I wrote the first drafts of “Blanket” in late 2001, no more than a year after I decided I wanted to be a writer. It was the first story I wrote in what was then intended to be a novel-in-stories, although I only finished four of the ten or twelve I planned on. One of those finished stories was never read by anyone else. Two others were published years later — 2004 or 2005 — in Hobart and Cellar Door — among my very first publications. I’d written their first drafts around the same period as “Blanket,” and continued to improve them by inches for a couple of years. I rewrote “Blanket” a number of times too, cutting at least 1200 words at one point. But it never got good enough to get accepted anywhere, although at the time I couldn’t see why.
It is, of course, fairly obvious now why that is. (And yet, haven’t I gotten it published here? Isn’t this the fulfillment of a ten-year goal?) But I like that the early version of my writerly self kept with the story for three or four years, improving it as he improved. I didn’t yet have the ability to rewrite deeply and drastically that I have now, and so it took a long time to move a story forward: I was, in many ways, waiting to learn the skills I needed to do the next draft, then applying each new nugget of wisdom I gleaned from an interview or craft essay or better writer as I received them.
The bulk of the DNA of this story is taken from Denis Johnson, from his Jesus’ Son. That’ll be obvious to almost anyone, I think: In fact, there’s one passage, about a third of the way in, which I believe is a pretty close paraphrase of one of his. (How embarrassing that I did that, and that I sent it out!) And this makes sense: It was Johnson who first spoke me in the language I heard buried in my own body — that gave me a voice to use to find my voice. I borrowed his words until I could utter my own, and still there are elements of his unique way of speaking that will never leave me. As much as I have tried to write against my influences in the past years, so that I might stake out some more unique place of my own, I’m still grateful for the fact that writers like Johnson reside so strongly in my thoughts: His were good words to carry with me, and to be carried by.
The big problem with stealing Johnson’s style — even in this bad imitation — is that I didn’t have Johnson’s worldview to go with it: The fact that this story is as sentimental as it is suggests that I didn’t even understand Johnson all that well then, and certainly I didn’t yet understand — as I think I do now — that our diction and syntax and formal choices should be tied to or sprung from our worldview, our unique stance.
In the end, I’m incredibly glad this story never got published on its own merits. But I can’t regret writing it any way, or working on it for several years. I last sent it out in 2006 — after five years of rewrites — to NOÖ Journal: It’s how I first corresponded with Mike Young, I think. I hope he doesn’t mind my quoting his editorial correspondence of years past, but he wrote in that rejection that “it’s quite well written, very sly command of language, but ultimately I just couldn’t wholly believe the story.” And that was the final word on it for me, because by then I agreed: That last part had always been the problem. I’d partially taught myself to write fiction by working on this story and the others from that failed linked collection, but I hadn’t found what I had to say yet: I was writing about what I thought I was supposed to be writing about, what I thought literary fiction revolved around — instead of what subjects I couldn’t not write about. Mike was smart enough to detect that falsehood here, that I was borrowing someone else’s world — and only by giving up on this story and others like it would I start to write my own.
+
I knew the woman with the dirty white tank top and the bleached out hair would sit beside me as soon as I saw her walk in. There was nowhere else for her to go. Still, she pretended to wander the bar, looking for a friendly face, someone to talk to, finally choosing me, the only exception to cowboy hats and spitting tobacco, as I’d already said she would.
I smoked and ignored her, but still I could feel her staring. When she finally spoke, it was a sound like whiskey and Newports, like the guests on nighttime cable talk shows. She said, “You know, you look really familiar to me. Do I know you?”
I denied it immediately, but that doesn’t mean I was telling the truth. It just means I didn’t want to know her. Like her voice, I feared any recognition between us would have a terrible feeling. I prayed it was just a cheap pick-up line, a mode of conversation.
“Where are you from? Not around here,” she said, smiling the way an animal does, all teeth. She was already lighting a second cigarette from the remains of the first, need obvious in every clouded puff, every soaking wet syllable of her speech.
I looked around, but there was nowhere to move to, and I’d never be able to sit here without talking to her. “Michigan, originally. I’ve been out west, and now I’m heading back home.”
“I’m from Michigan too,” she said, smiling again. “Maybe that’s where I know you from. Of course, I’ve got to be at least twenty years older than you.”
I imagined she was right, although hers was an ageless look, the mummifying slow rot of cancer and liver failure. Not that it made her different from anyone else in the bar, or from me. Her disease was just more advanced.
“I haven’t been to Michigan in a long time,” she said. “Not since I left my second husband. I’ve been married five times. I’m going through a divorce.”
I ordered another drink. Me and this woman, two people who’ve just left and left and kept leaving the people we’ve loved. In that way, maybe we did know each other.
+
I got up and went to the bathroom. I forced a stream of piss out, not really needing to go, just wanting to get away for a moment, hoping she’d move on while I was gone. When I returned to my stool, she was still there, and had taken her wallet out of her purse. In it were two pictures, tiny rectangles faded and worn. She showed them to me, sliding them along the surface of the bar. One was a portrait of Christ, 1950s style, the sacred heart blazing from within his discolored chest. The other made me weak and watery, and I felt a horrible sort of thing growing in my belly.
