Here, again, is chapter one of my novel.
Awhile back I posted the first chapter of the first novel I’ve written. Right now, it’s called THE LAMAT, but I’m only about 75% happy with it. In any case, after a, let’s say, “character building” 18 months of being template-rejected and no-response’d from every literary agent with contact information on the internet, I dusted myself off the ground and decided to go back in for a re-edit. It started at 120k words, and four chapters of edits in, it’s already down to 118k. I’m hoping to shave it all the down to 90k. Folks, there was a lot in there that didn’t need to be!
So, here’s that first chapter again. I’m a lot happier with it now. I think it’s better, and maybe more importantly, I think I found out what the whole thing’s about. Weird how that works.
TRUTH BE TOLD, Lafayette was in a sour mood and he'd be in one all day. That morning he woke from the four spastic hours of torment others named “sleep”—this evening's bout particularly harrowing as his REM mindscape landed him in the central food court of a heavily-fortified and labyrinthian Mall of America in desperate need of a toilet, groans from his bowels curdling loud and forceful, and when he ultimately found a sloped porcelain entry into the sewage infrastructure, way up on the 76th floor, its tiles covered in a layer of grime, flanked by Christmas shoppers needy and full of violent potential like a wassailing mob, it was stress enough for DreamLafayette to simply fall ass-first onto the linoleum and bring his search to an unfortunate close by letting go—to a familiar odor and squishy feeling between his legs. Lafayette's signals had apparently gotten mixed.
He unfurled his blanket onto the wooden floor, the approaching sun scrubbing the dark away into haze enough for his cataracted eyes to determine that this soil-job was a bad one, that it'd leave a stain if he didn't take care of it right quick. He rocked in his deep mattress bowl two, three times to build centripetal force enough to escape the concavity. On the fourth, he pulled his left shoulder to his chin and quickly cast it away as if it was scalding and filled the space with his right. It was a manipulation of a trick his dad taught him, years ago, called “Mike and Ike,” the goal to keep his head level as he swung a bat against an incoming baseball; “Mike” was his left shoulder, “Ike” his right, his chin diplomat brokering peace between. The move produced torque necessary to roll him over the lip of the prison of his own construct, into freedom. Momentum continued for two full rotations, twirling his body onto the bed proper and into the open space beyond. He extended his arms over the three-foot drop with the perfect blend of rigidity and flexibility to break his fall, performing the balletic action with a grace men forty years his junior would envy.
Face-up on the ground as that day's first golden wash streamed through his bedroom window, illuminating among saved ephemera from his past the helmet and shoulder pads of an ancient warrior outfit, whose angles declared in sharp glints from its perch on a custom-made dummy. He pulled loose his pajama drawstring, tucked two thumbs under the band, and rolled them off. He crouched over this borscht of soiled linens and considered whether or not to examine further the information encoded in this animal's droppings, but then the Mayan spear bounced and aimed sunlight onto the pile, highlighting a section with a hue so crimson that was information enough.
Lafayette began his precarious leery gait to the bathroom, cheeks in a tight clench. He slid the shower's glass door of the shower and crossed the threshold, his varicosed hand tilting the knob of the finicky system to the learned angle. Water soaked his spotted scalp and cascaded down the lingering spindly shoulder-length grays that'd never give up their right to exist. He shifted forward and the jet chipped away the offending area. Lafayette looked into the tile grout so as not to let them stray towards the spiraling maroon of the drain.
Lafayette finished, whiplashed the towel from behind the door and around his reddened body bathed in a blue flood from the tinted skylight. He collected his hairs into a ponytail. He walked back into his bedroom, sun horizoned, and scooped the sheets and blankets. He went to the landing and tossed the bunch over the mahogany railing onto the home's open Greeting Parlor, the moniker for the undefined space from his second ex-wife simply because she labeled it and claimed it so.
So, no, when I say that of Lafayette Toole's 30,833 days in his initial go-round on this planet, 30,509 of them floating in the past's murky viscous, that this was not among the greatest, I speak truth.
And that's why, when he got to that Monday's farmers' market—a weekly tradition in Lacombe, Louisiana (Pop: 8,679), taking place under the mossy overhang of the corporate bank, where Fish Hatchery Road meets up with U.S. 190—Lafayette was not in the mood for Joyce's shit.
