Preston Falls : a novel (3 page)

Took kids to town to get chicken etc. Coffee is on the stove.

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He gets the JOE mug down, pours in milk, then fills it with cold coffee. He splits a fork-split Thomas' English muffin with a paring knife— hey, fuck them —sticks the ragged, cratered halves in the toaster and gets

PRESTON FALLS

out the butter. Be a kick to do that thing where you make the Indian maiden's tawny knees into her breasts, which is still about the most hilarious fucking thing in the world. Except Jean will see the creases in the cardboard. Unless you stick the box in the garbage. No. Insanity. It's also insane to start off your day—your two months—with a bunch of butter when the idea is to be light and free. Dear God, help me, he prays, and is amazed to find himself actually putting the butter back, as if a higher power were guiding his hand. Woo, scary shit.

He eats the English muffin dry, washing it down with seltzer a meme la houteille. With the kids gone, this would be a good time to wrap those condoms, if he can remember where he put them. They're a gag present for Champ and Tina, the comic prologue to their real present: a weekend at Mohonk Mountain House, where they'd once spent a night after Tina won five hundred dollars in the lottery. Oh right: they're still out in the truck, behind the seat. And there used to be wrapping paper on the top shelf in the pantry, left over from when they spent Christmas here three years ago. (They kept it out of sight because it was the paper Santa's gifts had been wrapped in; three years ago Roger stiU believed.) Willis drags a chair into the pantry and finds the dusty rolls still up there: snowflakes, holly and shit, Christmas balls, Falstaffian Santas, one roll just with season's greetings over and over and over. Hey, in for a dime: let's go with the balls. He cuts off what looks about right with a carving knife—thinking Did you ever see such a sight in your life? —and then it takes him ten minutes of yanking drawers and banging cupboard doors before he finds where the fucking Scotch tape got put.

He steps outside, stiU barefoot, onto the sun-warmed stepstone, and smells the air. Loamy, grassy, little hit of pine—Jesus, you could bottle this shit. At the top of the maple tree, a few leaves have turned red. Rathbone, who must have heard the screen door slap, comes tear-assing around the side of the woodshed with a stick in his mouth. So Willis walks a few steps out into the wet grass, soaking his feet and the cuffs of his jeans. This gets old in a hurry. He makes a token lunge for the stick while Rathbone dances away, then he goes back inside, thinking Du wuschest mir die Fiisse. At one point in his life (when Jean was pregnant with Mel, in fact) he went to see Hans Jiirgen Syberberg's Parsifal film twelve times in twelve days.

Time is it, anyway? Ten o'clock? Better go pay off Calvin Castleman before he comes pulling into the dooryard honking his horn. One morning last fall, Willis came back upstairs (still half asleep) after paying

Calvin for a load of wood, took his pants off again, got back in bed and explained to Jean that this was a country thing, the noninvasive alternative to coming right up and banging on your door. "Oh please," she said. "People with manners cally on the telephone, at a civilized hour, to ask if it's convenient.''

Willis puts on his green Dickies work shirt, mostly so he'll have a pocket to stick his checkbook in—certainly not to make Calvin Castleman think he's anything but a weekend pussy from Westchester. The thing is, what could you wear in Preston Falls that wouldn't be a costume? This morning it no longer seems worth getting into a big thing about where Calvin dumped the wood. Shit, it's got to be stacked anyway.

He takes the truck over, though really he should walk the three-tenths of a mile, whatever, if he's so serious about getting healthy. But that would be a gaffe in Preston Falls. By his driveway, Calvin has a sign saying GUN SHOP SAWS SHARPENED FIRE WOOD, and what could pass for a piece of metal sculpture: an oil drum sliced lengthwise with a cutting torch to make a trough, welded to an angle-iron stand. HOG ROSTER FOR HIRE. Calvin also wheels and deals used cars, sells vodka and Canadian whiskey on Sundays for a five-dollar markup and works on slate roofs. He once offered to install a new metal roof for free in return for Willis's roofing slates. Willis turned him down, then worried that a real country person would have jumped at the deal. You also used to see BMWs and Lincoln Town Cars jouncing in and out of Calvin's driveway late at night, but he seems to have cooled that after he was busted last year and his lawyer got him off on some bullshit technicality. Ever since Willis started coming over, the gun cabinet in the shop part of the trailer has had the same three guns, with manila tags hanging from their trigger guards: a single-shot 20-gauge ("Asking %35'')', a double-barrel 12-gauge ("$175 firm") and a 12-gauge pump ("$125"). This was where Willis bought his .22, a Marlin with a scope and a composite varmint—head of woodchuck, tail of rat—carved into the stock. Calvin hides his real guns in the living quarters of his trailer, in a compartment behind a curio cabinet with blown-glass elephants and little china Dutch girls.

