The Gangsters

I started this tray by smoothing the sand and then studied the collection. The gangsters jumped out at me instantly and they went in the lower right corner off the tray. I don't place any significance on location of the objects in the tray until it is finished when the relationships and placement begin to reveal themselves. But they were looking diagonally at the upper left corner, emptiy at that point and I started looking at buildings to place there. The gingerbread house jumped out at me as well as the church and then I chose the mother and father, the little girl, the man and boy sitting in front of the TV, the old woman and the swing or bench. I thought of Flannery O'Connor's story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find because it had a midwest/southern gothic look to it. I tried to get O'Connor's story out of my thoughts so I went looking for more objects. The convertible and bloody foot seemed to want to be there, then the dog, mailbox, pill bottle and the ghost behind the church. I still needed to fight the midwest image that I was getting from A Good Man because I didn't want to do a take on that story so I found the horses and decided it was a ranch, not a farm. I studied the characters around the house and then figured they all had a secret. The old woman was addicted to the pills, and the grandfather watching TV had something going on under that Norman Rockwell exterior so I found the Japanese doll and decided she was his true love that he had to leave behind after his tour of duty in Korea and they probably had a child together. Of course, his wife, the old woman, got hooked on the pills because of their dead marriage. That was all I knew at first. I didn't know what the dog meant, or the big bloody foot. Hadn't a clue about ghost behind the church. I figured the mailbox meant there was some communication that would be important but I didn't know what it was. At first I thought the blonde was a long lost daughter gone bad looking for a hideaway for the gang, but then the story started to unfold in my mind that there was something in the house she wanted and these people were in her way. The various objects began to reveal themselves as I began writing The Gangsters.

“The place looks like a goddamn hotel. You said it was vacant.” Linda flicked her cigarette to the side of the road and walked back to the car, past Big Gene and Mickey cradling their machine guns like they were the last bottles of gin on earth. She knew them, itching for a signal to take out the figures milling around the ranch house in the distance. Especially Big Gene. “What the hell happened?” Neither of the boys answered. Linda had that snarl in her voice that signaled a shit storm was brewing. It started on the getaway from the convenience store. Better to keep their traps shut and wait for things to blow over. Linda knew it was going to be bad. She could tell from the match burning inside her gut. If she didn't put the fire out now, she wouldn't be able to think straight if things got out of hand again. And she was the only one doing the thinking in this outfit. She reached inside the closed convertible for the binoculars she had left on the dashboard. By keeping her eyes trained on the house, she avoided staring into the back seat at the huddled form moaning under a blood-spattered Indian blanket they had found behind a gas station after the shootout. The house sat at the end of a horse pasture at the bottom of the hill, too far away to learn much about the occupants without the glasses. Mickey had parked the car behind some trees at the end of the dirt road and she used them as a screen in case one of the folks looked up the hill and wondered about the bottle blonde in the black hat training binoculars on them.

She couldn’t tell much. Next to the side porch a little girl seemed to be throwing a tantrum from the way she was rubbing her eyes and kicking at her hovering mother. The father was hanging back with an old woman behind him. A couple of horses huddled by the fence around the corral. Linda didn’t know about horses and could only tell that one had a tan hide, maybe that’s what they called palomino, and the other was very dark. They seemed restless and switched their long tails, occasionally rubbing their necks against one another as if they were whispering some plan for escape into each others ears. The corral was too small to hold such large animals she thought, they looked like they might bolt and make a run for it, the way she and the boys had after the ruckus at the convenience store.

Goddamn Big Gene can’t keep his head about him. Had to pull out his gun when the owner's dog started sniffing Roxanne. Nobody touches his Roxanne, not even a mutt. So he blasted the dog and then all hell broke loose. A cop comes out of the back room zipping up after taking a leak. He starts shooting before thinking. Big Gene answers him. Then before anybody knew it there were two customers crashing into the stacks of cans and toilet paper and the gang made a run for the car. Roxanne got her foot caught getting into the back seat and she started screaming with a look on her face Linda would never forget. Mickey had jammed the gas before she was inside and her foot got caught under the wheel. They got her inside and peeled out but not before the cop ran out of the store to take aim at the tires. He missed but had plenty of time to get the license plate number. All they wanted in that joint was some beer and smokes. Now they find the house and it's swarming with people and animals. What the fucking Jesus was going on? It was supposed to be empty except for the stash under the pipes in the cellar.

