Son of Destruction

29




Jessie


Jessie has been in worse places. The cavernous front room of the Sixties Modern shrine to Orville and Mildred Kalen is littered with the expected: crumpled beer cans, miniature airline empties and ranks of full-sized dead soldiers; clothes strewn every whichway; unopened bills and second notices, sleazy skin mags and months’ worth of old newspapers, some still in their plastic wrappers like snakes that died before they could slough their skin.

The architect’s vision went to hell the day Brad Kalen shipped his ancient parents off to Golden Acres, that’ll teach you to have a baby way too late in life, that’ll teach you to spoil him rotten. Mold overtook the white stucco walls the day they left; their pictures faded. It’s been a long time since anybody opened the dusty fiberglass curtains on their panoramic view of the inlet, or opened the sliding doors. Dead dieffenbachia droop in porcelain urns on the filthy terrazzo and the whole place smells of sour laundry.

He’s here, she thinks, sailing into the kitchen as though she’d swept down the curved staircase all dressed up for the next party every night of her life here, the privileged child of the house.

Yes she has been here before. No she doesn’t want to talk about it. Junk from Brad’s tux pockets litters the kitchen counter: wallet, keys, dented silver flask. Somebody jammed last night’s dress clothes into the washer, tuxedo and all, and started it; through the glass she sees the stuff revolving, a study in black and white. A stinking load Brad washed but left to mildew in the machine is heaped on top; it was too vile to put into the drier. Brad’s black patent leather dress shoes sit in a bucket of suds, he’d probably puked on them. Somebody – not Brad – somebody’s fastidious.

Bobby, she thinks. He lugged Brad out of the club last night, an unlikely pairing. Sure, they hung out back in the day, but they were never friends: the gorilla and the thinking stork. That load is sloshing into the rinse cycle; he must have just left. Good old Bobby. She nukes water in one of the few clean mugs she can find and with a grimace, takes the only thing available – instant – and makes coffee. Get the bastard up. Then we can start.

She goes up the pink granite stairs, wondering whether she’d rather find him awake or stupefied. All she has to do is see whether or not he’s dead, but Lucy Carteret’s son is in town, and Jessie has questions. Snores rip through the upstairs hall: asleep, not dead. Too bad. It would have settled a lot of things.

F*ck. He’ll be hard to wake up.

Brad is on the rumpled platform bed in the ruined master bedroom, drooling on his black satin sheets. Round bed, mirrored ceiling. Looks like a set for a porn shoot, but not anything you’d want to watch. Bobby maxed out on Brad around the time he should have been shoveling him into the shower. The room stinks of puke and hangover.

There are things it’s OK to do in high school. Kids don’t cut as fine a line when it comes to niceties, but adults discriminate. People who used to hang out together stop being friends or realize they never were friends, really. Age makes men cautious. Judgmental, and once they judge, it’s final. Yeah, Bobby dumped Brad on the bed naked and filthy, and walked away. He was that anxious to get shut of him.

A rank pile of grey sweats by the bed tells her Bobby did finish the job and left before Brad yacked again and crawled away from the stink. She has no problem seeing him like this. Because she was a Pierce Point girl, not one of the cool kids, it’s the only way she’s ever seen him. Not naked, necessarily, but real Brad, neither charming nor social in the Fort Jude way. Underneath, he’s always been willful, brutish and blunt.

Now it shows, and if it hadn’t been for Walker taking control last night . . .

F*cking Brad will strut right back into that circle like the gypsy’s daughter, miraculously turned back into a virgin again. It’s the Fort Jude way. The Fort Jude way is a little miracle of denial. Jessie should know. There’s a thin line between organized society and raw nature. She knows how the town’s anointed nice boys looked at her back then; she heard the girls’ savage whispers snaking down the halls, but now everything is pretty, pretty, now everybody’s nice. Nice is the product of a powerful group effort. Societies like this one survive on the strength of a pact created by the group and mutually agreed upon. Nobody needs to know the truth if we act the part.

In this town the chosen are born smoothing over rough spots and ignoring the boggy ones – even Brad, at least they do in public, where people can see. Jessie shudders. As a kid, she envied that entitled, happy little circle. Now she’s in it – more or less. The kid who used to be nobody is somebody in this town. It’s comfortable. Fort Jude’s chosen do what they have to, to keep their pretty creation intact.

She’s been studying it ever since first grade. In a way, she’s like the anthropologist who moves into a jungle village, alien at first, fitting in so she can crack the place open for examination even as she’s welcomed into the tribe.

She knows now. Boy, does she know.

Before they bussed her across town to Northshore Elementary she was happy. She played in the dirt with kids who could care less who had what or who got invited or who your folks were, and if somebody pushed you down, you got up and started over. At Northshore, she spent solitary lunch hours and moody afternoons on the school bus, scheming all the way across town. Sure she could talk the talk and walk the walk if she had to, but she despised the superior little snots with their cotillions and sailing lessons at the Fort Jude Club. She loved to push their buttons. Never mind the cute outfits. She could turn heads, just boogieing down the hall in her trashy clothes.

