Let's No One Get Hurt Read online

  “I’m sure they are, Pearl.”

  “I mean, I think it’s an act.”

  I know he wants me to keep going.

  “They get all dressed up just to drive around in carts and get drunk.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me.”

  I don’t take the bait.

  “But to play the game, you try to make as few mistakes as possible?”

  “Sure.”

  “You have to be precise.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  He laughs.

  “So what if you’re a fatalist at heart?” I say.

  * * *

  We park in front of Main Boy’s house.

  “This is absurd,” my father says. “How many kids do they have in there?”

  “Just one.”

  I get out, prepared to confront Main Boy, but there’s nothing I want to say to him. I’ve erased the footage. Some of it is probably still out there, but I don’t care. Whatever it was we did together is all in the past anyway. I only wish I could say no one got hurt. I grab the things out of the truck and set them in a pile on the porch. The fly rod goes on last. I even go so far as to ring the doorbell, but I don’t wait for anyone to answer.

  * * *

  Dox and Fritter have started on the construction. There’s plenty of plywood, but I can see we’re going to need two-by-fours and lots of them. Fritter asks me if I think our raft is still at the park by the bridge, that maybe we can break it apart and bring some of the wood back in the pickup. I say, “Don’t even think about it,” and Dox gets a kick out of that. He doesn’t have to say what we all know, what we all believe. We’ll get it from somewhere, even if it’s somewhere else. We’ll find a way.

  * * *

  I go in our house, and when I pass Fritter’s door, I can see his new work. All of the walls are a silvered blue that blends into lavender at the very top. On the floor are the open cans of paint he had taken from the warehouse. There are trays with used roller brushes steeped in what’s left over. I step inside the room.

  The old mural is gone. Everything has been painted to look bright, like the side of a giant shad. I feel like I’m standing in the middle of the ocean, or I’ve just come from there, my anadromous body on the long journey upriver to spawn, my mind so clear with purpose.

  * * *

  I take out my journal and start writing. I remember something my mother once told me: “Don’t be afraid, Pearl, or you’ll just be like everyone else.” I wish I could have summoned these words sooner. But I’m not sure I would have made it here, thinking of myself as a girl with the whole world still in front of her.

  HELLO, MY NAME IS Marianne Moore. I don’t know how it was possible, but I could suddenly see everything. It was like I was in the sky floating above them all. I watched as they piled the scrap wood left over from fixing the side of the boathouse. It was a considerable pile. I could see the girl and hear her thinking about the river and how her father finally told her the truth about the property. All of it had been sold, except for where they were. Her mother had put what was left of the land in the girl’s name. Now the girl was the beneficiary of a dream.

  * * *

  The girl’s father meets them out in the field. He is carrying a milk crate filled with the typed onionskin pages of the woman’s unfinished manuscript, all the notebooks held together with a belt. He pulls at the typed pages like they’re petals. He feeds the petals into the fire. Inside the notebooks is the woman’s cursive writing, the ongoing record of her trying to find the right word, to get as close to the original meaning as possible. In the end, she ran out of ways to express herself, and that’s the brutal, beautiful truth.

  * * *

  The girl’s father undoes the belt and tightens it around his waist. His pants are bigger on him now that he doesn’t drink anymore. Dox says he’ll wait to see if the girl’s father’s promise holds before he’ll take the pants in for him. The sky gets darker now. The girl tends to the fire while Dox plays his cigar-box guitar. Fritter is singing louder than I’ve ever heard him sing, and the girl’s father is clapping his hands and trying to keep up. The fire is so bright. I close my eyes. There’s no other way to describe it. It grows brighter.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m grateful to everyone at FSG for supporting this work. I wish nothing short of a lifetime of rivers filled with native fish for my brilliant and killer editor, Emily Bell. Her guidance throughout the writing and shaping of this book has been unparalleled. Tight lines, too, for Jonathan Galassi, Jackson Howard, Na Kim, Sean McDonald, Devon Mazzone, Steven Pfau, Jeff Seroy, and the rest of the wonderful team working behind the scenes to give Pearl a life. I’m indebted to you all.

