Dive into the mesmerizing world of T. R. McCay with Unlikely Stories: a literary trifecta of The Fast Plates, The Salamander, and Gort's Butt, in an amazing fresh literary voice.
Spellbindingly written with the acumen of Historian Shelby Foote and a brilliant prose style reminiscent of past masters Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Robert Heinlein, and delightfully enhanced by generations of colorful Southern idiomatic expressions carefully conveyed in T. R. McCayâs scintillating inimitable style.
The Fast Plates: an Alabama ersatz Civil War artifact grifter gets his reputation ruined by a swindled client and his world is turned upside down when he stumbles across the single most significant historical artifact of the century.
The Salamander: A lifelong backpacker investigates a never-explored canyon and makes contact with a primordial civilization-catalyst species of Salamander.
Gortâs Butt: Twenty years after the earth stood still, rebellious high school seniors go on a tagging mission and uncover the incredible secret of an all-powerful alien guardian robot. - Library of Congress Registration #: 1-14206887191
Dive into the mesmerizing world of T. R. McCay with Unlikely Stories: a literary trifecta of The Fast Plates, The Salamander, and Gort's Butt, in an amazing fresh literary voice.
Spellbindingly written with the acumen of Historian Shelby Foote and a brilliant prose style reminiscent of past masters Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and Robert Heinlein, and delightfully enhanced by generations of colorful Southern idiomatic expressions carefully conveyed in T. R. McCayâs scintillating inimitable style.
The Fast Plates: an Alabama ersatz Civil War artifact grifter gets his reputation ruined by a swindled client and his world is turned upside down when he stumbles across the single most significant historical artifact of the century.
The Salamander: A lifelong backpacker investigates a never-explored canyon and makes contact with a primordial civilization-catalyst species of Salamander.
Gortâs Butt: Twenty years after the earth stood still, rebellious high school seniors go on a tagging mission and uncover the incredible secret of an all-powerful alien guardian robot. - Library of Congress Registration #: 1-14206887191
I woke up with a tremendous crick in my neck and the sun high in the sky. I went to the trailer, did my business, and dared to take a quick shower while the coffee perked. Every few minutes Iâd peek out the window looking for trouble, but nothing had changed. The barn door was still locked and the grass still needed mowing. Back in the barn, I sat on the trunk of the Mustang for quite a while just looking at the tarp-covered cases, almost afraid to look at what I had found. Reviewing the inventory convinced me this was no fraud. It was far too elaborate and way too difficult to fake economically. The big question now was whether the eye clock still worked, if it ever had. Iâm pretty handy with ceiling fans and bathtub valves, but one look at the guts of the eye clock had me pleading with the Almighty that it still worked.
Out of its box and on the workbench, I could really appreciate for the first time what a thing of beauty the eye clock was, even if it didnât work. Four feet long, eighteen inches at the beam and
twenty-four inches deep, the casing was all tongue and groove, fitted together by someone who definitely knew what he or she was doing, probably a furniture maker. It stood on four small bronze lionâs feet, the size of your big toe. The only other external decoration was an engraved silver plate tarnished with years but still legible.
MANUFACTURED BY
ISRAEL BENGAMIN AND SON
MOBILE, ALABAMA
The inside had a few flecks of green corrosion but nothing serious. I cleaned off the glass components with an eyeglass cleaning cloth dipped in a bit of Windex and picked away the few spots of verdigris with a dental tool. Finally, I had done everything I could think of to bring the ancient machine back to life. I inserted the iron crank into a recessed metal plug, obviously built to accept it, and gave it gentle forward pressure. It didnât budge; there wasnât even the slightest play in the mechanism. I jiggled and applied a few more drops of oil, wiping the small excess away with a paper towel, then gave it another try. Nothing. I examined the inner mechanism carefully for a loose gear or missing push rod but there was no obvious problem; it all looked to be in good condition. After pondering the difficulty for a few moments, I gave the crank an experimental pull toward me. The handle revolved smoothly and I could hear a muffled rhythmic clicking inside the case. Looking in as I turned the handle, I could see a busy assembly of cams, rods and gears, all working together in harmony.
Now I had a particle of insight. It takes a southpaw to know a southpaw, and one or both of these boys had been left-handed. Once I understood that, things went a little smoother. I fiddled and diddled with the eye clock until I could think of nothing to do but give it another whirl and see if I was the luckiest man in the county or just a self-deceiving idiot. I decided to begin at the beginning.
