Preston Falls : a novel (26 page)

"God no," says Willis. "Truly. I just really got caught short and I need some cash to get me through."

"Look, I don't give a shit. Just leave me the fuck out of it. You can tell Reed that too." He looks over his shoulder at the file cabinet. "I give you a thousand."

"No; no way," says Willis.

"Suit yourself."

"Calvin, those guitars—any one of them is worth like twice that."

"So go sell 'em. / don't give a flyin' fuck."

"Plus a complete slate roof? A couple of years ago you were going to put on a whole—"

"Thousand dollars cash."

"No way," says Willis. Then he says, "I got to get at least three."

"Yah, not from me you ain't."

"So what would you give?" says Willis.

"I told you already. Thousand dollars cash."

"No way," says Willis.

"Then get the fuck out of my house. I don't want your shit—sell me this, sell me that. Just because you're fuckin' done with it. And all of a sudden you fuckin' need money. So you come around trying to trade your fuckin' toys. Hey, I'll trade you. Thousand dollars cash."

"Christ," says Willis.

"The fuck you care?" Calvin says. "That stuff don't mean shit to you."

"Fifteen, and that's it. Fifteen and I'll throw in the computer."

Calvin says, "You don't listen."

Time to rock and roll.

Willis stops by the house to have a last look-see. And maybe take five absolutely essential books. Ten, tops. He sits at the kitchen table, gets his film can out and snorts a little off the point of Jean's potato peeler in order to maintain—shit already looks like it's half gone—then goes upstairs and looks under the bed for his .22, not that this is necessarily the best idea, since he's technically on drugs. Though it's weird to think of this as being on drugs. Well, he can't find the fucking .22 anyway, so that settles that. Until he remembers he never took the son of a bitch out of the truck.

He turns out the light, comes back downstairs, sees the stacks of books in the hall and decides to bag the desert-island shit. He turns out the hall light, goes into the kitchen and considers starting coffee. But he can stop somewhere for coffee. He's got a thousand dollars: ten big old hundred-dollar bills with wise old Ben Franklin looking like he's about to deliver a fucking maxim. Okay, you could look at it that Willis got boned, big time. But in fact Calvin got boned, too, because Calvin Castleman is a fucking worldling like Ben Franklin, and the guitars and the roofing slates and the thousands of dollars he stands to make are just that much more shit to lug around spiritually.

He noses the truck out into the road, looks left, looks right, then glances back at the house a last time and sees one of the eyebrow windows—second from left, his fucking study —dully glowing as if some happy, stupefied family were in there, passing the popcorn. The fucking computer. Just because he feels like it, he tromps on the parking brake, gets out of the truck, tilts the seat-back forward and takes his .22 out. Yep, clip's in it. He jerks the bolt, chambering a round and cocking the son of a bitch, and it suddenly feels lighter and very very touchy, as if it's alive. What it is, he's scared shitless of guns. He tries to get the crosshairs

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on the eyebrow window, but the thing's waggling all around, so he ends up resting the gun on the hood of the truck. He finds the window in the scope, gets the crosshairs sort of circling around the middle of it. Everything jumps as he fires, but he hears the glass smash and shimmer, then looks and sees he got the job done. That tv glow is still glowing— what did he expect, to shoot out the window and the monitor?—but he's made his little statement. Now let's get gone.

He pretends it's not safe to go his usual way, that the police have set up a roadblock, that kind of shit, so he goes left out the driveway and follows Ragged Hill Road all the way to the Wakefield town line, where it becomes Oldacre Road, checking his rearview mirror for a tail. He takes a left onto Neville Road and drives out past the beaver swamp, where the moon's reflected in the glassy water and the drowned branchless trees stick up. Past a dairy farm with the house lights off and a chained collie standing on top of his doghouse. Goodbye, goodbye. Down the hill and over a trapezoidal iron bridge that rattles when you cross, and left again at the fork onto something called Aylmer Road that he's never been on but seems to lead in the direction of 22A. It climbs gradually uphill, with big old slabby-barked maple trees along both sides. Sudden yellow glow around the curve, then a pair of headlights. He pretends it's the cops: dims his lights, gets way over to his side of the road, then keeps watching the rearview mirror until the red taillights wink out. Whew: close one. Farmhouse on the left, one upstairs light on, then a double-wide on the right, a white-painted truck tire half buried beside the driveway. Goodbye. Then nothing but trees, the road starts downhill again and, after half a mile, there's a stop sign and two-lane blacktop going left or right. Bingo.

