Preston Falls : a novel

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

Thanks to Jeff Giles, who read it first, for his advice and encouragement, for ridiculing several bum titles, and for not campaigning longer than six months for his bum title.

To Susan Szeliga, for letting loose with telepathi-cally apt suggestions.

To David Spry, for reassurance early on.

To Marjorie Horvitz, for vigilant copyediting and embarrassingly good catches.

To Gary Fisketjon, for the kind of editing that supposedly doesn't get done anymore, for a green-penciled duh where duh was the mot juste, and for taking this on in the first place.

To Amanda Urban, for state-of-the-art advocacy and cut-to-the-chase commentary.

To Cathleen McGuigan and my other editors at Newsweek, for the leaves of absence that helped me get this done.

And to Susan and Kate, for just about everything.

This book is for my father, Gene Gates.

So I saw in my dream that the man began to run. Now, he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, "Life! life! eternal life!"

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

Late Friday afternoon they start for Preston Falls: Jean and the kids in the Cherokee, Willis in his truck with Rathbone the dog riding shotgun. When Willis proposed that Roger ride with them and make it an all-male expedition, Roger said, "I don't want to." The one boy in America ashamed to be seen in a pickup truck. Or was that not the problem?

Among his colleagues (a word he precedes with a half-beat's hesitation, to suggest quotation marks) Willis keeps dropping the odd allusion to his truck, lest they forget he's a badass outlaw. And five mornings a week it's his fuck-you to the Volvos in the commuter lot at the Chesterton station. A '77 Dodge V-8, with mustard-yellow paint flaking off to show the original dark green, patches of gray Bondo on fenders and rocker panels, and—this is the best thing—a black driver's-side door that must've come off a whole different model, because the chrome doesn't line up. He spotted it one weekend in Want Ad Digest: "4WD, some rust, runs good." Guy wanted eight, Willis beat him down to seven, then put another seven fifty into it, not counting five for a pullout tape deck and decent speakers; so for fifteen hundred smackers he's got himself the hillbilly shitheap par excellence, complete with old-truck smell, but actually semireliable. Willis is Director of Public Affairs for Dandineau Beverages, bottlers of Sportif: the original caffeine-laced Gatorade knockoff, plus the line of flavored iced teas without all the minerals and shit.

Jean backs the Cherokee out of the driveway, then sets the hand brake and walks back to the truck. "You want to lead the way?" she says. Otherwise she's going to have his headlights in her mirror the whole trip.

"Ah," he says. "The alpha dog and his dog." One of his jokes or whatever they are. He salutes, touching the visor of his Raiders cap; she looks up at the embroidered pirate, complete with cutlasses and eye patch. This is going to be a long weekend. In both senses. Tomorrow

PRESTON FALLS

Willis's brother is coming up, probably bringing the girlfriend, and the Champ-and-Willis show can be wearing.

Waiting behind him for the light at the corner of Route 9, she sees him reach across and stroke Rathbone's head and say something. Probably That's my boy. Melanie, who won the coin toss for front seat, complains that taking two vehicles is wasteful. Jean walks her through it: Daddy's staying in Preston Falls and they have to come back to Chesterton Monday night, because Tuesday's the first day of school and a workday, and because Aunt Carol's coming Tuesday night. Mel says, "Right, I know all that. I'm not stupid, Mother." Roger's by himself in the back, going Poom, poom. He's found his old Shredder action figure in the little storage thing, and he's working its bendable arms to make it punch itself in the face.

She follows Willis's truck to the McDonald's just before the Tappan Zee, their traditional Friday night stop back when they first bought the place in Preston Falls. When he pulls up to the squawk box, Jean watches him talk down from his window, then ceremoniously touch his cap again; the truck lurches forward to the pickup window. She can hear that he's got music going, but she can't make out what. She orders a chicken fajita, the only thing even vaguely healthy Roger orders all the stuff in a Happy Meal but won't call it a Happy Meal, and she thinks, Well, good for you, you're not buying into that at least. (Putting the most hopeful interpretation.) Melanie won't eat anything from McDonald's. She's brought along rice cakes in a plastic bag and insists on eating them dry.