Back in the day, there were still things nice girls just didn’t do, whereas Jessie didn’t give a crap. At Fort Jude High she sent those girls – the very friends she sits down with now – a different message: I can take your boy away from you, no matter who you think you are. I can have any guy you have and every one you want. Those girls used to look right through her, like, slut.

Well, she has their number now. But Jessie has mellowed.

Defiance sat better on Jessie back then. Odd how in the end you always come home to the town you stepped out of like dirty underwear and kicked away. Back in Fort Jude thirty-some years after the fact, she chose to assume protective coloration because for Jessie Vukovich these days it’s restful, fitting in.

Like a declared state of peace.

She has money; she still has her looks and she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone, rising on company ladders in strange cities. She’s proved herself. She doesn’t need to prove anything to these candy-faced, aging girls and she certainly doesn’t need to fight them. In fact, they’ve grown into nice, likable women that it’s fun to sit down with. Every one of them has been seasoned by troubles they don’t talk about: f*cked-up kids, unfaithful or insufficient mates, some illness. They’ve all suffered losses and every one of them has chosen to smile in spite of it and keep going. These people have welcomed her, and at her age, Jessie is grateful. She needs a context, so she can rest.

There isn’t much else she needs, except a new man that she can go to all their parties with; she wants this one to be a keeper, so that when push comes to shove, they’ll both be around to help each other die. Odd what passes for happiness. Jessie’s led several lives outside Fort Jude so far, starting as a Blackjack dealer in Vegas at nineteen – high-end table at La Mirage, she might still be there if she hadn’t started marrying up. Her men were all good in their own ways, just not good at love.

It’s time to decide which of the good old local boys will wear well, and settle down.

First, Brad. Wake him up. Ask.

Even though the smell is disgusting, she puts coffee on the bedside table and jiggers the alarm clock to go off in five. She opens the heavy, lined curtains so the room is bright and pushes aside the sliding door. Then she sits down to wait.

In a way, it’s kind of wonderful. Pavlovian. He slams the clock off at the first beep, stumbles down the carpeted steps from the bed and lumbers into the shower. He comes out toweling his head with that useless dick flapping under his slack belly.

God she despises him.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m supposed to see if you’d offed yourself.’

‘Why would I do that?’ He does not move to cover himself.

‘Call it wishful thinking.’ She tosses him a throw from Mildred Kalen’s brocaded chaise longue. ‘Give me a break. Put this on.’

Only a fool with no sense of how he is perceived by others would crack that lewd grin, like, woo hoo. ‘I thought I was giving you a break.’

‘While you’re at it, cover that smirk.’

He drapes the Afghan over one shoulder and lets it drop as he heads into the walk-in closet, finishing his turn with a stripper’s bump of that hairy butt. She hears hangers sliding on the rack, drawers opening, Brad farting. When he comes out, the shorts and polo shirt hide the worst of the damages. Matchy green, one of those golf outfits Orville left behind when Brad shipped him off to Golden Acres. He faces her in an old man’s coordinated colors. ‘What are you really doing here?’

‘Lucy Carteret.’

Offhand: ‘I heard she died.’

Jessie’s head snaps back. ‘Who told you?’

Lucy? Dead? How does word get around anyway, zeitgeist? Jungle drums? Or do these people communicate like certain kinds of trees – bamboo, she thinks – with a common root system deep underground, woody tentacles interlocking?

He doesn’t answer. Instead he burps a question like that old TV comic who played the belching drunk, ‘What about her?’

F*ck if she’ll tell him that Lucy’s kid is down here from the north, Brad may not know he exists. Let him sop up that information like some f*cking tree draining its secret life from the sandy Florida dirt. Better yet, let the kid smack him in the face with it. Let this Dan Carteret track him down and put the f*cking question, and when Brad answers, she hopes the kid beats the crap out of him.

She hates this but she has to stay until she gives him the last, hard shove down the road to hell. The question she came to ask, and, as it turns out, can’t leave until she asks. ‘So. That time. Did you rape her?’

He picks up the mug like a defensive weapon. ‘When?’

‘Don’t insult me. Did you?’

‘Did I rape you?’

Vile, she thinks. Filthy, she thinks. Bitter. Bitter. ‘You know f*cking well what you did.’

Instead of answering, Brad says, ‘Shitty coffee.’

‘So did you? Rape her?’

Brad raises the mug to mask whatever is going on with his face, which is not necessarily completely under control. He looks at her over the rim, snarling, ‘Why would I do that?’

She does not have to say, ‘You have a history.’

Brad does not have to say, ‘I suppose you want to know if she enjoyed it.’

They have no need to dig up old shit. He does not have to respond with another insulting question, or force her to deconstruct the only possible response she can make to it. Instead she fixes him with a look that makes even Brad crumble. He seems to be melting all at once, a decomposing lump of flesh like Jabba the Hutt, or a monster from a kids’ picture book.

Jessie watches.

Then Brad says through a spurt of bile, ‘You might wanna split before it hits the fan here. I’m gonna puke.’