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Summary
Summary
In a triumphant return to the characters that launched his career two decades ago, Tom Drury travels back to Grouse County, the setting of his landmark debut, The End of Vandalism . Drury's depictions of the stark beauty of the Midwest and the futility of American wanderlust have earned him comparisons to Raymond Carver, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Auster.
When fourteen-year-old Micah Darling travels to Los Angeles to reunite with the mother who deserted him seven years ago, he finds himself out of his league in a land of magical freedom. He does new drugs with new people, falls in love with an enchanting but troubled equestrienne named Charlotte, and gets thrown out of school over the activities of a club called the New Luddites.
Back in the Midwest, an ethereal young woman comes to Stone City on a mission that will unsettle the lives of everyone she meets--including Micah's half-sister, Lyris, who still fights fears of abandonment after a childhood in foster care, and his father, Tiny, a petty thief. An investigation into the stranger's identity uncovers a darkly disturbed life, as parallel narratives of the comic and tragic, the mysterious and everyday, unfold in both the country and the city.
Author Notes
Tom Drury is the author of "The End of Vandalism" & "The Black Brook", one of Granta's "Best Young American Novelists," & a Guggenheim fellow for 2000-2001. His fiction has appeared most recently in "The New Yorker" & "Ploughshares". He lives with his wife & their daughter in Connecticut, where he teaches at Wesleyan University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Loneliness and fantasy bend reality in Drury's thin new work (after The Driftless Area), which returns readers to the world and characters of his much-celebrated 1994 novel The End of Vandalism. In the opening pages, Micah Darling, the son of casual thief Tiny, is taken by his TV actress mother Joan out of his small Midwestern town to live in Los Angeles. He soon makes friends with a set of privileged teenage drug enthusiasts and falls in love, like everybody else, with the beautiful but anguished Charlotte. "It's like a law of nature. Gravity, then Charlotte," says one, sardonically. Back in the Midwest, meanwhile, PI Dan Norman is on the trail of conman Jack Snow, whose forgeries of Celtic artifacts have led him to a thousand-year-old stone found in a dead man's hand in a bog in Ireland. As the investigation wears on, the lives of local residents are roiled when a mysterious and unhinged young woman arrives on a mission to recover the ancient Celtic stone. Cutting between decadent Los Angeles teenagers and weary smalltown men and women, all of whom struggle with loneliness and aimless desire, the two disjointed plot lines never really intersect. Still, uncanny dialogue, deadpan humor, a few morbid twists, and a considerable amount of quirk make for an engaging read. Agent: The Wylie Agency. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In his acclaimed debut, The End of Vandalism (1994), Drury introduced readers to an offbeat cast of lovers, cheaters, and criminals from Grouse County, Iowa. Set partly in the same town, his fifth and latest book reinstates some of his inaugural characters, including former sheriff Dan Norman, now an undercover detective investigating an ex-con's scam selling forged Celtic relics; Tiny Darling, a small-time crook and unsuccessful plumber; Tiny's ex-wife, Joan, who lives in L.A. and stars in a forensic TV show; and her stepdaughter, Lyris, a former foster child, who has recently moved to town. The fragmented, multiperspective story line begins when Joan returns to Grouse County to reclaim her 14-year-old son, Micah, whose new West Coast lifestyle finds him dabbling in drugs and sex. All the jumping around and the lack of a lead role result in a spotty overall plotline, which is at times dizzying. But as in his previous masterful novels, Drury weaves carefully metered sentences, deeply felt scenes, and struggling characters into an endlessly entertaining tapestry of human comedy and small-town living.