New Stories From the South 2010: The Year's Best

  I don’t know how to dance to this music, I say.

  Just follow my lead, Nancy says. She starts pushing me around the floor. I step on her foot once and she winces, but her smile climbs right back onto her face. She has waxy skin and bright red lips. Her hair is a cake of white curls. Her face sits behind a veil of wrinkles and creases, but the smile shines through it. She’s light in my arms and I take care not to crush her. She’s saying, Step and step and step and step. I smell the gin on her breath and I like it.

  When I finally get the step, she says, Atta boy!

  Her hands are rubbing at my back. I feel it in my chest, this feeling of almost burning warmth. It’s been a long time since I felt it. It’s how my body responds to kindness. I used to feel it at school, when a teacher would lean over me and show me how to draw cursive letters. Or when an older kid showed me how to fly a kite. I thought I had outgrown the ability to have that feeling. I had forgotten about it. But here I am, feeling it again as Nancy rubs my back.

  I’m lost in these thoughts when Chet taps me on the shoulder and asks to cut in. I surrender Nancy like a real gentleman, transferring her hand like it’s a parakeet that has to hop from my finger to his. He says, Thank you kindly, sir, and pretends to tip a hat.

  No problem, sir, I say.

  What a classy bunch of fellas, Nancy says, eyes rolling.

  Looking out from the haze trapped in my car, I can see them, silhouettes jitterbugging in the rosy window. The music is faint, but I tap along on the steering wheel. Maybe it’s sad to say, but it’s been just about the best party I’ve ever attended. Through the window they look like a movie flashed on a wall, hanging in space with no connection to time. It seems impossible that I stepped out from it, or that I could get back in. It’s like a soap bubble you try to put in your pocket.

  I pick up the moustache, which has curled up from the heat, and I smooth it under my nose. It still has some stick. From across the street, I hear a song end and everyone shouts out, More!

  That’s all I need to be called back. I cross the dark street and walk up the curvy brick path. I finish the joint leaning against a massive pepper tree, listening as I press at the moustache.

  They’re laughing in waves, singing harmonies. Someone’s mixing drinks, shaking ice like a maraca. Someone’s slicing meat with an electric knife. Why couldn’t I have met them a long time ago, and played their music and eaten their cheese and crackers and drank their gin? But they didn’t exist a long time ago, I know. Not as they are now. They only exist now and not much into later.

  My dad didn’t talk much. In the time I knew him, he only said one religious thing. He said, You know why people like beats? Because they tell you what’s going to happen next. I’ve thought about that a lot. I think he was talking about patterns, about loops. And it’s true that once you hear a measure or two of the beat, you know what’s going to happen next and what to do when it happens. And the part that makes me think everything still has a chance—always has a chance—to work out is that you never know when the beat has completed a full cycle. This means everything in life that seems so random could actually be part of a beat. We just don’t know yet. The full measure hasn’t been played.

  The door opens and one of the ladies peers out. It’s Nancy.

  There you are, Stanley! she says when her eyes lock in on me.

  I wave, thinking I should probably tell her my real name.

  Don’t think I don’t recognize you behind those handlebars.

  I touch the moustache and smile.

  She shuffles toward me and I offer my arm.

  Got you right where I want you, she says.

  She slowly leads me around to the other side of the pepper tree.

  Whoops. Tipsy, she says when she trips on a root.

  We step out on the lawn under the massive dark canopy. I can see a rope slicing down from a high branch, catching light from the house. I follow it down with my eyes and see that it is weighted on the end with a tire swing. Nancy pulls me to it.

  We have this here for the grandkids, but they’ve outgrown it, she explains. It needs a muscle man to get it going and here you are. Lift me?

  Before I know it, she has both her arms around my neck and she’s hanging off me like a human necklace. I scoop up her legs and slide her into the tire. All I can say is, Really? You want to swing?

  Swing, baby, swing, she says. Be-dap bap bap!

  I look up at the rope. It looks solid, but it’s dark so who can tell.

