I wrote about my first wife in The Rumpus, and my old best friend in Down in the River. And I wrote about my mom in Horses All Over Hell. At my Iowa graduation, my mom told my advisor, Marilynne Robinson, "That woman in the book isn't me!"
She was right of course. Many surface moments were hers, but the creative process changes everything.
Some have had negative reactions to my writing, as if I had captured their spirits and put them in aspirin bottles. My first wife never spoke to me again after The Rumpus article came out. That's fine. The only way to remedy her complaint is to stop writing.
Some at the Eugene Library were miffed that I wrote about a day when I took my son there (Explored in my novel The Lord's Hacker). It was a rough moment in which a preacher was telling everyone they were going to hell, and some librarians were trying to handle this person. There was good and bad behavior all around, with mitigating circumstance.
I don't write hagiography, but I never use actual names. That practice is designed to hurt people, as it will climb on Google. I'm interested in experiences, not in revenge.
But if librarians, of all people, don't know that writers seize material from the places they go, far be it from me to teach them. If Thoreau was ever rebuked for writing about people he knew, the accuser was not a literary person.
I was proud when a Yale man at Iowa wrote negatively about me in a Harvard Review story. It's better to be written about than not at all. What’s the big deal?
In “The Absence of Predators,” my character is a crazy kid who wears an ill-fitting blazer. He observes weird stuff that others don't observe. Damn right!
I'm sure not going to get hurt feelings over it. The truth is, I was honored.
I’m suspicious of the recent impulse many writers have to be incredibly decent human beings. If anything, this mood seems to make people worse, more judgmental, less forgiving, and it’s certainly bad for writing. More and more, in current short stories I read, the protagonist dwells on the behavior of others, and rarely on his own.
Nearly perfect humans do exist, but they are as rare as the Riverine rabbit. There can't really be so many people who are so wonderful. Thank goodness it's not necessary for writers or their characters.
After all, it's only a flawed protagonist who has room to change, and writers need to locate flaws in themselves to leap creatively into their characters.Once in the late 90s, a girlfriend told me that she and a friend, in 7th grade, escorted a very hirsute younger boy to the road and took down his pants when cars passed. This wasn’t funny or charmingly “edgy.” She was ashamed of the event. Her mom was a mess and her brother was dangerous, and so she did something awful. She wrote about it in a compelling and honest way.
When my family's Christian community cut us off the vine after my dad confessed that he quit drinking--and thereby revealed that he used to drink--I targeted the nicest boy on my baseball team and punched him in the face. The other boys had followed their parents' orders to shun me after we were cut off, but the boy I punched had still counted me as a friend. But I didn't fear him--he was nice--so he was the one I socked.
In my short story "Convent Boys," two boys encounter a special needs boy who seems to understand that they are poor and unhappy. To pay him back, the boys hit him with a pillow and rough him up a little. While this never happened, I used my experience of punching the nice boy, and the guilt I still have about it, and transferred it to "Convent Boys."
We can get bogged down in too much confession. But when we're not allowed to confess anything due to fear of others' politics or religion, a little confession can be a good thing. It sure beats pretending that we're wonderful and that only others are bad.
The 90s was a more creative time than our own moment. Therefore people were more likely to reveal themselves, in short stories or everyday life.
The ability to admit shameful moments and explore them in fiction shows a healthy awareness that we and others are flawed. Conversely, projecting false positivity, concealing flaws, and blaming others reveal a person who lives as a hidden creature, hidden even from himself, and this person is far more likely to damage others and to produce bad writing.
Exploring a flawed protagonist doesn’t mean the author committed the sin. Rather, there’s a basic stance that the character, and the author, have the ability to do wrong. In stories by Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Joyce Carol Oats, and Raymond Carver, we see sympathetic characters who are sometimes up to no good. And that is fiction at its best.
Writers' Jobs
I gave a reading at Barnes & Noble in Eugene three years ago. The women staff I spoke to were relentlessly positive. My books and background were amazing, and everyone we knew in common was amazing. They were amazing, and I was amazing, too.
After the reading, my country friend who'd come with me piped up to a B&N staff member, "Me and Ryan work together at Fred Meyer!"
For the rest of the night, staff traded their amazing faces for frowns, looks of shocked disappointment, or awkwardness. They seemed unable to shake the mental pictures of their nice educated author stocking freezers with Hungry Man dinners or cleaning up spills on aisle seven.
It would be no use telling them that Thom Jones was a high school janitor and Janet Frame tended a cafeteria counter.
My first Barnes and Noble reading was in Boise twelve years ago. I taught creative writing to seniors at BSU. It seemed that my status as an adjunct professor trumped my accomplishments as a writer. Staff and others asked me more about my job than my writing.
Becca was thirty-six and I was forty-three, older parents, but we had a baby and a book, and it was the best time. Becca had recently been chosen for the Mayor's Art Show in Eugene. There was an article about her painting in the Register-Guard before we left for Boise.
