X – When Jesse and Randy Got to Jackson (and Met a Steelers Fan)

A Story for Anxious Times

Chapter 10

For the previous installment of this serial novel, visit here.

Melanie was not a confrontational person by nature. And like a lot of people carved in that shape she found it easier to say tough things that needed to be said with a pen than with her lips. In 2009, young girls still wrote notes to each other on paper, and Melanie was a young girl with some paper and a problem. Specifically, how to tell someone she honestly loved enough to die for that she was playing with poison.

The roots of Melanie’s affection for Bobbie Jo were down deep, a good foot below the topsoil. She couldn’t remember the specific day they had first met, but she did know that it was third grade at the Christian school they both attended until their graduation about three months ago. Bobbie Jo had short, bright blonde hair and a knack for making kids laugh. She could do the silly noises and faces that all young kids get a kick out of, but she could also make actual jokes. And Melanie was pulled into her orbit quickly.

Melanie had always been just a bit socially awkward. Her rhythm was just a half-step off the typical person’s. She didn’t like making eye contact, and she found it hard to stop laughing once she started. It was around third grade when she noticed that these things, along with a few of her other little tics, put her just outside that solar system every child wants to be in, the one called “the other kids.” But Bobbie Jo was at the center of that circle, and she also had the rare and admirable trait of being fiercely loyal. So during that third grade year as Bobbie Jo’s magnetic pull brought the two of them together, they created a friendship that throughout the next ten years was really never in danger.

There’s always an element you can’t control when you truly love someone. There’s a reason we use the word “captivated.” It’s a good word. You are captive. Your heart is bound to her cadence, the corner of her mouth when she smiles, the way she breaks up graham crackers along the dotted lines and throws away the pieces that don’t break correctly, the time you and she and Lindsay Silverman went to the water tower at night after a softball game and looked at the city lights down the hill and talked about what it would be like when you were all adults. The smell of the grass from the softball field and the sound of the wind chimes on her front porch, the blue ones with the glass hummingbird, looking like a stained glass window when the sun ran through it. You could no more divorce them from your heart than you could your love for strawberry jelly or old Journey songs.

The pen felt like a brick in Melamine’s hands. She could barely make it move. Her amiga. Her sister. Name on her license plate in Sharpie because she thought it would be funny. And she was right. It was funny. Even Dad thought so.

Melanie let go of the pen and cried.

Pickup trucks are terrible for road trips. Jesse had actually brought a suitcase, the kind with the vertical handle and wheels you see businessmen lugging around airports, and Randy couldn’t help laughing as Jesse wheeled it down his own driveway to the old F-150. It wasn’t a mean spirited laugh, but Jesse did get a little defensive when he heard it. But Randy was too good a guy for him not to shake it off, and he threw it in the bed, the only place for it, with a smile and got in the passenger’s seat.

“Where’s your stuff?”

Randy pointed at the little plastic Kroger bag between them.

Jesse rolled his eyes and smirked, the way all friends do, and Randy laughed underneath his Dollar General black sunglasses and backed out of the driveway.

“What did your wife say about all this?”

“Really nothing.”

“Nothing?” Randy raised one of his coal black eyebrows.

“Well, you gotta’ remember, she’s eighty-five years old. She barely remembers we’re married.”

Randy smiled wide, enjoying the punchy Jesse who was just now glimpsing through the apprehension and the hopelessness.

“Fair enough, pal. Tell me how we’re getting to Jackson.”

Jesse furrowed his brow as though he were trying to remember. “275 East to 32 East. 32 East to 139. You stay on that until you hit the sunrise. If we hit Tokyo we’ve gone too far.”

“That means we have at least an hour of country music before we lose B-105.”

Randy laughed as though he were joking, but still reached forward and turned the dial on his ancient radio to 105 on the FM band.

Jackson had much more charm than Jesse was prepared for. Randy, having lived in Nebraska, was much more familiar with the quiet beauty of American small towns tucked in the middle of rural farming counties. Less hills in Nebraska, but still the same simple loveliness of the old man lingering outside the post office with his coffee, nodding at the cars that came in and parked near his own pickup truck, the local credit union with the sign congratulating the high school football team on last season’s conference championship, the local radio station in the one-story brick building with the carefully hand painted sign.

