On October 16th, NeoText is publishing The Goldtwinz, a novella billed as “psychedelic sunshine noir,” and the first collaboration between author Jardine Libaire and photographer Neil Krug. The saturated colors and seedy backdrops of Krug’s images harken back to his album covers for Lana Del Ray and Tame Impala, filling out the world of Libaire’s sultry, bleak tale. Below, find an exclusive excerpt and preview of illustrations from the forthcoming text.
They hit the road. It’s not quite dusk, the Florida sky throwing rainbows. The car is coated in light. The asphalt twinkles with rain. Marc just eats it up, inhales it, flows with it. They’re less than a hundred miles from Eleezium, population 165, the village on the lip of the Everglades.
Their hometown! Their lush, lurid, dangerous, off-the-grid big little world.
With its hurricanes, alligators, tarantulas, panthers, orchids, downpours, ocean tides.
Key lime pie, fishcakes, cold beer.
The eccentrics, churches, criminals, casinos.
Kent cigarettes, mosquitoes, weed dealers, fishermen, planes lost in swamps, bootleg history, ghosts of pirate ships, trailer parks, live and let live, satellite dishes, strangers, sunshine.
He can taste it. He’s gonna come and get it.
He turns up the radio: Sam Cooke, “She’s So Wonderful.” And she’s everywhere he goes…
Yvette’s getting hot, the tendrils of hair curling against her neck. She winds around holes by rote. The bumper goes up and down. Dusk moths are caught in the headlights.
They finish the distance between everything that’s happened up till now and their house. He gazes at it like a sailor coming to port, the amber porch light flickering through the woods, a grizzled old Chihuahua guarding the steps.
They roll up; no driveway, just an area where they leave the car. Slam the heavy car doors, and there ain’t no suitcase to grab from the back seat. They just head to the stairs.
Welcome home, brother, she says as they step into the kitchen. A phone book open on the counter, a mug half-filled with cold coffee. Marc smiles, even though it feels lonely without Mom home yet. Yvette throws her keys on the table, and sorts through catalogs.
Wow, Marc says, processing the familiar as something unknown.
Go put on a record, she tells him.
He opens the door to the living room and flicks the light—
Surprise!!!!!!!!
Welcome home, Marc!!!!
My baby! Marc, come to your mama— Surprise, motherfucker! Hahahahah—
Yvette leans against the door jamb as everyone gets in line to hug Marc, his mother first, of course.
Colleen’s orange bowl-cut is streaked with white, and her gums glisten when she smiles like a chipmunk, teeth brown from a life- time of dipping tobacco until her kids made her stop. Her bum is wide and flat in khaki shorts. She grins and puts her hands on his shoulders, gingerly, her knuckles permanently swollen from work— her eyes shine at her son.
He goes in for a big hug, and rocks her which makes her laugh.
Don’t ya knock me down, hun, she says.
I missed you so bad, he tells her.
She pats him on the cheek when he finally lets her go, and she says: I’m cooking you something you like.
I thought you’d never get here, dude, says Shay, giving Marc a high five then a quick hug.
Shay and Yvette do their own hand slap, self-congratulating.
Cherry and Radio drove in for the party from Miami, where they live on the same block even though they’re divorced, and they brought Ricky and Ronnie—6 and 8—shirtless lunatics with mullets who—now released from being quiet and waiting—chase each other into the dark yard with oyster hooks and scream like samurai.
You made it, Cherry says.
I made it, Marc says.
What doesn’t kill you, Radio says to Marc, and he means it affectionately.
But Marc looks at Cherry, clapping her hands, giddy to see her baby brother again, and her guilelessness and black tooth are evidence that what doesn’t kill you can sometimes still really fuck you up. So Marc doesn’t like that little aphorism—it’s not true across the board. Radio is fine. Cherry is not.
Yeah, Marc says though, unwilling to start anything tonight, especially since Radio’s biker buddies made a difference for Marc’s time inside.
Sis, Marc says as Cherry squishes him to her and squeals her joy, and he can’t help laughing. Your boys are like a foot taller.
Oh my god, we all hated you being gone, she says. Bless Jesus you returned to us, Marc.
