Greenville (22 page)

By now they have reached the edge of the Pine Barrens, and the boy drops back to follow Jimmy into the scrub. All that grows here is the dwarf white pine that gives the Barrens its name, a tree stunted by thin sandy soil and twisted by the Atlantic winds. The occasional chokecherry is equally gnarled, and splotched with lichen and mold besides, and close to the ground is a tough sharp grass that will cut your ankles if you’re not careful. That’s all there is, besides the litter of brown and white paper, cellophane, empty beer and soda bottles. In the falling light the contorted shadows of the trees make the place even more inhospitable, and the fact that it is a state park seems like a bureaucratic irony. The pines are too short and sticky with
pitch to climb, their needles too thin to provide substantial shade during the summer; the chokecherries won’t kill you if you eat them, but they will make you sick if you manage to keep them down. The only games the neighborhood children ever play here involve hiding, or violence, or death. The boy has been in it thousands of times before—taking the roundabout way to school, to work—but never on this errand. He knows about it, of course, not so much from Jimmy as from Duke, who never lost an opportunity to deride the boy’s drunken father. The Barrens abuts the back of the hospital grounds as well as two or three bars, and for the past few years it has been his older brothers’ summer task to find the old man where he has passed out on his way to or from one or another of these establishments, and lift whatever’s left of his paycheck from his pockets.

Don’t know why she sent us out so early.

Huh?

He don’t usually leave the bars till after dark. Says he feels safer looking for a foxhole when he knows nobody can see him.

You talk to him?

Sometimes. He’s woken up once or twice. Sometimes we have to follow him around too, until he finally passes out. Usually we keep outta sight, but if he sees us then we gotta go into the bars with him.

I hate going in them bars.

Jimmy shrugs.

You get used to it. Sometimes Duke even gets him to buy us drinks without him realizing.

You drink?

Don’t sound so shocked. I’m sixteen years—sshh!

Someone is crashing through the brush a ways ahead of them. As the boy peers through the shadows he sees they are closer to the hospital than he’d realized. Through the feathery curlicues of twisted pine limbs he can see the back of the dark building against the umber sky like a stage flat blocking out the light behind it.

Roll me over, in the
clover
—

It’s Dad all right, Jimmy whispers. Your dad, I mean. Damn. What?

He’s just leaving now. Unless he took something from the supply cabinet at work it’ll be a couple hours before he’s down.

Lay me down, roll me over and do it again!

The boy laughs quietly.

Does that sound like a sober man to you?

Jimmy shrugs.

I’m starving.

The boy nods. He’s hungry too.

Can’t we just ask him or something?

Jimmy makes a face at him.

We talking about the same Lloyd Peck? He’d sell you for a bottle, Dale, and don’t you forget it.

The boy’s stomach rumbles audibly. He wishes he’d thought to slip an orange into his pocket before surrendering the bag to his mother. To top it off the wind’s coming up as the sun goes down, and he is suddenly cold in his undershirt and bare feet. He is thinking he should have worn Donnie’s letter jacket when Jimmy hisses another sshh! The old man’s path has suddenly veered in their direction, and the boys duck behind a clump of chokecherries.

He’s going to Jack’s first, Jimmy whispers. C’mon, let’s go.

The boy follows Jimmy. The sandy soil, strewn with pine needles, muffles their footsteps, but they have to watch out for fallen branches. The old man takes no such precautions. You would think he was hacking his way through the jungle with a machete.

Roll me o-o-o-ver, in the clo-o-o-ver—

He sings in a loud voice, exuberantly off-key. A voice full of self-mockery but also self-love. At some point the old man embraced his role as a drunk, and he plays the part with relish if not flair or originality, even when there’s no audience around. He can stumble in at three A.M. with the best of them, the boy thinks, miss chairs when he sits down, wet his pants in his sleep and point out the stain to his own children and laugh at the pathetic spectacle of himself. He starts singing Auld Lang Syne in the first week of December and doesn’t relinquish it until Valentine’s Day. You’d almost think he was
Irish
.

Jimmy stops suddenly, and the boy comes up hard on his heels.

Damn it Dale! Jimmy whispers. Watch out!

