Facing the Music

by Larry Brown

Then she started crying. She wasn’t pretty when she was crying. Her whole face turned red and wrinkled up. I knew it was me. It’s always me.

  “You’re just so damn great, ain’t you?” she said. “Don’t even want nobody overt the house, cept a bunch of old drunks and freaks and whores.”

  My friends. Poets, artists, actors, English professors out at Ole Miss. She called them drunks and freaks. Slapper. Slap shit out of her.

  “Just go on git the damn beer,” she said. “I got something to tell you.”

  It’s awful to find pussy so good that treats you so bad. It’s like you’ve got to pay for it being good. But you’ve got to be either a man or a pussy. You can’t just lay around and pine. I thought at that point that maybe I’d gotten out of that particular car for the last time.

  I went on in. I was even starting to feel better. If she left, I could go home, open all the doors, crank up the stereo, get free. I could start sleeping in the daytime and writing at night again, nonstop if I wanted to, for eight or ten hours. I could have a party without somebody sullen in one corner. Everything would be different and the same again.

  Well, hell, I wasn’t perfect though, was I? I’d probably been a shitass a few times. Who’s not? Even your best friend will turn asshole on you from time to time. He’s only human.

  I knew somebody else would come along. I just didn’t know how long it would be. So I did a little quick rationalizing inside the store.

  Whatever I was going back outside to wasn’t going to be good. She was bracing herself up to be nasty to me, I could see that. And there wasn’t any need in a bit of it. I could do without all the nastiness. I could take an amicable breakup. All I had to do was hang around inside the store for a while, and she’d probably get tired of waiting for me, and run off and leave me. So I went back toward the rear. The old bag was watching me. She probably thought I was a criminal. All I was doing was sitting back there gnawing my fingernails. But it was no good. I couldn’t stand to know she was out there waiting on me.

  So I got back up and went up the beer aisle. I figured I might as well go on and face it. Maybe we’d have a goodbye roll. I got her a sixpack of Schlitz malt liquor and got myself a sixer of Stroh’s in bottles. The old bag was eyeing me with distaste. I still had my trunks on, and flip-flops, and my FireBusters T-shirt. I was red from passing out under the sun.

  I could see Miss Sheila out there. I set the beer on the counter just as a black guy pulled up beside her car and got out. I started pulling my money out and another car pulled up beside the first one. It had a black guy in it, too, only this one had a shotgun. The first black guy was up against the door, just coming in, and the second black guy suddenly blew the top of the first black guy’s head off. The first black guy flopped inside.

  “AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!” he said. “HHHHHHWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!” Blood and meat and black hair had flown inside everywhere with him, glass. It stuck to the walls, to the cigarettes in the rack over the counter, to the warming oven where they had the fried chicken. I’d eaten a lot of that fried chicken. The guy flopped down the detergent aisle. “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” he said.

  I just stood there holding my money. I’d been wrong. The top of his head hadn’t been blown off after all. He just didn’t have any hair up there.

  “HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” he said. He was flopping around like a fish. He flopped down to the end of the aisle, then flopped over a couple of tables where people ate their barbecue at lunchtime, (where I’d been sitting just a few minutes before) and then he flopped over in the floor. I looked outside. The second black guy had gotten back into his car with his shotgun and was backing out of the parking lot. I couldn’t see Miss Sheila.

  “Let me pay for my beer and get out of here,” I said, to the woman who had ducked down behind the counter. “The cops’ll be here in a minute.”

  The black guy got off the floor back there and flopped over the meat market. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” he said. He flopped up against the coolers, leaving big bloody handprints all over the glass. He started flopping up the beer aisle, coming back toward us.

  “Come on, lady,” I said. “Shitfire.”

  He flopped over a bunch of Vienna sausage and Moon Pies, and then he flopped over the crackers and cookies. Blood was pouring out of his head. I looked down at one of the coolers and saw a big piece of black wool sliding down the glass in some blood. He was tracking it all over the store, getting it everywhere.

  I knew what the beer cost. It was about six dollars. I didn’t wait for a sack. But I watched him for a moment longer. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He flopped over the candy and the little bags of potato chips, and across the front, and flopped across the chicken warmer and the ice cream box and the magazine racks. “HAAAAAAAAAAAH!” he said. I put some money up on the counter. Then I went outside.

  The guy had shot the whole place up. All the glass in the windows was shattered, and he’d even shot the bricks. He’d even shot the newspaper machines. He’d murdered the hell out of The Oxford Eagle.

  When I looked back inside, the guy had flopped up against the counter where the woman was hiding, flopping all over the cash register. Sheila wasn’t dead or murdered either one.

  I asked her, “You all right?” She was down in the floorboard. She looked up at me. She didn’t look good.

  “I thought you’s dead,” she screamed. “OH, GOD, HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO FOOLISH?”

  I set the beer on the back seat and got in. “You better git this sumbitch outa here,” I said. I reached over and got me a beer. I could hear the sirens coming. They were wailing way off in the distance. She latched onto me.

