Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

Armando and Miguel stretch out on their backs, fingers laced behind their heads. Their breathing slows and deepens. Brewer won’t be able to sleep without whiskey — that’s the way it is these days — but he’s content to sit and watch over the man and boy and wishes them peaceful dreams.

The stars do their dance for him, wheeling around a bright sliver of moon, and after making sure that all the constellations he knew as a boy are still there, he divides the sky into quadrants with an eye toward counting. Choosing a section, he begins: one star, two stars, three. He hopes Cassius made it home, pictures the dog waiting for him when he returns to the trailer.

After an hour he dozes off and finds Charlie Wiggins fishing in a river he knows but can’t name. His old friend draws his rod back, then snaps it forward, sending his lure into a dappled pool in the middle of the stream. Brewer is ecstatic watching him. If this is forever, he thinks, I’m fine with it. Suddenly, though, the light changes. The sun on the water burns brighter and brighter until Charlie is nothing but a silhouette against it, and Brewer is no longer able to distinguish his features. He reaches out to pull his friend into the shade with him, but no go. He wakes with a handful of sand and a too-familiar ache in his chest.

Armando has removed his jacket and covered Miguel with it and is sleeping with his arm wrapped protectively around the boy. Brewer is long past pondering how his life would have been different if certain things had happened or hadn’t, but seeing father and son like this, he can’t help but wonder about all that he missed that might have eased his way.

False dawn comes and goes, and the night seems somehow darker, colder, longer. Brewer is restless. He stands and walks, joints popping, to the edge of the flat, looks down canyon, then up toward the switchbacks they’ll climb in the morning. A pale blue glow limns the east wall of the canyon, and the mound of sand marking the grave slowly becomes visible. The boy was seventeen, the girl sixteen. They died in each other’s arms.

Alack, he was but one hour mine, Brewer thinks.

“You and your poems,” Charlie Wiggins once said, lying beside him on a steamy summer evening in a room they shared.

Me and my poems, Brewer thinks now, and somewhere, way off in the unburned distance, a bird wakes and sings.

Thanks again to my agent, Henry Dunow; my editor, Asya Muchnick; and everybody at Little, Brown/Mulholland Books. Thanks to the publications in which some of these stories were originally published. And thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and ECLA Aquitaine for financial support during the writing of this book.

Richard Lange is the author of the story collection Dead Boys and the novels This Wicked World and Angel Baby, which won the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Los Angeles.

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“Richard Lange dives into his characters’ lives in order to reveal ever deeper, ever darker wants….You know you’re in the hands of an expert….Most striking in these stories is Lange’s efficient use of language. The author creates poetry from the simplest of words and moments…. This is the kind of book you’ll want to savor.”

— Lisa L. Kirchner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Richard Lange’s stories are a revelation. He writes of the disaffections and bewilderments of ordinary lives with as keen an anger and searing lyricism as anybody out there today. He is Raymond Carver reborn in a hard cityscape. Read him and be amazed.”

— T. C. Boyle, author of The Harder They Come

“Beautifully crafted….Samuel Beckett is Lange’s major writing influence, but judging from the casual eloquence of his stories, Lange has already earned a place close to Beckett’s elevated company.”

— Jack Batten, Toronto Star

“Wonderful.… Swift, gut-wrenching, and sometimes cleverly disarming fiction by a master.”

— Joe R. Lansdale, author of Paradise Sky

“Lange has a terrific knack for plotting and a penchant for populating his tales with characters who live within or at the edge of a violent, lawless world….Denis Johnson’s influence is apparent in the terse lyricism of Lange’s prose….The stories are imbued with a sense of searing honesty about our common potential for failure and an empathy for human weakness that make the characters hard not to love, and their author impossible not to admire.”

— Ed Tarkington, Memphis Commercial Appeal

“Highly recommended….Lange knows how to inhabit the skin of his protagonists and breathe life and vitality into them with his minimalist prose….These citizens of L.A. are Lange’s bread and butter, and he drafts them with so much care and precision that they become just as real as your next-door neighbor…. Sweet Nothing is dark and gritty, but there’s a spark of life and light and a deadpan sense of humor that stops the stories from going full dark.”

— Keith Rawson, LitReactor

“With his lyrical yet matter-of-fact prose, Lange drills straight to the center of society’s fringe. We might not find his characters’ lives desirable, but we do relate to their basic humanity, occasionally in spite of ourselves.”

— Angela Lutz, Kansas City Star

“The syncopated rhythm of Lange’s dialogue and the laconic grace of his descriptions can still capture a life in a single episode.”

— Anna Mundow, Barnes and Noble Review

“For me the best stories are rabbit holes. You read the first lines, maybe a page, and you’re down there. Somewhere else. Another life. Richard Lange is one cwazy wabbit.”

— James Sallis, author of Drive

“Skillfully constructed….Lange portrays the lives of people struggling to survive, with the focus on families, both blood-related and chance-made….These stories will have broad appeal because of Lange’s accessible style and fine characterization.”

— Ellen Loughran, Booklist

“For all the darkness that runs through the stories, Lange maintains a disarmingly light touch….These tales are not far removed from the classic stories of O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“Utterly believable postcards from the edge; for those who like their realism not so magical but right there at street level.”

— Robert E. Brown, Library Journal

“Richard Lange piercingly depicts the grittier side of Los Angeles in his new short story collection.”

— David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy

Will you tell us a bit about Sweet Nothing ?

It’s my second collection of stories. ( Dead Boys was the first.) They’re mostly set in Southern California again, but I mixed things up this time when it came to narrators, time periods, writing style, etc. I wanted to stretch a bit. One thing that didn’t change, though, is the cloud of desperation that hangs over the characters. I tend to write about the make-or-break moments in people’s lives, and that continues in Sweet Nothing.