13
There were no falls at Falls End, and the principal endings there were those of civilization, ambition and, ultimately, lives. Sensibly, the founding fathers of the town had decided that, even in its earliest incarnation, a name like Civilization’s End, or Ambition’s End, or Dead End, might have hobbled the community’s chances of progress, and so an alternative identity was sought. A stream was found to feed into Prater Lake, and that stream began its life on a patch of rocky high ground known as The Rises, cascading down in a manner that might loosely be said to resemble a waterfall, as long as nobody had seen an actual waterfall against which to measure it. Hence Falls End, with no possessive apostrophe to trouble it on the grounds that such additions smacked of pretension, and pretension was for the French across the border.
That particular stream no longer flowed into Prater Lake. It had simply ceased burbling past the outskirts of the town some time at the start of the last century, and an expedition of the curious and the concerned, aided by a couple of local drunks who fancied some air, discovered that water no longer tumbled from the top of The Rises. Speculation as to what might have caused the blockage included seismic activity, a redirection of water flow due to logging, and, courtesy of one of the drunks, the actions of the devil himself. This latter suggestion was quickly discounted, although it later gave its name to a local phenomenon known as the ‘Devil of the Rises’ after it was pointed out that, seen from a certain angle, some of the rocks appeared to form the profile of a demonic figure if one was prepared to squint some, and discount the fact that, seen from a slightly different angle, it resembled a rabbit, or, if one moved along just a bit farther, nothing at all.
The town’s proximity to the Great North Woods, and the area’s reputation for fine hunting, meant that Falls End was, if not thriving, then surviving, which was good enough for most people, especially those who were aware of the difficulties being faced by similarly sized but less fortunately situated towns elsewhere in the County. There were a few modest motels that stayed open year-round, and a slightly more upscale lodge that opened from early April to early December, offering both intimate cabins and stylish rooms to hunters and leaf-peepers with money to burn. Falls End also had a pair of restaurants, one fancier than the other and in which locals ate only on special occasions such as weddings, graduations, anniversaries, or lottery wins.
Finally, Falls End boasted a grand total of two bars: one, named Lester’s Tavern, that stood on the town’s western edge, and another, The Pickled Pike, that lay at the center of the narrow strip of stores and businesses that constituted Falls End’s beating heart. These included a bank, a coffee shop, a grocery-cum-drugstore, a taxidermist’s, a lawyer’s office, and Falls End Bait & Fish. The latter stocked hunting and fishing equipment, and had recently discovered a lucrative sideline selling fly-fishing feathers to hairdressing salons for use on women who thought it exotic to add rooster feathers to their hair, a development that had occasioned some discussion in Lester’s Tavern, since there were a great many people, in Falls End and elsewhere, who felt that fly feathers had no business being anywhere other than at the end of a line, and should adorn nothing more unusual than a hook, although Harold Boncoeur, who owned Falls End Fish & Bait, had been known to remark that he found the thought of a woman with feathers in her hair wicked sexy. He had not mentioned this to his wife, though, for Mrs Boncoeur favored blue rinses and perms, and thus was not a likely candidate for feathering, nor was she likely to listen with any great understanding to such fantasies on the part of her husband.
So it was that there were worse places to live than Falls End. Grady Vetters had lived in a couple of them, and was in a better position to judge than most of his peers, including Teddy Gattle, with whom he had been friends since childhood, a friendship that had remained firm even during the long periods of Grady’s absence from town. In the manner of such friendships, Grady and Teddy simply picked up their conversation each time from where they had previously left off, regardless of months or years spent apart. It had been that way between them ever since they were boys.
Teddy felt no resentment toward Grady for leaving Falls End. Grady had always been different, and it was only natural that he should try to seek his fortune out in the wider world. Teddy just looked forward to Grady’s return, whenever that might be, and the stories he would bring with him of the women in New York, and Chicago, and San Francisco, places that Teddy had seen on television but which he had no desire to visit, the size and scale of them being frightening to him. Teddy was already a little lost in the world: he held on to his life in Falls End the way a drunk holds on to his bed when his head is spinning. He could not imagine what it would be like to be set adrift in a big city. He thought that he would surely die. Better that Grady should be the one to negotiate the wider world like the explorers of old, and leave Teddy to Falls End, and his beloved forest.
And what of Grady’s efforts to make his mark in that world of skyscrapers and subways? Teddy couldn’t and wouldn’t have said it, mainly because he didn’t allow himself to dwell too long on the matter, but it was possible, just possible, that Teddy was secretly pleased Grady Vetters hadn’t become the big shot artist he had always hoped to be, and the women he screwed in those faraway cities remained the stuff of stories and were not there in the flesh to stoke the secret fires of Teddy’s envy.