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HERE'S a paragraph you might find a little strange: "Micah had ridden three times, got thrown once. He found horses hard to read. Their thoughts might go back to the beginning of horse time, or they might be afraid of a candy wrapper on the ground. He was wary of anything that big that bit." This is from "Pacific," the new book by Tom Drury, a major figure in American literature, author of a string of novels without a dud in the bunch, and the kind of writer some people just don't get. I like his oddball but easygoing rhythm - "ridden three times, got thrown once." I like his take on the everyday vernacular - "hard to read" - which he often moves into contexts that feel wrong but fit right, like "horses." I like his occasional bouts of absurdity - "the beginning of horse time" - that often bump up against something deep and abstract I like the specificity of his eye - that "candy wrapper on the ground" - that grounds his more far-flung stretches. And a sentence like "He was wary of anything that big that bit" just pleases me. It sounds good and it's hilarious. "Big that bit!" I just read it out loud again and it cracked me up. Other people, it seems, don't get it. When I recommend Drury to friends, they're apt to find him puzzling. Critics sometimes compare him with Garrison Keillor and David Lynch, a name-droppy way of labeling him Midwestern or strange. That first label I never like -calling a writer "Midwestern" seems like a way to start up that familiar and imaginary battle between Plain Novels Full of People With Integrity and Dirty Fingernails versus Showoffy Books About People Having Martinis in Penthouses. And while it's true that Drury has set novels in Iowa - although he's also set them in New England and Belgium, and the sharp-eyed reader might predict that parts of "Pacific" are on the West Coast - he's not interested in chronicling a neglected slice of the culture. He chooses locations for their possibilities, not their trappings. His novels hang out in empty warehouses, saggy living rooms and forests that conjure none of the American mythology of the Midwest but sure do get spooky at night. And strange? Well, let's get this straight: All great books are strange. Every lasting work of literature since the very weird "Beowulf" has been strange, not only because it grapples with the strangeness around us, but also because the effect of originality is startling, making even the oldest books feel like brandnew stories. "Pacific" is not quite a new story, as it revisits characters from Drury's first novel, "The End of Vandalism." That book is something of a panorama, containing so many characters they're listed in the back, and "Pacific" traces some of the aftermath of its individual entanglements. But the book doesn't so much follow a few threads as it does explore how impossible they are to sort out, as everyone's troubles seem to stretch back into the inscrutable past and out into the equally foggy future. Micah, the more-or-less hero of "Pacific," is the 14-year-old result of a long-dead relationship, and at the book's outset he leaves his ne'er-do-well father, Tiny, in Iowa to go live in California with his prodigal mother, Joan. Micah sinks quickly into his new home, finding an alluring first love and some new drugs, both of which are maybe too powerful for a 14-year-old; meanwhile, his absence in Iowa leaves a vacuum filled by an unsettling and mysterious stranger. The stranger, I should add here, is a woman named Sandra who is looking for "the stone thrown by Cuchulainn to keep Conall's chariot from following him to Loch Echtra." I'll pause while you read that again. "Gee," says the antiques dealer, when Sandra inquires about this lofty item, "I doubt we'd get anything like that here." The juxtaposition of the supernatural with the banal is a scheme Drury's worked before - there's a ghost in his novel "The Black Brook," one of my favorite books on earth, that can talk only in advice from "A Treasury of Household Hints" - and "Pacific" uses Sandra, either legendary heroine or deluded screwball or both, to weave together the tangible stuff of the present moment and the unknowable mystery of distant points in space and time, where the novel keeps casting its gaze: "They got out of the car and tried the front door, then the back door. Locked, locked. It was dark and cold. There was no reason to go in. Half a dozen deer tearing up grass in the backyard froze, then bolted, thumping haunches and vaulting hedges. There were deer everywhere in those days." "Those days"? In just two words, we're catapulted away from that quiet house to some eerie distance, while Sandra's ancient quest gets hung up on the itchy details of the present day: "She'd walked in the back door and washed the sword in the kitchen sink. Then she dried it off and treated it with 3 in 1 from the cupboard and sat at the table working the oil into the blade with a cotton rag. It was not much of a sword, but she would not likely run into somebody with a