Before those Eugene days and Boise days, when I was in Portland around 2010, most of the creative people I knew worked at pizza joints or cafes. Others were janitors, etc. Portland was changing, due to California development and influence, but there was still a blue-collar ethos to hipster and creative life in Portland.
It was your life, your art, that mattered, not your job. If anything made a person suspect in old Portland, it was sweating for another man's dream while neglecting to have any dreams of his own.
I lived there in the 90s as well--started writing in '95--and I knew writers, musicians, artists, and a young film-maker. Elliot Smith, Katherine Dunn, Bob Pollard, and Chuck Palahniuk were a few of our gods, urging us forward to touch the sun.
By 2019, half of Los Angeles County moved to Portland. Our fine city transformed. Many Californians were already here, but they had Portland values. The newcomers were all business.
Almost no one discussed books and films in bars anymore. It was all about money or jobs. People might discuss some computer system for two hours.
It seemed creative people were suddenly icky types, especially poor ones who worked low jobs so that they could have the mental ease to do their real work.
So, most people I knew quit writing and went to work in tech. It's true they had to pay higher rents, but I sensed the real reason was to remedy the sudden shame they felt about carrying a food stamps card.
But there's often more adventure in blue-collar jobs, or, at least, the people you work with are more raw and interesting. Cormac McCarthy said you should work at places where your characters might work.
I worked on a barge on the Ohio River recently, and was a lead at a cannery in Alaska for three seasons. I carried a hose on a mop-up crew in the Oregon forest. Picked pears in Eastern Oregon two years ago. Worked with old men in the layout department at the Oregonian. At all of these jobs I had good friends. It was always interesting.
I taught ESL in Naxos, Greece, Salamanca, Spain, and Atlanta, and worked in natural food stores in Boston and San Francisco.
My best college teaching jobs were well-paid and enjoyable, but some were unpleasant, low-respect, and practically volunteer.
I worked a season in various university basements. One supervisor at the football stadium was tall, handsome, mentally sharp, and knew about machines. He told me, "Do you have any idea how fucking stupid it made me feel when you told me you're a writer? It pissed everyone off. Not just me."
It was unusual candor for the blue-collar world or anywhere. He was more impressive in his knowledge and abilities than most writers and academics I knew.
But I know I'm not welcome, with my degrees and books, though I also have a GED. At the start of each job, I always decide never to mention anything that is above basement level, but it leaks out eventually, and causes trouble.
Still, there are stories to be found in basement labyrinths, etc., that you won't find in offices, classrooms, and other such places.
My Literary Friend Turned John Wayne
One of my friends, Adam, was nerdy and subtly effeminate. He had eidetic recall of any book, and his intelligence was interesting and unique. He tutored high math at the university. His favorite musician was Elliot Smith. He got an MFA after taking my creative writing class in Portland.
When he returned, we often met at the 21st Street Bar.
"I found the best way to read the hard parts in Ulysses is to turn the book upside down," he said. "Your brain knows it's seeing things wrong, and so you can see the meanings easier."
He wasn't trying for weird. He had a sense of the way the brain worked--often counterintuitively. But he was hyper normal, at the same time. He was tall, with short hair, glasses, button up shirts, dainty sips of his drinks, punctual, fastidious.
When his dad died and left him his tree nurseries in Wilsonville, he adopted a voice that was a little bit John Wayne. Some of his comments were like movie lines.
"I been chasing my dad's ghost," he said, "but he's chasing me, more like it."
I was haunted when my dad died, too, and I changed a little, moving toward him in his absence.
When Adam and I went out for drinks, though, he was often his old self, kicking around books and anything else. He recited bits of Infinite Jest and Mrs. Dalloway, not like a school boy, but like someone who was interested in people and the world.
He moved between these literary and cowboy identities, until his father's persona emerged at last. Employees at the tree nursery had made fun of Adam for years, and his dad never stood up for him. Now he owned the joint. He liked the power. His new way of talking was part of that.
"Cows are good for any man to see," he said once on the phone, during a whiskey drunk. "Grow 'em up, watch 'em grow."
The tree farms he now owned were surrounded by grazing pasture. He seemed to give himself over to country life. Soon he was moving into one of the homes his family owned.
I understood his transformation to an extent. I had grown up in a country household, where it was all Johnny Cash, Little House, and church. It wasn't a bad way sometimes, when I was a kid, but I was sad to see another writer succumb to middle age.
We liked to quote from Red River.
"I don't like quitters," I said, "especially when they're not good enough to finish what they start."
He put on some weight, and my brilliant oddball friend got lost inside of it, as if sleeping in there. Adam and I talked on the phone for a couple of years until it was clear there wasn't much more to say.
He hadn't done anything wrong except swallow his best self. A lot of people do that.
Alphas
The numbers of alphas in Eugene are increasing. By the term alpha, I mean those strident performative guys who always have something to prove, and aren't comfortable as men. They seem to feel diminished and insecure, and so they burst their engines or deepen their voices unnaturally.
