Spotlight: Can't Shake the Dust by C. H. Hooks
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Buckle Up for a High-Octane Ride through the South's Shadowed Heart
In Can' t Shake the Dust, "Little" Bill Lemon, III, stands at the crossroads of a troubled legacy. From the notorious "Monkey Palace," his grandfather's bar, to the enigmatic history of his father, Wild, to his mother's questionable dog-breeding business, Little takes to the dirt track every Saturday night, racing to outpace the looming shadows of his family's past.
Behind the wheel of a ramshackle DIY car, in a place where scarcity reigns— be it money, jobs, food, or even soap to cleanse the stubborn Georgia red dirt— Little teeters on the edge of self-destruction and redemption. As he navigates life on the fringe of Southern backroads, the weight of his ancestry threatens to pull him under.
While checkered flags may elude him on the track, Little possesses the heart of a true champion. Readers will find themselves on their feet in the stands, rallying for him as he plunges headfirst into a turbulent voyage of self-discovery and survival.
Can't Shake the Dust is an exhilarating tale of resilience, tenacity, and the indomitable spirit of those who dare to race against all odds.
Excerpt
1. LITTLE
They say my daddy could’ve been the best racer there ever was, but that didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t breathe.
Dirt.
My nose was caked, and I could taste it in my teeth when I sucked through my lips, searching for a little bit of air to keep me running even when my car’s engine had found the shit-canned end of its own life—again. Might as well have left our house out on the track.
My roll cage rattled like a can. Every time another one of those assholes lapped me I could feel the whole world rattle, like somehow Jesus was out there playing soccer with me and the car as the ball. My car was the Lemon Party II because Daddy wrecked the first one. More like, daddy got wrecked in. Didn’t really do it his ownself. Somebody put him into the wall, but he still wouldn’t tell me who it was. I had enough to deal with driving against those folks’ kids.
Another car passed, and it felt like I might get sucked out through the window if I wasn’t strapped down so tight. Folks called me Little, just cause I was the youngest out of me and Daddy and Big Bill, my grandpaw. And I guess I was little once. But I’d stretched and leaned out, about as tall as Daddy now, but somehow the name stuck. My daddy got called “Wild” and that still makes sense.
When the whole flock of cars passed they blew more dirt into the Lemon Party—II. My sleeves got a shower, a loose dust of gray clay and red dirt. The birds would try to bury me. Dang noisy birds flying around, circling and pecking just like those assholes did at school. When the draft tried to pull me out, I thought I might fly into orbit, find some far star even while my own childhood tried to twinkle the fuck out. Believe me, I could blink past the cloud of dust and find some dark sky out past the lights. Someplace I’d rather have been. Then I’d see the whole slew of them coming back around, lap twenty-something by then, and I’d do just like daddy told me, what he wished he’d have done, and I’d tuck my legs in to the seat real tight, push them over to the console. I’d do that, hope I didn’t get t-boned, and dream about a place more permanent, a place that wouldn’t roll away, and listen to all fourteen years of my life breeze by until they passed again.
Instead, there was more dirt. My foot had slipped off the clutch mid-shift. The car stalled. It wouldn’t restart. The only time it had turned over, I’d given it too much gas and it sounded like somebody was playing ping-pong under the hood.
Come the end of the race, I could barely hear. Dirt was stuck deep in my ears and I knew I’d find mounds like anthills on my pillow the next morning. I’d spit when I brushed my teeth and it would come out this grayish-red. The collars of my school-uniform shirts were always stained. They’d have these streaks that would smudge over time, till the whole thing was a different color than the original white. They expected clean and pure at the St. Francis Catholic School. They dragged me along on scholarship when I was for sure the only Methodist. You’d think my shirt would stay white since I wasn’t supposed to believe in original sin. Theirs really should’ve come off the rack stained. Was pretty sure I kept everybody in my class passing, writing near all of their papers so they could keep on winning while I struggled to get my own work done.
Now I was in another race I couldn’t finish.
I could read the signs through the dust. Don’t know how many times I read the Lucas Oil ad over on the wall next to me. I somehow always ended up parked in the same spot. Usually around lap two out of twenty-five. I knew I couldn’t, that it wasn’t possible, but I swear I could hear those other kids laughing over the spattering of mud when they passed.
The officials didn’t stop the race to move my car. The dirt and mud covered the pair of large lemons and one smaller lemon hanging from the same stem. My mama, Nanny, painted the lemons on the door about a million years ago. She told daddy the white paint would look like a flash when it flew around the track. Mama didn’t come to the races to see that wasn’t for real.
The other cars crossed the finish and I watched Daddy limp over to the tall fence. He propped himself against the chain links and I barely pulled my scrawny ass out before the tow truck driver was hitching up to the bumper.
“Good race, boy,” Daddy said. He was trying to smile. Trying to believe his own words till they got gobbled up by somebody’s busted muffler.
The tow truck revved and dragged my car through the dirt. We’d made the roll cage out of patch welds and reclaimed steel. Now the car didn’t have a wheel touching the ground. It dragged behind chains drawing pictures in the dirt with its bumper. I’d been doing the same thing in the outfield at t-ball only a couple years before. Flies swarmed the lights high at the top of poles and the pale glow was just bright enough to make me have to squint over at daddy. Made it a little bit easier to hold back tears.
“Made it longer than last time.” Daddy scratched his right leg like he did when he was trying.
I looked back over at my car. The tow truck took the turn out of the track too tight. It kept pulling even when the Lemon Party II was stuck around the corner and the rear bumper popped off.
“We’ll get it all fixed up,” Daddy said.
