by Megan Kruse
“Sick,” Randy said. “Wish I could do that.”
“Yeah,” Jackson said. Jackson knew his friendship with Randy had something to do with Jackson being a fag and everyone assuming that Randy was, too, but he and Randy never talked about Chris, or about Jackson being a fag, for that matter. Randy talked about girls and seemed not to notice or care when Jackson didn’t join in.
Randy brought Jackson from the bus station to his little house near the high school. The fields flipped by. It was still early spring but it might as well have been the dead of Washington winter. Still green, but dark green. Black-green. A living lake bottom, a mildewed constitution.
The house was boxy and collapsing, rain-beaten. Randy had the basement apartment to himself. It was cold like a tomb, damp and snaky. There was a brick and board shelf of books on the paranormal, and a radio with the antennae covered in tinfoil – presumably, Jackson thought, so he could catch the radio program even ten feet underground. Two milky fish tanks. “Looks good in here,” Jackson said, and Randy grinned. The only lamp had a cloth thrown over it, making the whole place seem underwater.
Randy wanted to show him some computer game that Jackson didn’t understand – didn’t try to understand. They sat in the aquarium light of Randy’s room until six or seven, and he watched Randy maneuver a guerrilla fighter through a dark forest. Randy bit his lip and pounded his fist on the desk when the guerrilla was ambushed. A saucer of ash and resin clattered to the floor. “They rig it,” Randy said. “They rig the fucking thing so you can’t actually get to the eighth level without paying somebody for a tip. There’s a call line and everything.” He wiped his hands on his pants, glanced at the clock, and stood up. “AM 530,” he said. “Man.” He went to the radio and flipped it on. Static, a distant, low voice. A woman was saying, “The refrigerator just keeps opening on its own.”
Randy sat in a torn-up armchair and pulled out a bag of weed. He rolled some loose leaves into a crooked joint and lit it. “I don’t know about the appliance stuff,” Randy said, “I’m out on a limb about it.” He took a long drag of the joint and held it, blew it out in a long trail of smoke. “Too many variables. Too many technological flaws.” He handed the joint to Jackson.
The announcer was soothing. “How disturbing.” How disturbing, thought Jackson. His head felt a little swimmy. The eggs are ruined again. The mayonnaise has turned. “Have you had any other problems in the house? Anything out of place?”
Randy leaned back in the armchair and crossed his arms. “That’s the real test. It’s like diagnosing a disease when you have to have a certain number of symptoms.”
Jackson nodded. The woman said that the arms of her coat often appeared to wave at her from their hangers in the dark. The announcer made a low noise of interest. Jackson liked Randy’s basement room. He always liked places where no one else came. The back of a warehouse, the cab of an abandoned pickup. Anyplace where no one would know. He thought of the empty locker room, of Chris.
Their whole thing – that was what it was, a thing – was muted in his memory. The bat sounds of swimmers underwater, interrupted with an occasional hand job. He wanted Chris to like him, desperately, but he couldn’t say why. That was the bigger problem. Chris didn’t like him desperately, but Jackson was willing to pour himself into whatever vessel it took to make himself wanted or wantable. He would lay everything out on the table in front of Chris – a desperate banquet of need. And now what did it even matter? Chris was out there, standing under the locker room shower, kicking off his Speedo, throwing it down against the tiles, the water beating against the broad of his back, running down the roads of muscle, and Jackson was going to be stuck in Everett, in secret, alone.
When the announcer faded off for the commercial break, Randy turned to Jackson. “What’s going on with your dad, man?” He was looking very intently at crumbs of weed, trying to herd them onto another rolling paper. “I heard it was bad.”
“What did you hear?” Jackson asked.
“Ah – nothing, really,” Randy said. “Just that he … you know. Hit her a bunch. Broke the windows.”
Jackson picked up a paperclip from the table, bent it open, twisted it. “Yeah, well, don’t believe everything you hear,” he said.
