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Joseph E Bird

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Fiction

Bobcat Hollow

This is a passage from Chris Offutt’s book, The Good Brother.  In this scene, Virgil is about to leave the only town he has ever known.  He becomes aware of things he had never consciously noticed before.

He strolled the familiar sidewalk of Main Street, passing people whose faces he recognized – as Boyd put it, men he’d howdied but never shook.  Teenage boys outside the pool hall stood very close to each other.  As they got older, they would move further apart.  Old men in front of the courthouse owned a segment of space that surrounded them like a web.

And here, he visits his sister one last time.

He drove to his sister’s house at the head of Bobcat Hollow.  The dirt road crossed the creek several times, and in spring the two mixed freely.  At the top of the ridge, trees glowed with autumn colors, but near the creek, the leaves were still green.  Two dogs loped around the house and barked. A young billy goat with one horn stared at him, the only penned animal on the place.

It’s the understated writing; the deft observations; the cultural roots.

2

A random paragraph.

SOMETIMES WINTER IS SNEAKY and rides in quietly on the coattails of fall, cooling the evenings ever so slightly until one morning, there’s snow hiding between blades of grass. But on this particular Saturday, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, the wind blew hard and cold from the west, declaring an end to the mythos of the endless summer, and languid, hopeful nights.

copyright 2015, joseph e bird

6

First Lesson

He sat in the break room, feet up on the table, guitar across his lap, and played the same riff over and over.  It was a tricky combination of finger-picking and a shuffle strum that would take him a while to learn.  He could make it easier: slow the rhythm, alter the chord progression, or change the tune altogether.  It was his own composition, after all.

He played it three more times, each time, a little faster and a little smoother.  There was no rush.  It wasn’t on his playlist for that evening; most of those songs he could play in his sleep.   But he knew when it was ready, when he was ready, it would be worth all the work.

The speaker on the wall of the break room crackled.

Customer needs assistance in electrical.

“That’s you, Chet,” Doyle said from his chair on the other side of the room.

He stopped playing and looked at Doyle.  “Chet?”

“You’re too young,” Doyle said. “Chet Atkins.  He was the guitar player when I was a kid.”

“They had guitars on the Mayflower?”

“Let me see that thing.”

Trevor dropped his feet to the floor and walked across the room to Doyle.

“Can you play?”

“No.”

Doyle held the guitar and ran his left hand up and down the neck, his fingers buzzing on the strings while his palm slid along the varnished maple.  With his right thumb, he strummed the strings, muted by his left hand.  He lifted his fingers and strummed again.  Even though he played no chord and there was no tune and no music whatsoever, Doyle couldn’t help but smile.

“I can teach you.”

Doyle looked up and down the guitar, admiring the curves and shine and worn strings and that distinctive aroma that all musical instruments possess.  Then the smile disappeared.  “I’m too old.”  He held the guitar by the neck and pushed it back to Trevor.

“You’re never too old.” Trevor put the guitar back on Doyle’s lap and arranged his arms and hands in the proper position.

“What are you doing?”

Trevor twisted Doyle’s left hand so that his fingers hovered over the fret board.

“Take this finger and put it here.”  He positioned his ring finger on the second fret of the fourth string.  Doyle’s fingers were thin and bony.  Had they been more plump, Trevor’s experiment might have failed, a realization that came upon him a bit too late.  He placed his middle finger on the second fret of the fifth string, and his index finger on the first fret of the third string.

Customer needs assistance in electrical.

“Now press,” he said.

“You better go,” Doyle said.

“See how your fingers are flat against the strings?”

Doyle nodded.

“Straighten them up.  More vertical.”

“It hurts.”

“Yeah.”  Trevor moved Doyle’s fingers slightly, making sure they weren’t touching any other strings.  “Now hold that.”  He stepped back.

Doyle looked hard at his fingers, willing them to stay in position.

“Now strum.”

He did.  Doyle played his first chord.  He strummed again.  And again.

“Got to go,” Trevor said.

Doyle strummed again.

“That’s an E chord, by the way.  You wouldn’t believe how many songs start out with that chord.”  He wasn’t sure if Doyle had heard him. He plucked the srings one by one.  His first arpeggio.

copyright 2015, joseph e bird

The preceding is the opening of my current unnamed work in progress.  It will likely change as the writing progresses and the inevitable editing occurs. More to follow.

0

He plays the guitar.

There’s a guy I know named Maxfield Martin. Just met him. He’s in his 80s. Plays the guitar. But not just any guitar, the steel guitar. You know, the kind that sits on a stand horizontally across the lap. A steel slide in the left hand, picking the strings with the right.

Anybody remember Roscoe Swerps? That’s what he played way back when. Sad country songs.

