The first girl that came out was a lava lamp. As if her arms moved through water. Her warm motion practiced and secure. Shadows gathered under her breasts. Copper light ovaled across her belly, licked down her thigh. Her eyes never focused. Not once. I thought she'd look at someone, perhaps the lawyer with the courtroom voice and glinting watch. Maybe the bouncer with the rough knuckles and thatchwork stubble. But no. She was aloof. Unattainable. Full of the distance tendered by power. The pale head of a scar wriggled out the top of her red g-string and plunged back under with her motions. A quick, scabrous exposure. I sat there and watched the scar, hoping it'd reappear. Those glimpses of the real are precious.
This was years ago. Back when I worked at a technology shop in Dallas, when I commuted three hours a day and read books about UNIX and drove back home wearily, delighted in the dust of the road that weaved to our house. Lunch at the strip joint was T's idea. He'd appeared in my office door around 10am, shirtsleeves rolled up, his hairy forearms thick and purpled with veins.
—Titty bar for lunch?
I hesitated. I always did.
—Don't be a pussy. It's only 8 bucks. All you can eat buffet. Tons of titty to look at. You'll want to go home and bang your wife after. T held up his fingers in a V and slithered his tongue through the gesture. —No better way to spend lunch. Let's go. We're all going.
All was a group of geeks that I worked with. The UNIX team. Terminal users. Command-line kung-fu. Thick, stubby fingers on most of them, made for pounding keyboards and fondling plastic pens with chewed tips. Bellies that had never known flat. Mouths ripe with technical acronym. Our faces glowed in the operose jihad of computer monitor radiation. We were all better than our cubicles, smarter and bigger than our jobs. Right? None of us resembled our walls. None of us were average grey men. This was always the fear in the hive, the mumbled rumor of the farm. We'd look around at the whiteboards, at our drooping plants, at the office dust glinting in the hair on our arms and think that surely there must be a mistake. Surely we have just been overlooked.
The bar was shadowed and loud. Some men were stiff in their seats. Sweating glasses squeaked under their fingers. Others so relaxed they might have been on a couch in their house, their hands moving conversationally in the air, their faces open in a very human, masculine way. Some had a dark, desperate look and huffed their hot breath into the clinking ice of their empty glass. A few women as well, with thin arms draped over broad shoulders in suits. Naked knees at eye level. Clenching tendons, an etching of muscle along a calf. Gooseflesh around a nipple. Bellies wet with light. Music that thumped in the gut. A scar of some sort in everyone.
The UNIX team was quiet. Studious in their eating for the most part. Chicken ripped from bone with bared teeth. Gelatinous sauce quivering on the tines of forks. The reflection of a breast swelled in the cold hollow of my spoon. T wantonly gazed at the women, punched those of us in the shoulder sitting next to him. —Imagine pinning those legs back behind her ears, he said. —God, I'm going to fuck my wife so hard tonight. With his eyes, he gestured down at a bulge in his pants as a dancer moved past. She never focused. —I think it scared her, he said to everyone on the way back.
The boss was waiting for us when we returned to the office, tapping his pen on the desk. —The Kansas City upgrade needs to be reapplied. It was messed up last night. His eyes focused on T. —They're running on half-capacity with no backup. You've got to watch this shit. No more screw-ups!
We retired to our chairs and grey walls, the thrum of the machines around us. A cool hiss of recycled air. The light in the office was unrelenting, harsh in its exposure. T worked his fingers into his dry scalp, scratching. He shrugged his shoulders at the rest of us. —Wasn't that last bitch hot? We should go again. Sometime real soon.
I thought he was going to put up the V sign again, but his hands slid into his pockets and he slid into his cube out of our sight. Monitors flickered on. Gray walls rose around everyone. Our thoughts rendered into strangling wires. We approached our lives and work with the same lack of focus that the stripper offered us. Our fingers thickened and blunted to our tasks the way her body curved into hers. We manipulated that which doesn't exist. At least the stripper worked in the realm of the physical, in the currents of deep need and that which is inescapable. Our toil was contained in a screen. A plastic, humming square, only able to endure as long as the black cord wasn't yanked from the wall.
Brad Green's fiction has appeared or soon will in The Blue Earth Review, Storyglossia, elimae, Word Riot, Thieves Jargon and several other journals. He's currently at work on a novel. Read his blog at http://elevatetheordinary.blogspot.com.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
My friend Ray reminded me of this song on Facebook. I don't really have much to say about it--love John Prine--except that the movie he references, Daddy and Them, might have been really good, but it's sadly not. It's worth watching, though. Laura Dern is pretty good in it, and Billy Bob does his usual thing, which, if you like it like I do, is all good.
If you know the film, is there anything out there that compares in subject matter that's, um, good?
Monday, July 6, 2009
Sunday Afternoon at Earl's, fiction by Randy Lowens
The driver's window is down. Pavement hums beneath his tires, air beats against the rear windshield, and the engine howls as he climbs. A heifer moans from a shadowed pasture on the roadside.
Logan gears down as he rounds a curve and, without benefit of blinker or brakes, spins into the driveway. He races uphill, fishtailing, dodging the larger rocks and potholes. At the crest he slides to a stop and waits while a cloud of dust drifts past. His breath comes hard as though he had climbed the hill on foot. The rear view mirror shows stubble on his chin, eyes shot with streaks of red, and snarls of dark yellow hair that stick out like the roots of upturned trees in a bulldozed field. "You good-looking devil," he whispers. "Don't you ever die."
He gets out but doesn't go straight to the trailer. He crosses the front yard and stops at the edge of a garden plot. Ripe tomatoes stand bold against their foliage like Christmas ornaments on an outdoor tree. Cucumber vines snake through the garden before escaping into the lawn. Brown, brittle leaves cling to them. Two more weeks, he figures, and that'll be all she wrote.
Something about the trailer catches his eye. He isn't sure what, but something is different. Someone was on the property while he was working. He feels it, knows it, more than sees it or thinks it. A burglar? Not likely. Too many rich folks live on top the ridge for some meth head to kick out his window for a shotgun.
He doesn't keep a handgun in the van anymore. Homeland Security's made it so an old boy can't even tote. But he's not scared. Why should he be? Somebody going to kill him? He should be so lucky. He walks directly to the front of the rusting mobile home where a Plexiglas storm door hangs askew on a single hinge. He circles the trailer, examining windows. No evidence of forced entry. Hinges creak as he eases open the hollow wooden door.
Inside, cockroaches scatter into crevices. Some coffee grounds wallow in the bottom of a cup beside a wrinkled newspaper. Atop a plastic tablecloth, two German Purple tomatoes, deep red and irregularly shaped, frame a sheet of notebook paper.
He goes to the living room, no longer stepping lightly, and snatches a pair of reading glasses from the frayed arm of a sofa. He mounts them on the bridge of his nose and returns to the kitchen. Dale Earnhardt, in dark glasses and a Goodwrench cap, watches from the wall as he reads the note.
Darling, it says, I hope you're not too mad. I missed you so much, I had to come home. I'm glad I did because it don't look like you're eating so good. I'm gone to the grocery store. Take a shower and I'll kiss you all over when I get back. All my love, Sonja.
"Bout time you drug your ass home, woman," he says aloud. His voice booms. It sounds unnatural in the empty trailer.
He lays a blue oblong tablet on the tablecloth, covers it with the cellophane from his cigarette pack and starts crushing it with the heel of his Bic. As he sticks a truncated straw up his nose and bends over the line of powder, he notices an apron hanging on the doorknob of the broom closet. That makes him smile.
Logan pushes a platter scattered with morsels of fried potato, biscuit, and omelet away from his belly. He leans back in his chair and stretches. "I be damned if I ain't gained ten pounds since you been back," he says. "Your cooking gets better all the time. Like everything else."
Sonja looks down and smiles. "I gotta watch out. I might be taking on a few pounds myself."
His tone changes abruptly. "You come dragging home knocked up, and I'll show you the door sure enough."
"I ain't pregnant; I'm sure of that.” After a pause, she adds, “I'd like to be, though. With yore baby."
"For crying out loud." His voice turns gentle again, like spring water bubbling out a rock face. "Renée's going on a teenager, and you're talking about another kid. That ain't practical and you know it. Besides, three is more'n I can afford, already.”
"I know. I know all that. But still, I'd give my right arm for another kid. One of yores." She starts to cry.
He reaches across the table and strokes her arm. Wrinkles like back streets on a road map radiate from the corners of his eyes as he looks into hers. "Aw, Sugar, you know I love you. And Renée is like my own. They ain't no difference in my mind."
"I know," she says, sobbing. "I know. But still."
Minutes later he walks out and climbs into a service van that says BADCOCK'S REFRIGERATION SALES AND SERVICE in block letters on the side. Sonja leans against the doorjamb, wiping her nose with a tissue and brushing away tears with the back of her hand. She hugs herself and blows him kisses as he turns the vehicle around.
He tosses her a single kiss in return as he eases out of sight down the rocky, red dirt drive. When he reaches the road, he stomps the accelerator and cuts the wheel. Balding tires spin on rocks, then catch on pavement. They smoke, leaving twin streaks that curve across the street. "I got the best ole lady on all of Parsons Ridge," he yells out the window at some cattle grazing the hillside. "Good cook,” he continues in a conversational tone. “Hell-on-wheels in bed. And she loves me, in spite of all common sense and decency."
He pumps the brake pedal, striking a balance between checking the van's speed of descent and saving its brakes. Despite his efforts, when he hits bottom the acrid smell of scorched pads fill the cab.
The road levels onto the valley floor and his grip on the wheel relaxes. He reaches for the radio, but the knob comes off in his hand. He fiddles with it briefly, trying to fit the tuner back onto the metal core, then drops it into an open ashtray. "Glue it back on after while," he grumbles. A tall, slim girl in tight jeans is unlocking her car door by the roadside. He looks up and turns the steering wheel to avoid her. She presses her waist close against the sedan as he passes. "Dang," he murmurs, "Don't run over that."
