Novel-in-progress, Brown Bottle, excerpt

“My name's Wade.  Most you all know me.  I probably should say my name's Brown.  But it's not.  My name's Wade.  You remember me from high school, Alex.  We threw that fossil out the back window of Miss Dutton's science room.  You remember?  My name's Wade Kingston, people.  And this is a heap of bull poop.”

A short woman wearing half a dozen bracelets and sat at the head of one of the cafeteria tables with a worn book in front of her nodded to Brown to go on.  She held her hand up just slightly when a few giggles started along the back wall.

“They judged me to come here and talk about drinking and all that.  Being angry and trying to kill Tuck Collins and all that.  But I’d just soon they put me in jail with Dennie, that’s my nephew.  He’s there and I’m here.  They didn’t judge him to go to no meetings, and he should, cause Tuck’s got him hooked on pills and who knows what else.”

Brown stopped talking and the room went silent.  About six others, the back wall gang, were also court ordered to attend AA meetings once a day as part of various offenses.  Brown never joined them in that back galley.  Their plan was to float and do their time.  Just a different kind of prison.  Two or three showed up for meetings drunk, stood up and apologized and cried and said they’d do better.  Back to jail for them, and then the courts would place another two or three in the Gunther House, the halfway house for Teller County, and then the Gunther administration would have those two or three signed up for meetings.  Young boys, mostly.  And most of them were also attending, by the order of the court, of course, to attend NA meetings. It was a mess and Brown was in the middle of it.

He was still standing, but didn’t have much else to say, it seemed.  Then he pointed to a tall man wearing a thin jacketslumped next to the three coffee pots beside the restroom.  

“That’s Stan Collins there, folks.  Just wanted to say I got nothing against you, you understand.  But that brother of yours, he’s going to kill my Dennie, and I won’t have it.”

Stan hadn’t looked up from his coffee.  He’d listened to Brown and wanted to stand up against him when he mentioned Tuck.  He’d come to have at him, actually.  Was going to catch him outside when they all these poor people made a circle and done some sort of prayer or whatever to the higher power.  One guy told him when he showed up for the meeting that his higher power was Andy Griffith.  You can have anything you want as your higher power, he told him.  It don’t have to be God.  Stan told him that was a good thing, that a man better have some options and moved along, found his place at the coffee pot.  And now here was Brown Bottle Kingston pointing him out and speaking to him directly.

“I suppose I should’ve figured you’d spot me, Brown,” he said.  He sat up straight in the chair. “Stupid to think different now that I give some thought to it.”

The bracelet-wearing woman turned to get a look at Stan. “Is there a problem?”

“Yep, but we’ll work it out.  Step out, Brown?”

Stan scanned the room.  He knew about half the people there and they knew enough about him and about Brown to understand.  This lady running the show might not.  He stood up and pulled his jacket tightly around the swell of his belly and walked to the door, stopping briefly without looking back to Brown, then stepped out into the evening air.

The strange scent of snow was in the air though it was the second week of December of not a flake had fallen.  But it was coming.  It was warm that day when Brown stepped past him while Lafe pulled lettuce up from the ground, even for autumn. Pulled a pistol on him in the back bedroom after slamming the door through.  That sound, that snapping of metal and hinge, broke him away from Lafe.  By the time he made it into the trailer, Brown was standing over Tuck with the pistol.  Other than Tuck’s scared breathing, not a sound.  Eve must have made the call.  Police cruisers arrived within minutes.  They’d already been there once that day.  Place and purpose was easily definedand to face facts, Tuck’s had become a hotspot for the troopers, on the radar and a long list of other dealers in the region.  But this time they had to wrestle Wade Kingston to the ground.  This after luring him away from Tuck Collins, a crying and pitiful man who they wanted to arrest more for dealing drugs but couldn’t.  Brown could have shot Tuck.  He did not.  Maybe it was fear.  Maybe it was hesitation, which could have been the same thing, more or less.  But he didn’t kill him then.  It was a thought.  Something to go on.  

