This is Just Exactly Like You (10 page)

He doesn’t know. His arm hurts from the throw. He can’t really believe the can went through. He stands there in his front yard at whatever time it is, midnight. His window’s broken. He’ll have to fix it, have to tape something over it tonight. Cardboard. He picks her mug up, hands it back to her. “I’m sorry,” he says. Then he says, “I love you.” It just comes up out of him.

“Oh, shit, Jack, I love you, too,” she says. “But—” She stops, her voice catching.

“But what?”

“But nothing,” she says, backing up. She sits down on the bottom step.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” he says.

She pulls at her hair, looks out at the street. “I don’t think you ever mean to do anything,” she says.

“That’s not fair,” he tells her.

“I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t care. I don’t have to be fair.” She sounds quiet now, small.

“I mean to do things,” he says.

“Like the house?” she says. “Did you mean to do that? Have you done anything to it?”

“No. Not much.”

She runs her finger around the inside of her mug. “Are we broke yet?”

“We’re not broke.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Great,” she says. “Superb.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Jack,” she says, “maybe it’d be better—”

“You can’t have him,” he says, cutting her off. He saw this part of it coming when he parked the truck, found her on the porch. There’s no way he’s letting her pack him up and take him out of here.

“What?”

“If that’s what you’re doing here. You can’t have him. You can’t take him.”

“I miss him, Jack, OK? I miss him. And if this is the way you’re planning on taking care of him—”

“I’ll take you to court,” he says. “You left. You’re the one who left. I’ll take you to court, and I’ll find some way to win. If you want him, you come back here. You come back home.”

“I think you’d do just beautifully in court.”

“I think maybe we both would,” he says. “In fact, why don’t we just take this shit on the road? Sell tickets? Bring Canavan along? We can parade all of this in front of a judge and let him—”

Yul Brynner gets up to greet Hendrick, who’s all at once standing there in the screen door, naked except for a T-shirt, which he’s wearing on his head like a veil. He’s marching in place, very carefully picking up one foot and then the other, very carefully putting each back down again. He’ll be great in marching band, Jack suddenly thinks, picturing him wearing a xylophone in a chest harness, playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” And all the fight goes out of him. Beth too, he can see. A little truce drops down on them. Hendrick, the great and powerful common denominator.

The streetlight flicks off, then on again, and Hen starts breathing heavily through his nose, which is never good. What tends to come next is the
unarticulated screaming
, something that can go on for hours. A few months after he’d started it—long openmouthed wails, no tears, only stopping to breathe, and even then going on for what seemed impossibly long stretches, so long that at first they worried that he might suffocate himself—once they’d gotten used to it, or as used to it as they could get, they started betting on how long he’d go. A dark little game that helped them last it out. He’d start in screaming, and they’d each put a dollar on the counter, write a number of minutes on the face of it. 15. 40. 70. The kind of thing they wouldn’t share with regular parents in line at the checkout, but the kind of thing that eventually helped them survive. Hen’s breathing harder now, and Beth’s at the bottom of the stairs, pushing on her forehead. Jack gets a dollar out of his pocket, writes 0 on it, hands it to Beth. He’s got one trick left, this last trick, something new, something she hasn’t seen yet. She takes the dollar, looks at him like she’d like to know what it is he’s got in mind.

He walks up to Hendrick, opens the door. “Arizona,” Jack says.

Hen grunts a little, still trying to decide.

“Arizona,” Jack says again, eyeing Beth. They both know he should be at full blast by now.

Hendrick looks up at him, marching, planetary green eyes, little pot belly. “Tempe,” Hen says, measuring the syllables. “Phoenix.”

“New York,” Jack says, squatting down to his level.

Now he answers right away. “Binghamton Albany Bridgeport Buffalo Cooperstown.”

“Georgia,” Jack says.

“Macon Albany Valdosta Augusta,” Hen says. “Atlanta Kennesaw.” He’s calm.

Beth walks up the steps. “How did you figure this out?” She hands him his dollar back.

