If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls

AMENDS

PART TWO

Thom came into Russell’s room and looked guiltily at the three young men.

“Kids, go downstairs,” he told John’s children, and rolling off the bed, the boys did so without asking questions.

“And, Russ, shut the door.”

Russ turned around and said, “Uncle Tommy, will you take us to Syndication?”

“What?” Thom raised an eyebrow.

“It’s where Russell saw the Partridge Family.”

Russ looked up at his namesake. “Isn’t it?”

Russell didn’t try to explain it. Thom said he would later. Russ nodded and the boys went downstairs.

“They told me I couldn’t come,” Thom said.

 He had never taken off his day clothes, and he reached into the breast pocket of his white shirt and took out his Marlboros, which was a sign for Cody and Russell to do the same.

“Do you mind?” Cody said to Jason.

“Actually, do you mind being here?” Thom asked. “We tied up your whole night and sort of held you hostage. You could have been gone a long time ago.”

“No,” Jason said. “And Russell’s my friend. I smoke all the time.”

He took one of Russell’s cigarettes, lit it, inhaled and his eyes widened as his cheeks ballooned.

“Just cough,” Thom advised him, and Jason did.

“It’s an acquired habit, and there’s really no need for you to acquire it,” Thom told Jason, and took the cigarette from the boy and began to smoke it himself.

“I can’t get it together around him,” Thom said. “I wish I could. It’s just like this demon takes over. I’m so angry around the son-of-a-bitch, and I know I’ve got to get better.”

“Mr. Lewis—Thom,” Cody amended, the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. “I know how you feel. If I saw Max Barnard, I don’t think I’d be too much better to him.”

“Your Dad?” Russell assumed.

“Yup. I haven’t seen him since I was eight,” Cody explained.

“One day me and Jill were coming home from school, and we walk in the house and Mom’s crying—which I’ve never seen her do. And Dad’s yelling at her and calling her a lying whore. I thought maybe she’d been having an affair. We were living in East Sequoya back then. So he goes upstairs, gets his stuff and he yells at me. He shakes his finger and says, ‘You’re no goddamned son of mine.’”

Thom let his cigarette burn. Unconsciously his eyes had widened and his mouth hung slack. He was white. So was Russell. Neither one of them dared interrupt.

“And then he walked out,” Cody went on. He inhaled. As if on cue they all did, smoke filing the space between them.

“Privately... I think he’d wanted to leave for a long time and was just needing an excuse. Jill cried for a straight year. She thought she’d done something wrong. I just kept telling her: he’s a bastard. I think she finally believed me.”

Russell puffed on the last of his cigarette, crushed it out.

“How’d you get here?” he asked.

“Geschichte Falls?” Cody said. “My family comes from here. Mom’s side. They always come back... Mom’s parents got divorced when she was really young, and she went with her mom down to the state line. Niles, I think. That’s where she met my dad. Then they moved to East Sequoya. But when Max Barnard left, Mom moved back in with her dad... my granddad. Who’s dead. And we live in his house.”

“Do you have any other family?” Thom asked Cody, and Cody shook his head.

“Well,” Russell said what Thom had wanted to, but thought would sound too impulsive coming from him, “you’ve got us now.”

 

IN THE END THOM LEWIS said to hell with it, and told Cody and Russell to get in the car with the kids.

“Are you sure?” Russell was asking as they all piled into Cody’s truck, the boys in the back with Thom, and Russell between his Jason and Cody.

“I’m absolutely sure,” Thom said.

“I’m not going to miss my baby sister giving me a nephew. Or a niece.”

“Russell,” Jason said, “do you realize—”

“That this is the second birth in a year the three of us have been at together?” Cody finished.

Jason nodded.

Russell sat between Jason and Cody, both of their thighs rubbing against his. For a moment he turned to see Cody’s Adam’s apple, swallowing as he drove. He could smell the cigarette and the faint cologne on him and the strength of his thighs through the jeans and on the other side he felt Jason’s leg against his, smelled the cedar of his clothes, the spearmint of his gum. Russell felt his penis getting firm, squeezed his thighs together, went hot all over.

They stepped out of the car, Cody carrying Frankie, Thom carrying Tommy and Russell telling Russ that he was old enough to walk for himself no matter how cold and late it was.

“Sacred Net?” Russell asked his Cody, who only nodded.

Thom went to the desk, and a few seconds later was led to the fourth floor where no one seemed surprised to see him. There was no scene, no talking anyone down. Everyone acted as if he should have shown up a long time ago. Cody and the children were no surprise either.

The birth was not a quick one. Walking the fluorescent lit halls, Kristin—belly the size of a beach ball, confessed to her brother, “I’m worried.”

“About Jackie?”

“No, about me, ass!” Kristin snapped, herself again. “I got pregnant four weeks before she did. And no baby.”

“Well, you’re a little older—”

“Try ten years, Thom.”

“Well, more like twelve—” Thom began and stopped as his sister flashed him a dangerous look.

That’s why I’m worried,” she said, “This is the baby me and Reese have wanted for twenty years, and if we loose it...”

“Kristin stop!” Thom took his older sister by the shoulder and spoke directly to her for the first time. She turned her wide hazel eyes to him.

