THE EXISTENTIAL PATTERN OF THE SHORT STORIES OF MIKE KENNEDY

Existentialism can be reduced to this equation:  Consciousness minus self-deception equals freedom (the authentic human condition).

There are many types of lies.  English has 23 such words.  In the stories The Mendacium Institute and Double Double Toil and Trouble, the intentional inaccuracies of certain representations  (oral and written) are artistically observed as part of the existential experience of self-deception.  Put simply:  If you believe a lie, it is your responsibility.  It is self-deception as surely as if you had merely believed your own myths.  But there are other senses, in addition.

By way of contrast, the story Erotic Shock creates an environment which dispenses with language representations and deals only with those things which can be observed.  Such observed phenomena include conventions of meaning used in society and by Mother Nature. The overall irony is that even those things, which can be observed, can be misunderstood as readily as written and oral statements.   Therefore, they also lessen man’s authentic condition of perfect freedom of action.  And yet truth can reside in what we see if we respond to it with reflex and leave our clunky word-laden thoughts behind.

Similarly, the story Of Windage and Dead Reckoning shows the protagonist distrustful of all sense impressions.  Wisely, Conway abandons use of the mind’s reflective system and, instead, relies completely and faithfully upon only the mind’s intuitive system.

All of my stories include some limiting factor.  More often, the stories are part of a  world directed system which imposes limitations both concrete and abstract upon the protagonist.  Such stories include those four stories mentioned above.  Others in this category include:  West of West Texas, Leda and the Swan, Point of View, The Prince of Staten Island, A Danger in Becoming, and Evan Donevan Must Die.

In other of my stories, the freedom-restricting factor is some limitation of the self in a character directed system.  Such stories include Deadstick, Wise Enough Alone, Gather Me My Scattered Selves, Only Boat for Fifty Miles, Irresistibly American, and Reshuffled.

As you can see, a paradox exists.  Two opposites can be simultaneously true.  Our Booktender is a writer whose faith in words has been shaken over time, only because of the use to which men and women put them.  Yet we all believe in the perfectibility of mankind.  In time, this must, eventually, mean that words will no longer become "twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools."

Submitted by the Booktender of the GOOD STORY Saloon, October 1, 2013

SHOULD RESIDENCE ON KINDLE DISQUALIFY YOUR WORK RESULTING IN SUBMISSION REJECTED OR DECLINED?

The first duty of those who love literature is to insure that it is capable of living and developing.  All manner of love devolves upon this definition, which abides in the unconscious of the species, and is true by reason of its logical form alone.

As to love, I have never seen a magazine more like a book than the Spring, 2013 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review.  This is true for two reasons.  This VQR has the permanence of a book.  Its cover is heavy and moisture-shedding.  Its pages resist the impatience of the turn.  It even loves itself and you enough to give itself a frontispiece.

Then, there is the matter of enduring importance.  Both its fiction and its non-fiction has such utility and richness that I could not ever part with it.  After the cemetery, when they return to the house to divide those things I’ve laid up, they will find this magazine surrounded by two thousand books.  They will wonder why this magazine was not thrown out long ago.  Then my children will strum the pages.  They will see its margins filled with my notes and its printing painted in a yellow which tried to be abstemious.  And then, one of them will keep it, too; and they will love it more than I did.

Now to work.  Some editors and agents will disqualify a novel or a story if they find it residing in the stacks of Kindle.  They will say that they do not use “reprints.”  They will say you are already published.  I see two motives behind this definition of a "publisher."

Their motive may be that your work has popped its cherry, and they only bed down virgins.  With these folks, the rejection is abrupt, and I hear their high pitched sniff.

Other times, the word of parting is almost tearful and reluctant.  These well-meaning people worry about the penury that comes from familiarity with lawyers.  Yes, I agree.  Stay away from that breed until you’re going down for the third time. 

