Out of Spyte, Out of Mind

pickarooney

A chapter, but kind of a standalone...

N'thu pê i-T'chana-só.........................I am Tapir
Ko upé mi e-imok khû.........................Sent by the shadows
Ñe kuyeham'ê achi-mburuñe-lê.........................In the deep sleep of your passion
T'thu-û so'ingo achi-pêpé.........................Silence calls my name
Dhê pê ko si'ihele-ñó-lûi.........................I watch from the riverbank
Hsami mog'iemiñê achi-tulhum-lê .........................While your heart capsizes
N'thu pê i-T'chana-só.........................I am Tapir

It was a long, boring drive up the I-5 and Leonard Spyte busied himself by chanting under his breath and swearing at every driver who dared block his path. It was ****ing broiling in this nasty little hire-car, with its on-off eco-****ing friendly air-con that only seemed to switch itself on when human flesh actually began to melt.

This was not the American dream. For all the pansy-ass enviro-posturing his own limp-wrist government busied itself with, the yanks had no such geo-guilty concerns. He should be cruising the highway in a ten-litre gas-gobbler, windows down and the freeze on full, listening to Springsteen, not chugging listlessly in this tin-can ladybug and sweating kilos of Bud-Lite perspiration into his Joseph Abboud suit.

He wrenched his duckegg-blue Brent Morgan tie loose and fired it over his head into the back seat – the kind of circulation-cutting banquette where a midget would struggle to pop his cherry. The engine resisted like a Catholic debutante as he forced the car up to ninety. The motor began squealing and shaking like a spoiled toddler as he ate up the ground behind the fast-lane loiterer barring his progress up ahead. The ****er made like he didn't see Spyte's light-flash politely reminding him this wasn't pony club, and only moved over after he had sat on his horn for twenty seconds.

With a bit of space now he could open the engine up a bit and let the shakes sort themselves out. Unbelievably, there was another dawdler right up ahead. He couldn't have been doing more than eighty-five in the left lane and seemed in no hurry to adjust his position. Mother****er. Spyte tootled, the hairs in the small of his back plastered to his plaid Raffaello shirt, the ones on his neck bristling with impatience. Ass-faced Yankee bitch-bastard, get the **** out of my way!

Reluctantly, and with a post-watershed hand-gesture, the slowpoke gave way and Spyte was rolling again. It appeared to him as though the shaking was ironing itself out as he nudged the motor over a hundred. Momentarily taking his eye off the strobe-light flicker of the white lines separating the lanes – painted far too close together on these American roads – he mopped his forehead on his sleeve and looked back up to see the concrete divider loom huge in his windshield. He blinked rapidly as he righted the car. He had to keep his mind on the game. He had a ****-load of ground to cover, but luckily Spyte liked to drive.

When the phone-call had come, in he'd tossed his return ticket in the trash and gone straight to Avis where he'd agreed to rent a compact, to save hassle. Bad move. He could feel the car physically shrink around him as the day got warmer and warmer. Which didn't make much sense, he reckoned, as he was moving north.

His day had not started well. L.A., a prick-infested pox-hole at the best of times, was under siege from some bunch of ethnic asstards celebrating how great it was to be ****ing Cuban or Puerto Rican or **** knew what. Fat mamitas on tacked-tinsel milk-trucks with their brass-band boyfriends following close behind had clogged up the city for the entire morning, making him a half-hour late for his meeting.

His Ukrainian/Romanian driver didn't seem to know his ass from his elbow when it came to avoiding the crowded centre, even when coaxed with a handful of cash. One look at Ben Franklin was usually enough to cure the temporary geographical amnesia rife among people of his profession but all this schmuck had been able to do was shrug and chuckle. The ****.

When he had finally made it to Walcott and Fysher, the bitch at reception had given him one of those looks, like he was some tramp strolled in off the street to panhandle a few bucks. He was there to scrounge a hell of a lot more from her tenth-floor paymasters and a bit of respect for a man of his position – sweat-soaked, panting and uncoiffed as he may have been – would not have gone astray. He made a note to mention her lousy attitude to the bigwigs on ten once he'd wooed them with his pitch.

The presentation had gone down like a **** soufflé. From the moment he walked in they were sniffing their metrosexual noses and checking out their oversize Rolexes. Then the perma-tan ball-breakers had laughed out loud at him and shoved him out of the office before he'd got half-way through his presentation. Jizz-monkeys. They could rot in the festering hell that was their beloved city. He'd find someone with a bit more savoir ****in' faire to take him up on the deal of a lifetime he was toting around. As he pulled into LAX, amazed that the Transylvanian/Albanian cabby had been able to find the airport, his phone had rung with some good news. Finally. A second go at kicking some Yankee ass had presented itself and he was on it like spaghetti sauce on a white shirt.

****-stick! They were doing it on purpose, these assholes. This guy had no excuse; that big-ass German car of his could top two-hundred, easy, and here he was idling at under a ton. Didn't he know it was bad for his car to drive it that slowly, besides being as irritating as all **** for the guy behind? He felt something approaching shame as he parped his weedy horn a couple of times, like the prison prag politely asking the king fish to step aside in the canteen line.

The Mercedes didn't budge. Spyte sat on its bumper for a minute, making a pleading gesture clearly visible in the other driver's rear-view mirror. It was just the two of them on this stretch of highway and so Spyte took the only option left to him and sat back, gunned his puny engine and slid over into the middle lane.

