The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Read online

  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.

  At the bottom his dad lands on a metal surface with a leaden klunk. Planting his feet on either side of a wheel, he begins opening a hatch. Inside, another ladder descends into blackness. Then his dad finds the switch and the place lights up.

  “What’s this?”

  “Shelter,” Justin says. “It’s not finished yet.”

  “What for?”

  “Protection.”

  What? “You’re all coming down here?”

  “Half of us. We’re fitting out two.”

  Following him down, Jerome is dizzy with the complications. His mind keeps zigzagging between the two shelters: Will they be able to talk? How will they know if each other are all right? If somebody’s left behind? Whether everybody fits? Who’s gone to which? Here two minutes and he’s already feeling claustrophobic; it’s like being inside a cigar case, this funny metal cylinder that smells. How are they going to stand it for a year?

  “Took us a long time to work out the best thing to do the job,” his father says. “We’ve buried propane tanks.”

  “In case of what?”

  “Whatever happens,” his father says.

  He lets Jerome take it in: the double row of bunks at the far end of the enclosure, lights strung like Christmas bulbs, from exposed wires, wooden flooring that must hide the year’s worth of rations his father has told him about. The floor orients him. Without it they would be like astronauts in free fall. Jerome is giddy, short of breath; his dad has brought him all this way and showed him all this and told him everything and at no time and in no way has he mentioned the name of God. It would have been so neat, something to hang onto, that Jerome could pin it all on: the persistence or the folly of faith. But his father is done explaining.

  When Jerome can’t think of anything to say his father says, “We stay down here until it’s safe.” He runs out of steam, suddenly, and sits down on the wooden flooring with his back hunched to accommodate the curve in the metal wall. The tank seems hollow, leaden and echoing, cold. Jerome sits down next to him. They probably look like refugees hiding from World War II in the British underground.

  Cold and silent, Jerome is crowded by misgivings. Maybe he has attached too much to this. He imagined his father would get him down here and explain, at least; tell him some truth. Either that or demonstrate that he’s completely crazy, leaving Jerome free to hug him goodbye and walk away.

  Instead he just sits here next to Jerome in the dank shelter without saying anything.

  It is almost unbearable, the tension between the two of them wedged here in the curve of the cylinder, and yet there is no reason for it that Jerome can see. They’re just hanging, adrift in a welter of particles. There’s too much going on and none of it resolved; his father has hurt everybody and run away from everything and replaced it with this.

  Sitting shoulder to shoulder with his dad Jerome thinks maybe he’s come all this way to let it all out and get it over with; raging, he could just let his father have it: How could you do this to us? How could you run away and bust up our family?

  “Don’t be too hard on your father,” his mom said at the time. “He can’t help it.” Probably he can’t, Jerome thinks, and even if he can, there is no way for Jerome to charge him with it now. What would be the point? It’s something they can’t change that happened years ago. But this whole thing, this awful place. Sitting here under tons of earth, Jerome needs, what: to explain or justify whatever his father thinks he’s doing here. If he has come here and is doing this because of either sex or religion it may make some kind of sense, but there is no sign of a girlfriend anywhere in the trailer and this is only a bomb shelter.

  Jerome would just like to be able to go back home with some real reason that he can lay out for everyone, so he can call it finished. He wants something he can point to and say, OK. There.

  His father surprises him. “I suppose you’re here to see if I’m crazy.”

  Caught in the act, Jerome starts; his head bonks the metal wall. “You really think the end of the world is coming?”

  The gaze his father turns on him is empty, without guile. “Does it really matter?”

  “I think so,” Jerome says.

  “And if it’s true?”

  This is a trick question; if Jerome believes it, the true course of logic followed to its absolute limit dictates the shelter, everything. He has to beg the question. “But Dad, we’ve stopped being scared of the Russians. Getting nuked. The war.”

  The look his father turns on him is careful, lucid. “That’s only one of the names for it.”

  “Ah.” Jerome squirms. The air in here is becoming intolerable; he pushes. “Names for what?” Armageddon? He is intent, squinting as if he can see the answer written in air inside his father’s open mouth.

  “Whatever.”

  Jerome is stifling. “For God’s sake.”

  Then his father gets as close as he is going to come. “There are worse things than living at the edge of last things.”

  Jerome says angrily, “That’s it?”

  “What did you think you were going to get from me?”

  Better than this; too much; he doesn’t know.

