A Calling for Charlie Barnes Page 8

  There was only one item of interest to him that day: an official piece of correspondence from Michigan State University. Standing in the front room, he vented the venetian blinds in order to have another look at the errant van while tearing into the envelope. His reasons for requesting a school transcript had not been all that clear to him a few weeks ago, when he thought he was dying. Now, unfolding the document, he discovered without surprise a long list of incompletes. There was, however, something unexpected in those marks he had received for classes he saw to the end:

  Literature and the Individual: A–

  Introductory Economics: B+

  Elementary Chemistry: B–

  Descriptive Astronomy: B–

  Western Civilization I: B–

  Fundamentals of Speech: A

  He double-checked the name on the transcript. It was his, all right.

  Upon returning his family to Danville in 1968, Steady Boy entered a time of infidelities, of hushed and hasty and never entirely satisfying assignations, sneaked gropings in darkened movie houses, and old-fashioned trysts with married housewives. Returning home from these transgressions, he would envision the most extravagant fantasies of fate’s revenge: rollicking avalanches would bury the wayward husband and floods sweep him out to sea, though he lived in the heartland prairie, while a serene God ordered up heart attacks and head-on collisions. Though a longtime antagonist of organized religion, Charlie was as superstitious as the next guy and never wanted to cross the last remnants of God that still resided in his mind. But then something bad did happen: running dangerously late for an already suspicious Sue, he was energetically backing down a lover’s absurdly long driveway when he felt an ominous thud. His lover screamed. Her dog limped off. It would have to be put down but couldn’t be caught. At last he cornered the frightened animal, who bared his fangs. When Charlie finally made it back home, he was covered in raw red claw marks, which he tried passing off to his wife as an encounter with a bobcat on the Catlin-Tilton Road.

  Did she believe him? Never. The end was nigh anyway. Sue woke Jerry from an innocent slumber one night and dragged him out of bed. The poor kid! I have heard this story many times. He was alarmed and confused. Never had he known a night so late or so dark. As they were leaving the house, something flew out of the shadows and struck him in the face, and his cries raised the neighborhood. “Bats!” he hollered, his thin and frightened voice ringing out in the dead of night. “Bats, Mama!”

  “Those aren’t bats, genius,” his mother snapped. “Now get in the damn car!”

  Every seventeen years without fail, a migration of cicadas from deep within the earth overran the city of Danville, covering every inch of town with their crunchy hulls: front yards and driveways, flagpoles and parking lots, bank steps and water towers. It was a midwestern plague and source of otherworldly wonder. Sue put Jerry in the car and then worked the windshield wipers, bulldozing hundreds of crackling carapaces over the side. A few remained pinched under the glass and went along for the ride, unsettling Jerry. They had red bug eyes and black-veined wings like something out of his science fiction comics.

  Roselawn, Meadowlawn, Lawndale—nowhere are street names prettier than in Danville, Illinois. Sue backed the Buick down the drive at twenty miles an hour (Charlie was later informed by a nosy neighbor) and smashed the chrome fender against the pavement, shooting off sparks. Then she tore through town, heading east on Vermilion past the Palmer Bank, past the sodium-vapor lights still burning above the deserted American Legion baseball fields, past the giant glowing scoop of vanilla in its tilted cone advertising the Custard Cup, past the water tower and the golf club and out to the city limits and the start of farmhouses, silos, and combine harvesters. She drove everywhere that night looking for her philandering husband’s Plymouth: to the Sportsman’s Club on Lake Vermilion, to Cannon Alley and the pool hall, to the Sunken Gardens at Lincoln Park, and to the nature preserve at Kickapoo State Park. Throughout their search, she filled Jerry in on all the many reasons that he should never forgive his father for as long as he lived … while Jerry, dumbstruck and heartbroken at the sight of his mother’s tears, tried in vain to contain his own.

