by David Gates
But the whole point of Jacob’s dream, as I now understand it, is that it’s a dream. The door between this world and the spiritual world has closed, I have come to believe, and will remain so until heaven and earth shall be made new. This is where I part company not just with the Wylies of the world, but with the John Millikens. I soon shied away from the so-called spirit-filled church he brought me to that morning, where grown men and women stood blinking and babbling in no language, and he and I lost touch. He must be an old man now. I ended up with the Baptists—imagine what Great Grandfather Coley would say to that!—and have mostly felt at home there. With the doctrine if not always with the people.
Of course, there are Baptists and there are Baptists. The fellow up here, for instance, turned out to be—not a modernizer, exactly, but more missionary than pastor. Collecting cans of food is all well and good, but need we congratulate ourselves by stacking the cartons right there in the sanctuary? And where, meanwhile, was the spiritual food? Alice and I hardly need sermons against the metal music, I told him straight out, I said I’d sooner sit home and read God’s word. His answer to that was that it was a changing world. “Well, there you go,” I said. “Isn’t that all the more reason?” Like talking to a wall. He’s a young man, with the same haircut as the television people and a suit that’s too tight on him; he shaves so close his jowls gleam. He was probably glad to see the back of me. He probably said to himself, Like talking to a wall.
So that was more or less the end of our churchgoing, except for Easter Sunday, when you still stand a fighting chance of hearing a sermon instead of a public-service message. Easter falls early this year; we’ll still be in Seattle. (God willing.) I wonder if Wylie couldn’t be talked into going to services with us. How she used to plead, when she was a teenager, to be left at home: what if her friends saw her! I sometimes fought down a mean impulse to tell her it was like going to a bar where sailors met businessmen: anybody who saw you there had a guilty secret, too.
But that secret was mine, to live with as best I could. They’ll never convince me I was wrong not to have burdened Alice with details of the danger I’d been in. Bring it to the Lord in prayer, the song says. It doesn’t say, Bring it to your wife in guilt. Very much out of fashion, I know, the idea that certain things are between you and the Lord, period. And yes: that morning, in Everett, Massachusetts, in that shabby wainscoted church—the church smell comes back to me, the smell of varnish, the smell of musty hymnals—I made confession. But before a crowd of strangers, whose care was for a soul that could have been anybody’s.
It’s Wednesday morning, and we’re about ready to be on our way. Alice has locked the cellar door and the toolshed, carried her gloxinias to the bathtub, plugged the reading lamp into the timer, set the thermostats (except in the bathroom) down to fifty. And I’ve spent the morning trying to compose a letter. It may be the last piece of business I’ll do, formally handing down to my daughter what remains, and I chose to do this last thing without Alice’s help. It may also be foolishness—our plane will probably not go down, I will probably live on until the cost of my care eats up all our money—but I felt the need.
Dearest Wylie,
Airplanes I think are not so dangers but I am put in this today what you need to know and send by itself. Our lawyer Mr. Plankey who can explain. He is our will and his card you put away when you need it.
A day goes by with you and my prayers. When you look after your own child you remember He died and still looks after.
Loving father,
Lewis Coley
Oh, this is all wrong, preaching away as I’ve sworn a hundred times not to do. But too late now; let it stand. I seal the envelope—even pulling an envelope across the tongue, and at the same time moving my head in the opposite direction, takes analytic thinking—and put it with the bills to be left in the mailbox.
In our forty years of marriage, Alice has always done our packing, but never before has she handled the bags. I sit at the kitchen table and watch her out the window, struggling, dragging her right leg along in tandem with the avocado green Samsonite suitcase braced against her calf, head bowed to avoid the branches of the little cherry tree. Which I ought to have pruned last year. I must have assumed there would be time.
And, again, I find that I’m weeping. It’s the sight of her walking away from me. I hear the car trunk slam; I must stop this before she comes back in to get me, though I don’t know how to stop. A lovely beginning for our trip.
She pulls the car up onto the grass by the back door, but lets me do the steps by myself. There are more steps here than at the front door, but these are easier; a couple of years ago, I had a fellow come around and put up a railing. Nothing fancy, just pressure-treated two-by-fours. Back when breaking a hip in icy weather was my worst imagining. Gripping the rail with my good hand and hanging the cane from the crook of my arm like some antique gentleman, I make it down the steps all right. But by the time I’ve gotten myself into the car and the door closed, I’m done in. Enough and more than enough. And now there’s the ride all the way down to Logan yet to do, and after that whatever’s involved in getting a crippled man through a busy terminal, and after that the hours in the air and after that the journey’s unimaginable other end.
We start down the driveway, Alice keeping one wheel up on the strip of grass between the muddy wheel ruts and the other wheel on the lawn.
“Forget the mailbox,” I say, meaning Don’t. I’m making a joke on myself, the joke being that I’m an old fussbudget.
Alice just fetches a sigh. So I sigh too and look out the window, tapping the fingers of my good hand on my good knee, for all the world like a stroke patient. Though deep down I can’t believe it, I remind myself that this may be the last time I’ll see this lawn, such as it is, with its untrimmed shrubs and the rocks I used to hit with the lawnmower. I try to give it the looking-at it deserves. And fall short, as always. This was what we had worked toward, and we came here too late to love it.