“I could be the best that ever lived.” Don’t know why I mumbled those words or chose that second to do it. They say you are what you eat, and I’d been fed that goddamn line so many times from daddy. He watched the car disappear around the corner, too. I missed its tail in a blink. The bumper was still rocking, real slow, in the dirt.
“What I always said.” Daddy scratched his leg again.
I walked across the track, pant legs of my racing suit puddling over the tops and backs of my Pumas, and aimed loosely at the gate between the track and stands. The suit was Daddy’s from when he was my age. He limped along beside me.
2. WILD
Nobody cared about me trying. Folks said if there’s two cars on a road, there’s racing. I was racing an eight-week clock on a season that hadn’t even started yet—before the flag even dropped.
My own boy, Little, hadn’t won a race yet. Not even close. He’d chase the other cars around the track with the engine rattling a thrown rod, humping along like a heart ready to beat out. We chased bad money with good till there was nothing left to give but Nanny’s house. Nothing would change that but a new engine. We didn’t have the money for that, but my Daddy did. Driving to his bar for another round of begging, the clock was ticking off colors toward a sunset, peeling and dropping them like the label off a dip can.
I drove out past the concrete bunker-looking strip malls with rows of “For Lease” signs, but for the big-box spots and the Mexican restaurants. I passed ProCreations, where Nanny worked. That was the big pet store with all the animals in it all stroked up on love. They sold the dogs and cats and such in pairs all hot and bothered and foaming looking for a good time. I felt about the same. She used to bring home about a dog-a-month, but they’d always run off when food got scarce. Then she started just bringing home that blush wine instead.
It was over there on the left when I drove out to see Senior. So were the folks with their signs. The ones Daddy’d already milked for all their worth.
These goons were always out there on the sidewalk of the last strip center on the way out of town. The tall one, long and thin, walked hunched under a plywood board sign roped around his neck. Old goon had scribbled on the wood:
Your sin will find you out
I slowed down a little and squinted. Probably needed to slowdown anyhow. Another ticket and they’d be trying to take my license again. But I slowed down too because next to the words he had him a photo of a man taped on his sign. It was a picture of guess who—my daddy, Senior, from a newspaper or maybe his high school yearbook. All on the picture it said:
Theif, Theaf, and Theef
“Wonder what he done?”
I kept on driving.
Everybody owed daddy something, but they didn’t have to like it. He liked to think I owed him, too. A man couldn’t owe somebody who’d never done a lick of good for them.
Seeing that man straddled by his sign, his own doing, gave me a real empty feeling in my belly. I was hungry and had been for a while, ever since Nanny stopped coming around so much and the lawn-doing dried up. Every time I tried to go in ProCreations and see my fiancé, they got on the loud speaker talking about “Nanny Pet-Pet,” and everybody hid.
I was probably squirming from the talk I was about to have with Senior too.
Didn’t even own enough wood to make me a sign for all my gripes.
The late sun sat on the edge of falling off, right in my eyes, blurred my windshield like there was something I wasn’t supposed to see on the other side. The windshield was like a mosquito graveyard, and there were a couple of cracks in the glass from my slapping at them. I yanked on the sun visor and the goddamn thing fell off in my hand. A metal clip fell between my legs and I adjusted, pushed my weight back and forth on my thighs until I couldn’t feel it anymore. I threw the visor onto the bench seat and held my hand up to clear the view. My wrist was on the wheel and a hand between my eyes and the sun. The smoke from my cigarette had me squinting a little more, but I smoked it to the butt before I pushed the nub out the cracked window.
The wide-open parking lots tightened up into rows of tall pines that hugged the sides of the roads and the sun dropped behind their tops. Here and there, lines of tire marks were rutted through the thin strips of grass and traced patterns back to the trees. Their bark was scarred with burn marks and bald spots. Ribbons and rough wooden crosses leaned on the trunks. I could’ve slid my wrist just a little to the right and joined them. I wondered if somebody would’ve stuck a stuffed animal over there for me.
I pulled up behind a big cage balanced on the back of a flatbed trailer. It hung over both sides and stuck out into the lane of traffic coming from the other way, if there ever was traffic. I swear, no less than six dogs lay on the slat wood floor of that trailer looking bored as shit. The bottom of the cage pressed up through the soft of their bellies and made them jiggle. They huffed in the heat, panted and rumbled along the two-lane road, seemingly happy as could be. When they bounced over a big pothole and the dogs lifted their chins for a second, letting the world know they were still living.
The truck turned a little and angled off onto a dirt road. The dogs turned their heads only to be greeted by the dust kicked up by the truck’s tires directly in front of them. They cruised down the path, heads bobbing and bellies swaying, into the cloud of some forgotten shithole nook of South Georgia.
I passed the county line marker. Senior’s bar and the land around it was taped off and measured by stakes with little pink flags, making sure the letter of the law was followed and that he could be left the hell alone. Pink neon ran through the building like veins and the whole place throbbed like some late night horror show experiment had come to life. The light glowed off the gold paint that covered the building and I wanted to see it melted down. The sign across the top of Senior’s concrete block and plywood compound was hand painted and said, “The Monkey Palace—King Kong of Honky Tonks.”
Copyright 2024
Reprinted with permission from Regal House Publishing
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About the Author
C.H. Hooks is the author of Can’t Shake the Dust (October, 2024; Regal House Publishing) and Alligator Zoo-Park Magic (2019). His work has appeared in publications including: The Los Angeles Review, American Short Fiction, Four Way Review, The Tampa Review, The Bitter Southerner, and Burrow Press. He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar and Contributor at Sewanee Writers' Conference, and attended DISQUIET: Dzanc Books International Literary Program. He teaches at Flagler College, and lives and sails in St. Augustine. You can visit him online at chhooks.com.