All exceptions granted. There are men who seem that way, until you discover they're authentic people. But it's a rare exception. I like anyone who's bright and interesting, whether it's Ernest Hemingway or Oscar Wilde.
Yesterday, a man in a Cybertruck waited for me to cross the street. He shook his head at me in vaudeville fashion, as if to show his disapproval. I suppose I must have fit his description of a "libtard."
I was walking to the library where I have had good experiences and bad.
Last night, when I updated my library friend about my recent experience at her place of work, she told me there are male alphas and female alphas, and that was new to me, so I've been thinking about alphas.
At the counter on the library's first floor, I asked an employee if they ever found the little boy who was lost the previous week. The library was on lockdown then and many of us helped search for the kid. I came into it late, so I walked the second floor twice, then the third floor. They gave us updates. No one ever found him. I felt sick because I had worried about my own son getting lost. The mother waited in the building, no doubt out of her mind.
The employee appeared unconcerned about any of it, as if it was just some boy--zero interest. "No, I'm not going to give you that information," she said. She seemed to take pleasure in withholding the news. There was something suggesting a smile behind the sternness.
There could have been a policy not to disclose information. But playing the emotionless bureaucrat was not a good look when there was concern for human life.
Alphas tend to be narcissists. They want to control people, deny people, or own them outright, when possible.
Ten years back, an acquaintance demanded that his adolescent daughter adopt all of his views. Every other comment at the table directed her to be more "Christian" or "ladylike." When she gained some weight, he tacked her swimming suit onto her bedroom door and said she wasn't going swimming until she could fit into it again.
This alpha was a tech bro, respectful at the bar, though sometimes you don't learn about a person until you spend time in his house.
Strictness usually backfires. The father of a friend of mine destroyed a hundred of his rap CDs in the early aughts, and thus paved the road for his successful career as a DJ. Sometimes there's a good ending.
One day recently, a woman and her ten-year-old boy left the library. He wore a "Celebrate Women" T-shirt, and when he saw me notice it he crossed his arms over the shirt. Of course it's good to celebrate women, and it's good to celebrate boys too. She seemed only to celebrate herself.
Kids who aren't allowed to be themselves often have to invent false personalities. And it's anyone's guess how it will turn out.
Chris Offutt
Offutt was a visiting writer at BSU at one point. The MFA director, Mitch Weiland, told me they went to a bar in Boise one day, and some Marine was talking shit to a woman at a different table, using sexual and demeaning language.
Offutt told the Marine to shut his mouth. When the Marine continued to intimidate the woman and mention her physical assets, Offutt smashed a wine bottle on the table, held onto the bottle neck, and stood up. Then Mitch hustled him out of there before it came to that.
As a student and teacher at Iowa, Offutt was a wild Southerner. He got into fights at bars now and then, but he confronted the ugly, mean, shitty hearts in some people when he encountered them, and I believe he does that in his writing, in part. He didn't look for fights, but he didn't shy from physical confrontations either. Often he stood up for others.
Fistfights were more common then in the Midwest, twenty years ago. Even workshop students resorted to their fists over discussions of books, once or twice, after too many drinks at the Foxhead.
When he was my teacher at Iowa, Offutt had a parole officer. This seemed amazing to me. I was intrigued. I had tangled with cops and judges as a young teenager, and spent nights in juvenile detention, but here Chris was still a wild child in his 40s.
He's married now and has slowed down in his drinking, as they say. He went to Hollywood and wrote for True Blood and Weeds, then published a couple of Southern noir novels. He's one of the best writers of our time. The man is even big in France, where he has won four national literary awards. But his books, published in twelve languages, are known around the world.
He seemed to like my work pretty well, though he never said so directly in workshop. Once, I walked home in the snow through downtown, and I heard Chris shout my name behind me. He'd slowed in his Lexus at a cross street. He called, "I think you're a really good writer!"
That was big news for me in those struggling, insecure days. Many Iowa students seemed like patrician hipsters, too ivy-league, too PC, for my taste. My class had four students from Yale, and there was another, from Princeton, whose family vacationed with the Kennedys. Most of my fellow students didn't favor my Idaho stories. But one of my friends, Katie, a Harvard grad with acne and bright red hair, had as much social anxiety as I had, and we were together against the others.
But Offutt's compliment helped me a lot. I didn't tell anyone about it, except my girlfriend. He and I didn't talk much, but we had a rural, working class connection. He saw past the stereotypes of Idaho that were a sticking point for graduates of Old Eli.
They believed you shouldn't write about rural areas, or if you did, you should do it in a disapproving, Mother Jones sort of way. One of them told me that the crazy drunk uncle in my story "They Work at Night" didn't deserve a voice. Another told me that Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories was a "no no."
Who were these shocking weenies? I didn't know why they were here. Many of these people went on to be lawyers, high-end political fundraisers, or not so literary genre writers.