Willis has finished his Big Mac and fries before they even get onto the Tappan Zee, and Rathbone guzzled down his plain burger in three jerks of his head. The Friday of Labor Day weekend at six o'clock: could they possibly have timed it any worse? Traffic on the bridge creeping and stopping, creeping and stopping, Willis sweating like a bastard in the heat and golden glare, trying not to look at his temperature gauge too often, worrying about his clutch. He snaps the tape deck off; at zero miles an hour, Steve Earle is just another fucking irritant. Poor Rathbone has his head out the window, panting, sides heaving, tongue dripping drool. Willis unsnaps his seat belt and takes his eyes off the road long enough to lean down and swish a finger around in the weighted dog dish on the floor, hoping the sound will remind Rathbone. Rathbone looks over, and Willis says, "Yes, water. You know, water} Lap lap lap?" He turns back to the traffic just in time to see a Lexus cut in front of him.

He yells that the Lexus is a cocksucking son of a bitch, but its tinted windows are up.

Back in the Cherokee, Jean's running the air conditioner, but if this traffic doesn't start moving, she's going to have to turn it off and open the windows, because the needle's creeping up toward the red. There's probably some music all three of them could agree on, but she doesn't have the energy for negotiations. Maybe Mel and Roger will be on better behavior when her sister gets here. Carol said she'll stay in Chesterton for September, and perhaps into October. Because she misses fall in the Northeast. Jean supposes anything's possible.

"How come Daddy gets so much vacation and you don't?" says Mel.

"It's not actually vacation," Jean says. "It's a leave of absence."

"Oh. Well, excuse me.'' Mel opens the glove compartment, takes out a tape—Jean can't see what—then tosses it back in, making the plastic clatter.

"In answer to your question," Jean says, "I haven't been at my job as long as Daddy's been at his. And anyway I can't afford to just take two months off." Jean is the in-house design person for The Paley Group, a firm of investment consultants. After she took the job, Willis started doing a little faux man-of-the-people riff, where he'd go on about how the whole stock market was a conspiracy to bleed the working stiff.

"Can Daddy afford it?" says Mel.

"So he says. He worked the numbers on the computer, and he thinks we might actually make out a little better because of taxes."

Willis is far up ahead; she's let three cars bully their way in front of her. She sees his palm banging on the roof of the truck.

"I don't get it," says Mel.

"I'm still hungry," Roger says.

"You just ate," says Jean. Then, to Mel: "If you make less money, your taxes are lower."

"I know," Roger says, "but I still am''

"You'll just have to hang on," says Jean. "There should be food up at the house."

"But I might be asleep then."

"Why don't you just go to sleep now, Roger?" says Mel. "So Mom? He's just going to stay up there and work on the house the whole time?"

"I don't know how much he'll actually get done. I think he really just needs to get away."

"Yeah, right," says Mel. "Away from us."

PRESTON FALLS

"That's not so," Jean says. "Everybody needs to recharge sometimes."

"Yeah, right," says Mel.

"Are you disappointed that he's not coming back down for the first day of school?"

"Why would I be?" says Mel. "I mean, I've already had like how many first days of school in my life."

"What about you, Rog?" says Jean. "Do you feel disappointed that Daddy won't be there?" This is dancing on the line between encouraging them to voice their feelings and egging them on against their father.

"I don't care," Roger says. ''Mom. I'm really hungry, I'm not kidding. How much longer is it going to ^e?"

"Quite a while," says Jean. "Especially with this traffic."

"But like how long?"

"I don't know. Maybe another four hours?" This sounds terrible. "Three and a half?"

Roger throws Shredder to the floor and says, "Shit."

"You have a time-out," says Jean. When they're in the car, this means nine minutes without speaking. One minute per year. In the mirror she sees Roger shrug and mouth Shit shit shit.

After Newburgh the traffic finally gets up to speed, and Willis ejects the Steve Earle and feels around in the bag of tapes for something else. With no kids and no Jean, he can play whatever he wants as loud as he wants. Rathbone never seems to mind, maybe because riding with Willis for years has made him deaf. Willis sticks in Straight Outta Compton, gives the volume a good crank, and on comes the Nigga With Attitude, saying You are now about to witness the strenth of street knowledge, and then that boomy drum machine, and he wishes he had a pair of those huge fur-covered speaker boxes to do the son of a bitch justice. Crazy motherfucker named Willis.

