Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story

by Lorin Stein

  DRIVERS WANTED

  ANYWHERE

  ALL GAS PAID 502-3061118

  “This is how I get along. Drive anything though mostly tony cars. Cadillacs. Buicks. Lincolns. Because the people that like this service are rich and fly home and mostly old and feeble. I strip everything that’s not needed for the thing to move forward, move back and stop. Air conditioners. Stereo tapes. I swap the batteries and the tires and the jacks with junks in yards 10 or 20 miles from my drop-off point. And no one notices. I wash it up properly before I arrive. Sweep it out. Everyone’s happy as pie. Because they don’t know a thing about cars. As long as it gets them to the druggist for their Preparation H. As long as it gets them to the grave site. They’ve all got brains wrapped in prophylactics. They don’t allow nothing inside their heads. So this is how I manage. No way to make a killing but I see a lot of the country and I love to drive. Nothing I’d rather do than drive a big rocking ark like this for free. Driving a fast cool car going for places I don’t know … You got a lot of moles honey. That’s supposed to mean something, I read, though I can’t recall what. Something about something.”

  Mal nodded, his cheek full of fowl wing.

  “You know how to drive? No? Well, I’ll teach you.”

  But she never did. She did all the driving, fast and smooth and aggressive, heavy on the horn and gas, her round elbow burning in the southwestern sun, her legs set wide apart on the floorboards, hoop earrings shaking and shining, long yellow braid hanging pure as a rope from a church belfry.

  She never stopped talking. It was delicious. No one had talked to him like this since his momma with her fathomless loving prattle; her words after a few years no longer performing the function of speaking to him any more but of breathing for him. Providing his head with oxygen like an iron lung. Keeping him going. Tending him fit. The lids coming down and the nostrils pinching shut. The lips moving around the fingers she thrust at him to kiss.

  “Them really your eyes, honey? You didn’t get them out of one of those banks? Don’t seem to lie in your head right.”

  Oh she was tough and constant, blonde lean and shiny. He touched her hair and it was soft and so yellow that he thought the color of it would come off on his fingers just as though he’d been rubbing up against a flower. She fed him for a thousand miles. He kept eating and felt weaker and weaker. Shrimp and candy bars. Peaches and grapes and whole pecan pies. Lasagne in a bucket. Loaves of salty rye. Washing it all down with vodka and orange crush as they drove. The huge car bucking and snaking through the traffic of the towns and then out onto the plains, the single note of birds leaping in his ears, traveling so fast that the bird was two miles back by the time it had finished its trill.

  Oh she was hard and honest with the black glasses wrapped around her eyes even in the moonless night, handling the car as though it were an extension of herself. As though it were a steel claw attached to the wrist of a gone hand. Going through toll stations, she would pay for the strangers in the car behind, jetting off in their bafflement, leaving a coil of bluish smoke.

  “It confuses them,” she said. “It puts them in arrears.”

  Mal squeezed her arm tentatively. There was a hard hot determined little muscle there. She took two swallows of vodka for every one of crush from a bottle of chocolaty red. She had never even asked his name. He decided that if she did, he would say it was Monza. He wedged his head beneath her armpit.

  “I never did much of that,” she said and began kissing his neck, sucking up the skin beneath her teeth as though she were chewing on an artichoke, leaving round blue blossoms ringing his collarbone. She smelled so clean and distant—like something laundered in a brook and dried in the summer sun. He smelled like a wolf’s pissing tree, he knew. His navel itched and reeked. His pretty hair was wadded to his head. But the girl kept feeding him and tweaking his side. Tacos and fritters. Chili dogs and sugar crullers. Shards of potato chips quivered in his stinging gums. His mouth was stained blue with berry tarts. In Lubbock, she bought a case of bourbon and a box of fortune cookies. Mal cracked his open, eager but exhausted. The moisture from the air-conditioner dripped and beaded on the hot asphalt. There had been carelessness at the factory. A typographical error in the confection seductively creased and joined. The lines of print were overlaid, the future foundered. She shook her head and looked distressed, a bit illicit and naïve in her short thin dress and canvas shoes. She turned the car out of the grocery store’s lot, away from the sun-blackened bag boy, and onto the roadway toward salt water.

