He Went Out to Take a Leak. He Came Back a Different Man.
Dale Sturdivant is forty-three years old, has been married nineteen years, and runs two hundred and eleven vending machines across three counties in a white Chevy Express with a magnet on the door that falls off if you take a cattle guard too fast. He kneels down in the back hallways of chicken plants and Baptist hospitals, he puts in the Cheez-Its, he takes out the money, and in eleven years of doing it not one person has ever said his name.
He is not unhappy. He wants that on the record, and the book takes him seriously about it. His wife Michelle is funnier than he is. His fifteen year old actually talks to him at a campfire. His nine year old reads library books about the Skunk Ape with a flashlight and tells everybody at the picnic table that a Sasquatch has a middle toe that moves independent of the other ones.
He is just a man that nothing has been curious about in about eleven years.
Then, at a quarter after two in the morning on a family camping trip in the Ouachita National Forest, three Miller Lites and most of a blue Gatorade get him out of the tent, and while he is standing at the edge of the mowed grass looking at the sky the way a grown man only does when he is by himself, something crosses a patch of moonlight sixty yards up the slope.
It takes three steps to cross the light. And it is walking upright, the way you walk to the mailbox.
He should go back to the tent. He knows he should go back to the tent. He can see the tent from where he is standing, and he can see the shape of his son through the wall of it where the moonlight comes off it, and he stands there in a pair of Crocs and a Razorbacks t-shirt and says out loud, to nobody, in the exact tone a man uses on a Saturday before he does something stupid to a lawn mower: Well, I am just going to look.
Two hundred yards up that hill he picks a dead limb off the ground and hits a hickory with it.
Something hits back. Twice.
And that, not what happens twenty minutes later in the moss, is the moment his old life ends. Because a thing that knocks twice when you knock once is not making noise. It is taking a turn. It is a conversation, and Dale Sturdivant has just found out he is in one.
She is eight foot four. She is covered in dark red hair that goes silver across the tops of her shoulders. She has hands that cover a man’s chest from collarbone to ribs, eyes the color of a penny under a porch light, working hands that are scarred and busted up like a mechanic’s, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in his opinion about how the evening is going to go.
I want to be plain about what kind of book this is, because the title is doing a job and some people are going to guess wrong in both directions.
It is explicit. Thoroughly, repeatedly, in detail, and it does not cut away from any of it. She runs every single one of those scenes and he is not consulted about it once. If you were hoping for a tasteful fade to black, there is not one in here and no amount of skipping ahead is going to produce one.
It is also, and I did not entirely see this coming while I was writing it, a love story. The subtitle is not a bit.
What follows that first night is a Tuesday and a Friday. Then it is a black tote bag behind the seat with clean shirts and a can of Gain in it. Then it is a company GPS unit re-routed under the driver seat with four inches of slack so a man can get a hand on it. Then it is sixty-five cents of company honey buns written off as spoilage, and then it is two thousand two hundred and forty dollars of them. Then it is a jar of honey with the lid off it sitting on a rock ninety miles from his own kitchen, and a masking tape tally on the inside of a sun visor that he looks at while he is stopped at red lights.
And in the middle of September, on a hog trail on that ridge, he comes around a bend and finds her sitting in the leaves with an illegal cable snare buried half an inch into her forearm and her hand gone the wrong color, and she looks up at him and holds the arm out.
He drives fifty-five minutes to a Dollar General, buys a hacksaw and four blades and a gallon of iodine and tells the girl at the register a dog got in a snare, and then he kneels down in the dark with a headlamp on and cuts a steel cable out of her arm for forty minutes while she holds it perfectly still and lets him.
That is the chapter the whole book turns on, and it is the reason this is not ninety pages of one joke.
The other thing I will say is that his wife is not the problem. Michelle Sturdivant is a good woman for the entire length of this novel and the book never once lets Dale off the hook by making her somebody you would leave. She fixes the wired hinge on his folding camp chair in the middle of the worst month of her life. She lays the whole case out on a kitchen table at one thirty in the morning like a woman dealing cards. She offers him every bit of it back, on a porch, and asks him to do exactly one thing in return.
A man can love his family completely and go anyway. Nobody wants that in a book. Everybody wants there to be a reason. There is not one, and pretending otherwise would have made this a much more comfortable novel and a much worse one.
It ends on the twenty-third of October, when a light comes up out of the dark and everybody finds out at once. I am not going to tell you how that goes. I will tell you that a nine year old boy who has spent two summers telling anybody who would listen that they are real is standing forty feet away holding a flashlight when it happens, and that he is the only person in the world who ever believes his daddy afterward.
Funny for about two thirds of its length. Filthy throughout. And a great deal sadder at the end than the cover is going to lead you to believe.
Free with Kindle Unlimited.
More Unhinged Reads
New here? Start with Cryptid Romance Books: Bigfoot, Mothman, and Other Questionable Life Choices or Dark Humor Books: 14 Novels That Are Funny About Terrible Things.
