Read Online Jernigan by David Gates - Free Book Online Page A

broken down on the way to somewhere and that since he was stranded in the area he’d put on his show that night for—I forget what he’d ask, but something that would’ve been really a lot of money then. And they really used to fall for it. And he’d comb his hair the exact way Webb Pierce did and go in there with this real fancy cowboysuit on and sing, you know, ‘There Stands the Glass’ and everything.”
    “He actually got away with this?” I said.
    “For years,” she said. “And that was money he would never spend. He used to say Webb Pierce put me through college.”
    “He made that much on this thing?”
    “No,” she said. “He always liked to exaggerate. But I guess it might have covered a year or something.”
    “He still alive?” I said.
    She tapped her lips with index and middle finger. “Two packs of Luckies a day,” she said. “I really wish Clarissa could’ve known him.”
    It wasn’t until late afternoon that we got around to filling brown plastic trash bags with paper plates and beer cans. I emptied one can into a withered geranium in a pot on the mossy back steps, figuring kill or cure. And wondering if I’d be around to learn which. The kids had come back by this time, but they’d gone right up to Clarissa’s room. Of course. I spun the bags, twisting the mouths into tight ropy spirals which I tied with paper-clad lengths of wire. Then we dragged them out by the mailbox.
    “Garbage day isn’t till Wednesday,” she said. “I hope the raccoons don’t get into this stuff.”
    “What’s today anyhow?”
    “Sunday.”
    “Really Sunday?” I said. “It feels so much like a Sunday I thought it couldn’t actually be one.” A feeling I’d forgotten: Sunday with a wife, and work the next day. “Jesus,” I said. “Is that twisted thinking or what?”
    “Not really,” she said. “Do you always assume everything you think is so crazy nobody can understand it?”
    Odd that after all that bed it made me angry that she was getting personal. Odd unless you thought about it.
    “Hmm,” I said. “Am I a snob, in other words?”
    We were about that close to getting nasty.
    Then she laughed. “I would never suggest such a thing.”
    By six o’clock I’d had enough of it. I pleaded chores, unspecified, to finish up around the house before another workweek began, then knocked on the door of Clarissa’s room. After much rattling andclicking of bolts, the door opened to the exact width of the girl’s white face. “Daniel?” she said. And his face appeared above hers.
    “Petals on a wet black bough,” I said. The faces didn’t look any more or any less blank. “Listen, Danny?” I said. “I’ve got to get back to the hyacenda.” Now, where hyacenda came from was one of Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories, where Pat is writing a western movie and gets hacienda wrong. Ext. Long Shot of the Plains. Buck and Mexicans approaching the hyacenda . One more of my obscure things that Danny had no way of understanding. He probably thought it was really hyacenda. “I’ll see you back there, what, before eleven, huh? And if you want to come home for dinner we’ll call Domino’s or something, okay?” Don’t be fooled by how casual this all sounds: I was issuing a command.
    “Okay,” he said, looking down and away. I was sorry for him, being ordered around by his father, however collegially, in front of his girlfriend. Or perhaps he was embarrassed by a belated sense of having gone too far with his cheeky little thumbs-up this morning.
    Back downstairs, Martha stuck a cassette in my shirt pocket. A long kiss at the door—each bending a knee to insinuate a thigh between the other’s thighs, a voucher for unfinished sexual business—and I was out of there.
    The house looked, as I pulled into the driveway, the way a house looks if you’ve been away for a month: that is, the angles and proportions had gone all funny. Or something. Maybe just more distant than I’d expected, as if