“Yeah, I remember!” Jim squirms at this accusation, feeling the shame of it. Still supported by his parents: he can’t even make his own way in the world. He can see Dennis’s contempt and it makes him defensive, then angry. “I appreciate it, but I’ll take them over starting with the next one.” As if Dennis has been keeping him from paying on his own.
The pretense makes Dennis angry too. “You will not,” he snaps. “It’s illegal to be without that insurance, and you can’t afford it. If I gave it to you and you let it lapse and then got in an accident, then I’d be the one ended up paying the bills, wouldn’t I?”
Stung that his father would imagine him capable of that, Jim scowls at the ground. “I wouldn’t let it lapse!”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Jim turns and walks off across the lawn, circling. He’s ashamed, hurt, furiously angry. There’s nothing he can say. If he starts to cry in front of his father he’ll… “I don’t do things like that! I keep my commitments!” he shouts.
“The hell you do,” Dennis says. “You don’t even support yourself! Isn’t that a commitment? Why don’t you get a job where you can afford all your own expenses? Or why don’t you budget what you make to pay for them? Are you going to tell me you don’t spend any of what you make on entertaining yourself?”
“No!”
“So here you are twenty-seven years old and I’m still paying your bills!”
“I don’t want you paying for them! I’m sick of that!”
“You’re sick of it! Fine, I won’t. That’s it for that. But you’d better find yourself a decent job.”
“I’m looking! At least the jobs I have are decent work!”
For a second it almost looks like Dennis is going to hit him; he even shifts all the tools to his left hand, instantly, without thinking.… Then he freezes, snarls, turns away and walks into the house. Jim runs to his car, jumps in, tracks off cursing wildly, blindly.
16
Inside the house Dennis hears Jim’s old car click over the street track and hum away. It almost makes him laugh. When he was a kid, sons angry at their fathers could rev a car up to seven thousand RPM and burn rubber in a roaring, screeching departure; now all they can do is go hum, hum.
“Is that Jim?” says Lucy. “He didn’t come in to say goodbye.”
Damn. Dennis goes to sit before the video wall without a word.
“I wish you two wouldn’t argue,” Lucy says in a small, determined voice. “There aren’t that many jobs to be had, you know. Half the kids Jim’s age are unemployed.”
“The hell they are.” Dennis is angrier than ever. Now the kid’s gotten Lucy upset too, and he doesn’t like arguing with his son and having him tear off with that look of hurt resentment on his face: who would? But what can you do? And after a day like he’s had… Remembering it just makes him feel worse. After a successful test like the one at White Sands, having the program jerked back out to the uncertainties of open competition… Lemon’s fierce tongue-lashing… hell. An awful day. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
After a while he gets up from his chair, turns off the video; he’s been blind to it, hasn’t seen a thing. He goes to the sliding glass door, stares through his reflection at the lights of the condos of Citrus Heights, the pulsing head- and taillights of the Foothill Freeway viaduct, standing above the flats of Tustin. People everywhere. He’d like to go outside, into the house’s little backyard, but it belongs to the Aurelianos who own the other side of the house. They wouldn’t mind, but Dennis does.
He thinks of their land, up on the northern California coast near Eureka. Beautiful windswept pines, on a rocky hillside falling down into a wild sea. Ten years ago they bought five acres as an investment, and Dennis had even thought to retire up there, and build a home on the land. “Sometimes I’d like to just throw it in, move up to our land and get to work up there,” he says aloud. To build something with your own hands, something physical that you could see taking shape, day by day… it’s work he could love, work in stark contrast to the abstract, piecemeal, and endlessly delayed tasks he performs for LSR.
“Uh-huh,” Lucy says carefully.
It’s the tone of voice she uses when she wants to humor him, but doesn’t agree with whatever point he’s making. As Dennis well knows, Lucy hates the idea of moving north; it would mean leaving all her friends, the church, her job… Dennis frowns. He knows it’s just a dream, anyway.
“Do you think the trees have grown back yet?” Lucy asks.
Just a year after they bought their land a forest fire burned over several hundred acres in the Eureka area, including everything they bought. They tracked up on vacation to have a look; the ground was black. It looked awful. But the locals told them it would all recover in just a few years.…
“I don’t know,” Dennis says, irritated. He suspects the fire did not bother Lucy all that much, as it made it impossible for them to move up there for a good long while. “I’ll bet it has, though. The new trees will be small, but they’ll be there. The land recovers fast from something like that—it’s part of the natural cycle.”
“Except they found out some kids set the fire, didn’t they?”
Dennis doesn’t reply to that. After a minute or two he sighs, answers what he takes to be Lucy’s real point: “Well, we can’t go up there anyway.”
His black mood condenses to a big lump in his stomach. That bastard Lemon. He feels bad; certainly he transferred some of his anger at Lemon onto his idiot son, who surely deserved it, but still… that look on his face…
What a day.
“Did Jim say he was looking for a job?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
17
Tashi Nakamura gets to Jim’s writing class just before starting time. Tashi’s interest in writing is minimal, but Jim’s classes depend on enrollment for survival, and this semester it looked like there might not be enough students to keep the class going. So Tashi decided to sign up. It was a typical Tashi act; he has a streak of generosity that few know about, because of his shyness and poverty.
Jim arrives ten minutes late, just as his students are packing up to leave. Instantly Tashi can see that Jim is upset about something; he’s flushed, his mouth is a tight line, he slams his daypack down on his desktop and glares at it. Stands there pulling himself together.
After a while he takes a deep breath, begins the night’s lecture in a monotone. His explanations of comma use, shaky at the best of times, are now almost incoherent. In the middle of them he stops, veers off into one of his historical jags. “So the Irvine Ranch, which began as the county’s only force for conservation, ended up by selling out to a corporation that leased all its land to developers, who made it into a replica of the northern half of the county, ignoring all the lessons they should have learned and grading the hills with a complete disregard for the land. In fact our fine college is part of that heritage. And this development came at the time when the ballistic defense was being put into orbit, so the arms industry expanded into this new land and increased a hold on the county that was already completely dominant!”
Jim’s other students blink at him, completely unimpressed. In fact they’re looking rather mutinous. Most have taken the class to get by the minimal writing test necessary to graduate Trabuco, and they are impatient with Jim’s digressions. Learning to write is hard enough as it is. One of the more aggressive men breaks into Jim’s monologue to complain. “Listen here, Mr. McPherson, I still don’t have the slightest idea when to use ‘that’ or ‘which,’ or which one goes with commas or how to use the commas.” Really disgusted about it, too.