Cloud cover had come, and the town was bathed in blue-gray early afternoon light. Jesse had a new tightness in his chest as he looked first over Randy’s hands on the steering wheel at the left side of the street and then out his own side. This was the small town in the middle of nowhere his teenage father had run away to. Part of what was squeezing Jesse’s heart down in there he realized, after about five minutes, was the fact that other than the models of the cars this place had almost certainly changed very little since his father had wandered into it. That Lewis Drugs would have had to have been there, gray-green early twentieth century building still crowning the corner in the heart of the tiny downtown. The unmarked building next to the Sherwin Williams, too, reddish brown and beautiful cornices looking down at them from the left as Randy drove by at twenty-five miles per hour. These are the same old buildings his father would have seen about forty-five years ago. And knowing that made Jesse ravenously curious about what had made Bruce run away, what it was he’d kept hidden from him, his brothers and sister, and presumably his mother.

“It’s hard to believe he just basically hitchhiked here as a teenager,” Randy said, looking up at the Jackson County Courthouse, a three story red brick building with five high windows on each floor that ran along the side. It was the size of the little local library building a few blocks from his church back in Cincinnati.

“Yeah,” Jesse muttered, starting to wonder which street was the first his father had walked down. Which sidewalk his feet had first felt the firmness of. He didn’t even know if his father had ever been to his aunt’s house before running here. He didn’t know how long it had taken him to make the hundred mile journey. He only knew about the hitchhiking from a few comments his mother had made before she died. He doubted either of his younger brothers or his younger sister knew even that much. He was chasing a ghost. Sixteen years old (probably), shuffling into this strange, quaint town in the mid-sixties. He couldn’t even picture his father as a teenager, much less trying to do something Jesse himself found imaginable, leaving his parents forever to live with a relative he barely knew in another state.

Jesse closed his eyes for a second and tried. The face was blurry, white t-shirt, blue jeans, and a duffel bag. Chuck Taylor shoes, the walk fearful and slow. He was on the edge of this downtown, by the big old five story hotel. Jesse opened his eyes and frowned. Even that image was mostly mined from other sources. The blurry face had hair like Peter Brady. The duffel bag was Sylvester Stallone’s from First Blood (his father’s favorite movie). The white t-shirt was probably Fonzie’s from Happy Days. Jesse didn’t know anything that mattered other than an address, his father’s name, and the decade it happened in.

“It was a different time,” Jesse said. He used cliches at work as a way to end conversations he didn’t want to stay in, and there was a bit of that here, but he did also mean it. A teenager two years from adulthood leaving his home in some small, rural West Virginian town, even leaving it forever as his father had done, was imaginable forty years ago, before the internet and IP addresses and armies of social workers and cable news. But then the oddity of the cliche struck them both at the same moment, because for the most part it did not actually look like a different time here in Jackson. This small town struck both of them as traveling slowly down the decades with both blinkers on, waving other towns around it as it smiled wryly and squinted up at the sky and garbled out a prophecy about how the rain would be a few hours early.

For reasons that go further down towards his own roots than I can know, that moment driving through downtown Jackson was the first time Jesse actually realized that his father was dead and never coming back. He fought the flush in his face and the flood of chills running up and down his chest and back, but once that hit him he felt punch drunk. He couldn’t keep the picture of Jeremiah sitting on Grandpa’s lap out of his mind. Jeremiah, his little boy with the thick unruly black hair and the knobby knees and elbows and the word “autism,” whatever it meant, haunting all Jesse’s hopes for him, sitting up there on Bruce Henderson’s lap on Jesse’s couch in his living room, both of them asleep but only one snoring. That was the last time Jeremiah would ever touch Grandpa, that day a week before he went into the hospital for the hip replacement. Jesse had come in from talking to Manager Dave on his front porch about something they’d have to account for the next Monday morning, something he couldn’t remember now and seemed to be as far away as his father was. And he’d looked over at both of them, and he’d been both happy and resentful. And now he couldn’t stop this thing from being what it was, and he started crying silently in the passenger seat of Randy’s F-150 as they stopped at a red light and Randy looked up at the thick, dark clouds. And because Randy loved his new friend and was a good man, he looked longer than he would have otherwise, and said nothing about Jesse’s tears, and once the light turned green, he found Blossom Avenue right where Jesse’s printed directions had said it’d be. Randy turned left without using his turn signal because it was a small town and he was used to small towns where no one was ever on the road except you.

The house was an old cape cod halfway down the calm, still residential street, painted red with some white trim, both colors flaking off and looking rough enough to give Jesse some hope that maybe even his great aunt herself was still alive and living there. Maybe this would work. But then without thinking about it he reached to his left for the coffee can, then remembered that he’d put it in the suitcase. Why had he done that?  Something didn’t feel right about that.

Randy parked on the right side of the street, not feeling great about the idea of pulling into a stranger’s driveway. He looked over at Jesse, who was staring over him, taking all of the house in, the front yard, recently cut, the old high wooden fence in the backyard, the fancy but ancient lace curtains drawn on the upstairs windows. There were a few cigarette butts he could see on the edge of the front lawn.

