Speaker 1: Let's depart for one podcast and get away from the
monster stories and the bigfoot stories and the werewolf stories
and ghost stories and read something that's just normal. What
you're about to hear are the first few scenes from
a novel titled Salvaged this World by the author Michael
Ferris Smith. When I'm done reading this, I'll talk to
you a little more about what you're about to hear.
So here we go. She stood bathed in twilight, the
dust in her hair and a kid on her hip.
She stared at the approaching storm as if trying to
figure how to wrangle the thunderheads and steer them to
a distant and parched land where desperate souls would pay
whatever ransom she demanded. The acres of sugar cane cutting
up surrounding the house. A dry autumn turned to an
unpredictable winter, and then, eleven days ago, he left, and
she'd seen no one since it was a mile walk
along the dirt road that separated the acreage. Another eight
miles to walk to the nearest telephone, but even if
she wanted to bundle up and make it, she wouldn't
know who to call. He was gone, and he had
taken the car and the cigarettes and every dollar except
the stash she kept hidden beneath the floorplank in the closet.
She had finished the last of the whiskey three nights
before the milk had run out. Yesterday, Jesse stared at
the storm, and the wind began to blow, and dust
clouds rose like souls awakened, and she listened to the
wind and welcomed the sound of something else. She shifted
the child from one hip to the other and pointed
out at the lightning, and said, look at the light.
Can you see the light? One side of the sky
was thick with storm clouds, and the other side of
the sky was wrapped in a rusted belt that bled
into the horizon like an open wound. And the child
lifted his small hand and pointed at the light. But
it was not the lightning he saw, but a gathering
of headlights approaching in the distance. The thunder roared and
the engines roared, and she turned and ran for the house,
setting the child down on the porch and hurrying for
the bedroom. Her footfalls hard against the floorboards, and her
breath in quick sucks as she took the pistol from
beneath the mattress and grabbed the set of keys from
the dresser drawer that he had always told her to
grab if she had to make a run for it,
And then she hustled out and scooped up the child,
the headlights growing closer and splitting the dusk as she
hurried around the house and along the beaten trail through
the high grass that led into the woods. And she ran,
and the child bounced in her arms, and she had
just reached the edge of the woods when she looked
back to see the vehicles skid to a stop in
front of the house, a pale and powdery cloud rising
around them. She heard the engines cut and the door
slam behind her, and then she heard the shouts coming
in her direction as the last of twilight seeped into
the earth. They called out as they chased her into
the woods, and the child squeezed her neck and held
on but did not cry as she ran. She had
gone far into these woods before, but never far enough
to know if there was anything on the other side.
She was seized by the thought that she may run
over the edge of the earth, and that she and
the child would plummet soundlessly into nothing. That thought was
interrupted when a shotgun fired into the night, its echo
ringing through the trees. She pushed harder, squeezing the child
close to her chest, praying not to run over the edge,
or if there was such a thing, praying that her
fall would be brief and painless. Another shotgun blast, and
then in another, and she knew they were looking for him.
She knew there was a fine damn reason he had
never returned. She knew she and the child could never
go back to the house, and she knew she would
have to keep running. They shivered through the night. Jesse
unbuttoned her flannel shirt and held Jase against her skin
and wrapped the shirt around them both, but it did
not stop the shaking. He cried some little whimpers of discomfort,
little whimpers of hunger. She sat on a pile of leaves,
with her back against a white oak and held him tight.
She rocked a little, hummed, and sometimes sang, and she
kept promising that everything was going to be all right.
