Call Me Home (7 page)

Leary smiled. “Just get ready to work,” he said. “Walk around. Town's close enough. A few bars. Start a tab if you want, with Mary, tell her I said it's okay.”

“I'm eighteen,” Jackson said. Lame, he thought. Exceptionally, zealously lame. At least everyone would assume that he'd graduated high school already. He had a late August birthday and somehow it worked out so he didn't make the cut and was older than everyone in his class. Everyone in his class who was still there, rotting in the dingy airplane hangar that was Marysville-Pilchuck High School.

Leary shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He looked back into the gray dark of the semi cab. “Do whatever you want with this place. When we get more housing up, we'll try to move you. Pay's every Friday, and we've got a little bank in town that'll cash your checks.” He pointed to the road. “You need me, just head to town and ask for me. Everyone here is crew or knows the crew, okay?” He reached into the pocket of his canvas jacket and pulled out a crushed pack of cigarettes. He fumbled one out of the pack and pointed to Jackson's steel toes, his street kid insurance. “Wear those boots, tomorrow, and something warm.” Leary smiled again. “I'll be back in an hour or so with more supplies. You'll be all right?”

Jackson nodded. Leary brought him the sleeping bag and flashlight and a little battery-operated clock; he felt warm and grateful watching Leary drive away. His truck left narrow ruts in the soft dirt and birch bark around the parked truck cab. There were wolf's teeth of ice under the dirt.

The cab was in a pullout on a gravel road, a side road that ended in a clearing. He walked a little way up the main road and there was another clearing on the right. Two other semi cabs were pulled into the gravel there, but empty. Dark bosses, staring each
other down. They reminded him of toys he'd had when he was little. Transformers, things like that. Machines that were beasts, too.

He'd never had a place of his own, just the little bedroom on Firetrail Hill, which he'd shared with Lydia until the eighth grade. Then, after his father sawed the beds apart and moved Lydia to the study, his father demanded the bedroom doors be left constantly open. Jackson was too much of a liability. Who knew what little faggots did in their rooms alone? His father would walk the hall knocking doors back open. He was suspicious of Jackson before Jackson was suspicious of himself.

The day his mother and sister fled without him, leaving him in Tulalip, he could not stand to stay with his father, to be his conspirator. He couldn't stand to look at what he'd done: the two of them, father and son, the drunk and the toady, alone in the house. Instead he hitched to Randy's and sunk down in the basement there, not going to class, just watching the fish tanks, the fish dull and shedding skin and the film of old food on the top of the water. He drank the cheap beer that Randy's father bought for Randy and smoked Randy's leafy dry weed. His stomach hurt him, either the beer or the guilt. Both.

Jackson had stayed there for a few days, even though he sensed that Randy was frustrated with him. He tried to be obedient, to get his thoughts together. Each night he sat like an attentive puppy while Randy tuned into the radio show. It was a terrible feeling, he thought, to have exhausted even the people who have always exhausted you, to need to lean on them so badly. And so, it was only a week after his mother and Lydia left without him that he left again, too, hitching his way to Portland, for no reason other than that was where his ride let him off.

And now. He walked back to his strange truck-house. There was a little Honda generator on the floor, with extension cords snaking to the hot plate and a little icebox. A bare bulb hung in a metal cage; there were little round lights on each of the walls, too, and Jackson pressed one and it emitted a weak battery-operated glow. There was a row of cabinets under a narrow counter, and he
opened and shut the drawers – someone had left a box of plastic forks, half a dozen ketchup packets, and a porn magazine called
Creampie
. He opened his bag and took out his own meager housekeeping – a pair of good scissors and a knife; a photograph of himself with his mother and Lydia, on the beach, five years before; the watch and tie of Eric's; a little one-hitter that Randy had given him. He laid it all out and turned on the generator and watched the appliances come to life, and that was it, he supposed; he was home.

