I've decided to bring this blog back from the dead for a new project: I want to write a novel as blog entries. So, each Sunday I will post a new chapter of ROPE DANCERS, a crime novel that will explore the themes of guilt and forgiveness. The technical idea is to see if I can write a visual, cinematic novel, one that could be adapted to the screen with few to no changes. The model is John Steinbeck's play-novelettes, which he saw as novellas that could be performed without any alterations.
Will this experiment work? I have no idea.
|Is it worth trying? I believe so.
Since this is a working progress, I welcome any feedback.
Here then is chapter one of ROPE DANCERS:
ROPE DANCERS
a novel by
Michael Scott Cain
He who will dance on a rope will be alone,
and I will gather a stronger mob of people
who will say it was unbecoming.
-- Blaise Pascal
Chapter One
If there was one thing Jordan Crow had become aware of during this past week, it was that the whole town of Channing felt he should never have come back. The way they felt was that maybe he had gone off and become a big man up north, maybe Jordan Crow had talked folks into believing he was some kind of powerful man, a guy to be admired and feared, a leader of men, a person of influence. Maybe in some other places, he'd gone and built himself a big reputation and made a ton of money, but down here, folks still thought he was one small time son of a bitch.
So when he came back here just being himself, the locals acted like he was lording it over them and carrying on like he really was the person he pretended to be, well, maybe some folks were willing to believe he was all that and a basket of fries, but here in Channing, people weren't that easy to fool. Not by Jordan Crow, anyway.
Channing people remembered who he was; they had grown up with Jordan Crow and had put up with him long enough to know that this particular leopard wasn't about to change his spots.
The presence of this particular leopard bothered them so much that if they had known that right now, as Crow drove past the park, the man who followed along behind Crow in his Kia had in mind doing something about Jordan Crow, they would not have minded. They would have just nodded their heads and said, “Good. ‘Bout time, too.”
Maybe what the driver of the Kia had in mind wasn’t quite appropriate, you wouldn't catch any of them arguing that Crow didn't have it coming.
#
Terence Glass, the man driving the Kia, wore jeans, an Allman Brothers tee-shirt and a windbreaker. He had on a Braves cap and while he knew he was never going to be mistaken for a local, at least he wasn’t a sore thumb. He stayed a quarter of a mile behind Jordan Crow as they drove through town, driving lazily, his mind on things that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, things like revenge and justice and morality. He speculated about how people insisted on trying to be bigger, more important than other people; wondered how come people who hit it big and got themselves rich thought they were better than ordinary folks, no matter what they’d done or who they hurt to get all that money in the first place.
He had a lot of money himself -- if he started burning dollar bills right now, it would take him a decade or so to get rid of all the cash he had. Still, he didn’t think he was better than anyone else. He was a man like any other man. And if Jordan Crow had continued to think of himself that way, he might not have Terence Glass on his trail right now.
And he told himself that what was going to happen now was a matter of simple justice and that anybody with a brain knew he was morally obligated to carry out this particular act.
Sometimes he wished he could tell people about why he was coming for Crow, take out an ad in the papers maybe, or make a public service announcement for TV. Somehow, he thought, when it happens, people will know why, even if he didn’t tell them.
#
The night was hot. Even though it was September and back up north the summer heat had already broken, the air here was hot enough and humid enough to make Crow feel like he was sitting in a steam bath after a workout. He cranked the air conditioner all the way up and drove quickly, as if road speed contributed to coolness.
Being back in Channing was more complicated than Crow had figured it was going to be. He'd been looking for the triumphant homecoming. He'd had visions of being made welcome by the people who'd treated him so badly when he'd been growing up here.
The way they’d treated him still got to him. They still made him feel like a box of rusty nails, left behind when the construction job was done.
Crow had been surprised to discover that he still hurt from their treatment; until he came back, he’d figured it had all faded away like last week’s dream. Now he had to face the fact that even after all these years, after everything he'd accomplished, to the people he’d grown up with, he was still and forever would be nothing more than mud on the soles of their shoes.
He'd been gone for more than ten years, more than enough time for everybody to forgive and forget, but the town still treated him like an outsider. They just weren’t about to warm up to him, didn't trust him any more than they would a liberal president.
Crow didn't know how to feel about that.
