Excerpt from AMERICAN SKY by James Grady
RUN
Luc fought to calm his hammering heart as he faced the wall of windows to the world outside the Thriftway grocery store that early September Saturday afternoon. His white shirt and clipped-on black tie held no incriminating stains as he scanned the blue sky horizon of his Montana prairie valley hometown. The treacherous thirteen-year-old gray Dodge smirked in the parking lot.
He stood near the checkout counters of two chatting cashiers who he’d worked with those months of 1967 that the news was calling The Summer of Love.
Dennis, the other box boy, snuck onto the empty elevated office platform where local AM radio station krip filled the store with nightclub crooners and country and western wailers, not the rock ’n’ roll music sought by teenagers like just-graduated-from-high-school Luc. Two-years-younger Dennis spun the radio dial to a hundred-miles-away big-city Montana station. Landed on them playing an oldy-goldy that was still the #1 hit song for American troops in Vietnam.
That song title rocked Luc to his bones: “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Hell yes!
Especially after what happened last night with Cherie.
And what he’d done about that today that nearly got him . . . um . . . crucified.
Now all I’ve got to do is make it to tomorrow’s road outta here!
Then right now’s wall of windows showed him white-uniformed Cherie getting out of a car in the parking lot.
And heading into the grocery store.
Luc flashed on how maybe it all went back to the murders.
DREAMERS
Luc slammed his high school freshman locker door shut on a November 1963 Friday morning four years before that desperate grocery store afternoon.
On one end of that new “Big Pink” high school rose a gymnasium that could seat all 4,029 beating hearts populating this town called Vernon with seats left over for out of town crowds who came for the hallowed basketball games. Two pancaked floors of windowed classrooms stretched between the grand gym and the music and arts auditorium with its fold-up wooden seats for twice
the number of the school’s 401 students.
The black hands on the wall clock above Luc’s locker read: 8:53. He had seven minutes to find Buffy.
Casually walk up to her. Talk to her. See her smile.
Maybe she’d let him walk her to their first class. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
The thick lenses of Luc’s glasses scanned the gray lockers’ corridor teeming with students in collared shirts and skirts below their knees.
Blink/flash:
Everyone shimmers in their own shaft of light!
Sure, he knew their names. Vernon was Small Town America.
But that flash made Luc realize how little he knew of their actual lives.
There was Wendy from his class. Wide eyes, dusky curls. Not a mean bone in her body. Headed to an ambush in their senior year that exploded her world.
Wendy waved at her best friend, blonde Alice, whose savvy smile betrayed nothing of The Boogeyman.
There’s Walt walking steady to be who “they” said he wasn’t cut out to be. There’s Tod, a scared stranger in his own skin.
Luc saw classmate Donna’s dusky blonde head swaying with her polio limp. Her high school classmates dodged that virus until science came through and stood all those lucky kids in lines at their elementary schools to get a vaccinating hypo needle stuck in their arms and become safe. Parents cheered. Cried. But all that came too late for Donna. And Luc’s Gramma Meg.
Luc heard a burst of laughter from a crew cut boy in his class named Mike Jodrey. His glasses held far thinner lenses than Luc’s.
Luc saw his buddies Wayne, Kurt, and Marin going their own ways. But not Buffy.
Luc wedged his way through the streaming hall. Hurried down switchback stairs to the first floor. To the right waited the auditorium and music rooms. To the left was the gorilla’s cave. And by the bathrooms past the stairs—
—stood Buffy. Talking to Steve.
Steve. A year older than Luc and Buffy. Taller than Luc. Better looking. Cool. Luc and Steve were only just “Hi!” friends even though they were both tight with Marin, who told Luc that Steve was deep smart and, like them, read books.
A few weeks before, Buffy’d taken Steve to the annual formal gowns and suits Co-ed Ball when the rules reversed and high school girls “got to” ask out the boys.
Bobbi Jean’d asked Luc to go. He had to say yes.
Bobbi Jean told him: “My dad’ll drive us because we live at the refinery west of town.”
He’d been friends with Bobbi Jean since fifth grade. But she wasn’t Buffy.
