I finally took Wes up on his dinner offer. He was happy that I was having success finding interesting stories and invited me to his house for a dinner party. He lived in the vicinity of the Pisgah Forest, around Asheville, with his girlfriend, Valeria, and he said that he was happy to meet my girlfriend and son. He told me he hoped that he and Valeria would have children soon, or that his daughters would come out from DC to visit him; he missed them a lot. When I was at his house, after they took our coats and introduced us to the only other guest they had invited, and we ate a very good meal that Wes had prepared himself and desert that Valeria had been nice enough to scoop from ice cream cartons, and the kids were happy in front of the tv watching an animated movie, and all of the grownups sat around the dining room table with tea and coffee, Wes captured the attention of the room with a story of a man from Ladoga that nearly every member of the town knew, Crazy Jeffrey, who was apparently a relative of Wes’s though he wasn’t sure how. This is often the case with relation in Ladoga; a man can be introduced to new relatives everyday and not know exactly the way that relation worked out. Wes explained that Crazy Jeffrey was the son of his father’s youngest aunt, but he admitted, “Some of my cousins say she wasn’t able to have kids so he must have been adopted.” Even if he wasn’t adopted, it wasn’t uncommon in east Ladoga for women unable to have children of their own, to take in children who had been deserted or neglected by their parents. There were always a few perpetual runaways, children who wander around Ladoga like nomads, from group home to foster home to county lock up, no permanent place to lay their heads. This was the case for Crazy Jeffrey until he wandered onto the back porch of Wes’s aunt.
“My aunt’s house is Bottoms adjacent, a couple streets over from the community center. It’s a nice house. One level, but there’s a nice porch in the front and a sizeable yard all the way around. I guess it belongs to my dad and his siblings now, but it’s pretty much abandoned. I went over there a few months ago when I was in Ladoga, just to get a feel of the inside. When I went in, most of the linoleum was peeling up and it was filled with ants, fire ants, like they had tunneled under it so much that all of their trails loosened it. I stood in one place for too long and they started stinging my ankle. I guess I made some noise because I hear, deep inside the house, this male voice, ‘Get outta Ms. Livingston’s house, get out before I kill you.’”
This made one of the dinner guests nervous. “Squatters are crazy people, Wes. I’m glad you didn’t get hurt,” he said with concern. He was a round man with red cheeks, and when I introduced myself earlier that night, he told me that his name was Toby, that he worked with Valeria. He’d relocated for his job because he wanted to work with the telescopes in the forest that his new position offered and he relished the opportunity to flee the lonely desolation of the Nevada desert where he’d spent considerable time watching the stars. He’d left that quiet life for one just as quiet, but with trees and mountains.
“My first thought was get the hell out, but I’m tripping over myself because of the ants on my ankle. Then I see him, Crazy Jeffrey, and I’m not scared anymore, I’m just mad. I asked him what he was doing there. He smelled like piss and armpits and I knew that he was living there. He was scratching himself and I figured that he must be crawling with the ants.”
I’d seen Crazy Jeffrey all around Ladoga, wandering streets, rummaging through dumpsters, holding ‘Cash for Gold’ signs beside the highway, and I always wondered where he went to sleep. I was afraid of him at first; everyone will tell you not to mess with Crazy Jeffrey because of stories that people tell about his erratic behavior. In his youth, they say he never had a home, that he was born from a puddle that always collected in the vacant lot of red dirt beside the liquor store when it rained. And he lived in the gutter when he snuck away from whatever home they managed to put him in. I eventually worked up the nerve to give him change once when I saw him digging through scraps after the vendors at the farmer’s market had packed up and gone. I was talking with a friend who grew and sold collard greens that my grandmother swore by, and when my friend left, I approached Jeffrey, close enough to really see his face for the first time. He wasn’t as ancient as I had figured him to be. He is probably twenty years older than me, and he was so dry that I understood why people told stories about him like he was the oldest man in town. His eyes weren’t sad, but they were distant and unreachable, and even when he thanked me for the change I had given him, he couldn’t really look at me as we stood there. He told me that I looked like someone but the name was so generic that I wondered if he was just making small talk. He told me that if I ever wanted anything for cheap, to see him; if I ever needed something and he had it, it was mine. I didn’t accept the moldy tomatoes he offered me the last time I saw him walking along the street where my parents live, but I was grateful to know a man who is true to his word.
“So I asked him what he was doing there,” Wes continued, “and he tells me that he was waiting for my great aunt to get back.”
This time, Valeria interrupted, “That poor man. He must have really loved your aunt.”
And then Toby again, “I hope you called the police. People like that aren’t getting the help they need and it’s bad for everybody. Who do you think does crazy stuff like shoot up crowds of people?”
“This is America, Toby. That man has probably been arrested a million times already, and for what?” Valeria was passionate but spoke evenly, almost softly.
