Someone else asked if it has a happy ending, and the answer is no, but it doesn’t have an unhappy ending either. As it’s a story about life, and life is a story that won’t end until the last of us succumbs to the Zombie Apocalypse (or comet impact or religious tribulation or what have you), it doesn’t end cleanly with anyone riding off into a sunset. Happily-ever-after is the province of fairy tales and fantasy novels. I love both of those things and aspire to write them, but this is not either of those kinds of stories.

Growing up, I spent years believing that if we loved enough bad things wouldn’t happen to us. I grew up and discovered that bad things happen no matter how much you love someone. This story is about bad things that happen and the fact that people can love each other in spite of (or even because of) the string of tragedies that make up a human life. If you live a life without ever experiencing a tragedy, then you never bothered to live at all. The people in this story live a lot of life and earn whatever love that comes on the other side.

In this post I’ll put up the rest of the raw and unedited first chapter, and in my next post I’ll post the same for chapter two. After that, I’ll post my editing process and you can all see how I trim sentences and change words and generally whack back the unruly beast that is a draft into something a little bit more tame and readable.

     The old truck rumbled to life and the radio crackled alive a moment later.
     “...more attention to the troubles of the White House just a week after Bernstein and Woodward’s book hit shelves, and less than two weeks before arguments over the secret tapes are made before the Supreme Court...”
     She cranked the dial over and tried to find anything that wasn’t about the nation’s obsession with Watergate. A few crackling bursts later and she found the station out of Birmingham that played rock and roll when it switched to the overnight pattern. Lynyrd Skynyrd jumped out of the speaker, singing a love song to everything she was ready to drive away from.
     “...Now Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you?..”
     She left it as it was better than nothing and pulled out onto the dirt road heading into town. It took less than two minutes to get to the gas station on the corner of 4th and 4th, directly across from the post office and next door to the diner where she worked. The station closed up the same time the diner closed down, almost three hours earlier, but Bailey knew where the switch was for the pump, and she stuck a ten through the mail slot to cover the tank of gas that would get her at least two-hundred miles down the road.
     “Why Dixie girl, what on the good Lord’s fine earth has you out at this time of night?” Mrs. Little’s voice rang out from her front porch across the street and directly behind her as she was faced her pick-up. Bailey was barely able to contain the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard shudder that ran through her at the sound of it. Town busybody, terrible gossip, and Sherriff’s Wife, Eugenia Little took her self-assigned job of mother hen to everyone in a ten mile radius seriously. Her home on the corner between the town hall and the county jail just happened to give her a wonderful view over everything that might be happening that was worth repeating in hushed tones to the women at the rotary or the beauty parlor.
     “Evening Mrs. Little,” Bailey defaulted to her waitress manners and gave the older woman her best welcome-to-the-diner smile, “just getting some errands done before the heat of the day tomorrow.”
     “Why would you be pumping gas at this time of the night dear? One of the boys will be around tomorrow to help you, doesn’t matter if they sweat in the sun a little.”
     “I’m running over to Gadsden tomorrow morning, early. I figured I’d fill up now and leave Earl a note in case I’m late for my shift. You know how those doctors can be.”
     Given how many times she’d been over to the hospital when her Grandma was sick, trips to Gadsden had become a staple of Bailey’s life. She figured it would take Mrs. Little a few hours of working it over to realize that Bailey hadn’t had a good reason to go to Gadsden in the last two years.
     “Well...” the busybody’s face clouded over for a moment with an intuition that she wasn’t getting the whole story, “you just be sure you don’t leave poor Earl hanging. You know how busy it is on Friday mornings.”
     If by ‘busy’ she meant ‘two farmers and a deputy who drank his thermos dry before midnight’ then sure, anything else would be a serious stretch of the imagination.
     “I will Mrs. Little, you have a good night now.”
     Bailey hung up the nozzle and flipped the pump off, then crossed the street and unlocked the diner with the key under the flower pot next to the door. She opened the cash register and took out a twenty and three tens, then wrote a quick note on an order pad:
     “Earl, I took fifty out of the register to cover my final pay paycheck. If there’s more than that, please give it to Randy and tell him to pay the utility man before he spends it on beer. If it comes to less than that, we’ll just call it even or I’ll tell Jane how you run your hands under the girl’s skirts when we’re getting stuff out of the back. – Dixie”
     Below that she wrote in big block letters “I QUIT” just for clarity and then posted the order note on the line where the diner owner and full-time cook would be sure to see it first thing in the morning. Her grandma once told her that “some bridges you cross in life, some bridges you burn.” For all the times she’s been pinched on the ass to earn a dime tip, this was one bridge she wanted to burn on the way out of town.
     She grabbed two packs of Camels off the stack next to the register and a lighter from under the counter. She pulled one out and lit it up while she looked out the door of the place she’d worked for the last eight years. With one last glance down the counter she walked through the door and climbed into her truck, not even bothering to lock up behind her.
     When the truck roared back to life the radio was playing a driving guitar rhythm and a deep voice was singing about the girls in La Grange. Bailey looked northeast towards Chattanooga, and southwest towards Birmingham. Beyond Birmingham was Mississippi and Texas and at the end of the road was Hollywood.
     “Prettiest face since Hollywood...”
     She put it in gear to the beat of the music and dropped the clutch. The truck launched southwest, headlights illuminating all the something in front of her, taillights shining on all the nothing she was leaving behind.