  Scott Brotemarkle and Luke Johnson were with me for the first shad run. Out of those early mornings of standing waist-deep in a frigid river, Fritter’s joy materialized.

  I also found inspiration from the following artists, family, friends, and places: my brothers and sisters, my mother and father, James Baldwin, Melissa Bashor, Khris Baxter, Blind Pilot, Eric Bonds, David Bowie, Maurice Browne, Rob Butler, Laura Bylenok, Peter Chang’s, Jen Chang, Cathy Linh Che, Ken Chen, Yvon Chouinard, Alicia Christensen, Ralph Cohen, Harry Crews, Chris Dombrowski, Greg Donovan, Marguerite Duras, Claudia Emerson, The Faction, Tarfia Faizullah, Gisele Firmino, Brian Flanary, Fleet Foxes, Mary Flinn, Chris Foss, Kevin Goldberg, Myla Goldberg, Rigoberto González, Jim Harrison, Jonathan Haupt, Cathy Park Hong, Cindy Horne and Barb Toellner, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Hyperion Espresso, Kent Ippolito, Chris Irvin, Marcus Jackson, Jeff Jones, Allison Joseph, Richard Katrovas, Mary Kayler, Sally Keith, my Kundiman barkada, Laurie Kutchins, Chris Lessick, Ada Limón, Rebecca Lindenberg, Wayne Martin, Adrian Matejka, Marie McAllister, Dave McCormack, Jim McKean, The Milk Carton Kids, Thorpe Moeckel, Nick Montemarano, John Moore, The National, Neutral Milk Hotel, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Jessy Ohl, Orvis Woodbridge, Richard Owen, Alan Michael Parker, Persea Books, Pixies, Robert Polito, Josh Poteat, Colin Rafferty, Ladette Randolph, Ron Rash, Gary Richards, River Rock Outfitter, Warren Rochelle, Kristen Elias Rowley, Mara Scanlon, Phyllis Schirle, Dave Selover, John Shepherd, Daniel Slager, Charles Small, Son Volt, Rhonda and Matt Starcher, Phil Tabakow, Bill Tester, Jon Tribble, Trout Unlimited, Dan Tucker, R. A. Villanueva, David Wojahn, and my amazing colleagues and students in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte and at the University of Mary Washington.

  An extra round of bear hugs for Oliver de la Paz, Fred Leebron, Sarah Gambito, Joseph Legaspi, Patrick Rosal, and Tim Seibles.

  I have it on good authority that Pearl’s mother spent time with Graham Robb’s exquisite biography Rimbaud and with the work of Paul Valéry.

  Lastly, this book simply would not exist without the love of Amy, Emma, and Luke. They are my fire.

  ALSO BY JON PINEDA

  FICTION

  Apology

  NONFICTION

  Sleep in Me

  POETRY

  Little Anodynes

  The Translator’s Diary

  Birthmark

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jon Pineda is a poet, memoirist, and novelist living in Virginia. His memoir, Sleep in Me, was a 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and his novel Apology was the winner of the 2013 Milkweed National Fiction Prize. His recent poetry collection, Little Anodynes, won the 2016 Library of Virginia Literary Award. He teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte and at the University of Mary Washington. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Begin Reading

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Jon Pineda

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  175 Varick Street, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Jon Pineda

  All rights reserved

&nbs
p; First edition, 2018

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors at Persea Books for permission to reprint an excerpt from “A Scavenger’s Ode to the Turntable” by Patrick Rosal, from Brooklyn Antediluvian. Copyright © 2016 by Patrick Rosal. Reprinted with the permission of Persea Books, Inc. (New York), www.perseabooks.com. All rights reserved.

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71769-8

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