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Zusatztext " Watching Gideon is the best novel I've read in a long long while. Foreman so completely captures honky-tonk men and women and assorted hustlers of the 1950s variety! it is downright eerie." -- PATRICK F. McMANUS! author of Kerplunk! and The Double-Jack Murders Informationen zum Autor Stephen H. Foreman received a BA from Morgan State University and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and taught writing at various universities before moving to California to work as a screenwriter and director. Having trekked across the Alaskan wilderness, bushwhacked through tropical rain forests, and hunted for gold mines in Arizona, he now makes his home in the Catskill Mountains, with his wife and two children. Klappentext Foreman's exciting! fun novel follows a man's incredible connection with his mute child as they venture across the country in 1952 in search of wealth. PART 1 O ne bright day, shortly after Seaman First Class Jubal Pickett returned home to Natchez, Mississippi, from the war, he and his son, Gideon, going on three, went for a walk. Gideon wrapped his chubby little hand around Jubal’s trigger finger and lurched along beside his father with happy determination. It was during this period of time that Jubal had his dream. In his dream, he and Gideon were walking together across a meadow somewhere in Yugoslavia when artillery shells began exploding all around them. Jubal didn’t know what they were doing in Yugoslavia, since his tour of duty with the navy ended early with a sucking chest wound at Pearl Harbor, but that was his dream and there they were. In the instant, without thought, without hesitation, Jubal threw himself on top of his son to protect him as the shells screamed around them. In actuality, Jubal’s dream was so real he leaped out of bed and cracked his head against the bedside table on his way to the floor. In real life, he would die for his child, and Jubal knew this like he drew breath. The thought came to him that the Old Testament Abraham was one sick son of a bitch. He, Jubal Pickett, loved his son so much that he’d never dare harm him. “Wouldn’t give you a nickel for him, wouldn’t take a million,” Jubal would say with a fond wink in Gideon’s direction. As far as Jubal was concerned, a man who’d kill his own son wasn’t but scum. Anybody’d do that to his own kid ought to be spread-eagled on top a hill of fire ants with corn syrup poured over his skin and his eyelids held open with cactus needles. The day Jubal realized this was the day he stopped believing in the benevolence of any God who would ask such a thing. Gideon Pickett, sixteen years of age, sat beside his father in the cab of their red, nearly new 1952 Ford Flathead V-8 three-quarter-ton pickup as they left Natchez, Mississippi, behind them towing a used Airstream trailer and heading for the uranium fields of Utah and a future more promising than the past. About the time Jubal’s truck had rolled off the assembly line, uranium in the United States had gotten to be more valuable than gold. The bombs that had obliterated two entire cities and forever altered the universe transfixed the nation with the spectacle and promise of atomic power. The press took to calling that radioactive hoard buried somewhere in the vast and treacherous canyon country of southern Utah the Hidden Splendor. Fortune hunters from all over the nation converged on the tiny town of Edom, heretofore unheard of and home to no one but a handful of desert rats. The smart money stocked up on picks and shovels, but men like Jubal Pickett caught the fever like sails catch a gale-force wind. They believed so fervently that hard work and perseverance would pay off in great wealth that they mortgaged their farms and homes and headed into the feverish heat of the desert wilderness to find it. In Jubal’s case he sold a forty-acre farm on the river t...
