Any Day Now

Terry Bisson

Description

It is a poignant excursion into the last days of the Beats and the emerging radicalized culture of the sixties from Kentucky to New York City and daringly unique. This road movie of a novel, which begins as a fifties coming-of-age story and ends in an isolated hippy commune under threat of revolution, provides a transcendent commentary on America then and now.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468300079
• Langue: English

Extrait

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Talking Man
Fire on the Mountain
The Pickup Artist
In the Upper Room Greetings
Greetings
Bears Discover Fire
TVA Baby
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover the United States in 2012 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail]
Copyright © 2012 by Terry Bisson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-007-9
Family and friends:
If you hope to find yourself in these pages,
you will be disappointed. If you dread it,
you will be relieved. For I made it all up.
“Graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.”
—S HELLEY , “England in 1819”
For the Old Man, the Beatnik Daddy, once again.
Contents
By The Same Author
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
ONE
“H E’S JUST A LITTLE BOY. ”
“But I can’t see out the back.”
“What are those big mirrors for?”
“They’re for looks, Lou Emma. Not for looking out.”
“Shhhh. I think he’s asleep.”
“He’s pretending.”
Clay was just a little boy. He knew his name. He knew to keep his eyes closed so they would think he was sleeping, wasn’t listening, wasn’t there. That was his first trick. More would follow. He lay up in the back of the car, a ’39 Mercury coupe, june bug green, under the slanted glass. It was perfect, like a little bed. Like it was made for him.
Soon they were talking of something else in low voices in the soft light from the dash. Dash. Clay liked that word.
His mother’s voice was soft and familiar, like cotton cloth. His father’s voice was sharp and strange, like steel or plastic. It came from far away.
The little boy opened his eyes. The one-eyed moon looked back. The world below it was dark. Light bounced off running posts and signs. The world was flat. The moon was round. The car made a singing sound. Tires, motor, radio. It made the world go by. The big trees, far away, went slower the farther away they were.
It was all moving, just right. It was perfect.
“He’s not pretending,” his mother said. “He’s just a boy. A little boy.”
Calhoun was small.
Owensboro was big.
“This is it,” his father said. They had a new house. It was just like all the others. They were all new, all in a row. The trees in the front yards were all small, like children. Wires held them up. The trees in Calhoun had been big. He had lived in a big house with his aunts and his cousins. Now he had his own room.
“He’s not used to you yet,” said his mother.
His father was home from the War.
“He’ll get used to you,” said his mother.
“What was the War like?” he asked one day.
“It was like nothing,” his father said. “It was like a lot of big gray steel nothing.” He had been on a ship.
“Don’t tell him that,” his mother said.
“Why not,” his father said. “It’s true.”
Jimmy Spence lived two doors down. He was sixteen. His father was a dealer. Jimmy had a ’49 Ford. It made a rumbling sound like the ’39 Merc. He liked to drive fast through the puddles and splash the kids playing.
Everybody laughed but them.
There were no sidewalks. The neighborhood was too new.
Jesse and Yancey were twins. They lived next door. Clay hated them.
“Your daddy’s a Yankee,” they said. “He talks funny.”
“Your daddy’s a hillbilly,” said Clay.
“No, he’s not.”
Yes, he was. Clay had heard his mother and father talking about it. It was one of the few times they agreed.
The second grade school was new. There was a ditch between the playground and the tobacco field. There were crawdads in the muddy water.
The teacher’s name was Miss Wilson. She was pretty. Nice too. She let the boys catch crawdads and bring them into the classroom in a coffee can. Clay and Bobby Lee caught the most. Bobby Lee was his best friend.
On Monday they were all dead and the room smelled bad but Miss Wilson didn’t care. She opened all the windows with a crank.
It was Science, she said.
Fourth grade was another school, all the way across town. They had to ride a yellow bus. The driver’s name was Porter.
All the kids liked Porter. He taught them songs.
MacArthur, MacArthur, he’s our man!
Throw old Truman in the garbage can!
“Where’d you learn that?” Clay’s mother asked.
Clay didn’t know who MacArthur was, or Truman either, but he knew better than to tell on Porter.
“From Bobby Lee,” he said.
Bobby Lee’s father owned a drugstore and a picture show. Every Saturday there was a cowboy movie and a serial too. Clay and Bobby Lee got in free.
Clay’s mother picked them up after the show.
“How was the show?” she asked. “Did the cowboys win again?” She was smoking a cigarette. The cowboys always won.
“The niggers threw popcorn,” said Clay.
“The what?”
“The niggers in the balcony,” Bobby Lee explained. “They eat the popcorn and then they flatten out the boxes and sail them down to try and hit us. It doesn’t hurt though.”
Clay’s mother let Bobby Lee out at his house, then stopped the car again at the end of the block. She lit another cigarette and said, “Don’t you ever let me hear you say that again.”
“Say what?”
“ Nigger. That’s a white trash word. That’s white trash talk. You’re a Bewley and don’t you forget it. We’ve always had colored help, colored people around, in Calhoun. We don’t use that word.”
Clay had a little sister. Then she died. She was zero years old.
Now he had his own room again. His mother sat up late, crying and smoking. His father was in the garage, listening to the radio. He listened to the radio a lot. He had a shortwave.
Clay read airplane books under the covers with a flashlight. His favorite was the Curtiss P-40, the Warhawk.
On Sundays, after church, they went to Calhoun.
Calhoun Mama lived in the Big House, on the banks of the Green. There were old cars all around the barn and empty whiskey bottles in the rafters of the tobacco stripping room. A BB gun to keep cats out of the milk.
Calhoun Mama sat in a rocker by the window, with her legs straight out, like white sticks, all wrapped up. All the kids had to say hello and remind her of their names. The curtains were always closed.
All the aunts and cousins were there. Sometimes Uncle Ham cooked squirrels. They were like chicken but all dark meat. The boys looked for buckshot with their teeth, then played in the sweet-smelling barn, where the burley was hanging.
They sat on the big green tractor. From the barn door Clay could see the bridge and the cars speeding over, one at a time. Two out of three were Chevrolets

