Siegel, James - Derailed

I wanted to tell him that it was true — I hadn’t known who I was dealing with when I sat with Winston by the river, and later back in the Fairfax Hotel — even then I hadn’t. But that I did now. That I’d learned.

And one last thing. One very last thing. How when I stood there in the COs museum with my back to Fat Tommy, I'd whispered this thing I’d learned to myself. Like a prayer to the God of screwed plans. Because I’d learned if you want to make God laugh, that’s what you do — you make a plan; but if you want to make him smile, you make two.

Two.

I reached into my left pocket. I took out the spring-loaded gun made of soapwood and tin that I’d carefully loaded in the COs lounge.

I shot Vasquez directly between both surprised eyes.

Times Union

Prisoner killed in Attica attack

by Brent Harding

Raul Vasquez, 34, an Attica prisoner, was killed yesterday when his intended victim managed to wrest a prison-made gun away from him and fatally wound him. Lawrence Widdoes, 47, who teaches English to Attica prisoners two nights a week, was assaulted by Mr. Vasquez near the prison pharmacy. A witness who works in the pharmacy saw Mr. Vasquez physically attack Mr. Widdoes. “He was choking him good . . .” Claude Weathers, an Attica prisoner, stated. “Then pop — Vasquez goes down.” Mr. Widdoes, who suffered a bruised neck, is unsure what provoked the attack, but believes it might be related to some negative criticism he leveled at a student who is the cellmate of Mr. Vasquez. Mr. Widdoes, whose teaching duties are ending due to state budget cuts, is simply glad to be alive. “I feel like I’ve been given a second chance,” Mr. Widdoes said.

FIFTY-THREE

I came home.

Kim came rushing out of the kitchen and stopped and stared. As if I were an apparition.

I nodded at her, I whispered, “Yes.”

She slowly walked toward me and curled herself around my body like a blanket.

It’s okay, she was saying, you can rest now.

Alex came running down the stairs, crying, “Daddy’s home.” He tugged at my shirt until I picked him up and held him. His cheek was sticky with chocolate.

“Where’s Jamie?” I asked Kim.

“Doing her dialysis,” she said.

I kissed her on the top of her head. I put Alex down. I went upstairs to Jamie’s bedroom.

She was hooked up to the portable dialysis machine. I sat on the bed next to her.

“We’ll be going back to Oakdale soon,” I said. “Back to your friends, okay?”

She nodded.

She did this three days a week now.

There was some talk of getting her on a list for a kidney-pancreas transplant — the newest hope for diabetics like her. But then there would be antirejection drugs to worry about the rest of her life, so it was hard to know if it would really be better for her. As for now, we hooked her veins up to this terrible machine three days a week, and I sat there by her bed and listened to its whir and hum as it pumped blood through her failing body.

Sometimes I drift off to this sound, and Anna is suddenly four years old again and I’m back at the zoo with her on that long-ago Sunday morning. Feeding the elephants. I lift her up into my arms, and I can feel her tiny heart running to greet me. There’s a soft chill in the air, and the leaves are drifting down from a swaying canopy of dark russet. Just Anna and her dad, walking hand in hand together in search of memories.

And I know I will sit here forever.

I will sit here as long as it takes.

THE END

SPECIAL EBOOK FEATURE:

A NOVEL BEGINNING:

INSIGHT INTO JAMES SIEGEL’S

DERAILED

By James Siegel

When I left college, I was fully committed to becoming the next great novelist — a cross between Graham Greene and Robert Stone — with a little John Fowles thrown in for good measure. At the time, I was still driving a cab through the early morning hours of New York City in order to pay the rent on my modest studio in Flushing Queens. As it turned out, it was a fortuitous occupation.

My novels, alas, remained unsold, but one of my passengers turned out to be an executive at an advertising agency. We got to talking, as often happened between a bored taxi driver and a passenger with something to relate. I professed to the ability of being able to write anything — advertising included. A jingle, a clever line — how hard was that? My passenger, for some amazing reason, decided to overlook my hubris, and offered me a job.

As it turned out, taxi driving at four in the morning in East Harlem (where, by the way, I'd been robbed twice at gunpoint) proved to be the easier of the two occupations. For one thing, there was that annoying 30-second thing. You had to say everything about your product in half a minute. None of my sentences took half a minute. But in the brave new world of advertising, that was all you got. Hmm. How to give the product news, mention a tag line once or twice, and entertain someone enough to watch — all in the veritable blink of an eye?

It took a long time to master this particular discipline. And it is a discipline. My first efforts were impossibly corny — not to mention impossibly long. While creative writing had always easy to me (not that easy — I suffered through my writer’s blocks) being creative in thirty seconds was tortuous.

As I remember, my first commercial was for a Campbell's Soup and involved Sherlock Holmes saying things like: ‘It’s elementary, my dear Watson, there are bigger carrots in this soup!’ Had this commercial actually aired and had anyone been eating soup at the time, they probably would have upchucked it pronto.

Over time, I did improve. I learned that advertising, like the best jokes, is short and punchy. I began to think in thirty seconds. My tastes migrated from corny to halfway sophisticated. My commercials began to get noticed and for the right reasons. A Bob Dole spot here, a Super Bowl spot there, and I slowly climbed the ladder of success.

Eventually, I missed writing novels too much to not try it again. I wrote, I perservered, I got published. Which, oddly enough, is where I had to learn a similar kind of discipline all over again. My first novel was a literary detective mystery — long passages, long chapters, and sentences that often started at the top of the page and made it all the way to the bottom. It garnered good reviews and modest sales.

Like most first-time authors, my fondest wish had simply been to be published. Like most second-time authors, I now wanted to be read. We collectively agreed that my second novel would be a page-turning thriller. And once again, I found myself trying to learn the art of paring down. Halving two sentences when one sentence will do. Losing a scene here and there when it slowed down the story without adding something absolutely essential. Slaughtering passages, expunging expositions, dismembering digressions. Keeping things moving — like the commuter train my ad-writing protagonist takes in the story itself. Suspense, I learned, is a fragile substance that doesn't survive well in sterile environments.

This process of learning to shorten my thriller, was no less painful for me than learning to shorten my ad-copy. But I survived it. And so did the book. Which, after all those cuts and slashes, seems to be doing just what I intended it to — taking readers on a twisty and pulse-racing journey into the dark side of the American dream, and out the other side.

Enjoy.