A Stained White Radiance

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Chapter 8 is an adaptation of a short story by the author entitled "Texas City 1947," which appeared in the Summer 1991 issue of The Southern Review.

I would like to thank the following people for all the support and help they have given me over the years: Fran Majors of Wichita, Kansas, who typed and copyedited my manuscripts and was always my loyal friend; Patricia Mulcahy, my editor, who put her career on the line for me more than once; Dick and Patricia Karlan, my film agents whose commitment and faithful advocacy I will never be able to repay; and finally my literary agent, Philip G. Spitzer, one of the most honorable and fine men I've ever known, the only agent in New York who would keep my novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie under submission for nine years, making the rounds of almost one hundred publishers, until it found a home.

I had known the Sonnier family all my life. I had attended Catholic elementary school in New Iberia with three of them, had served with one of them in Vietnam, and for a short time had dated Drew, the youngest child, before I went away to the war. But, as I learned with Drew, the Sonniers belonged to that group of people whom you like from afar, not because of what they are themselves, but because of what they represent, a failure in the way that they're put together, a collapse of some genetic or familial element that should be the glue of humanity.

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