David Gates - Preston Falls

When the alarm goes off, he starts coffee and puts on his man-of-the-people Sunday best — brown Dickies work pants, khaki work shirt, with a brown knit tie. Kind of a Nazi vibe, actually. Hey, the old man would be proud. So balmy this morning he doesn't need a jacket. Can it be Indian summer already?

Inside the First Congregational Church of Preston Falls, the organ is wheedling away to a quarter-churchful of mosdy white-haired people. Willis scuttles sideways into an empty pew in the back; he's the only one here alone, which makes him look as if he's even deeper in spiritual crisis than he is. Fuck, if only it would be a crisis. Though isn't this a good way to bring it on, coming here and screwing around with the irrational?

Nice old church. All white inside, bare wood floor, tall windows, and up behind the pulpit a plain, squared-off gold cross — no faux tree bark, no writhing Saviour — against a hanging of burgundy-colored velvet. Either laudably severe or contemptibly bland.

He's deciding this when the organ cranks up and they all rise for the opening hymn — ^which sounds like "Morning Is Broken." By Cat Stevens. And it is. Too bizarre: he can't do this. He scissors-steps out of the pew and heads for the exit, doubled over with his hands across his belly, miming a sudden attack of stomach flu. Back in the truck, he loosens his tie. Well, at least he's found out that he's not far enough down yet to start begging help from "Jesus."

PRESTON FALLS

He stops at Stewart's for milk; the old farmer type in front of him asks for a pack of what he calls Pell Mells and takes for-fucking-ever picking out three different kinds of lottery tickets. When Willis sets his half gallon and his Milk Club card on the counter, he surprises the shit out of himself (though not really) by saying, "And a pack of Marlboros."

"Hard or soft?" says the girl. Pretty girl, a little beaten down.

"Make it hard, please?" he says. Willis, you dog.

He waits until he gets home to try the first cigarette; it's been ten years — no, more; he quit before Mel was born — and he's afraid if he lights up while driving it will hit him so hard he'll have to pull over. He finds a book of matches and a saucer, and settles on the couch. He zips the cellophane off, lifts the lid, slips out the square of dull silver paper to expose the caramel-brown filter ends. Sniffs them. Extracts one with a pinch and a tug of thumb and forefinger, then slips it between forefinger and middle finger. Which is just the way they found his father: smiling in his La-Z-Boy, his last Chesterfield burned all the way down, the skin fried in the crotch of his fingers. Harmlessly. Willis scratches a match, lights the cigarette, inhales, and whump. Yep, good thing he's sitting down.

When Willis got the call about his father, the doctor simply said it was a "sudden, massive" heart attack; he heard about the cigarette later, from Kenny Bishop, his best friend in sixth grade, who'd stayed in Etna all these years and who happened to be on rescue-squad duty that day. Willis had always expected something more operatic. If not a shootout with ATE agents, at least a Hemingway: both barrels in the mouth, brains on the wall. Shit, this was a guy who'd named his sons after Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay — and that was before things got heavy. (In Cambridge, Willis's mother used to tell her new friends he'd been named for William O. Douglas, which they must have thought was an odd thing to volunteer.) Willis had learned to avoid visiting him during manic episodes, but the old man could still fool you. One time, just after Mel was born, his father had sounded fine on the phone, and six hours later, when Willis walked across the porch to knock on the door, he heard the tv going, looked through the window and saw him in his recliner scribbling on a legal pad. He was writing down the words of the newscast that coincided with Dan Rather's eye blinks.

Champ blew off the funeral and Jean stayed in Chesterton with the kids, then six and three. (Mel had seen Grandpa Willis once and didn't remember him; Roger had never seen him at all.) Afterwards Willis

drove his mother on up to the house. While she prowled around in the attic — a bunch of her books and her old term papers from Smith were still up there — he sat in the La-Z-Boy and looked at a composition book he'd picked up off the floor. On the cover, his father had written "2/8/89-." A journal, the last entry dated April 22, the day he died: "Colder, mostly sunny this morning. Trees getting red with buds, grass getting green." Most of the entries simply recorded the time he'd gotten up (always between 6:30 and 7:00), the weather and his daily errands: "To P.O., paid light bill, bought bread and tuna fish." Had he found these simple things numinous? Or was he just completely shot to shit? On the back page, he'd been listing the small animals killed by his cat, Geoffrey: "3/12/89, 1 mouse. 3/17/89, 1 mouse. 4/3/89, 1 blue jay (feathers only found)." Willis and his mother split a Harry and David pear from a box he and Jean had sent the old man, then captured Geoffrey, put him in his Kennel Cab and drove back down to his mother's one-bedroom condo in Brookline. Next thing Willis heard, she was putting it on the market and moving up to Etna. Less because she'd gotten sentimental (though who the fuck knows) than because it was her one shot at ending up in a nice old farmhouse somewhere reading M. F. K. Fisher and shit. Or is that unkind?

When the cigarette's half gone, Willis stubs it out in the saucer, lightheaded and about to vomit. He closes his eyes: worse. Well, he won't be getting hooked on these sons of bitches again. Throw 'em out. Put 'em under the faucet and then throw 'em out. So maybe what he'll do is, he'll go and see his mother.

Etna looks close enough on the map — Route 4 all the way to White River Junction, across the river into Hanover — but it's all mountains and fucking little towns, so by the time Willis gets there it's dark and he's got a headache from squinting against sun in the rearview mirror. And probably from thinking the whole way, because he was asshole enough to throw his tape deck out the fucking window.

The porch light's on and all four eyebrow windows are lit up; since she doesn't use the upstairs much, this must be to welcome him. The house I grew up in, he calls this, for simplicity's sake. He sometimes soothes himself with this absolutely bullshit idea that his mother's actually been here the whole time, keeping safe his childhood things: the Thornton W Burgess books, the yellow seven-inch Burl Ives records, the Nichols Stallion cap pistol. In fact, she never set foot in the house from 1963—the year she split for Cambridge with Champ and Willis— until his father died.

His mother comes out onto the porch. As always, she looks an increment older than he expected; as soon as he's adjusted to the last incarnation, she's on to the next. But she looks good: suntan, silver-and-turquoise necklace with earrings to match, white hair in a single long braid. That and the hurt smile make her look like Willie Nelson.

"Come in, weary traveler," she says. "I was just starting to get anxious."

He gives her a one-arm hug. "I didn't know what to bring you, so I didn't bring you anything. You've got aU the same crap here we've got in Preston FaUs."

"Oh, I know; isn't it terrible}" she says. "If I never again taste maple syrup, do you know? Come in, come in,"

His mother got rid of the really butch accoutrements — deer head, gun rack — when she first moved in. And of course the La-Z-Boy. Where

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he used to have a gray metal file cabinet, she's put a dry sink with worn blue paint the color of a robin's egg. But she's kept some of the Ayn Rand touches: Willis follows her into the kitchen, and through her copper cookware hanging from the beams he sees the old IBM wall clock. She's got the radio on — huh, she's bought herself one of those glorified boomboxes made to look like a stack of components. An Optimus: Radio Shack's house brand. Successor to Realistic. It's depressing to picture his mother walking into Radio Shack. He's looking through her meager stack of CDs on the kitchen counter when that fucking jiggety theme music starts up: BUM BUM BUM BUM, BUM BUM BUM BUM, dump tadumpta dump tadumpta. "I'm Noah Adams," says the voice.