When I answered the phone and heard Jerry’s high, whiny voice on the other line, I knew he needed a favor, and I knew I’d say yes.
He called on a Tuesday, too hot for May, the Jacaranda tree in the yard not swaying a bit. Air as still as a statue, Linda would say. This was around the time Linda started calling me a bone loafer and telling me No one retires at fifty-eight, even though she was down to only two days a week taking blood at county health.
I wasn’t really surprised to hear Jerry’s voice, but I was glad Linda was out, that I was the one to answer. Jerry didn’t sound drunk, for what it’s worth, and he was, as Linda would say, up a creek.
“Jerry. How are you? You ok?”
I was sitting in my big faux leather armchair by the window, watching finches skip from the dirt yard up to the feeder and back down again. A mound of seed had formed below that reminded me of an ancient ruin or a burial mound.
“Yeah well, not too good man,” Jerry said. “Mom died.”
I held the receiver away from my face for a few seconds. “Well, shit, Jerry, I’m sorry to hear that.” I tried to picture his mother, but could only see him, his bald head haloed by thin yellow hair, the back stretched into a straggly ponytail. Face as white as the skull beneath. Permanent red racoon eyes.
“Yeah, thanks,” said Jerry. “Lung cancer. No surprise there.” I heard him flip the wheel of a lighter and the fuzz of a cigarette. I couldn’t tell if he was making a joke.
“So here’s the thing.” Jerry paused, drawing off his cigarette. “…and I know this is a longshot, but I’ve got no one else to call.”
I could hear him winding up, looking for the right words. He hadn’t called to ask for money or for a place to stay in years, not since the last time when Linda got on the other line and called him a mooch and a junkie bum and told him she’d get the cops involved if he kept calling. She wasn’t the most delicate in these matters, which I didn’t usually mind so much. She was mostly just looking out for me, and maybe only a little bit for my unemployment checks. Either way, she screamed until there was no one left on the other end to scream at. I hadn’t heard much from Jerry since then. It was hard to understand how things could change so much between two people, I thought, as Jerry worked up to asking his favor.
“What is it, Jerry?” I let down the leg rest of my armchair.
“Well see, mom’s service is next week in Denver. I need to get out there to help out with her house and the arrangements and that sort of thing.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, it’s good of you to step up.”
“Here’s the thing though. I can’t drive right now. You know…” He left me to fill in the rest. I pictured the mugshots. I pictured him staggering into court in a cheap suit. I pictured his old Lincoln Town Car parked on my front lawn a few years ago, two wheels busted through Linda’s cement flower box.
“So I’m wondering if you’d drive me out.”
“To Colorado?”
“We can make it in a day, I think. Only about fifteen hours to Denver.” He paused for a minute on the other line. “I’m a little short right now, but I can give you some money for the trouble once mom's stuff is sorted. I have a little bit coming my way.”
A map unfolded in my mind, and I traced the thin red line from my house in Riverside up through the desert. This was a bigger ask than I’d anticipated, but like I said, my mind was made up when I’d put the phone to my ear. I was unemployed for the foreseeable, and I couldn’t sit around the house and fight with Linda anymore. I’d been feeling dry for months, busted, like an old lawn chair left out in the yard. “If something doesn’t change there’s no way I’ll stay straight,” I had said in my meeting earlier that week, staring into a Styrofoam cup of cold coffee in a church basement. “I just don’t see the point.” Then Jerry called. In my mind, I was already packing a bag.
We left on Thursday. It was barely light out when I pulled up outside Jerry’s apartment complex. He looked mostly the same as the last time I’d seen him—skinny, bad beard, that straggly, hold-out ponytail. He seemed a little shorter maybe, his back bowed out in the shape of a satellite dish. He wore a black AC/DC t-shirt and cargo shorts. He was gaunt and gangly, his skin the color of gingerbread, and yet he somehow still looked younger than he was, younger than the rest of us, with sturdy roofer’s arms and a tan that didn’t look fake or leathery, not like mine or Linda’s. A single black duffel bag sat near his feet. The flap was open, and I could see his clothes poking out, black t-shirts and gym shorts and mismatched socks. His long yellow fingers waved at me as I pulled up.
Jerry and I had learned a long time ago how to get along by going along, as Linda would say. This mostly meant not talking about the old days or, more recently, not talking much at all. As he climbed in the passenger seat, I slapped his back like the old friends we were.
“Sorry for your loss man.”
“You're a lifesaver,” he said. “I owe you,” and then, “Linda ok with this?”
