Luce Lemay is out on parole three years after an awful tragedy sent him to prison. In his small Illinois town, he does his best to find hope: in a new job at the local Gas-N-Go; in his companion and fellow ex-con, Junior Breen, who spells out puzzling messages to the unquiet ghosts of his past; and finally, in the arms of the lovely but reckless Charlene.
But sorrow and violence lie in his path, in this suspenseful exploration of a country bright with the far-off stars of forgiveness and dark with the still-looming shadow of the death penalty.
“A wonderful accomplishment . . . The power is in the writing. Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman.” —Hubert Selby Jr., bestselling author of Last Exit to Brooklyn
“The author moves the story along at a surprisingly fast and easy pace.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Moving . . . Meno has a poet’s feel for small-town details, life in the joint and the trials an ex-con faces, and he’s a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization.” —Publishers Weekly
Luce Lemay is out on parole three years after an awful tragedy sent him to prison. In his small Illinois town, he does his best to find hope: in a new job at the local Gas-N-Go; in his companion and fellow ex-con, Junior Breen, who spells out puzzling messages to the unquiet ghosts of his past; and finally, in the arms of the lovely but reckless Charlene.
But sorrow and violence lie in his path, in this suspenseful exploration of a country bright with the far-off stars of forgiveness and dark with the still-looming shadow of the death penalty.
“A wonderful accomplishment . . . The power is in the writing. Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman.” —Hubert Selby Jr., bestselling author of Last Exit to Brooklyn
“The author moves the story along at a surprisingly fast and easy pace.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Moving . . . Meno has a poet’s feel for small-town details, life in the joint and the trials an ex-con faces, and he’s a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization.” —Publishers Weekly
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Luce Lemay is out on parole three years after an awful tragedy sent him to prison. In his small Illinois town, he does his best to find hope: in a new job at the local Gas-N-Go; in his companion and fellow ex-con, Junior Breen, who spells out puzzling messages to the unquiet ghosts of his past; and finally, in the arms of the lovely but reckless Charlene.
But sorrow and violence lie in his path, in this suspenseful exploration of a country bright with the far-off stars of forgiveness and dark with the still-looming shadow of the death penalty.
“A wonderful accomplishment . . . The power is in the writing. Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman.” —Hubert Selby Jr., bestselling author of Last Exit to Brooklyn
“The author moves the story along at a surprisingly fast and easy pace.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Moving . . . Meno has a poet’s feel for small-town details, life in the joint and the trials an ex-con faces, and he’s a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization.” —Publishers Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617752315 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Akashic Books |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 290 |
| Sales rank: | 543,989 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ghost town
Out of nowhere, I did what I ought not to. I thought of the girl I loved, waited for my chance, then robbed the liquor store where I worked. I got in my car, sped away, imagining the howl of sirens where no sirens were.
The highway itself was dark as hell and led up to the sky.
There was no room for headlight beams among the silver stars. Cat's eyes. That's how they glowed. Thick gray eaves of fog hung all along. There was no sign of anything around. No sign of providence or luck. It was like some lonesome dream where it's just you and your desire, left out to burn in the dark.
Did you ever watch the sky at night all over a lonely road?
Night can be the emptiest, most hollow thing you might ever feel driving toward your home, at fifty miles an hour, with an open bottle of port and the liquor store's returns for the night and that sweet plastic- faced Virgin Mary staring down at you from her all-fiery position on top of the red vinyl dash. No, there might not be any room for your poor thieving dreams in that incorruptible night, at all.
The Virgin did a little curtsy as I pulled off the highway and straight down La Harpie Road. The black vinyl steering wheel was loose in my greasy hands. My fingers were slick with my own sweat.
I had never stolen, really stolen, before.
I never had the need.
It's strange the things a desperate man will do to keep sane.
It's strange the things a desperate man will do to keep himself from feeling so desperate in the first place. My mouth was full of spit and cheap liquor. It tasted like old steeple dust. Streetlights flashed somewhere up ahead. I could hear the dtt-dtt-dtttt stutter of the wheels over the rough pavement, rattling along to the poor mechanisms in my mind. My eyes began to shut. I needed to sleep. A nice soft place to hide. The engine gave a little start. I opened my eyes.
Then this pretty lady walked right in front of the car.
No.
Sweet Jesus, no.
In those still moments, I could see her soft round face; her dress was long and pale blue. Her neck was thin and made her seem about as real as some shadow. Her lips made a little helpless move as the headlights fell across her face.
