Deal Me In, Week 27: "The Boy on the Train" by Arthur Robinson

I'm about a month behind on my Deal Me In reading and reviewing. Summer vacation happened to me (I'm not complaining though). Now it's time to catch up, which I plan to do over the next few days.

This story, originally published in the New Yorker, was chosen by the 6 of hearts -- which led me to The Best American Short Stories 1989. This is fast becoming my favorite of the four BASS volumes this year, probably because Margaret Atwood chose the stories.

At first glance, I thought this was going to be another "significant childhood event" story, and I was a little put off by that since I have had a rash of these kinds of stories lately. It did start out that way, but it quickly blossomed into something much more.

The story opens with little Lewis Fletcher, age 5, traveling by himself on the train all the way from Jacksonville, Florida to Camden, New York. The first his family hears of this, however, is 50 years later, when this factoid is printed as part of a "50 years ago today" feature in the local newspaper. This ignorance on the part of his family turns out to be not such a surprise, however, because we soon learn that Lewis is a no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of person who doesn't know how to relate to his wife and children very well, although the reader gradually realizes that he wants to relate, and he certainly does try.

Perhaps the most telling picture of Lewis as an adult and father comes as his three children -- Howard, Edward, and Sarah -- are discussing this pivotal event in their father's life:

In the evening, when their parents had gone to bed and the children stayed up talking, Sarah might say in a reverential tone, "Can you imagine him traveling alone from Jacksonville to Camden when he was five?" The two others -- Howard, the oldest, and Edward -- would say they could imagine it, that it was the easiest thing in the world to imagine. The picture they'd then conjure up was of a five-year-old old man with white hair, steel-rimmed bifocals, and a hearing aid that he kept turned off to save the flat, half-pint-shaped battery. (Edward and Howard had never thought of him as anything but an old man, even when they were small and he was in his thirties.) He would have dickered, they'd say, with the railroad until it agreed to give him a ticket in exchange for some worn-out toys, and he would have worked a deal in the dining car for his food, perhaps agreeing to polish silver. He would have brought along candy, fruit, and tattered copies of old newspapers to sell on the train. When he wasn't busy selling, or polishing silver, he'd be doing his bookkeeping. At every stop, he'd buy more stuff to sell, and at Jersey City he'd trade some of his inventory for the ferry ride to Manhattan. He'd be too busy to see the Hudson River or the Mohawk Valley, and when there was nothing else to do he'd make notes for the lectures he'd someday give his sons on How to Get Ahead and Be Somebody.

Of course, Howard and Edward's main goal in life is to make their father as miserable as possible, which they do with a series of shenanigans that make the story quite humorous. But later in the story, grown-up and with families of their own, they begin to appreciate the challenges that their father must have encountered with trying to raise them. It's not maudlin at all, but a rather bittersweet conclusion to a very satisfying story.

The Deal Me In short story challenge is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Deal Me In, Week 25: "Customs of the Country" by Madison Smartt Bell

This week, the four of hearts took me to an excellent story by Madison Smartt Bell, from The Best American Stories 1989.

The unnamed narrator of "Customs of the Country" is a young woman trying to get her life back on track. She does not succeed in the way that she hopes, but she does succeed. She's trying to regain custody of her young son, Davey, after losing him due to her drug addiction. She has cleaned up, and it's been two years, and she's ready to get him back. So to prove that she's ready, she gets a waitressing job at a truckstop, and rents a small apartment in a not-very-prosperous part of town. She does her best to make the apartment clean and homey, despite the nightly spouse abuse that goes on next door (always ending with a body hitting the wall hard enough to knock her pots and pans off the kitchen wall).

As she makes preparations to get Davey back from his foster family, we learn her backstory: about her husband, Patrick, who started stealing drugs from the hospital where he worked as an orderly and selling them on the street; her addiction to these drugs, and her withdrawal from them when Patrick gets arrested; and the inevitable crash when, sick from her withdrawal, she slings Davey across the room just a little too hard and breaks his leg.

The reader really begins to root for this young woman, because she's trying so hard. In her words, "Sometimes you don't get but one mistake, if the one you pick is bad enough." And she knows she has to work as hard as she can to recover from her mistake. But it's not enough. The judge decides to keep Davey with his foster family, with the understanding that they will eventually adopt him. It's a tragic blow to the young woman. But she recovers in a way that is both surprising, shocking, and redemptive.