“I guess I shouldn’t go up with you,” Randy said. He sounded sad and sure about it, and if he hadn’t been sure, Jesse would have reassured him.

He nodded, still staring at the red house and now squinting. What was wrong? Something was definitely wrong.

“Yeah,” he said, and opened the passenger’s side door and finally looked back at Randy. “How do I look?”

“Better than yesterday,” Randy said, smiling big under that wonderful black beard Jesse was increasingly growing fond of.

“I’ll be back.”

“You know what I’ll be doing.”

At first Jesse honestly didn’t, but he didn’t care enough to stop and ask. But then by the time he passed by the front of the truck and was halfway across Blossom he realized Randy had meant praying.

Stupid. As much as he owed Randy his life, in a very real though hard to explain way, and as grateful as he’d always be for his new buddy, that stuff was annoying. And never more so than when Jesse was scared. There was no part of him (at least no part he could discern) that thought what Randy was doing in that pickup truck right now would help him get an answer from the person living in this fifty-year-old house in the middle of nowhere about who his dead father was, what this thing he’d never gotten to say was. Either his great aunt or one of her kids would be there or they wouldn’t. Either somebody would tell him something or they wouldn’t. Randy’s harmless, eccentric, mumbling to his God wouldn’t change a thing.

Jesse’s dress shoes clicked on the stone steps as he tried to appear calm and walked up them and stepped up to the front door. He saw a man walking his dog come up Blossom very slowly, impossibly slowly for a nervous man like Jesse, and he did his best to ignore him as he knocked on the door. The man was looking at him. Why was he looking at him?

Three knocks. Wait. Listen. Hope. Listen.

Nothing. No creaking of floorboards. No sounds at all.

He knocked again.

Still nothing.

Please, no. This was the best lead. This was the only sure thing. He had no idea where his father had been raised, what house out in Pleasants County West Virginia was his. Please.

Five more knocks. He was anxious enough to be aggressive on the last knock, banging the door a bit. That man was definitely staring at him. He’d stopped walking his dog. Jesse could see him just to his right behind him, just out of the corner of his eye, next to the bright yellow fire hydrant. The man was big, at least horizontally. Big meaty hands, too. Old man sunglasses and a white t-shirt too tight for Jesse’s comfort. Suddenly Jesse hated this whole town. He hated this stupid idea, hated his father for waiting until the day he died to say he wanted to finally tell his family whoever he was and whatever he was, hated Janie for a million things, all too petty to even name in his mind without having to admit he was a bitter man. He clenched his teeth and turned around, prepared to tell this guy off and then give up and go home. Funeral, new job, divorce, in that order. But first let’s let this stranger have it. But the man spoke first, as his old basset hound just stared across the street at Randy (who had stopped praying and was watching Jesse with a big brother’s eye).

“No one lives there,” he said, slowly and with absolutely no movement on his face above the lips.

Somehow that fact cut a hole underneath Jesse and all that fear and anger drained out in two seconds, and left nothing but a rusty film of despair.

That’s it. I can’t do anything. I’ll never know.

“Who you looking for?” The man’s was moved a bit by the gray look of Jesse’s skin after he’d told him the house was unoccupied. And Jesse, who was depressed just enough to tell the truth, said, “I was hoping my dead father’s aunt or her kids still lived here.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Bruce Henderson.”

“No kidding?” The man said, with just enough surprise in his potato sack plain voice that Jesse’s heart stopped.

“Yeah. Did you know him?”

“Yep,” the old man said, and jerked his leash even though the basset hound hadn’t moved.

Jesse waited a full ten seconds before he realized that was it and it was his turn again.

“Did you live around here?”

“Next door,” the old man said, and licked the inside of his lower lip. “How’d he die?”

“He got a bad infection after a hip replacement,” Jesse said, and he noticed the old man frown a bit. “I didn’t know much about his time here, and I just had some questions I was hoping they could answer,” he said, jerking his head back at the house’s front door. “You wouldn’t have a minute to talk, would you?”

The man didn’t even seem to breathe. It was bizarre. Jesse was fascinated by him.

“I gotta’ finish walking my dog. Then swing by the post office. Come on up to my porch in about an hour. We can talk.” He pointed to the front porch of the blue house to their right, nodded, then continued his walk up Blossom Avenue.

Jesse stood on the porch, dumbstruck. What was that? What the heck was that?

He walked back to the truck, where Randy was waiting, all grins.

