If Jack's in Love

by Stephen Wetta

  “Says he wants to keep the trouble between me and Kellner from escalating.” Pop winked. “Letting me know he’s got my number.”

  “What’s that mean?” my mother said.

  “He’s Johnny-on-the-spot, that’s all. Through with your nap? I’m hungry.”

  “What’s he going to do?” she asked.

  “Watch me like a hawk.”

  “Can we move out of this dump?” Stan said.

  Unlike me, my brother remembered a time when Mom and Pop lived in Lakeside with Mom’s parents. Those were idyllic days. Grandma used to sing “In the Pines” to put him to sleep. People didn’t look down on the Witchers there. We moved to this place about the time I was born. It was the only place I knew.

  Leaving the neighborhood became my brother’s theme that afternoon. “What’s the point of living here? Nothing but trouble comes our way. Hell, let’s just move. An apartment would be better than this joint.”

  “Stop saying ‘hell,’” Mom said.

  Pop drove to the job he’d been fired from and picked up his last paycheck. When he came home he said, “Let’s go get a hamburger.”

  “On what, your good looks?”

  “Come on, let’s go down the drain in style.”

  We hopped in the battered Ford station wagon, which Pop allegedly had deployed as a missile to take Rusty’s life.

  “Look at us,” Stan said, “unemployed and going out to eat.”

  We rattled past the neat houses with their tidy yards.

  “Everyone around here is related to someone that can destroy us,” he went on, thinking of Mr. Ball. (By now we had an inkling it was Pop’s thrashing of Kellner that had led to his sacking.) “I hate this dump. Stupid lawns, stupid crew cuts, fucking squares.”

  “I’m warning you,” Mom said.

  Pop turned onto Clark, a verdant lane that rolled bucolically towards the newly asphalted four-lane. This was before developers had robbed the neighborhood of its woods. Set deep in the trees was a spanking-new brick-and-wood two-story palace with a concrete drive, carport and swimming pool. It had been completed only the month before. We neighborhood kids had been riding our bikes over to stare at its opulence, wondering at the aristocrats who could afford such a place. It was the talk of the neighborhood, and every time we passed it Mom would say, “Golly, what a gorgeous house.”

  Now its owners were moving in.

  A moving van, yellow and monstrous, squatted under the foliage of Clark Lane.

  “Look!” Mom hollered.

  Pop slowed so we could see.

  In front of the house were a well-tanned gentleman in tennis shorts and a platinum-haired lady in a white summer dress, who appeared to be supervising workers staggering like Atlases beneath furniture.

  They might have been hosting a cocktail party. To me they seemed like high-society people, like Thurston Howell III and Lovey from Gilligan’s Island, only not as old. We slowly cruised past and Mom, unseen, lifted her hand to wave, but decided to brush her hair instead. The daughter, if that’s who she was, placidly wound her way through the brawny movers to join her parents: a hippie girl in a paisley minidress and orange fishnets. Her blond hair had so many twists and turns I was reminded of the off-ramps and overpasses on an interstate highway.

  Stan’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.

  He swung his eyes to peer at the retreating tableau. “Who are those people?”

  “Looks like they’re our new neighbors,” Mom said.

  “Are they rich?”

  “Must be.”

  He grew quiet.

  We went down the highway to a beer joint decent enough to dine in as long as you got out of there before eight. Pop ordered a plate of corned beef and I watched him while he chewed. After a while he said, “Stan has a point. We could get an apartment right cheap. I hear they’re not so expensive at Colonial Courts.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Stan said. “Moving would be stupid. The only thing we’d accomplish is allowing them the satisfaction of thinking they drove us away.”

  We turned to stare at him.

  He was already lord of the manor, in his dreams.

  3

  TROUBLE ARRIVED on the very morning Mom started at the Ben Franklin. She had just stepped out the front door—we were at the table sopping our pancakes in syrup—when we heard a brokenhearted cry come from the yard. We ran and looked. Mom was standing atop a loose slate and staring at the house with her face all askew. For a moment we didn’t get it. We knew the house was ratty and it needed paint and it was missing screens; we knew about the junk rusting at the side of the house; we knew about the bare patches in the yard and the overgrown flourishes of ragweed here and there. But why the pain of it should attack her at this particular moment we didn’t understand.

