Preston Falls : a novel

by Gates, David, 1947-

  "Ah, this shit happens. I just thought it might be easier with us out from underfoot."

  "Well," says Willis, "easier on you, for sure."

  "Doesn't bother me. I think Tina's sort of bummed that you guys— but shit, she's young, you know? Hasn't quite achieved that Zen-like detachment. She likes you."

  "Well, I like her" Willis says. "I think you really scored."

  "Of course I scored. Nurk nurk nurk."

  "You dick. Listen, we'll be okay."

  "Right, I know that," says Champ. "And you know you can call me anytime."

  "Now there's a vote of confidence."

  "So," Champ says. "I guess we better do it."

  Willis puts Rathbone in the house—the boombox is still playing the same diddle diddle, or similar diddle diddle—and he and Jean walk out to the road to watch them off. When the convertible disappears around the corner, Jean says, "I think I'm going to go too."

  "Say again?"

  "If you'd like to have a little time with Mel and Roger," she says, "you could go pick them up while I get their stuff together."

  "What do you mean—you're leaving todays Willis tries to put the right English on this to make it sound like disappointment.

  "I just don't see what's in this for either of us. You might as well have the place to yourself, which is obviously what you want."

  "But this is your time off too."

  "That's right. And I've worked really hard for it, and I really need for it to be restful. Or dare I say fun? If that's even a possibility anymore?"

  "But what about the kids and their weekend?" Willis says. Telling himself Shut up shut up shut up.

  "Oh, well I'm glad you're so concerned^' she says. "I think I'm going to take them camping overnight. To the place we went that time. That you hated. The state park? And I would really appreciate it if you could be too busy to come along."

  "Camping for one day? Haifa day?"

  "That's the time we have."

  "What do you plan to do with them once you get them there?"

  "Swim," she says. "Throw a ball. Cook hot dogs. You know, normal things. I know you have nothing but contempt for all that, so you can do what you want for a change and not be bothered with us. I'm hoping it'll cool me out enough to m^aybe be able to deal with the trip back. And getting them ready for school on Tuesday. And —you know."

  "Sleeping in a fucking tent with two kids is going to cool you out?"

  "Right. But see," she says, "I like being with them."

  While Willis is picking up the kids, Jean searches the bedroom closet for the down-filled sleeping bags Carol gave them when they got married. Now they seem like a bad fairy's wedding curse: May you always sleep apart. The kids' sleeping bags are in Chesterton; she'll let them have these and make do herself with a couple of blankets.

  She stows bags, blankets and three pillows in the back of the Cherokee, then goes into the woodshed for the tent—just in case all the lean-tos are taken—and the cooler, a red-and-white Igloo, which smells like something died. Or so she'd say if she were telling somebody; all it really smells like is a cooler that hasn't been used all summer. She brings it into the kitchen and cleans it out with Pine Sol. She wishes she could stop saying things she doesn't absolutely mean.

  Actually, taking the kids camping is about the last thing she wants to do. But hanging on here—well, it's not that she couldn't do it, because what else is her life about? Yet if only they could have just one moment, one image to take away of summer and family, one smell of campfires and pine trees . . . Pathetic. And her little speech about hot dogs: what was that supposed to do—bring Willis to his knees? Well, they will cook hot dogs—she'll pick up some vegetables to grill for Mel—and there must be a ball someplace that Rathbone hasn't ruined.

  So stupid. She should have seen all this coming. Like his Prince Hamlet period when she was pregnant with Mel—no, even before that. Right from the first. But: towels. She has to remember towels. And something to sit on at the beach—another blanket? And her bathing suit, which is where? {Their suits they took with them to the Bjorks'.) Flashlight. Bug stuff. Sunscreen. She could kill him for making her do this. Except it's her idea. Camera: to carry out the pretense that this will be something they'll want to look back on. Still, it should be fine, right?

  Cook hot dogs and go swimming? They'd probably think it was weird if their father was there.

