If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls
24 Jul 2023 741 readers Score 8.6 (8 votes) PDF Mobi ePub Txt
PART ONE
THE OLD
WORLD
I want to tell if I am or am not myself
It's hard to know
How far or if at all could go
I've waited far too long
For something I forgot was wrong
I don't know all the answers
I think that I'll find
Or have it within the time
But it's all that I'll have in mind
Until I fall away
I won't keep you waiting long
Until I fall away
I don't know what to do anymore
Until I fall away…
"Until I Fall Away"- Robin Wilson, Jesse Valenzuela
ONE
THIRTY-ONE
“Unh! Unh! Harder! Now! Now! Baby... Oh, my Gawwwwwwwwwd!”
On her back, Debbie Baynes started to shout. Brad Long prevented it with the gentle penetration of the base of his palm in her mouth while he whispered, “Quiet Baby, Quiet!”
He said it in rhythm, gathering up strength as he fucked her.
They were in his basement. She’d snuck in this morning and said, “Happy Birthday, honey. Do you want your present?”
“What is it?”
“Me,” she said, and offered herself. Which, Brad thought, would have been gallant, would have been neat if she wasn’t always offering herself. He couldn’t complain. He was always taking.
He took this time.
Debbie told him, wrapping her little arms around his long neck, “I want you to be rough.”
He was rough enough. He took her on his hands and knees at seven in the morning and thrust himself into desire, and then into roughness. Roughness and tenderness were always a struggle, but right now there was no struggle because he didn’t want to be tender. Not really. He wanted this fucking, and then he wanted the coming and...
“Are you coming?”
Debbie stroked his head as the orgasm rumbled at the base of his cock.
“Are you coming?” her child voice demanded. “Are you okay?” She stroked him on his sweating head and stroked him while he trembled.
Brad opened his mouth to speak, grunted, shook, gasped like a fish while his body contracted, flailing out, and he let out a little strangled cry then collapsed on her.
“Oh, good boy,” Debbie said. “Oh, happy birthday!”
It filled him with self loathing how, at this moment, when he should have been at his most glorious, but was also at his most vulnerable, she pitied him like this and said stupid things, stroking his damp head. He was all damp. His heart was thumping. Debbie spoke on in her sweetly, vapid voice.
“How’s it feel to be thirty-one?”
Brad was drawing away from her, half swimming away to his side of the bed. His wet dick was shrinking into him.
He looked at Debbie, hair a mess, long face reddened and wet like his must have been.
He realized he hated her.
Brad could hear the water from the bathroom. Debbie was cleaning up. He wanted to clean up too, a little. He should go upstairs and take a shower—which Debbie—who had snuck into his parents’ house—could not do.
He did not say it, or even voice in a complete sentence that he was thirty-one as he looked around his domain. There were, painted in grey darkness, the rafters of the basement, They moved with the pressure of his mother’s feet. There were, behind him as there was across from him, the narrow windows, high and close to the ceiling by which he could see his father’s feet, or the dog’s paws as one of them walked the front yard.
“I’m underground,” said Brad. I’m buried alive.
He assessed the place, two large rooms, unfinished. This room he stayed in which was lower than the other with his large bed and a collection of many dog eared books, and on the opposite end of the great room that little bathroom where Debbie was washing off.
Brad was half tempted to look in the mirror, but he knew what he would see: the face at the end of the lanky, hirsute six feet that was pale nearly to the point of greenness. He’d see the eyes with the rings around them, the black hair and sideburns that made him look grungy, that needed to be cut, the goatee that his mother wished he’d shave.
He was surprised to see Debbie that morning and so early because she’d been over last night. She’d wanted to go on a walk. She liked this neighborhood. She loved the wide winding streets of what had been new thirty years ago, the low lying ranch houses, the trees just beginning to turn into something real. Brad had been here since Conestoga Drive was little more than a freshly baked prefab neighborhood. It meant nothing to him.
