by David Gates
“I’m 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.
8
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 piles, and stacks the bricks and boards out there too. The boards he’ll 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 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 die 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.
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.
He gets up and goes to look in the bathroom mirror. Yeah, nice job. Scraped the shit out of his chin and lower lip, dirt in between his teeth. Lucky he didn’t break a fucking tooth. He washes his face gingerly and presses a towel on to dry it. Brushes his teeth and goes back into the living room. Nice, really nice. What’s truly sickening, that was the original sash, nine-over-six, old glass with flaws that looked like floaters in your eyes. Absolutely smashed to shit. He thinks back to the moment he did this, and wonders if, contrary to the usual rule, there isn’t a way you could go back and change it. This isn’t one of those events in time where endless chains of other shit depend on it; it was just minutes ago, and nobody even saw it happen. Truly there’s no reason this couldn’t be wound back and then allowed to go forward again.
Outside, he finds the hammer in the grass, sticks it back in his toolbelt, and carries the stepladder (undamaged) back to the woodshed. The hammer he’s going to need. Out by the barn he’s got a pile of scrap lumber he tore out of the house; one of those old pieces of particleboard should do the trick. Except just now he doesn’t trus
t himself with the circular saw. So what the fuck: why not just put plastic? The true North Country look. He lays out two black garbage bags, joins them with duct tape, gets his staple gun—one thing, he’s fucking equipped—and staples the plastic to the outside of the window frame. Then he nails scrap one-by-twos over where he’s stapled so the shit won’t rip away in the first stiff wind. He steps back: pretty decent-looking job.
He wrenches apart the pieces of wrecked window sash and busts them up for kindling. He puts what broken glass he can find inside folded newspaper inside more folded newspaper and dumps it in the garbage, along with the few fragments of sheetrock he clawed down; then he sweeps up the dirt and mouseshit. Rathbone’s lying on the kitchen floor watching him. He must like that cool linoleum on his belly. Willis whistles, and he raises his head.
“C’mon, Big. Go for a walk?”
They take the path that leads down into the woods. A road to the lower pastures when this used to be a farm. Rathbone finds a stick, head-fakes Willis with it, jumps back. Willis lunges a couple of times. If his heart’s not even in this, what’s he doing with a family? Rathbone fakes with his stick again. “Sorry, Big,” Willis says. “I just feel so shitty.”
In addition to whatever else, he’s starting to worry about what could happen at that campground. First he can’t wait to get rid of them, now he’s imagining serial killers and buggering, throat-slitting prison escapees. (Yes yes yes, he knows fears are secret wishes. What doesn’t he fucking know.) And he let them go—no, he didn’t let them go, he fucking drove them out. Well, not exactly. But. What he’d better do, he’d better put Rathbone in the truck and get the hell down there before dark. Which is insane. But what if you ignored this premonition and something happened to them? Oh, so now he’s elevated this bullshit to a premonition.
Back at the house, he hides his guitars: the Rick and the Tele behind shit in the woodshed, the J-200 under the bed, the D-18 in the cellar. CDs into drawers, boombox back behind the canning jars. Rathbone, thinking they’re going back to Chesterton, where he gets cooped up all day, cringes away when Willis comes for him.
He’s pouring some Eukanuba into a plastic shopping bag when it hits him that maybe he should bring the .22 just in case. That shit about serial killers is a little over-the-top, but don’t campgrounds breed raccoons? He goes upstairs, gets down on his back and springs the bicycle lock that holds the rifle up under the bed. From the sock drawer, he takes the rolled pair of socks with the clip inside.
The gun just fits into the long duffel bag, which is excellent because he can sleep with it right by his side and Jean and the kids won’t know shit; he sticks it behind the seat of the truck. So. All squared away. But wouldn’t you know: just as he’s pulling out of the driveway, some asshole cruises by and gives the swivel-head stare. Might as well have a fucking loudspeaker announcing that Willis of Westchester and his faithful watchdog are now vacating their weekend home and that every teenage doper in the county is now invited to come on in and rip off all his expensive shit. Though he’s probably overreacting. It’s a Lumina van, which always makes Willis think of Sendero Luminoso, but which is in fact a car for decent people.
9
By the time they get to Lake Edwards, Jean actually wishes the trip could have taken longer. It felt so good getting farther and farther from Preston Falls; couldn’t they just go and go, the three of them, forever? The kids were a joy. They stopped at Grand Union for picnic stuff and Roger didn’t whine when she told him he couldn’t have some Schwarzenegger video he picked up and brought to the cart. (She did let him get a bottle of Sportif; the caffeine wouldn’t kill him this once.) They stopped at a Stewart’s for ice cream, and Mel took Jean’s word for it that Stewart’s stuff didn’t have bovine growth hormone (in fact Jean has no idea) and ate a small dish of peach frozen yogurt.