  And then we stepped into the yard and saw.

  During the night, while we slept, someone had spraypainted TRASH across the front of the house. It was near the bottom, under the paneled living room window, clearly visible from the street.

  “Son of a bitch,” my brother said.

  Pop was grinding his teeth. I saw a muscle twitch in his jaw.

  “I’ll have it off before you get home,” he told Mom.

  “Who would do such a thing? Who would be so cruel?”

  “Kellner was behind it,” my brother said.

  “Don’t you do anything, Stan, we don’t know who did this.”

  “I’ll find out,” he said.

  “There’s some paint in the crawl space,” Pop said, “go get it.”

  Pop’s temper was inscrutable. You never knew when he would lose it. It blew fierce when he did, but he could take a lot of grief. At the moment he didn’t seem terribly upset about the vandalism. He just wanted to get it off the wall for Mom’s sake.

  Me, I was burning with shame. This was Myra’s judgment on me, in bold black letters.

  Mom’s face was in tears. Pop put his arm around her shoulder to comfort her while three or four dogs loped across the yard, hoping Pop would toss them some scraps.

  “You go on to work,” he said, “don’t you worry about this.”

  “Why do people have to be so mean?”

  Pop couldn’t answer that. He just knew if you got lucky enough to catch ’em you could enjoy the pleasure of stomping the shit out of ’em. Whoever did this, young or old, better hope Pop never learned who did it.

  Stan had run around to the back of the house to fetch the paint. Now he came marching towards us with two buckets in his hands (like an old-stone savage armed, I thought, remembering my Robert Frost from school—I was a straight-A student).

  “Set ’em there,” Pop said, nudging his chin. “We’ll scrape and paint later. Let’s cover it up for now.”

  “I’m gonna kill the son of a bitch that did this,” Stan said.

  “Stan,” Mom said.

  The unmistakable rumble of Reedy’s patrol Plymouth sounded in our ears and we gazed at one another with questioning eyes. Who did this guy think he was, Deputy Dawg? The cruiser rumbled to a stop and the driver’s door cried plaintively open.

  Reedy got out, staring at our defaced house.

  “Got trouble?”

  Pop wasn’t very friendly. He eyed the cop and said, “We didn’t send for you, this ain’t your business.”

  “Looks like you had visitors in the night.”

  Pop didn’t say anything. We stood in a group. My mother sniffled. The dogs had joined us, excited about the action.

  “I guess I’ll go to work,” Mom said.

  “You want to make a complaint?” the cop asked.

  “Talk to him,” she replied, and walked off with a lowered head, mortified in advance by the scorn she would encounter.

  Pop seemed anxious about Reedy’s presence. He didn’t want people to think we had called the cops.

  “We can handle this without you,” he said.

  Reedy had a squinting, benevolent cowboy face that belied his limited stature. “You sur
e? Whoever did this is not likely to go away.”

  “I can handle it. When a law’s been broke I’ll call you.”

  “I’d say one has been broken.”

  Just then a car pulled onto our street, a long, polished Cadillac Fleetwood with the electronic windows sealed to keep in the air-conditioning. As it passed it slowed down a little. On the passenger side, riding shotgun, was the grande dame of the big house, critically examining the writing on our wall. She glanced at the police cruiser and swung her offended eyes to Reedy and to Pop. The stately coupe eased past like a luxury liner, and as it moved along we discerned a network of golden locks turned halfway and trembling in the rear window. They belonged to the hippie girl whose image had by now been burned into my brother’s dreams.

  “Christ,” he said, “she saw.”

  He had placed himself behind Pop, hoping he wouldn’t be spied.

  “It’s like a billboard telling ’em who we are,” he said.

  “I can make sure whoever did this gets prosecuted,” Reedy offered.

  For all I knew, some friend of Myra’s had attacked our house. Perhaps at this very second the vandal was laughingly retailing his deed.

