“There’s no way out—they’re coming, man! We’ve got to pull it off!”
A car passed on the road, then. Through the trees, Charlie could see the dusty yellow of its headlights sweeping the edges of the woods and hear the noise of its engine and rock music pulsing, fading.
“That was just kids.” Charlie tried to slow his breath. “Please. Let’s get out of here.”
But Jerry had taken the can and was running toward the bulldozer and flinging paint at it. Even in the dark, Charlie could see the splotches land on the yellow flank of the machine and begin to spread.
“Let’s go,” he tried one more time. “You’ve had too much to drink. You should sleep it off. I’ll take you home.”
Jerry dropped the paint can. “Home?”
“To your place. Where you live. I’ll—I’ll walk you there.”
“Have you heard of the indigo macaw? From Brazil?” Jerry’s voice was almost calm now, and full of wonder. “It’s supposed to be extinct, except in captivity, but I spotted it on my land. You should see it—all different shades of blue, and when it flies, phosphorescent! That bird is
rare
.”
“Maybe someone’s parrot escaped,” Charlie said, but even as he spoke, he caught a glimpse of something else—wild and impossible, crossing continents and time, a flash of blue, of green.
“Slash the tires!” Jerry began pounding the massive bulldozer tires with his fists. “Burn and slash pyrotechnically speaking ’cause there’s gooks in the barnyard, they’ve been coming over in the wheel holes, little buggers but they’ll get you when you turn your back, filling up the hoses, and the government is out for us but I know how to blow shit up using your basic trail dust mechanism—”
“
Calm down, Jerry
.”
“I’ll cut your ears off!” Jerry cried. “I’ll slice your trophy tongue!”
And then Charlie was running barefoot through the dark, down the access road, cutting through the brush, emerging, finally, at the clear, dark, empty road where he’d parked his car at a safe distance, and he was in the car, and in bed in the cabin.
Home.
As he got into bed, he experienced the by-now familiar separating of mind from body, but also something more: a separating from Jerry, a peeling apart, though he hadn’t realized until then how much he had twinned them, intertwined them, in his head.
Not me, not I, not me, not I, not me.
He knew how a mind could buckle; he’d seen it in the patients in the hospital in Cleveland, seen it in Dossy, the way reality could bend and stretch, accommodate almost anything—and then his aunt would go away for a while and return, talkative and funny, painting her paintings, writing her poems, all the while carrying this
thing
around with her, this dark possibility veined with gold. He knew firsthand how the ceiling could sink down, your sightline travel through an object, halos appear, the self disappear, becoming approximate, proximate, turned away from itself in parallel play. He’d seen this madness, tracked it in its various forms. He would come to think that it was primarily this, the tracking, the ability to track, that separated him from someone like Jerry (also war, he’d tell Rusty some years later when Jerry was found dead—basically he drank himself to death, Rich at the Village Market said—in the woods behind the Little River Golf and Tennis Club. Jerry went, we stayed).
He took a whole Valium, removed a thorn from his foot, zipped himself inside his mummy sleeping bag. Slept.
And if, some hours later, he heard the distant sound of sirens, it was through the gauze of sleep, and if, in the morning, he woke to find himself stained by black paint, it was nothing that couldn’t be fixed by an outdoor shower and a hard scrub, and later, at low tide, by dry kelp that he used (roughly and with nothing like kindness) to scour the last traces of paint from his skin.
THAT NIGHT, AFTER CHARLIE LEFT,
Jerry poured sand and water into the gas tanks of the bulldozer and backhoe and plugged their exhaust pipes with potatoes. He cut the valve stems off the backhoe’s tires. He piled brush around the bulldozer and set the pile on fire, and a policeman out patrolling for drunk drivers spotted the smoke, knocked over the deer fence and found him ranting and shit-faced, shirtless, painted black with his hair singed off (so went the story, round and round the town). When the cop walked up to him, Jerry apparently stripped naked, waved his penis at the cop and started chanting “Go home, Hogjaw!” into the night.
Charlie learned about it the next day from Rich at the Village Market, the details unfolding at the meat counter—two other patrons listening, contradicting, chiming in:
A whiskey bottle in one hand, a bomb in the other. . . . I heard it was a machete. . . . He might’ve been a tunnel rat over there, the skinny ones get that. . . . Should’ve been living with his mother, not right, a kid alone in the woods. . . . Destroying valuable equipment . . . Bad element, maybe a Weatherman . . . Radical signage. It’ll be all over the papers, just what we need. . . . Shell shock, thinks he’s still over there . . . waste of time and money . . . full-blown mental case. . . . He could have killed himself or someone else. . . .
