Uncle Dust
By Rob Pierce
314 pages
All Due Respect
Books; Jan. 15, 2015)
ISBN-10: 1507503962
ISBN-13: 978-1507503966
Uncle Dust – short for
Dustin -- is nobody’s uncle. That’s just what he’s called by Jeremy, his
girlfriend Theresa’s kid.
Dustin could be a
house painter or a drywall nailer or a paper-hanger or a mechanic. He’s a ham-and-egger:
a lunch bucket kind of guy who drinks too much and gets along poorly with the
women in his life – when he gets along with them at all.
On the surface, Dust
is just your average blue collar worker who enjoys kicking back with a beer and
a shot of scotch when he’s not on the job.
But underneath the
working class façade, Dustin’s lifestyle isn’t that straightforward. As he tells
Theresa, the woman he’s living with, “You and me, we ain’t even complicated and
we’re complicated.”
You see, Uncle Dust, the remarkable character that Swill magazine editor Rob Pierce has used as the lynchpin of his excellent first novel, is a bank robber.
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| Rob Pierce: His novel Uncle Dust is reminiscent of the work of David Goodis or Cornell Woolrich |
Unlike Donald
Westlake’s fictional heist specialist, Parker, Dust doesn’t do complicated robberies. He doesn’t
need a crew that includes a specialist in disconnecting alarms, an expert in blowing vaults or a brace of heavily armed "hooligans" to hold a roomful of victims at gunpoint while the stick-up goes down.
Dust works solo.
He is less likely to get double-crossed or ratted out that way.
His technique for
sticking up a bank is simplicity itself: he walks in, hands a note to a teller
ordering her to empty the till into his carryall, and then exits with the swag.
No muss, no fuss, no bother.
While Dustin’s
crimes may be simple, his home life is as twisted as cheap garden hose. At the
beginning of the book, he is shacked up with Theresa, a woman he describes as
having “gorgeous green eyes and a sense of humor and a mid-length skirt showing
off legs that looked like they’d kill me if I went any higher. And man, I was
ready to die.” Theresa is in love with him, but love is a complication Dust
doesn’t want or need.
Another complication
is Jeremy, Theresa’s ten-year-old son. Jeremy is a gamer and nerd who is easy
pickings for the bullies at his school. Dustin teaches the boy how to defend
himself from the older kids in ways the Marquess of Queensbury never dreamed.
He takes a liking to the kid, which puts him at odds with Theresa’s ex, a guy
named Davis who has some sort of link to a gaming parlor Jeremy frequents.
Because Dust checks
out banks very carefully before he pulls a job, he runs out of cash from his
last robbery and is forced to break legs for a loan shark who runs a local
sports book. This throws him back
together with his old partner Rico, and raises his stress level until it’s hard
to think clearly about bank heists, let alone plan one.
Meanwhile Dust is
diddling Olivia, a cocktail waitress at a local gin mill where he hangs out
between assignments.
As if two women aren’t
enough, Dust has an ex-girlfriend, Val, whose life has taken a tragic turn: she
was brutally raped by a petty criminal who killed her children. While Dustin’s
relationship with Val is not romantic, it is deep – when Dustin was doing time
at the state pen, he killed the man who raped her and murdered her kids. Since
he was released he keeps an eye on her and helps her out any way he can.
The connection is
part pity, part regret, part guilt. As he says to her at one point, “You’re
strong, Val. But how you carry this… it’s gonna kill you one way or the other.”
She wearily replies,
“Sometimes I wish it would. I wish I could pick the way.”
No -- the crimes are
simple. It’s Dustin’s life that’s all fucked up. What makes things worse is the
fact that he can’t talk honestly with any of the women in his life about what
he does for a living. They know he’s in the life, but none are sure exactly
how. It’s tough to build a relationship
with a woman when you can’t even tell her how you earn your cash.
Dustin is on the
road to disaster. One of his heists goes disastrously sour. He finds himself
dreaming of doing a major crime to get out from under his loan shark boss. Meanwhile,
his relationship with all three women goes steadily downhill. The frosting on
the cake? He becomes involved in a death that could put him behind bars again
for keeps.
Things get bad and
things get worse and Dustin begins making poor choices that look like they may
end up being lethal. He spends an increasing amount of time drunk, which makes
it even harder for him to make the clear-headed decisions he needs to stay
alive.
As Theresa tells him
at one point, “You’re always halfway out the door or halfway in the bag. Some
part of you’s never here.”
