A WRITER'S WIT
We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Carlos Castaneda
Born December 25, 1931
Blighted Childhood
“Blight” is also set in Kansas. I grew up on the south end of Main Street, two blocks from the Arkansas River (in my head I still say AR-kanzus) in Wichita. Except for a few times when it reached near-flood stage, the Arkansas was a lazy brown river, torpid, and you could often hop from sandbar to sandbar without getting your feet wet. I, according to house rules, wasn’t supposed to play there, but I found it an irresistible place to be for a few hours on a summer afternoon.
This story echoes one of the collection’s recurring themes: fatherless boys, or at least boys with absent or weak fathers:
This story echoes one of the collection’s recurring themes: fatherless boys, or at least boys with absent or weak fathers:
“My own father was a kind of ghost who worked the second shift at Boeing, and he was either at work or in bed behind a closed door. On weekends he sat at our breakfast table in a T-shirt not much whiter than his skin and issued orders no one followed. Jed was in better shape than my father, whose doughboy figure had surrendered to the slow, tortured death of an assembly line” (66).
My father did not work at Boeing, though a number of my neighbors did. And I myself was not lonely. There were too many neighbor kids for that to happen. And except for the river, I didn’t usually leave the property without asking permission. “Jed” is my recollection of a young neighbor man, whose name may have been Jake. But he and his wife moved away, and a man who’d escaped from China some time in the past bought the house.
Nothing like the violent events in this story ever happened to me. I was more compelled to write about the geographical and climatological indicators: the river, cockleburs getting stuck in a boy’s bare feet, summers in which the temperature soared to over a hundred day after day, elm beetles shredding the leaves off trees. It seemed to be the right backdrop for something creepy and almost dangerous to happen. As with the story “Ghost Riders,” I’m too much of a coward to carry this narrative any farther than it goes. The boy emerges as a hero of his own story! Or at least an escapee.
This story first appeared in riverSedge, the literary magazine out of the University of Texas-Pan American at Edinburgh.
Click here to buy a copy of My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, where it is available at Amazon.
NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
NEXT THURSDAY: Behind the Book: "A Gambler's Debt"
Nothing like the violent events in this story ever happened to me. I was more compelled to write about the geographical and climatological indicators: the river, cockleburs getting stuck in a boy’s bare feet, summers in which the temperature soared to over a hundred day after day, elm beetles shredding the leaves off trees. It seemed to be the right backdrop for something creepy and almost dangerous to happen. As with the story “Ghost Riders,” I’m too much of a coward to carry this narrative any farther than it goes. The boy emerges as a hero of his own story! Or at least an escapee.
This story first appeared in riverSedge, the literary magazine out of the University of Texas-Pan American at Edinburgh.
Click here to buy a copy of My Long-Playing Records and Other Stories, where it is available at Amazon.
NEXT TIME: NEW YORKER FICTION 2014
NEXT THURSDAY: Behind the Book: "A Gambler's Debt"
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