Another Perfect Catastrophe Read online

  Another Perfect Catastrophe

  Brad Barkley

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2003 by Brad Barkley

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  The stories in this collection first appeared in the following publications: “Under Water” in the Greensboro Review; “Circle View” in the Florida Review; “EAT” in the Oxford American; “Porter’s Dodge” in Cimarron Review and Republish; “Knots” in Tampa Review; “The Extent of Fatherhood” and “The Singing Trees of Byleah, Georgia” in the Georgia Review; “Clown Alley” in Willow Springs; “The New Us” in Southwest Review; “Yagi-Uda” in Chattahoochee Review; “Spontaneous Combustion” in Other Voices; “Smoke” in Glimmer Train; and “Escaping” in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote lyrics from “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Words by Gus Kahn, Music by Wilbur Schwandt and Fabian Andree. TRO © Copyright 1930 (Renewed) 1931 (Renewed) Essex Music, Inc., Words and Music, Inc., New York, Don Swan Publications, Miami Florida and Gilbert Keyes Music, Hollywood, CA. Used by Permission.

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-79-9

  eBook Cover Design: Steven Seighman

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For my parents, with love and thanks

  And for Jim Whitehead, in memoriam

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  The Way It’s Lasted

  The Properties of Stainless Steel

  Another Perfect Catastrophe

  The Atomic Age

  The Small Machine

  19 Amenities

  Mistletoe

  Those Imagined Lives

  St. Jimmy

  Beneath the Deep, Slow Motion

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks, as always, to my agent and friend, Peter Steinberg, and to those who cast their eyes and minds on early drafts, especially the beloved Thursday night group—Susan Allen, Jack DuBose, Stephen Dunn, Mary Edgerly, Michael Hughes, Barb Hurd, Kevin Kehrwald, Keith Schlegel, Maggie Smith, and Karen Zealand; also to Susan Perabo, to my friends in West Virginia and Maine, and to the editors of the magazines that first published these stories, particularly Staige Blackford, Michael Griffith, and Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies. Thanks to George Singleton just because, and to Fred Chappell for too many reasons to mention.

  Thanks to my friend and editor, Alicia Brooks, who gets it, to Carin Siegfried for grabbing the wheel with grace and humor, and to Stephen Lee, in advance. I am grateful to others at St. Martin’s for their continued support and faith: George Witte, editor in chief; John Cunningham, associate publisher; Matthew Shear, vice president and publisher; Kevin Sweeney, production editor; and Michael Storrings, jacket design. And thanks to the incomparable band Firewater, whose great song title I swiped for my own.

  Thanks for their support to the Maryland State Arts Council and to Frostburg State University, and to many others who help keep the raft on course in a variety of ways, to friends scattered everywhere, to Lucas and Alex, and to the lovely Mary B.

  If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning,

  we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh.

  —Lord Acton

  Another

  Perfect

  Catastrophe

  The Way It’s Lasted

  My father insists that because he is dying of cancer, he has every right to drive seven hours south, share my house for as long as he wants, and see firsthand the brand-new Noah’s Ark that the Freewill Baptist Church is erecting here. He explains all of this in a long, rambling message to my answering machine.

  “Tell Billy I’m coming,” he says, pausing. “Let him know to look for me before the cocktail hour.” I listen several times to the recording, the way he treats the machine like some reluctant secretary who might, with enough coaxing, relay messages to me. The machine still has that scrap of Laney’s voice on it, asking the anonymous world to state its business and the time of day, to wait for the beep. For the last three months, here is my morning routine: eat bran flakes out of a Cool Whip container, watch the morning sideshows on TV, wade through some of the sixty-three comp papers I have, always, to grade, then push the blue button on the machine and listen to Laney’s scratchy voice. I tell the empty kitchen that my business is remaining in love with my not-yet-ex-wife, waiting for her to decide that tossing me for her watercolor instructor was the wrong idea. The time is midmorning. I never wait for the beep.

  So by five o’clock Thursday Dad has arrived in North Carolina and we are well into the cocktail hour, as he likes to call it, confirming it with quart bottles of St. Pauli Girl. His Corvette, which he bought new for four thousand dollars in 1966, sits ticking and dripping in my driveway. The car is red on red, the fiberglass cracked above the wheel wells, the rest polished and gleaming. My father leans back in the bent-willow chair Laney made, his face and hands their own deep red from driving with the top down, his head shaved and pale in splotches where he tried dabbing on sunscreen. August heat bears down on us, but he sits there with his red satin Pennsylvania Corvette Club jacket zipped up like it’s early November. His full name, Tommy Kesler, is embossed on the breast pocket, the same as it’s painted on the front license plate of the car, a plate he had made for five bucks at some kiosk in the mall.

  “You know what?” I say, “You’re starting to look like that car.” And it’s true, the same way spouses come to look like each other, only Dad had the car a year before he married my mother, and has had it still in the six years since she died.

  “You mean the wear and tear, the ruin.” He looks at me over the newspaper and over his glasses, using both to search for his daily horoscope. “It’s true, son, cancer is an awful ravager of a man.”

