Deep
Down Things
Tamara
Linse
Genre:
literary fiction
Publisher:
Willow Words
Date
of Publication: July 14, 2014
Number
of pages: 330
Word
Count: 75,000 words
Cover
Artist: Tamara Linse
Book
Description:
Deep
Down Things, Tamara Linse’s debut novel, is the emotionally
riveting story of three siblings torn apart by a charismatic
bullrider-turned-writer and the love that triumphs despite tragedy.
From
the death of her parents at sixteen, Maggie Jordan yearns for lost
family, while sister CJ drowns in alcohol and brother Tibs withdraws.
When Maggie and an idealistic young writer named Jackdaw fall in
love, she is certain that she’s found what she’s looking for. As
she helps him write a novel, she gets pregnant, and they marry. But
after Maggie gives birth to a darling boy, Jes, she struggles to cope
with Jes’s severe birth defect, while Jackdaw struggles to overcome
writer’s block brought on by memories of his abusive father.
Ambitious,
but never seeming so, Deep Down Things may remind you of Kent Haruf’s
Plainsong and Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper.
Chapter
1
Maggie
Jackdaw
isn’t going to make it. I can tell by the way the first jump
unseats him. The big white bull lands and then tucks and gathers
underneath. Jackdaw curls forward and whips the air with his left
hand, but his butt slides off-center. Thirty yards away on the metal
bleachers, I involuntarily scoot sideways—as if it would do any
good. The bull springs out from under Jackdaw and then arches its
back, flipping its hind end.
Jackdaw
is tossed wide off the bull’s back. In the air he is all red-satin
arms and shaggy-chapped legs but then somehow he grabs his black felt
hat. He lands squarely on both feet, knees bent to catch his weight.
Then he straightens with a grand sweep of his hat. Even from here you
can see his smile burst out. There’s something about the way he
opens his body to the crowd, like a dog rolling over to show its
belly, that makes me feel sorry for him but drawn to him too. With
him standing there, holding himself halfway between a relaxed slouch
and head-high pride, I can see why my brother Tibs admires him.
I
haven’t actually met Jackdaw before, but he and Tibs hang out
together a lot, and they have some English classes together. I
haven’t run across him on campus.
The
crowd on the bleachers goes wild. It doesn’t matter that Jackdaw
didn’t stay on the full eight seconds. They holler and wolf-whistle
and shake their programs. Their metallic stomping vibrates my body
and brings up dust and the smell of old manure.
With
Jackdaw off its back, the bull leaps into the air. It gyrates its
hips and flips its head, a long ribbon of snot curling off its
nostril and arcing over its back. Then it stops and turns and looks
at Jackdaw. It hangs its head low. It shifts its weight onto its
front hooves, butt in the air, and pauses. The clown with the black
face paint and the big white circles around his eyes runs in front of
the bull to distract it, but it shakes its head like it’s saying no
to dessert.
The
crowd hushes.
Then,
I can’t believe it, Jackdaw takes a step toward the bull. The crowd
yells, but not like a crowd, like a bunch of kids on a playground.
Some holler encouragement. Others laugh. Some try to warn him. Some
egg him on. My heart beats wild in my chest like when my sister CJ
and I watch those slasher movies and Freddy’s coming after the guy
and you know because he’s the best friend that he’s going to get
killed and you want to warn him. “Bastard deserved it,” CJ always
says, “for being stupid.”
It’s
like Jackdaw doesn’t know the bull’s right there. He starts
walking, not directly to the fence but at a slant toward the loudest
of the cheers, which takes him right past the bull.
I
turn to Tibs. “What’s he doing?”
“He
knows his stuff,” Tibs says, his voice lower than normal. The look
on his face makes me want to give him a hug, but we’re not a
hugging family, so I nod, even though Tibs isn’t looking at me.
Tibs
is leaning forward, his eyes focused on Jackdaw, his elbows on his
knees, and his shoulders hunched. Tibs is tall and thin, and he
always looks a little fragile, a couple of sticks propped together.
His face is our dad’s, big eyes and not much of a chin, sort of
like an alien or an overgrown boy. He has the habit of playing with
his fingers, which he’s doing now. It’s like he wants to reach
out and grab something but he can’t quite bring himself to. It’s
the same when he talks—he’ll cover his mouth with his hand like
he’s holding back his words.
Tibs
is the tallest of us three kids—CJ, he, and I. CJ’s the oldest.
I’m the youngest and the shortest. Grandma Rose, Dad’s mom,
always said I got left with the leftovers. Growing up, it seemed like
CJ and Tibs got things and were told things that I was too young to
have or to know. It was good though, too, because when Dad and Mom
got killed when I was sixteen, I didn’t know enough to worry much
about money or things. They had saved up some so we could get by. But
poor CJ. She in particular had to be the parent, but she was used to
babysitting us and she was older anyway—twenty-two, I think.
Like
that time when we were kids when CJ was babysitting and I got so
sick. Turned out to be pneumonia. I don’t know where our parents
were. Most likely, they were away on business, but it could have been
something else. Grandma Rose had cracked her hip—I remember that—so
she couldn’t take care of us, but it was only for a couple of days
and CJ was thirteen at the time. In general, CJ had started ignoring
us, claiming she was a teenager now and didn’t want to play with
babies any more, like kids do, which really got Tibs, though he
didn’t do much besides sulk about it. But that day she was playing
with us like she was a little kid too.
We
had been playing in an irrigation ditch making a dam. I pretended to
be a beaver, and Tibs pretended to be an engineer on the Hoover Dam.