He's done this drive pretty much every Friday night for the past five years, more and more often by himself. Mel's gotten to the age where she'd rather do stuff with her friends; since it's her life too—Willis and Jean agree on that—somebody has to stay in Chesterton, and there's no point in them both. And Jean says the drive wears her out. They've talked about how some weekends maybe it should be the boys hitting the road and the girls hanging out at home. But the one time they tried

it, Roger spent the weekend whining. At one point he wantonly stomped a Raffi tape, and Willis (though he knew how satisfying it must have felt, plastic smashing underfoot) had to give him a time-out. Finally, in desperation, he drove Roger all the way to The Great Escape in Lake George. But Roger slept for most of the trip, woke up cranky, and refused to go on any of the shit, so they turned around and drove back to Preston Falls, with Willis thinking This is my life ticking away.

Jean was never gung-ho about Preston Falls in the first place, and he can sort of sympathize. In cold weather (meaning half the year) she can't use her workroom up there, which he pissily calls her atelier, because it's unheated and uninsulated and those oil-filled electric radiators they bought at Ames do fuck-all. So she'd end up playing Monopoly with the kids at the kitchen table, while he tried to get work done on the house. And maybe steal half an hour to play guitar, Preston Falls being the one place he can crank his Fender Twin. Mel likes dropping remarks to her friends about their "country house," but the one time she actually dragged What's-her-name—the fat one—along for a weekend, Pudgette complained that there was nothing to do and that the house smelled. And so it does: of good old woodsmoke. On winter weekends when the family's not there, Willis sometimes takes the batteries out of the smoke detectors and opens the doors of both woodstoves just to keep that smell intense, which he knows is like Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess. But hey. And now winter's rolling around again. Already the days are depressingly shorter: a month ago it was still light at eight-thirty.

John Coltrane is squealing and honking and Elvin Jones is crashing and bashing as Willis turns off of 22A onto Quaker Bridge Road. Quakers because they quaked before God, supposedly. This is the home stretch: Quaker Bridge Road to County Road 39 to Goodwin Hill Road to Ragged Hill Road, and bingo. Uphill all the way and scary as shit in winter; still, it beats going straight into the center of Preston Falls and then over, which they did the first two years, until Willis bought a county map. He shifts down—it's pure bullshit, but he likes to think even the clutch works better up here—and starts to climb. He feels the air turn chilly on his arm, rolls his window partway up and turns the music partway down, so as not to jolt awake the sleeping farmers and their farm wives.

They come bumping into the dooryard sometime after one. When his headlights hit the woodshed, Willis sees that Calvin Castleman finally

PRESTON FALLS

got around to delivering the two cords of wood he'd promised a month ago—and he's dumped the whole fucking pile against the door that connects the woodshed and the kitchen. Willis gets out of the truck and Rathbone scrambles past him, runs over and lifts his leg against the corner of the shed. Limping a little—his limp is always more noticeable at night—Willis walks back to the Cherokee, making circles with his fist to tell Jean to roll her window down.

"You're not going to fucking believe this," he says. Using clenched-teeth intensity rather than volume to show he's good and pissed. Jean shoots him a remember-the-children look regardless.

"Yeah, okay. Fine," he says. "But check it out." He twirls his hand three times and then— ta da! —stretches forth his palm to indicate the pile of wood. "So what do you think is an appropriate reaction? Stupid son of a bitch."

"Will you please watch yourself?" she says.

"Yeah, sorry, but this is completely unbelievable. I mean, the guy hasn't seen a door before? That goes into a house} Jesus." Mel, in the passenger seat, is rubbing her eyes; Roger, in back, is yawning and peering out his window into blackness. "This is called class hostility in action."

"Let's just get in the house," she says. "It's late, the drive was exhausting —^we just need to get to bed."

"Right, so we can be rested for a wonderful day of moving two cords of wood."

"Well, what time is your brother supposed to get here? Can't he give you a hand?"

"Yeah, just what he wants to spend his weekend doing."