Tomato Red (2 page)

—Ray Banks, author of
Sucker Punch
and
No More Heroes

 

“
Tomato Red. The Death of Sweet Mister. The Ones You Do. Under the Bright Lights. Give Us a Kiss. Woe to Live On.
These are just a few of Daniel Woodrell’s stunning, unforgettable, and beautifully written books. His prose is lean, brutal and poetic, as are his characters. And yet despite the tragedy, violence, and emotional pain in his stories, Woodrell always manages to find the humor, and the humanity . . . and even a little redemption. This man should be a bestselling author, held in the same high, popular regard as Michael Connelly, T. Jefferson Parker, George Pelecanos, and Dennis Lehane. He’s one of the best novelists out there in
any
genre. He’s the writer that other writers read to see how a master does the job . . . and to stay at the top of their game. If you love crime fiction, or just damn good writing, you’ve got to read this guy.”

—Lee Goldberg, author of
Mr. Monk in Trouble
and
The Man with the Iron-On Badge

 

“The first Daniel Woodrell book I ever read was
Tomato Red
. You know that feeling you get when you read something by a new to you author and your heart beats just that wee bit faster. You think ‘this is it—this guy is going to be one of my all-time favourite authors’—what a great feeling that is. From the first, awe inspiring sentence, which is over 250 words long, to the last heartbreaking page I was simply transported. As it happens, the second Daniel Woodrell I read was
The Death of Sweet Mister
—an uncomfortable, painful, brutal tale, which is also poetic and beautiful and just . . . breathtakingly wonderful. It’s a book of lost innocence, simmering rage, and ineffable cruelty that makes your heart ache. Daniel Woodrell is the master of making you care about people who live ‘lives of rancid nothingness.’ Their stories are so big, yet their lives are so small. I am so glad that Busted Flush Press is reprinting these two great books. Daniel Woodrell deserves a far wider audience. He’s a genius.”

—Donna Moore, author of
Old Dogs
and
Go to Helena Handbasket

 

“There are a handful of writers who are known, read and revered by other writers for the brilliant beauty of their words. Some have become better known—James Lee Burke is an obvious example—but some haven’t yet achieved the wide readership that they deserve. Daniel Woodrell is chief amongst them. He’s created his own niche in the mystery world—‘Ozark Noir’—and he’ll dazzle you with each page. Chandler once wrote his ideal of a private eye and I think it applies to writers as well, certainly to Woodrell: ‘He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ Woodrell is the best at what he does and he can equal the best writing in any other world.”

—JB Dickey, Seattle Mystery Bookshop

Under the Bright Lights
(1986)
Muscle for the Wing
(1988)
The Ones You Do
(1992)

 

Woe to Live On
(1987)
Give Us a Kiss
(1996)
Tomato Red
(1998)
The Death of Sweet Mister
(2001)
Winter’s Bone
(2006)

“I wish that road had bent another way.”

—
Tomato Red

 

AT FIRST GLANCE,
Tomato Red
may seem too modest, too slim, too earthy to conjure such magic. It is, after all, a tale of convenience stores and parking lots and mud-rut driveways and tiny homes with bail bondsmen’s phone numbers taped on every refrigerator door. But prepare yourself, because within a page, you are dropped—no, you sink, eagerly—into a world of such radical beauty and longing, you can’t catch your breath. Its seeming spareness, its rustic hide is the great gambit of
Tomato Red
, a conjurer’s dodge.

And the conjurer himself, Daniel Woodrell, casts his spell not with the starry lure of titillation nor, in the manner of many noir masters, a scene of such keen violence that we are stunned into submission. No, no. Woodrell does it with language. And not in the form of well-chosen words, the music of a fine sentence, the harmony of a paragraph crafted to draw you close to the book’s beating heart. No. The thing Woodrell does to words is the stuff of dark alchemy. He breaks language apart, shatters it to glittery pieces, then stitches it together new. You don’t even know what it is—are those words? Sentences? Or am I bewitched?

