XX – When Jesse Found the Address (and a Roommate)

A Story for Anxious Times

Chapter 20

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

He liked pain.

That was the problem.

Inflicting it, feeling it, seeing it. It entranced him. And down here, in the shadows, he could slake that thirst for a few minutes, maybe an hour, at a time.

It is a way of this rebellious world that the ugliest things inside a man are often the things he most protects. A husband gives up his family, his job, his reputation in order to indulge his senseless craving for booze or illicit sex. Another would rather sell his skin than give up the control and the power that make him insufferable to those closest to him. We often love what kills us.

And down there under the Henderson house, deep in the dark green hills of West Virginia, back in the 1960s, loving and killing went hand in hand.

The last time was a Tuesday. 1966. The darkest hours of a summer night drowning under thick rain. If you’d have been standing on that old road in front of the house, you’d have heard the one scream, right as it started, before the thunder drowned it out. That was just before 2:30 in the morning, at least according to the old clock in the farmhouse kitchen.

That last one was the hardest for Bruce.

”What are you thinking about?”

“This isn’t summer camp, Randy.”

Jesse had meant that to have more good humor in it than it struck him now that it did. “Or our honeymoon.”

His anger at Janie had subsided even less than he’d realized, despite the fact that it was four hours later and they were both laying in Joe Granger’s guest room.

“I never went to summer camp,” Randy said. “And Margaret and I never had a honeymoon.”

“Well I’ll take you camping when we get back to Cincinnati. But right now I just want to sleep,” Jesse lied.

Randy took the hint from over on his pull-out couch bed on the right side of Joe Granger’s fairly large spare room (he’d let Jesse have the actual bed). He decided to stay quiet and reached for his cell phone, down on the floor to his right. It was laying next to his wallet and paperback NIV Bible. He flipped it open, conceding that it was probably finally time to read the text message from Margaret that he’d gotten back on the car ride over to Pastor Matt’s house. It was six words, and they said everything as they slid under his skin and discreetly slit a long and deep incision in his heart.

“Don’t ever call me again Randy.”

It was the last text message he ever got from her.

After breakfast with Joe in the morning (french toast, cereal, orange juice, water) Jesse and Randy headed out for their last Hail Mary in Jackson, Ohio. Jesse knew it was incredibly unlikely he’d get what he was going to ask for, but that same little distress signal that brought him to Jackson in the first place was transmitting from the high school. So he was going to try.

They got into Randy’s old pickup truck at 9:47, at least according to Jesse’s phone, which he set down on the bench seat between him and Randy. He’d put the old coffee can there, too, and he looked at it suspiciously as he buckled his seatbelt. Despite all his willful blindness to who governs the world and how, Jesse Henderson was no dummy. And that blue coffee can with its too-perfect clues seemed to be winking at him sinisterly. It was that feeling he’d had in the lobby when the Holiday Inn kid’s name had turned out to be Jesse, too. But everyone should be so lucky as to have a friend who constantly complains about not having coffee. It’s a wonderful distraction from pondering things you’re not ready to understand yet.

“Dude, we have to get coffee.”

“We’ll get it after.”

Randy winced, but he didn’t object. This trip wasn’t about him, or about the sweet black liquid the Lord had blessed mankind with because He is kind and loves us, and without which Randy would slowly disintegrate and leave Jesse alone to pilot the truck to West Virginia. This was about Jesse, and about Bruce, and he could wait an hour.

The high school was a new building, big and bright inside with incredibly high cielings and windows that let in tidal waves of sunlight. Jesse recognized the office more quickly than Randy, who hadn’t been inside a high school in three presidencies. It was a large room, made up almost entirely of windows and with a glass door. As they entered it had been in front of them, and to the left, and Jesse could see that, at the moment, an older lady was the only person in it.

Her back was to them, but as he opened the door and stepped into the well-lit main office area she turned and smiled pleasantly. Jesse suddenly remembered how distressed he’d been looking to people the last day or two and, as he smiled faintly back at her, he smoothed out his shirt with his right hand and, as casually as he could, ran his left hand through his hair. The woman had too much sense not to notice that something was strange about this young man with the large friend with the dark wavy hair and bright teeth, but she simply held her smile and stepped up to the chest high desk that formed a divider by running from the back wall to the one on their right.

