Tomato Red

by Megan Abbott, Daniel Woodrell

Genres: Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

A sharp and funny addition to Daniel Woodrell's collection of "country noir" novels, featuring anti-hero Sammy Barlach and Jamalee Merridew, her hair tomato red with rage and ambition. In the Ozarks, what you are is where you are born. If you're born in Venus Holler, you're not much. For Jamalee Merridew, Venus Holler just won't cut it. Jamalee sees her brother Jason, blessed with drop-dead gorgeous looks and the local object of female obsession, as her ticket out of town. But Jason may just be gay, and in the hills and hollows of the Ozarks that is the most dangerous and courageous thing a man could be. Enter Sammy Barlach, a loser ex-con passing through a tired nowhere on the way to a fresher nowhere. Jamalee thinks Sammy is just the kind of muscle she and Jason need.

Release date: April 24, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 210

Sample

“I wish that road had bent another way.”

—TOMATO RED

At first glance, Tomato Red may seem too modest, too slim, too earthy to conjure such magic. It is, after all, a tale of convenience stores and parking lots and mud-rut driveways and tiny homes with bail bondsmen’s phone numbers taped on every refrigerator door. But prepare yourself, because within a page, you are dropped—no, you sink, eagerly—into a world of such radical beauty and longing, you can’t catch your breath. Its seeming spareness, its rustic hide is the great gambit of Tomato Red, a conjurer’s dodge.

And the conjurer himself, Daniel Woodrell, casts his spell not with the starry lure of titillation nor, in the manner of many noir masters, a scene of such keen violence that we are stunned into submission. No, no. Woodrell does it with language. And not in the form of well-chosen words, the music of a fine sentence, the harmony of a paragraph crafted to draw you close to the book’s beating heart. No. The thing Woodrell does to words is the stuff of dark alchemy. He breaks language apart, shatters it to glittery pieces, then stitches it together new. You don’t even know what it is—are those words? Sentences? Or am I bewitched?

In Tomato Red, Woodrell manages it all in the first line, which, unbroken, becomes the first paragraph, by the end of which you are utterly in his thrall. It begins:

You’re no angel, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it’s been a gray day sogged by a slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom, and since you’re fresh to West Table, Mo., and a new hand at the dog-food factory, your choices for company are narrow but you find some finally in a trailer court on East Main, and the coed circle of bums gathered there spot you a beer, then a jug of tequila starts to rotate and the rain keeps comin’ down with a miserable bluesy beat and there’s two girls millin’ about that probably can be had but they seem to like certain things and crank is one of those certain things…

There is no breath, no chance, and by the end of that first sentence, which is not even half over yet, you’ve burrowed through such tumult—girls with teeth like shoe-peg corn and all manner of rich adventures unfurling at your feet—you are utterly, early ensnared. Part of the ensnarement comes through the use of that second-person “you.” By page two, by the end of this epic first sentence, our narrator, one Sammy Barlach, holds you rapt between his two barreled arms. Because, although the book begins with “you,” it’s Sammy who has ended up in West Table, Mo., and stumbled eagerly into this gang of crank bums, and will soon stumble eagerly into much more. But by using that second-person “you,” he’s pointed the finger at you, the reader. “You’re no angel, you know how this stuff comes to happen.”

And, after that down-the-rabbit-hole first sentence, Sammy reminds us again that we are part of this, and we are just like him: “Can’t none of this be new to you,” he says. And so you are his. And you are Woodrell’s.

Tomato Red is a story of outliers, and, as none of this is new to us, we are thus outliers too. So we decide to go with Sammy, who stumbles haphazardly into the world of Venus Holler and the Merridew clan, mother Beverly, a slightly worn prostitute, and her two teenage children, the beautiful Jason (“If your ex had his lips,” Sammy tells the reader, “you’d still be married”) and his enterprising sister, Jamalee. Jamalee, of the eponymous tomato-red hair. Jamalee, whose ragged, raging heart beats wildly at the center of the book. She’s the dreamer, whose dreams are big and gold-gilt enough to entice her brother and Sammy alike.

