by David Gates
“The Cabin? Your basic dive. I like to say it’s the other B and B crowd—bikers and burnouts? Some real down hillbillies. Old Calvin used to come by once in a while—speaking of down hillbillies. Fuckin’ Calvin.” Reed shakes his head, and the ponytail wags. “Calvin’s a piece of work. But hey, he’s mah bud. Anyhow. Basically they keep having us back because we suck and we know we suck and we just sort of get up there, you know? Like we make up a different stupid name every time, that they can put in the paper. You know, Saturday night: Cowflop. Whatever it is. Like, Okay, we’re hacks and that’s the deal—you know what I’m saying? Or you could also just look at it as an excuse to do drugs and get away from the wives, which it also is.”
So this means they do drugs?
The waitress sets down coffees and little things of half-and-half. When she turns away, Reed kisses bunched fingertips. “So what do you say? You want to come over tomorrow? Kick some shit around?”
“I don’t know,” says Willis. “If I wouldn’t be fucking up your practice.”
“Our what?” says Reed. “Hey, practice is for lawyers.” Willis doubts it’s the first time he’s said this.
2
Since he doesn’t have to be anywhere anytime for anything, he takes his sweet time getting back to Preston Falls. He stops at the junk shop in East Wakefield that always has the same shit, hoping, as always, to find like a Danelectro guitar—something they don’t know is anything. As if people who make their living buying and selling shit don’t know what shit’s worth. No instruments at all; just an empty wooden violin case. But he finds a copy of Fear Strikes Out, which he’s always meant to read. Fifty cents? Can’t go wrong.
When he opens the kitchen door, the place already has that empty-house smell. He gets one of Champ’s tallboys out of the refrigerator and brings it into the front hall. Everything else can fucking wait until he settles in and zones out for a while. He sits down on the sofa and takes off his boots: a connoisseur’s stink, like a fine old cheese. He brings his feet up and lies back, head elevated to optimum angle by the sofa arm and one throw pillow. He pulls the comforter over him, then reaches up and switches on the floor lamp, though it’s the middle of a sunny afternoon. Now he’s safe. He picks up Dombey and Son, waiting faithfully where he left it. The lamp turns the white page a warm yellowish—unless this cheap fucking paper is already rotting because it’s not acid-free—and he imagines the warmth reflecting back and soaking into his face.
He wakes up blank, as if after a shock treatment: he’s someplace with a light on. Then all the old shit coalesces.
The sun’s gone down: it’s dark outside those oh-so-New-Englandy panes of glass on either side of the front door. He reaches for the tallboy he remembers must be there on the floor. Warm and raspy going down: dry, like light, powdery sand in his throat, as if it weren’t seeping into the tissues. He climbs over the back of the couch, opens the front door, and goes out onto the doorstep. The sky is a dark slate blue with a salmon tinge at the horizon, which fades even as he’s looking. Chilly out here in just t-shirt and stocking feet. He pisses down into the grass. A bat flitters by. He hears an owl, and a faraway car melodiously going through its gears. He grips his goosefleshed upper arms. Shit, let’s get back in.
What he’d better do, he’d better call and let Jean know he’s out and this thing is over, and thank her for doing the thing with the lawyer. True, she said no communication, but this would simply be observing the ordinary decencies, no?
The phone rings five times, then the machine comes on and he gets to hear his own voice saying leave a message. It beeps, and the silence starts unrolling. “Yeah, hi,” he says. “Just calling to say I got back, ah, to the house okay”—almost said got home, a faux pas for sure—“and, ah, the whole thing was over really quickly and it just turned out not to be that big a deal. So. I hope your trip back went okay, and that, you know, all is well? It’s Tuesday night—Tuesday evening, actually. I’ll talk to you later. Hello, Mel, if you get this. Hello, Rog. Hope school went well. And, I don’t know, talk to you later.”
