Preston Falls

by David Gates

  She waits until Mel gets back to watch Roger, then goes in to change into her suit. Not exactly your luxo bathhouse. But places like this are part of what a child’s summer ought to be: cement floor, gray-painted wood benches, cubicles with canvas curtains down to knee level. And even that smell, of other people’s excrement. She’s glad to be able to give them this at least. Though God knows if it leaves them with anything, really. Like no kid ever got into drugs after smelling pine trees and human shit in the summertime. She finds a vacant cubicle, draws the curtain (which leaves an inch at each side) and gets out of her clothes. Her poor legs are so white. And that line down the inside of her thigh where the seam of her jeans presses in: that’s attractive. And of course she’s forgotten to shave up top, and she hates those little curls peeking out. Oh well. Actually, this is not the world’s absolute worst body. For someone who’s forty and has had two kids? Except she might as well weigh three hundred pounds. In fact that might make things better: maybe Willis would think it was camp to make love to her.

  The sun sparkling off the water hurts her eyes when she comes back outside. Where’s Roger? Okay: Mel’s out there with him, knee-deep; they’re splashing each other as if the thing about Mel’s bathing suit had never happened. Carol would say there was something healing about water; Jean guesses they’re playing together because they don’t know any other kids here.

  Should she go in? The sun’s getting low, and that blue, glinting water looks so cold. But Mel and Roger seem to be having a ball, and she did go through the whole thing of getting her suit on. And who knows what the weather will be tomorrow, really. She takes her clothes over to the blanket, makes sure the car keys are safe in the pocket of her jeans and that the jeans are covering up the camera. Then she walks across the hot sand to the water’s edge; a cool breeze comes in off the lake and she hugs herself. Hmm, let’s think about this a second. It’s so typical of her: imagining she’s deciding something that she’s already decided.

  Willis pulls into the entrance with “Fuck tha Police” blasting; not until he sees the booth up ahead does it hit him that this isn’t quite the Lake Edwards vibe. Yet to turn it off would be craven. He edges way over to the right, then cuts the wheel hard left to pull a U-ey. Poor old truck has trouble making even this wide a turn, and the passenger-side wheels crunch gravel on the other shoulder. He gets back on the state highway and goes another mile before “Fuck tha Police” is over and he can eject Straight Outta Compton and stick in Back to the Barrooms; he pulls over to the side, waits for traffic to get past, then makes another U-turn and heads back for the park. But then it strikes him that while either Merle Haggard or a pickup truck might be plausible, both are too much. So he pulls over yet again, takes out Merle and sticks in Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes, although isn’t George Jones even more of a cliché? All this bullshit so that whoever’s at the booth won’t think he’s what he fucking is. And now watch: it’ll end up being the one black park ranger in all of Vermont.

  At the booth—hey, it is an old white guy—he lets ’em have maybe three seconds of George, then turns the music down and leans out his window. “Hi, how you doin’? My wife and kids should’ve got here, I don’t know, like an hour ago? Came in a Jeep Cherokee?”

  The ranger looks up at him. He’s a fat old geezer with hair coming out of his ears. “You know how many cars come through here today?” Then he looks at Rathbone.

  “Don’t people have to register when they come here to camp?” says Willis.

  “Oh, so they come to camp,” the ranger says. “You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Name would be Willis.” Guy wants to be a prick? Fine.

  “You better pull it over there.” The ranger points, then goes into his hut. Booth. Whatever. Being told you better this or that isn’t Willis’s favorite thing, but he parks over on the grass, rolls his window two-thirds of the way up so Rathbone can’t jump out and walks back to the booth. On the far side of the parking lot he sees blue water through the pine trees; a motorcycle-looking guy in a sleeveless denim jacket is lugging a cooler on the path to the beach.

  “They’re in Aspen,” the ranger says. Willis thinks for half a second that this is some bizarro put-down, something to the effect that people from Westchester should be off skiing with Jack Nicholson. “That’s this lean-to right here.” The ranger’s pointing to a plexiglassed map on the side of the booth. “You go up that road. All the way up the top of the hill. And you stay to your left where it forks.”

  “Aspen,” says Willis.

