Preston Falls : a novel (44 page)

Okay. We're not going to think about it today. God damn Doug Willis.

She picks up The Father Hunt and really does her best to zero in on it again and keep her thoughts off. I wish I knew if you would really he interested in what we . . . She tries picturing black blinders at her temples, like on a horse. No, no good. Anyhow, she's got to deal with Roger.

He's lying on his side on the floor of his room, his collection of Pogs before him in tall stacks like a miser's horde. He likes the ones that have cloaked-and-hooded skeletons, their skulls with vampire fangs. She should never have gone along with Willis's judgment that this was normal boy stuff. Or Roger's way of working through fears. Or whatever overintellectualized thing he'd come up with to avoid really looking at it, though in fairness she does the same thing.

"Hi," she says, kneeling beside him.

"What?" Not looking at her, he takes a Pog from a shorter stack and gingerly lowers it with his fingertips onto the top of an already taller stack.

"Aunt Carol showed me the sun you guys made. You did a really good job."

Roger shrugs. "It was her idea." He picks up a Pog: a silver skull with a red and green yin-yang on its forehead.

"So have you thought about what I asked you?" says Jean. "About why you scratched that thing on her truck?"

"No."

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"Then I'd like you to think about it right now." And how's she going to enforce this —march into his little head?

Seconds go by.

"Okay, I thought about it," Roger says.

"And?"

He shrugs and reaches for another Pog.

"Were you angry at her?" says Jean.

Shrug.

"Angry at me?"

Shrug. This Pog is identical to the other. He holds one up in each hand between thumb and forefinger and brings first one and then the other nearer and farther away.

"Angry at Daddy?"

"I don't know. He's probably dead or something."

"Do you wish he was?" She's really asking a nine-year-old this, about his father? "People sometimes wish that when they're really angry at somebody. It's a normal thing to wish that. It doesn't mean you're bad."

Tiny shrug: a twitch of the shoulders, really.

"I just want you to know that it's okay to be angry."

"I'm not,'' he says. "You always make everything a big deal." With a backhand swipe, he levels all the stacks.

This is going just as brilliantly as she'd thought. But now that she's started, there's no avoiding the rest.

"Do you know what that thing means?" she says. "That you scratched on Aunt Carol's truck? The swastika?"

"Yeah. The sun."

"But that's not what you thought it was when you did it."

Roger says nothing.

"So what did you think it was?"

"I don't know—a Nazi sign."

"And do you know what the Nazis were?"

"Yeah, Germans."

"Do you know what they did?"

Roger shrugs. "I don't know, killed people and stuff."

"Do you know how many?"

"Yeah, six million."

"Did you know that the people they killed were people like the Levys next door? Or like your friend Sam? Or Jason?"

"Yeah, I know."

3 0 3

"Well, then I guess I don't get it," says Jean. "You don't hate Sam or Jason." She doesn't dare make this a question. "You knew that what you were doing was wrong."

Silence. It's hurting her back to kneel like this.

"Can I tell you what it sounds like to me? It sounds to me almost like you were asking to be punished for something." She's tiptoeing around the idea that he might be blaming himself for Willis's being gone. But if he isn't, she doesn't want to put it in his head.

Silence.

"What do you think an appropriate punishment would be for something like this?" she says. She pauses, just in case, then goes on. "If you were older, I'd have you pay Aunt Carol for the damage you did. Even if they can just repaint the door by itself, I imagine it's going to be at least a couple hundred dollars. Do you know how long it would take you to pay back two hundred dollars out of your allowance?"

"Yeah, two hundred weeks."

"Yes, about four years," she says. "So I don't think it would be very helpful to give you a punishment that would still be going on when you're thirteen, for something you did when you were nine."

"It's less than four years," says Roger.

Jean closes her eyes: two hundred weeks, and one year is—he's right. "You'd still be thirteen," she says.

Roger says nothing.

"Okay, here's what's going to happen," she says, totally winging it. What is going to happen? She fixes on the scattered Pogs. "I'm going to have to pay for repainting Aunt Carol's truck, and that means I'll have to do without some things. So you're going to have to give up something too. We're going to say your Pogs are worth a dollar apiece, okay? So you're going to give up two hundred of them."

