Preston Falls : a novel

  At daybreak he gets up to piss, looks out the kitchen window and sees frost has whitened the grass. Quick, back to bed.

  When he's finally up for real—early afternoon, is it?—he makes coffee and starts in on Pilgrim's Progress, which turns out to be better than he remembers. Sometimes they would chide —Christian's wife and children, this is— and sometimes they would quite neglect him. Wherefore he hegan to retire himself to his chamber, to pray for and pity them, and also to condole his own misery. But when he gets through the Slough of Despond part, which he'd forgotten was so early on, and into the shit with Worldly Wiseman, he starts thinking he should probably break out a guitar and see if he can get his fingers working for tonight..He's still trying to motivate himself when the phone rings.

  Jean.

  "Hey. Hi. Sorry I didn't get back to you," he says. Coffee has kicked in. "Everything okay down there?"

  "As well as can be expected," she says.

  "Oh, listen, I wanted to ask you. How did you make out?"

  "With what?"

  "Talking to Roger. About the kid.'' What is the problem with this woman?

  "I don't know. I guess he's figured out that if you get caught hitting people, you get punished."

  "Hmm," says Willis.

  "The reason I called," she says, "I guess I'm just wondering what your plan is."

  "My plan?"

  "After your leave."

  "I don't know what you mean. After my leave, I guess my leave is over. Why?"

  "Oh God," she says. He hears her let out a big breath. "I just can't believe we've gotten to this place."

  I S 5

  "Are the kids there?" he says. I.e., hearing every word?

  "They're with Carol. She took them in to the Museum of Natural History."

  "So Carol got there?" he says.

  Silence.

  "Well, that's good at least." Silence. "That was nice of Carol." Silence. "I mean, to take them to the museum." Silence. "Listen, tell her I said hello. If that's appropriate." Jesus, he's got ants in here. Look at that scuttling little son of a bitch.

  "You didn't answer my question," she says.

  "Your question."

  "About your plans," she says.

  "I thought I had. Unless you know something I don't know."

  "Meaning what?" she says.

  "Well, Roger—for example—seems to have the idea that we're getting a divorce. Were you aware of that?"

  "Crap," she says. "I am going to kill Melanie."

  "So what exactly was it you said to her?"

  "She asked what was going on, and I tried to answer her as best I could. Since J have no idea what's going on either. I did not tell her we're getting a divorce."

  "Uh-huh. So you said what?"

  "I just more or less told her, yes, this was a difficult time. And I did try to prepare her that this could be one of the possibilities—which it obviously is."

  "Oh, great," he says. "So no wonder they're freaking out. That's practically an announcement."

  "Well, then, I wish you'd been there to set us straight. I'm sure I'm stupid, but I fail to see why mentioning something as a possibility is an announcement. But of course you're the master of words."

  Unbelievable. But he'll ignore the personal shit. "Apparently," he says, "what got communicated was that they better brace themselves. So it might be a good idea to get our stories straight."

  "Our stories?"

  "All I'm saying is, Roger has somehow gotten the idea that this is a certainty. Which it's very far from being. At least in my opinion."

  "So that's our story?" she says. "That nothing's a certainty? I have to tell you, it doesn't exactly fill me with hope. Whatever I would even hope for at this point."

  PRESTON FALLS

  "Meaning what?" he says.

  "Meaning I sometimes think there*s something to be said for not having quite this daily level of unhappiness."

  "That's quite a statement." He sits down on the floor, his back against the wall. This is clearly going to be a long one.

  "J think so," she says. "But I'm also not—I don't know—ready to say that I don't, you know, have any hope." Then she says, "Sorry, I guess that was an outburst. Am I embarrassing myself?"

  He says nothing.

  "Okay," she says. "Look, you want your break, you can have your break. I promise nobody will bother you from here on out. You've conditioned the kids not to expect to hear from you. And I don't want to hear from you. So I guess I'll just see you at the end of October. Maybe we'll end up taking the same train some morning."

  And she hangs up. Dial tone.

  He gets up and slams down the phone. Shit. For this not to fuck up the whole rest of the day is going to take some management. Which doesn't mean you try to push it away, no no-no-no. No, what you do, you bring it briefly up into the light: the way you propose a problem to yourself at bedtime, go to sleep and wake up with the solution, supposedly.