  Willis finds everybody down at the pond. The Bjork kids—Nelson, Frida and little Amina, the adopted one—are out in the inflatable boat, yelling. Mel's sunning on the dock, bikini top unfastened. Roger's at the far side of the pond, stalking frogs on the bank the Bjorks left muddy on the advice of a pond consultant. It's that summer's-over-but-we're-pretending-it's-not vibe. He calls out a hearty good morning to whom it may concern. The Bjork kids stare, then go back to yelling; Mel lifts and lowers a limp hand, a gesture he's supposed to take for a wave; Roger doesn't even look up. Willis guesses from the look of things that his kids have outstayed what welcome there was.

  Arthur and Katherine Bjork are sitting at the edge of their trucked-in sand in honest-to-God wooden Adirondack chairs, each with a piece of the Sunday Times; the sections they're not reading are weighted down by an antique brick with an embossed star. On the broad, flat arm of Arthur's chair, a cloth napkin and both halves of a plump bagel mounded high with scallion cream cheese. Arthur Bjork is one of those fat, red-faced walrus-men, with blond hair and gold-rimmed glasses; scrawny, overtanned Katherine must have to get on top if they bother anymore, though Willis is a great one to talk.

  "So how has it been?" he says.

  "Oh, fine." Katherine Bjork always sounds borderline exasperated, with good reason for all Willis knows. Or fucking cares.

  "No problems?"

  "Well, none to speak of," says Arthur. Poor son of a bitch looks like he's hanging on by his fingernails until he can get back to the office Tuesday morning.

  "Good, good," says Willis. Hear no evil. "Yo, Melanie and Rogerl" he calls. "Time to hit it, guys."

  "Darn," says Mel. Roger just goes on doing what he's doing.

  "Your mother has a surprise for you," says Willis.

  "What kind of surprise?" says Mel.

  "Hold still, you cocksucker!" Roger yells.

  "Roger! Get the hell over here!" Willis shouts. "I apologize for my son," he says to the space between the Bjorks.

  PRESTON FALLS

  Roger comes trudging over. "I wasn't gonna hurt him," he says.

  "You don't use language like that," says Willis, fixing him with a pointed finger. "Go get in the truck. Now.''

  "I have to get my stuff."

  "I said: in the truck, mister." Ooh, the heavy father. Mister, yet. Roger, head down, starts making his way toward the driveway. "Melanie," Willis says. She's guiltily hooking the top of her suit behind her back, skinny elbows out like chicken wings. "Get your clothes on, collect your brother's gear, and get in the truck."

  "Can't I just put a shirt over my suit?" she says.

  "I don't care what you wear. I want you in that truck in two minutes."

  Since the Bjorks are right there, she risks an eye roll as she turns and heads for the house.

  "Rog-^r?" Willis calls. Roger's not exactly hauling ass, and stops dead when he hears his name. ''Move it." He resumes ambling up the path.

  "We seem to be having one of those days," Willis says to the Bjorks.

  "Well, I guess we all have them." Arthur doesn't even deign to put down the Travel section.

  "Except you, right?" says Willis. "You fat fuck."

  That gets the son of a bitch focused: down goes the paper, covering his sausage thighs like a skirt, as Katherine's mouth opens to an O. (Billie Burke couldn't have done it better.) Mel stops but doesn't turn around.

  "I think you'd better go," Arthur says, though he doesn't stand up.

  "Hey, don't worry about it." Crazy motherfucker named Willis. The Bjorks just look at each other. Willis can imagine: Arthur's thinking h
is wife expects him to deck this guy, and she's thinking if her old man gets in a fistfight he'll finally have that heart attack. Out on the pond, the Bjork kids have the rubber boat spinning as if in a whirlpool, slashing away with the paddles, whooping and shrieking. Willis turns to follow his children up the path, and only now does his chest start pounding. Christ, he's the one who's going to have the fucking heart attack. He hauls off and kicks over the milk can the Bjorks have put at the head of the path to amp up the country charm, then looks back toward the pond. Resolutely, the Bjorks face the water.

  As the truck goes rumbling and crunching down the white-graveled drive, Mel stares at her feet. "Daddy, I can't believe you said that to him."

  S I

  "What'd he say?" says Roger.

  "Nothing, Roger," says Mel.

  "You can tell him," Willis says. "Long as it's a direct quote, you're off the hook."

  Mel, still looking at her feet, turns red.

  "What?" yeUs Roger.

  "Well, for reasons I don't fully understand myself," Willis says, "I called Mr. Bjork a fat pig."