“Jerry Silva? He’s an empty suitcase,” said Rich a few days later, when Charlie gathered the courage to return to the market and ask (as casually as he could manage) about Jerry, who was, he learned, in jail in New Bedford awaiting trial for arson and malicious destruction of property. “Ever since he got back from Vietnam. He was in the hospital for a while, but not long enough. I’m not surprised he got himself into this mess, but hell, it’s a damn shame.”
“How long has he been back?” Charlie asked.
“Jerry? Long enough to grow that rat tail.”
“Hasn’t anybody—”
“Excuse me, Rich,” said a young, pregnant mother, whose toddler son had squirmed down and was banging his fists against the glass deli case. “But if I could, he’s getting—come here, Kenny, stop it—”
“Shoot, Wendy,” said Rich. “Don’t mind us, we’re just gossiping like two old biddies. What can I do for you today?”
She wiped the hair from her forehead. “A pound and a half of hamburger.” She sighed. “Please.”
Rich weighed and wrapped the meat and handed it to the woman, along with a lollipop for the boy. She paid and grabbed her child by the hand, but not before giving Charlie a hard look.
“Does he have somewhere to live?” Charlie asked after the door chimed shut. “What does he do in the winter?”
Rich gave him his block of cheddar. “Jerry? He’s been staying out in the woods, mostly—his family’s got property out there, and some kind of shack. His mother lets him run up credit here and pays at the end of the month. ’Course he goes straight for the booze. I can’t tell him what to buy, and she can’t keep track of him every second. Every day she goes to mass to pray for him.”
“He should be—” Seeing a shrink, on medication, Charlie almost said. “Has anybody tried to help him, in, you know, practical ways?”
Rich, who had been stooped over the case, stood. “Help him, buddy? How about this? You leave a roast chicken out for him, he drops it in the neighbor’s well—thinks you’re trying to poison him. You try again, down the well. Ask my wife. You put the kibosh on selling him booze, he finds it farther down the road. You get him a mass offering card, he calls you the devil. No one dares go out to his place anymore, not even his own mother. He’s—” He twirled a finger near his head. “But not dumb. He was always a smart kid, maybe even some kind of genius. He’s got a brother who’s retarded. Dumb and sunny, the opposite of Jerry. George, their father, was a friend of mine. I’m glad he ain’t alive to see this. It would’ve done him in.”
“What happened to him?”
“Dropped dead of a heart attack, some, oh, ten years ago by now. He wanted to have a farm out on that land—you could get it for next to nothing back then. After he died, the wife opened a beauty parlor in New Bedford with her sister. She does all right.” He wiped his hands on his apron. “Listen to me, rambling on. Why are you so interested in Jerry, Charlie?”
Charlie reddened. “I gave him rides sometimes.” They’d never, he realized, come into the store together; Jerry always peeled off quickly, quietly. “We read some of the same books. He’s a good person. I’d like”—he spoke too fast—“to try to help him, if I could. I could, I don’t know, try to find a doctor who could help him.”
“Were you mixed up in this, Charlie?”
“No.” The lie came quickly, smoothly.
Rich nodded. “Good. Stay out of it. It’ll get you nowhere, and his mother’s not likely to appreciate it. Maybe a little time in the slammer will open his eyes—I’ve seen it happen before. When does your grandmother get here? She hasn’t placed her meat order yet.”
“The beginning of August.”
“And your mother?”
“Around then too.”
Rich flipped up a page of the calendar on the wall. “Six days. Tell them to call their meat orders in. And Charlie?”
He nodded.
“Stay out of trouble until then.”
THE VISITING HOURS AT THE
Ash Street jail were five to seven on weekdays, noon to two on weekends. Charlie needed to go there even more than he needed to stay away, driven by a toxic mixture of both guilt and fear. The jail was large and brick, oddly situated in a residential neighborhood between triple-deckers, some with the windows boarded up. When he entered, he was stopped by a short, burly guard, who asked to see his license and had him fill out a form: name, address, relationship to inmate (Charlie hesitated and then put “acquaintance”), date and place of birth, history of felonies or incarcerations.