  At last they found him in the parking lot of the Nutty Nut Shoppes (“Across from the Copper Indian”), where Charlie sat smooching a floozy in the back seat of his Plymouth. When Sue lay on the horn, Steady Boy, whose nickname had taken on new meaning as a married man, broke off from the part-time gal and peered out the rear window. He could still recall the terror that filled his heart at the sight of his wife. He stepped out of the car, tie off and shirttails untucked, crunching the cicadas underfoot. Caught red-handed, he responded the only way he knew how.

  “You started it, Sue! You fucked Marshall first!”

  Blinded by the Buick’s headlights, his eyes took a moment to adjust. Only then did he see that his wife was not alone. The top of his son’s head and his big frightened eyes peeked out just above the dashboard. But there was nothing Charlie could do about that just then, because Sue had hit the gas and was coming straight at him. When, many years later, Jerry informed his father that he was convinced he was witnessing, at ten years old, the murder-suicide of the two people he loved most in the world, Charlie understood just how badly they had fucked him up.

  Delighted by his school transcript, he set it aside; he was due out in the world. He transferred all calls to his cell phone and entered the garage. Sunlight flooded that dank, dark space as the rattling door slowly retracted. His twenty-year-old Saab was having engine troubles; they were expected at European Motors in an hour’s time. Whitney shrieked at him as he turned the key. He liked to sing along to her Bodyguard sound track on the highway when no one else was listening. He was reminded of the sniper’s van only upon backing down the drive. It was nothing, a service call, he would ignore it … and he might have, too, had Jerry himself not stumbled from the front seat and waved.

  29

  Now we meet him, his mystic son, the Zen master, full of news nobody wanted. We finally meet this Jerry—Charlie’s firstborn, and a towering giant. I mean it: when I was growing up, Jerry was like a god to me. I get almost giddy whenever I’m back in his company. But first, a story.

  One morning in the fall of 1975, newly remarried but still living in Danville, Mr. Charles Barnes, of 1622 North Vermilion Street, turning thirty-five that November and working at Old Poor Farm, opened his front door wearing a red velvet robe and a matching pair of travel slippers. His ex-wives were all behind him: Sue had married her beloved Marshall, while his rebound bride, Barbara Lefurst, came and went in the blink of an eye; he looked upon her as one would a bad dream. Jerry was doing fine, living but a few blocks away with his honeymooning mother, which was only appropriate. A child that age belonged with his mom.

  He was delighted by his own domestic arrangement: he and Charley lived with their newborn, Marcy, in a house they owned. He was leading one of those humble, happy lives of the sort he never imagined possible for a man with ambition: one of potlucks and bike rides, softball games in the late afternoon, a feast on Sunday, and sun tea always brewing on the back porch steps. It was not the morning frost that caused him to shiver when he opened the door but the sheer delight of a new day. He swooped down to collect the newspaper, and it was only upon straightening up again that he spotted the boy on the stairs. With all the eye-watering pain of a basketball pile-driving into his face, he knew at once that he’d miscalculated. No fifteen-year-old boy doing fine would be loitering on his father’s porch at the break of dawn. He didn’t wait to consult his new wife. He invited Jerry to come live with him there and then.

  You can bow out of almost anything, and sure, there might be consequences, but dodge them or square up to them, accrue them with interest or pay them down over time, there is the immediate illusion of freedom. On the day Jerry Barnes climbed from his unmarked van outside the house on Rust Road, Charlie had bowed out of Jonart’s Shoes and Lauhoff Grain, out of GE Ballast and Farnsworth Poultry,
and out of his gig as floor manager of ready-to-wear at the Danville Sears. He’d bowed out of two-handed dribbling, a career in the law, four marriages and the mortgages they bound him to, and the many other debts that could not or would not be paid. And just that morning, he had contemplated (or had imposed on him) the strange option of bowing out of reality itself by letting the phone ring and ring, thereby denying his further participation in life. But in the end, there was no bowing out of two things: physical death and fatherhood. Biological children and the Grim Reaper had in common what was shared by nothing else in the world: an unerring radar with which to find you when the time came.

