Gradle Bird Read online

  “Anyone who doesn’t fall in love with Gradle Bird, the character, might want to stop by an Urgent Care facility for an EKG. Anyone not totally mesmerized by the world depicted in Gradle Bird, the novel, might as well forfeit his or her Human Being ID card. J.C. Sasser’s invented a complex, big-hearted, dirt-road-smart protagonist surrounded by hilarious one-of-a-kind characters (and a ghost). Absurd, yet utterly believable. Southern, yet universal. I’m jealous.”

  –GEORGE SINGLETON, author of The Half-Mammals of Dixie

  “Think Flannery O’Connor riffing Elmore Leonard and you get some sense of this wildly inventive, picaresque novel that stretches the boundaries of what it means to be family and what it costs to love and be loved. But don’t get me wrong. J.C. Sasser writes in her own lyrical style, weaving often tragicomic events into a mosaic of sometimes hallucinogenic wonder. Her characters seemed swept up in an arc of ever-pending disaster. And yet in the unforgettable presence of Gradle Bird herself, the book’s 16-year-old chief protagonist, you learn how redemption can stumble into our lives at the unlikeliest of times from the unlikeliest of places.”

  –KEN WELLS, author of Meely LaBauve

  “I was caught in Gradle Bird’s spell from the very first lines. J.C. Sasser draws a magnificently weird cast of characters into a Gothic tale that could only come out of the backwoods of the South. Gradle Bird is a supreme mix of the gritty, the grotesque, and the haunted. Any fan of Southern fiction will be transfixed, and any Southern writer should take careful note.”

  –JAMES MCTEER, author of Minnow

  “Lush, haunting and imaginative, Gradle Bird marks J.C. Sasser as America’s new Southern Gothic darling, a name soon to be spoken alongside the likes of Harper Lee and Carson McCullers.”

  –BREN MCCLAIN, author of One Good Mama Bone

  “J.C. Sasser takes us on a romp of an adventure through the life, eyes and heart of Gradle Bird’s dark and twisted, but loving and hilarious world in rural Georgia. Gradle Bird reads like it was written, in collaboration, by the ghosts of Flannery O’Connor and Florence King, while finishing off a bottle of Battlefield Bourbon. And truth is, if it had been the fruit of the ghosts of two of the South’s darkest and wittiest writers, we could only hope that they would continue the collaboration. But we’re in luck as J.C. Sasser is alive and well and, hopefully, will be telling her stories for years to come. It’s a wonderful story, a wonderful book.”

  –ROBERT HICKS, author of The Widow of the South and The Orphan Mother

  “Any book that begins with the title character giving someone the bird on I-16 really speaks to my soul. Gradle Bird is like a good country song, and it features some of the finest cursing I’ve ever read. Christians are going to love this book!”

  –HARRISON SCOTT KEY, author of The World’s Largest Man

  “Gradle Bird is a dark Southern Gothic teeming with bizarre characters lovingly drawn and perverse plot twists wrought by a master storyteller. This book—or perhaps J.C. Sasser’s brilliantly imaginative mind—should come with caution tape around it. Stunned me again and again.”

  –NICOLE SEITZ, author of The Cage-maker and Saving Cicadas

  “Gradle Bird is a dazzling debut dripping with detail and drenched with unforgettable characters. Heart-wrenched and rhythmic, Sasser’s language breathes life to the page.”

  –DAVID JOY, author of The Weight Of This World

  “J.C. Sasser can write a pretty sentence. That’s obvious. The prose in Gradle Bird is gorgeous and can hold its own with anything written by William Gay or Barry Hannah and the like, but if you dig a little deeper, the real jewewl is Miss Bird herself and the rest of the cast of characters that get in your head an become part of your life. So, it’s also obvious that Sasser has been studying Elmore Leonard and Joe Lansdale as well. Her characters are vivid and bold, and most importantly, 100% Southern. There is magic in the South, and no one captures that bettter than Sasser has with Gradle Bird. The world at large argued that working class Southern literature died with Larry Brown. I’d counter that argument by handing them a copy of Gradle Bird. I personally hope Sasser has a lot more to say. The world of Southern fiction needs her.