The photograph was of a little boy about ten, wearing a checkered cowboy shirt and holding a blanket. That blanket — It all came back to me. I had forgotten.
I looked at the boy’s hands and remembered that he was trying not to suck his thumb.
This woman, she sighed as she looked at me and said, “God’s son and my son. I haven’t seen either of them in a long, long time.”
“See that?” she said, pointing at the picture of her kid. “My son had this security blanket. We shared a bed everywhere we lived, and he always slept with it. But some nights, when he was little, he’d wake me up in the middle of the night because I’d stolen it. Years later, he just let me sleep with it and went without.”
“He ran away when he was fourteen. Somehow, I thought he’d take it with him, but he left the blanket right where it was, tucked in my arms.” She smiled sadly. “I never saw him again. I still have the blanket.”
I struggled to stay calm. Through clenched teeth, I said, “Any idea what happened to him?”
She shook her head. “I looked for him for a while, but he was gone.” She stared at the back of the bar and recited the words I imagined her practicing over and over. “I hope he’s okay. I hope he’s a good boy, a strong boy.”
Sometimes, you look for someone for so long — you dream about that person for so much of your life — you end up forgetting who they really are. All the false shadows you chase into the night, these become your memories.
I hadn’t responded, but she continued anyway. “Even if he never wanted to see me again, I’d hope he could forgive me first.”
“Where do you keep his blanket? You still have it?”
“It’s in my car, right on the passenger seat.” She puffed hard on her cigarette, adding to the haze between us. “I’m moving to Florida to live with a friend. I’ve been moving my whole life, you know. Ever since I left my first husband.”
I imagined myself in twenty-five years, five wives and a million miles away. I thought of my beautiful wife, who, I must tell you, I hadn’t seen in over a year. I wished — Well, not for home. Not yet. I wished I was sober. I ordered another drink.
I don’t know what I felt, not exactly. If I had to describe it, I would say that there were all these connections in that bar, between every point of life there, and also I would say that on certain nights and in certain states of mind, you might have been able to connect the dots and form an image. The thing is, how would you know you’d done it correctly, and what kind of picture would it be?
+
If this really was my mother, then yes, I did leave her the blanket. I hadn’t wanted to, but I knew that if I woke her up trying to get it, something terrible would happen. More terrible than what was already happening. One thing I’d learned from her dealings with all the dozens of men she called my uncles — Always hurt the person who can hurt you. Better to leave than be rejected. Fuck them all.
So what if my blanket had comforted her over the years. I still wanted it back. The blanket, which I hadn’t thought of in over a decade, suddenly became necessary, totemic. As if it alone could make me feel safe.
“What are you thinking about?” She flashed a coy little grin, trying to be cute. Trying to pick me up. Maybe make me an uncle.
I nearly laughed, it was so ridiculous. That she didn’t know. That I did. I wanted to tell her. I knew I wouldn’t.
+
I stood up off my bar stool, weak in the knees. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been drinking. It was enough that I lost my balance and fell backwards into someone playing pool behind me. I apologized, hands in the air. With my mother behind me and this mustached cowboy in front of me, I felt desperate to leave. It was time to go, time to escape, time to get out of there before the really bad things started happening.
She cried out as I hit the heavy red door at the front of the bar. “Where are you going? You’re just going to leave, just like that?”
I stopped in the doorway for a moment, the cool night air rushing past me. Outside, it smelled clean, pushing away the smells of smoke and sweat and beer. The parking lot lights shined like the stars I couldn’t see through them. It seemed so beautiful to be going outside, to be walking in that air, to know that eventually I’d be anywhere else, if only I kept moving.
My mother, she said, “I thought we had something going on here. Who the fuck do you think you are?” Everyone was looking at her, sitting on that stool drunk and angry. Everyone was looking at me, at the back of my head staring out into the dark, at my hand on the doorframe. Bar room high drama.
I turned around and stared at her. I wasn’t crying. I tried to will her to recognize me, but she didn’t, instead letting her angry curses propel me through the door and out into the night.
+
There it was, just like I’d remembered. She was still driving the same ugly yellow pickup she’d had when I was a kid. It had grown older and worn, but I was getting used to that happening to things. I moved through the darkness towards where it sat under one of the parking lot lamps, a halo of light surrounding it. The blanket waited within.
My steps were slower than they were meant to be, my strides as long as the alcohol in my veins would allow. At the same time I felt pitched forward, as if rushing headlong into some unknowable idea. I hit the truck’s driver-side door with my whole body, falling against it. I tried one handle and then the other. Both were locked. Without hesitation I pulled my sleeve down over my hand, turned backwards and smashed the window with my elbow like I’d seen so many television robbers do.
