The Life of the World to Come
206 pages
English

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206 pages
English

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Description

In a weaving together of contradictory realms—past and present, rustbelt city and rural/urban South, old-world Catholicism and backwoods Protestantism—Joseph Bathanti draws readers into the 1970s as protagonist George Dolce faces major upheaval in The Life of the World to Come.

George aspires to leave his blue collar, Catholic neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. He is on the cusp of graduation from college and headed for law school when he becomes entangled in a local gambling ring. After his father gets laid off at the steel mill, George dramatically increases his wagering to help his parents with finances. What's more, he allows his boss at his real job and love interest's father, a pharmacist named Phil Rosechild, to place bets through him with the gambling ring's volatile kingpin.

As his parents' financial situation deteriorates, George delves deeper into gambling, and he even goes so far as to set up Phil by using the pharmacist's unschooled and ever-growing betting practices to his own end—cheating the father of the woman he loves. When Phil welches on a large bet that George has placed for him, George finds himself in life-threatening trouble and must abandon his law school dreams. He robs the pharmacy, steals the delivery car, and flees south.

After his stolen car breaks down in Queen, North Carolina, he meets a young, mysterious woman known as Crow. The two form a bond and eventually take to the road in an attempt to reconcile their harrowing, often surreal destiny and to escape George's inevitable punishment.


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Informations

Publié par
Date de parution 04 novembre 2014
Nombre de lectures 1
EAN13 9781611174540
Langue English
Poids de l'ouvrage 1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Life of the World to Come
The Life of the World to Come
A N OVEL
Joseph Bathanti

