot, said,
Goddamn snake in the pine straw. You see that son of a bitch? Ought to charge extra for the petting zoo.
Top soil. Compost. Shredded leaves. Regular shredded, a composite mix of everything Canavan and all the other tree guys bring in. For general use. Gravel, river rock, stones, boulders. No rubber mulch. He’ll never carry it. The dyed shredded pallets look fake enough. Rubber mulch is shit.

Here’s another: He knows, now, part of what must have been running through Beth’s mind when she drove to Canavan’s that night, rang his doorbell, stood out on his porch, waiting. He knows what Canavan must have thought when he opened the door and there she was, when he saw what kind of trouble he might be getting himself into. It doesn’t make anything any easier, doesn’t make it make any more sense, but now he knows.

Cherry, in the Shell, gives him a serious look when he buys the beer, a twelve pack, one of the long skinny boxes that’s supposed to fit in the refrigerator better. He also buys a bag of ice and a five-dollar Styrofoam cooler and a
Junior Big Ol’ Bucks
lottery ticket, which he scratches off right there. Nothing. By the time he gets back out to Rena, she’s found a few towels behind the seat of the truck, has made Hen a bed in the front seat. “He was freaking out a little bit,” she says. “He wanted to get down, so I let him, and all he did was run over there to the hose thing and touch his forehead to it a few times. Then he came right back.”

Jack says, “How’d you get him to lie down?” The cooler squeaks against his leg.

“I didn’t, really. He did it on his own. He’s got that tree book underneath him.”

“Good.” Jack puts the cooler on the hood of the truck, looks in at Hendrick, who’s not asleep. He’s lying on his side, eyes wide open, picking with one finger at the fabric of the seat.

“You know I’ve never actually been here?” says Rena. “I mean, I’ve driven by plenty of times, and I beep at you guys, but I’ve never actually been in here.” She looks around. “It’s kind of cool.”

“You’ve never come over with Canavan when he’s dropping shit off?”

She lets out a long breath. “You know what he smells like at the end of the day?”

“Basically,” he says, “I do.”

“Like gasoline,” she says. “Like a lawn mower, actually. Like my dad.” She’s got her back to him, arm on the hood. “He smells like my dad would smell Saturday afternoons when he cut the grass. We had a big lawn. He’d stop in the middle, have lunch, and make the whole kitchen smell like lawn mower and sweat. Then he’d come back in when he was done and drink a beer and sit in his chair and watch golf on TV. During the week, before he’d come home from work, I’d sit in that chair and smell him. I mean, I love that smell.” She kicks at the gravel. A big semi turns left through the traffic light, and then there’s quiet again. “Like that first week in spring when suddenly everything smells like cut grass and lawn mowers again? But it’s my dad’s smell. I don’t need my boyfriend smelling like that, too. So I wait for him to come home. I wait for him to shower.”