  “I WOULDN’T LEAVE YOU NOW FOR NOTHIN,” she screamed. “COULDN’T RUN ME OFF,” she hollered.

  “I’m telling you we better get our ass out of here,” I said.

  “Look out,” she screamed. I looked. The wounded black guy was flopping through the door where there wasn’t any door anymore. He flopped up beside the car. “WAAAAAAAAAAH!” he said. He was slinging blood all over us. But other than that he seemed harmless.

  “What I wanted to say was maybe we should watch more TV together,” she said. “If you just didn’t write so much. . . .”

  The cops screamed into the parking lot. They had their shotguns poking out the windows before they even stopped. Five or six cruisers. Blue uniforms and neat ties and shiny brass. They’d taken their hats off. They had shiny sunglasses. You could tell that they were itching to shoot somebody, now that they’d locked and loaded. The black guy was leaning against the car, heaving. I knew I wouldn’t get to finish my beer. I heard them shuck their pumps. I raised my hands and my beer. I pointed to Miss Sheila.

  “She did it,” I said.

  Larry Brown’s Letters from Tula

  Facing the Music, Larry Brown’s debut story collection, was originally published in hardcover in 1988. Thirty-seven years old, married and the father of three, captain in the Oxford, Mississippi, fire department, and co-owner of a convenience store in Tula, Mississippi, Larry Brown had been writing in isolation in his “spare time” for eight years when his first book was published to wide critical acclaim. Nine more books followed.

  Brown, who died suddenly in 2004 at the age of fifty-one, was a man who just plain loved to write. He is famous for the thousands of letters he wrote—to his fans, his fellow writers, his family, his friends, and his publisher. Here, from our files, are a few excerpts from the letters he sent us around the time Facing the Music was being readied for press.

  Sometimes he wrote about being a fireman:

  . . . I’m a full-time fireman. . . . I work a shift, 24 on, 48 off, so I guess it does look like a part-time job. I do spend one-third of my life up there, have for 14 years.

  We’ve been watching them work on pulling that baby out of that hole in Texas. They just now got her out. God, that was something. I used to run rescue all the time, years ago, car wrecks mostly, extrication. I went to the fire academy and learned all that. I had to ge
t some people out of some bad places. I remember one I went to . . . out on Highway 6. A dump truck full of lime had turned over in the middle of the road, upside down, and this girl was still under there. I had to crawl under there with her, broken glass and diesel fuel everywhere. The driver had made it out but she couldn’t. She was a young black woman, about 20. The thing was, she wasn’t hurt except for a broken nose. But the dash had her pinned in the one place a lady surely ought not to be caught. Not crushed or anything, just caught. . . I just stayed under there with her and talked to her and held her hand until they could get a crane out there. When they raised it a few inches, we pulled her out. She hugged my neck.

  My partner, BJ, and I had to go out to the Stark Young home the other evening. No sweat. The alarm was going off. Ole Miss owns it. No problem. It wasn’t dark yet. Reset the alarm, returned to station. . . . Then the damn thing goes off at midnight. And Rex (my other partner) and Billy Joe had already been out there a few times when I was off. Come to find out when the damn thing goes off at night, it’s always midnight. . . . So here we are, Billy Joe and I, out there at midnight. And we’d already been out there that evening. But when we got in there, something felt different. It’s an old, high, spooky, old house with creaking boards. No lights anywhere but the basement. And I don’t reckon I’m scared of a damn thing but some dogs and a few people. But I started up those stairs to the second floor. BJ was looking everywhere all at once, had them eyes just peeled. Well, we got about halfway up there and decided mutually that that was high enough. And I don’t know why, but the hair was wanting to get up on the back of my neck. Well, yeah, I do know why. There’s something in there. I felt it. . . . There were a few corners in there I didn’t want to shine my light around. Billy Joe didn’t even want to talk about it. There’s not a damn thing in there to set the smoke detectors off. At midnight.

  Today’s my anniversary, the big 13, and the kids went back to school today. Put my baby on the bus this morning. Had the whole day off. My baby almost choked to death yesterday. She got a grape hung in her throat. I almost never got it out of her, started praying. That’s happened to me three times. . . . Captain Brown goes to CPR class every year, knows what to do. It’s certain advantages to being a fireman.

  He also wrote us about life at Tula and in the store:

  I’m at the store now. I just loaded up my typewriter and everything and brought it with me. . . . In the middle of the afternoon nobody much is stirring over here and I can work sometimes then. It’s just a little country store in a little country community. It’s where I was raised, though I’ve been living over in Yocona ever since I got married in 1974. There’s farm land all around here, woods all around, so there’s a lot of logging going on too. . . .

  . . . (We interrupt this letter to bring you an eight-hour interruption involving my brother’s truck who wouldn’t crank, scurrying from one side of the county to the other, jumping off, charging, not charging, diagnoses, referrals to other diagnosers, relaying phone calls, horses shod, Tula Grocery, heaps of ham and cheese and baloney sliced, one hot radiator Tula Grocery had to deal with, one hot woman Tula Grocery had to deal with, money loaned, checks cashed. . . .)