And forty-five minutes later he's southbound on the Northway. He's keeping the speedometer at an even sixty-five and sitting up as straight as General Douglas MacArthur, his hands at ten o'clock and two o'clock. Sir yes sir. With drugs enough to keep him crisp and snappy. No tape deck or radio anymore, but he can sing, can't he? He can sing "Valderi, valdera" or "I'll Fly Away" or any fucking thing he wants. The Wicked Witch's soldiers' scary song that goes Oh-wee-oh. He's four hours from New York City.

He stops once to piss and get cash, coffee and gasoline at a service area, once to do some coke at a dark rest stop, once to pull over and wait until no cars are in sight and shoot at a deer sign (misses the deer but hits the sign at least), once again to do more coke in between two

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tractor-trailers in the parking lot at another service area, and once at the high point of the Tappan Zee Bridge, at about four in the morning. To throw that fucking gun into the Hudson River. Before he does something crazy. (Little joke.)

There's no traffic coming either way, and this forest of rivet-studded girders and braces screens him from the tollbooths. He cuts the engine, gets out and takes the .22 from behind the seat, then steps up off the roadway onto a catwalk with a little fence in front of it, high above the water. New York City's glowing downriver, H-bomb pink emanating from just around that bend. A car goes by in the other direction; it seems to slow briefly, then pick up speed. Better do this and get the fuck out of here. He grips the rifle by the barrel end, like a baseball bat, swings and lets the son of a bitch fly out into the dark.

Willis stands and listens but can't hear it hit. Can it still be falling?

THREE

Toward the middle of October, Jean leaves a message on the machine in Preston Falls. Just Hi how are you, how's the house coming, everything's fine down here, kids are fine. The lightest, brightest message possible. A first move. Though it's probably stupid: is this supposed to make him think their last conversation hadn't been as dire as it really was? Or to make her think so?

A week later she leaves a second message— Hi, just thought I might catch you in, give a call when you get a chance —and then, a few days after that, a third message, saying she's a little concerned and would appreciate it if he'd please call. This is Saturday. Monday he's due back at work.

Sunday starts out warm and clear. She takes Rathbone for his morning walk, with just an old shirt of Willis's over the t-shirt she wore to bed. Then she brings her coffee outside and sits on the tailgate of Carol's little red pickup, a Subaru Brat with roll bars and 4WD, and just breathes: the air still smells almost like summer. Rathbone lies with his belly in the cool, dewy grass.

Around eleven o'clock—which is really noon, since they set the clocks back last night—she and Carol take the kids to the pancake place. Jean brings a deck of cards, and in the booth they get in a hand of gin rummy before the food arrives. Roger, though he's embarrassed to be with three females, thinks gin rummy is terribly sophisticated. When he fans out his cards he makes sure their overlap is precisely uniform. Mel draws a card, takes a quick in-breath, tucks the card into her hand and discards a king of clubs; Roger bites his lip and grabs it too eagerly and Carol groans. This is almost like a family. Carol wins, as usual—she thinks it's condescending not to play your best against kids—but Mel almost takes her.

Half a honeydew for Mel, The Lumberjack ("A Buckle-Bustin' Breakfast from the North Woods") for Roger, a cheese omelette for

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Carol and just toast and coffee for Jean, since Roger can never finish The Lumberjack and she hates waste. So what does everybody want to do? Mel wants to go home and call her friend Erin. Roger wants to go home and watch videos. Carol suggests a hike at the reservoir; she's got to start back west sometime this week, and it's such an incredible day. Groaning from Mel and Roger, though less than you'd think. Even they feel the pull of a day like this.

But Jean's wondering what's going on up in Preston Falls. Could he maybe have—God, a million things. He's fallen off a ladder, lying there with his back broken, and here she is digging the last of the butter out of a little pleated paper cup for the last triangle of a buckwheat cake. Well, maybe when they get back to the house they'll find his truck parked behind Carol's, and the reason he didn't call to say he was on his way was—well, whatever it was. This just really doesn't look good.