FAST PLATES SERIES #1
FEBRUARY 16th, 1861
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA
HANDLE WITH CARE
It was exactly like the ones I had already opened: shredded softwood packing, contents kept clean by a silk cloth slowly degrading into course red dust. The drum was exactly the same:
a heavy brass framework with individual slots for each glass player, cushioned by thin strips of wood. Registration marks were thoughtfully provided and the whole assembly nested precisely on a pair of gears centered on the axis of the drum. I latched the top of the eye clock closed, placed my eyes against the viewer, took a deep breath, and turned the crank. I could hear a soft regular clacking inside the eye clock and the crank turned smoothly, but there was nothing to see but murky shadows. That one didnât take so long to troubleshoot.
I studied the teacup-size lens for a few moments, then began to dig around for a work lamp. I propped the hundred-watt bulb as close as I dared to the lens, plugged it in, and flipped on the switch.
Another deep breath and a few hasty prayers, then I leaned forward into the viewing slot and began to turn. A vanished era leapt back into life â on an occasion that would result in the deaths of over half a million men and alter the course of world history forever. The grain of the image was a bit coarse and had a few black specks and fleeting scratches, but nothing much worse than an old Keystone Cops episode.
The loop began with a huge gathering of people crowded around the front of a palatial building with broad steps and classical columns. The men were dressed in black coats; most had already removed their tall black hats. The women were dressed a bit more festively, with long skirts and jaunty bonnets, all wearing gloves, some with their hands thrust into fur muffs. At the top of the stairs, two men, backed by a line of dark-coated troops at present arms, stood behind a podium. One was of average height with a shock of white hair, bright against his dark clothing. The other, tall and rawboned, black coat and vest over a white shirt with a high collar.
He had badly groomed hair and a Billy Goat beard, and even from a distance you could see a grim determination etched on his angular face. His right hand was on a thick black book held out by the other man. Both men raised their right hands in the air, then the images looped back to the beginning.
This was no fake. No movie studio in the world could reproduce this moment with such accuracy. I knew exactly where it was. I had been there on several school field trips. I knew exactly who that tall man was. He had lived to the advanced age of eighty-one and had his picture taken more times than the Grand Canyon. The location was what is now the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. It was the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, the first
and thankfully last president of the ill-starred Confederate States of America. I hadnât just discovered the first movies ever made; I had discovered movies from the early 1860s. I ran the loop one more time against my stopwatch â fast plate run time of exactly thirty seconds. At one-hundred-eighty plates per drum, this gave the whole shebang a blistering six frames per second, just enough to trigger the persistence of vision.
Now, I grant that even a modestly sized production company could reproduce the scene of the inauguration with a high degree of accuracy. But they canât really reproduce the people. No matter how much makeup and authentic costuming, thereâs a certain air about the subjects that defies duplication. Look at Leeâs famous âBoots and Spursâ portrait. The uniform is magnificent, but if you study it closely, it also looks like something his mom made for him. Thatâs because it is handmade and embroidered. Look at the manâs hair; he looks like he just rolled out of his bunk after an all-nighter at the officersâ club. Like most other photographs of people taken during that era, he looks hard, tough, determined, and a little mean.
That was a good way to be in 1860. Hot showers were unknown and baths were weekly affairs, if at all. Women oiled their hair to keep down the lice and literally used old rags during their periods, boiling them afterward in an iron kettle for the next month. Seeing how most families didnât have much in the way of consumer goods, you donât want to know where the soup was cooked. A puncture from a rusty nail could kill your ass graveyard-dead inside a week. Just
like mumps, measles, scarlet fever, typhus, dysentery, or a bad tooth. If you crapped in the house you used a charming piece of functional ceramic known as a thunder mug, the contents to be dumped later in a hole in the backyard. You wiped your butt with corn cobs and washed everything, including yourself, in raw lye soap. It was a life fraught with dangers all but forgotten in the modern world. You didnât want to get injured back there.
Removing the drum I selected a plate at random and put it on an old light table originally used to read X-rays, last used to fake up nineteenth-century letters. I placed my best loupe in my best
eye and took a closer look at the backlit plate. Davis was halfway through raising his hand and looking intently into the judgeâs eyes.
