Peter Prasad's Blog: Expletives Deleted - Posts Tagged "new-novel"
New novel: The Tea & Crackers Campaign
The Tea and Crackers Campaign
Insane antics in a Florida election, 2014
Here is Henna Rabadel’s coming of age journey, a wry and witty look at the evolving American spirit. Over the summer of 2014, Henna struggles to help her Aunt Veda win election in Florida’s fictional US House District 28. This raucous uphill battle opens her eyes to all that is politics today. Henna’s tale is told with keen observation, outrageous characters and prescient insight, framed in a murder mystery. If you enjoy the blood sport of political campaigns, then join Henna as she matures to realize laughter is her favorite elective balm.
Dedication
Extremism in defense of virtue is no vice. – Barry Goldwater, US presidential candidate 1964. A small man who talked like a tiger, scion of a department store fortune, Arizona senator, first man to put an electronic sun sensor atop his flag pole so the Stars & Stripes rose to salute the dawning day.
Chapter 1
It was wicked hot and unnaturally dark outside as if the stars closed up early. I lifted my head from a sweat-damp pillow and sat up in my own bed at Aunt Veda’s with the window open. Maybe what I heard was a trick of the wind or the whisper of old Seminole spirits. It happened at two o’clock, I know because I looked at my wristwatch. It was a night with no moon in October 2013, nine months before Aunt Veda announced her candidacy.
I swear I woke up before I heard the shot that got Uncle Leland Rabadel, but that’s almost impossible to say. Sound travels for miles on a still night over the swamp, echoing around hammocks and bouncing off the flat shallows. It was a high-powered rifle, that’s what I heard, and the coroner confirmed it, dead center behind the ear, so we had a closed casket ceremony and suffered through nine months of misery.
It was hardest on Aunt Veda, that’s for sure. And I’m confident Unc’s ghost comes by to look in on us now and again. Sometimes I’ll see his face in the wrinkle of a window curtain or sense his presence by how a voter rolls his shoulders before asking a question. Uncle Leland may have leaned on some voters for Veda’s benefit, or plain spooked some into standing in long lines to cast their ballot, at least that was the fruit of my prayers.
Uncle Leland was out in his Boston Whaler with the two Merc engines, cruising at low idle, using his high-beam spotlight to patrol the Tide Swamp a few miles up the coast. He knew the swamp; he knew what he was doing. As a Florida state park ranger, his patrol quadrant covered the wildlife management area around Steinhatchee.
Often he’d patrol down to the Chassahowitzka refuge by Weeki Wachee Gardens, but most nights he stayed close to Deadman Bay. That’s where the big gators were. The name Deadman Bay shows up on old Spanish charts for this section of the Florida Gulf coast, so the bay wasn’t named after him. Unc’ made money for the state by enforcing hunting permits and putting fines on poachers. He always said his job was to use awareness and help interpret man’s foolishness for God’s understanding. But that night the swamp reared up and chewed off his head. Was it poachers, gator hunters or pot runners? It was fifteen months later, after the primary and a nasty general election, that I learned the truth.
It was a hellacious time for all of us Rabadels, pushing a boulder uphill with a bunch of junior varsity retreads, you might say. On the other hand, I did some important growing up. Fact is, it made me a woman. And once I got ahold of my guy -- his name is Jeeter -- it weren’t bad a’tall. Here’d how it all came to be.
***
Aunt Veda’s creaky green breadbasket of a Jeep caterpillar-crawled around another rain pond on the asphalt highway. Had I been driving, I’d be scorching the tarmac and rooster-tailing the dank behind me. The wipers slapped overtime as lightening gutted the sky. I tugged at my bra strap under a red and white hibiscus print dress, the first time I’d worn it since Easter Mass and my high school graduation and the funeral before that. I consider it my misery dress, even though my graduation had been fun. Normally I live in a sports bra and shorts.
Hereabouts in West Florida, the land is dead flat. Aunt Veda drove by hopping from one dry patch to another. It’s no way to outrun a gully-washer in late afternoon. My motto: if you see a dry patch ahead, floor it. But Aunt Veda didn’t drive like that, more like she hikes up her skirts and tippy-toes. For my taste, a good drencher rarely lingers long enough to make a proper flash flood that uproots trees and undermines sinkhole cave-ins. All that downpour drains off into the swamp and out to the Gulf by the next day anyway. And the thunder-drenchers always drag in ferocious heat and humidity behind them, bare-foot and in chains.
