L.A. Lit 2000

Editor’s Note: America is famously the republic of reinvention, where peoples the world over have sought an escape from history, a new identity in a land of seemingly endless possibility. And California, as Susan Sontag observes in her new novel “In America,” is America’s America. Los Angeles, precariously perched at the edge of the continent, is, of course, a terminus, the destination of desire. Despite its notorious reputation for making a fetish of the body and renouncing the life of the mind, Los Angeles has long been a mecca for writers. Hometown for some, refuge for others, it is both a place and a state of mind whose literature reflects a range of affection and disdain among writers who have found here what Carey McWilliams discovered more than half a century ago: a “curious amalgam of all America, of all states, of all peoples and cultures of America.”

To reflect the richness of literary aspiration now palpable throughout Southern California, we asked several dozen writers from L.A. to share with our readers the opening passages of as-yet-unpublished or forthcoming works of fiction. The number of writers in Los Angeles is too great, of course, to be represented successfully and completely within Book Review’s few pages. To those we have left out, we offer our regrets. The best list, of course, is the one each reader creates by virtue of his or her own reading. In the end, we are, whether writers or readers, properly the cartographers of our own literary discoveries.

*

T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

I’m out feeding the hyena her kibble and chicken backs and doing what I can to clean up after the latest storm, when the call comes through. It’s Andrea. Andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater, my ex-wife, my wife of a thousand years ago, when I was young and vigorous and relentlessly virile, the woman who routinely chained herself to cranes and bulldozers and seven-hundred-thousand-dollar Feller Buncher machines back in the time when we thought it mattered. Jesus Christ. If somebody has to come, why couldn’t it be Teo. He’d be easier --him I could just kill. Bang-bang. And then Lily would have something more than chicken backs for dinner.

T. Coraghessan Boyle is the author of the novel “A Friend of the Earth,” to be published in September by Viking Press. A first-serial excerpt will appear in Outside magazine in August. His previous books include the novels “Riven Rock,” “The Tortilla Curtain” and “The Road to Wellville” and “T.C. Boyle: Stories.”

*

MONA SIMPSON

Bea Maxwell remembered the first time she’d driven out to see the new part of town. It was 1956 and she was home from college for the holidays. It was after Christmas and she’d had to get out of the house. Her sister and her sister’s entourage had taken over the place. Her sister always had an entourage. And it was still nine days before Bea could return to Madison.

Bea had friends from high school too, quiet girls who were back from other colleges, even a few who had stayed in town, working in the kindergartens or in the hospital or at Kendalls, the big department store, but these were not the people she wanted to see. She needed someone from Madison, to touch that part of her life and know it was still there. So she’d called June Umberhum.

June sounded glad to hear from her. She was going stir crazy too, she said.

Just then, someone else had come on the line. A farmer’s wife June said she’d never even seen, who lived somewhere even further out.

“Well, how much longer are you going to be?” that woman asked.

“Just a jif,” June said.

“Already been on a quarter hour.”

After she hung up, rather loudly Bea thought, they hurried to make their plans.

Mona Simpson is the author of “Off Keck Road,” to be published by Alfred A. Knopf in September. Her previous works include “Anywhere But Here,” “The Lost Father” and “A Regular Guy.”

*

JOHN RECHY

When Lyle Clemens was born, in Rio Escondido, Texas, in 1981, his mother quickly covered his rosy nakedness just before she fainted, either from the rigors of the birth or from her first impression of the child. Sylvia Love, who gave Lyle his absent father’s name, was surprised that the child was even born, thinking he’d died inside her. That’s what Clarita, her trusted Mexican friend and self-appointed mid-wife, had told her after having listened (without confessing that she was growing hard of hearing in her right ear) for any stirrings within Sylvia’s belly. So when Clarita (who today had taken only two shots of Sylvia’s bourbon) pulled the child out, she shoved him back at Sylvia in disappointment that her psychic powers had failed, again. Sylvia Love blinked in double surprise. Not only was the child alive and yelling lustily, but--she would swear she saw this during the fluttering of her eyes--he was “big, brawly, and aroused, just like his damn father.” That, and a fleeting memory of her terrible experience as a contestant in the Miss Texas Beauty Pageant earlier that year, caused her to toss a sheet over the child who would grow up to become the Naked Cowboy at the Academy Awards in Hollywood.

John Rechy is the author of the unpublished “The Naked Cowboy.” His previous works include, most recently, “The Coming of the Night.” He is the 1997 recipient of PEN USA/West’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

*

SUE GRAFTON

PROLOGUE

I suppose I should paint the big picture, just so you’ll appreciate the trouble I’m in. At the moment, I’m sitting on the floor in the foyer of a house in Horton Ravine. I’m leaning against the far wall, facing the entrance, my H & K P 9 loaded and resting lightly on my knees, muzzle pointed at the door. It’s been raining, unusual in Santa Teresa at this time of the year. This November has been one of the wettest in memory, windy and bleak, especially by California standards. I’ve been waiting since 9:00 and it’s probably close to midnight, though I have no way to know. Moments ago, the power was cut so the cavernous house is now enveloped in darkness. The silence is profound; all the hum and the ticking of domestic machinery shut down. . . .

Sue Grafton is working on her next novel, “P Is For . . .”, to be published by Marian Wood / Putnam. She is the author of the Kinsey Millhone alphabet series, which began with “A Is For Alibi.”

*

RAY BRADBURY

PROLOGUE

Constance.

Constance Rattigan.

Or, as she was widely known, The Rattigan.

Forty years of triumphs and disasters crammed in one brown surf-seal body. Golden tan, five feet two inches tall, here she comes, there she goes, swimming far out at sunset, body-surfing back, they said, at dawn, to be beached at all hours, barking with the sea beasts half a mile out, or idling in her oceanside pool, a martini in each hand, stark naked to the sun, or whiplashing down into her basement projection room to watch herself run, timeless, on the pale ceiling with Erich Von Stroheim, Jack Gilbert, or Rod LaRocque’s ghost, then abandoning her silent laughter on the cellar walls, vanishing in the surf again, a quick target that Time and Death could never catch.

Constance.

The Rattigan.

Shouldn’t she have her own book?

She should.

Ray Bradbury is the author of “Let’s All Kill Constance!,” to be published this fall by Avon Books. His previous works include “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Illustrated Man.”

*

CRISTINA GARCIA

Central Highlands, Vietnam

(1969)

Rabo mono amarra mono

Domingo Chen was on nightwatch. He volunteered for it often, preferring the darkness to the day’s uneasy camraderies. Domingo sat behind his mound of hardpacked red clay, his M-16 oiled and loosely slung on his shoulder, his flak jacket coarsely scrawled with BINGO. A sickle moon played hide-and-seek through the jungle canopy. There were no stars. No way to read heaven with any accuracy. He might have loved this sky in another time, from another perspective.

