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One Response to “Writers And Artists Agency,”
Chris Garfield Says:May 25th, 2007 at 6:54 am
I’d like to submit my Young Adult novel, THE WHISPERING GAUL.
New York city is now a hole in the ground. Haven and her brother Quinn escape from a refugee camp and show up at their Grandparent’s rural Pennsylvania home. The world as Haven has known it is unrecognizable.
They enter a forest world. Gauls escaping Caesar had hidden here, planting a willow they taught to speak. From it the animals have become like us. This world is ending as well, but here, Haven and Quinn might help.
For the love of Quinn, Fex the fox drinks the willow’s tears and turns into a girl. Willow is later murdered. Fex is wrongly blamed and banished to the glacier. Quinn and Bear Bainbridge try to find her only to discover an abandoned New York City where feral Yeti and feathered Veloceraptors run wild.
The leopard who killed willow learned how to make beasts talk. He would make the forest his or destroy it. Haven and Quinn try to warn their new friends, but the Yeti are too strong, and the Leopard too clever. Haven’s only victory is her brave struggle. Only she escapes to tell their tale.
I wanted the book to have an adult sense of loss, though anything harsh takes place off stage. One sees the reaction, not the details.
Two of my adult novels were recently requested by separate publishers. The first ten pages follows this letter.
Thanks for your time and consideration.
Cordially
Chris Garfield
235 Washington Ave.
Clifton, NJ 09342
The Whispering Gaul
A Novel By
Chris Garfield
Chapter 1
One does not look back even in dreams, Haven thought. She had run out of nothing, into nothing. For all she knew, Grandpa existed only on a postcard in her pocket. As far as she knew, Queens was now only a return address on a letter in her bag. The train had skipped a number of stations. Haven had lost track at five. Stalled cars lined the passing highways. A tan dust lay on everything, as if the towns were made of train set buildings in an attic.
She blew a bubble from a piece of gum she’d found wrapped beneath the seat cushions. The taste of sugar had been missed. It exploded all over the LCD screen built into the seat ahead. For a moment the movie light shone fluorescent blue. She wiped the gum off with her sleeve before anybody could notice. Perhaps it didn’t matter, the movie ran fast forward on an endless loop.
She’d held on to her mp3 player, though the batteries were dead. Pressing the buttons calmed her. There had been so very many songs in the world. They played in her mind. She had to cling to things like that, a button in her pocket, an old movie stub, a song in her head.
The train took a high speed turn. Its on board computers adjusted for the curve in the track. A tree that had fallen across the track burst into sawdust when the train struck it. Bits flew into the train’s cracked, soapy windows. The jolt was enough to wake her younger brother, Quinn. It was better when he slept, he could ask no questions then. He looked up from his spot, all slouched over in the seat next to her. She brushed his hair out of his face and pulled a tick from the edge of his ear
“We’re o.k., Quinn.”
“Quit saying that.” He closed his eyes again. He was so thin. When had he grown last?.
Haven wondered how an empty car could be so worn. She had known so many people. Some must have ridden this way. The car had a personality made up of the slim shavings of each of them.
She looked down at a letter from her parents. She’d memorized large portions of it, but pretended it was rather new. It contained nice lies of good things. She could hear their voices in it.
She pulled her quilted jacket tight about her collar against the cold breeze from the missing windows at the other end of the car. Refugees had all been issued the same gear. The car still had the scent of newly poured asphalt. At first she’d thought they were going through some factory district, but the scent had lingered through many towns. Haven began to think it was a characteristic of the region. She had only been to Pennsylvania once, but she’d been younger then and foolish.
The view was the back end of strip malls, tan shrubbery and twisted trees tough enough to make a go of it in the ditches, but not lucky enough to ever really bloom. They were the last two people left on the car. She knew because someone had stolen her shoes while she’d slept. She searched in her bag for the pair of flip flops she’d made of old tires.
The conductor entered and checked their tickets again as he passed. Two men in contemporary suits of Black Watch plaid entered. They were in a way demure, but acted as if they had power over any passengers they might meet. They wore large black contact lenses that hid the whites of their eyes and wore stainless steel caps on their teeth. Haven had seen such men many times since the day the City had been evacuated. They took people. Haven saw them in her nightmares. She and Quinn had been detained for six months in a camp outside of Secaucus, hence the ticks in Qinn’s ears, and the nightmares in Haven’s dreams.
