Keller's Turn: A Novel

By Donovan Webster

Keller's Turn: a Novel concerns the life of Frank Keller, biotech billionaire, husband, avid sailor, runner, and bow hunter who, at fifty-three, sees his life come to bits in the days preceding Christmas. On a Friday night, the first night of the long holiday weekend, his wife of three decades decides to leave him (decamping for their Aspen house for the holidays), and, at a loss, Keller tries to reconstruct the remains his life through lonely action. In doing so, he telephones his ranch manager in Texas to check in and discovers that their Alpha bison, the largest male in the herd, is going crazy, destroying other livestock and wreaking havoc on the ranch. The manager says the aging (and expensive) bison may have to be put down in the interest of the other livestock and the property, and Keller nominates himself for the job, using his bow and arrow and hunting the bison on horseback across the ranch. It does not end well for the bison, other innocent people, and Keller himself. Taut, visual, and ultimately visceral, it's a good read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781499084115

Donovan Webster

Donovan Webster has written three books, including the prize-winning Aftermath: The Remnants of War. He has also written for major magazines such as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and the New York Times magazine.

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Copyright © 2014 by Donovan Webster.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014918510

ISBN:      Hardcover            978-1-4990-8409-2

                Softcover             978-1-4990-8410-8

                eBook                  978-1-4990-8411-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/24/2014

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CONTENTS

DECEMBER 21

DECEMBER 22

DECEMBER 23

DECEMBER 24

DECEMBER 25

Also by Donovan Webster

Aftermath: The Remnants of War

The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II

Babylon by Bus: or, the true story of two friends who gave up their valuable franchise selling Yankees Suck T-shirts at Fenway to find meaning and adventure in Iraq, where they became employed by the Occupation in jobs for which they lacked qualification and witnessed much that amazed and disturbed them

Meeting the Family: One Man’s Journey Through his Human Ancestry

War Stories: True-life Fiction of America’s Troops and Families in the Global War on Terror

To Everything….

Gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. —Albert Camus, The Stranger

DECEMBER 21

THE CLOUDS TUMBLED and rolled and moved inside themselves out across Lake Michigan toward the eastern horizon; each one making its own way toward that razor-line where the water met the sky. Alone. Individual. Always evolving.

Some of the clouds were grayer than others, a few were blindingly white, others were almost slatted in their lightness. Keller watched the clouds blow over the roof of his apartment building and into the vast lake sky. Moving away from land and over water, with no buildings or beacons beneath them any longer.

They were strange clouds for Chicago in December, Keller thought. Not at all like the boilerplate clouds that usually covered the December sky from horizon to horizon. These were August or September clouds. They were late summer or early autumn clouds full of drama and movement and unburdened by the ice of winter.

Keller had been watching clouds a lot lately. For the past six months or so. And not with any meteorological interest, but just because he suddenly loved the way clouds moved. He was in love with their unrestricted detachment from his world of concrete objects and temporal concerns. Secretly, deep inside him somewhere, as a cloud tumbled along with the wind, and he could feel the cloud’s changing shape inside himself—a truth he could tell no one for possibly seeming crazy with its utterance. Still, a cumulus cloud spilling forward, large and white in the golden light of sunset, would sometimes give Keller an inexplicable thrilling and tightening in his chest behind his sternum. It was as if he were holding his breath and at the same time trying to force it out of his lungs. Sometimes, as he watched the clouds at sunset from his apartment window, he would stop breathing completely and suddenly find himself starved for air.

It had become quite a ritual with Keller, coming home each night and watching the clouds. Now, in mid-December, Keller sometimes left his office early to get home in time for sunset.

Keller would hurry along Michigan Avenue toward his apartment at four o’clock, beneath the tiny white Christmas lights hanging from naked tree limbs above the sidewalk, watching the sky the whole way home. Walking north past the garish fashions of Walton Street, toward the spot in the sidewalk where Oak Street suddenly layed-open the sky at Oak Street Beach. Then, with the clouds rolling from the canyon-like buildings on his left into the huge skies above Lake Michigan to his right, Keller would tilt his head back a bit further against his tightly wound scarf and breathe deeply as he watched the drama in the sky. The clouds, sliding and skidding and being pushed along on cushions of air pressure, above it all.

WHEN HE’D get home to his apartment, Keller would toss off his overcoat and pour himself a drink, usually a light Bourbon, or sometimes a Chardonnay from the Russian River Valley winery he owned in a partnership—and he’d sit down in an armchair near the windows.

The chair, upholstered in a fabric printed with stylized orange orchids against a forest green background, was set so that Keller could see the clouds and the bend in North Lake Shore Drive through the apartment’s floor to ceiling windows overlooking the lake. And as the sun dropped toward the western horizon somewhere behind his apartment building, Keller would look east at the clouds and rush-hour motion in the changing light. Light and motion: sunset going from white to gold to pink to a deep, wintertime blue in the course of 30 minutes. Then his drink would be finished and his wife would come home, and Keller’s life of hard edges and concerns would return, bursting in front of him like a camera flash.

