“An inventive and powerful coming of age story about the search for community and all the ways our ties to one another come undone. Jon Pineda has a poet’s eye for the details of this vivid, haunting landscape, and he brings it blazingly to life.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
With the cinematic and terrifying beauty of the American South humming behind each line, Jon Pineda’s Let’s No One Get Hurt is a coming-of-age story set equally between real-world issues of race and socioeconomics, and a magical, Huck Finn-esque universe of community and exploration.
Fifteen-year-old Pearl is squatting in an abandoned boathouse with her father, a disgraced college professor, and two other grown men, deep in the swamps of the American South. All four live on the fringe, scavenging what they can—catfish, lumber, scraps for their ailing dog. Despite the isolation, Pearl feels at home with her makeshift family: the three men care for Pearl and teach her what they know of the world.
Mason Boyd, aka “Main Boy,” is from a nearby affluent neighborhood where he and his raucous friends ride around in tricked-out golf carts, shoot their fathers’ shotguns, and aspire to make Internet pranking videos. While Pearl is out scavenging in the woods, she meets Main Boy, who eventually reveals that his father has purchased the property on which Pearl and the others are squatting. With all the power in Main Boy’s hands, a very unbalanced relationship forms between the two kids, culminating in a devastating scene of violence and humiliation.
Release date:
March 12, 2019
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Print pages:
256
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IF I CONCENTRATE, I CAN see where the river should be. It almost doesn’t exist, like the blue of skim milk. Or tailor’s chalk I’ve watched Dox brush away after sealing a stitch. But I know it’s there. The river waits for me, and that’s all that matters.
* * *
My father shuts off the engine. The pickup rattles. We sit and stew. After a bit, we can smell the random field. It’s been torn open, that’s what I say. My father winces. In my head, he corrects me: “Aspire to precision, Pearl.” When he talks this way, I feel like he’s gone back in time, like I’m one of his students being forced to listen to him.
* * *
“Pearl,” my father says now but doesn’t say anything else. It means get out. It means, at the very least, get a handle on the dog. Marianne Moore is off the pickup and jumps the grass ditch. Though the dog has bad hips, she is doing smooth ovals, making a dirt necklace in the open field. She is smiling.
I slam the truck door. There’s a tinny ring, even though the sides are mostly rust and primer. I grab a shovel and some rope from the back. There are mouth-sized holes in the truck bed. Marianne Moore hunkers down like she’s already been shot.
MY EYES FOLLOW WHERE THE rows of broken earth head north. They end on the spongy loam. From there mix gaps of pale sky and lit leaf canopies the amber of fresh motor oil. The river is just on the other side of those trees. It’s a smear of acrylic. On the river’s surface float plywood skiffs and other vessels of scrap wood.
For the last few years I’ve had no choice but to become someone else. I’ve been around these kinds of boats, these quick creations. Sterns weighed down with piecemeal outboard motors, the shells endlessly dented out of frustration. Metal casings entirely removed. The dampened guts of tinkered-with chokes puff, held open by paint-coated screwdrivers and pastel pink putty.
Everything is makeshift.
* * *
My father reaches behind the bench seat, unzips one end of the leather case I’d sewn for him myself, Dox having been good enough to show me how on a scavenged sewing machine. My father pulls out the shotgun like he’s unsheathing a sword. He breaks the gun’s neck and checks the empty barrels out of habit.
He picks up a crushed box from the floorboard and shakes it, then slips into his suit-vest pocket the last of the shells, lipstick red and the size of quartered candlesticks. His vest is a light blue pinstripe. It’s a miniature of the tilled field, a riffle where the river shallows.
* * *
My father has become the kind of man who likes to wear a vest without a shirt. He is ripe and smells like what I remember of store-bought spices, back when my mother used to do all the shopping. He’s a dank mixture of cumin and turmeric, if I’m trying. His graying hair reaches past his shoulders. I turn my head the moment I see his nipples peek out from the sides of the vest. His nipples are brown and wrinkled like pecan meat.
* * *
“You ready?” he says.
“I think so.”
“Either you are or you aren’t.”
“Okay.”
“Precision, Pearl.”
“I’m prepared to do this one thing that will make you proud of me.”
“That’s better. That’s my girl.”
“How come we have to do this?”
“Because she should’ve been put down a long time ago.”
I let that sit out there for a bit.
“Pearl?”
I try to nod.