“Hi,” Jesse said, sounding just a little more like himself than he expected. “I was hoping you could help me with something.”

“Certainly,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

Jesse quickly looked down towards her pink sweater, but there was no name tag. “You wouldn’t happen to be Mrs. Carlisle, would you?”

The woman squinted without fully shedding the smile, obviously a little surprised that a stranger would ask for her by name like that. The thought fluttered in her mind that only Mr. Winchell, the head custodian, was at the school today, and she had no idea where he was at the moment. She could call for him on the intercom if something happened, but only if she got to it quickly, and it was way across the room. She drove the thought away as silly, though, and decided to focus her attention on the young man.

“I am,” she nodded, and waited for him to tell her what he wanted from a specific elderly high school secretary in rural southeast Ohio.

“My father went to school here about forty-five years ago, in the late sixties, and I’m trying to find some things out about him.” He decided sympathy might pry some doors open that cunning wouldn’t, especially with an older lady in a pink sweater who smiled like Aunt Bee. “He died last Wednesday. My brothers and sister and I just didn’t know much about his early life, and I was trying to find some things out before the funeral later this week.”

The woman tilted her head and moaned some of the sympathy Jesse had expected, and while he was as desperate as ever he tried to make note of the fact that it seemed genuine, and that the kids out here at Jackson High School had a very sweet office secretary.

“Well, let’s see,” she said. “I don’t think there’s hardly anyone currently on staff who would have worked here that long ago. Do you know the exact years he was a student?”

Jesse quickly pitched the sinking feeling behind him. The odds that she would have actually worked here when his father had been a student were always slim. He still had the other thing.

“I believe it would have been 1966 through 1968.”

Mrs. Carlisle turned to go to a small door in the desk/divider and come out to Jesse and Randy. It took her a full minute to get around to them because of her slow, mildly pained, shuffling steps, but she had no less of a smile than she did when she was standing still on the other side of the desk. When she got to them she patted Jesse’s right arm and said, “Come with me.”

“Thank you so much,” he said, looking down at her as she started towards the office door they’d come to. “I’m Jesse Henderson, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Henderson.”

“And I’m Randy,” Randy said, his baritone not as rich just yet as normal.

“Nice to meet you, too, Randy.”

“He’s a good friend of mine,” Jesse explained.

“Mrs. Carlisle?” Randy asked, rasing his eyebrows and giving the best polite grin he could. “Is there any chance you would have some coffee?”

Jesse turned and looked back at him with confusion and disgust. “Randy,” he said disapprovingly. It was the tone he used with Jeremiah when he didn’t flush the toilet or wash his hands.

“Well, now, I do actually have a pot back there behind the desk. I’ll tell you what, young man, you just help yourself and wait here for us. I’m going to take your friend down to the library. There are some styrofoam cups there next to the pot.”

“Thank you so much, Mrs. Carlisle,” he said, and winked at Jesse, who felt inside himself the desire to punch another grown man for only the fourth time in his adult life. He and Mrs. Carlisle stepped out into the hallway as Randy quickly made his way back behind the desk and over to the coffee pot, sitting on a little table not far from the copier. He whistled “Amazing Grace” as he took one of the six-ounce cups and poured himself some, taking in a deep breath of the aroma off the surface before sipping. Then he winced and shook his head.

“Colombian,” he said to himself.

But he shrugged, decided that he couldn’t be descriminating and desperate at the same time, and drank what he later called the worst cup of coffee he’d ever had.

Jesse found small talk as endurable as eating a cactus, so as much as he liked the five-foot-two little woman leading him on down the bright high school hallway that was lined on both sides with lockers, he couldn’t bring his mind or his mouth to say, “this is a nice building” or “how long have you been working here” or “I think I’m having a brain aneurysm.” Mrs. Carlisle didn’t mind, though, and a minute or so into their walk down the hallway she started telling Jesse about how the campus was laid out, how many students they had, and where the old building had been, the one his father would have attended. Jesse listened, and was interested, but he also had the sense of something from the past clawing at his heart. This wasn’t the floor Bruce had walked on, but it was the school and the town. His secretive father with the dangerous past and the runaway present, sixteen years old as he walked down halls like this, silent and scared, or angry. Hiding something. Or hiding from something.