Domingo listened to the rumble of nightmares from the foxholes, men crying out in their sleep, fear pulling wires in their throats. Lately, there’d been drowsy talk about how the snub-nosed monkeys started howling when the weather shifted, how the peasants hunted the monkeys and sold their skulls as war souvenirs. In Cuba, Domingo recalled, the paleros coveted the skulls of Chinese suicides for their curses and spells.

The day had been hell. In the hot, lacquering afternoon, three men were killed by snipers, another blown apart by a land mine, as if no more than a bad idea had been holding him together. The men had been joking about how the jungle air seemed to magnify everything like a heat mirage. You be lookin’ at yo’ peepaw brothers, and praisin’ the Lord!

Cristina Garcia is the author of “Traveling Through the Flesh,” to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. Her previous works include “Dreaming in Cuban” and “The Aguero Sisters.”

*

MICHAEL CONNELLY

Terry McCaleb looked at his wife and then followed her eyes down to the winding road below. He could see the golf cart making its way up the steep and winding road to the house. They were sitting on the back deck of the house they had rented up on La Mesa Avenue. The view ranged from the narrow winding road below to the whole of Avalon harbor and then across Santa Monica Bay to the haze of smog that marked overland. The view had been the reason they had chosen the house in which to make their new home on the island. But at the moment his wife had spoken McCaleb’s gaze had been on the baby in his arms, not the view. He could look no further than his daughter’s wide blue and trusting eyes.

Michael Connelly is the author of “A Darkness More Than Night,” to be published by next January by Little, Brown. His previous books include “Void Moon,” “Angels Flight,” “Trunk Music” and “The Last Coyote.”

*

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

ANGKOR WAT

She appeared as if an apparition on the surveillance tape. The tape was black and white, the definition jumpy, unstable. She was there, not there, shielded from view. It could have been. Might have been. Was. Probably. A glimpse of a white blouse, a blazer slung over a shoulder, held by her right finger, dark pleated trousers, sunglasses anchored in her hair, a cigarette in her left hand.

The profile said she did not smoke.

Her stride was steady, unhurried. The clock at the bottom of the tape said 20:47:42. At 20:47:47:49 the woman was blocked by what seemed an extended family exiting the elevators. An elderly man in a motorized wheelchair carrying a cane in his lap, a woman approximately the same age wearing a straw cowboy hat hovering close to the wheelchair’s arm rail, two grown women and two overweight male companions in floral Hawaiian shirts. The elderly man in the motorized wheelchair reached up with his stick and brushed the cowboy hat off the older woman’s head. 20:47:53. The woman in the white blouse again. She did not look back as one of the younger women picked up the cowboy hat and returned it to the older woman. The elderly man knocked it from her hands, his cane flailing, catching her hard on the wrists. The two overweight men in the Hawaiian shirts began waving their arms, one at the older woman, the other at the elderly man in the wheelchair. A security guard materialized, then a second. The surveillance camera zoomed in on the scuffle for a moment. Then resumed its sweep.

20:48:06. Another glimpse of the woman in the white blouse. She was no longer smoking. And was wearing the blazer. Her sunglasses were shielding her eyes. It would have been easy to miss her.

John Gregory Dunne is the author of the unpublished novel “Fit For Kings.” His previous books include “Monster: Living Off the Big Screen,” “The Studio” and “True Confessions: A Novel.”

*

APRIL SMITH

PROLOGUE

NOVEMBER, 1994

She was that close to busting the record for the most consecutive bull’s eyes made under the greatest influence of alcohol, when the bar phone rang.

It was three o’clock in the morning in a local dive in Laguna Beach called Papa’s. By then she had been throwing darts almost four hours, ever since the challenge by the French kick-boxer. The guy had looked like a cokehead, like he had been put through a pencil sharpener, stringy tendons and collapsed cheeks. She had seen him staring at her and known what he was thinking: Here’s one of those tall, all-American babes with the blonde braid and great body who lives for beach volleyball. Not too friendly, not too cool, but for him--une piece of cake.

He hadn’t counted on fire and desire.

Her first toss drilled straight through the center of a red cork circle the size of a quarter.

He took his beat-up aviator jacket and split, and she kept it going until the place emptied out--except for the other two icons of Papa’s, Mary Jo Martin, a TV newswriter who came in around midnight to work on a screenplay about a TV newswriter, and Big Tyson behind the bar, in his all-season leather vest and wool beanie.

The sound system was tuned to a jazz station and Cassidy Sanderson was working with the same smooth despair as Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” hitting the sweet spot seventeen times in a row. She had come straight from the stadium; khakis limp, the armpits of the white cotton button-down shirt translucent with sweat, but she had no idea. She had reached that state of detachment it takes Zen masters a lifetime to achieve: The point seeks the innermost circle, it is inevitable.

April Smith is the author of “Be the One,” to be published in July by Alfred A. Knopf. Her first novel was “North of Montana.”

*

GAVIN LAMBERT

BODY OF FORMER ACTRESS STILL UNCLAIMED

After 9 days in the County Morgue, the body of former screen actress June de Courville, 91, is still unclaimed, it was revealed today. She was found dead at 1532 Hidden Valley Lane, in a house that had stood empty for 10 months and was due for demolition.

De Courville played supporting roles in several 1930s movies, including “Easy Loving” and “Danger Street.”

An autopsy determined that death was due to heart failure, and the coroner’s office took charge of the body when no relatives or friends came forward to claim it.

Although I never met June de Courville, I knew a woman who once knew her very well, had often talked about her, and might be able to connect her childhood friend with an abandoned house in a remote canyon. In fact I wondered why Amy Crumble, in the absence of any relative or other friend, hadn’t come forward to claim the body. Had she read the item in the Los Angeles Times?

Presumably not. When I called Amy, a recorded voice informed me that the number was no longer in service. During the past twenty years, Amy had disconnected her phone without leaving a referral at least eight times, and always explained later that she’d found it prudent to leave Los Angeles very suddenly when “something went wrong,” or she needed “to keep a low profile for a while.”

In her (relative) youth, by the way, Amy Crumble was a convicted murderess; and for a long time I’d wanted to write her story. At first I thought of making her a fictional character, changing all the names in her story and inventing her death. But she’s a person who somehow demands to be allowed the last word, and I felt obliged to wait and see how her story ended. But the end can’t be delayed much longer. Amy must be almost as old as her friend.

I didn’t read the obituaries of June de Courville because she died while I was on vacation with a friend in the south of Morocco, and the news didn’t appear in the International Herald Tribune. Nine days later, her unclaimed body in the County Morgue didn’t make Page One or even Section A of the April 27, 1999 Los Angeles Times--which I bought at one of the airport newsstands on the afternoon of my return. I only bothered to flip through Section B (Metro) because rain and heavy traffic made the taxi ride to West Hollywood exceptionally slow. And during a long wait at a stop light, I noticed the headline on page 4. BODY OF FORMER ACTRESS was sandwiched between FATAL STABBING AT TEEN PARTY and KIDNAPPING SUSPECT SEIZED, and neighbor to a quarter-page ad for LIPOSUCTION AND TUMMY TUCK, with before-and-after photographs of a bloated belly and a perfect waistline.