“Whatcha got, Lare?” Joyce asked from her customary spot at the entrance, reward for being the seller first to scrape themselves from the weekend bed.
“Grandma Joyce's Red Apples” was scrawled atop her display in bright red, hand-drawn apples claiming space inside the letters they could. And she knitted as she presided, sixty-seven nasty years' worth nestled in an oversized and crusted forest green barcalounger. But while Joyce's status as honest-to-goodness grandma was rarely up for audible debate—although, not a week went by without shoppers consciously saving their whispered questions about the legitimacy of the framed photos of children strategically placed next to her apples until they were well out of her hearing aid's range due to that time she overheard a veiled accusation and, in retort, unleashed a sobbing spray of torrential expletives and stated desires her accuser die-of-choking-on-his-own-dick-and--be-buried-in-his-mother's-grave-so-as-to-rot-in-her-rotting-cunt scorched-earth'd the topic for good—the chair was a controversy still addressed while she was within earshot.
Eleven years ago, nearly to the day, the newly-retired patriarch and matriarch of the Gregory family—Sue and Ron, to get particular—had purchased a green barcalounger from the Sears in Metarie, technically one town over but also separated by 24 miles of Lake Pontchartrain, so you couldn't traverse the distance with a thrown rock if that's what you were thinking. To gather their claim, they'd taken their truck, a '76 red Ford Dodge D that never so much as false-started since it was bought new. But as happens to everything governed by the initiative of time, when the end came, it came quickly. The first sign showed after 23 miles of the Causeway, a loud engine sputter accompanied by a flickering momentary loss of electricity. The Gregorys turned to each another and by the time they locked eyes, the journey had normalized. For 50 feet, at least. The next failure came, an audible blast from the tail pipe that made Ron glimpse in his mind two annals of remembered facts: (1) The father and son duo, or uncle and nephew, or however the two whomevers were related, who drove through D.C. and shot innocent drivers on the highway; and (2) That it takes moments after getting shot before the pain receptors relay to the brain. Ron felt the front of his shirt for a hole or warm liquid, neither were present, it by then being obvious the sound was not random assassins. Ron didn't let Sue in on this over-hysteria until the truck crept to rest on that final mile off the exit ramp.
He forced the Ford into its final park and walked to Big George's, the closest joint with a tow truck. Sue, not one to be left alone without a loaded weapon on her lap since the world's true brutality unmasked itself to her 22-year-old self upon news that Nazi hippies in L.A. were breaking were savagely raping and murdering mansions' worth of actors and cultural kowtowers, followed along. This left their brand new barcalounger alone, unguarded in the truck's flatbed save a thin layer of plastic weighed with bricks meant to protect the buy from inclement weather. Nine of ten, hell ninety-nine of a hundred, the couple wouldn't've been considered fools to vacate their new property without theft deterrent. That's just the trusting atmosphere the region bred. But this fateful time, when the Gregorys returned as Big George's passengers, they were met with the sickening visual of the plastic floating down in the street like a phantom sent back to whence it came, the flatbed empty of proof they'd withdrawn $768.89 from their joint checking account for the splurge.
“A mighty goiter in the colon,” was how Big George put it.
The Gregorys agreed, not as explicitly. They got a lift back and called Danny at the sheriff's, who directed them to the requisite paperwork that'd alert the state an item of theirs was “stolen” and, if found, where it should go. Beyond that, Danny winced, wasn't much to do other than save for a new chair.
Truck-less from then on, the Gregorys had everything shipped direct. Books, lightbulbs, electronics, tools, t.p., furniture, one neighbor once overheard someone telling a friend they noticed a package on the Gregorys' front porch—a casual surveillance performed by every resident of Lacombe, but only discussed beyond the midnight hour at Jelly's—that looked like a sack of groceries. See, the lesson the sorrowful Gregorys learned was that their rampart had not been high enough, nor ample width. So, they'd raise their wall and never venture beyond, comfortable enough in that, some spoke diving into whispers above their fifth drink, that living coffin on Emerald Drive.
And so months later, when Joyce backed her truck into the dawn fog of the farmers' market, and her wares were now surrounding a forest green barcalounger, the town took notice. She organized in her usual early-bird spot, as usual maneuvering the flatbed behind the stand to give her a perch from which to watch the day's events, and upon that now she had a throne from which to rock and whittle and knit and judge. If a shopper wanted a granny smith or golden delicious, they'd be forced to look up to her and her down upon them, purposeful aesthetics by which to steer the haggling narrative that followed.
