The Middle of Everywhere

Ray Petersen

Description

One man's affliction is another's gift, and Kenny Hopewell's "special gift" is a terrible memory and virtually no sense of direction. Entrusted by a family friend to deliver a plea for help that might keep his hometown mill from closing, Kenny misses his ride and sets out on foot across an isolated rural area between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks. Along the way he meets and comes to terms with some of the denizens of this lonely landscape—the Casimir family, who survive on the outskirts of the law; Johnny Percy, a Vietnam veteran still defending his family's abandoned homestead; and Gunnar Molshoc, a well-driller and "witcher"—refugees, like him, from the decay of rural America in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, several characters at the local college are struggling to define the college's role in the mill fight and to rescue the soul of higher education. John Harlan is an instructor attempting to write a meaningful dissertation that won't threaten his chances at tenure; Ernest Guppy's notion of himself as a political comic is driving his wife off the deep end; and college president Baxter McAdam and his administrative vice president are locked in a withering campaign to force each other out of power.

The novel's setting, a fictional county in upstate New York, is like a braided rug: smooth on the top, all knots underneath. Chained to a dying farm economy and losing its youth to greener pastures, it's the sort of place where refugees from Brooklyn might live next to Amish farmers, who might live next to Italian millworkers, who might live next to a bigot whose house was once a stop on the Underground Railroad. Like so many rural American communities, it has the feel of a self-inflicted wound, and as Kenny comes to understand, sometimes you have to feel pain just to know you're still alive.
Acknowledgments
Cast of Characters

1. A Mile in Kenny’s Shoes

2. Strange Bedfellows

3. Getting to True

4. Kenny Goes to School

5. The Middle of Nowhere

6. Kenny Takes His Shot

7. The Inside Track

8.  Burning Love

9. True North

Sujets

• Regional
• Region

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438444710
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Cowkind: A Novel
“Cowabunga, what a first novel! … Petersen is a master of difficult tricks: he creates complex characters with few words and minimizes his animal characters' cuteness, instead using them to explore the human psyche. Comparable to Richard Adams's Watership Down or The Plague Dogs .”
— Library Journal
“… a fascinating book … With wit and wisdom, insight and invention, Ray Petersen has written about cows that converse, speculate, and have an innocent interest in the world around them … quite an interesting tale by a skilled author.”
— Denver Rocky Mountain News
“Give first-time novelist Petersen credit: Not many would have thought of exploring the hard lives of a farm family through the eyes of a dairy herd. And even fewer could have sustained the conceit as successfully as Petersen does … Petersen's fabulistic evocation of cows is wonderfully detailed and moving: Their rituals, beliefs, troubled grasp of the world are all vivid and convincing … this is one of the most original and promising of recent debuts.”
— Kirkus Reviews