In
Tomato Red
, Woodrell manages it all in the first line, which, unbroken, becomes the first paragraph, by the end of which you are utterly in his thrall. It begins,

There is no breath, no chance, and by the end of that first sentence, which is not even half over yet, you’ve burrowed through such tumult—girls with teeth like shoe-peg corn and all manner of rich adventures unfurling at your feet—you are utterly, early ensnared. Part of the ensnarement comes through the use of that second-person “you.” By page two, by the end of this epic first sentence, our narrator, one Sammy Barlach, holds you rapt between his two barreled arms. Because, although the book begins with “you,” it’s Sammy who has ended up in West Table, Mo., and stumbled eagerly into this gang of crank bums, and will soon stumble eagerly into much more. But by using that second-person “you,” he’s pointed the finger out at you, the reader. “
You’re
no angel,
you
know how this stuff come to happen.”

And, after that down-the-rabbit-hole first sentence, Sammy reminds us again that we are part of this, and we are just like him: “Can’t none of this be new to you,” he says. And so you are his. And you are Woodrell’s.

Tomato Red
is a story of outliers, and, as none of this is new to us, we are thus outliers too. So we decide to go with Sammy, who stumbles haphazardly into the world of Venus Hollow and the Merridew clan, mother Beverly, a slightly worn prostitute, and her two teenage children, the beautiful James (“If your ex had his lips,” Sammy tells the reader, “you’d still be married”) and his enterprising sister, Jamalee. Jamalee, of the eponymous tomato-red hair. Jamalee, whose ragged, raging heart beats wildly at the center of
the book. She’s the dreamer, whose dreams are big and gold-gilt enough to entice her brother and Sammy alike.

Before meeting Jamalee, Sammy never saw such possibility in life, and the yearning is painful for both of them. “God damn,” she says, “you know, that big rotten gap between who I am, and who I want to be, never does quit
hurtin’
to stare across.” Jamalee’s dreams, however, are Hollywood-made, a place where “squatly shiny fellas in tuxedos [are] making music just out of sight behind the palm trees”. The imagined futures she paints dazzle Sammy, whose world heretofore was only as big as that night’s passed bottle and fun, but he sees the dark edge. “The girl put bubbles in my spirit with her dedication and hope,” he says, before adding, “The world she aimed us at seemed like a child’s wish of a world . . .”

Sammy and the Merridews are not rebels. They’re aching to belong, and to find a place they can belong. For Jamalee, it’s a place of tinsel-edged beauty, a world Sammy can only see glimpses of. Her capacity to imagine that world staggers him and he realizes swiftly that he is “weak to her”. In this swift, unstoppable way, a die is cast. This sense that such yearning is both beautiful and a trap connects Woodrell to such 1930s noir masters as Horace McCoy, Nathanael West and James M. Cain. Life is the rawest of raw deals, and there’s no steeper price to pay than the one you pay for false illusions. “They don’t expect anything but trouble from the square world,” Woodrell said about
Tomato Red
’s characters in an interview with John Williams for
The Independent
, “Every time they interact with that world they’re given a ticket, sent to jail, drafted. It’s never good. So they live by a separate value system.”

Indeed, Sammy feels very much in the 1930s tradition of great noir confessors—Frank Chambers in Cain’s
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1934) and Robert Syverten in McCoy’s
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
(1935)—who whisper sweet confidences and swelling sorrow into your ear. Like Sammy, Frank Chambers’ life is small until he meets Cora, who dreams of bigger things, sealing both their fates. Likewise, Robert in McCoy’s bleak dance marathon tale finds himself transformed, in this case, by failed starlet Gloria’s relentless death drive. What is even more explicit in
Woodrell’s rendering, however, is that the woman in this scenario is no femme fatale. The noir trap is set not by the woman hungry for more but instead by a world that never gives these couples a chance—that only seeks to throw them away. These beautiful losers are disposable.

