Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [131]
Jack was rather pleased with himself for having come to so many interesting philosophical insights, until a few days later he realized that all he had thought of was crystalized in a single terse folk saying: “So go fight City Hall.” He had to laugh.
But something still troubled him. It could not be true that he had wasted his life up to now; it was not possible that fighting City Hall was wrong or futile. The folk saying had to be wrong. It was not like Don Quixote fighting a windmill, because a windmill wasn’t a criminal, and society was. Society was a criminal because it committed crimes. To fight society because it was a criminal had to be good. But was that what Jack had done most of his life? Had he fought to make society quit cheating, lying, robbing, and murdering? Or had he fought because he was scared? Search as he would, he could find nothing in his past to justify his fight. He had not fought the evil side of society; he was not even sure what it was. He had merely fought. It left him with an awful sense of frustration, because in his case society, too, had been fighting blindly and helplessly. There had been nothing else to do with him but what it had done. It was not society who had abandoned him, but his nameless and unknown parents; and they must have had their reasons for abandoning him. For all he knew, they were both dead and therefore blameless. Or they did not love one another, or did not have any money, or any of a dozen reasons for not keeping him. What if they had kept him anyway, and did not have any love to give him? What then? Mightn’t he have grown into a monster even worse than he was? Jack had known plenty of people whose home lives as children had been, at least on the surface, perfectly reasonable, and they were depraved maniacs compared to him. What about Dale Phipps, born into and raised by a solidly protective Catholic family, who liked nothing so much as murdering people? Jack could not even say with any certainty that Phipps had not been loved as a child. Maybe society didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe where you were born and who you were raised by didn’t affect things at all. Maybe some people were just naturally rotten and others just naturally good. But if that was the case, then what could he do to make sure Billy, his son, would turn out good?
Nothing.
It was an awful word. Nothing. It made him sick at heart. He refused to believe in it. He demanded that there be something he could do. He demanded that his love be worth something to his child. If it wasn’t, life was garbage. He had to rule out the idea that life was just a matter of accident, of percentages, because it was just too goddam much to stand for. Even if it was true, he was determined to live as if it were false. There had to be some way you could make yourself be felt.
One afternoon while Sally was ironing some of the things he had just brought back from the Laundromat, he said to her, “Don’t you think this is the answer to the whole goddam thing? I mean, society is just made up of people, and lots of them are rotten, so society’s partly rotten. So what we do is raise our kid to be good; and the more people who do that, the better the world gets. And, like, the more we do that, turn out good kids, the more of them there are to turn out more good kids. And the whole thing can snowball, dig, until finally all the rotten people are dead and forgotten.” He scratched his head. “Sort of. You know?”
She laughed at him. “What have you been smoking?”
“Listen, I’m serious. What can we do better than raise Billy so he doesn’t have any of the hang-ups we have?”
“You mean spend the rest of our lives on him? I’d like a little more than that.”
“Hell no, that’d wreck him. I mean, you know, making him a better person than we are.”
“How?”
That was the question, of course. “How the hell should I know?” he retorted. “Just do it as it comes up. Billy had this theory about life, you know. I told you about it. How we’re all connected. I mean,