Free Beer Tomorrow
A Book of Stories
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Thoreau once surmised that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. Reading
these stories brings Thoreaus words to mind. The characters are found in settings in
the Deep South in the days of Huey Long in Louisiana; in present day New York City
with its current economic hardships and other difficult goings on; and in several
Mississippi locales.. The characters exist in quiet desperation. Isolated within
Themselves all face crisis and loss. And yet somehow they struggle to cope with the
hope they will prevail.
In the title story a Cajun bartender struggles against fate and the two sons who
have stolen his farm. A farmer turned bartender, Joe Lee LeBlanc sues his boys
to recover the farm. His story circulates. He has his few minutes of
fame as interest in his case grows. People stop ignoring the khakis-clad
bartender. They ask about progress in his cause. Of course free beer
and tomorrow never arrive. The old bartender never gets his day in court. Chekhovs
story, The Lament, is recalled as one reads FBT, set in Opelousas, Louisiana, during the
Yambilee Festival.
The shadow world of cockfighting with its unlawfulness and potential for
violence is the environment where one youngster is coming of age. The Cockfighters,
reminiscent of Sherwood Andersons I Want To Know Why, and Ernest Hemingways
My Old Man, also has a Louisiana locale where the law and the Church (ironically in the
Parish of St. Landry) turn a blind eye to the blood sport in which fighting cocks
usually duel to the death.
An unknown assailant kills the boys father after a highly wagered cockfight. The
Lad, freed from the sport, is urged to get an education by his guardian, a former prostitute
and the mistress of the dead father.
At the end of the story, the fathers murder remains unsolved. And a sable rooster
with a fighting spirit, a bird the family pinned its hopes on, is killed in a cockpit battle it
was supposed to win. We are left to ponder what part the little cock had to do
with the death of the father after the little bird is found nailed to a post outside the
cockfighting arena. The question of the boys true understanding of his fathers
profession remains unresolved. The boy is last seen studying hard in school, reading
Hemingway and thinking about horseracing as a career.
In The Picaninny, an African American child is forced to leave the South after
innocently kissing a white boy. Later she finds fame as a singer in the North. She
returns to her roots in Mississippi. She finds change and understanding after talking
to a crippled white man from her past. She leaves Mississippi a second time but without
baggage.
The protagonist in To Kill A Kingfish races against time to stop his cousin from
killing Louisianas former governor (U.S. Senator Huey Long in the story). The tale
unfolds as the protagonists grandson attempts to unravel a relatives ties to the
assassination plot. In the end the grandson scruples and decides to let the story remain
unrecorded.
The WWII pilot hero of Beau Chandlers Wonderful Bedroom returns from the
Battle and settles in New York City. He finds the perfect one bedroom that eventually
becomes the prize in a battle of another sort. Chandler, a gentile, and Kahan, a
Jew who manages the building, are both obsessed with the apartment but for different
reasons. Both men are oblivious to some of the reasons the war was fought. There is no
brotherly love in the story. In the end the old pilot, an alcoholic, dies in a fall down a
stairwell. Was he pushed over the railing by Kahan? Does the old man simply give up
the fight? In the end the thought lingers: how easily man is motivated to kill.