“Are you living out here?” Henry asked. “In your garage?” He regretted his question immediately.
“Pretty much.” Jackson wiped out the frying pan with a wad of newspaper. “But I used to have a house, just like everyone else. A green ranch on Town Line Road, past the insulator plant.”
Brendan, who’d been very quiet since waking from his nap, set down his untouched plate. “What happened?” he asked. “Did you lose it?” His face was so thin that his cheekbones stood out in the fire’s glow.
Jackson said, “What happened was—” but before he could start, Henry cleared his throat. The idea that Jackson could be living like this was horrifying; the last thing he wanted to do was to listen to Jackson’s story. It was bound to be long and sad, and he had no idea where he and Brendan were going or where they might find a place to stay. “Dinner was great,” he told Jackson. “We really appreciate it. But we ought to get going.”
Jackson set down the frying pan and strode into the garage. When he returned, he held a pile of old blankets. “Why don’t you camp here tonight? You can put these in your van — you ought to be pretty comfortable.”
Henry looked at Brendan, sure that he’d want to get on the road again, but Brendan answered for both of them. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “We could use a place to stay.”
“You’re sure?” Henry said. “You won’t be very comfortable.”
“I’ll be fine,” Brendan said, and Jackson said, “Stay. I could use the company.”
Henry gave up. This was Brendan’s trip, Brendan’s idea entirely, and if the old man wanted to sit in the damp night air and let the mosquitoes get him, that was fine. He was as tired as he’d ever been. Kitty, Coreopsis Heights, the diner, and then the breakdown — it was too much for one day, more than he could sort out. He longed to rest.
Brendan sat in his wheelchair, his hands flapping against the armrests from time to time. Bongo lay next to him and worried the fish heads that Henry had set aside. Henry lounged in one of the tattered chairs, and when Jackson’s three-legged cat slunk by he scooped her up. Jackson had said that her left front leg had been caught in a trap when she was a kitten. The vet had popped the stump from the shoulder joint and closed the wound, which had healed so smoothly she might have been born that way. Henry liked the way his hand passed from her neck to her flank without interruption.
Jackson said, “I’ve been living here since spring. My wife, she fell in love with a guy who works at the bowling alley. And she threw me out of the house, like our twenty-two years together didn’t mean squat. You know what she said?”
“What?” asked Brendan. He was bent forward, listening intently. Henry imagined him sitting like that at St. Benedict’s, listening to the stories of the other old men while years and years went by. “What did she say?” Brendan’s voice was low and kind.
“She said, ‘Jackson, you don’t mean nothing to me anymore.’” He pointed at Henry’s lap. “Like I was that cat there. Which she didn’t want me to fix because she thought it was a waste of money and what good is a three-legged cat? She said, the kids are grown now, and I want something out of this life before I’m too old to enjoy it. She loved this guy, she said.
“I said I didn’t care, I loved her anyways. And she said if I really loved her, I’d move out. Leave her alone for a while, she said. Let her figure this out. So I’ve been sleeping out here these last few months, with just Rosie here for company, and she’s been letting this jerk live in our house with her, and I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you — do you think I’m a fool?”
“Who’s to say?” said Henry. The cat squirmed in his lap, settling her head into his armpit and her strange smooth chest against his. He tried to imagine what had kept Jackson from beating his wife, driving her lover off, laying claim to his own house, but when he thought about how he’d let Kitty push him away, he knew. Houses belonged to women — despite all the houses he’d sold to men, and all the ones he’d owned himself, he believed that. Men bought them, but women folded them around their bodies like shells as soon as they moved in. He could see Jackson’s wife sealing doors and windows until Jackson had no place to go.
“I’m trying to wait it out,” Jackson said. “She’ll let me back when she’s ready. Do you think she will?”
No, Henry wanted to say. No more than Kitty ever will. He knew, listening to Jackson’s tale, that his marriage to Kitty was over. She was never going to change back into the girl he’d married. She was never going to forgive him for losing their home.
“You had troubles,” Brendan said. “Always?”
Jackson shrugged. “Things were tough. Like they’re tough for everyone. Ronnie — that’s our oldest — he’s been in trouble since junior high. And Barbara got pregnant last year, and there’s never been enough money — but what does Rhonda complain about? She doesn’t like the way I smell, she says. She doesn’t like the way I look. ‘Jackson,’ she says, ‘I want some romance. ‘ Like we’re still kids. Shit, she’s forty-three, you’d thinks she’d know better. This guy she’s seeing can’t be more than thirty. He doesn’t know anything about her and she doesn’t care.”
“Nobody knows her like you do,” Brendan said. “That matters.” Henry thought how it did matter, but in the wrong way; Kitty hated some of the things he knew about her. That she was cranky in the morning and had frequent bladder infections and cried when she was angry; that the curl in her hair was not natural and that she scratched in bed.
“I tell myself that every day,” Jackson said. “But I’m sleeping on a cot here and cooking outside, and I’m lonely all the time.”
“We’re all lonely,” Brendan said. “It’s what we do with it that counts.”
“You want to see what I do?” Jackson said. “Check this out.”
He went into the garage and returned with two gas cans and three empty cans of oil. He made more trips for the five-gallon drums and the hubcaps and the leaf springs. While Henry and Brendan watched, he arranged the metal pieces in a circle at his feet. Then he seized two long sticks and started pounding.
The cans and car parts gave out different notes, something like steel drums, and Jackson pounded out a wandering melody on them. The notes rose in the cool air and settled like birds in the branches. Jackson’s face was red and heavy-cheeked; his legs were thick; his hands were enormous. The sparse, long strands of his hair stuck up from his head like wires.
“I made that up,” Jackson said when he was done. “I made it up for Rhonda.”
“It’s something,” Brendan said. “Really. I bet she comes back.”
“Maybe. But it’s all right out here, in a weird way. Sometimes I almost like it.”
Brendan said, “There’s a certain quiet that comes, when you’ve been alone for a long time,” and Jackson said, “I get these ideas for my cans, when I’m alone for a couple of days,” and Henry listened to them and wondered what they were talking about.
When he was alone, the way he’d been for the past six months in Waldo’s awful apartment, the silence drove him wild. He left the TV on all the time, even when he wasn’t watching; sometimes he turned the radio on as well. He left his window open through rainstorms, just to hear the pounding water and the occasional noises from the street. He’d thought about Brendan on those nights, surrounded by other old men and talking, talking, talking, and sometimes he’d actually envied him. Old, sick, stuck in a home that wasn’t his, at least Brendan had some company. There had been nights when Henry had wondered how sick he’d have to be to enter a place like St. Benedict’s himself.