"Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood"

So, I'm often distracted by grand ideas (in length and requisite effort if not potential quality)such that one overlaps the other and every few weeks I find myself planning some protracted novel. Perhaps this is my inability to create neat little capsules of fiction. Below is the a three or four page excerpt of something that I'm currently kicking around . . I think this might end up being a ten page chapter that works as a stand-alone.


Bob and I had driven all day through the water. Passed with the secure herd of a few other tail-lights and destinations, down into scummy, ankle-high brine. Watched the others, no license plates or convenient signs to warn us, pull off onto higher-ground or make U-turns with spraying rooster tails. Bob and I moved like the water; naturally, bound by the same hills. When twilight became actual darkness, we were alone with the whooshing beneath us and the disorientation of our headlights beaming out over the reflection.
I sort of dozed. Considered the claims that if we persevered there was a place we could catch a plane. Bob, moaning in a way I'd learned was the wrath of delirium tremens, stopped the car and swung the door open. He stood in the metallic ding of the running car for a moment, waiting, and finally hurled the last few slugs of dried bagel in his stomach. The water at his feet gushed forward from the momentum of our car, and little whirlpools of salt-water and his vomit spun around his pantlegs.
Somewhere around halfway, we saw the neon smudge of civilization ahead and sighed. The white rip of knuckles on Bob's left hand relaxed and moved to rub his forehead. The place was called Ciro's, written in lit, cursive red. It was a diner, familiar-looking, perched some thirty feet above the road. He wheeled the car into the sloping parking lot without conversation.
There was one customer sitting at the grubby counter, pensively shoveling apple pie into his mouth with one hand and stuttering a drum solo with the fingers of the other. A ruddy waitress, uniformed in a puke green number with black trim, said something to him that thinly veiled her disgust. She turned to us, practically a girl, and asked in her twang if she could “ha'p” us.
We took seats at the counter, at Bob's gesture, and exchanged experienced hellos to the other patron. Me banging the dandruff out of my hat on the flat of my hand. Amber brought us coffee and a nearly invisible cook in the place's nethers waved a spatula at us. It smelled like the docks.
“How much further is the water?” Bob asked, to everyone.
“Fuck if I know,” our neighbor said “I been here almost a month now waiting for goddamn Shevitz to pick my ass up”
“Who's Shevitz?” I asked. Jesus Christ.

“Shevitz is the fucking Jew that stranded me out here in the goddamn ocean without a truck.” He replied, reaching for a cigarette, his grip fierce on the soft-pack.
“Hardly answered the man's question, did'ja Tom?” Amber said, moving to fill our coffee cups, now emptied by one swallow.
“
If you want to know how far the water goes to the south, truth is, I don't really know. It's been here, right in front of the diner, for a coup'a years now. But things changed . . . .”

“Does it get deeper?”

“Not too sure, this time of year. Depends on a lot of things. Only one way to find out . . .”

Bob and I ordered Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato sandwiches with french-fries, though I didn't know how we were going to pay for it. The cook in the back, just white eyes buried in a brown face, looked delighted.

“I tell you what,” said Tom “I'd be half-inclined go with you. But I don't know as I give a shit anymore.” He was smoking now, his second course in a cycle that must have gone on all day.

“We've got to get to Marston.” I said, first declarative out of my mouth in hours. I felt the twist of drying saliva in my throat, pulled my dingy hood up onto my head. “Trying to catch a plane.”

The cook in back laughed, and stopped himself on the heel of his palm. His eyes apologized.

“Don't know if that's going to happen . . not with what I've heard comin' outta Marston.” Amber said.

“Well, we've gotta try.” I say, “No other real options, the way Bob and I see it.”

Tom nods his head, but won't deign to probe our intent. We may be fugitives or refugees, he didn't care. He pulled at his beard a little bit.
“Worth a try, out on the coast you never know.” Tom said. He had settled a bit. I wanted to credit the cigarette; but he looked at me.
Bob was flush, his forehead now tight wrinkles of anticipation. He took a tone livelier then he'd had in days. It had been a rough morning, followed by a trying day, and finally it seemed we might get some rest. He started to tell Tom and Amber the shit we'd slogged through that day, stopped short when he realized they knew the travails better than he and then winced and shielded his eyes from the fluorescent lights with his left hand.
“You alright?” Tom asked. The way a trucker asks another; I saw him saying the same thing to strung-out truckers in slimey South Dakota shower stalls.
“mkay. Just a little woozy. You,” He looked at Amber, cupping his left eye now like it had caught shrapnel. “Wouldn't happen to have any booze, would you?”
“Sorry,” she poured herself coffee, “Tom drank just about all of it in the first week. You need a drink that bad?”
“Yes.” I said, he'd be embarassed to say it himself.
Bob was now rolling his forehead on the cold metal trim around the counter. A dull moan and the word “ . . .libris”. Amber came around to our side of the counter, pulled up a chair to include the three of us, and pulled some items from her apron.

“You want to smoke some of this? Its not booze, but it might keep out the shakes.”

We did. And she broke up a cigarette and mixed a few pinches of brownish marijuana in. The cook gave a little exclamatory. The sizzle of bacon mingling with the pot and the dead fish smell of the sea.

“Frankly, since Tom. You boys are two of the only people we've seen . How many guys came in here the other night Tom?” She began, as though we'd provoked her.

“”s about a week ago Amber, or more. There was three of 'em. Sons of bitches threw us a goddamn pity parade.” Tom had now removed his trucker hat and swiveled his chair around to point his crotch at Amber's head.

Bob moved to scrape a chair across the dirty floor, Amber had stopped mopping more than an arm's reach from the counter. And the cook, a Peruvian I think, walked out with an identical plate in each hand and set them near us. He pulled a chair around to get a seat inside the circle and Amber lit her pregnant joint as the power winked out and wound back up. Bob eyed the sandwich; later he would tell me that he saw maggots writhing inside of it and didn't know if they were real or he was dead. He waited for me to take a bite and dry-heaved once sharply.
Respite often leads perspective by the ear; and as I ate the day's first meal the impetus for all this dragging ourselves along water and Bob's puking his brains out coalesced in my stomach. A warm ball of purpose.

“C'mon Bob, you've got to eat this man. You need something on your stomach.”
“He going to be alright?” Tom asked me, finding something in himself stirring after a long stretch of the same.
“I'll be fine,” Tom said. “It comes in waves, and builds until I can't handle it anymore. I'm going to lay on the floor.” He exhaled and raised the joint for anyone to grab, purposely avoiding eye contact that might terrify him. When he landed on the ground, not delicately but with an “umph”, the sweat ran from his head onto the tile and left a smudge with the texture of his hair.
“What's it like?” Amber asked. “Describe it.”
“He's really better at that sort of thing,” Bob looked at me with one eye, and then back toward the floor. “But it's . .uhh . . the worst hangover of all time. And you see things that make your skin crawl.”

“What are you seeing right now?” Amber asked, the tail end of a hit.
“I'm seein' . . .I'm surrounded by pigeons, and they're mouthing my childhood nickname.”
“Jesus Christ.” Said the Peruvian.
“I'm seeing a . . Tom's battered ex-wife leaning over his shoulder, wafting in his cigarette smoke . .” Bob has his head in his hands, covering his eyes. Tom looks wary, snuffs out the cigarette. But he doesn't say a word.