At the Morgue, I pretended I’d met de Courville a few times and wanted to pay my last respects. An attendant led me to an ice-cold room and opened a drawer. Her face above the sheet looked very pale and surprisingly young, in spite of her wispy white hair. Before I left, the attendant handed me an opaque plastic trash bag. “The clothes she died in,” he said. “And her purse with a few personal belongs.”

She died wearing black knitwear pants, dirty white sneakers, a white nylon blouse, turquoise silk jacket, and a quartz wristwatch. No jewelry. The purse contained a pair of dark glasses with prescription lenses, an empty pack of Carlton cigarettes, a disposable butane lighter and a special “Stars of Tomorrow” issue of ScreenTime for March 1938, with June de Courville among several other forgotten faces on the cover.

The attendant told me she’d been carrying other identification, and tried to burn it. Among charred plastic in a corner of an empty room in the derelict house, the police had found remains of a MasterCard, driver’s license, a $10 bill, and a long silver-blond wig with a fringe. There was no car outside the house when her body was discovered, and no record of any vehicle registered in the name of June de Courville, so presumably she arrived by cab.

She lived, it turned out, only two blocks away from my apartment in West Hollywood. A long way from Hidden Valley Lane, which the attendant said was a dead end street in a canyon in the mountains beyond Glendora, and the nearest house almost a mile away.

Gavin Lambert is the author of the unpublished novel “Mixed Feelings.” His previous works include “Nazimova,” “On Cukor” and “The Slide Area.”

*

DAVID FREEMAN

Under the Hollywood Freeway, at the Gower Street ramp, there’s a place where runaways squat. The road is their roof. Sometimes at night the boys climb out on the overpass and piss on the traffic below. That ramp was once the site of a dusty bungalow court called Gower Gardens. I spent part of my childhood there. My father was away in the Navy and my mother worked the day shift at Lockheed in Burbank, so I was in the care of a neighbor who was old and not always attentive. I roamed free, unsupervised and unafraid in what were then the wilds of the Cahuenga Pass. There were coyotes and rattlesnakes in the chaparral and the tall grass. It was probably dangerous, though it didn’t seem that way. Gower Gardens is long gone but the Mexican palms that framed the entrance are still there. They still tower and bend in the wind but now they stand over other children who live under the freeway and face their own risks. *

David Freeman is the author of the unpublished short story “Night Over Gower Street.” His books include “A Hollywood Education” and “One of Us.”

*

WANDA COLEMAN

They went together like salt and pepper. Dark-skinned Perry loved melon-toned Sandra, but he also loved hanging out with his homeboys and so, in a symbolic gesture, she wanted to put salt on his tail.

And that might have been effective had she done so in the wise and womanly way of the day, and if she had taken into account Perry’s being raised among a southern and superstitious people, his maternal grandmother in particular (who they said was a two-headed woman).

Whenever he knocked over the saltshaker, he tossed the grains over his left shoulder. There was a rabbit’s foot on every key ring. Once she found a strange root under her pillow. One washday morning, she caught his feet in a sweep of the broom. He snatched that broom from her hands and swept the entire apartment. He groaned and yelled whenever she put her purse on the floor. He always wore his “lucky jacket” when playing poker. He had a saint for every occasion, it seemed. He was always burning this colored candle or that. She was choking in the smoke, thinking she was doing her best to tolerate his different background and beliefs. She loved Perry, but his “scary ways” tickled her more and more.

Wanda Coleman is the author of the short story “Pepper,” to be published this spring in Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora. Her previous works include, most recently, the novel “Mambo Hips & Make Believe,” “African Sleeping Sickness: Stories & Poems” and “A War of Eyes & Other Stories.”

*

YXTA MAYA MURRAY

Matthew was my boyfriend a long time ago. We first met in my junior year of high school, when I was sixteen, so at this particular point in time it had been fifteen years since we’d dated. It had thus also been fifteen years since I’d had what could be called a committed or meaningful sexual relationship, which was a difficult bit of addition to accept the first time I tallied it up. I’m unfortunately more penguin than tiger--that is, I think I might be one of those people who mate for life, and so I didn’t merely regard Matthew in a goo-sweet haze of nostalgia or casually chalk up our prior coital exchanges as the funny fumblings of hormone-blind pubes. No: I had once loved him in extremis--so much that love had printed itself right on me and I have never been able to rub its impression off, so that every stage of my life and every moment of tenderness is also colored by that love, or the memories of it.

And what memories! Sometimes, when Matthew and I ran into each other now, I’d experience this quick, soft fugue that had a curious science fiction taste to it, slightly medicinal and hallucinogenic, as though I had just taken a drug which permitted me to leap over space-time boundaries and slide through glittering worm holes. But I wouldn’t discover Vulcan or a three-mooned sky on the other side; instead I would find myself padding through the green Eden of the mid-1980s when I was sixteen and Matthew was seventeen, and I could recall every perfect trembling detail, like our asymmetrical haircuts and our androgynous outfits and non-androgynous hot couplings, experiments we performed after midnight in cool dark rooms while unsuspecting parents slept. *

Yxta Maya Murray is the author of the unpublished “The Autobiography of a Liar.” Her previous works include “What It Takes to Get to Vegas” and “Locas.”

*

HUBERT SELBY JR.

march (?) 1999

. . . but the Hemlock Society says the best way is with sleeping pills and a plastic bag over your head . . . sitting in a tub filled with water, I think. Sounds easy enough. Sort of peaceful. Go to sleep and thats it. Yeah, I guess so.

But suppose I suddenly change my mind and call 911? What happens then? I/d end up in a booby hatch with millions of people asking me questions, driving me nuts wanting to know why I did it, as if living in this world is so wonderful you must be crazy to want to leave it. They knock themselves out trying to live longer and longer, just another year, thats all. . . . Yeah, live to be 70 or 80 or 90 or krist knows how long. For what? And who the hell are they to say Im nuts because Ive had enough of this lousy world? The hell withem. Bugging me with their questions: why did you do this? why did you do that? why dont you like this? why dont you like that? why dont you exercise more? join a gym, yeah, thats it, get in shape, drink Evian water, learn to dance, go to clubs, meet some chicks, join a Church and meet some chicks, mingle more, socialize, expand your circle of friends, have a drink or two, dont be so stiff, start smoking marijuana, chill, meet some chicks

and

Hubert Selby Jr. is the author of the unpublished novel “The Waiting Period.” His previous works include “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and “The Demon.”

*

F.X. TOOLE

I stop blood.

I stop it between rounds for fighters so they can stay in the fight.

Blood ruins some boys. It was that way with Sonny Liston, God rest his soul. Bad as he was, he’d see his own blood and fall apart.