Beyond the many narrow students, the Iowa Writers' Workshop was an accepting place. Maybe the best evidence of their absolute commitment to writing was their warm inclusion of Chris Offutt, who was a prized author. Director Frank Conroy may have had to fetch him from jail now and then, but he always had a job waiting for him. Offutt was charming and well-liked by men and women. But I doubt a traditional academic department would have endured his Southern traits.
I learned more about writing from Chris Offutt than from any other teacher. His trouble with the law only made him more interesting.
On Remodeling the Writing Factory. Log Cabin Literary, 2006.
When I started writing twenty-five years ago, I had the discipline of a German factory foreman. Every morning at six, I leapt into my work boots and began slapping keys, writing in furious labor seven, eight, ten hours, breaking only to smoke, gulp coffee, and brood. I shouted at sentences, as if the words were lazy employees. Of course, the more I abused the words on the page, the more they refused to function, and the door to creativity was often locked.
Now and then, as if against my will, I slipped into the gentle trance of art.
But much of my time was spent in this factory, noisy with the clatter of fast machines, the sound of will, ambition, and control. I worked in frustrated insistence that a convincing world appear on the page now. It's a miracle such a "work ethic" finally produced a book. There was a price to clocking hours in a cold, noisy place: prematurely gray hair, a breakdown, and a constant scowl.
I altered my work habits. The new, calmer method was more promising, and it was certainly more fun.
Now when I sat down to work, I didn't touch the keys for thirty minutes or so. I sipped coffee and looked out the window--waiting, listening, sitting still. The factory knew I had come to work, and it would wake to its task in due time. There was no hurry, no clock to punch anymore. The tools were silence, calm, patience. I trusted the unconscious to do its slow work.
Soon the factory lights flickered on, the conveyor belts rattled to motion. I glimpsed pieces of my deepest self riding the belts, memories, hallucinations: a sun-faded beach ball, a package of cellophane-wrapped hamburger, a snapshot of my father barbecuing.
When I was in that deeper place, I began to write. Soon recognizable shapes appeared on the page. The gray, still world began to turn, colors emerged. Hazy characters from my past and from my dreams, unconvincing in sketch form, stood and walked, moving and talking like people.
I'd like to say my writing comes faster now, that this slowness has accelerated my production. But that would be more bottom-line nonsense. What's needed is better work, enjoyable work, not faster production.
In literature, better means truer. And it's very hard to transfer emotional and psychological realities to the page. We'll fail most of the time, and knowing about this failure is good: Experiencing the pain of close but not quite, after so much effort, implies that we have a standard, and that our work will improve.
Henry James wrote a careful first draft simply in order to glimpse the germ of his novel's direction and possibilities. The real world moves too fast to see it clearly, and meaningfully, at first glance. Since the most perceptive of us humans are half-blind, groping creatures, we simply can't conjure a true world on the page now. A page a day! A book a year! Ten easy plots!
I left assembly-line writing behind me, and slowed down. Only the dreamy way will get me there, eventually. Writers need a lot of time to decide the simplest of things. Is this bright beach ball of my childhood a sweet, nostalgic thing? Is it an object of menace?
Don Quixote is my lead-man at the factory. Together we run a perfectly useless operation that produces an occasional object of beauty that we couldn't ever sell, and I rejoice. We're not creating romance novels or thrillers. We work for free over here.
I still go to the factory and work hard every day. Good writing needs form and shape, hard work, discipline. But I've remodeled the factory. There are smashed holes in the walls to let in the air, light, and birds. There are indoor gardens and a mysteriously pure stream. The machines are fixed to work at a slow, comfortable speed; they are fixed to quit often and, finally, to lie still, scattered with cowboy boots, whiskey bottles, old socks.
I'm a neglectful, diligent foreman, and it's a good job. The only rule is that I have to sit in the chair during operating hours, and yet I get to stare into space whenever I feel like it. Stretch my legs out, dream, and enjoy the work.
"THEY WORK AT NIGHT," published in Antioch Review in 2011, and in Horses All Over Hell in 2019.
Cory and his mom and little brother went to church every night, and once after Friday mass, they met Lucy at the hotel café. Lucy attended his mom’s A.A. meetings. She wore a long brown coat with a fur collar, in summer, and her hair was short, and she liked to wear aviator sunglasses pushed back on her head. She and her son had moved from the reservation a few years before. The booth window showed Cory how they looked to families driving by—two boys and two women in a diner at ten o’clock at night.
The ceiling vent rattled and cold air sprayed his shoulders.
“Why did Uncle Jerud sleep under the kitchen table last night?” Matt said.
Their mom held her cup for warmth, breathing steam. She told Lucy that her brother in law got a job selling insurance, and that he and Marty dressed up like cowboys and spied on their clients at the bars. “He’s not even trying to come up with good lies anymore,” she said.
“But they’re not lying,” Cory said. “They really are working undercover.”
Lucy stood and tossed a dollar on the table. “I have to pick up my boy at the movies. Stop by my place sometime.”
