Coasters
A novel
Gerald Duff
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
Also by Gerald Duff
Novels
Indian Giver
Graveyard Working
That’s All Right, Mama: The Unauthorized Life of Elvis’s Twin
Memphis Ribs
Snake Song
Poetry
A Ceremony of Light
Calling Collect
Non-Fiction
William Cobbett and the Politics of Earth
Letters of William Cobbett
NewSouth Books
P.O. Box 1588
Montgomery, AL 36102
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2001 by Gerald Duff. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 9781588380296
ebook ISBN: 9781603062268
LCCN: 2001031479
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
This book is in memory of Addison Irwin,
Wallace Kay, Robert Daniel, and Terry Brown,
absent friends.
And for my children,
Audrey and Stuart,
blocks off the old chip.
Contents
Gravity sliding is the downslope movement of part of the Earth’s crust. This mechanism appears to be responsible for many observed extensive, low-angle faults. The phenomenon is thought to be intimately connected with many of the Earth’s great systems of slide.
— Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition
Why then is this people of Jerusalem slidden
back by perpetual backsliding? They hold
fast deceit, they refuse to return.
— Jeremiah 8:5
Slipping and sliding
Peeping and a hiding
Been so a long time ago.
— Little Richard
The singer on the radio show called “Tried and True Tunes” was chanting over and over that there’s a bad moon on the rise, and Waylon McPhee was struck by the truth of that as he pulled his car into the driveway of his father’s house. Midday though it was, the moon hung like a stone in the sky above the rooflines of the Helena Street addition, reflected sunlight blazing from its white face so strongly that Waylon felt like looking off to avoid eyestrain.
A little out of phase, Waylon thought, like everything else on the Gulf Coast had come to be these days. Not wrong in itself, just wrong in the timing.