I’m not the one who decides when to stop a fight, and I don’t stitch up cuts once the fight’s over. And it’s not my job to hospitalize a boy for brain damage. My job is to stop blood so the fighter can see enough to keep on fighting. I do that, maybe I save a boy’s title. I do that one little thing and I’m worth every cent they pay me. I stop the blood and save the fight, the boy loves me more than he loves his daddy. *

F.X. Toole is the author of a collection of stories, “Rope Burns,” to be published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins. This excerpt is from the story “The monkey look,” which was published in Zyzzyva last spring.

*

MICHELLE HUNEVEN

Alice Black awoke to the sound of skidding furniture. She sat up in the blue darkness of her bedroom in the house on Wren Street. “Nick?” she called, certain he’d come back. Their evening together had ended badly; she’d wept and pleaded with him to stay, and he’d left angry. Now, as sometimes happened, he’d returned, probably more than a little drunk, to apologize--and leave again. “Nick?” she said, louder this time. “Is that you?” The reply was a muffled thump: man meets armchair.

“Hold on, baby.” She swung out of bed. “I’ll get the light.”

At the dining room doorway, reaching for the wall switch, she smelled hills: the dry, spicy scent of chaparral, and with it, a wet dog stink. Her first thought was that the entire dining room was alive: wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mammal, furred and quivering.

She withdrew her hand, stepped back into the hall. In the chill light from moon, stars and street lamps she made out the grooves and spheres carved into the door’s moulding. She waited, listening, and after a stretch of silence, peered again into the living room. Objects in the dim room bled into view: the rosewood table and ladderback chairs, the Venetian glass vase of pale, overblown roses; a furry shoulder and long broad neck. Large, pricked ears.

As the word deer surfaced, Alice noted the shiny black nose, wide veins rivering the animal’s cheek, a lack of antlers.

Michelle Huneven is the author of the unpublished novel, “Jamesland.” Her previous book is “Round Rock.”

*

DENNIS COOPER

We’re parked in the hills overlooking the town. It’s dusk, or maybe not. Down there they can’t see like they did. It’ll take them about an hour to figure that out. When they do, it’ll look sort of pretty from here, I guess. It’s his thing.

“Cool,” he says. It just happened.

“I guess.”

He has a face out of Norway or somewhere that never looks me in the eye. Other than that, he’s just a friend of my brother.

“Bored?” he says.

“No.” I must seem weird now, but I feel so like myself.

“You sure?”

When I don’t answer, he writes in his notebook. That’s him. He’s always scribbling in there. No one can read what he’s written. It even locks, just in case. When he’s dead, the first thing I’ll do is pick that lock.

“Let’s do it.” He’ll think he knows what I mean.

A senior is paying me five hundred dollars to kill him. Actually, Pete got hired. But he flaked, and asked me. I don’t know the senior’s name or what his problem is yet. I like the boy well enough to pretend like we’re friends. He’s not my thing, but he’s an awful example of someone’s, I guess.

Two days ago, as a favor to me, my girlfriend Jude got drunk enough to seduce him. I pretended to pass out, wake up and catch them getting in bed. I made a show of forgiving her, then asked to watch. What they did made me so mad at her that I decided to kill him already. So I guess it worked. *

Dennis Cooper is the author of “High School Shooters,” to be published next year by Ecco Press / HarperCollins. His previous works include “Period” and “Guide.”

*

BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL

My shift had just started when she came in, right after Thanksgiving. Wasn’t big as a banty hen. Mr. Weinstock was right behind her. “Hosanna,” he said to me, “This is Gilda Rosenstein, and she’ll be working with you. I want you to train her.”

There were five of us women cleaning at the Braddock Hotel, all colored. We’d finished having our get-started cup of coffee (as compared to our keep-going cup in the afternoon, and our hold-on cup toward the end of our day) in a small room in the basement. The manager called it the Maid’s Room, because we were the only ones who used it. We called it Our Room; we did everything in there: change our clothes; drink coffee; eat lunch; smoke cigarettes; sneak a quick nap or a drink. It was a gray room with peeling paint and furniture that looked as though it needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It’s been more than fifty years and I’ll bet that all of us, the living and the dead, can recall just what we were doing when we saw Gilda dressed in that pink uniform. It wasn’t every day we saw a white woman wearing what we wore, doing what we do. Gilda was the first and I remember her in this life I’m living and the one I left behind.

Bebe Moore Campbell is the author of the novel, tentatively titled “Taking Care of Business” or “Face Value,” to be published next year by Penguin / Putnam. She is the author of the soon-to-be reissued “Sweet Summer.” Previous works include “Singing in the Comeback Choir” and “Brothers and Sisters.”

*

CLIVE BARKER

It’s night in Coldheart Canyon, and the winds are off the desert.

The Santa Anas, they call these winds. They come off the Mojave, bringing malaise, and the threat of fire. Some say they are named after Saint Anne, the mother of Mary, others that they are named after one General Santa Ana, of the Mexican cavalry, a great stirrer-up of dusts; others still that the name is derived from santanta, which means Devil Wind.

Whatever the truth of it, this much is certain: the Santa Anas are always baking hot, and so heavily laden with perfume it’s as though they’ve picked up the scent of every blossom they’ve shaken on their way here. Every wild lilac and wild rose, white sage and rank jimsomweed, every heliotrope and creosote bush. Gathered them all up in their hot arms and carried them into the dark channel of Coldheart Canyon.

There’s no lack of blossoms here, of course. The Canyon is almost uncannily verdant. Some of the plants were brought from the world outside by these same burning winds, these Santa Anas; some were dropped in the feces of the wild animals who wander through--the deer and coyote and raccoon--some spread from the gardens of the dream palaces that lie almost hidden in the greenery: alien blooms these--orchids and lotus flowers--nurtured by gardeners who have long since left off their pruning and their watering, and departed, allowing the bowers which they treasured to run riot.

But for some reason there is always a certain bitterness in the blooms here. Even the hungry deer, driven from their traditional trails these days by the trampling of sightseers and by the tawdry glories those sightseers have come to view, do not linger here in the Canyon for very long. Though the animals venture along the ridge and down the steep slopes of the Canyon, and curiosity, especially amongst the younger animals, often leads them over the rotted fences and toppled walls into the secret enclaves of the gardens, they seldom choose to stay.

Perhaps it isn’t just that the leaves and petals are bitter. Perhaps there are too many whispers in the air around the ruined gazebos, and the animals are unnerved. Perhaps there are too many invisible presences brushing against their trembling flanks as they explore the clotted pathways. Perhaps, grazing the overgrown lawns, they mistake a statue for some pale piece of life, and are startled, and take flight.

Perhaps, sometimes, they are not mistaken.

Clive Barker is the author of “Coldheart Canyon,” to be published this fall by HarperCollins. His previous works include “Galilee: A Romance, “The Great and Secret Show,” “Imajica,” “Books of Blood” and “The Damnation Game.”

*

AIMEE BENDER

On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax.

This was the best gift I got in a decade. Before I saw it, shining on the wall of the hardware store like a lover made from steel and wood, I’d given up completely on the birthday celebration.

On my nineteenth, my mother had kicked me out of the house.