There wasn't any time to stop.
The wheel went dead right in my hands.
The baby carriage this lady pushed met the cool steely grill and shot straight up into the dark night sky, losing itself among all that pleasant distance and the sparkle of the silver stars. Good night, the tiny round wheels seemed to say, as they spun around. Good night, like I was falling right into a kind of dream.
Then it was all over. Then it was as good as done.
I fell out of the car and vomited all over my dull black shoes, right before the night moved in straight through my eyes and sore mouth, knocking me down, pulling me along some desperate road out of my body, out of my own unhappy life, and straight up to Pontiac for a three-to-five bid for manslaughter and reckless driving. My old boss at the liquor store was Christian enough not to press charges for robbery, seeing me sunken in the sad state I had fallen.
"The prisoner will be remanded to the State of Illinois Department of Corrections until his sentence has been served or until the courts see fit for his release ..."
That night played over in my dreams every evening like an awful jukebox song. I would try to fix it all in my head, stopping just a foot or so short, keeping my eyes open long enough to see this poor lady with her baby carriage, her pale skin lit up with fear and the certainty of that unwieldy moment, her brown hair hanging long down her back, the twisted knot at the end somehow sealing all our fates, and me, me, gripping the steering wheel tighter or hitting the brakes sooner. Somehow I would try to trick myself so it didn't happen and that sky never fell apart, but those still seconds always ended the same: the sound of the engine spinning right through my ears, pulling all the blood straight out of my body, and that tiny blue carriage being knocked up into the night, like it was so light and empty and hollow and was being lifted by the invisible hand of Solomon, straight up, disappearing among the brightest of the stars, taking its place in a fixed spot laid out by Jesus or the Virgin or some fleeting angel somewhere above, just before it all faded to black and was done.
No events before that night mattered anymore.
Those dark little moments suddenly held everything.
All the things that would follow would come from that single hopeless second in all of the heartlessness of space and time. All those things would send me straight through my acquaintance with the old state pen and Junior Breen and would forever change the life I would then lead.
CHAPTER 2old tattoos
They gave me back my full Christian name and my own clothes and three miserable old Viceroy Golds. I had hidden them in the lining of my red suit coat. They were the stalest cigarettes I ever tasted, I swear. There were some little nicotine ghosts with unfiltered moans that drifted up within that smoke because those goddamn cigarettes were so old.
They gave me back my full name and the life I had lost, but still that baby carriage rolled on cold through my head. It rocked and wavered right past me as I wandered out of those penitent iron gates and back to being a sovereign man. I bought myself a vanilla shake at the Dairy Queen right away and sucked it down slow, holding that straw between my teeth until it was all gone and just a cold feeling along my teeth. Then I bought myself a bus ticket for the passenger line home and took a seat up near the front.
That trip home was kind to me as an open wound.
I sat still in my seat, watching this other con I knew, Jimmy Fargo, feeling up his sweaty home-fried girl, undressing her right on the bench in front of me, trying to give her the time right on those awful gray cloth seats. Jimmy Fargo's girl was a plump redhead with a pleasant round face and a white blouse unbuttoned all the way down to show her ample bosom and freckled white flesh. There was a wave of pure undulation as ol' Jimmy unclasped her bra. It echoed along my mouth and in my own head.
"Hey, now, watch it back there!" the old buzzard of a bus driver shouted over his shoulder. "Or I'll stop in the next town and turn you over to the cops and they'll send you right back to the old pen."
Jimmy snarled a little and nuzzled his sweet's rouge-stained cheek. I wondered if there was something in his thin eyes that gave him away. Something that gave some accurate sign, some portal of his time spent behind locked prison metal doors. I wondered if the same gray halo hung over my own head. Maybe it was his haircut. Trimmed a little too straight. A little too thin above the ears. My own hair was cut in a high and tight pompadour, trimmed expertly by Darcell, the prison's only barber, who would do a real right cutting job on you if you slipped him a generous tip.
Two years and ten months had faded right away like old skin left dead in the sheets. There was nothing in that time that made me think I'd been forgiven. There was nothing that made me think I'd ever be able to breathe without hearing that baby's soft name.
Hyacinth.
Sent straight up to the sky.
Those letters were burned in my mind in a way I could never forget. The way it had always been figured for me, it had only been a matter of time before I ended up in the pen anyway. Looking back, it seemed my whole life kind of led up to that single moment, accidental and horrible as it was.