  “They go Aspen Birch Cherry Dogwood,” says the ranger. “Now, your dog there stays in the campground. You come down to the lake, you leave your dog, you understand?”

  “What’s your problem?” says Willis.

  “Say what?” The ranger puts a hand to his ear.

  “I said what’s the problem,” Willis says. Pissed at himself for backing down even that much.

  “I don’t have a problem, mister. Unless you give me one.”

  “Fine,” says Willis. “So what do I owe you?”

  “Your wife paid,” says the ranger. Little note of contempt here for a man who would allow his wife to pay? Never mind the fact that his wife got here an hour ago and therefore had to pay. “I’m charging you the day rate for your second vehicle there,” says the ranger. “Be three dollars.”

  Willis gets three limp singles from his wallet and holds them out just far enough so the fat son of a bitch has to reach for them. Willis flatters himself that he’s done it so subtly the poor stupid bastard doesn’t even understand why he’s now angrier than ever. This is about class, really: Willis of Westchester gets to loll, while this sad old fuck has to spend the last glorious weekend of summer in a hot uniform. But hey, who is Willis to fly in the face of Providence?

  The ranger produces a card with a hole in the top the size of a quarter and a mingy little white plastic bag with a stylized green pine tree. By this time, four cars are lined up at the booth, engines running.

  “You hang this on your rearview mirror.” He hands Willis the card. “This here is for your garbage.” The bag. “Anything you carry into the park, you carry it out again, you understand? You’re not out of the campsite by eleven a.m., you pay another day irregardless.”

  “Noted.” Willis snottily enunciates the t and the d. Irregardless: love it.

  “You’re to drive directly to the campsite.”

  One of the lined-up cars honks.

  The ranger looks over his shoulder and gives them what he must imagine is a Clint Eastwood stony stare—poor bastard has a stomach on him that comes out to here—and while his head’s turned, Willis flips him the bird, pumping once, twice, three times.

  “Are we finished, then?” Willis says.

  The ranger turns the stare on him. “Don’t forget it, your dog stays in camp at all times.”

  “Yeah, I think we’ve covered that,” says Willis. But the ranger’s already motioning to the first car in line.

  The campground is half a mile up a winding blacktop road; Willis spots the Cherokee parked by the last lean-to, which looks just like all the others, Birch and Cherry and Dogwood and whatever the fuck E would be. Eucalyptus? Depressing beyond belief: plywood walls painted forest green because this is a fucking forest, that whole trip. The lean-tos are strung along this ridge above the lake. You’d have a better view looking off if they’d thin out some of these pine trees or whatever they technically are—F must be Fir—but God forbid. He pulls in beside the Cherokee; Rathbone’s already dancing back and forth on the seat. “Who’s here, boy? Go get ’em.” By loosing Rathbone first he’s preparing them for who’s bringing up the rear. Rathbone! What the—and then it dawns on them. And the little faces light up.

  He opens the door and Rathbone scrambles over his legs and begins madly sniffing the ground. “Where’s your friends?” says Willis, getting out of the truck. “Go get your friends.” The lean-to is empty except for a Sportif bottle the ecopolice must have missed. Weird to
see that logo. Okay, so what must’ve happened, they must’ve walked down to the lake and left their shit locked in the car. About the millionth reason not to go camping: having to worry all the time about your shit getting ripped off. As he’s sure he’ll find occasion to point out, since he doesn’t seem able to keep his fucking mouth shut.

  “Bone-face,” says Willis. “Which way did they go?” Rathbone wags his tail harder, “Lassie! Go find Timmy!” Ridiculing his dog for being a dog.

  Between Aspen and Beech, a rocky, dusty path leads steeply down. Canny woodsman that he is, Willis reasons that if you keep going downhill you’ll eventually hit the lake, and after a couple of switchbacks he spots blue water below, sparkling through the trees. And then he remembers: no dogs. Shit. He stops, whistles again, turns around and starts back up the path. Rathbone looks at him and cocks his head. “Yeah?” says Willis. “Well, fuck you too.” Then he says, “Sorry, buddy. C’m’ere.” He squats, and Rathbone approaches; Willis roughs up his ears with both hands and rubs his chin across the top of the dog’s head. As they near the lean-to again, Rathbone in his whatever-is-is-right mode, capering and sniffing among the pine needles, it occurs to Willis that E must be Elm. Not fucking Eucalyptus. This is why all the George Jones tapes in the world just aren’t going to do it.

