David Gates - Preston Falls

At least none of them got rabies, that was one good thing you could point to. Except for Memorial Day and the Fourth, she and the kids ended up not spending much time in Preston Falls. She'd already used up most of her vacation on days Mel and Roger had off during the school year. And after working all week and taking the train home, she'd be too bushed to face that four-hour drive on Friday night. And then the four hours back on Sunday afternoon. So on Friday evenings Willis would stay long enough to have dinner and help put the kids to bed, then stick some things in his truck and off he'd go. We can deal, he'd said, way back when she told him she was pregnant the first time, and admitted the timing wasn't terrific. This was the answer she'd wanted. (The tone was just Willis being Willis.) And that, Jean thought then, was their true wedding day. Though of course she never said so, for fear of putting him off. We can deal. So of course who's dealing now?

She definitely had the right to say something about this gun suddenly appearing out of nowhere, no matter how seldom she came up here. But even by the Fourth of July, with two months of summer still to get through, she was weary. So she simply said, "I trust you keep that thing locked up."

PRESTON FALLS

He sighed his martyr sigh. "I'm not a complete asshole," he said. "Whatever opinions there are to the contrary."

But the next day, after he came back from doing errands in town, she was rooting around in his truck, looking for his county map, and found a True Value bag behind the seat, with a bicycle lock in it. All the bicycles were down in Chesterton. And they already had locks.

The stepstone's too cold to stand on any longer with bare feet. She comes back inside, leaving Rathbone to run; Willis claims he knows to stay out of the road. She takes her clothes into the bathroom, lifts off her nightgown, pees, puts in a new tampon, washes her hands and face, brushes her teeth. Toilet needs a good scrubbing, especially with people coming today — one of those things it's easier just to do yourself than to nag Willis about fifty times. Though it does seem excessive to be up scrubbing toilets at five-thirty in the morning. She gets the can of Vanish out from under the sink, pours some in and closes the lid on the frothing and hissing.

She makes a pot of coffee, takes down the white mug that says JOE, puts it back and takes the black mug with the picture of Alan Jackson— a gift from Carol, who calls him a "babe." The JOE mug had been a gift to Jean's father for his seventy-sixth, and last, birthday. Mel had picked it out, from a revolving rack at Kmart; she was five then, and so proud of being able to read. He thanked her and patted her head, but he was second only to Willis in seeing what crap everything was. When he gave Mel that little mocking smile Jean had seen a million times, she could've hit him: her own father, who she knew was dying. The mug turned up in a box of stuff Carol had packed for Jean when she went through the house in Sarasota after Mom died. Jean, in turn, stuck it in a box of stuff for Preston Falls, where Willis took to using it. Figure that one out. Because Willis hadn't liked her father (who had?), and it was like drinking out of a dead enemy's skull. Or because of the expression cup of Joe. Or because he thought Joe was a joke name. Willis always has about five reasons for everything.

It's still only quarter to six. She takes her coffee into the living room (Alan Jackson really is a babe) and settles in on the sofa with Sense and Sensibility. It's the part where WiUoughby publicly humiliates Marianne, and Jean's secretly cheering him on. Which worries her. You're supposed to identify with Elinor and feel bemusement at Marianne, but Jean absolutely loathes Marianne and wants to see her get her stupid face rubbed in it. So she must be bringing her own whatever to this.

There's a tv in his dream, the old cabinet kind where the screen's behind doors, and he opens it to a movie where a whore is taking off her blouse, then her actual brassiere; you see the man's hard-on beneath his jockey shorts. Unbelievable: this is on television, where children might be watching? Willis resists getting involved with the whore himself, aware that he's in bed dreaming and there's the problem of cleanup. Instead he goes out to the sidewalk, realizes he's got no clothes on and wakes up. He's alone in bed in daylight in Preston Falls. The Unnamable is arching and aching: he reaches into his jockey shorts and grabs the shaft so the head's sticking out of his fist. Just a boy and his dick. No. Better just get up, go downstairs and piss.

Through the open window, a phoebe's two notes, like someone softly beckoning. Otherwise, silence. He pulls on yesterday's jeans (the Unnamable already subsiding) and yesterday's t-shirt. Rathbone hears him from down in the living room; his nails come clicking up the stairs and here he is, panting and wagging. Willis strokes his head and sings, Oh doggie, doggie, it's a wild world — doody-doody-doody-doody-dump, then goes downstairs with Rathbone pushing past him, trotting to the kitchen door, looking back, wagging harder. Willis lets him out, then sees, sticking out of the refrigerator door, an envelope with a note written on the back:

Took kids to town to get chicken etc. Coffee is on the stove.

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He gets the JOE mug down, pours in milk, then fills it with cold coffee. He splits a fork-split Thomas' English muffin with a paring knife— hey, fuck them — sticks the ragged, cratered halves in the toaster and gets

PRESTON FALLS

out the butter. Be a kick to do that thing where you make the Indian maiden's tawny knees into her breasts, which is still about the most hilarious fucking thing in the world. Except Jean will see the creases in the cardboard. Unless you stick the box in the garbage. No. Insanity. It's also insane to start off your day — your two months — with a bunch of butter when the idea is to be light and free. Dear God, help me, he prays, and is amazed to find himself actually putting the butter back, as if a higher power were guiding his hand. Woo, scary shit.

He eats the English muffin dry, washing it down with seltzer a meme la houteille. With the kids gone, this would be a good time to wrap those condoms, if he can remember where he put them. They're a gag present for Champ and Tina, the comic prologue to their real present: a weekend at Mohonk Mountain House, where they'd once spent a night after Tina won five hundred dollars in the lottery. Oh right: they're still out in the truck, behind the seat. And there used to be wrapping paper on the top shelf in the pantry, left over from when they spent Christmas here three years ago. (They kept it out of sight because it was the paper Santa's gifts had been wrapped in; three years ago Roger stiU believed.) Willis drags a chair into the pantry and finds the dusty rolls still up there: snowflakes, holly and shit, Christmas balls, Falstaffian Santas, one roll just with season's greetings over and over and over. Hey, in for a dime: let's go with the balls. He cuts off what looks about right with a carving knife — thinking Did you ever see such a sight in your life? — and then it takes him ten minutes of yanking drawers and banging cupboard doors before he finds where the fucking Scotch tape got put.

He steps outside, stiU barefoot, onto the sun-warmed stepstone, and smells the air. Loamy, grassy, little hit of pine — Jesus, you could bottle this shit. At the top of the maple tree, a few leaves have turned red. Rathbone, who must have heard the screen door slap, comes tear-assing around the side of the woodshed with a stick in his mouth. So Willis walks a few steps out into the wet grass, soaking his feet and the cuffs of his jeans. This gets old in a hurry. He makes a token lunge for the stick while Rathbone dances away, then he goes back inside, thinking Du wuschest mir die Fiisse. At one point in his life (when Jean was pregnant with Mel, in fact) he went to see Hans Jiirgen Syberberg's Parsifal film twelve times in twelve days.