Stan sniffed the air, waited for Brown.  When he stepped out the door, Stan half-expected the fighting to start right away.  He’d been preparing for that, but he was prepared for Brown to start off with conversation.

“I got no bones to pick with you, Stan,” Brown said evenly, squaring his shoulders. “But it might just be that you got plenty for me, so just go on ahead and try what you think you ought toand be done with it.  I settle my scores one at a time.”

Stan took a step forward and Brown held his hand out, spoke quietly.  “Now you ought to be fair and tell me if you got a gun somewhere on you, cause I’ll be honest and tell you I don’t have mine on me.”

It all puzzled Stan more than he hoped was showing to Brown.  “I ain’t got a gun.  But I’ll tell you one thing.  We have to settle this now, this thing with you and Tuck.”

“That’s for Tuck to settle.  Not you.  I said as much in there with the boozers.”

“Now see, you’re interrupting me, Brown.  That won’t do.”

“Don’t call me Brown.”

Stan rubbed his chin and looked at the starless sky, sniffed that scent of snow, took it deep into his lungs, and tried to compose himself.  “We’re not getting too far with words it seems to me.  Why worry about one?”

Brown placed his hand on the door, stood a half beat, and then walked four steps across until he standing in Stan’s face.  “I understand you don’t want me around Tuck.  That’s cause you love him and don’t want harm put to him.  That’s how I am with Dennie and so we’re just caught in some real poop here, Stan.  Rock and a hard place, for sure.”

Brown started back into the meeting and Stan coughed loudly.  Brown turned around slowly.

“I don’t think you’re going to kill my brother.  But I can’t let you do anything to him.  And so, yep, we’re stuck a little, but at least I know you’re not going to kill him.  It’s more than I had before we talked.”

“Well, hell now.  Good for you, Stan.”

 

Back to Basics

Writing, with no expectations, and swelled with a love for words and the stories they bring me. I've found my pen again, and it belongs to me. 

Wait for it

You gotta watch the weather. Wait for it. In the meantime, write and pretend no one will ever read it. 

Dysphoria

The kitchen is spun in warm brown colors and nearly soundless, insulated. The scent of butter and fried meats ease in and out of lungs.  And there is mostly that quietness, an aloneness, the boy's fork working the edges of his plate. 

The grandmother is at the head of the table and the father sits somewhere in the middle, a haze, present in the same intangible way as a sound or a scent.  The father is busy with his own food.  His face is slack.  Blank.  Nothing.  Two tired blue eyes gazing and lost behind clumps of raven tangles. 

The boy works the plate and eats.

The father's mouth is pulled into a long and permanent frown, the corners blending bark-like as near to the middle of a hard, military chin as possible.  Just parts of a face mostly overlooked because of its severity.

But the grandmother is still in her chair, food neglected, her eyes tremble in the sockets.  Waiting.  Worried.  Somehow expectant.  Her hands only move when the boy moves his fork across the plate, a twitch, a pulling in of the fingers.

An explosion and everything is bright blue electricity.

The father is out of his chair, a phantom tornado, a fast moving mouth and violent, becoming the whole sensory world.  The boy's stomach walls beat against his ribs. 

The boy is not me.  The boy is you.

The Insomniac by G.C. Compton

Note: Winner of the 2006 Kudzu Poetry Prize

Not since that August morning in 1945

have I had a good night’s sleep.

The hoot-owl never lifts a wing

nor do the crickets stop in the grass

when I walk the road alone,

another shadow,

another creature of the night.

On my knees at odd wakings

I ask the Lord the difference between

heroism and murder,

between duty and desire

and what it means to “love thine enemies.”

I can’t sleep.

I saw “Little Boy” coddled and cradled

while he was yet asleep.

I remember the innocent dew failing

and heard the croaking of a frog.

They couldn’t have done it without me:

Colonel Tibbets, Oppenheimer, Harry Truman…

on the brightest darkest day

in the history of the world.

You may not wish to shake my hand—

and then again, you might.

It’s the hand that did it.

I’m Private First Class Chalmos Wright

of Three-Mile, Kentucky,

The man who put the fuel in the Enola Gay.

