Preston Falls : a novel (45 page)

"Like tomorrow."

"Well, so you'll get a chance to sleep. She's not going to know."

"What are you, shittin' me? Tina has fuckin' X-ray telepathy. And what about that?" He points at the wall behind Willis. "I mean, what does that say?" He squints and pokes his index finger five times: "Drugs. Have. Been. Abused. Here."

Willis sticks his finger back in Oswald Talked and twists around to look. Last night he and Champ painted a speedometer six feet long and three feet high on that big kitchen wall. They'd gotten the idea on the way back from the East Village in Champ's car. Willis had argued that a tachometer would be more ironic—i.e., revving and getting nowhere— but Champ said that was too inside baseball. Actually, Champ's original idea was Ruby shooting Oswald—all you had to do was put like a grid over the picture and just copy the sucker square by square—but Willis said it was too political. They stopped and bought a pad so they could sketch Champ's speedometer, a quart of black Rust-Oleum, two quarter-inch brushes and, to paint by, Parsifal, on four CDs, Armin Jordan conducting the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. (Champ circled the block while Willis hit the downtown Tower, since he was afraid to sneak up to his office for his own copy.) They roughed the thing out on the wall in pencil, then bent the shit out of a W-monogrammed butter

3 I I

knife trying to pry open the fucking can. Willis painted the 0 to 60 side; Champ got to do 60 to 120 because it was his speedometer. They had been going to put a red needle that you could actually move—by an amazing miracle, Champ actually had a mop with a red handle—but they couldn't figure out a way to rig it up. Champ thought just a big screw, but by the time this became an issue, all the hardware stores were closed.

"Maybe you could paint over it," says Willis.

"Yeah, like how many coats of white paint? Ten?''

"Well, you don't just paint right on top of it. You use paint remover first. Or you could use stain-killing primer. Like that stuff KHz. K-i-l-z?"

"Like you've really done this. What do you care? You'll be back at the fuckin' Bates Motel, man. Tell me something. Why don't you at least go back up to East Buttfuck instead of that shithole? I mean, if you just want to fuckin' dwindle"

"I told you already," says Willis. "I can't go up there anymore."

"Oh, right, because the bad boys are going to get you. I forgot about that one. Didn't anybody ever tell you that coke makes you paranoid?"

"You don't know the situation. These are serious people."

"Right, they're so serious they have you making their fuckin' runs for 'em. No offense."

''Youd go back there?" says Willis. "Let 'em plant dope in your house?"

"Fuck, I wish. Okay, look. You obviously want to believe this shit— you know, which is cool. Actually, it is cool. I mean, that place up there wasn't doing you a whole lot of good. Any of you. My opinion. You have to go home, man."

"I need to think about that."

"Translation," Champ says. "/ need to go back and hole up again in my little motel room half a mile from my fuckin house. Don't expect me to fuckin' drive you."

"It's more like three miles."

"Oh, well then, that's difterent. What a sick pile of shit you are. I'm not kidding either. Fuck, I should've been a shrink. My family background?" He stretches forth a hand. "C. L. Willis, Psychotherapist. Practice Limited to Psychotherapy. Get a couch in here? Feel the ladies' titties? Shit, fuckin' Freud used to do coke. Speaking of which, what do you say? Put the edge back on?"

"I thought you said we were out."

PRESTON FALLS

"Okay, that was almost true," Champ says. "But I do have a top-secret super-emergency stash that we might as well do up. The more I think about it, I don't need that shit around. I want to just live a pure life, you know what I'm saying? Up in the morning, beddy-bye at night, throw a fuck into the old lady couple times a week? The pure life. That's what you need, bro."

"That's what I had."

"That's what you had," says Champ. ''Yes. ¥.xact\y. So will you call your fuckin' wife, please? So we can get high in peace? And then Til drive you up there."

"I thought you weren't going to."

"Not to the fuckin' Bates Motel, no. To your house. You know, where you fuckin' live.''

Why does Willis's finger suddenly hurt like a bastard? Oh: because he's squeezing it in this book. He leans forward and sets it on the floor. Oswald talks, bullshit walks.