Before meeting Jamalee, Sammy never saw such possibility in life, and the yearning is painful for both of them. “God damn,” she says, “you know, that big rotten gap between who I am, and who I want to be, never does quit hurtin’ to stare across.” Jamalee’s dreams, however, are made in Hollywood, a place where “squatty shiny fellas in tuxedos [are] making music just out of sight behind the palm trees.” The imagined futures she paints dazzle Sammy, whose world heretofore was only as big as that night’s passed bottle and fun, but he sees the dark edge. “The girl put bubbles in my spirit with her dedication and hope,” he says, before adding, “The world she aimed us at seemed like a child’s wish of a world…”

Sammy and the Merridews are not rebels. They’re aching to belong, and to find a place where they can belong. For Jamalee, it’s a place of tinsel-edged beauty, a world Sammy can only see glimpses of. Her capacity to imagine that world staggers him and he realizes swiftly that he is “weak to her.” In this swift, unstoppable way, a die is cast. This sense that such yearning is both beautiful and a trap connects Woodrell to such 1930s noir masters as Horace McCoy, Nathanael West, and James M. Cain. Life is the rawest of raw deals, and there’s no steeper price to pay than the one you pay for false illusions. “They don’t expect anything but trouble from the square world,” Woodrell said about Tomato Red’s characters in an interview with John Williams for The Independent. “Every time they interact with that world they’re given a ticket, sent to jail, drafted. It’s never good. So they live by a separate value system.”

Indeed, Sammy feels very much in the 1930s tradition of great noir confessors—Frank Chambers in Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Robert Syverten in McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935)—who whisper sweet confidences and swelling sorrow into your ear. Like Sammy, Frank Chambers’s life is small until he meets Cora, who dreams of bigger things, sealing both their fates. Likewise, Robert in McCoy’s bleak dance marathon tale finds himself transformed, in this case by failed starlet Gloria’s relentless death drive. What is even more explicit in Woodrell’s rendering, however, is that the woman in this scenario is no femme fatale. The noir trap is set not by the woman hungry for more but instead by a world that never gives these couples a chance—that only seeks to throw them away. These beautiful losers are disposable.

It’s a heartbreaking vision, and one that’s clear from the very first, seemingly jaunty pages of the book, when Sammy finds himself, through petty criminal means, in a posh rich man’s house. “You see the insides of a classier world like that,” he tells us, “and it sets your own to spinning off-balance… I ain’t shit! I ain’t shit! shouts your brain, and this place proves the point.”

But this class rage, this outsider yearning suggests a book torn apart by misery. There is so much joy in its pages too, in the pleasures of the alternative family and alternative world Sammy and the Merridews create together: Sammy dancing in his carseat to the King; Jason cutting Sammy’s hair in the kitchen, giving him a rockabilly do; the way Jamalee hops up on the counter and gazes over a road atlas, planning adventures, mapping a future with glimmers and hope.

The rough magic of Tomato Red is not easily shaken off. It’s a spell you think you don’t ever want to wake from, until the pain becomes so great in its heartrending last pages that you can scarcely bear it. It’s a novel of great humor and woeful disappointments, of woolly hijinks and sweeping moments of blue. But nothing prepares you for the final pages, even as, by the time you get to them, you also realize there could be no other way.

—Megan Abbott

YOU’RE NO angel, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it’s been a gray day sogged by a slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom, and since you’re fresh to West Table, Mo., and a new hand at the dog-food factory, your choices for company are narrow but you find some finally in a trailer court on East Main, and the coed circle of bums gathered there spot you a beer, then a jug of tequila starts to rotate and the rain keeps comin’ down with a miserable bluesy beat and there’s two girls millin’ about that probably can be had but they seem to like certain things and crank is one of those certain things, and a fistful of party straws tumble from a woven handbag somebody brung, the crank gets cut into lines, and the next time you notice the time it’s three or four Sunday mornin’ and you ain’t slept since Thursday night and one of the girl voices, the one you want most and ain’t had yet though her teeth are the size of shoe-peg corn and look like maybe they’d taste sort of sour, suggests something to do, ’cause with crank you want something, anything, to do, and this cajoling voice suggests we all rob this certain house on this certain street in that rich area where folks can afford to wallow in their vices and likely have a bunch of recreational dope stashed around the mansion and goin’ to waste since an article in The Scroll said the rich people whisked off to France or some such on a noteworthy vacation.