  I stare at him a minute, smirking. “Dad, you don’t have cancer.”

  “Billy…” He draws down the newspaper. “I know that denial is one of the stages of grief, but you need to move on. I forget what’s next, but you can find out. Should be on the Internet somewhere.”

  “Dad…”

  “I think it’s anger. Maybe … I don’t know. Hell, whatever suits you.”

  “How about incredulity?”

  He looks at me. “Goddamn English teachers.”

  We are quiet a while. He turns the pages of the paper while I finish off my beer and toss the empty into the front yard. Out here I have no neighbors, and this little act of lawlessness is something I do, then tell myself it’s evidence of how much things have improved since Laney’s departure. Desperado, outlaw, thrower of beer bottles. The new me. I once washed my socks in a bucket with the garden hose, and when drunk will allow myself to piss in the sink or out the back door, standing on the stoop.

  Dad finds his horoscope and tells me that it promises Taurus an emphasis on creativity, advises that he organize his priorities. He says that spending time with me is a priority now, with his “impending death.”

  “Impending in maybe thirty years,” I tell him. “Impending when I’m drawing Social Security.” Five years have passed since a few blood tests came back skewed and his doctor mentioned non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in a long list of things it might be. Subsequent tests nailed it down as an infect
ion, but after my mother died my father reinvented himself, fully embracing his imagined disease. He read all the books, joined a cancer victim’s support group, walked for the cure, shaved his head to look the part. My mother, in her own death, had made the wire services and the nightly news—she was killed by a faulty electric fry pan that shorted out through the handles, and after a six-figure settlement and lawyer fees, I think what my father was left with (besides new carpet for the Vette) was some combination of loneliness and jealousy over the spectacle of her passing. So he created his own. He has been dying for so long now that I can imagine not believing it when it finally does happen.

  “Hey, remember these, the paper lanterns?” he says. He pulls together the four corners of the sports page and twists them at the top, then twists the four openings to make a kind of hollow paper boat. “We used to set fire to them over the ball field.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” I tell him. “You almost burned up Mr. Schlegel’s lawn mower.” All his life my father has set about to amuse me with little stunts of the type that used to be known as parlor tricks. He could balance an egg on its end, pull quarters from his nose, skewer a balloon with toothpicks without popping it. My memory of him is compressed into one or two days’ worth of time—he would return noisily from some place or another in the Vette, show me a few tricks at the kitchen table, then rush out the door again, like some hurried magician hired to entertain me in five-minute increments.

  “We should do one again,” he says. “Like the old times. You know you have an honest-to-God lake across the street? I found it out walking today.”

  I open another beer and drink. “That’s not a lake, Dad, it’s a construction runoff pond. And this house is about all I have. I’d rather not burn it down.”

  He is quiet and we sit and watch the evening lower itself over the house and yard, until the mosquitoes drive us inside. At the kitchen table I mark a good inch of comp papers, just throwing grades at them quickly, while Dad paces around the kitchen and swallows fifteen vitamin C pills, one at a time, with orange juice.

  He stops, wipes his mouth with the dish towel. “Billy, what if I told you I had cancer?”

  I laugh out loud, having just read the opening of a freshman essay on euthanasia: Since the beginning of mankind, man has seen many different ways of dealing with the problem of death.

  He nudges me with his forefinger. “Well, what if?”

  “Dad, you’ve been telling the world that for five years now. Why should tonight be any different?”

  He has dressed for bed, stripped down to paisley boxers and a T-shirt, still wearing his Corvette jacket and a beeper he never bothers to turn on. “Really this time. What if?”

  “Oh, really this time,” I say, and as the words leave my mouth I see Laney calling me a sarcastic prick just before she threw a wooden spoon at my head. “You’re like that children’s story, the boy who cried non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” I tell him. “Just drop it.”

  Dad picks up the salt shaker and balances it on edge. “Hey, we need to head out tomorrow and see that ark,” he says. “I want you to come with me.”

  “It’s really nothing to see, believe me.”

  He rubs his hand over the five o’clock shadow covering his head. He keeps it shaved so that the ladies in Buena Vista where he lives will think he’s still having chemo and will bring him chicken dinners. “The story was in our paper, all the way up in Carlisle. ‘Church Rebuilds Noah’s Ark,’ it said. Cute little sidebar about the drought here, too.”

  I mark a comma splice, start skimming the rest. “We can go see,” I tell him, “but you’re in for a letdown.”

  He nods. “Won’t be the first. No sir.”

  “You had a long drive,” I tell him. “You should sleep.”

  “We should do something, though. We never did all that much, did we, Billy?”

  I shrug. “You were an okay father, if that’s what you’re fishing for. Kids thought it was cool that my dad sold swimming pools. You were entertaining. You didn’t do any damage.”

  “But you say ‘were,’ not ‘are.’” He snaps and unsnaps a button on his Corvette jacket.

  “I don’t need much fathering, at thirty-one.”

  “And I guess I never did much, at thirty-one, did I?”