“Oh, honey!” she gushed, patting his face off as she reentered the room where Brad was still sitting naked, looking half dazed. “Let’s go on a walk. It’s a beautiful night. Come on. Get dressed!”
It had been a wretched night and the air was filled with cricket song, which annoyed the hell out of Brad, and the air was so thick that Brad thought, if I lean forward, the air will catch me and I’ll just be able to swim through it. But the thought of swimming just made him hotter. The air smelled hot. The lights on Conestoga Drive were out now. There were no sidewalks in Stonybrook subdivision. They walked the gravel.
“This is a nice life,” Debbie said. “I think we should have a house like this.”
“Like that one?” Brad pointed up a driveway posted with globe lanterns.
Debbie smiled with a simplicity that bordered on retardation.
“Yeah,” she said.
“But that’s like the house I live in now.”
“I know.”
“It’s like the house you live in.”
“My house doesn’t have those little gnomes.”
Brad stopped himself from frowning. He caught her hand and they kept walking. It was his fault. Didn’t she realize he was thirty? Past thirty! Didn’t she understand that he had different needs even if he himself didn’t know exactly what those needs were? She was twenty-two. Her whole life was ahead of her. If she took it.
“What do want, Debra?”
“Whaddo you mean?”
“What are you going to do with your life? I mean, what do you want to do?”
She smiled up at him, swung his long arm and said, “Be with you, silly.”
Well, we’re back here live in Washington D.C.--
**Applause. Applause
On Voice of the Nation from International Radio. And this hour our subject is Generation X-ers. With me are Bob Mc,Gee, Director of Intergeneration Studies at Brown University, and Alexandra Yarbro, an X-er herself--do you mind the term, Alex?
--No, Kevin.
**Laugh.
Well, Bob, exactly what is Generation X?
Kevin, it’s that group of people right after the baby boomers. Their reach is wide, anywhere from the late sixties... would you say 1965, Alex?
That’s the extreme end. Way before my time!
Up until about 1977, 78?
Yeah, it’s a lot of people shocked by that. My sister thinks she’s Generation X. Had to tell her, sorry, Sis.
What is she?
Kevin, the question for us is what are we?
Well that’s a good question. What typifies this generation?
Usually, a since of loss, of drifting, there’s no direction. Some people think there’s no ambition. That’s not true. It’s not that there’s no hope. There’s a lot of disillusionment.
Well, ah. We’re going to take a few callers from the disgruntled generation. Hello? Hello?
Hey, Kevin!
Hello.
My Name’s Brad, and I come from Michigan. That’s me! I’m thirty one. I live at home with my parents in their basement. I can’t seem to find any meaning in my life...
“Did we miss the turn?” Shane Meriwether demanded.
“I think we were supposed to take Old Route 30,” Nehru said, turning the map over and pushing up his glasses.
In the seats behind them, Leon Dixon, said, “I just saw a sign that said Route 30... when he hit the bypass.”
“Did it say Old 30?” Nehru turned around.
There’s a difference?” Leon asked him.
“That would be why,” Nehru explained in the slow voice he used for some white people, “one route is called 30 and the other one’s called Old 30.”
“Fuck it,” said Shane, taking a hand through his blond hair, “I’m turning back.”
“No!” shouted Brad, leaning in front of Debbie. “Look, the sign said Saint Joseph—twelve miles!”
“And isn’t that the church we saw last year?” Debbie said. “I think we know where we are.”
Shane sighed and kept driving.
“I think you’re full of shit,” Robin Childress wrapped a long, black braid around her caramel colored finger.
Shane sighed deeper and raised an eyebrow to Nehru who said, “I’m sure we’re in the right direction.”
From the hatchback Hale Weathertop shouted, “Are we there yet?”
Except for Robin, who turned him a murderous look, they all rode through southern Michigan in silence.
“Oh, thank God,” Brad said when familiar buildings started popping up and the road grew a little narrower. “We are in Saint Joseph.”
Banners hung across the street with red letters exclaiming, “Welcome to the Venetian Festival.”
“I wonder if it’ll suck this year?” Nehru said.
