High Skies

by Tracy Daugherty

Overview

High Skies recounts the collision of devastating weather, Cold War suspicion, tense race relations, and the unintended consequences of good intentions in a small West Texas town in the 1950s, changing the futures of the families there and altering their perceptions of America. At the center of this perfect storm is Raymond “Flyboy” Seaker, a respected military veteran, now the vice principal of a school in which Troy, who tells the story, and his disabled friend Stevie will have their lives upended forever. Through a combination of his own well-meaning ambitions and the political maneuverings of others, Flyboy and the families he serves come to grasp the meaning of community and of individual fortitude. Written with a vivid economy recalling Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and painting as indelible a portrait of small town life as Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, High Skies is a perfectly distilled American epic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597094450
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Tracy Daugherty is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestseller The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion. His short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, British Vogue, the Paris Review online, McSweeney’s, and many other journals. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Corvallis, Oregon with his wife, writer Marjorie Sandor.

Read an Excerpt

The first dust storm that spring coincided with the onset of my mother’s migraines. Early in the morning, that Friday, she grimaced while she stood at the stove scrambling eggs for our breakfast, and a little later while she packed peanut butter sandwiches and apple slices into clunky lunch pails for my sister and me to take to school. By eight thirty, when my father was pulling on his suit jacket and preparing to leave for his job at the independent oil and gas outfit he worked for, she was complaining of a shimmering blue aura flitting at the edges of her eyesight, making her nauseous. The sun was too bright through the kitchen window, she said. It blinded her, though the rays were finely filtered through the leaves of the spunky little pecan tree our father had planted in the backyard just last year. She could barely stand. She propped herself upright by hanging on to the greasy corner of the stove. My father dropped his jacket onto a kitchen chair and moved to help her into the bedroom. Neither of my parents were big nor tall, but my mother had never looked so bird-like, trembling, curled within the circle of my father’s slender arms. She hadn’t done her face and hair yet that morning; her cheeks were the color of the milk I’d spilled on the table earlier while fixing my cereal, and her uncombed hair resembled the checkered maze of the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, lines and angles branching in all directions.

The storm blew in on a Monday afternoon. It was as though the earth tilted: the ground seemed to advance toward us relentlessly at a ninety-degree angle. What little remained of the sky was nearly obscured in a thin wedge on the western horizon, a dim blue—almost purple—backdrop to the skeletal outlines of oil rigs and windmills surrounding our town.

I was on the playground when the first gusts stirred dust devils at my feet. I ran toward the classroom buildings, dodging a minefield of little tornadoes. Immediately, my chest tightened and each breath felt like a fist slamming against my ribs. The air smelled of sewage—we later learned that several pipes had broken and septic tanks had ruptured on the “other side of the tracks.” Cattle waste had also been sucked up and spread by the winds. In the time it took me to sprint from the center of the open field to my classroom door, the air temperature plummeted over ten degrees—almost icy.

Editorial Reviews

08/31/2020

Daugherty’s engrossing latest (after the collection American Originals) focuses on the small community of Midland, Tex., in the late 1950s as it reels from severe weather, Cold War paranoia, and school integration. Troy, the asthmatic protagonist, is 10 when his mother is first stricken by a migraine during a dust storm. At school, Troy helps his friend Stevie, who has arthritis, get on the ground during “duck and cover” drills. And when the school board moves to convert an abandoned Quonset hut on school property into classroom space for students from a neighboring Black high school that was damaged in a storm, local tensions come to a head. Vice principal Raymond Seaker is placed in charge of the project, which many families object to as a step toward integration. Seaker visits with families whose children have dust-storm–induced illnesses and is confronted by the community’s unjust fears over the spread of diseases by Black students rather than environmental factors as he works to carry out the plan, which the school board has approved for financial rather than progressive reasons. In an illuminating coda, Troy and Stevie reminisce about Seaker’s efforts and the town’s slow, staggered march toward change. Daugherty adeptly creates a toxic environment where people’s fears obscure their rationality and impair their judgment. The account of one man left out to dry makes for a stark, memorable outing. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Tracy Daugherty's characters have a stubborn, wonderful realness to them, the sign of a writer absolutely alert to the complex world around us." —Andrea Barrett, winner of the National Book Award

"Daugherty's writing is deeply rooted in time and place and the historical events that color the characters lives. The effect of this is not nostalgia but a perspective on the relationship between the private and the public, the personal and the political. His characters are wholly realized, the writing as clean as sheets on a summer line."—Robert Boswell, PEN West Award finalist

"The account of one man left out to dry makes for a stark, memorable outing."—Publisher's Weekly

From the Publisher