During the barcalounger's first market appearance, not a single market-goer didn't plan on later visiting the Gregorys and urging them outdoors towards an official I.D. In the 24 hours following the debut of “Joyce's new chair,” their doorbell was struck 68 times. They answered once, after their clandestine peer through the curtains allowed a section to bunch and reveal Joe's pant leg.
“See yous,” said to the window the interloper, the identity of which only the Gregorys know.
“What is it?” Sue finally spoke.
“Believe Riggins got your chair.”
A brief consortium revealed the Gregorys' only reasonable course of action was to sit there inside their house and wait for a confession and apology. So wait they did, behind rising piles of mail order catalogs, a towering jenga of furniture, heightened systems of theft detection, DIY evildoer deterrent like glass shards under their first floor windows, the end result of their once treasured Christmas ornaments. Behind these fortifications they sat, and they waited and they felt safe. And to this day, continue.
This tale of the Gregorys' rotten trip across the lake was retold monthly inside a Lacombe home, the retelling due either to a visiting friend, or more likely that attempt to delay the decay of memory that escorts aging by repeating the same stories again and again, like those nostalgic choruses hiding somewhere on that radio band. And every time the retelling came, that week's market trip would include an innocent-and-nothing-more-of-course query into where exactly in these fruited plains did Joyce ever find such a lovely chair, and every response used with the same general script.
“Great deal from a friend,” was her smirking excuse, a flutter of the eye that could be interrupted as a wink if one was inclined, and back to knitting. If she ever tired of the question, it didn't show.
“It's not Lare, Joyce,” Lafayette resigned to himself. “Never was.”
“Well, what is it you got there?”
He reached to his hip and unsheathed his machete.
“That I am, Lare,” she said. “That I most certainly am.”
“I've taken to carrying a sharpened machete on my person,” he said. “Being the fool without is, in my humble opinion, the same embarrassment as the diplomat without translator, the traveler sans vaccine, the hustler without wit. It makes absolutely no sense to me not have one in today's political and social climate. See Joyce, it's not simply a weapon. It's a tool. Have a nail needs pounding? Here's trusty friend machete. Have to slice a dinner turkey and the dog ran off with your instruments? Machete's on it. Need to Further! Illustrate! A point!” Lafayette hoisted the blade at each exclamation. “Bam! Machete. And when it comes to needing a pal to confide your deepest, darkest secrets to, there's no worry about machete running and telling the neighbors.” Lafayette tipped the blade softly to his mouth as if a lover and pressed his lips against the cold steel. He whispered and removed the obstruction from his face, revealing to Joyce the wide yellow-toothed grin of a maniac.
It's worth pointing out that Joyce had, since their tete-a-tete began, substantially decreased the amount of energy her legs spent on rocking the barcalounger, not through purposeful volition, but a redirection of her body's focus towards the more imminent threat, crotchety, possibly insane, ponytailed, armed. Evidently, any energy in the muscles holding up her jaw were also needed. Lafayette continued, gathering from Joyce's statuesque position—save her right hand, spastically clutching her sewing needle in a grasp meant for stabbing—that she'd nothing to interject. By this point, a crowd had diverted their attention from their own consumer needs as well as what everyone else was carrying and wearing and speaking about and with whom, and turned towards Laffey's rant at Joyce, a regular occurrence albeit this time while holding some kind of sword. Lafayette side-eyed the new entrants.
“Sometimes, hell, most the time, a man needs to be aware about possible offense while carrying around such a tool,” he said. “Still learning the societal implications that come with its unharnessing. Despite its usefulness as a multi-use tool that won't let you down,” he divided his sermon between Joyce and his coalescing coalition, “it is not smart nor savvy to wield it out in the open amongst certain mixed company.” And then he turned to his new witnesses for good.
“Don't want to bring this into a bank, as a for instance. Bound to give security reason to finger their triggers. It's a plain bad idea. Unnecessary. Same for cocktail parties, though if I was a spectating bettor, that is if I were some of you, I'd hazard a gamble that I'd eventually break that decorum. I'm a sucker for a good squabble, and this baby's too grand a conversation piece to leave collecting dust at home,” he winked.
A few chuckled, Joyce held steady.
