Laura Novak
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Welcome to my Friday Feature, in which my Quick Take Tuesday guests regale us with tasty and tantalizing morsels of their work. Feast your eyes on today’s excerpt…

4/15/2011

 
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From DO THEY KNOW I'M RUNNING? by David Corbett

 

 

It was daybreak and the rancher, standing at his kitchen window, watched two silhouettes stagger forward through the desert scrub. One clutched the other but they both seemed hurt. The porch light, the rancher thought, that’s the thing they been walking toward all night. See it for miles. All the way from the footpaths snaking through the mountains out of Mexico.

Rooster lurched at the end of his chain, hackles up, that snarl in his bark, trying to warn the strangers off. They just kept coming. All right then, he thought. Not like you wanted this. He set his coffee in the sink and went to the door leading out to the porch and collected the shotgun kept there, racked a shell into the chamber, stepped outside.

Streamers of winter cloud laced the sky, pale to the east, purplish dark to the west. A cold parched wind keened in the telephone wires. The landscape bristled with nopal, saguaro, cholla. Black ancient ironwood cropped up here and there among the mesquite and Joshua trees.

Before he could close the door behind him, his wife called his name. She eased forward unsteadily out of the hallway shadow, robe cinched tight. The gaunt face, once framed with steel- gray hair pulled back and braided into a rope, now seemed all the more stark with her pallor and the stubbled baldness. The treatments were savaging her bone marrow too. He wondered sometimes whether the cure wasn’t worse than the disease—wondered as well whether he’d be anywhere near as brave when his time came.

Where does the promise go when it leaves you, he wondered. He wished the years had made them calm and strong and wise, but here they were, her sick, him afraid, trying to protect each other—their stake owned free and clear but now little more than a borderland throughway, shadows scurrying past the house at night, sometimes trying the door, shattering a window, hoping for shelter or water or food. Same problem everywhere: the Stanhope girl—raped last spring. Old woman Hobbes—robbed at knifepoint, truck stolen, the fridge ransacked and the house turned upside down for cash before the culprits scurried off, leaving her tied up in her garage. Enough, everybody said. Things’re only getting worse across the border. We’ll form patrols. We’ll make an example out of every goddamn tonk we catch.

But there’s more to “enough” than the saying of it, too much terrain to patrol and too many who still slip through to make an example mean anything. Ask the two lurching forward. The promise hadn’t left them just yet. It was as simple as a steady light glowing at the foot of a mountain pass with the black desert floor beyond. He felt the pump gun’s weight in his hands, a commensurate weight on his soul. It was that second burden that haunted him.

“They don’t look too good,” she told him, feeling her way forward, hand to the wall.

He met her eyes. “They do that sometimes.”

“Is that how we think now?”

“Not because we want to. Remember that part.”


Ivyfree link
4/15/2011 11:46:55 am

This addresses something I've wondered about ever since we first heard about the famous "hole in the heart" (and that's a pretty damn nonspecific diagnosis). There are all kinds of cardiac anomalies that are possible. A premature baby with a suspected cardiac problem would have been born somewhere that he could be appropriately monitored for heart failure. A level-III NICU is where he'd HAVE to be for this. Going home two days after a premature birth? That's not long enough.

Of course, that presupposes that Palin was actually pregnant, which I will believe when the sun rises in the west. But if you believe she was pregnant, then her behavior was breathtakingly stupid and/or infanticidal.

Incidentally, I think that Trig is Bristol's baby because I think Sarah's way too self-absorbed to inconvenience herself in the slightest for anyone not related to her. And the intense secrecy related to the birth of Tripp, whose appearance was supposed to "prove" Sarah's Trig pregnancy, raises suspicion. At that point, there was no issue about protecting Bristol from public attention. Everyone knew she was pregnant. So why conceal the birth?

The whole Palin family are crabs they never go straight towards anything- they sidle around.


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    Laura Novak

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