He had, because of this crisis, reverted to wearing the clothes that, as a child, he had worn around the house. Here again was the pair of brown corduroy slacks that our mother had picked out for him back in the early 'forties. And he had on a blue cotton shirt—clean, but so repeatedly washed that it had turned white. The collar was almost nothing but threads and all the buttons were off it. He had fastened the front together with paperclips.
“You poop,” I said.
Roaming around, Charley said, “Why do you save all this junk?” He had come upon a table covered with small washed rocks.
“I got those because of the possibility of radioactive ores,” Jack said.
That meant, that, even with his job, he still took his long walks. Sure enough, in his closet, under a heap of sweaters that had fallen from their hangers, a cardboard box of worn-out Army surplus boots had been carefully tied up with twine and marked in Jack's crabbed handwriting. Every month or so, as a high school boy, he had worn out a pair of boots, those old-fashioned high topped boots with hooks on the tops.
To me this was more serious than the stealing, and I cleared a heap of Life magazines from a chair and seated myself, having decided to stay long enough for a real talk with him. Charley, naturally, remained standing to keep me aware that he wanted to go. Jack made him nervous. They did not know each other at all, but while Jack paid no attention to him, Charley always seemed to imagine that something to his disadvantage was going to happen. After he had met Jack for the first time he told me straightforwardly—Charley never could keep anything to himself—that my brother was the most screwed-up person he had ever met. When I asked him why he said that, he answered that he knew god damn well that Jack did not have to act the way he did; he acted like that because he wanted to. To me the distinction was meaningless, but Charley always set great store by such matters.
The long walks had begun in junior high school, back in the 'thirties, before World War Two. We were living on a street named Garibaldi Street, and during the Spanish Civil War because of the feeling against the Italians the street name was changed to Cervantes Street. Jack soon got the notion that all the street names were going to be changed and for a while he seemed to be living among the new names—all ancient writers and poets, no doubt—but when no other street names were changed that mood passed. Anyhow it had made the world situation seem real to him for a month or so, and we thought of that as an improvement; up to then he had seemed unable to imagine either the war as an actual event or, for that matter, the real world itself in which that war was taking place. He had never been able to distinguish between what he read and what he actually experienced. To him, vividness was the criterion, and those nauseating accounts in the Sunday supplements about lost continents and jungle goddesses had always been more compelling and convincing than the daily headlines.
“Are you still working?” Charley said from behind him.
“Of course he is,” I said.
But Jack said, “I temporarily gave up my job at the tire place.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“I'm too busy,” Jack said.
“Doing what?”
He pointed to a pile of notebooks, filled, I could see, with pages of his writing. At one time he had spent his spare time writing letters to the newspapers, and here, once more, he was involved in some long-winded crank project, probably elaborating some schemes for irrigating the Sahara Desert. Picking up the first notebook, Charley thumbed through it and then tossed it down. “It's a diary,” he said.
“No,” Jack said, arising. His thin, knobbly face got that cold, superior look, that travesty of the hauteur of the scholar who faces the layman. “It's a scientific account of proven facts,” he said.
I said, “How are you supporting yourself?” I knew instinctively how he was supporting himself; he was once again depending on handouts from home, from our parents—who, at this late point in their lives, couldn't afford to support anyone, scarcely themselves.
“I'm okay,” Jack said. But of course he would say that; as soon as money came in he spent it, usually for flashy clothes, or else lost it or lent it or invested it in some madness he heard about in a pulp magazine: giant mushrooms, perhaps, or skin-healing salve to be peddled from door to door. At least the tire job, although bordering on the crooked, had been steady.
“How much money do you have?” I demanded, keeping after him.
“I'll see,” he said. He opened a dresser drawer. From it he took a cigar box. He sat down on the bed, again on the sheets, and, placing the cigar box on his lap, opened it. The cigar box was empty except for a few dozen pennies and three nickels.
“Are you trying to get another job?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
In the past he had held the dregs of jobs; he had helped deliver washing machines for an appliance store; he had un-crated vegetables for a grocery store; he had swept out a drug store; once he had even given out tools at the Alameda Naval Air Station. During the summer he had now and then hired himself out as a fruit picker and gotten carried, by open truck, miles out into the country; that was his favorite job because he got to stuff himself with fruit. And in the fall he invariably walked to the Heinz cannery near San Jose and filled cans with Bartlett pears.
“You know what you are?” I said. “You're the most ignorant, inept individual on the face of the globe. In my entire life I've never seen anyone with such rubbish in their head. How do you manage to stay alive at all? How the hell did you get born into my family? There were never any nuts before you.”
“Take it easy,” Charley said.