Now here they were, Grady and Teddy, together once more, smoking cigarettes out back of Lester’s, sitting at the bench tables placed there for precisely that purpose, and the starlight flickering through pinpricks in the night sky. Grady had told Teddy that you couldn’t see the stars in some cities, so bright were their own lights, and Teddy had shuddered. He loved these cloudless nights, loved to pick out the constellations, loved to navigate his way through the woods by their position in the heavens. He saw no contradiction in his fear of the immensity of cities and his comfort with the vastness of the universe. He watched a shooting star cross the sky, burning itself out in the atmosphere, and he looked at his best friend and thought that Grady Vetters was the closest thing to a shooting star he had ever encountered close up, and just like one of those stars he was destined to burn out to nothing.
The barest of breezes stirred the fairy lights that adorned the back of the bar but not, strangely, the front, a circumstance dictated by a town ordinance that Teddy did not understand, since it wasn’t as if Falls End was so pretty that it couldn’t do with a little more color along its main street. On the other hand, it lent the back of Lester’s a vaguely magical air. Sometimes when Teddy was returning to town from one of his trips into the forest, whether as a guide or as a solitary hunter, or simply because he wanted to be away from people for a time, he would glimpse the lights of Lester’s twinkling through the branches, and it was a sight that he always associated with comfort, and warmth, and belonging. For Teddy, the lights of Lester’s meant home.
Grady didn’t like Lester’s as much as Teddy did. Oh, he’d always have a good time there on his first night back in town, shooting the breeze with familiar faces and joshing with old Lester, who had a fondness for Grady because Lester was something of a frustrated artist himself whose godawful watercolors hung on the walls of the bar and were always for sale, although Teddy couldn’t recall anyone ever taking Lester up on that offer, no matter how low he priced them. The paintings changed a couple of times a year, mostly to give the impression that somebody, somewhere was cornering the market in the primitive, unique vision of Lester LeForge, instead of the reality, which was that Lester’s paintings now took up so much space in his garage that he had to park his car in the drive. To Lester, Grady Vetters was a success: he’d exhibited his work in minor galleries, and had even been reviewed in a Friday edition of the New York Times back in 2003 as part of an ‘emerging artists’ show somewhere in SoHo. Lester had carefully cut out the review, plasticized it, then stuck it behind the bar beneath a hand-lettered sign that read ‘Local Boy Makes It in the Big Apple!’
That was as good as it had ever got for Grady Vetters, and now it seemed to Teddy that his friend was less an emerging artist than a submerging one, gradually sinking beneath the weight of his own failed expectations, his inability to hold down a job of any kind, his ongoing love affairs with booze, pot, and inappropriate women, and his hatred for his father, which hadn’t eased any despite the old man apparently making Grady’s fondest wish come true by dying at last.
Everybody believed that Grady Vetters was smarter than Teddy Gattle, even Teddy himself, but he knew that for all Grady’s talk about old Harlan and how much of a hard-ass he was, and how he had meant nothing to his only son, and vice versa, Grady was worse off than ever now that his old man was gone. Despite everything, Grady had wanted to impress his father, and any success he had made of his life was largely down to that desire. Without him, Grady had nothing to aim for because he didn’t have enough self-respect and self-motivation to pursue his painting and drawing for the love of the thing itself. He was also destined, Teddy thought, to carry through life the knowledge that his father had died unreconciled with his only son, and at least fifty percent of the blame for that, and maybe a good deal more, lay with the younger party.
But, Jesus, Grady was in a foul mood tonight. Kathleen Cover was in Lester’s with her husband, and some of his buddies and their wives. Kathleen and Grady had enjoyed a fling a couple of years back while Davie Cover was off fighting the ragheads in some place that Davie couldn’t even spell, and certainly couldn’t have found on a map before he was sent there. It might have been considered low, and even unpatriotic, to fuck a man’s wife while he was off serving his country, except that Davie Cover was a bedbug on the ass of life, and the president of the United States himself would have felt duty-bound to fuck Kathleen Cover as a way of spiting her husband had he ever been forced to spend any time in Davie’s company. Davie Cover was a bully and – naturally, since the two went together – a coward, a man with the social skills of a scorpion and the higher intellectual functions of one of those insects that could keep existing on a basic level even if their heads were cut off. He’d joined the National Guard because he craved the veneer of authority offered by a weekend warrior’s uniform, and the official sanction for his actions that it implied. Then airplanes had started flying into buildings, and suddenly the US was seemingly at war with every country that was more than half sand, except maybe Australia, and Davie had found himself separated from his wife of six months and the mother of his child, Little Davie, the fact of their marriage not being unconnected to the existence of that child. Most everyone in Falls End, possibly including some of Davie’s blood relatives, felt a sense of profound relief at Davie Cover’s departure, and waited hopefully for the appearance of his name in an obituary column.
Surprisingly, though, Davie Cover had thrived in the army, in no small part because he was put on a prison detail, and therefore spent most of his time in uniform tormenting semi-naked men by alternately beating them, boiling them, freezing them, and pissing in their food. He’d liked it so much that he’d stayed on for an extra nine months, and he might still have been there had his enthusiasm for the uncontracted aspects of his job not brought him to the attention of superiors with a conscience and, more to the point, a desire to protect their own reputations, and Davie Cover had found himself quietly discharged.