The boy slept in increments, the ragged sleep of distress
and discomfort, and an owl hooted, and nightbirds sang. The
deer moved in the dark, and their creeping sounded like
monsters and wait. She nodded in and out of sleep,
and when her eyes fell heavy, she imagined strong arms
and strong hands reaching for her through the dark, prying
the child from her grasp. She would wake with a
jerk to find herself squeezing the child so tightly that
he was struggling for freedom. She would stroke the back
of his head and coax him back to sleep, and
her eyes stayed open, wide, watching the woods and watching
for the arms and hands that approached in her dreams,
but then closing them again. Finally there was light. She
rubbed her eyes and felt the warmth of the child's
skin against her own. She did not want to wake him,
so she sat there and watched the morning come, listen
to the chirps and whistles and the movement of the
early creatures. The child lifted its head and coughed, opened
his eyes and looked with question at his mother. She
kissed the boy on top of his ear and said,
it's all right, it's all right. She then tucked the
empty pistol into the back of her pants, and she
started them walking south, believing if she kept walking south
that she would run into de Cambre. Amidst the trees.
She would stop and listen for the hum of the highway,
and set the boy down and rest him in it
and listen. Then he would cry to be carried again,
and she would tell him to hold on, hush a second,
but he was not concerned, and he cried harder and
made little mad fists, and she would pick him up
and start again. In an hour, she came to a clearing,
and the earth grew soft and heavy. The damp ground
sucked at her feet, and she set the child down
and retied the laces on her boots. He wabbled and
plopped down on his behind a smack as his ass
hit the wet ground. He screamed something different now from
toddler whimpers. And he screamed and shook and slapped at
his own legs, red faced and releasing as much anger
as his little body could muster. And she propped her
hands on her hips and looked down at him and said,
let it out, Let it all out, boy, And when
he was done, she reached down and helped him to
his feet. In the back of his pants muddy, he
stood next to her and they both looked out across
the marshland cranes stood on stumps. A flock of blackbirds
rose from a cluster of young cypress and scattered across
the low sky, and the sun sat on the horizon
and lathered the Martian gold, and it seemed beautiful to
her in a way she had not expected. But there
was no time to admire. The child was now wet
and hungry and cold, and she was hungry and cold,
and she didn't know where they were, but she knew
there was a highway somewhere. They circled around the edge
of the marsh for at least an hour, and crossed
into another wood, where the trees thinned. The sun rose
higher into a blue and cloudless sky, and their pace
had slowed, and the child slept with his head on
his mother's shoulder. The pistol was cold and hard against
the small of her back, and every now and then
she touched the pocket of her jeans, feeling the keys
and making sure she had grabbed them, and it was
not part of some hurried dream. First she saw the smoke,
and she followed it until she was close enough to
smell it. She came to the edge of the woods
and stopped hid herself behind a tree. Saw a small
cabin with smoke rising from its chimney and a trailer
next to it. A truck sat unavidly propped up by
a jack, a front tier missing the hood raised behind
a truck, a hatchback sat running and the driver's door
was open, a cloud of exhaust from the tailpipe as
the heat met the coal. A woman stood on the
cabin porch with a lit cigarette, and then another woman
joined her. She held a shovel and she leaned it
against the doorframe. They both wore denim jackets with collars
pushed up around their necks, and both stood with their
hips propped while they smoked. They talked between inhales and
exhales and one and two word sentences, and when they
were done smoking, they flicked the butts into the dirt,
and one of them yelled out toward the trailer, come on,
we got shit to do. The women then stepped back
inside the cabin, leaving the door open, and Jesse sprinted
from the woods, the child waking with a sudden jolt,
and he let out a cry that she didn't acknowledge
as she darted between old tires and a pile of
firewood and a smoldering heap of trash, and then she
heard the growl as a wolf on a chain rose
from slumber and lurched at her backside with its bone
white fangs, only to be held fast by a chain.