* * *
I hate when he calls me his girl. Not because I can’t be anyone’s girl, but because if I’m anyone’s girl, I’d have to be his by default. I’m trying to make peace with this idea. It’s been getting more difficult. The more I catch glimpses of what kind of man he really is.
* * *
Marianne Moore curls up the size of an alligator snapper, or one of those antique circular hatboxes I’ve found in one of the hallway closets of the boathouse. She waits for us in the dirt. I could kick her where she is and send her rolling between the rows. Sometimes I want nothing more than to let her have it. Don’t get me wrong, I love her, but I can’t help thinking about how that would look, the dog on her back like a flipped turtle, with her legs going through the motions all herky-jerky.
* * *
My father and I walk the field. I carry the shovel. There’s a skin of rust on the shovel’s head. It’s been put to the test a time or two. My father cradles the shotgun in the crook of his arm. In these moments, it’s as if he’s bought into this new life—hook, line, and sinker.
* * *
In the air of the open field there’s the tang of gun oil my father wiped over both barrels. I hold the shovel in one hand and the splintered rope in the other. If I squint like my father, the rope is a single line that leads to Marianne Moore’s neck.
“Princess,” I say, and the dog smiles back, I swear. Like sweet Dox, she has lost most of her teeth. My father calls it a survivor’s smile. Whatever it is, it’s painful to take note of.
* * *
“This is for her own good,” my father says.
I know it, though I don’t let on.
He wants me to put the dog out of her misery, but instead, I’m going to turn her body into lace.
MY FATHER WON’T TALK ABOUT who we used to be because that would mean talking about her, my mother, and what she did to the both of us. I don’t happen to think it was so bad, but that’s just me.
“You’re as crazy as her,” my father would say if he could read my mind.
* * *
I picture my father and me someday striking out for an unknown future. This time the pickup loaded down with every item from the boathouse we share with the two men.
“No Dox and no Fritter,” he says.
“We’ll just leave them?”
“Damn straight.”
I laugh. “They took us in, and we’ll just leave them.”
“They didn’t take us in.”
“What do you call it then?”
“They scooted over.”
“They did more than that.”
“Fine. They made room.”
“Piss-poor explanation.”
He’s the one who laughs now.
“Well, they deserve more,” I say.
“We all deserve more.”
“They’re grown men who’ve worked hard, and now—”
My father does a spit take. The air burns, and he shakes his head. “That’s a generous assessment. You’re always so generous, Pearl.”
I decide not to bite.
“You know what they say about you?” I try my best not to make a face.
“One can only imagine.”
“They say you’re the best friend anyone could ask for.”
“You lie.”
“Dox does, at least.”
“Dox is a good egg.”
“And Fritter?”
My father can only show me his teeth. They’re chipped mostly, the middle two flat as sugar cubes.
“What?” I say.
“You tell me.”
* * *
Fritter, at over three hundred pounds, resembles multiple copies of Dox sewn together. Unlike Dox, Fritter is motor-oil black, like he was spit out of some great big flame-shooting engine. His dreadlocks are a spectrum of burnt orange. When they’re not swept back, they writhe. It’s a wonder the two are even related.
* * *
When I used to think there was a future for me, I imagined myself becoming a translator, like my mother had wanted to be. The last time I offered the idea up, it was over a dinner of crayfish we’d trapped ourselves and chanterelles Dox scooped from the surrounding woods. My father said it was a nice thought and hoped the world would stick around long enough for it to happen.
“Where’s it going?” I’d asked.
I don’t know why I even bothered.
“The world?” my father said.
“Yeah.”
“Probably to sleep.”
Dox, glowing at a distance, shook his head. He started the opening riff of “Drown” by Son Volt. The song had the misfortune of having been left on a mixtape in the pickup. I could relate.
My father’s cough pulled me back.
“Best we can hope for, Pearl, is that it’ll just close its eyes and never wake up.”
Dox worked the slide up and down the fretless neck of the cigar-box guitar. The notes wove and blended like pocket water.
“You do know I’m still a child,” I said to my father. “An innocent child.”
“What did I say that was so bad?” my father said to Dox, but it was too late. The image was already having its way with me.
* * *
Most days the door to my father’s room stays shut. He’s like Fritter, except instead of silence, I hear the typewriter going. Its keys plink. Some days it’s a downpour. Other days it’s a trickle. He keeps a stack of typed onionskin papers in a milk crate beside the desk. When he’s gone from the house, I sometimes hold the pages up to a lighter. The words float in the light. I wonder what he’d do if I actually lit the pages on fire. All that work sent to kingdom come.
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