Looking straight ahead, he began easing the pedal all the way to the floor. The motor whinged, struggling now, outside the wind-buffer of the wide, German automobile, as the red finger of his speedometer reluctantly crawled closer to one-oh-five. There must have been a sneaky rise in the road, because it was hell to get the extra couple of kph out of its screeching engine. He was going to need to put another ten on the clock to get the space to nick past the left-lane loafer and overtake him from the right.

As the needle flickered past the semi-notch he glanced over to see his Benz-driving rival frown at him while lowering his own foot. The cocksucker was going to play hardball now, eh? Spyte looked back and put his foot straight through the pedal, thunking the back of the accelerator against the floor of the howling car. It was a gain of two centimetres, tops, and the difference in speed was negligible.

The screeching grew louder and all of a sudden a third vehicle appeared, preparing to overtake him in the right lane. This was nuts. He looked back to his left where an empty lane stretched out into the distance. The Mercedes had disappeared. Spyte blinked. How could he... ? Even those German machines couldn't accelerate out of sight that fast.

The black saloon caught him on his right and gave him the finger. The asswipe did it wrong, stabbing the digit downwards. Spyte replied in kind, popping a splendid bird through his passenger window. The black car dropped back. As Spyte laughed to himself, it reappeared, this time on his left. The guy riding shotgun was doing it now, not only getting the direction ass-backwards, but using the wrong finger to insult him. What was with this pair of ******s? They had the left lane and a bigger car, why didn't the matching-shirted homos just take off already. They seemed to be shouting something at him, gesturing for him to roll down his window. Probably so they could jump in and invite him to their butt-party.

The whining was becoming unbearable and Spyte began to wonder if his hire-car was just not built for even these relatively low speeds, although when he listened closely the noise seemed to be coming from outside the car. In a cold moment, he realised that this was true – the screeching was from the other car. He looked over with a coprophagous grin and caught sight of the flashing light on the roof of the black sedan. ****ity-****ity-foo.

"A hundred and six in an eighty zone, you want to tell us what's so important you have to ignore our speeds limits, sir?" asked the blond state trooper, peering into Spyte's hire-car as though searching for sawn-up corpses or big bags of drugs.
His pal was busy scribbling down all the particulars of the rented vehicle.
"Eighty? What the f... you can't be serious. Eighty?"
"Oh I am deadly serious sir. We the good people of Oregon believe in the right to drive respectfully and sensibly at a maximum of eighty miles per hour. By which we do not mean switching lanes and overtaking on the right... trying to overtake on the right."
Blondie crushed a smirk. Officer Fenimore Klein, according to his name-tag.
"Which in a way is fortunate for you, as our friends back there over the state line don't take kindly to people breaking seventy."
"Miles..." said Spyte, stunned and stupid.
"Yessir", said Klein, taking Spyte's Canadian licence. "Don't you have miles up there in Caynaduh? Measure your distances in moose-steps, do you? Eh?" he mocked.

The prick was enjoying it even more now that he knew Spyte was a Canuck. These retrograde pig****ers with their miles and gallons were teasing him. And he was going to have to suck it up. He'd be forced to listen to their jibes for a while and then cut a fat cheque, if they'd even take one drawn from a foreign bank. He began to force an apology through a ****-eating smile, mentally counting the remaining bills in his wallet.

Grievous

I really like this piece. I would read more.

A few things that bothered me though:

1) I can understand your character spyte speaks like a sailor and loves the curse freely. and this comes natural to him and reads well. But the narrator is doing plenty of cursing as well. Who is the narrator at this point? I'll read it again and see if it feels as jarring.

2) I am not a huge dialogue writer yet myself. I like to narrate stories from first and third person narrative. When you write your dialogue like *Caynaduh* in a phonetic manner I think this takes alot of skill. I'll say that much, But I always find this kind of dialogue jarring. Richard have read any RODDY DOYLE? I appreciate the effort that goes into writing the way someone talks but find it hard to read. This is something I'll have to think about for future short stories when writing dialogue. Do I write *AN* from the perspective of my character or do I rish being boring by saying *AND*.

3) I loved some of the descriptions at the start of the piece concerning his clothes and tie qnd other things he was wearing and things he had. It reminded me of bret ellis american pyscho. And that's a good thing.

pickarooney

Grievous wrote: »

I really like this piece. I would read more.

A few things that bothered me though:

1) I can understand your character spyte speaks like a sailor and loves the curse freely. and this comes natural to him and reads well. But the narrator is doing plenty of cursing as well. Who is the narrator at this point? I'll read it again and see if it feels as jarring.

I tend to merge the two a lot. Way back in the beginning, each chapter was supposed to be written completely in the style of the protagonist, e.g. a small child might be described as a delightful creature or a noisy pain in the arse depending on who was interacting with him. This is no longer completely the case but I kept it in various places.

2) I am not a huge dialogue writer yet myself. I like to narrate stories from first and third person narrative. When you write your dialogue like *Caynaduh* in a phonetic manner I think this takes alot of skill. I'll say that much, But I always find this kind of dialogue jarring. Richard have read any RODDY DOYLE? I appreciate the effort that goes into writing the way someone talks but find it hard to read. This is something I'll have to think about for future short stories when writing dialogue. Do I write *AN* from the perspective of my character or do I rish being boring by saying *AND*.

I've toyed with several variations on this, from very slightly phonetic transcriptions to neutral to painstaking sound for sound replications. I quickly came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as a neutral accent and to be even-handed every single line of dialogue would have to be rendered phonetically which, while fun, is a little distracting. 'Caynaduh' in this instance is the cop taking a hand out of the driver.