His marriage had been unhappy for quite a while, and many of the evenings as Keller sat watching the clouds he would think about his marriage and the mess they’d made of it. Rather than try to fix the situation, Keller and his wife, who was the producer of a daytime television talk show that was now rumored to be moving to New York, had resigned themselves to unhappy cohabitation with some moments being less unhappy than others. Keller had often wondered why his marriage had stayed together for more than twenty-five years, and, after brooding on this for a week or two, he’d decided that the marriage had deteriorated from love into safety.

He had become a very successful businessman, which still sometimes astounded him: an enormously prosperous entrepreneur in the biomedical field. He had built a business precisely at the right time. It had been all about the timing. Just out of Stanford (where he’d gotten an academic scholarship, and thereby always felt he had to work harder than everyone else), he’d emerged with a Masters in bioengineering. She was the product of Catholicism and Mennonite Christianism in central Missouri and Knox College in Illinois, and her work had now grown so interesting and hectic that she didn’t need to find any further fulfillment at home.

That, Keller had decided, was his life.

THIS NIGHT, a Friday with clouds that looked more like Labor Day than the winter solstice, was the beginning of his wife’s three-week holiday from work. That was just one appealing thing about the job Keller’s wife had, each August and December there was this hiatus for the entire staff.

Keller had suspected for some weeks that his wife had made some travel plans for her break, but she had yet to disclose them to him. Every time Keller had brought up the idea of celebrating Christmas, his wife had somehow slipped off the subject before anything was resolved. And when he’d started to press her on their Christmas plans, she had become illogical and angry and had once stormed out of the kitchen. Three nights ago, Keller had started discussing Christmas plans over dinner in his wife’s favorite restaurant, a place called Mon Ami Gabi, and his wife had gotten up from the table in the middle of the entree and left. Keller had stayed at the table and finished the bottle of wine, a fine Washington-state Pinot Noir and the wine and the silence after his wife’s departure had cemented his thoughts that she would be spending her hiatus without him.

And now Keller watched the sky grow dark, sitting in his living room, and thought of what Christmas would be like. When the last rays of the sun—shining upward into the sky from the western horizon—had almost died, Keller noticed some new and thin ribs of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere. He had mistaken the nearly translucent clouds for sky earlier, that was how fine and delicate they were. But now, with the pinkish glow of the last sunshine lighting them alone above the blue air of pre-darkness, Keller sat and watched the cirrus move slowly and evenly from west to east across the sky. The movement of the washboard clouds reminded Keller of a cage sliding shut, or maybe the casement of a roll-top desk being closed. The clouds continued eastward until the last, bright rays of sunshine were replaced by the same deep blue that had overrun the lower atmosphere. Then, as it grew dark outside, with the lower, heavier clouds skirting the dome of light that nighttime Chicago gave off, Keller sat back and finished his drink—a Bourbon with ice tonight—and figured that he’d probably learn about his wife’s plans for Christmas soon.

IT WAS quite dark outside when Keller’s wife, Beth, finally got home. Keller heard the elevator doors open and shut, and Beth entered the apartment through the front door. Keller, who was still sitting in his orange and forest green armchair and looking into the dark night sky, saw her reflection in the glass of the now dark windows.

Hey Keller said.

God, we’re late, Beth said. She pulled off her trench coat and hung it in the front closet. Her shoulder-length brown hair, streaked through with threads of sexy white-gray, was pulled back in an impatient knot behind her head. Keller saw the Burberry plaid of the coat’s lining flash in the window reflection. Beth hung-up Keller’s coat, too. It had still been sitting on a chair near the door. I tried to get home sooner, because I knew you wouldn’t remember about tonight, Beth said. "I almost called the grocery and had them deliver stuff for dinner, but right when I was dialing, everybody came into my office and said it was time for a Merry Christmas drink down in the studio. God, it took forever."

Keller watched his wife’s reflection in the window. He had stopped listening so much to her and had started watching her reflection. She was beautiful. God. Her smooth movements, the way she moved from one thing to the next, hanging coats, picking up and checking the mail (weighing each letter’s importance by the return address) and now checking herself in the entry hall mirror. It struck Keller that, when watching Beth in the reflection, she was suddenly doing everything correctly and real life might be reversed.

Beth walked into the living room and over to where Keller was sitting in his chair. He watched her in the windows. Beth stood to the left of Keller’s chair and looked at him, Keller examined his wife in reflection. Hey, she said. You okay?

Oh, yeah, Keller said. Late for what

Beth glared at Keller. Jesus, she said. Pat’s coming over tonight. Don’t you remember?

Keller looked away from his wife’s reflection and saw her in person. In the flesh. No, I’m sorry, he said. Just slipped my mind.

Pat Donnell was the host of the national talk show where Beth worked. He was a glib and quick-witted man whose knowledgeable, Irish altar-boy style worked well with the audience question-and-answer format of his show. Keller had always thought Donnell a lightweight: a man capable of holding audience-to-guest forums on such grave subjects as parents of lesbian nuns or the rash of