They let me go and I took a job back in my hometown of La Harpie, Illinois. There were still some folks that had once known my own old man, Rowdy Lemay, as a decent hog farmer and either didn't remember where his son had gone or never knew exactly why they had both left in the first place. In a small town, rumors tended to circulate and die pretty fast. The problem with that was people might forget what horrible thing it was you did but still remembered your name with a kind of undistinguished shame. It's a thing you can see go dark in other people's eyes and faces. It was a thing I'd expected to find in anyone that had once known me back home.
My own mother had split town when I was ten. My old man had moved away after I had been sent to the pen and now lived somewhere south of Minneapolis. There was no pretty gal or weepy- eyed father waiting outside those concrete-and-wire gates for me. I would be going home to a place where none of my own blood was living and where most everyone else disregarded or completely mistrusted me.
That bus had a sugary smell like sleep.
I fought the whole way between unsettling, unwholesome dreams.
I startled myself awake. I wiped my face and looked down at my hands, worn, but well-scrubbed and clean. Everything was fine. Someone mumbling something right in my ear.
"The only thing you're missing there is gasoline," he whispered. This crazy old man beside me gave a little smile. Then he gave a gentle wink. We were already within the city limits. Nearly at the bus station on Trotter Road.
"Do you need any gas?"
This old guy had a dirty red gasoline can sitting in his lap. His eyes were black, his lips were pale. There were flies sticking to his sweat. Beneath the stink of his breath, there was the faintest odor of gasoline rising up from the can that shook in his lap. "This here gas is only five dollars."
"No. No thanks." I smiled. There was always some kind of poor fellow on the bus. Always some sort of stranger or something unsettling like that.
"This is premium gasoline."
I stared out the dirty windows. It was already getting dark. I shook my head, feeling it turn down in my gut.
La Harpie.
A place of a kind of quiet villainy and secret lust. A place where the dirty dreams of every twelve-year-old man-child were visible on the bus station's bathroom walls in hand-scrawled tattoos of ladies with oversized breasts and inappropriate female genitalia, inaccurately portrayed as a singularly dangerous triangle of doom. Those kinds of drawings set me up for a world of confusion.
I stared out the huge glass windshield and frowned.
A pretty girl walked right in front of the bus.
Jesus — no.
The bus heaved to a stop, burning up its brakes, almost running the pretty lady down where she stood, tall upon her cheap high heels. The girl just shook her head and straightened her white blouse. Those breathy pneumatic doors opened with a hush and she climbed on up.
"Nearly ran you down, missy." The gray-toothed bus driver frowned. The pretty lady just gave a little smile.
"Then you might've mussed up my skirt."
The bus driver gave a weak chuckle and took her fare. She held her black suitcase at her side and took a seat across from me.
The girl was really something. A nice toast-and-butter kind of gal. Her eyes were big and brown, her hair was dark black like fine molasses and ran in curls down to her shoulders. Her whole neck was covered in little beads of sweat. There was a tiny white collection of her perspiration along her blouse's thin collar. I could see her delicate white brassiere moving beneath. I could hear her underwear as she crossed her legs.
My god, I hadn't touched a woman in nearly three years. My hands began to tremble. I began to feel like a real stranger, impure and swarthy as hell. The bus shook a little as it moved. This lady just flipped her curly hair over the other shoulder and stared down at her feet. Then she looked up. Then she looked me right in the face.
"I know you, don't I?"
"I don't think so," I grunted. I turned and held my breath and looked straight ahead. My face began to get all red and hot.
"No, I think I know your name," this woman whispered. "Isn't it Luce Lemay?"
"Sure is." I grinned. "How'd you happen to know that?"
"We've met before. My name is Charlene Dulaire."
"I'm sure I would have remembered meeting a pretty lady like you," I whispered.
The lady blushed a little, then stared hard at my face. She looked down at my arms, along the back of my sweaty hands to my wrists.
"I do know you." Her thin black eyelashes fluttered just once. "I know those tattoos."
"Excuse me?"
Her eyes were bright as she ran her fingers over my wrist, up my arm. Her touch was so light, so soft. I felt my stomach curl into a knot. There was a dark black tattoo of a sacred heart burning along my forearm. She smiled.
"You've had those for a while, haven't you?"
"Since I was about sixteen or so."
Her soft face blushed red like two perfectly round apples turning hard on her cheeks.
"You used to make it with my older sister in high school."
"How's that?" I mumbled. My face was creaking with humiliation.
