David Gates - Preston Falls

corrected him, he'd say, "That's what I said, twinkle twinkle yittle star." He was scared of Dr. Seuss books — and there was something sinister about how things popped into existence only because the words for them rhymed with the words for other things Dr. Seuss had just thrown out there. He liked "Ain't Got No Home," by Clarence "Frogman" Henry.

Okay, let's not beat this shit to death.

When Roger turned nine this past January, he announced he was too old to be read to anymore. And since, in the oh-so-white public schools they moved to Chesterton for, the kids seem to spend half the day watching supposedly educational videos and the other half playing with computers, Willis fears for his future. As if he were a walking advertisement for the life of the mind: whoring himself and buying toys as compensation. The guitars, the truck, the good sound system, the sagging shelves of books and CDs. Hey, Preston Falls itself.

He found the farmhouse five summers ago, while they were tourist-ing around that weird New York-Vermont border country. Heading for Fort Ticonderoga, more to have something to head for than as a history lesson: Roger was only four, and Mel's first-grade teacher had pissed away the whole year on the fucking Indians. Willis bought the Preston Falls Argus to check out the — ^whatever the word was — the spatial analogue to Zeitgeist — and there was the ad: "Owner Says Sell! Country Setting, 20 ac+ —. Needs TLC." And a picture of the house with bare trees around it. It had those eyebrow windows. Like the house Willis grew up in, until he was twelve, in Etna, New Hampshire. He pointed out the bare trees to Jean: since this was July, the place had obviously been on the market awhile. "Fifty-five thousand?" she said. "It must be a mess inside."

The old Somebody place — Willis has heard the name fifty fucking times — had once been a five-hundred-acre farm: from the top of this hill to the top of that hill, way up the road, way down the road, on both sides of the road, including the land where Calvin Castleman's trailer now sits. The owner saying "Sell!" turned out to be the National Bank of Preston Falls; they'd foreclosed after the poor son of a bitch who'd bought the house and the last twenty acres got laid off at the woodworking plant. A real estate lady with glasses like the wife who gets strangled in Strangers on a Train showed them through. Her big selling point was that the house was post and beam. Right. Didn't all houses have fucking beams? And since the beams weren't hanging in space, what was holding them

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up but fucking posts? Upstairs in what he imagined as Roger's room, Willis sat cross-legged on the particleboard floor, looked out the eyebrow window and pictured his son on a summer morning, sitting on wide, sun-warmed floorboards, lacing up his sneaks and peering out at the day being offered to him. Willis's old bedroom — before his mother took him and Champ to live in Cambridge — had the same shin-level windows. He used to sit cross-legged and look down at his tire swing hanging from the big maple tree, though he never actually swung in it much, Willis was never a jock, even before he broke his leg playing baseball and spent three months in a cast. WeU, enough. He took the real estate lady down into the cellar, jabbed a jackknife into a post or a beam or whatever the fuck, which had the consistency of angel food cake, and offered her forty.

The owner said "SeU!"

Jean said, "It's your money."

Willis was flush that year. His father had died and his mother had moved back up to Etna, into their old house with the eyebrow windows; the old man had never taken her name off the deed. She sold her apartment in Brookline and split the proceeds three ways with Wfllis and Champ, actuafly using the word reparations. Willis did some rough figuring. If he put twenty thousand down, it would mean making payments on a twenty-thousand-dollar loan, plus property taxes. What, three hundred and change a month? It was nothing. It was like an extra-bad phone bill. He could actually do this. And once he'd exposed the beams and the wide floorboards, built bookcases and brought in Oriental rugs and blue-painted pie safes, Jean might be less freaked out by the whole Preston FaUs gestalt— that was the word, gestalt. The trailers. The ratty chalets and A-frames. The Bondo'd-and-primered cars up on cinder-blocks. The wandering chickens. The dead raccoons and the roadside litter. The snarling dogs coming at you until their chains stopped them short.

This was before he saw that these were his secret allies.

When Willis wakes up it feels like late afternoon, and the Unnamable's rigid. Sort of tries to polish himself off but can't think what to think of. The temptation: Tina bent over in biker shorts. Some taboo there he can't articulate.

He goes downstairs, pisses, starts coffee. Clock says 3:27. Only mid-afternoon. Wednesday? So it's tonight he's supposed to go jam with What's-his-name. An hour to get there, probably, and an hour back. Which is crazy. But to play with actual people again? And if he stayed here he'd do what — lie on the couch reading books where the men say Damme, Sir! and the women are named shit like Louisa. Peter somebody — no, Philip. Philip Reed. He'd have to leave around eight. So four and a half hours to kill? Well, cook some oatmeal and take a shower and you're down to four. Play guitar a little to get the feel, maybe take another crack at that ceiling? He ends up reading more of Dombey and Son.

It's dark again when he loads the Twin and the Tele into the back of the truck. He sticks the guitar stand behind the seat, then decides he'll look like a dilettante and takes it back to the house. Then he wastes more time dithering over tapes; he ends up with Buddy Guy for the drive there, to make his playing subliminally blues-drenched, and Public Enemy to keep him awake on the way back.

He stops at the cash machine in Preston Falls and gets FAST CASH $40. Pitiful: in Chesterton it's FAST CASH $100. But he's only got about a thousand to last him these two months, and nothing coming in. Then over to Stewart's, where he pours a cup of coffee and pisses away a dollar and a quarter of his forty on a Want Ad Digest. Showing up early would be pushy, so he sits in a booth and looks through Musical Instruments, Motorcycles, Personals and Farm Equipment. He'd like to find an affordable 8N with a brush hog, not that he could afford it. The

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coffee gets him queasy, so he goes back up to the counter and buys a kaiser roll with butter and peanut butter, on the theory that it's porous. Then he feels as if something big is swelling inside him, pushing up on his heart. Willis and his body, those ancient enemies.

Halfway to Sandgate, he remembers he forgot Calvin Castleman's fucking hundred and fifty dollars.

Philip Reed's directions turn out to be good. The house either is or is not lime green (too dark to tell), but it sure does have a plastic gila monster on the porch roof. Fucker's the size of a German shepherd and glowing, lit from within; you can see the cord going into its mouth. Party boys. Willis comes jolting up the two-rut driveway past the house, as instructed, to a barn where he recognizes Reed's Z-whatever between a rusted-out Econoline van and an old bulbous Volvo from the days before they made them boxy. When he cuts the engine he can hear electric guitars tuning.

He hauls his guitar and amp through the tall barn door, held open by a cinderblock, and follows the sound up steep, trembling stairs to a hayloft, resting that fucking Fender Twin on every other step. When his head clears the floor of the loft, he can see a few sagging brown haybales and, in the far corner, a giant cube of cloudy plastic sheeting over a frame of two-by-fours, and the blurred, faceless forms of people inside. What might be a billed cap. A red shirt. A guitar neck, probably. Willis lugs his stuff over to where two sheets of plastic overlap, parts them with his guitar case and gets a skunky noseful of reefer.