The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (33 page)

The snapshots show a ring of outsized mobile homes beached on cinder-block foundations, an assembly hall that promises more than it seems to deliver and a nineteenth-century house restored and painted like a wedding cake, and as for the rest? Half-finished foundations and a couple of huge, raw places in the earth, as if from excavations hastily filled and incompletely healed. Is this all? Jerome’s dad says that when it’s finished they will all live in contemporary houses with jutting redwood decks and crashing expanses of glass, but this will have to wait. Except for the self-styled mayor and leader of the group, the colonists are all stashed in those trailers, waiting for the town to rise. Their money always seems to be going into something else, but on the phone Jerome’s father is vague about what. If it isn’t the real thing, he thinks, then what’s the point?

It’s a strange place for Jerome, but here he is.

He has brought this on himself. Mostly he lives a normal life but when he goes home to visit he runs out of things to say. Caught short at Christmas, fresh out of words, he accidentally showed the brochure to his mom: mistake; the clouds around her head turned brown and started to boil.

“Lord,” she said, squinting at the pictures as if she expected to find Jerome’s dad walking around in them, this high, “what do you think is going on?”

Who was Jerome to tell her they were getting ready for the end of the world? He should have known she would figure it out: the prose, the strange device on the Bluemont sign.

“My God, he’s in a religious sect.”

“It’s his life.”

“He’s your father,” she said. So his mom has sent him to see about it. Although his folks have been divorced since he was ten, Jerome’s mom can’t stop worrying.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “It’s never over with a person, no matter what you tell yourself.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I just want you to go.”

What is he supposed to do, talk his dad out of this thing he’s joined and bring him back to life as they know it? He doesn’t think so. Is he supposed to be his mom’s advance man, preparing the way? Certainly not. She is with Barry now. They’re getting married in the spring.

“So, what?”

“A sect,” she said, dispatching him. “I just …” She was at a loss. “I just want you to see if he’s all right.”

Maybe, Jerome thinks, she wants to find out if he’s being held against his will.

He doesn’t think so. The place isn’t jail. It doesn’t have to be. Jerome reasons, perhaps because he was brought up Catholic, that all religion is a captivity, souls held tight against their will.

So, hey. It may be what they want. And hey, what if they turn out to be right? A strange, almost sexual undercurrent draws him to this outside possibility. So he is here for his own reasons. Probably he spends too much time trying to make sense of things.

The last thing he did before he got here was to check with her. Stopping at a diner outside Ogallala, he’d called his mother collect. “What if these people are right?”

“God is God, but this is crazy,” his mother said.

Still. But before he could raise this or demand marching orders she broke his heart with the good mom’s farewell formula. Good old Mom, dismissing him: “Be good. Have fun.”

Jerome wants to see his father, is afraid. It’s been so long; what are they to each other now? Although they have talked, phone calls from pads on the other side of town and in Maine and Morocco and San Francisco, he hasn’t seen his dad since the divorce. After years of bopping around, his father has
finally landed in one place. After a lot of confusion, his dad seems to be focused on one thing. Jerome is going to feel better about things if it turns out to be the right one.

Will his father be glad to see Jerome?

At least he’ll be surprised.

Jerome is less anxious than depressed, driving in. Bluemont does not look good even in brochures; in person, in mud season, it’s worse. In the waning spring light it looks not so much deserted as abandoned, the kind of place a reasonable God would turn his back on as too shabby to figure in any divine scheme. The tinny-looking pastel trailers are listing on their foundations, the assembly hall windows are boarded up against the winter cold and the wedding-cake house looks bedraggled and smirched. If these people are really onto something, there are no outward signs. Unless hardship is the whole thing.

My kingdom is not of this world
, Jerome thinks. Yeah, right.

Negotiating the guck, he’s grateful for the use of Barry’s well-kept Jeep Cherokee, which has four-wheel drive. At least he’ll be able to pull out of the mud when it’s time to leave. Getting out of the car, he’s also glad nobody’s around. He really doesn’t want to have to talk to anybody until he’s seen his dad. It seems important to meet this place on his father’s terms. He would like to wander around until he runs into his father, like, accidentally? Oh, hi.

When he gets out of the car, he’s surprised by a watery feeling in his shins. It turns out Jerome is scared to death of meeting the other colonists, or whatever, is afraid of what he’ll see rattling around behind the eyes. Flickering beyond this encounter with his father is the outside possibility of an absolute; the truth of this place, or his dad’s life in this place, is strictly between the two of them. Somebody is coming out of the assembly hall—a woman in a big plaid jacket, quilted pants; she has her wool hat pulled way down, so, good. Jerome slouches along the board sidewalk with his chin buried in his shoulder, trying to look as though he comes here every day. He is so preoccupied by the mud squelching between the boards and over the rubber toes of his Nikes that when they pass, he doesn’t even know whether the woman speaks. Automatically polite, he says hi and hurries on.

Finding his father turns out to be no problem. He is out behind his trailer splitting wood; at the right time Jerome just looks up and he’s there.

“Dad!” The wind, emotion, something takes his voice away. His big moment and he can’t make enough noise for his father to hear.

He looks the same, even from behind. In spite of the weather Justin is working with his coat off and his head uncovered, his fine hair is blowing, and where the drooping neck of the sweatshirt exposes it, the skin on the back of
his neck is fair. Jerome is unsettled by the change. When he was little his father was too big for him to see whole; now they are the same size.

Then. It is humiliating. Argh. Ghah. Jerome hears himself gabbling, “Hi. Bet you don’t know who I am.”

His father turns. “Oh, Jerome,” he says, as if it’s only been ten minutes. His face goes through a number of changes as he considers possible reasons for this visit. Stabbing Jerome in the heart, he lights on the wrong one. “What’s the matter, are you in trouble?”