Idling down the state highway towards town, Penny Sue's Café passes on the right hand side. The restaurant is newly boarded up, and Logan sighs. Penny Sue was the last holdout among the small business owners when chain stores began to appear like bait worms after a summer rain, dotting the slopes beside the interstate exit. Abner Croft of Croft's Auto Parts, Buster Riley of Riley's Hometown Pharmacy, and now Penny Sue commute forty or fifty miles every day to jobs in Chattanooga or Knoxville. “Bad enough when the mill closed, and now this shit,” he says to himself.
A Godfather's Pizza, Walgreens, Auto-Zone and Favorite Market stand glossy and metallic against the farmhouse Penny Sue had turned into a restaurant. Next to the abandoned A&W drive-in, one side of a billboard advertises cure for drug addiction while the other admonishes the reader to REPENT because JESUS IS COMING. An old man sells tomatoes and cucumbers from the back of his truck; a woman, used clothes from her front yard. As he continues down the highway, the businesses and signs, old and new, hopeful and threatening, shrink to a cluster of dots in his rear view mirror and finally merge.
Logan turns off the highway and promenades the former business district. Downtown is more of the same, smiling mannequins desperately posing naked in deserted department stores, boarded shoe-store display windows framed in brick, row upon row of vacant buildings interrupted only by the occasional pool hall or storefront church. Logan sticks his arm out and pretends to be a 1950's teenager cruising the main drag in a muscle car, looking for action. Giggling, he pulls it back in and rolls up the window. "Folks done think you crazy, Logan. Don't make it no worse."
He looks at his watch. Five minutes after eight. “Well,” he says, making a wide U turn across an intersection, “I guess I ought to quit riding around and go to work. See what the sonuvabitch wants out of me today.”
Earl Bartlett wears a long-sleeve plaid shirt over a white ribbed undershirt every day of the year. In summertime he rolls up the sleeves and unbuttons the front. During the winter he pulls a jacket over it. Several of his plaid shirts are red and a couple are blue, so a body might think he rotates the same two shirts for days on end. But that's not true. The fact is simply that, years ago, he chose a certain look, and he's never had call to change it. He would no more wear a polo shirt and khakis than he would decline to stand and cheer when the band played Dixie at a high school football game.
Today the front of his shirt is buttoned, but the sleeves are rolled up. The dog days are behind, and the air is comfortable.
Earl stands beside a metal-frame dinner table. A Lucky Strike smolders in the ashtray beside a stovepipe can of PBR. Smoke hovers around his hairline. Behind him cases of Bud and Bud Light are stacked clear to the ceiling.
An older fellow sits at the table. The two men have the same tailor, all plaid shirts and denim pants, but the slicked-back hair of the sitting man is red. He's a big guy with inch-long tufts the color of dishwater growing beneath giant knuckles.
The sound of a mower passes the kitchen window. The man tilts his head in that direction and asks, “How's ole Billy Wayne working out, Earl? Don't cut him no slack, just cause he's my nephew.”
“He's all right. Works hard, don't complain.” Not the sharpest pencil in the package, Earl silently adds, but he don't have to be.
“I'm glad to hear it. Family's family, but a job's a job. If he don't work out, show him the door, same as anybody.” He wets his lips from a tall glass; it's straight bourbon, but he doesn't wince. “You know Logan Padgett, got his leg shot up in Iraq?”
“Twelve pack ever Sunday. Yeah, I know him.”
The redhead grunts. “Yeah, that's him. No relation to me, but he's blood kin to Billy Wayne. On his mother's side.” He figures you don't really know a man till you can name his family.
The racket of the mower stops. Billy Wayne sticks his head in the door. He's shirtless, and beads of sweat glisten on his muscled, hairless chest. “Hey Earl,” he calls, “I got the back yard done. You want me to do the front?”
Earl stares as he answers. “Yeeess, I generally do mow them in sets.”
Billy Wayne looks puzzled. His uncle covers the bottom of his face with a large, hairy hand. Earl grins and helps the boy out. “Go mow the front,” he confirms, pointing.
The kid bounds happily down the steps while the men watch and laugh.
Sunrise finds Logan sipping coffee at the kitchen table. He's reading the funny papers in a stained tee shirt and a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee.
A teenage girl with cornrows in her hair comes out of a bedroom. She plops on the couch, rubbing her eyes, feeling between the cushions for the TV controls. She's still in nightclothes, a green tank top and a pair of canary yellow panties. Ebony legs gleam in the morning light. Logan watches her for a moment. He turns the page of his newspaper and continues reading.
Sonja steps out of the other bedroom. "Damn it, Renée,” she says, walking past, “how many times I tole you not to sit around half naked in front of Logan? Go get some clothes on."
The girl rolls her eyes and continues punching buttons on the remote. The mother takes another step, turns and bellows, "Go!" The face Logan usually finds so attractive is a scowling mask.
The child stands and stretches. When her arms come down, the tee shirt rests on the small of her back a good two inches above florescent underwear. "Morning, Daddy," she purrs, flashing a smile over her shoulder that's all white teeth and thick lips.
"Morning, sweetie," Logan replies to her departing back.
Sonja takes a seat across from Logan. She glowers, drumming her fingers on the table and shaking her head. "That child," she says. "That child.”
Logan chuckles. He puts down the funnies and picks up the sports. "I think I'll go start on the yard work here in a bit," he says.
From his seat at the little metal-frame dinner table, Earl can watch the entire front yard out his picture window. When a blue Honda Accord pulls into the drive, he busts a big smile.
He opens the door before she can knock. “Come in, young lady. Come right in. What can I do for you today?”
Sonja is wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless sweater. She clutches a purse at her waist. Timidly, she steps inside and looks around.
Bartlett's place never changes. Everything is in its place, down to the Lucky Strike releasing curls of smoke from the ashtray. Sonja can't recall ever seeing him pick the cigarette up and take a puff. Does he really smoke, or does he just light cigarettes and burn them for incense?
“Logan sent me after a twelve pack, Earl,” she says. “We was supposed to have Sunday beer, but he done run through it all.”
“Honey, a beer can chugging is like the jingle of pocket change to my ears.” He treats her to a large smile. “So Logan's drunk today. Good for him. How you doing yourself, little girl? Don't seem well. You worried about something?”
“Aw, it's nothing. I'm all right.”
“Come on, you can talk to ole Earl. I used to work with your Uncle Herman. We like family.”
"Really, it ain't nothing much. Renée--that's my little girl--she's having a birthday, is all. Turning fourteen, and her boyfriend is over. I just wish Logan wouldn't drink so much. Or at least wait till after.”
“He ain't taking drunk and hitting you, is he?”
“Oh no, it ain't nothing like that. He just stays so high all the time, I feel. . . I dunno. Kinda lonesome. Like I'm by myself.”
“Zat right. Huh.” Bartlett scratches his ear and looks out the window. “Wasn't he in Iraq awhile? Took a bullet in the leg, I think it was?”
“Yeah. He don't talk about it much. I tell him he should be proud, but he don't think so. Says he'd rather a been somewhere else.”
Bartlett laughs. “I admire an honest man.”
“Anyway, yeah, shrapnel in his knee's what it was. The VA gives him pain pills. Between those pills and all the beer he drinks, and the pot he smokes, and. . . I'm sorry, maybe I shouldn't have said that.” Sonja's looks at the purse in her hand and blushes.
Earl laughs again. “Honey, this ole bootlegger been around. I might even have tasted one of them joints, years ago. I tell you what: pull up a seat, and I'll fix a couple of drinks. We could both use one.”
“Oh no, I gotta get back home. Logan wouldn't like it if I stayed gone. And there's Renée's party.”
“You done said Logan's drunk. And Renée's a teenager, so I'm sure that little boyfriend can entertain her. Besides, Ray's coming over later, and we gonna play some cards. We may need you to cook up a little something.”
“Here, sit down,” he says, pulling a chair out from the table, “and ole Earl gonna get you a drink.”
“Well, maybe just a quick one,” she agrees, taking the proffered seat. Earl half fills a highball glass from an open fifth of Canadian Club, adds ice and Coke, and places it beside her. His cigarette in the ashtray is down to a nub, so he puts it out. He takes a fresh one from his shirt pocket, thumps it once, twice, three times and lights it.
Logan parks his van behind Sonja's car. From the back of the trailer, he hears a mower running before the machine itself appears. A young man is riding it. He's muscled up and tan, dressed in nothing but a pair of long denim pants. The boy turns the mower in a sharp circle without noticing Logan, intent upon his simple task, and disappears behind the trailer once more.
Logan gets out. Ignoring the concrete sidewalk, he strides directly across the lawn to the front door. He raises his hand to knock but thinks better of it. He reaches for the doorknob but decides against that, too. He rares back and kicks the door open. The lock breaks out of the facing. Splinters fly across the room. The door makes a second crashing sound when the handle punches a hole in the wall behind. It's a satisfying noise to Logan's ears.
He stands in the doorway with his finger pointed at Sonja's face, enjoying her dazed look, disgusted by the lipstick on her whiskey glass and the surprise on the bootlegger's face, before he realizes that Ollie Ray Crider is sighting down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special, aiming up at his head. Where did that sonuvabitch come from? He's some kinda kin by marriage on Logan's Daddy's side, and fuck all that anyway.
Ollie Ray speaks first. “I'm only gonna say this once, son. Turn around right now, and walk back out that door. Close it behind you. Knock, like your mama taught you, and this time wait for an answer.”
Logan stares back at Ray. His upper lip quivers.
“Walk!” the big man barks. Logan leans his head back and laughs. He makes a hacking noise in the back of his throat, and when his head comes down he spits on the table in front of Ray. Ray flinches but holds his fire. Silent tears trickle like branch water down Sonja's cheeks, and her shoulders quake. Bartlett sits motionless, palms flat on the table.
"You come for something that belongs to you. That's all well and good,” Ray continues. “We just having a drink here. Ain't nobody trying to steal your woman. But you going about it all wrong, see. Now,” he continues, cocking the pistol and standing up from the table to assume a firing position, “Walk. Back out. That fucking door.”