  She settled him into a beach house while she delivered the car. Bones of cows holding up the window sashes. Cold sand clogged in corners. Insects by the rag-wrapped pipes. Rust on the undersides of everything. Mal had bathed by the time she returned by taxi, squatting in the truncated tub, scrubbing with a pillowcase. The water was sulphurous and had steadily turned a dark green as he soaped. Not unattractive. Not without its charm. Green like his eyes might have been when they were well. Clinging tenaciously without substance to the porcelain sides. Nothing he could put his finger on.

  The sea air lapped his head. He felt on holiday. As though it were Boxing Day at home. He was Monza Dong from Wollongong. The sea birds flew by in a tight clutch and she said, “It flies to Chile and then to Greenland, that bird. Them sanderlings. And they aren’t but a few inches long and tall.”

  She strung some twine from the shack to a sea grape and washed out their clothes and hung them out to dry. She curled up on the mildewed sheets all pale and frail and accessible except for the black glasses wrapped around her eyes, and with her hair yellow and warm as a buttered biscuit. In the night, Mal woke dizzy to the thick braid sliding from his cheek and the call of the whippoorwill and he saw her opening the refrigerator door, the light muffled somewhere from a bulb behind the hastily stocked shelves, exposing her as she pushed her throat back to drink milk from a carton, showing just to him her small breasts and curving ribs shining in the hum. Shining like wheat in a frost … and her chest was cool when she returned, her lips cold and sour. When she touched him, it was as though she were trying to get at something else, something in the damp mattress ticking, something in the punctured foam, as though she’d push her hand right through him to get it, cupping her hand through his chest and drawing out what she preferred. Mal rolled his eyes shut. He slept fitfully. Things rode across the shiny sand. The girl’s dress rose and seized in the noiseless wind.

  IX

  It is stated that a lad in Victoria,

  many years ago, climbed into the entrance of an occupied wombat’s burrow.

  The disturbed animal started to come

  out and in passing the young man, feeling pressure on its back, immediately

  raised its back to support the supposed

  fall of its roof and pressed its victim

  against the roof, killing him.

  She cut off her braid and astonished him by not looking any different than she had before. Sawing it off with a blunt bread knife, tying it around his collapsed and peeling waist, going back to her bourbon in the flowered coffee cup.

  “If I cut it off at just the right length,” she said, “it’ll grow right back in six or so months. Like a crab making up its biggest claw.” She was great on hair and fingernails she told him. Like something in the grave.

  Mal was shy. With not too much effort, he could see a withered face within it. Caulked nostrils. Little glass eyes. He hung it in the shade, poured sand in the last of the whiskey bottles and looked back at the shore where he had been watching a school of fish rising white and predisposed through a wave. The girl went back to sleeping on the beach, slung in a small depression, her cleavered hair curling around her ear lobes, her stomach pulsing like her heart, her square toenails pointing out to the fog coming off the water.

  She’d later wrap the braid around him and they’d walk along the heat-heaved road, holding hands and sweating in the dark. The hair chaffed him though she washed it in shampoo and braided it fresh each da
y. It was gold. The tub was now a decided green. Very modern looking. His own hair was the color of walnuts and hid the painful knobs of his spine. He was frightened that it would set to smolder in the sun. At night it would seem to steam.

  The road had been made cheaply with large quantities of sand and it was pocky and dangerous. Cars bottomed out. In the rains some floated and some didn’t. Everything in the area was made with sand. Houses and bridges and benches. The statue of a cow in town. Toys were filled with it. They cheated and beat at you with sand, the girl said. They treated and tempered the things you used. The sand was disappearing from the beach. All that was left were gravelly pockets and people writing ORAMIT in the smooth tidal wash, which she had seen, in letters so big they could only be for an airplane or a chopper or the Chile flying bird. She was waiting for them to make a car from sand that ran on salt water, she said, and she’d be happy as a princess then, she’d be smug and set forever. They had already made cars with frames of wood, of glass. In a wreck it would slide up under your skin like a sliver, punching into your heart as though you were a fiend. In a smash it would slice you up like a 2000 pound beer bottle. Caroming icicles. All crackling like snow on the heat of the overhead cams.

