The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Jimmy D’s Thrive -n- Dine

A Short Story

Summary

Garrett Webb is a 1940’s crime writer with a problem.  He has written his title character—hard-boiled New York Detective Jack McMannis – down into an open grave with a gun pointed at his head and now cannot summon the words that will get him back out. As Detective McMannis lays on his back bleeding from a bullet wound to his shoulder and stares up into the eyes of his beautiful assassin, he desperately tries to conjure the words that will convince her to spare his life and set him free. But there are no words to save hero Jack McMannis. Not this this time. Because Garrett Webb, author of the Detective Jack McMannis crime series, has writer’s block. 

Writer’s block is not an unfamiliar problem to Garrett, but this latest bout has proven especially intractable. In hopes of some inspiration for what Jack McMannis might be thinking from the bottom of a cold dark grave, Garrett has taken to attending the funerals of strangers, watching in the hot sun as mourners pay their final respects and take turns shoveling soft earth back into the hole from which it came. In his imagination, he can hear the dead chattering – Flap-gatta-gatta-flap-flap-gatta-gatta-gatta—furiously calling out to the living walking around above. But try as he might, Garrett does not understand the words to their lament.

Just as the dead and bereaved are of little help, so too is Imajean, Garrett’s wife, who has finally exhausted all indulgence for the notion that writing crime fiction was the same thing as making an honest living and raising a family. In Imajean’s mind, Garrett has turned out to be the low-bred disappointment of her father’s prediction. Surrounded by the cold walls of a loveless marriage, Garrett is every bit as trapped and wordless in the face of his fate as Jack McMannis.

But while attending funerals does not produce any inspiration or words that will pull the hero detective out of the ground, it does produce something unexpected: a tail. Someone in a sky blue sedan with white wall tires and an improbable slash of red over a corner of the hood—is following Garrett Webb. Or has his imagination and the unrelenting heat made him as paranoid as his most famous character? Garrett will add it to all of the questions he cannot answer. How to help Jack McMannis save himself? Who among the dead chatter their ragged words up to the living and who are silent beneath the ground? And Why?

The answers are in Wilsonville, a small forgotten town in the middle of nowhere, where Garrett seeks refuge from the boiling sun, and the tail he cannot shake, in a little diner called Jimmy D’s Thrive-n-Dine.