Shrapnel
is what warriors call the little pieces of flesh-tearing metal
launched by a bomb, an exploding artillery or mortar shell, or a
grenade like the one on the cover of James Lloyd Davis's new
collection of fifty literary tales. A warrior himself, having served
in Vietnam, Davis knew well the
metaphor's power when he chose SHRAPNEL
as the book's title. He doesn't explain why he chose it, but to me
the grenade represents Davis's creative mind. Open the book, and its
cleverly crafted pieces fly at you—the many sizes and shapes—none
lethal, although some will discomfit readers whose own minds cringe
from notions outside familiar terrain.
"Be
good for what ails them," as my mother would say in her generous
variation of the “tough s**t” lesser souls are apt to employ.
But words
are “only games, after all,” Davis reassures us in the first of
Shrapnel’s
stories, Knitting
the Unraveled Sleeves,
a tender, yet suspenseful yarn from the viewpoints of an Irish
couple, he a retired fisherman who can’t resist going “to sea”
with his small boat every morning from their home on the Nova Scotia
coast. This morning, protected from cold north winds in the heavy
wool sweater his wife knitted for him, he catches “a heavy, proper
cod” As he prepares to gut the fish, noting that with its size it
could feed him and his wife for at least a couple of days, lightning
from an approaching storm strikes the water nearby and heavy gusts
arrive pushing waves and battering the little boat. He drops the fish
and tries to start the outboard motor. In his haste he floods the
engine, but, knowing the oars won’t get him home in time, continues
to struggle with the motor hoping to beat the storm that’s racing
toward him...
Resonances
of another old-man-at-sea story reach through these words as no
surprise recalling the other author’s physical sense in this one’s
visage. Indeed, Davis does Hemingway more than once in this
collection, albeit keeping to subtle inflections and with original
characters and stories. The tone is hard to miss from the start in
Storefront Poet:
“Opening
the shop in the early morning, turning the key in the lock, I look
over in time to see Mrs. Rodriguez wave from her taqueria
across the street. Her bright eyes and beautiful teeth always make my
day, but this morning they help me transcend the sounds of a low
rider homeboy, passing by between us on Telephone Road, basso
profundo
speakers trembling my big glass window with alpha-waves I never
really understood, but recognize...”
Hemingway’s seeming
simplicity can tempt any halfway skilled wordsmith to give him a try,
especially a male who resembles the Nobel laureate in his person. And
Hemingway parodies abound. Key West holds an annual “Bad Hemingway”
contest for writers, and it seems the winners frequently look like
“Papa” as well as try to send up his easily recognizable style. I
don’t know if James Lloyd Davis has ever entered this contest, but
it would surprise me, as, based on these stories alone, I find him
unquestionably too serious a writer to consciously make fun of
another.
Not
that his sensibility doesn’t drift onto other stylists’ turf,
such as the “Southern grotesque” plots and characters of the
inimitable Flannery O’Connor, whose
milieu and tempo come through with dark familiarity in Davis’s
flash story Way Cross, Georgia, 1937. Imagine
two traveling snake-oil salesmen who attract deadly
trouble hawking
“holy”
mineral oil off the back of their pickup in a
banjo-belt crossroads town. Laughs
and gasps from this masterful glimpse of con and consequence.
No
one is safe from Davis’s unerring eye and ear—bumpkins,
slicksters, tough
guys, damsels, predators, victims...none so vulnerable as other
artists, such as Where have you gone, Norma Jeane, Norma Jeane? And
those in the “being” vignettes:
Bogart, James Dean, Che, and Picasso. “Being Picasso” has one of
those laugh-out-loud endings you write down so you get it just right
in your mental archive:
(Being
Picasso has left me entirely drained, so I must now lie down. It is
also dangerous, Please…don't try this at home.)
For
those attracted to Shrapnel
thinking the stories might be about the
military,
considering the grenade on the cover and seeing that Davis is a
Vietnam vet, if such is the only sort of story you feel like reading
at this time, there
are two, which alone are worth the price of this book. Both are
short, no longer than the average newspaper column, but they are
unforgettable—even for readers who have never worn the uniform.
They are Memorial Day and Pulitzer Grade.
In
wrapping up this review I want to leave you with something special, a
zinger perhaps, something to “close the deal” as people in sales
would put it. But I’m not selling anything. I’m merely sharing my
enthusiasm for a book I truly enjoyed, hoping to infect you with some
of that spirit because I know no one who reads Shrapnel
will come away disappointed. These stories, as I mentioned my mother
would say of them, “Are good for what ails you.” I would add,
“They’re just plain damned good.” As for zingers, Davis has
sprinkled so many sparkling, resonant
lines of prose throughout these stories I am hard-pressed to pick
only one to leave you with. I
had planned early on, in the very first story—Knitting the
Unraveled Sleeves—to use this line to conclude the review:
“What is it that anyone can wish for, finally, but comfort, a hedge
against solitude, and, once in a while, a poke or two at rapture?”
And that line has held up against all of the others that come to mind
right now. It’s a keeper. It shall stay with me for the rest of my
life. But it’s too fine a sentiment for zinger duty.
What
we need now is what stand-up comics call a rimshot. If you don’t
know what I mean, you’ll find out when you read Standup Gigs in
Zendos Make You Cry. It
features the comic “Zenny Youngman, [who] walks onstage and blinks,
squints into the silence, the spotlight so bright he cannot see the
room. The sharp light it casts illuminates the pockmarks on his
cheeks, accentuates his wide nose, casts shadows that resemble a dark
mustache on his upper lip. His intro ends and he bows at the waist.”
The silence continues, joke after joke… Oh, the jokes aren’t that
good, but we feel his pain. We love Zenny. We want someone
to laugh. And when the rimshot comes, we do.
George Kelley
Jerry House
Happy Birthday, Josh. To all I could ask for in a son.
Author
Frank Kane created P.I. Johnny Littell in a short story for the pulps
in 1944 and went on to write twenty-nine novels featuring him, plus an
unknown number of short stories. According to his granddaughter, he
claimed four hundred, though she believes that an exaggeration. And Bill
Crider said in 2000, if it’s a Frank Kane book, chances are “it’ll be a
competent straightforward P.I. story.” DUE OR DIE certainly was all
that. I quite enjoyed my first Kane book.