  In a sand car, she said, they’d go to Florida and eat coconut ice cream. They’d see a reptile show. They’d have to carry straws to be prepared, to push up through the weight if it collapsed, to use for breathing until the rescue party dug them out, in the meantime, however, using them to draw on the frozen daiquiris that she would pack in the thermos. Mal giggled slowly and adjusted the hair cocoon. He stopped and kissed her. Her tongue rooted out his chewing gum.

  At noon, she would often run ice cubes across his wrists. She noted that he had no lines on the palms of his hands.

  One morning as they were playing boule on the beach, they saw several trucks and cranes traveling up the road. They parked in the ditch not far away. The men swung down from the cabs and walked back toward the town. Mal and the girl tried to ignore them but they were huge and brightly painted. No one ever attended them or moved them any further up the road. They just canted in the sand and shone in the sun, the chrome so clear that cardinals hopped over them all day long, admiring their own scarlet, dashing selves.

  Mal went back to playing the pretty game. The sight of the balls as they arched heavily through the air and the sound of them as they struck one another was very pleasant to him. The sun was a sockeye salmon weaving in the mist. The clouds were foaming gin. Sometimes Mal would fall asleep while standing.

  The girl left in the morning for limes. The tide was out, a bar exposed. He could still see the moon in the sky. He thought the shark was a rubber tire until he had reached its snout. Someone had carved out the jaws. It was deflated, the stomach covered its side, all black and orange like a bad squash. He sat down to watch it and discovered that he couldn’t think about it any more. He walked down the beach to see what else he could find. When he turned back, he could see dimly that the house had been leveled. The machines were further down the road and all that remained was a stack of boards and insects fleeing across the sand, and the boule balls in a ragged nest.

  Mal ran around in a tight little circle like a dog trying to bite himself. He didn’t know if he would see the braid waving from the aerial, whipping like a squirrel’s tail on the right, on the side of her protective jockey which was blown up by her own damp and narrow and nervous lips. He didn’t know what, in that which he saw passing on the road, he should regard as his own.

  No one was immune. The wilderness snapped and glided like a varmint. He could hear it at dusk, whirring and wheeling, hooting in his ear. The oceanic desert. The jungled marsh. Didn’t she know? There were rabid foxes and loose tie rods. Current rattled up through the bidet. Sails luffed. Brain pans bent and burnt.

  Mal started to run. Snapping from car aerials were flags and flowers and underwear. Inside the people were smiling and shifting around and drinking from paper cups. And over it all was the smell of rubber and oil and salt in the light and the bright sunshine. The beach was endless and Mal ran and ran.

  Issue 48, 1969

  Ann Beattie

  on

  Craig Nova’s Another Drunk Gambler

  The narrator could not tell this story unless the levels of complexity, duplicity, and suspense were understood by him when he begins. If he has the complete picture from the get-go, isn’t it unfair to be withholding, isn’t it disingenuous to tell a story that seems to unfold, when the ending is already known?

  Answer: Good storytellers, in life as in fiction, reveal information in a way that mimics life’s seeming importance and conclusiveness in the moment—moments so often undone, undercut, or somehow changed by the different perspective the future will provide. From moment to moment, though, how we weigh the story’s small scenes will figure in our ultimate opinion about how heavy the story seems to us when it concludes, since serious stories don’t tend to end with a punch line.