"Ullele. That's my older sister's name. You used to sneak into her bedroom and make it with her on Sunday nights when our parents were at Mass. My Aunt Fiona, remember her, the one who thought she had a bird living in her chest, she just kept getting crazier and crazier, so my folks would go to church every Sunday and light a candle. Then you'd sneak in up the tree and climb in my sister's room. Me and my other sisters used to listen to you doing it through the heating vents."
"Jesus." This girl, Ullele, her eyes were dark and round and brown, her legs were thin and long, but there was some problem with her teeth. There were three or four extra teeth that made her mouth look huge. It was a horrible thing to see that poor girl smile. Her daddy owned a used car lot in town and was known as Milford Dulaire, the Used Car King of the Greater Southern Illinois and Northern Kentucky Area. He was a tall thin man who hated me more than you could ever believe.
"Which sister are you?" I asked.
"The littlest one. I remember my father wanted to murder you. He really did. He told my sister to stay away from your kind. He called you a hood. He said you were born with those tattoos." She looked away, down at her feet. Those big brown eyes got sad. "He shook his head when he heard about you in that trouble a few years ago."
I gave a frown. I felt like I couldn't breathe at all.
"That was a few years ago all right ..." I said in a kind of sigh. "It was all some kind of accident ... it was all some kind of mistake I made ..."
"My older sister cried all night when she heard you'd been sent away. Cried all night and through the better part of a day.
Nearly left a running stream in her bed there were so many tears. But that's Ullele for you. She cries sometimes when the sun's too bright. She'll cry in the middle of the day for missing the night." Charlene gave a little smile and stared up into my face.
"Looks like you made it through it okay. I mean to say, you still look good. How long were you in for?"
"Three years," I replied. "Three longest years of my own short life." This pretty girl was so smooth and soft. I wanted to press my fingers along her lips and kiss her chin more than anything. I wanted to feel something good beside my skin. But now she knew. No parole board could make me a different man in any beauty's big brown eyes.
"Did you ever get married to that girl?" Charlene asked.
"Who?" I asked.
"That girl, Dahlia. My older sister hated her. Said she stole you away from her."
"No, that's not true. Ullele and me broke up a long time before. She started dating some guy from Colterville and she didn't miss me at all after that."
"No. She still has a torch for you. All my sisters do."
Charlene's eyelashes fluttered like a summer dream as she crossed her legs. "So did you marry that girl?"
"No," I said, shaking my head. "That was like a bad joke."
The girl twitched her nose.
"Oh, dammit, I have to go."
"You heading on some kind of trip?" I asked.
"Huh?" She looked down at her suitcase like it was the last thing she expected to find in her hand. She gave a little huff and shook her head.
"Where you headin'?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm going back to my parents' home."
She shot up out of her seat and started toward the front of the bus, then turned around and looked back at me. She gave a quiet smile and stared right at me, making the air around my head seem perfumed and sweet. Then her lips parted and the softest words ever spoken came unbuckled from behind her white teeth.
"Welcome home, Luce Lemay," I heard her say and I felt like I was about to faint. Charlene shook her head and walked to the front as the bus rolled to a stop. The doors opened with a hush. She stepped off and out into the road before I could find a single word to speak. The bus took off again and I felt my tongue come undone from its knot.
"Hey ... wait," I kind of mumbled. I imagined her young lips firm against mine. I fell back into my seat like an invalid.
"Hey, that sure is a nice suit," the crazy old man beside me said. I nodded. The bus rumbled along, stinking with all our sweat. "That sure is nice."
"Thanks."
"Where'd you get a nice suit like that?"
"I'm not sure."
The suit I was wearing was red polyester, with a red collar, the only suit I owned, the one I had worn to trial, the one that had sat in a drawer somewhere in the Illinois Department of Corrections for three years. It was old and wrinkled and stank of a short stay of incarceration.
"So you want this gasoline or not?"
"Sure. All I got is three dollars," I said.
"Fine, that's fine."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How the Hula Girl Sings"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Joe Meno.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
title page,
copyright page,
acknowledgments,
ghost town,
old tattoos,
honeymoon veil,
two birds and one broken wing,
a beautiful thing,
that sweet young bird ain't sweet no more,
knot in the flesh,
clout,
the red ventricle along the wall,
the fair queen of all corn,
strange customer,
long black veil,
lonely driver,
home,
old red organ,
christ told the woman at the well,
buried treasure,
last words at the bus depot,
tonight,
Bonus Material: Excerpt from Marvel and a Wonder,
About Joe Meno,
About Akashic Books,