  Pop jerked his eyes nervously while Reedy lectured him on the efficacy of statements to the police. He didn’t like the questions the lawman was asking.

  After a while the cop reluctantly drove away.

  My brother and I, meanwhile, were spreading paint over the letters that all too soon would immortalize our social status if we didn’t get rid of them fast. Even after we finished, the word TRASH still whispered through the thin coat of white.

  I moved dejectedly indoors and threw myself on my bed. My brother followed and climbed to the bunk above; he was so quiet I figured he’d fallen asleep. Then, from the declivity in the bunk, his voice rang out, deep and serious.

  “I’m gonna fuck Gaylord Joyner up. I’m gonna hurt that motherfucker bad.”

  4

  I HAD GONE to the Ben Franklin to see my mother for a reason I can’t remember, probably some message Pop wanted delivered. (Our phone had been cut off.) I found her behind the register, primly awaiting the first customers of the day, while Mr. Harris leaned against the counter contemplating his treasure. When I left the store I glanced casually towards the steps on my right, and lo and behold, there was the angel of my social studies class ascending them—little Myra Joyner, sister to Gaylord.

  I waited until she reached the top step and then I took off to follow her.

  Before the school year ended, while we were undergoing a discussion in class on the problem of racial prejudice in America, Mrs. Carter had asked us to reflect upon the reasons white people looked down upon blacks. Now, Martin Luther King, Jr., was Mrs. Carter’s hero, and she had spent most of that lesson refuting a charge, made by Benny Fisher and backed up by a pamphlet he’d discovered the previous day in his mailbox, that King was funded by Russians headquartered deep in the heart of the Kremlin. (The pamphlet bore a photograph of King in a classroom with others, attentively listening to some lecture: proof, the caption asserted, that King visited communist training camps.) It was progressive Mrs. Carter’s commitment to social justice that had led her to embrace me as her cause that year; yet I wondered if her mission to convince my classmates that even Witchers deserved equal rights might best be left alone.

  “So why,” she was asking, “why is it that white people, even in a society founded on these principles we’ve been talking about, these principles of justice and equal rights, why is it that so many white people still put black people down? How do racial stereotypes persist even in this day and age?”

  The question fell on dead air. No one raised a hand or volunteered a response. And then, to my alarm, Mrs. Carter began to scan the aisles. I dropped my head and shaded my brow, thinking, Please, don’t, don’t, don’t call on me. She always called on me—praised my exam scores, my book reports, my mastery of punctuation, my handwriting. She would read aloud my written assignments as models of elegant and concise composition. What she never understood was the outrage her good intentions provoked. Rather than derive edification from my essays, the other students would seethe with the social injury of having a Witcher placed above them.

  Oh, what the hell, I already knew what she was planning to do. Scanning the classroom, pretending to search for someone besides me to call on, that was just a charade masking the lady’s insane humanitarianism. Why didn’t she drop it? I didn’t want to be saved, I wanted to be ignored.

  Finally her eyes lighted on me.

  “Jack,” she called.

  I raised my head. “Ma’am?”

  “Why do you think white people still have prejudice? How do white people see black people in our society?”

  “Well,” I said.

  I should have told her to go to hell, which might at least have cured her of the urge to raise me up. But I was incapable of institutional disobedience—that was my downfall. Who’d ever heard of a Witcher who obeyed?

  “White people see black people as being low-class, as having an inferior social status,” I said.

  “And why is that?” Mrs. Carter urged, delighted I had taken the bait.

  “Well, because black people are denied education and they’re not allowed to have good jobs, and that forces them to live in poverty and not get ahead. And then other people see them as stupid and trashy when really they just haven’t had the same opportunities that white people have.”

  Had I let the word “trashy” slip? Like a straight man in a comedy routine I allowed a beat to pass. I’d set up the punch line inadvertently, and now I wanted to get it over with.

  It arrived in a whisper from behind.

  “Like Witchers.”

  The class let loose with hysterical laughter while Mrs. Carter glared in hopeless reproof.

