Gone South - Softcover

McCammon, Robert R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140166602 ISBN 13: 9780140166606

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 1994

Synopsis

It was hell's season, and the air smelled of burning children....

With “one of the most arresting first sentences in contemporary writing” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution), Robert McCammon unfurls his visionary masterpiece of survival, redemption, and the astonishing transformations love can create.

Gone South chronicles a desperate man’s journey through a desperate land, in “a gothic picaresque that mixes gritty plot and black comedy...a smoothly constructed and satisfying story” (The Wall Street Journal).

Flooded by memories, poisoned by Agent Orange, Dan Lambert kills a man in a moment of fear and fury—and changes his life forever. Pursued by police and bounty hunters, Dan flees south toward the Louisiana bayous. In the swamplands he meets Arden Halliday, a young woman who bears the vivid burdens of her own past, and who is searching for a legendary faith healer called the Bright Girl. Looking for simple kindness in a world that rarely shows it, bound by a loyalty stronger than love, Dan and Arden set off on a journey of relentless suspense and impassioned discovery...over dark, twisting waterways into the mysterious depths of the human heart.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert McCammon is the New York Times bestselling author of Boy's Life and Gone South, among many critically acclaimed works of fiction, with millions of copies of his novels in print. He is a recipient of the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award, the Grand Master Award from the World Horror Convention, and is a World Fantasy Award winner. He lives in Alabama. Visit the author at RobertMcCammon.com.

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

1

The Good Son

It was hell's season, and the air smelled of burning children.

This smell was what had destroyed Dan Lambert's taste for barbecued pork sandwiches. Before August of 1969, the year he'd turned twenty, his favorite food had been barbecue crispy at the edges and drenched with sloppy red sauce. After the eleventh day of that month, the smell of it was enough to make him sick to death.

He was driving east through Shreveport on 70th Street, into the glare of the morning sun. It glanced off the hood of his gray pickup truck and stabbed his eyes, inflaming the slow ache in his skull. He knew this pain, and its vagaries. Sometimes it came upon him like a brute with a hammer, sometimes like a surgeon with a precise scalpel. During the worst times it hit and ran like a Mack truck and all he could do was chew on his rage and lie there until his body came back to him.

It was a hard thing, dying was.

In this August of 1991, a summer that had been one of the hottest in Louisiana's long history of hellish seasons, Dan was forty-two years old. He looked ten years older, his rawboned, heavily lined face a testament to his ceaseless combat with pain. It was a fight he knew he couldn't win. If he knew for certain he would live three more years, he wasn't sure if he'd be happy about it. Right now it was day-to-day. Some days were all right, some weren't worth a bucket of warm spit. But it wasn't in his nature to give up, no matter how tough things got. His father, the quitter, had not raised a quitter. In this, at least, Dan could find strength. He drove on along the arrow-straight line of 70th Street, past strip malls and car lots and fast-food joints. He drove on into the merciless sun and the smell of murdered innocents.

Lining the commercial carnival of 70th Street was a score of barbecue restaurants, and it was from their kitchen chimneys that this odor of burned flesh rose into the scalded sky. It was just after nine, and already the temperature sign in front of the Friendship Bank of Louisiana read eighty-six degrees. The sky was cloudless, but was more white than blue, as if all the color had been bleached from it. The sun was a burnished ball of pewter, a promise of another day of misery across the Gulf states. Yesterday the temperature had hit a hundred and two, and Dan figured that today it was going to be hot enough to fry pigeons on the wing. Afternoon showers passed through every few days, but it was just enough to steam the streets. The Red River flowed its muddy course through Shreveport to the bayou country and the air shimmered over the larger buildings that stood iron-gray against the horizon.

Dan had to stop for a red light. The pickup's brakes squealed a little, in need of new pads. A job replacing rotten lumber on a patio deck last week had made him enough to pay the month's rent and utilities, and he'd had a few dollars left over for groceries. Still, some things had to slide. He'd missed two payments on the pickup, and he needed to go in and see Mr. Jarrett to work something out. Mr. Jarrett, the loan manager at the First Commercial Bank, understood that Dan had fallen on hard times, and cut him some slack.

The pain was back behind his eyes. It lived there, like a hermit crab. Dan reached beside himself on the seat, picked up the white bottle of Excedrin, and popped it open. He shook two tablets onto his tongue and chewed them. The light turned green and he drove on, toward Death Valley.

Dan wore a rust-colored short-sleeve shirt and blue jeans with patches on the knees. Under a faded blue baseball cap, his thinning brown hair was combed back from his forehead and spilled over his shoulders; haircuts were not high on his list of priorities. He had light brown eyes and a close-cropped beard that was almost all gray. On his left wrist was a Timex and on his feet was a sturdy pair of brown, much-scuffed workboots. On his right forearm was the bluish-green ghost of a snake tattoo, a reminder of a burly kid who'd had one too many cheap and potent zombies with his buddies on a night of leave in Saigon. That kid was long gone, and Dan was left with the tattoo. The Snake Handlers, that's what they'd been. Not afraid to stick their hands in the jungle's holes and pull out whatever horror might be coiled up and waiting in there. They had not known, then, that the entire world was a snake hole, and that the snakes just kept getting bigger and meaner. They had not known, in their raucous rush toward the future, that the snakes were lying in wait not only in the holes but in the mowed green grass of the American Dream. They got your legs first, wound around your ankles, and slowed you down. They slithered into your guts and made you sick and afraid, and then you were easy to kill.