Map designed by Joel DiCaprio

The Middle of Everywhere
A Novel
Ray Petersen

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or, in the case of “real” public or political figures, are used in a fictitious manner. They do not denote or pretend to be based on any private information about actual persons, living or dead.
Cover photo: Paul Cowan / Dreamstime.com
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 Ray Petersen
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press
Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Kate McDonnell
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Petersen, Ray.
The middle of everywhere : a novel / Ray Petersen.
p. cm. — (Excelsior editions.)
ISBN 978-1-4384-4470-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.E7638M53 2012
813'.54—dc23
2012001541
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For all of those who survived the Eighties (and the Aughts), and especially for those who didn't. For Luke, we miss you
Acknowledgments
I'll do my best to keep the acknowledgments shorter than the book. All of the following people have been important in giving Kenny direction.
Early readers of the manuscript who provided helpful insights begin with Corin See and our first writers' group (Karen Lizon, Rob Morrow, Laurie Lind Petersen and Dean Anthony). I'm also grateful to Corin for plucking my query letter out of hundreds and recommending my first novel to Bob Wyatt, who published it at St. Martin's Press.
James Peltz and Diane Ganeles at SUNY Press have demonstrated both enthusiasm and patience while working with me to get this book into print for Excelsior Editions, for which I cannot thank them enough.
Paul Slansky's book The Clothes Have No Emperor was wonderful in capturing the atmosphere of the Reagan years. Thanks to John Koelle for recommending it, and to Debbie Sperry for her Eighties research.
Profound thanks to Peter Corodimas for his generosity with time and stylistic comments; Todd Davis and Kenyon Wells for their great advice, meta-encouragement and for being sounding boards; and all my students and colleagues at Jefferson Community College, especially Ron Palmer and Rebecca Riehm for arranging teaching schedules allowing me to write.
Thanks to Gene at the Disc Connection for help with musical references; to Don Martin and Ernie Prievo for technical details about the paper mill; and to Peter Landesman, Jane Wilcox, Marty Fleisher, Ann Clark, Fred and Lynda Feldman, Kimberley Reiser, Diana Zimmer, Tom Barthel, and Tom Sims for their inspiration at critical junctures.
Tom Kriger, Brian Waddell, Ingrid Overacker, Lynn Sprott, Glenn Miller, George Davis, and Jim and Polly Shaud kept me grounded through many revisions.
Thanks to my stepson, Joel DiCaprio, for taking the roughest of ideas and translating them into a map of Kenny's travels. Those assisting me with design ideas and tech support include Dreamer Schwartz, Ross Robinson, and Jeremy Moench. Special thanks go to David Bowhall for the final design of the compass points and the Onlius County map.
Erin Begel, Jeremy and Joel DiCaprio, and Luke and Zane Petersen helped me in more ways than I could recount, including typing, design, and character names. Alice and Lee Booth helped with baby-sitting, and Keitha Petersen kept the faith.
Laurie Lind Petersen did all of the above, as well as being my muse, typist-in-chief, editor-in-chief, morale-booster, proofreader, and hyphen advocate. I cannot imagine being able to accomplish this without her.
Cast of Characters
These people are points on the compass of this story
  Kenny and Aurelia Hopewell—the man-child wanderer sent to save the Alta paper mill; his sister, left to take care of him
  John Harlan and Robin—untenured college professor struggling to maintain his integrity; his student and love interest
  Janie and Billy Nicmond—millworker/college student/single parent; her son (AKA Cujo)
  Cough Niclay and Horace Patell—Kenny's father's best friend; the mill foreman/company man
  Zola and Lyle Lester—Politics Department secretary; her millworker husband
  McAdam, Wispen, Koemover, The Judge—the Onlius College president; the college's V.P. for Administration/Younger Brother; an Abstract Empiricist; a puppet-master
  Celeste and Ernest Guppy—a graduate-school dropout and faculty wife; her court-jester-wannabe husband
  Georgette Casimir—matriarch of the outlaw Casimir family
  Charles Darcardt—retiring professor looking to pass the mantle
  Johnny Percy—a disabled Vietnam vet, protector of the family farm
  Stosh and Prett Casimir—the elder and younger brothers Casimir
  Alfonzo and Tilia Aligheri—an Old World couple in the Town of Brood
  Carrie Casimir—Georgette's daughter and Joanie Prwanzas's former best friend
  Carmen; Emilio Aguinaldo—McDonald's worker and struggling college student; homeless namesake of a Filipino insurrectionist
  Gerry Scott—lonely farmer who takes in Kenny: not the Happiest Man In the World
  Gunnar Molshoc—well dowser and driller, Vietnam veteran
  Marie Earhart—Celeste's port in a storm
  A state of mind
Chapter One
A Mile in Kenny's Shoes

  On the fly
In dreams Kenny Hopewell always knew where he was, and where he was supposed to be. That's why the first two times his sister Aurelia called up the stairs to wake him he had trouble shaking off the sleep. The third time he was struggling to figure out where he was. After a few moments he remembered he was in his own room. As far as he could tell.
He sat up with a start, a fleeting memory fragment that he had something to do, then settled back in bed a while studying the room, his feet hanging off the end of the mattress. The ceiling was dull white. Shadow tails like anti-comets stretched out from flecks of sand paint in the muted morning light.
He turned on his side toward warm sunlight splayed across the top of his dresser. For early May it was very warm, past expectation. Not that Kenny would know that this spring was much milder than normal. If you asked him, he would say it was summer already.
Four and a half steps from the bed to the dresser, underwear in the top drawer on the right, socks on the left. This was the one he was keeping the baby snakes in, the ones he'd found two days ago. Shirts next drawer down, pants below them. Seven steps to the door of the closet, comic books on the bottom shelf. Around the corner, four steps to the hallway door, then downstairs to the right into the kitchen.
Kenny gobbled down three bowls of Sunny Square Frosted Flakes and four pieces of toasted white bread before saying a word.
“Was I s'posed to go someplace today?” he asked Aurelia.
“You said Cough wanted to talk to you Friday,” Aurelia said, as she wiped crumbs from the table.
“What day is it?”
“Friday.”
“Ohh, man.” Kenny bounced up from his chair and ran out the front door.
“Kenny, check your fly!” Kenny paused on the top step of the porch, tugged the fabric of his pants out past the bulge of his belly to get a good look at the zipper. It was closed, mostly.
He shook his head, disgusted.
He was on a mission, and she wasn't taking him seriously. Just because he hadn't been able to hold a job, even trying hard. He didn't get her.
“Criminy, ’Relia. Coug