SOL Books Prose Series selection

Congratulations go out to Michael Loyd Gray whose novel, Well Deserved, was selected for our Prose Series.

The Vietnam War is ending, and America has an identity crisis. Everyone from the small- town dope dealer to the returning vet, the townie grocery store clerk and the new sheriff knows what they want in life, but the paths to their desires are conflicted and foreboding. In a narrative with all the clarity and determination of a prophecy, Gray's Well Deserved chronicles the struggles of four people as they come to the stark realization that their paths are not solitary, but entwined, and their very lives hinge on one shared moment.

              Art resisted the temptation to snoop around. He had no business in that rickety trailer. He was just a cop, not some medieval lord hovering over vassals. That was another man’s home, as run-down as it looked. He had no evidence of a crime. That wasn’t what this was about. What was it about? There was no design, no plan. It was about driving home the message. He couldn’t count on Dom to be a reliable architect of that. Maybe it was also about covering his ass a little. That was always prudent, always smart, always necessary. He could even make notes about his talk with Dom, his trip today out to the trailer, to the outlaw’s lair. He got a kick out of calling it that – outlaw’s lair.

              But notes would be a mistake. No paper trail. If it came to it, it would be enough to say he had taken steps. He had taken action. He had been on top of it, out in front of it. He’d monitored the situation. That’s what all those trips to the lake were about, he would explain. The mayor would back him. He had that chit on the mayor to cash whenever he needed it. He was sure of it. As sure, anyway, as he could reasonably be. What he knew in his head was not what anyone else could know he knew. That sounded silly, actually. But it was enough that he knew what it meant.

              The trees were coming back thick and green and limited his view of the lake. He figured he had some time so he got out and strolled to where the woods ended and the road to Kelton began and watched small whitecaps on the lake. There was just enough breeze for that, and it also ruffled branches and limbs above him in the trees. They made a very pleasant swishing sound, like people whispering secrets. From there he would see that cherry red GTO come across the causeway. Or maybe they would sneak home the back way. Maybe so.  He couldn’t discount that. Where would that come from? From Dom. Right. He might very well suggest that. He’d seen so much more of the world than that kid Jesse. Vietnam was still so fresh and vivid in Dom that he would be looking for a back way, safe haven, for quite a while. He probably hadn’t been home long enough yet to get the smell of Vietnam out of his nostrils. So be it. Art calculated time and mileage, factored in some doper paranoia, and knew there was time to see them and to get back to his car. Sitting in the car would have an effect. So would standing beside it. He decided sitting was best. Let them ruminate a bit on whether he’d ever gotten out and snooped around.

              And anyway, he knew there wouldn’t be anything to see. If Jesse James was worth a damn at all as a doper, and he figured he was, there just wouldn’t be anything in that trailer that could hurt him. Art looked back a moment at the thick woods. That’s where it was, in there somewhere. Like a squirrel hiding nuts. Only Jesse James would know where the pot of gold was hidden. Pot of gold – that was a good one.

              Art didn’t care for the implications of going in a home without a warrant, without a real reason. That wasn’t done. Not in his world. In Chicago it had sometimes been different. But that was more of a jungle than Argus. Far, far more. It had different rules, and ultimately Art had found the rules too onerous to live with. And the fallout from the rules. Remembering his Chicago days made him absently rub the little scar on his cheek where the bullet had teased him.

              He glanced at his watch, then the causeway. He looked at the rolling whitecaps beckoning for a moment, then back at the clump of trees on the far side of the causeway where the road disappeared toward town. Nothing. So, it was the back way. Why not? That might have been his choice, too. He edged back into the woods, looking up a few times at the tall tops of the canopy, watched them sway and rub each other.  He wondered how often deer eased up to the trailer at night, when there was no noise at all and the only light came from the trailer – from the outlaw’s lair – and listened to the sounds of the only human for several miles – the music, no doubt, that sometimes poured from the trailer. Loud rock and roll. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who. Art liked those bands, but few people knew it. He had some of their albums. In the privacy of his home. Not for public consumption. He had been sorry, privately, to learn the Beatles were no more. It was all very recent. He’d heard about it on WLS out of Chicago one day in the police cruiser.

              What did the deer and raccoons and possums think when the Beatles and the Stones and others filled their lonely woods? "Whose woods these are I think I know." He was remembering Frost again, from school. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep."

              He always liked that one a lot. It was a dense poem and the mood could be cut with a knife. Hell, a machete. It was very dark inside that poem. He wasn’t sure he understood poetry at all. That one offered all sorts of possibilities. Death, for example, though he had heard that was deceptive and not the case at all. He wondered about that a moment. What else was it about? He remembered, too, that teachers seemed to bleed the life out of poetry. All that jazz about metering. Iambic pentameter and all the rest. He remembered those things because they had quite a sound. So many syllables. But he never really understood it. He knew that rhythm was involved somehow. But wasn’t all that iambic stuff really just mathematics? Math and poetry seemed an odd pair to him, like a tall man dancing with a very short woman. Rhyme he understood. But not all poetry rhymed. Much of it did not, though he couldn’t say he had read a lot of it. Sometimes in a bookstore, not so very often, he would drift into the poetry section and read a few poems and ponder their meaning. He knew that in his police uniform, reading a book of poetry, he must have been quite the picture to some folks.

              That particular Frost poem had stayed with him through the years. He was pleased that it had. It wasn’t entirely true that you forgot what you learned in school. He’d also read some Hemingway in school, those tight little stories about the boy in Michigan trying to make sense of things. On the lake this day it could easily be a day for Hemingway, but that wasn’t what he thought of. It was the Frost poem that lived inside him. He even recited it once during a black and lonely night off the coast of Korea as he gripped the ship’s handrail and tried to see the coast, but it had proved to be invisible and the air was very crisp and the ship was blacked out and suddenly jets could be heard above, muffled swooshing noises, but not seen as they streaked inland and disappeared over the hills he knew were there but he could not see; and quickly the jets were very far away and barely audible and then he heard faint explosions, more like Fourth of July firecrackers than anything else. It was all taking place out in the dense blackness – out there. It was the blackest night he’d ever known, as black as in the Frost poem, though he was not depressed, just solitary, and as he heard the distant rumblings, that odd and haunting poem came to him, and he thought of the determined pilots in those jets, alone in their tiny bubble cockpits in a sea of blackness – "and miles to go before I sleep."

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