Preston Falls : a novel (46 page)

For a week or so he worried that Jean might drive by and spot the truck; then that problem got solved. Buzzed on his last, rainy-day smidgen at three a.m., he'd driven into the city to an after-hours club he'd read about in the Village Voice, on Avenue D, where Haitians supposedly hung out selling coke, ketamine and Ecstasy. (Later he learned that you could buy crack right there at the Birlstone, if you had the balls to knock on the door of Number 23. If you had the balls to try crack.) He found the club somehow and somehow didn't get mugged walking up from where he'd parked on Houston Street; but though he loitered in each smoky room, nobody came up to him and he didn't dare go up to anybody. One boy, who looked fourteen and had a safety pin through his nostril, eyed him, waved hi with his pinkie and then gave the pinkie a mock blowjob, in and out of his mouth. Five years older than Roger. Willis smelled piney currents of hash and reefer in the cigarette smoke; some kind of music that he assumed must be techno was thumping and beeping. And the accelerating sense of menace—maybe secondhand dope smoke—drove him out the door. When he got back to his good old truck, though, it wouldn't fucking get out of reverse. In desperation he turned the key, and the starter made the son of a bitch buck backward. Fuck. He knew that clutch was shot to shit. Good, fine: motherfucker can sit right there. He took the subway up to Grand Central and caught the first train to Chesterton—too early to run into Jean—then walked

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from the station to the motel. Four miles, give or take. Blistered the shit out of his feet. Well, they'd probably toughen up.

Nobody expected him back until the end of October. So why not let the sisters have their litde moment. Jean had agreed to leave him alone. And if she did call Preston Falls for some reason, she wasn't likely to put out an APB when nobody answered; not after their last few conversations. Mel and Roger? Trickier. While on the one hand it was axiomatic that kids needed a dad, did these kids need this dad? Mel was already gone, essentially: marking time until she could go to college and be with her friends 24-7, which was hip-hop talk. Willis was proud of being so many-minded he knew that and axiomatic too. And Roger—what would mend things there? A game of catch in the backyard? A couple of years ago, Willis had bought a book called The Father's Almanac: An Indispensable Book of Practical Advice and Ideas for Men Who Enjoy the Fun and Challenge of Raising Young Children. Cartoonish picture on the cover of a female-looking daddy holding two toddlers in his arms, his big lumpy ass puffing out the back of his brown pants. Willis found it discouraging that enjoyment seemed to be a precondition, but he did try a couple of the activities with Roger. Up in Preston Falls, they (meaning Willis) dug a hole behind the shed and made a Ugandan Ground Bow, putting a piece of eighth-inch plywood over the hole, attaching a string to the plywood and a flexible stick to the string and poking the stick into the ground. Roger twanged at the thing for almost thirty seconds before he got bored. And they made a mousetrap out of a plastic trash can: mouse walks up ramp, leaps for suspended cheese, falls in, can't climb out. But Roger took it outside in hopes of bigger game, forgot about it and a week later found a long-tailed mouse drowned in rainwater; he freaked, blamed Willis and refused to speak for two days. The book was still in Willis's office, at the bottom of his bottom desk drawer.

One way to think of this time might be to consider it a spiritual retreat. And in fact he thought about reading Thomas Merton. Though in fact he was rereading Pickwick Papers, which he'd borrowed from the library in Chesterton, because it was so satisfyingly infantile: fat old Mr. Pickwick always getting drunk and having to be taken care of, and just about no women. They had a laundry room at the Birlstone, and he decided to get into this monastic thing of wearing clean clothes every day. He walked to Kmart again and bought blue Dickies pants and shirts, plus a package each of Fruit Of The Loom briefs, Hanes crew socks (white with a double blue stripe at the top) and blue Fruit Of The

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Loom pocket t-shirts. He'd also decided to get into a thing with blue. It was like beyond black: that was his formulation, though he couldn't come up with any theory for it. Experimentally, he took off his wedding band for a few days. But it proved more distracting not to have it on: his ring finger felt light and bare. Apparently the microcompensations for that extra scruple of weight were still operating, the way your fingernails grow after you die.

