The fire burned hot here. Not even the blackened bones of the trees are still standing. It’s as if a bomb exploded, leaving only scorched sand and bare rock. Brewer concentrates on this, the destruction, the smoke still billowing in the distance. He’ll not pause to lament the cruelty of man. Better to keep running with that as a given.
MIGUEL’S FOOT HURTS, a blister on top of his little toe, and he’s hungry too. He checks over his shoulder again, worried that the pendejos in the truck may be following, but the road is clear. It’s funny: He’s lived in the city all his life, and out here is the first place he’s had a gun pulled on him.
They eventually leave the road for a trail that weaves through burned scrub oak and manzanita before depositing them at the mouth of a narrow canyon already deep in afternoon shadow. Papá and Mr. Brewer consult the map and agree that this is the route taken by El Chango.
“I’ll go on with you,” Mr. Brewer says. “Seeing as how I’m already out here.”
“So let’s hurry then,” Miguel says, eager to get this over with. The men act like they don’t even see the sun, a virulent orange through the smoke, sitting just a hand’s width above the hills to the west. Miguel decides to lead the way to try to speed them up. He tightens the laces on his sneakers, blows a clot of black snot from his nose, and sets off.
The trail is a pale scar running up the middle of the canyon floor, and at first the going is easy, the route fairly level. But then the canyon narrows, and the trail begins to climb. Papá has a hard time of it. The crutches keep slipping, and he falls farther and farther behind. Mr. Brewer hangs back to help him, but Miguel stays out front, still hoping to set a good pace.
Everything in the canyon burned. The chaparral, the grass. Miguel bends to pick a stick up off the ground, and it crumbles in his hand. The trail eventually spits him out onto a sandy flat. The canyon dead-ends here, in a hundred-foot wall of rock, but the trail continues, zigzagging up the wall in a series of steep switchbacks. Miguel turns to check the men’s progress just in time to see Papá go down on one knee and Mr. Brewer step forward to lift him to his feet. It’s going to take them forever to climb out of here.
Miguel kicks at a pile of burned wood. Once, twice, three times. A blackened skull is dislodged and rolls across the flat. Miguel backs quickly away from the pile as he realizes that what he took for wood is bone. A leg that ends in a melted shoe. A clawlike hand. The canyon walls close in, and his mouth dries out. He turns and races down the trail toward Papá and Mr. Brewer, stumbling when he reaches them, falling and sliding painfully across the ground on hands and knees.
“They’re up there,” he says. “Dead.”
“You sure?” Mr. Brewer asks.
Miguel nods.
The three of them make their way to the flat together. Miguel hangs back when Papá and Mr. Brewer approach the bones. He doesn’t want to see them again. Papá tosses his crutches aside when he reaches the pile and kneels beside it, reaches out to run his fingers over the remains.
Miguel stares down canyon, following the trail back to its mouth. He imagines the fire funneling up toward Alberto and Maria, their fear when they realized they wouldn’t be able to outrun it, their pain as the flames enveloped them. A shiver runs through him. He doesn’t want to die. Ever.
The sky overhead is now a deep blue streaked with pink and orange, and the first stars flicker weakly against it like they might still go out. Papá and Mr. Brewer discuss what to do next. Mr. Brewer says he’ll hike out by himself. He thinks he can reach the highway before full dark and bring back help. But Papá shakes his head when Miguel translates this.
“I’ll bury them here,” he says. “It’s nobody’s job but mine.”
He sticks his finger down into his sock, fishes around, and comes up with a square of green paper, a hundred-dollar bill folded small. He holds it out to Mr. Brewer. “Thank this man for his help and tell him he has my gratitude,” he says to Miguel. “Then tell him to go home. He’s done enough.”
Mr. Brewer pushes the money aside. “I’m staying,” he says.
“Take it,” Papá says in English. “Please.”
“Let’s get to work.”
They go back and forth, but Mr. Brewer won’t be swayed. Papá finally relents and puts the bill away. He picks up the bag containing the burritos and passes it to Miguel. “Share with him,” he says, nodding at Mr. Brewer, then walks to a spot near the bones, kneels, and begins scooping a hole in the sand.
There are two burritos left. Miguel unwraps one and offers the other to Mr. Brewer.
“You go ahead,” the man says. “I had a hell of a lunch.” He carries a bottle of water to Papá and makes him drink before crouching to help dig.
Miguel thinks maybe he shouldn’t eat either, that it’s some custom the older men know and he doesn’t, but his legs are shaking, and he feels like he’ll pass out if he doesn’t get at least a little food in his stomach. He eats only half of his burrito, barely anything, and wraps up the rest and puts it back in the bag.
The men are knee-deep in the grave when he finishes. Papá waves him off when he offers to help, but Mr. Brewer says he could use a break. Miguel replaces him in the hole and begins digging alongside his father.
Papá chuckles and says he can’t believe it. He jokes about how Miguel has always hated having dirt on his hands, how even as a baby he’d run to Mamá when he got the littlest bit of mud on himself and cry and cry until she lifted him to the faucet and scrubbed his fingers clean. It’s not funny to Miguel. Why don’t you look at me now, old man? he thinks.
