Preston Falls : a novel (8 page)

"I think you'd better go," Arthur says, though he doesn't stand up.

"Hey, don't worry about it." Crazy motherfucker named Willis. The Bjorks just look at each other. Willis can imagine: Arthur's thinking his wife expects him to deck this guy, and she's thinking if her old man gets in a fistfight he'll finally have that heart attack. Out on the pond, the Bjork kids have the rubber boat spinning as if in a whirlpool, slashing away with the paddles, whooping and shrieking. Willis turns to follow his children up the path, and only now does his chest start pounding. Christ, he's the one who's going to have the fucking heart attack. He hauls off and kicks over the milk can the Bjorks have put at the head of the path to amp up the country charm, then looks back toward the pond. Resolutely, the Bjorks face the water.

As the truck goes rumbling and crunching down the white-graveled drive, Mel stares at her feet. "Daddy, I can't believe you said that to him."

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"What'd he say?" says Roger.

"Nothing, Roger," says Mel.

"You can tell him," Willis says. "Long as it's a direct quote, you're off the hook."

Mel, still looking at her feet, turns red.

"What?" yeUs Roger.

"Well, for reasons I don't fully understand myself," Willis says, "I called Mr. Bjork a fat pig."

"That's not exactly what you said, Daddy," Mel says.

"What did he say?'' says Roger.

Mel takes a breath and looks out the window. "He called Mr. Bjork afat f-u-c-k."

"All right" says Willis. "Melanie has spelled/«c^ for us. We've all heard the word, yes?"

Mel and Roger say nothing. He grinds gears as he shifts down to make the turn onto County Road 39; can't decide if the clutch is really going or if he's babying it and not pushing the pedal down far enough because he thinks the clutch is going.

"So," he says. "Isn't anybody curious about this surprise?"

''What surprise?" says Roger.

"Should I just tell you?" Willis says.

"Yes," says Roger.

Mel says nothing.

"Okay, what it is, you guys are going camping with your mom this afternoon."

"Do we have to?" says Roger.

"I knew you'd be thrilled to the—"

"Daddy, watch where you're going" says Mel. Willis swerves back over to his side to miss a tractor, cutter bar down, mowing brush on the other side of the road. "Are you coming too?" she says.

"No. I'm going to stay and see if I can't get some work done. Rathbone'U keep me company "

"I don't want to," says Roger.

"You," says Willis. "We haven't gotten around to you yet, mister. What's gotten into you, using that kind of language around people?"

"So? Look what you said."

"True," says Willis. "But the difference is—" Right. What is the difference? "Look. This is the kind of thing where, you know, fairly or uniairly, if you're a kid, it sounds worse to people than it does if you're

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a grownup," Great: he's just told Roger how he can get a rise out of people. "When they hear you using bad language, they're going to think, Well, that's a bad person, and I don't want to be that person's friend."

"So? If they don't want to be my friend they don't have to be."

"What?" Willis has blanked out for a second. What the fuck are they talking about?

"I don't care if they don't want to be my friend," Roger says. "They're probably a feeb like her that has to spell everything."

"Watch out, Roger," says Mel.

"Watch out, Roger," says Roger.

"I'm not kidding," says Mel.

"Vm 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.

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 pfles, and stacks the bricks and boards out there too. The boards he'U 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

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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.

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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 tool-

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belt, 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 trust 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.