Finn (39 page)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A
S MUCH AS A BOOK
like this seems to spring from nowhere—even to its amazed author—I owe enormous debts of gratitude all around.
To Mark Twain, who created the world within which this interloper has dared to meddle.
To my mother and father, Joyce and Warren Clinch, who freed me early on to do as I liked. Including this sort of thing.
To a small handful of early readers and encouragement-mongers—among whom I name in my heart old pals Bob Hill and Steve Kendra, newer friends Karen Dionne and Chris Graham of Bksp.org, and faithful cohorts Zarina Docken, Kristy Kiernan, Sachin Waikar, Tasha Alexander, Elizabeth Letts, and Rachel Cole—each of whom has seen to it that I’ve kept going, even when the going has seemed pointless.
To my tireless agent, Jeff Kleinman. To my irreplaceable editor, Will Murphy. To the rest of the extraordinary team at Random House: Daniel Menaker, Tom Perry, Sanyu Dillon, Sally Marvin, Jynne Martin, Lea Beresford, Megan Fishmann, Gabrielle Bordwin, Gene Mydlowski, Vincent La Scala, Amy Edelman, and Matt Kellogg.
To my astonishing daughter, Emily, who would have been enough.
And above all to my dear wife, Wendy, without whom I would surely perish.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of upstate New York and a graduate of Syracuse University,
JON CLINCH
has taught American literature, has been creative director for a Philadelphia ad agency, and has run his own agency in the Philadelphia suburbs. His stories have appeared in John Gardner’s
MSS.
magazine. He and his wife have one daughter.
H
E WENT
and bent down and looked, and says:
“It’s a dead man. Yes, indeedy; naked, too. He’s ben shot in de back. I reck’n he’s ben dead two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan’ look at his face—it’s too gashly.”
I didn’t look at him at all. Jim throwed some old rags over him, but he needn’t done it; I didn’t want to see him. There was heaps of old greasy cards scattered around over the floor, and old whiskey bottles, and a couple of masks made out of black cloth; and all over the walls was the ignorantest kind of words and pictures, made with charcoal. There was two old dirty calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some women’s underclothes, hanging against the wall, and some men’s clothing, too. We put the lot into the canoe; it might come good. There was a boy’s old speckled straw hat on the floor; I took that too. And there was a bottle that had had milk in it; and it had a rag stopper for a baby to suck. We would a took the bottle, but it was broke. There was a seedy old chest, and an old hair trunk with the hinges broke.
M
ARK
T
WAIN
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Finn
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Jon Clinch
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Clinch, Jon.
Finn: a novel / Jon Clinch.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Finn, Huckleberry (Fictitious character) 2. Mississippi River—Fiction. 3. Runaway children—Fiction. 4. Fugitive slaves—Fiction. 5. Male friendship—Fiction. 6. Race relations—Fiction. 7. Missouri—Fiction. 8. Boys—Fiction.
I.
Title.
PS
3603.
L
54
F
56 2007
813'.6—dc22 2006045802
eISBN: 978-1-58836-584-2
v3.0