On my eighteenth, I had a party of two people and after an hour, both claimed allergies, and went home, sneezing.

On my seventeenth, I made myself a chocolate cake but since I didn’t really want to eat it, stirred bug poison in with the mix. It rose beautifully, the best ever, and when I took it out of the oven, a perfect brown dome, I just circled the pan for a few hours, breathing in that warm buttery air. Some ants ate the crumbs on the counter and died.

Aimee Bender is the author of “Invisible Sign of My Own,” to be published in July by Doubleday. Her first book was a selection of short stories, “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.”

*

STEVE ERICKSON

Sometimes I’m paralyzed by my love for him. When he calls me from his little bed I know I’m not supposed to answer because that’s the way he learns to go back to sleep on his own. Every night when I’m putting him to bed I say now listen Kirk you’re getting to be a big boy, you have to learn to go to sleep on your own, do you understand? and he says, Yes please. And then in the middle of the night he calls and, you know, I can’t resist. It’s the way he calls, not sleepy, not frightened, not crying, but very determined and aware and awake--”Mama?” I can hear the question mark so insistent it’s not a question . . . it would break my heart not to answer.

In my heart he opens the door to this vast impassable terrain of fear. It’s a fear stretching out beyond these young years of mine when mortality’s supposed to be so inconceivable . . . and my own mortality is inconceivable, until I consider his--then it’s existence itself that’s inconceivable. How have moms down through the ages survived their love for their kids? The thought of his mortality is abysmal to me.

We were at a fair yesterday down by the lakeside and a vendor had in captivity one of the owls that have invaded the city ever since the lake first appeared a couple of years ago. She was explaining to some other mom’s kid how, far up in the sky, the owl can hear a human heartbeat--and even at that very moment, I thought to myself, this owl could hear Kirk’s little heart as I stood there holding him in my arms. Could it have heard his heart in my belly three years ago? Was this my first betrayal of my boy, his very birth, exposing him to the peril of owls that hear heartbeats? Every night I wait for the sun to set before writing this, and there it goes now, slipping down behind the San Vicente Bridge that crosses the lake to the northwest, I see it from my window . . . the sun goes down, the sky goes dark, the lake goes black, and owls swoop across the rising moon like leaves blown loose from a phantasmagoric tree twisting up out of the ground--and my voice rises from the crypt of my consciousness shaking words off like topsoil. Kirk and I are bonded by a cord of blood that runs from his heart to my thighs. Menstrual waves crash against the inner beach of my belly.

Steve Erickson is the author of the unpublished “Swan Lake.” A longer version of this excerpt appears in Conjunctions: 34, American Fiction. His last novel, “The Sea Came In at Midnight,” has just been published in paperback by HarperPerennial. His previous works include “Days Between Stations” and “American Nomad.”

*

STEPHEN J. CANNELL

Chooch arrived this afternoon as planned, (actually, I picked him up). This is already shaping up as one of my biggest boners. I pulled up at the fancy private school Sandy’s got him enrolled in and I had to go to the principal’s office to sign the pickup permission slip. The principal, John St. John, is a wheezing, hollow-chested geek who seems to honestly hate Chooch. The way he put it was, “That child is from the ninth circle.” I had to ask too. It’s from Dante’s Inferno. Apparently the ninth circle is the circle closest to Hell. Now that I’ve met Chooch, not an entirely inappropriate analogy. Then, this pale erection with ears hands me a packet of Teacher Evaluation slips. For a fifteen year old, his rap sheet is impressive . . . pulled fire alarms and fights in the school cafeteria (food as well as fists). Mr. St. John informs me that they have notified Sandy that Chooch is not to return to Harvard Westlake School next semester and that I need to get him enrolled elsewhere, (like this is all of a sudden supposed to be my problem). It’s not as if this boy doesn’t have a good reason to be angry. I think I wrote you, he’s a love child with one of Sandy’s old clients. Making it worse, Sandy doesn’t want him to know how she makes her living, so she’s been shipping him off to boarding schools since third grade.

Needless to say, I had no idea what I was getting into here. Maybe I can last the month until Sandy takes him back or sends him to the next sucker on her list. One way or another I’ll work it out.

Stephen J. Cannell is the author of an unpublished, untitled novel. His previous works include “The Devil’s Workshop,” “Final Victim” and “King Con.”

*

DIANE LESLIE

A Rorschach of teardrops had stained the lap of my dress. Weary of my sob story, I distracted myself by peering out of the window of the bruised station wagon in which I was riding. If there had been a town, I’d missed it. A dusty, sun-seared landscape appeared before me wherein grimy beer cans, French fry wrappers, paper cups and straws had been impaled on the spines of innumerable saguaro cacti. From the fleeting vehicle, it seemed to me, I was looking at a petrified forest of shish kebabs.

My parents, Charmian and Maurice Leigh, who considered cactus so hideous they wanted the entire phylum banned from Beverly Hills, were responsible for slapping me down in this alien collage. “We’re giving you a surprise party,” Charmian had informed me on the way to the airport. “I’m speaking metaphorically, tu comprends, about the boarding school to which you’re bound.” *

Diane Leslie is the author of the unpublished novel “Fleur de Leigh’s Surprise Party.” Her first novel was “Fleur De Leigh’s Life of Crime.”

*

CLANCY SIGAL

High, high in the Bel-Air Hills, above the smog line, up a dangerously steep pencil-thin road from Sunset Boulevard, the former movie star once known as “Asia” sprawled in her cave-like living room, now converted into a private screening theater, and pressed Rewind. She leaned forward intently to study, on her immense TV screen, for the fifth night running, Linda Hamilton in “Terminator 2--Judgment Day.”

What was it about the girl? The camera didn’t love her, she was no raving beauty--look at that oily skin!--yet Hamilton dominated it. I could do that, Asia thought. I can make them fall in love with me all over again.

Norma Desmond whispered in Asia’s ear. They’ll laugh at you, dear. “You’re crazy,” Asia spoke aloud. No more than you, Norma Desmond said, fading out.

Asia heard something real. A scraping sound.

She made straight for the hallway where she tripped the Westec armed-response alarm on the wall console. Another button doused all the lights inside and out. Then, just like the girl in “Terminator,” she tiptoed to the padded water boiler in the kitchen and reached behind for the Remington double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun. She jacked it once, twice.

Silently she headed for the sliding door nearest the pool and stepped out. Automatically the front driveway of her long low Paul Williams-designed house exploded with white halogen, a brilliantly lit stage with a mountain backdrop like a Wagner opera.

Asia angled the shotgun so the heavy stock rested on her hip exactly as she had played the dykey cattle queen in her lover Emmett’s smash hit, “Fast Lady In A Slow Town.”

“What’s that in your hand?” she shouted at the human thing frozen by the light on the wrong side of her spiked electrified wrought-iron gate.

The thing dropped to the ground.

“Is that a bomb?” she demanded.

He was black. Young. On his knees, hands raised.

“Let’s hope not,” he said, carefully nudging the object toward her.

It was a damn script.

