Preston Falls : a novel (4 page)

"Wow, you'd think they'd be running around in all this woods."

"You'd think," he says, as Champ comes out from behind the shed, fiddling with his fly.

Tina claps her hands over her eyes: see no evil. "Jesus, Champ. Why don't you just shake off in front of us too?"

"Hey, it's my bro," says Champ. "So listen, where's the family?"

Jean takes Mel and Roger to breakfast at Winner's and stays at the counter drinking coffee and reading the Times while they play the video games. She leaves them there while she runs stupid errands: to the post office, to the cash machine, to the Grand Union, to Rite Aid for Off and Caladryl, to the new little hippie place for decent bread. But she can't stay in town forever.

When she pulls into the driveway, she has to go up onto the grass to get around this huge, sagging hulk of a convertible—the sort of car locals drive, except they don't know any locals besides that creature Willis buys wood from. Mr. Hog Roster, (It took her the longest time to realize this was a misspelling and not some kind of registry, or an obscure farm tool.) So this must belong to Willis's brother—^who of course would also drive some V-8 rustbucket. The father really did a job on those two. She gets out of the Cherokee and sees the three of them— Willis, his brother and the girlfriend—sitting out on the plastic-resin Adirondack chairs Willis bought at Ames for $6.99, each with one of those tall cans of beer. Champ and the girlfriend look like a Gap ad with their matching white t-shirts and sunglasses. Do they plan their outfits? She wouldn't put it past them. Willis has his boombox outside, plugged into the long orange cord. Champ stands up and raises his beer can at her when she gets out to unload the shopping bags. (Mel and Roger are still in the car, arguing.) Finally the girlfriend bestirs herself to pick her way across the grass in fetching bare feet and give a cheek-to-cheek air kiss. Tina: that's the name. This apparendy shames Willis into getting up and coming over too. Jean can hear some sort of depressing fifties country music going—not Hank Williams, she doesn't think. Him she can usually tell.

"Hi," she says to Tina. "You must have made good time." She looks at Willis, who's just standing there. "Could you help with the bags, please?"

"Melanie, that is one of the great t-shirts," says Tina, touching a finger to Courtney Love's fat red lip. Mel shrugs.

Champ has finally roused himself and come over. "Cool," he says to Mel. "And you. Boiler," he says to Roger. "You're getting huge. You play middle linebacker? Here, what can I carry?"

"Sit, both of you," says Willis. "I got 'em."

PRESTON FALLS

"This is Roger?'' says Tina in fake disbelief. "Roger, I wouldn't have even recognized you." Of course not, Jean feels like saying; she's met him, what, once before? My guit-tar stays a little better in tune, the singer sings. The sun shines bright and there's honey on the moon.

Roger says to Willis, "She said we can't go swimming."

"Roger," says Willis. "When we have guests, it's nice to greet them? You too, Mel." He grabs up two plastic bags by the handles with his right hand and takes a third in his left.

"But how come we can't}" says Roger. Willis looks at Jean and raises his eyebrows: take a stand here, or let it go?

"We ran into Arthur Bjork and the kids coming out of Winner's," Jean tells Willis. "They invited Mel and Roger over to swim in their pond, but I said we had company."

"I'm sure they'll give you guys a rain check," Willis says. "Speaking o{ which, it looks like it's clouding over anyway. Tell you what. While Fm helping Mommy with the stuff, why don't you show your uncle and his friend where they're going to sleep." I.e., Roger's room, which he agreed to give up if he could sleep in his pup tent.

"Why don't youT' says Roger.

"Hmm," says Willis, setting the bags back on the ground. Heavy sons of bitches. "This is not going to end pleasantly."

"Roger," Jean says, "you were warned earlier about talking back."

"You're wrecking everything, Roger," says Mel.

"Melanie," Willis says. "Let your mother handle this?"

"Fine," says Jean. "Yes, let me handle it. Roger, you have a time-out. You can take it in your sister's room." She picks up a bag of groceries in each hand and starts for the house.

Willis picks up his bags again. "Wait, let me get the door."

Jean keeps walking.

"Mom?" Mel calls. "Can I take a shower?"

"Fine," Jean says. She sets down a bag, opens the screen door and lets it slap behind her.