He opens the refrigerator. Two tallboys left. Plus the usual shit that accumulates. Bowl of fruit salad that might still be okay, with a drumhead of plastic wrap. Eggs. Half a package of cheese with a rubber band around it, which Jean must have put away; Willis always just folds the excess plastic under and lets the cheese itself weight it down. Thing of bacon with a couple of strips left. Polaner All Fruit: raspberry, strawberry, apricot. Stick and a half of butter. Paul Newman salad dressing with the once-amusing garlanded N. So he can eat through all this shit before he gets back to the subsistence food he eats when he’s here alone in a stupid attempt to lose weight, which he undermines with shit like beer. Oatmeal when he wakes up; the rest of the oatmeal, cold, for lunch. For dinner, brown rice, with garlic browned separately in olive oil.
“Tell you what let’s have,” he says aloud. But he can’t think what. He stands there staring into the open refrigerator until the thermostat kicks the motor on, and his body twitches at the sudden noise. Fucking silent in here. Well, that was the idea, no?
He ends up eating Cheerios and working away on another tallboy while lying on the sofa reading Sherlock Holmes as a warmup for Dombey and Son. He reads the one about the guy who murders his sister and drives his brothers insane by burning some kind of hallucinogenic poison in their room, and then the one about the guy who builds the fake partition he hides behind so they think he’s dead and his body’s been burned in the woodpile. He never does get back to Dombey and Son, but that’s cool too. Eventually this should make him sleepy, because what he doesn’t want is to be up until five in the morning and then wake up at like three in the afternoon.
But around midnight, still wide awake, he figures he might as well play some guitar, and starts a thing of coffee. Crazy motherfucker named Willis. He goes out to the woodshed for the Twin and the Tele—got to finish stacking that wood tomorrow—and lugs them into the kitchen. He wedges The Woman’s Home Companion Cookbook under the front of the Twin to angle the son of a bitch so it’s rearing back and blasting in his face. He sets the boombox on the kitchen counter, on the theory that the whole cabinet underneath acts as a resonating chamber. Then he picks out CDs to play along with: Guitar Town, Serving 190 Proof, Talk Is Cheap, Ragged Glory, Slow Train Coming. And then feels guilty that it’s all white music, so he puts The Best of Buddy Guy on the stack, even though he won’t actually play along with it, because Buddy Guy is too discouraging. Coffee’s ready.
He starts out with the Neil Young, that song about how Neil Young is thankful for his country home. Slow tempo, three chords, nothing too fucking subtle. Willis isn’t your world’s best guitar player, but neither is Neil Young, so he can more or less keep up—which is why he’s into Neil Young. That and because he’s smarter than Neil Young, or at least more cynical. Although maybe Neil Young is in fact smarter than Willis and has managed to get his head so Zen simple that he can go to his country home and get peace of mind the way the song says. All of which is probably making too much of what’s basically a trite piece of shit. Unless it’s actually a sendup, but Willis doesn’t think so. Though later on Neil Young does send up “Farmer John,” unless that’s not a sendup either. Willis worries about this exact same shit every time he plays along with Ragged Glory. Because he’s a fucking machine.
After he’s done with the Neil Young, he puts on the Dylan and cracks the last of the tallboys to help him start thinking about starting to think about going to sleep. Except one poor tallboy can’t do much against all that coffee, so he washes down a Comtrex to level the playing field. He gets sick of the Dylan—all that medium-tempo shit in A minor—and pops another Comtrex, then puts on the Keith. At last, partway through that, he starts to feel he’s losing track of things. By now trees and shit are starting to emerge in the brightening grayness outside the windows. He hits Stop and switches off the hissing amplifier. In thesudden silence, amid residual buzz in his ringing ears, he hears a blue ja
y scream, then a crow cawing as if in response. Day birds.
He sets the Tele on the guitar stand and goes upstairs, taking along Dombey and Son just in case he’s not as far gone as he estimates. In the bedroom, it’s gray enough to make out all the pieces of furniture but not to read print. So fuck it. He pulls off his jeans, which it occurs to him he hasn’t had off for however many days, and gets under the covers. Slipping his hand under the waistband of his underpants, he grasps the Unnamable; to warm his hand as much as anything. Son of a bitch swells, though you wouldn’t call it hard. Now his eyes are adjusting, and it’s not dark in here at all. But that’s cool. Better, actually. A whole waking world standing guard while he sleeps.