If he were to die some night here at the Birlstone—of a heart attack—his wallet would teU the story. He was born 7/8/51. He was 5'10" and had brown eyes. He was an organ donor. His signature looked like a twelve-year-old's. His license was good until 7/8/98. He owned a 1977 Dodge truck, plate number D96-8GX. No pictures of anybody. His Stewart's Milk Club card had two of the ten numbers stamped: a long, weary way from that free half gallon.

Sometimes he'd chat with the genial black man who lived in 25, or was it 21? At any rate, two doors away from the crack dealers. Wilfredo looked to be in his sixties, a comfy belly filling out his knit shirts. His slacks always went with the shirt and he always wore the same narrow alligator belt. He smelled of what Willis thought might be Aramis. They first got to talking when Wilfredo saw Willis going into his room with the Times, smiled and held up a copy of The Economist. Fellow intellectuals! Wilfredo took The Economist for its Mideast coverage, which—as Willis was to learn—he followed to look for signs of the endtimes. After playing it cagey for a while to see which side Willis was on, Wilfredo gave him the lowdown on the American Legion: the man possessed by devils in Luke 8 told Jesus his name was Legion and Jesus cast the devils into swine and this was the swine flu that the government covered up and called Legionnaires' disease. Swine flu. Legionnaires' disease, AIDS, rabies, schizophrenia—all the same disease, which could be transmitted either by thinking or by radio. Wilfredo grew concerned about Willis's trips into New York and warned him that the subway trains marked N carry dead people—you must never, never get on one. Once, he said, at the 57th Street station, right under Carnegie Hall, President Truman beckoned to him when the car doors opened. Willis could usually get him off that stuff by bringing up bygone baseball. Wilfredo said he was at the Polo Grounds when Bobby Thompson hit the home run, and for all Willis could tell, he might've been. "Ralph Branca, right?" Willis said. "Number thirteen." Wilfredo punched his arms and said, "You got it, you got it." They talked Mays versus Mantle, Willis taking up for

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Mays though he'd always been for Mantle. (Even over Ted Williams, who got forced down your throat if you grew up in New England.) Wilfredo frowned and nodded. Hey, the father you never had.

Every couple of days, Willis would hike to the station, take a midday train into Grand Central and a late train back. (Little chance on either end of running into Jean, what with her work and family responsibilities.) He'd walk to the Public Library, or up to the Metropolitan to look at the Egyptian shit, pretending he thought it meant something to be in the presence of something ancient. Ancient, for Christ's sake. Wasn't your average rock more ancient, by millions of years, than any Egyptian shit? Which after all was made of rock. He'd sit in the Starbucks at Second Avenue and 81st Street, where they had an upstairs with exposed brick and funky furniture and where the music was always pleasing—hard bop or Gillian Welch or the Shirelles—though Willis wasn't always pleased. Sometimes he'd see the same big-eyed little girl, about Roger's age, with her gray-haired father, clearly on his second or third go-round. Or he assumed they were the same. She always wore a plaid school uniform; he usually wore a baseball cap with the Sinclair dinosaur. The father would drink coffee and read the Times; she would eat a chocolate mini-bundt cake and do her homework. Once, he saw the father sharpen her pencil with a pocketknife. Willis sometimes wondered if they might be hired actors. Hired to make him feel like shit. He tried not to let the father catch him looking. A stranger taking too much interest in your child: Willis used to worry about it himself.

Two or three times he walked over to spy, from across the street, on the building where Jean worked. Once, he even went into the lobby, bold as brass, and bought a cellophane bag of Mr. Nature nuts and raisins at the newsstand. It made him nervous, which apparently was the point. For a couple of weeks after his truck died, he'd walk down to Houston Street, stroll east on the downtown sidewalk and glance across at it, parked on the uptown side, each time with more tickets under the wiper. One day he saw the curbside window had been smashed. The next time he walked by, the wheels were gone and it was resting on four brake drums. And the last time, a bright-yellow VW bug, obviously a restoration, was parked where he thought the truck had been. All this walking was definitely beneficial. He'd stopped feeling short of breath, so maybe he didn't have a heart condition, and his big sloppy thighs were firming up. On Columbus Day, avoiding the fucking parade, he hiked up to 108th Street and actually managed to get into the building

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where he and Jean had first lived together. The lock on the street door was broken, and there he was in the same old brown-painted, gas-smelling hallway, with the fluorescent fixture hanging askew from the ceiling. He climbed up to the fourth floor, not even breathing hard, but when he got to the actual door of their old apartment, 4D, he had this flash of Twilight Zone fear that the thirty-year-old Doug Willis might suddenly come barging out, running some desperate, now-forgotten errand.