“They’re not lying,” Cory said.
His mom watched her cross the floor and slouch to her truck at the curb right outside. They smiled at each other, waving, as she drove away.
“Mom, she’s a janitor,” Cory said.
“Yes. Some places need cleaning up.”
“I want to go to sleep.” He glanced at where the sky would be. Long tubes of light reflected in the glass. “We have practice in the morning.”
They clicked shut the seat belts, and she tapped the breaks before their driveway. The porch bulb fanned a bright light on the front door. The two big windows presented black rooms. Cory disliked the outside light flaring while the inside lights were off.
Inside, she helped Matt get ready in the bathroom before tucking him in. Later the house began to creak. Cory knew that Matt didn’t like the creaking.
He trotted into Cory’s bedroom. “There’s a devil in my window,” he whispered. Cory flapped the sheet back and his brother dove in facing away and pulled his knees to his chest, folding up small against the bad things. Cory fit his arm around him, careful not to bother his sleep breaths. He was nice to hold onto when the house was quiet, dark.
A breeze rustled his curtains of gun-shooting cowboys. A chain clinked on the pole out back.
At breakfast his mom accidentally set a plate at his father’s empty chair. She clattered the plate back into the cupboard, put a kettle on, and sat with the boys. She read a magazine, eating bacon. She’d have tea, then rest till late afternoon, reading, napping.
Cory squinted into the back window sunrise.
“Here they come,” he said. “Mom.”
She rolled up the magazine and squeezed it in a fist. Across the back fields, their shapes walked toward home—his father and his uncle, melting against the sun.
They stumbled through the kitchen door laughing so hard they were quiet. His father fell against the stove, knocking the kettle, and rested his elbow on the hot red coil. His shirt sent up a trail of smoke. He dipped his arm into a tub of dishwater. “You guys booby trap the place? Ouch. Damn.” He dropped to a squat. “Ha ha!”
Jerud lay on the floor, laughing. “Booby trap! You kill me!”
When their laughter died, they sighed and hooted, giggled in fits. Jerud had moved here two weeks before. At dinner one night he said he was a tank, made of the same stuff, and what he drank in the bars was fuel for the next day.
“How many days in a row can you keep this up?” she said, when their giggling had settled. His father touched his elbow where he’d burned it.
“Ask my boss here,” he said. “Not easy doing two jobs.”
“Did you catch anybody?” Matt said.
“Caught one,” Jerud said. “Fella claimed a neck injury. We got video of him riding the bull down at the bar.”
“Where’s your video camera?” she said.
Jerud sniffed. “In the car, downtown.”
“Dad, we have practice,” Cory said.
“I know it, buddy. I’ll be there.”
His father lit a cigarette and tipped over and slept. Smoke drifted out of his mouth. The church men had asked him to coach the team. They told him they all took turns.
When the cigarette rolled off his finger, Jerud picked it up.
“Mind if I sleep over?” Jerud said.
“I don’t crash into your house half wild.”
He tapped an ash into his own crew cut. “Well, if you did, I wouldn’t kick you out.”
“Your brother is passed out in front of his children,” she said.
“Aw, you don’t get my sense of humor. Marty’s the only one who gets me.”
“Why don’t you stay at your apartment?”
“It’s empty, it’s lonesome. I’m not too sure about this town anyway. I’m thinking about a move to Vegas.”
“You’re going to quit another job?”
“I hear you been running with that Indian gal,” he said.
“She’s my friend.”
“Yeah, I been hearing.”
She turned off the stove and swung her purse from the chair, went out the back door and threw the magazine flapping over the yard. “Boys, come here!” she said. Matt and Cory followed her out the side gate.
They circled neighborhoods in her car, once around the church, twice around the graveyard. Cory sat in back. In the front seat Matt pounded the plastic farmer against the dash and the head snapped off. He stuck the body in the glove box. Her fingers shook when she floated a hand to change gears.
“Can we say a prayer?” Matt said. He was trying to sound holy for her.
“We’ll go to mass tonight.”
“Mom,” Cory said, “where are we going?”
“Your dad promised me in college, he said no more whiskey—ever. Jerud knows Marty can’t handle liquor. I shouldn’t speak, but you boys know what’s going on. Kids know. I remember. Kids know what’s wrong.”
“I have practice,” Cory said.
“Mr. Larkin might have to coach again.”
“Dad said he’s going to.”
“Honey, did you see your dad just now?” She found him in the rearview. “Did you see him? Did you?”
“Nothing’s a matter. He said he would. He can sleep for two hours and then we’ll go. Practice isn’t till nine.”
“We’ll visit Lucy. She won’t mind.”
She turned onto the river road. Far down in the canyon, house shadows striped the water, and the shimmering parts were like scales. They glided past their house, where his father was sick inside—his mom didn’t even look at it—and she turned onto a dirt road before the high cliffs, the road looping up and into the Orchards. The ground flattened. Rows of trees flashed by in angles. Then came desert country, and they entered a canyon dark in shade, with green fields at its bottom.