THEY WERE FINISHING
up on his third day. It was a liar sun – or that was what they called in it Washington, in the late spring, when it seemed like maybe the long winter was over, and you could stand in the weak light in the afternoon and feel warm, until five or six when it was gone and the cold settled back in. Jackson sweated all afternoon and now his T-shirt was cold and stiff under the arms. He was dragging trash to piles, where later he'd burn it once the rest of the men moved on. That seemed to be the heart of it – they did all the work and then he took the scraps and the shit and burned it all down. He swept up, wishing he had something – anything – in front of him besides lying in the dark truck cab, blinking a flashlight off and on when he heard the mice down in the wheel well.

Dave Riley was putting his tools away across the lot. He slammed the truck closed and headed toward Jackson, wiping his face with a towel. He kicked out one of the footlights that were trained up behind the beams. “You coming to the Longhorn?” he asked.

“Is that the bar in town?”

“Sure. You coming?”

The men on the crew liked to spend the hours between five and eight in the bar in town, drinking Old Milwaukie and talking about their wives. Riley didn't seem to notice that Jackson was barely eighteen if he was a day, and so Jackson shrugged. It's not like he had any real pride to lose at being kicked out, anyway. Riley and half the rest of the North crew had seen him fumble through
the back of the tool truck like the bonafide sissy he was, pulling out tools at random when they'd asked him for a Phillip's head. “Sure,” Jackson said.

“You need a ride?” Riley nodded over at his truck, a monster of a Silverado, probably worth twice as much as the house Jackson had grown up in.

“Nah,” Jackson said. It was a twenty or thirty minute walk to the main strip of Silver, but he liked the idea of having his moment of underage glory alone at the door, if the bartender kicked him out, without Dave Riley on hand. “I'm going to finish up. I'll see you there.”

Jackson waited until Riley's truck had pulled away, with Slow Honey and Don Newlon following in Newlon's little Toyota. It was cold. The lake outside was turning a dark color in the evening light, swallowing up what heat was left of the day. He stood at the edge of the A-frame – where those picture windows would be. Where some other family would eat and go to bed and get up and keep their own secrets.

He felt a little jump of excitement thinking about the Longhorn – if he could get in. The summer that Lydia turned six she'd suddenly stopped being interesting to his father – too many questions, too much new strength. She'd lost some shine to their father, and he'd turned briefly to Jackson. It was, Jackson realized now, the last and only time his father had showed any real interest in him. He was trying to believe that Jackson was who he wanted him to be. It was that summer that he'd taken Jackson to the bar with his friends – the little bar down on Lake Goodwin, plastic picnic tables and an assortment of liquor bottles that looked like they'd been stolen from someone's parents. His father drank too much and Jackson ate two orders of French fries and watched everyone – the regulars, the couple in the back shooting pool, the bartender with the blouse that gapped between the buttons, showing her worn-out bra. He couldn't explain it, but there was something he loved about it. There was a bar for every loneliness, he suspected. A bar for every sad story, and one for every joy. All of those
things, contained in the shifting glass, the water rings and fingerprints across old wood, the smell of sweat.

He'd been around and briefly inside the bars in Portland, but there he was someone else, a secret and a shame. All he'd wanted in those days with his father, sitting in the cigarette smoke that floated off a forgotten butt in an ashtray, was to belong to his father, to belong in that world and be held by it, and for a moment it had seemed like he did and he was. His father had gathered him up under his outstretched arm, rough wool against his cheek, and they'd gone back out to the car. All the way home, the painted lines weaved across the road.

He lost his way briefly on the way to the Longhorn, where the dozed roads met up with the strip of town; he walked too far around the lake and then had to walk back up through town. All of the little shops were closed, except for a little bar called Pete's – it looked smaller than the Longhorn and like if you needed to look at it twice you probably weren't invited. There were plenty of cars outside the Longhorn, though, and he could hear the jukebox.

Whatever scene he imagined – Minor Kicked Out of Local Bar, Loses Job He Was Never Qualified For! – faded away. Dave Riley called him over and made an invisible sign to the waitress and suddenly there was beer in front of him, and he was being introduced to some of the men who worked on the other sites, and it really was that bar dream, then. He took off his jacket and his arms had streaks of dust, and the guy everyone called Slow Honey clapped him hard on the back. He drank from the beer.

“You make any money today, Honey?” someone asked. “We've got a load of scrap and rebar down on eight.”

