David Gates: Preston Falls

"If it rains," he says, "the windowsills get wet. I think that's preferable to rolling in here and having it be baking upstairs. Or don't you agree?"

"I just worry that it might do damage."

"Then I suggest you raise the point with Mrs. Danvers," he says. "Have her come in and air our rooms an hour before we arrive."

"I'm sorry I said anything," she says. "Do whatever you want." She walks over to the sink.

"What a concept," he says.

She takes the thing of Advil off the windowsill over the sink and a box of Tampax from her purse and goes into the bathroom. Okay, okay, he gets the picture. When she comes out she gets down the bottle of Dewar's. He plays a D scale with no open strings, then works his way up. An E-flat scale. An E scale. An F scale. All with the same fingering, so what's he proving?

"I'm sorry, did you want some?"

He looks up: she's already put the cap on the bottle, and she's clutching her glass with her palm over the opening. Now, what would all this be telling him if Freud hadn't been debunked?

"What's funny?" she says. He sees she's poured herself one whole whopping finger of whiskey, good girl that she is, even when trying to be a bad girl.

He shakes his head. "I get punchy after putting in a day of work and driving till one in the morning." He stands up and puts the guitar in the case. "It's something you can remember about me." He lets that hang

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there while he closes the lid and snaps the snaps, then adds, "In case I have a heart attack moving two cords of wood."

"You were planning to stack it anyway, weren't you?"

"Ah," he says. "Then I guess you've found the silver lining,"

"I'm going up to bed," she says.

"I'll be up in a while," he says, but she's already brushed past him. He watches her walk barefoot through the doorway into the dining room. The fabric of her nightgown clings to her buttocks, of which her bare, rounded heels seem a mocking analogue. Once, when they were first married, he had let loose all over the soles of those feet. "O my," she had said. "Dr. Scholl would not approve." True, it had been his idea. But she had been keenly interested.

Jean wakes up at the first faint gray light before dawn and can't get to sleep again. Willis is lying there on his back, no covers over him, growling in rhythm, jaw slack, a white slice of eyeball showing, a long bulge in his jockey shorts. One time, years ago, such a sight had so tempted her that she'd slyly sucked him in his sleep, though finally she didn't dare, \]kQ, finish. He never woke up, and she never told.

She slips out of bed, pulls the sheet over him, silently unzips her bag and finds clean underwear, socks, t-shirt, jeans and her book; still in her nightgown, she creeps out into the hall. She stops outside Mel's door, then Roger's, to listen for their breathing, then tries to steal down the stairs without making them creak (good luck), to change in the bathroom. But Rathbone has heard her: he waits at the foot of the stairs, tail wagging.

She opens the kitchen door to let him out and stands barefoot on the cold stepstone. Beyond the unmowed meadow, it's still dark under the trees. So empty of sound this morning; depressing up here when the birds have gone. This has been the worst summer she can remember: too hot, too tropical. Probably because of what's being done to the planet. In Chesterton, weeds crowded out the basil and fennel and dill she'd planted in the backyard, even though she tried to get out there for at least a couple of minutes every day. (One more thing that was her fault yet not her fault.) Plus the rabies epidemic, mostly in raccoons but also in bats and foxes and skunks. She'd even been afraid to let Mel and Roger pet Rathbone: though he'd had his shots, what if he tangled with some rabid animal whose saliva. . and so forth and so on.

Though she hates to admit it, Preston Falls was probably no worse than Westchester County. Right in Ossining, a woman was bitten by a fox while working in her garden. Another woman, in Larchmont, was attacked by a raccoon while putting out the garbage. Jean warned Mel

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and Roger: You never, ever, approach a strange animal. And guess how the epidemic started. She found this out from the vet where they took Rathbone. A bunch of coon hunters in North Carolina ran out of local raccoons to kill, so they trucked in new raccoons from Florida and a third of them turned out to be rabid, and the rabies has just crept north and north and north. Completely and absolutely a male thing.

But her own truly scary moment came in Preston Falls. On Fourth of July weekend, a raccoon tottered into the dooryard in broad daylight, eleven o'clock in the morning. Rathbone — who, thank God, was in the house — started barking his head off and the raccoon didn't even react. Willis ran upstairs and came back down with this gun, for God's sake, that Jean had no idea he even had. This rifle, with a telescope. A real Lee Harvey Oswald special. In their house. He slid aside an inch of the screen they'd put in the kitchen window, dropped to one knee, and rested the gun on the windowsill. The crack of it echoed off the house, then off the hills, but Jean could swear she also heard just the little thoonk that was the bullet hitting. The raccoon stood still a second, shivered, then tipped over, his legs started clawing, and Willis shot him again as Mel came running in, shrieking, "What is going onT' Jean said, "My God, where's Roger?" and Roger said, "I'm right here. Mom'' giving the Mom that extra little edge of contempt. He was standing in the doorway to the dinmg room, taking in the whole scene. Willis shot the animal a third time, and Jean said, "Isn't that enough}''

He turned and looked up at her. ''You want to do this?"

Gun in hand, he walked out into the yard as Jean and Mel and Roger crowded at the screen door. Like the young'uns and womenfolk watching Pa, in some movie. Willis approached the animal slowly, keeping the gun pointed. It didn't move. He stood right over it and shot down, twice more.

He came back into the kitchen and asked if there were rubber gloves.

"What are you going to do?" said Jean.

"Dig a hole, stick him in, torch him, cover him up," said Willis. "Thing was obviously rabid."

"I want to watch," said Roger.

"Shouldn't you call the health department or something?" said Jean.

"I doubt they care," said Willis. "Rabid raccoon number ten thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven. We have those gloves or not?"

"Let me look," she said. "What about — did he bleed out there?"

"No. He was one of those new-model raccoons that's all solid-state." Then he quickly said, "Actually, he bled less than you'd think."

"But it could spread from just blood, couldn't it?" she said. "Like what if some animal got into it? Or if Rathbone — you know."

"Fine," he said. "You're worried about it, pour gas over it and we'll torch that too. That can be your contribution to public health."

Willis went for the gas can and the shovel, and she found a pair of yellow rubber gloves under the sink; he leaned the shovel against his shoulder to put them on. Then he walked over to pick up the raccoon, Roger a step behind. (Mel had gone back upstairs in tears.) Jean sloshed gasoline over where she saw blood on the grass — Willis was right; she'd expected more — then carried the gas can way far away. She wadded a page of the Times business section into a ball, touched a match to it, tossed it at the spot, and a wall of flame whooshed up. When the fire died down, she rubbed the sole of her shoe across the burned earth, and tiny pale flames sprouted up again.

Finally she went inside. From the window she could see Willis out in the meadow, standing watch over his own fire, shovel braced in his armpit, baseball cap on his head, looking, at that distance, just like a local. His big dream.