  Of course, Nova could have selected an omniscient narrator’s point of view, though he chose, instead, to make this a story within a story. Therefore, whatever we read is bracketed or contextualized by the presence of a particular internal perceiver. We don’t have a faddish unreliable narrator. He pretty much retreats into the background. This narrator passes no moral judgment. We do not know enough about him to conflate his life with the story about other people that he narrates, except for the obvious fact that he thinks it’s important to tell this particular story. We do know that things more or less take off when an American named Harlow notices horse shit. And remembering the story’s first line, we know that that time has passed, and Harlow has become a congressman. Politics figures hugely, but subtly, in this story.

  As the story evolves, we think we have enough information to assume something about the characters’ secrets and desires. There is a horse race, which of course happens publically, but only then do we realize that another more subtle race to the finish has been going on, and that things other than one horse’s winning are at stake. I can’t in good conscience ruin the moment, but when Xannie—complicitous, and therefore also with an ability to blackmail Harlow—makes his personal wishes known, it is for the reader a second surprising, ghastly aspect of this “horse race.” The end of the story lays everything out as simply as someone showing his fanned-out winning cards. The foreigner, Xannie, has lured in the American, Harlow—no different from any other wild animal who would be curious to explore some source of light. Animals, men—they just want to see what’s going on. Xannie, it turns out, has been the consummate gambler, playing a game of his own devising, warping his desires to whatever the web of destiny allows for.

  The language, as always with Craig Nova, is a wonder: the internal injury that figures prominently in the story is echoed though not conflated with the bruised sky; the Malaysian pediatrician—the doctor we never meet; the Godot of doctors—has her doctorly actions of scrubbing imitated by men whose dirty arms tell their dirty secret; and the rain, so desired in Eliot’s The Waste Land, here turns into punishing monsoons, those times it does not tease in the “sea-like” movements of the almost perfect horse. When this rain falls, it saves nothing, but rather exposes hypocrisy. There is also much to say about blindness: the jockey who trusts his instincts to decide on something based on touch, though he strokes the deceptive surface of an untouchable flaw; the suffering people, sometimes afflicted in body, sometimes unsighted: virtual vs. moral blindness. Americans might find themselves in Ipoh, but if not that place, then as well another. “[Harlow] hated to be a bystander. He tried to explain gambling by saying that it was the difference between walking through an abandoned orchard with a gun and a dog, looking for grouse, and just walking.”

  Right. Americans hate to be bystanders, so we aren’t.

  Craig Nova

  Another Drunk Gambler

  I know more secrets than any man I have ever met. My neighbor, Harlow Pearson, was a gambler, although this was never a
secret and many people knew about it, even when he was in Congress. He came from New England, was tall, and thin, broad in the chest. I am an old man now. I sit in my house, hearing the shutters banging in the winter wind, and I think of things from a long time ago, like the time when Harlow was a young man in Ipoh. His gambling before Ipoh had been done in European casinos, especially those with chandeliers and chamber music played by musicians in evening clothes, and where there were men who stood around the roulette tables with small notebooks taking down the number on each turn of the wheel. Gambling made Harlow feel as though he were participating in the world. He hated to be a bystander. He tried to explain gambling by saying that it was the difference between walking through an abandoned orchard with a gun and a dog, looking for grouse, and just walking.

  Harlow had a houseboy, and his name was Xan Thu. In America he was called Xannie. Xannie’s parents had been Asian tribesmen, and in 1950 Xannie was working as a groom at the race track at Ipoh, in Malaysia. He spent his nights there at the race track, too, sleeping at the back of a barn, his bed made on bales of hay, on which he stretched out, hearing the rustle of it and feeling the itch through a thin blanket he spread there and smelling the dusty, grassy odor. He took his meals alone, eating while he squatted and leaned against a stall door, or back where he slept. There were other grooms, too, and they found their places to sleep in the barn, each one having a small bag in which there were a few personal things, a book, a photograph, a comb, an extra white shirt, a pair of dark pants.

  The man Xannie worked for most often was half French and half Burmese; he was heavy, bald, and had greenish eyes. His skin was smooth, an olive brown color. His suits were made in London, and he wore a large, gold watch that gave the time for any place on the earth. The man’s name was Pierre Bouteille. There were times when he couldn’t sleep and came to wake Xannie up.