Papá refuses to take any breaks, but Miguel and Mr. Brewer switch off every few minutes. The ground beneath the sand is rock hard, so they pull the rubber tips off the crutches and use the crutches like jackhammers to bust up the soil. They work silently except for an occasional grunt or exhaled curse. Sweat runs down Miguel’s face, and he licks his lips to taste it. Neither Papá nor Mr. Brewer admits to noticing when night falls, so Miguel doesn’t comment either. The three of them continue digging in the dark.
Miguel is resting, lying on his back on a pile of freshly excavated dirt with his eyes closed, when Papá declares that they’re finished. The hole is five feet deep. They chopped a step halfway up, which the old man and Mr. Brewer use now, Miguel pulling them the rest of the way out.
Papá sits for a while and drinks some water. He’s covered from head to toe in dirt that’s turned to mud wherever he sweats. He rinses his mouth and spits.
“I need you to bring the bones to me in the hole,” he says to Miguel.
Miguel’s heart stops.
“I can’t,” he says.
“Why not?”
“I can’t touch them.”
“It’s your family.”
Miguel doesn’t respond; he’s crying too hard. Deep, deep sobs, all of a sudden, out of nowhere. He’s ashamed, but also angry. It’s not normal, what the old man is asking. This isn’t Mexico.
Mr. Brewer pats him on the back. “It’s okay,” he says, then walks over to the pile.
Mr. Brewer passes the remains to Papá, who stands in the grave and carefully lays them at his feet. Five minutes, and they’ve finished. Papá climbs out of the grave, and he and Mr. Brewer sit down to rest. Miguel feels like crying again. He and the old man will never be the same with each other, he knows. This day will forever stand between them.
Swallowing his grief, he walks over and begins shoveling dirt onto the bones with his hands.
“Wait, mijo, I’ll help you,” Papá says.
“I’m fine,” Miguel replies, his voice too loud in the nighttime silence of the canyon. And then there’s only the reassuring hymn of his breath and the grateful sigh of earth returning in darkness to where it belongs.
IT’S CLOSE TO midnight when they finish refilling the grave and stand over it with bowed heads. Brewer realizes he’s forgotten all the prayers he ever knew except the childish ones, “Now I lay me down to sleep” and such, and decides he’s fine with that.
Miguel is ready to walk out tonight, says he’ll carry his dad if he has to. He’s got school tomorrow, a track meet. Brewer argues the other side, pointing out how tricky the switchbacks will be for Armando on crutches, especially with no flashlight. Better to hunker down here until dawn, when it’ll take half as long to make the climb and be a lot less dangerous. Miguel’s face falls when Armando decides to wait. Brewer hates to see him disappointed. He’s a good kid.
“A few more hours,” he says to him.
The boy turns away, doesn’t want to hear it.
The night is plenty warm, and there’s food and enough water if they go easy on it. The three of them sit on the ground with their backs to the canyon wall, and Brewer smokes a cigarette. Lights twinkle in the distance. A ranch in Mexico, on the other side of the fence. The silence is so profound—everything that might make a noise having fled or been burned—that the distant roar of a jet passing high overhead makes them all look up.
Armando and Miguel stretch out on their backs, fingers laced behind their heads. Their breathing slows and deepens. Brewer won’t be able to sleep without whiskey—that’s the way it is these days—but he’s content to sit and watch over the man and boy and wishes them peaceful dreams.
The stars do their dance for him, wheeling around a bright sliver of moon, and after making sure that all the constellations he knew as a boy are still there, he divides the sky into quadrants with an eye toward counting. Choosing a section, he begins: one star, two stars, three. He hopes Cassius made it home, pictures the dog waiting for him when he returns to the trailer.
After an hour he dozes off and finds Charlie Wiggins fishing in a river he knows but can’t name. His old friend draws his rod back, then snaps it forward, sending his lure into a dappled pool in the middle of the stream. Brewer is ecstatic watching him. If this is forever, he thinks, I’m fine with it. Suddenly, though, the light changes. The sun on the water burns brighter and brighter until Charlie is nothing but a silhouette against it, and Brewer is no longer able to distinguish his features. He reaches out to pull his friend into the shade with him, but no go. He wakes with a handful of sand and a too-familiar ache in his chest.
Armando has removed his jacket and covered Miguel with it and is sleeping with his arm wrapped protectively around the boy. Brewer is long past pondering how his life would have been different if certain things had happened or hadn’t, but seeing father and son like this, he can’t help but wonder about all that he missed that might have eased his way.
False dawn comes and goes, and the night seems somehow darker, colder, longer. Brewer is restless. He stands and walks, joints popping, to the edge of the flat, looks down canyon, then up toward the switchbacks they’ll climb in the morning. A pale blue glow limns the east wall of the canyon, and the mound of sand marking the grave slowly becomes visible. The boy was seventeen, the girl sixteen. They died in each other’s arms.
Alack, he was but one hour mine, Brewer thinks.
“You and your poems,” Charlie Wiggins once said, lying beside him on a steamy summer evening in a room they shared.