Willis sets the bags on the kitchen table and goes upstairs to make sure Roger's doing his time-out. When he comes back down, Jean's standing at the counter, chopping an onion and stinking up the place like a fucking tenement. "Now, where to stow all this shit," he says.

She turns around, tears all down her cheeks. "I can deal with that." Her voice is okay, therefore it's the onion. "I'd rather you got the fire started."

He salutes and says, "Your wish." To add is my command, he decides, would be too pissy. "You did remember charcoal, right?"

"Yes," she says.

He finds it in one of the bags, under some celery and shit. "Ah, Kingsford: what ho. Now, I think we've got some lighter fluid left."

"I bought a new thing of it," she says. "It should be there somewhere. "

He brings the charcoal and fluid out to where they've got the hibachi set up on a flat rock. He takes off the black-crusted grills and dumps the old ashes into the high grass and weeds on the other side of the stone wall. He pours in a pile of charcoal and squirts on probably way too much stuff. Looking up from the tall, smelly flames, he sees a dark cloudbank in the east. He sucks his index finger and sticks it in the air, but his finger feels equaUy cool on all sides, so who the fuck knows. He brings the grills into the kitchen.

"When you're finished cleaning those," Jean says, "could you put some olive oil or something on them? Maybe that'll keep stuff from sticking this time."

"Yeah, when Vm finished.''

He stands at the sink scraping burned-on grease from the grills with a putty knife, deftly dodging when Jean ducks in from time to time to wash a vegetable under the running water. He sprinkles Comet onto a piece of steel wool, scours and rinses, then saturates a corner of paper towel with olive oil and rubs it over the grills. To absolutely no purpose, it seems to him. Won't it just burn off?

He takes the grflls outside and puts them on the fire; sure enough, the olive ofl starts hissing. Shit, that sky looks evfl. He washes his hands at the kitchen sink with Lemon Joy and goes into the living room. Roger's back down from his time-out and he's got his sneakers up on the couch: a no-no in Chesterton, but this couch is coated with hair and stinks of dog. Tina and wet-haired Mel sit cross-legged on the floor, Mel talking, Tina nodding.

Champ's perched like an ape on a pressback chair, sitting on his heels. "Say there. Dad,'' he says. "These kids say they never been in a ragtop. We got time for a little spin before we chow, right?"

PRESTON FALLS

"Can we?" says Roger.

"Yeah, short one, I guess," Willis says. "Ten, fifteen minutes? I just started the fire. Aren't you sick of driving, though?"

"Hey, not with the mighty turnpike cruiser." Champ climbs down off the chair, stands and stretches. "Got to pick the music, though. What are you guys into—Metallica?"

"Yess!" says Roger.

"Oh God" says Mel.

"Uh-oh, gender gap," Champ says. ''Some kind of gap. Okay, you can look through, we got Alanis What s-her-ass, we got Green Day, Green Bay, whatever the hell. My animal companion keeps me up on all this crap."

"Yeah, guess what hed be listening to if I let him." Tina, holding an imaginary mike, sings, "Sometoms it's hord, tuh he a wum-mun"

"She lies," says Champ.

"Could we have Alanis?" says Mel.

Roger pretends to vomit. And they all troop through the dining room, into the kitchen and out the door, like a happy family.

Willis goes back into the kitchen, and Jean looks up from chopping. "I take it you think he's all right to drive."

"What, because someone's in a decent mood they're not fit to be behind the wheel?"

"He's been drinking," she says. "On top of whatever else he does." She cuts the stem out of a green pepper. The horn honks.

"He's had a can of beer, for Christ's sake." Willis looks out the window and waves. "Now. What can I do?"

"It would help if you put the chicken and the vegetables on the skewers." With the knife, she pushes chunks of the pepper into the pile of other vegetables on the cutting board.

"Ah. So I take it we're shishking."

"The chicken's in a bowl in the refrigerator," she says. "Don't throw out the marinade, please?"

"Using it to baste?" See? He knows.

"Yes," she says.

He takes out the earthenware bowl with the blue rings. She's been marinating the chicken in her usual pink goop: raspberry Dannon Light plus whatever else. "Hey, the old Lost Frank," he says. "So. Where did the skewers get to?"

"They're on the counter," she says.

"Ah," he says. "What do you know. If they'd been a snake, dot dot dot."