James Salter: Polishing Words

GRANTED, Last Night, is the first book of James Salter’s I've ever read, and maybe that’s why I feel compelled to say that I've never seen anything like this in my life, but I’m pretty sure Salter might be the greatest writer who ever dabbled in the alphabet.

            No seriously.

            Just listen to this:

            “They ate dinner in silence.  Her husband did not look at her.  Her face annoyed him, he did not know why.  She could be good-looking but there were times when she was not.  Her face was like a series of photographs, some of which ought to have been thrown away.  Tonight was like that” (Salter 44).

            Many of Salter’s critics say that, although the New York born writer may be a great stylist, that is not an important writer, one that will have the lasting impact on his society that did, say, Hemingway.  But I think that the mark of an important writer is how much insight into the human condition one can provide.  And I think that style is merely a meter by which to measure how well that message is put across.  It’s the equivalent of saying, okay, this person can sing like a bird.  Okay, you listen to them sing and you get the story behind the song, if there is one, because the instrument that was used to communicate is beautiful and effective.  It’s the same thing with Salter.  His sentences are so beautiful and wonderfully designed, polished, as he says, like rare gems, each one, that they communicate, without any sign of fat or excess verbage, exactly the same feeling you might have had at one time in your life, or someone you might know.

            And tension, don’t even talk to be about tension with this guy.

            In the first story of this collection, Salter puts the vice grips on real slow and then just keeps twisting.  Here we have a couple in the story, “Comet,” who has gotten married, but there are hints in the first opening paragraphs that things are slightly off center.  She wore a white dress, but Salter doesn’t just leave it at that, no, instead, he takes that opportunity to start planting seeds and building character.  “It had been a while since Adele had married and she wore white: white pumps with low heels, a long white skirt that clung to her hips, a filmy blouse with a white bra underneath, and around her neck a string of freshwater pearls” (3).  What’s happening here is that seed of tension is being placed, very gently by a really talented writer.  This isn’t just an ordinary marriage.  This is a second marriage and then later we get even more hints of the tension already building and the tension to come. 

“Behind her as best man, somewhat oblivious, her young son was standing, and           pinned to her panties as something borrowed was a small silver disc, actually a St. Christopher medal her father had worn in the war; she had several times rolled down the waistband of her skirt to show it to people” (3).

Why is this lady essentially showing her panties to people during her wedding?  It’s an unsettling image for me, personally.  And this continues to build throughout the story with the woman’s story of her ex-husband, the one that Philip is forced to endure time and again, that has, itself, some unsettling details.

All of this tension suggests one thing, and it’s a theme I see throughout the collection – that of longing and regret.

Another good example of regret, particularly, comes in the short story, “My Lord You,” which depicts a woman who is unhappy with her current life/ husband and sees the possibility of something new and exciting in this poet character.  The quote at the beginning of this essay is from that story and illustrates the indifference her husband has toward her.  There are some really painful moments earlier in that story where we see that the husband makes little or no effort to thwart, or at least discuss, some of his wife’s longing and perhaps even lust for this poet character, Brennan, who pretty much stains not only the opening scene but the remainder of the story.  From the start, we know that he is going to be a driving force for throwing a wrench into the fabric of these people’s lives.

“There were crumpled napkins on the table, wine-glasses still with dark remnant in them, coffee stains, and plates with bits of hardened Brie.  Beyond the bluish windows the gardens lay motionless beneath the birdsong of summer morning.  Daylight had come.  It had been a success except for one thing: Brennan” (27).

I can’t help but cite Salter in long form, he’s just too good.  Even writing his sentences here to cite myself for reference from his work nearly makes my fingers tingle at the very tips, magic somehow to even have the great honor of forming those common letters into the same passage that he himself wrote.

Ron Rash, I Expect Honesty. Thank You.

Looking forward to Ron Rash's new collection. But we'll have to see about this "underside" business. I'll be looking for a belly more closely resembling that of a trash-eating Carp than the smooth tummy of your average smallmouth. I'll be looking for the spoken truth of what I see each day, and hope it's in here.

Here's the news story I came across: Short stories show Appalachia's raw underside.