The clack of their steel heals could change the tone of any room they entered. Everyone was chipped. All tings were considered. Sattalites and wireless towers could track all the refugees, all but Quinn and Haven. They’d cut their chips out. They would be cruelly treated if these men learned what Haven had done. Her heart pounded. The steel heals scraped along the train’s floor. She could no longer think.
“Passengers,” the first man shouted.
The conductor looked back as if checking the car. Haven and Quinn were below his range of vision. He pulled out a set of hooped keys and pushed his cap further back on his head, like the yokel he was not. “This car back’s empty. No need to check.”
Haven swore she’d never be locked up again, but they were so clever. Every refugee who’d escaped had been dragged back eventually. She feared every nightmare that had contained the clicking of their heals. She imagined they could see through the seat ahead of her and into her brain. They were so well put together, so polished, so polite, like great dragons who had no one to fear.
The men took a quick glance and left the car. The conductor held the door open until they were safely away, then locked it. One of the men looked back and punched the conductor’s badge number into a Palm Pilot. The conductor flipped a switch and turned the air conditioning on in the rest of the train.
“That’ll freeze you out, boys.”
Haven knew they would not check twice. Just a few more stops. She and Quinn would be fre slipped her seat upright and stretched against the armrest. People roamed the town that whizzed by, things might be back to normal here. “You hungry, Quinn?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” She gave him a squishy sandwich and soda she’d bought at the beginning of the trip, then checked their funds, which looked smaller than she’d planned.
He tore into it, then stopped. “What about yours? The soda’s warm too.” He held the soda mid air, the hunger fighting his good manners.
“You want half?”
“Not now,” Haven said, though her stomach felt like a big hole that must be filled.
Quinn finished chewing before he spoke again. “I remember, about how some people in the detention centers. People dressed like that came.”
Of course they came, of course they had avoided them, running two miles through empty streets and climbing through back yards to make the train. They had dug under the fence like dogs.
The conductor rattled seats and pointed back over his shoulder at the door. “Maybe people like that think you oughta’ still be there?”
He would say that. “Well we’re not,” Haven said.
He came closer. “You got people up ahead, in Pequot?”
“My Grandparents will be waiting for us.”
“Good to hear it.” He reached into his wallet and counted out a few bills, then laid them out towards Haven.
“I don’t want your money.”
“Didn’t say you did. But you miss your Grandfather for some reason, you don’t want to be standing out around the station. End up right back where you came from, maybe. Go on, take it. I had family in the City. They took my daughter.”
“Why?”
“Cause they could. I suppose they had their reasons. They point, they wish, they take it. People whisper they can read your dreams.”
“Cost of gifts is high,” Haven said. She handed him the empty mp3 player. “Needs batteries.”
He took it as if they knew each other quite well. “I do appreciate that.”
“Do you think?-“
“Shush, listen. When the train pulls into the station, I’ll open up the doors on the wrong side for you. Get off at the end of the car, walk around the far platform and up the hill. You’ll avoid a lot of trouble. Some people, they send back. Some people just disappear. Cab stand right there, if your people aren’t waiting for you. This is just so you don’t hang around too much, trick is to keep moving.”
“I’m sure we’ll blend right in.”
“Been to Pequot before?”
She found herself trusting him but couldn’t bear to give away too much information. Yesterday, in the camp, someone had bitten her hand to get her to drop a raw potato. It changed her view of things.
“Little fish like you gotta swim low and quiet.” He pulled a compact mirror from the lost and found locker and held it up to Haven’s face.
She’d assumed they’d held up pretty well, but her reflection was filthy, and her face pinchey and pale. She hadn’t seen a mirror for a season. How had they made it so far?
“How long were you detained?”
“About three months. Wasn’t as bad as all that.”
“Your parents?”
“In the war.”
“Funny how this one doesn’t talk.” His tone turned shy. “My daughter’s name was Karen. You didn’t know her, did you?”
“I’m sure she’s all right.”
His dead eyes didn’t believe that. “And what’s your names?”
“No,” Haven said before Quinn could answer. If he knew their names he could send them back. He could touch his Blackberry and change their fate. Still, she wanted to trust him.