“Linda and I aren’t seeing eye to eye on much these days.” I adjusted my mirror to have something to do with my hands. “It’s all good though. Everyone fights right?” The truth was, Linda and I didn’t fight as much as we slumped. Some days I felt alive and well with Linda, but just as often I felt so stagnant, I could crawl right up out of my skin. For her, the peak of contentment was a steady keel and calm waters, and my old life was an ever-encroaching squall. I didn’t see things quite that way though, as much as I was glad to have made it out alive. I was never good at hiding my feelings, not good at sitting still either. So when the Jerry’s of the world came calling, hell hounds reaching back from a faster, rowdier life, I answered the calls more often than not.
“Do you smoke in here?” said Jerry, reaching back to dig through his duffle.
“Tobacco’s fine.” I tried not to place any particular emphasis. Jerry had, for a while, been practicing what he called California sober, but from the little I heard about the situation, it seemed like the pot usually led him down the same little circuit he’d been running for years. I wasn’t here to judge, as long as he left me out of it.
“Got it,” he said. He lit a cigarette and rolled down his window. I pulled out of the apartment complex and put on my blinker, squinted, and leaned east.
We managed some small talk in the morning hours of our drive. Where we’d been and what we’d been working at. Plans. Schemes. Jerry was vague about details, talking mostly about a couple friends named Tim and Richie and some jobs down south. I talked about fitting pipes and about being out of work. My bum knee and the day I had it out with my neighbors about their little shit dog. Around noon Jerry fell asleep, his bald head frying like an egg against the window.
Past Joshua Tree, I pulled into a truck stop to piss. Jerry rocked awake as the car rumbled into the dirt parking lot. The bathrooms were in a brick out-building in the back and took quarters. I pissed and tried not to touch too much, then sat on the bumper and waited for Jerry.
When he’d been in the bathroom long enough for me to start to worry, I started running scenarios in my head. First, beat on the door and hope he finished his lengthy shit and come out with no problems at all. Next, fetch the pimply gas station attendant and ask him to unlock the door. After that the scenarios got darker and harder for me to formulate in my mind. I thought back to a particularly wretched bathroom in East Hollywood from the old days, Jerry curled up in a pool of his own vomit on the tile floor.
Finally, Jerry emerged from the bathroom looking bug-eyed and squirrelly. I tried my best not to be suspicious. The most useless pain, Linda always said about suspicion. I was never really sure where she got that one from. But as Jerry walked up to the car he seemed to be swaying in his shoes. He smelled like weed. He looked like weed.
“Jerry, you still with me? I thought you’d drowned in there.”
He smiled and steadied himself, put one hand out and leaned on the hood of the car. “This heat, man. That bathroom isn’t helping anyone out either, is it?”
“Well, that’s right I guess.” I looked back at the quarter shack behind us.
“How are you feeling? Want to let me take over for a while?” he asked, a little sheepishly.
“I don’t know, Jerry. That’s why I’m here isn’t it? To drive? Plus, you look a little worse for wear right now.” Linda would have said he looked higher than groceries.
Jerry made a frown that might have touched the dirt. “Okay, Steve, I’ll level. I smoked a little bit in there to set me up. But just pot. I’m feeling alright though.” He said “alright” with a Southern drawl, an accent that wasn’t his. “You know the program.”
I squinted past him into the desert sun. A car pulled out of the parking lot, and an eerie silence settled around us.
Jerry scratched the back of his neck and kicked at a spot in the dirt in front him. “I get it, man I do. It’s just… do you ever feel like you're not doing anything?”
“I don’t really mind being unemployed actually.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
Jerry sat down in the dirt and leaned against the bumper. His t-shirt was wrinkled, and a wreath of sweat had formed at the collar. “I mean life just moving on around you.”
I was getting impatient. “You’re stoned.”
“I was supposed to be home last month for my cousin’s funeral. You remember Little Matt?”
I nodded, though I did not remember Little Matt.
“Couldn’t make it back. Mom was pretty upset when I talked to her. That was one of the last times we spoke.” He got up and dusted himself off. “It’s just all this dying, man. And here I am, just riding along. Not even making the turns. Not even at the wheel.”
Jerry’s face looked like it might slide off his skull. A sunburnt map. A legend for suffering. A big rig pulled into the parking lot, sending up few fussy cactus wrens. I looked at the long stretch of road in front of us and the long stretch behind. Not a car in sight. Not even a mile marker.
“Fuck. Alright,” I said. “Keep it at seventy.” I tossed Jerry the keys.
I felt a little jolt of energy as we left the rest stop. The sun was still high, and Jerry looked confident behind the wheel, his hands at ten and two like they’d taught us in high school. He was smiling big, and he kept saying, “You’re the real deal, Steve” and “No one knows me like you,” which felt cheesy but was probably also a little true. I felt like I’d given him something real. I felt a little like I’d hit off the pipe with him back at the rest stop.