Clancy Sigal is the author of the unpublished novel “Morocco Junction.” His previous works include “Going Away” and “The Secret Defector.”

*

DEAN KOONTZ

Bartholomew Lampion was blinded at the age of three, when surgeons reluctantly removed his eyes to save him from a fast-spreading cancer, but although eyeless, Barty regained his sight when he was thirteen.

This sudden ascent from a decade of darkness into the glory of light was not brought about by the hands of a holy healer. No celestial trumpets announced the restoration of his vision, just as none had announced his birth.

A roller coaster had something to do with his recovery, as did a seagull. And you can’t discount the importance of Barty’s profound desire to make his mother proud of him before her second death.

The first time she died was the day Barty was born.

January 6, 1965.

Dean Koontz is the author of “From the Corner of His Eye,” to be published next year by Bantam Books. His previous works include “Fear Nothing,” “Seize the Night” and “False Memory.”

*

ELIZABETH FORSYTHE HAILEY

My dearest family--now and future:

This letter is undated because I want you to read it as if it were written yesterday. I pray, however, that I am writing it years, even decades, before my death. I will not tell you my age at the moment because, more and more, I find any chronological measure irrelevant, at least when it concerns human life. Suffice it to say, I am of sound mind and strong heart. My legs no longer take me everywhere I want to go, but my imagination happily still does.

This afternoon as I was looking over my will (something I make a habit of doing every year as soon as I have finished my income tax--perhaps to reassure myself that I still have a few dollars left to disperse among my heirs), it occurred to me that I have something more valuable than money to bequeath you, the members of my family, my proudest accomplishment. Indeed every individual fortunate enough to enjoy old age should feel an obligation to pass on to succeeding generations whatever hard lessons life has taught. I have chosen to do it in the form that comes most easily to me--a letter, a letter I am leaving sealed in my safe, to be opened on the day of my death.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey is the author of the unpublished “A Woman of Small Rebellions.” Her previous works include “A Woman of Independent Means,” “Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife” and “Life Sentences.”

*

GINA B. NAHAI

Listen.

I will tell you a story you will not easily forget--one you cannot turn away from, or deny, or leave behind in the folds of my hands and on the edges of my lips.

It is the story you have searched for all these years, the one you resolved to uncover no matter what the cost to yourself or others. You have traveled the world looking for an answer only I can reveal, and now you are back, armed with a long-ago fury that has cooled and hardened and turned into rigid morality, certain of my guilt, intent on proving it to the world.

You have come to destroy me--you who once saved me with your silence, who believed in me before I spoke in my own defense. You have come to destroy me and all I can do to absolve myself is to offer you my words as I once offered you my skin, to take your hand and guide it over my memories as if they were my flesh, as if I could seduce you with my passion.

Is Truth more urgent than Desire?

So come closer. I will show you what you have asked to see, whisper it against the silence that has divided us, you and I, since the beginning of our time. For when I am done you will believe that which seems impossible to you now--that you and I are one and the same, regardless of all of our differences, that you cannot undo me without destroying yourself, that hearing my story has made you--my confessor, my judge, my enemy--it has made you my accomplice.

Listen.

Gina B. Nahai is the author of “Sunday’s Silence,” to be published in the spring of 2001 by Harcourt Brace. Her previous works are “Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith” and “Cry of the Peacock.”

*

ARAM SAROYAN

I was summoned to Los Angeles on the basis of interest in my first novel, a Hollywood satire I brashly titled “Sometimes a Moron.” It was the sixties. I remember the first phone call I got from Danny Laveggio. He told me he was in New York for only a day and wouldn’t have time to see me but wanted to know what my favorite television show was. I was living with Beverly and our infant daughter, Lilac, at the Chelsea in a small suite next to Viva’s larger one.

“Who are you?” I said into the old fashioned phone, surveying the low buildings on the downtown side of the Chelsea. It was a lovely spring afternoon.

“The head of Paramount,” Danny answered, and added, “I hope not ‘always a moron.’ ”

I was silent.

“I’m joking with you,” Danny said. “Loved the book, and I’ve got an idea for you, but I need to know, kid. I have to know about your favorite TV show.”

“I’m a fan of ‘Mod Squad,’ ” I said without emphasis. Then I heard a dial tone.

Aram Saroyan is the author of the unpublished “My Literary Life.” A collection of his essays, “Starting Out in the Sixties,” will be published this fall by Talisman House. Previous works include “Day & Night: Bolinas Poems” and “Rancho Mirage: An American Tragedy of Manners, Madness and Murder.”

*

JIM KRUSOE

Although he could not remember how the idea first began to take shape, eventually it came about that Wilson found himself convinced that for some time every night, while he was sleeping, for several minutes or maybe even hours, he was actually and completely dead. And though there was no real consequence to this--no tingling at the tips of his fingers or numbness or his toes, no correspondence with the spirit world he could call upon the next morning--neither could he think why this should not be so, if only for seconds rather than minutes or hours.

Jim Krusoe is the author of the unpublished story “Smoke.” His previous book is “Blood Lake: And Other Stories” (Boaz Publishers).

*

CAROLYN SEE

Five in the morning, out on the pier, I liked that I was alone. In mist and spray I walked out to the end as I did three times a week, seeing that--as always--families had already set up along the sides with folding chairs, sleeping children, boomboxes turned down low. I intended, knowing that I was a fool, to look out across the Pacific to my “homeland,” but this morning, another regular had snagged something. A giant skate thrashed, perhaps a quarter mile out, breaking the surface with silver wings. The fisherman played his line; a small crowd gathered, the sun broke through thin fog. I suppose I spent forty minutes watching--while across town I guessed my family woke up, noted my absence, and proceeded with overwhelming indifference to whatever my absence implied. Forty minutes. The skate was close in now. We leaned out over the edge of the pier. It broke the water once again, and from this angle I saw its face--eyes furious, mouth curved in a vengeful smile. One more being yanked from peaceful nowhere to this strange shore. I consider myself a strong man, but I had to turn away.

Carolyn See is the author of “Alexandria,” to be published by Random House. Her previous works include “The Rest Is Done With Mirrors,” “Making History,” “Dreaming” and “The Handyman.”

*

JONATHAN KELLERMAN

Irony can be a rich dessert, so when the contents of the van were publicized, some people gorged. The ones who’d believed Eldon H. Mate to be the Angel of Death.

Those who’d considered him Mercy Personified grieved.

I viewed it through a different lens, had my own worries.

Mate was murdered in the very early hours of a sour-smelling, fog-laden Monday in September. No earthquakes or wars interceded by sundown, so the death merited a lead story on the evening news. Newspaper headlines in the Times and the Daily News followed on Tuesday. TV dropped the story within twenty-four hours but recaps ran in the Wednesday papers. In total, four days of coverage, the maximum in short-attention-span L.A. unless the corpse is that of a princess or the killer can afford lawyers who yearn for Oscars.

No easy solve on this one; no breaks of any kind. Milo had been doing his job long enough not to expect otherwise.

