A Calling for Charlie Barnes Page 16

  It is hard to know now why I did not turn to him long before I was detained. I suppose Marcy was not the only one in whose ear Charley Proffit poured her poison. I suppose that I, too, knew all about crass, disappointing Charlie Barnes. Besides, who was I? A nobody. And he was in Chicago now in a whole new life. Did he even remember me?

  But would it be worth a shot, I wondered, now that I was in custody? I didn’t dare reach out to him before that, I didn’t dare give him the option to decline, I didn’t dare and I didn’t dare … until, one day, I did.

  We were reunited the year I turned fifteen. It was a brief and magical time. He couldn’t believe that, as happened with Jerry in 1975, he’d assumed once again that all was right with the world because a boy was with his mother. He had no idea I was living on the street, sleeping on the beach, hanging out with drunks and the half dead while Charley Proffit and Dickie Dickerdick pursued their divorce … and I spared him 90 percent of it. He took me in, no questions asked, and we agreed to put the rest behind us.

  My stepmother welcomed me with open arms. Evangeline was childless and happy to keep house. A native of Romeoville and the eldest of three daughters, she took great care to put her face on daily before an illuminated makeup mirror. She loved dried flowers and sachets of potpourri. She drove a Chrysler LeBaron and owned a blue-eyed Siberian husky named Stevie Nicks. All this was a far cry from Duval Street. She encouraged me to watch television with her in the living room, which she had nicely decorated with doilies and throw pillows. Evangeline’s idea of heaven on earth was to curl up on the sofa with a lap blanket and a wine cooler and a new episode of Knots Landing, which was just fine by me. I don’t recall now what she did for a living, but it had nothing to do with historic narcotics or child abuse. It was a leave-itat-work kind of job, and she left it, happy to come home to me and our soap operas. We lived in Downers Grove, in a little cottage on Benton Avenue. She made us sloppy joes for dinner, bought me CDs from the Sam Goody and Fruit Roll-Ups from the Jewel-Osco. Downtown Downers had a discount theater called the Tivoli with a neon marquee out front. There, in 1989, for three bucks apiece, the whole family—the whole family!—saw the strangest double feature in the history of Hollywood: Weekend at Bernie’s followed by Do the Right Thing. The old man was in heaven, went back for a refill of his tub of buttered popcorn. He had gained weight and gotten older, but he was still so much like a teenager himself. We played a lot of Ping-Pong in the basement and joined a pool league at a place called Muddler’s, on Clybourn. It was at Muddler’s, where I learned to shoot one-handed with a bridge, that Charlie first told me about Junior’s in Danville and his father’s time running a hustle for a stake horse in Little Egypt. His father died later that year, in Danville. I remember the funeral. I remember the tears streaming down my Uncle Rudy’s face. I had been under the impression that no one cared for Alden Barnes, a deadbeat and a loner, but there was Rudy, shaken to the core, and Charlie right beside him. You can’t lose a father and not be affected in some profound and unexpected way.

  I considered myself the luckiest person on earth to be in the care of Charlie Barnes. An alternative fate was all too easy to imagine: landing in some central Florida penitentiary, or learning to suck cock for ten bucks a shot, or using the wrong needle on a whim. Instead, I was learning trigonometry at Downers Grove North, picking my zits and drooling through study hall. I had been rescued. I had to repeat the tenth grade, but at least I was alive. And this beautiful spell lasted three full years, until Charlie began his affair with the nurse at First Baptist.

  Evangeline and I were in the basement one night watching Knots Landing when the phone rang. He said to offer her some excuse and to meet him at the McDonald’s near the highway. When I pulled up beside him twenty minutes later, he rolled down the window and smiled under a beige Kangol cap. Still a year from starting his own outfit and leaving Bear Stearns forever, he was driving a high-end Lexus leased for a small fortune. We exchanged a few words. Then we rolled up our windows and I followed him into the night.