“Lucy said the first gravel drive on the left,” his mom said. She found the drive, followed its curves, and parked in front of a double-wide trailer, painted in colorful diagonal stripes and black figures here and there, bear, tree, hammer, hand.
Next to the trailer were fenced horses, two staring at the ground while another stared at the visitors. When they got out, Matt offered grass to the horses, but they didn’t want any. A creek slipped behind the trailer. On the shore, next to a tree painted six feet in red, a refrigerator lay on its back.
Canyon walls crowded the sky. Cory tipped his head to see the line of sun.
Lucy came outside in her long brown coat. She wore slippers that weren’t pink anymore. Her hair was messy. Cory scowled around at broken things in the dirt, a tipped over barbecue, a rusted bike. His mom was looking at the figures painted on the trailer. “I love your house,” she said. Then, “My God, are you okay?”
Lucy smiled. “It’s pretty mild as far as black eyes go.”
“Do you ever get any sun around here?” Cory said.
“Not much. But you appreciate it when it comes.”
“I think I’d like having shade,” his mom said.
“Why’s the fridge outside?” he said.
Lucy laughed. “I had to sleep in it last night.”
“Why?”
“What are you, a little cop?” his mom said. “She doesn’t have to tell you anything.”
“I’ll tell him if he wants to know,” Lucy said. “You mind?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Well, my husband came to visit my son. He was sober and I let him stay on the couch. But he’s got a mouth on him.” She pointed at her eye. “He gave me this, but I hit him first. Not good, not good. First sober punch I ever threw. Anyway, I wasn’t going to sleep in the house, not with him in it, so I went out back to the broken fridge and chopped out the freezer shelf and dragged the fridge next to the creek. I got in, in my sleeping bag, and shut the fridge door. Kept the freezer door open and listened to the creek. All told, it wasn’t a bad night.”
Lucy opened her front door, laughing. She laughed at anything.
“Look at you all, hugging your elbows. Yes, this canyon keeps cold. Come on in. Jason’s out fishing with his dad.”
Inside, the house smelled like wet ground. Against the far wall a couch sat with no legs, and below the front window, where a TV should’ve been, a green-bulbed lamp without a shade rested on the floor. The woodstove leaked smoke halfway up the pipe, thin clouds drifting near the ceiling. There was nothing on the walls but a couple of paintings. One showed an animal skull next to a fence. He could barely see. In the dim light, the paintings became windows that looked out to desert. Down the hallway a dryer scraped, wheezing.
“Can we stay a while?” His mom’s voice trembled. “Marty and Jerud just got home.”
“You look wore out.” Lucy gave her a hug, sliding a hand on her back. As the dryer buzzed, Cory waved a hand through a smoke stream slanting down the air.
“Mom,” he said. “We have practice.”
“We’ll make it,” Lucy said. “I’m meeting Jason at the field. Why don’t you rest a while first?” She led them down the hall to her bedroom. “Let me throw a cover on this bed real quick. Okay, lay down. Don’t feel funny. There’s room for the three of you.”
They lay down and she came back with an armload of clothes and let the warm things tumble on top of them. “These are extra hot. I was redrying them to have warm things to wear. It’s all a bunch of sweatshirts and T’s. Don’t talk, be still. I’ll wake you up soon.” Lucy floated a blanket down, trapping the warmth of the clothes. Over the window the shade was pulled down. It was like night. “Mmm,” his mom said.
After a while, when Matt and his mom were asleep or lying there, he rolled off the bed and ran out to the living room. Lucy caught him by the arm.
“You have troubles I know all about,” she said. “Your dad’s a drinker, right?”
“No.”
He walked up the gravel drive and down the canyon road, stretching his fingers and making fists. In a field a horse jerked its head up and gazed with laughter in its eyes.
“Why don’t you look away,” Cory shouted at it.
Somebody whistled behind him. It was Lucy, standing in the road, a hand on her head. “Come on back!” When he thought she must’ve heard him yell at the horse, he ran away on weird legs.
The road left the canyon. He found a trail that cut through the fields, toward his house a couple of miles away.
They were only five minutes late for practice, but the boys looked bothered when they pulled up, all of them quiet as if they had been talking. “Hey, kids!” his father shouted from the window. He yelled it too loudly. Cory jogged over to the boys. “See this arm?” he said. “Worth ten million.” But they didn’t believe it.
His father walked to the diamond shouldering bats and hauling a ball bucket. He crashed the bats in the dirt. In jeans and no shirt he knelt on one knee, to plan the day, Cory guessed. His elbow was red, with a skin bubble on it, where he’d burned himself. He grunted to his feet and stumbled back one step. He laid a hand over his mouth. At home Cory had found him sitting on the couch with a plate of uneaten breakfast in his lap while Jerud laughed at a cartoon. Cory led him out of the house and opened the door of his truck.
