Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  “Not bad, Son,” he said. He held my hand, for three seconds, or four, and then he stood and left.

  7.

  You’ve Got to Stay Inside the Napkin

  At seven the next morning, my father was perched on the edge of my bed, shaking me awake.

  “How about you take the day off from school and come on a little trip to the dacha with me?” he proposed. “I tacked up a sign on a bulletin board downtown, and these people called. People who talk like gentle rednecks. We’re going to move our shit out so some nice rednecks with a truck can move their shit in. I’ve never met these people, but they say they’ll help us get our furniture in some mammoth pickup they’ve got and help us load it into storage. Would you care to participate?”

  In the agreement he and my mother had composed in the study, he explained, it was written that my mother would keep the house and he would keep our cabin in the Berkshires, the dacha to which he referred. His plan was to rent it to the rednecks for a year and ease our new state of scarcity. It was not clear to me how he was going to fund both new residences: the New York apartment and the Wattsbury apartment, in which Rachel and I would see him on weekends.

  I was tired of my room by that time, and it was almost spring. I said yes. Leaving what was now my mother’s house at 7:30 in his green Subaru, we went west toward the hills.

  “What have you been doing with yourself besides playing guitar, Joshy?” he asked as he drove. “These past four days have been no good fun for anyone, I know.”

  “I’m also listening to music.” I was glad to have an unimpeachably cool response.

  He stroked his beard for a while. “You want an electric?”

  “Yes.”

  “You need an amp?”

  “Yes. And two effect pedals, and three patch cords.”

  “How much you think that’s going to set back your old man?”

  I had walked to WATTSbury Music the previous afternoon, to ogle, and while there had calculated the answer to this very question. “Six hundred fifty bucks.”

  He drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Money is weird right now.”

  I was silent. I knew I was owed.

  “Cost be damned,” he said. “I’ll have the cash tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, man.” I felt that, because of his fallen state and his congeniality, we were rockers together now, and man was a fit term of endearment. “That’s the shit.”

  His eyes grew moist. “There’s a Richard Thompson show at Smith next week. I was thinking of going myself, but I’ll get you a ticket. You should watch some up-close finger action, right?”

  “That would be really helpful. Thank you.”

  “Resolved.” He thumped the wheel with his fist. “I hate to lose the cabin, but I’m going to use that money to be a father,” he said as he pushed the Subaru’s 4WD into gear. “To pay for a Wattsbury apartment, be here for you and your sister.” The Subaru growled earnestly. “I’m going to be riding the train or taking a plane just about every weekend. Essentially, I’m hocking the dacha to buy us some familial glue.”

  Despite his loss of moral authority, these words excited me. So he was imperfect, as a husband. Were we not both rebels, in our way, nonconformists? I hoped we would go on long walks and talk about which drugs I should try, what I should say to women, whether I should hang a certain poster on my wall. I’d been thinking about the poster, ever since Khadijah and I had gotten in trouble. It was on display in the back room of a head shop in Northampton: a black-and-white photograph of a young Parisian in a long wool coat, a radical of ’68, his arm cranked back to throw a rock. On the cobblestones, his shadow was watery and vast.

  “What do you want to write essays about?” I asked. “Or, like, poem-essays?”

  “The first one I’ve conceptualized is called ‘How Do We Make a Kid?’ The idea is that when we, members of my generation, were young, the iconography was all war versus children. The posters that said ‘War Is Bad for Children and Other Living Things,’ ‘Teach Your Children Well,’ imagery from Joni Mitchell songs, like ‘Ladies of the Canyon,’ say, where you’ve got these nurturing, peaceful women with children at their feet, flower children, the key motif being children . . . The idea was that war was destructive, and having babies, raising a brood, was a generative, positive act. I remember looking at your mother, thinking, We will be virtuous people, with our children and our garden. I mean, War and Peace, it’s an old dichotomy, isn’t it? But pretty shortly after we had children evidence began to accumulate that suggested having kids and raising them as comfortable Westerners was—is—an act of violence, consuming more of our limited natural resources than anyone should be allowed, and now . . . I’m curious, what is your sense of global warming? You’ve heard of it?”