better one." A jump to an abstract view outside the house, and a vengeful swordfighter working with household cleansers: Drury overlays the grand and mythic with the specific and everyday, giving ordinary moments the majesty of legend, but also muddying up the olden stories a little bit. Before long, the supernatural has been folded neatly and riotously into the normal, so that catty descriptions have a touch of the mystical - "People feared her, as if she had special powers, but she was just an old lady given to yelling at people and playing with their minds" - and a spectral encounter is spiked with ordinary reaction: "Don't be afraid," Sandra says. "Well, I am," replies the girl she has encountered in the forest "I am afraid." THE novel has a lovely epigraph from the "Mabinogion," which I'm sure I don't have to remind you is a collection of Welsh folklore from the Middle Ages, and indeed the novel's pace and shape feel in the tradition of some of the old, odd tales Drury invokes. It's not a tidy narrative, and I wouldn't be surprised if a few readers find "Pacific" as hard to read as Micah does horses. But Drury gives us the wondrous and engaging stuff of real storytelling, of actual inquiry and investigation into the haunting and jokey puzzles of the world, at a time when so much literature stops short of invoking something larger or spends so much time touting grand themes that it forgets to make something happen. "Pacific" is a terrific book, and a strange one, as strange as the world and the great literature that helps us make our way through it. Drury overlays the grand and mythic with the everyday, giving ordinary life the majesty of legend. Daniel Handler is the author, most recently, of "Why We Broke Up" and, as Lemony Snicket, "The Dark."
Guardian Review
The conclusion to Drury's Grouse County trilogy showcases a laconic talent that can go from laughter to darkness in an instant This fifth novel by Tom Drury boasts a thumbs-up cover line from Jonathan Franzen, who might, you suspect, have given it in baffled gratitude at the disparity between their careers. The author of The Corrections has experienced one way that the life of a gifted American writer can go -- bestsellers, National Book award, world tours, stray remarks sparking Twitter-storms -- while Drury, 60 next year, has had the other: magazine short stories, small-press publication, literary superstars expressing mystification in interviews and puff quotes that he isn't as well known as they are. One reason for this neglect is publishing momentum. Pacific, published in the US two years ago, extends into a trilogy a sequence that began in 1994 with The End of Vandalism and was followed, 15 years ago, by Hunts in Dreams. These long gaps were punctuated by a couple of other books, but it is the three linked works that best make the case for Drury's closet greatness. They are based in the American midwest, in an unspecified location somewhere around the Dakotas, Minnesota and Illinois, and focus on the fictional community of Grouse County, where the civic fathers thought nothing of calling a town Boris or a thoroughfare Old Woman Springs Road. Some characters recur across the three books, ageing, procreating and divorcing. At the start of Pacific, Sheriff Dan Norman, whose investigation into vandalism at an anti-vandalism dance kicked off the trilogy, has declined to run for a sixth term as sheriff and become a private detective, while Albert Robeshaw, a child in the first book, is now a reporter on the local paper. A son's pursuit to Los Angeles of his estranged mother geographically expands the story. American writing on either side of the second millennium features a recurrent voice of laconic documentary. This register exists on a spectrum from the whimsical -- Garrison Keillor, Armistead Maupin, David Sedaris -- to the ominous: Don DeLillo, David Lynch, James Ellroy. Drury hovers somewhere in the middle of that range, close to Raymond Carver, especially the Carver of Short Cuts, the tragicomic anthology movie that Robert Altman fashioned from the short stories. In a similar way, Pacific plaits together multiple plot lines that have a unifying quality of fretful oddness. The star of the TV crime show Forensic Mystic is summoned to a remote cabin by a screenwriter to discuss the ghostly romance that may be her movie break; fresh from a spell in the penitentiary for embezzlement, an ex-con becomes involved in a market for faked relics of Celtic antiquity; an old man in a park, pushing a shopping trolley, stops to demonstrate a dying-out method of muscle-based handwriting; high-school