Thoreau once surmised that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. Reading
these stories brings Thoreau’s words to mind. The characters are found in settings in
the Deep South in the days of Huey Long in Louisiana; in present day New York City
with its current economic hardships and other difficult goings on; and in several
Mississippi locales.. The characters exist in quiet desperation. Isolated within
Themselves all face crisis and loss. And yet somehow they struggle to cope with the
hope they will prevail.
In the title story a Cajun bartender struggles against fate and the two sons who
have “stolen” his farm. A farmer turned bartender, Joe Lee LeBlanc sues his boys
to recover the farm. His story circulates. He has his few minutes of
fame as interest in his case grows. People stop ignoring the khakis-clad
bartender. They ask about progress in his cause. Of course free beer
and tomorrow never arrive. The old bartender never gets his day in court. Chekhov’s
story, The Lament, is recalled as one reads FBT, set in Opelousas, Louisiana, during the
Yambilee Festival.
The shadow world of cockfighting with its unlawfulness and potential for
violence is the environment where one youngster is coming of age. The Cockfighters,
reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s I Want To Know Why, and Ernest Hemingway’s
My Old Man, also has a Louisiana locale where the law and the Church (ironically in the
Parish of St. Landry) turn a blind eye to the blood “sport” in which fighting cocks
usually duel to the death.
An unknown assailant kills the boy’s father after a highly wagered cockfight. The
Lad, freed from the sport, is urged to get an education by his guardian, a former prostitute
and the mistress of the dead father.
At the end of the story, the father’s murder remains unsolved. And a sable rooster
with a fighting spirit, a bird the family pinned its hopes on, is killed in a cockpit battle it
was supposed to win. We are left to ponder what part the little cock had to do
with the death of the father after the little bird is found nailed to a post outside the
cockfighting arena. The question of the boy’s true understanding of his father’s
profession remains unresolved. The boy is last seen studying hard in school, reading
Hemingway and thinking about horseracing as a career.
In The Picaninny, an African American child is forced to leave the South after
innocently kissing a white boy. Later she finds fame as a singer in the North. She
returns to her “roots” in Mississippi. She finds change and understanding after talking
to a crippled white man from her past. She leaves Mississippi a second time but without
“ baggage”.
The protagonist in To Kill A Kingfish races against time to stop his cousin from
killing Louisiana’s former governor (U.S. Senator Huey Long in the story). The tale
unfolds as the protagonist’s grandson attempts to unravel a relative’s ties to the
assassination plot. In the end the grandson “scruples” and decides to let the story remain
unrecorded.
The WWII pilot hero of Beau Chandler’s Wonderful Bedroom returns from the
Battle and settles in New York City. He finds the perfect one bedroom that eventually
becomes the prize in a battle of another sort. Chandler, a gentile, and Kahan, a
Jew who manages the building, are both obsessed with the apartment but for different
reasons. Both men are oblivious to some of the reasons the war was fought. There is no
brotherly love in the story. In the end the old pilot, an alcoholic, dies in a fall down a
stairwell. Was he pushed over the railing by Kahan? Does the old man simply give up
the fight? In the end the thought lingers: how easily man is motivated to kill.
In Experience an aspiring journalist fresh out of college “stumbles” into a hanging
in a Southwest Louisiana town. The graduate is in town for an interview. In the French-
speaking region, the boy is mistaken for a reporter and given carte blanche as
a bona fide member of the press. The boy agonizes over the hanging and later falsely
implies to his prospective employer that he has had more experience than is true. The
boy is invited to have a drink with veteran newsmen who witnessed the hanging. He gets
drunk for the first time. He apparently pays the bar’s proprietess for
sex in a room upstairs above the bar. However, the memory of the hanging and the
drunkenness put him in a spin. He is on the floor in the room and unable to answer the
door for his first experience in sex..
Ira Spielberg, a Jew, converts and becomes a Lutheran like his wife. She’s a
Swede who has inherited a fortune. Ira somehow thwarts a hijacking of a plane carrying
the couple on vacation. Reporters interview Ira who has been labeled a hero. The story
unfolds as two friends question Ira’s motives for the conversion. Ira and his wife arrive
at a party where the friends are discussing the convert and reminiscing about their own
religious upbringing. In the end Ira, wearing a large crucifix handing around his neck, is
surrounded at the party by “worshippers” as he maintains a beatific pose..
Rounding out the book are: A Man’s Best Friend, a story of perversion with a
surprise ending; Miele Mouthed, a gay man is outed not by himself but by
someone he has wronged; Tennis in Baghdad, the idea of tennis games amid the noise of
warfare, the swirling blood-red sand and the hallucinations of a wounded soldier
depict the absurdity of the war; and Perleman’s Event, a surgeon who is also a skilled
equestrian sees his life begin to unravel. He becomes a paraplegic when his horse falls
in Central Park. How the medical and equestrian communities remember him sums up
the man
Loaded with Irony, the final story, Several Endings, explores the death of a
friendship in the time before and just after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. |
Book Display
A Book of Stories