  So he tells himself, experimentally. You used to love this woman.

  Okay, so?

  He turns it around: This woman used to be loved.

  And then he begins to weep: big glottal sobs he knows will turn to retching if he doesn't stop. He has to feel his way to the kitchen table and sit down, hugging his shoulders and rocking, teeth bared and clenched as if he were doing his Louis Armstrong imitation. It doesn't escape him how weird this is: that he could work up a few sobs only by imagining her feeling bereft. If this is narcissism—and what the fuck else could it be?—it's got a kink or two.

  When he's done, he goes into the bathroom, splashes his face with cold water, dries off and checks in the mirror to see how red the whites of his eyes got. Pretty satisfactory. Sons of bitches feel like they're swollen. He takes three Advils to preempt a headache. So what now? Haul out the Unnamable and try to condole his misery?

  No: no heart for it. So back to the couch and Pilgrim's Progress, until he hits the thing with the guy in the iron cage who's hardened his heart and can't repent. He looks out the window. A nice day, looks like. But

  I 5 7

  the trees really are starting to go. Not just a few reds among the green, a whole bunch of fucking reds.

  He puts his boots on and goes into the kitchen. After dumping the dregs of flat seltzer out of a plastic bottle, he pours in milk, then cold coffee, then Kahlua from the bottle Carol sent them as a housewarming gift five years ago. Which he's lately been working on when there's nothing else in the house. He takes the seltzer bottle, the comforter and Sherlock Holmes, and he's out the door.

  He tries to climb the hill slowly, so as not to depress himself with heaving gut and pounding heart. But he still has to stop and take deep breaths. This is absolutely how he's going to die. When he reaches the top, he spreads out the comforter, sits down, flabby legs crossed, and looks across at the other hills. He imagines soaring off above the green and red and yellow treetops and into the everlasting blue. Then he looks down at the house, as you might look down upon your own body at the moment of separation. Down there, under the roof slates, he imagines Doug Willis stretched out on the dog-smelling couch.

  He wakes up on the hilltop, with the sun going down. The fuck time is it? He's got to be at Calvin's when? Shit, probably right now. He works himself free of the comforter, gets to his feet and snatches the son of a bitch off the ground—and of course his book falls out into the wet grass because that's what he fucking deserves.

  Back at the house, he loads the Twin and the Telecaster. Okay, so what else does he need to bring? Jacket in case it gets chilly. It's already chilly. Ten of six: shit. Well, not so bad. Wallet? Keys?

  He comes jouncing into Calvin's dooryard and cuts the engine. There's the truck, still heaped high with firewood. A light's on in the trailer; Willis gets out of his truck, smells woodsmoke and looks up at the ragged space of pink-orange sky hemmed by black trees.

  Calvin opens the door and sticks his head out. Willis can see his bare shoulder. Calvin looks like shit: raccoon eyes,
and he must not have shaved since Willis saw him last. "Yah, okay," he says. "Get a shirt on here be right with you." He shuts the door, and Willis boosts himself up to sit on the fender. He hears a pack of dogs yapping somewhere, off in the direction of Wakefield. The yapping gets louder, now coming out of the sky. Geese going south. He keeps looking up, but the trees block his view, and the yapping gets fainter and fainter, moving away toward Preston Falls. Then Calvin comes out..

  "You hear that string of geese just go over?" Willis says.

  "I can't hear shit no more. Account of the fuckin' chainsaw."

  "Those ear things help any?" Willis cups hands over ears to show he means those things that look like headphones.

  "Nah, bunch of fuckin' OSHA bullshit. Top of that, I got that fuckin' thing where you can't feel nothin' in your hands?" He massages a wrist with thumb and middle finger. "Same fuckin' thing them computer son of a bitches get."

  I 5 9

  "Carpal tunnel," says Willis.

  "Whatever the fuck. Here, let me see this cocksucker." He climbs onto Willis's truck and hunkers down to peer at the amplifier, palms on knees, elbows out. "Yah, okay. Let's take it in where we can see what the fuck we're doin' here."

  "What do you mean?" says Willis.

  "Got to put the shit in this here."

  "You sure? You can see right in the back."

