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Praise for One D.O.A., One on the Way
“One D.O.A., One on the Way has all the razored style and zigzag tone one expects, but also a new connection to a bigger world, in which all of our circumstances are as desperate and hilarious as her characters’ . . . Mary Robison’s work has always felt like a glorious amenity, but One D.O.A., One on the Way is a powerful necessity.”
—DANIEL HANDLER, The New York Times
“Robison could work for a food or drug packager: she squeezes dire warnings into tiny spaces . . . [One D.O.A., One on the Way] can be read in half an afternoon, leaving plenty of room for afterthoughts about Robison’s funny and heartbreaking conversations.”
—The New Yorker
“Mary Robison is a woman of few words. But what powerful words they are . . . Pushcart Prize and O. Henry Award–winner Robison’s searing novella is rendered in edgy vignettes . . . Robison is a master at delivering dark scenarios with mordant wit. One D.O.A., One on the Way is an impressive addition to her ouvre, by turns horrifying, comic, shocking, and wise.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“With a laconic voice and a despairing sense of humor, film location scout Eve Broussard narrates award-winning Robison’s grim yet witty novella about the dissolution of a family and a city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina . . . Robison’s narrative is jumpy but effective, interspersed with and informed by startling statistics.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Robison’s spare, hilarious dialogue and collection of fragmented images, moments and excerpts call on readers to fill in blanks and to organize what looks at first glance like chaos glimpsed from a moving car . . . a vivid, witty ride.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Robison eloquently reveals the dissolution of a family . . . The southern novel’s bread and butter are rich descriptions, thick as humidity and Spanish moss.”
—Booklist
ALSO BY MARY ROBISON
An Amateur’s Guide to the Night
Believe Them
Days
Oh!
Subtraction
Tell Me
Why Did I Ever
ONE D.O.A., ONE ON THE WAY
Copyright © 2009 by Mary Robison.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Author’s note: This is a work of fiction. Nonetheless, the author has not knowingly made statements about New Orleans that are incorrect. Information was gathered from numerous sources, including: The American Medical Association, Bureau of Justice Statistics, The New Orleans Emergency Operations Center, The New Orleans Mayor’s Office, The New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, The New Orleans Police Department, The N.O.P.D. Crime Statistics, The F.B.I. Crime Statistics and Population Data, The Louisiana Census Bureau, The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, The Orleans Parish Criminal Justice System Accountability Reports, and The Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robison, Mary, author.
Title: One D.O.A., one on the way : a novel / Mary Robison.
Description: Berkeley : Counterpoint, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010600 | ISBN 9781640090873 | eISBN 9781640090880
Subjects: LCSH: Terminally ill—Fiction. | Adult children—Family relationships— Fiction. | Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3568.O317 O54 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010600
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
Book design by Megan Jones Design
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
in memory of my brother, Louis
CHAPTER 1
[1]
NOW I’VE STEPPED ON A a rusty fucking nail. Not my first, either. Three nails at three different locations have pierced the soles of three unrelated shoes. And this happens to everybody who wanders out. I have to keep a First-Aid kit in my van for this type of thing. “Kit” is inadequate, and too short a word.
There’s a little window period with Tetanus, of about twenty-four hours. Or so I was told by Mrs. G., a woman with a camper truck, who drove the neighborhoods, passing out vaccines.
[2]
I have this friend, Lucien, not a friend so much as he’s my intern, who’s been going around with me for months, every weekday, for a good part of the day.
Although, there is little left to our job.
Ah, but you carry on here as if nothing could ever really be over.
[3]
There was work once before the work went out of town. You could do a lot of location scouting here. Everyone wanted you to. They hurled money at you, the production people with so much money, who wanted to film here because of the tax incentives, or the nine months of shooting weather, or the easy attitude toward permits, or because the place can mimic any other place that a film crew, then, wouldn’t have to go.
I still get work, oh sure, and the New Orleans film industry isn’t 100 percent in the shitter. I get commercials, or they’re not quite commercials. These one- or two-day shoots. They’re more like change-of-address ads. The businesses want to announce they still exist. They’ve relocated maybe, but they’re back up, open.
[4]
So Lucien, my intern all this time, day-after-day for months, turns and says to me, “My name’s Paul.”
[5]
I’m not from here and I’ll probably never get used to things, but I doubt if I’ll ever leave. A rest might be an idea. There’s too much eating. There’s altogether too much sex, dancing, carousing, reveling. All of it goes on for far too long. There’s powdered sugar dust on everything. There are twinkle lights burning every day of the year. Funerals, Jell-O shots, fishing, swearing, barbecues, back-door gigs, vats and vats of jambalaya. There are too many houses and sidewalks disappearing under weeds and vines and in yards that look impenetrable, too many neon signs, too much on-the-stoop drinking, corruption, and Technicolor clothes, too much crawfish shucking, and Catholic everything, too much stale beer, too many heroin junkies shooting up on the balconies, too many big homes, and trees snapped off, too many steel billboards bent to the ground, too much andouille sausage, too many second lines, too much money, and debauch, and cars parked all crooked.
“Do you never tire?” I cry from the car window.
[6]