One D.O.A., One on the Way: A Novel - Hardcover

Robison, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582433054 ISBN 13: 9781582433059

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2009

Synopsis

One D.O.A., One on the Way is a novel which opens on Jay, a location scout for a movie production company. She is complacently married to Alt, who has just been diagnosed with a grave illness and gone back to his palatial family home, back to the care of his parents. Which is just fine with Jay or so she tells herself at the start. But standing left of center in this still-prosperous but mortally wounded family does not get easier as the weeks wear on. As she tries to negotiate her way around the anger of Saunders, Alt’s despised twin brother; maintain her friendship with Petal, his beautiful wife; and protect what’s left of the innocence of Collie, the niece caught in the middle, Jay finds more than the Louisiana heat oppressive.
With her trademark biting humor and breathtaking facility with minimalist language, Mary Robison, author of the award-winning Why Did I Ever, sets the stage for a beguiling Southern Gothic sure to delight her fanatical following and new readers alike.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Robison is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. She is the author of three previous novels, Oh! (1981), Subtraction (1991), and Why Did I Ever (2001), and of four story collections, Days (1979), An Amateur's Guide to the Night (1983), Believe Them (1988), and Tell Me (2002). Robison has written for Hollywood and has been a contributor to the New Yorker since 1977.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

chapter 1
[1]

Now I've stepped on a rusty fucking nail. Not my first, either. Three nails at three different locations have pierced the soles of three unrelated shoes. And this happens to everybody who wanders out. I have to keep a First-Aid kit in my van for this type of thing. "Kit" is inadequate, and too short a word.

There's a little window period with Tetanus, of about twenty-four hours. Or so I was told by Mrs. G., a woman with a camper truck, who drove the neighborhoods, passing out vaccines.

[2]

I have this friend, Lucien, not a friend so much as he's my intern, who's been going around with me for months, every weekday, for a good part of the day.

Although, there is little left to our job. Ah, but you carry on here as if nothing could ever really be over.

[3]

There was work once before the work went out of town. You could do a lot of location scouting here. Everyone wanted you to. They hurled money at you, the production people with so much money, who wanted to film here because of the tax incentives, or the nine months of shooting weather, or the easy attitude toward permits, or because the place can mimic any other place that a film crew, then, wouldn't have to go.

I still get work, oh sure, and the New Orleans film industry isn't 100 percent in the shitter. I get commercials, or they're not quite commercials. These one- or two-day shoots. They're more like change-of-address ads. The businesses want to announce they still exist. They've relocated maybe, but they're back up, open.

[4]

So Lucien, my intern all this time, day-after-day for months, turns and says to me, "My name's Paul."

[5]

I'm not from here and I'll probably never get used to things, but I doubt if I'll ever leave. A rest might be an idea. There's too much eating. There's altogether too much sex, dancing, carousing, reveling. All of it goes on for far too long. There's powdered sugar dust on everything. There are twinkle lights burning every day of the year. Funerals, Jell-O shots, fishing, swearing, barbecues, back-door gigs, vats and vats of jambalaya. There are too many houses and sidewalks disappearing under weeds and vines and in yards that look impenetrable, too many neon signs, too much on-the-stoop drinking, corruption, and Technicolor clothes, too much crawfish shucking, and Catholic everything, too much stale beer, too many heroin junkies shooting up on the balconies, too many big homes, and trees snapped off, too many steel billboards bent to the ground, too much andouille sausage, too many second lines, too much money, and debauch, and cars parked all crooked. "Do you never tire?" I cry from the car window.

[6]

My husband is from here. So is his twin. They're a couple of rummies with money to burn. I've been married eight years to my husband. He wasn't my first; I wasn't his, what of it?

[7]
Ease and Comfort

Holstered guns are worn under your clothing, close to the skin. The holster's waterproof padding will protect your gun from body moisture and perspiration.

The side of a holster that faces out is broader so your gun won't imprint an outline through your clothes.

A rigid-walled holster will allow you to put your gun away easily, with one hand. Flexible models can collapse after you draw, requiring both hands and more time to reholster.

[8]

Here they are now, the twins Rags & Gasoline, lounging on their parents' veranda in the shade of a blue jacaranda tree.

They are dressed exactly alike again today, and that is one of the many ways they entertain themselves. I've been standing at a little distance, watching, and I wouldn't bet a dime on my guessing which is which.

Now a man in white linen appears on the veranda with a tray. It has coffee in mugs, honey and biscuits, a bottle of English whiskey.

"Whose turn is it to be my husband?" I ask, stepping up. To the man serving the breakfast tray, I say, "Not you. Or, not necessarily. Only if you want."

[9]

I found out a little while ago that my husband has Hep-C. It's symptomless! And yet, he has an active strain. He could be lying! He isn't, though.

"It's all right," he says now, with a hand patting my back. "I feel good. Be just fine. It's really all right."

I say, "Well, goddamn you."

"Underway," says he.

[10]

It's not great, the deal Adam has with his parents. It takes care of some bits of business, in that they pay for everything. They provide nurses, and a dietician. They paid to get him onto a transplant list. But he has to live here, with them, all the time.

I think sometimes: "He's only forty-two and he's this sick!"

Or, I think: "He's forty-two and he's had to run home to his parents!"

While I'm left kind of standing at the corner. And where, above me, it would seem, there's a very red light.

[11]

Saunders is the other twin, utterly identical. That's a good thing about him. Also to his credit are his wife and his little girl.