“No, Dad, everything is fine.”

“Oh, son. Don’t look like that.” His father drops the ax and advances, thumping him into a hug.

Jerome is surprised by the force with which they collide. “Oh, hey.”

Probably his father wishes he’d said the right thing to him.

Justin grins his same grin. “Come on in.”

Inside is reassuring; the trailer is like a captain’s cabin, everything trig; his dad’s things look the same: books marching across the desktop, clipper ship bookend Justin took with him when he left, baby picture of Jerome. He has added a laptop and a decanter set. Jerome touches one of the crystal stoppers.

“Your mom never forgave me for liberating the Waterford.”

His mom never forgave him period.

In the old days his father used to be much heavier and wear a suit. Now he is skinny, mellow, aggressively laid back in the worn, silvery jeans and the baggy sweatshirt. He commands this space like the captain of a submarine. He is watching Jerome.

“Well, what do you think?”

“Nice,” Jerome says, “but isn’t it kind of small?”

“We’re getting used to functioning in tight quarters.” Without explaining, his father pulls out two lead crystal glasses Jerome remembers from his childhood. “Port?”

It’s like the class reunion of a very small school. They are having alcohol because it’s a party; because his dad still thinks of Jerome as ten years old, they are also having candy. The ashtray between them is filling up with little tags and silver foil.

In a strange way this seems perfectly right to Jerome—lounging on the neat convertible sofas with his dad in the late afternoon, eating Hershey’s kisses and getting a buzz on. He focuses on the laptop, thinks it’s a good sign. In case it turns out these people are crazy, his dad’s probably here writing a book about them. Unless something better comes up, it’s what he’s going to tell his mom. But he stops his mouth with melting chocolate and doesn’t ask. For a long time
all they talk about are things they both remember from ten years ago, the dog they had, Jerome’s troubles learning to ride his first two-wheeler, but the whole time Jerome is sitting with his eyes cracked too wide and his mouth open, listening for something he may not recognize.

He wants to come right out and ask his father, Where were you when you left us? He doesn’t mean, Where did you go? He means, Where were you in your head? But hard as he tries to phrase the question, he has to get semiblitzed before he can ask Justin anything, and when he does, all he can come up with is, “What happened to your house?”

His dad turns bland eyes to him. “What house?”

“I thought you guys were building modern houses.”

“In time,” his dad says. “Right now, there are more important things.”

Jerome is just drunk enough to say, “The end of the world?”

Justin does not answer. “Supplies, for one.”

Then while he slouches in the cushions with his mouth full, letting the chocolate melt and run around in there, his dad lays it out for him: how many of them there are in this community, what the arrangement is. They are pooling funds. The houses are not as important as laying in supplies. Like a materiel officer he numbers the things they have shored up against destruction, whether of society or the earth he does not say. At no point does his dad say anything crazy. The plan as he describes it is not religious, but pragmatic. He names some of the things they have: generators, enough food and water for sixty years, medical supplies, weapons, radiation detectors, a shopping list for Armageddon, but: what makes these people so sure it’s coming? Jerome is afraid his dad will say God came down and told him. But he doesn’t. He just goes on about hydroponics and subsistence farming and the division of chores.

As his father talks, Jerome scours his speech for clues: as to why he’s really here, what he thinks Jerome is doing here, because as he gets drunker and drunker, the tension builds until Jerome is squirming with urgency. He has to know what this man believes in. What’s going to be expected of him.

“So that’s the whole thing,” his dad says finally, although it isn’t.

When Jerome speaks, spit and chocolate overflow even though he’s been careful to swallow beforehand. “I thought you were into something else.”

His father does not ask the question.

Jerome can’t frame the answer. “You know.”

“I’ll show you.” Shoving a flashlight into his belt, the dad puts on his heavy jacket and throws a down vest at Jerome. “Here. You’ll need an extra coat.”

They go outside into the weak spring twilight, picking their way between
lighted trailers like steaming jack-o’-lanterns that smell of a dozen dinners cooking. The few people caught outside at this hour are heading for their trailers with their heads down. They don’t stop and they don’t speak, but when father and son pass the wedding-cake house on their way to the periphery, a man comes out on the porch in his shirtsleeves to hail them; is this the leader?

“Justin,” he says to Jerome’s father.

“Martel.”

Jerome wants to dig in his heels and take a good look at this person, but his father has him by the elbow now; all he has time to do is note the absence of beard or dreadlocks, whatever are the hallmarks. This is an ordinary-looking guy with a bland face, trying to get a squint at Jerome.

When they don’t stop, Martel calls, “New believer?”

“My son,” Justin says, hurrying Jerome past.

Martel raises his hand in what looks like a blessing. Relieved, Jerome thinks, Oh,
OK
, so it is a religious thing. “Believer,” he says. It’s the word he’s been waiting for but the speaker is in no respect his father, so … what?

His father says only, “Martel is in charge.”

“Readiness,” the man on the porch calls after them.

“Readiness.” Jerome whips his head around. “Is that the whole thing?”

The question is imprecise; Jerome’s dad doesn’t bother to answer. He runs ahead like a big kid calling, Come play. “Come over here. Come on down and you’ll see.”

When Jerome catches up Justin is standing in the middle of one of the raw places, in the mixture of mud and rubble that covers a recent excavation. A cement mixer leans next to a makeshift railing around an open space. He turns on his flashlight and shines it into the hole. The sides are shored up by cement forms, suggesting that whatever work is going on here is only partly done. From the top Jerome can’t see how deep the ladder goes, but his father has already turned on his flashlight and started down.