  “Go on, Jack,” she said, kindly.

  I shook my head. I didn’t have the energy. Mrs. Carter smiled grimly for my humiliation and, having already plucked me from time-serving obscurity, removed the spotlight and placed it on Benny Fisher (the source of the whisper) by forcing him to repeat his rude words aloud. Which, of course, only threw the spotlight back on me.

  So there you have it. It might have been an average day in my wretched life (a good one was when I escaped notice), but for the fact that she approached after class, ever so carefully and delicately, and spoke aloud the words that would give me direction, meaning and purpose… . But more on that later.

  The shopping center was built into the side of a long hill with terraced rows of shops that you reached by a series of steps, which culminated where Mr. Gladstein had his jewelry store. This was the direction Myra was heading. I nearly called out to her, but I suddenly remembered how she’d turned away that morning when I was walking with my mother. I wasn’t sure I could tolerate that anymore, not from her of all people, and so I followed quietly, keeping a distance of fifty feet between us.

  She labored up the succeeding stairways, admiring her reflection in the windows and bouncing lightly like a pogo stick, a peculiar way of walking she had. After she passed Gladstein’s she hooked a right, went around the corner.

  This left me in a dilemma. I couldn’t follow her without being discovered, because the shops along that pathway led to the end of the line and she’d eventually have to turn back. But there was another problem. People in our neighborhood tended to exit the shopping center through the alleyway in the rear. If Myra was patronizing a store down there, chances were good she’d pass through the alleyway when her business was over. Which meant I could either tail her and be discovered, or lose her.

  I felt reasonably certain she was visiting the sewing store. Her mother was an amateur seamstress, and Myra might very well have been sent to pick up thread and pins and other tools of the couturier’s art.

  Needing an observation post, I impulsively dashed into Gladstein’s Jewelry, Inc.

  Now this Gladstein was a corpulent, goateed Jewish man, a native of New Je
rsey with manners distinctly Yankee. He didn’t like kids and (there being enough anti-Semitism abroad to keep him on the defensive) he seemed to distrust southerners. I’d have gladly sought sanctuary from any other storeowner. But there I was. And there he was, sitting behind his glittery glass counter and peering my way with a jeweler’s knob in his eye.

  “May I help you?”

  He had a great bass voice, powerful, nearly godlike. Hearing it reminded me of a recent evening at the supper table, when my mother, out of the blue and in front of Pop, had blurted, “You know, Mr. Gladstein isn’t good-looking, but I’ll bet a girl could fall in love with him just by the sound of his voice.” My brother and I were stunned, and Pop raised his head from his plate in slow amazement. He didn’t say anything, he just kept chewing. Perhaps he’d realized that Mom’s erotic imagination ran much further than he’d ever credited it.

  Now the jeweler was giving me a real good going-over. He removed the knob from his eye. Maybe he was worried I might set a precedent and other young hoodlums would come loiter in his shop.

  “I want to buy a ring for the girl that just passed,” I improvised, hoping to reassure him and gain some time.

  The fat of his pallid neck oozed like peanut butter over the border of his collar. His tie was too thin, too short, ending halfway up his shirt.

  “Myra Joyner?”

  He knew!

  That would be something to reflect upon, later. We in the neighborhood had long pegged Gladstein as a Yankee Jew insolently unconscious of our goy world. He was so preoccupied with his baubles and diamonds that whenever we peered in his window he would hardly deign to acknowledge us. It had gotten to be a joke among the kids in the neighborhood, and one day on a dare Dickie Pudding performed a tap dance before the jewelry store window to see if he would react. (He didn’t.)

  His sharp jeweler eyes focused closely on me.

  “Yes sir,” I said. “Don’t tell her.”

  I peeked at the mirrored column that ran the height of the shop’s side window. In its reflection I would be able to monitor the front of the sewing store. On the panel in front of me Gladstein’s face was hovering quizzically.

  “Myra doesn’t know that she has an admirer?” He caught the internal homonym. “Ad-Myra,” he said, in case I didn’t get it.