  So he’s got a problem. He can either (a) sit here with his thumb up his ass and wait God knows how long for them to come back; or (b) walk down to the beach and leave Rathbone tied up here, where he’ll bark and yap and yowl the whole time and probably get them kicked out of this shithole. So he’ll have to put Rathbone in the fucking truck, drive back down to the parking lot by the beach, leave the dog in the truck while he tries to find Jean, then beat it back up here before anybody can bust his chops.

  He gets Rathbone’s leash back on him with a low-down trick—offers a stick, then grabs his collar—drags him into the truck and sets off down the road the way he came. When he gets in sight of the booth again, he peels off into the parking lot and takes a space as close to the beach as he can find. He rolls the windows up, leaving the usual gap, and says, “Stay. I’ll be right back, okay?” Rathbone yips and whines as Willis walks away.

  Before he reaches the head of the path he hears someone yelling “Hey, you!” Which he ignores because it can’t be happening. “You! Hey! You get back over here!”

  Now what the fuck? Willis turns and glares. Sure enough, it’s that same asshole ranger, bearing down on him in this fucked-up gimpy gait that’s partly a jog-trot and partly a stride, belly swaying from side to side. Willis waits for him to get closer—not deigning to raise his voice—so he can say Are you talking to me? Not De Niro style; more your frightfully-sorry-old-man-but-do-we-know-one-another tone. Except isn’t that going to sound rehearsed, given that the son of a bitch is yelling right at him?

  “You were told not to bring that dog to the lake area!” The ranger’s sweating and panting. A mouth-breather, literally.

  “The dog,” says Willis, “is in the truck. The dog,” he says, “cannot get out of the truck.”

  “Now, what did I say? I said you were to proceed with your dog to the campsite. Isn’t that what I told you? You read that sign there?” The ranger jabs a finger at a NO PETS sign by the head of the path. This character must have been in the military. Fucking Korean War.

  “Yes, I can read, thank you. I am now going down to the beach,” he says, “to let my family know that I am here. I will be back. Good? Good.” He turns and starts along the path.

  “You get back here, mister. You hear me talking to you?”

  Willis stops, turns again and stares at this cartoon man with vast sweat stains darkening the underarms of his uniform. Some flunky who takes tickets. Is Willis not a patron, whose three-dollar admission pays this fellow’s salary? And is not the spirit of the NO PETS rule—i.e., that grass and sand not be shat upon—being complied with? And in fact, since the dog is in the truck, is not the fucking letter of the NO PETS rule being complied with?

  “You know what?” says Willis. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, okay?”

  “You’re out of here, my friend.” The ranger’s face has gone aneurysm red. “You’re to leave the park immediately. And you don’t come back, you understand? You don’t leave the park immediately, I call the sheriff’s deputy and he’ll see to it you leave. You think I’m foolin’ now?”

  “Yeah, why don’t you call him, man? I’d like to see you fucking explain to a fucking deputy sheriff why it is I can’t keep a fucking dog in a fucking truck while I walk a hundred fucking yards to the fucking beach.”

  “You got it, mister,” says the ranger. “I’m done foolin’ with you. You’ll move when he says to. He don’t fool around.” And the son of a bitch starts gimping back to his booth. Willis turns and starts along the white-graveled path, bordered by these stupid foot-high logs painted a redundant brown. Hopes the son of a bitch does call a cop: somebody needs to set this motherfucker straight.

  He passes grills and picnic tables, fat laughing fathers in baseball caps and dumpy teenage girls groping empty air for badly thrown Frisbees. A spastic in a motorized wheelchair, putting Willis to shame. Smells of woodsmoke, pine trees, hot dogs roasting. A radio somewhere (which shouldn’t be allowed) playing “Jimmy Mack” by Martha and the Vandellas. A “mack,” we now know, is a pimp. In the maple trees, more hints of cautionary red. Bathers crowding the sand: a scrawny old bozo with a white goatee, a teenage thug with shaved head and iridescent sunglasses, a mom with a wide ass and oatmeal thighs holding her little girl by the hand—and there’s Jean, her back to him, toweling herself off, wet hair hanging. She’s looking out at the glinting water, and he sees how the insides of her thighs do that nice thing at the top where they bulge out a little and then go back in. Still so slender after two children. His children. There’s something wrong with him.