But not Maxfield Martin. Man, that guy can play. I mean, yeah, he can make that guitar cry, but he can flat-out tear it up with screaming foot-stomping rockabilly phosphorescent bluegrass.

Maxfield Martin told me a story.

I’ll share it with you some day soon.

4

Do you hear voices?

Writers (and writing advisors) like to talk about voice.

“You must find your voice,” they say.

I hear it so often that it must be true.  I can think of a couple of authors that have an identifiable voice.  Cormac McCarthy. Kurt Vonnegut. I might be able to identify their writing in a random setting. I just looked up and down my bookcase to see if anybody else jumped out at me. Lots of good storytelling on those shelves, but not necessarily a strong authorial voice.

Here’s another spin on the idea of voice that might be more important than the author’s voice – the characters’ voices. In the hands of a good writer, the characters in the story will all sound a little different.  And I’m not talking about exaggerated regional (hillbilly/southern/yankee) dialect.  I’m not a fan of dropping (droppin’) the g off words or having your character say bar when, in fact, it’s a bear chasing him.  It’s more subtle than that.

It’s in the pacing.  Some people speak slowly, in measured words.  Others are rapid fire pontificators.  Some use certain words and phrases, you know what I mean?  Some are loud, others are low talkers.

Stephen King’s short story, A Death, which was just published in the New Yorker, illustrates this principle.  (Although the story is not in his horror genre, it does have a couple of graphic scenes that might spoil your appetite.  Don’t read it before eating.)  Pay particular attention to the character Trusdale.  You can literally (not literally, but almost) hear his voice. Same with Sheriff Barclay.  We hear the characters, not Stephen King.

Here’s the story.  Enjoy.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/a-death-stephen-king

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This is an easy read, and it’s interesting.

I’m reading and writing and thinking today.  Here’s what’s on my mind:

Much is made of the need to hook the reader with the first line.  Consider these first lines from well-respected authors.

“At twenty-four the ambassador’s daughter slept badly through the warm, unsurprising nights.”

“All this happened, more or less.”

“On the first day of my teaching career, I was almost fired for eating the sandwich of a high school boy.”

Any of these hook you?

The first one is from Salman Rushdie (or Sal Bass, as he was known on Seinfeld). The book is Shalimar the Clown.  I wasn’t all that knocked out by the opening line.  The rest of the book follows the same tone.

The second is from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.  This is an oft-quoted example of a good first line, but really, the first paragraph is important for the hook.  Here it is:

“All of this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.  One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his.  Another guy I  knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.  And so on.  I’ve changed all the names.”

Not only do you get a sense of what the book is all about, you get a big dose of that acerbic Vonnegut voice.

The third “first line” is by Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who gave us Angela’s Ashes.  This is from his later memoir, Teacher Man. What a story-teller, McCourt was.  He gets right into it, when, on his first day as a New York school teacher in 1958, Petey throws his baloney sandwich at Andy.  The first line tells you what happens to the sandwich, but you need to have McCourt tell you the whole story. He’s the kind of guy you’d want to have over for dinner.  Well, not now, with him being dead and all.  But you know what I mean.

Chapter 17 of Teacher Man ends with:

“Someone calls, Hey, Mr. McCourt, you should write a book.”

Here’s Chapter 18, the last chapter of the book, in its entirety:

“I’ll try.”

We should talk about endings some day.  They’re probably more important than beginnings.  Kind of a chicken and egg conundrum.

That is all. Go back to your ball game or cooking show or beach (if you’re lucky enough to live in southern California).

7

All the Pretty Horses

Editor’s Notes:

Context: Two young cowboys, Rawlins and John Grady, have hit the trail, headed for Mexico.  In this exchange, Rawlins gets a little philosophical.

I like this. There’s simple, transparent writing.  There’s meaning. There’s humor. Yep.

And the missing punctation is on Cormac McCarthy, not me.

You ever get ill at ease, said Rawlins.

About what?

I don’t know. About anything.

Sometimes. If you’re someplace you aint supposed to be to be I guess you’d be ill at ease. Should be anyways.

Well suppose you were ill at ease and didn’t know why. Would that mean that you might be someplace you wasnt supposed to be and didnt know it?

What the hell’s wrong with you?

from All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

1

The well.

From the Chris Offutt story, A Good Pine.

“He couldn’t recall the last time he had laughed or cried.  Both came from the same well with different buckets, but his water table had dropped forever, the spout long sealed shut.”

 

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Can you feel the wind?

Forget the movies, don’t think about the characters, or even the story.  Just enjoy F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mastery of the scene in The Great Gatsby.  You don’t just see it, you hear it and feel it.

“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald from The Great Gatsby

 

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