Field of View
by Jack Pirtle
Author
Jack Pirtle
Author Bio
First time author Jack Pirtle was born and raised in northeast Texas. He attended segregated schools during the Jim Crow forties and fifties. “I was walking around with this story in my head for much of my adult life,” he says. “Further, I was eager to have my youthful teenage experiences take the shape and form of regional fiction.”
Pirtle holds a masters degree in education from the University of Arizona. He taught social studies and photography at Sunnyside High School and Pima Community College in Tucson. His high school photography students won local, state and national awards for their creativity. He is the father of six children and the grandfather of eleven. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife Klaire.
Description
On her nineteenth birthday, a girl jumps to her death from the window of a twenty-two story Dallas hotel. The ramifications of her suicide soon reach the backwaters of a rural God-fearing town ninety miles northeast of Dallas. In the early fifties, Mayweather, Texas, is a town where the social order is stratified, women are often objectified, people of color suffer from the sting and humiliation of racial oppression and seemingly ordinary lives often harbor dark secrets.
Everything heats up when a shocking Polaroid photograph is discovered by a cleaning lady at the town’s shabby and disheveled Lone Star Hotel. The image is pornographic. Protagonist J.B. Turman, likes to tie up loose ends and for things to make sense. He thinks he can recall having seen the girl in the photograph elsewhere. But, where and when? Disturbed by the image and the possibility that a pornographer is on the loose, he organizes a disparate group of citizens to investigate.
Book excerpt
“A stout Negro woman with freckled, light skin walked awkwardly in the direction of the bus stop, her legs bowed as if from the weight of her lot. Her plan was to catch the noon bus to south Dallas. There, she would spend the weekend with her four grandchildren and her recently abandoned daughter-in-law. Her son, unfortunately, like his father before him, was seemingly bent on a self-destructive path to nowhere worthwhile.
As she had done many times before, she made sure her plans for travel were not to be upset by the rude arrival of an early bus. Buses, like a lot of things in life, were not to be trusted. Buses were either late or early. Experience had taught her that they were never on time. Of the two, an early arrival was by far the riskiest of the two scenarios. Satisfied she had beaten the bus to its mark, she took a deep breath and settled in on a sun-ravaged wooden bench whose faded sign urged her, or anyone else, to take out a loan at a nearby First National Bank. “We have high interest in our customers,” the sign read, “but[…]”
Excerpt
From: Jack Pirtle. “Field of View.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=3086E9ABA0D257AD03202E47AFCF48AD
Author Website
http://www.jackpirtleauthor.com
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