One hour and eleven minutes later they were sitting in Joe Granger’s living room, drinking sweet tea on opposite sides of his surprisingly nice green couch in his plainly finished living room. There was a Pittsburgh Steelers poster on the wall (which a good detective would have taken as evidence that Joe was a widower or a bachelor, but which Jesse was merely unsettled by, as he was by all things related to sports), and a ten-year-old tube television that had been playing an episode of an old western television show Jesse hadn’t remembered ever hearing of called “The Rifleman” until Joe turned it off as they sat down. Joe sat in a recliner whose best days had been during the Soviet Union’s worst, and set his sweet tea on an old coaster (the detective would have quietly written “widower” at that point, and been right) on the small table to his left and started talking.

Jesse could see, now that they were inside and the man’s sunglasses were off, that Joe had very observant eyes, and while they were steady and seemed to pierce you and pin you to the wall behind you, they also weren’t hostile. You weren’t going to disarm Joe, but he might use what weapons he had for your good. Randy had the thought, “I would never have been able pack profit into a car deal on this guy.” And he liked him a lot.

“Your dad came to live with Mrs. Lowell in about ’66. She was a nice enough lady, a little strange, but kept her house in order and said hello. I’d bought this house a year or two earlier, for me and Gladys. My wife-” he looked at Randy, maybe intuiting that as the older of the two he would understand a bit better- “died eleven years ago.” He gave it a second, and stared into Jesse with placid green eyes that made him look away. Jesse couldn’t help it. He felt the way a child does when he knows the next thing the doctor will do involves a needle.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Randy said, and Joe nodded and looked back at the big, dark haired, dark skinned man Jesse had very plainly called his friend. Joe hadn’t needed any more than that to invite him inside, too. He could tell Jesse was looking for what he said he was looking for, and that was enough for him to bring him and his friend into his living room and offer him a drink and spend some of his afternoon with him.

“She never said anything about him coming to live with her. I always took it that she didn’t expect him, but we never talked about it.”

“That’s right,” Jesse said, leaning a bit forward and clearing his throat. He rubbed his neck. It felt odd to not be wearing a tie. “He ran away from his home in West Virginia. He never went back. Not even for a day. I don’t know anything about his family.”

Joe grunted in a way that told Jesse he wasn’t surprised, and then he shifted his chin as he thought, never taking his eyes of Jesse’s. “You want some more tea?” he asked.

“Sure,” Jesse said. Randy declined.

Joe pulled himself out of his chair and creaked into the kitchen behind his living room and continued to talk.

“Your dad was about sixteen. My wife and I were about, oh, twenty-eight or so. We couldn’t have children, we tried-” he stopped as he opened up the refrigerator. Then he returned to the living room with the golden plastic pitcher. “We just couldn’t. I guess it felt a little to us like he might be our son, something like that. Part of it was that he was so scared.” Joe closed his eyes for a second, took in a deep breath and held it, nodded to himself, and then said, “Yeah. Scared. Real scared.”

Jesse was too taken aback to say thank you as Joe refilled his glass. He knew his father had run from something bad, or lots of somethings that were bad, or someone who was bad. He knew this thing, whatever it had been, was not good. But he’d never been able to picture fear on his father’s face, and this man saying it out loud right here in this room while Jesse held a glass and listened to his voice and saw the trees out the living room window shiver in the breeze under those still darkening clouds that meant rain made it finally real. However invisible it was to Jesse’s mind, this thing had actually happened.

“The first time I actually saw him he was getting in Mrs. Lowell’s car with her. When they came back, he had his hair cut shorter, and I waived to him, but he didn’t wave back. He looked skinny and sad but mostly afraid, and he wouldn’t look up at you, not in the face, anyway. At first I thought he was on drugs, but he wasn’t.” Joe waited until Jesse looked back up at him from the spot on Joe’s carpet where he’d placed his eyes as he’d tried to slow his heart. “He wasn’t,” he repeated when their eyes met, and they both nodded at each other.

“I don’t know why he came out here. I wish I did. I wish I could tell you. The first time we talked was when Mrs. Lowell needed me to give him a ride to the store to get him some new pants and shirts and things like that.” Joe squinted and looked up. His hands still never moved, resting on his slacks so still they might as well have been made of marble. “It was about two or three weeks after he moved in.” He took a sip of his tea, smiled slightly as he thought of the car ride over four decades ago. “He said he liked Mrs. Lowell, but he wouldn’t talk about anything else. It was strange, but I just liked him. He just had a way that broke your heart a little. He kept looking out the window, it seemed to me at nothing, and then eventually I got him to talk about baseball. He loved baseball.”

