Chapter Twenty-Three #2
But now that someone has bothered to mention Skip, Tom wants to go back to the part where they all found out about this, when he was eight years old and Skip was ten. He says the word none of them have said yet.
“So, I had a brother.”
“Half,” Cal clarifies, then looks down and touches a finger to his lips.
“Half a brother,” Tom says.
There’s his father, perched on their armchair, wearing a light-blue sport shirt with wide lapels and looking pent-up, like he’s witnessing a medical procedure. He was far more talkative on the rock. All these sodden words are stacking up; he looks miserable. They all look miserable.
Their answer to Tom’s question, why did they wait so long?
—put to his father on the rock, put to all three of them in the Jenkinses’ living room—is that they did the best they could, and that they did what they did for him, and for Skip.
But it isn’t true. They lied about everything to make their own lives easier.
With his body language, but also with what he tries to say, he lets them know that.
Lets them know he thinks what they’ve done is an abuse of power.
And hearing it hurts them, he can tell. He changes the question: why are they telling him now?
His father exhales. “Your number was high. It just felt like we were through something. Or had turned a corner. The lottery. I was sorry for so long that we hadn’t told you—hadn’t told both of you.”
Whaa-whaa-whaa.
Perhaps craziest of all: it seems important to them that he not think anything has changed.
—
He doesn’t stick around long. Not in that cyclone of unwelcome information.
He doesn’t know how to measure it, how to weigh it, how to think about it.
Does he storm out? Say things he wished he hadn’t?
Slam their front door? He’s not a slammer.
But he does leave, when they start pumping him for reassurance that he knows how bad they all feel; fuck that.
On his way out, he tells them this is bullshit.
But he doesn’t mean it isn’t true, because he knows it is.
He knew it on the rock. He knew it from the way Felix—his father—was telling him.
That’s another thing: by the time he gets out of the Jenkinses’ house, he’s heard all three of them say that Felix is still his father.
As if they’re worried he might abandon the guy who’s been his dad his whole life and throw his arms around Mr. Jenkins.
As if his sense of loyalty is that nudgeable.
No. He has a brain; he understands. Felix Salt is his father.
Cal Jenkins is his birth father. His mother washed her hands of all of them—conveniently—and the rest of the grown-ups decided to make life a little smoother for themselves by picking up her torch and carrying it all the way through the second half of his and Skip’s childhoods.
Lying through their teeth every single day of their lives.
—
He walks back to Roswell Lane. It takes twenty minutes—on streets he used to sail down on his bicycle. Riding, at times, with no hands on the handlebars; he’d loved that. At the house, he gets into the Corvair and, because it suddenly feels like the only place to go, he drives out to the cemetery.
It doesn’t help. He sits down at the foot of that little plot of land where Skip isn’t buried and says, “You’re not going to believe this.” But he doesn’t say anything else because no words will come, and there’s no one to say them to.
From there, he goes to the Tiger’s Foot on Carson Street and sits at the bar with a beer he doesn’t want, turning it with his fingers and setting his thoughts on fire, one after another, in his head.
It feels like a conspiracy. It is a conspiracy!
Who are all these people who’ve made these enormous decisions for him, without giving him a say?
Who are they, to have decided it was better to lie to him than face their own fuckups?
It makes him wonder what else they’ve lied to him about.
He decides to head back to Toledo tonight, not tomorrow.
He can’t face the grieving Jenkinses again.
Their grief actually pisses him off now.
He knows it’s not fair, but he can’t look at Mr. Jenkins and have him looking back, seeing a son.
He also can’t talk about this with his father anymore.
He understands. People get laid, babies get made, everybody lies to their kids. Isn’t that the story of the world?
And now, they—his father and the Jenkinses—can’t live with themselves until they hear from him that he’s okay with all this. Even though they’ve been living with themselves pretty easily for a long time, as far as he can tell.
From across the room, he hears the snap of a cap gun and looks over to see a guy he thinks he recognizes playing the Rifle Range game in the corner next to the bathrooms. Black, a little older than him.
A lot more hair than he used to have, it almost doubles the size of his head.