  Now, what the fuck is that—a lucid moment?

  He calls her name. Willis hates yoohooing, but to sneak up close and then suddenly start talking normally will scare the shit out of her, which’ll piss her off good. Not that she won’t be pissed anyway. After he yells it out enough times for the whole fucking beach to know Jee-yeen’s husband is here, she turns around. He could swear he sees a flicker of glad smile before she remembers what the deal is.

  “What are you doing here?” she says. Then she clamps a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God.” She takes the hand away. “Did something happen?”

  “No. No-no-no, nothing. I just sort of had a change of heart.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Well, good for you. I guess.” She drapes the towel around her shoulders.

  “I missed you guys.” Not precisely true, but it would be insulting on feminist grounds to say he suddenly got afraid for them. Or maybe it is true, and he’s such a head case that his missing them can only take the form of imagining them buggered and murdered. Just a boy and his mind.

  “You missed us,” she says, “so you followed us here. And what’s your plan now?”

  “Well, I guess I’d hoped to stay and camp out with you guys.” A little hat-in-hand shit seems called for just here. “I sort of thought we should try to leave things on a better note, you know? Where are the kids?”

  “Over there,” she says, not pointing. “What about the dog? You just left him at the house?”

  “Of course not,” he says. “He’s out in the truck—in fact, I should get back to him. I just wanted to let you know I was here.”

  “And what did you plan to sleep in? Did you bring blankets for yourself?”

  “Shit,” he says. “I knew there was something.”

  Silence.

  “Well,” she says. “I suppose you could use this.” She nods toward the old blanket spread out on the sand. “Did you remember to bring any food for the dog?” Translation: My darling, I’m so glad you’ve come. Though he guesses he should admire her for not snapping to it. They’ve done reconciliation-and-relapse.

  Mel comes stalking over, in what he cou
ld swear is a different bathing suit from the one this morning. Right, because wasn’t she sunning with the top off? This is a metallic-blue one-piece with a gold boomerang. So he is not a totally head-up-his-ass father.

  “Mother, I told Roger, and he still won’t come. Hi, Daddy. I knew you’d be here.”

  “You did?” he says. “That’s more than I knew.”

  She shrugs. This is her more-mystic-than-thou mode.

  “I’ll go deal,” Jean says to Mel. “I want you to get dried off and changed, okay?” Mel picks up a towel and starts scrubbing it at her hair; Willis notices what might be the beginnings of breasts trembling in rhythm. He looks away, and sees a man in gray uniform and Smokey hat heading their way through the bathing suits. Gun in a holster.

  “Jesus, he got here in a hurry,” he says. “Good, I’m glad.”

  “Who?” Jean turns around, sees the cop, looks at Willis. “What’s this about?”

  “Actually nothing, really,” he says. “Guy at the gate was being an asshole. I guess he’s here to adjudicate.”

  “Would you watch your language, please?” Jean says, and looks at Mel, who’s making a turban of her towel.

  “Right,” says Willis. “She’s never heard the word adjudicate before.”

  Melanie blushes down to her collarbone.

  Jean says, “Sometimes your humor—”

  “Excuse me, folks,” says the cop. Sheriff, deputy, whatever he is. Marine-looking guy about Willis’s age, one of your not-an-ounce-of-fat-on-him cops. “Are you the gentleman owns the dog?”

  “Yep,” says Willis. “I sure am.” He says to Jean, “I better get going. You guys want to meet me back at camp? Or I could drive us all up in a few minutes.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the cop says. Embroidered patch on his sleeve says SHERIFFS DEPT: no apostrophe, no period. “I’ve been requested to escort you out of the park.”

  Jean and Mel both look at Willis.

  “Whoa, wait a minute. Let me explain what happened.” He pauses before launching in.