And her luck’s holding: they score the last available lean-to. The ranger points out the location on the big map and gives her a small map, on which he traces the route in yellow highlight pen, marking their lean-to, Aspen, with a star. The afternoon has stayed hot and the kids are eager to get in the water, so they’ll probably eat well, then sleep well. And it’s supposed to stay sunny, so they can hang here till late tomorrow afternoon and get their fill of swimming; she’ll worry about fighting the holiday traffic when it’s time to worry about it. (The Tappan Zee will be a nightmare.) Maybe she can even get them to go on a hike. And if she can keep them from napping on the drive home—car games? loud rock and roll?—they’ll be ready to pop into bed right after supper and be well rested for the first day of school. Which she truly can’t believe Willis wouldn’t want to be home for. But let’s not get into that.
She parks in the space by their lean-to and just leaves all their things locked in the Cherokee; great as it would be to come back and have their camp all set up, stuff gets stolen even in places like this. She hands Roger the map and has him find the path to the lake; really, it takes so little to make him feel proud. As he leads them down sandy switchbacks through the pine trees, she considers telling him he’s the man of the family today, but that’s laying it on too thick. Just let him feel good about himself, without getting him thinking about why he’s feeling what he’s feeling and so on and so on—what Willis used to call Willis’s Disease. And maybe still does, to somebody.
Roger spreads their blanket on the hot white sand, and Jean waits until his back is turned to smooth out the folds and creases. Mel says she’s going to go change: the first word out of her, now that Jean thinks of it, since they were at Stewart’s. So something’s up with her. It’s all fine and good to tell yourself they’re hardened to their father not being around, but the fact is.
“How come you have to go change?” Roger pulls at the neck of Mel’s t-shirt; she yanks his hand off and twists away. “You have it on under there, stupid,” he says. “Why don’t you just take your pants off? That is so stupid.”
“Roger,” says Jean.
“It’s not any of your business, Roger,” says Mel, turning red.
“It’s not any of your—”
“Stop,” Jean says. “Your sister’s entitled to change where she wants to change, with no input from—”
“But she’s not changing,” says Roger. “She’s just—”
“One more word,” says Jean. “Got it? Let’s please not have anything ruin this beautiful day, all right? All we have is today and tomorrow, and that’s it for the summer. You guys are back in school, I’m back at work….” Admitting, in effect, that despite all the propaganda she feeds them, school and work are a drag and a burden.
“But Mom?” Roger says. “Isn’t it summer until September twenty-second?” Borderline backtalk, which he thinks he’s craftily disguised as a point of information.
“So they say. See how you feel about it Tuesday morning.”
Jean watches Mel walk toward the bathhouse; she’s gotten so lanky you can see space between the thighs of even those loose cotton pants. Mel’s being silly, but Jean goes through the same thing: once you’re on the beach in a bathing suit you’re on the beach in a bathing suit, but taking down your pants in public to reveal the bathing suit feels immodest. Well, better to have Mel be this way than the other. Roger, meanwhile, has pulled off his t-shirt and is working on his shoes and socks.
“You know, I forgot to ask,” she says. “What was it like staying at the Bjorks’?” With Roger you have to make questions open-ended; if she asks Did you have a good time? he’ll just say yes.
“Okay,” he says.
God give her patience. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know. Watched this video Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
“Oh really?” Hmm. Well, probably not so bad. From what she can remember. Some little girl in Roger’s class had a slumber party where they watched The Silence of the Lambs; even in Chesterton this was considered a bit much. “And how was that?”
Roger shrugs. “It was okay. It had Nazis.”
“That’s righ
t, I forgot that part,” she says. “They were after the Ark too, weren’t they?” Nazis: just lovely. “I mostly remember the snakes,” she says. “And the big rock. You know, that’s chasing them?”
“Can I go in now?”
“Sure,” she says. “Just don’t get wet.”
“Ma-om.” He sounds genuinely irritated, and she guesses she can’t blame him.
He walks to where the sand is hard at the water’s edge, then gets down and starts doing push-ups; a woman next to him, holding her little daughter’s hand, stares and steps back. Aha. Jean thought his arms and shoulders were getting big; how long has this been going on? He probably started at day camp, maybe something he picked up from the older boys. This must be his way of announcing it to her. So should she mention it or not? He gets up, wipes his palms on his swimming trunks and strides into the water.
Really, he’s such a little striven It’s just that he’s wound so terribly tight. Which is right at the top of the list of things she can never forgive Willis for. Once, when Roger was six, his friend Adam came over for a play date and she and Willis took them to Waldbaum’s to pick out stuff for lunch. When they got to the chips-and-soda aisle, Roger went running to the bottles of Sportif, yelling “My dad makes this!” And Willis said, “I don’t make it. I work for the company that makes it. As I’ve told you several times.” You could see Roger just shrivel; little Adam (a cool customer) looked up at Willis as if he were some strange specimen of something. When the boys moved on, Jean said, “You’re the one who’s being a child.” And Willis said, “Fine. In that case you can be the grownup.” He took out his car keys and dangled them at her until she felt she had to stick out her hand. Then he walked all the way to the station, took a train into the city, spent the afternoon in his office—he said—and didn’t call until about seven o’clock: he was shocked at himself, he must be more stressed out than he realized, would she forgive him. And she did. At the time.