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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Paper
Trails by Pete Dexter |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Characters Pete Dexter’s
latest book, Paper
Trails, is perfect to have around when you don’t have a lot of time to
read. This collection of 82 of his newspaper columns allows a reader to appreciate
his masterful writing in small doses. Where Dexter excels is in capturing
character and personality in a few words or phrases. Here’s an excerpt, all
of Chapter 4, pp. 12-14: The last
I’d heard of Low Gear and Minus, one of them had shot the other one in the
leg, trying to kill a pig that they’d raised from a baby in their backyard in
The plan
was for the pig to end up bacon. Like most things Minus and Low Gear touch,
the pig ended up in the want ads, damaged but alive, and Minus and Low Gear
ended up sellers in a buyers’ market and lost $60, not counting labor and the
medical bills. It didn’t do much for the friendship, either. A month
after Minus stopped limping, though, he and Low Gear bought a rug-shampoo
business. They found it in the want ads. It came with shampoo, a shampoo
machine, a 1968 Ford van with “Flash Rug Cleaners” written on both sides and
a list of twenty-five loyal clients who, Low Gear said, were “warrantied not to see dogshit
on their feet before they halfway to the kitchen.” They felt
so good about going into business again that they decided to take a vacation.
They loaded an undetermined number of cases of Busch beer into the van, found
some hopeless teenage drug addicts with names like Jennifer and Stephanie,
and headed south for Low Gear
had found the girls, and Minus studied them in the rear-view mirror. “Nobody
back there is married, is it?” he said. Minus had
been shot twice in his life, and now there were two things he was afraid of,
married women and pigs. He had been married once himself, and sometime, if
the right song was on the jukebox and he had enough beer in him, he’d tell
Low Gear that he still loved her. Low Gear
used teenagers and never told Minus a thing. And after the drinking was over,
Minus always felt a little ashamed and wished Low Gear would confess
something too. The boys
never made it to They
stopped just short at the Saddle Bunch Keys. By the time they got there, it
was the middle of the morning and two cases of beer were gone. The empty cans
rolled across the floor every time Minus pulled the van over for somebody to
go to the bathroom. One of the girls thought they sounded like church bells. They found
a spot on one of the beaches. Low Gear had to carry the cooler because Minus
said it hurt his leg to put weight on it. The girls sat in shallow water, feeling
the sand moving, and every now and then one of them would scream, “I’m
falling.” Low Gear
and Minus stayed close to the beer for an hour, and then Low Gear got up to
swim. It was a clear, calm day, and he swam a long way out and a long way
back. He was about a hundred yards offshore when the jellyfish got him. The
tentacles went around his hand and arm, they touched his neck. He’d never
been hit by a jellyfish before and he was surprised how much they stung. He
was more surprised a minute later when he noticed it was getting harder to
breathe. There were
other people on the beach, and some of them had seen it happen. By the time
Low Gear got his feet on the bottom, several of them were waiting there to
rub sand into his arms and neck. By that
time Low Gear was weak and dizzy and white. He was bent Over the arm,
fighting a middle-aged woman for his hand. “The only way to get the sting out
is to urinate on it,” she said. “Really, it is.” Low Gear
was pulling for his air now, it sounded to the woman like he was crying. “I
know it hurts,” she said, “but the thing is to urinate right on the burns. . .” The beer
can on Minus’s chest fell over and woke him up. He shaded his eyes and saw a
small crowd walking Low Gear up from the water. He fell twice getting there, and when
he looked into Low Gear’s eyes, they weren’t focusing. “What the hell?” he
said. The woman said, “A jellyfish stung him.
The only thing that helps is either vinegar or somebody has to urinate on it. . .“ Minus leaned in to help him and Low Gear
talked in his ear. “I’m in allergic shock,” he said, “and
someplace around here there is a woman who keeps trying to piss on my arm.” One of the teenagers drove the van
across Low Gear was dying and he knew it.
Minus was holding him against his shoulder in the front seat, and slowly, Low
Gear made a sentence. “You tell . . . if this doesn’t work
out . . . you tell Mona . . .” The van was off the bridge and coming
to the emergency room entrance, still going eighty-five miles an hour. Minus
leaned closer. “What?” he said. “Tell me who the fuck is Mona . . .” Low Gear said, “Tell Mona . . .” and
went to sleep. The emergency room doctor and two
nurses ran outside to get him. They’d run inside a second before that when
they’d seen a Flash Rug Cleaners van coming at them sideways, forty miles an
hour. They gave him oxygen
and put adrenaline into his chest, and Low Gear lived. He spent the night in
intensive care, and the doctor told him that being drunk had probably slowed
down the allergic reaction and saved his life. In the morning they
let him go. He walked across the parking lot to a 7-Eleven
store and bought a six-pack of Busch, and was half through it when the
van pulled into the parking lot. The girls were asleep
in the back. Minus drove back over the Low Gear looked at him
and smiled. “You know what the doctor said?” “No, what?” Low Gear reached back
into the cooler and found a cold beer. “He said this shit saved my life.” There are doxens more columns like this one in Paper
Trails, each one a pleasure to read. Steve Hopkins,
March 23, 2007 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Paper
Trails.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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