The conductor didn’t wait for an answer and left to finish his newspaper. Haven went back to counting telephone poles, following the wire as it whisked closer and then farther away from the track, and wishing the train would move faster. She jerked back as an eastbound train whisked past and rattled the window.
The conductor flipped seats back for the return trip. When he got to them he flipped a seat back, sat on the armrest and stared at them as if he knew their names. “Dressed kind of funny, aren’t you?”
Haven tapped Quinn’s arm as he started to speak. The conductor reached into one of the overhead compartments and searched around until he found two winter jackets that had been left behind. He tossed them down.
“Wouldn’t do to run around Pequot dressed like that. Not lately, anyway.”
He walked off as if they had never met.
Quinn switched coats. His own smelled of charcoal fires and leaves, cabbage and latrines.
Haven checked through his pockets to see what he ‘d forgotten, then handed him his gear. If she had to do the thinking for both of them, she ought to have two brains. She held their old coats up for a second, not knowing what to do with them. They had served them well. She stood up on the seat and squeezed them into the open luggage compartment.
When she jumped down, the conductor was behind her. “Hey,” he shouted, the way one might yell, tickets. He had steel heels as well. It couldn’t mean anything, it mustn’t mean anything.
He tossed them his lunch, some extra large takeout special meal.
Haven held it out, trying not to crush it. “I don’t want to take your lunch.”
“Go ahead. Council’s could feed you better in those places, couldn’t they?”
She felt her chest tighten and handed the bag to Quinn.
The Conductor took his meal back as if she’d insulted him, lowered the little tray in the back of the seat and laid out the meal for her as if she was a petulant brat.
She thanked him as she ate. “Haven,” she said. “This is Quinn.”
“But everybody calls me Greg.” He leaned forward as if to tell a secret. “That’s the name I’m supposed to use with strangers.”
“They neglect your education in that place?”
Life was simple. Haven had two problems; take care of Quinn; don’t tell Quinn about the missing City behind them. She wasn’t about to let a stranger rattle her now. “No. I told you, it wasn’t all that bad.”
“How many States are there?”
Haven started to answer, but the Conductor held his hand up and pointed at Quinn.
“Twenty-eight.”
“Fourteen. Don’t know a thing do you?”
He was right, the world had grown clever around them. Most evacuees had no idea how badly the war was going. There had been rumors, but in a way, time had stopped for them. The enemy was called simply the enemy, the weapon, only the weapon. One could read into it what one wanted to. No more was ever announced. Haven knew they’d been too young to be alone when they’d first been caught, hiding in their apartment. Then the woman who’d bit her hand had run off with the potato and she knew they’d die there. Before they’d left, there’d been a blue flash in the distance. People whispered that New York City was now a hole in the ground. Quinn mustn’t know, at least until they were a few potatoes ahead, as people said nowadays. The conductor shook his head and walked off to his newspaper.
“Mister,” Haven asked, “Will you be in some trouble?”
“Nah, what can they do to me now?”
The train landed in Pequot Station. They struggled with their bags as they exited and climbed the narrow concrete steps built into the hill. Quinn leaned over the railing and tossed a snowball as the train pulled out. Haven felt better when he played. For weeks she had been sure coming to Pequot would solve all their problems, telling herself it was the best place one could find.
The people on the platform hurried to leave, pushing, shoving, ready, it would seem, to bite. Never mind, Grandpa would know what to do. Below, crowds of people climbed onto the train’s roof as the last train headed out. Conductors tried to push them off.
“Come on, Quinn.”
“What did he mean, fourteen States? Dad and Mom are all right?”
“Easy, Quinn? How many times I tell you?”
They crossed the busy street, entered a commuter donut place and grabbed a seat. Haven fished around for the number and counted change from her pocket. She walked toward the phone, but a patron pushed her out of the way.
She came back to the table, sat down next to Quinn and counted out some change. She’d save the extra cash just in case they needed tickets to somewhere else. “Why don’t you get us two coffees.”
“I’m thirteen, I don’t drink coffee.”
“Well, I’m fourteen, I’m going to start. Get whatever you like.”