students renounce their cellphones in a sudden revival of luddism. As the connections between these weirdnesses become clearer, the serious business is Drury's prose. The style is slyly wry, so that a reference to "a locally famous taxidermist who had his own radio show" has gone past before you start to wonder just how the stuffing of animals would work on the wireless. This is also a writer who can go from laughter to darkness in an instant, as when, after what has seemed to be a tender sex scene, a woman reflects: "This was the best, the most bearable loneliness." Writing of this kind is all about leaving things out. Events sufficient for a chapter or even a novel are summarised in eight words: "Tiny explained how he lost the plumbing business." It is left to the reader to deduce that one relationship in Pacific probably involves statutory rape, while Drury's application of point of view is so meticulous that when one character overhears another on the phone saying, during a rain storm, "Do you believe this? ... they're only guessing like the rest of us", we supply the presumed comment at the other end of the line about the unreliability of weather forecasters. Emblematic of his non-interventionist economy is that Drury never adds to "said" any interpretative adverbs such as "sadly" or "jokingly", so that readers are left to infer the tone when, for instance, after the departure of a waitress who has addressed customers as "babe" and "angel", a diner remarks: "She seems awfully fond of us." It would be nice if one day actors give us their readings of those lines in the screen version, by a latter-day Altman, that surely lies in Grouse County. Until then, readers are encouraged to close the gap between the sales figures of Drury and Franzen. American literature can appear so crowded that it seems unlikely we could be overlooking giants, but the recently acclaimed short-story writer Edith Pearlman is one and Drury is another. * Mark Lawson's The Deaths is published by Picador. To order Pacific for [pound]9.60 (RRP [pound]12) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Mark Lawson.
Kirkus Review
Getting by, getting over, getting laid: Drury's characters keep busy in his fifth novel, another wild ride. Some of them we've met before in Hunts in Dreams (2000) and The End of Vandalism (1994): Charles, Joan, Lyris and Micah. The action is split among small Midwest towns and Los Angeles. Charles, now known as Tiny, had a plumbing business which has since failed. His ex-wife, Joan, has moved to LA and has a juicy role in a TV show. Stepdaughter Lyris has moved into town to shack up with a young newspaper reporter. Joan re-appears to claim 14-year-old Micah and move him to the coast. She's going to take another stab at this mothering business; or is she just playing a role? These departures leave Tiny in an empty nest. Out of loneliness, he starts stealing boxes from the loading docks of big-box stores. That's kids' stuff compared to Jack Snow's criminal enterprise. Jack is an ex-con shipping fake Celtic artifacts from a warehouse. It's his bad luck to be tracked down by Sandra Zulma, his old childhood playmate. Sandra is now cuckoo, lost in a Celtic fantasy world, but with the single-minded energy of the mad, she is looking for a rock that Jack may own. Also on Jack's trail is Dan, once the sheriff but now working for a detective agency, though he hates the sleaze. He and his wife, Louise, are emblems of decency; their private sorrow is the loss of a daughter at birth. Meanwhile, in LA, Micah is experimenting with drugs and girls, while Joan is making the leap to the big screen and sleeping with the screenwriter. The second half includes a murder and a divorce; Micah, overwhelmed, calls his half sister Lyris, who flies out to help. There's no plot or protagonist, but a fine percussive beat sweeps the reader along. The always fresh perspective of this one-of-a-kind writer will have you responding like his character, who "laughed with surprise in her heart."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
