Cottonwood, An On-line Novel: Chapter 2 - Light and Shadow Play (fiction, regionalism, the west, writing process, cinematography, "Curtains" by Elton John)

Chapter 2:  Shadow and Light Play

Photo by Rio Brown

Shadows of vine move across four slanted squares of moonlight on a worn wood floor.  A bug crawls the last patch of moon-glow, heading towards a pair of slippers and a chrome walker by the foot of a bed.  Rick Carter lays on his back, part of the lump of shadow before a four-paned window and stares up at the ceiling where a softer, more forgiving play of light and shadow mirrors that stark shadow dance across the floor.  If one moved closely, one would see that even in this light his eyes are a soft-gray, the color of cottonwood reflected in shallow water—a story almost there, but not quite, pebbles of reality breaking through the narrative like a bony knuckle or elbow pressing against paper-thin skin.

But, if one were to view the movie projected by his mind’s eye onto the ceiling, one would see something quite different—vibrant tufts of green standing high above a creek bed, reflected in a deep warm golden water textured with river-rock showing through, intense sunlight sparking and dashing as two inner-tubes carried two bare-backed boys downstream towards a spiraling metal culvert.

“Hey, hey, here we go!” would cry the first.

“Be sure to duck low, low,” would cry the second.

Here the camera would be mounted on the front of the second tube.  There would be a dip, a bit of water would splash on the lens as the first tube disappeared into the shadows.  Then there would be brief blackness and tinny watery echoes as the boys yelled “Hello, Hello” and echoes bounces all around the spiraling metal tunnel.

Then the screen would snap to blinding white before slowly coming into soft focus.

There would be flowers along the banks.  Not wild, but garden flowers, irises, gladiolas, petunias and the viewer would slowly realize the boys were now floating through a back yard.

  

But this is perhaps the limits of cinematography.  It gets clunky when it comes to conveying inner thoughts.  Perhaps a close-up on young Rick’s face could convey the mixture of anxiety and excitement he felt, but probably not.  Maybe, if one cut to a new scene—

Low camera angle.  Two girls in their early teens jump on a trampoline.  One is slightly chubby with shoulder length black hair and wears the nondescript clothing—shorts perhaps, and a t-shirt.   The other has long, blond hair, big round sunglasses, glossy pink lips and wears bright yellow overalls.  As she jumps, you see her confidence, her style, in the way she arches her back and kicks her legs up behind her until her feet touch her butt.  In the final jump, the girls rise towards the sun isolated in a deep blue sky, stop in a freeze-frame, hair extended heavenward, as the intense sunlight bleaches out the edges of Kristi’s blond hair before the scene dissolves into white and refocuses on diamond reflection sparking off a ripple in the creek before Rick’s eyes.

Now, perhaps, the right expression on Rick’s face might convey the dread and joy Rick felt on this river journey through such sacred land.

Moonlight spreads across Rick’s wrinkled face, a thin, closed smile on his dry, papery lips.  That, he thinks, is the beauty of young love—totally unconditional.  As we get older, we expect more.  This is not bad.  If it were not so, even more of us would find ourselves in abusive relationships, but there is nothing grander to the heart then loving purely, unconditionally, expecting nothing in return beyond the pure unadulterated joy of worship.  We experience this once, only once, if we’re lucky, for it comes from a place of innocence and cannot be sustained by experience.

That is what I could never convey to you, Marie.  Oh, how you hated my telling that story to little Ethan and Conner. You’ll make them sexist, make them shallow, you’d say.  But I knew you were jealous.  You shouldn’t have been though.  What makes a once-upon-a-time sacred is just that.   It was once upon a time.   Why in the hell am I just figuring this out?  I never meant to hurt you, not even a little.  You just weren’t my once-upon-a-time.  How could you be?  We had bills, boys, hours and hours of work, dirty dishes, church.   Real love and once-upon-a-time love aren’t the same thing.  And they shouldn’t be.  That is the part I left out, the most vital part.  No wonder Ethan is so damn screwed up!  He’s chasing once-upon-a-time.

Rick throws off his bedcovers, agitated, swings his feet down to the floor.  As he moves his feet along the scuffed hardwood surface, the viewer can’t help but notice his long, dirty, chipped toenails and veiny foot, such a contrast to the peaches and cream complexion of Kristi’s heart-shaped face in the trampoline scene.  Finally, one foot finds a slipper.  The camera zooms in and juxtaposes the plush padded fabric against the frail, thin skin.  The other foot finds the other slipper.  There is a shot of his hand reaching for his walker.  Vine shadows play the wall as the scene dissolves.