“Why don’t I pull over close to the mailbox,” Alice says, “and you just put down your window and pop the things in.”
“Get stuck,” I say.
“Good heavens,” she says, “Mrs. Laffond goes in and out of here every day.”
She gets the car over so that my mirror almost scrapes the mailbox, and I feel my whole side of the car go down. Oh, brother: I roll down my window as if nothing were wrong (trying to work magic, in spite of all I know and believe), pull open the mailbox, stick the envelopes in, push the thing shut and flip up the flag. As I roll the window back up, I look over at Alice, who looks at her watch and then at the dashboard clock. Her mouth is twitching. She steps on the gas: the wheels just whine and spin. She cuts the steering hard to the left, guns the motor and we sink deeper.
“No no no no,” I say. Doesn’t the woman know you want to keep your wheels straight?
She jams it into reverse, guns it again, and the back tires just spin deeper.
“Cut your wheels!” I cry, meaning Don’t. So of course she does, except she can’t because we’re in so deep. “Rock have to rock.” Damn it, she has to rock the damn car, if it’ll even rock.
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she says.
“You car rocking!” I holler. She slams it back into drive, the wheels spin and she glares over at me.
I say, “Damn fuck.”
“Well, why don’t you try it then,” she says. Then she says, “I’m sorry, Lew, I didn’t mean that.” But the harm is done: I’m bawling like a big angry baby.
“Lew,” she says, “I’m so sorry. It’s truly my fault.” I entertain the thought that I’m weeping to punish her. Which may be so, but I can’t stop it now.
“Lew,” she says. “Now, listen to me a minute. Try and listen. Will you be all right to sit here while I go back up to the house?”
“Do what?” I say.
“I can’t understand you, dear.”
I try harder. “You what to you do?”
/> “I guess I’m going to try to raise somebody on the phone,” she says. “Maybe one of the boys from the Shell station would come up.”
I’ve got the blubbering stopped now. “Plane make the plane,” I say, meaning We’ll never.
“Well, Lew, I don’t know what else to do,” she says. “I’ll leave the motor running so you can have the heater.”
I don’t turn to watch her walking up the driveway for fear it’ll set me off again. I put the radio on, just in time to catch the end of some bouncy tune from way, way back. Can it have been “The Dipsy Doodle”? But then the announcer comes on to say the time is 10:08, and I turn it off. The last thing I need is to be hearing the time every two minutes. The dashboard clock says 10:07. I take a glove out of my pocket and drape it over the dashboard so that it blocks my view of the clock. I stare out the windshield at the road we should be on and listen to the motor humming away. We’ve been very satisfied with the Lumina.
An idling engine consumes a gallon of gasoline an hour. Or used to years ago. (It said so in the owner’s manual of some car we had, and it always stuck in my mind for some reason.) An hour. It would be a good hour before anybody got here, if they ran true to form. Oh, brother. Well, there’s not a thing you can do about it. I go back to the hum of the motor.
But wait now. Sunk in mud, motor running: couldn’t this clog the tailpipe, making carbon monoxide seep inside? Isn’t this what they do, trapped and Godless men going out to the garage with the hose from the vacuum? In fact, it’s beginning to seem to me that I’m starting to feel sleepy, that something’s woozy with my thoughts. You better reach over, turn the ignition key.
I let it run.
Before shutting my eyes I decide I’ll take a last look around at things. And when I turn my head I see somebody pulling up in front of the Paquettes’. I see them sit there a second, then pull out again, coming right at me. If it’s a car full of roughnecks I’m helpless out here. I spot Alice, but she’s far away, she’s on the doorstep, opening the door. They’re still coming. I stretch over with my good hand and blow the horn. But she’s already in the house. They’re halfway here, coming fast now. And now I see it’s something too high up off the ground to be a car. Oh, I’d rather the roughnecks than what’s going to happen now. It’s the mail lady in her moon vehicle. And we are saved.
ALSO BY DAVID GATES
PRESTON FALLS
When Doug Willis has a midlife crisis, he doesn’t join a gym or have an affair. Instead he gets himself arrested while camping with his wife and kids, takes a two-month leave from his PR job, and retreats to his farmhouse in rural Preston Falls, where he plugs in his guitar and tries to shut out his life. While his wife, Jean, struggles to pay the bills and raise their sullen, skeptical kids, Willis’s plans for hiatus crumble into Dewars-and-cocaine-fueled disarray. A shattered window, an unguarded gun, and a shady small-town attorney force a crisis—and Willis can’t go home again.
“Preston Falls is dark and funny, bleak and brilliant.… In other words, David Gates makes me sick with envy.”
—Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity
Fiction/Literature/0-679-75643-4
JERNIGAN
From Holden Caulfield to Moses Herzog, our best literature has been narrated by malcontents. To this lineage add Peter Jernigan, who views the world with ferocious intelligence, grim rapture, and a chainsaw wit that he turns, with disastrous consequences, on his wife, his teenaged son, his dangerously vulnerable mistress—and, not least of all, on himself. This novel is a bravura performance: a funny, scary, mesmerizing study of a man walking off the cliff with his eyes wide open—and wisecracking all the way.
“Brilliantly handled … at once harrowing and hilarious, an artful chronicling of one man’s free-fall into an exhilarating, devouring nihilism.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73713-8
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