Tom remembers riding with him and Skip out to Skip’s grandfather’s house on Compton Road, finding the cat skeleton.
Vincent Deeds. The bartender, who’s also the owner of the place, is an older white man named Mr. Chuppy.
Mr. Chuppy, Tom notices, has walked down to the end of the bar and is standing with a lit cigarette drooping from one side of his mouth, his arms folded, staring at Vincent. Just staring.
If you had to get stared at your whole life, not just in a town like this but everywhere you went, Tom wondered, would you start to get used to it? Probably not.
He picks up his beer, carries it over to the Rifle Range game, and reintroduces himself.
Vincent, it turns out, has been back for almost a year from his tour in Vietnam.
He’s just finished his shift at Lankford Auto, down the street.
When Tom asks what it was like—over there—Vincent won’t say anything more than, “Subhuman, man. Don’t ask.
” The Game Over light comes on, and he drapes his arm over the mounted rifle, angling it upward.
Looks at Tom and says he didn’t find out about Skip until he got back.
Tom thinks to tell him what the day has revealed. But no. Vincent has been through what he’s been through and is still going through it; he doesn’t need to be dragged into Tom’s woes. Something—everything—tells Tom his own woes can’t touch what Vincent and way too many other guys have experienced.
“Remember Theo Bach?” Vincent says.
Now that Tom is talking to him, other names from Skip’s coterie—squadrons, Skip called them—begin to surface in his mind. Theo Bach is that rabbity kid with the taped glasses who lived in Camden. He came to dinner at the Jenkinses’ the night before Skip shipped out. “What about him?”
Vincent shakes his head again. “Over and back. You didn’t see him? His grave’s on the same row as Skip’s.”
—
He tells his father he’ll call in a few days.
He declines the offer to talk some more about everything they’ve already talked about.
He hugs him, and tells him he loves him, makes a point of calling him “Dad.” But as for that thing his father and the Jenkinses seem to need so badly from him, that all’s-well thumbs-up they suddenly can’t live without?
Tom takes that with him. Into the trunk of the Corvair it goes, next to his suitcase.
They can jump into Lake Meyer, waiting for that.
Nothing is quite as maddening as being angry at people who lovingly understand your anger.
Unless it’s feeling guilty about the very justifiable anger you have toward those people. Because one of them raised you, for God’s sake. Because two of them just lost their kid.
And what of his mother, co-wielder of this sledgehammer that’s smashed his understanding of who he is?
She hasn’t had to deal with any of this.
Had she foreseen that they might keep the secret all these years?
She hadn’t cared, obviously, but would she be dismayed to find out they had?
Mortified? Both, he hopes. It jabs at him all over again that he’s never known what was going through her head that day.
No matter what was happening with his father—or with anyone else’s father—what was she thinking as she rolled past him in her car that afternoon, and straight out of town?
He has, suddenly, a rekindled desire to know, now that almost every other piece of this puzzle is on the table.
Because she took a few of his pieces with her and probably doesn’t even know it, which is sad.
That’s the thing. He’s mad in about ten different directions.
But he’s also sad, because there isn’t anyone left in his family—even his unexpectedly extended one—who hasn’t lied to him.
He could have flipped a coin at that moment to decide which he wanted more: to make his mother listen to what he’s been through, or demand that she explain herself to him, once and for all.
Maybe he just wants to collect all the versions of himself that are out there, lock them away, and lose the key.
It’s the first of May. The once scale-like clouds have come together across the sky, and a light rain falls through the dusk, speckling the windshield. He turns on the wipers.
He hasn’t flipped a coin and doesn’t feel like he’s decided anything when he turns the car around, then heads south. And east.
—
Less than two hours to get there. Just over a hundred miles.
At the tail end of dusk, he picks up a radio station out of Columbus playing the entire Days of Future Passed album, which means the DJ’s probably not even at the sound desk; he’s taking a nap or went to get a slice of pizza, Tom’s seen DJs do it more than a few times.
When “Nights in White Satin” comes on, he turns the volume up and rides its lush, orchestral waves into a city of lights that looks, to him, far bigger than Toledo.