The announcer came back on and they sat in silence for a while. “All of my sheep were gone, a man said. The whole farm, lifted up in the night.” The announcer said gravely, “This is not as uncommon as you may think.”
He ditched Randy at eight. “Dude,” Randy said. “Are you sticking around? You staying with your old man?”
“Yeah,” Jackson said. Later, he wouldn’t know why he’d said it, why he’d come to Marysville at all. His life – and his mother’s life, and Lydia’s – pivoting on that stupid “Yeah,” accidental, inevitable.
“You want a ride?” Randy’s eyes were bloodshot. His T-shirt was torn a little and a patch of his soft chest was showing.
“Yeah,” Jackson said. “Thanks, man.” Randy led him out of the cave of the room and followed him into the wet air.
The pool was a mile from Randy’s, and it was seven miles after that to his father’s house in Tulalip. His father’s house, his mother’s motel. Jackson hoped Lydia wasn’t worried about him. Chris always practiced at the pool from four until seven. One night Jackson had shown up at the pool just around closing, and they’d hid in the locker room until the janitors had locked up. Chris lifted Jackson up onto his shoulders, naked, and threw him over and over again in the shallow end. It was dark and he had to keep clambering over Chris’s head, clutching at his hair. They didn’t talk about it, just kept laughing and doing it again. He could have done that forever. They hadn’t even slept together – they never did, not really, but he didn’t care. He would have done that for the rest of his life. The short flight through the air, the lukewarm water, again and again.
Randy slowed by the pool under the sodium lights as though he knew. There were no cars in the parking lot. Of course not. What had Jackson thought, that because he was there, the pool would suddenly stay open? That Chris would be slicing through the water or sitting on the pool deck waiting? He had the feeling of someone having come back to see an empty house, someplace he used to live. He wanted to feel what he used to feel, but there was nothing. His whole night was already mapped out – Randy’s aquatic basement, the empty pool, his father. He knew he would go and he went.
His father’s car was gone when he made it to the house. The mobile home. There was a trash bag taped over the window his mother had sprawled through, a week ago now. A sickening, slow fall that he had watched from the hallway, his throat tight so that he almost couldn’t breathe. “Promise me you will never get involved,” his mother had told him. “It will make it worse.” She’d hung over the side of the frame, at the waist, where his father had thrown her, and then he came up behind her, kicked out the rest of the window, and watched her fall the four feet to the ground. Jackson had taken Lydia back to his room and held her there for the rest of the night. He’d gotten up once to throw up, hating everything, his father most of all.
That was their last fight, the one that had landed him and his mother and Lydia in Everett, and it had started with him. It made him angry at himself, and at his father, and at his mother. He’d said something about moving to Seattle for school, Seattle Central Community College. His mother had smiled. “There’s queers up on Capitol Hill,” his father said. “It’s where the queers go.” He looked at Jackson, a half smile on his face.
His mother put her hand on his father’s arm. “It’s a good school,” she said. “And it’s a little early to be talking about this, anyway.” It was too early, Jackson had thought, thinking about the weepy guidance counselor and the column of shitty grades on his transcript.
“I’ll go where I want,” Jackson had said, and shrugged. And how had it gone from there? The loud confusion, his mother jumping to his defense. The window. Lydia in the back bedroom, chewing on her hands.
His mother s
at in a deadly calm for a few days. She listened over and over to a Bellamy Brothers record, which only made Jackson feel more certain that they were about to leave. Let your love flow. Each time before there had been an uncomfortable incongruous quality to the days – “Don’t forget your coat,” he remembered her telling Lydia once at noon on a ninety-degree day before they loaded up the car and took off for three weeks in Carnation.
Jackson knew they were going to go, he could feel it, and so he went down to the pool one night and found Chris. “I might be gone for a while,” he said. Chris had barely acknowledged him. Jackson gave him a round wooden box he’d turned on a lathe in shop class. Inside he’d slipped – he couldn’t even believe this now – a lock of his hair. He hated to think about it. There was no way to make it not awful.
