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Drift and Swerve

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Samuel Ligon

March 2009

Ryan Call

Drift and Swerve, Samuel Ligon’s second book and winner of the 2008 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, takes its title from the second piece in the collection, a road trip story about a family traveling behind a drunk driver as they return home after visiting their dying grandmother. While the family bickers, the drunk driver grows more erratic, weaving across the road, first lazily and then desperately, before wrecking the car into an enormous concrete ditch. Each family member reacts differently to the nearly fatal accident: the mother cradles the injured drunk’s head against her body to comfort him; the father weakly stands to the side with a blanket, pretending to offer help; and the children, disappointed because the man is not dead, go sliding through the mud “as if it were winter and the drainage ditch a frozen over river.”

Drift and Swerve, Samuel Ligon’s second book and winner of the 2008 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, takes its title from the second piece in the collection, a road trip story about a family traveling behind a drunk driver as they return home after visiting their dying grandmother. While the family bickers, the drunk driver grows more erratic, weaving across the road, first lazily and then desperately, before wrecking the car into an enormous concrete ditch. Each family member reacts differently to the nearly fatal accident: the mother cradles the injured drunk’s head against her body to comfort him; the father weakly stands to the side with a blanket, pretending to offer help; and the children, disappointed because the man is not dead, go sliding through the mud “as if it were winter and the drainage ditch a frozen over river.”

The doomed path of the drunk driver characterizes the terrible attraction of the work in this collection. Reading Ligon’s stories is much like searching for internet videos of people being physically injured, accidentally or otherwise: you know you shouldn’t be watching, but you can’t help it. Whether you’re reading the few linked stories about Nikki, a wandering young woman who can’t seem to escape the surging violence of her life, or the story of Henry, the boy who is disciplined by his elderly teacher for drawing a swastika at the bottom of a quiz, you can sense running throughout the book the hysteria of characters who see disaster approaching and can do nothing to escape it.

Two stories in particular especially deserve mention here, as they embody this drift and swerve: the first, “Something Awful,” quietly floats to its sad conclusion, while “Vandals” leaps into an altogether new, and disturbing realm of horror.

In “Something Awful,” Jack and his wife Elaine visit with two other couples to drink, smoke pot, and take part in a painful social game, which requires everyone to confess the worst thing he or she has ever done. Throughout the evening, Jack cannot keep himself from leering at Sally, his neighbor’s wife. While he makes drinks in the kitchen, Sally propositions him in return, grinding her body against his, and despite the fact that Jack “never wanted to be the kind of guy who cheats on his wife,” he later faces the consequences of his lust: Sally tells her own version of what happened in the kitchen, and Jack suddenly finds himself to be the most awful person of the night.

In “Vandals,” Hugh booby-traps a tree in his yard to teach a lesson to the teenagers who have been vandalizing his property for the past few months. The story begins calmly enough until the teens arrive at night in their station wagon, and Hugh, “hungry for the beautiful crashing sounds of revenge,” sends tumbling down the concrete blocks and crates of railroad spikes he’s stockpiled up in the tree only to realize that what he wanted isn’t exactly what he’s received:

Time changes after that, after it starts to happen. Sounds accumulate. Glass and metal. The back block bounces off the roof of the wagon, but the middle one crashes right through the windshield, followed by the dull thud of the front block landing on the hood, where it seems to be firmly lodged. Hugh upends the crate of spikes, and then the car is moving, fishtailing in the dirt. Screams come from inside, but Hugh doesn’t register words, just the sounds of startled fear as the wagon drunkenly weaves away from him, the tires spinning up a roostertail of dust and gravel.

As the ensuing chaos mounts, Hugh impossibly tries to make right what he’s done to the teenagers, but amidst the stink of gore, the flashing lights of the ambulance and police cruisers, the insane sobbing of his wife Roberta, he can only fall back on the part he’s so used to playing: that of the victim. It’s an empty ruse, one that might temporarily fool the others who come to help, but he and Roberta know the full extent of his guilt. In the aftermath of the accident, Hugh can do nothing but turn the hot water to full blast and drag Roberta into the shower with him to wash away the blood that’s caked onto their bodies.

What makes “Vandals” remarkable is that scene of frantic cleansing in the bathroom; it is an example of Samuel Ligon’s thoughtful tendency to project his characters’ lives beyond the final sentences of the text. This is what gives Drift and Swerve its emotional weight: these characters, regardless of the hard circumstances they’ve suddenly fallen into, try somehow to recover and carry on.

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