CHAPTER ONE Tiny and his son Micah sat on the back porch watching the sun set behind the trees. "Say you're carrying something," said Tiny. "Like what?" Micah was fourteen and wore a forest-green stocking hat, his hair like feathers around his calm brown eyes. "Something of value," said Tiny. "This ashtray here. Say this ashtray is of value." The astray was made of green glass with yellowed seashells glued to the rim. So old it actually might have been of value. Micah picked it up and walked to the end of the porch and back. "Good," said Tiny. "Something of value you carry in front of you and never at your side." "I'll remember." "Now say you get in a fight." "I won't." "What you do is you put your head down and ram them in the solar plexus. It's unexpected." "I wouldn't expect it." "Well, no one does," said Tiny. "Sometimes they faint. They always fall over. Oh, and never get a credit card." It was a cool night in May. The level light cast a red glow on the grass and trees, the house and the shed. "Do you still want to go?" said Tiny. "You can call it off any time." "I've never been in an airplane." "We could get Paul Francis to take you up." "That's not what I'm talking about," said Micah. Tiny nodded. "I just said that to be saying something." A red-tailed hawk came from the north and landed on a hardwood branch with new leaves. "There's your hawk," said Tiny. "Come to say goodbye." • Dan Norman walked out of his house carrying the pieces of a broken table. He and Louise still lived on the old Klar farm on the hill. The table had fallen apart in the living room. It was not bearing unusual weight and neither Dan nor Louise was nearby when it fell. Just the table's time, apparently. A car pulled slowly into the driveway and a woman got out and stood in the yellow circle of the yard light. She had long blond hair, wore a pleated red dress and white gloves. "You don't remember me," she said. "I do," said Dan. "Joan Gower." He shifted the table pieces over to his left arm and they shook hands. "Did you know we get second chances, Sheriff?" said Joan. "Yeah. I'd say I knew that." "He will turn again and have compassion upon us and subdue our iniquities." "I'm not sheriff anymore, though." The door of the house opened and Louise came out wearing a long white button-down shirt as a dress. "Who are you talking to?" "Joan Gower." "Really." Louise had tangled red hair, wild and alive with the light of the house behind her. "Is this business?" "I'm getting my son back," said Joan. "Give me those, love," said Louise. She took the table parts from Dan and headed for the hedge behind the house. • Louise put the wood in the trash burner and went on to the barn, the dust of the old farmyard cool and powdery on her feet. Empty and dark as a church, the barn was no longer used for anything. Louise climbed the ladder and walked across the floor of the hayloft. The planks had been worn smooth by decades of boots and bales and the changing of seasons. She sat in the open door, dangled her bare legs over the side, lit a cigarette, and smoked in the night. Dan and Joan were down there, talking in the yard. Louise listened to the muted sound of their voices. She saw Joan reach up and put her hand on Dan's shoulder, and then his face. The gesture made Louise happy for some reason. Maybe that it was beautiful. A graceful sight to be seen in the country, whatever else you might think of it. • Lyris and Albert slouched on a davenport smoking grass from a wooden pipe from El Salvador and reading the promotional copy printed on Lyris's moving boxes. Lyris was Joan's other child----Micah's half sister. At twenty-three she had just moved in with her boyfriend, Albert Robeshaw. The boxes were said to be good for four moves or twelve years' storage, and anyone who got more use out of them was directed to sign onto the company's website and explain. "As if anyone would do that," said Albert. "To whom it may concern," said Lyris. "We move constantly." "It's a hard life. We love your boxes." "So what are we doing?" said Albert. "About what?" "Are we going to see Micah?" Lyris drew on the pipe. "The little scamper," she said. Joan had given her up for adoption at birth. She appeared at Joan and Tiny's door when she was sixteen and Micah seven. When Joan went away Lyris raised Micah as much as anyone did. • Louise came down from the hayloft and walked back to the house. Dan made her a drink and opened a beer, and they faced each other across the kitchen table. "What have we learned?" Dan raised his eyebrows. "Sounds like Micah Darling's going to live with her in California." "What's that got to do with us?" "I don't know. Guess she just wanted to tell someone." "I saw her touch you," said Louise. "Did you?" Louise picked up the bottle cap from the beer and flicked it at Dan. "Yeah, man. Pretty sweet scene." Dan caught the cap and tossed it toward the corner where it landed on the floor by the wastebasket. "Where were you?" said Dan. "Up in the barn." "How was it?" "The same. Good." • Tiny was drinking vodka and Hi-C and watching the Ironman Triathlon on television when Lyris and Albert arrived. An athlete had completed