The honor guard wore dark coats, which would probably be correct. Early in the war, many Southern units wore the old blue uniforms of the National Army. One Alabama regiment had gone into action at the Battle of First Manassas wearing the old uniforms, and had the shit shot out of them by both sides. You could see a number of women, but with one exception: their faces were obscured by bonnets. The one woman I could see had her face turned two-thirds
toward the camera like it was more interesting than the swearing-in ceremony. She was young but completely innocent of makeup, giving her a very plain visage with inky circles under her eyes. The men had mostly removed their hats; all had appalling haircuts.
Like any great discovery, it all raised more questions than answers. I had never heard of Israel Benjamin and Son, but they had a Mobile address. Even if it was one hundred thirty years out of date, it was a lead. Whoever they had been, they had overcome formidable technical challenges. One of the challenges was a flexible medium to print the images on. Plastic, even flexible celluloid, was far in the future. The boys had solved that problem with the ingenious drum system. A cam and push rod raised each plate in turn, lining it up in front of the eye clockâs front lens, then reflecting the image via a pair of mirrors into the viewer. I had yet to find a cracked or broken fast plate. Each one must have been constructed of very high-quality glass. Every single one I had seen so far was framed with gilded copper strips to prevent cracking or chipping. A lot of money had gone into the eye clock. A lot of thought too.
Somehow, someone had broken the film speed barrier â the amount of light it takes to produce an image. One reason people in nineteenth-century photographic portraits look like they have a stick up their butts is that they just about do.
Subjects had their noggins strapped into iron frames resembling medieval torture devices to hold them still. With lengthy exposure time, even the slightest movement would result in blurring. And thatâs just for starters. After exposure, you would have to rush the exposed plate back to the darkroom â or dark wagon â for an elaborate process accomplished with dangerous chemicals.
All done in the absence of light. Thatâs the reason there were no action photos from the era, or at least until now. Daguerreotypes were printed on polished copper plates faced with silver, so that
was out. There was a wet Collodion process that came along in the late 1850s, but no one was making action movies with them. The process was still painstakingly elaborate and prone to failure at the slightest screw-up. Collodion used a glass plate medium, but like the daguerreotype, it was hampered by hellishly long exposure times.
Still, the fast plate process was at least partially derived from the Collodion-based technology. I was hoping one of the other drums would provide a little more insight. I packed series #1 away and went to the next drum of plates.
FAST PLATES SERIES #2
ISRAEL, JUDAH AND HENRY
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA
FEBRUARY 17, 1862
HANDLE WITH CARE
I wondered what I was going to get when I started reading T.R. McCay's Unlikely Stories. I was pleasantly surprised.
What you have here is a storyteller who is comfortable with tackling different genres; who knows just what is needed word-wise for description to capture a reader's attention but doesn't overdo it; who creates realistic characters with convincing dialogue - all the solid attributes expected in a well-written fiction piece - but who is also confident enough to take you into slightly surreal and disturbing situations and landscapes, treading the tightrope where balance is needed between conveying believability whilst also providing you, the reader, with something unique and memorable.
The Fast Plates is a story about a swindler who has been discovered as such. The irony though of his situation is that he uncovers something which is incredibly valuable both in terms of what it would mean to a collector but also in its intrinsic value as a piece of history. The story is a tour through America's history trouble spots for instance, slavery and the Civil War but McCay leads us to an enlightening ending. What I especially liked about this story was the discovery of what is "on" the plates. It was like being an observer to someone opening a surprise present - that anticipation was captured perfectly by McCay.
The Salamander is something different again: the excitement of undiscovered country combined with a surreal, mystical experience. It is an unsettling tale, its strength lying in its slow build, and whilst good, not my favourite.
And then on to Gort's Butt which I was concerned I wouldn't like at all but was actually a tale that was a surprise too. A combination of high school high jinks placed alongside the threat of extermination from an external source threaded with humour, Gort's Butt was a great way to end this book. I loved its quirkiness and the way that it seamlessly joined so much that probably shouldn't have been put in the same story together and yet, it created a tale of mischief, futuristic vision and an understanding of humanity which will stay with me far beyond my reading of it.
I would thoroughly recommend these stories and look forward to reading more by T.R. McCay.