Three Excerpts from The Dark Corner : A Novel, Forthcoming in 2012 from UT Press

Abstract

Three Excerpts from The Dark Corner:A Novel, Forthcoming in 2012 from UT Press Mark Powell (bio) Oconee The eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge is footed in the north-western corner of Oconee County, the mountains rising slowly from the end of Main Street where the public pool and a Jehovah Witness Kingdom Hall mark the city's limit. The vast low-ceilinged textile mills that once hummed night and day were shuttered in the 1980s, the buildings marked with graffiti and straddling abandoned railroad lines. What remains are the water towers and a mill hill of identical shotgun houses, shabby with age and occupied by immigrant families a generation removed from the sweatshops of Mexico and Honduras. The Tire & Body Shop a tienda now, the windows plastered with posters advertising international calling cards and Western Union wire transfers. MEXICO, CENTRO Y SUDAMERICA. Malcolm caught the red light by the Marine Corps recruiting office and realized he had passed the enlistment offices for all four branches of the service. There hadn't been any when he'd left, and he figured that had become the county's chief export: kids whose career choices were deploying to Anbar province or putting out stock at Wal-Mart. He left Main Street, passed Powell's Real Estate and Frasier's General Store, passed the Last Chance, an old biker roadhouse now owned by Florida investors—the sign out front read FRIDAY KARAOKE—and started up the mountain. The switchbacks wound through walls of hardwoods and scrub pine, the slopes cut with the occasional logging or fire road that inched through the forests. He drove slowly, the sun barely over the treetops and the blacktop slick. Past the Ranger Station, the road leveled and straightened, and people sat on porches with portable phones and police scanners, quilts across their laps, yards littered with garden gnomes and plastic waterfowl. In a couple of months, the quilts would be gone, and they'd be shelling peas [End Page 12] into washtubs, box fans whirring, phones still crooked in the bend of their necks. He took a left at the intersection of 28 and Whetstone Road, gained speed as he approached the higher elevations where the gated communities and vacation homes perched. When the last of the Piedmont mills had fled, the chief employment had become the construction of second homes for trial lawyers and surgeons out of Atlanta and Charlotte, hulking behemoths of stone and glass stilted on limestone crags and brokered, almost exclusively, by Dallas. Malcolm hit his father's gravel drive hard enough to fishtail into the yard, the beagles on the porch waking, ears pricked. When he stepped out they barreled into the yard and twisted around his feet. "All right, all right." He rubbed a furry pouch of gut. "Wait a second here." He walked onto the porch and reached into a Rubber Maid carton and removed several strips of beef jerky he tossed to them. The cabin consisted of three rooms, a broad porch, and a narrow bathroom walled with Tyvek wrap. Originally it had been his father's hunting camp, built on the back forty after the old man had returned from Vietnam and needed a quiet place to sit in a deer-blind and drink his Early Times. The house in which Malcolm and Dallas had been raised was on the far end of the property, situated off Whetstone Road and overlooking the orchards and pond. The Winter House, his mother had called it, since the old man had spent so much of his summers at the cabin. After she had passed, he had abandoned it altogether. She couldn't have lived with such awareness, she could hardly live at all. Malcolm remembered her as incorporeal as weather, a cloud formation, some heat, less light. He had looked at her the way one might study a planet, some faraway celestial body, brilliant and glittering if only you could step closer, if only you were less removed. She had glided into a bridge embankment his sophomore year in high school, and from this he had retreated to the church, to books and prayers and suffering of the dispossessed, for...