On page 38 of the Spring, 2013 VQR, a Mr. Simon Lipskar, president of the  literary agency of Writer’s House, supplies us a useful definition.  To quote:  “…they talk about…the royalty that Amazon pays through KDP.  That’s not a royalty.  A royalty is when you get something from a publisher…it’s a distribution fee.”

Mr. Lipskar seems to say that “self-publishing” (on Kindle, at least), is not "publishing" at all.  It is more like “self-stocking” of a shelf left bare for you by a store.  What else in this round-robin discussion in VQR might serve to re-define Kindle as something other than a "publisher?"  They mention curating and gatekeeping as publishing jobs.  Kindle does not do that either. 

Perhaps understood (though never mentioned) in their 12-page discussion is the job function of the kindly editor.  He provides more light (than heat) for those of us who write in total isolation.  Kindle does not do this either.  Kindle does not even know that my “ones and zeroes” are within their servers.

In service to a dear lady who recently wished to publish two pieces of mine (and who reluctantly had to pass for fear of lawyers and copyright laws), I pulled up the fine print of both Kindle and the web-host of GoodStorySaloon.com.

My words:  Kindle does not claim any property rights with “plain-vanilla-Kindle.”  You may be published either electronically or hard-copy anytime parties can agree.  In the case of “Kindle Select,” you may, once again, be published hard-copy anytime parties can agree.  However, in this form (which is an elective for you, if you choose it), you are enjoined for as much as 90 days from publishing your work electronically.  After that, you are at liberty to contract out your property as you wish.

As for me, I have a quarter-million words+ on Kindle (and another 125K ready) not in any expectation of a payday.  That would be nice, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for readers to find me.  For me, Kindle is a display case.  Kindle enables any editor, publisher, or agent (who permits himself to be induced to visit my author page) to find four previews of twenty pages each.  From this, they can, in brief and in part, evaluate my work.  Because of Kindle, my work waits upon their pleasure day and night.

I say Amazon Kindle does a very big service to mankind.  For the undiscovered author, Kindle is a tool with a specific, and a proper and a productive use.  It may be that Amazon will empower the next Shakespeare, and, thereby, ratchet-up the human consciousness and condition.

If your rejection is made because your piece shows up on Kindle, I say that the slush-pile editor is either misinformed, or that he does not love literature.  On one level, there exists for any word as many meanings as there are motives.  On another level, every word has but one.

Submitted by the booktender of the Good Story Saloon on September 24, 2013.

A Review of One-Story Chapbook Volume 182: DRAWN ONWARD, a star-crossed comic by Matt Madden (August 11, 2013)

This is either a heavily illustrated story or it is a comic book with an especially heavy load of story.  I think that this attempt is an important first step.  In the last several years, I have begun adding graphics to my own stories and, this year, to my latest novel.  It is a yoking together of two art forms which was often done in years past, but abandoned in the last half century. 

I remember my chagrin as a youth when the books began to have fewer and fewer pictures, and finally none at all—perhaps not even a single one on the cover.  As we know, a good story assembles a series of pictures within the mind of the reader and, if the word count is long enough, then perhaps a world.

An example of the other side of this coin might be the evocative painting of Monet’s wife on a garden bench.  It does not require a strenuous effort to imagine the story of Camille from this.  Monet has two characters, two plot devices and a place.

Just why do we see a comic book, in place of the usual 8,000 word short story?  Is it a manifestation of insecurity about modern fiction?  If this intuition is correct, then it is ironic because the comic finally fails for the very same reason that modern fiction often does.  Drawings cannot save it.  They might make a failure richer, but they cannot replace a failure of imagination.  If the plane is going to crash, playing movies for the passengers is not enough.

Still and all, it was a worthy first effort.  But in the end, there was no story.  It does us no good to redefine a story.  It does us no good to shift responsibilities to the reader.  A story must have an arc raised by a problem.  The arc must have a shape we know and the problem must have a name we recognize.  If Odysseus had stayed with Calypso, it might have been a situation, but it never would have been an epic poem.