  "Nah, up inside here." Calvin taps the top of the Twin with his index finger.

  "What, you're taking the guts out of it?"

  "Yah, that's the idea." He stands up, lets down the tailgate and lugs the Twin to the edge.

  "But this is what I play through," Willis says.

  "Not tonight I guess you ain't." Calvin jumps down, pulls the amp down off the tailgate and starts for the trailer.

  "Shit, there's got to be some other place you can put it," says Willis, tagging behind.

  "It ain't my idea," says Calvin. "Talk to Reed about it." He opens the door. "You comin' in or stayin' out?"

  It's hot inside the trailer; Willis takes his jacket off and sits down on the car seat. He watches Calvin Hft the Twin onto his workbench and pick up a PhiUips-head screwdriver. "You know how to take these things apart?"

  "Guess I'll figure it out."

  "This is a vintage amplifier," says Willis, hating the tone he's taking. "It's worth money."

  "Yah, couple minutes here be worth a whole lot more, tell you that."

  "You mind if I don't watch?" Ooh, Willis, you bitch.

  "Suit yourself," says Calvin.

  Willis pages through a copy of Car and Driver. They've got a test report on the Mitsubishi Galant, which makes him think of a Renaissance dance. A venereal disease. Courante, galliard, gallantry, glans, gleet. How can this be happening to someone so well read?

  "All right, stay here," Calvin Castleman says. Willis looks up. The operation's over, apparently: on the workbench next to the Twin sits a long aluminum box with tubes sticking up out of it, like a city of the future.

  "You should get a dog," says Willis.

  PRESTON FALLS

  "Why's that?"

  "I don't know." What's he trying to do? Goad Calvin into beating the shit out of him? "Guard your place."

  "Yah, I thought about it," says Calvin, and out he goes.

  Willis listens for a minute, then creeps over to the window, kneels and gently, gently, with his index finger, moves the corner of the curtain aside an inch to peer out. It's like he almost wants to see Calvin's eye right there on the other side of the glass glaring back at him. But Calvin has climbed up onto his truck and he's kneeling among the split chunks of firewood, tossing logs to the side, digging down for something.

  When he comes back in, carrying a black nylon gym bag, Willis is on the seat again, with Car and Driver in his lap.

  Calvin sets the bag on his workbench, unzips it and looks inside. "I hate like hell to see anybody get started on this shit." He zips the bag shut. "Any son of a bitch ever give this shit to my boy, they have to fuckin' deal with me.''

  "You've got a son}'' Willis never suspected Calvin of having had human entanglements.

  Calvin shrugs. "Lives with his mother." He lays the gym bag inside the shell of the Twin, then takes it out again. "Now, how the fuck am I supposed to do this?"

  "How old is he?" Willis says.

  "Be fourteen." Calvin picks up a roll of duct tape and tears off a foot-long piece.

  "My daughter's twelve," says Willis. "So he lives where?" Whieh sounds like he's asking because he dreads the one-in-a-zillion chance.

  "California." Calvin crams the gym bag up inside the Twin and secures it with the piece of tape. "Canoga Park."

  "Long way," says Willis.

  "Yah, about as far away's the bitch could get him," Calvin says. "Okay, that'll work." He tears off another piece of tape.

  "He like it out there?" says Willis.

  Calvin looks down at Willis. "How the fuck do I know?"

  Willis carries the gutted Twin out to the truck and lifts it into the back; it weighs nothing now. "Remember, you want to go careful," Calvin says. "You ain't got to rush. But you don't want to go twenty miles an hour neither. Your headlights both working?"

  "Far as I know," says Willis.

  "Get in turn 'em on." Willis climbs in behind the wheel as Calvin

  walks around to the front of the truck. "That's good. Your brights?" Willis stomps the foot switch. "Yah, okay. Let's see your turn signals." Calvin walks around behind the truck. "Okay, signals again? Yah. Other one? Now tap your brakes." He comes around to the driver's-side door. "Okay. Now, you come back here what time? You don't want to leave early. You want to wait till the place is clearing out, lot of other cars and shit. Two, two-thirty? So I won't look for you till three, maybe. The earliest. Just be sure you come straight here. Before you go home. You don't stop noplace for coffee, nothin'. You got enough gas you don't have to stop?"