Cherry’s clean now, and she’s found the lord. Her vibe is Chris- tian rockabilly redemption girl. Radio pretends to be clean and even goes to meetings with her sometimes but still does maintenance speed (Marc can tell). Radio works two jobs and puts macaroni and orange juice on the table for the kids, so it’s hard to complain. Marc can’t help blaming the guy anyway.
I’m back and never leaving again, Marc tells her.
Cherry’s blue eyes swim in tears, the good kind. She looks healthier than when he went in. Her red hair longer, some muscle tone to her tattooed arms, some pride in her game.
Marc does the rounds of their house (two big trailers fused together years ago by Dale the engineering genius), while Colleen heats the crawfish stew she’s been laboring over the last couple of days. Her friends, Bandy and Rolando and Jerry, bake Pillsbury rolls and make salad with the backyard-lemon dressing recipe Dale used to make from scratch. Colleen is bossing people around, which isn’t like her, but she hasn’t been this excited in almost twenty years.
Someone puts on a record, someone else pops a beer can, and the smokers go outside to smoke, which includes Yvette, who can finally chill out.
Shay and Marc collapse onto the couch.
This is crazy, man, Marc says, looking at the WELCOME HOME banner hung from the ceiling.
How do I get you to tell me what happened in there, Shay says, when are you gonna crack and spill Marc’s Life at the Genessee Unit or do I have to, like, buy your biography, or wait forever?
Marc laughs. I want to forget it though.
I want to hear all about the drama, the fights, the CORRUPTION, the secrets of the warden that only Marc Gold knows now, the gang on gang, the tips and tricks—
Nope. Boring. Next chapter.
Shay’s tearing through Triscuits smeared with crab dip that someone brought. This white-boy misfit in Hawaiian shorts with a Minor Threat t-shirt and checkered Vans, hair so yellow he looks like a doll, freckled to death, with a fixed hare lip, looks clumsy but can surf the eye of a hurricane or skate a parking garage in his sleep. Shay’s been a friend since day one, and he doesn’t shut up, and he acts doofy but he’s not.
Shay wipes cracker from his mouth. It’s good to see you though, for real.
Marc says, It’s mutual, man.
After a beat, Shay steels himself and asks: Do you want to know where he is?
Marc shakes his head, smile twisted in an unnecessary apology.
Shay, relieved and also disappointed, says: Okay, but when you want… I’ll go with you. Day or night.
Standing in the yard, Yvette squints through the window at the boys talking on the couch. Although she can’t hear a word, she knows what they’re discussing. And she can tell by Marc’s body language, his face, shaking his head, that he’s turning down the offer. For now. A shiver runs up her spine, and she’s not sure how she feels.
She casually taps a mosquito on her wrist: red smear. Strange to kill something and it’s your own blood that comes out.
The moon is dirty gold, clouds moving and covering it, the light touching the land with love. The sea, sky and earth are still locked together here, despite the human effort to break it all apart. The Everglades is a fierce place, having rejected all attempts to curtail and control and dredge it. It thrives on its own logic. Yvette has known this environment in her bones since she was very young. The pythons and spiders and rats and gators are folded into the darkness, and she stands out of reach of the porch lamp, happy like them to be unwatched.
Inside, Colleen’s falling asleep in the kitchen chair. Her puffy eyelids are pale blue with exhaustion and closing like a turtle’s eye.
Mama, want me to do the cake? Cherry asks.
Of course not! Colleen answers, offended.
None but Colleen can serve that dessert. She lights candles, carries the coconut cake through the dark room while everyone sings Welcome ho-ome to youuuuu, welcome ho-ome to youuu! Marc tells his mom she shouldn’t have, as she trudges like a hunchback, and then he leans to blow out those little flames, and there’s clapping and whistling.
Cherry quickly takes the cake before Colleen drops it, divides it onto plates in the kitchen.
Colleen smiles like a drunk, even though she’s sober, and says to no one: I’m gonna lie down. Put a slice by my bed, will you, honey.
She makes it into her room where her friend Bandy unlaces her shoes and drags an afghan blanket over her since Colleen is heavy as cement with sleep, and happiness.
Her five Chihuahuas arrange themselves on the bed: Loverman, Baby King, Queen of Hearts, Fox, and Astronaut. They perch tiny chins on her thigh, or curl like rats between her jaw and her shoul- der. On her dresser, a photo of the twins when they were five, in bathing suits at the beach, Colleen in her omnipresent khaki shorts and a Micky Mouse t-shirt.