That’s how it happens.

Can’t none of this be new to you.

The gal with her mouth full of shoe-peg corn and the bright idea in the first place drives over and lets me off at the curb, and there’s another burglar passed out in the backseat who won’t be of any help. She doses a kiss out to me, a dry peck on the lips, and claims she’ll keep her eyes peeled and I should give the high sign once I’ve burgled my way inside.

The rain has made the ground skittish, it just quakes and slides away from my footsteps, and this fantastic mist has risen up and thickened so that eyesight is temporarily marked way down in value.

I stumbled into a couple of different hedgerows, one about head high and one around the waist, before I fell onto the walkway. The walkway was, I suppose, made of laid brick, but the bricks were that type that’s bigger than house bricks, more the shape of bread loaves, which I think classes them as cobblestones or something. So I wobbled along this big brick walkway, on up the slope and past a lamppost in the yard that made a hepatitis-yellow glow, straight to the backside of the mansion.

Rich folk apparently love their spectacular views, pay dear for them, I’m sure, so there was all this glass. The door was glass and the entire rear wall practically was glass. By sunlight I’d reckon you could see the total spread of the town and long, long pony rides’ worth of countryside from any corner in there. All that window gave me brief goofy thoughts of diamond-point glasscutters and suction cups and the whole rigmarole of jewel-thief piss elegance but, actually, with my head out to lunch as it was I just grabbed a few logs from the firewood stack on the patio there and flung them at that glass door.

I suppose I had a sad need to fit in socially with those trailer-park bums, since I imagined they were the only crowd that would have me, because when that first chunk of wood merely bounced from the glass door and skidded across the patio I became bulldog-determined to get the job done for my new friends, and damn the effort or obvious risk.

The logs hit with a bang. Two, three, four times I chucked firewood at that glass and never heard anything close to the sound of a shatter. I sidled up in the mist and skimmed my fingers over the door and felt, I think, the start of some tiny hairline fractures, but there were no big, hopeful splits.

The glass of that door surely had some special qualities that must’ve been expensive to come by, but worth it, I’d have to say, judging from the wimpy way those logs merely bounced and failed to bust me in there. But I kept pitchin’, and bangs kept bangin’ out across that neighborhood of mist, until my pitches became tired and wild and I whipped a firewood chunk three or four yards off-line and into a small square window to the flank of the door, and that glass thankfully was of a typical lower order and flew all to pieces.

The glass shatter seemed like a sincere burst of applause, a sincere burst of applause that would come across as alarming and requiring a look-see to any ears open out there in the mist. I went motionless, tried to be a shadow. Pretty quick I heard a derisive shout from shoe-peg mouth, something that might’ve hurt my feelings to hear clear, then tires squealed and carried my social circle away, leaving me to do the mansion solo.

I stayed a still shadow for a bit, but my mind, such as it was at the moment, was made up and determined: I needed friends, and friendship is this slow awkward process you’ve got to angle through, and I could yet maybe find what we looked for, return to the trailer park on foot as both a hero and the sudden life of the party.

When no alarm was raised, I came out of my shadow imitation and went to the broken window. The mist felt like a tongue I kept walking into, and my skin and clothes seemed slobbered on. The world aped a harmless watchdog, puttin’ big licks all over my face.

The window set too high to spring through, and the glass was not perfectly broken out. There were jaggedy places with long points. I got up on tiptoes and reached my arm through, extra careful, but couldn’t reach a latch or doorknob or anything worthwhile.

The batch of flung logs had scattered about and lay underfoot, and the third or fourth time I stumbled on one this thought jumped me. The thought called for a ladder of firewood chunks, and I went to work building this theory that had jumped me from below. That mist made any effort seem sweaty and sweat made me feel employed and that made me start expectin’ a foreman to come along and, because of the part in my hair or the attitude of my slouch, fire my ass on a whim, as per usual. But the ladder got built and came to reach the height it needed to.

I think I thought this ladder i. . .