Fallen Land Read Online Free PDF Page B

Paul. Game over. You’ve already lost. God bless your mother but she’s been coddling you.” After that they started hunting together on “father–son weekends,” sleeping in a two-man tent in the woods, shitting and pissing outdoors with no privacy but a tree or a bush. Ralph made it clear that these weekends away were not just about bonding. “I’m teaching you survival, Paul. I need to know that you’re prepared for this world, for when you leave the house and have to make your own way. That’s my responsibility to you. I’m not gonna baby you, and from now on, neither is your mother. I’ve been remiss. I’ve let you down. I want you to be able to look after yourself. That’s the best gift I can give you. You have to learn to trust yourself, but first I need to turn you into your own best Trustee, help you develop your animal intuition. You have to learn to stand tall as God made you: do not be timid, do not apologize. Your height as a man is your virtue, as the height of this country is our nation’s virtue. It is by nature’s law that the great among men shall
overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not
. The great man said that, son, and I want you also to be a great man, to take your deserved place in this greatest of nations, to ride atop the lesser who will try to bring you down.” He can hear the incantation of his father’s voice, the way the words both inspired and soothed.
    Not long after the house was finished his parents came for a barbecue. His father scrutinized the building materials and design while his mother, Dolores, kept shaking her head. Her own family, far away in Arizona, had always danced along the edge of destitution, and Paul could not tell whether she was proud or disbelieving or both.
    “You were always gonna build houses, Pablito. Remember how you loved those bricks? I could keep you occupied that way for hours. You would just sit there in your fort talking to yourself, playing with your little action figures and whatnot.” Now, lying alone in the dark, hands pressed against the stock of the rifle, Paul can see the way his mother ravaged a fingernail between her teeth, as if she had already guessed how things would end up, how he was going to lose everything, the way society would turn against him, the way everyone, even she, was going to abandon him. “You remember that?”
    “Yeah, mama. I remember.”
    “‘I’m buildin’ a house,’ that’s what you’d say.”
    “A house not a fort?”
    “I guess sometimes it coulda been a fort. But usually it was just a house. ‘I’m buildin’ my house.’ Whenever you had friends over you wouldn’t let anyone play with those bricks. You hated sharing your toys, but the bricks were the worst. No one except me could touch them—you wouldn’t even let your dad. You used to say, ‘anybody who touches my bricks I’ll butcher ’em.’ You were always so angry. You didn’t want to do anything I told you.”
    “
A man has to be
his own star
, mama. Isn’t that right, dad, isn’t that what you always said?”
    His father, talking to Amanda on the other side of the back porch, sucked his beer and nodded as he fingered the vinyl siding. “Plastic,” he muttered. “Plastic in tornado country. What you want is brick and mortar.”
    “You always knew what you wanted to be. You were always going to build houses. I saw that from the beginning,
chiquito
. Not like your father,” his mother whispered.
    As a toddler, his favorite toys were a collection of blocks made from corrugated cardboard printed to resemble red bricks. Stacked on top of one another they formed walls that stood straight but were light enough to come tumbling down without causing damage. He built uncommonly straight walls for a child and the only time they ever fell was when he knocked them apart with his fists or his feet, imagining himself as one of the hulking superhuman characters he watched on television. “You