  I had, so I nodded. But I didn’t know what it was.

  “Ah well,” he said. “Scientists have been sure for a long time, but no one’s hardly ever a hundred percent on anything in science, so journalists ask if they’re sure, and the scientists say, well, pretty sure, so journalists say it’s not sure. Anyway, we’re making the climatic conditions under which civilization has been constructed permanently defunct, by building houses and driving cars and having children who will do the same. If my ancestors had stayed in Ireland, with luck we’d all be living in a farmhouse and dying young and lamenting our wasted promise over glasses of whiskey, and thereby living less destructively, better preserving the planet, contributing less to drought and starvation. Creating drought and starvation is what we’re doing, you know, right now. It might as well be the blood of third-world children powering this Subaru, which is designed for the portage of first-world children. I mean, I’m just saying. It’s not your fault. What do we do when the way we always thought we were building a peaceful future turns out to be another kind of killing?”

  I tried to think of a countercultural response. What was the radical thing to say? “We have to compensate for existing, basically,” I said.

  He wrinkled his nose, as if I had mentioned a vulgar activity, such as Jet Skiing, or skiing. “Nah. Too Protestant.”

  We were silent again, for a quarter of an hour. The strangeness of the silence grew and grew, until finally he punched me in the arm, experimentally, a comradely gesture he’d never tried before.

  “You know me and Nancy are in love with each other, don’t you? We wouldn’t do this, make all these changes happen, if we weren’t in love. But I suspect we’re the love of each other’s lives.”

  “I understand.” I apologized to my mother in my head as I said it.

  “Sometimes things just become very clear, and there’s not much you can do about it when it happens to you. God kind of taps you on the shoulder and says, ‘Sorry, buddy, your life isn’t over there, where you’ve been headed, it’s over here, you have to change, or you won’t be fully awake anymore.’”

  “Are you and Nancy going to live together?”

  He shook his head. “Nancy and Khadijah are moving to Cambridge.” He spoke slowly and precisely. “Nancy’s been courted pretty avidly by a couple schools around Boston for years. It’s late in the hiring season, so she’s taking meetings next week.”

  “But what about Khadijah? There’s two more months of school.”

  “She’s going to do her last quarter at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Nancy’s going to commute to Wattsbury. Those two can’t be running into each other at the grocery store, Nancy and Arty. Things in that family aren’t as polite as they are in this one, right now. Fact is, things have been hard between Nancy and Arty for some time. She said it’d be better if he and I didn’t wind up in the same room. But you and Khadijah should stay in touch.”

  “Oh, we will.”

  He looked at me. “I don’t know if I’d talk about it to your mother too much, if you two actually get to be close friends or something. Might be weird. On the other hand, your mother’s kept her cool.” His eyes went shiny again. “She’s really been quite cool.”

  Now, with the sun high
in the pines, we turned right onto the long gravel driveway, and the cabin bumped into view. My father had built it ten years ago, with bearded friends. A Monopoly house, a perfect cube, unpainted sides, pine green roof. Outside, a circular clearing in miles of woods. Within, a potbellied woodstove, a loft with foam mattresses, a steel ladder in lieu of stairs.

  A man and a woman waited at the end of the driveway, leaning on the hood of a red Toyota pickup.

  “We can’t call it the dacha anymore today,” my father said. “If we do, these people will think we’re assholes.”

  He killed the engine, jangled the keys. “Shit, I was promised a big truck. That pickup is supposed to take all our furniture to the storage space in Stockbridge. If that dinky-ass motherfucker is supposed to be the Big Truck, I will shit my brain.”