[Word Count: 1345]

Anyway, I’ll be posting the rest of the pieces on my fiction oriented site once I refresh that one and give it a face-lift and reboot. As I continue to post over there I’ll drop posts with links here just so no one has to follow both to keep up with the writing if they want to.

—

     The train-whistle called out through the heavy air of an Alabama summer night, and she looked out over the long moonlit field between her front porch and the tracks on the other side of old man Gilbert’s farm.
     It was the ten-thirty running north and east from Birmingham to Chattanooga, and like everything else in her eye-blink little town it was running slow. Slow like the words on the lips of the customers at the diner she called a job. Slow like the ambition of her brother sleeping off an afternoon of beers and girly magazines on the couch in the living room. Slow like the minutes of her life that were bleeding out of her with every breath she took, choking on the stink of stale cigarettes and rotting garbage piled up under the sink; the smell of a little life drowning in boredom and suffocating under the weight of being less than the nothing she ever thought she’d be.
     She looked back at the picture of Ben Franklin on the hundred dollar bill she’d been holding as reverently as her grandmother’s Bible for the last hour. She couldn’t decide if he’d been drunk when he tipped her more money than she took home in a week, but he said she “had the prettiest face he’d seen since Hollywood” and then drove away in his fancy silver sports car. She’d spent her entire shift assuming it was a dollar bill, or maybe even a five like she might get from the men who thought they were high rollers after too much whiskey on a Saturday night. When she pulled it out at the end of her shift it shocked her so much she dropped it on the bathroom floor like it had burned her finger tips.
     The train called out again in the night, telling the world it was going somewhere, anywhere, just not here. Attalla Alabama was nothing and nowhere. She’d been born here on a summer night in nineteen fifty and not a damn thing had happened in the twenty-four years since. She listened to the power of the train pushing itself away from her nowhere, wheels grinding in a deep roar of purpose eating up the black distance between where she was and the brighter lights of anywhere else on earth.
     The sudden sound of an empty beer bottle falling from her brother’s sleeping hand snapped her out of her reverie, and jolted Bailey Dixon – the girl everyone called Dixie - into making the first something decision of her nothing life.
     Truthfully, she’d been thinking about this since the day two years ago when she inherited the house and responsibility for the drunk and snoring pervert face-down and drooling between the spread thighs of his latest Hustler darling in the next room. Her grandmother left her both of them, as well as a stack of hospital bills and the rough running ’56 Chevy pick-up parked next to the pecan tree out front. The doctors said it was cancer from the cigarettes that killed her, but Bailey figured being a miserable old bitch might have had something to do with it.
     She walked down the hallway back to the bedroom with the crooked door hanging from one hinge and took the oversized white Bible down off the top shelf. The morning after her grandmother’s funeral she’d opened it up to write down the date in the record of births and deaths recorded in the front, and that’s when she found them. Placed neatly and pressed smooth, fives and tens and twenties squirreled away in the one place no one would ever look by accident. Her grandmother had spent years using that old white monstrosity to threaten and torture her, never once letting slip that almost five hundred dollars were hiding between Ruth and Samuel.
     She took out the old tweed-covered suitcase with the leather trimmed edges for the first time since she brought hit home with her grandmother’s effects from the funeral home. Unceremoniously she emptied the old woman’s shirts and polyester pants into a heap on the floor and then packed it with the three dresses she owned, four shirts, two pairs of jeans, the grey mock-heels she’d bought on a lark last spring, her Sunday bra and slip, and all the panties in her top drawer. Just before closing the lid she had a pang of sympathy for the old woman who’d raised her since her mother disappeared on a summer night hardly any different from this one, the same year they bought the pickup new off the lot in Birmingham; so she grabbed up the old woman’s Bible and placed it in the suitcase before snapping the latches tight and carrying the only pieces of her nothing life she could be bothered to keep out to the old Chevy.