  I stand back. There’s a buzzed eighty-year-old woman hanging a couple feet off the ground in front of me, jewelry jangling, white hair slightly aglow.

  Come fly with me, she sings, Come fly, we’ll fly away!

  I’ll swing her a little, I think. Why not?

  I push her gently forward again. She’s shaking her head.

  Come on now, she says. Put some muscle into it! We’re not going to get off the ground if that’s your idea of swinging.

  I give her a good push and she swings out over some of the yard.

  That’s better!

  She swings back into me and I grab on to the tire and throw it out into the darkness. She goes with it, saying, Atta boy. Now really put your back into it!

  She comes back at me and I sidestep her like a bullfighter, but as she passes by again, I throw my weight into a push that drops me to my knees. I watch her sail up and away, then reach the top of her arc, ease to a point, then fall back at me. She’s yelling, Woohoo!

  I roll out of the way and get to my feet in time to add to her momentum as she swings by. I watch her flying upward, now higher than the roof of the house. So high, her feet are up above her and her head aimed at the ground. The rope is creaking. The tree is moaning, shuddering when she hits the end of some slack.

  All the way, honey! Loop the loop! Loop the loop!

  I stand back and watch her moving past me like the arm of a metronome. She’s keeping time but losing the beat with every pass, slowing more and more, until I come in and use everything I have to get her back on the beat, to hold the time steady. It will only slow down if I let it. I step in after her as she jangles by and try to send her over the top.

  Glorious! she shouts as she sails up into the darkness.

  Then I hear the guys yelling inside. Something crashes and someone screams. Be right back, I tell Nancy, giving her another shove into space.

  Inside, I find the living room a mess. The coffee table has been knocked over and crackers and peanuts cover the ground. The guys are trying to pull Wally and Clyde apart as they grapple on the floor. I push in and pick up Wally.

  Clyde comes with him, then lets go and falls to the ground with a grunt. The others pull Wally away as Horace helps Clyde to his feet. Clyde makes a big show of dusting himself off.

  Hey, guys, I say. Chill out!

  You’re lucky this kid came along, Clyde says. I was close to murdering you.

  You see what you did, you son of a bitch! Chet is yelling at Clyde. You see?

  Chet points at Wally’s ear, which is ripped a little by the lobe. Blood runs down into his collar. Wally dabs it and looks at his fingers. He rushes at Clyde but I push him back and he falls onto the couch.

  You’re all a bunch of assholes, Horace says, swatting at the air. You’re all bent on ruining a good thing.

  What’s going on? I say.

  Everything has to end, Wally says. It’s the way of the world. You think you can escape that?

  At first, I think they’re talking about the party, the ladies. But what I soon realize is that they’re talking about the band. They’re talking about breaking up the band.

  I sit down on the couch. Well, goddamn.

  You said it was over when Abe died, Wally tells Clyde.

  Then they’re all shouting about Abe, who I learn was the drummer who just died. Abe was their meter man, their beat. It seems that Clyde promised Abe on his deathbed the band was kaput.

  But you just got to keep going with the charade,
Chet says. Look at us, for Christ’s sake, we’re down from fifteen guys to just the five of us.

  I count the guys and it’s clear that Chet isn’t counting me. I’m six. If they want me, I’m six.

  You think anyone cares about what we’re doing? Chet yells.

  They argue on, shouting in each other’s faces. Ruth comes in and says if they don’t leave she’s calling the police, but they ignore her as they bring up old complaints about each other: Horace is losing his ear and he’s hitting a lot of clinkers. Wally’s lip is shot. Chet can’t make it through a song without getting dizzy.

  It’s DOA, Wally is saying. It’s DOA.

  I reach up and pull off the moustache and smooth it out on my thigh, then crumple it up in my hand and stuff it in my pocket. Outside, I can hear a woman’s frail voice, calling for someone named Stanley.