We drove for another hour or so, and I was beginning to nod off in the passenger seat when
I saw lights burning red and blue on the road ahead of us, fires kindled atop half a dozen highway patrol cars. As we pulled closer the sun bounced back off the doors of two staties parked at angles across the highway.
He was drifting to the side of the road. “Listen,” he said, putting the car in park on the shoulder, “I don’t want you to get overheated here, but I haven’t been totally above board”
“Jerry, you can’t turn stop right now.”
“Damnit, Jerry.” I rubbed my eyes.
We were only about fifty yards from the police lights. The car idled. The heat sent waxy halos up around us.
“You gotta pull up. We can't just sit here. It’s even more sketchy to turn around and hit bricks the other way now.” I waited for him to do something, anything. His eyes were so huge and glassy you could have cannonballed into them.
“Fuck.” Jerry slapped the steering wheel. He rubbed his brow and then, slowly, put the car back into drive and slunk toward the police blockade. An officer stepped out in front of the patrol cars as we slowed to a stop. He bent down to lean in Jerry’s open window. He wore a flat brimmed hat which knocked at the door frame. I could smell his coffee breath from the passenger seat.
The officer leaned down to fix me in his gaze, then looked in the back seat.
“Yes sir,” said Jerry, but in a distracted way, as if he were just tossing the words out for anyone to catch. He did not look at the officer but instead looked past the parked police cars to the wreckage on the highway. I looked too. I couldn’t not look.
“You remember when you left me outside The Viper Room that one night? To go pick up some dope?” He asked the question as if he were describing a movie, as if neither of us had been there that night but had just seen it all go down.
I felt a stab of guilt. “Lots of mistakes back then.”
“Or there was that time when you left me on the hook at that motel in Phoenix? You and the girls were just gone when I woke up.”
I didn’t remember it that way, but as Jerry described it, I knew his version was likely just as true as mine.
“What are you getting at Jerry?”
“Well, that was probably when I knew that you and I were in it for the long haul.” We hit a long, straight stretch of highway and Jerry accelerated.
“What do you mean?”
“Just that we are both always looking for something, and that neither of us would ever be able to find it. Like you're here with me now. And like your situation with Linda. I get it, is all.”
“You don’t know anything about my situation with Linda.”
I let this hang in the air. I pictured Linda sitting at the kitchen table painting her nails, and suddenly I missed her, missed her more than I’d maybe missed anyone ever in my life. Maybe she would be happy to see me when I got home, even though I’d been a fuck lately. Even though I’d left her again.
“My mom always liked you,” said Jerry. “She’d appreciate this.”
“Your mom didn’t really ever know me,” I said. I fiddled with the latch to the glove box. I was still heated at him for putting me in this position, and he was still trying to pull me up out of my anger. “I only really met her the one time.”
“No, you’re right,” said Jerry. “But still.” He turned on the radio low, barely audible behind the wind and the road noise. Dusk had fallen around us, turning the landscape even more Martian, the red cake horizon burning. A brush of plum behind that. We passed massive desert rocks, chimneys and spindles and sharp spires.
Jerry took the cash, but when I came back a few minutes later he was nowhere to be found, and the pump still read zeros, not an ounce added.
Inside, the gas station was empty except for a gray-haired woman behind the glass. She pointed past the junk food and American flag t-shirts to a line of one-eyed jacks on the back wall, their screens screaming technicolor. Jerry’s shoulders tensed when he heard me approach.
“Jerry what the fuck!?”
“Oh good,” he said casually, as if he’d been waiting for me. “My good luck charm.”
“Are you seriously back here dumping our gas money into a slot machine?.
Jerry laughed but didn’t look up. He pulled the arm and sent the wheel spinning. “Take it easy. I’m about to get hot.”
“Jerry, are you crazy man?”
The wheel settled and the machine buzzed. “I’m trying to make you some money here. Why are you acting like I’m the bad guy?”
“You are the bad guy Jerry! Damnit. I should have known this trip would be a fiasco.”
“You know what, you are right.” Jerry finally turned and looked up at me. “It was a bad idea calling you. Always a bad idea calling you.”
“No, my bad,” I said. “Fool me once.”
Jerry pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes were watering, and he looked suddenly like a younger version of himself, my old friend Jerry who played bass guitar and hated onions. “Listen Steve, you are kidding yourself with this strait-laced routine. You act like you are doing me some favor by coming out here, but you were jumping at the chance to get out of your shitty little life.” He shook his head. “You won’t admit this either, but that’s how it’s always been. Before Linda and even before Andrea. You’ve always acted like you had it figured, and I didn’t, like we weren’t on the same level. But It’s like I said in the car, we’re the same.”
“Are you serious? I’ve been fixing your messes for thirty years!” I nearly screamed it at him. The old woman at the register was staring. “I’m done bailing you out.”