Champ shakes his head. "Shit, Fm dead. Fuckin' Tina, man, Fm going to have to borrow off of her to pay the fuckin' rent, which Fm already like a week late or something. Seven hundred dollars, man, right up the old information superhighway." He taps the side of his nose. "I can't afford this shit, you know? I mean, Fm not a fuckin' Wall Street analyst. Look, bro. You have to at least call and let her know you're fuckin' alive, man. 'Cause if you don't I will."

"Bullshit."

"I don't think so," says Champ. "Jesus, how can you do it? How can you fuckin' do it? Kids and everything? Believe me, if I had kids? I wouldn't put 'em through this shit."

"Bullshit," says Willis. "You're a bigger fuckup than me, even."

"I don't think so."

"Bullshit."

"Well, this is a really fucking intelligent discussion," Champ says.

"So where's this secret hidden stash?" Willis tries to get up out of the chair. "Actually I have to pee." Could beer go through him this fast? Isn't that supposed to be one warning sign of prostate cancer?

"Pee?" Champ says. "You have to pee} You mean you have to piss. Jesus. What do you, go in and sit down} First it's the fucking opera . . . I think you need marital relations."

Willis can't seem to get up out of this chair. He rocks forward, back, forward; at last he's on his feet, swaying. He looks at the speedometer. A

3 I 3

bad drip coming off the 0 in 30. Another one off the 7 in 70. Off both Is in 110. Bathroom's through the doorway and to the left. He paws at the curtain of clattering beads.

"Y'all come back now," he hears Champ say. "You can't say Dallas doesn't love you, Mr. President."

Somebody must have been watching him: how could you throw a fucking rifle off the Tappan Zee Bridge and get away with it? And sure enough, as he climbed back into his truck, a car on the westbound span slowed suspiciously. The toll lady wouldn't look him in the eye, and in the mirror Willis was sure he saw her with a phone at her ear. Still, nobody stopped him the rest of the way into the city, though he was pretty sure he was being shadowed, maybe by a helicopter.

He crossed the Third Avenue Bridge at that weird hour when you can't tell if it's daylight or streetlight, and stopped at a Korean's at the corner of Second Avenue and 89th to buy coffee, a shrink-wrapped slice of pound cake and a Sunday Times. He took a left on 88th, another left on First Avenue, left again on 97th and through the park, watching his rearview mirror. Once he reached the West Side, he pretended he felt safe, on the theory that if he radiated only this feeling they wouldn't be able to pick up his presence. He parked at the corner of West End and 102nd and drank the coffee and looked at the Magazine and the Book Review, trying to find something he could concentrate on. The pound cake went to a dim, grimy man who tapped at his window; Willis pretended to believe the man really was a. bum, and sure enough, off he went. What it was, he just wasn't all that high anymore. In fact, you'd probably have to call this crashing. Every few minutes he'd start up the truck again and blast the heater. Then he'd turn it off and feel everything around him cool down and down and down.

When squads of dressed-up churchgoers showed that it must be a plausible hour, he drove downtown and parked on Chambers Street (legal on Sunday), then walked around the corner to his office. Definitely crashing: legs heavy, head throbbing. The weekend guy in the lobby (white guy with mustache and Marine haircut, probably a moonlighting cop) took for-fucking-ever checking Willis's ID (meanwhile the

3 I 5

son of a bitch had fucking "Piano Man" coming out of his portable radio) and finally deigned to let him sign in and go to the fucking elevators. In the seventeenth-floor men's room, he took off all his clothes and gave himself a whore's bath, then went into his office, closed the Venetian blinds and got out the bottle of Rebel Yell he kept in his desk drawer. In a while, he curled up on the floor, wearing for extra warmth the shirt he kept hanging on the back of his door, hugging himself, using his boots for a pillow.

He woke up sometime after dark. Mouth dry. Hungry. He took the elevator up to 21, where they had the machines, and bought a Dannon Light raspberry yogurt and a flat package of microwave popcorn. Back on 17, he put the popcorn in the departmental microwave and made a pot of departmental coffee. He found half-and-half in the departmental refrigerator, plus a can of Diet Coke and a stick of Polly-O string cheese. The fluorescent fixtures seemed to be buzzing and pulsing, but otherwise this was an okay place to be. He considered coming here every night after people had gone home and just having thatho. his life from now on. But of course sooner or later.