He took a beer from the fridge – empty otherwise, except for mayonnaise, a carton of eggs, and an open bag of chips that his dad probably put there when he was drunk. He sat down and turned on the television, trying to pretend he was someone else – a guy at home. Watching a little TV. Drinking a beer. The news was less and less interesting. Someone’s tractor had slid into a ditch. There were too many animals for the local shelter. The key in the lock. “Hello?” His father.
“Jack,” his father said. Jackson could see he was drunk. His pants were unbuckled – it used to drive his mother crazy that his father would piss in the yard – and he looked at Jackson and smiled. “My boy.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“Where you been?”
“Around. Came back to see you.”
His father smiled. It was disarming, that smile. He had a shadowy face, eyes sunk deep under his brow, but then that hard, bright smile. One of his ears stuck out and when he smiled it made him seem goofy and disheveled. Jackson felt relieved. He wanted it to be normal, as though his mother and Lydia were just off somewhere shopping or at an appointment. No questions, just easy.
His father took a beer from the fridge and brought another to Jackson. He sat down and put his legs up on the coffee table. He wasn’t a big man, but he was tall and strong. His arms were muscled and the table groaned under his heavy legs, his work boots. “Nothing on the news these days but shit,” he said.
“Somebody put their tractor in a ditch,” Jackson said.
His father laughed loudly. “This is good, Jack,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
He smelled like sawdust and beer. “How’s your sister?”
“Fine.”
“Your mother? How’s she?”
“She’s fine.”
“Sorry you had to see that quarrel.”
Quarrel, Jackson thought, was not a word he’d ever heard his father use before. He shrugged again and drained his beer. He felt a terrible guilt for a moment, thinking of his mother. Her new blonde hair. She was probably lying on the motel bed right then. Trusting him. Rain spattered against the plastic that covered the window.
“Where you been staying?” his father asked. “Someplace safe, right?”
“It’s safe,” Jackson said. He looked down into his beer.
“I hope your mother hurries up and heads home,” his father said darkly. “You better leave her number here. We should chat, Amy and me.”
“No, Dad.” He looked at a spot on the wall, where a picture had been. A hazy not-there mark. The news had gone off and there was some crime show playing.
His father was quiet for a while, watching the fuzzy picture on the television. Jackson shook one of his father’s cigarettes from the pack on the coffee table and lit it. L&Ms. His father raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. The smoke curled up and then hung like a veil around the yellow lamp. The beer was making him sleepy, and he knew he shouldn’t be here, but at the same time it felt like the only place in the world he knew. There had been times when they’d been happy. He and his father and his mother. Less when Lydia was born, but that was only because things were harder. Money was tighter. Where had it gone? To shoes and food, according to his father. To Christmas presents.
His father opened another beer and handed one to Jackson. There was something on the television – the crime show, the victim had been camping. “Do you remember when we went camping?” his father asked. “When we used to go?”
Jackson remembered a river, wide and brown, moving slowly. It couldn’t have been Washington, or at least not the western half of the state. His father’s shorts rolled up around his thighs, the languid air, the water warm and torpid. All evening the moon had wallowed in the oily water and his father had played the guitar while his mother sang, mournful, laughing. Jackson was small but still he was allowed to stand sunk to his neck in the river.
They had slept there on the bank, on camp mats, the mud bank strewn with crockery and beer cans. All night long mosquitos whined in his ears and bats swung across the sky. They had lost a suitcase in the water and found it days later, shored up in ragweed and briar. And there had been a motorbike – before? after? – and then a summer rain, and his father had driven, and his mother sat on the back, and Jackson fit between them so he could see only narrow lines of sky and ground above and below his mother’s grasp. The water had come so quickly. He felt his mother’s hands pulling him closer, and his cheek was against the soaked cloth of his father’s shirt. He pulled his feet higher. He could see nothing, not the lights up ahead, not the trees washing free from their webbed roots, not the ground slipping away.