  “Whatever it is, w
hatever threatens us …” The look his father turns to him is careful, lucid. “You might as well boil it all down to something you can prepare for. Can do something about. And start doing it.” And then his father, who is supposed to be the adult here, gives him a noogie on the shoulder, grinding the knuckles in with a grin. “But, hey. It doesn’t matter if I believe in it. I like it here.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s as good as any of the reasons people give for the things they do.”

  The logic. “God, Dad.” Jerome jumps to his feet; the clammy air is killing him; he can hardly stand it. “Are you ever going to let us out of here?”

  “I guess I’d better cancel your reservation,” Justin says lightly.

  At least there is some logic; Jerome lets his breath out all at once. “Damn straight.”

  His father pushes him up the ladder. “You first. I’m starved.”

  The stars are out when they reach the top and explode into the evening air. Jerome’s dizzy all over again, this time with relief and delight at being released; Justin catches some of his son’s joy. “Come on,” he says, “we’re out of here. The last of the big spenders is going to take you into Ogallala and buy you a steak.”

  Then at the end, when Jerome has almost forgotten about it, he gets, if not exactly what he thought he came for, this; it’s as good as he’s going to get.

  They are standing in the Bluemont parking area in the pink early morning, getting ready to say goodbye. His dad, with his face full of incomplete good intentions, is looking at Jerome, who’s waiting next to Barry’s Jeep Cherokee, kicking the cleated tire. They’ve already hugged and Jerome is about to get in the car and go but he can’t just leave it like this; he is sick of being cool.

  “God, Dad,” he cries—he wants to get it all back: himself, when little, the family he used to have. Belief. “I didn’t come all this way for this.”

  “What do you want?”

  He is astounded to hear himself: “I love you. I want you to come with me!”

  “Too late.” His father shrugs. “You know. But you can come back here any time you want.”

  His voice sinks so deep only he can hear it. “Oh God. Oh Dad.”

  So he has to get into the car. He’s already shut the door on himself and rolled down the window to catch any last words when his father blunders into it; his smile is beautiful.

  “Be good,” Justin says, inadvertently recalling the old pattern, this: that their lives together are all of a piece. “Have fun.”

  —Voice Literary Supplement, 1991

  Family Bed

  —We have to go!

  Like a mouse with the cat crouched outside waiting, my sister burrows deeper. There is cocoa on her breath. —Why, when it’s so nice?

  —I mean it, Beth. I jab her fat flank. We are too old to be in here. Frankly, there are crumbs.

  —Niiice. Bethany, who Mother named after something I don’t know about, drops into sleep like a stone into a pond.

  Oh sure it’s nice in here. Too nice. Soft and warm and seductive. —Mom, other kids don’t have to go to bed at …

  —Shh, Sarah. Can a person thunder in a whisper? Mother can. —We’re the Dermotts. This is who we are.

  The six of us are, like, trapped inside an idea she had. We used to be seven, but Darryl went out one night and that’s all I know. Father says Darryl is fighting for our country in Lebanon.

  —Sarah? My one remaining brother mutters, —Cover for me, dude.

  My heart lurches. —Bill, you’re not …

  He claps his hand over my mouth.

  The word comes out in a little puff anyway, —leaving.

  But he is. Bill bundles pillows into a guy-shaped heap as Mother shuts the book and turns off the light with that hateful snap, like she is shutting the lid on us. During the ritual night-nights, he slithers out like a ferret; outside a car waits—five cute guys giggling and whispering; they are heading for the mall. I grab his hand. —Don’t go.

  —Children! Mom’s hiss breaks the connection between us.

  Am I the only one who hears him snaking across the rug? Outside the car starts up and my heart goes after it. There are kids at the mall, cute guys, skate-boards and loud music. I poke Bethany. —We can’t go on like this.

  But we do. You see us on TV, you see us in the magazines, the happy Dermotts, smiling, smiling, smiling and you think, how wonderful: sweet family, together here in the dark, what closer bond?

  Well, listen.

  Here in the dark.

  Get it?

  Lights out after bedtime cocoa, that means, whether or not you are sleepy. No music at bedtime, no iPod, no whispering; no squirming and no humming please, you know it gets on my nerves. No Game Boy, children, and no TV, especially not now, and definitely no talking after the half hour officially designated for sharing in which we each have to say something embarrassing to make it stop, and as for cell calls or instant messaging, forget it. You get grounded, or worse.

  —Mom, it’s only nine p.m.!

