Читать книгу West Virginia - Joe Halstead - Страница 8

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JAMIE WOKE THE NEXT AFTERNOON, December twenty-something, dried blood all over his face, on top of damp sheets. The sun was low and coming through the window, hitting him in the face, and his arm, which was numb, reached for his iPhone on the nightstand, but the phone was dead, disconnected from the charger. He connected the phone and charged it, which took two minutes, and checked his text messages. He got out of bed, knocking a Burnett’s bottle over onto some books from his last semester in college, and then walked into the living room looking for a lighter. He found the note written on the whiteboard and the hummus on the wall and then saw his jacket was gone and panicked but then had to stop and stare at the hummus some more because it didn’t make sense; he couldn’t understand what it was until he noticed the empty container on the floor. He tore the room apart looking for his arrowhead and then went to the sink and splashed water on his face. He couldn’t even think about how the girl from last night came and fucked everything up because everything was already fucked. His father had been dead five days—no, six—and still hadn’t been laid to rest because his family hadn’t done it. That had always been their way. Time passes and people die and every day leaves you with less to say about it all. But Jamie could feel a clot of anger growing in his body. Gone for almost a week and still no funeral? His father deserved better. More than anything, or, to be honest, he felt sorry for his mother and sister: they were naive, and they obviously weren’t taking anything seriously. They should’ve been planning the funeral.

But his sorrow didn’t stop him from waiting six days to start looking for a flight. He wasn’t a complete shit about going home, but there was something there that was holding him back, some reservation, some fear. It was almost Christmas, so he started thinking about Christmases as a kid and how he and his sister would sit at the bottom of the little twenty-dollar tree from Walmart and it was usually one of the good times. They’d grown up poor, same as everyone who lived in the food-stamp hollers, but they always had presents from Walmart or pencils or a video game stolen from Blockbuster. But those days had gone long before his father died, so he knew if he went home it’d be one of the sad times. He was, in truth, afraid of how bad things had gotten while being away. After a while, what he wished was that it’d all stop mattering. No matter how much he tried, though, it never did.

There was something else, when he’d spoken to his mother yesterday, for a second time since his dad had died. She’d added a new detail that she hadn’t mentioned earlier, when she’d called with the news, something his sister hadn’t mentioned when he’d talked to her a couple of days ago either. She’d said they couldn’t bury his father because the cops hadn’t found the body. And Jamie got frustrated with her. If it was true—and why would she make this up?—then how did they know his father was even actually dead? He thought about how he was getting older and how he kept losing things, things like his father, and how the more things he lost the fewer things he had, and he just wanted that damn arrowhead back more than anything. All he could think about was how he’d found it as a boy and how he’d promised his father he’d hold on to it forever, take care of it, never show it to anyone, and never, ever lose it.

He washed off in a long, hot shower with a washcloth and then went to the kitchen and swallowed a Xanax and looked out the window past the city, his eyes disappointed at the buildings, and superimposed on it, his own reflection in the glass. He had an extraterrestrial look about him that only emphasized his estrangement from West Virginia, a look acquired during the six years he’d lived in New York City. He had gaps between his teeth, which gave his face a childlike look, and there were acne scars on his left cheek, which gave him a predatory look, or it might’ve been his cheekbones that somehow seemed too protuberant. He got dressed—jeans, black ankle boots, a gray sweater, a ceremonial trench—and then he left the apartment.

Walking north along Second Avenue to the fashion design student’s apartment, texting, Facebooking, he wondered at the reasons he’d come to New York. As a boy and later, too, he thought he’d been born far from home. As if the whole time he’d been following a map, trying to get back, tracing footsteps and showing his face one last time everywhere he went. He’d come after high school on a scholarship to NYU. Vaguely he’d wanted to accomplish some journey, wanted to live in a room above a coffee shop with a rumpled mattress in one corner, a cheap Sony laptop in the other. Many of the people he met had come from faraway places like Brazil and France, but none had come from farther away than West Virginia, and after some time they’d been absorbed into Manhattan, while he held on to something, or something held on to him. He’d come to a kind of world fundamentally different from the one he’d always known and he realized such a world would require a different kind of person. So he changed. He started taking sleeping pills. Only Ambien, just here and there, but even so. He’d spent his nights at clubs or college parties, trying to return to a place from which he could begin again. More likely he’d begun to believe all the things his father had spent years telling him: That’s your home now. There’s no coming back. This place will suck you deeper and faster than quicksand in one of them old Tarzan movies. You can’t come back.