A Hare Krishna chant reverberated from Veda’s speakers, all whining harmonium, thumb-tapping drum and dippity-do chanting. Strapped tight in a seat next to Veda, I shimmied and weaved my elbows and shoulders to stay tuned into Kali, the destroyer of worlds. Lord knows, I could have been a belly-dancer in another life. I bet God would have bought a ticket to see me peel through a scarf or two.
Veda didn’t know it but I had a small chaw up under my lip. It made me feel armed and dangerous. Since the age of twelve, five years now, I’d lay a hock of tobacco spit at a guy’s feet and he’d back right off. It works every time, even when I land some on his shoe, especially when we’re outnumbered and about to be grabbed at by a boys’ team at a volleyball tournament. Hell, half the girls on my volleyball squad are chawed up when we board the travel bus. We’re the undefeated warriors hereabouts with a district reputation to maintain. Being called the scary witches of Steinhatchee works for us, plus spitting is fun.
God bless the Steinhatchee Bobcats. I finished my senior year as co-captain. ‘Hammer the Slammer’ my team mates called me, though Henrietta Anthrop Rabadel is my birth certificate name. My friends call me Henna, like the ancient organic hair mix, because I have flaming red hair. Like my forbearers, I have an inch-wide streak of white flowing back from my widow’s peak. It’s genetic, so we can tell who’s who around here.
The Hindu chanting was cranked loud so I didn’t have to sit still. I lifted my hands in a parade of Balinese hand mudra, like egrets rising from the knobby knee of a mangrove tree. It didn’t bother Aunt Veda, she drove wearing large black headphones, ensconced in her affirmations for a better tomorrow. I could have been listening to Prairie Home Companion, it wouldn’t matter. Veda was focused on driving and mouthing platitudes from her latest self-esteem CD from Club Audio Oprah. Maybe it made her feel chawed up in her own way, but never as belligerent as me.
She had a two-handed white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel as a rain squall buffeted the Jeep. A howling black hat lightening licker of a storm was trying to blow us off the road. Aunt Veda powered through it, heading for G-string Gainesville, where all the sinners lived. My Aunt Veda, she’d get up extra early to drive across our little redneck town of Steinhatchee, so as not to upset the egg lady. It was the opposite of me, I’d replicate Sherman’s march to the sea, but I loved her for it.
Insane antics in a Florida election, 2014
Here is Henna Rabadel’s coming of age journey, a wry and witty look at the evolving American spirit. Over the summer of 2014, Henna struggles to help her Aunt Veda win election in Florida’s fictional US House District 28. This raucous uphill battle opens her eyes to all that is politics today. Henna’s tale is told with keen observation, outrageous characters and prescient insight, framed in a murder mystery. If you enjoy the blood sport of political campaigns, then join Henna as she matures to realize laughter is her favorite elective balm.
Dedication
Extremism in defense of virtue is no vice. – Barry Goldwater, US presidential candidate 1964. A small man who talked like a tiger, scion of a department store fortune, Arizona senator, first man to put an electronic sun sensor atop his flag pole so the Stars & Stripes rose to salute the dawning day.
Chapter 1
It was wicked hot and unnaturally dark outside as if the stars closed up early. I lifted my head from a sweat-damp pillow and sat up in my own bed at Aunt Veda’s with the window open. Maybe what I heard was a trick of the wind or the whisper of old Seminole spirits. It happened at two o’clock, I know because I looked at my wristwatch. It was a night with no moon in October 2013, nine months before Aunt Veda announced her candidacy.
I swear I woke up before I heard the shot that got Uncle Leland Rabadel, but that’s almost impossible to say. Sound travels for miles on a still night over the swamp, echoing around hammocks and bouncing off the flat shallows. It was a high-powered rifle, that’s what I heard, and the coroner confirmed it, dead center behind the ear, so we had a closed casket ceremony and suffered through nine months of misery.
It was hardest on Aunt Veda, that’s for sure. And I’m confident Unc’s ghost comes by to look in on us now and again. Sometimes I’ll see his face in the wrinkle of a window curtain or sense his presence by how a voter rolls his shoulders before asking a question. Uncle Leland may have leaned on some voters for Veda’s benefit, or plain spooked some into standing in long lines to cast their ballot, at least that was the fruit of my prayers.
Uncle Leland was out in his Boston Whaler with the two Merc engines, cruising at low idle, using his high-beam spotlight to patrol the Tide Swamp a few miles up the coast. He knew the swamp; he knew what he was doing. As a Florida state park ranger, his patrol quadrant covered the wildlife management area around Steinhatchee.