Earl Bartlett hears the grandfather clock that's been in his family for generations go click, click, click, for three of the longest seconds of his life before Logan turns on his heel and strolls outside. The limp from his war wound is only faintly evident as he descends the wooden steps and crosses the lawn to his van.
Sonja's forehead drops to the table. Ray exhales. He eases the hammer down on the weapon and places it gingerly on the table. The bootlegger takes a deep breath. He turns to Ray and says, “I thought you tole that boy to close the door on his way out.”
"Shut up, Bartlett,” is his only reply.
Logan guns the engine of his van as he leaves, throwing a low wave of gravel across the quarter panel of Sonja's car like the wake of a motorboat lapping against the shore.
Billy Wayne appears at the door of the trailer. “Hey Earl,” he yells, though the man is only yards away. Billy stands with his hand resting on the door frame, oblivious to the damage done to it by his second cousin on his mother's side. “I got the backyard done. Tell me where the gas can is, and I'll start the front.” He notices the hair stuck to Sonja's face. He spies the pistol on the table. He opens his mouth to ask, but Bartlett cuts him off.
“Hell, son, the gas can's in the shed. Where you think it is? Now get on back to work, while you still got a job.”
The roof of the Piggly Wiggly is a sea of small stones stretching from corner to corner across the top of the store. The debris of years floats atop its placid surface: two discolored plastic jugs overlooked during a cleanup; a magazine stolen from the store below, thumbed through and discarded; and the occasional rusty screwdriver or pair of pliers that someone flung away in frustration. The motor room is windowless, a sheet-metal anchor buoy floating lonely beneath a clouded sky.
All is stillness and quiet save the flapping cover of the faded girlie book. A plastic baggy nestles in Logan's shirt pocket. The crystals are gone. Only a chalky residue remains, devoid of financial value but worth a decade in the state pen. The sour chemical taste of methamphetamine lingers, reminiscent of the paint thinner and gasoline he huffed as a child. He stands awestruck, stunned, holding a charred square of aluminum foil in his left hand and a Zippo in his right.
Across a two foot chasm of silence, Johnny McCullough's eyes appear hollow and wide. The skin on his face is like cracked leather from the sun, wind and rain of a thousand rooftops like this one.
Logan's reverie is shattered by the phone at his side flashing and playing a tinny version of Reveille. The sound is carnivalesque, in a way obscene given the gray sky and grim circumstance. The caller can only be the boss man.
“I, ah, don't think I wish to talk to him, right now at the moment,” Logan says. He tries to force a smile, but just succeeds at looking vaguely ill.
Blue veins pulse in Johnny's forehead. He drags a parched tongue across blistered lips. “S'all right,” he says in a voice that sounds like a croak. “I'm sure he'll be glad to call us back later.”
Sunday afternoon is Earl's busiest time of the week. Monday morning is the slowest, so that's when the liquor van runs. He's sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for it to arrive. Today is Billy Wayne's first run by himself.
Earl looks up at the sound of scratching gravel. Yeah, it's the van. It doesn't appear wrecked, that's good. But it seems like Billy Wayne is taking a long time to climb out. When the boy does exit, he wobbles and steadies himself against the side of the vehicle.
“I be goddamn,” Earl mutters. “Out driving my van and it loaded, and he done gone and got drunk. I'm gonna string him up and put him in a shallow grave.” The old bootlegger continues mumbling to himself as he starts down the front steps. He walks real careful like, holding onto the railing and easing himself down. He's not as young as he used to be, and he's had a drink or two his own self.
Logan is paranoid as all hell. He's sitting on the toilet with his pants around his ankles. He's not even thinking about shitting. He's just hiding out. He's hiding from the store manager. He's hiding from the boss man who, more and more, is prone to show up uninvited. Hell, he's hiding from Ollie Ray.
Of course, there's no reason for Ollie Ray to stalk the stalls of the bathroom at the Piggly Wiggly, looking for the man who kicked in the door of his favorite bootlegger. No reason at all. Logan knows he's paranoid, oh yeah. His mind understands. His intellect tells him to be rational, to calm down, but his nervous system won't listen. Every time the door to the restroom swings open, his gut clenches, his nuts shrivel, and sweat breaks out across his brow.
Goddamn that Johnny McCullough. He knows Logan's a downer man. Why'd he go and offer that shit?
Only one hydrocodone remains in the bottle. Logan was going to save it for tomorrow, but now he can't. No way, man. Soon as his hands stop shaking he'll pull his pants up, go the van and crush the pill. He'll chase it with a tall Miller; maybe that'll soothe his nerves. Maybe the boss man won't stop by. Maybe the store manager won't smell the booze.
Maybe Sonja won't be too pissed off about the scene at the bootleggers. She's not answering the phone, but when he sees her face to face, he can smooth things over. He needs her comfort. He needs her bad, more than ever before. More than he ever needed anything in his life, he needs that girl. She's just going to have to understand that after all they been through, a man is going to be kind of sensitive sometimes. A little bit jealous.
Goddamn that Johnny McCullough.
Sonja stands on her tiptoes to force another shirt into the suitcase. She pulls the zipper closed, drags it off the bed and totes it into the next room where she places it beside two similar bags. That's everything but the toiletries. Three suitcases, a bag of brushes and hairspray, and a Honda Accord: not much to show for thirty years. Oh well, she's surviving. Some folks can't say that much.
She's trying not to think about Logan. That's why she's not leaving a note: when she attempts to explain herself, inevitably she finds her way back to the good things, and they decide to try it one more time. But the one-more-times are all used up.
When she returns from the bathroom with the toiletries bag, her chest clenches like a fist at the sight of Logan standing in the doorway. How did he get off work so early? And when did he learn to step so quiet, anyway?
After several seconds her breath returns. She wanted to make things easy for both of them, but okay, here we go. She squares her shoulders and forces herself to look at his face.
“So, what you doing, Sonja?” he asks her, his voice all causal as he steps out of the doorway and takes a seat at the dinner table. Something's wrong. Something's bad wrong. She's used to seeing him messed up, with slanted, bloodshot eyes, but not like this. Today his eyes have barely any whites left, the pupils are so large. And he hasn't called her Sonja in years; the name sounds strange coming from him. Sugar Lips, Honey Pie. Bitch, whore. But never just Sonja.
“I'm, ah, I'm getting a few things together. So you can have your house back.” The muscles in her throat quiver as she speaks, but she manages a note of defiance as she adds, “Like you want, apparently.”
“You ain't got to leave on my account.” He's looking past her knees as he speaks, studying the way a piece of torn linoleum curls up on the edges like it's just the oddest thing. Last time she saw him, he was kicking in doors and spitting on tables, and now he looks looks like he's seen a ghost. What's he strung out on this time?
“I got to leave on my own account, Logan. On Renée's account. We've been through it and through it, and it don't get no better. Now please don't start nothing.”
He raises an eyebrow like she said something surprising. “I ain't starting nothing.” He stands up, and she takes a quick step backward. He sits back down. “I got the cotton mouth, is all. Would you fetch me a beer?”
She hands a sweating can across the table.
“I ought to quit this shit,” he says as he opens the tab. “I know I should. I been thinking about that a lot, lately.
“You're as likely to quit drinking as I am to drive at Talladega,” she spits out the side of her mouth. She snatches a bag from the floor and stalks out the door.
“I guess you're right about that,” he says to a kitchen left empty by her departure. He looks down at the can in his hand, shrugs, and takes a long drink. “Yeah, I guess you're right. But seems like there should be something we could do,” he continues as she walks back in and stands over the remaining luggage. “It just don't seem right, two people in love, but who can't live together.”
“Well, it may not be right, but that's how it is.” She grabs up the last two suitcases, then puts them back down. Her face turns red. If she can stay mad, she knows she can get through this and leave. “You come around showing your ass over me having a drink with Earl Bartlett. Earl Bartlett, for god's sake! Old enough to be my Daddy, and used to work with my Uncle Herman. And you go showing your butt. . .” She grabs the bags up and goes out the door, shaking her head and muttering.
She tosses them in the trunk and gets in the driver's seat. She takes a deep breath and releases it, slowly, as she checks her makeup in the rear view mirror. “I just hope you don't think this is what I want,” she whispers to the steering wheel. She tries to say something else, but the sound just comes out a sob. Stay mad, girl. Don't try to explain, just stay mad. She puts the key in the ignition and cranks the car.
A minute passes before Logan understands that all her gear is loaded. She's not coming back inside. When he hears her car start, he walks to the door and leans against the frame. If he was the crying type, this would be the perfect occasion. But he ain't, so he watches, dry eyed, as she puts the car in gear. He manages a weak smile and blows her a kiss, the way she used to when she saw him off to work. But she disappears behind a stand of mimosa that lines the drive without looking back.
He listens to her leave. He can tell the difference between the scratch of gravel and the sound her car makes accelerating onto the pavement. Then comes the silence. The damn silence always comes next.
A squirrel scampers down a branch and jumps onto a pile of fire wood left from the previous winter. He takes a nut in his mouth and turns to stare at Logan.
“What are you looking at?”
The animal doesn't respond. It remains still, watching.
Damn. He sits on the concrete blocks that form the steps to the trailer. Some things are sure hard to figure. A man spends his whole life facing down danger, proving himself, and after it all, the only thing it takes to knock the wind clean out of him is some skinny girl with a ponytail. Logan jumps to his feet and kicks gravel in the direction of the wood pile, and the squirrel darts out of sight.
Randy Lowens lives in a cabin on a wooded hillside in eastern Kentucky. His writing has appeared in Dogmatika, Blue Collar Review, and elsewhere. "The Flotsam and Jetsam of War" received the Tacenda award for Best Short Story of 2007, illuminating social injustice. "Sunday Afternoon at Earl's" is excerpted from a novel in progress.