The window blew itself apart trying to get out of my way, and I reached through the broken glass and found the latch. I opened the door and looked down at the passenger seat. My blanket wasn’t there, or much of anything else. Just a man’s ball cap and a map of Oklahoma on the seat, empty cigarette packs on the floor. Not Newports, either. I stepped back and looked into the rear of the truck. There were no boxes or suitcases or anything. It was the wrong truck, and maybe she wasn’t mymother, I realized just as I was spun around by the man from inside, the one I’d bumped into by the pool table. I was too surprised and drunk to stop him as he threw me to the pavement. He’d gotten in a good kick or two to my ribs before I got my feet back. “What did you do to my truck, asshole? I’m going to mess you up real good, and you better believe it.” He came at me again but by then I was hitting back. People poured out of the bar to watch us.
The cowboy was a bit stronger than me, and would have easily won, except that between blows I spied her face a few feet away, at the edge of the circle of bodies surrounding us. She had the same look on her face she used to wear when I skinned my knee or fell off a merry-go-round, this “What did little Jacky do now?” look. The last doubts vanished, and I wished that man would stop hitting me so I could hit her. I wanted to knock her to the ground, I wanted my hands around her throat, I wanted to scream that this was all her fault. Just a mistake, I wanted to tell the man striking me. She’s to blame, and let’s get her.
But I couldn’t, and so I just punched him harder, as hard as I could. Once it became obvious that the two of us might kill each other, other men stepped in and separated us. The cowboy hadn’t expected me to come at him the way I had. He looked confused by the events that had occurred. One minute, he’d been drinking and playing pool, the next he’d ended up with another man’s blood on his fists. As for me, I had no such problem. It was hardly the first time this had happened.
The bar owner came out into the parking lot, yelling that he was going to call the cops. It was that time of night. I left the bar, but I couldn’t leave town, or even go very far. I had to find my mother again, I had to confront her, had to at least steal my blanket. I was spattered with blood and one of my back teeth felt loose in its socket. I wasn’t walking away from this now.
+
I limped away, but couldn’t go more than a block or two. There wouldn’t be a bus until the morning, and if my face looked as bad as it felt I wouldn’t be hitchhiking either. Down the street was an all night diner where I ignored the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign and found myself a table near the long windows looking out onto the street. The waitress came by and took my order, not giving a second look to my already bruising face. It was that kind of town, I swear.
Time passed. I ate. I drank coffee. I smoked cigarettes. I watched the window, but I never saw my mother drive by. Maybe she went the other way, I thought. Maybe she’s still at the bar.
Or maybe she was in the diner with me the whole time, because that’s where she was when I turned around. Standing right over my left shoulder, between me and the cash register, between me and the doors.
She slid into the booth with me. “Wow. You really got the shit kicked out of you, didn’t you?” She raised an eyebrow at me, but I only shrugged, unable to make eye contact. “What were you trying to steal back there?”
“I wasn’t trying to steal anything from that guy,” I said.
“Then what were you doing breaking into his truck?” She smoked her cigarette the same way I do, held between the thumb and index finger, smoking beneath our hands to block the wind. Our fingernails have turned the same shade of yellow from years of doing it.
“I was looking for something that belonged to me. I had the wrong car.”
When she concentrated, her forehead made the same lines as mine did. She had the same lips as I do, and I imagined that if she ever stopped dying it, her hair would be the same color brown mine is.
“What was it?”
“Just something that was taken from me a long time ago.” I grabbed my cigarettes off the table and walked towards the cash register. Before I got there, she quietly called out to me. Called out to me and said my name.
My name, which I’d never told her.
+
When I didn’t move, she spoke again. “Is this what you were looking for?”
I turned, very slowly. From out of her purse, she’d taken a worn blue rectangle, not much bigger than a handkerchief.
I stood there, transfixed, until she said, “Jesus, Jacky, I knew it was you.”
I sat back down. What else could I do?
“When? When did you know?” I pulled out a fresh cigarette, but failed to get it to my lips in as calmly as I’d intended. I put it down on the table, unlit.
She shrugged. “After the conversation we had, you go and break into a truck that looks just like the one I had when you were a kid, and you expect me not to figure it out. I’m not as stupid as you thought I was.”
If someone was your worst enemy, the person who made all your mistakes for you so that all you can do is repeat them over and over again, could you ever forgive them?
“I was so young then, Jacky, and I was never a good mother to you. I wish I could do it all over.”
If that same person who had wronged you, if she’d finally found you and told you she was sorry, would you forgive her then?
“Tommy, the guy I was living with when you ran away, he’s dead now. He got killed in a motorcycle accident. I looked after that, but I never found you. Until now.”
And what if that person had never really been bad? What if she’d just been fucked up and then fucked over, by all the people who were suppose to love her? Could you still love her?
What if maybe you were one of those people?
She began to cry, softly. “God, Jacky, say something. Jacky, say anything, please…”
If you had to choose between loving her and forgiving her, which would you pick? Does it even make a difference?
+
I took the blanket out of her hand, what was left of it. It was nothing now, barely a rag. I held it up to my mother and smiled my crooked smile, the best one I had. She tried smiling too, and then everything that happens at times like these happened. Sometimes, I like to think that those two pictures in her purse shined together, like faith. One prayed for his mother’s love, and the other for a second chance. Sometimes they prayed together, for the same thing. They prayed for me, and for that, I was thankful.