Then there was the day he was supposed to be back at Dandineau— that was a weird day. Halloween, as it happened. He got up way early and walked to the station; on the platform he clung close to a steel pillar, ready to dodge behind it, running his fingers over the round rivet heads. From Grand Central he walked all the way downtown without breaking a sweat and stood in the lobby of the building across the street from his office. To outfox the security guards, he glanced from time to time at his wrist as if he were waiting for someone. As if he had a wrist-watch. Every few looks, out of sheer deviltry, he'd check the underside of his wrist instead of the top. He didn't see any of the old gang, unless you counted a woman from Personnel he'd always half thought he might want to . . . whatever, despite her fake fingernails. She came out the revolving door, leaned against the building and smoked a cigarette, then flicked it away and went back in. He could have walked across the street, stepped into the elevator, and bingo: back in his life. Instead he took the A train uptown, with the idea of going to the Cloisters and looking at that triptych he thought he remembered they had there, some Flemish thing with weird perspective? He stood in the front of the lead car, forehead against the glass, peering ahead into the tunnel, and each new lighted station coming up far ahead, with the little people on the platform, was like a new level of understanding he could reach, if he could only get "Take the 'A Train" out of his fucking head. He was really no crazier here than he had been in Preston Falls, just more free. You sort of rose up as shit around you fell away. And the less you talked to people, the less you yourself were anybody in particular and the bigger and the more—what?—the more inclusive you got.

By 181st Street he was so panicked he got out of the subway and found a working phone and called Champ. Got his machine. "Hello, I love you . . ." He hung up without leaving a message. But it got him back to the old one-two one-two, simply being able to make the worldly judgment that it was asshoHc to put cute shit on your machine. If he could

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climb down so readily to this level of thinking, why not cross over to the other platform, take the train to Chambers Street and just go in to work? It was only like ten in the morning. For one thing, at a hundred and a half a week for just his room at the Birlstone, he was now down to— okay, whatever he was down to. Point taken.

That was a Monday. Tuesday morning, after Champ would have left for work, he called the apartment again, to leave a message saying he was safe and would Champ pass the word to Jean—but he got a busy signal. On Thursday he called a third time. (He had such a good grip on what day it was because every morning he got the Times at the little market a quarter mile south on Route 9.) This time he waited through Jim Morrison and past the beep, but hung up when he couldn't think how to start. He shouldVe written something down. Poor Champ was going to think the CIA was after him.

So on Friday afternoon he decided just to surrender himself in person. Easier on everybody. And of course in the back of his mind, cocaine was calling; maybe Champ would have some. Or could get some. Actually, spatial shit like "back" and "front" wasn't all that useful as a model for the mind. On the walk to the station, he shrank from every Cherokee he saw—a lot of fucking Jeep Cherokees in Chesterton, boy—and made it onto the 6:05 without being spotted. A couple of hours later he was buzzing Champ's buzzer, hoping that maybe, Friday night. Champ might be out someplace. Or hoping that he wouldn't.

"Is this even the right exit?" Champ says, putting his turn signal on. "It looks funny,"

"Chesterton, Route 9," says Willis. "Same as it ever was."

"I don't know. Shit, maybe I'm wrecked."

"Yeah,may^e."

"Look," Champ says, "I still think we should stop someplace and call. She's going to fuckin' shit her britches. You want me to call?"

"It's too late. What time is it?"

"That makes no sense. If it's too late to call —"

"What, you think we should put it off?"

"That's what you want to hear, right?" says Champ. "Look, I'll go in with you, how's that?" He pulls up at the light behind a BMW. "Look at that motherfucker. Watch, this'll fry his ass." He hits his brights and the BMW's inside lights up. The rearview mirror gleams white, and you can see that the guy driving is bald on top.