Pine Grove Gothic (eBook)

(A Drugged Family)

Curtis Martin (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
169 Seiten
Curtis Martin (Verlag)
661000011600-3 (EAN)

Infos

Pine Grove Gothic is more about the times than it is the story itself. The characters live, react to, and disintegrate in the world of rampant drug use in a rural area of Appalachia. Hidden from the general public due to poor media coverage, this novel attempts to break open the lives of people, families, and children affected by this scourge. This is not a happy, hopeful, or moral uplifting story. It is fierce and honest, tragic, and there is not positive outcome.

Pine Grove Gothic revolves around Raymond Duvall and his family and their lives in the Pine Grove Trailer Park. Raymond is an angry alcoholic. Lynn is addicted to heroin. Raven and Pup are their children who struggle with the addictions that drive their parents from day to day, hour by hour. The trailer park is a menagerie of characters from other drug addicts, to the morbidly obese, and those with chronic medical conditions. But this isn't exceptional, it's everyone's reality. There is the murder of Mrs. Keirns. There is the need to get more heroin. There is the tremendous stress of profound poverty.

Pine Grove Gothic is about everyone's struggle in the milieu of drugs and what it takes to get them. The traditional roles of husband, wife, and family are shattered by this ever- present struggle. Since childhood, a childhood filled with abuse, Lynn knows what she has to do to get her required fix. Raymond tries his best to fulfill her needs, but his love of alcohol since the age of twelve keeps him from providing for Lynn and his children. Raven, nine, is her brother's protector, shielding him as best she can from their tough reality; from their father. Pup, seven, is delayed by the effects of drugs and alcohol during pregnancy. He is on potent medication to curb is aggression and ADHD. He finds his solace in his sister, the stray dog, Roy, and the woods and creek that run along the trailer park. The two siblings witness and are victims of their parents addiction; suffering from lack of food, to being in the trailer while Raymond makes methamphetamine, to finding Lynn overdosed on a variety of lethal drugs. In the end the Duval family dissolves under the overwhelming pressure.

Pine Grove Gothic is for the reader who wants action and a compelling story line and not in five hundred or a thousand pages. The murder of Mrs. Keirns is brutal. Sex is without love. The story is current but generational. The role of legal and illegal drug use affects us all. When Lynn is asked by a TV reporter what will stop her addition, Lynn relies, 'Probably a casket.'

Textauszug

Chapter Three

There are nearly fifty trailers in the Pine Grove Trailer Park. There is an entrance and an exit. An asphalt lane runs from one end to the other. Mrs. Keirns lives near the entrance, near the park office; Raymond toward the exit. The heat and humidity are oppressive. A sweat breaks out on Raymond’s skin as it does on anybody outside. That’s why most are inside, those not at work. There was generally more activity at the beginning and end of the month when the rent comes due and new people move in. Consequently, Raymond only knew a few of his fellow pinegrovians. Pine Grove catered to a transient clientele. The Duvall’s are one of the more established family’s in Pine Grove. But Mrs. Keirns is the last of the original residents, having moved in with her late husband, Gerald in 1978. Being the middle of the month, Raymond is 0surprised to see a poorly mufflered Ford pickup truck pull in up ahead of him loaded with somebody’s world of a bed frame, washer and dryer, TV, sundry items. The truck is dark blue, but it has a white passenger side door. There is a woman at the wheel. She seemed to be driving and looking for an address or a landmark with her head looking left and right and working a standard transmission. There is no one in the passenger seat or anyone standing in the bed trying to hold the household furnishings down against the highway wind. From what he can see at the distance is she’s blond and thin. He puts a hand up to his brow to shade against the sun and better see which empty trailer it was headed too. Pine Grove doesn’t have any pines to block the sun and provide shade. They were cut down years ago when people complained about the thick sap getting on their cars and homes. The twenty-year-old F 150 pulls up to the park office.