“He’s been in the road atlas some this week. At work. He likes to do the cities. Butner quizzes him.”

“What, like he’s some kind of toy?”

“No. Like he’s some kind of kid who likes place names. Montana.”

Hen wipes his nose. “Missoula,” he says. “Helena.”

“It works,” Beth says.

“Yeah.”

“I can’t believe that really works.”

“Yeah.”

“Bozeman,” says Hendrick.

“I’m not coming back yet,” she says. “Just so you know.”

He stands back up. “That’s what you came over here to tell me?”

“No. I came over here hoping I could bring fucking Child & Family Services down on your head.”

“OK.”

“I’m not coming back yet.”

“That’s fine. But you still can’t have him.”

“Jack—”

“What?”

“Jesus. I don’t know.” She gives the porch railing a shake, rocks it back and forth. “I tried to get him to call the police. He wouldn’t do it.”

“Cut Bank,” Hendrick says, almost whispering.

“I’ll replace it all,” he tells her. He’s not sorry, but he can help put it back together. “Tell him to come by the lot tomorrow and take whatever he wants. I’ll even send some guys over to replant it for him. I can find a crew. We’ve got better shrubs on the yard than what he had in, anyway.”

“It’s not like that fixes anything,” she says.

“It fixes some of it, doesn’t it?”

“He had tomatoes by the mailbox. Tomatoes and basil. When I left he was out there trying to get the vines back upright. He was wrapping electrical tape around the places where you broke them.”

“I’ve got tomatoes going in the greenhouse. Butner does. They’re huge. He can have as many as he wants.”

“I’ll tell him that, I guess,” she says, going to retrieve Hendrick, who’s walked down into the flowerbed. He’s drawing lines in the dirt with his finger. She shepherds him back up onto the porch. “Don’t do that,” she tells him. “Daddy’s having a hard enough time keeping track of you as it is.”

“How about I put him to bed,” Jack says, trying for something. “We can have another beer. We can sit out here a while.”

“No,” she says. “No way. I’m leaving.” She watches Hen. “I’m going to go ahead and leave.”

He can’t tell what he wants here—whether he’d like her to change her mind, to stay, to drink beer out of her coffee mug for a while and then maybe go to bed with him, or whether he might actually want her gone, away again, the house back to its quiet awful rhythms of men. Regardless, he realizes, it worked. He trenched Canavan’s lawn, and it worked. She’s here. Whatever he meant it to mean, it did.

“I could put him to bed,” he says again, “and we could sit up. We could sit right here.”

“I have to go,” she says. She looks at Hen. “Maine,” she says. “Have you done that one yet?”

“Have you done that one yet?” Hen repeats.

“Maine,” she says.

“Maine.”

She tries one more time. “Maine.”

“Bangor,” says Hen, slowly, squatting down, his penis hanging like a comma. “Portland. Bar Harbor. Bar Harbor, Maine.”

“That’s terrific, honey,” she says. She might be crying. He can’t quite tell.

“Get him to come by tomorrow,” says Jack. “Tell him to come take whatever the hell he wants.”

“Bar Harbor, Maine,” says Hendrick.

“I’m going,” Beth says. “I’m sorry.” She says it to Hen, too. She leans down, holds his face to hers. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Mommy’s really sorry.” She tries to hug him, but he backs up, starts marching again.

“Maine,” he says.

She’s definitely crying now, and Jack’s pretty sure he wants to do something to hold her here, but he can’t think of what that would be. She stares at Hen a while longer, and then she turns around and walks to the car, gets in, backs it down the drive. Like that, she’s gone again. He wonders whether or not she’d stop if he chased her down. If he got in the truck and chased her to the next traffic light. But what would he say? He’d pull up next to her, roll the window down, and he’d have to have something to tell her. He watches her headlights sweep across each front yard until she turns at the end of the block. He thinks about those possums down in the bottom of that metal trash can. He opens the last beer, takes Hen back inside, runs him once more on his loop around the house, toothbrush to each faucet head, gets him down again. Then he sits outside with Yul Brynner, listens to the night birds and the crickets. Across the street the porch light has timed off, or burned out, or something—he’s not sure—but the house over there is so dark it’s like no one has ever lived there. He gets a starkly clear picture of Beth sleeping not in Canavan’s bed tonight, but on his blue sofa, downstairs, bath towels for blankets. Bar Harbor, Maine. Except for it being in Maine, Jack has no real idea where that is.

