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THE SUPERNORMALIST
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WHEN RANDALL HUNSACKER WAS THIRTEEN,
his family moved from Salt Lake City to a canyon in the foothills, into a
stilted five-room house perched above the tightest in a series of tight
turns in the canyon's sharply descending road, so that from their front
porch Randall's family often got a good view of cars pushed to the limits
of control. The screech of tires, followed by the acrid and--to Randall's
nose--exhilarating odor of burnt rubber, was an everyday occurrence.
Randall himself hoped that one of these cars would spin out and perhaps
roll over. He didn't exactly hope for human carnage, but he knew that
in such cases it was sometimes unavoidable. Occasionally, if he was alone
as a car passed by, Randall would make the ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunking
sounds he imagined a rolling car would produce.
When a Buick Riviera carrying two people actually did miss the curve,
Randall was disappointed he was not there to see it. It was an early July
evening. He and his father were working late, painting somebody's guest
house in Federal Heights. His mother had already begun her shift at the Ten
Pin. His sister, Louise, was in the back of the house with a girlfriend,
sitting at the kitchen table, thumbing through TV Guide and Glamour,
talking about boys and haircuts. The man driving the Buick Riviera missed
the curve completely, shot pell-mell up the embankment and without braking
slammed through the spindly posts that supported the front porch, which
dropped like a table leaf.
By the time Louise and her girlfriend rushed out the back door and came
sliding down the bank, the driver, an oil man from Wyoming, and his
passenger, a young woman wearing Levi's and dangly silver earrings, were
laughing like maniacs. The driver's comic perspective of the event did not,
however, keep him from filing legal actions one week later against Wasatch
County and the builder of the house and Randall's parents for approval,
construction and occupancy of a substandard structure within the county's
required building setback. (In regard to the county, there were several
ancillary charges involving such things as "inadequate signage precedent
to a mortifyingly dangerous curve.")
From August to December, while this matter inched toward resolution,
Randall's family entered the house either by scrambling up the side of the
hill and coming around back or by climbing an ancient extension ladder to
the front door (to improve stability, Randall's father strapped the ladder
to stakes at its base and to the house above, but nonetheless, at its
midsection, the ladder had the unnerving feel of a suspension bridge).
"An oil man, out sightseeing with a girl half his age, knocks out your front
porch, then sues the bejabbers out of you," Randall's father said to Randall
one day out of the blue as they were finishing up a job. He swung his
characteristic half grin toward Randall. "Don't ever tell me it ain't a
screwy ol' world."
Reprinted with permission
from Goodnight, Nebraska
Copyright © 1998
by Tom McNeal
Random House
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