Jesus' Son: Stories Read Free Page A

here. And it was just bogus."
    "What do you want to do?" Tom said.
    "Oh, let's just take him wherever he wants to go." I didn't want to go home. My wife was different than she used to be, and we had a six-month-old baby I was afraid of, a little son.
    The next place we took him to stood all by itself out on the Old Highway. I'd been out this road more than once, a little farther every time, and I'd never found anything that made me happy. Some of my friends had had a farm out here, but the police had raided the place and put them all in jail.
    This house didn't seem to be part of a farm. It was about two-tenths of a mile off the Old Highway, its front porch edged right up against the road. When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside---jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely.
    We all went up to the porch with the silent man. He knocked on the door. Tom, Richard, and I flanked him at a slight, a very subtle distance.
    As soon as the door opened, he pushed his way inside. We followed him in and stopped, but he headed right into the next room.
    We didn't get any farther inside than the kitchen. The next room past that was dim and blue-lit, and inside it, through the doorway, we saw a loft, almost a gigantic bunk bed, in which several ghost-complected women were lying around. One just like those came through the door from that room and stood looking at the three of us with her mascara blurred and her lipstick kissed away. She wore a skirt but not a blouse, just a white bra like someone in an undies ad in a teenage magazine. But she was older than that. Looking at her I thought of going out in the fields with mywife back when we were so in love we didn't know what it was.
    She wiped her nose, a sleepy gesture. Inside of two seconds she was closely attended by a black man slapping the palm of his hand with a pair of gloves, a very large man looking blindly down at me with the invulnerable smile of someone on dope.
    The young woman said, "If you'd called ahead, we would've encouraged you not to bring him."
    Her companion was delighted. "That's a beautiful way of saying it."
    In the room behind her the man we'd brought stood like a bad sculpture, posing unnaturally with his shoulders wilting, as if he couldn't lug his gigantic hands any farther.
    "What the hell is his problem?" Richard asked.
    "It doesn't matter what his problem is, until he's fully understood it himself," the man said.
    Tom laughed, in a way.
    "What does he do?" Richard asked the girl.
    "He's a real good football player. Or anyhow he was." Her face was tired. She couldn't have cared less.
    "He's still good. He's still on the team," the black man said.
    "He's not even in school."
    "But he could get back on the team if he was."
    "But he'll never be in school because he's fucked, man. And so are you."
    He flicked one of his gloves back and forth. "I know that now, thank you, baby."
    "You dropped your other glove," she said.
    "Thank you, babe, I know that, too," he said.
    A big muscular boy with fresh cheeks and a blond flattop came over and joined us. I felt he was the host, because he gripped the handle of a green beer mug almost the size of a wastepaper basket with a swastika and a dollar sign painted on it. This personalized touch made him seem right at home, like Hugh Hefner circulating around the Playboy cocktail parties in his pajamas.
    He smiled at me and shook his head. "He can't stay. Tammy doesn't want him here."
    "Okay, whoever Tammy is," I said. Around these strange people I felt hungry. I smelled some kind of debauchery, the whiff of a potion that would banish everything plaguing me.
    "Now would be a good time to take him out of here," the big host said.
    "What's his name, anyway?"
    "Stan."
    "Stan. Is he really deaf?"
    The girl snorted.
    The boy laughed and said, "That's a good one."
    Richard punched my arm and glanced at the door, indicating we should go. I realized that he and Tom were afraid of these