She screamed, and the wolf yet, but she didn't slow down,
making it to the hatchback and hopping in, just as
a man in coveralls emerged from the trailer holding a
coffee mug. He sipped and watched dumb eyed, before realizing
that it was a stranger in the car, a stranger
holding a child. He hollered, and two women came from
the cabin, and the three of them came down the
steps and ran for the hatchback. As Jesse shifted into reverse,
the car door opened and flapping like a wing, and
then slamming shut when she hit the brakes, shifted into
drive and stamped the gas, the tires spinning and the
three of them trying to corral the hatchback like some
untamed animal. And as the car raced away from their cries,
a coffee mug crashed on the hood as if dropped
from heaven, just as the tires caught firm on the
gravel road. She drove along the back roads away from
De Cambre and toward Lake Penure, finding a solitary gas
station where she stopped and bought a small bottle of
milk and honey, buns and powdered doughnuts, cigarettes and a lighter,
and a pack of diapers. Then she left the store
and drove east a long highway fourteen, the landscape shifting
from swamp to crops and back to swamp. She turned
off down a dirt road, and she and the child
ate and drank until there was nothing left but to
lift the sugar from their fingertips. She changed the boy's diaper,
leaned back the passenger seat, let him lie down while
she sat on the hood, smoked a cigarette and tried
to figure out what the hell to do. She would
need to get rid of the hatchback, and she was
ready for that. The upholstery was stained and poked with
cigarette burns, and smelled sour and sick. The back seat
was piled with wadded clothes and fast food bags. And
as foul as the hatchback looked and smelled, she knew
it had been called in. They were not far from
New Iberia, and there was probably a bus station there,
and she could leave the hatchback with a nice note
that said I was only borrowing it, but also a
new Iberia. There would be real police made aware of
the license plate and given a description of both them
and the shitty little car. And where the hell do
you think you're taking a bus to? Anyway, She made
a lap around the car, smoking and thinking, and looking
in at Jace, who was turned on his side and sleeping,
small hands tuck beneath a small cheek powdered sugar on
the corners of his mouth. She flicked away the cigarette
and looked at the heap and the back seat, and
it didn't matter if she was going another mile or
another one hundred miles. She couldn't do it with the smell.
So she quietly opened the door, pulled the lever on
the driver's seat and it came forward, and she reached
into the back seat and grabbed a mess of clothes
and trash. She made three before she had it all
lying in a pile at the rear of the car,
and then she took the keys from the ignition and
she unlocked the hatch to shove it all into the back,
but there was no room. It was covered in garbage
bags and bound with duct tape, and it was big
and lumpy, and she knew what it was. She stepped back,
tripping through the clothes and trash and falling to the ground,
up quickly and hand over her mouth as she moved
back toward the hatch and stared at it, wondering if
it would jerk if she poked it. And she watched
carefully for a moment, any rise and fall of breathing,
any possibility of it being something other than dead as hell.
But it was still, and the world hell still around her,
as her mind could only find one thought, Is it him?
She walked back and forth along the side of the car,
mumbling to herself, rubbing at her face and neck, wanting
to look and to keep away. And she picked up
a rock and threw it, and then another and another,
finally crying out in disgust with not just today and yesterday,
but crying out against the years that had led her
to now all the steps she had taken to arrive
on this empty road in the middle of nowhere, with
her small son asleep in a stolen car and a
dead thing wrapped in a garbage bag and the hatch,
and she screamed out into the void. And when she
had screamed herself out of breath, she turned and saw
Jason's face in the window, awakened by his mother, his
nose and palms pressed against the glass. She slammed the
hatch before opening the car door and lifting him out,
talking to him in a flurry of motherly voice, did
you sleep okay? I didn't mean to wake you up.
Do you feel better with your tummy full? Ready to
ride some more? The child shook his head at her questions,
rubbed at his eyes, and then he put his hands
on her cheeks, as if to hold her still and
gain her full attention. Their eyes were close, and the
boy pushed at her cheeks. Home. He said, but I
don't know where that is. She thought, I don't know
which direction. I don't know what to do, And then
he said it again and pressed her cheeks harder with
his little hands. Home. She squeezed him, walked down the
road holding him, singing bits and pieces of songs, fragments
of lullabies and a half of a verse of amazing Grace,
and ending with both of them quacking like ducks. They
sang and walked, and she kept looking back at the hatchback,
as if hoping it had sunk into the earth, or
maybe never existed at all. They returned to the car.
Nobody would have called it in. She could drive it
to the end of the world if she wanted to,
but she didn't want to. She opened the milk bottle
and Jase took a swallow, and then she took a swallow.
