praise for
White Nights In Split Town City
“Annie DeWitt takes us to the strange and stirring depths of language and shows us, with equal parts pain and beauty, how we really feel. A bold, word-drunk novel by a wonderful new writer.” —Ben Marcus
“Annie DeWitt’s fiction, with its lush precision, its daring leaps, its sly wit and rhythmic beauty, breaks hearts and takes names and names a vivid world anew.”
—Sam Lipsyte
“White Nights in Split Town City is a ferocious tumble of a book, told from the wild edge of the 90s. Follow the sharp wonder of Jean’s voice through the electrifying night of this novel and you will emerge breathless, exhilarated, changed.
Annie DeWitt is a daring and spectacular new talent.” —Laura van den Berg
“Thirteen year-old Jean is the luminous, clear hearted voice and eyes of Annie DeWitt’s gorgeous debut novel. Though this slim novel takes place in a single summer, on a small dirt road, in a rural town—this couldn’t be a bigger or bolder story. DeWitt renders the known world with originality of language and vision.
Every page of this book is surprising and wonderfully moving.” —Victoria Redel
“In White Nights in Split Town City Ann Dewitt writes of a family during a single summer, both mundane and transformative. In scene after lovely and telling scene she mines the subtle emotions between mother and daughter This is a sad and beautiful story. I was engaged and enchanted from the first pages.”
—Darcey Steinke
“Annie Dewitt is like Kesey in the Sometimes a Great Notion era mated by Didion in her Play It As It Lays years. That much intensity, that much might and clear minded provoking of the story to careen forth through her hungry hammering of prose and the keen eye of her heart. That middle finger from the arm of the boat on the river, too, is present, and yet there is warmth and remembrance and truth from DeWitt and the eras that are all her own, the 90’s we grew of age in. This book will become a classic for this era.”
—Luke Goebel
“A very cool blue-collar country novel filled with such strong sentences that I could feel the dirt-road dust and summer sun on my skin.” —Shane Jones
Tyrant Books
426 West 46th Street Apt. D
NYC 10036
www.NYTyrant.com
Copyright © Annie DeWitt 2016
ISBN 13: 978-0-9913608-4-0
First Edition
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and organizations portrayed herein are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical reviews and articles.
Front cover photo Copyright Summer Kellogg / Offset.com
Cover design & author photo by Jerome Jakubiec resilientandoverwhelmed.com
Interior design by Adam Robinson
WHITE NIGHTS IN
SPLIT TOWN CITY
Annie DeWitt
Tyrant Books
I wonder, now, only when it will happen,
when the young mother will hear the
noise like somebody’s pressure cooker
down the block, going off. She’ll go out into the yard
holding her small daughter in her arms,
and there, above the end of the street, in the
air above the line of trees,
she will see it rising, lifting up
over our horizon, the upper rim of the
gold ball, large as a giant
planet starting to lift up over ours.
She will be standing there in the yard holding her daughter,
looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise,
and the child will open her arms to it,
it will look so beautiful.
—“When” by Sharon Olds
For Diane Williams and Alan Ziegler,
Thank you for opening the doors to the house
and showing me inside.
With love to Gian,
for taking the gamble.
To my sister, who witnessed it all with me.
1.
The car appeared to descend from the sky like the old gray pigeons that skirted the power lines tracing the upheaval of the mountain. Fender, the youngest of the abandoned Steelhead brothers, was sprawled out horizontal over-top of the Jeep, a dare the older boys had put him up to. Maybe he was shackled at the ankles. Maybe he was relying on his own grip. It looked as though his brothers had strapped him there, turned the nose of the 4x4 down the trail, and put the vehicle in neutral. The Jeep had gained enough speed by the time it reached the turnoff onto our little road that its body absorbed any imperfections in the macadam and it surfed over the frost heaves and skids of gravel, catching a bit of warm summer air. Mother stood beside me. We were on our way out to the garden. We stared at the back of Fender’s head as it hurtled toward us. The wind took his shirt and its colors billowed up around his face.
Liden, the eldest Steelhead brother, was at the wheel. One of his arms rested across the horn. The other straddled the shoulders of a young girl in a neon tank. The rest of the boys were in the back tending the beer. A long-haired kid tossed cans of Miller High Life out the rear, exploding them over the road. The gold of a can flared in the sunlight before the aluminum burst from the pressure.
This was the summer of 1990. The Berlin Wall fell. The Hubble Space Telescope launched. Mandela was released from prison. Microsoft released a disk, which Father brought home from work, called Windows. Mikhail Gorbachev—The Big Red Splot, my sister Birdie called him—was elected. In school we gathered our pennies to save the whales from Exxon Valdez. Ryan White died of AIDS—“What’s AIDS?” Birdie said—“It’s a disease of the blood which came from a flight attendant,” Mother said over breakfast as Birdie and I discussed the image
