Dust (eBook)

Patricia Danaher, Noel De Sousa (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
184 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3178-2717-5 (ISBN)

Infos

DUST is a searing portrait of working-class America in the 1950s-a time when factories promised prosperity but delivered poison, when small towns held you close enough to suffocate. It's the story of a young man choosing between inherited defeat and the courage to want more. Between saving everything for someday and living recklessly today. For readers who loved the stark beauty of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the quiet desperation of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, and the fierce tenderness of Kent Haruf's Plainsong-DUST is an unforgettable debut about the price of staying, the cost of leaving, and the moment you realize you deserve a life that doesn't kill you.

Patricia Danaher is a writer, journalist, mythologist, and editor. As a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Patricia has covered the entertainment industry for years, developing an insider's perspective on Hollywood. Patricia is the editor of two acclaimed anthologies: Seven Deadly Sins and Once Upon a Fairytale. Her award winning radio play The Long Way Round demonstrated her gift for capturing complex emotional landscapes through dialogue and voice.

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Dust is a story about loyalty and longing, about the courage it takes to leave, and the grace required to let someone go. It's about the lives of quiet despair of factory workers and waitresses in an industrial town in 1950's Oklahoma. Seth Manton is twenty-four, works the factory line cutting asbestos pipe, and spends his nights at the Rough Riders bar, where Dover holds court with terrible jokes and the jukebox plays Hank Williams on repeat. His father is dying from the same dust Seth breathes eight hours a day but still laughs at his old stories. Dover naively believes loyalty to his factory bosses will be rewarded. And Buck blames migrant workers for the heartless choices the industrialists make anyway. Seth's ex, Linda Sue is drowning her sorrows and her disappointment, and while flipping burgers and serving coffee at the diner, Jessie dreams of following Osage born, prima ballerina, Maria Tallchief, who wowed international audiences and danced for Stravinsky. Seth dreams of a better life in California, growing food as a farmer, instead of toiling in an asbestos factory and dying young. Everyone dreams of something better in this small town, but standing out is never easy, even when fitting in is hard. For readers who loved the stark beauty of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the quiet desperation of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, and the fierce tenderness of Kent Haruf's Plainsong Dust is an unforgettable debut about the price of staying, the cost of leaving, and realize you deserve a life that doesn't kill you.

Textauszug

The Rough Riders

The Rough Riders Saloon rose out of the flat darkness—a massive circus tent made permanent, all swooping curves and impossible angles, painted in murals so garish they hurt to look at. Cowboys and Indians locked in eternal combat. Sitting Bull mid-leap on one side, Buffalo Bill on the other, both rendered in colors that had never existed in nature. Saturday night in Tyler, Oklahoma, and the neon cowboy was drawing his gun.

Seth Manton pulled his truck into the gravel lot and sat for a moment, engine idling, watching the building pulse with light and sound like a living thing.

Neon everywhere. Pink cursive letters four feet tall. Blue horses bucking. Green six-shooters firing. The signs buzzed and flickered, casting shadows that moved like ghosts across the packed parking lot.

"You just gonna sit there all night?" Dover Roberts leaned out the passenger window of his own truck, two spaces over. His sandy hair was slicked back, his grin wide and loose. Already three beers in, Seth could tell. "Or you planning to actually come inside?"

"I'm coming." Seth killed the engine and climbed out. The July heat hit him even at nine o'clock—thick Oklahoma air that pressed down like a wet blanket.

"You look like hell," Dover said cheerfully.

"Thanks."

The stairs led up to the entrance where the seven-foot cowboy statue stood guard—fiberglass and paint, white hat and black vest, six-shooter drawn and aimed at everyone who walked through the doors. Seth touched the brim of an imaginary hat as he passed. The statue's painted eyes seemed to follow him.

Inside was chaos and light and sound.

The Rough Riders on a busy night was Tyler at its most alive. The space was enormous—thirty feet to the ceiling, eighty feet deep, packed with bodies and noise and the smell of beer and smoke and humanity. The bar ran the length of the left wall, backed by an ornate mirror salvaged from some dead hotel's lobby. Three bartenders in worked the length of it, pouring and mixing and taking money.

The dance floor dominated the center—polished wood scarred by ten thousand boots, couples and line dancers moving to something fast and country pouring from the jukebox. A disco ball spun overhead, throwing light like scattered diamonds.

But it was the machines that made the place legendary.

Quick-draw games lined one wall—wooden cowboys with target chests, bells and lights flashing when someone was fast enough. Punching bags on springs with dials that measured your anger. Two mechanical bulls—one marked Easy, one marked Wild—both occupied and bucking. Pool tables in the back. Dartboards. A strength-testing machine with a mallet and a bell.

The walls were covered in artifacts—license plates from every state, fading Polaroids, concert posters, mounted deer heads with Christmas lights on their antlers. Flags flew from the rafters—American, Texas, Oklahoma, all of them sagging in the cigarette smoke that hung like fog.

The mechanical bull was in full swing when Seth walked in.

Linda Sue, his ex-wife, sat astride the Easy bull, her back arched, one hand gripping the rope while the other was raised high in the air. She wore tight jeans and a red western shirt with pearl snaps, her blonde hair flying as the machine bucked beneath her.

The crowd around the bull was thick—mostly men, mostly drunk, all of them watching.