Logan gears down as he rounds a curve and, without benefit of blinker or brakes, spins into the driveway. He races uphill, fishtailing, dodging the larger rocks and potholes. At the crest he slides to a stop and waits while a cloud of dust drifts past. His breath comes hard as though he had climbed the hill on foot. The rear view mirror shows stubble on his chin, eyes shot with streaks of red, and snarls of dark yellow hair that stick out like the roots of upturned trees in a bulldozed field. "You good-looking devil," he whispers. "Don't you ever die."
He gets out but doesn't go straight to the trailer. He crosses the front yard and stops at the edge of a garden plot. Ripe tomatoes stand bold against their foliage like Christmas ornaments on an outdoor tree. Cucumber vines snake through the garden before escaping into the lawn. Brown, brittle leaves cling to them. Two more weeks, he figures, and that'll be all she wrote.
Something about the trailer catches his eye. He isn't sure what, but something is different. Someone was on the property while he was working. He feels it, knows it, more than sees it or thinks it. A burglar? Not likely. Too many rich folks live on top the ridge for some meth head to kick out his window for a shotgun.
He doesn't keep a handgun in the van anymore. Homeland Security's made it so an old boy can't even tote. But he's not scared. Why should he be? Somebody going to kill him? He should be so lucky. He walks directly to the front of the rusting mobile home where a Plexiglas storm door hangs askew on a single hinge. He circles the trailer, examining windows. No evidence of forced entry. Hinges creak as he eases open the hollow wooden door.
Inside, cockroaches scatter into crevices. Some coffee grounds wallow in the bottom of a cup beside a wrinkled newspaper. Atop a plastic tablecloth, two German Purple tomatoes, deep red and irregularly shaped, frame a sheet of notebook paper.
He goes to the living room, no longer stepping lightly, and snatches a pair of reading glasses from the frayed arm of a sofa. He mounts them on the bridge of his nose and returns to the kitchen. Dale Earnhardt, in dark glasses and a Goodwrench cap, watches from the wall as he reads the note.
Darling, it says, I hope you're not too mad. I missed you so much, I had to come home. I'm glad I did because it don't look like you're eating so good. I'm gone to the grocery store. Take a shower and I'll kiss you all over when I get back. All my love, Sonja.
"Bout time you drug your ass home, woman," he says aloud. His voice booms. It sounds unnatural in the empty trailer.
He lays a blue oblong tablet on the tablecloth, covers it with the cellophane from his cigarette pack and starts crushing it with the heel of his Bic. As he sticks a truncated straw up his nose and bends over the line of powder, he notices an apron hanging on the doorknob of the broom closet. That makes him smile.
###
Logan pushes a platter scattered with morsels of fried potato, biscuit, and omelet away from his belly. He leans back in his chair and stretches. "I be damned if I ain't gained ten pounds since you been back," he says. "Your cooking gets better all the time. Like everything else."
Sonja looks down and smiles. "I gotta watch out. I might be taking on a few pounds myself."
His tone changes abruptly. "You come dragging home knocked up, and I'll show you the door sure enough."
"I ain't pregnant; I'm sure of that.” After a pause, she adds, “I'd like to be, though. With yore baby."
"For crying out loud." His voice turns gentle again, like spring water bubbling out a rock face. "Renée's going on a teenager, and you're talking about another kid. That ain't practical and you know it. Besides, three is more'n I can afford, already.”
"I know. I know all that. But still, I'd give my right arm for another kid. One of yores." She starts to cry.
He reaches across the table and strokes her arm. Wrinkles like back streets on a road map radiate from the corners of his eyes as he looks into hers. "Aw, Sugar, you know I love you. And Renée is like my own. They ain't no difference in my mind."
"I know," she says, sobbing. "I know. But still."
Minutes later he walks out and climbs into a service van that says BADCOCK'S REFRIGERATION SALES AND SERVICE in block letters on the side. Sonja leans against the doorjamb, wiping her nose with a tissue and brushing away tears with the back of her hand. She hugs herself and blows him kisses as he turns the vehicle around.
He tosses her a single kiss in return as he eases out of sight down the rocky, red dirt drive. When he reaches the road, he stomps the accelerator and cuts the wheel. Balding tires spin on rocks, then catch on pavement. They smoke, leaving twin streaks that curve across the street. "I got the best ole lady on all of Parsons Ridge," he yells out the window at some cattle grazing the hillside. "Good cook,” he continues in a conversational tone. “Hell-on-wheels in bed. And she loves me, in spite of all common sense and decency."
He pumps the brake pedal, striking a balance between checking the van's speed of descent and saving its brakes. Despite his efforts, when he hits bottom the acrid smell of scorched pads fill the cab.
The road levels onto the valley floor and his grip on the wheel relaxes. He reaches for the radio, but the knob comes off in his hand. He fiddles with it briefly, trying to fit the tuner back onto the metal core, then drops it into an open ashtray. "Glue it back on after while," he grumbles. A tall, slim girl in tight jeans is unlocking her car door by the roadside. He looks up and turns the steering wheel to avoid her. She presses her waist close against the sedan as he passes. "Dang," he murmurs, "Don't run over that."
Idling down the state highway towards town, Penny Sue's Café passes on the right hand side. The restaurant is newly boarded up, and Logan sighs. Penny Sue was the last holdout among the small business owners when chain stores began to appear like bait worms after a summer rain, dotting the slopes beside the interstate exit. Abner Croft of Croft's Auto Parts, Buster Riley of Riley's Hometown Pharmacy, and now Penny Sue commute forty or fifty miles every day to jobs in Chattanooga or Knoxville. “Bad enough when the mill closed, and now this shit,” he says to himself.
A Godfather's Pizza, Walgreens, Auto-Zone and Favorite Market stand glossy and metallic against the farmhouse Penny Sue had turned into a restaurant. Next to the abandoned A&W drive-in, one side of a billboard advertises cure for drug addiction while the other admonishes the reader to REPENT because JESUS IS COMING. An old man sells tomatoes and cucumbers from the back of his truck; a woman, used clothes from her front yard. As he continues down the highway, the businesses and signs, old and new, hopeful and threatening, shrink to a cluster of dots in his rear view mirror and finally merge.
Logan turns off the highway and promenades the former business district. Downtown is more of the same, smiling mannequins desperately posing naked in deserted department stores, boarded shoe-store display windows framed in brick, row upon row of vacant buildings interrupted only by the occasional pool hall or storefront church. Logan sticks his arm out and pretends to be a 1950's teenager cruising the main drag in a muscle car, looking for action. Giggling, he pulls it back in and rolls up the window. "Folks done think you crazy, Logan. Don't make it no worse."
He looks at his watch. Five minutes after eight. “Well,” he says, making a wide U turn across an intersection, “I guess I ought to quit riding around and go to work. See what the sonuvabitch wants out of me today.”
###
Earl Bartlett wears a long-sleeve plaid shirt over a white ribbed undershirt every day of the year. In summertime he rolls up the sleeves and unbuttons the front. During the winter he pulls a jacket over it. Several of his plaid shirts are red and a couple are blue, so a body might think he rotates the same two shirts for days on end. But that's not true. The fact is simply that, years ago, he chose a certain look, and he's never had call to change it. He would no more wear a polo shirt and khakis than he would decline to stand and cheer when the band played Dixie at a high school football game.
Today the front of his shirt is buttoned, but the sleeves are rolled up. The dog days are behind, and the air is comfortable.
Earl stands beside a metal-frame dinner table. A Lucky Strike smolders in the ashtray beside a stovepipe can of PBR. Smoke hovers around his hairline. Behind him cases of Bud and Bud Light are stacked clear to the ceiling.
An older fellow sits at the table. The two men have the same tailor, all plaid shirts and denim pants, but the slicked-back hair of the sitting man is red. He's a big guy with inch-long tufts the color of dishwater growing beneath giant knuckles.
The sound of a mower passes the kitchen window. The man tilts his head in that direction and asks, “How's ole Billy Wayne working out, Earl? Don't cut him no slack, just cause he's my nephew.”
“He's all right. Works hard, don't complain.” Not the sharpest pencil in the package, Earl silently adds, but he don't have to be.
“I'm glad to hear it. Family's family, but a job's a job. If he don't work out, show him the door, same as anybody.” He wets his lips from a tall glass; it's straight bourbon, but he doesn't wince. “You know Logan Padgett, got his leg shot up in Iraq?”
“Twelve pack ever Sunday. Yeah, I know him.”
The redhead grunts. “Yeah, that's him. No relation to me, but he's blood kin to Billy Wayne. On his mother's side.” He figures you don't really know a man till you can name his family.
The racket of the mower stops. Billy Wayne sticks his head in the door. He's shirtless, and beads of sweat glisten on his muscled, hairless chest. “Hey Earl,” he calls, “I got the back yard done. You want me to do the front?”
Earl stares as he answers. “Yeeess, I generally do mow them in sets.”
Billy Wayne looks puzzled. His uncle covers the bottom of his face with a large, hairy hand. Earl grins and helps the boy out. “Go mow the front,” he confirms, pointing.
The kid bounds happily down the steps while the men watch and laugh.
###
Sunrise finds Logan sipping coffee at the kitchen table. He's reading the funny papers in a stained tee shirt and a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee.
A teenage girl with cornrows in her hair comes out of a bedroom. She plops on the couch, rubbing her eyes, feeling between the cushions for the TV controls. She's still in nightclothes, a green tank top and a pair of canary yellow panties. Ebony legs gleam in the morning light. Logan watches her for a moment. He turns the page of his newspaper and continues reading.
Sonja steps out of the other bedroom. "Damn it, Renée,” she says, walking past, “how many times I tole you not to sit around half naked in front of Logan? Go get some clothes on."
The girl rolls her eyes and continues punching buttons on the remote. The mother takes another step, turns and bellows, "Go!" The face Logan usually finds so attractive is a scowling mask.
The child stands and stretches. When her arms come down, the tee shirt rests on the small of her back a good two inches above florescent underwear. "Morning, Daddy," she purrs, flashing a smile over her shoulder that's all white teeth and thick lips.