He’d had an easy summer, catching a quartet of lovingly stupid homicides during July and August, one domestic violence taken to the horrible extreme and three brain-dead drunks shooting other inebriates in squalid West Side bars. *

Jonathan Kellerman is the author of “Dr. Death,” to be published this December by Random House. His previous books include “Monster,” “Survival of the Fittest,” “Billy Straight” and “The Clinic.”

*

JO-ANN MAPSON

“C---------!!!” floats out the open window of my apartment as I argue with my soon-to-be-ex-landlord. Mr. Shaw says my parrot’s cursing is the reason I’m being evicted, but the real reason is because he discovered I served time for a felony, a fact that I didn’t disclose on my rental application.

“Before you moved in, this complex was quiet. No fighting, rents on time, everybody happy. Mrs. Benvenuti’s Chihuahua--does he bark all hours of the day? No. Mr. McKinney’s python. . . . “

He actually believes we’re happy? With laundry facilities broken and half the tenants on welfare, nobody’s running the joy meter into the red. A $425 studio that allows pets, however, is nothing to let go of without a fight. “I’ll keep the windows shut.”

“Get rid of the bird, Beryl.”

“I can’t.”

“Then be out by the end of the week.”

“But. . . . “

“Take a look at the lease you signed.” He flips pages madly, practically foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Shaw reminds me of my husband, the screaming, I mean. I went to prison because this one time when J.W. started in on me, I stuck a knife in his chest. Not far, maybe an inch. At the time, I was slicing vegetables. Maybe I didn’t want any more broken ribs, or to have to explain why my eye was black. There’s also the possibility that I mistook him for an onion, since the sight of him usually made me cry.

Jo-Ann Mapson is the author of “Bad Girl Creek,” to be published next spring by Simon & Schuster. Her previous novels include “Hank and Chloe,” “The Wilder Sisters” and “Blue Rodeo.”

*

RACHEL RESNICK

Topless in Beverly Hills was the subject on the radio news show “Which Way L.A.?” I was driving surface streets to Mrs. Larkin’s address in Beverly Hills adjacent. I didn’t want to think about the upcoming job, so I listened closely. A deadly disease had struck the stately palms of the richest part of Los Angeles, eating away at their cores. During high winds, their feathered crowns were known to snap off and hurtle as much as seventy feet to the ground. Each palm head weighed a full ton. At the time of the report, eleven trees had lost their heads. Luckily no one had been hurt--so far. Leading arborists were stumped. All they knew was a fungus was infecting the palms through a wound in the trunk, but no one could figure how the fungus spread from tree to tree. These palms were synonymous with Southern California, the journalist asserted, they were everywhere--on postcards and brochures and film--and now that very image was threatened. Something had to be done. As a footnote, the journalist mentioned the palms were originally from the Canary Islands.

Rachel Resnick is the author of the unpublished novel, “Club Tomorrow.” She is the author of “Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick.”

LISA SEE

*

Brian Worth was dead by the time his body hit the swirling muddy waters of the river. With no panicked attempts to reach for the safety of land or a protruding rock, with no last agonized breaths to endeavor, with no searing pain of water being gulped into lungs, the body was simply swept away by the fast moving current. How quickly he cooled in the chilly waters. How quickly he moved, even on this first day of his journey. Like any other flotsam on the river, the body went where the waters took it in an irrevocable pull to the sea. Here, in just these few miles, was the imperative of the Yangtze. *

Lisa See is the author of “Dragon Bones,” to be published in the fall of 2001 by Random House. Her previous works include “The Interior,” “The Flower Net” and “On Gold Mountain.”

*

EVE BUNTING

I got my dog, Riley, two months exactly after my grandpa died. Grandpa lived with us and he was my best pal. To tell the truth, I think Mom’s letting me get a dog so I’ll start to feel better. Maybe it will work.

She drove Grace and me into Portland because it’s good to get an animal from the pound. You could be saving its life. I picked mine out from all the other dogs right away. He’s a lab, not quite pure bred, but great looking anyway. His coat is the color of a lion’s, but smooth and shiny.

Eve Bunting is the author of “The Summer of Riley,” to be published next spring by HarperCollins. Her previous works include “The Butterfly House,” “The Wall” and “Going Home.”

*

ROBERT CRAIS

Code Three Roll Out

Bomb Squad

Silver Lake, California

Charlie Riggio stared at the cardboard box sitting beside the Dumpster. It was a Jolly Green Giant box, with what appeared to be a crumpled brown paper bag sticking up through the top. The box was stamped green beans. Neither Riggio nor the two uniformed officers with him approached closer than the corner of the strip mall there on Sunset Boulevard; they could see the box fine from where they were.

“How long has it been there?”

One of the Adam car officers, a probationary officer named Lopez, checked his watch.

“We got our dispatch two hours ago. We been here since.”

“Find anyone who saw how it got there?”

“Oh, no, dude. Nobody.”

Lopez described seeing the capped ends of two galvanized pipes taped together with black electrical tape. The pipes were loosely wrapped in newspaper, Lopez said, so he had only seen the ends.

Riggio considered that. They were standing in a strip mall on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, an area that had seen increasing gang activity in recent months. Gangbangers would steal galvanized pipe from construction sites or dig up plastic PVC from some poor bastard’s garden, then stuff them with bottle rocket powder or match heads. Riggio didn’t know if the Green Giant box held an actual bomb or not, but as a bomb technician with the Los Angeles Police Department Bomb Squad, he had to approach it as if it did. That’s the way it was with bomb calls. Better than ninety-five percent turned out to be hairspray cans, some teenager’s book bag, or, like his most recent call-out, two pounds of marijuana wrapped in Pampers. Only one out of a hundred was what the bomb techs called an “improvised munition.”

A homemade bomb.

Robert Crais is the author of “Demolition Angel,” to be published next month by Doubleday. His previous books include “L.A. Requiem,” “Sunset Express” and “Indigo Slam.”

*

PETER GADOL

Finally the day came to go out into the city.

I remember that someone tuning a cello in the courtyard woke me at six that morning, a long bow-stroke repeatedly riding one troubling string, sliding from sharp to flat, sharp to flat. After a while, I realized that it was not a cello but a cat, and I lay in bed waiting for one of my neighbors to either feed or free her. But the plaint continued, and eventually I found my robe and headed downstairs barefoot, taking the oval stairwell a little too quickly after a long night of wine and play. I had to sit down at the threshold of my courtyard to catch my breath, and by then, the cat cries had ceased.

Peter Gadol is the author of “Light at Dusk,” to be published this month by Picador. He has also written “The Long Rain,” “Closer to the Sun, “The Mystery Roast” and “Coyote.” He teaches in the master of fine arts writing program at the California Institute of the Arts.

*

PAULA L. WOODS

When we Justice kids were little and we’d finish watching a movie with my parents, my mother would always ask, “And what was the moral? What have we learned?” And while we would wince and make faces over how that question intruded on our celluloid fantasies, I think I’ve finally figured out what Joymarie meant.

