The Gold Coast

15

So Jim tracks up to his parents’ home that evening, to join them for dinner. Up the knob of Red Hill, the first rise off the big flat plain of the OC basin, a sort of lookout point sticking out from the hills behind it. Jim’s books say there was a mine there in the 1920s, the Red Hill mercury mine, with tailings that could be found decades later. And the soil of the hill had a reddish cast, because of the high amount of cinnabar in it.

Home is the same. Dennis is back from work, out in the garage working on his car’s motor, which is already in perfect factory condition. He doesn’t reply to Jim’s hello, and Jim goes on into their section of the house. Lucy is making dinner; happily she greets him, and he sits down comfortably at the kitchen table. Quickly enough he’s up on the latest developments at the little church: the minister still has some problem related to the death of his wife, the new vicar continues to vex the veteran membership, Lillian Keilbacher has started work as Lucy’s assistant in the minister’s office.

Then he hears about Lucy’s friends, and then Dennis’s work. This is the only way that Jim ever hears about his father’s work, perhaps because Dennis assumes, correctly, that Jim is a pacifist bleeding-heart pseudoradical who wouldn’t approve of any of it. So Dennis never speaks of it to Jim. Apparently he’s almost as bad with Lucy; her account is fragmented and incomplete, consisting mostly of her own judgments and opinions, generated by the minute bits of evidence Dennis mutters when he arrives home, disgruntled and closemouthed. “He hates this Lemon he’s working for,” Lucy opines, shaking her head in disapproval. It’s not Christian, it’s not good for his health, it’s not good for his career. “He should try to like him more. It’s not as if the man is the devil or something like that. He probably has troubles of his own.”

“I don’t know,” Jim says. “Some people can be pretty awful to work for.”

“It’s what you make of it that counts.” Sigh. “Dennis should have a hobby, something to take his mind off work.”

“He’s got the car, right? That’s a hobby.”

“Well, yes but it’s just more of the same, isn’t it. Trying to get some machine to work.”

Jim has begun a radically censored account of his week, when Dennis comes in and washes up for dinner. Lucy sets out the salad and casserole and they sit down; she says grace and they eat. Dennis eats in silence, gets up and goes back out to continue his work.

Lucy gets up and goes to the sink. “So how is Sheila?” she asks.

“Well, um…” Jim fumbles, feeling sudden guilt. He hasn’t even thought of Sheila for a long time. “Actually, we aren’t seeing each other as much these days.”

A quick tkh of disapproval. Lucy doesn’t like it. Jim gets up to help clean the table. Of course she’s ambivalent about it; Sheila wasn’t a Christian, and she’d really like Jim to settle down with a Christian girl, even get married—in fact she knows some candidates down at the church. On the other hand, she met Sheila many times and liked her, and the real and actual always count more for Lucy than the theoretical. “What’s wrong?” she complains.

“Well… we’re just not on the same track.” It’s a phrase of Lucy’s.

She shakes her head. “She’s nice. I like her. You should call her and talk to her. You’ve got to communicate.” This is a sacred tenet with Lucy: talking will cure everything. Jim supposes she believes it because Dennis doesn’t talk much. If he did, she’d know better that the tenet wasn’t true.

“Yeah, I’ll call her.” And really he should. Have to tell her that he’s, um, seeing other people. A difficult call at best. And so a part of him is already busy forgetting the resolution. Sheila will get the idea. “I will.”

“Did you go see Tom?”

“Yeah.”

“How was he?”

“Same as always.”

She sighs. “He should be living here.”

Jim shakes his head. “I don’t know where you’d put him. Or how you’d take care of him, either.”

“I know.” There’s a slight quiver at Lucy’s jaw, and suddenly Jim perceives that she’s upset. He doesn’t have the faintest idea why. “But it isn’t right.”

Maybe that’s it. “I’ll go down there more often.” This too he instantly begins to forget.

“Dennis has got to go to Washington again this week.”

“He’s been going a lot this year.”

“Yes.” She’s still upset, throwing dishes into the dishwasher almost blindly. Jim doesn’t want to ask her why, she’ll start crying and he doesn’t want to deal with it. He ignores the signs and tells her cheerily of his week, his classes and what he’s been reading, while she pulls it together. Is she angry at Dennis about something? he wonders. He can’t tell; there’s lots he doesn’t know or understand about his parents’ relationship. He’s more comfortable with it that way.

Dishes finished, the talk continues desultorily. Jim’s mind wanders to his various problems and he doesn’t catch one of his mom’s questions. “What’s that?”