Calvin Castleman's out front, leaning into the engine of a rotting Cadillac with a peeling vinyl roof; over the fender he's draped a greasy red plastic thing with indecipherable traces of white lettering.

"Ho," says Willis. Preston Falls-speak for Hello. "This your rig, Calvin?"

PRESTON FALLS

Calvin straightens up, wiping blackened hands on blackened work pants. "Is now," he says. His pubic-looking beard has an inch-wide white streak down one side, whatever that's about. Deep, grimy lines in the red face, though he can't be forty.

"Where'd you find 'er?" says Willis. Probably pushing it, though Calvin's asked him shit that's way more personal. When Calvin first came by and introduced himself—Willis had been unloading a U-Haul with stuff from Chesterton—he asked straight out what they'd paid for the place. Willis thought it was stupidly coy not to tell him; he was also proud of getting it for his lowball offer. Calvin pressed his lips together as if with sudden heartburn, turned away and shook his head; then he turned back and said he'd had his eye on the place for the woodlot but didn't have any use for another house. Willis assumes Calvin hasn't forgotten getting boned—or giving himself away for that little moment. He also assumes tnat Calvin assumes he hasn't forgotten.

"Took it in trade," says Calvin.

"So what's she need?"

"Oh, this and that. Leastways the engine's free and the fuckin' block ain't cracked."

"You keep it or fix up to sell?" Willis talks the talk better and better.

"Somebody come by and twist my arm they probably could have it. Hell, fresh coat of paint? Little bodywork? Set of wire wheels instead of them fuckin' piece of shits they got on there?"

Willis nods to show he can envision it. "Listen, let me write you a check for that load of wood."

"Tell you the truth, I just as soon wait till you got the cash on you. More I can keep my business the hell out of everybody's fuckin' computers, happier I fuckin' am."

"I hear you," says Willis. "Sure. I can go down to the cash machine."

" 'Cause it's all the one computer, you know? That's where we're gettin' to. After that bullshit here last year, I had 'em come and take out their fuckin' telephone. I told 'em, I said, I don't even want your fuckin' cable goin' in my house. They were listenin' in on the fuckin' telephone. My lawyer found that out."

"Yeah, I remember you telling me," says Willis.

"Good job I had him, or I'd been in jail right now with all the niggers. And this is what your God damn taxes go for."

"Hey, that and Bill Clinton's salary." Contempt for Bill Clinton is

their common ground politically. True, Willis comes at it from the left and Calvin from the right, but still. Willis sometimes thinks Calvin's shit about niggers and liberals might just be a sort of ritual ordeal he puts you through to test your worthiness. "So listen, I better get a move on if I want to hit that cash machine. I got my brother coming up later on."

"Hell, you got company this weekend I ain't in no hurry," Calvin says. "Next time you come up be good enough."

"I am up," says Willis. "I'm here the next two months."

"The hell happen, lose your job down there?"

"No such luck." Which is a shit thing to say to somebody up here scrabbling to get by. Or is Calvin simply a free man doing exactly what he wants? "Just took some unpaid leave." Willis wants to make sure to get that unpaid in there. "See if I can get some work done on the house."

"Hell, then," says Calvin. "I'll catch up with you. I know where you live." Structurally this is a joke, though only Willis smiles.

He's just hit the part of Dombey and Son where Mrs. Skewton has her first stroke, when Rathbone starts barking outside. Willis gets up and goes to the kitchen door, and into the yard rolls this big-ass convertible, a Monte Carlo or something, rocker panels rusted to shit. It's Champ and Tina, both in sunglasses and white t-shirts. Rathbone's up on his hind legs, paws against the driver's-side door. Champ gets out, tousles Rathbone's ears, then stretches, his t-shirt pulling up. He's starting to get a belly too, Willis is glad to see. Tina jackknifes herself over into the back seat, biker-shorted ass in the air.