3
The plan they used to have went like this: Willis would stick it out at Dandineau and support them while Jean was finishing Pratt, then she would turn around and support them with some incredibly satisfying job and Willis would figure out something. “You could just do your music,” Jean used to say. Yeah, well, his music. With like eight hours a day to practice, maybe he could cut it with some hundred-dollar-a-night bar band. Maybe. Time has marched since Willis learned Mick Taylor’s break on “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’?” note for note.
What Willis knows about himself is that deep down he’s a word man. Which is contemptible. He got his first promotion for the press release he wrote when Dandineau shut down the plant in Meridian, Mississippi. (Hey, the hometown of Jimmie Rodgers.) On the first draft, Marty Katz underlined a throwaway reference to “counseling” for employees left high and dry, and wrote in the margin, “Pls amp up.” There was nothing to amp up: a ten-minute presentation in the lunchroom by some woman from the Mississippi state employment service. In his rewrite, Willis called this “an intensive counseling program with a range of placement services” and made up a quote from James Buckridge, chairman and president, about Dandineau’s commitment to its people. Marty wrote “Kudos! (Singular!)” in the margin, and changed “commitment” to “loyalty.” Which amped up Willis’s respect for Marty Katz.
Willis pissed and moaned to Jean that what little integrity he’d ever had was down the toilet, but he secretly trusted he’d be okay as long as his cynicism held out. He was making money, however worldly that was, and winning praise from father figures, however pathetic that was. So: in for a dime. After the first couple of years at Dandineau he let his hair grow back and started wearing black t-shirts under Armani-knockoff suits, keeping an emergency dress shirt and tie on a hanger behind his door.
He bought his first good acoustic guitar: a ’59 J-200, because Martins were a cliché. And then a John Lennon-type Rickenbacker—for a while, Willis loved that clangy shit—and then a ’39 D-18 because he’d always wanted a Martin. All this, of course, was when they still lived in their rent-controlled shithole on West 108th Street, before the kids and the house in Chesterton. He got his old Telecaster worked on by the guy who did Danny Gatton’s guitars, and he had the blackface Twin he’d owned since high school completely gone over: even a new cord with a three-prong plug. For a while he was getting together on Wednesday nights with a hip dentist, an assistant dean at City College and an abstract painter who actually played decent guitar. They chipped in on a rehearsal studio in the West Thirties and worked away for months on the same ten or fifteen songs: “Jolly Green Giant,” “Charley’s Girl,” “I Fought the Law,” a Sex Pistols-sounding version of “White Lightning.”
Then, with a year to go at Pratt, Jean got pregnant: an inadvertency with the diaphragm, supposedly.
“But what do you expect me to do with her?” Jean said, when Willis reminded her of their old plan. They were cleaning up from Mel’s second birthday party. “Just stick her in day care?”
“It’s not exactly unprecedented,” he said.
“Oh, but I’m so into her now,” she said, scraping ice-cream-sodden cake into the garbage. “I just want to drink her. This time with her is so short.”
“Short for you,” he said. “I’m going right out of my fucking mind.”
“Do you realize in three years she’ll be starting kindergarten? And after that she’ll just be gone.”
“Three years? I don’t know if I can do another three months in that place.” He popped a balloon. “This is not what I signed on for.”
“You have such a memorable way of putting things,” she said.
“I’m asking you to honor an agreement we had.”
“Yes, when things were totally different.” She turned to scrape another plate, and he drank the red wine from some parent’s plastic glass.
“Besides,” he said, “she needs to be interacting more with other kids. You saw what she was like today.”
“She’s only two.”
“Still,” he said. “And you need to start working back into your life.” He tossed the glass into the garbage.
“How dare you tell me what I need?”
So they were into the how-dare-yous. He held up a hand. “Fine. Just wanted to know what I could count on. Now I know.”
But apparently the shit about interacting with other kids did its work. It might even have been true. Once they were speaking again, they renegotiated the plan: Jean was to go back for one course that fall, then two in the spring; Melanie was to be put in day care for the afternoons; Willis was to pick her up after work and cook dinner while Jean did her school shit. Since Willis had just been kicked up another ten thousand, he thought they could swing the day care, though after taxes ten thousand dollars worked out to about nothing per paycheck. And now there was Jean’s tuition. Plus payments on the year-old Honda he’d bought with the excuse that Melanie should be exposed to trees and grass and fresh air. Another thing that might have been true.