  He flicked off his sunglasses and waved to the couple. They waved back, struggled into motion. The man was fat and slow, the woman thin and slower. With every step, she dumped her weight on her left leg, forcing it to drag her right. Her lame right foot scraped the ground at a diagonal, like a peeler skinning a potato.

  “Look at them move, Son. These people are poor. The businessman in me says, Don’t touch this shit. But I’m an old lefty. I think you give people a chance.”

  We got out of the car, made introductions. The renters were named Steven and Alexis.

  “Listen, friends,” my father said. “With all due respect. This is not the truck that is going to haul my furniture.”

  Steven made a face that said I am a beacon of positivity. “One and the same,” he chimed, as if to confirm good news.

  My father looked at the truck, acclimating. “May I have the deposit, then, please?”

  Steven took a pale blue document from his pocket and presented it to my father. My father examined it.

  “I stated explicitly: a certified check.”

  “That’s the closest we could do.” Steven wedged his thumbs through the belt loops of his soft, strained jeans.

  “You guys don’t have a bank?”

  Alexis shook her head. She drew close, her foot scraping the earth. “If you don’t like it, that’s fine. We can call this whole thing off.”

  “Oh God,” said my father. “Fuck me, man.”

  “If you don’t want to take it,” said Steven, “we can go our separate ways right now.”

  My father closed his eyes. It occurred to me he might need money, more urgently than I’d realized. He was going to New York City, not just to write essays but to do something called consulting. What did this mean?

  “No, no, it’s fine,” he said, twisting the hairs of one sideburn between his fingers. “It’s cool.” He took the money order—I could see that was what it was—folded it, and slid it into the pocket of his checked blue shirt.

  The four of us emptied the cabin, to make way for the couple’s things. We carried out our two couches, our dining room table, our foam mattresses, a record player, Candy Land, Chinese checkers. Framed posters from political theory conferences my father had organized when I was a small boy: Helsinki, Stockholm, Budapest. We unhooked the pans from the wall and threw them in a garbage bag. After we packed the fans, we learned each other’s scents. The weather had turned suddenly warm, and the windows opened only four or five inches, hinging outward on cranks. The water and electricity had been turned off for the winter, and wouldn’t come back on until the lease began. We made trips to the woods and returned with our hands smelling like pee.

  While Steven and my father wrestled the couches into the bed of the pickup, Alexis and I did women’s work, bubble-wrapping the breakables. I dropped a framed letter, and the glass shattered. She picked up the letter to see if it was important.

  “That’s from the United Nations,” I said casually. “Before my dad was a professor he was one of the executives in a pacifist organization. They won international praise during the Cold War.”

  I felt some wincing awe would have been appropriate. She only brushed the shards off the frame.

  “He met Gorbachev,” I said. “Pretty fucking cool.”

  She looked down at the letter and back up at me.

  “The leader of Russia.” I jabbed my forehead. “With the thing.”

  “You think I’m stupid,” she said. “I think you should tell your dad you broke the glass. He wouldn’t want this letter to get messed up.”

  “He won’t care,” I explained. “That’s not the point of these things, everything being just so, or whatever.” I folded a Guatemalan tapestry over the framed letter, hiding the broken glass. I put it back in the box.

  Alexis carried the box of breakables to the truck and wedged it between the backs of two armchairs.

  “Everything intact?” my father asked.

  “Double-checked, sir.” She threw me a wink.

  The furniture fit in the truck bed. Steven crossed bungee cords over the dome of wood and upholstery.

  “I’ll be damned, partner,” said my father, slapping Steven on the back. “This shit ain’t going nowhere, that’s for damned sure.”

  Steven smacked his soft red hand into my father’s. “You ready to hit the road, my man?”

  After the handclasp, my father glowed. “Never be a snob, Son,” he said as we rolled backward down the driveway. “You’ll find yourself isolated from the people in this world who will remind you what really matters. These people don’t have shit, they don’t know shit, but they know they don’t know shit. They go about their day and they don’t expect otherwise, and there’s a great wisdom in that. I always planned to raise you working-class until puberty.” He shook his head. “Somehow, it didn’t happen. But you’re a really good guy.”