I can't say enough about this great story. It's one of those that sucks you in from the beginning and carries you along effortlessly until the climax, and it was very satisfying to read.

The Deal Me In short story challenge is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Deal Me In, Week 21: "Disneyland" by Barbara Gowdy

This week the five of hearts led me to an extremely captivating story from The Best American Short Stories 1989. I chose this story solely because of the title. Who doesn't want to read a story involving Disneyland? But you have probably already guessed that this story has almost nothing to do with Disneyland, hence its intriguing nature.

As the story opens, it's Christmas 1960, and three young sisters -- Linda, Louise, and Sandy -- are getting a summertime trip to Disneyland from their parents. Their dad is taking two weeks off from work, and they're planning to have a great time.

Then paranoia and fear set in about nuclear bombs being dropped on the US, and Dad becomes obsessed with building a fallout shelter in the backyard (which he does), and leading the family through countless drills to see how quickly they can all get to the shelter in case of an attack.

Summertime comes, and Dad announces that the family is going to spend two weeks down in the fallout shelter, simulating what life would be like after a real attack. It becomes quickly and painfully obvious that THIS is the two weeks the family was to have spent at Disneyland, and they are about to experience a Disneyland of a different sort -- a not-very-nice one. The family barely gets settled into the shelter when Louise has her first period. Of course they have no supplies for such a thing, so they have to improvise with rags and such. The family is forced by Dad to follow a strict daily schedule, which includes periods of darkness throughout the day to conserve candles and fuel. This would not be so bad, except that every time the lights go out, Sandy, the youngest daughter, smells an odor that she is convinced is the smell of their dead dog, Checkers, who was buried somewhere in the backyard, and -- who knows? -- maybe the shelter was built near his grave.

Although this sounds like a somewhat horrifying story (because it kind of is one), it was still fascinating to me as a psychological study of the characters. I like stories where you put characters into some weird or difficult situation like this one, and then see what they do.

The Deal Me In short story challenge is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

Deal Me In, Week 3: "Strays" by Mark Richard

This week's card: The Queen of Hearts

(Sorry, couldn't resist!)

The anthology: The Best American Short Stories 1989

The story: "Strays" by Mark Richard

I was unfamiliar with Mark Richard's work before reading this story. According to Wikipedia, he is a short story writer, novelist, screenwriter, and poet. He was born in 1955 in Lake Charles, Louisiana (kind of my neck of the woods, broadly geographically speaking) and had a childhood on which he must have drawn heavily in the writing of this story. Which was HORRIBLY depressing, but good (with occasional glimpses of humor).

The title of the story comes from the stray dogs that come up underneath the narrator's house each night to lick water from the house's leaking pipes. The narrator takes great pleasure in stomping on the floor and scaring the dogs away, but his younger brother is always thinking up plans to capture one of the dogs and make it his pet.

The story opens as the boys' mother runs off one morning. She appears to be mentally disturbed, because before she leaves, she pulls all the preserves off the kitchen shelves, and stuffs her children's drawings into her mouth. She takes off across the fields, and the boys' father calls "their nearest relative with a car," Uncle Trash. Uncle Trash loans his car to the boys' father, who takes off after their mother. It's not until the car is gone that Uncle Trash remembers the bottle of booze that was stashed under the seat of the car. So he takes off to town himself to find a drink, leaving the boys alone with a final admonition, "Don't y'all burn the house down." This becomes a constant refrain, as Uncle Trash is not the world's best babysitter, and he leaves the boys alone a lot.

Uncle Trash is a gambler, and this is one of the main sources of humor and tragedy in this story. He comes back with a mangled face after that first trip to town, and it's because he gets into a fight after betting his car in a card game -- the car he no longer has, of course. After another card game, he wins the services of the grocery store owner's wife, who grudgingly comes to the house and cleans it for the family.

This story does not end well, of course, as the boys accidentally do exactly what Uncle Trash has been telling them NOT to do for weeks. And the mother is retrieved from her long journey, only to run away again. There's not much redemption or resolution here. So even though this story has quite a bit of humor in it, it is not a humorous story. All the characters are clearly trapped in their meager, tragic existences, and it becomes clear by the end of the story that there are more strays here than just the dogs under the house.

However, in spite of the depressing outcome, this WAS an excellent story, and I highly recommend it!

The Deal Me In short story challenge is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.