  Kenneth Calhoun is astonished to realize he has lived in the South for ten years. During this residency, his short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Fence Magazine, Fiction International, Quick Fiction, Salt Hill, and other publications. He has also won the Italo Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction and the Summer Literary Seminars/Fence Magazine fiction contest. He currently resides in the International Pavilion at Elon University, where he teaches interactive media.

  A year out of high school, I made a living as a drummer. I taught lessons, did some theater, and played in two bands. One was a wedding band. The other was a post-punk, neighbor’s nightmare called Hemingway Shotgun. We played all the hot clubs and bars. Only we played them on Tuesday night. Around that time, my grandfather used to invite me to a concert-in-the-park series to hear Dixieland, which I secretly loved. Most of the musicians were pretty elderly, but they could still tear it up. Sitting in front of the bandstand with a crowd of senior citizens, carving at the inevitable cheese log with a fistful of crackers, I’d sometimes entertain myself with an absurd fantasy in which the ancient drummer would keel over and I’d have to fill in, saving the day. All this was nearly forgotten until my dad joined a Dixieland band after retiring. Most of his bandmates were in their seventies and beyond. It wasn’t long before members started dying off and the band began to shrink. The fantasy of filling in came back to me, and this time I did something with it.

  Marjorie Kemper

  DISCOVERED AMERICA

  (from Southwest Review)

  In the fall of 1963, before John and I left California on what we were billing as our “Discover America Trip,” people warned us we might hit bad weather. And there was some snow in the Rockies, but most of the heavy weather turned out to be inside the car; elsewhere, the fine Indian summer seemed destined for a long run. We went all the way north to Canada. Even there they were still enjoying summer. They wore light clothes and surprised expressions. Then we turned south.

  In Kentucky, at an abandoned rock quarry, John and I made love for what turned out to be the last time. Under sycamores which blazed red and gold. Driving south to Memphis, John began to itch and scratch.

  “It’s poison oak, or poison ivy, I can’t tell which,” he said.

  It was poison oak, but I didn’t see any particular reason to tell him. And it was serious, because John was one of these people who swell up like the Goodyear Blimp if they’re bitten by a bee. We drove through Kentucky and into Tennessee. While John drove I scratched his shoulders for him.

  “I can’t wait to get home,” he said, his voice hoarse, even the membranes of his throat were now irritated and swelling.

  “I am home,” I said, meaning the South, where I had lived my whole life until I’d gone away to college in California and met John.

  “You know what I mean. I’m looking forward to it being just you and me again, in our own house. Jesus, I wish you knew how to drive! You’re getting your license the day we get back.”

  Of course, it hadn’t been just “you and me” in our house for a long time. But I wasn’t supposed to know that.

  John had been enthusiastic about seeing the America that lay beyond California, and so long as we had been in the north he seemed to like what he saw. But starting in Tennessee, John became more and more critical. Even the scenery irked him. He’d been outraged by the shacks on the edges of fields.

  “Look at all those abandoned places,” he said. “Why doesn’t somebody pull them down?”

  “They’re not abandoned,” I said. “They’re sharecroppers’ houses.”

  “You call those houses?” John asked angrily, as if I’d personally refused the occupants plumbing and whitewash.

  “I’m only saying they’re occupied.”

  “I don’t know how you people live with yourselves.”

  I didn’t say anything. John was the first person I’d ever had any difficulty living with.

  By the time we made Memphis, and my Aunt Louise and Uncle Harold’s house, John was turning a bad color.

  The next morning, he was so swollen, his neck disappeared; it looked like his head was sitting on his shoulders. Calamine wasn’t going to get it. Not an ocean of the lotion could have prevailed. My young cousins, five and eight, stared at John openly.

  “John’s head ate his neck,” Teresa said.

  “John’s as red as my fire engine,” Paul said, holding up this vehicle next to John’s face for comparison.

  “Go away,” John croaked.