They went into the library, and the automatic lights turned on and illuminated a huge room with widely spaced shelves of books stretching about a hundred feet away from them towards a back wall with a door in it. Mrs. Carlisle walked him around the front desk to their right and into a small room just behind it. Inside, on tall white shelves lining three of the walls, were old bound books and a scattered collections of banker’s boxes that he could see had folders in them.

Mrs. Carlisle made her way to the wall furthest from them, looked on the second shelf, then pursed her lips and said, “Hmm.” After about ten seconds of running her finger along a stack of old books, she turned to the wall on their right and saw something she wanted.

“Could you help me, Mr. Henderson?” she asked, and pointed up to the top shelf.

“Certainly,” he said. He walked over to it and asked which book from up there she wanted.

“Let’s get them all down,” she said, and Jesse obeyed and brought down all eight thick, bound dark green or brown books. It took three trips, and he set them where Mrs. Carlisle motioned he should, on a white desk towards the door they’d come in through. He saw now that they were yearbooks, and he despaired of this trip all of a sudden. What would a picture of his father tell him?

“Now, what was your father’s name?”

“Bruce Henderson,” Jesse said, trying to disguise his disappointment out of deference for Mrs. Carlisle. But when she opened the 1967 yearbook and found him (she’d tried 1966 with no luck), Jesse’s heart stopped. The teenage Bruce Henderson looking into the camera looked more like himself than he’d ever imagined his father did.

The hair was shorter, but he had the same eyes, the same high cheekbones the same skinny frame obvious from the bony shoulders, though with a bit more muscle than Jesse had. It was him. It was Jesse. And the violet creases under both eyes, dark as bruises, were the same as the ones he’d seen in Joe Granger’s bathroom mirror this morning.

His mouth was dry. The hair on the back of his neck was raised. He felt dizzy.

He had no idea who this man was. But this man was him.

Chalk it up to the kindness of old school secretaries, but Mrs. Carlisle broke Jackson High School Staff Handbook Policy #13.6 that Monday morning. She found a paper copy of Bruce Henderson’s student record and gave his shaken son what he’d listed as his prior address when he’d filled it out in his aunt’s name. 3140 Pike Road. St. Marys, West Virginia.

She told Jesse she hoped he found what he was looking for, and Randy thanked her politely for the coffee that almost killed him, and the two of them got into the pickup truck and head to the Silver Handle for one last taste of Jackson, Ohio.

Joe and Pastor Matt them there, even though it was Pastor Matt’s day off, and Jesse bought them all lunch. Beverly was their waitress, because sometimes the world just works that way, and she noticed that Jesse looked even worse than he had the other day, but he gave her a good full smile and thanked her for the turkey sandwich and chips Saturday night. He ordered bacon and eggs today because he figured he could give Randy the bacon and spread the eggs around on his plate enough to not raise any of the six eyebrows with whom he was sharing the table. He couldn’t think about eating without grimacing and feeling his gut revolt.

Jesse told Pastor Matt and Joe about the address, and that his plan was no deeper than just finding it and seeing what was there. Randy was a little creeped out by the idea, especially when Matt used his laptop to look the address up online and see that it was in the middle of nowhere, but he was in too deep to make any sense of pulling out now.

“But we’ll probably be murdered,” he said, as he ate the first piece of Jesse’s bacon.

“Oh yeah, definitely,” Jesse said, and looked back for Beverly and her silver-handled coffee pot (it took him til this second visit to get it). “But at least we’ll be together.”

“And you don’t have any idea what you’re going to find out there?” Matt asked Jesse, looking pensively at him over his white mug of coffee.

“No,” Jesse answered. “At least not any worth sharing.” He smiled grimly, and Matt got the point, and looked down at his pancakes.