I shall explain these 32 pages and their 87 frames.  First, there is both narration as well as dialogue shown in the frame in the conventional manner.  This is the story of a man and woman in their twenties.  They live in a city large enough to have a subway.

It both begins and ends with an artist’s storyboard.  At the beginning, there is a hook advising us that this comic is a “double suicide note.”  It tells us that there is a span of three weeks.  It tells us that the drawings were done to keep from going crazy and also that these drawings have now caused some unnamed great harm.

At the end, we are, once again, told three things.  We read of the artist’s disappointment that she failed to capture the other character’s point of view.  She had told us only her own.  The end also tells us to read the story over again while focused on the clue that the ending of the story is only the halfway point.  Finally, this piece loses all sense of dramatic narrative and crashes into an abstraction.  The author tells us that, while the beginning of her story is the end of his, the beginning of his story is the end of her.  Even as an abstraction that is fuzzy.  End of her or end of her story?  And why talk about the end of her at the end when you began it with the promise of a double suicide?

This can only work if the story line becomes a story ellipse.  And, if it is an ellipse, then both characters are manifestations of the same person.  Just a guess.

In between the beginning and the end, there are two halves.  First, he stalks her around the city and in the subway.  In the second half, she stalks him.  In either case, one runs while the other pledges love.  There is no motivation for any of this and so the reader takes the characters to simply be a “type.”  This turns the story into a fable or a parable or whatever you want to call a story which relies for its existence upon its themes.   Except the writer does not write the end.  The writer does not write the themes.  He sends you back into the story to fetch them for yourself.

In this piece, our author actually tells the reader to go back and do his work for him.  I call such a thing “creative ambiguity.”  However, as powerful an effect as the shock of recognition is, the storyline should not gamble everything on every reader finding whatever it is the writer can’t show him or won’t show him.  When you confuse the reader, you draw a screen across the storyline.  As soon as you force him to hunt around, you’ll lose energy and you’ll lose him. 

That is asking too much 99 times out of 100.  But isn’t that the problem with fiction?  Doesn’t modern fiction “write off” the other 99 readers as stupid or lazy?  Isn’t that the dirty, unmentioned secret of it all?  Remember the Faulkner interview in the Paris Review?  Remember what Faulkner had the balls to actually say?

Lack of plot is often a failure of nerve.  Or, maybe the writer just plain wants to get the damn thing over with.  The latter is too abject to contemplate and so let us assume the former. 

The author worries that showing us the truth of it will not “work.”  So, the writer lapses into creative ambiguity.  Flash fiction often does this simply because the word count is too small.  But here, these 87 drawings were supposed to fully supplement the text.  The word must become flesh.  It must dwell among us.  It must be concrete.  Drama is the Greek word for the deed.  There must be deeds.  By their deeds, we shall know them.  Characters must actually do something.  Things must happen.  It is not enough to simply describe an expressive face.  It is not enough for the place to be evocative.  Creative ambiguity can work, but often when it does, it does in poetry.
It is also very likely that this is not the failure of the concept or of nerve or of dilligence . This may merely be a demonstration of the difficulty of the story-creation-process.  I use this metaphor:  When I write, I have to get all the paint out of the can and up on the wall.  Usually, when I finish, I discover that much of the paint that I thought I'd laid up on the wall, instead remains in the can.

No, I did not hate the piece.  It was an interesting attempt.  Kudos to Madden and to One-Story for getting the ball rolling on this way of doing things.  This could be the start of something good (an occasional something, done occasionally).

Offered by the booktender of the GOOD STORY Saloon

September 2, 2013

A Review of Danzy Senna's Short Story CAROL ANNE, from the Spring 2013 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review

The Spring 2013 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review includes a short story by Danzy Senna entitled Carol Anne.  This is a fine story and well told.  By this, I mean the story is well told.  The word count is longer than the story.  Sort of like having your shirttail out in back.

