Windwhistle Bone

Richard Trainor

Description

Richard Trainor's Windwhistle Bone is a novel of time and place as we follow the protagonist, Ram Le Doir, on a journey tracing his rise as a celebrated poet and reporter, which comes to a tragic conclusion as he is unlocking a series of dangerous stories that nearly costs him his life, and destroys his marriage and career. Ram's fall and eventual redemption concern the double murder of his wife, actress Vera Dubeck, and her lover. Trainor's prose was cited by the late Luther Nichols, Doubleday's former West Coast Bureau Chief, as "reminiscent of Faulkner (the Snopes-like nature of the Le Doirs), Thomas Wolfe, J. P. Dunleavy (the scapegrace of Ram), Dylan Thomas, and Bukowski. There's a great California feel to your novel which is one of the finest first novels I have ever read." Nichols gave testimony for Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books during the obscenity trial held over Allen Ginsburg's poem, Howl, in 1960.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 12 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781645366720
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Windwhistle Bone
Richard Trainor
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-12-12
Windwhistle Bone About the Author Copyright Information © Book I The Hour of Not Quite Rain Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Book Two Woe the Luck Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Book III Restless Farewell Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Epilogue
About the Author
Richard Trainor began writing Windwhistle Bone at the start of his publishing career in the early 1980s. Trainor has published four non-fiction books and over 100 feature stories for national and international publications including The Sacramento Bee , The Los Angeles Times , Elle , American Film , and Sight & Sound.
Trainor is now working on the second volume of his California trilogy, the prequel of Windwhistle Bone , titled Fran’s Nocturne ; a collection of short stories, Valley Fever and Other Stories; and a new non-fiction book titled Final Say .
Copyright Information ©
Richard Trainor (2019)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Trainor, Richard
Windwhistle Bone
ISBN 9781643780122 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781645754701 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645366720 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 2019942826 
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
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“If ever, in days to come, you shall see ruin at hand, and, thinking you understand mankind, shall tremble for your friendships, and tremble for your pride; and partly through love for the one and fear for the other, shall resolve to be beforehand with the world and save it from a sin by prospectively taking that sin to yourself, then will you do as one I dream of once did, and like him will you suffer, but how fortunate and grateful should you be, if like him, after all that had happened, you could be a little happy again.”
– Herman Melville , The Confidence-Man


“If ever, in days to come, you shall see ruin at hand, and, thinking you understand mankind, shall tremble for your friendships, and tremble for your pride; and partly through love for the one and fear for the other, shall resolve to be beforehand with the world and save it from a sin by prospectively taking that sin to yourself, then will you do as one I dream of once did, and like him will you suffer, but how fortunate and grateful should you be, if like him, after all that had happened, you could be a little happy again.”
– Herman Melville , The Confidence-Man
Book I