“Anything in that notebook?” Joe asked. And Jesse found himself without the willpower to resist Joe Granger.

“A story from a nightmare he had. Two drawings of the farmhouse. A description of some place out there, I’m guessing. Somewhere he wanted to remember, or he’d put something. And then this.”

He pulled the letter, or note, that he didn’t understand out of his left pocket and handed it to Joe, who read it slowly and without moving a muscle or folicle on his face above or below his eyes. When he was done he looked up at Jesse.

“What do you think this is?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse said honestly. Then, just as honestly, “I was hoping you might.”

“I think Bruce was crazier than I thought. And I don’t mean that as an insult, son.”

Jesse broken into as heartfelt a smile as he’d had since Wednesday. “That’s what I think, too,” he said. Something about the fact that Joe had the same idea made him feel better.

After about thirty seconds of silence, Randy said, “No, no- I’m good. It’s just my truck we’re driving into the seventh circle of Hell.”

“I’m buying,” Jesse said, winking at him and holding the smile for another moment.

Prayer from a 2007 Toyota Camry (ER Doctor)

I don’t know what that was. I mean, I don’t understand what I just saw. That boy was desperate for her. He hurt like she did. They might as well have been one body. I didn’t even know something like that was out there. Brandon. That was his name. Hers is Rachel.

I’ve been hoping you don’t find me. I’m sick over the affair, wanting to drown myself, and I don’t want to stop enough to stop. But that was a tire iron to the barest part of my heart, and I’m ready to now to say what I am and what I’ve done. 

Help me, God. I hate what I am. I hate what I’ve done. She’s my wife, and I’ve spat on her name and her heart with this thing. I’ll be done today, and I’ll tell her today, and I’ll take what’s coming. But God, please help me. I need to be forgiven for this thing, I need a clean slate. Will you help me, please?

I remember what Grandma’ used to say, that Jesus takes the scoundrels, and that that’s good because in the end that’s all there are. I’m a scoundrel, Jesus. Will you take me?

“Please talk to me, Rachel.”

Her head was turned on its side to face him, resting on the hospital bed pillow that smelled chemically clean. That smell was an unwelcome visitor to the moment, puncturing the air between them, making everything feel more sterile and less like it really was. The blood was off her face by now, but her nose was still swollen, and now her left eye had bruised, too. And she just looked into him and through him and said nothing.

She hadn’t said one word since she’d woken up yesterday. The nurses had stopped asking her questions and instead asked Brandon everything. And he did his best to answer and not wonder why his girl of spark and faith was broken down to rubble now. But it had been an hour since he’d seen the last nurse, and he wanted to take her home tomorrow, and he was wondering who he’d be taking home. So now he cried as he looked at her, and he begged her again to talk to him.

“Please, Rachel. Just say anything. Just tell me anything.”

She closed her eyes, and shook her head, and she kept them closed for a solid minute before finally his head fell down on the bed just beside hers and he started praying and she opened them in anger.

That was the first time prayer had made Rachel angry. Because her baby boy was gone, and He took him. But then she confessed the sin of it, of outrage at a God who never does wrong. She closed her eyes again and now asked Him to forgive her for that, because all of those contours in her heart, those grooves formed by a hundred thousand trips to the Bible and prayers that had poured from her lips since she was a little girl, brought her turbulent emotions in line with the truth. He was good, all good, and her pain didn’t change that. It just obscured it because her eyes were weak and her heart was small and the world could be a blurry place, but if she could focus on the truth she’d be sad but not wrecked. She could still grieve, but with worship. What was Brandon saying now? She couldn’t make it out. His voice had gotten much lower, and he was crying, and it was hard to make out.

She leaned her head in close, and he thought she was kissing his head, so he looked up with a hint of a smile on his face underneath his wet, red eyes, and it hurt her and disgusted her, and she closed her own again to make him and the room and everyone and everything who couldn’t bear this with her go away. She shut them tight to hold out the Monday morning sunlight coming in the windows at the top of the hospital room, and then she started crying.

She didn’t stop for thirteen minutes, all of which Brandon spent saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” or silently crying with her.

And then the ER doctor came in.