The arc of the story is sufficient for its word count of 4,500 and vice-versa.  Sufficient, just barely.  It could easily have been three times as long.  Furthermore, not all the 4,500 words are used for the story.  Some of them are diverted on behalf of motivations which I have little chance of guessing.  And if I did guess them, I do not have the robust piquancy of intellect sufficient to understand them.  None of my business anyway.  Live and let live.  But what about the story?

When I began my reading,  my initial reaction was:  “Holy cow, a conceit.  Whadayaknow about that?” Way cool.

Yes, you don’t find those much anymore.  And finally, in this one, you don’t find it here either.  It just doesn’t get used like that.  It could have, but it didn’t.  It had the makings of an Elizabethan conceit, but it never got farther off the ground than plot device or symbol.  Too bad.  The mixed-up, tricked-out suitcase could have been one for the ages.  Unfortunately, this suitcase is not the only baggage packed into the word count.

This is a story of pretty, preppy, precious, picky people piddling their lives away, pondering diurnally (alliteration skids to a halt, thud).  That’s okay.  You want to get out of Yoknapatawpha County once in a while, is this not so, mon frère et mon petite?

However, it is the dark truth of dabblers that they never finish anything, and these characters do not.  There is an ending, but not an end.  There is a ballistic arc of travel, but we never see it land.  Our ending is to watch the sun almost rise.  Fortunately, I had a piano sonata on the record player and so the overall experience was satisfying.

Now Flannery urges us to just have (I know, I split that one.) the experience and stop there.  She hisses when people begin trying to drain stories of their theme and (worse) poke around for handy aphorisms to save for the next time life’s logic fails.

The story is slowed by the extra weight of popular themes it is shanghied into carrying on behalf of the sinecures for race and homosexuality.  This boosterism is stuck all over the outside of the story like “fragile” stickers.  With 500 more words, you could have saved the whales, prevented forest fires, and condemned fracking.  Once so intoxicated, this leads to polemics and, ultimately, to manifestos, leaving the reader a sadder man, but wiser.  

The result of this was that I kept reading while putting all thoughts of the characters aside.  I started poking around for themes.  I became confused and quit.  Was I being entertained or educated?  For a moment, I wondered if I was waking up in a women's studies class somewhere. 
With those subjects thrown-in our word count needed to grow.  Or else, it needed to be cut down and this converted into a poem.  There it is:  stretch it, or shrink it.  To the rack or to the dryer with it.

So, I went outside and cut the grass and then came back in reinvigorated and prepared to do what I always do at times like these:  reread and skip over the boring parts.  

That done, I pronounced myself entertained with the remaining 3,000 words, not exactly giddy with it, but at least bemused.  I closed the heavyweight glossy covers of the VQR, hand-pumped a new five gallons of yellow highlighter, and waited to make the next journey from my tedious and pointless life and into a fashionably tedious and pointless life.

Offered by the booktender of the GOOD STORY Saloon.  August 26, 2013

A Review of THE HORSEHAIR BALL GOWN by Bobbie Ann Mason Published by Virginia Quarterly Review - Spring 2013

The Virginia Quarterly Review gives us yet another look at what it is like to be alive.  This one displaces old memories, both in me and in its characters.

It takes spare time and some bit of love to appreciate the “teacup-and-doily world” in which two old ladies live in self-imposed exile.  The reward here had to do with something that becomes a meditation as a person ages.  You begin to think about fate, and how it works, and how it is defeated, on occasion.  The Greek and Christian sides of that two-headed coin compete for your wavering faith.  Competition is good, I have been told.  Personally, I hate it.

Bobbie Ann Mason’s story resurrects an incident which might have been trivial in many other lives but which was pivotal in the girlhood of “Little Bit” and “Puss.”  Now, seventy years later, after lives of “tabbyhood,” the incident rises up with new power to ally with a new incident, which, like the older one, would have been harmless—not even worth mentioning—in nearly any other life.  But not these.  Mason’s story ends before we see it unwind, but we know it is going to kill the older sister and ruin the other.  It will be an arrow tipped with a poison compounded to kill only them.  Mason shows us that irony can have lethal persistence. 