He sat back in his chair, feet on his desk, and ate and drank his coffee while listening to the prelude to Parsifal on his office boombox. Such a trip to hear a CD again, every little thing so cold and clear. He really should listen to more opera and bag all this ignorant faux-primitive shit he'd been abusing himself with for so many years: the caterwauling inbred hillbillies and the ugga-bugga Negroes. (So he was thinking in terms of life going on.) By the time the prelude faded on that last, drawn-out, nerve-racking seventh-chord that never does fucking resolve, he'd finished the popcorn and the Polly-O and the yogurt; he hit Stop before Gurnemanz started in and the proceedings actually began. Getting a leetle edgy about being here, actually.

Down in the lobby, he signed out for a different security guy, a shaven-headed young black man with gold-rimmed spectacles, listening to Brother Harold Camping on Family Radio. When he'd signed in this morning, he'd scrawled an illegible tangle: good. With fuck-you clarity, he wrote: 7:48 p.m. His truck was where he'd left it. He headed back uptown, stopped for coffee and followed First Avenue all the way up to that shit-ass little bridge where you don't have to pay toll and onto the Major Deegan, bound for Chesterton. When he got there he'd stop and call from like the Gulf station. He truly meant to be going home. Thought he meant to be. Thought he thought he meant to be.

PRESTON FALLS

But instead of stopping, he drove straight to the house. Just to look things over, get the feel. He shifted down to second and crawled by. There sat the Cherokee in the driveway and, parked behind it, a little red pickup truck with Washington State tags. So her sister finally got it together. The downstairs lights were on. Past the house, he made a left on Crofts, turned around in somebody's driveway and crept back around the corner. He pulled over to the curb and killed his lights. Through the kitchen window he could make out Jean's head. The mouth seemed to be moving: talking to somebody? He pretended she was singing: the tearjerking Act IV reprise of the naively happy little aria she'd sung in Act I. Then in from the left came Carol (the mezzo) with her mouth moving: it was the famous Commiseration Scene.

What time was it anyway? Maybe 8:30? Later? She wouldVe just put Roger to bed, or be just about to. And this was Sunday night: school day tomorrow. Not the absolute greatest timing. He tromped the clutch and worked the gearshift—grind grind—and waited till he was past the house to turn his lights back on. Jesus, if she'd seen him. He suddenly had to take a shit.

He drove to McDonald's and sneaked past the counter into their clean men's room. Then to Dunkin' Donuts for coffee, since he was starting to fade again. And a chocolate glazed, to take a little edge off the coffee: dense little fucker, from all the oil it soaked up, and black like the turd of a meat-eater. He got back on Route 9 north, looking for a place to pull over and eat where he couldn't be seen, and then remembered the Birlstone. TV. WEEKLY RATES AVAILABLE. Just for tonight, this might be a better idea. Not disrupt their whole thing.

And then it was easiest just to keep staying.

Paneling, carpeting, double bed with a Formica-veneer headboard and a wall fixture with a bullet-shaped metal shade. His pied a terror, a litde joke he made up, in his head, for when he talked to Champ sometime, or to Marty Katz. For a time when he'd be looking back on this time. It wasn't the photogenic deprivation he'd always aspired to—sitting on an iron bedstead under a bare bulb thinking absolute zero Zen nothing— but better in a way. Or at least more noir. The Birlstone was your basic fifties motor court turned hot-sheets motel: flat-roofed, salmon-pink, a sign out front with lights timed to blink in a circle. Welfare clients placed by the county occupied half the rooms, and at night, through the

3 I 7

flimsy walls, different TV stations mooshed together into a neutral uproar. One day he walked to Kmart and bought a small portable radio, a Sharp, $14.99, which he kept tuned to WNYC, or to WQXR, the station of The New York Times. He tried to keep his Saturday afternoons free (another little joke) for the Metropolitan Opera broadcast. He considered a way of life that would include making a note of what next week's opera was going to be and getting hold of the libretto somewhere. The New York Public Library, maybe. That would sure as hell give things more of a focus.

He was afraid that what was left of his money would get ripped off unless he carried it on him, which he was afraid to do. Eventually he found a place, over by the bathroom door, where you could pry away the paneling, and he taped the big bills in there, flat against the sheetrock, and let the paneling whap back into place. And he hid a last, rainy-day smidgen of cocaine inside the switch for the bathroom light, unscrewing the switch plate and tucking the little foil packet among the capped wire ends.