“This market, however, seems to me fair game,” he raised his machete and swirled it over his head like some last stand by a cornered lunatic, forcing those parties that found his rant comical to shift nervously in reconsideration. “Here, in the open, gliding expanses in which to maneuver.” He performed an exotic an acrobatic pirouette, the blade chimed through the air as if conjuring a phantom mission bell. “No peskies around to blockade my Third Amendment rights!”
“Think you mean Second there, Laffey,” said Franklin Jent from the crowd, a large plastic bag of navel oranges dangling from their anchor in his elbow. “Second's the guns. Third's about not having Brits sleep in your house or some such.”
“Tell that to my in-laws!” Marcie Jones shoehorned an in-joke, to the neighborhood's delight.
“Soldiers, I think, is what's meant,” Franklin muttered, but his clarification communique was suffocated by laughter, and so missed by all but the man he'd interrupted in the first place, who now furrowed and focusing and tried to use his never-strong lip-reading ability to decipher the mutter.
“So Jersey Lick is walled men?” Lafayette asked through a confused squint.
Franklin wasn't sure what to make that, nor had the necessary gravitas to question a man brandishing a weapon, so he simply stayed quit, nodded, and shifted the navels to his opposite elbow. Lafayette nodded back in feigned understanding and returned to Joyce.
“Anyway, Joyce, the point, if you will” he said. “I have right to carry this machete any place I please. And today, at this market, in the vicinity of your controversial barcalounger, I choose to exercise that damn American right.” He re-sheathed his blade. “Don't use 'em, you may lose 'em, and the like.”
“Lare,” Joyce loosened the grip on her sewing needle. “I'm too studied to believe your claims of innocent intentions anymore.”
“You know me better than most,” Lafayette admitted. “At least, as well as most the other gals from my life.” He twirled and lingered his eye contact on four specific women in the mass. Marcie Jones accepted hers without without as Mr. Jones was still busy dabbing tears of laughter from his eyes, pre-moistened with the wetness of advanced age. Lafayette winked, parted through the crowd towards the stands, their cue to disperse and continue commerce once again.
Lafayette paused at Mrs. O'Brien's nectarine supply and lobbed a small sample into his mouth, immediately spitting it back.
“Too tart, Molly. Too tart this week.”
He crossed to Johnny Tang's display of nuts and dried fruits. He sampled a chestnut and spat that onto the pavement with a quick flick of his tongue.
“Too dry, Johnny. Too dry.”
And on he went, table to table, the scantest of samples hitting his taste buds before ejecting coarsely onto the ground, loudly declaring too rough, too soft, too stringy, too moist, not moist enough, too chock full of seeds, containing a subtle hint of lingering pesticides, too compromised by GMOs for his personal liking, obviously bleached, like a pineapple and no fan of pineapple was he, too acidic, aligned with an odor reminding him of the phrase “shit weasel” from his military days he wasn't quite sure why, just not the right color.
“'s color have to do with flavor?” asked Miles Cutter from his strawberry stand.
“My senses are heightened to the point where my taste buds can sense color,” Lafayette explained. “Maybe next week, add a few more parts water to your supply of red dye.”
Miles threatened a lunge before a passing glint reminded him the old man still had his machete. He rocked back and focused his rage on Lafayette's swinging, greasy ponytail instead. It hypnotized him to complacency and he turned to examine the hue of his berries.
Lafayette made purchases where there was a need, filling a bag evenly split with yellow and white corn, settling for sweet fruits; one could obtain only limited staples from a small town Louisianan farmers' market. The rest would wait. He paused in the middle of the street and made a further display by dropping his bag and rubbing the stubble on his face. The crowd kept a curious distance.
“Why, what's that up there now?” Lafayette boomed to no one in particular, which is to say everyone. “That what I think?” His attention was on a bulky tree sprouting from the yards of the bank, its branches looming over the market. “Would you look at that.”
Lafayette pulled both palms to his forehead in a self-baptism and ushered them back over his barren scalp, shepherding the loosened strands of gray that remained and forcing them back into the confines of his ponytail. His biceps flexed with a density and tautness no remaining eighty-three-and-a-half-year-olds could claim, unobstructed by a white T-shirt—which provided evidence he'd, at some previous point on his timeline, eaten “Fingerlick' Good Grub” at Pussy's Crab Shack in Beaumont—with both sleeves cut at the shoulder, an alteration he'd conducted that morning with his machete.
