Goines On: Had he died but not realized it?

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As Goines began the day’s walk, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already died and was just walking around in a daze imagining he was still alive. If that were so, then – in some sense anyway – there was life after death. If you could call the way he was feeling life.
    Why do you feel this way? He asked himself – aloud, for he was dictating his thoughts into his iPhone. The day before had been one chore after another from getting out of bed at 6 a.m. until 4 p.m.: he did the usual daily household chores before they drove to Chapel Hill and Durham to do errands, and then carry in and put away their purchases at the Wild Bird Center (a 50-lb bag of sunflower chips, which the spunky young woman tending the place had easily carried to the car for him, but which he struggled to even get out of the car at home) and at Costco. And then help Mrs. Goines prepare lunch, and then eat lunch and clean up the kitchen again before doing a few more chores he couldn’t even remember now. But he did remember feeling at times as though he might fall down – not fall down and break something, but fall down dead, no delay.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#15)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Horse Balls didn’t want anything to do with it. A Caesarean section done by a high school student? Even, he admitted, a very bright and talented high school student who knew his anatomy as well as he knew his Socrates? On a poor woman not even quite dead? Not that he didn’t know the procedure, but he was sure it was different in real life from in the manuals. People weren’t line drawings, they bled and screamed and died. Of that much he was sure; he’d seen it last night. So it took all the persuasion Louise had to make him do it. By this time Porcelain was barely breathing. She coughed out great clots of blood. Horace was certain she had broken ribs that had punctured her lungs, and there was nothing he could do about that. He came to a decision.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#14)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Louise jerked awake, snorting, a sharp pain stabbing into her neck. Florencia and the other girls lay all around her on the floor of the ample Quonset hut where they’d been “billeted.” The Waves, the Navy women’s corps, had set them up with a few blankets and pillows, and they had grabbed four or five hours of sleep. Oddly enough, it had been good for her, with the rain hammering on the curved metal roof, and she felt rested and sharp. A woman not much older than herself noticed her standing and waved her over for a cup of coffee. The storm had blown over in the night. Louise’s heels on the concrete expanse of floor woke the other girls, and by the time the sun lit the high windows they were all up and ready to go.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#13)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Louise Dedge stood with the dual rear wheels of the school bus behind her legs to help shield her from the blasting wind. She huddled between the buses with Jim and about a dozen Navy men and their girls, along with one civilian male and his girl: Horace Ball. Horace had astonished her by showing up at Excilencio and Healy’s bungalow, and he continued to surprise her now. He and his gorgeous Cubanita clung together as he calmed her with his fluent Spanish. He told her, Louise gathered, that they would stick with the Navy hombres because, after all, it was a sea storm and they of all people should know what to do. Horace spoke with confidence. The frightened girl nodded numbly, dripping wet and shaking in the cold wind, wanting to trust him. The white girls gathered while their men shouted in each other’s ears, trying to form a plan in the screaming gale. They ignored Horace’s lady until Louise grabbed her by the arms, pulled her into their group and hugged her close. The other girls hesitated for only one second, and then closed around her in a cooing mass, all arms and love, while she sobbed with fright. In the rain her tears poured unseen across Louise’s shoulder. Sand and seashells, tossed by the wind, battered the far side of the bus.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#12)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Louise Dedge was in heaven. The New Year’s Eve Ball was a huge success, in spite of the storm. Not just the students but their parents, the teachers, and even some grandparents were still swirling about the polished wood floor to the music of a band that were in no hurry to load up their instruments in a pouring rain. Mr. Thompson had come, hovering near the punch bowl everyone knew had tropical rum in it. And to top things off, Ernest Hemingway had given the dance a pass. Chalk one up for Captain Niko. Louise had danced the entire evening with Jim, already a graceful and accomplished footsman, without a single interruption. Quite a few other Navy fellows were there, but they all had their own sweethearts and were not interested in cutting in. And no high school boy would have dared risk his life by horning in on a military man’s date. The one man she had noticed other than James Donald Owens had been, of all people, Horace Ball, who danced with any girl he could coax onto the floor and turned out to be astonishingly good. When the music played, Horse Balls lost his stoop, his hesitant nature vanished, and he became smooth as ice cream, gliding across the hardwood floors wearing an outdated brown suit and vest like an actor from Hollywood.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#11)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Well, we’d been fishing for shrimp for a couple of months in the Straits and out in the Gulf, and we hadn’t done that bad. Blackie spent some money refitting the Horny B. with the trawling booms and nets, and cousin Lester had proven his mechanical abilities many times over. He did most of the welding himself, after careful calculations as to the weight and drag and so on, and I gather it was a painstaking job to weld those booms in the right places. Engineering was never my strong point. Then it was Joe Hook who once again showed us how things worked, operating the diesel-powered compressor to let out and retrieve the nets like he was born to the job. How he knew stuff like that was beyond me. Blackie mutely shook his head when Lester asked him how Joe might have learned how to trawl for shrimp in upstate New York. In any case, we would load the hold with shrimp and pack it in the ice Blackie bought in Key West, and every week or ten days we would pull in to the port and sell it all at a nice profit.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#10)