"Morning, sweetie," Logan replies to her departing back.
Sonja takes a seat across from Logan. She glowers, drumming her fingers on the table and shaking her head. "That child," she says. "That child.”
Logan chuckles. He puts down the funnies and picks up the sports. "I think I'll go start on the yard work here in a bit," he says.
###
From his seat at the little metal-frame dinner table, Earl can watch the entire front yard out his picture window. When a blue Honda Accord pulls into the drive, he busts a big smile.
He opens the door before she can knock. “Come in, young lady. Come right in. What can I do for you today?”
Sonja is wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless sweater. She clutches a purse at her waist. Timidly, she steps inside and looks around.
Bartlett's place never changes. Everything is in its place, down to the Lucky Strike releasing curls of smoke from the ashtray. Sonja can't recall ever seeing him pick the cigarette up and take a puff. Does he really smoke, or does he just light cigarettes and burn them for incense?
“Logan sent me after a twelve pack, Earl,” she says. “We was supposed to have Sunday beer, but he done run through it all.”
“Honey, a beer can chugging is like the jingle of pocket change to my ears.” He treats her to a large smile. “So Logan's drunk today. Good for him. How you doing yourself, little girl? Don't seem well. You worried about something?”
“Aw, it's nothing. I'm all right.”
“Come on, you can talk to ole Earl. I used to work with your Uncle Herman. We like family.”
"Really, it ain't nothing much. Renée--that's my little girl--she's having a birthday, is all. Turning fourteen, and her boyfriend is over. I just wish Logan wouldn't drink so much. Or at least wait till after.”
“He ain't taking drunk and hitting you, is he?”
“Oh no, it ain't nothing like that. He just stays so high all the time, I feel. . . I dunno. Kinda lonesome. Like I'm by myself.”
“Zat right. Huh.” Bartlett scratches his ear and looks out the window. “Wasn't he in Iraq awhile? Took a bullet in the leg, I think it was?”
“Yeah. He don't talk about it much. I tell him he should be proud, but he don't think so. Says he'd rather a been somewhere else.”
Bartlett laughs. “I admire an honest man.”
“Anyway, yeah, shrapnel in his knee's what it was. The VA gives him pain pills. Between those pills and all the beer he drinks, and the pot he smokes, and. . . I'm sorry, maybe I shouldn't have said that.” Sonja's looks at the purse in her hand and blushes.
Earl laughs again. “Honey, this ole bootlegger been around. I might even have tasted one of them joints, years ago. I tell you what: pull up a seat, and I'll fix a couple of drinks. We could both use one.”
“Oh no, I gotta get back home. Logan wouldn't like it if I stayed gone. And there's Renée's party.”
“You done said Logan's drunk. And Renée's a teenager, so I'm sure that little boyfriend can entertain her. Besides, Ray's coming over later, and we gonna play some cards. We may need you to cook up a little something.”
“Here, sit down,” he says, pulling a chair out from the table, “and ole Earl gonna get you a drink.”
“Well, maybe just a quick one,” she agrees, taking the proffered seat. Earl half fills a highball glass from an open fifth of Canadian Club, adds ice and Coke, and places it beside her. His cigarette in the ashtray is down to a nub, so he puts it out. He takes a fresh one from his shirt pocket, thumps it once, twice, three times and lights it.
###
Logan parks his van behind Sonja's car. From the back of the trailer, he hears a mower running before the machine itself appears. A young man is riding it. He's muscled up and tan, dressed in nothing but a pair of long denim pants. The boy turns the mower in a sharp circle without noticing Logan, intent upon his simple task, and disappears behind the trailer once more.
Logan gets out. Ignoring the concrete sidewalk, he strides directly across the lawn to the front door. He raises his hand to knock but thinks better of it. He reaches for the doorknob but decides against that, too. He rares back and kicks the door open. The lock breaks out of the facing. Splinters fly across the room. The door makes a second crashing sound when the handle punches a hole in the wall behind. It's a satisfying noise to Logan's ears.
He stands in the doorway with his finger pointed at Sonja's face, enjoying her dazed look, disgusted by the lipstick on her whiskey glass and the surprise on the bootlegger's face, before he realizes that Ollie Ray Crider is sighting down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special, aiming up at his head. Where did that sonuvabitch come from? He's some kinda kin by marriage on Logan's Daddy's side, and fuck all that anyway.
Ollie Ray speaks first. “I'm only gonna say this once, son. Turn around right now, and walk back out that door. Close it behind you. Knock, like your mama taught you, and this time wait for an answer.”
Logan stares back at Ray. His upper lip quivers.
“Walk!” the big man barks. Logan leans his head back and laughs. He makes a hacking noise in the back of his throat, and when his head comes down he spits on the table in front of Ray. Ray flinches but holds his fire. Silent tears trickle like branch water down Sonja's cheeks, and her shoulders quake. Bartlett sits motionless, palms flat on the table.
"You come for something that belongs to you. That's all well and good,” Ray continues. “We just having a drink here. Ain't nobody trying to steal your woman. But you going about it all wrong, see. Now,” he continues, cocking the pistol and standing up from the table to assume a firing position, “Walk. Back out. That fucking door.”
Earl Bartlett hears the grandfather clock that's been in his family for generations go click, click, click, for three of the longest seconds of his life before Logan turns on his heel and strolls outside. The limp from his war wound is only faintly evident as he descends the wooden steps and crosses the lawn to his van.
Sonja's forehead drops to the table. Ray exhales. He eases the hammer down on the weapon and places it gingerly on the table. The bootlegger takes a deep breath. He turns to Ray and says, “I thought you tole that boy to close the door on his way out.”
"Shut up, Bartlett,” is his only reply.
Logan guns the engine of his van as he leaves, throwing a low wave of gravel across the quarter panel of Sonja's car like the wake of a motorboat lapping against the shore.
Billy Wayne appears at the door of the trailer. “Hey Earl,” he yells, though the man is only yards away. Billy stands with his hand resting on the door frame, oblivious to the damage done to it by his second cousin on his mother's side. “I got the backyard done. Tell me where the gas can is, and I'll start the front.” He notices the hair stuck to Sonja's face. He spies the pistol on the table. He opens his mouth to ask, but Bartlett cuts him off.
“Hell, son, the gas can's in the shed. Where you think it is? Now get on back to work, while you still got a job.”
###
The roof of the Piggly Wiggly is a sea of small stones stretching from corner to corner across the top of the store. The debris of years floats atop its placid surface: two discolored plastic jugs overlooked during a cleanup; a magazine stolen from the store below, thumbed through and discarded; and the occasional rusty screwdriver or pair of pliers that someone flung away in frustration. The motor room is windowless, a sheet-metal anchor buoy floating lonely beneath a clouded sky.
All is stillness and quiet save the flapping cover of the faded girlie book. A plastic baggy nestles in Logan's shirt pocket. The crystals are gone. Only a chalky residue remains, devoid of financial value but worth a decade in the state pen. The sour chemical taste of methamphetamine lingers, reminiscent of the paint thinner and gasoline he huffed as a child. He stands awestruck, stunned, holding a charred square of aluminum foil in his left hand and a Zippo in his right.
Across a two foot chasm of silence, Johnny McCullough's eyes appear hollow and wide. The skin on his face is like cracked leather from the sun, wind and rain of a thousand rooftops like this one.
Logan's reverie is shattered by the phone at his side flashing and playing a tinny version of Reveille. The sound is carnivalesque, in a way obscene given the gray sky and grim circumstance. The caller can only be the boss man.
“I, ah, don't think I wish to talk to him, right now at the moment,” Logan says. He tries to force a smile, but just succeeds at looking vaguely ill.
Blue veins pulse in Johnny's forehead. He drags a parched tongue across blistered lips. “S'all right,” he says in a voice that sounds like a croak. “I'm sure he'll be glad to call us back later.”
###
Sunday afternoon is Earl's busiest time of the week. Monday morning is the slowest, so that's when the liquor van runs. He's sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for it to arrive. Today is Billy Wayne's first run by himself.
Earl looks up at the sound of scratching gravel. Yeah, it's the van. It doesn't appear wrecked, that's good. But it seems like Billy Wayne is taking a long time to climb out. When the boy does exit, he wobbles and steadies himself against the side of the vehicle.
“I be goddamn,” Earl mutters. “Out driving my van and it loaded, and he done gone and got drunk. I'm gonna string him up and put him in a shallow grave.” The old bootlegger continues mumbling to himself as he starts down the front steps. He walks real careful like, holding onto the railing and easing himself down. He's not as young as he used to be, and he's had a drink or two his own self.
###
Logan is paranoid as all hell. He's sitting on the toilet with his pants around his ankles. He's not even thinking about shitting. He's just hiding out. He's hiding from the store manager. He's hiding from the boss man who, more and more, is prone to show up uninvited. Hell, he's hiding from Ollie Ray.
Of course, there's no reason for Ollie Ray to stalk the stalls of the bathroom at the Piggly Wiggly, looking for the man who kicked in the door of his favorite bootlegger. No reason at all. Logan knows he's paranoid, oh yeah. His mind understands. His intellect tells him to be rational, to calm down, but his nervous system won't listen. Every time the door to the restroom swings open, his gut clenches, his nuts shrivel, and sweat breaks out across his brow.
Goddamn that Johnny McCullough. He knows Logan's a downer man. Why'd he go and offer that shit?
Only one hydrocodone remains in the bottle. Logan was going to save it for tomorrow, but now he can't. No way, man. Soon as his hands stop shaking he'll pull his pants up, go the van and crush the pill. He'll chase it with a tall Miller; maybe that'll soothe his nerves. Maybe the boss man won't stop by. Maybe the store manager won't smell the booze.
Maybe Sonja won't be too pissed off about the scene at the bootleggers. She's not answering the phone, but when he sees her face to face, he can smooth things over. He needs her comfort. He needs her bad, more than ever before. More than he ever needed anything in his life, he needs that girl. She's just going to have to understand that after all they been through, a man is going to be kind of sensitive sometimes. A little bit jealous.