  The geography of Chicagoland confounded me. We entered the highway and passed tollbooths and cloverleafs, corkscrewing irreparably into townships unknown. Our final leg consisted of a series of intensely local turns that left me bewildered. That Charlie did know where we were, that he went there by feel, that he pulled up before a second home, lesser in every way to the first, as if he belonged there, paid the bills there, parked in its driveway to announce the end of a night, astonished me, and that we approached the front door and went through it unimpeded and without knocking astonished me further still. The loyal stepson of another woman, I was being initiated into the house on Rust Road.

  Was it fair of the old man? Was it right? He was too punch-drunk to think straight. To some extent, the discomfort I felt at his betrayal of sweet, domestic Evangeline was tempered by the flattering fact that he had not forgotten me. His new romance was incomplete or unreal until I, Jake Barnes, had stood witness to it. Once I set foot inside, once I beheld his new amour, he could say that he had united his two families, his past with his future, his delight with his duty. Nothing feels more natural or morally sound as having all your family under one roof.

  “Come on in,” Charlie said to me before crying out, “Honey! We’re home!”

  Honey? Home? There was chaos everywhere in this new home of his: library books climbing the staircase, unfolded laundry on the couch, dog toys littering the carpet, at least two competing televisions with volumes on high. He would eventually impose order on 105 Rust Road, but he didn’t technically live there just yet and made no claim on its conditions. He still flickered uncertainly between a knight in shining armor and one more jerk who would come and go, and no one, not even he, could say for certain which way it would ultimately break. A dog skittered, its nails clacking, as it rounded the bend and came at me.

  “Yort!” cried Charlie. “Jake, meet Yort.”

  “Yort?”

  “Get down, Yort!”

  “What kind of name is—”

  Yort, a comically protracted dachshund-Doberman mix, had pounced. His nails were like a spiked mace, and he used my legs as scratching posts.

  “Yort is harmless,” my dad said, “but a pain in the ass. Just brush him off you, like this.”

  He demonstrated, Yort repounced, and a pattern was established, together with a new circle of hell. The pouncing persisted, it seemed, all night long, until my veins had been opened. But it was the act of brushing Yort off that stayed most vivid in my mind. He was free to take liberties with the pets.

  “Shoes on or off?” I asked him.

  “Whatever you prefer, son. I want you to feel at home here.”

  “But is there a custom?”

  “Better take them off,” he whispered.

  I knew much more in that moment than “shoes on or off.” I knew there were customs, indeed, and that they were whispered.

  More information came fast and furious. Barbara had a son, a future private in the United States Army. He materialized out of nowhere, six years old at the time, and charged me like a bull.

  “Charlie’s here! Charlie’s here!” this little guy sang out, naked but for a pair of camo undies. He stopped on a dime in front of me. “Saddam Hussein!” he cried, and with that, hauled off and whaled me in the nuts. I doubled over. He screamed away like a banshee. My father clapped after him in fury.

  “Troy!” he cried. “Troy, come back here this instant and apologize! Sorry about that, Jake,” he said. “He’s a work in progress. Here, let me take your coat.”

  So disorienting, for me, were those first few minutes—from our free and easy entry to our pulling out chairs for ourselves at the kitchen table as if we had been dining there as a family for years—that I imagined it had to be a skipped reel of some kind, a waking dream, a hallucination. Where were we? And why would we swap the cottage in Downers Grove for this low-rent study in mayhem? Perhaps he’s lost his mind, I thought, and the real man of that house, alarmed by our vo
ices, will soon rush downstairs locked and loaded and force the two wandering maniacs out the door. But no one came threatening, and as the night wore on I noticed all the many quotidian ways Charlie’s presence had been woven into the domestic tapestry all around us. His hats on the coatrack. His shoes on the welcome mat. His newspaper on the arm of the recliner. On the kitchen table, mail with his name on it. In the fridge, his favorite brand of beer.

