Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Willie Morris is the author of North Toward Home, New York Days, My Dog Skip, My Cat Spit McGee, and numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction. As the imaginative and creative editor of Harper’s magazine in the 1960s, he published such writers as William Styron, Gay Talese, David Halberstam, and Norman Mailer, and he was a major influence in changing our postwar literary and journalistic history. He died in August 1999 at the age of sixty-four.

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Taps

Mariner Books

Excerpt

Luke Cartwright became for me a harbinger of death in that year. It
was an ambient evening of early summer when he first came by my house.
My mother was at a bridge tournament at the country club and would be
late, and I was relishing the solitude from her injunctions. Earlier
it had rained, and the trees arched in shadowy silhouettes, darkly
green now before the coming of the heat, dripping with moisture in the
cooling breeze. The hills began only a hundred yards from the house,
and the whole earth sang with crickets and other nocturnal things.
Soon the DDT truck came by, spraying for the season"s first
mosquitoes, known and acknowledged as the largest and most aggressive
in Christendom, or so we believed.
I heard the wheeze of a motor at the front curb. I looked up
and saw Luke Cartwright stepping out of his red pickup truck with its
high boxed rectangular cabin and a black cat sprawled on his
dashboard. I stood to greet him. He was in khaki trousers and a
metallic blue sports shirt that glowed under the streetlamp. From a
few feet away a frog jumped in an arc and landed with a whish.
"Ain"t you a little old to be barefoot in your front yard in
the middle of the night? How old are you, anyway?"
"Sixteen, almost."
"That"s old enough."
I had never thought of it that way, if indeed I had
considered it at all. Does the only child — the solitary son of a
widowed and indomitable mother fraught with an inordinate propensity
for intrusion — dwell on age? Especially when she teaches tap dancing?
Survival, perhaps, although I would not have used the word then — nor
escape nor improvisation nor even loneliness. Old enough for what?
"I hear you play the trumpet in the band. And you"re good."
"Only pretty good," I replied.
"Can you play "Taps"?"

Copyright © 2001 by JoAnne Prichard Morris and David Rae Morris

Continues...

Excerpted from Tapsby Willie Morris Copyright © 2002 by Willie Morris. Excerpted by permission.
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