The bad things include an array of incidents, arrests, brawls, screaming, wretched Western Union transactions, also, all the clubs, bars, saloons, hotels, private homes, city parks, businesses, establishments, and streets he's been asked to leave.

[12]
Thirty Months After Katrina

N.O.P.D.'s crime lab was destroyed and has not been replaced.

There is 1 fingerprint examiner.

More than 2,000 evidence tests are backlogged.

The department still has no headquarters, and officers operate out of F.E.M.A. trailers, even the brass.

The trailers are not air-conditioned. In hot months, officers do reports and paperwork in their cars.

There's no place for storing evidence. It too is kept in trailers, unprotected.

There's no place for interviewing witnesses and victims, no place for interrogating suspects.

N.O.P.D.'s guns were destroyed during the storm. Police officers often have to provide their own guns and ammo.

[13]

I just can't manage the switch. It's undoable. Two days of correcting myself after every Lucien thought with "You mean Paul. Paul. It's Paul. Who's actually Lucien. Think of him as Paul."

[14]

"You look different," he says now.

I try this: "No. I don't."

He asks, "Aren't you ordinarily wearing a hat?"

"No, I'm never wearing a hat. Not one single time. I don't even own any."

"Well, something's weird then, because I remember you in different hats. Especially the two I liked best," says he.

I say, "I'm about to smash you in the shoulder blades."

"Vividly, I remember," he says. "There were two that I favored over all your other headgear."

"Lucien," I say, without reluctance or regret.

[15]

Drowsily, the husband lifts up in bed. He reaches and searches the end table for the T.V. remote.

"It's right here," I say, showing him I have it.

There are noises through the open windows from a cypress forest behind the house. Spiky shadows knife the walls in here, and there's a sweet odor from some fruit tree or other. We have only a snapping, inconsistent light from the television screen and its Mr. Moto movie.

He eases out of the sheets, and sits on the side of the bed. In the dim, his bare chest shines and his boxer shorts blink the whitest white.

Neither of us used to sleep through 'til morning. We would take naps together, at this time of the evening. We would wake up and play around, put on music, drink, go back to sleep, awaken.

We'd have whiskey in tea, and sweet potato muffins.

"Hit channel thirty," he tells me now.

Outside the room are powdery-white hallways, arched doors, a carved staircase. It would seem an enormous, lovely house where you could sit in an alcove on a bench and read, but it isn't.

I turn down the T.V. volume and switch around in my seat. "O.K., this is thirty. What are we tuning in?"

"Like you're staying," he says.

There is work waiting for me, true. Work that'll keep me busy tonight, some of tomorrow. Work, though, that I would rather not go and do.

Longing and resentment. Some of both in the way my husband is stamping out his cigarette.

[16]

I've motored out on the Great River Road toward Bayou Lafourche below Napoleonville. Here, I will see what I can see.

You have to get up on the levee for a view of anything. Down by the river, there's a pearly dawn over the blazing water, and an egret acting drunk on the banks. Otherwise, not a lot going on.

Here are a couple guys, however, waltzing along.

"Do you know anything about the riverboat schedules?" I ask.

"No," from these two, who are trying to act nonchalant, and as if they don't live their lives in various abandoned vehicles.

[17]
Some Things, You Finish With and They're Over

Yesterday, for the last time in my life, I cleaned a broiler pan.

I'm never again wearing anything bought at Lowe's.

I'm done drinking boilermakers.

Spinning until dizzy on barstools is a thing of the past.

No more pawning my luggage.

[18]

"Completion bonds," I'm telling Lucien. We're somewhere, parked in my location-scouting van. I'm giving a lesson.

He says, "Does this have partly to do with a deaf couple and Tom Cruise?"

"Nothing to do with them."

"Go on then," says Lucien.

"Completion bonds are something a film company acquires in advance. Then, if a production doesn't finish filming on time, the money people don't get fucked by the over-budget expenses. I guess the bonding people get fucked instead, but they must expect that to happen from time to time. It's just insurance, O.K.? You see what I mean?"

Lucien nods a few times while drawing on a cigarette. Now he holds it as though his hand is very, very tired.

"After Katrina," I say, "no one was willing to write completion bonds. Your thing's about to drip ashes there, amigo. Nobody would, and that's one of the biggest reasons the film companies took a hike."

"Ma'am?" says Lucien, and I'll want to speak to him about that later on.

"Just let me get through this," I say.

He settles back on the passenger seat, his smoking hand now dangled out the window. He watches me dully, as if he'll soon be going to sleep.

I say, "Even a more serious problem, is what went with the production companies on their way out of town. The crew base. We have a diminished and devalued crew base. Where you need a depth of three or four individuals in each and every skill. We're down to one individual for some skills, and, for most skills, no individuals."

"That's sad," Lucien says.

"Yep," I say, turning the engine.

He says, "You know what I think we should do? Like, immediately? Or, never mind. I'm not even going to suggest anything."

"You're welcome to."

"No. Maybe you just better ignore me," he says, as if that would not have occurred to me to do.

[19]

Hell, it's a lucky day if I'm photographing real estate. Things will never get back. I'm out of business, and I ought to fucking move.

What I do now, day in and day out, is all hypothetical. I've become a "what-if" location scout.

[20]
In a City That Is Only Seven Miles Long

Alcoholic beverages are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Alcohol is the leading cause of death for Louisiana youth.

Drinking in the street is acceptable and legal, although not from a glass or a bottle.

Bars and clubs provide plastic go-cup containers.

Most have walk-up windows for refills.

More undergraduates die from alcohol-related causes than the number who receive advanced degrees.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1582433054
• ISBN 13: 9781582433059
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176