“I’m not against it,” I said. We knew a number of the ranchers; we could easily get him on as a novice milker.
“Let’s drive him back up with us,” Charley said.
To get him up to Marin County we had to pack all his valuables, his collection of facts, his rocks, his writing and drawings, and all his junky clothes and his elegant sweaters and slacks that he put on to dazzle the punks at Reno on weekends… everything got put in boxes and loaded in the rear of the Buick. When he had finished—Charley did the actual work; I sat in the front seat of the car reading, and Jack disappeared for an hour to say good-bye to some of his pals—the room was almost empty, except for the shopping news piles, which I refused to let him bring.
Just like his room when he was a child, I thought. During the war, when he had been, for a few months, in the Service, we had gone in and cleared out everything and destroyed it. Naturally, when he got back—given a medical discharge because of allergies… he had spells of asthma—he had a terrible fit, and then a long drawn-out depression. He pined for the missing junk. And after that, instead of growing up and getting involved in something more reasonable, he had moved out and gotten a room of his own and begun all over again.
As Charley drove off toward the freeway going north, with me beside him and Jack with all his boxes in the back, I dreaded what would become of my house with my loony brother taking up residence in it, even for a few days. However, we did have the utility room which we could turn over to him. And the children kept their part of the house a mess as it was. Surely he couldn’t do more than draw on the walls with crayon, grind clay into the curtains and couch cushions, spill paint on the patio concrete, leave last month’s socks stuffed in the sugar shaker, sneeze in his soup, fall down while carrying out the garbage and cut his eye half out of his head on a sardine can lid. A child is a filthy amoral animal, without instincts or sense, that fouls its own nest if given a chance. Ofthand I can’t think of any redeeming features in a child, except that as long as it is small it can be kicked around. Charley and I lived in the front part of the house, and, in the rear, the children gradually pushed their mess forward inch by inch. until we and Mrs. Medini would go in and clean it all up, throw everything away, burn all the rubbish, and then the process would begin again. Jack would simply add to the chaos; he would bring nothing new, only more of the same.
Of course, being physically mature, he could not be handled as we handled the children, and this frightened me. In some respects I had been frightened of him for years; always I felt that I never could tell what he might do or say next, what unnatural ideas might spill out—that he regarded lamp posts as authority figures, perhaps, and policemen as objects made out of wine. I know that, as a child, he had had the notion that various people’s heads wene going to fall off; he had told us about that. And I know that he believed his high school geometry teacher to be a rooster wearing a suit… .an idea that he may have gotten from seeing an old Charley Chaplin movie. Certainly that teacher had a rooster-like way of stalking around the front of the classroom.
Suppose, for instance, he ran amock and ate the neighbors’ sheep. In farm country, sheep-killing is a major crime, and a thing that kills sheep is always shot on sight. Once a farm boy had gone around breaking the necks of all the new calves for miles around… .no one had been able to figure out why, but no doubt it was the rural equivalent for the city child’s breaking windows on knifing auto tires. Vandalism in the country, though, so often involves killing, because farm property is expressed in terms of flocks of ducks and chickens, herds of dairy cows, lambs and sheep, even goats. To the right of us the Landners, an old couple, raised goats, and every so often they killed and ate a goat, having such things as goat stew and goat soup. To people in the country, a prize sheep or cow is to be guarded against any menace; they are used to poisoning rats and shooting foxes and coons and dogs and cats who infringe, and I could just see Jack being shot, some night, while crawling under a barbed wire fence with a bloody lamb in his jaws.
So now, driving back to Drake’s Landing, I was beginning to pick up morbid anxiety fantasies… having them for Jack, possibly, as he seemed to be rather calm and undisturbea.
But that is one aspect of country life. I have sat in the living room, listening to Bach on the hi-fi, and looked through the windows and across the field to the ranch on the hillside beyond, and seen some ghastly act taking place: some old rancher in his manure-impregnated blue jeans, his boots and hat, out with an ax knocking in the skull of a dog found nosing around his chicken coop. Nothing to do but keep on listening to Bach and trying to read “By Love Possessed.” And of course we killed our own ducks when it came time to eat them, and the dog killed gophers and squirrels daily. And at least once a week we found a half-eaten deer head by the front door, carried there by the dog from a garbage can somewhere in the neighborhood.
Of course there was simply the problem of having a horse’s ass like Jack undenfoot all the time. It was easy for Charley; he spent all day down at the plant, and in the evenings he shut himself up in his study and did paper work, and on weekends he usually went outdoors and used the noto-tiller or the chain saw. Contemplating my brother lounging around the house all day made me realize how neally coopedup you are in the country; there’s no place to go and nobody to visit—you just sit home all day reading or doing housework or taking care of the kids. When did I get out of the house? On Tuesday and Thursday nights I had my sculpture class down in San Rafael. On Wednesday afternoon I had the Bluebirds over, to bake bread on weave mats. On Monday morning I drove down to San Francisco to see Doctor Andrews, my analyst. On Friday morning I drove over to Petaluma to the Purity Market to shop. And on Tuesday afternoon I had my modern dance at the hall. And that was it, except for occasionally having dinner with the Finebungs or the Meritans on driving out on weekends to the beach. The most exciting thing that had happened in years was the hay truck losing its load on the Petaluma road and smashing in Alise Hatfield’s station wagon with her and her three kids inside. And the four teenagers who got beaten up at Olema by the twenty loggers. This is the country. This isn’t the city.
You’re lucky, up where we live, to be able to get the daily San Francisco Chronicle; they don’t deliver it—you have to drive over to the Mayfair Market and buy it off the stands.
As we drove through San Francisco, Jack perked up and began to comment on the buildings and traffic. The city obviously stimulated him, no doubt unwholesomely. He caught sight of the tiny, scrunchedtogether shops along Mission and he wanted to stop. Luckily we got out of the South of Market district and onto Van Ness. Charley gazed at the various imported cans in the dealers’ display windows, but Jack did not seem interested. When we got onto the Golden Gate Bridge neither of them paid attention to the incredible view of the City and the Bay and the Marin hills; both of them had no capacity to enjoy anything esthetically—for Charley things had to be financially valuable, and for Jack they had to be—what? God knows. Weird facts, like the rain of frogs. Miracles and the like. This spectacular sight was wasted on both of them, but I kept my eyes on the view as long as possible, until finally we were out of the hills, past the forts, and back among the rubbishy little suburban towns, Mill Valley, San Rafael—the pit, as far as I’m concerned. The really all-time low, with the dirt and smog, and always the County machinery tearing up the roads for a new freeway.