In classic noir fashion, Dustin has become snared in
his own trap and there are no good ways out.
Uncle Dust is something
of a throwback – a straightforward tale in which the criminals are portrayed as
working stiffs whose only saleable skills are robbing banks or collecting on
usurious loans. It reminds me of the
work of Cornell Woolrich or David Goodis. Pierce’s characters are fully
realized and entirely believable. His dialog is tight and remarkably
straightforward for noir, a genre in
which duplicity is normal and characters often lie – even to themselves – or speak
at cross purposes.
If you are looking
for maximum body count, this is probably not the book for you: there are only
two deaths in the entire 372 page novel. Mostly what Pierce gives you is a
clean, simple tale told in language as terse as a rap sheet about a tough guy
in a situation where being tough not only doesn’t help, but actually makes
things worse.
The book is full of
sharp observation served up in laconic prose. Unlike some hardboiled writers, Pierce
doesn’t overdo the criminal argot or wise-ass gibes. The words he puts into his
characters’ mouths ring with authenticity and have that twist of graveyard humor
you often encounter in men who find themselves living just this side of
desperation.
For example, Dust
tells us his long-time friend and “business” associate Rico avoids classy
watering holes because “the drinks cost more, and the women all say no.”
At one dive, Dust
says, “the bartender was a surly old guy with a pocked face, blond hair, and a
Hawaiian shirt. I guess the surfing career didn’t pan out.”
He describes that
bar, Sparks, as the kind of place frequented by serious drinkers who don’t
waste their time picking tunes off the jukebox or tossing darts at a target
while their Guinness goes flat: “I hadn’t been to Sparks in months, but it was
exactly how I remembered it. Grunt workers straight off eight- or ten-hour
shifts sitting near the door, like they couldn’t make it any farther, putting
down everything they could as fast as they could and if a fight came their way
they wouldn’t mind it.”
“I’d never seen a
fight in Sparks, though,” he continues. “Unless you wanted one there was no
reason to talk to those guys, and they only talked to each other. I was looking
down the bar at the grunts, and I turned back to look at Rico and he must have
been looking down there too. We both grinned. If we wanted we could clear that
end of the room in a couple of seconds. So dumb, thinking about shit we didn’t
even want to do. We both laughed, and I waved to the surly surfer for another
round.”
For criminals of
this class, alcohol is a staple and bars like Sparks are a place to hatch
schemes, split the swag and shoot the shit. The problem for careerist drinkers,
Dust notes, is the price they pay the following day. But, he goes on, “A man
who can’t work with a hangover shouldn’t have a job.”
Pierce’s protagonist
is even able to find a sepulchral laugh in the face of disaster. During one
bank job, Dust gets shot and barely escapes. As he is leaving, a peevish
customer who was behind him in line when he grabbed the cash says, “What is
this, hurry up and wait? Hurry up and wait? I’ve been here all day and he’s
taking all the money!”
At the beginning of
the novel, it seems that Dust knows what he’s about. But as the book continues,
the reader begins to realize Dust is out of control
“I’m just a man with work to do.” He tells Rico toward the denouement.
“And pussy to fuck.” Rico sat back laughing. “Don’t forget that part.
That’s what you’re working for.”
I laughed with him but he had it wrong. Pussy was pussy. I worked for
something else, and I wasn’t even sure what that was.
Around 300 pages in,
after Dust gets mugged like any other square, the reader realizes that the
central character in this story is in way over his head.
Olivia asks him, “They
get a lotta money?”
“‘That doesn’t matter. I got beat. That’s all,’ ” Dust replies. “I
tried to say it like I was shrugging it off, like it was a little thing. But
when I said it was all, I meant it was everything. This whole damn game is king
of the hill.”
Another clue is
offered the reader when Dust is reminiscing about the abrasive relationship
between his father and mother.
He recalls his
father telling him, “You couldn’t get her
to say yes to anything. I take her to the market, she says maybe someone wants
some apricots. I say you want apricots, we get apricots. She says well maybe
someone would like them. I say, you want them? And it goes in circles. Then she
leaves me because I don’t give her what she wants. Jesus. Fucking apricots.”
It’s a telling
moment because this short anecdote tells you succinctly why Dustin’s
relationships go awry and his life is a mess. He may be as brutal as his father
was, but in other ways he’s a lot like his mother, arguing aimlessly over
apricots.