Haven went back to the phone line, with one eye on their bags. The other caller probably only took a minute or so, but Haven checked her watch forever. When the phone was free she jumped on it and dialed the number written on a faded card. She counted a thousand rings, then heard the answering machine. She began to cry but caught it.
She looked at the passersby, as if this could make Grandpa magically appear. She tried to read from the street sign but someone had nicked it. “We’re at the coffee shop, Grandpa, this is Haven. I’ve got Quinn with me. We’ve just come to town. I’ll call right back when I know for sure.”
She hung up and went back to their table and counted out the little of her remaining change. She had to start over a few times and didn’t notice that Quinn was back.
He sat across from her, half propped up on his bag.
“Sit straight.”
“You don’t tell me what to do.”
“Didn’t I say to watch our bags? Sure I do, Quinn.”
When she went back to the phone, he pulled at the letter sticking out of the top of her bag. There were five letters there, all rubber banded together. He flipped them through his fingers. Each was addressed to one of their parents’ units, each was marked return to sender. He tried to slip them back into her pack before she could catch him, but he spilled the coffee all over them. She returned with a distance about her. This little knapsack was all the privacy she had. It hadn’t been easy telling him all their letters had gotten out.
“Thanks, Quinn,” she said and zipped the flap shut.
The clock rolled on the long side of an hour. The waitress hinted that they should leave. Haven saw no more trains.
She welled up, but turned to hide it from Quinn.
“I knew they returned the letters. But it’s not so bad.”
They laughed. They were free.
***
A black Navigator rolled by, shining a swivel light into the donut shop. Haven grabbed the table, fighting the urge to duck under it and curl up into a ball.
Sure, she’d known Karen, Karen with the mind wiped clean, bitting her hand over a potato. If they entered here, they would scan the room with their Palm Pilots and, having no chips, she and Quinn would be taken into the Navigator and off to dark places.
The light was so bright she had to close her eyes. This was like a piece of her nightmares sprung to life. The light shut off and a recorded voice came over the SUV’s loudspeaker. “Nightfall, curfew ahead, citizens return to their domiciles.”
Her pack still had a cardboard tag touting its lifetime guarantee. The picture of the skeleton rock climber had wilted from the weather, and the ride and the coffee. She pulled it off and tossed it away with their trays. A phone call into nothing, a long walk to spend a quarter. They don’t even know what we look like.
Haven held the door and let Quinn out behind her. They pushed their way through crowds of skinny armed people with nothing in their eyes and walked down the main thoroughfare until they ran out of town. The leaving Pequot proper sign marked a bridge spanning a short river. Haven dropped her bag down and used it as a seat. Nothing but weeds grew along the road, no traffic no street lights.
“I don’t remember what home looks like,” Quinn said.
“It was grand. I told you this morning.” When I dream it is grand, she thought. When I wake it is gone.
“Just asking. I wish they didn’t return all the letters, though.”
Haven walked into the street and looked both ways trying to see if any new faces were about. Fireflies appeared in the weeds. They had a half hour until sunset. Curfew sirens rang. Night was an illusion. It did not fall, it crept like smoke into the mind and fooled the brain until it could not see, then the feet stumbled.
“You remember what Grandpa looked like?” Quinn asked.
Haven remembered him as a photo on a mantle. Their house stood empty, the door kicked in. She could form a picture in her mind of every object in it but that photo. “I think he had a hat.” She smiled and wondered if he would remember them.
“When did he say he’d pick us up?”
Quinn wasn’t going to give this up. “I just left a message.”
Quinn scrunched his face up as if his brain was ticking. “But before that, he knew we were coming?”
“No, Quinn, they don’t.”
He backed away as if Haven had just broken a fine dish that could no longer be replaced. “You always pull something like this. It’s getting dark, Haven. No trains back. There I said it.”
She couldn’t take the whining anymore. “Get it through your thick skull.”
“What are we supposed to do?”
She counted to three before she spoke. “Just hang on, Quinn. I’ll think of something.”
They waited into evening. Gnats buzzed around their faces. She missed her shoes. They were from her house. All she did was foolish.
An old style Land Rover with a homemade green finish pulled up. Haven puled Quinn back into the bushes. Perhaps they could hide under the bridge.
