The Yellow Jeep - Stories and Songs
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A selection from one short story, “The Yellow Jeep.”
Supper then. A grey light of afternoon brushing damp tumbleweeds at the kitchen glass. The sink and range warm in the yellow light of a lamp at the cupboards.
He ate sullenly, not looking up at her, and they said nothing to each other for the longest time.
“What’d you do today?” he asked finally.
She dropped the knife, and it clanged musically on the edge of her plate. She looked over her shoulder at the kitchen counter, even though there was nothing on it for her to see. Then she turned back, but still she would not look at him.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Not much. I ran a few errands in town, stopped by Stone Realty and talked with Mr. Hinkle. That sort of thing.”
“Anything else?” said Stewart. He didn’t mention that he’d seen her in school.
“I guess not,” she said.
“Oh,” said Stewart.
There was still some dark meat in the bone on his plate. He went to work on it, prying with the point of his bread knife, digging the burned fat out, and chewing it like a peanut as each piece broke off.
“I was wondering if Mr. Hinkle had anything to say about this place,” Stewart said between bites. “Anything new, I mean.”
A small wind rattled the window near the sink. Mother turned and looked.
Her neck and arms are so small, he thought. I’ve never realized she was that small.
She turned back to the table again. “It’s supposed to get pretty cold tonight,” she said. “Somewhere around freezing before morning, I heard.”
“I heard that too,” said Stewart.
“Are you going anywhere?”
“I don’t know. For a ride. Maybe.”
“Be sure to take warm clothes, then,” said Mother. “Some tools, too. And maybe a chain wouldn’t hurt. You might get stuck out there.”
“I won’t get stuck,” Stewart said.
“Oh,” said Mother, after a moment. She began gathering the silver into a handful, and sliding the plates over each other like cards. She stood and carried the dishes to the sink.
“I bought a pie today,” she said. “Do you want some now?”
“Apple?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t have any cheddar cheese, do you?” Stewart asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I bought that too.”
“I’ll have apple pie with cheddar cheese.”
“Should I heat it?” Mother asked. “It’ll only take a minute.”
“Yes,” said Stewart.
A sudden gust of wind came out of the hills at the edge of town. It roared down a steep slope, and he could hear it burrowing in and around garages and dead trees and abandoned chicken coops at the city limits. Mother stood dead still in the center of the room.
“What’s wrong?” Stewart asked.
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About the Book
Joel Vernon Smith invites you to watch while life unfolds for entities we’ll never meet, in settings far from our day-to-day locales. Each character is someone we once loved. Or we wish we could have loved. Or perhaps we seek merely to understand her.
A sensitive teen takes his dad’s memory for a ride in a new four-wheel-drive in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A married couple shares a traumatic memory of a decaying barn. A passionate duo learns that their ship is doomed. A wealthy college student argues with his girlfriend when a draft notice arrives. A mentally-troubled elderly woman claims a friendship with a man of smoke. Frightful demons force a man to do a dark tunnel-dance in front of a stalled bus.
The author of The Rapists bids you to explore the lives of mostly-gentle human beings as they deal with feelings of love or the arrival of unexpected horror. If it’s true (as a late-sixties song suggests) that words of love won’t win a girl’s heart anymore, perhaps the reader should open this book and take a journey to somewhere she’s never been before.
The ride will be exciting.
About the Author
In the approximate forty-one years since he left high school, Joel Vernon Smith has walked countless miles in cold rain and November winds. He made a major discovery long ago: When you’re all alone in place where other people don’t want to be, you begin to meet characters who do not reside anywhere on the earth. With a little encouragement, these new friends can be persuaded to act out their lives in organized fiction.
This collection of short tales, The Yellow Jeep, has a foundation in the many other-world individuals who were encountered on hikes through numerous small cities.
His first novel – The Rapists (AuthorHouse) – portrayed an emotional struggle between a wounded 19-year-old and the cantankerous 87-year-old who rescued her. Some readers thought the odd match actually worked.
Joel will soon begin his most poetic and difficult writing project to date. Daughter of Aaron will be a lengthy tale of horror, love and final redemption for an emotionally-troubled combat veteran of the Vietnam era. He hopes to have the novel done sometime in late 2005.