Next to that photo, one of her husband Dale, who didn’t live to meet Marc and Yvette.
Yvette and Marc wave goodbye as everyone steps through the woods to cars parked out of sight.
I should have known you were throwing a party, Marc says.
Yvette vapes on the stairs to the house. You didn’t figure it out? She spreads her legs and leans back.
I must have got stupid in there, he says benevolently.
Hey, listen, did Shay ask if you want—
Marc closes his eyes. Want to know what I really want? It’s to NOT talk about what happened, to not talk about the past year and a half, to just be home, Yvette. I just wanna be here and forget.
He tries to smile and it comes out lopsided, and then he steps around her and into the house.
It’s been a rollercoaster day, and him leaving her out here alone is another humiliation.
She looks into his bedroom when she goes up, and his lights are off.
Marc, she whispers. Marc, are you awake?
She knows he’s lying there with eyes open.
In her room, she smears off makeup with Oil of Olay and gets under the sheets. Too pissed to cry. For a spell she can’t see, the inside of her mind wet like the yellow-red of a molten volcano, its heat sluggishly destroying everything. So this is it, they’re right back to where they used to be.
Which is where? And why is that bad?
Fuck if she knows, and she’s sick and tired of wondering. It’s just that she understands in the marrow of her bones that his plan of forgetting and burying everything can’t work, and an implosion is on its way. The question is who will get hurt and who will survive.
Her vision adjusts: out the screened window are the curling hands of plants in moonlight. This room is as crowded with imagination as the night with humidity. She flips through the book of their past, kid gangsters in the undergrowth. Flowers and snakes.
Eve and Adam in the Florida jungle. She actually smiles in her sleep, basking in a fairy tale.
He gets up at 7am—which is late for him—and sits on the bed. Rubs his face and takes a shit in the bathroom (which has a real door!) and makes coffee in the kitchen. The day is rosy with light. He eats a banana on the porch, smiling like a goofball as the blue mist burns off.
After he does pull-ups hanging off the outside staircase, and
then push-ups in the grass, he goes for a long run. Comes home sweating as much as a man can sweat, trying to wring that place out of him.
He’s working at his desk by the time Yvette opens an eye. She always takes hours to get moving. Today she pulls a lavender silk robe around her and stands behind her brother as he scrolls through messages. He can feel her presence, and turns to say good morning, and to see if she’s given up.
What’s the damage? she asks sweetly, with breath like Satan.
I think most everyone figured it out. Doubt it’s rare for people like me to disappear for months.
Any business?
A few inquiries, and just letting regulars know I’m back. Shay’s got mushrooms that need one more week, and I’ll see if Oscar has jellyfish. Talking to my penpals too. What about you?
She wanders to the kitchen for Fruit Loops. Meh. Boring. This and that.
Any gigs?
Me?? What do you think? And what do you care?
Marc watches her retreat into the hall, her sleepy body banging into one wall. Aggressively elusive and charming. Back to her usual self. Even if it’s just pretend, he’ll take it.
There was no point daydreaming she’d somehow be auditioning for record labels while he was gone, but he couldn’t help hoping she’d done something. To everyone who ever heard her sing—it’s her calling, she’s the one in a million meant to do it. But he can count those people on one hand because she’s shyer about singing on stage than a Siamese kitten. Deathly shy. If he even brings up the topic, she’ll glare, say something cruel, leave the house. And she points the finger at HIM for not dealing!
He sighs, gets back to work. His desk looks over the marsh, so murky and mineral-rich and thick and stinky and soaked with energy—it’s the polar opposite of the prison, and he breathes it in gratefully. He’s home, he’s safe, he’s back. He keeps forgetting this, in a sense, and then it comes flooding back into his heart: you’re home, you’re safe, you’re back. Every half hour or so, he goes outside, just to feel the light on his skin, to inhale the wet air, to be sure of it.
He’s brokering through Magic MRKT now, just little stuff. His dream is to slip back into business, like someone who took a phone call outside but returns to the dinner party. Act like nothing happened.
And yet it did. His savings are gone, he owes the lawyer. He’s worried that Colleen spent her own nest egg to keep the house going while he was gone. Time to catch up.