Goddamn that Johnny McCullough.
###
Sonja stands on her tiptoes to force another shirt into the suitcase. She pulls the zipper closed, drags it off the bed and totes it into the next room where she places it beside two similar bags. That's everything but the toiletries. Three suitcases, a bag of brushes and hairspray, and a Honda Accord: not much to show for thirty years. Oh well, she's surviving. Some folks can't say that much.
She's trying not to think about Logan. That's why she's not leaving a note: when she attempts to explain herself, inevitably she finds her way back to the good things, and they decide to try it one more time. But the one-more-times are all used up.
When she returns from the bathroom with the toiletries bag, her chest clenches like a fist at the sight of Logan standing in the doorway. How did he get off work so early? And when did he learn to step so quiet, anyway?
After several seconds her breath returns. She wanted to make things easy for both of them, but okay, here we go. She squares her shoulders and forces herself to look at his face.
“So, what you doing, Sonja?” he asks her, his voice all causal as he steps out of the doorway and takes a seat at the dinner table. Something's wrong. Something's bad wrong. She's used to seeing him messed up, with slanted, bloodshot eyes, but not like this. Today his eyes have barely any whites left, the pupils are so large. And he hasn't called her Sonja in years; the name sounds strange coming from him. Sugar Lips, Honey Pie. Bitch, whore. But never just Sonja.
“I'm, ah, I'm getting a few things together. So you can have your house back.” The muscles in her throat quiver as she speaks, but she manages a note of defiance as she adds, “Like you want, apparently.”
“You ain't got to leave on my account.” He's looking past her knees as he speaks, studying the way a piece of torn linoleum curls up on the edges like it's just the oddest thing. Last time she saw him, he was kicking in doors and spitting on tables, and now he looks looks like he's seen a ghost. What's he strung out on this time?
“I got to leave on my own account, Logan. On Renée's account. We've been through it and through it, and it don't get no better. Now please don't start nothing.”
He raises an eyebrow like she said something surprising. “I ain't starting nothing.” He stands up, and she takes a quick step backward. He sits back down. “I got the cotton mouth, is all. Would you fetch me a beer?”
She hands a sweating can across the table.
“I ought to quit this shit,” he says as he opens the tab. “I know I should. I been thinking about that a lot, lately.
“You're as likely to quit drinking as I am to drive at Talladega,” she spits out the side of her mouth. She snatches a bag from the floor and stalks out the door.
“I guess you're right about that,” he says to a kitchen left empty by her departure. He looks down at the can in his hand, shrugs, and takes a long drink. “Yeah, I guess you're right. But seems like there should be something we could do,” he continues as she walks back in and stands over the remaining luggage. “It just don't seem right, two people in love, but who can't live together.”
“Well, it may not be right, but that's how it is.” She grabs up the last two suitcases, then puts them back down. Her face turns red. If she can stay mad, she knows she can get through this and leave. “You come around showing your ass over me having a drink with Earl Bartlett. Earl Bartlett, for god's sake! Old enough to be my Daddy, and used to work with my Uncle Herman. And you go showing your butt. . .” She grabs the bags up and goes out the door, shaking her head and muttering.
She tosses them in the trunk and gets in the driver's seat. She takes a deep breath and releases it, slowly, as she checks her makeup in the rear view mirror. “I just hope you don't think this is what I want,” she whispers to the steering wheel. She tries to say something else, but the sound just comes out a sob. Stay mad, girl. Don't try to explain, just stay mad. She puts the key in the ignition and cranks the car.
A minute passes before Logan understands that all her gear is loaded. She's not coming back inside. When he hears her car start, he walks to the door and leans against the frame. If he was the crying type, this would be the perfect occasion. But he ain't, so he watches, dry eyed, as she puts the car in gear. He manages a weak smile and blows her a kiss, the way she used to when she saw him off to work. But she disappears behind a stand of mimosa that lines the drive without looking back.
He listens to her leave. He can tell the difference between the scratch of gravel and the sound her car makes accelerating onto the pavement. Then comes the silence. The damn silence always comes next.
A squirrel scampers down a branch and jumps onto a pile of fire wood left from the previous winter. He takes a nut in his mouth and turns to stare at Logan.
“What are you looking at?”
The animal doesn't respond. It remains still, watching.
Damn. He sits on the concrete blocks that form the steps to the trailer. Some things are sure hard to figure. A man spends his whole life facing down danger, proving himself, and after it all, the only thing it takes to knock the wind clean out of him is some skinny girl with a ponytail. Logan jumps to his feet and kicks gravel in the direction of the wood pile, and the squirrel darts out of sight.
Randy Lowens lives in a cabin on a wooded hillside in eastern Kentucky. His writing has appeared in Dogmatika, Blue Collar Review, and elsewhere. "The Flotsam and Jetsam of War" received the Tacenda award for Best Short Story of 2007, illuminating social injustice. "Sunday Afternoon at Earl's" is excerpted from a novel in progress.Saturday, July 4, 2009
A Review of Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
I gakked this from Halvard Johnson on Facebook. Not the meth, the review, dummy.Let's hope it's theft he doesn't mind. It is the NY Times after all.
Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of “Methland,” Nick Reding’s unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years in the life of Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear. The ravages of meth, or “crank,” on Oelwein and countless forsaken locales much like it are shown to be merely superficial symptoms of a vaster social dementia caused by, among other things, the iron dominion of corporate agriculture and the slow melting of villages and families into the worldwide financial stew.
This is happening as well in the Twin Tiers, the area where I grew up, particularly in Bradford County PA, whose county seat, Newsweek claimed a few years ago, is yet another Meth Valley.
They're EVERYWHERE, folks! Gitcher own.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Bent Country, by Sheldon Lee Compton
I steadied myself on the embankment. Below, down the hooknose incline of brush and gravel, ran the tracks, glinting like a school of silver fish running in the moonlight to chase the C & O. I stood carefully, leaned my head back so it was only me and mother-fish moon in a blanket of black, and pissed loudly.
Pete and Bryan waited in the car while I finished, Pete slouched behind the wheel of his Grenada and Bryan in the passenger seat. Bryan tapped the window as I zipped and tugged to readjust. I turned and flashed him the finger. The Poverty House would be there. It wasn’t going to close down while I took a piss.
“Jesus, Van,” Bryan said as soon as I was in the back seat. “We still have to pick up Deb. You’re already piss drunk. Seriously."
“Man’s gotta piss, Hoss. Man’s gotta piss,” Pete said. He didn’t wait for any response but punched the gas pedal peeling trenches into the gravel that left behind a dust burst rising off into the sky to join my mother moon.
I looked out the back windshield, tried to watch the sky for as long as possible. My piss splash would be shining gold on the brush the rest of the night while we stomped and drank at the House. I found myself wishing I could take it with me and realized I was very drunk. Aware of this, I slid sideways in the backseat and fell into an impossible sleep while Pete straightened out curves like a child finger-painting his own escape plan.
A half-mile from Deb’s house, Pete cut the engine and rolled through the last few curves with the headlights off. He pulled the Grenada to the side of the road and waited. Bryan leaned roughly against his door and got out. He crept to the back and eased the latch on the back door and sat down beside me.
“Hi, Bryan,” I said.
Bryan smiled. “Drunk ass.”
We watched the house in silence. Awake again, I fumbled in the floorboard for another beer. Bryan motioned to the bag and I pulled another out and handed it to him. We drank our beers slowly and watched Pete watch for Deb.
“There she is,” Pete whispered.
We leaned to the window and saw Deb moving across the yard, a lean figure moving like a swan through the swells of a lake. Blonde braids bounced across her shoulders and when she smiled I saw Pete lean toward her and their smiles lit the world. I finished off my beer just as she got to the car and settled in beside Pete. She spoke softly to Pete for a time and then turned to us, her braids swiping at the air, her evenly tanned arms draped across the back of the seat.
“Hey, losers. I was just telling Peter here that we’re gonna have to burn out of here like bats out of hell. No cruising in silent like you came in,” Deb said. She reached between my knees and came up with a beer. “That’s gonna be nice, huh? Dad’ll just cuss in his bed and pray for damnation and vengeance for the wild heathens, right? Right.”
“Here we go!” Pete yelled, starting the Grenada and pulling into gear.
“Long live the heathens!” Deb yelled back to Pete.
More trenches more dust bursts floating away to the moon. We were leaving behind us wild souls ascending to the unknown, marks of where we had been like my golden splash alone in the brush, a part of me for this place to remember.
The final decision was made the day before. Me and Bryan and Pete were leaving the next morning or afternoon for Peru, Indiana. There were jobs there in factories. Jobs in buildings, not underneath mountains in two-foot high coal with angry machinery and men who looked swallowed up and drained of their blood, walking, working faded carbon copies of men thrown together with burned leather and discarded bones, hollow-eyed and forever silent while they ate their sandwiches.
Our fathers all worked or did work the mines. Pete’s dad was killed picking rock from the belt line. Caught his leg and pulled him off into the coal. He was the outside man and the rest of the nightshift crew was inside. It took three hours before anybody noticed Pete’s dad was missing. By then, he was covered up under tons of coal, crushed. They dug him out after the foreman convinced the rest of the workers that he hadn’t skipped out and left shift. It was a closed casket. Pete was two years old.
Every day before our shift two words were always looping inside my head as persistent and undaunted as a bird’s song. Pete’s dad. Pete’s dad. Pete’s dad.
I wondered if Pete and Bryan had the same song in their head. Every shift, looking into their eyes, it seemed they might. We made our decision after three months at the Jericho Number 5 Mine, and The Poverty House was our last night before Peru. He hadn’t said anything, but we all knew Pete was going to ask Deb to come along. She just finished her junior year of high school and there was the chance she would stay, a really good chance. Pete didn’t see it that way. Pete always saw things his way, then made it happen.
Now, speeding to Haysi, Virginia to our bar under my moon there was another song in my drink-rattled head, a bird song beautiful in the morning light, a canary to replace the death call of the crow.