The car stopped. She could see the steel teeth. She imagined the tap tap of steel heels. They would call her name from a long list. They toyed with her and had let her run this far, had the dragon been so patient to move its claws just now? Haven tried to run. Karen with the brain drained, every body would be Karen one day.
Quinn held her back. It crossed her mind to hit him if he didn’t let go.
The driver got out and walked over. His trousers rode a little higher on his waist than she’d remembered, but if Haven wasn’t mistaken, it could have been the same outfit he’d worn the last time they’d met; green cotton work pants, matching shirt and hat that could not be found in any store in her experience. He could have stepped out of an old photograph. Haven shook as all the long day’s tensions slipped away.
“You Haven?” He walked closer to them. “And you’re Quinn. Let me look at you.”
The kids straightened up, all shivery from the lack of sleep and the damp.
“Oh, it hasn’t been that long, has it? Gonna just stand there staring at me?”
A jet flew overhead, engines rumbling loud enough to shake the car’s windows. It had high tech engines and biplane wings. When it passed, Grandpa was still shouting. “I said that’s one of ours. No use jumping into a ditch. Nothing personal, but frankly, you two kind of stink.”
They picked themselves up. “Are we close to the front lines?” Haven asked.
“Which one. Come on, grab your git.” He opened the back of the car and helped them in with their bags. “No, we’re about a hundred miles from the fighting. You like to sit in the front?”
He signaled and pulled out of town. The turn signal never clicked off. He never went to fix it. The houses became more spaced apart and the road less well shoveled out. Grandpa got out and switched into four wheel drive. “Did I tell you, it’s good to see you?”
“No,” they both answered.
The warm, beat up cabin seemed like a fortress. Quinn tried the radio but all the stations were staticy.”
“That’s rude, Quinn,” Haven said.
“But where’s the radio?”
“Leave it alone.”
Grandpa took his time getting back inside the cab and adjusting his rearview mirror. “Well, it is good to see you.”
***
They drove up a winding road that was cut out of the top of a mountain. One side was hilly slopes, the other, trees and wetlands. Swamps, Grandpa called them, though not without affection. He stopped at the top of the hill and put the parking break on. The road slid steep before them. He pointed to the first house at the bottom. “That’s where we live, but we got a little problem. You two have to walk the rest of the way.”
“Why?” Haven wondered what they’d done.
“There’s a little problem with the breaks, sometimes.”
“But,” Haven said as he pushed her out.
Gnats buzzed about her face and into her nose. She looked down the road, completely lost. Then she saw the house, just like the postcard in her pocket.
“Go on. You got feet. You fall, you got hands.” He waved as he pulled off.
The car picked up speed and rolled down the winding hill. A dog barked, wood smoke filled the air, laundry flapped on a clothesline in back of Grandpa’s house as if the wind would blow it away. The air smelled mountainous.
They could hear the breaks bite and miss. The car rolled past the driveway and stopped about a hundred yards beyond the house. He honked the horn, then slowly backed up.
They laughed. “That’s what he does every day?” Haven asked.
They walked to the far shoulder and hurried down the hill.
The neighbor across the road had a converted barn for a house, a loaded barn off to one side, and a stream out the back. A bit of corn grew in a corner, and there was a boat tide up against a dilapidated dock.
Grandpa’s house had a slate roof with a sag in the middle.
He waited for them at the end of his driveway. A fat Pointer walked up and toppled Quinn over in greeting, then ran back towards Grandpa when it was called, then off to some other interests when it was done with him. Haven felt like she’d just finished a long run. Clear stars shown overhead, more than showed above the City. She looked at Quinn, as if he had read her thoughts. Best train ride they’d ever taken.
They stopped near the mailbox, and she pulled Quinn a little closer as if to ask permission to enter. Grandpa reached inside the car and honked the horn a few times, and took their bags as he showed them into the house.
Haven stepped into the vestibule and then into the overheated living room which smelled of the tight indoors.
Quinn grabbed a framed photo. Haven shook her head and he put it down. She still wasn’t quite sure if they’d be welcome.
“Go ahead.” Their Grandfather got the pasty, faded, photo of her parents down and tapped it as if to turn it on. “Have a seat, make yourselves at home. I’ll be right back.”
He nimbly climbed the stairs and yelled when he got to the top. “Hey, old woman, look what I’ve brought you?”