  My aunt called the doctor she used for emergencies, usually having to do with Paul and Teresa—two congenital hellions who were forever splitting their lips, gashing their knees, and knocking out teeth—their own or each other’s. Dr. Grueber’s office was in his house ten minutes away, Louise told us. He’d see us right away, and it was better than sitting for hours in the emergency room at the hospital.

  The house was just on the edge of town. On the verge of a black suburb. Actually, it wasn’t a suburb, it was plain old outskirts. Some of you may remember outskirts. A light-skinned black woman let us in and showed us to the kitchen. This was my aunt’s doctor’s office: a kitchen in a run-down frame house with torn screens on the outskirts of Memphis. I wish I could say I was surprised.

  Two little coffee-colored, red-haired boys were running in and out at the back screen door. Clearly, they were the doctor’s own. And that did surprise me, because my aunt’s views on “miscegenation” were broadcast regularly and well-known to us all. Perhaps the doctor and this woman had a grand passion, which had put convention in the shade for my aunt. But from the way they spoke to one another, not even that. Still, Grueber was a doctor. He had a diploma from Heidelberg University, hanging on his kitchen wall over wallpaper decorated with bunches of grapes.

  When we’d pulled up, Dr. Grueber had been working on a GM van in his driveway. He was middle-aged—I couldn’t help thinking he was the right age to have worn a German uniform during World War II. He washed his hands at the sink with Borax. He dried them on a towel hanging off the kitchen stove.

  “So! Poison ivy!”

  “Right,” John whispered. John’s head had eaten his neck; John was the color of Paul’s fire truck, he was in no condition to question his new doctor’s credentials, his diagnosis, or his living arrangements.

  “Cortisone,” the doctor said briskly. “Some epinephrine for good measure, I think,” he added, eyeing John.

  Dr. Grueber opened the fridge and batted around in it. A family-size bottle of ketchup fell out on the floor. The doctor kicked at it, and it lodged beneath a baseboard that had never seen a scrub brush. He called to the woman in German.

  She was leaning against a counter and answered him in English. He found what he was looking for in the door. Where she’d said it was.

  “Roll up your sleeve,” he said. But John’s arms were so swollen that his sleeve had to be slit with a bandage scissor before the doctor could administer the injections. At least John didn’t faint, as he had when we got the blood tests for our marriage license. That had surprised me because John was a research chemist and did far worse things to rabbits all day long than draw their blood.
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  The doctor listened to John’s chest with a stethoscope and took his blood pressure. I think he was vamping. He was giving the drugs time to work. Gradually John began to look more human. He cautiously cleared his throat.

  “So,” Dr. Grueber said, “you’re starting feeling better?”

  John nodded and smiled.

  “You are traveling the country, your aunt told me.”

  John began to tell him about our trip, haltingly at first, but as his throat cleared, he achieved his usual pedantic stride. John delighted in maps, in gas mileage, in alternate routes, so he had a great deal to say. He made no mention of the rock quarry.

  The doctor’s wife continued to lounge against her kitchen counter. She looked angry. Or maybe just tired. I thought she might be as sick of Dr. Grueber as I was of John. Our eyes met only once, and then by accident, we both dropped our gaze at the same exact moment.

  “Lorraine, let’s have some coffee and kuchen.”

  Lorraine filled the kettle and put it on the stove with a thump.

  As I’d known he would, John began to tell the doctor that as a child he’d lived in Germany. The doctor naturally asked him if he spoke German. Ja.

  I had been struggling through my language requirement at Scripps when John and I met. John was an assistant professor at Caltech. Back then I’d been impressed by his gift for languages. I’d thought it a proof of culture and refinement.

  John and Dr. Grueber spoke in German. My German was not equal to following much of what they said. They both spoke with Bavarian accents; it didn’t even sound like the German I had tried to learn. When the coffee was ready, the doctor switched to English, and the subject changed to race relations.

  It was November 1963. All of my relatives, and now it seemed their peculiar doctors as well, were furious with President Kennedy and “that turncoat Johnson.” Already that morning at break-fast this topic had come up.