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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3398 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Go figure James Lineberger (native dancer) his name is william gaddis. if this were fiction some people the few who have ever read gaddis will think the name was appropriated for some reason or other to be discovered later on perhaps even buried in the narrative but no that is simply the man's name and he himself is unaware of any writer named gaddis and the william was his father's brother who died in world war ii during the omaha beach landing one of the unfortunates who caught a round just as the ramp fell open and now this william the ii crouching a bit like a cautious warrior himself gets out of his car and stands under a jack pine to remove his clothes in the moonless night lit only by the glow of a string of christmas lites at the roof's edge of a boathouse along the shores of lake norman. squatting indian fashion he duckwalks amid a group of flat-bottom pleasure boats moored at the pier and unfastens them laboriously one by one pouring gasoline over them and setting them on fire before casting them adrift in the cool dark where they leave little trails behind them twinkling against the corpses of dead trees on the horizon uprooted by bulldozers to make way for another group of those mansions which are becoming as bland and indistinquishable from one another as their suburban brothers. the lake police will decide the burned boats are the work of teenagers perhaps even the spoiled children of these noveau riche themselves but what of gaddis whose body will be discovered weeks later dead of exposure in an unheated one room walk-up in new york wearing his uncle's ill-fitting combat fatigues and a posthumous bronze star clutching his only companion a frozen stiff-legged pomeranian its tongue stuck to his face in a final vain gesture of love. |
