Villains from the Gallows Tree -- index




This is the complete novel, which I had been posting previously in segments.
This is a series of stories in which I chose to run somewhat out of order, using the seasons as an organizing principle rather than chronological. So, in effect, some stories foreshadow others in the sequence with only the first and last chapter meant to open and close the volume.
This is a story about my relationship to my childhood friend. We were not good kids -- although we later turned out to be half way decent adults.
I excluded a novella that includes these same characters partly because of length. I will publish this later. This collection is a draft and I will be publishing a print edition after it has been reedited. Any editor who wishes to help will welcome.


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

02 - Cleaning Day

Image
Dave can’t say where he comes from, because he comes from all over, a shiftless gypsy life he can’t always remember, one cheap apartment bleeding into another so that sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night forgetting which one he is in or just where he can go to find the bathroom. Not that his mother wanted to keep moving, she just does, she loses a job, money runs out, and they move before the landlord comes to collect rent they don’t have, finding a place just as bad in another part of Paterson, loaded with other apartments and other landlords, if not other jobs. Dave says she moved them to Clifton because she didn’t want him to get killed going to the schools in Paterson, Dave being big but not tough, on the verge of going to high school where no white boy like him in Paterson is likely to survive. But Clifton isn’t Paterson , and people on this side of Crooks Avenue don’t like renting to family’s like Dave’s, even when they’re white, and want too much whe...
Read more

08 -- Memorial Day

Image
We sweep into Weasel Brook Park at full speed, sometimes playing Robin Hood, other times Tonto and the Lone Ranger, or Frank and Jesse James. But today being Memorial Day, we both play soldiers or spies, Dave wearing a tattered American flag like a bandana; I wear the soft army hat my eldest uncle wore on his last trip back from his war in Korea. Dave’s dad doesn’t come home from the veteran’s hospital often or for long; he drinks when he does and won’t talk about his time in the war. My uncle – my mother’s oldest sibling – doesn’t talk about it either, a tough man, who likes to lecture me at night, refused to kill people and so went to war with a first aid kit instead of a carbine, fixing those who he could fix, trying not to let the soldiers in his care lose too many toes and fingers to the cold when he could do nothing to fix the bullets imbedded in them, even when he got trapped in a cave behind enemy lines for three days, running out of medicine and hope, living with...
Read more

01 - Cigarettes and coffee

Image
The coffee drips down Dave’s long fingers like brown blood, his mother’s fingernails pressed into the palms of his hands along with the coins like the Stigmata, this tall boy with limbs so long he looks stretched out, a rubber band pulled until he cannot regain his original shape, his face narrow, sharp, nearly fish-like with each eye set on each side of his head, his lips as thin as ribbon candy, vanishing when pressed Yet, when he stops to look at me he looks like a warped reflection of me in a carnival mirror, the color of his eyes just like mine, the look in his eyes just like mine, curious and sad, his drunken father lost in their depths just the way my mad mother is lost in mine. His trip takes him diagonally across Crooks and Vernon from an apartment near the liquor store, mine takes me the length of the block down from Lakeview, and we both order the same thing: cigarettes and coffee. Cigarettes and coffee, and candy if the store keeper hands us any change. Dave...
Read more