Photograph of autographed
copy from author to editor
[cover slightly curled]

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

James Donald Owens was sweating more than usual as he headed up Roosevelt Boulevard, the warships at the base standing on the skyline behind him like ugly grey buildings. It was rarely so cold you couldn’t take a swim anywhere in the Keys, even on Christmas Day or New Year’s, but this still, silent heat was oppressive. It felt more like August than December. The south-east wind, which folks considered more or less permanent in these parts, seemed to have died an unfortunate death. It would be sorely missed, he thought with his normal good humor.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#9)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Lester Clayton, after helping clear the docklines, was down in the engine room when he felt the boat rock to the right (starboard, he thought stubbornly), and he listened carefully for a heartbeat before he went back on deck. The engines sounded good. Lester had been Assistant Parts Manager at the Ford dealership in Prosperity, South Carolina, nearby Birdswood, and before that he’d been a Ford mechanic for six years, ever since he got out of high school. Two of those years had been on contract to the US Army, which service had kept him out of the war. The only reason he drove a Buick was because his daddy had given it to him when he’d bought a new one, and he admitted to himself, with a dose of guilt, that he had loved it. It was a really nice car. He hated to let it go, but it had provided a nice nest egg for him and Porcelain, which he would need when they found a place to live.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#8)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Well, that Deputy Undersheriff Carl Willard Schoolie, as he identified himself, thought he was a hell of a man, that was plain as grass, and he went about the Horny B. like she was his very own, with us all bitchin’ and complainin’ at his fat rear end to no effect whatsoever I could see. The sweat soaked his armpits and the back of his shirt and I for one was glad. I hoped he was suffering. I wished for a time that he might fall on the deck and die gasping from heat exhaustion, but as I have already admitted I was much less forgiving back in those days. We all knew if Blackie was here he’d have run him off so fast he’d think he was back home at the orphanage, being sodomized by the older boys, but nothing we said impressed him. Like I said, he was already too all-fired impressed with himself to hear much of what we were saying. Blackie was meeting a new buyer for our future catch and wouldn’t be back for another few hours.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#7)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Well, after what-all had happened that night already, I sure wasn’t expecting to hear how we were going to Miami to buy and run a fishing boat. After Blackie shooting somebody deader than hammered dog shit, and Joe Hook turning out so cold-blooded and all, I didn’t know what to think. But when Blackie told us his plan and said should we ask if the guy and his colored girlfriend wanted to come, we all said yes right off. He told us we would need about six or seven hands to run the size of boat he had in mind, but if Joe Hook and Lottie were thinking like me right then, I figure they thought fishing in the sunshine for a living sounded mighty good to them if we had enough hands or not, and they were. Thinking like me, I mean. So I told him we all said not just yeah but hell yeah. Blackie laughed at that. He said it was one of my “alpine aphorisms,” or as I would laugh with him and say if he were here today, one of my “mountain mouthfuls.” Damn, I wish he was still on this Earth somewhere. I said it back then and I’ll say it again now. Blackie Wainwright was special. He made this place more interesting.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#6)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Lester Clayton Tottenmann couldn’t believe he was still alive, that Porcelain would not be raped and killed, that anything might ever be all right again. How had this happened? He was a dead man. If it had been him on the other end of that oar, the son of a bitch on the ground would have been a goner for sure and for certain. What had he, a piece of racist shit not much better than the slab of meat sprawled on the white sand by his feet, ever done to deserve to keep on living? What right did he have to keep his girl, the only girl he ever loved? His head began to clear, and he wondered if he would be in any better shape with these white men than he had been with the others. He thought maybe he had a chance with these folks. They didn’t seem to be in the game the way backwoods people up home were, the way salt-water folks seemed to be here. But then again, they hadn’t seen Porcelain yet.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#5)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Lester knew they couldn’t stay in any of the white hotels or cabins, but the bad part was, they couldn’t stay at any of the black places either. He couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He was a white man, he could tell any nigger what to do, but if he stayed in a black establishment he knew damn well they would both wake up dead. And there wasn’t nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t call the sheriff, he’d be put in jail his ownself for causing a ruckus, and if there wasn’t a charge on the books for living in sin with a black woman, they would just make one up. Prob’ly get hisself hung before it was over. They had come across south Florida on Alligator Alley, and they had sure seen some. Fat black monsters that lay across the miserable excuse for a road and sometimes wouldn’t move for all the arm-waving and horn-blowing a man could do. God, he hated Florida.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#4)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Porcelain Jones was still terrified. Something had to go wrong. Everything in her nineteen years always had gone wrong, and there was no reason to think now would be any different. Her father had died, her stepdaddy lost his job like every other black man when all the white boys came home from the war, and took to drinking and beating her mother and everyone else near him. And worse. He’d tried to come to her bed more than once, but he’d always been so drunk she’d been able to fight him off. She worked a little at Mrs. Jeffries’ dance hall to make enough money to get out of the house, but she had known that sometime she would have to sell herself to live. There was no work anywhere. The service jobs that had sustained her family for generations were going to white women who were out of work for the same reason black men’s jobs were going to white men. The white men were back.

