Nowhere Is Always Somewhere

By Robert Earle

In the six tales of Nowhere is Always Somewhere, short story master Robert Earle again creates compelling characters caught up in life’s dramas all over the world: Americans imprisoned in Bolivia...homeless kids forging a relationship under a bridge in L.A. ...a man whose writer daughter understands him better than he thinks...a Brit encountering the Chechen insurgent who cast him off as a child...a young girl challenging her father’s racism in the South...a son humbled by his father’s nursing home experience in Pennsylvania...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordrunner eChapbooks
• Release date: Sep 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370438518

Book preview

Nowhere

Is Always

Somewhere

Six Stories

By Robert Earle

Published by Wordrunner eChapbooks

(an imprint of Wordrunner Press)

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 Robert Earle

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Under the Bridge

The Mustard Pot

Nowhere is Always Somewhere

Monsters, Monsters Everywhere

What Maggie Knew

The Last Summer

About Robert Earle

About Wordrunner eChapbooks

Under the Bridge

After she said all right and he lay down beside her and a few moments had passed with the two of them lying there like two pieces of detritus bumped together by the ocean’s wayward currents, he said the thing was you didn’t know what you were doing before you did it and didn’t know afterward what you’d done. You only knew right now.

Sort of like a substitute teacher trying to sound impressive. She gave him a pass, though, to see if there was more because in a way he was right as far as right now went, and if she didn’t pay attention, true, there would be nothing, as there had been before he showed up and asked if she minded him lying there beside her.

Sort of like sitting in a truck cab, what you saw erasing what you’d seen, he continued. All you did was watch the whole country snapping past you, and it’s gone, and you’re here, and you don’t know where here will lead, either.

They lay there under the bridge in what they mistook for silence because they were paying attention to each other, comfortable on the sloping concrete channel wall above the trickling river flow that didn’t glint in the shadow of the bridge, displaying its freight of oils and fertilizers, insecticides, and factory run-off. The surface of the river danced with that stuff while it was in the sun and then stopped dancing under the bridge and farther along, back in the sun, danced again, very pretty although it would kill you if you drank it.

What I would say to you, he said, is an hour from now we may never see one another again.

She asked him where he got this annoying way of talking—What I would say to you—intending to squash his philosophizing like a bug.

My mother, he said, unsquashed. She would talk like that. Sit down and pull herself together and start with that. She said it all the time.

His clothes were not totally subsided into his skin, she thought, contemplating a poem she would never finish, clothing so worn that it subsided into a person’s skin. He also had a grease smear on his cheek. He said he got it helping a driver turn a crank on his trailer, tightening the load, which led to him getting in the truck cab he was talking about. One ride all the way to L.A. Then he finished up walking to Long Beach to see the ocean and then followed the river channel back to where they lay.

She offered him a cigarette. He declined.

So, you’re here, she said, exhaling.

I’m here.

How long is it?

Since I got here? Four days. You?

More like four years.

She wasn’t a poet and turned to how she looked at things, her own philosophy, so to speak.

The first thing is being hungry. That’s the main thing you’ve got to deal with. The second thing is going to the bathroom. The third thing is staying cool. Fourth is the boredom and not letting it get the best of you and make a mistake in getting rid of it. Fifth is where do you sleep. And sixth is not hating it all, what you’ve done, gotten yourself here.

But you haven’t done anything, he objected. That’s what I’m saying, and if you did, you couldn’t say that was why you were here, the only single reason. There is no single reason.

How old are you? she asked.

Seventeen. You?

Twenty.

Where are you from?

The way you put it, nowhere. The way most people would put it, St. Paul. You?

St. Louis. So, the both of us running from saints.

I’m not running anywhere. I’m lying here like I would have been lying here if you had kept on walking.

She had gone through phases. Boyfriends for free. Drinking for free. Drugs that weren’t free. Boyfriends for pay. Cleaning houses, stringing wire, factory night guard, sleeping in the canyons, the house she got into, the house where she was invited on the beach, San Jose once, another time Brentwood, staking out a chaise lounge by the pool, no bathing suit, browning like a cigar. And other things, street things, barrio things and this thing, the river channel thing.

Say your name again.

Tim. I never said it before, though. Yours?

Martha, Marty, Mart. Depends.

Her jeans, to her the most famous thing in her life, were soft to the point of disintegrating, totally subsided. She had the tank top, the hoodie, three pairs of underwear, the trainers, poquito Spanish, bonjour in French, a sense of these four years enveloping her like cake batter folding into a cake pan.

The seventh thing, she said, is gangs, staying clear. One time one of them had me in a basement, and they would fuck me for nothing except Colonel Sanders and Mt. Dew, which they all drank. The white girl downstairs, they called me. Chica blanca.

You were like a sex slave?

More like a sex prisoner. Slaves have rights.

How did you get in with them?

I was with another gang and this one snatched me off the street.

How did you escape?

My pussy swelled to where they couldn’t get in and they put me back out on the street right where they snatched me.

The old gang didn’t want her back. Then she heard about a clinic where they