She asked me if I could help out with a friend of hers. He had problems with alcohol, women, and drugs. I already knew about the women, because every pretty girl in town seemed to have slept with him.
I don’t know what happened at the ice cream parlor after I left, but later that day while I put a load of sheets and towels into the Maytag at Mount-Wash-More, Soldier Boy watched me, leaning against a dryer, talking into his wrist-watch.
The baby, Lela, one day old, named by Effie without Dan, was a beauty, but girls are pretty to their fathers, which begged the question: Was this child his?
I am in the boss's cabin listening to him, and suddenly I feel my face flee. It is as if it is drifting sideways, toward the wall, or toward the translucent board that is riveted to the wall for scribbling thoughts.
After the third failed pregnancy, Harriet’s sisters started to call her the self-cleaning oven. Henry already had one kid with Doris, the bitch who kept calling them in the middle of the night to complain about the water temperature in Henry’s old house. She still expected him to maintain the property even after receiving full custody of their mewling little boy Jamie. Henry began sleeping through the phone calls, and so it was Harriet who had to answer the phone.
The beautiful silver-haired ex-movie actress had stood at the car window with her rescued doe and black bear, while Blair talked to her husband about the Night Slayer and the latest cattle thefts and mutilations...
Calvert Thorne, familiar to club scene fans as DJ Sergey, sprinkles pine pollen in his hair. He collects it himself, scrambling up mighty ponderosas, nimble as someone half his age. Each spring, a year’s supply saved in antique apothecary jars. It’s his only obvious affectation—indeed, apart from pop music chops, he seems bourgeois to the toes.
Repeating the trauma of Afghanistan is supposed to cure it. I don the state-of-the-art headset, 3 fucking D, and hold the controller. Hepatic feedback. Sit in the seat. Hepatic feedback. Humvee on a bumpy road? Not really. No way to simulate the choke of sand and smoke, but when she thinks you’re ready, the doctor adds smells—diesel, sweat, gunpowder, blood.
My father liked to say that the only thing to do in Florence, South Carolina, is eat dinner at Cain’s BBQ, and I am beginning to think he’s goddamned right. Of course, many thousand more restaurants exist here now, most of them slick chains, but the notion that my father, the Colonel, once had still holds water and holds it pretty well.