Some Heroes

As the title promises, these stories range from a sheriff who rids his town of a murderer his own way, after talking matters over with a mountain; to a woman who dyes her hair with teen-style purple streaks to wait on staid lawyers and judges in an up-and-coming restaurant; to a priest who–yes–plunges right into the recent headlines of child abuse in one moment of misguided loneliness. But just as the adjacent cover shifts from white to gray, so do the collection’s characters–and Taylor reminds us that we all–despite our flashes and forays into one spectrum’s end or the other–we all mostly just muddle along, in the ragged gray.

He looked through the Greyhound’s window to the blackboard schedule outside, to a motionless clock, then back to the blackboard schedule. It was Kansas City, Kansas, 1959. It was 12:10 p.m. in Kansas City, Kansas. He placed his ear against the Greyhound’s window and imagined that he could hear each wondrous sway of the schedule in some thick summer breeze; he imagined he could hear the echo of chalk being scratched on the schedule outlining important places, important times; then he pictured a handsome man like the movies say, a man standing straight as a chalk stick itself, as straight as his sergeant in Texas.
      —Kansas City, Kansas, the bus driver sang out.
      He opened his eyes and saw that the clock had not moved, that the schedule hung dead still. He left the bus and walked to the YMCA. There, a sleepy night clerk who was pulling a double woke up enough to smile at the short G. I. hair and Elvis-blue eyes. The blue eyes fastened on the large wall clock behind the clerk and watched its thin red second hand sweep everything clean.
      —You share showers and toilets, the clerk said, coughing to get the attention of those eyes. Just like the army, the clerk added, tossing down a key and walking back to collapse in a chair even before the sound of the key’s dropping metal had cleared the air.
      He smiled and looked from the clerk to the clock.
            And he, Tom Watkins Wallace, at last got an almost union job in a Kansas City terminal unloading boxes for $3.85 an hour. An hour, an hour, he whistled as a supervisor led him out of the trucking office, closing its door gently, reverently on a man in a…

Home