Northline by Willy Vlautin (P.S. 2008)

 

Well, the lady fired me after the second time so I didn’t get another job or anything for the rest of the summer. I just laid around with the A/C on in the dark and rented movies. I saw Paul Newman first in Slap Shot, and I thought he was the funniest guy I’d ever seen. Plus he was so handsome. Then I started renting all his movies. When he’s young, like in Cool Hand Luke, he’s amazing. He’s really really handsome in that. Or in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But if you’ve ever seen Fort Apache, the Bronx, then you’d understand him. You ever seen that one?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘He’s older in it and he falls in love with a nurse. She’s really beautiful, but she’s a junkie and lives in a horrible part of New York City. But she’s a good person, she’s just had a hard life. Paul Newman is a cop and he’s tough and strong, but he’s also really nice. He’s just tired and worn out ’cause being a policeman in New York City is an awful job. Anyway, there’s this scene where the nurse and him are together, and she’s really exhausted so he makes her a bath. He puts bubbles in it and shakes the water so the bubbles get extra bubbly and he sits with her while she lays in the water. It’s hard to explain, but it just kills me. As sad as it is to admit, he’s probably the greatest thing that ever happened to me.’

‘Paul Newman?’

‘Any time I get worried or my anxieties start in, I just think about Paul Newman. Sometimes it’s hard to get him here, but most of the time he shows up. Ever since that summer, it’s been like that.

The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin (Faber and Faber 2006)

The night it happened  I was drunk, almost passed out, and I swear to God a bird came flying through my motel room window. It was maybe five degrees out and the bird, some sorta duck, was suddenly on my floor surrounded in glass. The window must have killed it. It would have scared me to death if I hadn’t been so drunk. All I could do was get up, turn on the light, and throw it back out the window. It fell three stories and landed on the sidewalk below. I turned my electric blanket up to ten, got back in bed, and fell asleep.

A few hours later I woke again to my brother standing over me, crying uncontrollably. He had a key to my room. I could barely see straight and I knew then I was going to be sick. It was snowing out and the wind would flurry snow through the broken window and into my room. The streets were empty, frozen with ice.

Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin (Harper Perennial 2010)

When I woke up that morning it was still pretty early. Summer had just begun and from where I lay in my sleeping bag I could see out the window. There were hardly any clouds and the sky was clear and blue. I looked at the Polaroid I had taped to the wall next to where I slept. It shows my aunt and me sitting by a river; she has on a swimsuit. She’s my dad’s sister and she looks like him, with black hair and blue eyes and she’s really thin. In the photo she’s holding a can of soda and smiling as I sit next to her. She has her arm around me. My hair’s wet and I’m smiling. That was when we all lived in Wyoming. But it had been four years since I’d seen her, and I didn’t even know where she lived anymore.

My dad and I had just moved to Portland, Oregon, and we’d been there for a week. We didn’t know anybody. Two days before my school year was done we packed the truck and moved out from Spokane. We brought our kitchen table and four chairs, dishes and pots and pans, our clothes and TV, and my dad’s bed. We left all the rest.