© Steve Brown, 2013

Working Days:  Journaling Cottonwood.

Perhaps we all experience life quite differently.  Some through dialogue, some through narrative, some through smell or touch.  I have always lived life through scenes, through vignettes, snippets of a larger, untold story, and most of these are pretty much silent.  As Marci can testify, I’m not much of a listener.  I had a creative writing teacher who encouraged us to go to diners like Denny’s and take out a notebook and record conversation.  I probably needed that.

But instead, I would notice the reflection of the waitress across the room on the coffee cream canister and think now that’s a story.  Just describe the light, her movements, the expression on her face.  Who cares what she has to say?  Her body language says it all.

I’m not necessarily good at getting that down.  But if I can pull this novel off, that is how it will have to be, in short vignettes with limited audio, for that is the only world I know.  I love sound, am a huge fan of music, but it’s the patterns, the light and shadow textures of words, not the meaning, that matters.   It would be amazing to pull off an entire story of random noises.  Dishes clanking, chunks of conversation here and there, a random thought, all distorted like the reflection in a cream canister or Lennon’s Revolution 9.  Probably not doable, of course, especially on the printed page—all the more reason to try.

Cottonwood, An On-line Novel: Chapter 1 - Porch Sitting and Year-Salvaging (climate change, fiction, regionalism, the west, writing process)

Chapter One: Porch Sitting and Year-Salvaging  

August 2043.  Late afternoon light slants through a window and ignites old telephone wires protruding from a turquoise clapboard wall.  The rectangle of sun continues down and bends at the black and white checkered linoleum floor.  Grains of dirt and particles of food appear unnaturally detailed. The front wheels of an aluminum walker move towards the back porch followed by black and red plaid slippers and veiny ankles.

Light on rusted screen.  Chipped paint.  Gray splintered wood.  A hand with knobbed knuckles turns the handle.   It creeks open.  The porch is big, screened, the woods beyond it blitzed by light and shadow.   Rick Carter wheels and shuffles towards the flamingo-pink rocking chair, slightly passes it, until his walker is a foot and half in front.  His spotted hands shake on the handles as he lowers himself gently down into the chair.  Light accents thin, gray wisps of hair and pale gray eyes.

Even though he sleeps much of the day now, the early morning and late afternoon is still his, as is his grandparent’s house.

Most everything else is gone now.  Marie.   The boys too, except on holidays when the house and property briefly fill with life—grandchildren rocketing through the woods on hovers, Danny and Courtney yelling at each other in the bedroom upstairs, his beautiful bright-eyed great granddaughter, Nevada, on his lap, looking up in amazement as he talks about the not-so-distant days of blue-ray, ATV’s  and the last sliver of glacier on Mount Lehi, or the more distant days of phonographs, 8-tracks and three feet of snow Christmas morning.

Rick stares out across the boulder-strewn, timber-tangled canyon towards the new paved walking trail beyond his fence line.  It’s been years since more than a few inches fell, he thinks, picturing deep black water puddled between snow-loaded stones, Boulder Creek sluggish after a heavy December snow.  No more.  However, winter rain, he had to admit, has its own charm.  It’s only the summer fires and floods that terrify him.  Luckily, Boulder Canyon has been spared from fire and only flooded badly three times.  The last two times though, the water receded just in time.

Visions of winter melt around the edges and bleed into summer.  His eyes focus on a woman and a child in the last direct sunlight of the day.  She is perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties, though it is so hard to tell now.  Everyone but the bed-ridden look so young, so vibrant.   Both she and her daughter, who must be around 5 or 7, squat by the creek.  The mom’s hair is pulled back in a ponytail and sunlight warms her left ear, cheek, neck and exposed shoulder.  She wears a lime-green sports bra and skin-tight bike shorts.  It’s odd, he thinks, how styles are like the seasons.  It could be the 80’s, he could be in Dallas watching Amber ride off into the woods near White Rock Lake for the last time.  And yet sunlight on her shoulder takes him to an even more distant time, to the time he stumbled upon Kristi undressing to go for a swim here, under the cottonwood, along the banks of the pond.

