David Gates - Preston Falls

"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."

Jean closes her eyes and says, "Can we please go in if we're going in?"

Willis carries in the stuff while Jean gets the kids to bed. He brings their black canvas duffel bags and Jean's yellow nylon one upstairs, then starts loading his own shit in. He keeps clothes up here, so his shoulder bag has only books, tapes and CDs. And he's brought along the guitars that weren't here already: the Rick, the J-200 and the D-18, which he brings in last and leaves in the kitchen. He goes into the pantry and gets the boombox out of its hiding place behind the canning jars they'd bought the first year and never used. He takes CDs out of kitchen drawers and puts them back in the wooden Coca-Cola crates on the counter.

He's sitting on a kitchen chair playing along with Merle Hag-

gard singing "Wake Up," when Jean comes down in her long cotton nightgown.

Wake up, don t just lay there hike cold granite stone.

This is so hit-you-over-the-head applicable that what can he do but pretend it's not.

"The upstairs windows were open," she says.

"Yes. I left them open," he says, turning the guitar strings-down and laying it across his thighs. "Otherwise it gets too stuffy to sleep. As you know." He leans forward and hits Stop.

"What if it rains?" she says. "You don't have to stop, by the way. Tm just going to bed."