He ambled towards the bank, a two-story gothic shell that was gutted and parceled by corporate enterprises the previous year, and stood below the newly-installed gutter that funneled the roof's rainwater to the lawn. He extended his arms straight forward like a child's version of flight, inhaled deeply, bent his knees to lower his body as near the ground as possible, butt nearly striking the pavement. He spoke.
“The importance of adequately stretching before any potentially strenuous activity is well-known and definitive.”
He repeated the move a second, third, fourth time, before exhaling a guttural yell of anguish and pleasure that rattled the aluminum. He leapt and his fingers impossibly gripped and pulled himself up, walking up the brick wall with his black boots. He wiggled up and compacted like a snake towards the roof's ridge and—if eyewitness testimony is to be believed—disappeared entirely from view within thirty seconds, or fifteen, depending on the many generations of phone-tag the tale had filtered through.
Onlookers nudged forward, the scene silent save a bird's whistle and an oblivious truck moaning down U.S. 190.
Joyce stood from her barcalounger to get a better look, revealing a fabric dent that resembled a pair of holiday hams. She tiptoed to the edge of her trailer hitch and steadied herself with an elbow against the edge.
“Stubborn motherfucker,” she breathed.
The onlookers tracked Lafayette's whereabouts through evidence circumstantial: a deep sigh from the building's roof, leafy debris floating to the ground, a phantom grunt that seemed to groan from the darkening sky itself.
“There,” said Miles, almost defeated. “Nope, higher.” Lafayette was pulling himself up the tree branch by branch. “Even higher.”
And there he was, easily forty feet above the cement, dangling with only his left arm as support.
“Heads up down there,” Lafayette called, “clear space.”
The owners of craned necks saw a swiping metallic flash, heard the severing snap of a cracked branch, and from that chaos appeared almost as if summoned by another realm a small object that grew larger and larger. It whooshed past and splattered, flakes of red and white spread against the concrete. A lone stem stood in the mess as a beacon for the tightening circle of the confused to fix their gaze.
“An apple,” someone finally answered, it was never known who.
“Indeed,” said Lafayette, now among them, hoisting a giant tree branch dotted with fresh red apples. “Collateral damage, there. Got away at the last moment.” He leaned to the fallen comrade. “Sorry, bud.” He rested the branch on his shoulder and walked away.
He paused at Miles' booth and asked to borrow a pen and paper, an inquiry met with silence, which was consent enough. He ripped paper from a notebook, began a whistled rendition of “The Overture of 1812” and plucked a black pen from Miles' front shirt pocket. In large block-letters he wrote the word GRATIS, taking care to detail the G in the exquisite decorative font of a Parliamentary scroll.
Lafayette walked to the market's entrance and sat down the rudimentary sign and his apple branch, obscuring the going rate for Joyce's apples that day. He twisted an apple from the branch and sank into it a wide chomp, and chewed and swallowed in the market's anticipatory silence, cushioned only by the swaying murmur above, the remaining branches speaking of the storm to come.
“Delicious,” Lafayette boomed. “Simply delicious. Have at them, fellow citizens. No more must we bow to the pricing pressures of this tyrant from the scarlet Manus. We are free once again. Nya b’a’n tu’n t-xi tewin chib’aj cye tuliy, ku’n ajo chib’aj b’e’x cy-elilx chuk-ix!”
“Having a stroke,” asked Miles derisively.
“Surely, the answer to that hateful question is self-evident!”
“Oh, Lare,” Joyce settled into the barcalounger. “You are one rotten piece of shit.”
“Market correction's all,” Lafayette doffed a nonexistent hat in her direction. “Market correction, my dear.”
Lafayette turned and glided from the market. The police were called and arrived quickly thereafter, but by the time they decided there wasn't much to do other than take statements and inform the bank they may want to have an inspector survey the roof, Lafayette was leaning on his porch's mahogany railing, finishing his apple, smiling at lightning at it sparked in a purple-blue haze in the far reaches of his four acres. He squinted and saw near the family of shortleaf pines that surrounded his pond a burnt-orange tent. It was not there the night before. Lafayette flicked the core onto a nearby mulch pile with his middle finger muscle, strong and true from years of cigarette discards, and walked to greet his visitor.