Me and my poems, Brewer thinks now, and somewhere, way off in the unburned distance, a bird wakes and sings.
Acknowledgments
Thanks again to my agent, Henry Dunow; my editor, Asya Muchnick; and everybody at Little, Brown/Mulholland Books. Thanks to the publications in which some of these stories were originally published. And thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and ECLA Aquitaine for financial support during the writing of this book.
About the Author
Richard Lange is the author of the story collection Dead Boys and the novels This Wicked World and Angel Baby, which won the Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Los Angeles.
richlange.com
@richardlange
Praise for Richard Lange’s
Sweet Nothing
“Richard Lange dives into his characters’ lives in order to reveal ever deeper, ever darker wants....You know you’re in the hands of an expert....Most striking in these stories is Lange’s efficient use of language. The author creates poetry from the simplest of words and moments.... This is the kind of book you’ll want to savor.”
—Lisa L. Kirchner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Richard Lange’s stories are a revelation. He writes of the disaffections and bewilderments of ordinary lives with as keen an anger and searing lyricism as anybody out there today. He is Raymond Carver reborn in a hard cityscape. Read him and be amazed.”
—T. C. Boyle, author of The Harder They Come
“Beautifully crafted....Samuel Beckett is Lange’s major writing influence, but judging from the casual eloquence of his stories, Lange has already earned a place close to Beckett’s elevated company.”
—Jack Batten, Toronto Star
“Wonderful.… Swift, gut-wrenching, and sometimes cleverly disarming fiction by a master.”
—Joe R. Lansdale, author of Paradise Sky
“Lange has a terrific knack for plotting and a penchant for populating his tales with characters who live within or at the edge of a violent, lawless world....Denis Johnson’s influence is apparent in the terse lyricism of Lange’s prose....The stories are imbued with a sense of searing honesty about our common potential for failure and an empathy for human weakness that make the characters hard not to love, and their author impossible not to admire.”
—Ed Tarkington, Memphis Commercial Appeal
“Highly recommended....Lange knows how to inhabit the skin of his protagonists and breathe life and vitality into them with his minimalist prose....These citizens of L.A. are Lange’s bread and butter, and he drafts them with so much care and precision that they become just as real as your next-door neighbor....Sweet Nothing is dark and gritty, but there’s a spark of life and light and a deadpan sense of humor that stops the stories from going full dark.”
—Keith Rawson, LitReactor
“With his lyrical yet matter-of-fact prose, Lange drills straight to the center of society’s fringe. We might not find his characters’ lives desirable, but we do relate to their basic humanity, occasionally in spite of ourselves.”
—Angela Lutz, Kansas City Star
“The syncopated rhythm of Lange’s dialogue and the laconic grace of his descriptions can still capture a life in a single episode.”
—Anna Mundow, Barnes and Noble Review
“For me the best stories are rabbit holes. You read the first lines, maybe a page, and you’re down there. Somewhere else. Another life. Richard Lange is one cwazy wabbit.”
—James Sallis, author of Drive
“Skillfully constructed....Lange portrays the lives of people struggling to survive, with the focus on families, both blood-related and chance-made....These stories will have broad appeal because of Lange’s accessible style and fine characterization.”
—Ellen Loughran, Booklist
“For all the darkness that runs through the stories, Lange maintains a disarmingly light touch....These tales are not far removed from the classic stories of O. Henry and Guy de Maupassant.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Utterly believable postcards from the edge; for those who like their realism not so magical but right there at street level.”
—Robert E. Brown, Library Journal
“Richard Lange piercingly depicts the grittier side of Los Angeles in his new short story collection.”
—David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
Books by Richard Lange
Dead Boys
This Wicked World
Angel Baby
Reading Group Guide
SWEET NOTHING
Stories
by
by
RICHARD LANGE
A conversation with Richard Lange
Will you tell us a bit about
Sweet Nothing?
It’s my second collection of stories. (Dead Boys was the first.) They’re mostly set in Southern California again, but I mixed things up this time when it came to narrators, time periods, writing style, etc. I wanted to stretch a bit. One thing that didn’t change, though, is the cloud of desperation that hangs over the characters. I tend to write about the make-or-break moments in people’s lives, and that continues in Sweet Nothing.
What are a few of your personal favorites from the collection?
I love them all for different reasons. Writing each was an adventure for me, a journey, and I learned something from each one about myself as a writer and as a person and about the world around me. Writing is how I process life, the way I bring order to chaos.
What is your writing process for short fiction as opposed to full-length novels? Is it easier for you to write short stories, or more difficult (or neither)?
Writing anything is hard for me because I’m always pushing myself and I’m a harsh critic of my own work. That said, writing stories is hard in a different way from writing novels. With stories, the difficulty is stringing together a series of moments that sometimes don’t want to be strung together into a cohesive emotional experience for the reader. With novels, I’m working a lot more with plot, with moving the story along. That’s still a challenge for me. I tend to want to dawdle.
What do you like to see in a good short story?
I want an experience. I want to be entertained or moved or dazzled or taught something or impressed. I like it when writers aim high, when they go for it, whether that’s through plot, character, structure, language, or rhythm.
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