Why’d you stop?

The old man answers for him. In the quiet evening the boy hears the faint sound of urine striking the trunk of a tree.

Glass clinks against glass as the old man fishes in his pocket. The urine stream wavers as the old man fumbles with the top of his bottle—Oops, a little on the shoe, Lloyd, hee hee—and then he drinks and pees steadily.

There we go, my pretty pine tree. A little drink for you, and a little drink for me.

Jesus Christ, Jimmy says. Je-sus Christ.

When he has finished the old man stows himself and stumbles on and the boys follow him. The wet tree steams slightly in the falling temperature, and they give it wide berth.

When they reach the bar the old man stops at the edge of the forest to compose himself. It’s as if he knows they are watching: he pantomimes straightening a tie, slicking his hair back in a mirror, then sets off across the back parking lot with a casual but unsteady stride, as if he is just out for an evening stroll through a slalom course. There are a dozen cars in the bar’s back lot, the battered vehicles of men hiding from wives or creditors, and the old man pats the flecked chrome on the grille of an ancient enormous Packard with a coffin-shaped snout as though it were some shy Labrador come up to lick his hand. There is a clink when his hand strikes the grille, and it takes the boy a moment to realize it is the old man’s wedding ring.

Jimmy walks to a fallen pine and settles down on it. His actions have the air of familiarity, as if he has sat on this tree many times before. The tree is close to the bar’s dumpster, which exudes a stale odor of rust and beer.

What do we do now? the boy says.

We wait. You’re lucky. It looks like he got some syrup from work. They don’t usually let him stay more than an hour when he’s been hitting the syrup.

An hour!

Maybe an hour. Maybe two.

Two hours! I don’t believe it!

Jimmy shrugs.

He’s your dad.

The boy looks over at his half brother. He is sitting with his
feet up on the trunk, his knees bent, untying and tying the laces of his new boots.

Do you ever—

Jimmy looks up at him sharply.

What?

The boy shakes his head.

Nothing.

Say it.

Do you ever … I mean, have you … asked Ma …

What? Jimmy is squinting in the dim light. His nose is thinner than ours, the boy thinks. It’s not a Peck nose. Not a Dundas nose either, for that matter. Come on, Dale, spit it out.

The boy shoves his hands in his pockets.

I was just wondering, you know, if you’d ever asked Ma. Who your dad was.

Jimmy squints into the boy’s face as if looking for a sign that he is making fun, one of his hands already balled into a fist. The two boys stare at each other for a long moment, and then Jimmy’s face drops and his hand relaxes. He peels a strip of gummy bark off the trunk he is sitting on, wads it up and throws it into the forest.

I don’t suppose it matters.

No, I guess not.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Nothing. I mean, what’s it matter, right?

Jimmy is rubbing his hands together to ball up the pitch that has stuck to them so he can pick it off. He rubs, and picks, and rubs, and picks.

She’s a fertile woman, our ma.

The boy laughs.

That’s for sure.

Thought she was done after Edi, but then she started up again with Lois.

And Lance. And Gregory.

Who knows how many more she’s got in her.

A car pulls into the parking lot then, and the boys sit in silence until its driver has gone into the bar. When the boy looks back at Jimmy, he is still picking at the pitch on his hands like a zoo monkey picking at flies.

You’re better off not knowing anyway. At least this way you can pretend he’s not a drunk.

Jimmy pinches at his hand.

Yeah, that’s probably true.

Hey, the boy says then. Hey, you wanna know something?

Jimmy continues to pick at his hands for a moment, then flings them away in disgust. He looks up at the boy.

What?

Did you know Dad, my dad was married before? Before he was married to Ma?

Jimmy peers at him, not quite disbelieving but definitely suspicious.

Think about it, the boy says. He was twenty-nine when I was born. Who waits till they’re twenty-nine to get married, have their first kid?

Or the other way around.

The two boys laugh. If nothing else, they’ll always have this in common.

Ma was nineteen when she had Duke, Jimmy says then. He
looks up at the boy. But who cares, right? It’s not our, our … He struggles for a word. Not our responsibility, right? Not our problem. It don’t have nothing to do with us.

