Excerpt from Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Night Of The Living Rez

When the bus arrived in Overtown, it parked and hissed and sank in the cracked concrete lot. The woman sitting beside me—thin brown hair, worn brown skin, puffy brown mole on her neck—did not stand, and she did not look to want to leave the bus.

From South Station in Boston to Overtown—through dark tunnels lit by passing headlights and orange bulbs, through highways green with pine and pressed below gray sky—the woman had sat in the same position: upright, hands folded over the blue-and-white-striped handbag on her lap, and her eyes set straight ahead much like a driver, like in her mind she was traveling somewhere and could not take her gaze from it. She had a used Gatorade bottle. Cool Blue, the label read, yet the contents were not Cool Blue but instead looked to be apple juice. She didn't drink from it, and every once in a while, my eyes shut, I'd hear her shaking the bottle, my eyes open, and then she'd set it back in the cupholder.

The woman had coughed on occasion during the trip, and she spoke only twice. A man in faded jeans and a paint-speckled shirt had leaned from his seat across from us and said, "That's a nice gun." He said it so loudly that everyone turned to look at the woman—the bus driver watched in the mirror, eyes flicking behind sunglasses to the road to the woman to the road to the woman to the road—and the woman opened her blue-and-white bag and pulled out a bulky orange water gun, and she raised it into the air. "Super Soaker," she said, and for a time everyone admired the orange frame and blue handle and the barrel with six holes for water to spray through. The woman put the Super Soaker back in her bag and the man who asked the question said, "For your child?"

"No," was all the woman said.

The bus was clearing out, and the woman would not move. She looked straight ahead. I stood, thinking she'd see me trying to get out, and I bumped my head on the overhead TV that Greyhound never used. The woman looked at me, and she put up a finger. Hold on. Through the window, Mom's white car was parked in the parking lot. Her window was down, and how she saw me through the tinted bus windows was beyond me, yet she did and she was waving.

The back of the bus cleared out and the woman stood with her bag, grabbed her Gatorade bottle, and went to the bathroom in the back of the bus. I got off the bus, and as I descended the steps I wondered if Overtown was that woman's stop.

The air was chilly for August. But then again, each time I came home from Dad's the world got a little colder, more so now than ever: I hadn't spent the summer with my father in four years—I was thirteen the last time I saw him, when Mom let me see him or let him see me—and he looked so sickly this time. All summer he smoked and barely moved from his recliner, and before I left to catch the cab that took me to the bus station Dad hugged me as tight as he could, his cigarette smoke going up my nose, and said, "I'll see you, buddy."

Mom leaned over and unlocked the car door.

"Welcome home, gwus." She patted my leg and then she put the car in drive. Her freshly dyed brown hair darkened her skin. She had grown her hair out and it went past her ears now. The last time I saw her it was short and speckled with grays around the rims of her ears. "Your father behave himself?" Mom ran a red light leaving the parking lot.

"You got a cigarette?" I said.

She gave me one. I wanted to tell her how the one and only time Dad and I went someplace he fell asleep driving on the highway and I had to grab the wheel and guide the golden Saturn to the emergency breakdown lane. But why say anything about it? We survived.

I lit the smoke, and Mom said, "Well, did he?"

"I don't know why you're prying so much," I said. "Since when do you care if he behaved himself?"

Excerpted from Night of the Living Rez by Stephan Talty. Copyright © 2022 by Stephan Talty. Excerpted by permission of Tin House Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.