Pacific

Tom Drury

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780802194800
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"A truly great writer" returns to the Midwest characters and setting of his landmark debut novel, The End of Vandalism ( Esquire ). When fourteen-year-old Micah Darling travels to Los Angeles to reunite with the mother who abandoned him seven years ago, he finds himself out of his league in a land of magical freedom. He does new drugs with new people, falls in love with an enchanting but troubled equestrienne named Charlotte, and gets thrown out of school over the activities of a club called the New Luddites. Back in the Midwest, an ethereal young woman comes to Stone City on a mission that will unsettle the lives of everyone she meets including Micah's half-sister, Lyris, who still fights fears of abandonment after a childhood in foster care, and his father, Tiny, a petty thief. An investigation into the stranger's identity uncovers a darkly disturbed life, as parallel narratives of the comic and tragic, the mysterious and everyday, unfold in both the country and the city. " Pacific is a terrific book, and a strange one, as strange as the world and the great literature that helps us make our way through it." — The New York Times Book Review "On the surface, Pacific is a disarmingly plain tale about people managing loss. But look closer, and you'll see it's as deep as the ocean it's named after." — San Francisco Chronicle "If The End of Vandalism provided a world for readers to slow down and catch their breath, Pacific is determined to knock it out of them." — New York Observer

CHAPTER ONE

TINY AND Micah sat on the back porch of the house where they lived outside the town of Boris, watching the sun go down behind the train tracks and the trees.

“Say you’re carrying something,” said Tiny.

“Yeah? Like what?” Fourteen years old, Micah wore a forest-green stocking hat. His hair curved like feathers around his calm brown eyes.

“Something of value,” said Tiny. “This ashtray here. Say this ashtray is of value.”

The ashtray was made of green glass with yellowed seashells glued to the rim. Likely it came from Yellowstone or some other tourist place originally. It might have been of value. Micah picked it up and walked to the end of the porch and back.

“Good,” said Tiny. “Something of value you carry in front of you and never at your side.”

“I just didn’t want the ashes to fall out.”

“Now say you get in a fight.”

“Yeah, I’m not doing that.”

“What you do is put your head down and ram them in the solar plexus. It’s unexpected.”

“I wouldn’t expect it.”

“Well, no one does,” said Tiny. “Sometimes they faint. They almost always fall over.”

“Got it.”

“And never, never get a credit card.”

“How would I pay it back?”

“You wouldn’t. That’s the idea.”

It was a cool night in May. The red sky shaded the grass and the shed and the house.

“Do you still want to go?” said Tiny. “You can change your mind any time.”

“Dad, I’ve never been in an airplane.”

“We could get Paul Francis to take you up.”

“I mean a real airplane.”

Tiny nodded. “I just said that to be saying something.”

A band-tailed Cooper’s hawk came from the west and landed on a hardwood branch with new leaves.

“There’s your hawk,” said Tiny. “Come to say goodbye.”

Dan Norman walked out of his house carrying the pieces of a broken table. He and Louise still lived on the old Klar farm on the hill.

The table had fallen apart in the living room. It was not bearing unusual weight and neither Dan nor Louise was nearby when it fell. Just the table’s time, apparently.

A car pulled slowly into the driveway and a woman got out and stood in the yellow circle of the yard light. She had long blond hair, wore a pleated red dress and white gloves.

“You don’t remember me,” she said.

“I do,” said Dan. “Joan Gower.”

He shifted the table pieces over to his left arm and they shook hands.

“Did you know we get second chances, Sheriff?” said Joan.

“Sometimes. I’d say I knew that.”

“He will turn again and have compassion upon us and subdue our iniquities.”

“I’m not sheriff anymore, though.”

The door of the house opened and Louise came out wearing a long white button-down shirt as a dress.

“Who are you talking to?”

“Joan Gower.”

“Really.”

Louise had tangled red hair, wild and alive with the light of the house behind her.

“Is this business?”

“I’m getting my son back,” said Joan.

“Give me those, love,” said Louise.

She took the table parts from Dan and headed for the hedge behind the house.

Louise put the wood in the trash burner and went on to the barn, the dust of the old farmyard cool and powdery on her feet.

Empty and dark as a church, the barn was no longer used for anything. Louise climbed the ladder and walked across the floor of the hayloft.

The planks had been worn smooth by decades of boots and bales and the changing of seasons. She sat in the open door, dangled her bare legs over the side, lit a cigarette, and smoked in the night.

Dan and Joan were down there, talking in the yard. Louise listened to the quiet sound of their voices. What they were saying she could not tell.

She saw Joan reach up and put her hand on Dan’s shoulder, and then his face. The gesture made Louise happy for some reason.

Maybe that it was beautiful. A graceful sight to be seen in the country, whatever else you might think of it.

Lyris and Albert slouched on a davenport smoking grass from a wooden pipe from El Salvador and reading the promotional copy printed on Lyris’s moving boxes.

Lyris was Joan’s other child—Micah’s half sister, Tiny’s stepdaughter. At twenty-three she had just moved in with her boyfriend, Albert Robeshaw.

The boxes were said to be good for four moves or twelve years’ storage, and anyone who got more use out of them was directed to sign on to the company’s website and explain.

“As if anyone would do that,” said Albert.

“To whom it may concern,” said Lyris.

“We move constantly.”

“We love your boxes.”

“So what are we doing?” said Albert.

“About what?”

“Are we going to see Micah?”

Lyris drew on the pipe. “The little scamper,” she said.

Joan had given Lyris up for adoption at birth. She appeared at Joan and Tiny’s door when she was sixteen and Micah seven. When Joan went away Lyris raised Micah as much as anyone did.

Louise came down from the hayloft and walked back to the house. Dan made her a drink and opened a beer, and they faced each other across the kitchen table.

“What have we learned?”

Dan raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like Micah Darling’s going to live with her in California.”

“What’s it got to do with us?”

“I think she just wanted to tell someone.”

“I saw her ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• PACIFIC
• ALSO BY TOM DRURY
• Title Page
• Copyright © 2013 by Tom Drury
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Pacific
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CHAPTER FIVE
• CHAPTER SIX
• CHAPTER SEVEN
• CHAPTER EIGHT
• CHAPTER NINE
• CHAPTER TEN
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
• CHAPTER TWELVE
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• AUTHOR’S NOTE