  “What the hell?” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Where are we?”

  “Jake,” he said, “I can’t hide it anymore, son … I’m in love.”

  “But what about Evangeline?”

  Not unlike the sharp-taloned Yort, my father pounced. “Shhh!”

  “What?” I said.

  “Not that name! Not here.”

  “Evangeline?”

  “It’s tearing me up, what I’m doing to her.” He was whispering again. “But I haven’t felt this alive since I fell in love with”—he lowered his voice still further—“Charley Proffit!”

  It must be said that, at the start of the affair, anyway, the house on Rust Road delighted him. It was where his new beloved lived, and he never wanted to leave.

  Well, okay, I thought. I was open to change and always happy to meet new people. But the longer I sat there, the worse I began to feel, as if I were the one cheating on Evangeline. She had taken me in no less than he had. And I was not exactly gung-ho about starting all over here, in another house, adjusting mentally to the new accommodations, sleeping in whatever bed I was given, sharing breakfast with strangers, all that, but still expected to express gratitude, feign harmony, perform that old trick called family feeling. I was goddamn sick of starting over and had no appetite for a new crew when that delivering angel Evangeline was waiting for us with soap operas and snacks back in benign and orderly Downers Grove. I loved the old man and appreciated his enfolding me in this new charade, but he’d gone and ruined a good thing, and briefly I understood the complaint made so often against him: he was selfish and shortsighted. Jerry thought so. Marcy did, too. All his ex-wives. This was it: my first experience of the old man following his worst instincts. It made me mad.

  “Evangeline,” I said.

  “Shhh, Jake!”

  “Evangeline!”

  “This is not the time or place!”

  “Are we just erasing her from the record?”

  “Absolutely not! No, only right now—”

  “Right now, she’s sitting at home watching TV, waiting for you to walk through the door.”

  “I know … I feel terrible!”

  We heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “Evangeline,” I said.

  “Please don’t, Jake.”

  “Evangeline!”

  “Stop it, Jake! That’s it. No more.”

  “Evangeline!” I whispered, more fiercely than before.

  That name remained on the tip of my tongue for years inside the house on Rust Road. Evangeline. The bearer of that name was a revenant capable of unleashing total ruin, of reminding them of the ruin they had unleashed—and I had the power to conjure her. I had the power to conjure them all—Sue Starter, Barbara Lefurst, Charley Proffit—to trace the bread crumbs of history back to earlier cottages, more legitimate queens. I was serving not as a witness to a new romance but as an accomplice to a broken vow, to a whole slew of broken vows, and when Barbara and I finally locked eyes, shook hands, said hello, we knew this as he did not. I was the institutional memory in a house of forgetting, and for that reason alone, Barbara would never accept me.

  Curvy in scrubs, her hair cut short, Barbara was no local beauty à la Charley Proffit. But at thirty-four she was something of a honeypot for a man getting up there in age—he was over fifty by then—who had never thrilled to Evangeline’s bony frame. After she shook my hand, all her calculated mirth dropped off her face as in a mudslide and failed to return for the remainder of the evening.

  “Does he want a Dr Pepper?” she asked, rubbing her nose without looking at me. They were the first words I heard her speak, and they were directed at my father.

  “Would you like a Dr Pepper, Jake?” Chuck asked me.

  “Sure, I’ll take a Dr Pepper.”

  “We only have diet,” she said. “Is he okay with diet?”

  “Diet okay, Jake?”

  “Diet’s fine,” I said.

  “Can he open it?”

  “He can open a can, honey. He can even work a can opener. Can’t you, Jake?”

  “I can work a lawn mower.”

  “That’s true,” he said to Barbara. “He mows my lawn. I hate mowing the lawn.”

  “I don’t mind it,” I said. “I could mow your lawn,” I offered.

  “Chicken for dinner,” she said. “Does he like chicken?”

  “Great,” my dad said. “Jake loves the bird.”