  –BRIAN PANOWICH, author of Like Lions and Bull Mountain

  “Sasser has written a vivid and violently tender story. Landscape and people are both flawed and wounded, and their vulnerability is so raw, at times you want to turn away…but you can’t. We are brought into a world where there is as much to fear as there is to love. With enough family secrets to make Faulkner blush, Gradle Bird infuses magical realism with classic Southern Gothic, taking the reader barreling down Georgia’s I-16 with an unforgettable cast of characters.”

  –MICHELE MOORE, author of The Cigar Factory

  “Reminiscent of Faulkner, Gradle Bird is a magical gem of Southern writing.”

  –MARY ARNO, author of Thanksgiving

  “Gradle Bird gifts the reader with an astonishing spellbinding journey, one woven with prose that is not just poetry, but poetry laced with Southern colors and characters you will never forget. Gradle Bird stands alongside the classics of Southern literature.”

  –JJ FLOWERS, author of Juan Pablo and the Butterflies

  “Sasser’s voice is as unique as the characters she has so skillfully crafted. Gradle Bird is sure to sing to readers long after the final page.”

  –NICOLE WAGGONER, author of Center Ring and The Act

  “ …I loved being pulled into this mysterious world of love, loss, hope, magic, and ghosts. Gradle Bird is a tale of self-discovery and redemption set in a bizarre world. It explores jealousy, fatherly love, the complexities of human cruelty, and the consequences of guilt. Joy and tears mix in this coming of age tale, which is beautifully rendered in Sasser’s evocative prose.”

  –B. LYNN GOODWIN, Story Circle Book Reviews

  “Gradle Bird is edgy, thought-provoking, and anything but predictable.”

  –D. DONOVAN, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

  “Here is my Stamp of Pulpwood Queen Approval!” (Gradle Bird has been named a 2017 PQ Book Club read!)

  –KATHY L. MURPHY, aka The Pulpwood Queen

  Gradle Bird

  by J.C. Sasser

  © Copyright 2017 J.C. Sasser

  ISBN 978-1-63393-263-0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue, and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  800-435-4811

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  For Mama, who taught me to love all creatures great and small.

  And for The Lone Singer, a creature both great and small.

  But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.

  1 Corinthians 1: 27

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN />
  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCUSSION GUIDE

  GRADLE BIRD SUCKED on a piece of penny candy and carried a sack of SpaghettiOs and an expired loaf of Wonder Bread she’d gotten on discount from the Timesaver up the road. A summertime growler stalked her back, and a pair of yellow butterflies quivered around her knees as she walked a stretch of Georgia’s I-16 that wasn’t good for much except semi-traffic, flying rocks, and the Fireside Motel. Her arm was about to give out, and the plastic flip-flops had burned blisters on the insides of both big toes. She laid down the sack to get a break, pushed her cat-eye glasses up her nose, and pulled the photograph from her bra that had been sweating against her heart on the six-mile walk there and back.

  She blew on the photograph to keep it from melting and studied her grandpa and her mother, barefoot on the sugar-white banks of a black river. Gradle had worn the picture raw from handling it so much, and its caption, Leonard and Veela 1972, had bled a faint blue tattoo into her skin. Her mother wore a ponytail with thick raven bangs chopped crooked and too short, a pair of cat-eye glasses, and a green chiffon tank dress with a wildflower corsage. She held up a stringer of fish, and by the light in Grandpa’s half-dimpled smile, there was no doubt Veela was his pride and joy.