  "That's not exactly what you said, Daddy," Mel says.

  "What did he say?'' says Roger.

  Mel takes a breath and looks out the window. "He called Mr. Bjork afat f-u-c-k."

  "All right" says Willis. "Melanie has spelled/«c^ for us. We've all heard the word, yes?"

  Mel and Roger say nothing. He grinds gears as he shifts down to make the turn onto County Road 39; can't decide if the clutch is really going or if he's babying it and not pushing the pedal down far enough because he thinks the clutch is going.

  "So," he says. "Isn't anybody curious about this surprise?"

  ''What surprise?" says Roger.

  "Should I just tell you?" Willis says.

  "Yes," says Roger.

  Mel says nothing.

  "Okay, what it is, you guys are going camping with your mom this afternoon."

  "Do we have to?" says Roger.

  "I knew you'd be thrilled to the—"

  "Daddy, watch where you're going" says Mel. Willis swerves back over to his side to miss a tractor, cutter bar down, mowing brush on the other side of the road. "Are you coming too?" she says.

  "No. I'm going to stay and see if I can't get some work done. Rathbone'U keep me company "

  "I don't want to," says Roger.

  "You," says Willis. "We haven't gotten around to you yet, mister. What's gotten into you, using that kind of language around people?"

  "So? Look what you said."

  "True," says Willis. "But the difference is—" Right. What is the difference? "Look. This is the kind of thing where, you know, fairly or uniairly, if you're a kid, it sounds worse to people than it does if you're

  PRESTON FALLS

  a grownup," Great: he's just told Roger how he can get a rise out of people. "When they hear you using bad language, they're going to think, Well, that's a bad person, and I don't want to be that person's friend."

  "So? If they don't want to be my friend they don't have to be."

  "What?" Willis has blanked out for a second. What the fuck are they talking about?

  "I don't care if they don't want to be my friend," Roger says. "They're probably a feeb like her that has to spell everything."

  "Watch out, Roger," says Mel.

  "Watch out, Roger," says Roger.

  "I'm not kidding," says Mel.

  "Vm not kidding," says Roger.

  "Enough," Willis says.

  "Yeah, well, she started it."

  "I did not.''

  "God help you both," Willis says.

  He shifts down again, double-clutching but still grinding gears, and turns onto Goodwin Hill Road. Setting one more piss-poor example by cruising through the stop sign.

  "So," he says. He keeps the truck in second to get up this first steep stretch; it feels as if he's fucking up the engine by revving it to a roar while the thing's just crawling, but in third it'll clunk and lurch. "I imagine your mother's just about packed."

  Not a word from either of them. But what are they supposed to say? There's truly something wrong with him; you don't act this way with your children. The thing to do is to pull over, fall on them with slobbery kisses, clutch at their bare knees, bathe their bare feet with your tears and dry them with your hair. At least he's sane enough just to keep driving.

  Willis stands in the middle of the road, holding Rathbone by the collar with one hand and waving the Cherokee out of sight with the other. As they turn the corner, Jean's arm comes out the window: the hand flutters and they're gone. Willis lets go of Rathbone, who looks down the road, then up at him. Summer's over. It's one o'clock in the afternoon.

  Okay. To work, to work.

  Okay, first thing he's going to do, he's going to tear out the living room ceiling, where some asshole smeared joint compound over the sheetrock in modernistic swirls. Probably the same asshole who nailed particleboard over the foot-wide floorboards upstairs, for carpeting he never put down. Asshole, though: that's a little harsh. Really just somebody doing his best to make an old house less depressing by his lights. So Willis is going to expose the beams, which he hopes are hand-hewn, then frame around them with two-by-fours and cut sheetrock to fit in between. True, this chichi severity is basically bullshit. But if not that, then what? He's asked Jean, who went to fucking Pratt, for Christ's sake, and now spends her days advising those sharks she works for on exactly this kind of shit. What color to paint the walls in the fucking shark tank. She told him, "Do what you want."

