The new novel WEST VIRGINIA by Joe Halstead from Unnamed Press: When Jamie Paddock learns of his father’s suicide, memories of his childhood in West Virginia come roaring back. One of the few people in his town to ever make it out, Jamie’s living in New York City now, developing marketing videos for YouTube, struggling to write and partying a lot — all while suppressing the accent that gives him away. Spurred by an artistic curiosity surrounding his silent and private father, Jamie goes home, staying with his disabled mother and sister in their trailer, conveniently located between two Walmarts. Always poorer than the local coal miners, Jamie’s family relies on welfare, but it is the mystery of his father’s suicide that will help define Jamie’s identity and possibly decide whether he leaves West Virginia for good.
EXCERPT:
That evening, they went to his aunt Marge’s house, which was just up the hill from his parents’ single-wide. It was a two-story house built using coal-mine money in the mid-1990s and the outside walls were covered with mounted deer heads. Jamie hadn’t been there in more than ten years and he felt disembodied standing on the porch, and then Janice knocked on the door and Marge answered and said, “Come on in,” and foolishly stared at him a moment, her face melted, doughy, loosened by time. With his arms loaded with the bags of HomestyleBakes stuff from Walmart, he used his heel to prop the front door open so it wouldn’t close on Janice and Carol and they went inside and he put the bags on the counter and unloaded them and then walked around the house. Its kitchen opened to a dining area with a table and seven chairs from Big Lots or something, and on the walls were more mounted deer heads and sepia family photos in which everyone, including the kids, looked like ghosts or junkies. Meanwhile, Janice and Marge stewed the chicken on the bone in just the right amount of sop after they dropped in the chilled dough strips, and Carol drifted, like she always did in social situations.
He wandered the house looking for a quiet place and went down the landing into the den where they all used to play video games as kids. It was dark except for a ninety-inch TV that was playing the Outdoor Channel. He watched two bearded men in orange hunting jackets stalk into a deer path where a young fawn was running. There was something in its eyes, a struggle to understand, as it ran in circles, and it gave a start when it saw the men and then sprawled on all fours as if that very second, by miserable coincidence, it realized it was doomed. One of the hunters led the fawn and squeezed the trigger, and the shot thundered through the speakers.
“Hey, Jamie.” His uncle Mike lounged on a recliner in the dark, formless beneath a quilt, eyes hollow, face gaunt. Even under the quilt Jamie could tell he was half his normal size, down around a hundred pounds, and his skin was gray, and as quickly as he felt like a nephew coming for a visit he remembered they were strangers. Mike had been a hard uncle to live with, awkward in his affection and loudmouthed. Everyone in the tri-county area who wasn’t a relative or car salesman thought he was a son of a bitch. One of Jamie’s clearest memories of him was when he’d hit Marge in the face with a frozen steak. She’d forgotten to turn on the oven. Now Mike was vulnerable and it made him nervous just standing there.
“You still live up in ol’ New York?”
“Yeah, yeah, for now.”
“Sand niggers walkin’ down the street everywhere you go?”
An obvious pause followed, with just the sound of the TV. To break the noticeably uncomfortable silence, Jamie cleared his throat and said, “All kinds of people.”
“You still in school? Wha’d’ya do up’ere?”
“Usual, writing. Working at an advertising agency thing.” He paused. “Workin’ on a novel. Doin’ a reading in Brooklyn next week for this story I wrote.”
“Brooklyn?” Mike took a breath that looked like it hurt. “God, it’s freezin’,” he shouted, tugging the quilt up. “Are you cold, too, or is it just me?”
“It’s a little chilly.”
“I tell you what,” Mike said, “you try that new jalapeño chicken sandwich they got at Wendy’s? It’s hot, by god, you better have a glass of milk when you eat it.”
“I’ll have to try it sometime.”
“It burns whoever takes a bite of it. Whoo-wee, by god it’s hot, though, I tell you what.” There was a long pause. “I’m sorry about your dad,” he said.
Jamie stared at him, slightly freaked out. “Did he say anything to you . . . before?”
Mike sighed and shook his head. “Before I got sick, ol’ coyotes kept gettin’ up to Gene’s place, how come his cows were dyin’. Your dad went out with me one day and we killed us one or two, skinned one. But he was bein’ real quiet-like, so I asked him if he was sick. He said, ‘Ugh.’ ‘Ugh,’ he goes, just like that. Said he felt somethin’ open, a space in his head, like his head was a house and he’d been livin’ his entar life in the basement, and he realized somethin’ and it opened up rooms in him, back rooms, bedrooms, living rooms, upstairs rooms.”
“What does that even mean?”
Mike went on: “Your dad—you think he was everything. Perfect, you know. He was my brother, too. But he couldn’t seem to keep hisself happy and that give him ideas. And one’a them ideas . . .” He trailed off. “Well, he was a sad guy and that’s it to him—he ain’t guilty’a nothin’ else. He killed hisself stone cold.”
“You think he was depressed—that what you’re sayin’?”
“Aw, shit—don’t put too much stock in that.” He whispered, “But if anyone’d know, it’d be you. The face you’re makin’? It’s him to a tee, boy. It’s your dad to a tee.”
Jamie felt a chill run down the knuckles of his spine. “It’s everybody on occasion.”
Mike merely stared at the hunters on the Outdoor Channel. “They can do anything these days, all the musk and night vision and shit. When I build these handrails I’m fixin’ to build, I’m gonna go out in the woods all day again. Gotta admar the guys who stay out all day just to get one buck. Really, that’s the kind of guy you want to be.”
They sat there and Jamie began to notice the way Mike was watching the Outdoor Channel, how he had a faint and barely noticeable but nonetheless unmistakable smile on his face, and it moved Jamie to tears, almost. There are times we all imagine ourselves as someone else, somewhere else, and this perfect world has no logic except, of course, that it’s perfect, and then we forget the perfect world we live in isn’t the real one, but by then it refuses to let us go.
Quicksand in one of them old Tarzan movies.
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