  A trickle of sweat ran down the inside of Gradle’s thigh. She hiked her green chiffon tank dress to her knees and knotted it below her hips to get relief from the heat. Thunder clappers surrounded the entire globe now, and were cause for the line of semis with sighing brakes waiting their turn to park in the Fireside’s pea gravel lot. People who drove this stretch knew the Fireside was the only place to lay your head between Macon and Savannah. It advertised air-conditioned rooms, cable TV, and negotiable rates, and it was where Gradle and her grandpa, Leonard, had been living in room 42, a standard double, since she could remember.

  A Peterbilt she didn’t recognize snatched her eyes from the photo when it tooted its horn, pulling out of the lot. The trucker looked down on Gradle, made a V with his fingers, and brought it to his tongue. Gradle blew him a kiss, shot him the bird, and stared him down until his dumb, silly smile left his face and she could no longer smell the tar from the pulpwood he was hauling.

  She blew on the photograph again and lifted up her bra strap that had fallen off her shoulder. The bra didn’t fit any better than it had when she found it two years ago, when the Fireside’s pool still had water. It was left dangling on a lounge chair by a woman with Florida tags who sped-read bodice rippers, sipped Shasta Grape from a straw, and French-inhaled Misty Menthol Lights. Gradle was skinny as straw, still hadn’t gotten her period, and figured the delay had something to do with the birthmark she’d inherited from her mother, a grey streak of hair that grew from the top of her head. She turned sixteen today, and maybe she was destined to skip her period altogether and go straight to menopause. So for now, she used the bra primarily as a purse, like her one and only role model, Loretta the lot lizard, who stalked the truck lot in the night.

  Gradle’s underwear didn’t fit either—a pair of Fruit of the Loom briefs that sagged in the rear. They came from room 30, left to dry on the shower rod by a twitchy serpent lover on his way to the Rattlesnake Roundup.

  But the one thing that did fit was the earring she wore in her right ear. She found it in the tub drain of room 25 clutching on for dear life, and if it wasn’t for the gold cross at the end of its chain it would have been flushed to hell. Gradle considered it lucky, meant for this world, and after she found it, she brought out the motel sewing kit and pierced her ear with a needle she’d sterilized with a flame.

  She kicked off her flip-flops, hooked them on her pinkie, and hiked the grocery sack up her hip. In the distance, the Fireside’s neon vacancy sign sizzled to life. Duck, the motel manager, plugged it in only at twilight in an effort to save on electricity. She passed through the neon glow and walked toward the Fireside’s marquee Grandpa had beautified with a bed of daisies. He’d planted them on Duck’s request, a marketing campaign with intentions of attracting a more respectable brand of clientele. But Gradle liked to think Grandpa had done it for her, to give her something pretty to look at, a yard to run around in. Grandpa was the Fireside’s maintenance man and worked off their rent by fixing whatever Duck said needed fixing. Punched walls, kicked-in doors, busted windows, and clogged toilets were the high-runners, and on occasion there was a big job, like the one he was on now. He stood on the motel’s roof, manning a corn broom and a bucket of liquid tar. She picked a daisy from the bed, tucked it behind her ear, and stared up at him while he worked. He looked like a lightning rod, a God or sky wizard of some sort, with his white T-shirt and painter pants, his long silver hair whipping in the wind, and a silver mustache she imagined he could peel off and throw like a boomerang.

  A raindrop smacked the part in her bangs, and she sheltered the photograph inside her bra, protecting it from a sudden onslaught. Gravel punctured her feet as she ran lightfooted across the lot. The doorbell jingled, and she entered the Fireside’s lobby, an icebox of dark paneled wood, stale cigarette smoke, and amateur wildlife art. The Magnavox perched on the wall televised a suited-up weatherman in front of a Doppler radar map of Georgia. Tornado warnings in six surrounding counties. It was July in South Georgia, and while afternoon thunderstorms were typical this time of year, their persistence and hostility this season were far from ordinary. It had rained every day since the summer solstice. The rivers were out of their banks. There were no pond edges or dams to keep the gators and water moccasins from spilling into backyards and swimming pools. In the past two weeks, WTOC news reported five dogs had gone missing and one small child. And with the rain came mosquitoes, heaps of them. There wasn’t a cemetery urn or pig trough in the county that wasn’t teeming with wrigglers, and down in the really damp places, in the low-lying swamps, mosquitoes met in masses so thick they formed gauzy drapes one had to pull back to walk through. But Gradle didn’t mind all the mosquitoes and rain. In fact, she found the mosquitoes a source of entertainment and spent hours watching them fill their bodies with her blood. And the rain matched her melancholy mood. She found it hard to be sad in the sun.