Honey tipped the brim of his hat up. “Yup,” he said.

Dave was sitting beside him and he put a hand on Jackson's shoulder. Jackson started from the warm weight of it. “Honey's our not-for-profit junkman. He makes his own little fortune picking off our scrap.” Jackson had seen Honey in his pickup hauling a trailer of scrap metal, twisted parts. Honey didn't seem slow; but then, Jackson thought, it was hard to tell with the quiet ones. He
hadn't spoken more than a few words in the last few days and they probably thought he was slow, too. Better to be a thought a fool than proved a fool, he thought.

Newlon, the crew boss, bought a round for everyone. The conversation dipped and swung, words like the tools themselves, the raw material of work. Rebar, scrap, plywood. Skill saw. Forms. The sturdy little blocks of names: Ed, Don, Dick, Joe – Jack, he thought, he would be Jack. Who had it good, who didn't. The concrete guys, who had it easy. All of their scrap settling down in the foundation, roughneck gypsies, backfilling dirt and moving on. The beer was dark and bitter and Jackson let it wash over him, conversation, the comfort of being unnoticed, of being part of a group of men who worked.

“I was driving one of the big old one tons, thirty-year-old dump truck things with the hydraulic lift –”

“She had tits like this –”

“– just hit the switch and dumped it all on that brand new Lexus –”

“You just couldn't believe she was his sister –”

He tried to name each man at the table and couldn't. Don Newlon was the boss, he knew that – olive-skinned, long and lean, that dark beard. He looked away. Dick, Ed, Eli – they were construction, still snowed with sawdust that fell from their clothes to the bar floor. Joe was the one next to him – lanky and mean looking. He had a scar over his left eye.

“My first summer,” Joe was saying to Don, “that bastard was up on the roof and I was down below, cutting whatever he yelled out and handing it up to him. I was on the ground with the plywood and it had just rained – I'm standing in a pool of water and it's hell. I'm dying, and I'm scared as shit because it's my first job and he's such a bastard, and I keep fucking up because that saw is killing my hands, and finally he gets pissed and comes down and grabs the saw and nearly drops it, like
What the fuck?
There was a current running through that fucker. That was two hours I was getting electrocuted because I was so damn afraid of him.”

Don laughed and shook his head. He turned toward the bartender and swept his hand in a circle. Another round. He was a good boss, Jackson thought. He could tell by the way the men talked in front of him. And Ed, the one at the end of the table. Ed was funny, but he was good, Jackson thought. He finished his beer and picked up the new one. He'd never had beer that tasted so good, just his father's cans of dishwater and whatever he could get on the street. Ed had strong arms and bowlegs, and Jackson liked him.

“I was driving a quad, two guys beside me,” Ed was saying. “I just looked ahead of me and there was a killdeer in my path and she got up on her legs and wouldn't run, got up on her wings in my path, then, and one of the guys gets a rock. He says, ‘I'll kill it,' and I say, ‘I'll kill you.'” He took a long drink. “Can you imagine being that small, and something as big as us comes around, and standing your ground? Jesus.”

Jackson felt a kind of humming in his chest, a tender relief, the beating of invisible wings. The bird in the path. The brave bird and the tender guard. “That was one of hell of a bird,” Eli said, and the other men nodded in agreement. They weren't like his father, he thought. They weren't like his father at all.

Really, when he looked back on it, he had decided to get drunk. “Fuck it, let's get drunk,” he said. And everyone had raised their glasses up like,
Of course
, but also like he had made a wonderful new suggestion, like he might in fact be their leader – or, if not their leader, he amended, in the bathroom, staring at the penis someone had carved into the wall above the urinal – at least one of them. One of the guys. He swayed a little at the urinal and laughed at himself. There was something he was supposed to be thinking – something he had been thinking – about the kind of person he was, the kind of person that he had been. All his life and none of it made sense together. He was a construction worker. A cleanup boy, but still. A construction cleanup boy. A construction cleanup boy out with the guys. And the Longhorn had such good music! And such good people! He shook and zipped and launched
himself toward the table and this new fortune, his little family of outlaws, his friends.