“As much as it does every year,” Shane told him as they made a right turn, away from the street that led down to the beach, past the bank, into the parking lot. On the house tops people were sitting, laughing and drinking. The streets were filled with folks walking to the beach or back to their cars.
Shane got the minivan parked in the bank’s parking lot, and they tumbled, cramped and stumbling, onto the blacktop. Brad reached into the pocket of his white shorts and pulled out his Marlboro’s.
“What kind?” Robin held out her hand.
“Menthols,” he said, lips clenched around the cigarette he lit. Robin made a face and drew back her hand. Brad inhaled, exhaled.
“Oh, honey, it’s such a bad habit,” said Debbie.
“It helps me deal with stress,” said Brad as he began walking at the head of the group, shaking out his long legs.
“What stress?” Debbie inquired.
Robin and Nehru rolled their eyes at each other and all Shane said was, “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Is that Chayne and Russell?” Nehru wondered.
“Chayne! Russell!”
He called before the rest of them understood what he was saying.”
As they were going up the street, headed to the wide avenue thye would cross to reach the beach, Russell Lewis’s red head and the white fedora of Chayne Kandzierski were coming toward them. Not far beyond, her black hair swinging, her skin golden in a tank top came the tall figure of Anigel Reyes beside Rob Keyes, the goodlooking guy who even now wore linen pants and a linen shirt and bright smile under wraparound shades.
“Nehru?” Chayne said.
They all greeted each other and Anigel said, “Go at your own peril. It’s crowded as fuck down there. We’re headed to New Union.”
“Crowded,” Rob added, “and once you get down there you lose the energy to make the trip back up, so you just stand on the beach between all those people and sort of lose the will to live.”
“Howabout we get to New Union soon as possible,” Chayne said, “And find that will again.”
After they parted someone shouted down and Nehru shouted up, waving.
“Wanna beer?” a white guy in a tank top asked.
“Thanks.”
Nehru threw up his hands and caught the beer tossed down.
“Happy Fourth!” Nehru shouted up.
“You too, man.”
“I’m such a swinger,” Nehru said.
“What?” Brad demanded.
“I’m such a swinger. You know, a real swinging guy.”
“That…” Brad began, “is not what that word means.”
“It’s what it means to me,” Nehru said, cracking open the beer and yelping, then laughing, as some of it foamed up his nose before he drank.
“That Rob guy looks a lot like you,” Nehru said.
“Cute ass, compact built,” Robin assessed.
“Spiky blond hair. If he has blue eyes under those shades you all would be twins.”
The group crossed the wide street with about twelve or so others and a bicycle. There was a two block walk down a cobble stone street full of shops with things no one could afford before they reached the beach.
Leon said, “Hey, did you know I got laid last night?”
“No,” said Robin. “but I know men lie a lot.”
“I got laid,” Leon insisted. “I took this girl home and fucked her in my Impala last night. She was hot as hell. But a little stupid.”
Against his desire to pretend he didn’t care, Hale said, “Did you meet her at the wedding you DJ-ed?”
“Un hunh. Red hair, nice tan, brown eyes. Nice ass. Kind of a bitch, though. She was a bridesmaid.”
“At Tara Daniel’s wedding?” Hale said.
“Um hum. Her name was.... I think her name was Jill. She lives on Colum.”
“You fucked Jill Barnard?” Shane turned on Leon.
“Yeah, that’s her name.”
Shane smiled fiercely. “You’re full of shit. I don’t believe you.”
“It’s a small world,” Nehru noted.
“It’s a small town,” Brad said darkly.
“Brad got laid last night too!” Debbie announced proudly.
Brad, who had been giving his attention to Nehru, suddenly blushed and his younger friend saw the taller man’s eyes widen a little.
“For his birthday,” Debbie announced.
Nehru was embarrassed for his friend who just kept walking with a fixed expression—or lack of expression—through the crowd.
Brad turned to Nehru and murmured, “Can I talk to you later?”
“About what?” said Nehru, smiling vapidly.