  “Does it make you feel good to steal from people?” Gradle asked Duck, who sat behind the counter popping Fruit Chill Nicorette and counting the quarters he’d collected from the rigged vending machine that lit the breezeway.

  “Gotta pay for the cable somehow,” Duck said, punching out a square of gum and offering it to Gradle between a pair of nicotine fingernails.

  “Negotiate better rates,” she said. She set the groceries and flip-flops on the counter, took the gum, and chewed it into the piece of candy she’d sucked down to half its original size.

  “How’d you get the candy?”

  “I stole it.”

  Duck popped his gum. “How’d that make you feel?”

  “Like shit.”

  A toothless smile folded his face in a million tiny pleats. He lit a Winston Red, spun his chair around, and sifted through a stack of mail. “You’ll wanna get the old man to open this one,” he said, and threw a letter on the counter. “Looks important.”

  They rarely got mail and whatever mail they did get Grandpa trashed and never opened. She wondered how anyone in the world knew he existed much less knew his whereabouts. She opened the letter and read it. It was a notice of condemnation regarding property at 263 South Spivey Street, Janesboro, Georgia, stating it was unfit for human habitation and dangerous to life and health because of rats.

  “It’s a felony to open other people’s mail,” Duck said. He ashed his cigarette in a tray full of them.

  “Call the cops,” she said, shoving the letter unde
r her armpit.

  “I been hollering at him for the past hour to get off the roof,” Duck said. “That tar won’t set in the rain.”

  “You know how he is when he cocks his mind on something.”

  “Gonna get struck by lightning, stubborn bastard.”

  “A little shock therapy wouldn’t hurt him,” she said. She grabbed the sack of groceries. “Can I borrow a quarter?”

  “What for?” Duck asked. He popped another piece of Nicorette in his mouth and followed it with a drag from his Winston red.

  “Pay the Timesaver back for the candy I stole.”

  “Clean number nine and I’ll think about it,” Duck said. He dangled the room key over her nose. “It’s Friday night and raining. It’ll be busy.”

  Gradle took the key and walked out of the cold lobby onto the breezeway where rain ran from the eaves in strings of liquid crystal. She pulled the photograph from her bra to make sure it wasn’t hurt, and stared at it as she walked toward her room.

  A man with a toothpick, tight black jeans, and a Hawaiian floral shirt unbuttoned to the navel stepped back from the vending machine and kicked it with a pointy black boot.

  “That thing eats quarters,” Gradle said as she walked by.

  The man spun around on his boot heel and tracked her up and down with his eyes. “You got any change?”

  “Duck’ll help you at the front desk,” she said, hiding behind the sack of groceries, hoping the brown bag would bore his eyes.

  “What’re you looking at?” he asked, switched his toothpick to the other side of his mouth, and snatched the photograph from her hand. “Is that your Daddy?” he asked.

  “My grandpa,” she said. She snatched the photograph back.

  “You look lonely,” he said, moving into her.

  She could smell the smoke and artificial spice in his greased-back hair. She felt shaky, and her head buzzed from the Fruit Chill Nicorette.

  “You feeling lonely?” he asked, nodding at the room key. He came closer, skimmed his teeth with his tongue, and clutched his groin. “Let me help you with that.” He went for the groceries and backed her into a pole.