Steam rose off the grass now. A dog chased a butterfly across the field.
“Think I have to sit down,” his father said.
“Already?” Jason said. “Aren’t you going to hit balls to us?”
“You boys run laps a while.”
The boys glanced at each other. A couple of them stepped back, away from his father. They ran laps while he sat cross-legged holding his face.
Across the field, Lucy sat on her coat reading a book, in a T-shirt that pinched her armpits, the mirrored sunglasses over her eyes. Cory’s mom and brother must still have been resting in her bed.
Jason ignored his mom when they jogged past her. After the second lap they stopped in the shade and paced, out of earshot of any adults, hands on their hips, catching their breaths. Teddy Larkin, who was big-jawed like his dad, said, “Worse coach ever.”
“He works two jobs,” Cory said. “All day at the prison, and then at night he’s a detective.”
“He’s a drunk,” Jason said.
“Look,” Teddy said. “He’s trying to stand up.”
“He’s rising from the deep.”
“Will he do it, ladies and gentlemen? Will he stand up?”
Jason applauded. “He’s done it again. He got up.”
The boys clapped, all but Cory. At the backstop, his father stood with a bat on his shoulder. They found their mitts and kicked up dirt heading to center.
His father swung and missed in the haze. He knelt, stood, and he swung and swung, staggering around. More dust rose into the air. Hit it, hit it, and Cory finally heard the crack. They all shoved together, gloves high. Jason fired the ball back and punched his glove like he wanted another. They spread out. Cory quickly tugged the front of his shirt. Then when his father cracked a bad grounder a boy chased the ball into the street. A car slowed fast, bouncing to a stop with a shriek of tires.
“This is dumb,” Jason said. “Why’s he even coaching? We have a game next week.”
When he finally popped another one, nobody ran for it. Sun rays filled the curtain of dust, and his father swayed with a hand against the glare, as if he had lost them.
Lucy jogged over to him. They talked for a minute before she touched his shoulder and he sat in the shade. Lucy took over, hitting mostly grounders, and swinging and missing some. Cory was glad she wasn’t much better.
Although his father was ready for a night off, he went out that night and the next and every weeknight, too, and Cory and his brother and mom went to church.
On Friday night, instead of going to mass, they met Lucy at the fair. His mom and Lucy and Matt walked together while he kept far behind. They were like girlfriends in a movie, clutching each other’s arm, pointing, one of them running ahead. Matt held Lucy’s hand. She flipped a coin into a jar and won their mom a fat stuffed horse. The three of them rode the Tilt-a-Whirl. Flashing bulbs showed their laughing faces. After the ride Cory’s mom wanted him to stay close to them, but he kept running off, losing himself in all the people.
In the morning, the boys were tossing a ball in the backyard when Jerud stepped out the kitchen door. Her music shook the windows, a rock song called Jesus Take Me Home. Clouds slid across the sky and the day flickered bright and dark. In the night the wind had shifted their yard to a new mess—trash buckets and lawn chairs, tarps and cans and plastic jugs, all scattered around.
“She won’t mind me playing her CD,” Jerud said. “I’m trying to wake up your dad for the game. That boy’s out cold this time.” He sucked a breath and panted a little, coughed. “I had too many smokes last night.”
“Will you help warm up my arm?” Cory said. “Matt can’t take hard throws.”
An upstairs window slid open. His mom clutched her robe together at the neck. “Turn that off! I got two hours of sleep last night. Stay here one more time and you’ll find a bucket of water on your head.”
“You’re not baptizing me,” Jerud said.
He leaned a hand on the shed, above a plate of rusty nails and screwdrivers in the grass. His mom walked through the kitchen. The stereo went quiet, and a neighbor lady laughed—her kids were leaping a sprinkler—and Cory picked up a few twigs wet-eyed and tossed them to the ground.
“Is he going to coach my game?”
“I wouldn’t lay money on him,” he said. “Let me tell you boys a story.”
“My game’s clear down in Kirby.”
Jerud squatted. His knees popped. He sucked at a cigarette with no filter.
“Me and your dad and the cattle dogs. I’ll tell you this because we were the same ages you boys are. That makes you old enough to hear.
“Our dad liked his herding dogs, but our mom hated them, and she wanted everything her way. Always laying in bed reading crazy religious shit. You know what I’m talking about.”
Cory glanced at his mom’s window.
“Dogs were everywhere. They thought they owned the place. One time one of the dogs got hold of Momma’s sleeve—on the road, in front of neighbors—and the next day she had a chore for us,” Jerud said. “She gave us a rifle and we boys went in the barn where she put a few unruly dogs. I did the deed first. Then your dad chased a dog, gun in hand, while I faced the big shut doors, us taking turns like that. They were slinking around close to the walls, whining. A couple of them were just puppies, but old enough to know it was time.”
Wind hissed in the trees and Matt’s hair came alive. “You shot them?” he said. Cory knelt and stabbed a screwdriver at the ground, concentrating on the slow, careful plunges.
