Tom Sheehan
I might be the only person in Montana who knows Tom Sheehan, so I feel obligated to fill in this blank. He’s very American, a veteran of the Korean War, and a long-time employee of Raytheon in Saugus, Massachusetts. He wins all sorts of prizes but the Big Five publishers take no notice. Somehow he manages to write in an old-fashioned plot vs. character way while all the time being curiously modern. Hard to explain. He writes about shooting, horses and bad guys -- all with extraordinary names and detail -- but he also manages a poetic grasp of detail and landscape. He doesn’t stay in categories very well, but once he chooses his “method,” he knows what he’s doing.
So here’s what he did with one short story. The title is “Aces and Eights” which is the hand of cards that the frontier gambler Will Bill Hickok was holding at the time of his death. Bob Scriver did a sculpture and so have others. It’s kind of an American folk tale.
by Gib Singleton
In this version the main character is Sergeant Charlie Twohig who so loves to gamble that the cards are like an extension of his hands. Hear the word echoes? I think they’re rooted in Sheehan’s brain. Some people don’t like the Hickok/Twohig reminder. Writing workshop people sometimes classify alliteration with comma errors -- to be extirpated at once! (I think it’s part of the Hemingway obsession.) Nor do they appreciate the metaphor joke about hands of cards in hands who play cards so much that the cards becomes extensions of hands. But this story is woven out of “tells,” the little giveaways of tick and gesture that a gambler can’t help happening but which are very helpful to a really “ace” player.
Tom Sheehan
The plot points come along like cards coming down. The men are in a convoy of LST’s, frying under the sun, trying not to think about Ceylon, their ultimate destination. An early scene is Twohig manipulating Corporal Tally Biggs into cutting cards for stakes. His hands literally itch and he has a kind of “high” that he attributes to the heat but also to the prospect of a winning streak. The heat is so intense that when a sweat-soaked soldier leans forward, there is a little explosion of steam from his back. Biggs asks Private Jake Breda whether he has ever felt so intensely excited that he was sick from it. Breda ("breed her") says only on his wedding night. (This is an old-fashioned story.) A little thread of sex weaves in.
Corporal Tally Biggs comes to sit by Charlie, who calls him “Twig”. Twig suggests that without his ever-present cards, Charlie would seem naked. Twohig agrees and gets him to cut cards though Biggs has already lost a lot of money to him. Biggs is obsessing about sharks in the Red Sea but doesn’t twig to card sharps.
Having had enough fun with Biggs, Charlie moves to Captain Redmond. The gambler has nothing but contempt for every one -- they’re all losers. Redmond is ugly, stuffy, wearing a tie in the heat. Twohig “accidentally” kicks his “box.” But Redmond has aces in his pocket, letters from Twohig’s wife. She clearly loves her mad gambler husband in spite of being much superior to him, but out of concern for him, she has betrayed him. Redmond “has never had, owned or partaken of a woman for any extended period of time, though he knew how deep the hooks of a good, true love went.” And he falls in love with his fancy of what Twohig’s wife is like: “big of bust and hip, blond hair, bue eyes, skin like buttermilk, and tremendously good in bed.”
Korean Graveyard Registration
Gradually we realize these men are not going into combat. They are a “Graveyard Registration” company meant to find and ceremonially bury the dead, even the ones of their own company who die in the course of performing the task of search and burial. Victims of ghastly torture need to be buried and the sight of them sticks to the insides of one’s eye, even in sleep. Another writer might have gone into detail about rot and so on, but Sheehan only gives a few nasty little anecdotes.
Sheehan knows that the real story is in the uncomfortable relationships among the men, misunderstanding each other, keeping secrets, and building up hatreds and obsessions while somehow struggling forward with their assignment. So the greedy gambler, who suddenly hits a period of good luck he would not be able to believe except that his health seems to be losing a long battle with tropical parasites and that interferes with his thinking. He is so resented that his lethargy is interpreted as gold-bricking so he is pushed on and on.
This is genre writing -- for the people. This is the sort of story that lends itself to telling around a campfire, oral literature. But that would lose the little trills of poetry. (“A licorice sensation ran through Charlie Twohig.” I’m still thinking about that one! Sweet, dark and a little funky -- twisted?) But I’m thinking that all these hot-wire boundaries: prose/poetry, written/oral, are just more academic distinctions from workshops. When such fences are disregarded by writers with real skill and a strong sense of plot, they become powerful.
Part of the surprise in this story is how it all turns out in the end when all the little clues and tells pay off. I won’t give it away, but in the end Charlie Twohig is no match for Redmond.
Tom Sheehan
From “Epic Cures: A Collection of Stories by Tom Sheehan.” (2005) Press 53, PO Box 30314, Winston-Salem, NC 27130
I came to know Sheehan by reading his short stories on “Rope and Wire,” a website that refuses to give up the Westerns of the Fifties when the veterans were trying to find their feet. Sheehan has almost 400 stories on this site: every one of them in the Western template. Something unjust and terrible is happening, a hero with a clever name decides to do something about it, he faces impossible odds but wins in some improbable way. The site owner doesn’t allow sex, which discouraged me, but Sheehan deftly leaves sex out. I thought it was his taboo, but as I look at this collection, I see it was not.
http://www.ropeandwire.com/authors-spotlight: Sheehan served in the 31st Infantry Regiment, Korea 1951 and graduated from Boston College in 1956. His print/eBooks are Epic Cures; Brief Cases, Short Spans (from Press 53); A Collection of Friends; From the Quickening (from Pocol Press).
Books from Milspeak Publishers include Korean Echoes, 2011, nominated for a Distinguished Military Award and The Westering, 2012, nominated for a National Book Award.
His newest eBooks, from Danse Macabre/Lazarus/Anvil, are Murder at the Forum, an NHL mystery novel, Death of a Lottery Foe, Death by Punishment and An Accountable Death.
His work is in Rosebud (6 issues), The Linnet’s Wings (7 issues),Literary Orphans (4 issues including the Ireland issue), Ocean Magazine (8 issues), Frontier Tales (9 issues), Provo Canyon Review (2 issues), Western Online Magazine (9 issues).
His work has appeared in the following anthologies: Nazar Look, Eastlit, 3 A.M. Magazine, Appalachian Voices, Jake’s Monthly Recollections, Lady Jane’s Miscellany, Loch Raven Review, Rusty Nail, Red Dirt Review, Erzahlungen, R&W Kindle #2 and; 4, Peripheral Sex, Storybrewhouse, Wheelhouse Magazine, Home of the Brave, Green Lantern Press, River Poets Journal , Writers Write and A Tall Ship, a Star, and Plunder.
He has 24 Pushcart nominations, and 375 stories on Rope and Wire Magazine. A new collection of short stories, In the Garden of Long Shadows, has gone to press with solid pre-release reviews and will be issued by Pocol Press this summer.
Tom Sheehan, the family years
No comments:
Post a Comment