Often he’d patrol down to the Chassahowitzka refuge by Weeki Wachee Gardens, but most nights he stayed close to Deadman Bay. That’s where the big gators were. The name Deadman Bay shows up on old Spanish charts for this section of the Florida Gulf coast, so the bay wasn’t named after him. Unc’ made money for the state by enforcing hunting permits and putting fines on poachers. He always said his job was to use awareness and help interpret man’s foolishness for God’s understanding. But that night the swamp reared up and chewed off his head. Was it poachers, gator hunters or pot runners? It was fifteen months later, after the primary and a nasty general election, that I learned the truth.
It was a hellacious time for all of us Rabadels, pushing a boulder uphill with a bunch of junior varsity retreads, you might say. On the other hand, I did some important growing up. Fact is, it made me a woman. And once I got ahold of my guy -- his name is Jeeter -- it weren’t bad a’tall. Here’d how it all came to be.
***
Aunt Veda’s creaky green breadbasket of a Jeep caterpillar-crawled around another rain pond on the asphalt highway. Had I been driving, I’d be scorching the tarmac and rooster-tailing the dank behind me. The wipers slapped overtime as lightening gutted the sky. I tugged at my bra strap under a red and white hibiscus print dress, the first time I’d worn it since Easter Mass and my high school graduation and the funeral before that. I consider it my misery dress, even though my graduation had been fun. Normally I live in a sports bra and shorts.
Hereabouts in West Florida, the land is dead flat. Aunt Veda drove by hopping from one dry patch to another. It’s no way to outrun a gully-washer in late afternoon. My motto: if you see a dry patch ahead, floor it. But Aunt Veda didn’t drive like that, more like she hikes up her skirts and tippy-toes. For my taste, a good drencher rarely lingers long enough to make a proper flash flood that uproots trees and undermines sinkhole cave-ins. All that downpour drains off into the swamp and out to the Gulf by the next day anyway. And the thunder-drenchers always drag in ferocious heat and humidity behind them, bare-foot and in chains.
A Hare Krishna chant reverberated from Veda’s speakers, all whining harmonium, thumb-tapping drum and dippity-do chanting. Strapped tight in a seat next to Veda, I shimmied and weaved my elbows and shoulders to stay tuned into Kali, the destroyer of worlds. Lord knows, I could have been a belly-dancer in another life. I bet God would have bought a ticket to see me peel through a scarf or two.
Veda didn’t know it but I had a small chaw up under my lip. It made me feel armed and dangerous. Since the age of twelve, five years now, I’d lay a hock of tobacco spit at a guy’s feet and he’d back right off. It works every time, even when I land some on his shoe, especially when we’re outnumbered and about to be grabbed at by a boys’ team at a volleyball tournament. Hell, half the girls on my volleyball squad are chawed up when we board the travel bus. We’re the undefeated warriors hereabouts with a district reputation to maintain. Being called the scary witches of Steinhatchee works for us, plus spitting is fun.
God bless the Steinhatchee Bobcats. I finished my senior year as co-captain. ‘Hammer the Slammer’ my team mates called me, though Henrietta Anthrop Rabadel is my birth certificate name. My friends call me Henna, like the ancient organic hair mix, because I have flaming red hair. Like my forbearers, I have an inch-wide streak of white flowing back from my widow’s peak. It’s genetic, so we can tell who’s who around here.
The Hindu chanting was cranked loud so I didn’t have to sit still. I lifted my hands in a parade of Balinese hand mudra, like egrets rising from the knobby knee of a mangrove tree. It didn’t bother Aunt Veda, she drove wearing large black headphones, ensconced in her affirmations for a better tomorrow. I could have been listening to Prairie Home Companion, it wouldn’t matter. Veda was focused on driving and mouthing platitudes from her latest self-esteem CD from Club Audio Oprah. Maybe it made her feel chawed up in her own way, but never as belligerent as me.
She had a two-handed white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel as a rain squall buffeted the Jeep. A howling black hat lightening licker of a storm was trying to blow us off the road. Aunt Veda powered through it, heading for G-string Gainesville, where all the sinners lived. My Aunt Veda, she’d get up extra early to drive across our little redneck town of Steinhatchee, so as not to upset the egg lady. It was the opposite of me, I’d replicate Sherman’s march to the sea, but I loved her for it.
Expletives Deleted
We like to write and read and muse awhile and smile. My pal Prasad comes to mutter too. Together we turn words into the arc of a rainbow. Insight Lite, you see?
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