[Word Count: 980]

The rest of Chapter 1 in this post.

“What?!?” I yelled back down.

“You need to come listen to this, right NOW!” came the response to my delaying tactic.  

I slid the keyboard back and sighed as I stood up from the desk, it was just a dumb video game anyway.  I glanced over to the webcam still open and linking our home with my mother-in-law’s remodeled garage.  ”I’ll be right back,” I said to no one in particular.

I tromped down the stairs two at a time, swinging my body around the landing halfway down and practically crashing into the couch opposite the bottom of the stairway.  In the kitchen stood my [now ex] wife, trying to negotiate with my daughter the terms and conditions of Sarah’s surrender to the unwanted task of eating her lunch.

“Do you know what she said to me?” Heather asked.  ”She doesn’t want cheese on it. You tell your father why you don’t want cheese on it!”  I could now see the smile hidden in the corner’s of Heather’s mouth.  This wasn’t an argument, this was a joke; probably at my expense.

Sarah looked at me defiantly, but it was her mother that she was determined to foil.  Heather saw the look in Sarah’s eyes and turned to face me.  ”She said she doesn’t like MELTED cheese.  I blame you!” at this point Heather was openly grinning, and I got the joke.

Years ago, my little brother had developed some unusual food preferences.  The most baffling was a staunch rejection of melted cheese.  Not based on the taste of cheese, but rather, some unusual opposition to the sensation of melted cheese.  If the meted cheese was sufficiently mixed in with other textures, he was fine; if not then he would simply refuse.

Now, to be fair, he’d LONG since outgrown this particular aversion…so much so that either of the times that Sarah met him, I’m quite sure that he’d never mentioned it, even in passing.  So this wasn’t environmental, this…this was inherited.  And that was the joke.  Clearly, this was something wrong on MY side of the family.  Some broken bit of genetics passed on through me to our daughter.

Having lost one child to genetic defects, Heather and I had a certain shared dark humor in making “genetics” jokes. How this trait or that trait was “my fault” or “her family’s genes.”  In fact, “those are your bad genes” had become something of a running joke; which only made the following few moments so much funnier…

Right before Heather could say it, with the words on the tip of her tongue, Sarah burst out in distress.  ”No!  I don’t want to have bad pants!”

There was a pause, a sort of processing delay that registered on each of our faces.

…bad pants…

…my bad genes…

Yep, leave it to a three year old in a high-chair wearing a pair of jeans from Gymoboree and worried about fashion already. Those are my “bad pants” right there.  

I don’t think we stopped laughing for an hour.  It was the prototypical “inside joke”…so inside it was genetic.

It’s a pun that lives on for me.  I love my family.  I love my history.  I love where we came from, and I have a lot of faith in what’s on our horizon.  I’m proud of my bad pants.  I love my bad pants.

I want to tell the world about the pants that I come from.

If you read that sentence and thought about family and friends and stories about the things you love in your life, then you’re in the right place.

If you read that sentence and snickered a little bit because it sounded a bit dirty…you’re also probably in the right place.

I’m going to write about the people that came before me, the people that I grew up with, and the people that still shape my life today.  Somtimes these people have been inspiring.  Somtimes, well, we’re all human.  But we’re good at funny…and sorta dirty in that unintentional-but-really-hilarious-when-you-think-about-it-later sort of way.