  If we were to look at Jerry through a child’s eyes, we would not see the unkempt, shabbily dressed, slightly overweight man of middle age who climbed out of a killer’s van with a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in hand, slamming the door with a rusted screech, but that young guitar player and pilot in training whose Ping-Pong skills, mastery of campfires and beautiful belly laugh knew no equal. The child, naturally inclined to exaggerate a pretty young man into a myth, meets with so many adult abetters who wish the child to see his big brother’s competence and charm rather than those creeping tendencies only adults can discern that will in time force the myth back into a man. The worst thing that could have happened to Icarus was not, in fact, his fiery end but his decision at the last second to go by Greyhound, and to start a nice family in Cleveland.

  “What’s this?” Charlie asked him, in the middle of Rust Road.

  “The Gita.”

  “Jerry,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in Belgium?”

  Jerry insisted, and finally Charlie took hold of the book, the fourth of its kind to be gifted him by the Zen master. Jerry promptly had a seat on the fading yellow paint of the curb. It was the sort of perch that would have been uncomfortable even for a child, but then Jerry did childish things. It was, for me, part of his charm.

  Biographically speaking, Jerry had graduated from Danville High in 1978, received his BA with a double major in musicology and computer science in 1983, returned for his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, five years later, and five years after that pursued the only advanced degree that ever mattered to him, in Eastern thought, from the University of Virginia. Between these episodes of intense study, he worked for Fifth Third Bank, Sysco Corp., and Sears, Roebuck—not, like his father, on the sales floor but in the corporate office, managing payroll for the retail department. He was licensed to fly in 1986. Owned an apartment in Boystown, then a loft in Wicker Park, then a town house in Naperville. Married once, briefly, no children. Had a taste for Triumphs and Ducatis. Was the coolest, bar none. What happened?

  Charlie joined him on the curb. “What are you doing here, son? Shouldn’t you be in Belgium?”

  “Came to give you the Gita. It won’t cure cancer, but it renders death meaningless, which is something.”

  “Thank you,” Charlie said, and briefly looked the book over as if he were curious, as if it were the first copy he had ever received.

  Charlie’s two sons were always hounding him to take their master classes. Privately, he called these “Literature 101” and “Advanced Religion,” and he had no interest in either one. The readings were dull, the lectures long and didactic, and one of them, “Advanced Religion,” had been on offer since Jimmy Carter’s only term, when Charlie was kicking nicotine in all its forms and not in the mood. He had disappointed his religion professor going on about five decades now, receiving failing marks year after year—and severe frowns whenever the subject of his soul came up in conversation. Fact of the matter was, he had tried more than once with the Gita—Jerry always called it the Gita—but never made it past the bit about … well, whatever that first bit was about … before falling into a deep and restful sleep.

  “What I mean is, what are you doing here, in Chicago?”

  “I told you. Read this, Pop. It’s never too late to square up to reality.”

  “What’s this about reality, Jerry? I was led to believe you were just having lunch in Belgium.”

  Jerry shrugged and looked off. He had on his old Jesus sandals, a pair of cutoff denims with tassels the color and consistency of rat tails, while his white T-shirt, that unbranded emblem of austerity and resistance, glowed horridly with pit stains. It had come as an enormous relief to his father when Jerry got the coding job. He would have health benefits again, and a retirement account of the kind he had blown through before declaring bankruptcy. But it was his father’s understanding that to do the actual coding, Jerry had to be in Belgium.

  “You were never employed in Belgium, were you?”

  Jerry made no reply.

  “You were never hired by a multinational.”

  “Do you have pancreatic cancer, Pop?”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “To get you off my back. Do you have cancer?”

  “You told me you were living in Belgium just to get me off your back?”

  The magnitude of the lie set in. Belgium!

  “No one goes all the way to Belgium just to code, Pop. Now I hear you have cancer. I’m here because of the cancer.”

  “Have you been twenty miles away this entire time?”

  “I have an apartment on Western Avenue. You don’t have cancer, do you?”

