Indie Page 99 discussion

Dusty Waters: A Ghost Story
Laura J. W. Ryan
Copyright 2007, Laura J. Wellner, All Rights Reserved.

Synopsis:
Dusty Waters is a ghost story, a family saga, the history of a haunted house, and a biography of a folksinger. Dusty's friend, Katharine, has volunteered to help her write the official biography, but there is one piece of her life that will not be part of the biography, she can see ghosts; Dusty's ancestral home Tanglewood is filled with them. This inherited sight adds a vexing dimension to her psyche that becomes an uneasy burden.

(Additional note: Born at the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation, Dusty grew up during the Vietnam era with a different perspective than her older siblings (she is the second to the last in a brood of seven children). This difficult period in American history affected her psyche, and her edgy point of view about the human condition places her as a distinguished bookend for her generation.)


Page 99 (with small bits from page 98 and page 100 to complete paragraphs on each end)

After he left, it seemed he zoomed through his twelve weeks of boot camp at Parris Island and then went on to Camp Lejeune. He did come home before heading to North Carolina, but he didn’t stay long — only an hour or two, then he swaggered out the door after saying “so long” and went off to spend his remaining leave time doing his heart’s desire before reporting for duty on base. About a month later, we received a letter from him telling us that he got married to “Trisha”. (We all looked at each other and asked: “Who’s Trisha?” No one knew.) “Dear All, I’m sorry for not inviting you guys to the wedding, it was a quiet thing between us and a J. P. — no big deal — we’ve got a nice little apartment on the base, we’re doing fine — love, Dennis.” At least he enclosed a wedding picture — well, a Polaroid. It depicted him in his Marine dress uniform, and she in what might have been a high school prom dress — a black, strapless number that made her look like a mermaid. She was pretty in a meek sort of way that the dress contradicted — she looked too flat to fill it out; my guess was he picked it out.

“Married in black, you’ll wish yourself back.” Ma recited one of those old wives tales of wisdom as she shook her head with the certainty that their marriage is already doomed. In my juvenile opinion, their marriage was doomed just because Dennis had anything to do with it; a black wedding dress will only season the demise of their marital bliss.

When Spence called home on Christmas day — already his second holiday season away from home — he was on R-’n-R leave in Tokyo with a bunch of buddies, taking in the sights of Japan. Ma told him to look for Dennis sooner or later. He wasn’t happy about having his younger brother joining him in the rice paddies. When Ma told him that Dennis had voluntarily enlisted, I could hear Spence yelling all the way from Japan through the phone receiver: “That idiot — he thinks it’s all one big game out here, stupid, stupid idiot!”

From his side of the ocean, Nixon’s Vietnamization plan didn’t seem to change anything. “Guys keep dying, so they send more to replace them. Ma, some of these boys are so fresh, I can run my finger down them and they squeak — they’re not ready for this place. I can pick out the ones who will die as they come off the truck, I feel sick seeing them.”

Just as Dennis’s boots hit the ground to begin making a name for himself in Vietnam as one of the proud and few, Asher turned eighteen, and as if the military wasn’t satisfied with taking two of my brothers, his draft notice came in the mail the day before his high school graduation. Another young man without college intentions to secure his future, and no health deferments to keep him safe, he quietly left home with nothing more than a shrug to indicate his feelings about going.

Two weeks after Ash left us to begin the process of being molded into a man, an official - looking car rolled into our driveway one Saturday afternoon. Two uniformed officers representing the U.S. Marine Corps came to deliver the bad news that unbeknownst to us, Lance Corporal Dennis Bradford Waters had been killed in action on the twenty-first of July — over two weeks ago. The senior officer, a chaplain, who did most of the talking, apologized for the delay, but they had not been able to confirm Dennis’s status until recently. He explained to us that Dennis’s unit went out on a mission to secure an area — he didn’t say where. The initial mission had gone well, but enemy combatants attacked their extraction location; unfortunately, the chopper that had been dispatched to retrieve them was shot down before it ever reached its destination.

Dusty Waters is now available as an e-book at B&N for the Nook.

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