Jernigan Read Free

other, it was mostly to get away from Angleton and the people he’d started bringing around that the two of us went up to Connecticut to spend some time at his parents’ house. Guilford had country roads to drive, in Uncle Fred’s father’s Buick, playing the radio loud: this was the summer of “Hanky Panky” and “Wild Thing.” Not the “Wild Thing” they have now, where the guy just talks in rhyme the whole way through, but the real “Wild Thing,” where he thinks she moves him but he doesn’t know for sure. Woods to trip in, a village green to circle and circle and circle looking for girls, the beach at Hammonasset a couple of exits up the turnpike, New Haven with movies and Cutler’s record store a few exits down. And Uncle Fred’s fourteen-year-old sister always there when we got home: pretty enough to keep me stirred up, young enough not to have to do anything about.
    We were still there when Uncle Fred’s father got a four-day weekend because he’d had to work over the Fourth of July. He was going to spend it at their camp up in New Hampshire, putting up a lean-to to keep firewood under. (Right, same lean-to, same green fiberglass roof.) Mrs. Warriner said he’d do better to get going on the bathroom, and that all that hammering would give her a sick headache, and that she’d just as soon not go shacking all over Robin Hood’s barn. Maybe Michael and his friend would like to go up and give a hand, and she and Diane would hold the fort and have a regular old hen party.
    “Oh man,” I said to Uncle Fred when I got him alone. We were supposed to have been getting together that weekend with some girl he knew from Clinton and some friend of hers whose parents were supposed to be away.
    “It’s cool up there,” he said. “It’ll be cool, promise. The old man just farts around and doesn’t know what’s happening.” As if I’d had any choice anyway. My father had sold the house in the Springs—I think he let it go for twenty-five—and he’d sublet the place on BarrowStreet to somebody while he was in Mexico. So it was either stick with Uncle Fred or go back to 10th Street with Angleton sitting crosslegged on his mattress all night fucking around with his works and smoking Camels and scratching himself and jerking his head to the soul music on WWRL.
    Late on a Friday afternoon, we bumped down the rutted track, kicking up a dustcloud, then straight across the big field, milkweed and goldenrod on both sides as high as the car windows. Right around the trailer itself the grass was kept down with a lawnmower, less grass really than dandelions and fuzzy pale-green lamb’s-tongue. It was a plain old white house trailer, sitting out in the middle of things at the far end of the field. (It didn’t get painted blue until years later, after Mr. Warriner died and Uncle Fred got the place.) A cinderblock for a doorstep. Behind the trailer the woods began, and above the treetops rose a hill shaped like the side view of the old Studebaker Grandpa Jernigan used to drive: a round peak, left side sloping away gradually, right side dropping steeply like the windshield of a car that was moving from left to right, the direction of time. Such a hill, I remembered from eighth-grade Earth Science, was called a roche moutonnée: that is, a sheep-shaped rock. Years later, when Judith and I had taken over the place on Barrow Street, we came in with groceries one afternoon and found the kitchen counter alive with cockroaches. “Well well,” I said, always lightsome, “a roach matinee.” She didn’t seem to get it. And I thought, Oh well, so one more little thing.
    But we’re jumping all around here and losing track. Not that I mind losing track, far from it. But.
    The camp had no electricity then: just kerosene lamps and an ice chest. An outhouse, since the bathroom in the trailer wasn’t hooked up to anything yet. I was given Diane’s tiny room, and I remember quietly sneaking her bureau drawer open and looking