After Jean’s fall semester Willis was made head of Public Affairs and got kicked up another twenty. This was when his eleven- and twelve-hour days began, and he started putting on weight and getting short of breath. Yet even with just the early afternoons and late nights to herself, Jean thought she could still have her degree in another two years, three max. By which time Mel would be in school. Jean could take a full-time job and Willis could start thinking what he might want to do with his life.
Then, right before Jean’s last semester, another inadvertency. She obviously had it in for him, as well as for herself. Now he got it: he would work at Dandineau Beverages until he died of a heart attack, and that would be his fucking life.
On the other hand, he had a son. To his shame, he had been secretly put off by Mel’s babyhood, but with Roger he was able to feel, mostly, the way a father should feel. Including the feeling that time was short. First the tiny scrunched face that seemed to mutate more each day into the face Roger would someday have. Then holding him up by his arms as he skimmed along making walking motions with his legs, forced wide apart by the bulky diaper. Roger talking, then talking in sentences. When neither Jean nor Mel could hear, Willis used to sing to him: Love is lovelier the second time around. And Roger would sing, in that fluting voice, hoarse around the edges: Twinkle twinkle yittle star. When Mel corrected him, he’d say, “That’s what I said, twinkle twinkle yittle star.” He was scared of Dr. Seuss books—and there was something sinister about how things popped into existence only because the words for them rhymed with the words for other things Dr. Seuss had just thrown out there. He liked “Ain’t Got No Home,” by Clarence “Frogman” Henry.
Okay, let’s not beat this shit to death.
When Roger turned nine this past January, he announced he was too old to be read to anymore. And since, in the oh-so-white public schools they moved to Chesterton for, the kids seem to spend half the day watching supposedly educational videos and the other half playing with computers, Willis fears for his future. As if he were a walking advertisement for the life of the mind: whoring himself and buying toys as compensation. The guitars, the truck, the good sound system, the sagging shelves of books and CDs. Hey, Preston Falls itself.
He found the farmhouse five summers ago, w
hile they were touristing around that weird New York-Vermont border country. Heading for Fort Ticonderoga, more to have something to head for than as a history lesson: Roger was only four, and Mel’s first-grade teacher had pissed away the whole year on the fucking Indians. Willis bought the Preston Falls Argus to check out the—whatever the word was—the spatial analogue to zeitgeist—and there was the ad: “Owner Says Sell! Country Setting, 20 ac+ –. Needs TLC.” And a picture of the house with bare trees around it. It had those eyebrow windows. Like the house Willis grew up in, until he was twelve, in Etna, New Hampshire. He pointed out the bare trees to Jean: since this was July, the place had obviously been on the market awhile. “Fifty-five thousand?” she said. “It must be a mess inside.”
The old Somebody place—Willis has heard the name fifty fucking times—had once been a five-hundred-acre farm: from the top of this hill to the top of that hill, way up the road, way down the road, on both sides of the road, including the land where Calvin Castleman’s trailer now sits. The owner saying “Sell!” turned out to be the National Bank of Preston Falls; they’d foreclosed after the poor son of a bitch who’d bought the house and the last twenty acres got laid off at the woodworking plant. A real estate lady with glasses like the wife who gets strangled in Strangers on a Train showed them through. Her big selling point was that the house was post and beam. Right. Didn’t all houses have fucking beams? And since the beams weren’t hanging in space, what was holding them up but fucking posts? Upstairs in what he imagined as Roger’s room, Willis sat cross-legged on the particleboard floor, looked out the eyebrow window and pictured his son on a summer morning, sitting on wide, sun-warmed floorboards, lacing up his sneaks and peering out at the day being offered to him. Willis’s old bedroom—before his mother took him and Champ to live in Cambridge—had the same shin-level windows. He used to sit cross-legged and look down at his tire swing hanging from the big maple tree, though he never actually swung in it much. Willis was never a jock, even before he broke his leg playing baseball and spent three months in a cast. Well, enough. He took the real estate lady down into the cellar, jabbed a jackknife into a post or a beam or whatever the fuck, which had the consistency of angel food cake, and offered her forty.