"Why don't we do this,'" she says to Carol, for the kids to hear. "We have to go back to the house anyway, right? If we're taking Rathbone. So what I thought we could do, you could get your truck and follow me to the reservoir, I'll hike with you guys for a little, and then I thought maybe I'd take off and drive up to Preston Falls, and sort of check and see if Willis needs a hand with anything. There's always so much stuff to take care of. And then maybe he and I could caravan down tonight."

Good old Carol: doesn't even raise an eyebrow. "Actually, that might not be a bad idea," she says.

"I want to go too," says Mel. Roger just stares down at his puzzle placemat, tracing routes through the maze with his knife.

"That's nice of you, sweetie," Jean says. "But you know what that drive is like. And then we'd have to turn right around and come back. You'd be bored out of your mind."

"I'm bored here."

"And besides, I think Aunt Carol could use your help." Jean tips a quick nod in the direction of Roger. She hates herself when she pushes their buttons. Then again, it seldom works anymore.

Mel heaves a major sigh.

"While the cat's away," says Carol, giving Roger a wink he doesn't see. "Now we can stop at the video store on the way home and go bazonkers."

Carol's the good cop. The kids like their friends to see them bombing around with their hippie aunt in her little red pickup, and she lets them blast their own tapes, as loud as they want. One night she allowed

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them to rent Nightmare on Elm Street, Part Something —which in fact pissed Jean off. Roger, of course, said it wasn't scary, but Mel had trouble getting to sleep. (Jean worried more about Roger.) Still, when Carol leaves . . . Oh, but then Willis will be back. Her rock. God, was there a time she really thought that?

"Crap," Jean says. "I just remembered. I totally forgot about candy for tomorrow. For the trick-or-treaters."

"We can take care of the candy," says Carol.

"That would be great if you could," says Jean. "I usually just pick up some M&M's or Raisinets, and one kind of miniature candy bar, Milky Ways or something, and then those little rolls of Smarties? And then we put together little individual bags. What we've been doing, we take this stamp—I think it's in the desk—you know, that's got our name and address? And just stamp each bag. I think it makes the mothers a little more secure."

"What a cool idea," Carol says. Willis used to say it was begging people to sue their asses.

The waitress puts the check down in front of Carol.

"Here, let me give you some money for the candy," Jean says, grabbing the check. "You sure you don't mind doing this?" She gives Carol a twenty, then lays four singles on the table for the waitress and puts an unused knife on top of them.

"It'll be a good project for tonight," says Carol.

The four singles look mingy, so Jean takes them back and puts down a five. For the working woman who has to be inside on a day like this. Whose face she never looked at.

Out in the parking lot, sunlight beams off bumpers and windshields. "All right,'' says Carol. 'Tm pumped." Fist in the air.

The kids say nothing; still, they climb in without complaint and Jean doesn't have to tell Roger to fasten his seat belt. She rolls her window down, puts on the radio—the middle of something sprightly with violins—and swings onto Route 9. But the sun looks like it's already starting down the sky.

"Listen, I hate to say this," she says, "but would you guys mind too much if I punk out on this hike entirely? It's already getting sort of late, and it's such a trek up to Preston Falls, you know?"

"Booo," Carol says. "No, you're probably right. Be nice to get there before dark if you could." She turns to the back seat. "But hey, one party pooper isn't going to poop on our party, right? No way.''

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"I really want to go with you," Mel says.

"It's going to be so late, dear," says Jean. "And you have school tomorrow. And it's Halloween."

"I can sleep in the car."

Jean shakes her head.

''lean/'

"I really appreciate you wanting to keep me company, sweetie. But I want you and Roger to get to bed early." God knows why she's pretending this is about altruism.

She takes the long way up: the Taconic to 22 to 22A. Because she hates all those trucks on the Thruway and the Northway Because she feels like indulging herself. And because whatever's wrong can't get much worse in the extra forty-five minutes. And really because she doesn't want to be doing this. As she goes north and north and north, the fierce reds and yellows give way to browns and then the leaves themselves start going and at last it's bare trees reaching up into the bright, blank blue. In the little towns, pumpkins sit on doorsteps and ghosts dangle and flap from tree branches: mostly store-bought plastic ones with cartoon faces, but here and there just a white bedsheet hung from a noose. Very Diane Arbus.