There was a new boy in the fifth grade, Emil, pronounced “a meal.” He was a Yankee, from Chicago. He talked funny but Clay liked him. He knew all about airplanes. Bobby Lee liked him too. Emil had all the Oz books. He kept them on a shelf in his room, in order.
There were thirty-nine in all. Clay had never dreamed there could be so many.
They formed an Oz club. You had to read all the books, in order. They built a clubhouse under an Osage orange tree and each took a name. Bobby Lee was Tik-Tok of Oz, Emil was Peter Brown, the American boy, and Clay was Ojo.
“When we grow up and get out of here, we’ll find Oz,” said Bobby Lee. Nome, Alaska, was suspect.
Owensboro seemed suddenly small. Now they saw it for what it really was: a shadow of the real world.
On the first Saturday of every month all the boys in Owensboro, it seemed like anyway, went to the icehouse on Ninth Street. An old colored man on the porch gave haircuts for a quarter. The icehouse had a big old-fashioned porch like in a Western and the boys all lined up. It only took sixty seconds and all the boys looked alike when he was done. Only white boys of course. They were all ten. The iceman’s grandson took the quarters. He was thirteen and mean-looking and black as night. He had already failed two grades.
The boys were all afraid of him.
There was a girl with a shovel behind the Loyals’ garage.
“Who are you?” Clay asked.
“None of your beeswax,” she said. She was tall for a girl and skinny.
She was burying a bird. That seemed more interesting than hide-and-seek. It was a little gray thing. There was no blood and nothing was broken. The only thing wrong with it was that it was dead.
“How did you kill it?”
“I didn’t. I found it. Maybe it just died.”
“If it was a cat, it would have eaten it. There would at least be blood.”
It seemed better without the blood. Even more dead.
She handed Clay the shovel. They wrapped the bird in a paper bag. Ruth Ann put a ribbon around it, but that didn’t seem right. That was her name. They put a little cross on the grave.
“I wonder if he died from the inside out,” Clay said.
“Maybe he just didn’t belong here,” said Ruth Ann. “Do you think there’s a heaven for birds?”
“I guess there would have to be. What about a hell?”
“Brrr.” They shivered and looked at the tiny grave. Had they sent a bird to Hell?
They decided to dig it up in a year, to see what it looked like. Clay looked for Ruth Ann the next day but she was gone. “She’s our cousin,” said Yancey, the only one of the Loyal twins who had any sense. “She liv