Preston Falls : a novel (14 page)

He bought his first good acoustic guitar: a '59 J-200, because Martins were a cliche. And then a John Lennon-type Rickenbacker— for a while, Willis loved that clangy shit—and then a '39 D-18 because he'd always wanted a Martin. All this, of course, was when they still lived in their rent-controlled shithole on West 108th Street, before the kids and the house in Chesterton. He got his old Telecaster worked on by the guy who did Danny Gatton's guitars, and he had the blackface Twin he'd owned since high school completely gone over: even a new cord with a three-prong plug. For a while he was getting together on Wednesday nights with a hip dentist, an assistant dean at City College and an abstract painter who actually played decent guitar. They chipped in on a rehearsal studio in the West Thirties and worked away for months on the same ten or fifteen songs: "Jo^y Green Giant," "Charley's Girl," "I Fought the Law," a Sex Pistols-sounding version of "White Lightning."

Then, with a year to go at Pratt, Jean got pregnant: an inadvertency with the diaphragm, supposedly.

"But what do you expect me to do with her?" Jean said, when Willis reminded her of their old plan. They were cleaning up from Mel's second birthday party. "Just stick her in day care?"

"It's not exactly unprecedented," he said.

"Oh, but Fm so into her now," she said, scraping ice-cream-sodden cake into the garbage. "I just want to drink her. This time with her is so short."

"Short for you," he said. "Fm going right out of my fucking mind.''

"Do you realize in three years she'll be starting kindergarten? And after that she'll just be gone."

"Three years? I don't know if I can do another three months in that place." He popped a balloon. "This is not what I signed on for."

"You have such a memorable way of putting things," she said.

"Fm asking you to honor an agreement we had."

"Yes, when things were totally different." She turned to scrape another plate, and he drank the red wine from some parent's plastic glass.

"Besides," he said, "she needs to be interacting more with other kids. You saw what she was like today."

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"She's only two''

"Still," he said. "And you need to start working back into your life." He tossed the glass into the garbage.

"How dare you tell me what I need?"

So they were into the how-dare-yous. He held up a hand. "Fine. Just wanted to know what I could count on. Now I know."

But apparently the shit about interacting with other kids did its work. It might even have been true. Once they were speaking again, they renegotiated the plan: Jean was to go back for one course that fall, then two in the spring; Melanie was to be put in day care for the afternoons; Willis was to pick her up after work and cook dinner while Jean did her school shit. Since Willis had just been kicked up another ten thousand, he thought they could swing the day care, though after taxes ten thousand dollars worked out to about nothing per paycheck. And now there was Jean's tuition. Plus payments on the year-old Honda he'd bought with the excuse that Melanie should be exposed to trees and grass and fresh air. Another thing that might have been true.

After Jean's fall semester Willis was made head of Public Affairs and got kicked up another twenty. This was when his eleven- and twelve-hour days began, and he started putting on weight and getting short of breath. Yet even with just the early afternoons and late nights to herself, Jean thought she could still have her degree in another two years, three max. By which time Mel would be in school. Jean could take a full-time job and Willis could start thinking what he might want to do with his life.

Then, right before Jean's last semester, another inadvertency. She obviously had it in for him, as well as for herself. Now he got it: he would work at Dandineau Beverages until he died of a heart attack, and that would be his fucking life.

On the other hand, he had a son. To his shame, he had been secretly put off by Mel's babyhood, but with Roger he was able to feel, mostly, the way a father should feel. Including the feeling that time was short. First the tiny scrunched face that seemed to mutate more each day into the face Roger would someday have. Then holding him up by his arms as he skimmed along making walking motions with his legs, forced wide apart by the bulky diaper. Roger talking, then talking in sentences. When neither Jean nor Mel could hear, Willis used to sing to him: Love is lovelier the second time around. And Roger would sing, in that fluting voice, hoarse around the edges: Twinkle twinkle yittle star. When Mel

corrected him, he'd say, "That's what I said, twinkle twinkle yittle star." He was scared of Dr. Seuss books—and there was something sinister about how things popped into existence only because the words for them rhymed with the words for other things Dr. Seuss had just thrown out there. He liked "Ain't Got No Home," by Clarence "Frogman" Henry.