The Hour of Not Quite Rain
“Authors of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know. When they claim to get to the painful admissions, you have to watch out, for they are about to dress the corpse.”
– Albert Camus , The Fall
Chapter One
Shapes, just shapes. Different sizes, colors, attitudes. Shapes. That’s the way things seem to me these days. Shapes. Motley shapes. I like that word; motley. I just learned it and now everything’s motley. I like the sound of it. It sounds like a parade or a carnival. I see the parade pass by every now and then on the street that runs by the park and I imagine myself out there being as motley as the rest of them. But anyway, I was talking about shapes, and I know I used to have names for all these things, but now, I have to learn them again—piano, candle, philodendron. And I learn the names of all these things that I’m finding out about, but they’re still shapes, shapes that either move or grow or change colors or speak or even just stay the same. If they mean anything, I don’t know about it, and I try and do like I’m told and not worry about the things that I can’t understand yet. I guess I forgot the names of these things not long after I got here. Maybe it was before I got here. Maybe I never knew them, I don’t have much memory.
Barry showed me an instrument the other day and even though I recognized it, I couldn’t find a name for it. I asked him what’s that silver shape, and he said it was a hemostat. I’ve seen them before but I can’t remember when. Anyway, it was interesting and at the same time, a kind of mystery seeing this silver hemostat and knowing that I knew it but couldn’t name it. And that’s the way things are for me these days: Naming shapes. But after something like that hemostat thing, I usually either get tired or depressed, and if I get depressed, I just sit there at lunch or dinner and cry as quietly as I can while I play with my applesauce or stewed prunes. I don’t understand it. Hemostat. Just a harmless little silver shape and I wound up crying on my bed almost all night long.
I’m afraid I’ll have to leave here soon, and I hope that’s not true because I’ve gotten used to the routine, and I know how to play the game pretty well without winding up in the hot seat. Katz and Bardens—they’re the head guys on this unit—came to visit me the other day, and along with the usual tests and instruments that are part of the routine, they also had this big yellow thing with a red sticker on it. My file, they told me, and they said that they’d gotten back the report from the board and things were looking promising is how they put it. Promising for whom? Promising for what? They talk to me fairly straight these days—just a little of their old style left. They used to talk to me real slow with their eyes opened up real wide. It used to make me feel like I was four years old or like I’d just landed from outer space. It was like they were creeping around me and didn’t want me to know if—that’s what I told them.
So anyway, they said—Katz and Bardens, that is—that I had made real progress and they were going to schedule me for something they were sure I’d like and that it would help me get better. I didn’t say much. I was looking down at the desk and picking at the plastic strip that was peeling on the edge, and they looked at each other and nodded, probably because I was smiling. I was thinking that they told me the same thing right before they started giving me the shocks. I like this time of year the best—Fall. Especially from up here on the sixth floor, where I can look down on everything, and it all seems to move in a nice little order. People crossing the wet streets and buses stopping and pulling up to the curb where some get on and some get off. In the dayroom, there’s this huge window, and below it is a park with thousands of trees—big green, gray, red, and yellow shapes—and they still have their leaves on, but they don’t seem as busy as they are in the summertime. They seem to be thinking or resting, and I usually spend part of the afternoon looking down on that park, and the leaves are so thick that you can barely see the grass and paths that I know go through there. It’s something that I’ve really come to like and look forward to—looking down into that park and the thousands of trees whose names I used to know. It’s a whole lot different than walking up to a tree and looking up through it. Sometimes, looking down into that park, I can imagine how God feels.
When I think of what it would be like to leave here, I’m both thrilled and scared. I’ve been here a long time—long enough to get over being nervous—because that’s one of the things that I can still remember. When I arrived here, I was in quite a state. That’s what Bardens says, and although I don’t remember exactly clear that time, I do recall that I was all worked up. A lot happened when I first arrived—it was a much busier time for me then—maybe because I was new, and they have to do that to everyone when they first arrive. But then again, I don’t think so. When Barry first showed up, he didn’t get nearly as much attention as I did. I look at the calendar every now and then and try to figure out how long I’ve been here—I think it was sixteen months the last time I checked, but I’m not really sure. They—the staff—are pretty quiet about these things and tell me not to trouble myself about such matters. Sometimes, I feel like they’re keeping something from me, but maybe it’s just their way to ask questions and not answer them.
I’ve been here this long—from when I was nervous and in quite a state and took lots of shots and pills and was always busy with tests and experiments until now when I can talk and write again and am pretty calm. I don’t worry anymore, and I sometimes wonder how that felt. Maybe it’s because I know that I have no control and figure that worrying about things won’t do me any good. I just leave it up to the staff and hope they know what’s good for me. They tell me to trust them and that they’re only trying to help me, so I do.
This is the way things are—just shapes—mostly, sixteen months here on Six East, last time I checked, looking promising and not worrying too much. It’s really not such a bad life, now that I think of it.
I sometimes can’t help from thinking though. Are worry and wonder the same things? The other night, I was playing bones—dominoes, that is, but we call it bones up here—with Corvo, an old guy in a chair, and I remember thinking to myself— his face is as white as the white cliffs of Dover —and I had no id