David Gates - Preston Falls

"I don't care if they don't want to be my friend," Roger says. "They're probably a feeb like her that has to spell everything."

"Watch out, Roger," says Mel.

"Watch out, Roger," says Roger.

"I'm not kidding," says Mel.

"Vm not kidding," says Roger.

"Enough," Willis says.

"Yeah, well, she started it."

"I did not.''

"God help you both," Willis says.

He shifts down again, double-clutching but still grinding gears, and turns onto Goodwin Hill Road. Setting one more piss-poor example by cruising through the stop sign.

"So," he says. He keeps the truck in second to get up this first steep stretch; it feels as if he's fucking up the engine by revving it to a roar while the thing's just crawling, but in third it'll clunk and lurch. "I imagine your mother's just about packed."

Not a word from either of them. But what are they supposed to say? There's truly something wrong with him; you don't act this way with your children. The thing to do is to pull over, fall on them with slobbery kisses, clutch at their bare knees, bathe their bare feet with your tears and dry them with your hair. At least he's sane enough just to keep driving.

Willis stands in the middle of the road, holding Rathbone by the collar with one hand and waving the Cherokee out of sight with the other. As they turn the corner, Jean's arm comes out the window: the hand flutters and they're gone. Willis lets go of Rathbone, who looks down the road, then up at him. Summer's over. It's one o'clock in the afternoon.

Okay. To work, to work.

Okay, first thing he's going to do, he's going to tear out the living room ceiling, where some asshole smeared joint compound over the sheetrock in modernistic swirls. Probably the same asshole who nailed particleboard over the foot-wide floorboards upstairs, for carpeting he never put down. Asshole, though: that's a little harsh. Really just somebody doing his best to make an old house less depressing by his lights. So Willis is going to expose the beams, which he hopes are hand-hewn, then frame around them with two-by-fours and cut sheetrock to fit in between. True, this chichi severity is basically bullshit. But if not that, then what? He's asked Jean, who went to fucking Pratt, for Christ's sake, and now spends her days advising those sharks she works for on exactly this kind of shit. What color to paint the walls in the fucking shark tank. She told him, "Do what you want."

He brings the stepladder and his toolbelt in from the woodshed, then starts moving shit out of the living room. He carries the armchair into the dining room, along with the oak end table he doesn't like but belonged to Grandma Willis, and the lamp that goes on it. The books, Jesus. He ends up just putting them out in the hall, in tall, tottering Dr. Seuss pfles, and stacks the bricks and boards out there too. The boards he'U recycle when he gets around to doing built-in bookcases. And the blanket chest they use as a coffee table? Well, how about up in the bedroom, at the foot of the bed. Like the fucking blanket chest it is.

Which leaves the sofa. Maybe just throw some plastic over it and

PRESTON FALLS

work around the fucker. But when you get a room this close to empty you want it fucking empty, so he decides to wrestle the cocksucker out into the hall. It's so wide he has to slip the pins and take off the door between the hall and the living room, and as it is the son of a bitch makes it with about that much to spare. He wedges it catty-corner, which blocks the front door, but at least you can squeeze past to get upstairs. Good. He brings the floor lamp in and lifts it over into the triangular space behind the sofa. Makes a cozy little nook.

"So what do you think, bro?" he says to Rathbone. "C'mere." Rathbone pads over, toenails clicking on the bare floorboards. "Our new headquarters — okay, bud?" He pats a sofa cushion; Rathbone climbs up, settles and sighs, chin on the cushion but eyes open. Willis goes back into the living room: dead empty. Okay. Ready to rock and roll.

He buckles on his toolbelt, picks up the decking hammer and, standing in the middle of the empty room, takes a two-handed swing at the ceiling like fucking Thor, the heavy head plowing claws-first into sheetrock.

Except it doesn't feel satisfying. And there's just a pissy little foot-long gash the width of the hammerhead.

He pokes the claws into the gash and rips, which is supposed to make a heroic expanse of ceiling buckle and come thundering down; it only busts out a little piece the size of a saucer. This is not fucking working. He grabs the stepladder and climbs up to tear at the gash with his hands: just a few more dipshit pieces. He gets down off the stepladder and tries the hammer again. Maybe if he can smash across in a straight line, perforate the son of a bitch, he can pull down a huge fucking section. What it is, he really doesn't know how to do this. And meanwhile all the dirt and mouseshit from up under the ceiling is falling into his face and he's coughing like a fucking miner — and can't you die of some virus that's carried in dried mouseshit?

So he goes looking for the fucking dust masks he bought last year and used one of and put the rest someplace, but he can't find the cock-suckers. He thrusts the hammer back into the loop of his toolbelt, stomps upstairs, paws through the laundry bag to find a dirty t-shirt, and brings it back down to the living room. He drapes it over his nose and mouth so he looks like a fucking harem girl, ties the son of a bitch around back of his neck by the fucking sleeves — which of course fogs his fucking glasses because he's sweating like a pig because he's fucking out of shape.

s s

He rips the t-shirt off his face, yanks the hammer out of his toolbelt, and throws it overhand at the window, which knocks the window screen out onto the grass which brings the sash crashing down.

Then he picks up the stepladder and heaves that at the fucking window: top end first, shattering glass, splintering sash. It smashes through in slow detail, like a Japanese wave.

The noise brings Rathbone into the living room, wagging his tail to placate Willis, who races into the kitchen and out the screen door, afraid that next he'll damage his dog. He throws himself down and starts tearing up grass and earth with his fists — hoping to God Rathbone won't jump through the smashed window thinking it's a game — jamming his face into the ground, biting at grass and earth. The feel of grainy dirt in his mouth makes him stop, finally; either that or something has simply run its course. He lies there on his stomach, spent, panting, his heart feeling like something in there's hitting him.

When he gets to his feet again, his lower lip is smarting and he's got a headache above his right eye, drilling into a single spot the size of a.22 hole — the classic warning sign of a stroke, isn't it? This could be the ballgame right here. He stumbles back inside, kneels on the kitchen floor and calls Rathbone, who cowers away, though still wagging his tail. This starts Willis weeping, and he lets himself collapse onto his side. Which seems to reassure Rathbone, who comes clicking over, sniffs, and lets Willis reach up and pat his head. Willis tries to get him in a bear hug, but the dog struggles and slithers away, and Willis starts blubbering all this shit, how sorry he is, how he'd never hurt him, so forth and so on. Thinking Hey, this time you really have fucking snapped. Congratulations.

He gets up and goes to look in the bathroom mirror. Yeah, nice job. Scraped the shit out of his chin and lower lip, dirt in between his teeth. Lucky he didn't break a fucking tooth. He washes his face gingerly and presses a towel on to dry it. Brushes his teeth and goes back into the living room. Nice, really nice. What's truly sickening, that was the original sash, nine-over-six, old glass with flaws that looked like floaters in your eyes. Absolutely smashed to shit. He thinks back to the moment he did this, and wonders if, contrary to the usual rule, there isn't a way you could go back and change it. This isn't one of those events in time where endless chains of other shit depend on it; it was just minutes ago, and nobody even saw it happen. Truly there's no reason this couldn't be wound back and then allowed to go forward again.