Lunch at Harvey’s in Lexington, Ky., will remind us of the stubborn wrath of god.  If ever we thought God had grown modern, Mason shows us that still he seeks atonements from the keepers of cold altars.  And, if you should prefer the abstract, we can call it fate.

I stopped.  I remembered almost exactly where to go.  I pulled Mason’s first book off one of my shelves.  Inside was the review from Time Magazine.  It was early in 1983.  It was one of those “Geritol books” I dutifully swallowed— even in the midst of a killer business world several times harsher than almost any other businessman would ever come to know.

I knew that one day, I would write, somehow—and make use of that degree—after the kids were grown and after I had killed my final alligator.  And so back then, and for that reason, I grimly, dutifully read Bobby Ann Mason one-handed, while diapering with the other and an elbow.

No, you cannot expect a young man with the highest testosterone count ever recorded to dote on stories of the life contained in a drop of pond water.  But I am ready now.  I am not confessing that I am a dried stick.  But now, yes, it is right for me. 

Plato had something in the Republic about this (when he and his pals ran into Sophocles), but that shall be another blog, sometime.  Remind me.

Yes, I forgive myself for breezing through her first book.  However, The Horsehair Ball Gown has unlocked it and this next read will be a good one, I predict.  I shall give Shiloh and Other Stories the thoughtful, watchful reading it deserved 30 years ago, when I zoomed through it.  It just did not happen to fit my pistol back then.

Since I believe that I write about what other people think about, I suspect that this shall become a minor trend.  Boomers shall start to read.  You heard it here first.  Border’s may simply have missed it by a few years.  Such a close one!  We will call them “Battered Border’s Better Boomers.”  By the way, what do snotty literary critics mean by “Boomer angst?”

Now remember, neighbors, The Horsehair Ball Gown is not going to be like wrestling a drunk to the barroom floor and going home without a scratch to brag about it.  You are going to have to open it like you do butterfly legs, and you will take it easy.  Hear?  This is going to be like taking time with a woman that you want to see again.

I have always thought that Shakespeare is prized today for a lot of clever quipage that was likely commonplace back then.  The point is, he saved it for us, and now we give him full credit for it all.

Mason does this too.  “Going to heaven in house shoes,” and “Tiptoe Day,” and “Better than sex cake” shall now live on and on.  Mason still has those “Burns and Allen” moments.  A case in point, the old ladies politely listen to the waitress brag about her kid that goes to a magnet school.  When she leaves, they puzzle over why any sane mother would brag on a child that is retarded or disabled.  This will tend to happen to folks who have not read the newspaper for 40 years.

It seems that many years ago, when the two sisters were trying to survive their childhood (with pretty-good, but typically imperfect parents), there had been an older sister and one who had no pet name.  Geisel was wild.

The youngest sister lied to protect Geisel and the middle one would not.  They coerced Little Bit into an honesty that backfired when their father barked so hard that Geisel ran away.

Foolishly, Mom and Dad ignored her letters and so she stayed gone.  Now the incident at Harvey’s in Lexington has raised up dreams of this in Puss.  This rattles both of them.

Still looking to fix things, Little Bit cannot leave well enough alone.  Fate was laying for them in a little chain of innocence—one end of it nearly forgotten, the other as fresh as two Thursdays ago.

Offered by the Booktender of the GOOD STORY Saloon – August 24, 2013

A YEAR SPENT FACING INTO THE WIND

I stayed on the upper deck, next to the helmsman and the wheel.  She hove to briskly each time I gave the order.  Her clean lines made her responsive, and she carried as much sail as we could ballast for.  She could run as fast as any, but like all the rest, we were at the mercy of the winds.