  He brings the stepladder and his toolbelt in from the woodshed, then starts moving shit out of the living room. He carries the armchair into the dining room, along with the oak end table he doesn't like but belonged to Grandma Willis, and the lamp that goes on it. The books, Jesus. He ends up just putting them out in the hall, in tall, tottering Dr. Seuss pfles, and stacks the bricks and boards out there too. The boards he'U recycle when he gets around to doing built-in bookcases. And the blanket chest they use as a coffee table? Well, how about up in the bedroom, at the foot of the bed. Like the fucking blanket chest it is.

  Which leaves the sofa. Maybe just throw some plastic over it and

  PRESTON FALLS

  work around the fucker. But when you get a room this close to empty you want it fucking empty, so he decides to wrestle the cocksucker out into the hall. It's so wide he has to slip the pins and take off the door between the hall and the living room, and as it is the son of a bitch makes it with about that much to spare. He wedges it catty-corner, which blocks the front door, but at least you can squeeze past to get upstairs. Good. He brings the floor lamp in and lifts it over into the triangular space behind the sofa. Makes a cozy little nook.

  "So what do you think, bro?" he says to Rathbone. "C'mere." Rathbone pads over, toenails clicking on the bare floorboards. "Our new headquarters—okay, bud?" He pats a sofa cushion; Rathbone climbs up, settles and sighs, chin on the cushion but eyes open. Willis goes back into the living room: dead empty. Okay. Ready to rock and roll.

  He buckles on his toolbelt, picks up the decking hammer and, standing in the middle of the empty room, takes a two-handed swing at the ceiling like fucking Thor, the heavy head plowing claws-first into sheetrock.

  Except it doesn't feel satisfying. And there's just a pissy little foot-long gash the width of the hammerhead.

  He pokes the claws into the gash and rips, which is supposed to make a heroic expanse of ceiling buckle and come thundering down; it only busts out a little piece the size of a saucer. This is not fucking working. He grabs the stepladder and climbs up to tear at the gash with his hands: just a few more dipshit pieces. He gets down off the stepladder and tries the hammer again. Maybe if he can smash across in a straight line, perforate the son of a bitch, he can pull down a huge fucking section. What it is, he really doesn't know how to do this. And meanwhile all the dirt and mouseshit from up under the ceiling is falling into his face and he's coughing like a fucking miner—and can't you di
e of some virus that's carried in dried mouseshit?

  So he goes looking for the fucking dust masks he bought last year and used one of and put the rest someplace, but he can't find the cock-suckers. He thrusts the hammer back into the loop of his toolbelt, stomps upstairs, paws through the laundry bag to find a dirty t-shirt, and brings it back down to the living room. He drapes it over his nose and mouth so he looks like a fucking harem girl, ties the son of a bitch around back of his neck by the fucking sleeves—which of course fogs his fucking glasses because he's sweating like a pig because he's fucking out of shape.

  s s

  He rips the t-shirt off his face, yanks the hammer out of his toolbelt, and throws it overhand at the window, which knocks the window screen out onto the grass which brings the sash crashing down.

  Then he picks up the stepladder and heaves that at the fucking window: top end first, shattering glass, splintering sash. It smashes through in slow detail, like a Japanese wave.

  The noise brings Rathbone into the living room, wagging his tail to placate Willis, who races into the kitchen and out the screen door, afraid that next he'll damage his dog. He throws himself down and starts tearing up grass and earth with his fists—hoping to God Rathbone won't jump through the smashed window thinking it's a game—jamming his face into the ground, biting at grass and earth. The feel of grainy dirt in his mouth makes him stop, finally; either that or something has simply run its course. He lies there on his stomach, spent, panting, his heart feeling like something in there's hitting him.

  When he gets to his feet again, his lower lip is smarting and he's got a headache above his right eye, drilling into a single spot the size of a .22 hole—the classic warning sign of a stroke, isn't it? This could be the ballgame right here. He stumbles back inside, kneels on the kitchen floor and calls Rathbone, who cowers away, though still wagging his tail. This starts Willis weeping, and he lets himself collapse onto his side. Which seems to reassure Rathbone, who comes clicking over, sniffs, and lets Willis reach up and pat his head. Willis tries to get him in a bear hug, but the dog struggles and slithers away, and Willis starts blubbering all this shit, how sorry he is, how he'd never hurt him, so forth and so on. Thinking Hey, this time you really have fucking snapped. Congratulations.