This piece interested me from the start and was fun to write. The voice came naturally from the 30's and 40's costumes on the gangters and immediately I began to imagine film noir scenarios and 30's gangster movies. I also started hearing my daughter's voice, who was addicted to those movies in high school and even now does funny riffs on those genres. I decided just to go with what was in my head and the story started to write itself. I had to look at each object in the tray and find a reference to it in the story. This is where I am seeing a difference in using the sandtray for inspiration rather than a written suggestion. The sandtray produces specific objects that have to be accounted for, chosen by me as directed by some inner guide who, I believe, was dictating the story to me through those objects and characters, just as that guide puts writing ideas in our heads the typical way, in thoughts. You could cheat and take out an item that doesn't seem to fit the story or is creating a problem, but from my experience with sandtray, every element has a purpose, even if that purpose is not immediately apparent. I recommend leaving the tray as is, adding objects if necessary and as desired, but not removing any. Sandtray work moves and you can advance the story by adding pieces to the tray. I was able to come up with some background on most of the objects and some easily moved the story along. Placing the Japanese figure behind the house made me think she was a secret, hidden and out of sight and soon I pictured her in a relationship with the grandfather in his young life, one he has never forgotten. Other objects were stubborn. What was the significance of that damn bloody foot? that eluded me for some time. When Linda goes to the car for the binoculars I studied the convertible and realized there was someone in the back seat who was wounded. Nothing more. Then I tried to understand that big dog. It was so large it had to have a major role or I would have chosen another, family pet or ranch hound size. My collection has several dogs of different sizes and temperments. Then it came to me. The injured figure was a woman, so there were two couples in the gang. And she had a damaged foot. Somehow the dog was linked to her injury and not merely a family pet. It was just too big, out of proportion to the horses even. How did she get injured or wounded? Then the scene in the convenience store came to me and I realized it was not a big dog per say but the dog had a big function, by sniffing at Roxanne in the convenience store, it led to the shootout, the police hunting them down and helped to, as my friend Margaret advises fiction writers, give my characters a really bad day.

I still don't know how the church will figure in the story or the ghost, or what the story is with that family. The canon still eludes me, maybe the family has roots that go back to the Civil War, or the ranch does. I think they got the house through foreclosure. It was abandoned and they needed a place for their horse ranch. They are a hard luck family and the place is pretty run down but now they are the owners. They are pretty disfunctional, too. I think the ghost is indicative of skeletons in their closet or maybe the ghost has to do with the stash that is under the house that they don't know about but has now made them prey to Linda and the predators. Sounds like a 50's rock band, and now that I think about it, the scene is set in the 50s.

I could run with this piece but I will restrict myself to using it as a one day exercise. I can always go back to it as a non-exercise serious work, but not now. These exercises are time consuming, doing the sandtray, pondering it until a story appears, then posting it, describing it, commenting on it afterwards. I'm find it very satisfying, however, and having all of the images contained in the tray is speeding along the discovery of the story. Images feed our work all the time, but finding them is random, and discovering something important as you are flipping through a magazine or grocery shopping or wherever inspiration hits us can come late in the piece and require much rewriting to fit in. However, in the sandtray, the elements are there immediately, and I find that even if I take a day or so let the story unfold before I write the page, the story is quite complete.

I'm wondering how this blog can benefit others who don't know about sandtray work. Perhaps the description of the process from creation of the sandtray to the commentary after the story is useful to help others analyze their own process. Also, I wonder if the trays I create and photograph might be used by other writers to create their own stories. Ideally, I am interested in demonstrating how sandtray work will produce our own, unique stories not influenced by someone else's suggestion. The sandtray is the source, not someone else's imagination. However, unless I discover a way to post my collection and figure out a program to do sandtrays online--not gonna happen in my lifetime--the pictures of a sandtray may be more effective than a written suggestion. I'll think about that and perhaps try doing sandtrays just to post as exercises, not for my own writing.