Okay, let's not beat this shit to death.

When Roger turned nine this past January, he announced he was too old to be read to anymore. And since, in the oh-so-white public schools they moved to Chesterton for, the kids seem to spend half the day watching supposedly educational videos and the other half playing with computers, Willis fears for his future. As if he were a walking advertisement for the life of the mind: whoring himself and buying toys as compensation. The guitars, the truck, the good sound system, the sagging shelves of books and CDs. Hey, Preston Falls itself.

He found the farmhouse five summers ago, while they were tourist-ing around that weird New York-Vermont border country. Heading for Fort Ticonderoga, more to have something to head for than as a history lesson: Roger was only four, and Mel's first-grade teacher had pissed away the whole year on the fucking Indians. Willis bought the Preston Falls Argus to check out the—^whatever the word was—the spatial analogue to Zeitgeist —and there was the ad: "Owner Says Sell! Country Setting, 20 ac+ — . Needs TLC." And a picture of the house with bare trees around it. It had those eyebrow windows. Like the house Willis grew up in, until he was twelve, in Etna, New Hampshire. He pointed out the bare trees to Jean: since this was July, the place had obviously been on the market awhile. "Fifty-five thousand?" she said. "It must be a mess inside."

The old Somebody place—Willis has heard the name fifty fucking times—had once been a five-hundred-acre farm: from the top of this hill to the top of that hill, way up the road, way down the road, on both sides of the road, including the land where Calvin Castleman's trailer now sits. The owner saying "Sell!" turned out to be the National Bank of Preston Falls; they'd foreclosed after the poor son of a bitch who'd bought the house and the last twenty acres got laid off at the woodworking plant. A real estate lady with glasses like the wife who gets strangled in Strangers on a Train showed them through. Her big selling point was that the house was post and beam. Right. Didn't all houses have fucking beams? And since the beams weren't hanging in space, what was holding them

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up but fucking posts? Upstairs in what he imagined as Roger's room, Willis sat cross-legged on the particleboard floor, looked out the eyebrow window and pictured his son on a summer morning, sitting on wide, sun-warmed floorboards, lacing up his sneaks and peering out at the day being offered to him. Willis's old bedroom—before his mother took him and Champ to live in Cambridge—had the same shin-level windows. He used to sit cross-legged and look down at his tire swing hanging from the big maple tree, though he never actually swung in it much, Willis was never a jock, even before he broke his leg playing baseball and spent three months in a cast. WeU, enough. He took the real estate lady down into the cellar, jabbed a jackknife into a post or a beam or whatever the fuck, which had the consistency of angel food cake, and offered her forty.

The owner said "SeU!"

Jean said, "It's your money."

Willis was flush that year. His father had died and his mother had moved back up to Etna, into their old house with the eyebrow windows; the old man had never taken her name off the deed. She sold her apartment in Brookline and split the proceeds three ways with Wfllis and Champ, actuafly using the word reparations. Willis did some rough figuring. If he put twenty thousand down, it would mean making payments on a twenty-thousand-dollar loan, plus property taxes. What, three hundred and change a month? It was nothing. It was like an extra-bad phone bill. He could actually do this. And once he'd exposed the beams and the wide floorboards, built bookcases and brought in Oriental rugs and blue-painted pie safes, Jean might be less freaked out by the whole Preston FaUs gestalt— that was the word, gestalt. The trailers. The ratty chalets and A-frames. The Bondo'd-and-primered cars up on cinder-blocks. The wandering chickens. The dead raccoons and the roadside litter. The snarling dogs coming at you until their chains stopped them short.

This was before he saw that these were his secret allies.

When Willis wakes up it feels like late afternoon, and the Unnamable's rigid. Sort of tries to polish himself off but can't think what to think of. The temptation: Tina bent over in biker shorts. Some taboo there he can't articulate.

He goes downstairs, pisses, starts coffee. Clock says 3:27. Only mid-afternoon. Wednesday? So it's tonight he's supposed to go jam with What's-his-name. An hour to get there, probably, and an hour back. Which is crazy. But to play with actual people again? And if he stayed here he'd do what—lie on the couch reading books where the men say Damme, Sir! and the women are named shit like Louisa. Peter somebody—no, Philip. Philip Reed. He'd have to leave around eight. So four and a half hours to kill? Well, cook some oatmeal and take a shower and you're down to four. Play guitar a little to get the feel, maybe take another crack at that ceiling? He ends up reading more of Dombey and Son.