What is the answer? Peru is the answer. What is the answer? Peru is the answer.
Dress was casual at The Poverty House. If some poor shit showed up in blue jeans, the bouncer or from time to time the owner, a guy called Blue Eyes, turned the guy out. Slacks and dress shirts. Church clothes. It was helpful to know this driving from Calvary to Haysi. I pushed the wrinkles from my slacks at the front door and nodded to the bouncer, a thin man named Herman.
“Hello, folks,” Herman said, crossing his arms and taking a step toward us.
Pete pulled out his wallet and paid the cover charge for everyone. A miner from Burned Rock had once tried to push through Herman a few years back and dodge the cover, but Herman popped his eye with a boney elbow. They said the eye oozed black and sluggish out of the socket after Herman hit him. Herman also had nails driven up through the soles of his boots so out of the back of the heels there was this sharp tip of the nail that stuck out about half an inch, just enough to sweep kick somebody’s gut open. To look at him, Herman wasn’t much, which is why I guess he was tested like that from time to time. But military experience, and horrible experiences those, were Herman’s weapons. We all avoided eye contact as we passed through the door.
The House was dim with only a few patrons seated at the bar, regulars. We paid the second charge at the front desk for a running tab at the bar and then passed the two or three older men on stools, craning their necks to watch us pass. All of them had hair slicked back with oil and wore checkered button-up work shirts with the sleeves rolled past the elbows. One of them, a high-cheeked amber-colored man who had to have come from a strong Cherokee line, offered a slimy grin to Deb and Pete laughed at him as we went single file to a table with two white candles burning in the center.
The orders, except for Deb’s, were simple. Beer, beer, beer. Deb asked the waitress for a boilermaker with a second beer chaser and a full bottle of Tvarscki.
“Bring us a shot glass, cutie,” Deb called after the waitress, a dish rag of a girl, beaten down by night after night of half-breed Cherokees telling bad jokes and asking for rides home. A space of utter darkness poured from her eyes, vacant and fundamental, focused on squeezing out the hours. She nodded and left for the bar.
While we waited for the drinks, the band started plucking strings and running scales, adjusting amp levels and positioning a microphone as big as the head of a twenty-pound sledgehammer and bright silver in the dimness.
“Check one, check two. . . check one, check two.”
The front man for the band, which, according to the decal on the bass drum, was called The Shine, jerked across the stage, pulling the mic chord across his shoulders and around his waist, fly-fishing across the stage. He belted out a single note, deep and grating, the whiskey-soaked voice of an old man, thick and raspy. It sounded fine.
“Guy’s got some pipes,” I said into my beer bottle.
“That’s for sure,” Deb added and propped her hands under her chin watching the singer flop across the stage. “He’s high. He’s like Jim Morrison. Look at that.”
The singer turned on stage, tuning his instrument, the hard voice and lean body, the presence, his front man tools. He stopped and across at us. We were the only visitors at a table. The rest of the bar was empty except the Indian and the other regulars.
“I’m going to the bar,” Pete said and quickly stood up.
Deb watched after him and then gave me and Bryan a couple seconds worth of strange looks and went back to watching the singer.
I could hear Pete at the bar ordering Jack Daniels, a bottle. Then I heard the bartender, a lady in her forties with jet black hair and heavy purple lipstick, tell him the seat was reserved. I went to the bar and sat down beside Pete. In front of him was a napkin Scotch-taped to the bar. The napkin said the stool was reserved for someone named Rose.
“Deb wants to fuck Jim Morrison over there,” Pete said. He waved his hand to the stage where the singer had stopped his rehearsal ritual and was now sitting at the edge of the stage, his feet dangling off the edge. The band seemed to be waiting for the crowd or some cue for when to start their set.
“Check one, check one,” the singer baritoned into the mic. He sounded bored, and Deb was right. He was definitely high.
I couldn’t argue. It seemed Deb was into the guy. So for a time we sat at the bar, having scooted a couple stools down for Rose who still hadn’t shown up. Gradually the bar picked up. Groups of five and six were filing in, paying their bar cover and moving to the other tables. The tables sat off from a hardwood dance floor, and men outnumbered women, just like our group. Most groups had just one girl in tow, and that girl was probably with one of the others. Finding some hard love my last night in Kentucky was going to be a challenge. I’d have to find the sister, the girl who made her brother take her to Haysi for a night out. More likely there would be some fighting.
I looked back to our table and Bryan gave a quick hand motion for us to come back. Deb was out of her chair and moving to the dance floor, the curves of her body shifting like the smooth surface of a cut diamond under her dress. The singer, who by this time I thought of as simply Jim, had hopped down from the stage and was walking slowly across the hardwood. I poured myself a shot of Jack and turned to fill Pete’s glass when I saw a flicker of hard white light at his belt line.
“I’m gonna gut Jim Morrison,” Pete said holding the knife under the bar. “I’m gonna gut him like a fish.”
Bright dance floor light. Arms and legs swooping in blurred arcs. The knife clattering across the floor. Deb yelling then whooping and laughing insanely. Bryan holding Jim Morrison’s arms and rocking back from the transferred energy of Pete’s body blows administered to the singer’s ribs and gut. Me wiggling a tooth now loose from a lick I took from some guy I never saw before, maybe the half-breed, but I couldn’t be sure. And then Herman and the odd, complete silence.
One by one, cradling us like fresh caught fish by the back of our new trousers, Herman sent us skidding across the dirt parking lot. The skinny bouncer with the deadly boot heels held Pete’s knife up in the moonlight and then tossed it into a nearby thicket of trees. Deb waited in the Grenada. Her braids were slung out the open window, sleeping snakes against the Bondo of the driver’s door, her head lopped sideways, blacked out from cheap St. Louis vodka.
“You’ll be good enough to get to work tomorrow, Pete?” Herman asked. His voice was even and calm
Pete righted himself in the parking lot, stumbled back into the packed dirt and then got to his feet. “What?”
“You get into work and then bring me your payday next week to hire a new house band or pay for Calvin’s doctor bills. That comes from Blue Eyes, you stupid civvy.”
Pete grinned at Bryan and then winked at me.
“I’ll do better than that, Herman. You tell that to Blue Eyes. I’ll make good on all repairs and pay the band or hire another fag or whatever. I’ll do that and then some. Money is no object.”
“Money is no object,” Herman said. “Money is always an object. But you wanna go deeper to make good on this, then that’s fine by me. Should be fine with Blue Eyes. See you next week.”
Herman resumed his spot in front of the door and through the darkness I could see the swelled places of his knuckles, droplets of blood hanging there, skin peeled up and white, ready to start bleeding as soon the circulation made its way back to his knotted hands. I wiggled my tooth with the side of my tongue. The half-breed hadn’t got a good lick in, but Herman had popped me in the mouth. It was the fingerprints of my teeth hanging off Herman’s knuckles. No wonder my head was spinning like a top. I turned my attention to Pete as we made it back to the car. He pushed Deb across to the open passenger window to make room behind the steering wheel and I kicked the back of his seat with my knee. Pete turned around and, seeing my busted lip, laughed and started out of the parking lot.
“Money is no object?” I finally asked.
“Van, don’t you understand nothing. We’re not even gonna be here tomorrow. I coulda told Herman I was giving him my house to make good and it’s all just talk.”
I sat quiet for a time, Bryan leaned against my shoulder. He held tight to his stomach and was laughing under his breath. It came out of him like a weak breeze twisting through a torn down valley. Probably a cracked rib. Cracked rib, busted tooth, crazy Deb and Pete the Knife and not a good buzz between us. The Poverty House was a bust. Soon I allowed myself to lean gently against Bryan and the two of us held the other up for more impossible sleep.
When I heard the hissing again, much louder now, my first thought was that one of Bryan’s cracked ribs must have busted through a lung and the life was escaping him like a balloon. I shook him awake. Deb was gazing back at me, eyes of fire and her mouth a small pink circle in the middle of her face. Her eyes looked like tiny saucers streaked with tomato sauce. Pete was hunched behind the steering wheel, furious in his silence. The hissing grew louder and then the front of the Grenada started flopping like the fin of a hooked bluegill.
“Flat tire,” Deb said sleepily.
“Flat lung,” I said, shaking Bryan.
“Flat tire,” Pete said. “Flat tire, Hoss.”
No spare. Those two words were repeated, yelled, screamed, and kicked around until they almost lost meaning. No spare. We were hours from home, breaking the speed limit.
“Let’s hitch,” Deb said.
She was sitting on the guardrail smoking. She and Pete hadn’t spoken. The comment may have been directed to me. I started to answer when Pete whirled around the grill, jumped the guardrail and stood five inches from Deb’s face, arms stiff at his sides, fists clenched, soft curls of smoke from her cigarette appearing to come from Pete’s ears, the top of his head.
“We can’t all flash a leg and get a ride,” Pete spat.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Deb said and took a long last drag from her cigarette.
With Bryan leaning against the back bumper, I eased over and hopped the guardrail and joined Pete who had stalked five good steps from Deb. I sat down, clearing my head and saw the firefly of Deb’s cigarette streak down the bank, its ember the single red arch of a midnight rainbow. The glowing ember bounced onto the tracks below. It thought of my splash earlier and rubbed my eyes, trying again to clear my head. Pete didn’t seem nearly as drunk, which was comforting, even now with all the Deb problems and flat tire, considering he was driving. The ember nearly landed in perfect balance across a flatted out rail and then lightly fell to the middle, a red light fading into the dark.
The ridge line was visible even in the darkest dark, its outline rolling past on every side of us, thick and more dense than the sky itself with millions of years of vegetation. The Rockies were young kids compared to our soft curved mountains, naked and cold, ugly rocks jutting up like half-wit bullies, no majesty, no history, just flat gray fault line hemorrhoids. But our majestic ridge line circled now like a sea snake watching us drowning in the depths, hanging on to a shredded Goodyear.