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#3)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

[Editor’s Note: On Saturday, this book finally became available in paperback. The long delay since its availability as a Kindle eBook owes to two things: (1) Hurricane Irma, which swept along the west coast of the author’s state, prompting him to evacuate, and (2) the ineptitude of the book’s cover designer ( m e ), who hadn’t noticed that some of the text originally extended into the area that gets trimmed off after each book is printed and bound.]

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#2)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Lottie Jane Miller was tired of walking. She knew what her momma had said about taking rides from strangers, but if she kept turning down rides she was never going to get anywhere. The sun hung flaming in the Florida sky, while both ends of the flat, empty highway disappeared into the shimmering September haze. She shaded her eyes with a hand that was at once delicately boned and roughly used. Her nails were broken and dirty, and calluses marred her palms. She dreaded another night out in the mosquito-ridden woods of Florida’s Big Bend, where the west coast takes a turn to the south. Last night she’d felt like a plate of ribs at Hank’s Barbecue back in Wewahitchka, where she’d run off from the other day, the damn bugs were that bad. “Wewa” was outside of Panama City, and she had considered going there; the air station at Panama made the place a real town. But for sure her daddy, the no-good bastard, would find her in Panama City. He was probably there right now, looking for her. She hoped he got run over by one of those busses that brought new draftees to the base, until she remembered the war was over and not so many recruits came there anymore. Well, as her mother would say if she wasn’t dead, one could always hope for the best. Maybe a farm tractor would do the job instead. The thought of Daddy mashed under big black tractor tires made her feel a little better. There would be a lot of blood. Maybe he would scream. She smiled, seeing it in her imagination. She peered north up the highway, where there seemed to be a shimmer in the haze. Was that a car?

Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#1)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

[Editor’s Note: Hurricane Irma seems to be telling us to go ahead and announce  n o w  the forthcoming publication of Roger’s novella: “With 130-M.P.H. Winds, Storm’s Eye Begins Passing Over the Florida Keys,” says a headline today in the NY Times. “The eye of the Category 4 hurricane was 15 miles southeast of Key West, the National Hurricane Center said.”]