I watched the characters working on the decks below me.  I shouted my orders and they snapped to it—each one of them seeming to think that the success of the voyage rested on his or her shoulders alone.  There were no slackers among the crew.

I had designed the ship the previous year.  I constantly puzzled over the compromises of cargo and speed.  We could not remain afloat forever.  We must reach a finish.  Yet, how much freight was enough became my constant refrain.

We were well underway through February and March.  Then the novel advanced slowly, creeping forward unnoticed like the vernal advance of the spring itself.  From time to time, it would overtake doldrums and stall, with slack sails luffing in a listless sea.  The next, it would dash forward, sailing close hauled, the canvas full, the rigging complaining against the wind.  As spring turned into May, we began making surprising progress.  Each time I turned, there was a long white wake astern for me to see.

I had written the final chapter, and so the destination was known by me all along the way.  Oddly, what was not known was whether the port we’d shipped from was home or if it was the one ahead, the one to which we bent all of our labor.

I had only a general idea of how we would get there.  There were no charts in this area of the ocean.  That was the reason that we had put to sea—to be the first to get from here to there.  Let others make the same run they had last year.  We gladly ventured to the edges of the charts, to the places marked only by the coiling of sea monsters, and by warnings written in other languages.

At the end, I shall have only the vaguest idea of what our cargo might be worth.  To the dockhands at the end, this might only be more of what they already had in plenty.

Still, the venture would never be a failure.  We would have the voyage, at least, if not a profit at the end.  We must wait to see what Report From Mali brings us.  I see the harbor ahead, a stillness beyond the whitecaps.

Offered by the Booktender of the Good Story Saloon - August 23, 2013

A Review of FINDING BILLY WHITE FEATHER, a short story by Percival Everett published in the Spring 2013 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review

Finding Billy White Feather, a short story by Percival Everett, is among those packed into your survival kit of art and ideas, and stowed between the covers of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2013.

Everett does not waste your time.  The story begins:  “Oliver Campbell had never met Billy White Feather.”  That is enough to start.  You will learn the rest along the way.

A story is like a car.  Literature is supposed to take you somewhere—when it’s not up on blocks. 

This story is not up on blocks.  It is a four hundred horsepower 4 X 4 and it took me to Everett’s destination quicker than a dog with hot sauce on its ass.  Such is the power of the story.

This time, I think I could have stayed right there, and been happy about it, and telephoned back home to tell them to sell the house and to wire me the money.  I like the way these people talk.

Oliver is a rancher, and a good one by the sounds of it.  Mrs. Campbell (Lauren) is the best wife that ever skipped happily off an altar.  The ranch folk include Hiram Shakespeare, a ranch hand named Oscar, a ranch owner named George Big Elk, Duncan Dwight (a lawyer who investigates cattle rustlers), and Sam Innis—the local vet.

I like these people.  Sam delivers the second of two meditations.

A horse gives birth to twins.  I hate to call the two foals a plot device, but in their brief lives, that is the work they do.  They are beautiful, but they don’t make it.  The vet tells us it was “failure to thrive.”  He tells Oliver:  “I’m going to do an autopsy on them, but nothing is going to turn up.  It just happens.”

The supporting cast also lives on Everett’s pages.  They include store clerks, waitresses, and the boss of a hamburger stand.  They each sound like they should.

The one person we never encounter is Billy White Feather and his is the first, and the foremost, of our two meditations in this story.  Flannery would say that any good character resists summary.  We never meet Billy, but nine characters each summarize him and each differently.  So, do we have an identity crisis here?  A crisis of the self?  Is Everett telling us that people are unknowable?  Or that their descriptions are inexpressible?

Billy shows up twice at Oliver’s ranch.  There is evidence.  He is around, yet we never see him.  Oliver never meets him.

The point is that none of those nine opinions is flattering.  Some of them sound like they would kill Billy if they had the chance, and maybe a chance to get away with it.  I have some ideas about this.  Permit me.