Charlie Johnson stood at the controls. He was thirty-five, maybe forty, with a weathered face and hands that had seen hard work. He'd been tending bar at The Rough Riders for as long as Seth could remember. Quiet guy. Never caused trouble. Never said much.

But the way he watched Linda Sue wasn't quiet at all.

His hand rested on the speed dial, adjusting it with a precision that had nothing to do with the machine and everything to do with the woman riding it. When she leaned back, he slowed it down. When she laughed, he sped it up. When she closed her eyes, he made it gentle, almost tender.

He was making love to her through that goddamn bull.

Linda Sue didn't notice. Or maybe she did. Maybe that's why she kept riding it, kept coming back week after week, kept giving Charlie something to watch while she pretended she was somewhere else, someone else.

The bull dipped and she gasped—a sound that carried across the bar, that made the watching men shift on their feet and exchange glances. Charlie's jaw tightened. His knuckles went white on the controls.

She rode it like she was trying to prove something. Like if she could just stay on long enough, wild enough, she could shake off everything that held her down—Tyler, Seth and her fading dreams.

Her shirt had come partially unbuttoned. Sweat gleamed on her throat. The disco ball overhead threw fragments of light across her face—now shadow, now illuminated, now shadow again.

The bull spun left and she leaned into it, her hips moving with the machine's rhythm. Someone in the crowd whooped. Someone else whistled.

Charlie's hand moved on the dial. Slower now. Gentler. Drawing it out.

Linda Sue's eyes were closed. Her mouth was parted. The expression on her face was somewhere between pleasure and pain, between holding on and letting go.

Eight seconds became ten. Ten became fifteen. The crowd was counting now, shouting the numbers, but Charlie wasn't listening to them. He was watching her face, reading it like a language only he understood.

Twenty seconds. Twenty-five.

She was beautiful up there. Not Tyler beautiful—not high school prom queen, not factory worker's girlfriend beautiful. Something else. Something wild and desperate and free.

Thirty seconds.

Charlie eased the speed down, brought the bull to a gentle stop. Linda Sue's eyes opened slowly, like she was waking from a dream she didn't want to end.

The crowd erupted. Men clapping, whistling, shouting her name.

She slid off the bull, her legs unsteady, and someone handed her a beer. She was laughing, flushed, her shirt still half-unbuttoned and her hair wild. She took a long drink and raised the bottle to the crowd.

Charlie watched her from the controls. Just watched. His face expressionless except for his eyes, which said everything he'd never get to say out loud.

Then he turned and walked back to the bar, his face carefully blank, and started pouring drinks for men who'd never know what it was like to love someone from a distance, to touch them only through machines and speed dials and the careful mathematics of longing.

Seth watched all of this from near the entrance.

Watched Charlie. Watched Linda Sue. Watched the whole pathetic shooting gallery and thought: This is Tyler. This is what love looks like here. Desperate and unspoken.

"There!" Dover pointed to the bar where two stools had miraculously opened up. "Move!"

They pushed through the crowd. Seth recognized faces—Bobby Terrell from the factory, the Martinez brothers, Old Pete sitting alone with a shot and beer both untouched. Factory workers still in dusty clothes. Cowboys in clean Wranglers and pearl snaps. Oil field roughnecks with money to burn.

Dover claimed the stools and waved at the nearest bartender—a woman named Rita, forty-something, bottle-blonde, too much makeup but a genuine smile. She appeared with two Lone Stars before Dover even asked.

"Thought you boys weren't coming!" Rita had to yell over the noise.

"We're here!" Dover slid money across. "You couldn’t pay us to stay away!"

Dover turned to Seth, his face flushed with heat and beer and Saturday night energy.

“Bottoms up.”

Your Cheatin’ Heart by Hank Williams came on the jukebox. The dance floor shifted, couples moving closer. Seth scanned the crowd.

"Don't look now," Dover said, his voice dropping. "But Linda Sue is headed this way."

Seth looked anyway.

Linda Sue Peterson. Used to be Linda Sue Manton. Twenty-three years old and Seth's biggest mistake. They'd married at nineteen when she thought she was pregnant. She wasn't. But by then they were stuck with each other, and five years of trying to make it work had ground them both down to nothing. She'd moved out six months ago, but she kept coming back. Every few weeks. Always drunk. Always wanting to "talk." Her face was still flushed pink from the mechanical bull ride.

"You could leave," Dover suggested. "Back door's right there."

"No." Seth surprised himself with the certainty in his voice. "I'm tired of running."

"This is gonna end badly."

"Probably."

"She's gonna make a scene."

"Probably."

"Seth—"

But Linda Sue had spotted him. Her face lit up like he was the only person in the room. She started pushing through the crowd, breaking up the line dancers, bumping into people without apology.

"Here we go," Dover muttered.

Before Linda Sue arrived, Seth noticed a woman he hadn’t seen before—the only person in the bar who wasn't moving, just standing still and calm by herself, while chaos swirled around her. She caught his eye and something passed between them. Recognition, maybe. Or warning.

Then Linda Sue was there, throwing her arms around him, and Saturday night began in earnest.

***

"Seth! Oh my God, Seth!" Linda Sue's voice was too loud, pitched high with vodka and emotion. Her arms went around his neck and she pressed against him. She smelled like perfume and desperation. "I've been looking everywhere for you!"

Seth stood with his arms at...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3178-2717-5 / 9798317827175