He gets down the oblong white platter, then washes his hands at the sink again (more Lemon Joy) to show he's oh so careful about contamination. Under cover of the running water he chants, in Nigga With Attitude voice, "Mah ahdentity hah itself causes vahlence." Then glances over his shoulder. She couldn't have heard him anyway; she's in the dining room, folding paper napkins into triangles.

He takes a skewer in his right hand and with his left thumb and forefinger picks the first chunk of translucent chicken out of the goop. Meat that light shines through: does that fucking nail it or what? Fit emblem for Man! For are we not all of us meat that light shines through? And is it not meet that we should be meat? He holds it up and runs the skewer right through the son of a bitch—zow! Take that, you fuck.

He turns around and there's Jean, pinching three water glasses in each hand. She takes them into the dining room; he skewers a square of green pepper, then a piece of whatever this other thing is.

A peal of thunder: a sharp crack widening and deepening into a kaboom that rattles the windows.

Rathbone comes scuttling into the kitchen, tail between his legs, and Willis strokes his head; poor bastard's trembling. Then in comes Jean. "Oh my God," she says. "They're out in that car with the top down."

"I assume Curtis has the sense to put his top up in a thunderstorm," he says. "Anyhow, a car's supposedly the safest place to be."

"Yes. Thank you. Fm aware of that."

"Okay, fine," he says. "Fm going to go try to get the fucking grill under cover."

He opens the screen door and stares at the sky: dark now all the way down to the horizon. There's this weird hush, then another rolling thunderclap. He goes out to the hibachi—the flames have died and the briquets are white at the edges—picks it up by the wooden handles and starts for the open doorway of the woodshed. A breeze comes up, leaves rustle overhead, and a raindrop hits the charcoal with a hiss and a wisp of smoke. He makes it underneath the woodshed roof just as the heavens open and the rain comes roaring down. Faster than he would've thought possible, a plinky tune starts up where something's wrong with the gutter.

Thunderclap.

He looks out at the rain, coming down so hard it raises a mist above

PRESTON FALLS

the ground, and spots the boombox sitting out by the plastic chairs. He should at least unplug the orange cord in the kitchen before lightning strikes the boombox, races along the cord and nukes out everything in the house. Or is that idiotic? He turns and looks at the fucking hill of firewood blocking the door into the house. He's nerving himself up to make a run for it, when here comes the convertible—with the top down—pulling up to the kitchen door, lights on, wipers going madly. Mel and Roger scramble over the sides of the car as Tina opens her door; the three of them dash for the house, but Champ just sits there behind the wheel. He looks in the rearview mirror, slicks back his sopping hair with both hands, then opens the door and walks through the rain over to the woodshed. "Fifty fuckin' times I had that son of a bitch top up and down," he says. "Switch must've got wet or something,"

"It won't go up?" says Willis.

Champ puts index finger to temple and speed-talks: "The sum of the square root of an isosceles triangle is equal to the hypotenuse of the other two sides." He slicks back his hair again. "Listen, how about we move some of this shit to one side so I can get the thing under cover?"

"Try it, I guess," says Willis. "It's pretty big. Might get it partway in."

"Hey, just what the little woman says, nurk nurk nurk."

When they come into the kitchen, Jean's just mopping the muddy floor where Tina and the kids came through. "That's awful about your top," she says to Champ. "You're welcome to take a warm shower when Tina gets out. You just have to wait a few minutes for the hot water to build up again. It's a little primitive up here."

Champ goes stiff and raises a palm. "Me like primitive. You not worry. He^^-ya hey-ya hey-y2t. hey-ya."

Jean turns to Willis. "Did you get the griU under cover?"

He snaps her a salute.

Champ points to the platter stacked with shish kebabs. "Us heap good plenty eat." Rubs his stomach. "Me checkum squaw."

"How are the coals?" Jean says.

"Getting there," says Willis.

She fetches a sigh. "How long until it's ready to cook?"

"Probably by the time everything's together it should be ready."

"Everything is together," she says.

Well, who could resist? "Isn't it pretty to think so," he says. Then he adds, "I guess we could start bringing shit out."

He gallantly holds a garbage bag over her as she bears the platter to the woodshed, then drags over a cinderblock. She sets the platter on it; he takes a skewer and lays it on the grill.

"Why don't I do that?" she says. "You could take the platter in and wash it."