Devil House(27)

“Sorry to keep you,” you say. “Will you tell him he’s welcome in class whether he’s going to graduate or not?” You’re doing your duty: trying to give your students as much as you can give them in the time allotted to you as their teacher.

“You got it,” Jesse says, the way you might promise a child that you’re checking for monsters underneath the bed.





4.


YOU ARE SOUND ASLEEP. It’s one in the morning. In the parking lot of the Taco Bell over in San Luis Obispo, Gene and Jesse are sitting side by side in the front seat of Gene’s blue Ford Torino. Gene is too high to drive, but nobody can tell Gene anything when he’s high; Jesse hopes that the bag of tacos they’re working through will help him drive less erratically, and then maybe Jesse will mention that Miss Crane said he should come back to class, that it’s no big deal.

Taco Bell is closed now; Gene is a cook there, and he worked closing shift tonight. About an hour ago, he turned the OPEN sign around at the window and scraped down the grill, washing the spatulas and serving spoons afterward in the tiny sink in the back. Then he went back to the line and, gloveless, assembled twelve tacos, heavy on the ground beef and light on everything else: any leftover beef he has to throw away, but the lettuce and the olives and the tomatoes and the sour cream will go back into cold storage for the night. If he hits the reserves too hard, he’s supposed to charge himself for an extra meal on his time card, so Gene’s after-work tacos consist of hours-old seasoned ground beef ladled into a hard shell and given a cursory dressing of two other things apiece, varying it from taco to taco to minimize the amount taken of each ingredient. Sour cream and olives. Tomato and lettuce. Lettuce and olives. Olives and cheese. Some of the combinations don’t really taste good at all without the other stuff that’d usually be on there, but Gene doesn’t seem to notice. In the front seat, later, a joint in one hand and a Marlboro Red in the other, he identifies each taco by whatever two-topping combination it happened to catch: “You like tomato and cheese? I got two tomato and cheese.”

Jesse is scared of Gene these days, who seems to be getting worse. He smokes so many cigarettes. It makes him look like one of those people who hang around outside the public library but never check out any books. He’s smoking right now, a sour cream and olive taco in his free hand.

He’s talking about moving to Oregon. He does this a lot. Gene’s never been there, but one of his dad’s biker friends moved to Bend last year: every time he’s back in town, he gets drunk with Gene’s dad at their kitchen table and talks about how nobody gives a shit what people do up in Oregon. Then, for the next week, without fail, these are the stories Gene relays to Jesse. “All the pussy you can eat up in Medford,” he says. “Even the Oregon cops smoke pot,” he says. “Super-clean microdot coming out of a lab in Eugene, they sell it to you in little vials, you can just drop it on your tongue and you’re flying,” he says.

He sticks his tongue out when he says this, pointing at the tip. He’s like this all the time now. It’s weird and uncomfortable to be around. Jesse doesn’t really have any other friends, so he hopes he can be a positive influence on Gene, but, at the same time, his own natural stance is a sort of half-paralyzed neutrality: his positive charge is weak. He likes how hanging out with Gene seems to make him care less about stuff that usually bothers him: moving out, for example. Jesse really wants to get out of his house and live somewhere else, by himself, and he knows he’s going to need money to do that: first and last and deposit, that’s what everybody says. But to hear Gene tell it, there’s a million ways to get first and last and deposit together.

“You just say the word, little brother,” he says now, drawing on his cigarette, still chewing. “People act like money is such a big deal, there’s a million ways to get money. Nicky comes down here with everything he needs in a brown bag and leaves town with thousands of dollars. Thousands. Sits in the kitchen talking on the phone for maybe ten minutes, some other people come by a little later, and he’s good for two months. Three. Barely has to lift a finger.” Nicky is Gene’s dad’s biker friend; because Gene’s dad’s apartment is such a shithole, Jesse wonders if Nicky the biker who lives in Oregon now is exaggerating a little to impress his friend, or if maybe Gene’s just making stuff up. It could be either, but there’s no point trying to find out, when Gene’s like this.

“There’s some new apartments over in Los Osos,” he continues, Jesse still waiting out the storm. “Not even expensive. We could talk to Nicky, get the work done, pay all the up-front on one of those, and—shit!—can you even imagine? Right out there on the fucking bay. We can totally put this together. Nicky can probably get us a stereo, too, he hooked my dad up with one. Big, loud speakers.”

The way Gene talks about his dad paints a picture of a household in which father and son get along famously, but Jesse knows that this is not the case; he doesn’t understand why Gene puts so much effort into keeping up this fiction. Gene’s father is worse than Jesse’s ever was. The magnitude of his presence in Gene’s life can hardly be measured. Once, when Jesse was over at Gene’s watching television, Gene’s dad came into the room, looked at the two teenagers sitting on the floor, and then, to his son, said: “You always gonna be a piece of shit?”