Read more
Informationen zum Autor Claudia Cravens has a BA in literature from Bard College and participated in Catapult’s yearlong novel generator. Lucky Red is her first novel. Klappentext A vibrant and cinematic debut set in the 19th-century American West about a scrappy orphan who finds friendship, romance, and her true calling as a revenge-seeking gunslinger. A thoroughly modern reimagining of the Western genre. Leseprobe Chapter 1 Some years ago, in Dodge, I was a sporting woman. This was before I took up my current trade, back when the prairie ran with cattle like a river runs with fish. It’s different now, of course, but then, so am I. I didn’t mind whoring—it can be good work in the right house—but it demands a great deal of keeping still, and I’m one of those itchy, fidgety sorts who’s always looking out the window or glancing toward the door, so it was only a matter of time until I had to move on. Most rambling types like to act as if they just woke up one morning and lit out, turning their backs to all and sundry, but this is just good storytelling. The truth is that making your own way happens piecemeal, like a baby who scoots, then crawls, then eventually toddles her way right out the cabin door where she’s as likely to be snatched up by coyotes as she is to seek her fortune; either way, once she gets loose, there’ll be no getting her back. All of which is to say that though I ended up a pretty girl in boy’s clothes, mounted like a woman and armed like a man, I started much smaller and simpler, and mostly alone. Before I was a whore in Kansas, I was a poor drunkard’s daughter in Arkansas. My pa wasn’t a bad man, but it was far too easy for circumstances to get the upper hand on him. He called himself unlucky, but the losing hands dealt him were too frequent and too numerous to be mere turns of fate. I will admit that at times, events truly were beyond his control: first Ma died having me, then came the Brothers War, then he was on the losing side, and then he lost what was left of the farm to nursing his broken heart. But there were other misadventures that showed me, if not him, that there’s more to this life than luck, even bad luck. First there were the mustangs, which he bought cheap and wild but lacked the will to break and was forced to sell off cheaper and wilder. Then the sheep flock, whose feed he let rot so they all went mad when they ate it. When we finally had to slaughter them, the screaming clatter of blood and terror seemed to thrust him back to some Virginian hellscape, for halfway through he threw aside his knife and shot the rest as fast as he could. In between, there were crates of plow-blades that wouldn’t hold an edge, barrels of discarded horseshoes, bales of kinked wire, all manner of flotsam that somehow always cost more than it made. He told himself he was getting by on his wits, when most of the time it was my willingness to scrub linens, tote water, and muck out horse barns that kept our souls inside of our bodies. When I wasn’t hiring myself out on odd jobs, I was usually standing in the doorway of our small cabin on the edge of Fort Smith, from whence I watched the sunsets and periodically wondered if my pa had finally gone off for good. He was a restless soul, and his absences always mixed me up bad. There was the fear that comes from being alone—I was just sixteen and getting a little too ripe to be left unguarded—the snapping awake at every shift in the wind outside only to stare into the blue-black darkness and wait with bated breath for nothing to happen. There was the righteous fury at having been forgotten, as though I, his child and only living kin, was no more memorable than a cracked jug or a harness with a broken strap. This fury would surge up unannounced: suddenly I’d find myself slamming down buckets only to slosh water over my feet, wringing wet linens like turkey necks, shoveling ho...