Who he fell for hard when northside her and southside him merged in the junior high that held all the town’s kids—
—except for the red brick St. Jude’s Catholic School kids where that November ’63 Friday morning, a girl Luc didn’t know named Cherie was dodging nuns’ rulers in her last year before ascending to the Big Pink public high school.
During his date with Bobbi Jean, Luc blinded his eyes to Buffy and Steve. Teenagers gyrated with no-touching fast dancing, not early rock ’n’ roll’s holding-hands jitterbug. Three years earlier, a Black eighteen-year-old New Jersey singer who made a suit look fine triggered that change with his song and dance “The Twist.”
No Black people lived in Vernon.
And except for military bases, few lived in the whole state of Montana, even though many cowboys back in the day had been Black and the Army’s Buffalo Soldiers left hoofprints on those yellow prairies.
Bobbi Jean insisted on dancing the first slow song.
Luc was careful not to wrinkle her ball gown or hold her too tight. “Huh,” she said after that dance.
After their properly arms-length second slow dance she said: “Oh.” Chaperone and music teacher Mr. Bundy smiled his way toward them. “Good to see you out there, Bobbi Jean,” he said. “You’ve got music in your soul. Music you want to live. Set you free to be.”
Blood rushed into Bobbi Jean’s face. She had no words.
So Luc helped her out: “She plays good. We took piano lessons together.” “My guess is you quit,” said Mr. Bundy.
Luc nodded.
Mr. Bundy told the blushing girl: “You’re just getting started. I can feel it in your heart. I hope you get it right. Figure it out. Live it.”
Teacher Bundy was a muscled six feet with thick black hair. Luc glanced across the dance floor.
Saw a sad-eyed, too-thin senior girl staring at Bobbi Jean.
Bobbi Jean rode in silence as her dad drove them home from the dance.
That dad idled the car out front of Luc’s house. Oh so obviously stared at the car’s hood ornament—not the rearview mirror reflecting two nervous teenagers sitting side by side in the backseat.
Luc’s heart thundered: Am I supposed to kiss her?
You’re fourteen, he told himself. A freshman. And never been kissed. Bobbi Jean whispered: “It’s OK.”
Shrugged her bared shoulders: “I’ll see you in school.”
Now on a month’s later fall Friday, trapped Luc hurried his steps down the stairs to the first floor where Buffy stood with not him.
He whirled left to charge through that first-floor corridor. That hallway held mostly upperclassmen—
—like the junior star jock named Daryl, who spotted Luc.
Daryl’s smirk reminded his prey how after yesterday’s football practice, he’d ordered freshman JV Luc to kneel, use his fingers to clean Varsity Daryl’s cleats because the real rules said—
Gorilla in the office doorway!
Stabbing his meaty pointer finger at Luc: “You!”
© James Grady 2025. Shared with permission from Pegasus Books
A Novel
For the teenaged Luc, his days are preoccupied with the daily dramas of high school. President John F. Kennedy's assassination seems a world away. But the winds of history find its way to his small Montana town as marijuana clouds rise in the hallways and the notices of neighborhood young men of "Killed in Action" in Vietnam keep arriving at an increasing rate.
Acclaimed novelist James Grady's American Sky brings to life the world of a young man who is caught in the nexus of vast social change. From blue collar life in the heartland to Kent State and the Civil Rights movement, American Sky is a sweeping narrative that builds to a crime that threatens to tear Luc's world apart. Previous compared to Larry McMurty, George Orwell, Harper Lee and Bob Dylan, James Grady explores Bruce Springsteen's generation and has crafted a action filled and timeless destined to become a classic.
Historical | Small Town [Pegasus Books, On Sale: July 1, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9781639369218 / eISBN: 9781639369225]
James Grady is the author of bestselling thrillers including Six Days of the Condor and Mad Dogs, the former of which became the Robert Redford movie Three Days of the Condor. He is the recipient of the Grand Prix du Roman Noir (France) and the Raymond Chandler Award (Italy), and was an Edgar nominee in the United States. Grady now lives in Washington, D.C.
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