It’s a heartbreaking vision, and one that’s clear from the very first, seemingly jaunty pages of the book, when Sammy finds himself, through petty criminal means, in a posh rich man’s house. “You see the insides of a classier world like that,” he tells us, “and it sets your own to spinning off-balance …
I ain’t shit! I ain’t shit!
shouts your brain, and this place proves the point.”

But this class rage, this outsider yearning suggests a book torn apart by misery. There is so much joy in its pages too, in the pleasures of the alternative family and alternative world Sammy and the Merridews create together: Sammy dancing in his carseat to the King, Jason cutting Sammy’s hair in the kitchen, giving him a rockabilly do, the way Jamalee hops up on the counter and gazes over a road atlas, planning adventures, mapping a future with glimmers and hope.

The rough magic of
Tomato Red
is not easily shaken off. It’s a spell you think you don’t ever want to wake from, until the pain becomes so great in its heartrending last pages that you can scarcely bear it. It’s a novel of great humor and woeful disappointments, of woolly hijinks and sweeping moments of blue. But nothing prepares you for the final pages, even as, by the time you get to them, you also realize there could be no other way.

 

Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award-winning author of
Queenpin, Die a Little, The Song Is You,
and
Bury Me Deep
.

Anybody possessing analytical knowledge recognizes the fact that the world is full of actions performed by people exclusively to their detriment and without perceptible advantage, although their eyes were open.

—THEODOR REIK

It’s not all peaches and cream. But I haven’t learned that yet.

—OIL CAN BOYD

YOU’RE NO ANGEL, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it’s been a gray day sogged by a slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom, and since you’re fresh to West Table, Mo., and a new hand at the dog-food factory, your choices for company are narrow but you find some finally in a trailer court on East Main, and the coed circle of bums gathered there spot you a beer, then a jug of tequila starts to rotate and the rain keeps comin’ down with a miserable bluesy beat and there’s two girls millin’ about that probably can be had but they seem to like certain things and crank is one of those certain things, and a fistful of party straws tumble from a woven handbag somebody brung, the crank gets cut into lines, and the next time you notice the time it’s three or four Sunday mornin’ and you ain’t slept since Thursday night and one of the girl voices, the one you want most and ain’t had yet though her teeth are the size of shoe-peg corn and look like maybe they’d taste sort of sour, suggests something to do, ’cause with crank you want something,
anything
, to do, and this cajoling voice suggests we all rob this certain house on this certain street in that rich area where folks can afford to wallow in their vices and likely have a bunch of recreational dope stashed around the mansion and goin’ to waste since an article in
The Scroll
said the rich people whisked off to France or some such on a noteworthy vacation.

That’s how it happens.

Can’t none of this be new to you.

The gal with her mouth full of shoe-peg corn and the bright idea in the first place drives over and lets me off at the curb, and there’s another burglar passed out in the backseat who won’t be of any help. She doses a kiss out to me, a dry peck on the lips, and claims she’ll keep her eyes peeled and I should give the high sign once I’ve burgled my way inside.

The rain has made the ground skittish, it just quakes and slides away from my footsteps, and this fantastic mist has risen up and thickened so that eyesight is temporarily marked way down in value.

I stumbled into a couple of different hedgerows, one about head high and one around the waist, before I fell onto the walkway. The walkway was, I suppose, made of laid brick, but the bricks were that type that’s bigger than house bricks, more the shape of bread loaves, which I think classes them as cobblestones or something. So I wobbled along this big brick walkway, on up the slope and past a lamppost in the yard that made a hepatitis-yellow glow, straight to the backside of the mansion.

Rich folk apparently love their spectacular views, pay dear for them, I’m sure, so there was all this glass. The door was glass and the entire rear wall practically was glass. By sunlight I’d reckon you could see the total spread of the town and long, long pony rides’ worth of countryside from any corner in there. All that window gave me brief goofy thoughts of diamond-point glasscutters and suction cups and the whole rigamarole of jewel-thief piss elegance but, actually, with my head out to lunch as it was I just grabbed a few logs from the firewood stack on the patio there and flung them at that glass door.