She settled him in the passenger seat, and then she
returned to the back. You have to look, she thought,
you know, you have to look and see if it's him.
She opened the hatch again and felt around and found
the head pulled at the plastic bags and tore a hole,
and she saw matted hair and crusted blood on the forehead.
And she turned the face toward her, and two bruised,
pulpy and half open eyes looked at her, and she gasped,
taken quickly by the stair of the dead, and she
stepped back and put her hands on her knees and
bent over, drawing deep breaths, settling herself because it was
not him, and she had been ready for it to
be so. But she took a breath and pulled at
the body and tried to rustle it out of the hatchback.
It was heavy and awkward and kept flopping back down,
but she finally got the legs over the side and
she lifted the torso and the weight carried forward and
the body tumbled out. It lay on its back, the
hole and the plastic, allowing its swollen eyes one last
glimpse of sunlight before she turned it on its stomach
and grabbed the legs and pulled it into the ditch.
When she was done, she turned around and Jace was
standing there watching her, holding the bottle of milk and
pointing at the thing in the ditch as if pointing
at an animal in the zoo. The wrestling and the
anxiety had given her a sweat, and she wiped her
forehead and mouth, and then she scooped up the child
and began telling the story of the Three Little Bears
as she returned him to the car and buckled his
seat belt. And she kept telling it as she cranked
the car, and as they turned back onto the highway,
Jay set silently and Jesse drove with both hands gripping
the steering wheel. Her forearms clenched and her shoulders clenched
as she deepened her voice for Papa Bear and lightened
it for Mama Bear and the rough road thump beneath
them as she told the story and tried to figure
out how many years it had been since she had
last spoken to her father. I've been doing this podcast
for six years. It'll be six years this October, I think.
And I've done some I've done several audio books. I've
done hundreds and thousands of stories that you guys have
sent me. I've done several stories that I've written myself.
We've done the Steve Lily series, which if you don't
know who Steve Lily is, it's another podcast. Just look
up the Steve Lily Journals. I was able to write
those and share them with you. But of all the
all these all the time that I've been doing this,
that what I just read you to me is the
greatest honor that I've and greatest pleasure that I've had
to share something with you. I'm not saying I did
the story any justice, and it's just the beginning of
the novel. But here's how this came about. You all
know that I'm a I'm not a voracious reader. I'm
a picky reader. I like to read good quality stuff
and sometimes I like to read just you know, fun
stuff that may not be written well. But I love
Southern writers. You all know I live in Mississippi. I
actually lived just about an hour north of this author.
I came across his books. My wife and I went
to a movie probably last year. The title of the
movie is Desperation Road, and we thought it was a
great story. We were enthralled with the movie. And when
I see a movie that a film that I really like,
I will sit through the credits to see if it's
based on a novel, so that if it's a good story,
I can look up the author and see what they
have out and maybe read their stuff. And I did
on this one, and it it's very and it said
it is based on a novel by Michael Ferris Smith,
who is a Mississippi writer who's written a novel and
it was turned into a really popular film. He has
several books out. I've read them all. He has another
novel out called The Fighter, which is an excellent, excellent
story which was also made into a film called I Believe.
The title is Rumble in the Dark. It's about a
prize fighter, a bare knuckle fighter in the Delta in Mississippi,
and it's just a saga of his last few days.
But Michael Ferris Smith, so let me just you know,
you guys, I ramble a lot. So here's how this
came about. I've read all his books, and when I
read good stuff, and since I do narrate some of
this stuff for this podcast, as I'm reading these novels,
I can I can hear it in my mind, and
I can see the story with my mind's eye. Everybody's
vision of what they read is different, but mine is.