He’s thirsty for a beer, has been for days. He loves to drink. The nerve pills he takes, the Ativan and Xanax bars help. But alcohol has its own special quality. And mixed with the psychotropic duo; now that’s a tranquil time; till somebody wants to start trouble. Life would be a great deal nicer, easier if he could use the EBT card for beer and whiskey. The government doesn’t understand what life is like for a man with nerves like his. Pup and Raven are calmly playing with the other kids. Raven waves at him and asks him if he wants to get in. “I can’t, honey. I gotta go see Mrs. Keirns.” And keeps on walking by. Pup ducks underwater. The trailers are quite or there’s a small stir of activity. He smells pot at one. Hears a soap opera on TV in another. Someone is frying up lunch. Bald headed, Curly, lives a rental. He weighs over six hundred pounds and can’t get through the door any longer. The local volunteer fire department will have to cut him out of the tin box like he was in a wrecked car when he has to go to the hospital next time. Curly’s wife is half his size. She waddles about, keeping a plate in Curly’s face all day long. He eats a dozen eggs in the morning; Hot Pockets till lunch. Curly’s fat kids run around the trailer park with something in their hands to eat. Pepsi is their milk. Lonny lives in another of the tightly grouped trailers. There’s a ramp up to the front door. He has emphysema and doesn’t have the air necessary to go to the store even with his bottle of oxygen. He started smoking at ten finding tobacco helped take away the hunger away he often had as a kid. His wife, Elaine, died of congestive heart failure last year. Lonny, the fifty-six-year-old, sits in there alone, waiting his turn to stop breathing while smoking cigarettes and a nasal cannula up his nostrils. On the stand next to his recliner is an inhaler, a breathing treatment when he needs one; often. When the breathing gets really bad, like there’s cotton stuffed in his ruined lungs, he dials nine-one-one, about twice a month. When Lonny’s wife died at four in the morning, he had come and got him, using what air he had to get himself across the trailer park on his motorized scooter. To this day, Raymond doesn’t understand why Lonny had done that before dialing nine-one-one. Once he had given the chronic lunger a cigarette. A couple of others he knows in the aluminum homes he strolls by, but for the most part if someone lives in Pine Grove more than six months, they’re homesteaders. Davis Lowery sits in the shade under his carport. The mid-twenties boyman is talking on a cell phone smoking a cigarette. Davis has his skinny legs crossed and chats and giggles, puffing between chuckles. He wears t frayed jean shorts that dare sight of his crotch, orange flip-flops, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off. The shirt is unbuttoned and tied in a knot at his narrow waist. Davis has a new hair color since Raymond last saw him. It’s aqua blue. Davis waves at Raymond without interrupting his coy conversation. Raymond lifts the tip of the weed eater in reply. Fucking faggot cocksucker. His buddy, Jackie, had shown him Davis’ craigslist posting, ‘M4M’ and a picture of his pink, erect dick sticking out from a pair of thong underwear. The ad went onto say, ‘Sissy boy likes to be told what to do. Can host’. There are no toys in the bed of the pickup truck. He doesn’t see anything manly like a toolbox as he nosily passes by the front of the heat-radiating, oily smelling pickup. He thought about slowing down his pace, lingering a bit until the new Pine Grove resident reappeared from the office with Wanda showing where to go. Wanda Van Dyke has the only double wide trailer in the park. The wider body trailer serves as her home (rent free) and office. But the opportunity to get some cold beer wins out over meeting the thin blond. Two bearded men have a Volkswagen Jetta up on blocks. The silver sedan is crumpled on the right fender. Raymond doesn’t know them by name. Can’t say if he ever had seen them before. One wears bib overalls with no underwear visible on the sides where the three buttons are unfastened. He hands tools to the other in jeans, no shirt. Both have a skin grimy from crawling on the ground and grease and oil you get from putting on a set of brakes. The one in bib overalls notices Raymond walk by but says or nods nothing. The one in bib overalls has a sweaty bear belly and has a black bandana across the forehead. The one working under the German diesel has a summer season Mountain Dew cap turned around backwards so the bill doesn’t get in the way. Tattoos randomly splotch their skin without much thought to placement or theme. A skull. A Rebel flag. Live Free. There are two sun-warmed 40’s, half drank, on the warming asphalt far enough away not to be knocked over. There are two registered sex offenders. One was caught with a six-year-old boy. The other had had an extended relationship with a cousin who had turned him when she turned fifteen. Raymond doesn’t know what he would he would do if he caught any of them or anyone else messing with his kids. Lynn had told him what it had been like for her. It stays with you longer after the diddling is over with. There are American flags, POW/MIA black and silver flags, NASCAR and black and white checkered flags. 24 and 3 is prominent. Rebel flags flutter in the wind. The odd mix of patriotic and sentimental loyalties hangs from masts attached to the side of trailers or adorns the windows of cars.

Mrs. Keirns’ mobile home is a mobile home, like they were first meant to be, heavy gauge metal; a true home on wheels, you could move to the location with other modern mobile homes. Pictures of young families grilling out, sitting around the TV. Father with a pipe reading the paper. Her trailer is yellow with white trim. She gets it power washed every Spring. And despite being seventy-eight years old Mrs. Keirns puts in her own flowerbeds but must have someone cut the grass once a week and shovel the snow in the winter. The wheels and axles that brought the trailer to Pine Grove were removed upon arrival. The trailer sits on a cement foundation. It is solidly set. About the only real evolution from its original look has been going from rabbit ears, antennae, to satellite dish. Small changes but Mrs. Keirns knew something very important had changed with every new “improvement”. Raymond stands in front of the trailer. He feels a bead of sweat roll down his spine, cross the elastic waistband, and run down the crack of his underwear less ass. The louvers on the front windows are closed which surprises Raymond. The teased-up gray-haired widow usually tried to keep a breeze blowing through her home from front to back before she turned on the air conditioning and wasting electricity. Gerald Keirns died over a decade ago. First a stroke and then a heart attack. It was in his side of the family. They were high school sweethearts. Mr. & Mrs. Keirns had two children, Robert in nineteen fifty-seven. June in nineteen sixty. The year they all moved into the new trailer park. There was a pool and a tennis court. And a community center where there was square dancing and every holiday was celebrated; fireworks on the Fourth of July, Santa at Christmas, and a sunrise service at Easter. Mrs. Keirns often told him stories of the old days when everyone knew each other and cared about each other. Robert lived in Georgia and has sugar. June is a school teacher getting ready to retire with her husband Joe. It also surprises him that Mrs. Keirns isn’t about doing something. By this time of the day she is dressed in a dress, powdered, and pink rouge on her wrinkled cheeks. Her white Chevy Malibu is under the carport, spotless and polished. Coming around the rear fender, Raymond sees the front door open.

Raymond has been dealing with Mrs. Keirns for almost three years. Their relationship started when he was walking by by chance (Lynn had a visitor) and saw her struggling with a bag of mulch from the trunk of her car. There was iced tea, a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.6.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: addiction • Crime • Drugs • Family conflict • Law • Poverty • Rural