“And I know Jeffrey,” Wes said, “throwing him in jail won’t get him the help he needs. If it did, he wouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
My girlfriend is very familiar with Crazy Jeffrey and she weighed in. “Wes, I know that house, I used to pass it every day when I walked to school and it used to be really nice. No offense to your family, but it’s a dump now and if Jeffrey was living there, throwing him in jail would have been way better than leaving him there. Those ants over in that area are too much. I know somebody that had to move, didn’t matter what he tried to get rid of ’em. I heard that they called in the city to do something about it.”
“They only agreed to do anything once they started having to deal with them on the West Side,” Wes said. “I understand where you’re coming from, Mary, but I couldn’t just send that man to jail. And I didn’t want to leave him there either, so I knew I had to figure something out. I took him to my grandfather’s house for a shower. My grandfather hates him, apparently he had stolen tools from his shed on more than one occasion and he just didn’t trust Jeffrey. But when my grandfather saw his face, small bumps where the ants had stung him everywhere and down his neck, he let him in. I called the homeless shelter by the train tracks to see if they would even take him, but apparently Jeffrey had gotten into fights before and he wasn’t allowed there anymore. There’s only the one place for homeless people to go in Ladoga and I wondered if I should try to take him to the next town, but that didn’t feel like a solution either, he’d probably just get kicked out of there.”
As much as I appreciated Jeffrey and wanted his life to be better, I would have never allowed him inside of my car. He’s the kind of person that needs so much help, that once you try to really solve his problems you end up stuck with him, slowly helping him find his way back to normal functions like working and paying bills. If you cleaned Jeffery up and gave him a job, a nice place to live, he wouldn’t know what to do with it and he’d eventually just wander away from it all. But apparently Wes was much more optimistic than myself. Or maybe he was tired of watching people ignore Jeffrey.
“I talked my grandfather into setting him up in his backyard. He wanted to tie Jeffrey up like a dog, but we compromised and I ended up buying padlocks for his shed. I can’t blame my grandfather, it’s stupid to think that Jeffrey wouldn’t have tried to steal from him again, but I think that’s the kind of thing that makes someone bitter enough to target you.”
My girlfriend disagreed. “You got a good heart, Wes, but even putting him in the backyard was too much. They said he threw rocks at the row houses, all along M street, busted all their back windows. He didn’t steal anything, but that’s the kind of thing he does and gets away with because he’s crazy. He belongs somewhere locked up.” She despises people like Crazy Jeffrey because she thought that they kept the East Side looking and feeling inferior to the West Side when it didn’t have to. She was born in east Ladoga like I was, but unlike myself, she felt that she had no place there anymore. I will always enjoy Ladoga as my home; it’s not the people that make it home for me, or not just the people, it’s also the house where I grew up and the parks, schools, parking lots, stores, that I occupied while I was there that give me a strong sense of who I was. Mary’s had it rough, though, her family is mostly dead now, except for her younger brother who she thinks is lost to the drug culture that exists there, and her biological father, though he insists that he is not her real father and refuses paternity tests. I can’t help but feel that she is so alienated from life in Ladoga because she never really felt loved and accepted, not until we started loving one another in high school. Her main complaint about the city was the people, not all of them, but the ones who numbered just enough to make her feel unwelcomed or too good to spend too much time there.
“Maybe not a jail,” she continued, “but a home, a psychiatric ward?”
“And who pays for that,” Wes asked. “We do, and the state doesn’t use that money right. I hate to beat an old horse, but Jeffrey has been there many times before and if it worked he wouldn’t have needed my help.”
“So what did you do with him?” Toby asked, eager to hear a solution better than his own, but he seemed sure that there wasn’t one.
“He stayed there, in my grandfather’s backyard. And I started working to fix up my aunt’s house for him. I bug bombed the ants first. Then I cleared out the old stuff, replaced moldy wood. I bought him an air mattress, one of those mini-fridges, filled it up with stuff. Put can goods in the cabinets.”
Everyone looked impressed with Wes. It was a noble thing to do. But it was obvious that Wes wasn’t as impressed as we all were and I asked him,
“So he’s good now? I haven’t seen him around town lately.”
And Wes shook his head ominously. “He wasn’t there two days before he was off somewhere else. I figured he’d come back when he was hungry, I didn’t think he’d walk away from the food. But a week later the ants were back and had found their way inside the fridge; everything inside was full of ’em.”
My girlfriend and Toby suppressed their I told you so’s and Valeria looked like she was on the verge of tears. “You tried,” she said and grabbed Wes’s hand.
I have a lot of respect for Wes. Only a good man would try. But maybe it’s not our place to enact our own ideas for positive change. Maybe our solutions can’t work for people so mired in the present that they can’t see the hand trying its best to help them.
No one saw Crazy Jeffrey again after Wes’s experiment. Some say he went back into his puddle and dried up with it the next day, others think the ants got him and carried off his bones as a trophy. I think Wes looked too closely at him, closer than anyone had in a long time and it made Jeffrey too uncomfortable to realize how far he had fallen, how lost he truly was, and he left Ladoga in search of people who would look right through him.
PRL Serials 