“Nothing is going to happen to your baby. You’ll be just fine. I’ve waited too long to have nephews. Mom’s waited too long to have more grandkids. You’re going to have a fine, healthy baby, so shut the fuck up and sit down. Alright?”

The two of them looked at each other, and then Thom grinned and Kristin laughed and touched her brother’s cheek.

“Ah, Thom,” she said. “You’re something else.”

Then she said, “Go talk to R.L.”

As it turned out, R.L. found Thom. His son was sitting at the Finnalay Parkway entrance watching an eighteen wheeler trawl up the road in the predawn darkness.

“I came to you, and I don’t know what to say,” R.L. said, at last.

Thom sucked on his cigarette, exhaled out of the side of his mouth, but did not look up.

“I don’t know what to say, either. I wish you’d just stayed dead.”

“I was never dead.”

“I wished you were, though. That way it wouldn’t have been like you left me. It would have been like you didn’t have a choice. I used to blame Mom for moving away. Maybe you’d come back. But I didn’t really like it when you were around anyway.”

“Tommy—”

“I told you about that.”

“Thomas, I came to try to make things right. I came to see you.”

“Why?”

R.L. sat down beside him.

“Because you’re my son, Thomas.”:

“Your son was twelve. I—am almost forty. I’ve been with Patti for twenty years. I’ve got a son who’s older than I was when you left.”

“You don’t seem forty—and actually, you’re thirty eight. Just turned it in June—”

“Shut up,” Thom said, dully, flicking the cigarette away. “I hate you—”

“June 6th,” R.L. went on.

“Wait, you remembered my birthday” Thom said. “Let me get that award out of my back pocket.”

“Class President of Our Lady of Mercy High School, 1975, Prom King ‘77,” R.L. said. Then, “Merit Scholarship to Notre Dame. 100th in his graduating class—not that high up, but not bad by any stretch of the imagination. Even... Employee of the month four times when you worked at Denny’s.”

`    Another truck roared by. For a second, Thom turned his head to see it then turned back to the old man, as if R.L. was speaking another language.

R.L. went on.

“Thomas Russell Lewis to wed Patricia Janna Mc.Llarchlahn at 2 P.M. in the Church of the Sacred Heart, Notre Dame, Indiana. Pastor— ”

“What are you talking about—” Thom stopped him.

“Your life,” R.L. said simply. “Thomas, there isn’t a thing you’ve done—at least publicly—that I don’t know about.

“I stayed away because I knew if I came back I would just mess everything up. I stayed away until I couldn’t stay away any longer, Thom.”

 

The sky was grey as they sat in the carpeted waiting room, and the first cars racing to work came down Finnalay Parkway.

“So,” Kathleen asked her husband, “what did you do all those years?”

R.L. shrugged. Sitting side by side, neither looked at the other.

“Nothin’ worth mentioning.”

“You were gone for over a quarter of a century, and you haven’t done anything worth mentioning?”

Kathleen smiled, tired, and a laugh came out.

“R.L., that’s a goddamned shame.”

“You know what else is a goddamned shame?”

Now she looked at him.

“That I couldn’t be a good husband. Now that’s a shame for starters. But I was going to say it’s a goddamned shame that it looks like Finn’s going to stay with that Meg Rice woman.”

Kathleen was so tired she could only raise an eyebrow in shock.

“How in the hell do you know Finn? I was barely pregnant with him when I came here.”

“That’s how I know him. He didn’t remember me. So he couldn’t feel bad about me. He tracked me down. Finn was quite a surprise. Katey, I didn’t even know about him. He doesn’t really know his ass from a hole in the ground, but he’s got a good heart somewhere beneath all the acid trips. He’s not like Thom.”

“No,” Kathleen agreed. “And I suggest you don’t let on to Thom—or any of your other children, that you’ve had a running correspondence with your youngest child for… how long?”

“About eight years.”

Kathleen’s eyes flew open.

“A friend helped him find me. When he left home where do you think he went?”

“On the road.”

“He did go on the road, but Katey, even Jack Kerouac had to stop in Denver. He came to me. Whenever he was gone for a long time or didn’t want to come back here, he found me. Finn told me that it might be time to come home, that Jackie was pregnant and so was Kristin and that Thom had almost got a divorce...”

As R.L. told her these things, Kathleen realized that she and the rest of the family had always assumed Finn was spacing out, that Finn had no idea of what the hell was going on. On the surface, Thom had always been close mouthed, a pleasant but shut book with a smiling cover. But no one ever bothered to think that Finn was a closed book as well. He was a book no one bothered to open.

“You sure do look good, Katey.”

“Yeah,” she nodded unpretentiously. “I know. I’d like that divorce R.L. I don’t want to have to live in sin with Mason.”

“Forty-one, forty-two years....” R.L. nodded. “That’s not a bad record for a marriage at all.”

“Even if you weren’t here most of the time?”

“I’ve seen a lot of marriages, Katey O’Donnell, and I think the secret to our success as a couple is that I haven’t been around for the last twenty-six years. If you think about, I’m sure you enjoyed me more after I left.”

“Is that why you left so often?” she asked in discovery.

R.L. did not answer.

A male nurse came out followed by Russell and Cody, both of them pushing the wings of their hair out of their faces as they jogged to R.L. and Kathleen.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lewis,” said the blond young man in his black rimmed spectacles, “You all have a very, very beautiful, healthy granddaughter. Come and see.”