I don’t remember CJ pretending to be anything, just helping us
arrange sticks and slop mud and then flopping in the water to cool
down. I started feeling pretty bad. Over the course of the day, I had
a cough that got worse and then I got really hot and then really cold
and my body ached. My lungs started wheezing when I breathed. I
remember thinking someone had punched a hole in me, like a balloon,
and all my air was leaking out. CJ felt my head and then felt it
again and then grabbed my arm and dragged me to the house, Tibs
trailing behind. All I wanted to do was lie down, but she bundled me
in a blanket and put me in a wagon, and between them she and Tibs
pulled me down the driveway and out onto the highway. We lived twelve
miles from town, in the house where I live now. I don’t know why CJ
didn’t just call 911. But here we were, rattling down the middle of
the highway. A woman in a truck stopped and gave us a ride to the
hospital here in Loveland. Can you imagine it? A skinny muddy
thirteen-year-old girl in her brown bikini and her skinny
nine-year-old brother, taller than her but no bigger around than a
stick and wearing red, white, and blue swim trunks, hauling their
six-year-old sister through the sliding doors of the emergency room
in a little red wagon. What those nurses must’ve thought.
On
the bleachers, I glance from Tibs back out to Jackdaw. The bull
doesn’t know what’s going on either. It shakes its lowered head
and snorts, blowing up dust from the ground. Jackdaw bows his head
and slips on his hat. Then the bull decides and launches itself at
Jackdaw. Just as the bull charges down on Jackdaw, the white-eyed
clown runs between him and the bull and slaps the bull’s nose.
Jackdaw turns toward them just as the bull plants its front feet,
turns, and charges after the running clown.
Pure
foolishness and bravery. My hands are shaking. I want to go down and
take Jackdaw’s hand and lead him out of the arena. A thought like a
little alarm bell—who’d want to care about somebody who’d walk
a nose-length from an angry bull? But something about the awkward
hang of his arms and the flip of his chaps and the way his hat sets
cockeyed on his head makes me want to be with him.
The
clown runs toward a padded barrel in the center of the arena, his
white-stockinged calves flipping the split legs of his suspendered
oversized jeans. He jumps into the barrel feet-first and ducks his
head below the rim. The crowd gasps and murmurs as the charging bull
hooks the barrel over onto its side and bats it this way and that for
twenty yards. The bull stops and turns and faces the crowd, head
high, tail cocked and twitching. He tips his snout up once, twice,
and snorts.
While
the bull chases the clown, Jackdaw walks to the fence and climbs the
boards.
The
clown pops his head out of the sideways barrel where he can see the
bull from the rear. He pushes himself out and then scrambles crabwise
around behind. He turns to face the bull, his hands braced on the
barrel. The bull’s anger still bubbling, it turns back toward the
clown and charges. As the bull hooks at the barrel and butts it
forward, the clown scoots backwards, keeping the barrel between him
and the bull, something I’m sure he’s done many times. He keeps
scooting as the bull bats at the barrel. But then something
happens—the clown trips and falls over backwards. The barrel rolls
half over him as he turns sideways and tries to push himself up. The
bull stops for a split second, as if to gloat, and then stomps on the
clown’s franticly scrambling body and hooks the horns on its tilted
head into the clown’s side, flipping the clown over onto his back.
Why
do rodeo clowns do it? Put their lives on the line for other people?
I don’t understand it.
The
pickup men on the horses are there, but a second too late. They
charge the bull, their horses shouldering into it. They yell and whip
with quirts and kick with stirrupped boots. Tail still cocked, the
reluctant bull is hazed away and into the gathering pen at the end of
the arena. The metal gate clangs shut behind it.
Head
thrown back and arms splayed, the clown isn’t moving. Men jump off
the rails and run toward him, and the huge doors at the end of the
arena open and an ambulance comes in. It stops beside the clown. The
EMTs jump out, pull out a gurney, and then huddle around the prone
body. One goes back to the vehicle and brings some equipment. There’s
frantic activity, and with the help of the other men, they place him
on the gurney and slide him into the ambulance. It pulls out the
doors and disappears, and the siren wails and recedes.
Tibs
stands up, looks at me, and jerks his head, saying come on, let’s
go. I stand and follow him.
About
the Author:
Like
the characters in Deep Down Things, the author Tamara Linse and her
husband have lost babies. They had five miscarriages before their
twins were born through the help of a wonderful woman who acted as a
gestational carrier. Tamara is also the author of the short story
collection How to Be a Man and earned her master’s in English from
the University of Wyoming, where she taught writing. Her work appears
in the Georgetown Review, South Dakota Review, and Talking River,
among others, and she was a finalist for Arts & Letters and
Glimmer Train contests, as well as the Black Lawrence Press Hudson
Prize for a book of short stories. She works as an editor for a
foundation and a freelancer. Find her online at tamaralinse.com and
on her blog Writer, Cogitator, Recovering Ranch Girl at
www.tamara-linse.blogspot.com
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My review
I have just finished reading Deep Down Things . The book was very sad and heart wrenching to me . Every character has suffered a tragic past and or present life. I am sure that although it isn't my cup of tea others will probably love it. I was able to feel each characters feelings as they each told their story ongoing in different chapters because the author explained them so well. I give this book a 4/5 . I was given this book for the purpose of a review and all opinions are my own.
What an ambitious book with a gritty realism to it. Good title too.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely sounds like a heart wrenching book.
ReplyDeleteA must read for me. I think I will need a box
of tissues though.
CherylB1987 at Hotmail DOT com
thanks for the generous giveaway
ReplyDeletekmichellec87(at)yahoo(dot)com
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