  My father got me a diet Dr Pepper and the two of us retreated to the living room. After a while, he thought he should ask Barbara if she needed help with dinner, and when he left for the kitchen, I was free to look around. Crocheted scenes of God and country hung in oval frames affixed to the wood paneling. There were a dozen VHS tapes and one dictionary, vaguely chewed, on an otherwise empty bookcase. Something else, too. I stood for a closer look: a blackened banana peel. I returned to the sofa. I later found half a hot dog lodged between two of its cushions. This, I thought darkly, was precisely what Dickie Dickerdick had been trying to avoid whenever he kicked Marcy and me off his bachelor furniture. I watched Troy, the future soldier, watch TV, which he did by gripping its side paneling and engaging with it as if it were sentient. Ten minutes later, his sister, Tory—fourteen, large and dark—appeared in that room fully naked. She was not yet accustomed to Charlie being there, let alone Charlie’s children, and had no reason on earth to guess at my presence in that room. She was on her way to the basement to find some fresh clothes after a shower. She got one look at me, gasped, cupped her private parts and reversed in horror out of the room.

  Yort, who had been chasing his tail for ten minutes, was now whining at the sliding glass door. A clever devil, he combed his elongated dog’s body across the dangling venetian blinds to attract my attention. Then he turned with clacking nails and stared at me as the rattling noise from the blinds slowly died.

  “Whaddya want, boy?” I asked him. “Or should I say ‘girl’? Just what the fuck is a Yort anyway?”

  Yort wagged his tail. I got up to see if I should let the dog out, but when I entered the kitchen, my father was gone. So was his new lady friend. They had retreated upstairs. I went back to the living room, resolved to finish my diet soda and ignore the dog completely. But a half hour later, I, too, had to pee, and my sympathies went out to the mutt, who was still whining and doing his trick with the blinds. I stood and opened the sliding glass door. Bursting—and beaming, too, I still believe to this day, beaming right at me like a freed prisoner—Yort, an indoor dog, went straight through the hedgerows and was never seen again.

  Shortly after I returned to the couch, but well before everyone went out to search for the dog in the rain, live music made me start. I turned in alarm. An ancient old lady with a raspy voice was playing her heart out on the piano in the corner—I hadn’t registered its presence until that moment. And when, exactly, had the human being materialized? She played a show tune to start, followed by an old standard. The little soldier swiveled his head without unhanding his television. “Grandma!” he cried. “Turn that down!” Grandma went on playing without a care.

  My father returned from his time upstairs with Barbara. I gestured at the old lady. “Oh, right,” he said. “Barbara’s mother. Very musical.” I revealed the hot dog between the sofa cushions. “Where’s Yort?” he asked.

  That desperately fleeing dog was a blessing in disguise for poor Barbara, who had reason to resent me without ever having to hear the name Evangeline. We didn’t eat that night until ten.

  42

  By seven in the mornin
g some fifteen years later, Barbara and I remained a pair of sorts, sitting together in the waiting room of Rush Memorial. Her son was in Afghanistan; her dog was still missing; her musical mother was dead.

  Her husband was then undergoing a massive medical procedure. I read books during that time, did puzzles to distract myself, fielded a call about an appearance on Conan. At some point I looked over at her. Though inscrutable as ever, she had stuck by his side—and was solely responsible for questioning his test results and possibly saving his life. I recalled what Charlie had said to me the night before: “Barbara and I do not delve.” Well, Barbara and I did not delve, either. In fact, what we did could hardly be called chatting. I preferred Evangeline, as Jerry preferred Sue Starter and Marcy preferred Charley Proffit, but Evangeline had remarried and moved to New Port Richey, Florida. It might be past time, I thought (now that the old man was undergoing lifesaving surgery), to ask what he saw in Barbara Ledeux. Who was she? And what made her special? I was just about to inquire when she looked up from her magazine.