The Salvage Man

cover design by Sarah Kate Chamness

I've just published my 2nd book. It's called The Salvage Man.

The Salvage Man is the story of Dan Reynolds, a man who’s become invisible in a place where he thought he’d live a life of purpose, where he thought he’d matter. In a startling moment of terror and wonder, he meets another soul as invisible as he is.  Together, they seek redemption.

Dan’s story was born in my imagination in 1994.

In the early morning dark, driving down Cherry Street to my out-of-town teaching job, I found myself behind a slow moving city truck, pulling a magnet that hung an inch above the street, gathering nails dumped by union workers to harass scabs. Noblesville’s biggest employer, Firestone, was trying to bust the union, which in return was striking. The union-busting, picket-line crossing, slow-motion destruction of those jobs happened just blocks from my home. The plight of those workers weighed on my mind.

When I moved to Noblesville in the late ‘80s, the population was 18,000. Growth had already changed the town. Many of those Firestone workers had grown up in a different Noblesville. As the years passed I met blue-collar workers my age who grew up in a town they thought would be 10-15,000 people, where they’d have jobs of a certain kind and would fit in socially in the life of the town. But even in the late ‘80s it was changing rapidly, and by the mid ‘90s, that world was evaporating.

That growth and those new suburban residents created an economic vitality that obscured the fading of blue-collar Noblesville. But I saw it on my way to work every morning. For the writer in me, that became Dan Reynolds background.

During the same period my little family was living in an old house I was restoring just down the street from that strike. We were surviving on my teacher’s salary. I took to dumpster diving for old house parts at demolition sites and salvaging old houses prior to demolition. It helped restore my home and provided extra cash as I sold truckloads to antique salvage yards.

Once I went with a neighbor, Russ Wagoner, to salvage century-old cut stone steps from a neglected farmstead west of town. It was being demolished to make way for the new Mill Grove subdivision. The 1870s Italianate farmhouse had already partially collapsed, leaning to one side like a Dr. Seuss cartoon house, but one could have still slipped in a window to grab a door or fireplace mantel. Russ had been in there already. Digging around the five-foot long stones that hot sunny day, I asked if there was anything inside worth taking. Russ is not a foolish man, not prone to mysticism, but he gravely said, “Something bad happened in there. You can feel it. Don’t go in.” The cold insistence in his eyes convinced me. I peered into a back window at the fractured kitchen, but otherwise took his advice. We muscled the stone steps into my pickup and left.

The old Cottingham farmhouse, where The Salvage Man is set.

I salvaged again at a picturesque farmstead at the north end of 10^th Street, across from Potter’s Bridge. In my new position as a Realtor and the president of the local preservation group, I’d convinced the developer to save the pre-Civil War home, but the barn, the grain bin, the milk house and carriage house, shaded by towering trees in an overgrown courtyard-like setting, were all being demolished to make way for the Potter’s Woods subdivision. I felt a deep sadness as I gathered doors, porch posts and shutters that had been discarded in the barn loft. The next week when I went back to dig through old books and personal belongings stacked in the grain bin, I arrived to find a staggering mountain of dirt had been moved, making a twenty foot deep dry mote around the barn, which now seemed to float on an island. It was a bizarre scene. Eventually the barn would be demolished and the ground beneath it also moved to make the subdivision’s retention pond.

It was there on that farmstead that I set the story of the Salvage Man, there that I imagined Dan Reynolds doing the same work I was doing, but he did it to financially survive after the strike. And like the old farmhouse Russ had entered only to feel a rising sense of unease, this farmhouse had an ominous feeling inside; dense, stale air, and dark rooms and recesses that put a tingle at the back of your neck and filled your chest with an adrenaline-spiked urge to get out fast.

It is there inside that house, in that barn, and on that land that Dan Reynolds life changes.

I imagined Dan not only challenged by the end of his factory job, but divorced at age 50, his kids gone or in college. All the things that once defined this silent, emotionless man – job, marriage, parenthood – are all gone. And his hometown is increasingly unrecognizable from the place where he was raised. To make him feel even shittier, the lone way he finds to survive is to “undress,” as Dan puts it, the town’s historic identity, to be sold off at antique stores before it’s demolished.

But there in that house, in that barn, and on that land, Dan finds redemption.

I hope you’ll buy a copy of the book and discover the story for yourself. Copies can be bought for e-readers at iTunes, Barnes&noble.com, or Amazon.com. Barnes & Noble and the Amazon site can also sell print version for mail delivery. I’ll have hardcopy versions available in a few stores in Noblesville. Please encourage your friends to check it out.