Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: Independent
ISBN-10: 1980433364
Type: Fiction
Pages: 561
Copyright: Feb 28, 2018
ISBN-13: 9781980433361
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
A roaring ride through a small midwestern town, two young men attempt to peel back the veneer of reality in order to reveal the mystery and wonder beneath.
On a whim, freelance journalist Dakota Bird packs a bag to document the adventure of a quasi-friend on an even more unclear week-long journey. Part urban legend, part mystery, part all-out lie, Dakota is thrown into the invisible mythos and history of a nearby town, where his task quickly becomes understanding who his guide truly is, and through that, who Dakota himself has been and could become. With the help of a pair of idiosyncratic townies, and a messenger's bag full of questions, Dakota climbs deeper and deeper into the narrative of a life, all the while attempting to reconcile the importance of the stories we experience with the stories we tell instead. A sculpture of folklore and hearsay build on a concrete reality, Rephrame is a challenge to not only understand who you are, but to alter that vision to an even higher focus.
Excerpt
intro.
“So, really, there’s a couple of ways of looking at this,” he said. “One version I read, and one this kid told me in high school. Or around then. But, either way, that’s the one I go with. Because I like it better. The point is, the little uninteresting part that might be true is exactly the same. Namely, there was a car. The rest could just be pizzazz.”
He drove over a small hump in the road, curved a little to the left, and, coming up to a small town, or maybe “burg” would be the proper term, he continued.
“Anyway, up in Brazil, which is kind of the next town if you stay on 40, there was a guy who had a car lot back in the twenties and thirties. Roy something. A friend said that he, Roy that is, told the friend this story.
“So Roy says he’s at work one day, minding his own business, doing whatever, and this guy comes in and wants to buy a car. Turns out it was Harry Pierpont.”
Thad glanced over here, checking to see if there’s any impression at the name-drop.
As there wasn’t, he went on.
“Harry Pierpont was one of John Dillinger’s friends. Or gang, I guess you’d call them.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. So, Harry Pierpont says he wants to buy a car, and this guy, Roy, says all right and shows him some cars or whatever, and they decide on one, and he asks Harry Pierpont how he wants to pay for it. Pierpont says cash, which, at that time was pretty much unheard of. It would be like one of us saying that now.” He laughed a little. “So, anyway, Roy says all right whatever, because apparently everybody knew Harry Pierpont at the time. And it wasn’t like, a total secret that he wasn’t necessarily somebody you’d wanna pester. The thing I read said something like, ‘nicest guy in the world, but he’d kill you.’” Another laugh.
“Well, either way, Harry buys the car, and Roy tells him to bring it back in 30 days or 10,000 miles and they’ll give it the old once-over and make sure everything’s still up to snuff. So, apparently, he does. He goes ahead and brings it back but instead of 10,000 miles on it, it’s got like 40 or 50,000 miles on it.”
“Hm.”
“Yeah. The general thought process was, since he was probs Dillinger’s driver, they put some miles on the car running around the state, robbing banks.”
“Right.”
“I know. It’s not exactly the most exciting story. Just a car. And, I mean, none of them really are. Exciting stories, I mean. But, I don’t know.” He looked out the window. “You have to kind of get the feel for it and then you’ll fall in. And plus, like I was saying, that wasn’t exactly the version I heard anyway.” He glanced over at me, gauging my reaction as if to the opening band.
“The one I heard,” he said, “was there’s this guy that owned a car lot, again, obviously, but it was in town, not in Brazil. And some guy shows up looking at cars one day and they kind of hit it off and eventually come up with some kind of deal. Probably cash again, because the whole time this guy, the lot owner, has been thinking how his customer looks sort of familiar, or that something is off. Whatever it is, he can’t really put his finger on it, but it’s bothering him. So, like I said, they make the deal on the car and when he goes into the little office shack or whatever it’s called, it dawns on him. The guy in the lot is actually John Dillinger.