“No food.” The guard took the chocolate bars he had brought for Jerry. Charlie had never been in a jail; the feeling was a strange one, like being stuck on the set of a TV crime show, bleak and unreal at the same time. The walls were pale green, the few windows barred, their panes lined with mesh wire. The place was dirty, paint peeling on the walls, and the air held a foul, unidentifiable smell only partly masked by ammonia. The guard led him into a small room divided by an inner wall, its bottom half wood, its upper screened. A woman stood close to the screen talking to a man, both of them whispering in Portuguese.
“Who’s he here for?” asked another guard, sitting in a ratty armchair near the door.
The first guard handed over Charlie’s paperwork. “To see the Bug.”
“Jerry,” Charlie said. “Silva. You can tell him it’s Charlie. He doesn’t have to see me. Only if he wants to. I brought him—” He held out a copy of
Walden
. “I can just leave it—”
The guard in the chair took the book. “Jerry O, star of the show. He should’ve gone straight to Bridgewater. The doc had to load him up on Thorazine. Eddie, see if our man’s awake.”
It took Charlie a moment to recognize the person who appeared. They had shaved Jerry’s head, making him look exposed and childlike—his eyes bigger, his ears sticking out. They had shaved his beard; his chin was pale, and he seemed smaller, in a green V-necked shirt, too big, that resembled medical scrubs. His arms were wrapped in bandages, his face still stained with the remnants of black paint.
“Jerry.” Charlie gave a feeble wave and stepped toward the divider. “Hey. Hi, it’s Charlie. I thought you might want—I brought you
Walden
. I know you’ve already read it, but I thought—”
Jerry stared blankly through the screen.
“Listen, Jerry, I’m—” Get it over with, Charlie told himself. Apologize (for what, though? Joining in? Abandoning? Misjudging? All of the above?). He wanted, also, to make sure that Jerry hadn’t ratted him out for his own role in what had happened, but there was no good way to find out. He’d hardly slept since he’d talked to Rich two days earlier. He’d been jumpy—afraid of being hauled off, found out, even as he’d been having fantasies of being back in the loony bin in Cleveland, clean, bound and gagged,
not guilty by reason of insanity
(though he’d never been exactly insane, which complicated the matter and made his own role worse).
“It’s Charlie,” he repeated to Jerry. As he heard his own name again, he could feel the warning signs of a panic attack, his breath growing shallow, the tightening of his forehead, a rubber band looped around his brain. “I’m . . .” He shut his eyes, then opened them. “This isn’t the right place for you, you don’t belong here—”
Jerry nodded, his features blurred by the grid of screen. “It’s a case of mistaken identity or, like, alias. I wasn’t in uniform, see, I couldn’t find it in the dark but what I was doing was legit, totally, I didn’t hurt anyone, I just—” He shuddered. “Someone was there. Golden? Was it him? Do you remember? Listen, I could use another beer, could you get me a six-pack or maybe a shot of—”
“You can’t have alcohol in here. You’re in jail. In New Bedford. That’s where you are right now. Just temporarily. I’m really sorry about—that you ended up here. Really sorry.” Charlie's eyes stung with childish tears. “I’d like to try to help you.”
“They said it was R&R, but they’ll tell you anything, I wasn’t ghosting or anything. Golden was there, but I lost track—”
An empty suitcase. An empty suitcase that read Thoreau. Charlie remembered a patient at the hospital in Cleveland who went in and out of thinking he was a fireman rescuing sexy extraterrestrials or watching them burn, and how the nurse had played along with it: You got her, Mr. Gerstein; ease her down the ladder, nice and slow. Ten minutes later, the guy would be normal. An insurance adjuster. Two kids. Wife ran off on him. He’d round up the patients, including Charlie, to play bridge.
“Golden’s okay,” he told Jerry.
“For real?”
“For real. Nobody got hurt.”
“
Golden’s
okay?” Now Jerry sounded skeptical. “How do you know? I’m”—he tensed, then released every muscle in his face—“not supposed to be here.” He looked out, his gaze dense and fully present through the screen.
“Listen, Jerry.” Charlie stepped closer. “What can I do? Please tell me. What can I do to help?”
“The cat.”
“What?”
“She’ll starve out there. I’ve got twenty bucks under the mattress.”
“No problem—I’ll feed her.”