It’s like death. I’ve probably worked hundreds of homicide cases over the years and they’ve all meant something different to me, just like my favorite movies. Some homicides pull at your heartstrings--the murder of an innocent child or a battered woman--and haunt you long after the case is closed. Others--gangbangers, a homeless person--make you wonder how our society could stoop so low. Point is, you never know how death will slap you upside the head, or what a homicide investigation will teach you about the victim, the perpetrator or yourself.

Paula L. Woods is the author of “Stormy Weather: A Charlotte Justice Novel,” to be published next spring by W.W. Norton. Her previous works include “Inner City Blues: A Charlotte Justice Novel” and “Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: Black Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction in the 20th Century.”

*

T. JEFFERSON PARKER

“Out of the way, please. Sheriff’s investigator. Come on now. Out.”

Merci Rayborn ducked under the ribbon and continued down the walk. Her heart was beating fast and her senses were jacked up high, registering all at once the cars hissing along Coast Highway to her left, waves breaking on the other side of the building, the citizens murmuring behind her, the moon hanging low over the eastern hills, the smell of ocean and exhaust, the night air cool against her cheeks, the walkway slats bending under her duty boots. She figured a place like this, oceanfront in San Clemente, would run you two grand a month and you still got termites in your walkway and spiderwebs high in the porch corners.

Or maybe you got worse.

Two patrolmen were talking to two paramedics, all four of whom nodded and stepped aside. Merci stopped short of the entryway alcove to 23 Wave Street and looked at the door. It was open about two inches. It was painted a flat Cape Cod gray. The red splatter a foot above the doorknob looked wet in the overhead light, a yellow tinted bulb so as not to draw insects.

T. Jefferson Parker is the author of “Red Light,” to be published by Hyperion. His previous books include “The Blue Hour,” “Where Serpents Lie” and “Laguna Heat.”

*

SUSAN STRAIGHT

“Naa?” Elvia called to her mother in their Mixtec language. “Ndu cha yujan nuni yihi?” She wanted Serafina to make atole, to heat the milk with ground-corn masa and sugar and cinnamon. Serafina waited, her eyebrows raised. “Please,” Elvia said perfectly. She had just turned three. She could say many words. Serafina picked her up and carried her to the kitchen so she could feel the small hands fluttering like moths on her shoulders. Serafina knew Please. Thank you. Money. Pay. Okay. Sorry. She knew sorry, but she couldn’t properly form her lips around any of the words. She had said “Sorry,” a few hours ago to Larry, when he whirled around the house and tore the Virgin from her veladora and said, “Ellie’s American! My kid’s American, okay? Quit this shit!” But her sorry didn’t sound right. She tried to whisper it now, but her throat wouldn’t cooperate. She was crying. She wanted to kneel inside the church at home, to touch San Cristobal, the patron saint of her village, to rub Elvia with flowers and then lay them on the altar as an offering, to pray about what kind of life Elvia would have. “Naa?” Elvia crooned now. “Cap’n Crunch?”

Susan Straight is the author of “Highwire Moon,” to be published next spring by Houghton Mifflin. Her previous works include “Aquaboogie: A Novel in Stories,” “The Gettin Place” and “I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots.”

*

GARY INDIANA

Warren dreamed of hands that could never be made clean. Laterite of Paraguay, black sand below the house near Diamond Head, blood in the bungalow in Puerto Plata: none of it washed off, impervious to bleach or the headiest of perfumed soaps. Hands forever dipped in fecal springs of revenue and savorless revenge, scrubbing themselves for inspection by an angry God and filthier with every effort. He did not think they were his hands, but in dreams they were his responsibility, attached to his will and agents of his mature.

“We’re not too far from the Mandalay,” he sighed, reminding himself to get a manicure. Sprawled longlimbed on the buttery leather behind the driver’s partition, he poked ice in his bourbon. “Cash cow of the Inland Empire. We tried running it ourselves for five, six months, but I’ll tell you something, any couple operating even a halfway viable motel, the pressures are odious. Odious,” Warren repeated, “odious” being a favorite word.

“I can imagine,” Kevie prompted, though his imagination was elsewhere.

“I mean the people,” Warren said, the elbow supporting his drink hand meeting the knee of his crossed leg. He flicked imaginary dust from his loafer tassels. “Hayseeds. Kiwanis Club. F***ing Knights of Pythias. And you can imagine, love complaining. Plus you’re playing house in a fish bowl, people checking in and out twenty-four-seven, we turned it over to a nice couple from let me think, Costa Mesa. Ran it for us for ten years without a problem, can’t think of their names.”

“The Richters.” Kevie supplied the name as Warren reached for the Jim Beam. Besides liquor, the limo smelled of gardenias: Warren’s inspiration.

“Richter. Of course. You’ve heard this ad nauseam haven’t you.”

“It stuck in my mind because Mr. Richter. . . .”

“Snuffed Mrs. Richter,” Warren recalled with satisfaction. “Used something like a weed whacker, which gave it a certain local play in the media. She was f---ing our linen supplier. Samoan named Kendall. Now it comes back. Same week JFK bought the farm. We brought in a management company after that, had them take over the High Hat in Monterey and all the stuff in Nevada. Also the flagship property in Anaheim. Less headaches all the way around.”

Gary Indiana is the author of the unpublished novel “Depraved Indifference.” His previous books include “Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story” and “Resentment: A Comedy.”

*

HARLAN ELLISON

DEATHBED STATEMENT

BY ED M. RINKE (A45632)

TRANSCRIBED: 17 DECEMBER 73

TAPE RECORDED: 16 DECEMBER 73

AT: CALIFORNIA CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION

AT TEHACHAPI

BY: THOMAS KIRLIN, ADMIN. ASST.

TO SUPERVISOR G.J. BLEMISS

Funny to think about anybody’s giving a damn about this now. I kilt him the first time in, oh I guess it was 1939; and then again in 1940 and a hundred or so times till 1956; and they don’t know about how many times up through the ‘90s; but they put me in here sometime around the middle of it, which was the year 1957, two years after Tehachapi was opened. There’s been three or four newspaper people around from time to time, once a writer from a true crime magazine. They called it one of the great mystery murders of the Twentieth Century when it happened, and the trial and all. But people forget, thank God, and mostly, I’ve been left alone.

But I’m dying now, all unexpected, so I’ll tell it to you. But I’ll tell it my own way, and I’ve got the time, because I’m going slow and I want to finish this the way I used to eat when I was a kid: you know what I mean: eat a bite of meat and then a bite of apple sauce and then a bite of something else, and just enough ketchup so’s I’d finish everything at the same time. Well, that’s what I have in mind here with this tape. That was the only condition I made, that I could take my time and you wouldn’t get it till I was gone.

Oh, before I forget, I want to express my thanks to the Supervisor here at Tehachapi. He is a good man and he does a swell job with all of us. There’s only about twelve hundred of us here, and that makes for a pretty stable population, not much trouble.

My name is Ed