The pond is gone now, all but erased by the flood of eighty-three and totally buried by the floods of 2031 and five.  But she, he is sure, is in the same place Kristi slid off her shirt and jeans to reveal a bright yellow bikini before she and Connie went for a swim.  That was the last time he ever saw her.  She would have been sixteen, but he carried that image like a torch for years:  she reaches down, slender, delicate fingers grasping the bottom of a soft, blue and white football jersey, lifts it up over her head, releasing a stream of thick blond hair that glistens in the sunlight as her newly exposed shoulder is warmed by the late afternoon sunlight.  Fingers must undo jean buttons up front, but he doesn’t see that, only the cool blue shadows on her back and then her pants coming down, the amazing shock of bright yellow fabric and skin.

It sucks getting old, he thinks.  Every thought you think seems unnatural because a corpse shouldn’t desire.  Leave the yearning for the living.  How do you day dream when only death welcomes you?  Everyone else is just there to ease you into your coffin.  Someday, lady, that sweet child of yours will either put you in a home, or if you’re ornery enough to fight for your independence, drop in every two weeks to give you a shave, talk to you like a child, and then make hush-hush conversation in the other room with whatever relative is with her about their plans to bury you.

Maybe another flood wouldn’t be so bad, he thinks.  I could be pulled under a clog of cottonwood limbs, buried over with boulders and crud from upstream, my corpse resting in the cool moist earth until devoured by worms or speared by the young, vibrant root of a cottonwood yearning to stretch out his tender arms and embrace the universe by decomposing the last remnants of the dead.

Why do I ponder death as so final, he sighs and shakes his head, when I know otherwise?  And yet I do.  It is just too hard to visualize the hereafter.   Forgive me, Marie, forgive me.  I should be looking forward to meeting up with you, and instead I spend my days here, trying to dig my way back into the fallen trunk of my life like a carpenter ant drilling into a cottonwood.   For why?  I do not know.  Especially when my life really only started after meeting you.  Maybe it is recovery I want—I just don’t know—to salvage the years that could have just as easily been thrown away and make something meaningful out of them.  That is it!  To make Kristi and the cottonwood count when I know they don’t count for nothing at all.

That, my Dear, is art—the selfish act of restructuring reality into how it should have been while life continues to pass you by.  But after over thirty years of living with me, you know this better than I.

Working-Days—Journaling  Cottonwood

Mitchell and Grandpa cleaning around the cottonwood several years ago.

Writing is such a terrifying thing.  Even in fiction, each word opens up the inner world of the writer, making him or her vulnerable to others.  And there is something especially pompous about a novel, a claim that I’ve arrived that I know what I’m doing.  And what if one hasn’t arrived and the novel isn’t good at all?  No wonder every time I’ve started a novel I’ve quickly abandoned it.

But it shouldn’t be that way.  One should be allowed to learn to write good novels by writing mediocre or even bad ones first.  One should be able to follow an impulse, see if it will sustain itself or fizzle out.

This is one such impulse.  A week ago, I was traveling to St. George to pick up my boys who had spent the summer with their grandparents in Page and there was something about the light that made the cottonwoods stand out more than usual.

Flying by on the freeway, I looked out the passenger window and saw a chalky road, an old house and a cottonwood and I thought that right there is a novel.  I pictured the book jacket—a painted illustration in the regionalist style of the 1930’s-1940’s, something akin to the original jacket for the Grapes of Wrath and the tittle Cottonwood printed at the top in simple bold black letters.

I have no doubt Cottonwood as a book needs to exist.  I do, however, have doubts about my ability to pull it off.  I know I’m a strong poet and adequate essayists, but that’s as far as my confidence carries me.  But every time I decide to discount the idea of writing a novel I come to this:  do I really want to die without at least trying?

And the answer is no.  I think I have things to tell my children, my future grandchildren and great grandchildren—big things that won’t fit in a poem, won’t fit in a story, won’t fit in an autobiography—because there is some truth that can only be told by mythmaking--big narratives that combine God, soil, plant and people.  For me, specifically that means a truth which fuses the text of the cricket, the text of the dirt, the text of the coyote, the text of stone in cold creeks, the text of the cottonwood and the text of my people, small town Mormons living big lives outside the eye of the media.

Am I up to it?  Who knows, but why not try?