Jesse smiled, imagining his strange adolescent father loving the game he loved to the end of his life.

“He still liked baseball?”

Jesse nodded.

“I don’t know what he’d come here to get away from. But for a few months we took him to church with us, and he’d talk to Gladys some. More than me. She was a-” Joe cleared his throat. “She cared about your father. And she told me after one of them trips home from church that something awful had happened wherever he’d lived, but he wouldn’t talk about it. She thought it was real bad.” Joe waited a full five seconds, and Jesse became uncomfortable with the silence. There wasn’t a clock ticking or an air conditioner running or anything. Just unsettling quiet. “Real bad. I mean evil. And she thought he either did it or had it done to him. But he never talked about it to her.”

Randy spoke before he’d had a chance to consider that it wasn’t his right. “Did he ever talk to you?”

Joe never took his eyes off Jesse, but said slowly, “You want to hear this?” Jesse’s face went red and he felt dizzy, but he nodded.

“There was a Thanksgiving morning, we were standing outside because I had just picked up my paper, and he was out there doing something to Mrs. Lowell’s Buick. Changing the battery, it seems. But he was happy because of the long weekend. At least that’s why I was happy, and he seemed like he was in a pretty good mood, too. And we talked a little about baseball and what we’d each be doing that night. And I asked him if he’d see his mom or dad for Christmas, and I didn’t even know if his mom or dad were alive. But he got quiet, and then finally said no, and then he asked me if I believed in Hell. And I told him yes, it was in my Bible and so I believed in it. And he said yeah, me, too. And I was a little scared and worried because of how he was so still and just staring at the road, and he said he was going to Hell, and he already knew what it was like. I asked him how he knew he was going to Hell, and he just kept staring at the road in between us, not moving at all. And he said something like, ‘Because of what we did,’ but it was real quiet and he didn’t even sound like he was talking to me, really. And I told him Jesus died so people like him wouldn’t have to go to Hell, and he did something like scratch the back of his neck, and he said the things he was talking about were things I couldn’t understand. They were the worst things. And I said maybe that was so, but that didn’t make what I said any less true. And then he said he wouldn’t talk anymore, and he turned back to the car. But then he said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and so I just touched his back, just wanting him to feel better. And he jumped fast, and his hand hit something under the hood hard, but he didn’t look at it. He just looked at me, and he was so angry and scared I was sure he wanted to kill me. But he walked up to Mrs. Lowell’s front door and went inside. I didn’t see him the rest of that day, so I picked up his toolbox and shut her hood later that morning.

“Yeah, it was something real bad that he was trying to hide.”

Joe stood up again, sighing as he did this time from the pain his knees. He’d taken the dog on a longer walk than usual, and the trips up and down the stairs here in his house after the post office hadn’t helped. But they were necessary. This boy needed these things, small though they were. So Joe Granger picked up the box at the foot of the stairs and brought it over to Jesse, setting it on the empty couch cushion to his right, the one between him and Randy.

“That’s for you,” he said. “Got it together before y’all came up. Just a couple of things Gladys had of Bruce’s. She held onto them. He never came back after school and joining the army, but she thought about him sometimes and still loved him.”

Jesse looked into the brown box. There was an autographed baseball, though he couldn’t read the name and wouldn’t have recognized it even if he could, unless it had been Michael Jordan (he played baseball for a while, right?) or Babe Ruth. And there was a baseball hat, a greeting card, and a faded red composition notebook.

Jesse looked back up at Joe.

He was smiling just enough that Jesse couldn’t see the tears.

But Randy did.

The first page of the composition notebook was a very good drawing of an old farmhouse. Startlingly good. It was drawn the long way on the page, so that you had to turn the notebook to the side to see it right-side-up. The house was sitting in front of a bare field, and behind the field were woods that stretched all the way across the paper. On the left side of the paper, about a half-inch from the edge, there was an “X” drawn above the trees.

And near the house there was an arrow, pointing diagonally down, towards the base.

Pointing under the house.

Melanie put her forehead down on her right arm, resting on the desk that had about fifteen pages of handwritten love on it. She was exhausted. Her hand was throbbing at the knuckles and in the wrist, and her eyes were swollen and felt like they were weighing her head down.

There was no one outside her family she loved like she did Bobbie Jo; and she loved her more after hurting for her these last two hours.

Maybe she could take a nap.

She lay down on her bed, stared up at the ceiling for a moment and asked her God a question, and then told Him she loved Him, and that she was still so sorry for not saying something to her friend sooner. She closed her eyes, tried to control her breathing, and thought about sleep.

More tears fell down both cheeks, and she gritted her teeth, and waited for sleep to come.