Preston Falls : a novel (13 page)

"Like you say. What does anybody. You play in a band?" The light turns green. Reed honks and the Saab moves.

"Used to," says Willis. "Couple years ago. Now I just haul the thing out once in a while and play along with stuff. Try not to lose my calluses."

"Well, hey, you're welcome to come jam with my sick crew," says Reed. "What kind of guitar you have?"

"Tele."

"Cool. So who are you into?"

"Whoever. You know, lot of people. I guess if it came right down, Keith more than anybody."

"Cool."

"Speaking of people who can't play but can play" says Willis. "But if I'm jamming along with something, it'll be anywhere from, I don't know, country shit—"

"Cool."

"—to James Brown to—"

"Cool. Listen," says Philip Reed, "you got to come jam with us, man. We finally, after three years, found a kick-ass drummer."

"Hardest thing," says Willis.

"Yeah, see, you know. Fve been trying to get this across to these assholes. All the guy asks is that we let him sing 'Get Out of My Life, Woman'—you know, that's his little number that he likes to do—and these guys are like 'He's em^^^rrassing us.' Unbelievable. This is a guy who used to tour with Anne Murray, man. You know, he says. Course he's also a major fuckup, but come on. Here, this is the place right here."

A plastic Diet Pepsi sign hangs over the sidewalk from a two-story brick box with fresh white paint and red geraniums in the window. Willis holds open the screen door, not out of courtliness but because he doesn't want Philip Reed behind him, where his most shameful stink must be.

"So does your band play out?" Willis picks up the menu, a Xeroxed page in a clear plastic sheath with metal corners.

"Once a month, that's it. The Log Cabin, over in Brandon? Shit,

PRESTON FALLS

we're all busy. I mean, Sparky's not busy—the drummer I was telling you? But everybody else, you know, between jobs and families. We do get together once a week and just kick shit around. Guy who plays bass lives down in Sandgate— way out in the fuckin' boonies—and he fixed up a spot in his barn where we can make some serious noise." Willis notices for the first time Philip Reed's wedding band. "In fact, what are you doing tomorrow night? We're supposed to get together about nine o'clock, and we usually go to one, two in the morning."

"Shit, I don't know," says Willis. "What kind of stuff you do?"

"Ah, you know, just whatever anybody feels like. And knows some words to. All covers, that's the one stipulation. Anybody writes an original song, they're out of the band. So it's like anything from 'Call Me the Breeze' to—I don't know—'Gloria'? 'Sweet Home Alabama'? Shit like that."

" 'Farmer John'?" says Willis.

''There you go.''

A plump, pimply young waitress comes and asks for their order. She pronounces it like Nabokov's Ada. Cheese omelettes: cheddar for Willis, American for Reed. "I think I'm in love," Reed says when she's gone. "See, she's the real thing. Fucking eugenics is going to come in and you're going to have a world of Sharon Stones drinking fucking latte."

"I could get into that," says Willis, who in fact has never seen a Sharon Stone movie.

"So could I, actually."

"What's this place like, where you play?" says Willis.

"The Cabin? Your basic dive. I like to say it's the other B and B crowd—bikers and burnouts? Some real down hillbillies. Old Calvin used to come by once in a while—speaking of down hillbillies. Fuckin' Calvin." Reed shakes his head, and the ponytail wags. "Calvin's a piece of work. But hey, he's mah bud. Anyhow. Basically they keep having us back because we suck and we know we suck and we just sort of get up there, you know? Like we make up a different stupid name every time, that they can put in the paper. You know, Saturday night: Cowflop. Whatever it is. Like, Okay, we're hacks and that's the deal—you know what I'm saying? Or you could also just look at it as an excuse to do drugs and get away from the wives, which it also is."

So this means they do drugs?

The waitress sets down coffees and little things of half-and-half.

When she turns away, Reed kisses bunched fingertips. "So what do you say? You want to come over tomorrow? Kick some shit around?"

"I don't know," says Willis. "If I wouldn't be fucking up your practice."

"Our what?'' says Reed. "Hey, practice is for lawyers."

Willis doubts it's the first time he's said this.

