Sunburn (2 page)

Authors: John Lescroart

Tags: #Suspense, #Thriller

BOOK: Sunburn

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Hence, bittersweet.

Although
Sunburn
did win the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for best as-yet unpublished novel by a California author under thirty-five, publication did not follow for another four years. And that initial publication was after the book had gathered the proverbial drawerful of rejections. Finally, when it did come out, it was as a paperback original with a cover that was misleading and tasteless at best, and semipor nographic at worst.

So now I approach the occasion of the reissu ance of
Sunburn
with a mixture of joy and trepidation: joy because for a writer it is always wonderful to see one of your very early efforts have a new chance to come back into print and to reach an entirely new audience; and trepidation because the book in question is so far removed from the kind of story, and the style of writing, of the rest of my published work that a part of me halfway fears that it might disappoint my loyal readers.

So for those readers, and also the new ones, who are now holding
Sunburn
in your hands, I offer you not an apologia, because I remain extremely proud of this book and believe that there is much to recommend it, but an explanation of the first stirrings of a writer’s instincts that drew me to this story in the first place.

So what did writing this book teach me? How did it help to turn me into the writer that I am today?

One of the conceits that accounted for my early rejections was my then-held—and long-held—belief that the act of writing was such a sacred artistic endeavor that it should flow unimpeded from the brain to the page. The idea of rewriting struck me as impure, sacrilegious. So I wrote slowly, self-consciously, forming whole sentences at a time before I would commit them like precious brushstrokes to my canvas. If a conversation failed to sustain interest, or a description fell flat, I would be tempted to let the words stand because they were natural. I thought they were more real, not realizing that “real” in fiction, as in sculpture, is an artifice. When I finished my first draft, every instinct in me wanted to call the book finished for good.

But then I asked myself, what if it could be better? Would revision lessen the book’s power or purity? The answer, of course, though painful to admit, was no. The answer to that question is always no. The cliché is that there is no good writing; there is only good rewriting. And this is the book that taught me that. I labored and labored over the words of the second draft, removing what made me cringe, adding flashes of poetry or insight. And all of these changes made the book so much better. Still not perfect, but well on its way to readable.

The other major problem as I set out to be a writer was that my focus was almost exclusively on character, and this in spite of the fact that I had not yet learned two crucial lessons: one, André Malraux’s dictum that character is fate, and two, that character is revealed by action. It was in the actual writing of this book that these twin pillars of fiction came to have some meaning to me. I wanted everyone to talk about ideas and to represent ideals, but I found as I tried to formulate scenes that unless the characters in them actually did something—and, more than that, something interesting or unexpected!—that there was no life, no vibrancy, no drama.

The power of the first scene, of the very first words—“It wasn’t what you’d call a clean kill.”—introduces action as revelatory of character in a specific scene, and it’s this sense of scenes building on one another, of people interacting and revealing themselves, that drives the story forward. Story is so much more than mood, but until I put characters into action and into conflict, I had been blind to this lesson.

As I’ve intimated here, I’ve done another small revision on this edition of
Sunburn
. I’ve removed a few inconsistencies, added some motivation, deleted excessive and cringe-inducing verbiage. What’s left is the best book I could write at the age of thirty, and one that taught me much of what I’ve come to know about writing.

Now, rereading the novel myself for the first time in nearly thirty years, I was alternatively pleased by my audacity, by some flashes of verbal dexterity, by the depth of tone and the complexity of the plot itself, and chagrined by many glaring motivational failures among my characters and an embarrassing overabundance of cliché and profanity (most of both of these flaws hopefully excised in this printing). In the end, I was happily surprised not by how much revision the book needed, but by how little. The story still works. The characters are alive and real. The setting is genuine. I would be surprised if many of this book’s modern readers did not have to stifle at least a lump in the throat in the final pages. I know that I did.

—John Lescroart

PART I

My weariness amazes me,
I’m branded on my feet,
I have no one to meet
And the ancient, empty street’s
too dead for dreamin’.

—BOB DYLAN “Mr. Tambourine Man”

One

It wasn’t what you’d call a clean kill.

But then, it was only meant to be theater, and judging from Kyra’s reaction, a comedy at that.

She was sitting on the stone wall laughing, and I hurried out from the woods next to the house to see what was so funny. Her squeals drowned out the squawks from the chicken until I’d come into the courtyard.

I noticed at the same time that she was wearing no underwear, and that the chicken was bleeding from its back, not its neck. Sean was standing over it, one leg holding down its legs, the ax in his one hand, ready to swing again. The chicken fluttered its wings madly, trying to free itself, pecking randomly, crazily, at Sean’s foot. Kyra laughed again, and I stood transfixed while he brought the ax down three more times, finally severing the head. Then he removed his foot and the body began running in its last, hopeless freedom. When it dropped, Sean looked up at his audience.

“I told you I could.”

“And you did. You were wonderful.”

“Close your legs,” he said. “You’re pretty visible.”

“You’ve got blood on your pants.” She dropped from the fence. “Here’s Douglas. Did you see him?” she asked me. “Wasn’t he splendid?”