The University of South Carolina Press
2015 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bathanti, Joseph.
The life of the world to come : a novel / Joseph Bathanti.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61117-453-3 (hardbound : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-454-0 (ebook) I. Title.
PS3602.A89L54 1014
813'.6-dc23
2014011488
Cover design by Faceout Studio, Emily Weigel
For Jacob and Beckett
My deep appreciation to the North Carolina Arts Council for a Literature Fellowship in Fiction and to Appalachian State University for a University Research Council grant. These gene ous awards were invaluable in the completion of this novel.
Special thanks to my dear wife, Joan, who lent her eyes to mine as we pored over draft after draft together. This n vel would have been impossible without her.
I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
THE NICENE CREED
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
D. H. LAWRENCE, Sons and Lovers
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 1
W e live, Crow and I, in an attic apartment at 302 Lark Terrace. Across the front of our duplex pants Andromeda Boulevard, a six-laned juggernaut, choked on cars, that dead-ends east in the Atlantic Ocean and west in the Great Smoky Mountains.
On the other side of Andromeda hulks Memorial Stadium, County Detox, and MacKenzie Gault Home for Unwed Mothers. From our bedroom window we look down and make out the fallow hash marks fretted across the floor of the stadium, the perimeter lights doming Detox; and, beyond, maybe a mile and a half straight down 7th Street, the downtown lights of Queen s three skyscrapers.
At odd times, a man dressed solely in the clothes of a woman, sprawls on the bench on the sidewalk below us, staring at the traffic like some maudlin jilted belle, still half-hoping her beloved will walk out of the indifferent night, sit next to her, and ask for her hand. He wears a shawl over his baggy dress, and a hat with a veil that drapes his dark heavy brow. In such raiment, he looks more than anything like a heart-broken man. As if he is a visitor, someone who has dropped from the sky. Like me. Like Crow. And like the occasional fallen angels from Gault, fey little girls impossibly enormous with child: pony tails and tattoos, a dreadful glimmer in their eyes; later with strollers, still wearing ballooned hatching smocks, aged and weighted thirty years with their lying in.
There is no terrace to our terrace, but rather a precipitous drop through beggar-lice and poison ivy to a tar alley shrouded in wild Mimosas. A little haven for all stripe of collaboration with the night. The machinations of Crow and me occasionally included, her favorite tree the Mimosa, her favorite time once the sun disappears-I there essentially to abet her whims.
Beyond the alley sprawls an abandoned little league field, the diamond given over to tares and winos; then a long row of tiny identical ramshackle white mill houses built, judging by their similarity, on the same day in the thirties when Queen couldn t have been much more than a wayfarer s respite on the way to Atlanta or even Miami.
When I arrived by accident in Queen, on the first day of 1975, I knew patently nothing of the South other than a mythic vision nurtured, I m ashamed to say, by Gone with the Wind: temperate weather year-round and wild poinsettias, antebellum glory, a time-warp where feudal gentility still reigned. I had seen the movie twice before I met Crow: once at the behest of my mother, who clung to it as the final document on vanished noblesse oblige, and as she watched it sobbed into Kleenex pulled from the sleeves of her housecoat; and once to please a woman with whom I was achingly in love, who also whimpered breathtakingly throughout the movie, a woman I lost and who is, more or less, the reason I find myself in Queen.
The third time I saw Gone with the Wind was with Crow, entangled with her on our thrift couch; and it was in front of that epic film that I was tempted to say, God forbid, I love you, though I wonder now if the impulse was mere reflex prompted by simpering Scarlet in the arms of Clark Gable, with whom I then egotistically identified. Crow is no southern belle, though like Scarlet she is a spitfire and a bit of a femme fatale. I am hardly Clark Gable, a man who would have never found himself in my predicament-a man who, incidentally, shaved his armpits.
Of Queen, a small, but aspiring city, in the middle of North Carolina, not far from the border of South Carolina, I knew even less than I did about the Southland. I had never heard of Queen. By happenstance alone, it ended up the place where my stolen automobile stopped when its water pump ruptured and the engine melted. I buried the license plate and owner s card and left the car, a silver hatchback Vega with Rosechild s Pharmacy decaled on its doors, in a culvert off I-85; then shuffled along the frigid highway like the ruffian I appeared to be until I reached the Southern 500 truck stop and thumbed a ride into Queen proper.
In the parlance of what had been my former life, I was then as I am now a lammist, a fugitive, ironically, from both the law and a minor Sicilian racketeer named Felix Costa; and I ll go so far as to say from God as well. The only item of authenticity I toted with me when I had fled Pittsburgh just two days before was my broken heart. It sits on my chest, a dagger sliced into it, a spout of fire crowning it, like those famous likenesses of Jesus in which he points to His bloody smoldering breast and stares plaintively out from the icon s gilt border. It would have been apparent the first time Crow laid eyes on me: a young man s iconographic heart superimposed on his measly jacket, a fellow who looked like he hadn t seen to himself in a bit, a troubled, fatigued, unshaven, darkly handsome mug and a busted bloody hand.
My mother had habitually instructed me to cross to the other side of the street when I encountered a shady lot like myself. Crow, however, was undaunted. If anything, my pensive seediness tithed her to me the morning I lurched into The Tea Rose, a little caf in the Clarence Pfeiffer Hotel on Tyrone Street in downtown Queen, where she was working breakfast. The Pfeiffer had opened in 1913 and hadn t been tended to since. Nevertheless, it insisted doggedly on its haunted vanished past: the columned veranda, chipping mansard roof, high chandeliered ceilings, an impervious flaking grandeur-imposing and maudlin at once. Streamers and bunting, a listing glittering sign, Happy New Year, dangled from scrolled cornices in the lobby. Dead Mylar ballons. Champagne corks. Confetti sparkled in the funereal carpet. The Pfeiffer was hanging on-its past and present existing simultaneously-like its residents, like me, like Crow.
I had glanced up from my window table and there she stood, clutching a pot of coffee in her right hand, the other on her hip, peering down at me with discreet impatience. Wide-set, tawny eyes, oddly pale and aglow like she might shoot something out of them and I d disappear or vaporize. Unconsciously, I lifted my bad hand and put it on the table. Her skinny black eyebrows shot up. She turned over my cup, where it lay upside down on the saucer, and poured it full of coffee.
What happened to you? she asked.
My first thought had been to lie, but I realized it didn t matter. Got in a fight.
You a fighter?
Uh uh.
What you get in a fight about?
Girl.
Has anybody looked at that hand?
Yeah. It s fine.
She looked like a little girl and a grown woman at the same time. Hair inky as a St. Joseph s missal, too crazily black to not be dyed, and chopped an inch above her shoulders. Black lipstick. Mascara, Eyeliner. But nothing on her face. Completely undoctored. Not the slightest blush nor cream nor powder. Tallish. Spare as linguine. Like the other waitresses, she wore a full striped skirt, white shirt and black necktie. On her head sat an antique hat, like the kind my old aunts and grandmother sported in ancient photos, a black velvet crescent with a brace of black feathers swooping above one eye.
Her nametag said Crow, her surname, which she goes by, as if this lone black bird perched on carrion that no one likes or understands; but her Christian name is Ruby Lydia. In my neighborhood Ruby Lydia would have been the brazen runaway daughter of a screaming Calabrese widow. But in the South, such appellations, wistful, anachronistic, homespun-Ruby Lydia-are not uncommon.
Crow had rust in her voice: a little creak oiled by a softening declension every time she dipped into a vowel or chipped off a final consonant. Standing next to me when I chanced to look up in my first moments of exile, that morning at The Tea Rose in Queen, she was a stark and stunning apparition. Black and white-like an Escher chess board. An exaggeration. Starved and pasty as a Diane Arbus, and an inflection that drew me to h

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