the running part and staggered like a new colt. "They ought to put him in a wheelbarrow or something," said Tiny. Lyris and Albert stood on either side of his chair, looking at the screen. "Is there archery in this?" Albert asked. Tiny laughed. "Hell no, there isn't archery. You swim, ride a bike, and run. It all has to be done in seventeen minutes." "That can't be right," said Lyris. "I'm sorry. Hours," said Tiny. "Where's Micah?" Tiny tipped his head back to gaze at the ceiling. "In his room. Packing his belongings." "How are you?" "I'm all right." Albert sat down in a chair to watch TV, or watch Tiny watching TV. Lyris climbed the narrow stairs between pineboard walls lined with pictures that she had cut from magazines and framed. Micah had Lyris's old suitcase open on his bed and was folding clothes into it. The suitcase was made of woven sand-colored fibers with red metal edges. From the pocket of her jeans Lyris took out a folded sheet of paper and tucked it in the suitcase. "Okay, boy, that's my number," she said. "You get into trouble, you need to talk, I'm here." "Who will call me boy in California?" "No one. That's why you shouldn't leave." "Do you think so?" She shrugged. "Go and see what it is." "Are airplanes loud?" "You get used to it," said Lyris. "Sometimes they kind of shake." "They shake?" "Well, no. Rattle. Occasionally. From bumps in the clouds. But that's nothing. If you get nervous just look at the flight people. No matter what happens, they always seem to be thinking, 'Hmm-hmm-hmm, wonder what I'll have for supper tonight." • The hotel that Joan stayed in had a tavern with blue neon lights in the windows. She went in and sat at the bar and ordered a Dark and Stormy. The bartender was a young woman in a black and white smock with horizontal ivy vines above the belt and black-eyed susans below. "Are you here for the wedding?" she asked. Joan explained about Micah----how she'd left him seven years ago and wanted a chance to make up for it. "Oh my," said the bartender. "That will be quite a change for everyone." "It will," said Joan. "They all probably think it will be a big disaster." "Well, it seems brave to me." Joan took a drink. "It does?" "Oh, yeah. Even kind of, what would you say, inspirational." "You are the sweetest girl," said Joan. "You look like someone on TV." "That's 'cause I am." "Sister Mia. On Forensic Mystic." Joan nodded. "Oh my gosh," said the bartender. "Would you autograph my hand?" "I would be honored." "Say Sister Mia." Joan held the bartender's hand palm up and using a purple felt pen wrote Sister Mia and drew a heart with an arrow through it. "People will think I did this myself," said the bartender. "Why would you?" Joan finished her drink and went to her room. It was on the second floor in the back, overlooking a pond with dark trees and houses all around. She turned off the lights in the room and stood on the balcony looking at the water. • Tiny made breakfast and Micah came downstairs to the smell of scrambled eggs and canadian bacon and coffee. They ate and Micah asked Tiny if he was going to fight with Joan and Tiny shook his head. "I don't think about her that much anymore." "You watch her show." "Sometimes." "You must think of her then." Tiny put pepper on his food from a red tin. "I have trouble enough following the plot." "I believe that." "You have to mind her," said Tiny. "Maybe you think she owes you. It won't work if you think like that. You have to mind her like you mind me." "I don't mind you." "Use your imagination." "You seem more like a brother than a father to me," said Micah. "And I don't mean that bad." Tiny got up and carried his plate and silverware to the sink, where he washed and rinsed them and put them on the drainboard. "I don't take it bad," he said. • Joan arrived in the middle of the morning, and Micah watched her from the window. She crossed the yard smiling, as if thinking it was not so different from what she remembered. The three of them met on the front porch. For a moment they seemed to be waiting for someone to appear who could tell them what to do. Then Joan cried, took Micah in her arms, and pressed her head to his chest. He was a head taller than she was. "I can hear your heart," she said. "Come on inside," said Tiny. "You have to invite me." "I just did." "Come in, Mom," said Micah. Joan took a chair at the table. Her eyelids and lips were brushed with fine reddish powder, and her skin glowed like a lamp in the room. "We had eggs and canadian bacon," said Tiny. "Do you want some?" "No thank you, I ate at the hotel," she said quietly. "How was it?" "Fair." "Where