"But I only have —"

"You're old enough to know that the things you do have consequences," she says.

"But if I'm good I get them back, right?"

"I need to think about that." The lesson, at its purest, should be that gone is gone. Or is this just stupidly punitive? The whole thing is so artificial: why shouldn't the loss be artificial as well? "I'm not going to answer that now," she says. "I want you to count out two hundred of these."

Roger rolls over onto his stomach in defeat. "Can I pick which onesy

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"As long as it's two hundred," she says, getting up and digging in her thumbs to massage her lower back. "And I expect them to be in the bottom drawer of my dresser before you come downstairs."

Down in the living room, she finds Mel sitting cross-legged on the sofa with the road atlas on her lap, open to New HampshireA^ermont. Jean decides to think she's just looking at where she was yesterday and not cooking up her next escapade.

"Mom, can I go over to Erin's?"

"We need to talk about some things first."

"Like what?"

"Like whether or not you're grounded."

Mel's mouth comes open, theatrically. "Why-y}''

Jean drops her own jaw open, in mean-spirited imitation. "Why? Because you skipped school, you stole my credit card, you could have gotten yourself into—by the way, may I have my card back?"

Mel bends forward to reach in the hip pocket of her too-snug Levi's; when she straightens up, Jean sees she's begun to cry. She hands her mother the MasterCard.

"I'm not mad at you, sweetheart. I just want to make really sure that you would never, ever, do anything like this again. No matter how upset you are. Right?"

Mel looks down, shoulders shaking.

"Promise me," says Jean.

Mel gets out an Okay. Jean listens to the sobbing to assess its sincerity, as if homing in on an instrument somewhere in an orchestra to hear if it's an oboe or an English horn.

When she subsides, Jean says, "I'm not going to ground you." Like Mel's usually allowed this wild social life. "The only thing, as far as going over to Erin's, I think today I'd just rather have you home. I haven't really seen you or Roger for—"

"You saw me all >'6'j^terday. Mother." Mel's back to normal. Too quickly: she's devalued her weeping.

"You know what I mean. I'd like us to be together."

"Oh great."

"If Erin would like to come over here later—"

"She doesn't want to," says Mel. "Our house is cruddy, and there's nothing to do."

"Is that what she said?"

"No, but that's what she thinks."

3 0 S

"So what did she say, exactly?"

"That her and her mom had to go somewhere."

"That doesn't sound quite the same to me as saying she didn't want to come here," Jean says. "Are you getting hungry? We haven't had any lunch."

"Sort of."

"So why don't I go put the clothes in the dryer and then fix us some lunch. And maybe try to get Roger involved in a game of Monopoly or something."

"I don't feel like Monopoly," says Mel. "I don't know, maybe."

It turns out to be the first right move of the day. Of the week. Roger lets himself be lured down, and as they play, they eat peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches—peanut butter and banana for Mel—and listen to the Beatles. It's so odd that a terrifying song like "I Am the Walrus" has become kid-friendly, Roger buys Park Place and Boardwalk but passes up chances to get other stuff so he can save for a hotel. Two Beatles CDs go by before Mel begins fidgeting and Roger starts getting up to do things between turns. When Jean suspends the game—to be continued tonight—they protest, but they clearly need a break. And she needs to put in the storm windows, to stop these cold drafts.

The downstairs windows are easy: push the screens up, pull the glass down. She takes the screens out of the combination doors, carries them out to the garage, brings the glass inserts back and sticks them in. The upstairs windows, though, take the old-fashioned wooden storm sash. Does she really dare do this? She gets the aluminum extension ladder from the garage, leans it against the house and climbs up to scope out the situation. Looks like all you have to do is hang the storm sash from those hooks above the windows, push them into place and turn the little things at the sides to secure them. She goes back out to the garage for the first one. Thank God they're not huge—you can bring them up the ladder one-handed while holding on with the other hand. And there's only six of them.