The boy looks at his half brother. He had been about to mention his namesake, but suddenly he can’t face the thought of Jimmy saying that that has nothing to do with him either. That it doesn’t affect him, doesn’t matter. Because even though weeks might pass between thoughts of the first Dale Peck, the boy still knows Jimmy’s wrong. He just doesn’t know why.

Yeah, right, he says to Jimmy. It’s just, you know, weird. To think that if things had worked out between Dad and his first wife, you know, we wouldn’t be here.

You
wouldn’t, Jimmy says, his attention already drawn back to the pitch on his hands. What isn’t weird in this family?

It’s almost fully dark now. The boy can’t believe Jimmy can see anything on his hand. He is just picking at them for something to do. He picks at his hands and at his shoes and then again at his hands, and neither boy owns a watch, so they don’t know how much time has gone by when the old man emerges from the bar’s back door. A trickle of music announces his exit, and then a faint but cheerful See ya later Lloyd! and then the old man stumbles out into the parking lot. When the door slams closed behind him he stops suddenly, standing up straight and putting his hand to his chest as though he’s been shot, and then he relaxes and shuffles into the Barrens.

Close one, he says, and laughs quietly and pats himself on the shoulder.

The boys hide behind the dumpster until the old man has disappeared into the trees, then set out after him. Darkness and the
need for silence slow them, and the boy can hear the old man’s crashing shambling progress grow farther away.

C’mon, hurry, he says to Jimmy. We’re losing him.

Relax, Dale. We’ll just wait and see which way he’s going and then head him off.

A branch snaps under the boy’s foot then. He feels it before he hears it, its springy resistance beneath his bare sole, and then the crack erupts into the dark forest like a little bomb, and when the sound fades the boy realizes the old man has stopped up ahead of them.

The boy peers through the darkness. The trees are all black spirals, like crazy straws sucking up tar, and visible only against the faint haze of emerging stars.

Who’s there?

The boy looks toward the voice. That stooped shadow, wavering slightly? Is that the old man, or just a squat pine shivering in the breeze? The boy can’t tell.

Vernon, the old man calls. That you?

The boy wants to ask who Vernon is but doesn’t risk speaking. But Jimmy seems to understand, and shrugs an I-don’t-know.

Vernon? the old man calls again. Come on, Vernon, don’t be sore. I was only joking back there.

A gust blows a few blades of grass over the boy’s foot like a spider’s delicate stalking, and the boy nearly jumps out of his skin. He suddenly realizes he is terrified and elated at the same time, though he has no idea why. He wants to scream and giggle both, but Jimmy has his finger over his lips.

Sshh.

Hello? the old man calls, and then: Jimmy? Is that you
Jimmy? He laughs, Come on out, son, you don’t have to hide from your old man.

Something happens to Jimmy when the old man calls to him. Longing and rage seem to compete in his body. His hands curl into tight fists, but his bottom lip trembles and sticks out as if he is going to cry. For the second time that day the boy thinks of his namesake, the first Dale Peck. Does he too long to hear the word
son
from a father’s mouth? Does he long to hear it, and kill the man who says it?

Jimmy’s breath is so loud through his nose that the boy thinks the old man must hear him for sure.

Hello? the old man calls one more time, and then a moment later he resumes walking. All righty then, he calls as he stumbles and crashes his way through the underbrush. Come and get me if you want me.

The stooped shadow was a pine after all. The old man was several feet to the left.

It takes a long moment for Jimmy to relax and then they follow the old man for a few minutes more and then Jimmy hisses, Damn!

What?

He’s heading toward Carl’s. He must be on a real bender. We’re gonna be out here all night. Be lucky if we get anything off him at all. He pauses, looking over at the boy. It’s hard to tell with just the stars and low moon for illumination, but the boy thinks Jimmy is looking at him with pity. Ma’s gonna whip you for sure.

Where does the idea come from? The boy can’t say. It is just there, as fully formed as a slide projector image appearing on the blank wall of his mind.

You still carry around that penknife?

What? Yeah, why?

Give it to me, the boy says. And take your arms out of your sleeves.

Wha—

Up ahead the old man’s voice reaches them, faint and warbling.

Oh my darling, oh my darling—