The worst part isn’t that Alvin died
The worst part isn’t that Alvin died. The worst part was that Mom and I never really talked about it. People can get over a trauma. If they deal. But we never did. Mom would never say it, but it was a lot easier for her to raise one son by herself than two. I hear working class folks say stuff like “I didn’t know we went without until I was older.” But if you’re poor, you know. When you’re a kid and you wake up hungry and there’s not a scrap of food in the house, you know. When your mom tries to hide the food stamps in the checkout line, you know.
And then, all of a sudden, there was one less mouth. I’m sure the guilt of that, the unwanted feelings of relief, ate at Mom every day. She soldiered on as best she could. But I could tell something had broken inside her. Something permanent. She started using more. And gambling. I think after so much trouble — one man in prison and another leaving and losing a son and getting hurt so bad she couldn’t work — she felt she had one big win coming. That she was owed it. That if she had faith and played long enough, God would see her through. Her number would hit. It had to.
At first it was pocket money. She’d save up what she could and spend a Saturday afternoon playing quarter slots at the Indian casino across the border in Alabama. After a while, she started carving out twenty dollars here and there from the grocery money. I’d come home from school and get scolded for buying the wrong kind of cereal or getting the good bread. She’d tell me I was selfish and then snap her mouth shut, like she’d just stopped short of comparing me with Alvin, who would never do such a thing.
A dead boy is an angel. You can’t compete. I know. I tried. All through high school I tried. I tried to do everything right. To win Mom’s praise. Maybe even make her feel better. She just seemed so tired all the time. Especially after nights at the casino, three hours away. She’d come back with grocery money and show it to me and say “See?” Like everything was justified.
“I’m gonna quit now,” she’d say. “You’ll see.”
But I knew. By then I wasn’t a kid anymore. I knew the difference between a good day at the slots, when she’d come home high and happy, and a good “night” after. Those weren’t the same.
A boy grows to hate his mom for something like that.
Then he starts to dream about getting out.
Mom had been told she had dyslexia when she was a girl. I’m not sure who said it, but I know in her mind it became the reason why she could never do good in school or never get a better job, so it was always real important to her that I make something of myself. She was so relieved the day I got a basketball scholarship to a little college in Ohio. By then it was clear she and I couldn’t live together anymore. Not and stay mother and son.
I thought moving out would fix things. But still we never talked about Alvin. No one even told me how he died. I just assumed. I assumed Curtis Wilson and his crew had caught up to him somehow. It wasn’t until graduate school that I realized how stupid that was, that an illiterate fifteen-year-old and his boys weren’t going to steal a car and drive out to the boonies of rural North Carolina, away from everyone and everything they knew, for . . . what? In their eyes, they’d already won. They were kings.
So I called Mom from school. “You never told me what happened to my brother.”
I could hear her shaking her head through the phone.
“Why won’t you talk about it?”
The phone went down and Cliff, Mom’s new boyfriend from the casino, came on to yell at me for making her cry, and who did I think I was, Mr. Uppity College Degree, and he had a mind to drive up there and whoop my ass.
“You ain’t got no car, asshole.” I hung up.
When Cliff left a few years later, Mom hit bottom. She never came back. And I stopped bringing it up.
I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming hardboiled occult mystery in order until the book is released in early 2018.
Enjoy this? Sign up here to be notified when the book is released. Or just leave a tip!
You can start here: I saw my first dead body the summer we moved to Atlanta
The next chapter is here: (not yet posted)
cover image by Billelis
Introduction to the story:
One of the hallmarks of traditional detective fiction is that the detective doesn’t really change. He — it’s almost always a man — might see his hopes for a bright future raised and then dashed, but fundamentally, Hercule Poirot is the same obsessive compulsive gentleman in each case, Sherlock the same eccentric genius, Philip Marlowe the same sarcastic asshole.
The lives of the people the detective encounters, however, are changed completely. In fact, they’re often devastated! What’s more, since it’s the intricate, personal details of people’s lives that create the motive for murder, the detective, as an outsider, has to eat his way in, like a worm into an apple.
This often requires some unusual plot gyrations. Agatha Christie’s typical solution was to have an “old friend” of Poirot — no one the reader has ever seen or heard before, of course, but an “old friend” all the same — invite the detective to dinner at his remote estate where all the guests are intimately familiar with each other, except the infamous detective. In Murder on the Orient Express, she goes one step further and makes it a sheer fluke that brings Poirot to the scene.
Raymond Chandler did the same kind of thing in The Long Goodbye, but rather than using the old friend bit, he simply manufactures Marlowe a new friend in the opening chapters and asks us to believe they instantly become bosom buddies. Introducing a long lost love is also popular, or a wayward relative, but whatever the mechanism, the effect is the same. Anyone who had any real emotional connection to the dramatic events in the story would be irrevocably changed by them and so couldn’t appear again in the next book!
FEAST OF SHADOWS is a kind of detective story, but an atypical one. First, it’s a supernatural mystery. Magic and the occult are vital to the story. But it also has an unusual structure. It’s told in five courses, as in a meal, from the standpoint of the people who are affected, even devastated, by the events of each mystery. There’s still a “detective” of course, and each narrator encounters him, but he moves in and out of the action (as seen by them) while they desperately try to fix their lives.
This approach changes less than you might think. For example, the classic detective often has his “regulars” who assist him . Where would Nero Wolfe be without Archie Goodwin? Or Poirot without Captain Hastings? As established agents of the detective, these characters can appear out of nowhere with vital information, or just in time to stop a bullet. In fact, authors typically send their detectives’ agents on secret errands, often near the end of the story, for that exact reason. The mission is intentionally kept from the reader so that we can be surprised by the dramatic reveal, where we wouldn’t be if we knew what the detective was up to. In other words, sometimes a mystery works best when we don’t know what the detective is up to.
The first courses of this book also borrow heavily from the thematic and structural elements of classic detective fiction, and in chronological order. The first course is narrated by a “doctor” (a PhD in this case) who meets an eccentric genius and has an unusual adventure, hearkening back to Arthur Conan Doyle. The second course is narrated by a down-on-her-luck young woman caught between various parties trying to get their hands on an ancient artifact (here, a dagger), hearkening back to Dashiell Hammett.
Starting in the 1960s and 70s, solving crimes required more and more forensic evidence, meaning to stay current, detectives need access to the resources of the state, and so the number of fictional PIs (Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer) began to decline and the number of police officers (Inspector Imanishi, DI Rebus, Harry Bosch, Clarice Starling) to increase. The third course, then, is narrated by a policewoman and has the structure of a traditional police procedural.
The fourth course is narrated by a little boy and so brings us to contemporary fiction, with it’s emphasis on magical realism and “alternative” protagonists. The fifth brings them all together. With each, the reader learns a little bit more about the mysterious “detective” and the grander mystery that links all five courses into one, the feast of shadows.
[image error]