  The sun tore a hole in a dissolving cloud. Light split on the windshield. My father spun out into the wide gravel road, and we flew down the hill. He stuck his hand out the window and thumped a four-four allegro on the door. I did the same thing on my side, but there was something disgusting about our being synchronized, and he withdrew his hand.

  With his hands at 10:00 and 2:00, we gained speed. As the tree canopy fell, we could see the other hills, plush lumps against a hard blue sky.

  “Did you know working-class people growing up?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “I caddied. That was a way of creating my own diverse environment.”

  “Were you already a socialist back then?”

  “Let me put it this way: Your grandmother’s cocktail party world? I wanted to blow it up. But hold on a minute,” he said, “we’re losing Steven.” He slowed down, waiting for the truck to catch up. “Got a little carried away here. There’s a dumb-ass ecstasy in driving downhill, you know.”

  Steven’s large, red, shaggy head popped Muppet-like from the cab. His hand made a stop sign. My father pulled the Subaru over and set the parking brake. In the rearview mirror, I could see the truck shudder to a halt, the furniture still in the bed, the bungees still in place.

  Steven climbed out. My father revived his allegro on the door.

  “Hola,” my father said. “How’s that old machine getting along?”

  Steven hustled to the open window, bent, and caught his breath.

  “Dude, I have got your furniture back there, and you are driving one hundred fucking miles per hour down this motherfucking hill. This may never have occurred to you, but when you’ve got a payload on a truck, when you’re driving and carrying something, you drive a little slower than if you’re in a Subaru, taking a family vacation.”

  My father stared straight ahead.

  “Slow down,” suggested Steven, his hands on his knees. “Slow . . . the . . . fuck . . . down.”

  Crickets. My father took the blue money order from his shirt pocket and unfolded it. In two precise and deliberate motions, he ripped it into four pieces. He threw the quadrants in Steven’s face. The Subaru spit gravel through the air. My father yanked down the parking brake as Steven kicked at the rear door.

  I stuck my head out the window, my hair blowing into a veil aro
und my face. I saw Alexis slip down from the truck and scrape after us.

  “Hey, buddy!” She coned her hands in front of her mouth. “We’ve got your furniture back here!” She toppled over to one knee, and her hand landed hard on the gravel road. Steven circled back to the place where she had fallen. The two of them shrank into action figures.

  I stared at my father.

  “I don’t need it,” he said. “Furniture’s old, not worth much.”

  Clearly, this was a lapse in understanding. I worked up the courage to open my mouth. “They’re poor people.”

  “If he’s telling me to fuck off already, Son, that’s not the beginning of a good business relationship. I’d lose money.”

  My father was not alive to the implications of his behavior. My duty was clear.

  “We’re privileged,” I said. “We should lose money.”

  He ran a hand through his beard. “Dear Saint Josh. This is your close friend God. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  I made a cry of righteous anguish. “The least we can do is help them with our stuff.”

  “Too late now.”

  I listened to the wind rush through the windows. I remembered Khadijah in her anarchist ensemble and got an instant, nearly painful erection, coupled with a lovelier, heart-based yearning, thinking of her chipped black nail polish, her unponytailed hair thick against the back of her gray sweatshirt, and immediately knew what I would do. I would continue to transgress as she had shown me how. I would be worthy of her, so that someday we would have sex many times, married in our apartment with cacti in the windows near downtown Northampton. “Let me out,” I said.

  “You going Dances with Wolves on me, Son?”

  “I’m utterly serious.”

  He thumped the wheel with the palm of his hand. “Right away, young massah.” The brakes squealed. He jerked the wheel to the right and the car slid halfway onto the blowing grass. We didn’t look at each other.