Since he doesn't have to be anywhere anytime for anything, he takes his sweet time getting back to Preston Falls. He stops at the junk shop in East Wakefield that always has the same shit, hoping, as always, to find like a Danelectro guitar—something they don't know is anything. As if people who make their living buying and selling shit don't know what shit's worth. No instruments at all; just an empty wooden violin case. But he finds a copy of Fear Strikes Out, which he's always meant to read. Fifty cents? Can't go wrong.

When he opens the kitchen door, the place already has that empty-house smell. He gets one of Champ's tallboys out of the refrigerator and brings it into the front hall. Everything else can fucking wait until he settles in and zones out for a while. He sits down on the sofa and takes off his boots: a connoisseur's stink, like a fine old cheese. He brings his feet up and lies back, head elevated to optimum angle by the sofa arm and one throw pillow. He pulls the comforter over him, then reaches up and switches on the floor lamp, though it's the middle of a sunny afternoon. Now he's safe. He picks up Dombey and Son, waiting faithfully where he left it. The lamp turns the white page a warm yellowish—unless this cheap fucking paper is already rotting because it's not acid-free—and he imagines the warmth reflecting back and soaking into his face.

He wakes up blank, as if after a shock treatment: he's someplace with a light on. Then all the old shit coalesces.

The sun's gone down: it's dark outside those oh-so-New-Englandy panes of glass on either side of the front door. He reaches for the tallboy he remembers must be there on the floor. Warm and raspy going down: dry, like light, powdery sand in his throat, as if it weren't seeping into the tissues. He climbs over the back of the couch, opens the front door, and goes out onto the doorstep. The sky is a dark slate blue with a salmon tinge at the horizon, which fades even as he's looking. Chilly out here in

just t-shirt and stocking feet. He pisses down into the grass. A bat flitters by. He hears an owl, and a faraway car melodiously going through its gears. He grips his goosefleshed upper arms. Shit, let's get back in.

What he'd better do, he'd better call and let Jean know he's out and this thing is over, and thank her for doing the thing with the lawyer. True, she said no communication, but this would simply be observing the ordinary decencies, no?

The phone rings five times, then the machine comes on and he gets to hear his own voice saying leave a message. It beeps, and the silence starts unrolling. "Yeah, hi," he says. "Just calling to say I got back, ah, to the house okay"—almost said got home, a faux pas for sure—"and, ah, the whole thing was over really quickly and it just turned out not to be that big a deal. So. I hope your trip back went okay, and that, you know, all is well? It's Tuesday night—Tuesday evening, actually. I'll talk to you later. Hello, Mel, if you get this. Hello, Rog. Hope school went well. And, I don't know, talk to you later."

He opens the refrigerator. Two tallboys left. Plus the usual shit that accumulates. Bowl of fruit salad that might still be okay, with a drumhead of plastic wrap. Eggs. Half a package of cheese with a rubber band around it, which Jean must have put away; Willis always just folds the excess plastic under and lets the cheese itself weight it down. Thing of bacon with a couple of strips left. Polaner All Fruit: raspberry, strawberry, apricot. Stick and a half of butter. Paul Newman salad dressing with the once-amusing garlanded N. So he can eat through all this shit before he gets back to the subsistence food he eats when he's here alone in a stupid attempt to lose weight, which he undermines with shit like beer. Oatmeal when he wakes up; the rest of the oatmeal, cold, for lunch. For dinner, brown rice, with garlic browned separately in olive oil.

"Tell you what let's have," he says aloud. But he can't think what. He stands there staring into the open refrigerator until the thermostat kicks the motor on, and his body twitches at the sudden noise. Fucking silent in here. Well, that was the idea, no?

He ends up eating Cheerios and working away on another taUboy while lying on the sofa reading Sherlock Holmes as a warmup for Dombey and Son. He reads the one about the guy who murders his sister and drives his brothers insane by burning some kind of hallucinogenic poison in their room, and then the one about the guy who builds the fake partition he hides behind so they think he's dead and his body's

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been burned in the woodpile. He never does get back to Dombey and Son, but that's cool too. Eventually this should make him sleepy, because what he doesn't want is to be up until five in the morning and then wake up at like three in the afternoon.