Drama is the Greek word for “deeds.”  In Finding Billy we don’t have many deeds.  In their place, we have meditations, and so the story line is not an arc.  It becomes a chain of incidents, at the end of which Billy White Feather is never found.  Yet the title continually reminds us that we do find him.

I wonder if Everett worried over his ending.  Maybe it came out pure and true in a single exhalation of the unconscious.  I am not saying his ending is wrong.  I am saying that I can imagine other endings.  Some of them would complete the arc of the story line.

The neat thing is that maybe a lot of different endings would work.  So, what does that say about a story that is so facile?  It might be saying something good about it, something very special.  The ancient Greeks had many versions of their fables.

At the end of the story, “a woman” tells Oliver, “Fuck you,” and slams the door.  Then a five sentence coda, then oblivion.

We never find Billy White Feather.  Nonetheless, we find much else.  Some of it we know, without knowing how we know.  And some of what we know has no name.  The reader must become a mystic.  The reader must find the theme and provide an end.

This is an example of “creative ambiguity.”  This is an instance of where the reader does the work, if he wishes, if he can.  The ineffable is a difficult subject for an impatient mystic.

Sometimes an idea is like a baby bird.  If the author holds it in his hands, it flies away.  Some ideas resist becoming concrete.  Maybe motivation helps.

We have an ending, but not an end.  In place of the story’s end, we have a meditation.  You expect a meditation with a poem.  You expect a story to have an end.

Everett cannot (or will not) come out and say it.  He has to make you come out and say it.  The end is up to you.  Everett provides us an ellipsis (a workplace for us to finish it).  Americans are impatient mystics. I'd rather not wait for Wakan Tanka to appear to me at the end of a buffalo dance.  I’d have to change my life so I could read my stories.

There might be an end if the main character had a motive equal to his actions.  Oliver drives into the next state trying to find Billy White Feather.  He has every reason not to go.  Everett’s problem is that Oliver has no good reason to make the trip.  Everett is messing with my willing suspension of disbelief. 

I’d like to see Oliver assume that someone had murdered Billy.  I’d like this to be a part of the finishing coda, just after the door slams in his face.  Everett has taken pains to show nine characters with opinions of Billy ranging from dislike to hatred.  There would be no shortage of suspects.  All we need is nine more sentences, earlier in the story—each a little different, yet each foreshadowing menace.  This provides a motive for Oliver’s obsession with finding Billy White Feather.

We don’t have to have blood stains—just complete the story’s arc.  Maybe Billy has tricked Oliver into driving far away so that he can appear at his ranch at the end (when Loren is alone, a la Hitchcock).  Maybe Oliver can complete the arc by unwittingly bringing a message to the story’s final place and final character.

I’d like to think that Everett wrote it with a murder.  I’d like to think that the Virginia Quarterly Review (God bless ‘em) turned up their nose and said, “We don’t do murders around here.  Perhaps you should turn this in to Ellery Queen, Mr. Everett.”  I’d like to think that Everett is a practical man and said, “Fine, fine.  I’ll revise and send it back in tonight.”  Everett wants to thrive.  The vet was right.  Life persists like that.

I wonder if Oliver is Everett's alter ego.  Percival and Oliver each have three syllables.  Hiram Shakespeare addresses Oliver as brown man.  Maybe one of Everett's great-granddads was a Buffalo Soldier, or maybe Everett wishes he had been.  That would be very cool.  Even just wishing it is cool.

Oh, before I leave you.  Did you know that a “white feather” is a conventional symbol in Europe?  Was I supposed to be meditating on this during the read?  All things considered, it remains a remarkable story and any problems with it might be mine as a reader.  Perhaps I am just an oaf.  There are many of us.  Barbarians are not at the gate, only oafs.  Can we have a place at Mr. Everett’s table, too?  We want to thrive, too.

Offered by the booktender of the Good Story Saloon (August 18, 2013)