In the years since that Day-Glo memory of a night in Saigon, Dan Lambert had shrunken. At his chest-thumping, Charlie-whomping best he'd stood six-two and carried two hundred and twelve pounds of Parris Island-trained muscle. Back then, he'd felt as if he could swallow bullets and shit iron. He weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds now, and he didn't think he was much over six feet. There was a gauntness in his face that made him think of some of the old Vietnamese people who'd huddled in their hootches with eyes as terrified as those of mongrel dogs expecting a boot. His cheekbones jutted, his chin was as sharp as a can opener under the beard. It was the fact that he rarely ate three meals a day, and of course a lot of his shrinkage was due to the sickness, too.

Gravity and time were the giant killers, he thought as he drove along the sun-washed highway with the back of his sweat-wet shirt stuck to the seat. Gravity shrank you and time pulled you into the grave, and not even the Snake Handlers could beat such fearsome enemies as those.

He drove through pale smoke that had drifted from the chimney of Hungry Bob's Barbecue Shack, the cook getting all that meat good and black for the lunch crowd. A tire hit a pothole, and in the truck's bed his box of tools jangled. They were the hammers, nails, levels, and saws of a carpenter.

At the next intersection he turned right and drove south into an area of warehouses. It was a world of chain-link fences, loading docks, and brick walls. Between the buildings the heat lay trapped and vengeful. Up ahead a half-dozen pickup trucks and a few cars were parked in an empty lot. Dan could see some of the men standing around talking. Another man was sitting in a folding chair reading a newspaper, his CAT hat throwing a slice of shade across his face. Standing near one of the cars was a man who had a sign hanging around his neck, and on that sign was hand-lettered WILL WORK FOR FOOD.

This was Death Valley.

Dan pulled his truck into the lot and cut the engine. He unpeeled his damp shirt from the backrest, slipped the bottle of aspirin into his pocket, and got out. "There's Dan the man!" Steve Lynam called from where he stood talking with Darryl Glennon and Curtis Nowell, and Dan raised a hand in greeting.

"Mornin', Dan," Joe Yates said, laying his newspaper in his lap. "How's it hangin'?"

"It's still there," Dan answered. "I think."

"Got iced tea." A plastic jug and a bag of Dixie cups sat on the ground next to Joe's folding chair. "Come on over."

Dan joined him. He drew iced tea into a cup and eased himself down beside Joe's shadow. "Terry got a ticket," Joe said as he offered Dan some of the newspaper. "Fella came by 'bout ten minutes ago, lookin' for a man to set some Sheetrock. Picked Terry and off they went."

"That's good." Terry Palmeter had a wife and two kids to feed. "Fella say he might be needin' some more help later on?"

"Just the one Sheetrock man." Joe squinted up toward the sun. He was a lean, hard-faced man with a nose that had been broken and flattened by a vicious fist somewhere down the line. He'd been coming here to Death Valley for over a year, about as long as Dan had been. On most days Joe was an amiable gent, but on others he sat brooding and dark-spirited and was not to be approached. Like the other men who came to Death Valley, Joe had never revealed much about himself, though Dan had learned the man had been married and divorced the same as he had. Most of the men were from towns other than Shreveport. They were wanderers, following the promise of work, and for them the roads on the map led not so much from city to city as from hot-tarred roofs to mortared walls to the raw frameworks of new houses with pinewood so fresh the timbers wept yellow tears. "God, it's gonna be a cooker today," Joe said, and he lowered his head and returned to his reading and waiting.

Dan drank the iced tea and felt sweat prickling the back of his neck. He didn't want to stare, but his eyes kept returning to the man who wore the desperate hand-lettered sign. The man had sandy-blond hair, was probably in his late twenties, and wore a checked shirt and stained overalls. His face was still boyish, though it was starting to take on the tautness of true hunger. It reminded Dan of someone he'd known a long time ago. A name came to him: Farrow. He let it go, and the memory drifted away like the acrid barbecue smoke.

"Looky here, Dan." Joe thumped an article in the paper. "President's economics honcho says the recession's over and everybody ought to be in fine shape by Christmas. Says new construction's already up thirty percent."

"Do tell," Dan said.

"Got all sorts of graphs in here to show how happy we oughta be." He showed them to Dan, who glanced at the meaningless bars and arrows and then watched the man with the sign again. "Yeah, things are sure gettin' better all over, ain't they?" Joe nodded, answering his own cynical question. "Yessir. Too bad they forgot to tell the workman."

"Joe, who's that fella over there?" Dan asked. "The guy with the sign."

"I don't know." He didn't lift his gaze from the paper. "He was there when I got here. Young fella, looks to be. Hell, every man jack of us would work for food if it came to that, but we don't wear signs advertisin' it, do we?"

"Maybe we're not hungry enough yet."

"Maybe not," Joe agreed, and ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0140166602
• ISBN 13: 9780140166606
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528