But around midnight, still wide awake, he figures he might as well play some guitar, and starts a thing of coffee. Crazy motherfucker named Willis. He goes out to the woodshed for the Twin and the Tele—got to finish stacking that wood tomorrow—and lugs them into the kitchen. He wedges The Woman's Home Companion Cookbook under the front of the Twin to angle the son of a bitch so it's rearing back and blasting in his face. He sets the boombox on the kitchen counter, on the theory that the whole cabinet underneath acts as a resonating chamber. Then he picks out CDs to play along with: Guitar Town, Serving 190 Proof, Talk Is Cheap, Ragged Glory, Slow Train Coming. And then feels guilty that it's all white music, so he puts The Best of Buddy Guy on the stack, even though he won't actually play along with it, because Buddy Guy is too discouraging. Coffee's ready.

He starts out with the Neil Young, that song about how Neil Young is thankful for his country home. Slow tempo, three chords, nothing too fucking subtle. Willis isn't your world's best guitar player, but neither is Neil Young, so he can more or less keep up—which is why he's into Neil Young. That and because he's smarter than Neil Young, or at least more cynical. Although maybe Neil Young is in fact smarter than Willis and has managed to get his head so Zen simple that he can go to his country home and get peace of mind the way the song says. All of which is probably making too much of what's basically a trite piece of shit. Unless it's actually a sendup, but Willis doesn't think so. Though later on Neil Young does send up "Farmer John," unless that's not a sendup either. Willis worries about this exact same shit every time he plays along with Ragged Glory. Because he's a fucking machine.

After he's done with the Neil Young, he puts on the Dylan and cracks the last of the tallboys to help him start thinking about starting to think about going to sleep. Except one poor tallboy can't do much against all that coffee, so he washes down a Comtrex to level the playing field. He gets sick of the Dylan—all that medium-tempo shit in A minor—and pops another Comtrex, then puts on the Keith. At last, partway through that, he starts to feel he's losing track of things. By now trees and shit are starting to emerge in the brightening grayness outside the windows. He hits Stop and switches off the hissing amplifier. In the

sudden silence, amid residual buzz in his ringing ears, he hears a blue jay scream, then a crow cawing as if in response. Day birds.

He sets the Tele on the guitar stand and goes upstairs, taking along Dombey and Son just in case he's not as far gone as he estimates. In the bedroom, it's gray enough to make out all the pieces of furniture but not to read print. So fuck it. He pulls off his jeans, which it occurs to him he hasn't had off for however many days, and gets under the covers. Slipping his hand under the waistband of his underpants, he grasps the Unnamable; to warm his hand as much as anything. Son of a bitch swells, though you wouldn't call it hard. Now his eyes are adjusting, and it's not dark in here at all. But that's cool. Better, actually. A whole waking world standing guard while he sleeps.

The plan they used to have went like this: Willis would stick it out at Dandineau and support them while Jean was finishing Pratt, then she would turn around and support them with some incredibly satisfying job and Willis would figure out something. "You could just do your music," Jean used to say. Yeah, well, his music. With like eight hours a day to practice, maybe he could cut it with some hundred-dollar-a-night bar band. Maybe. Time has marched since Willis learned Mick Taylor's break on "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'?" note for note.

What Willis knows about himself is that deep down he's a word man. Which is contemptible. He got his first promotion for the press release he wrote when Dandineau shut down the plant in Meridian, Mississippi. (Hey, the hometown of Jimmie Rodgers.) On the first draft, Marty Katz underlined a throwaway reference to "counseling" for employees left high and dry, and wrote in the margin, "Pis amp up." There was nothing to amp up: a ten-minute presentation in the lunchroom by some woman from the Mississippi state employment service. In his rewrite, Willis called this "an intensive counseling program with a range of placement services" and made up a quote from James Buck-ridge, chairman and president, about Dandineau's commitment to its people. Marty wrote "Kudos! (Singular!)" in the margin, and changed "commitment" to "loyalty." Which amped up Willis's respect for Marty Katz.

Willis pissed and moaned to Jean that what little integrity he'd ever had was down the toilet, but he secretly trusted he'd be okay as long as his cynicism held out. He was making money, however worldly that was, and winning praise from father figures, however pathetic that was. So: in for a dime. After the first couple of years at Dandineau he let his hair grow back and started wearing black t-shirts under Armani-knockoff

suits, keeping an emergency dress shirt and tie on a hanger behind his door.