Tuesday morning. His head’s full of Beth on the porch, and he takes Hen in early, thinking they might have the lot to themselves for an hour or so. It’s good when it’s empty. But Butner’s there already, and so’s Ernesto, and they’ve got the radio tuned in and blaring, coffee going in the little cheap coffeemaker, doughnuts set up on the desk next to the register.
It’s a no repeat workday on 94.1 FM,
the morning guy says.
Your home for the hits of the eighties, nineties, and today. Up next, a Mr. Mister rock block.
Butner leans forward on the sofa, mouth full of doughnut, greets them as they come in the door. “It’s the little man and the big man,” he says, stuffing more food in his mouth. “You remember dancing to this shit in middle school? Like at your middle school dance?”

“No,” Jack says.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Butner says. “I was talking to Paco. I danced with Jenny Resnick. She had a terrific ass, even in eighth grade. And a huge rack.” He offers Hendrick a doughnut.

“He can’t,” Jack says, intercepting. “Blood sugar. He’s not supposed to eat them.” He gets a yogurt out of the fridge instead, pops the top off, hands it to Hendrick with one of the spoons he keeps in the register drawer, in the slot reserved for fifties.

“Jenny Resnick,” Butner’s saying. “Eighth grade could be the high point of ass. The assal high point.” He’s making motions in the air, drawing it out for Ernesto. “After eighth grade,” Butner says, “they start eating cheese doodles. Then it’s over.”

“That’s lovely,” Jack says.

“I had this on tape and on vinyl,” says Butner, nodding his head at the radio. “Both.” He starts singing along in a kind of terrible high whine.

Ernesto shakes his head. “I hate this shit,” he says. “American music.” He goes out to water the flowers, mumbling to himself.

“Paco’s in a bad mood today,” Butner says. “Isn’t talking to me much.”

Jack watches Hen playing with his yogurt, stirring the fruit in patterns. “Maybe if you didn’t call him Paco all the time.”

“I think he likes it, actually.”

Jack looks up at the whiteboard. “Any business?”

“Hundred and twenty bales of wheat straw to Greensboro. Guy called this morning.”

“Do we have a hundred and twenty?”

“We do,” he says. “Barely.”

“It’s late to be planting grass,” says Jack.

“Hey, man, do the math. Five hundred bucks free and clear. What do I care what time of year it is?” He takes another doughnut. “That’s my week right there. You paid me in the first fifteen minutes this morning. Plus fifty delivery.”

“Just make it twenty-five for everybody,” Jack tells him. “People talk to each other.”

“Not these people,” says Butner. “But it’s your show, boss man.” He gets up, walks out on the lot. “Hey, Paco,” he yells, heading for one of the loaders. “What’s ‘delivery’? How do you say ‘delivery’?”

Hen looks up from his yogurt, looks at Jack, touches the end of the spoon to his mouth twice, and says, “
Entrega
.”

Everything gets a little brighter right then. The phone rings and Jack lets it go. His head feels squeezed. This is not something that’s possible. He stares at Hendrick. He says, “Say that again.” Hen says nothing. He eats his yogurt. Jack sits down next to him, takes his arm, says, “Hen, say that again.”

“
Entrega,
” Hendrick says. Easy, simple, clear, perfect. “Delivery.
Entrega.
”

Jack goes to the door and yells for Ernesto to come in, but he’s already on his way, jogging, to answer the phone, which is still ringing. “Patriot Mulch & Tree,” he says, in a hurry, so it comes out Patriomulshantree.