I walked over and picked up the chicken by its legs. “I don’t get it,” I said.

“It’s dinner,” said Sean, no longer triumphant.

“I gathered that, but why didn’t you let Berta kill it, or me, or even Lea, for God’s sake. I just don’t see the point.”

Kyra put her arm around his waist, and lifted her breasts at me. “I told him he couldn’t do it with only one hand. He’d been going on about how he could do anything anyone else can, even if he didn’t have two hands, and I bet him he couldn’t catch a chicken and cut off its head. And what are you so sore about, anyway? It’s only a chicken.”

“I guess I don’t have the same stomach for blood that you do,” I said, and walked into the house, holding the limp and bloodless bird.

The vacation had been Lea’s idea, and at first it had seemed like a good one. We’d been stagnating at our work for a year or more, and it had been time to get over the inertia and move anywhere, so we had decided to visit her brother in Spain. He lived out behind the little town of Tossa de Mar, which is about halfway to France along the coast from Barcelona, and it had seemed far enough away to make it a real change.

Her brother, Sean Mallory, had bought the house about a year after his accident. The insurance company had paid him a fortune for losing his hand in a press, and he decided to see something of the world with his newfound riches. He’d only gotten as far as Spain before he decided he’d found paradise, and he’d bought this house and settled down. Since then, we’d received letters about once a month extolling the wonder of Ibe ria, and they’d sold us on going over.

Now he spent his time trying to write novels. He was, for the most part, an entertaining and generous host who left us alone when we wanted to be. Occasionally, he’d become intolerable and yell at everyone in the manner of someone who’s grown used to getting his own way, but it would always pass quickly, and it seemed a small price to pay for an otherwise idyllic Spanish vacation.

I had supposed at the time, since Kyra and novel-writing commenced simultaneously, that there had been some link between the two. From his descriptions, I had imagined her to be interested in art and artists. This was not the case, and though there must have been some connection between this new vocation and his life with Kyra, I couldn’t fathom it.

She was a well-built woman and knew it, and whatever power she exerted over Sean I suspected lay in his adoration for her body. She exposed herself subtly but often to inflame him with jealousy, and he exploded into rage every two weeks or so. Once, he’d even gone so far as to throw her out of the house, though on that occasion she hadn’t even made it out of the courtyard when he’d called her back, begging forgiveness. As far as I knew, she’d been faithful to him since she’d moved in, which had been about six months before our arrival.

When we’d left Los Angeles we had no idea of what Spain was like, or who peopled this paradise called Tossa. Lea had wanted to get out of the ad game, and I had thought, what the hell, maybe I’d write a novel. I had given up fiction after three years of poverty had been neither as romantic nor as fulfilling as I’d hoped it would be. The magazine articles I wrote had provided a good living, but I, too, had felt it would be good to have a change. I’d become bored putting words together as if I were macramé-ing something. This I say in retrospect. I hadn’t really noticed that I wasn’t content until Lea had put the bug in my ear. Since we’d arrived, I hadn’t written a word.

Berta was standing by the kitchen door when I came inside. She had looked to me, at first, like every other Spanish woman older than a girl, always dressed in a black dress and black stockings. But as I’d come to know her, I realized that she was not so much unattractive as lacking in glamour. Her features were strong and her smile really wonderful. She probably wasn’t much beyond forty-five, and before too long, we’d become friends in broken English and Spanish.

Now she leaned with a weary smile against the doorpost.
“Muy loco,”
she said, motioning outside.

I laughed. “
Sí.
You want the chicken?”

She took it and walked into the kitchen. Sitting on a stool near the table, she pulled over a can and began plucking, talking quietly to herself all the while.

After a few moments of watching her, I went upstairs to where Lea was napping. She lay curled in the bed, her back to me, the solitary sheet down around her waist. When I opened the door, she turned over, half-awake, and yawned.

“What was that awful noise?”

I sat on the bed. “Puberty rites, I suppose. Sean had to prove his manhood to Kyra.”

“What? Again?”

“Again.”

“What time is it?”

“About six, I guess. You sleep well?”

“Must have.” She put her head on my leg, and curled herself around me. She had the slender and, I thought, beautiful body of an underdeveloped girl of twenty, and she was nearly twice that. Still, I felt that lately she’d come into bloom. She’d never been shy about her body with me, but now she exuded a certain pride in its lines. Before we’d left, she’d stood one day in front of the mirror and looked at herself, naked. “I’m so glad I’ve never had big breasts,” she’d said. Then, later, “I’m beginning to feel like a beautiful woman. Should a woman my age feel that way?”

“Douglas,” she said, “I’m not that way with you, am I? I don’t test you all the time?”

I leaned over and kissed her. “If you do, I don’t notice.”

“Because I think it’s terrible. If only poor Sean would see . . .”

“But he does it himself. Even if he doesn’t see it, it must come out in other places we don’t know about.”

“I wish she’d leave.”

“Now, now . . .”

“Well, he is my brother.”

“And he is no kid.” I lay down beside her and kissed her again. “
Basta,
OK?”

“OK.”

We began making love. Downstairs we heard a car pull up and honk, and we stopped.