  I drag two beers from the fridge and hand him one. “Okay, listen,” I tell him, “you’re here for however long, we sit around, take in a ball game on TV, drink some beer. I’ll take you to see the ark. Then you go home. Let’s leave the big, weepy scenes to TV movies, okay? I’ve had my fill of moroseness for this year.”

  He sits and drinks, rubs his scalp, nods. “What’s the story with you and that girl?”

  “Laney, Dad. We were married four years. I’d think you’d know her name.”

  “Well. So what of her?”

  I shrug again, looking down at the euthanasia essay, trying to remember if I’ve read it or not. I decide I have and give it a C plus. Much improved, I write. “I guess what of her is that she’s in another guy’s bed right now. Not much ambiguity there, huh?”

  He looks away, frowns at the wall. I toss him a small stack of essays. “Here you go, grade a few. Then you can say we did something together.”

  He narrows his eyes at me. “What do you mean, Billy? I’m not trained in this.”

  “Just pick up a pen. Come on, it’s fun. Give it a B minus, then write, Try a little harder next time.’”

  He frowns again, shakes his head. “I didn’t raise you like this, to shirk your responsibilities.”

  “Hey, maybe that’s the next stage of grief—shirking.”

  He lifts the papers and places them back on my stack. “Must be the first stage, then.”

  “First? You’ve been dying half a decade now,” I say.

  “Right,” he says and looks at me. “And that girl’s been gone three months.”

  Near two in the morning I hear him moving through the hallways, muttering to himself, opening the refrigerator, clicking the mouse on the computer. He started an online club called the Tommy Kesler Society and so far has tracked down and recruited seventeen Tommy Keslers, two of them women, one of them as far away as Madagascar. They have nothing in common and little to do beyond tracking down the next Tommy Kesler. Some of them plan to meet next year at a Western Sizzlin’.

  Again I can’t sleep and so lie in the dark looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Laney stuck to the ceiling. In college she’d majored in astronomy, because, she said, it was the only area of study where a final exam could be canceled by clouds. On our ceiling she made the Big Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia, all to scale, saying she didn’t want to forget the knowledge she worked so hard to gain, no matter how useless it might be. I reach over to her empty side of the bed, the sheets smooth and cool. One of my old T-shirts is still stashed under the headboard where she kept it in case of a fire, so the firefighters wouldn’t see her naked. I pull the shirt to my face and breathe it in, then turn over and pick up the phone. I punch in the numbers for the watercolorist’s house, which I always imagine painted in faded pastels, the edges running over the lines that define it. It rings twice, then the watercolorist picks up. It has happened before and I never know what to say to him.

  “Hello? Hello?” His voice is tinged with sleepiness and panic.

  “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” I say to him. My hands shake.

  “Oh, God, it’s him again,” he says, his words muffled, far off.

  “Billy, damn it.” Laney’s voice, and his behind her, their words tumbling together in the sheets of his bed. “This stops, right now, tonight,” she says, “Or from here on I only talk through the lawyer.” She hesitates. I can see her, pulling the sheet up over her breasts, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Billy, please.”

  “I was missing you, wanted to see how things are.”

  “It’s two in the morning. Things are dark and quiet.” I hear him behind her saying just hang up the phone.

  “Dad’s here.” I can hea
r him, too, as I say it, shutting down the computer, walking through the hall. The screen door bangs shut behind him.

  “Yeah? How’s the cancer coming along?” In her voice I hear her half smiling; for a long time Dad’s illness was a joke between us, one of those little tent pegs that stake down the corner of a marriage.

  “Well, not much change, but he’s working on it.”

  She laughs a little, sighs.

  “I’m gonna hang up now, Billy,” she says. I say, “Yeah” and then she does. I hold the phone against my ear until it begins its machine-gun fire of beeps.

  I figure to find Dad on the porch and follow him out with a couple of bourbons, to take in the night noises of tree peepers and distant highway traffic, but he isn’t there. I look out into the fan of light from the house, at the glimmer of cans and bottles I have strewn there. Nothing but his Vette, shiny with dew in the driveway.

  “Dad?” My voice sounds like any voice at night, like an intrusion, a rip in the surface of the quiet.

  I set the bourbons on the porch rail and walk out in my shorts and bare feet, down the road a ways, until I find him next to the rise of fill dirt that surrounds the new self-storage facility being built, over by the runoff pond. He is doing the newspaper trick, folding the edges up into a lantern shape and twisting them closed. When I was a kid, he’d let the lanterns go on the Little League field behind us, would do it on Fourth of July instead of buying me bottle rockets or firecrackers. He’d argue that they were better than fireworks, but something about them those close summer nights struck me as off. They made no noise as they burned, and we watched them without a word. The whole endeavor was too … ceremonial somehow. I didn’t have the words to say so then—I remember only standing beside him (my mother back at the house) and watching, but casting my attention toward the gut-shaking boom of the professional fireworks show at the football field, or the neighborhood rattle of firecracker strings, straining for the sound of them instead of all that quiet. Now, as then, he twists the ends closed and sets fire to them with his Zippo lighter. As heat fills the hollow paper it lifts into the air, slowly spinning.