MY FICTION

MY FICTION

STORYTELLING

I hope I’m not abusing Latin too much when I call our species homo fabulis—the storytelling hominid—although it is likely unfair to exclude earlier members of our family from this activity. Telling a tale, our most defining characteristic, might have begun with a mother comforting a child saying father would be home soon with meat or a hunter trying to impress the girls or the band with his exploits. I tend to believe it started while we were sitting around a fire in a cave or on the savannah and one of us asked perhaps the most important question ever asked after, “Where do we come from?” which was, “And then what happened?”

The townspeople of Solvidado regretted the senseless loss of life when the lovers, Thomas and Penelope, drove their wagon over the cliff to escape pursuers, but not nearly so much as the disappearance of the gold they had stolen. Ever since the tragedy, treasure hunters have searched Solvidado and its environs for the hidden gold.  

A hundred years later in a hotel, April, a new bride, prepares to take her own life. Her husband, Philip, just stormed out of the room in a rage. Ravela, a demon from April’s past, has reappeared and convinced her that the only cure for her hopelessness is death. But then Aquino, a cat burglar, breaks into the bridal suite and interrupts her preparations. He persuades April to delay her suicide for the night. He has the strange idea that she is uniquely able to help him find the treasure by reliving the events leading up to the pursuit over the cliff. They exit the hotel off the third story balcony.

Meanwhile Philip has met Jacinto, the ghost of a Portuguese undertaker, a witness to the tragedy, who assures him the gold is where an honest person would hide it. Jacinto offers to guide him through Solvidado and narrate the story of Thomas while Philip tries to solve the riddle.

April and Philip each set off on harrowing nighttime journeys that take them into the previous century where they encounter the unusual love affair between Thomas, a man who lives well but has no apparent source of income, and Penelope, a young woman who always wears a veil in public . April and Philip each discover in their time travel different pieces of the puzzle of the missing gold that can only be made sense of if they reunite. Among the pieces they have to put together are a child lost in Paris, a master who is a servant, a locked door to a cold room, a rancher with a scarred lip out for revenge, a high-stakes poker game for the hand of a young woman, a foggy night, a burning wagon, a Portuguese undertaker and his pig.

However, before the mystery is solved and the treasure discovered, April must first teeter on the edge of the same cliff and wrestle with her demon Ravela.

Marcela, a shy and reserved young Mexican woman, is shattered when her brother, Raul, and her fiancé, Alberto, are killed in a shootout with the police. The police claim they were running drugs. She knows that is a lie.

Unable to rebuild her life in Mexico, Marcela crosses the border. She glimpses at a distance a man on a street in East LA who resembles her brother. The man disappears when she approaches. Not wanting to relive her grief, Marcela refuses to believe Raul might be alive. Then she sees him again. Compelled to unravel the mystery, Marcela searches the drug-infested neighborhoods of Los Angeles,  questioning those who might know—the dangerous, the crazy, the marginal—for clues about her brother. Raul's enemies capture Marcela, brutally interrogate her, then use her as bait to catch her brother. The suspense culminates in a brief harrowing encounter with Raul.

Marcela travels into the Sierras of northern Mexico where several cartels are battling Raul and his army of the indigenous mountain people over the control of the opium fields. She wants to plead with him to stop the drug war that is threatening their family and engulfing the region. Marcela is uncertain whether she will meet the dear brother she has always loved or a monster who kills without remorse. Her survival hinges on whether Raul receives her as his beloved sister or treats her as an enemy.

A dark suspense novel of human evil and redemption.

We all have something to hide, even those of us who appear to be upstanding citizens. For Nick and his High School friends, their secret was big. Craig’s murder wasn’t perfect—Evelyn was the first to drive in the knife, but then he passed it on to the others. Afterwards, Nick made sure they did a damn good coverup. He was certain no incriminating evidence, much less anything that could survive twenty years submerged in the lake, remained with Craig’s body. Why then does the detective want to interview him and his friends? Has somebody betrayed them? Newly married and a different person from the maladjusted teenager who participated in the murder, Nick has a lot to lose.

What begins for Detective Homer Hamlin as a puzzling timeline in a cold case of a boy’s disappearance turns into a harrowing investigation into a group of High School friends  who calling themselves the ‘band of brothers’ dared each other to confront their greatest fears. Did Craig make the mistake of wanting to join the group? Was his murder just another dare? Obsessed with finding the evidence that would connect the band to Craig’s disappearance, Hamlin explores the nearby desert and mountains. He finds a campsite and an abandoned house where they engaged in their extreme trials. Yet the proof of Craig’s involvement in these games eludes him for four years until he happens upon an isolated lake. Believing he has enough evidence to pressure them to confess, Homer calls Nick and the other ‘brothers’ in for an interview.

Excepting Evelyn who is rumored to have died in Mexico, the band reunites to plan how to handle the interviews with Hamlin. As long as they don’t break under questioning and confess, it is doubtful the detective has sufficient evidence to make a case against them. But then things go terribly wrong. Circumstances demand more victims in order to save themselves.

When he calls the ‘brothers’ in for interviews, Homer Hamlin little suspects the evil dynamic that compelled the band to murder Craig twenty years before would also reappear and go after what he holds dearest.

Nor does Nick anticipate the final trial that takes his greatest fear to the extreme and which he is unlikely to survive.

THROWING THE BABY OUT IN THE LITERAL SENSE

Sometimes you just have to get out of the way of a story. This comes from Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee’s reminiscences of his childhood in a village in the Cotswold.

“But secretly, silently, aided by unknown forces, I hung on—though it was touch and go. My most perilous moment came when I was eighteen months old, at the hand of a neighbor, Mrs. Moore. My mother was in bed for the birth of my brother—we were all born at home in those days. Mrs. Moore had been called in to help, scrub the children and cook them soups. She was a jolly, eye-bulging, voodoo-like creature, who took charge of us with a primitive casualness. While still in her care I entered a second bout of pneumonia. What followed I was told much later.

“It seems that brother Tony was but two days born and Mother just beginning to take notice. Eleven-year-old Dorothy came upstairs to see her, played awhile with the baby, nibbled some biscuits, then sat in the window and whistled

‘How are you getting on?’ Mother asked.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Dorothy.

‘You behaving yourselves?’

‘Yes, Ma.’

‘And what you all up to?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘Where’s Marjorie, then?’

‘Out in the yard.’                                       ‘

‘And Phyllis?’

‘She’s peeling spuds.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Harold is cleaning his trolley. And Jack and Francis is sitting on the steps.’

‘And Laurie?...How’s Laurie?’

‘Oh, Laurie’s dead.’

‘What!’

‘He turned yellow. They’re laying him out…’

Giving one of her screams, Mother leapt out of bed.

‘No one’s going to lay out Laurie!’

Gasping, she groped her way downstairs and staggered towards the kitchen; and lo, there I was, stretched naked on the table, yellow just as Dorothy said. Mrs. Moore humming gaily was sponging my body as if preparing a chicken for dinner.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ My mother shouted.

‘Poor boy, he’s gone,’ crooned Mrs. Moore. ‘Gone fled to the angels—thought I’d wash him for the box—just didn’t want to bother you, mum.’

You cruel wicked woman! Our Laurie ain’t dead—just look at his healthy colour.’

Mother plucked me from the table, wrapped me up in a blanket, and carried me back to my cot—cursing Mrs. Moore for a snatcher of bodies and asking the saints what they thought they were up to. Somehow, I lived—though it was a very near thing, a very near thing indeed. So easy to have succumbed to Mrs. Moore’s cold sponge. Only Dorothy’s boredom saved me.”

From In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.