By the time they came back downstairs, Quinn was sitting asleep, sunk into crocheted pillows on an ugly couch. Haven stared into the pictures. The faded Fuji color did no justice to her mother’s green eyes, which her children shared. She ran her fingers over the brass frame, which looked somehow homemade.
Before she knew what was happening, her plump Grandmother was hugging her and laughing and asking so many questions that Haven just didn’t answer any of them.
“Hello,” Haven said.
“We did try to find out where you was. We did,” Grandma said, touching her face as if it was broken and needed mending.
“Leave her alone,” Grandpa said. “Haven, go out back there, through the kitchen. We want to talk about you and it wouldn’t be polite if you were standing in the room when we did that, now would it?”
Haven slipped her jacket off and sat down on the edge of a couch, watching Grandma’s seven cats paw Quinn to wake him. Her Grandfather grabbed her arm and guided her through the kitchen to the back entrance. He leaned into the glass at the upper portion of the storm door and tapped it. “There you go. They got a horse back there, why don’t you take a look?”
Haven walked outside, all her attention focussed on the horse. The ground was uneven as if a rutted spring field had just been caught in a flash freeze. She tripped and nearly fell, then tiptoed to the horse as if there was a rope between them that must remain taught.
The horse was a swayback thing, as if its rider would have to be shaped like a quarter moon. It whinnied as she approached the fence. Haven put one foot up on a lower rail. It lifted its head from a half barrel of hay.
“Come on,” she called to it.
It came a little closer and looked up at her with its milky colored, cataract eyes. She rubbed its snout. It yielded for a moment, made as if to bite, then jumped away and trotted off behind some bushes and out of view. She hung out over the fence calling it back, then turned to the house.
Her Grandparents argued in the kitchen. Hands shook in the air, the coffee pot slammed down. Grandma swung her arm out and the blinds flipped up then fell off the window.
Haven hadn’t slept much the last week and to be honest she didn’t care if they were all that welcome, as long as they could stay a few days. She walked past a closed window, around the bend of the house. She could hear them arguing as the house had holes in it.
“It’s not that I’m not glad to see them here. I just don’t know if they can stay,” Grandma said.
“And where will they go?” Grandpa asked.
“There’s procedures for these things, now a days. Men come in the middle of the night. They carry you away.”
“No.”
“All them empty houses on this road.”
“You’ll break their hearts.”
“Maybe.”
Grandpa noticed Haven. They slipped into the parlor.
Haven sat on the shallow bench that wrapped around three sides of the gnarled oak that grew in the center of the backyard and lay back against the tree trunk. Cold raindrops fell through the branches. She caught them and washed her face. The raindrops wilted all she wore, stopped the katydids singing, shushed the chickadees back to wherever it is they live.
The rain stopped. She looked up and the tree branches were all bunched up on one side of it. It must be her imagination, but it seemed that the tree had leaned over and shielded her from the rain.
A light came on at the second floor, the window opened. “There’s a bath for you, and some dinner soon. If you like, that is,” Grandma said. Her voice ever hurried, her feet never did.
Haven sniffed, afraid that she might stink. Then she counted the days they had been traveling and figured the world might have a point. “All right. Thanks.”
“Don’t worry about the horse. He’ll get used to you.”
“Is he yours, Grandma?”
“No. Put ‘em out to pasture on that guy’s land. Saves me the trouble. I won’t have far to go.”
Haven smiled and skipped over to the steps choosing to believe the horse was hers and happier than she’d been since someone had stolen her dog.
She heard a low pitched crack behind her, the sound a dock makes when bumped by a ferry. The tree was standing high upright again. She turned away, afraid to look at it.
A bundle of newspapers lay stacked and unread on the porch, probably ready for a fire. She poked through them, not having seen a newspaper in a number of months, but was too tired to read. One page showed a flaming, doomed ship. She dropped the paper, put it from her mind, and by the time she thought of the photo again, her head was hitting a down pillow under a pitched attic bedroom and all she wanted to do was sleep. She put the covers over her head, so no cold would bite her. But she’d been wrong, it was not cold here, nor could it be.
The tree rapped against the window. It must be the wind, but jets flew overhead and Haven covered her ears.
(End)