Jackson burrowed into the sunken couch cushion. He felt a relief that he’d spend the night in his own room, his tiny bed. His father had built bunks for him and Lydia, and then, four years ago, he’d taken a chainsaw and split them apart, shoved Lydia’s half into the study. Jackson had carefully decorated his room, finally free of the schizophrenic décor: his music posters, her stuffed bear in its pink overalls. Not that his music choices weren’t on the nelly side – at thirteen, he’d hung a poster of Reba McEntire, in her big hair days, and then that picture of Kenny Rogers from the cover of The Gambler, staring straight ahead, laying his money on the stacked poker table while a crowd of burlesque dancers and socialites crowd around him. There was something about that – the beard, the steely gaze, the vest. Jackson had nursed a long fantasy starring Kenny Rogers as a kind bachelor, a plane crash that tragically takes his parents’ lives, his ultimate adoption by Rogers.
The adoption fantasy didn’t start until the fighting did – or at least until he knew about the fighting. He didn’t remember any problems until after Lydia was born, but maybe that was just because there was no one else to watch out for.
Jackson was aware, after a while, of his father looking at him. He felt uneasy. A few minutes later, his father flipped a beer cap across the room. It hit the wall and bounced off onto the carpet. “I saw that faggot friend of yours,” he said. “What’s-his-name.”
Chris. Where had his father seen him? Had he said anything? Jackson felt a sick anger at himself, thinking of that lock of hair. Why would he do that? Then anger rose at his mother in the Starlight with that slutty haircut. Jesus Christ.
“Yep,” his father said. “I saw him. Looked like shit.”
Later, Jackson wouldn’t understand why the idea of Chris and his father made him angry at his mother. And still – he’d sat on the sofa and thought about how she should be sorry for all of it – sorry that he was sitting here in the house they couldn’t come back to, and why couldn’t they just fix it up like adults, act like grown-ups, for Christ’s sake, instead of his mother dragging him and Lydia off to another shitty one-star motel to start another shitty one-star life, when this one was bad enough already?
Had his father asked? The television was still on, but Jackson couldn’t hear it and he only barely remembered saying it, but he had, exactly as though it was what he came to do: “Mom’s in Everett,” he said. “At the Starlight Motel. Room 121.”
There was a long silence. Jackson stood up, walked to the fridge, and opened another beer. He wanted to drink it all, before his father could. His fa
ther turned from the sofa and looked at him. He smiled slowly, that boozy, friendly smile. “You’re a good kid,” he said.
That was it. His father went off to bed and Jackson sat staring around the house.
He did nothing – he didn’t call the motel, he didn’t change the story. He watched his father set out in the morning in the truck, heading south to the Starlight. Jackson milled around the house, waiting. There was a bitter taste in his mouth. He thought about his mother’s new hair. The precise penmanship on the job applications, the way she’d said, “Well, that would be nice, a 10 percent discount for employees.” She had looked out the window of the motel into the parking lot and smiled. Jackson looked out the window now – outside, the ruts that the truck had left in the yard were filling with rainwater. The house smelled of cigarettes and mold. There was nothing here, he thought. Nothing to show that this place was theirs. Just the scuffed-up walls, the broken spine of the couch, his watery reflection in the window. It was a shame, he thought, to have a face this ugly in a place with so little beauty already.
Now, two months later and two hundred miles south, in Portland, he couldn’t piece together what he’d been thinking that night, why he’d done what he had. He and his mother and Lydia had almost been free. Instead, he’d ruined everything. His father brought his mother and sister back from the Starlight, and a week later, they left again without him, lighting out to anywhere, nowhere, leaving him in Tulalip with his father. … He couldn’t blame them; how could they trust him? He couldn’t trust himself. He’d sold them out to the man he hated most in the world, and by the end of the month he was on the streets in Portland. His whole life, small as it was, and he’d fucked it up. His mistake.