Smoke and Gravity - Softcover

Neagle, Win; Chappell, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0970172605 ISBN 13: 9780970172600

Publisher: Paper Journey Pr, 2001

Synopsis

This first novella by Win Neagle is a rollicking good read about a treehouse architect, his stripper girlfriend, a house-burgling germaphobe, a washed-up dentist and his shopaholic wife. It's a rollercoaster of laughs in a zany, whimsical exploration of life. Fred Chappell calls the book ... original, whimsical and utterly untrammeled humor that will have you comparing Neagle to Voltair and Vonnegut.

About this title

About the Author

A former tennis instructor, securities broker, barge driver, and tree surgeon, Win Neagle now lives in Raleigh, NC and teaches in the English Department at Louisburg College.

While writing and teaching consume much of his energy, riding his vintage motorcycle and tossing boomerangs are two passions he shares with the protagonist of his first novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

To say Myron Fugate stands naked in his backyard may not be completely accurate.

He is, indeed, in his backyard, a vast expanse of land as backyards go. Between Myron and the rear boundary of his property rest nearly thirty acres of rolling meadow and an occasional tree.

However, it might be more accurate to say Myron Fugate throws boomerangs in his backyard. Scattered within a twenty- pace radius of Myron lie forty-nine of his seventy-five boomerangs, and at this moment he is reaching into a cotton laundry bag to select the v-shaped projectile with which he will perform his fiftieth toss of the evening.

Or maybe we should reconsider the word naked, for though it is true that Myron wears neither shirt nor pants, naked might conjure up an image of complete nudity and might give an impression of slight, perhaps even total, vulnerability, and it is difficult to picture Myron Fugate as a vulnerable man.

Myron tosses his fiftieth boomerang of the evening. It is one of his cheaper, plastic boomerangs, but its flight proves true. Holding steady to its elliptical flight pattern, the boomerang pretends to zoom past its nearly naked thrower, but then stalls in a hover, allowing Myron to reach out and gently pluck it from the air. It is the sixth catch he’s made this evening. Myron tosses the boomerang aside and gives himself a congratulatory stroke of his beard.

The beard is one of the elements that renders Myron nearly naked, rather than completely so. The beard is longer and grayer than one might expect for a man under forty years old. If he were to stand straight and tall—which is unlikely given Myron’s preference for a casual slouch—the longest of the coarse, gray strands might stretch from chin to navel when pulled taut.

Besides the beard, Myron also wears a tool belt and a pair of brown leather work boots.

It should be kept in mind that except for overhead air traffic on its way to and from the airport in nearby Charlotte, it is highly unlikely that while in his backyard Myron will be seen by any human other than his girlfriend, Bambi, who is inside the small, three-room house Myron built with his own hands more than a decade ago. Bambi is in the living/sleeping room struggling to work the kinks out of her latest invention which we will discuss in a few moments.

Myron’s workboots are of a pragmatic nature. Most weather conditions suitable for lawn mowing are also suitable for boomerang tossing. Therefore, Myron seldomly mows his monstrous yard. The boots are protection from any stray glass or nails that might be lurking beneath the knee-high grass.

As for the tool belt, it should be apparent that the presence of large obstacles is not conducive to the sport of boomeranging. And since a table would surely qualify as a large obstacle, if one wanted to have an evening cocktail or two in the same vicinity as one throwing boomerangs, one (the one wishing to drink cocktails) would be forced to hold all supplies in his arms.

And what if one wished to be both the boomerang thrower and the cocktail consumer? This is the question Myron posed to Bambi several years ago, and though Bambi’s specialty is inventing exercise equipment, not drinking apparatuses, it took less than a week for her to arrive at a simple solution. She had Myron take her to Home Warehouse, where she purchased a tool belt that was easily customized to hold a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke and a pint of bourbon.

Using a soldering iron, she then attached a money clip—an old silver one she’d bought at an auction and had been saving for Myron’s birthday—to a tin cup she found in the back of Myron’s lone kitchen cabinet. The cup clips securely to the belt, and though there’s an occasional slosh, it’s not as if a refill isn’t handy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Paper Journey Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0970172605
• ISBN 13: 9780970172600
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144