EDWARD FALCO
WOLF POINT
Tom “T” Walker, a 57-year-old businessman, knows better than to pick up a beautiful young woman hitchhiking with her dangerous-looking boyfriend, but he stops for them anyway. He’s been living alone, his life ruinously off course, in such utter isolation from everyone he has ever loved that he welcomes the company and the excitement. But as T finds himself pulled into the chaos of their world in a way he will barely survive, he comes to see his personal history and experiences in an altered and troubling light.
Edward Falco brings stunning emotional depth and tense action to unforgettable characters as they journey through the mundane world to places where illusions fail and they must face their hidden selves.
$14.95 | Fiction Paperback Reprint | 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 | 240 pages
September 2006
ISBN: 978-1-932961-30-0
EISBN: 978-1-93607-135-7
“Because—” She pulled her foot away from his thigh, tucking her feet under her again. She crossed her arms beneath her breasts as if trying to hug and fold herself into as small a space as possible. “Because,” she continued. “Though the plan was to rob you, I wasn’t ever really sure I’d actually let Lester go through with it.”
“Just out of curiosity,” T said. “What exactly was the plan?”
“I play like a hooker,” she said. “Which I’m not nor have I ever been, for the record. But I come on like a country tramp or a hooker or whatever once I figure you out; then I offer to go in the back seat with you while Lester drives.”
“And this is something you’ve done before?” T asked.
“No. It’s not. Though I think Lester here might have some similar past experiences. Lester?”
Lester didn’t answer. He leaned back in his seat with his arms spread out grasping the backrest to either side of him.
“Then what?” T pressed. “Once I get in the back seat with you?”
“You don’t make it to the back seat. Before you get there Lester hits you over the head with a piece of pipe he’s got stuck down the back of his pants.”
“That’s great, Jen,” Lester said, breaking his silence but not moving. “Thanks for taking away the element of surprise. What am I supposed to do now, hit him over the head while he’s driving?”
“Why don’t we drop the whole hitting-over-the-head thing?” T said. “It won’t be necessary. I already planned on taking you wherever you want to go.”
“Really?” Les said. “And did you plan on giving us your car and your money?”
When T didn’t answer, the Rover filled up with a silence that felt pressurized, as if it were pushing against the windows and doors. The vehicle continued rolling on, and Jennifer continued to sit with her feet folded under her, holding herself in her own arms, though she had turned to look out the front window and appeared to be quietly watching the sky as the last light faded and the somber clouds deepened toward darkness. T held the steering wheel with both hands and watched the road. Behind him, he could feel Lester’s presence where he occupied the whole of the back seat as if it were his throne.
Ed Falco most recently is the author of the NYTimes best-selling novel, The Family Corleone, a prequel to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and subsequent saga.
Falco has received innumerable awards, prizes and fellowships, and is the author of four previous novels, four story collections, and numerous plays, poems, essays, and critical reviews, including the novels St John of the Five Boroughs (Unbridled 2009), Wolf Point (Unbridled 2006), and the story collection Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories (Unbridled 2006). His stories have been published widely in journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, The Missouri Review and TriQuarterly, and collected in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and several anthologies, including, Blue Cathedral: Short Fiction for the New Millennium. An early innovator in the field of digital writing, Falco’s online work includes Self-Portrait as Child w/Father (Iowa Review Web), Circa 1967-1968 (Eastgate Reading Room), “Charmin’ Cleary” (Eastgate Reading Room), and “Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales (with photographer Mary Pinto, in Volume I of The Electronic Literature Collection).