Pete wasn’t talking and Deb wasn’t talking and maybe because I was drunk and not my usual mediating self, I also continued to sit quietly. A scooting about of roadside gravel trailed up behind us and Bryan put a hand each on our shoulders. His breathing was less labored now and I only now noticed that he had taken what may have been a knee to his forehead. A knot the size of a bird egg cast a small shadow across his brow. Bryan: the human unicorn lunger of Calvary. I laughed and Deb shot me a look, her eyes sparkling beautiful fire.
“Fear not,” Bryan said. “I have the answer.”
“Peru is the answer,” I said. My lips were still numb.
“Shut up,” Bryan said.
“Sorry.”
“The C & O runs through here to Burned Rock about this time,” Bryan continued, then glanced at a nonexistent watch, screwed up the corner of his mouth. “Anyway, it ain’t come yet. It’s coming. It always slows here, I’ve seen it. We blind jump it and when she cranks back up we ride to Burned Rock, walk to Calvary and get a car and a spare. From Burned Rock, it’s just a half mile walk.” He held out his arms, favoring his side as he did so, and made a wobbling bowing gesture.
Pete had been listening without looking at Bryan. He had left his gaze somewhere out there with the sea snake. “Yeah, sure thing. That can be our backup plan,” he finally said. “Backup plan. Got it?”
All of us, even Deb, looked at Pete. Going hobo on a train back to Burned Rock was not the most desirable suggestion made since the flat sent us to the side of the road, but it was something. It was a little better than clinging to a shredded Goodyear and crossing our fingers. But now Deb was off the guardrail and easing over to us. The sleek, slow movements of her legs cut through the moonlight. Her breath might have smelled of electric rain waiting in the clouds. She ignored me and Bryan and now it was Deb who was in front of Pete. It was some kind of musical guardrail game.
“So what’s the real plan, Peter?”
“Don’t call me that, okay?”
She sulked the way Deb sulked, a gorgeous set of tics and twitches. The flash lightning and storm clouds were gone. If I’d known her the way Pete knew her, I’d say she was worried. Pete must have noticed it, informed as he was. His voice was different when he spoke again.
“We just ride the flat hard as hell back home,” Pete said, and went to her, taking her small shoulders in his hands. “I’ll drive it straight, sixty, sixty-five, and that’ll keep down the grind on the rim, at least enough to get us there. I’ll have to get another rim on top of another tire, but we should get there.”
Deb’s features softened. She gave Pete the gift of her smile and then kissed him hard on the mouth. Breaking the speed limit so that three good tires lifted on the current and eased the grind on the rim seemed to excite her endlessly.
My golden splash machine shriveled inside my khakis and then, suddenly, I needed to relieve myself again. I paced off a good distance and pulled out, bending, adjusting, and going through my routine. There was a firm smack against my side. My knees buckled and piss streaked my pant leg. Bryan sidled up next to me.
“You going on the roller coaster ride?” he asked after I finished.
“You made me piss on my pants.”
“You pissed you pants?”
“No. You made me . . . Look, Never mind. I’m not riding that thing back home. I’m with you. Let’s play it hobo style and catch the C & O.”
Bryan seemed pleased with this and we walked back to the Grenada where Pete was inspecting the damage to the tire. Deb was already at shotgun picking her fingernails and holding them up in front of her face, nibbling the edges. She waved to us and we squatted beside Pete.
“Pete, we’re catching the C & O,” I said. I thought of the silver fish streaks of moonlight on the rails from earlier chasing their way across the broken map line of tracks leading through the valley.
Pete seemed generally unconcerned, but content. “Okay, Hoss. See you in a few hours and then we’re out of here. Out of here for good!” He whirled around the grill again, the strange dance an exact replica of what he had performed in hot white anger just moments before. White hot anger, white hot lust. I figured there wasn’t much difference. Didn’t look to be, anyway.
As soon as Pete was behind the wheel it was bursts of dust and trenches again and Deb waving backwards out the window, her nibbled fingers wiggling a goodbye. I wondered if she noticed the stain down my new pants. Seeing the sparks fly like welded metal from the rim, I wondered if we looked like wicked souls ascending, lifted away with the dust.
Sheldon Lee Compton lives at the easternmost tip of Kentucky. He has earned paychecks as a teacher, journalist, coal miner, plumber, public relations specialist and carpenter. His work has appeared in New Southerner, Inscape, The Cut-Thru Review, Kudzu and elsewhere.
Friday, June 26, 2009
James Baker Hall Dead
James Baker Hall died on June 25th. I confess to not having read him (yet--only so much time and energy in one life-span) but I had read about him a few times in connection with Wendell Berry. The poems I'm able to find online are quite good, though. I'm combing the online booksellers soon, so if anyone has a book recommendation, I'm game.From Tom Thurman at ket.org:
James Baker Hall
A Profile
James Baker Hall grew up in Lexington, KY, where he was a multi-sport star athlete at Henry Clay High School. With money he made from his paper route, he traveled to Paris at age 20. After finishing college back home at the University of Kentucky, he left for graduate work at Stanford, where he was later joined by fellow Kentuckians and UK alums Wendell Berry, Gurney Norman, and then Ed McClanahan.
Jim squeezed in a stay in Seattle between stints at Stanford. Later he settled in Storrs, CT, where he was joined by Gurney for a time and re-established ties with Bobbie Ann Mason, then a graduate student at the University of Connecticut. Jim is quick to give credit to UK writing professor Bob Hazel for encouraging young writers to explore the world before settling down to write about it:
“The one thing that Robert Hazel insisted upon that had an immediate and lasting effect on us all was that we get out of Kentucky,” he remembers. “We had to leave in order to escape the provincialism of our heritage. And what leaving Kentucky at that time meant more often than not, if not all the time, was New York. So we went somewhere.”
After leaving Connecticut, where he bluntly states that his life was in turmoil, Jim returned to Kentucky in the early 1970s as a writing professor at his alma mater. As a poet, photographer, and filmmaker, he has established himself as a major creative force in many fields, and in 2001 he was named to a two-year term as Kentucky’s Poet Laureate.
“I came back in 1973, after having been gone for 20 years or so ... and I found out after a number of years that I had very, very profound unfinished business here. But I didn’t know that when I came back,” Jim says. “And I stayed on because it’s my home. You don’t have to like your home, right? You only got one.”
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Interview with Dorothy Allison
This is not my interview--I will have some up one of these days, though--but one by Susanne Dietzel from Tulane University, conducted in 1995.When I taught a writing course using what I called White Trash Literature maybe ten years ago, nearly every author we read was met initially with skepticism and ennui--another themed writing class. Most of the students had taken the class because of the subject matter, though, thinking I don't know what--that it would be an easier grade? And for some of them it was--it was a tough class to keep on topic,because I had so much to say and and a captive audience. But the one book they were uniformly floored by was Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. Like many inexperienced readers, students thought novels were true a great deal of the time, if not always, and this book, and the harrowing film made from it, stuck to their brains like burdock, and reinforced this mistake, and it took some talking to disabuse them. And the film showing was one of the few times I had multiple walk-outs. As I said, what struck them, always, was what they termed 'brutal honesty.' They respected the text too much to question or discuss it, except for a couple voluble quick wits who made fun of it. So I was glad to see Dietzel dealing with that aspect of Allison's work specifically in this interview.
This interview was conducted as part of the annual Zale Writer in Residence Program at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women at Tulane University in November 1995. This year the program committee had invited award-winning novelist Dorothy Allison, who is most famous for her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, to be the Zale Writer-in-Residence. Dorothy Allison's work is securely located on the borders of southern and working-class literature, with deep roots in feminist and lesbian-feminist activism and politics.
Dorothy Allison is the author five books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction and the winner of numerous literary awards. She grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Florida and now lives with her partner, son, and dogs in northern California.This interview was conducted by Susanne Dietzel, a Visiting Scholar at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women and doctoral candidate in American Studies and Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is now a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Tulane University.
This interview was transcribed by Kelly Donald and Michelle Attebury, and (only slightly) edited by Susanne Dietzel.
Susanne Dietzel- Dorothy Allison is an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist. She is also an activist in feminist and lesbian feminist politics and, later on I want to talk a little bit about the connection between writing and politics. She has published five books, the first was a collection of short stories called TRASH came out in 1989. Her second book is a collection of poetry called THE WOMEN WHO HATE ME, poems 1980-1990 that came out in 1991. Dorothy Allison is most famous for her novel BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA, which came out in 1992, and won the Lambda Award, and was nominated for the National Book Award. She followed that one up with her absolutley wonderful collection of essays called SKIN that was published by Firebrand Books in 1994 and here is her newest book, called TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW FOR SURE, which is a memoir about fictional and real families coming to terms with each other and with their history. Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and Florida and now lives in Northern California with her partner, child and dogs.
Susanne Dietzel- What I find most striking about your writing is your brutal, but loving honesty. As a reader, you just come to love, but also hate your characters. Your fiction then is to some extent relentless, because you take your reader right into those experiences. But again, I kept coming back to the themes of honesty and love that I think are really the foundation of your writing.
Dorothy Allison- I have a theory about writing fiction. I often run into young writers who ask me the question "How can you tell those terrible stories about people? How can you make them seem almost real, or liveable or loveable?" And my theory is that if you create a character and if you tell enough about that character, even if you are creating someone who is a villain or someone who does terrible things, if you tell enough about them, then you have the possibility of loving them. And that if you tell enough about a character, even if you use a character based on people you know, you don't create an act of betrayal. It is when you use characters in small ways that you betray them. The key is to make the portrait as full as possible and it is not possible if you lie. It is not possible if you try to hide. And the thing that writers hide is themselves. I don't belive you can be any good as a writer if you're trying to hide yourself. So, I get told a lot that I'm brutally honest. I essentially think that I want to do it right, and I don't believe that you can if you try to shave off any margin of safety. If you're trying to be safe, you got no business writing. If you're trying to control what happens, you really don't have a whole lot of chance. The only thing you can control is to create as full a portrait as possible. Then you can make people seem human. But you don't really get any safety in that. And you don't get to lie - except of course that you are telling great lies.
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