  "Three quarters of a tank?" says Willis.

  Calvin nods. "And listen, you count how much he gives you, understand? Don't let him tell you you don't need to. Supposed to be five thousand. He don't let you count it, just leave it lay. Tell him you need to see me. Don't argue with him, nothin'. You just come back here. That way there you ain't in the middle of it. You understand? But hell, that ain't gonna happen, probably."

  "Wait. Come back with the stuff?"

  "No—shit, he ain't going to let you do that.''

  "Well, then what stops him from saying he never got it?" This is suddenly sounding worse and worse.

  "Nah, see, he's got people waitin' on him, I know who the fuck they are. So he can't dick me around."

  "Christ."

  "Quit worrying," says Calvin. "It ain't gonna happen. See, last thing he wants is me to fuckin' show up there. Or him have to come here. Because they're watchin' me and him—he heard this from a guy that's a sheriff. And you're too fuckin' scared to get greedy."

  "Tell me about it," says Willis.

  "Want to do a little before you go?" Calvin says. "Little bit never hurt nobody."

  But he's crashing even before he gets to Brandon: nothing left of his high but baseline irritability. He picks up 7, follows it north toward Middle-bury for a couple of miles, and spots the Log Cabin on the left-hand side: a flat-roofed cinderblock building that might once have been a drive-in restaurant. Carhops and shit. Overhanging roof in front, with iron pipes for pillars, and a portable electric sign out by the road.

  PRESTON FALLS

  lady's get in free tonite! air bag

  He puts his turn signal on, then sees, parked across the road in a dirt turnout, a state police cruiser with his lights off. Not good. What now, boogie on by? Shit. Can't. Begging to be pulled over.

  Willis shifts down and pulls into the cratered parking lot. That clutch is definitely slipping, unless he's letting up funny because he's trying not to let up funny with the cop watching him. He checks his mirror, expecting the cruiser's lights to go on. But no. The lot's already filling up with cars and
pickups; out front, a matched pair of Sportsters—stock except for Fat Bob tanks—lean at the same angle next to a Plymouth Duster with whirlwind emblem, next to a chopper whose long chrome forks gleam from the blue neon outline of the Budweiser dog. Okay, there's Reed's car. And the Econoline, by the side door.

  He parks where the old blacktop ends and new traprock begins, between a Subaru and some big American shitbomb with a peeling vinyl roof and Fifth Avenue in chrome script on its ass end. Chrysler, right? Let's all give a fuck. He cuts his lights, turns the key, and sits there: leave the amp in the back of the truck for now and check out the lay of the land? No, uh-uh. And have some son of a bitch steal it? Just have to bring it in; if you're fucked, you're fucked.

  He carries the Twin and the Tele to the side door, picking his way around potholes, listing to the right as if the amp were still a heavy mother. He glances over (turning his head as little as possible) but the cruiser hasn't moved. He puts down the Twin and tries the doorknob. Locked. Inside, he can hear Little Richard. He raps knuckles on the glass. Raps again, and here comes a fat guy with salt-and-pepper beard, breasts joggling under a black Jack Daniel's t-shirt. Guy opens the door and the music's louder: now Willis can hear that it's fucking Bob Seger.

  "You must be the dude we been waitin' on," says Jack Daniel's. "Need a hand there?"

  "I guess I got it under control," Willis says. "Thanks." Bad cigarette smoke in here. So this character knows? Or is he just a genial asshole?

  "Hey, you made it." It's the little Strat guy.

  "Hey," says Willis.

  "Everything cool?"

  "Mitch, why'n't you go find Reed, tell him his buddy got here?" says

  I 6 3

  Jack Daniel's. As Mitch trots off, he shakes his head. "Christ, just what we need." Guy knows, absolutely.

  Willis sets his stuff down and looks around. Low ceiling of stained, sagging tiles, strings of chili-pepper lights drooping between posts, clusters of locals standing at the bar, sitting at the tables, yakking, smoking, laughing, tipping back brown beer bottles. Heavy-metal longhairs, buzz-cut storm troopers, an older guy with a deep-creased face and an every-hair-in-place duck's ass, a pair of dumpy women in skintight jeans.