“I want Mom,” Matt said.
“It was quite a time. Our mom speaking tongues like a preacher afire. That how you boys feel, about your mother?”
Cory looked at their bedroom window, reflecting sky. Jerud shouldn’t talk about his mom.
“I don’t know why your dad lets his wife run with that Lucy. Men in town are laughing at him. I wouldn’t stand for it.”
He picked tobacco off his tongue, looking at the fields. Weeds rolled like dogs running unseen.
“We have to be there,” Cory said. “In Kirby.”
“Don’t know what to tell you. Your dad’s in his hole.”
“Will you help us?”
“What’s your mother doing up there—surfing the Galilee? Why the hell do some women need so much rest?”
“She yells in her sleep at night,” Cory said, “and that makes her tired.”
“They say we marry our mommas. Your dad sure did. She doesn’t even go to your games. Mine didn’t either.”
“Too much noise for her, too bright.”
“Guess somebody has to take care of you kids,” Jerud said. “All right. I’ll go find my car downtown. We’ll try and do a Lazarus on that boy inside.”
The Kirby team was out fielding balls. When their coach hit a pop fly, he tipped his head and hopped on one foot, and if the ball was caught, he made a fist at his shoulder and whispered yes. Across the road, in a park, a sprinkler went ch ch ch, as if trying to water the grass before it went up in flames. There was nothing down here but desert, not even a breeze.
Teddy Larkin and Cory swung bats warming up, three at once, by the dugout. Teddy’s parents, in tennis clothes, had perched themselves in the middle of the bleachers, with the church families. Mr. Larkin had cancer the year before, but they all prayed until he had returned to his large, tanned self.
The other team jogged to their dugout. Mr. Larkin clapped. “You’re going down!” he said.
“Think I’ll ask my dad to coach,” Teddy said to Cory.
It was no surprise to see his father blinking slowly on the dugout bench. But a minute ago he’d pencil checked the roster with Matt. Cory thought he was okay after sleeping in the car. He’d said he was. When he woke up outside Kirby, he said, “I’m fine, I’m fine. Nothing wrong with me. Your mom in the car? You tell her no more from me, I’m done. No more drinking.”
“Dad,” he said now, “should we head out to center? It’s our turn to field balls.”
“I’m fine. It’s not that hot.” He took deep breaths. “Let’s start calling this a ball game.” He clapped twice. “You guys ready?” Then he jogged out of the dugout, doubled over, and disappeared around the corner. There was a retching noise in the parking lot.
Jason clawed the high fence behind home plate, shaking it. “Something happens every time,” he said. High atop the bleachers, Lucy sat alone, a book shut in her lap. “Watch yourself, son.”
Some of the church families, who sat below Lucy, talked among themselves, but Mr. Larkin used a loud voice: “Here’s a guy who drives drunk with his own boys. We saw him at the store, booze on his breath, kids in tow.”
Jerud sat at the bottom corner of the bleachers. “Don’t wreck on the way home,” he told them. “I work at the insurance company and you’re not covered, as of right now”—Jerud snapped his fingers—“and neither are your children. Nobody’s covered! You hear me? Nobody!”
Mr. Larkin turned his angry face at people’s shoes on either side of him. Everybody was quiet.
Cory twisted his glove in the fresh chalk line, messing it up, wishing that Mr. Larkin liked his family. The Larkins were the richest family in church. They led the Apologetics class. They carried up the gifts.
“You boys get on the field,” Mr. Larkin said. “We’re going to kill them!”
Cory sat in the dugout while the boys moved at his command. Way across the ball field, past the highway, a tiny plane flew up the Clearwater, wobbling in the calm air, as if guided by an unsteady pilot. Mr. Larkin shouted again. He kept shouting.
Lucy came into the dugout. She handed him a styrofoam cup of ice-water.
“Is my dad gone?” he said. “I heard a car leave.”
“Your uncle took him. He asked me if it was okay. Your little brother ran to the park across the street.”
“They’re not coming back?”
“No. Are you up for playing in this game?”
“I have to. Everybody does.”
“Not if they don’t want to. How’s your mom?”
“Really good. She’s at home, baking things.”
Lucy nodded. They left the field and crossed the park, Matt ran to them, his shoulders up and his face strange in fear. They walked between the brick buildings for something cold to drink.
In an alley, in the shade of a store, they drank the cold drinks Lucy bought them. She spoke to them. Somewhere past his inability to hear her, Cory was glad she was there. She held his hand when he reached for hers. He waited for the furious sound of the game to fade and disappear, though he continued to hear it even when the fans were silent. The ghosts of their hoarse cries hunted him through the hot streets while she laughed and told them jokes he couldn’t understand.
PEN America Justice Writing managers Robbie, Jess, and Caits
We will read published stories as models. Amy Hempel writes of a woman who abandons a close friend dying of cancer, and confronts the aftermath of her choice. 