“Jim. You don’t listen.” A cardinal sin, in this household where it happens so often.…

“Sorry.” But at the same time he’s glancing at a newsheet headline that’s grabbed his eye. “I can’t believe this famine in India.”

“Why, what’s it say?”

“Same old thing. Third major famine of the year in Asia, kills another million. And look at this! Fight in Mozambique killed a hundred!” From their kitchen window they can see the two giant hangars down at El Toro Marine Base, the helicopters rising and dropping like bees around a hive.

“They should learn to talk.”

Jim nods, absorbed in the details of the second article. When he’s done he says, “I’m off. Gotta go teach my class.”

“Good. Don’t forget about visiting Tom more often, now.” She is serious, scolding, insistent: still upset about something.

“I won’t, but remember I just saw him today. I’ll go again next Thursday.”

“Tuesday would be better.”

Jim goes out to the garage. He doesn’t notice the intensity of Dennis’s silence, hasn’t noticed the tension in him all evening long. Dennis is quiet a lot; and Jim hasn’t really been paying attention.

He clears his throat; Dennis looks up from a bundle of colored wires running over the motor block of his car. “Um, Dad, my car’s having some power troubles going uptrack.”

Dennis pokes his glasses up his nose, glares at Jim. “How does it start?” he asks after a long pause.

“Not so well.”

“Have you cleaned the track contacts lately?”

“Um…”

Angrily Dennis grabs up some tools, rags, leads Jim out to his car. It looks shabby and unkempt under the streetlight. Dennis pulls up the hood wordlessly, reaches down to shift the contact rod up into maintenance position. His back says he’s sick of doing work on Jim’s car.

“Look at these brushes, they’re caked!” A black paste of oily scum adheres to the contacts where they come closest to the road and the track. “Here, you clean them.”

Jim starts on it, fumbles with a screwdriver, gouges the side of one brush, propels a gob of the pasty black goo right past Dennis’s eye.

Dennis elbows him aside. “Watch out, you’re wrecking them. Watch how I do it.”

Jim watches, bored. Dennis’s hands move surely, economically. He gets every brush coppery clean, factory perfect. “I suppose you’ll just let all this go to hell again,” Dennis says bitterly as he finishes, gesturing at the car’s motor.

“No,” Jim protests. But he knows that after years of negligence and ineptitude with his car, there’s nothing he can do now to convince Dennis that he is really interested. It is interesting, of course, in a theoretical way; forces of entropy, resistance to it, a great metaphor for society, etc. But ten seconds after the hood is down the actual physical details fade for Jim, the words turn back into jargon and he’s as ignorant as he was when the lesson started. His memory is retentive, so maybe he truly isn’t interested.

“Have you done anything about getting another job?” Dennis demands.

“Yeah, I’ve been looking.”

Disgust twists Dennis’s features. “You know I’m still making the insurance payments on this car?” he says as he gathers his tools. “Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember!” Jim squirms at this accusation, feeling the shame of it. Still supported by his parents: he can’t even make his own way in the world. He can see Dennis’s contempt and it makes him defensive, then angry. “I appreciate it, but I’ll take them over starting with the next one.” As if Dennis has been keeping him from paying on his own.

The pretense makes Dennis angry too. “You will not,” he snaps. “It’s illegal to be without that insurance, and you can’t afford it. If I gave it to you and you let it lapse and then got in an accident, then I’d be the one ended up paying the bills, wouldn’t I?”

Stung that his father would imagine him capable of that, Jim scowls at the ground. “I wouldn’t let it lapse!”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

Jim turns and walks off across the lawn, circling. He’s ashamed, hurt, furiously angry. There’s nothing he can say. If he starts to cry in front of his father he’ll… “I don’t do things like that! I keep my commitments!” he shouts.

“The hell you do,” Dennis says. “You don’t even support yourself! Isn’t that a commitment? Why don’t you get a job where you can afford all your own expenses? Or why don’t you budget what you make to pay for them? Are you going to tell me you don’t spend any of what you make on entertaining yourself?”

“No!”

“So here you are twenty-seven years old and I’m still paying your bills!”

“I don’t want you paying for them! I’m sick of that!”

“You’re sick of it! Fine, I won’t. That’s it for that. But you’d better find yourself a decent job.”

“I’m looking! At least the jobs I have are decent work!”

For a second it almost looks like Dennis is going to hit him; he even shifts all the tools to his left hand, instantly, without thinking.… Then he freezes, snarls, turns away and walks into the house. Jim runs to his car, jumps in, tracks off cursing wildly, blindly.