  Almost every letter mentioned trying to find time to write:

  I’m paying a boy minimum wage to work the store for me awhile this afternoon so I can get this out and work on my novel a little. My wife and kids are gone for the weekend to Vicksburg which means I can whoopee work on my stuff a little without being molested. I have visions of being in here tonight with the room dark and cold beer and the air conditioner running. . . .

  And he was always apologetic about taking our time:

  I guess I’d better let you go soon. I don’t want to bore you. I get carried away in letters and write better than I talk.

  But Larry Brown couldn’t help himself. He saw a story in every encounter. We wish he’d had more time to write them.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Mary Annie Brown for permission to reprint excerpts from Larry Brown’s letters.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988 by Larry Brown.

  All rights reserved.

  Several stories in this book have appeared previously: “Boy and Dog” in Fiction International; “Facing the Music” and “The Rich” in Mississippi Review; “Kubuku Rides” (This Is It)” in The Greensboro Review; “Samaritans” in St. Andrews Review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for a previous edition of this work.

  E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-731-9

  Photo by TOM RANKIN

  LARRY BROWN was born in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1951. After graduating from high school he joined the Marine Corps, serving from 1970 to 1972. He married Mary Annie Coleman on his return to Mississippi and was captain of the Oxford Fire Department for sixteen years until he retired in 1990 in order to write full time. His books have won many prizes and awards, including two Southern Book Critics Circle Awards for fiction, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. He died in 2004. In 2005 he was posthumously inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

  Praise for Facing the Music

  “Larry Brown . . . is a choir of Southern voices all by himself.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Ten raw and strictly 100-proof stories make up one of the more exciting debuts of recent memory—fiction that’s gritty and genuine, and funny in a hard-luck way.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Larry Brown, a captain of the firehouse in Oxford, Mississippi, rediscovers real stuff, like great writers do. He’s been out there, and reports it beautifully. He is a master.”

  —Barry Hannah, author of Ray and Hey, Jack

  “A stunning debut short story collection.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Like his profession, Larry Brown’s stories are not for the delicate or the fainthearted . . . his characters are limited people who are under siege . . . their stories manage to touch us in surprisingly potent ways.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Direct, powerful, and singularly honest.”

  —Willie Morris, author of North Toward Home

  “Brown’s special gift is to make you feel while you’re reading it that only this story is worth telling.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “Unpredictability, combined with a hard-eyed realism and a virtuoso display of style keeps the reader riveted to what Brown tells us about people we’ve often seen but never really known.”

  —Southern Magazine

  “If his first book . . . were itself a fire, it would require five alarms.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “A collection of finely written stories, which, even at their darkest, claim as theirs the will to hope.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “He doesn’t seem to care if readers walk away from a story depressed, so long as they are aware that the ability to destroy does not preclude a tender sensibility, and that humor and catastrophe occupy the same seat on the bus.”

  —Independent Weekly

  “Ten terrific stories . . . great reading.”

  —Grand Rapids Press

  “Larry Brown has an unerring comic sense, a sensitive ear for talk, an unsentimental commitment to his characters and, above all, the intimate, ruthless, loving connections with the world he writes ab
out that is the hallmark of a good and honest writer.”

  —Ellen Douglas, author of A Family’s Affairs and Can’t Quit You, Baby

  “This is the debut of a valuable writer.”

  —The Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “He writes live people, and he knows things about them you didn’t think would get found out until Judgment Day.”

  —Jack Butler, author of Jujitsu for Christ

  “Tough stuff. Good stuff.”

  —The Antioch Review

  “Larry Brown’s work is exceptional by any standard. Talent has struck.”

  —Harry Crews, author of A Feast of Snakes and Body

  Also by LARRY BROWN

  FICTION

  Dirty Work

  Big Bad Love

  Joe

  Father and Son

  Fay

  The Rabbit Factory

  A Miracle of Catfish

  NONFICTION

  On Fire

  Billy Ray’s Farm

  OTHER BOOKS BY LARRY BROWN NOW AVAILABLE FROM ALGONQUIN

  A Miracle of Catfish, a novel

  * * *

  “A Miracle of Catfish yields so many pleasures, it hurts to say so.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Larry Brown’s posthumous novel is the story of one year in the lives of five characters—an old farmer with a new pond he wants stocked with baby catfish; a bankrupt fish pond stocker who secretly releases his forty-pound brood catfish into the farmer’s pond; a little boy from the trailer home across the road who inadvertently hooks the behemoth catfish; the boy’s inept father; and a former convict down the road who kills a second time to save his daughter.

  * * *

  Fiction • Hardcover • ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-536-0

  Dirty Work, a novel

  * * *

  “The writing, the characters, and the plot are so compelling that you can’t help but stay with the book until its conclusion.” —Washington Post Book World