David Gates - Preston Falls

After he's done with the Neil Young, he puts on the Dylan and cracks the last of the tallboys to help him start thinking about starting to think about going to sleep. Except one poor tallboy can't do much against all that coffee, so he washes down a Comtrex to level the playing field. He gets sick of the Dylan — all that medium-tempo shit in A minor — and pops another Comtrex, then puts on the Keith. At last, partway through that, he starts to feel he's losing track of things. By now trees and shit are starting to emerge in the brightening grayness outside the windows. He hits Stop and switches off the hissing amplifier. In the

sudden silence, amid residual buzz in his ringing ears, he hears a blue jay scream, then a crow cawing as if in response. Day birds.

He sets the Tele on the guitar stand and goes upstairs, taking along Dombey and Son just in case he's not as far gone as he estimates. In the bedroom, it's gray enough to make out all the pieces of furniture but not to read print. So fuck it. He pulls off his jeans, which it occurs to him he hasn't had off for however many days, and gets under the covers. Slipping his hand under the waistband of his underpants, he grasps the Unnamable; to warm his hand as much as anything. Son of a bitch swells, though you wouldn't call it hard. Now his eyes are adjusting, and it's not dark in here at all. But that's cool. Better, actually. A whole waking world standing guard while he sleeps.

The plan they used to have went like this: Willis would stick it out at Dandineau and support them while Jean was finishing Pratt, then she would turn around and support them with some incredibly satisfying job and Willis would figure out something. "You could just do your music," Jean used to say. Yeah, well, his music. With like eight hours a day to practice, maybe he could cut it with some hundred-dollar-a-night bar band. Maybe. Time has marched since Willis learned Mick Taylor's break on "Can't You Hear Me Knockin'?" note for note.

What Willis knows about himself is that deep down he's a word man. Which is contemptible. He got his first promotion for the press release he wrote when Dandineau shut down the plant in Meridian, Mississippi. (Hey, the hometown of Jimmie Rodgers.) On the first draft, Marty Katz underlined a throwaway reference to "counseling" for employees left high and dry, and wrote in the margin, "Pis amp up." There was nothing to amp up: a ten-minute presentation in the lunchroom by some woman from the Mississippi state employment service. In his rewrite, Willis called this "an intensive counseling program with a range of placement services" and made up a quote from James Buck-ridge, chairman and president, about Dandineau's commitment to its people. Marty wrote "Kudos! (Singular!)" in the margin, and changed "commitment" to "loyalty." Which amped up Willis's respect for Marty Katz.

Willis pissed and moaned to Jean that what little integrity he'd ever had was down the toilet, but he secretly trusted he'd be okay as long as his cynicism held out. He was making money, however worldly that was, and winning praise from father figures, however pathetic that was. So: in for a dime. After the first couple of years at Dandineau he let his hair grow back and started wearing black t-shirts under Armani-knockoff

suits, keeping an emergency dress shirt and tie on a hanger behind his door.

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."

PRESTON FALLS

"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