It's dark again when he loads the Twin and the Tele into the back of the truck. He sticks the guitar stand behind the seat, then decides he'll look like a dilettante and takes it back to the house. Then he wastes more time dithering over tapes; he ends up with Buddy Guy for the drive there, to make his playing subliminally blues-drenched, and Public Enemy to keep him awake on the way back.

He stops at the cash machine in Preston Falls and gets FAST CASH $40. Pitiful: in Chesterton it's FAST CASH $100. But he's only got about a thousand to last him these two months, and nothing coming in. Then over to Stewart's, where he pours a cup of coffee and pisses away a dollar and a quarter of his forty on a Want Ad Digest. Showing up early would be pushy, so he sits in a booth and looks through Musical Instruments, Motorcycles, Personals and Farm Equipment. He'd like to find an affordable 8N with a brush hog, not that he could afford it. The

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coffee gets him queasy, so he goes back up to the counter and buys a kaiser roll with butter and peanut butter, on the theory that it's porous. Then he feels as if something big is swelling inside him, pushing up on his heart. Willis and his body, those ancient enemies.

Halfway to Sandgate, he remembers he forgot Calvin Castleman's fucking hundred and fifty dollars.

Philip Reed's directions turn out to be good. The house either is or is not lime green (too dark to tell), but it sure does have a plastic gila monster on the porch roof. Fucker's the size of a German shepherd and glowing, lit from within; you can see the cord going into its mouth. Party boys. Willis comes jolting up the two-rut driveway past the house, as instructed, to a barn where he recognizes Reed's Z-whatever between a rusted-out Econoline van and an old bulbous Volvo from the days before they made them boxy. When he cuts the engine he can hear electric guitars tuning.

He hauls his guitar and amp through the tall barn door, held open by a cinderblock, and follows the sound up steep, trembling stairs to a hayloft, resting that fucking Fender Twin on every other step. When his head clears the floor of the loft, he can see a few sagging brown haybales and, in the far corner, a giant cube of cloudy plastic sheeting over a frame of two-by-fours, and the blurred, faceless forms of people inside. What might be a billed cap. A red shirt. A guitar neck, probably. Willis lugs his stuff over to where two sheets of plastic overlap, parts them with his guitar case and gets a skunky noseful of reefer.

Reed's kneeling on the shag carpeting that covers the hilly floorboards, plugging cords into a couple of stomp boxes, a black Les Paul slung over his shoulder on a tooled-leather strap. He looks up and says, "Hey, here's the man."

"I think I found the right place," Willis says, and sportively sniffs the air. There's a drum set (a fat longhair is tightening a snare), a mixing board set up on a card table, two old-time capsule-shaped mikes on mike stands, two speaker horns on sturdy tripods, two scuffed-up floor monitors. For decor, campy LP covers pushpinned to a beam: Lawrence Welk with liftfed baton, Sgt. Barry Sadler, Jim Nabors, some goony-looking country singer even Willis doesn't recognize: This Is Tommy Collins. A rusty oil-drum stove resting on cinderblocks, with a salvaged piece of corrugated aluminum roofing underneath: the stovepipe sticks right out through a circular hole in the wood siding, without a baffle, or flange, whatever you call it.

"Gentlemen?" says Reed. "Doug Willis."

"Hey."

"Hey."

"Okay, we got Sparky"—leveling a finger at the fat-boy drummer— "and Dan"—finger moving to a tall, lanky guy in a plaid hunting cap with the earflaps down—"and Mitch"—to a short guy with bug-eye sunglasses and a red shirt, wearing a low-slung Strat that looks too big on him.

The little Strat guy nods at Willis's case. "So what have we here?"

"Tele," says Willis. "Nothing special. Early seventies."

"Cool," the little guy says. "Come on, early seventies? They hadn't gone to shit then. By any means."

"Yeah, me either," says Willis.

"You got that right," says the drummer. He cocks his head and hits the snare once with a drumstick. Shakes his head.

"So whip it out," says Reed.