Leslie Edgerton - The death of Tarpons

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title	:	The Death of Tarpons
author	:	Edgerton, Leslie.
publisher	:	University of North Texas Press
isbn10 | asin	:	1574410113
print isbn13	:	9781574410112
ebook isbn13	:	9780585231396
language	:	English
subject	Problem families--Fiction, Fathers and sons--Fiction, Grandfathers--Fiction, Bildungsromane, Domestic fiction.
publication date	:	1996
lcc	:	PS3555.D472D4 1996eb
ddc	:	813/.54
subject	:	Problem families--Fiction, Fathers and sons--Fiction, Grandfathers--Fiction, Bildungsromane, Domestic fiction.

Page i The Death of Tarpons Leslie H. Edgerton

Page ii Leslie Edgerton, 1996 Printed in the United States of America All Rights Reserved First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Permissions University of North Texas Press P. O. Box 13856 Denton, Texas 76203 The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48.1984. Binding materials have been chosen for durability. The author gratefully acknowledges support provided during the writing of this book gained from his award of a $2000 Associate Fellowship Grant in Literature from the Indiana Arts Commission, which is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edgerton, Leslie. The death of Tarpons / Leslie H. Edgerton. p. cm. ISBN 1-57441-001-3 I. Title. PS3555.D472D4 1996 813'.54-dc20 95-43090 CIP

Page iii When working on a book, I am like many other writers I have an ideal person in mind for whom I'm writing. I had two such readers in mind as I wrote The Death of Tarpons, my wife Mary and my good friend Patty Klingenberger, and it is to these two sensitive and caring individuals I would like to dedicate the effort you hold in your hands.

Page v Contents Back to Freeport 1 Grandma's Drunk 26 A Long-ago Fishing Trip 42 The Sun Wins 64 Rattlesnake! 83 Some Things Become Clearer 113 A Stab in the Toe and an Embarrassing Situation 141 The Funeral 167 Thief! 194 The Death of Tarpons 219

Page vii Acknowledgments Although the author's is the name that appears on any book, publication of any work is the result of many others who sometimes are not properly recognized. Significant among those without whom this novel would not have been possible are the people at the University of North Texas Press, especially Fran Vick and Charlotte Wright, as well as Valerie Borgfield, Barbara Edmanson, Melanie Peirson and all the others at UNTP who had the faith that this was a book worth publishing. Thank you for that faith. Next to his wife, a writer's best friend is usually his mailman. Thanks to a group of people who have made my life infinitely easier as a writer, namely my postman, Mike Grable, and the folks at my local Mail Boxes, Inc. office, Paul Lanning, Mary Roemer and Marilyn Roemer, who have time and time again gone above and beyond the requirements of their jobs in assisting me many, many times. And appreciation to my kids, Britney, Sienna and Mike, and my wife Mary, for allowing me to sacrifice our time together so his book could be written.

Page 1 Back to Freeport Not long ago, I returned to the town of my youth, and made a disturbing discovery. It had weathered the intervening thirty years better than I had, at least physically, and that had the effect of giving me a bit of a jolt, as if the events of the last summer I spent there, the summer of my fourteenth year, hadn't been as cataclysmic as I'd imagined. Somehow, I'd labored under the notion that the town itself would be materially altered in some electrifying and obvious way, influenced, as it were, by the same momentous and epochal occurrences that had transformed my own then-tender psyche, but no, the downtown district, the park and business square, were not much changed from the last time these eyes had gazed upon it, that being the fall after Grandpa's fu-

Page 2 neral; only it looked shabbier and tired-out, as if the buildings themselves suffered from emphysema or another of those creeping old-age diseases. That was not a possible thing, I knew, but the immutability of it all made me feel as though the interval since I'd last stood on the sidewalk I now found myself on, peering myopically into the window of the family restaurant, or more correctly, the building that had formerly housed the family restaurant, now an empty, boarded, and shuttered hulk, had been aught but a dream, albeit a terribly long one of some three decades. Had I really survived that terrible fourteenth summer, had I later that fall gone up north to live with Aunt Pat and Uncle Charles, finished high school, gone to college, married and buried a wife, had children from that union, and held straining, squealing grandchildren on my knee even as late as last week? Staring at the weathered building, absorbing the Texas heat as it beat down, it scarcely seemed possible; I felt transported back to the time when I was fourteen years old and wincing at my father's constant rages, red-eyed fury, and fermentings against a world conspired against him, and presenting itself to him in my image, me, the son that failed him at every step, at every important juncture, in every single point that it was possible to fail him at.

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