When she comes back inside, her face feeling aglow from being out in the cold, fresh air, she calls upstairs to ask who's ready to go on with the game. Roger yes; Mel no, then yes. Soon Jean's having to mortgage her cheapo properties. She nicknames Roger "Roger the Ruthless," and he goes Heh-heh-heh. For all the world like a nine-year-old. Mel's bored but indulgent.

When Jean thinks to look, it's dark outside. She remembers they

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need milk and God knows what else, so she asks Mel to play for her and goes into the kitchen to make a list. Actually, Carol left them pretty well stocked. Okay, milk, orange juice, maybe Rice Krispies, since even Mel won't eat shredded wheat. They've got bread for toast, but English muffins would be a nice change. It might be good just to have something light for supper. Soup and toasted English muffins. Cut up an apple. She puts on her jacket and asks if anybody wants to ride along to 7-Eleven; no takers. Roger says she's just won second prize in a beauty contest, collect ten dollars; this cracks him up.

She uses the pay phone outside the 7-Eleven to give Champ another try, feeling like a straying wife inventing an errand so she can call her lover. But she thought she should tell him they found Willis's truck, at least that's her excuse, and the kids don't need to know about every hopeless phone call. Champ hasn't heard a word. Not a peep. Would've called if he had—^well, hell, she knows that. Weird about the truck. But shit, it's all weird. What can he say?

Heading home with their little bag of groceries, Jean turns the corner and pulls over to look down the block at their house. Lights cheerily on, orange pumpkin bag bulging with dead leaves. It could be any family's house. For a second she pretends that she has no connection to any of this. The thought creeps her out. She could just drive by that house and keep going.

F Q U R

Champ hangs up the phone and says, "You are a sick, sick pup."

"Yeah, okay," Willis says. "No argument." He's sitting in the plump, onion-smelling Salvation Army easy chair in Champ's kitchen, sunk with his ass lower than his knees because the springs are shot to shit; his index finger's clamped in a book called Oswald Talked that Champ says blows Gerald Posner out of the water.

"And I'm a sick pup," says Champ, "for going along with this shit,"

"Okay. Point taken. But what did she say exactly?"

"Well, I can't like paraphrase it word for word" Champ says. "They towed your truck off of Houston Street—she thought I better have that information. Look, you have got to straighten this shit out. You know what I'm saying?"

"I wiU. I'm going to."

"Yeah, like when? Because I'm not doin' this shit anymore, okay? The last fuckin' time I'm going to like lie to your wife.''

"When did you lie before?"

"I didn't," says Champ, "That's the fuckin' point. She calls the first time and I'm like, Nope, nope, not a word, haven't heard shit, you know, which I hadn't."

"Okay, so you're telling her the same thing now."

"Yeah, right, except now —you want a cold one, by the way? You know for one thing, Tina's going to fuckin' kill me, out of fuckin' female solidarity." He opens the refrigerator and holds up a Budweiser tallboy. "Yes? No? Might take the edge off of shit."

"What a concept," says Willis. "Yeah. Please." He takes his finger out of the book and looks some more at the picture of Oswald with his white undershirt and his I'm-a-patsy stare, posed between two thug cops in dark uniforms. One's a fat old potato-shaped fuck with sergeant's stripes, the other a young brush-cut Nazi like the early George Jones,

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glaring at Oswald as if he really was the piece of shit who shot the President.

"Okay, just to put this at its crudest level," says Champ, "you must be tired of spanking the monkey." Willis's arm gives a jerk—something icy. "Here." Champ's handing him the tallboy.

"I don't know," Willis says. "Shit, what does that even mean, tired of}" Fact is, he loses focus and the Unnamable won't stay stiff. For months now. This really could be clinical depression. He takes the first sip, supposedly the best.

"Oh, phi/orophy," says Champ. "Great, let's do that for a while." He takes out a tallboy for himself, sits down at the kitchen table and pops it. "You're welcome," he says. "Fuck time is it? It's dark out again. Oh baby. Tina's going to fuckin' kill me."

"You keep saying that," says Willis.

"I wasn't going to do this shit anymore. Fuckin' all-nighters. All-dayers. And I was being real good, you know? Okay, I'm fucked. Fm fucked.''

"When was she supposed to get back?"