Trust me, you can’t.

He cut a diagonal somewhere above Twenty-First Street and the wind picked up and he put his hands into his coat pockets, and the traffic light changed from red to green and the red hand lit up and told people they couldn’t walk, but he crossed the street anyway and then stopped outside the entrance to the fashion design student’s building and rang the bell and looked into the eye of the camera and the door buzzed open and he entered.

Drinks sat on every surface and two girls, young and white and blond, wearing long cardigans and Nikes, sat on the couch staring at him as he passed, not saying anything. There was music coming from above and he walked upstairs and down the hallway into a large room that seemed to take up the entire second floor, and he stood in the doorway and watched as the fashion design student got dressed. She pretended not to care, which made him feel like a ghost.

“Thought you left last night,” she said. “Fill me a bowl?”

When she said this, he turned away from her and she asked him what he was doing there and he asked if she knew the girl from the party. He took the weed off the nightstand and filled the bowl and gave it to her, and she started looking for a lighter and told him that the girl’s name was Sara and that she did kind of know her but she didn’t look at him.

“Well, Sara stole my fucking jacket, so…” he said.

“Wow,” she said. “I guess I’m sorry.” There was a pause. “Should I be?”

“Are you serious? My leather fucking jacket—”

“I just want to know one thing,” she said. “Why the fuck did I set you up with Jo if you were just going to ditch her? You lied to me. I am so fucking over the men of this country—well, this world, really, but you know what I mean.”

“I know. It was extra shitty of me. I’m sorry,” he said.

He sat down on her bed and stared out the dusty window. Across the street was a construction site, a large pit ringed by machines that looked to him like giant monsters, which he found momentarily distressing. “I’m just gonna call the police,” he said.

“Look, Sara’s unstable, self-destructive, uncontrollable. She’s run off again—not sure where this time. If she lives to see thirty, I’ll be surprised.”

“How do you know her?”

“She’s my cousin.”

“Then she has money to buy her own shit.”

“Hey, chill out. We don’t know if she stole the jacket. She was probably just cold,” she said. “Why are you being such a pussy about this jacket thing?”

“Why am I a pussy for wanting my jacket back?”

“A leather jacket.” She laughed. “You’ve been in fistfights and you have a black eye. People look at you and say, ‘Look, there goes a guy with a black eye and a leather jacket.’ We get it, you’re a visionary, a badass.”

“Actually, I fell into a cab door. But that’s an interesting theory.”

“What I can’t seem to figure out is if you’re the real deal or just full of shit.” She paused. “Girls steal clothes all the time. Honestly, what is the big deal?”

“I had things in my pockets. I had this arrowhead—”

He stopped midsentence and didn’t say anything else. Maybe forty-five seconds—an uncomfortably long pause—and listened to the traffic humming outside. “Look,” he said, “tell Sara my dad died last week and I have to leave town and I need my jacket.”

“Shit, I forgot about that. What happened?”

“They think he killed himself.”

He stopped looking out the window when he saw her staring at him and he thought she was maybe looking at his eye but then he realized she was watching him. She licked her thumb and wiped something off his cheek.

“You can’t even tell,” she said.

That night Jamie had a strange dream in which he was skinning a white-tailed deer somewhere around Fulton and Nassau. He pinned the deer with his forearm and pressed his knees against the body and then angled a blade across its throat, near the jaw, and severed the windpipe and neck bones and sliced completely through the spine and then cut out the rectum and ripped off the ears. There was a woodpile nearby and for some reason he was throwing the guts onto it, and when he stood he saw his father dead in the woodpile. He dropped the knife and he was no longer himself and he watched the rest of it from beyond.

