~ Sheila Cloatch mixed expensive blue cognac with Gatorade, which doesn't give hangovers. Classy
~ This chilling piece of dialogue from Ellis: "I'd eat her whole damn child just to taste the thing he squeezed out of." For some reason this reminds me of a joke out of a Dorothy Allison story or something a character in one of her stories would say: What do you call a virgin from South Carolina? (I could be mixing up the state; it's somewhere in the south.) A ten year old that can run fast.
~ Jeff Park's stepfather attempts to bite his step son on his balls, which prompts Jeff to run away, and eventually ends up working at the carnival.
~ Jeff watching the orange sweater wearing Katie, with "the pale green glimmering behind her teeth, a light of both desolation and comfort, the light of a lone cottage window on an empty street. He (Jeff) thinks it's there for him." At first, I imagined the green light to be the old style crystallized rock candy (or "phosphorescent candy that they sell at the fair"), but my professor in class pointed out in class that it was probably bubble gum. I like to imagine it as rock candy, in that "that green summer mouth".
~ The whole story reminded me of the ending of Henderson, Rain King. Henderson had run away from home, after his father blamed him for his brother's death and he goes and joins a carnival. He rides a roller coaster with Smolak, a bear, that wets itself when it gets scared riding the roller coaster. [At one point Jeff calls home to see if he can return home and his mother dismisses that idea. She says to call later, because the Hendersons were coming over to eat dinner with her and the stepfather. Clue The Twilight Show theme song.]
~ The ending of Jeff looking for Katie, who ditched him, and when he finds her, she ignores him. He grabs her and causes a scene, and when he looks into her mouth, “the light…has gone out.”
~ Jeff's whole story is secondary to the main story: a boy is molested in a privy, and the search for who did it. Right after it happens, the boy acts undisturbed, his father questions if he believes his son and he thinks about how the ordeal will negatively affect his (the father's) life. The molestation is real, as the culprit dreamily recalls it, when it is revealed it is he who committed the crime on the third to last page. There are other side stories, even side shows almost, that pop in and out, but the crime and Jeff’s story are what kept my attention. It was like a culmination of the worse things you think carnies can do, a kind of wrong place wrong time story, shitty parenting, all in an intertwined with braided narrative. Wells Tower delivered. I intend to check out many more of his stories.
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