I pay attention to it. I pay attention to the
voice as I read. And every time I read a
really good book, I think, oh my gosh, I would
love to just be able to just share with this
audience one chapter to show you how well these Southern
writers are able to tell a story in a succinct,
compact way, yet move a story from point A to
point B, which could be one hundred miles in two weeks,
and they can do it in three chapters. And it
is and the adjectives and the way they describe the scenery,
and all that is not over flowery. That's the best
word I can think of, but it is so to
the point and so beautiful. Anyway, I started reading Michael
Faris Smith, and I love uh. This was the first
book I read that he's written, is called Rivers, excellent book.
I think Salvage this World, which is the first few
scenes you just heard, was a second book I read.
Then I read Blackwood, which is an excellent, very good novel,
and then I went to Desperation Road because I had
already seen the movie, so I kind of had an
idea of the story. By the way, Desperation Road I
believe was produced by Mel Gibson, he's actually in the movie. Anyway.
So I read these books and I think, oh my gosh,
I kind of do that, And you know, I'm into
this stuff. I love fiction, especially Southern fiction, and I
think it would be so great if I could just
read one or two chapters to show you all what
really good writing sounds like and encourage you to maybe,
if you are a reader, to go buy these books
and try these authors out. And so I got on
Michael Ferrissmith's website just to read more about him. I'm
interested in writers, and you know how they do their thing,
where they live, where there, what are their influences. I
don't know why I'm interested in that. I just am
and there was a contact information a contact link which
gave me his email address. So I thought, well, I'm
just going to fire him off an email, and I
sent him an email and I said, look, you staid
nothing to gain from this, because I'm just a small
podcast narrator, you know, who narrates audio book style stories.
But I would love permission from you to share a
few chapters from some of your books with my audience.
And a couple of days later he responded and he said,
he said, sure, that sounds great, go ahead and do it.
And thanks for asking. What an I mean? This guy
is a best selling author. He knows and associates with
people who make films and produce films. He's really done well,
and for him to give me permission to do this
is one of my favorite things I've ever done with
this podcast. And I don't know if he'll ever hear
this or not, but Michael, if you're listening, thank you
for giving me permission. So that's all I wanted to say.
You can find all of his books. I'll put his
name in a list of two or three of the
books that I can remember off the top of my
head in the description. You can look him up on Amazon.
I'm not going to put a link to any of
his books because I don't think YouTube likes Amazon. I
don't think they like the Amazon links. I don't know
why I say that, but it seems like a couple
of years ago I had a video taken down because
I was promoting an indie author, and it seems like
I'm pretty sure YouTube took the video down, they demonetized it,
and then took the video down, mainly because that link
was in the description. So I'll put Michael Ferris Smith's website,
his name and a list of a few of the
novels he has out. Please look him up and buy
his books. If you enjoy good storytelling and good writing,
exceptional writing, read him. Here are some other authors that
I read. These are Southern. These are Southern authors who
that I kind of follow. I haven't read all of
their stuff, but I'm getting through it. One is Larry Brown.
I've just told you about Michael Ferris Smith. There's an
author named Barry Hannah. There's Brad Watson, Harry Crews. He
writes some kind of weird stuff, but it's really good.
It's good stuff. And then there's Pat Conroy. Larry Brown
and Pat Conroy have died since I began reading their stuff.
Pat Conroy is a wonderful Southern writer. One of my
favorite novels of all time is The Prince of Tides.
It's the most beautiful, one of the most beautifully written
books think I've ever read. I've actually that's one of
the few novels I've actually reread. And Prince of Ties.
Pat Conroy has several novels out. You can read them.
So that's all I wanted to do for this podcast.
I know it's unusual, and I know it's short, but
sometimes you just want to do something different. And I'm
as long as Michael Ferris Smith's permission stands, I'm going
to pick up over the next few months a couple
of his other books and read three or four chapters
from it to try to give you get you interested
in it. Because if you enjoy good writing, you will
enjoy all these writers. So that's it. This is I'm
gonna upload this on Sunday. I don't know what the
date is. The first, maybe September first, as Labor Day weekend.
Hope you guys are having a good Labor Day weekend
and we'll be back to monster stories on the next podcast.
Love you all, see you on the next one. Thanks
the was amashim my computer