“Yeah, well I’m done giving you something to live for.” He turned back to his game.
“This ain’t living, Jerry.”
“Well go ahead then,” he said with his back to me. “You know how to leave people.”
I was still standing next to the car, deciding what to do next, when Jerry came out after me. He shrugged and pushed a wad of cash towards me. “I doubled it for you. I gave the crone forty bucks too. Will that fill the tank?”
“I don’t want your money,” I said. I was still shaking.
He waved the money again. “Come on man, take it. For the trouble. She said there’s a bus station somewhere. So, you can go on and head back.”
“I don’t want it,” I said again, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the wad of cash in his hand. The money glowed in the gas station neons, a sparkling payload. I thought about going back to my life with Linda. The neighbor’s dog. Weekly AA meetings in the church basement.
“Doubled it, huh?” I said.
He smiled, and a string of memories passed through my mind like photos in a carousel, a dozen times when Jerry had bailed me out or when I’d fucked Jerry over, and all the times we’d run at the same pace or fallen through the same dark holes. I looked from the cash back up to Jerry, and there it was. He was right, at least in part, I’d just been working my whole life to not admit it.
He fanned out the bills and waved them. “I’m not unlucky all the time. Just in matters of love. And when the bottle’s involved obviously.”
“Obviously,” I said.
Over Jerry’s shoulder I could see the old woman still slumped over inside the gash station’s sickly yellow light.
“So what happens next?” he folded the bills and tucked them into my shirt pocket.
I looked at Jerry’s flushed cheeks, the star below his eye I knew was from a particular night we’d spent in West Hollywood. “I guess you take us the rest of the way to Colorado,” I said, and handed over the keys.
It was dark when we hit the Colorado border, Jerry behind the wheel the whole way. He pulled into a rest stop outside Loma and turned off the car. We had not spoken for several hours, and we sat there in the rest stop parking lot in silence, both of us staring off into the low line of night. The windows were down, and the high desert air had turned cool. The engine hummed and clicked beneath us like a chased animal trying to catch its breath.
Jerry opened his door and got out of the car. He stretched and walked past the parking lot into a dirt field beside the road. Miles of desert stretched before him, and beyond that a white row of subdivision lifted like tiny teeth. The sky had turned the color of a dark bruise, mauve tinged in gold. Jerry put his hands on his hips and dipped his head. In the low light, from my vantage in the passenger seat, he looked like a cactus or a desert cedar, bent over and gnarled by time, but studded too with tiny, luminous flowers.
It was a one-way trip for Jerry in the end. He moved into his mom’s old house in south Denver, and I drove back to California alone, the desert even more alien and lonely than it had been on the way there. I never heard what happened with his parole. No news is probably good news on that front.
“Pretty peaceful ride all in all,” I told Linda when I got home. She didn’t believe me, and I didn’t apologize directly for leaving, but she forgave me enough not to ask any other questions.
I went back to work that fall and tried to listen to Linda more, even when she wasn’t talking, and we started walking more in the evenings and she kept on tending her succulents and we kept on tending our little slice of earth. Jerry called occasionally, and we talked about the old days with a bit of new varnish added, the way a new ending to a story can change all that came before.
Jerry died young like I always knew he would, though it was from your average heart troubles and nothing too unsavory. He spent his last few years near family and, by all accounts, pretty clean and pretty happy.
A cousin named Keeno found my name in Jerry’s wispy little address book and called to let me know about the funeral. He sounded a bit desperate on the phone, like he was having trouble rounding up enough mourners. “I know it’s a long drive,” he said, “but I bet he’d like it if you walked with the urn.” I thought about making the trip again, this time without Jerry riding shotgun. I thought too about what kind of audience I might draw at my own funeral.
When I hung up with Keeno I sat at the kitchen table for a long time, just staring at my hands, picturing Jerry pulling over the car and walking out into the dusky desert those years before. I was still studying my hands when Linda walked into the kitchen.
“You ever think about cremation?” I said. About the afterlife?”
“What, are you drinking again?” She put a kettle on the range. The burner clicked and whooshed. “Do I need to get you to a meeting?”
“There’s these trees,” I said, “trees that you can get for when you die…” I tried to explain to her what Jerry had explained to me about the trees and the roots and living on forever, the endless movement of molecules.
“Who would want to live forever?” said Linda. She pulled two mugs from the cupboard.
“I heard too you can get one tree, for two people.”
I said it quiet, a little embarrassed maybe. The kettle was just starting to rattle. “You can share roots, I mean.”
Linda didn’t turn from the stove, but I could see her shoulders lift slightly, which meant she was smiling. I’ll thank Jerry forever for that, for helping me make Linda smile on a random Tuesday afternoon as his cells were being torched and shoveled into a pile, soon to be folded into the Rocky Mountain dirt.