"Some wagon," Willis calls. Not a Monte Carlo but an LTD. "Rath-bone, enough. Sit." He has to not look at Tina's ass. "So whatta we got here, about a seventy-seven?" Shooting for the most ironic year possible.

"Hey, seventy-fuckin'-/z/;o, bro," says Champ. "Last year they made the ragtop. Hundred and sixty-eight thousand miles, and that son of a hilch purrs.''

"She's a honey." Willis wishes Tina would hurry up and get whatever she's getting.

Champ switches to radio baritone. "Madge and I appreciate the built-in safety that only an American car can offer."

"So hey, welcome," says Willis. "You guys made good time. You must have been up with the fuckin' lark."

"You know me, early to bed," Champ says. "Fuckin' Tina, had to haul her out by the fuckin' hair and pour coffee into her."

"He lies," says Tina.

"So how was the trip up?"

"Well, I loved the shit out of it. I think the Jesus stations started to get to old Tina."

"Oh, you noticed that," she says.

"You got the best fuckin' Jesus stations up here, man. Except for maybe M&bama. This guy was like interpreting and everything? All this completely addled shit. Six sixty-six? All that stuff. He was gettin' into it."

"I would even listen to Howard Stern,'' she says.

"Hey, that your rig?" Nodding at Willis's truck. "Fm fuckin' impressed."

"You've seen that," says Willis.

"No way. Last time, you still had that Honda piece of shit."

Tina extricates herself, slams her door (big American ka-thunk) and comes around the front with a purse-sized Bert-and-Ernie bag slung over her shoulder.

"I help you guys carry anything?" says Willis.

"Carry your hostess present if you want." Champ walks around and twists a key in the trunk lock. "Here, back here." But Tina's hugging Willis (he feels liquidy breasts, smells dirty hair) and saying, "Ooh, it's nice to see you."

"Here." Champ's holding up two six-packs of Budweiser tallboys by the plastic. "Replace those essential minerals." He always gives Willis shit about Sportif; the good way to read this is that Champ agrees flacking for Dandineau Beverages is beneath him. Champ, meanwhile, is clerking at the Counter Spy Shop.

"Hey, replace this," says Willis, giving him the finger.

But Champ isn't looking. "So, Teen," he says, setting the six-packs on the ground, "should I give him the test?"

Tina cocks her head.

''You know. The—c'mere." Tina goes over, he whispers, she shrugs. "My animal companion here," he says to Willis, "blew the test big time."

"You're a man, for God's sake," Tina says. "If you were wearing a skirt or something—"

"He'sh going to guessh," says Champ through bared teeth, "ish you don't shut ut."

Tina turns to Willis. "He did this at the service area. I was mortified. All these like families and everything?"

Champ climbs over the closed door into the back seat, sits down and calls, "Okay, you ready? Now watch, and tell me who this is." He gets to his feet, turns and crawls over the seat and across the trunk on his hands and knees.

PRESTON FALLS

"Rats leaving a sinking ship," says Willis.

"Whoa, getting warm."

"Let's see—me taking a leave of absence."

"You dick," Champ says. "Everything's not about you''

"Hey, so they tell me," says Willis. "Okay, I don't know. Good money going after bad? Pride going before a fall?"

"Cold, very cold. Shit, I got to take a piss something wicked."

"Why don't you make him happy," Tina says, "and say you give up."

"That would make me happy? To know my brother is an ignorant slut?"

"Okay," WiUis says. "I give up."

"Jackie Kennedy!"

Willis whams his forehead with the heel of his hand.

"Unreal." Champ dusts the knees of his black jeans, then wipes his palms on the thighs. "I thought at least somebody your age would get it. Isn't that what fucked all you guys up?" He holds up a hand for silence and says, "Okay: Jackie, for three hundred. How did Jackie dislocate her back? Or, like, sprain her back?"

Tina fetches a loud sigh. "Didn't you have to go pee-pee, honey buns?"

"Give up? She was reaching around, or kind of bending over backwards, trying to touch her Onassis. Get it? Reach her Onassis? I didn't tell that very well."

"No kidding," says Tina.

"Christ, I gotta piss." Champ trots around the corner of the woodshed.

"I think it's this country air," says Tina. "So where's the family?"

"Jean went to hustle some provisions," says Willis. "A la recherche de Frank Perdue.'' He'd thought of this on the way back from Calvin's; Tina's the lucky one who gets to hear it. "And I guess the kids went along to get their little hit of civilization. Store in town has video games."