Read Falling Down for Free Online Page B

haven’t seen these people for thirty years.
    My dearest of dear old friends. Anna Jean and Tom Jacqua, and their three daughters. They live on a large farm somewhere in mountain foothills, more than a farm, could even be a commune?
    I get inside and nobody’s home. Nobody. Am I in the wrong house? Suddenly a car pulls up. I run to the front bay window, thinking it’s Anna Jean and Tom, but it’s an ancient Cadillac, the kind with huge fins, rust all along the bottoms and sides and wheel wells, left rear fender covered over with rust inhibitor and a primer coat, a dull purple while the rest of the caddy is hibiscus red.
    Four men get out and immediately see me in the bay window and begin firing shotguns. I run from room to room, it’s like one of those vast hotel suites, the men tromping around and blasting everything with the shotguns before they round a corner after me until one man with a huge Fu Manchu mustache says, Christ, it’s them, and everybody leaves, the Caddy pealing rubber. Anna Jean and Tom must be home, again I’m in the bay window, it’s still all glass, I thought the shotguns had pulverized it, and outside is a brand-new Dodge Ram full-size double cab, pulling a large, trailered powerboat. Another four men get out and they’ve also got shotguns and blast away, except this time, I find a portable telephone and dial 911 and the police tell me the squad cars are already on the way.
    Ten or twelve people fill the living room, Anna Jean is hugging me fiercely, Tom comes in, he’s almost bald, a round elfish face, he can’t wait to hug me so the three ofus dance in a circle and all the others join in, one of those dances they do at weddings where people hold hands and swell out to the full extent of the ring and then, with raised held hands, bunch in toward the middle.
    A detective is looking at marks all over the walls, Shotguns, all right, he says, except no slugs have penetrated the wall, the plaster has dimpled patterns, and Anna Jean says, We did that two years ago, want to see our horses? three horses are stabled in a room inside the house, everybody’s drinking Almaden wine, those jugs shaped like the bottom of an hourglass, everybody’s cooking some kind of dinner, we’re all incredibly connected as friends.
    C’mon out back, a cop says. Leads me through a grove of sycamores to an eight-sided stone house, the doorway facing east. They’re all waiting, the cop says. Inside, they’re waiting . We enter a large room, the stone house is really just one big room, essentially an eating place and a kitchen with a propane refrigerator and a fifty-gallon drum cut down to function as a wood-burning stove. Part of the room was sectioned off by hanging sheepskins and rugs. The cop held one of the rugs aside and motioned me through.
    Nathan stood in the middle of a large group of people. You’re not from my mother’s or father’s clan, Nathan said. Now there are no taboos against us, now we can get married.
    But where’s the swimming pool? I said.
    It’s out back, the cop said. Want to see it?
    Out back, nothing but desert for miles and miles. The cop held a pistol on me. You weren’t supposed to find me, he said. It was a bad mistake, your friend Bob Gates hiring you. You weren’t even supposed to come looking for me.
    But I didn’t want to find you, I said. I just wanted to get married.
    Marry this, he said. Raising his pistol.
    And he killed me.
    Â 
    Ultimately, a violent dream. My life, as Nathan saw my life, the violence that Nathan rejected as though I deliberately chose violence, rather than having it wash over my life.
    When your lover says goodbye, when your lover or your partner or your spouse says it’s over, your way of life is not what I choose, you can renounce it or join me or I will renounce you.
    Whoever figures on being dumped?
    What are the odds, when you don’t see it coming?
    And what are