“It's true,” I said to him. “Good god, he probably thinks this is the bottom of the ocean and we're living in a castle left over from Atlantis. What year is this?” I asked Jack. “Why did you steal those ants?” I said. “Why? Tell me.” Grabbing him I started to shake him, as I had done as a child, a very small child, when I had first heard him spout the nutty rubbish that filled his mind. When in exasperation—and fear—I had realized that his brain simply had a warp to it, that in distinguishing fact from fiction he chose fiction, and between good sense and foolishness he preferred foolishness. He could tell the difference—but he preferred the rubbish; he stuffed it into himself with great systemization. Like some creep in the Middle Ages memorizing all that absurd St. Thomas Aquinas system about the universe, that creaky, false structure that finally collapsed—except for little intellectual swamp-like areas, such as in my brother's brain.
Jack said, “I needed to perform an experiment.”
“What kind?” I demanded.
'There are known cases of toads staying alive in suspended animation in mud for centuries,” Jack said.
I saw, then, what his mind had conceived: that the ants, being dipped in chocolate, might be preserved, embalmed, and might be brought back to life.
“Get me out of here,” I said to Charley.
Opening the door I left the room and went out into the hall. I was really shaking: I couldn't stand it. Charley followed after me and then said, in a low voice, “He obviously can't take care of himself.”
“That's for sure,” I said. I felt that if I didn't get into some place I could have a drink I'd go out of my mind. I wished to hell we hadn't driven down from Marin County; I hadn't seen Jack in months and at this point I would have been glad never to see him again.
“Look, Fay,” Charley said. “He's your flesh and blood. You can't just leave him.”
“I sure can,” I said.
“He ought to be up in the country,” Charley said. “In the healthy air. Where he could be with animals.”
Several times Charley had tried to get my brother up to the farm area around Petaluma; he wanted to get him on to one of the big dairy farms as a milker. All Jack would have to do was open a wooden door, head a cow in, push the electric gadgets on to its teats, start the vacuum working, stop the vacuum at the right moment, unhook the cow, go on to the next cow. Over and over again—the pit, as far as
creative jobs go, but something that Jack could handle. It paid about a dollar and a half an hour, and the milkers got their meals and a bunkhouse to sleep in. Why not? And he'd be up where there were animals—big dirty cows crapping and swilling, crapping and swilling.
“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 towards 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 of sense, that fouls its own nest if given a chance. Offhand 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 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 wire. I know that, as a child, he had had the notion that various people's heads were 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 amok 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 or 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 Lardners, 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 undisturbed.
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 underfoot 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 paperwork, and on weekends he usually went outdoors and used the roto-tiller or the chain saw. Contemplating my brother lounging around the house all day made me realize how really cooped-up 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 or 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 Fineburgs or the Meritans or 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 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, scrunched-together shops along Mission and he wanted to stop. Luckily we got out of the South of Market district and on to Van Ness. Charley gazed at the various imported cars in the dealers' display windows, but Jack did not seem interested. When we got on to 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.
At a slow rate we drove through Ross and San Anselmo, fighting the commute traffic. And then, past Fairfax, we left the stores and apartments and got out on that stretch in the first pasture land, the first canyons. All at once there were cows instead of gas stations.
“How does it look to you?” Charley asked my brother.
Jack said, “It's deserted.” With bitterness, I said, “Well, who'd wan
t to live out here with the cows.”
“A cow has four stomachs,” Jack said.
White's Hill impressed him, with its terrible steep and winding grade, and then, on the far side, the San Gerónimo Valley made the three of us feel pleased. Charley got the Buick up to eighty-five on the straightaway, and the warm mid-day wind, the fresh-smelling country wind, blew in around us and cleaned the car of the smell of moldy paper and old laundry. The fields on both sides of us had turned brown from the sun and lack of water, but around the clusters of live oak trees, mixed in with the granite boulders, we saw grass and wild flowers.
We would have liked to have lived down here, closer to San Francisco, but land cost too much and the traffic, in summer, had a depressing element to it, the resort people heading for Lagunitas and the cabins there and the campers on their way to Samuel Taylor Park. Now we passed through Lagunitas with its one general store, and then the road curved, suddenly as always, forcing Charley to slow so radically that the nose of the Buick sank down and all four tires squealed. The warm dry sunlight disappeared and we were down deep in the redwoods, sniffing the stream, the wet needles, the cold, dark places where ferns grew in July.
Rousing himself, Jack said, “Hey, didn't we go picnicking here once?” He craned his neck at the sight of the tables and barbecue pits.
“No,” I said. “That was Muir Woods. You were nine.”
After we had reached the hills overlooking Olema and Tómales Bay, Jack began to recognize that he had passed entirely out of the town area and had entered the country.
He noticed the shabby, peeling old wooden windmills, the boarded-up abandoned buildings, the chickens scratching in driveways, and that indubitable sign of the country: the butane tanks mounted one behind each house. There, too, was the sign to the right of the road just before reaching the Inverness Wye: so-and-so well driller.