  —Finish your cocoa. It’s nine o’clock, she says in Channel Five news tones. Grimly, she adds what I know by heart. —and I know where my children are. Night night, children. Kisses, everybody. Mmm, now you. Mmmmm. And you. And you. Is she counting? —Sleep tight.

  Mother, I’m sixteen years old!

  Nice, you think, but only because our mother has you brainwashed. We have the perfect mother. Everybody says so on TV. We are a media phenom: magazines, supermarket rags. How perfect, you think when she gets all gooshy about family stuff, which she does on every talk show between here and East Wherever, I wish we were close like that. Snug as bunnies in the nest.

  Do you hear yourselves?

  —Family bonding, Mother says with that smug, perfect smile, while Daddy nods gravely into whichever camera, yaaas, yaaas. —This is our private, special time.

  Mom, everybody I care about is down at the mall!

  But I am jabbed by knees and elbows and sandpaper heels on the special big bed Daddy built for us when we outgrew the super King, six Dermotts locked down for the night. Together. Again. Well, all but one, and this is what they are all ignoring, like: under cover of darkness, my one remaining big brother has fled.

  I still miss Darryl. I love Billy and I’m scared for him, well, a little bit. But I am also pissed. Why should he have all the fun? He’s malling with slutty Jacie Peterson, for all I know they are going to have sex, and me? I love Tommy, why can’t I … It’s for his own good, I think, but I am lying to myself. —Mom.

  —Shhhshh, Sarah, night-night.

  —Mo-om!

  She probably already knows. She’ll blow it off just like everything else that doesn’t fit her glowing picture, like, pretend it isn’t happening. When I grab her toe she says, —Howard …

  Dad plants one foot on my shoulder. —Sarah, that’s enough.

  —But Dad! Bill is … God only knows what he’s doing and it is killing me. —Mother, he’s gone!

  —Honey, he probably had to … Embarrassed pause. —You know.

  —Pee? That’s crap and you know it, he’s …

  —Sarah, language!

  I go on anyway. —down at the mall.

  So she has to face the fact. —Not for long. I said, Howard!

  He yawns. —Don’t worry honey, he’ll be back. Sleep tight.

  —Howard! When she gets that tone it scares me shit.

  —Mom, I was only kidding! Billy, what have I done to you?

  Dad lunges up in a plume of bedcovers like Moby Dick spouting. —OK, OK!

  The minute it’s done I feel bad. It’s after Lights Out so we don’t see our father dress. We don’t see what he slides out of the drawer and snaps on his belt and we don’t really know what he’ll do when he catches Bill, we only know that it’s happened before and Bill comes back to bed shaken, but not changed. It happens and we never speak of it. We never speak of anything bad. It would wreck the show. Dad settles into his boots: thump.

&
nbsp; I jump out of bed. —Daddy, I’ll come with. Save him somehow.

  Mother hauls me back by the hair. —It’s a jungle out there.

  —But I have to help!

  —It isn’t safe.

  —Mom! I want to hit or yell bullshit but we don’t hit or yell in our family. We aren’t allowed to whine. —All the other kids …

  —Lie down. I’ll read you all another chapter as an extra treat.

  Last month it was Pilgrim’s Progress and Moby-Dick, she has a great reading voice but the quizzes after are hard. Tonight it’s Don Quixote, after which she reprises the night-nights and kills the light, after which we are expected to lie still until sleep rescues us, at least for now.

  Like a person could sleep with Bill gone and Daddy out there, armed with God knows what. Plus. Beth’s elbow is digging into my left boob and Dad’s toenail scraped my neck when he left. Mom changes the sheets every day so there are never cocoa stains, but there are still crumbs. Probably this bed thing was cute when we were babies, but, Mom! Plus you and Daddy hog the pillows with Baby Ronnie jammed between you; God only knows when you had sex.

  For the sake of our mother, we sleep in the belly of the beast, and in exchange for our freedom? We’re famous on TV.

  Tomorrow Vandella LeSpire is shooting the Inside Everything show from our very own bed. Mother’s face is creamed to East Judas in preparation, and her hair is tweaked into cornrows on which, let me tell you, the beads and things look pretty lame. I mean, you can see the scalp and her hair is a scrunty, dyed blonde. Cornrows are supposed to show that what we are doing is very next, like: nothing retro about Family Bed. Mother wants people to see us on TV and go, “How wonderful.” What a good mother she is, to do this for her kids. See how safe and happy they are, bonding in the Family Bed.