you staying." "The Landmark Suites," said Joan. "Nice." "Oh! There's the broom." "What?" said Tiny. "I see the broom. I bought it, and now I'm looking right at it." "Yeah, we haven't changed. It's missing a few straws." Micah went upstairs to have a last look at his room. He thought he should feel sad, but he only wondered when he would see it again. • "And how is the plumbing business going?" said Joan. Tiny explained how he lost the plumbing business. The pipes had burst in a house, and the house froze and fell in on itself. The insurance company came in and sued all the contractors. "Was it your fault?" "Any pipe you let freeze with water in it, that pipe'll split. Who puts it in is immaterial. Could be Jesus, pipe's going to break. Since then I've been moving things for people." "Do you need money?" With his hands on the table, Tiny pushed his chair back and looked at her. "I have nothing against you. You want to do things for Micah, and I hope you can. But do I want money? Come on, Joan." "I'm sorry." "This is my house." "I know it." She apologized again, and he waved a hand as if to say it was done. "You want to stay over? You can stay in Lyris's old room." "We fly out of Stone City this afternoon," said Joan. "Is she going to be here?" "Her and Albert Robeshaw came over last night. She's still kind of mad at you." "You can't blame her," said Joan. "I don't." • Tiny's mother arrived. Her ahadow loomed in the doorway and she yelled hello though Tiny and Joan were sitting right there. She wore a large Hawaiian shirt, jeans with hammer loops, and Red Wing boots. People feared her, as if she had special powers, but she was just an old lady given to yelling at people and playing with their minds. Joan stood and gave her a hug, which made her uncomfortable. It wasn't that she didn't like Joan, she just wasn't used to being hugged. Micah walked down the stairs sideways, dragging Lyris's suitcase by the red plastic handle. The suitcase bumped down the stairs. The kitchen became crowded, and Tiny took the suitcase and led everyone out to the front yard. They gathered around Micah in the shadow of the willow tree. "I'm going to miss you," said Micah's grandmother. "But you'll be all right. There'll be somebody there to help you when you run into trouble. " "I will," said Joan. "Besides you. There's someone else." Tiny stood behind his mother, gazing absently into the panoramic view of her Hawaiian shirt. Her predictions never surprised him. She made lots of them. The shirt was dark blue and green and depicted nightfall in an island village of palm trees and grass huts with yellow lights burning in the windows. A pretty place. Then Micah put thumb and finger to the corners of his mouth and whistled. Pretty soon an old doe goat crept around the side of the house. Micah and Lyris had raised her----fed and tended her, anyhow----there wasn't a lot of training involved. The goat came soft-footed down the grass. The reds and whites of her coat had faded to shades of silver. She surveyed the visitors and then stared at Micah, as if to say, "Oh, wait a minute. You're leaving? That's what this is all about?" Micah fell to his knees and roughed up the goat's long and matted coat. You could see him trying not to cry. His lips trembled, his eyes blurred with tears. The goat stared with slotted eyes at the road that went by the house. "This is harder than I thought it would be," said Micah. • Tiny and his mother stood in the yard, watching Joan's car go around the bend. A bank of blue and gray clouds moved in hiding the sun. Colette took out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco and proceeded to smoke. "And then there was one," she said. "You think he's doing the right thing?" "He might be." She walked off to her truck, and Tiny went into the house, closed the door, and walked up the stairs with his shoulders bumping the walls. Micah's bed was made with a blanket of red and black plaid and a light blue pillow centered beneath the headboard. A hockey stick leaned in the corner, blade wrapped in frayed electrical tape, by an old poster from a movie about heroic dogs. The bedsprings wheezed like an accordion as Tiny sat down at the foot of the bed. A car went by, the road became quiet, and light rain began to fall against the window. He sat with his forearms on his knees and his hands folded, remembering when the goat was young, how she and Micah would dance around the yard. Then he got up, pulled the blanket tight at the corners, and left the room. Excerpted from Pacific by Tom Drury All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