Physically, Channing had changed. He had a hard time recognizing it as the place where he'd grown up. His hotel was out by the highway, maybe ten miles west of town. When he’d lived here, there had been nothing around this area but pasture land and a drive-in theater. Now the drive-in had been so thoroughly demolished he couldn’t quite remember exactly where it had even stood. In its place were sprawling subdivisions, hundreds of vinyl-sided houses with formstone fronts that were supposed to fool a person into thinking they were brick. The houses all looked the same and were too close together, crowded up against each other like scared kids.
The subdivisions had names like Rambling Heights and Country Corners and the houses stood in bare open areas that looked like middle east war zones; all of the trees, in fact, all of the vegetation, had been stripped when they were built. The area looked even more desolate because, due to the spring and summer drought, the sodded lawns hadn't grown in.
Every couple of miles, he'd drive past a strip mall, made from the same cheap materials as the houses. Each of the strip malls held the same assortment of Piggly-Wigglys, Seven-Elevens, Eye Care Centers, dollar stores and Hardware Fairs. Every once in a while, you could see something unusual, like a hypnosis center, that seemed to have been dropped into the wrong place. When Crow first saw the hypnosis center, it reminded him of a puzzle piece that had been broken off at the corners and shoved into a slot where it didn't fit.
He couldn’t get over the changes. When he'd lived here, the only buildings out this way had been the ramshackle falling-down cottages that the white people called slave shacks, even though the odds of them having been erected during the slavery era were pretty remote. Still, since migrant workers had lived in them during the old days, the name fit. As he sped past these buildings, Jordan Crow couldn't help but remember how Channing hadn’t been a good place for a man with a brain and some ambition to grow up.
#
Now, on his last night back, he recognized that he was still looking for respect. He wanted all of these people who'd treated him so miserably, who'd ignored him, who had never been willing to take a single minute out of their lives to make time for him, well, he wanted them to take him seriously. He wanted, no, he needed them to be able to, if they couldn't find kindness in their hearts for him, at the very least they could show a little respect and fear.
Because here was the thing; he was about to turn their town upside down. In just a couple of years, he was going to own this place. They might as well change the name of Channing to Crow right now because it was all going to be be his.
#
He slowed as he drove down Main Street. The downtown Channing was the same as it had always been. Small and quiet, remote and forgotten, like a pocket watch lost so long ago that no one could remember ever owning it, Channing just sat there, a terminally ill town waiting to die.
All of the growth was outside of town. Channing might be falling into nothingness, but Ponder County was a Gold Rush. For the past ten years or so, Atlanta had been spreading out like ripples from a wave, sweeping up every piece of land before it. Places that just a few years ago were covered with farms were now covered with townhouse communities. Damn near the whole state of Georgia was becoming one big suburb.
Now, it was Ponder County’s turn. It was caught up in change and growth and in just a few years it was going to be unrecognizable. And Jordan Crow was going to be right in the middle of it, driving the change, shaping Ponder County into what he wanted it to be and raking in money like some fairy tale character whose garden grew gold coins.
Traveling Main Street, he wondered how long it would take for the change to hit downtown Channing. Main Street was less than a mile long, with the town square located right at the halfway point. The square was made up of a bunch of stores and offices that formed a horseshoe around Robert E. Lee Park, which was where all the townspeople gathered. In any weather, you could find the old guys playing dominos at one end, while at the other, the young mothers sat on benches and passed the time as their kids ran and played and climbed on the monkey bars.
When he’d lived here, the black folks had concentrated themselves down at the south end of the park as though they’d been shoved behind one of those electronic fences that held dogs in, but now, he noticed, they spread out over the whole park, like they would if they lived up north.
The park anchored the town the way a big box store anchored a mall. When you drove down the main drag, you saw it looming in front of you from blocks away, growing bigger as you neared it. Main Street sloped around it in a long, slow graded curve and then headed out again into the miles and miles of new suburbs and strip malls.
Three blocks beyond the park, he turned left and cruised down a dark street into a declining section of working class houses, still unaware of the Kia behind him. This had been a pretty good neighborhood when he’d been here, one that he’d always felt self-conscious walking through, but these days as soon as you entered it, you could see that it had known better days. It had gotten shabby; too many houses had chipped paint and untended lawns. Down the block, he could see a rusted out Chevy up on blocks. It looked like it had been there forever.
He drove slowly for three blocks, past the Goodwill store that had been an electronics repair shop during his days here, and pulled into a driveway. It was late; no other cars drove the street.
The house he'd arrived at was the only one with lights on.