  Charlie frowned. “Western Avenue?”

  “When you called this morning and said you had cancer, that was a lie, wasn’t it?”

  “It was not a lie. I was reading the internet wrong.”

  “How do you read the internet wrong?”

  They were getting off to a bad start.

  “Hey,” Charlie said, “come inside.” The sweat was beginning to tickle under his collar. “Let’s get out of this goddamn heat.” He tapped Jerry gamely on the leg. “Come on.”

  Jerry made no effort to move.

  “What are we doing sitting on the goddamn curb, Jerry? Come on, come inside. Let’s talk.”

  “Is she in there?”

  “Who?” he asked. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. You gotta be pulling my goddamn leg. You, too, Jerry?”

  “I’m happy at the curb, thanks.”

  “No, she’s not in there. Barbara is at work. Your stepmother works hard. Some people do, you know.”

  “I should be getting back anyway.”

  “Back where? Belgium?”

  When his children spoke to their therapists and lovers about their most recent stepmother, the revulsion was hard to justify. You don’t like your stepmother because she evinces no warmth, expresses no joy, feigns no happiness when you’re around? But that doesn’t make her a criminal. Perhaps she is only shy or insecure. They went ballistic at suggestions like these. Yet there was no proof of iniquity or sabotage, no evidence to point to, no support for their claims. It was even a little amusing how desperate they were among themselves to identify the source of a universal feeling: Barbara was not just cold or withholding, but evil. They found themselves drawn to German folklore in an effort to explain their aversion to the nurse at First Baptist: she would banish them to the forest, turn them into blackbirds, poison their suppers when they weren’t looking if it meant having the king to herself. But in the end, their lovers and therapists tended to argue, their complaints about Barbara said as much if not more about the age-old grudges they held against their father.

  “What could that woman possibly have done to make my children hate her?” Charlie asked.

  “We don’t hate her, Pop. We just know where we aren’t welcome.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “Call it a sixth sense, honed over the many years and your many wives. We can distinguish now between the real welcomers and the …” He couldn’t think of the right word. “The Barbaras,” he said.

  “First of all, Barbara does welcome you, with open arms, whether you want to believe that or not. She just has a hard time expressing herself with words.”

  “It’s not so much her words I have in mind as her fac
ial expressions,” Jerry said. “Also her eye contact, general body language, and her actions.”

  “And second of all, I live here, too, you know. And I hope you know by now that you are always welcome in my home.”

  Jerry glanced back. “Really, Pop—105 Rust Road?” he said.

  “I don’t claim it often,” he said. “Why should I? It’s a piece of shit. But it’s all I’ve got, Jerry. And what’s mine is yours, my boy. It’s always been that way.”

  “You tell me it’s mine, Pop. But it’s been in the family for all of one marriage now—”

  “Barbara and I have been together for fifteen years.”

  “—in a long line of them, so how do I know you won’t just cross the street one day and start living over there? Besides, the woman who actually owns the house would not mind if I never set foot inside it again.”

  “Oh, hogwash. You want to stay out here? Fine. But don’t blame that on Barbara.”

  “I don’t blame it on Barbara. I blame it on the man who married her.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jerry. I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this. What did I do to you? What did your mother and I do?”

  “Shall we review, Pop? You might recall the night you and Mom tried to kill each other outside the Nutty Nut Shoppes.”

  “Sue came at me. I wasn’t the one in control of the gas pedal.”

  “No, but you were in control of your pecker.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said. “Not in those years.”

  “You couldn’t keep your dick in your pants for two nights running? I can still see those freaky cicadas. Jesus, the world is a fucking nightmare.”

  “Your mother started it, Jerry. She was sleeping with Marshall. What was I, a fool? Of course I slept around. But she started it.”

  Blocks of speech assigned at birth. He was no better at life than his mother, and full of the same self-pity.

  “Look,” he said. “Let’s not rehash this. I feel terrible about how it all shook out. I wish I could go back and make it right, but there’s little I can do about it forty years later.”