Coasters. Gerald Duff

      

      Coasters

      A novel

      Gerald Duff

      NewSouth Books

      Montgomery

      Also by Gerald Duff

      Novels

      Indian Giver

      Graveyard Working

      That’s All Right, Mama: The Unauthorized Life of Elvis’s Twin

      Memphis Ribs

      Snake Song

       Fire Ants

      Poetry

      A Ceremony of Light

      Calling Collect

      Non-Fiction

      William Cobbett and the Politics of Earth

      Letters of William Cobbett

      NewSouth Books

      P.O. Box 1588

      Montgomery, AL 36102

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      Copyright 2001 by Gerald Duff. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

      ISBN-13: 9781588380296

      ebook ISBN: 9781603062268

      LCCN: 2001031479

      Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.

      This book is in memory of Addison Irwin,

      Wallace Kay, Robert Daniel, and Terry Brown,

      absent friends.

      And for my children,

      Audrey and Stuart,

      blocks off the old chip.

Contents

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Chapter 21

       Chapter 22

       Chapter 23

       Chapter 24

       Chapter 25

       Chapter 26

       Chapter 27

       Chapter 28

       Chapter 29

       Chapter 30

       Chapter 31

       Chapter 32

       Chapter 33

       Chapter 34

       About the Author

      Gravity sliding is the downslope movement of part of the Earth’s crust. This mechanism appears to be responsible for many observed extensive, low-angle faults. The phenomenon is thought to be intimately connected with many of the Earth’s great systems of slide.

      — Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition

      Why then is this people of Jerusalem slidden

      back by perpetual backsliding? They hold

      fast deceit, they refuse to return.

      — Jeremiah 8:5

      Slipping and sliding

      Peeping and a hiding

      Been so a long time ago.

      — Little Richard

1

      The singer on the radio show called “Tried and True Tunes” was chanting over and over that there’s a bad moon on the rise, and Waylon McPhee was struck by the truth of that as he pulled his car into the driveway of his father’s house. Midday though it was, the moon hung like a stone in the sky above the rooflines of the Helena Street addition, reflected sunlight blazing from its white face so strongly that Waylon felt like looking off to avoid eyestrain.

      A little out of phase, Waylon thought, like everything else on the Gulf Coast had come to be these days. Not wrong in itself, just wrong in the timing.