Before he had a chance to get out of the car, the front door opened. In the doorway, Doreen Melson flashed him a smile that was shadowed by the back light which also showed the curve of her legs under her nightgown. When he reached her, she caressed his cheek and said, "Why don't you put the car in the garage? We don't want to be worried about the neighbors, do we?"
Now it was his turn to smile.
#
Veronica Wyeth couldn't sleep. When you got to be her age, it was hard to get to asleep and even harder to stay that way. You'd no sooner drop off than you'd spring awake by some noise that you wouldn't have even noticed back when you were, say, ten years younger.
Most of the time, she would hear something and her eyes would spring wide open, her heart thumping like a hummingbird's and she’d lie in her quiet bed in the still room on her back, looking up at her ceiling, feeling the nerves in her body racing like Nascar cars.
She felt that way now and knew she was going to be awake for hours. That always happened. A person her age, well, once you woke them up, that was it; there was no going back to sleep.
Slowly, she reached down and used her hands to drop her legs over the edge of the bed, and pulled herself up to a sitting position. She moved slowly so she wouldn't get dizzy After her head cleared, Veronica Wyeth stood, exhaled and hauled herself over to her chair. Again, she moved slowly. She'd been getting dizzy spells the past few months and she was afraid of them, since they were sure signs she was failing.
She was going to be up for hours, so she did what she always did when this happened: flip on the TV and see if she could find a late starting ball game on ESPN. The Braves were out in California. If ESPN wasn’t carrying the game, maybe TBS was.
As she searched for the remote, she noticed movement outside and glanced out the window. Across the street, Doreen Meltzer's garage door was closing and a man was walking into her house. It was dark over there, the bulb above the garage door wasn’t bright enough to shed much light, but she could see that Doreen Melton had gone out and found herself a little plaything to warm up her bed. At one time, not long ago in fact, she would have found that shocking. She would have disapproved. Well, now she didn’t mind so much.
Veronica Wyeth was a grown woman, Doreen Melson was a grown woman, and who the hell cared what grown women did with their lives?
Nothing like a case of cancer to change your thinking. Since Dr, Draco told her she was dying, a lot of stuff she used to think was so important didn’t mean a thing to her anymore. Facing your own death had a way of putting things into perspective.
Veronica Wyeth knew what it was to spend a night in a bed by herself and she didn't wish it on anybody. If Doreen could find herself a man to warm that bed up, well, that was just fine. She only wished Doreen could find another one for her.
As she was about to turn away from the window, a second car, one of those little foreign jobs that looked like a baby jeep, one of those, what did they call them? SUVs, that was it, one of those SUVs, pulled up in front of Doreen's house. The driver parked next to the big oak tree so that he was in the shadows. Nobody got out of the car.
Now that was strange, she thought, as she turned on the TV. But like everything else going on over there, it was none of her business. And the years had taught her not to get involved in stuff that was none of her business.
#
On a night as hot as this, Terence Glass felt he ought to be out at Fat Sam’s Roadhouse, tossing back a few beers and chewing on some ribs in the air conditioning. He liked Fat Sam’s. In fact, discovering that place had made this trip tolerable. There was always some action there because the two counties that bordered Ponder County were still dry and Fat Sam’s had been built to be convenient to all three counties. So there was always a crowd there; lots of pretty young ladies from all over South Georgia. He checked his watch; maybe there’d be time to drop by there when he finished up here.
He glanced at the shotgun propped against the passenger’s door. Part of him that didn’t want to do this. He had nothing against Jordan Crow but he’d been hired to do a job and he wasn’t about to go against the people who threw money at him.
He touched the barrel of the gun as if to make sure it was really there. No matter what the weather, a shotgun’s barrel never heated up. Right now it felt as cool as air conditioning, which in this car wasn’t working and that irritated him. How the agency could have turned loose a car whose air conditioning was going to break down within an hour of his taking it off of the lot was beyond him. He’d thought about taking it back, getting another one, but the airport was so far away and he intended to be out of this town really soon, so it just wasn’t worth the effort.
Maybe it was fall on the calendar but it was still hot as hell, with humidity that brought a sweat as soon as you stepped out the door and he was going to be sitting here for God knows how long.
Maybe he ought to just go on back to the hotel.
No, he couldn’t do that. He had a job to do. A mission, if you wanted to use that kind of language. He lifted his Atlanta Braves cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his forearm. For just a moment, he wondered exactly how long he'd been stroking the barrel of the shotgun.
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