He woke up and there was a cry caught in his throat, and in some indefinable way the dream made him feel closer to home than ever. He couldn’t get back to sleep so he opened his MacBook and compared prices of rental cars on Enterprise. He thought about his father. The police said there was no note. Only his truck, still running, on the side of the bridge.

In all things Jamie strove to be like his father. He’d never gone to school, lived in West Virginia his whole life. Claimed he’d only ever be happy in West Virginia and that no change of place could ever change who he was. All his friends could sit on their heels in their old age while he just kept on working, and he did so by preference. He’d been sensible and well meaning and always had a look of honesty about him. Tall, with good posture, a nice chin; a man who’d look you straight in the eye, friendly, but with a boyish air. There’d been something assured, Gregory Peck–ish about him. Jamie’s best memory of him was the day he’d found the arrowhead. It was a Saturday and they were walking through the woods. He was five or six years old. The old logging road they often walked went through thickets, across a creek bed, and wound around a hill until it reached a pasture. Jamie fell on his butt and noticed the arrowhead lying under a laurel bush. Almost two inches long, the arrowhead’s sides narrowed until they reached the tip, pencil thin, sharp. The right side was shaped with a precise curve.

“What’s that?” his father said.

“I don’t know,” Jamie said.

His father took the arrowhead. “Let’s see here,” he said. With great formality he began inspecting the arrowhead. They stood on the path for a long moment without talking and Jamie was surprised to see that his father was smiling, apparently pleased with Jamie’s discovery.

“What is it?” Jamie asked.

“It’s an old Indian arrowhead,” his father said. “They probably used it to kill a deer, then dropped it here. It’s kinda cool, if you think about it.”

“What is?”

“That somethin’ an Indian did hundreds of years ago can touch us today. That it was lost by some Indian and wound up here to point us somewhere. Think about it.”

Jamie took the arrowhead and pretended to inspect it. He climbed onto a small log that jutted out of the rocks. Standing up there, he was almost at eye level with his father. He’d spent his life thus far looking up at a mountain; it was the first time he’d considered how different that place might look from the mountaintop.

“Pretty proud of yourself, ain’t ya, knothead?” his father said. “Let me see that again for a second, will ya? I promise to give it right back.”

Jamie slowly handed the arrowhead to his father, who took it from him in the same manner in which he’d given it, and it even looked to him as if his father didn’t want to take it, which made Jamie feel like he truly would get it back.

His father put the arrowhead in the palm of his hand and held it out. “You see how it’s like the arrow on a compass?” he said. “It can point any way it wants to.”

Jamie jumped from the log. “Wonder what it’s pointin’ to then.”

His father lowered himself to one knee. “Maybe the search for whatever it’s pointin’ to is better than whatever it’s pointin’ to. Do you understand?”

Jamie nodded.

His father lightly swatted him on the bottom. “Let’s go on home then.”

It’d been a long time, nearly four years, since Jamie had managed to visit his father, and he barely called anymore, didn’t even write—because that was, he thought, something his father would never understand, that there would be no use searching, no use having an arrowhead to guide him, if there wasn’t something worth finding in the end.

At four in the morning, he left his apartment. The sun wasn’t up, but he smelled the pizza from 2 Bros Pizza and felt a little better. He walked to a coffee shop where he had a coffee among a handful of New Yorkers with their historic faces. He paid and then lit a cigarette and set out walking aimlessly. It’d snowed earlier and he looked for places where he was the first to walk and kicked at the snow and then looked back at his fresh black tracks disappearing in the light powder. A guitar playing a folk tune drew him to a doorway with a homeless woman. She was unusually beautiful even with the abscesses on her arms and the blood on the tail of her shirt, and he walked away and they never said a word to each other. A few hours later, he sat in the public library and tried to write and then looked at flights to West Virginia on Kayak.com. He thought about his father jumping from the bridge. What would it feel like to hit the water below? Would it hurt, or would your heart stop on the way down? Something was running down his cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.