“So, of course, he’s kind of excited because there’s probably a reward or something and he decides he’s going to call the police. Turn him in. But, apparently, when he was on the phone, they, the police, wanted to know if he was sure it was really him. I don’t know if there were a lot of people calling in ‘sightings’ or something. You’d think they’d just go see. But either way, the guy looks out the window to double-check he’s not just some guy that kind of looks like Dillinger but really isn’t, and apparently they’re taking a bunch of bags and Tommy guns out of the trunk of the car they drove in and loading them into the one they just bought.”
He looked over again, checking my engagement. I said, “Geez.”
“Right? I thought it was pretty funny at least. Or ballsy maybe. Anyway, of course the police don’t get there before he leaves and that’s kind of the end of that one. Admittedly, again, it leaves you wanting a little more. Like, for the police, was it really that hard to find one of the other like, three cars in town at that point? I don’t know. But, I like to think they weren’t looking super hard for him anyway. He had that whole Robin Hood thing going on for a lot of people.”
“You’d think they’d be worried about him robbing some place in town. New car and everything. Make a pit-stop and then head out again.”
Thad laughed. “Actually probably not. Supposedly he said he’d never rob a bank there because there were too many trains.”
“Seriously?”
“Well it’s not like swarms of them, but, you’ll see.”
“Weird.”
“I like to think of it as good pre-planning.”
“Isn’t all planning pre-planning?”
“You know what I mean.”
He lapsed into a thoughtful silence, apparently either still at the car lot, in the shack, or chewing on the validity of ‘pre-planning.’
We were on Highway 46, somewhere. The last time I’d checked our progress on my phone it showed us just on the west side of Six Points. Whatever that is. The drive had so far shown an uncanny ability for repetition in variety. The scenery was like the background in old video games. There was some change to it, enough to let you know you were moving, but nothing that jumped out as a “landmark.” After getting out of Bloom, we’d passed through Vandalia, and then were pretty much in the woods. Occasionally there’d be a four-way stop or a blinker, an intersection somewhere with maybe a house or a shut-down gas station or, usually, an auto-parts place. Those, you couldn’t tell if they were open or not.
Thad was driving. He’d gotten a pick-up truck at some point. The last time I remembered seeing him he’d been driving an old nothing car. A Stratus or a Corolla or something that you’d never notice unless you ran into it. That had been almost two years before though. And with Thad, you could always ask questions if you wanted to, you just never knew if the answer was going to be the one that was more true, or the one that was more interesting. He wasn’t a liar, per se. It was more like he didn’t want you to be too bored by the actual story, so he’d spice it for you up a bit.
Or at least that was the general impression I had. You gotta remember, I was basing this almost entirely on things he’d told me in the first place.
So we drove down 46. More accurately, across, probably. Thad had his window cracked, his fingers slipped through the gap to rest on the frame. He’d lapsed into silence, easy as letting one side of a record play out. I had a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in my jacket pocket and took one out, looking over at him and rolling my window down a little.
“You care if I smoke in here?”
He looked a little surprised but said, “No, not at all. It’s a truck after all.” He reached over and searched through the radio stations absently. “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“Trying it out I guess.”
“I see.”
The hills around us, covered alternately with clumps of spindly trees, buds stretching out for spring, and gaunt, board farm houses with barns in back, rusty white swing sets in front, effectively blocked any radio signal from more than a brief connection with the antenna. Dipping down, passing between the mostly geometric (though not square, I was noticing) turned dirt fields, we’d just now and again get a bit of a song, a few words of news, leaving us to piece together the rest. To fill in the blanks. It seemed somehow pertinent, or accurate, background sound.
All I knew of the trip at that point is that we were looking for information. Or stories. Whatever the term is for those bits of truth and history that get saved up and mixed around and then, years later, laid out in a beautiful, if not entirely accurate, tale of Before. I blew smoke out the window, thinking it was at least a few days away from Bloom. And I had to admit, there was a part of me, maybe that supposed explorer/conqueror/detective all guys think they have inside, that was okay with all of the vaguery.
What I knew, or all I had been able to piece together at least, was, we were on a search. First in a place called High Ground, later for a person named Sarah Bremmerman, but mostly for a thing called the Dethwullf.
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