Deal Me In, Week 23: "The Mail Lady" by David Gates

I love mail. I love sending it, receiving it, blogging about it -- you name it. So when I was composing my Deal Me In roster of stories for this year, I couldn't resist adding this one to the list just solely because of the title. The Queen of Diamonds picked it out for me from The Best American Short Stories 1994.

(The beautiful Queen of Diamonds card was designed by Romanian artist Roxana Ganescu.)

The story is told from the point of view of the main character, Lewis Coley, who has been partially incapacitated by a stroke. He has trouble walking and speaking, but is otherwise intelligent and alert, so he makes for a most interesting main character. All of his frustrations with daily life, his family, and his surroundings come out in the narrative, but he of course can't do much about any of them any more.

Lewis is not the most likeable character, however. He has found religion late in his life, before the stroke, and his religion is clearly important to him -- he treats his life post-stroke as a kind of cross he must bear, although he doesn't understand it. But in spite of his religious conversion, he manages to be a pompous, irritable, self-righteous know-it-all who is more or less alienated from his daughter Wiley, and his wife Alice. He's also embarrassed and over-sensitive about his illness, wondering how Alice can possibly still put up with him. Although he doesn't sound very nice, the reader does learn to sympathize with Lewis and what he is going through, because his interior monologue and memories constitute the entire story.

So how does the mail lady from the title figure into all this? Well, I don't want to give away too much of the story, because I definitely think it's worth your time to find and read. But in short, the mail lady is a Mrs. Laffond, who dresses in mannish clothes (in Lewis' opinion) and drives a big pickup truck that often comes to the rescue of townspeople whose cars are stuck in ditches. Such is Lewis' small and bigoted mind that he suspects Mrs. Laffond of being a lesbian even though she has been married with children and he has no other evidence to go on than what she drives and how she dresses. However, the point of the story seems to be that Lewis is supposed to be paying a penance through his illness that is teaching him humility and his reliance on others -- so you just know Mrs. Laffond is going to come to his rescue at some point in the story. And she does.

I enjoyed this story a lot. It was a long story, but Lewis' interior monologue was so engrossing that it was a relatively quick read.

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

Deal Me In, Week 17: "The Prophet from Jupiter" by Tony Earley

This week the King of Diamonds took me back to The Best American Short Stories 1994 volume for a story by Tony Earley, originally published in Harper's Magazine.

(Image of the King of Diamonds from the WhiteKnuckle Cards website)

I read this story as my first item in Dewey's Readathon yesterday. It was a captivating story, full of images and quirky characters, and while I don't feel like I got everything out of the story that was there, I enjoyed it very much.

The story is narrated by an unnamed main character, the dam-keeper of a dam in a sleepy little North Carolina resort town called Lake Glen. The dam is an elaborate affair, complete with a generator which supplies the town with more electricity than it can ever use. The dam-keeper's job is to monitor water levels and make sure they are appropriate both for the generator, the dam, and for the residents who recreationally use the lake created by the dam.

The dam-keeper thus becomes a town historian of sorts -- being on the job 24/7, he sees and hears everything. And there's a lot that goes on in this town. It even has its "ghosts" of a sort, since the lake encompasses another town that was flooded when the dam was built.

It has nothing to do with this story, but there's a famous submerged town in Lake Resia, Italy -- all that can be seen now is the bell tower of the church.

The title of the story comes from one of the characters, a former realtor named Archie Simpson who lived in Jupiter, Florida before moving to Lake Glen. He's a prophet because he claims God told him so -- he's the One True Prophet who will lead Christians in the last days. In a sense, the events of this story give the reader a certain sense that some of the characters are living through their own "last days" -- the dam-keeper's wife has left him for the new police chief, the dam-keeper is being replaced by a guy named Randy who is the assistant dam-keeper -- everything seems to be falling apart in a way.

This was an intriguing story because there was so much going on in it. It was also a little confusing because the narrative was not at all straightforward. The narrator keeps jumping back and forth between current events and the events of the past (which, of course, have shaped and informed the current events). It's one of those stories where things come out bit by bit, and by the end of the story the reader has a complete picture of what is really going on. Although it can be confusing, this is one of my favorite kinds of stories because it's most like real life.

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

Deal Me In, Week 16: "Proper Library" by Carolyn Ferrell

The card this week:

The collection:

The story: "Proper Library" is an unusual little story about a black teenager nicknamed Lorrie. His real name is Lawrence Lincoln Jefferson Adams. When the story opens, we learn that he has been out of school for six months, mainly because he has fallen in love with a boy named Rakeem (who appears to be a very bad influence). But he also keeps himself busy during his time off, helping take care of his younger brothers and sisters and cousins, and teaching himself math out of the "Math 4" book. He finally decides he should go back to school, but the pull of Rakeem is strong. His family warns him not to pay any attention to Rakeem, and Lorrie's mantra throughout the story is "I keep moving," a phrase one gradually comes to realize is Lorrie's guard against Rakeem and everything else that would pull him back out of school and towards things and people that are not good for him.

The title of the story comes from Lorrie's efforts to learn as many words as possible for the City Wide Test, an achievement test that will let him finally progress to the next grade. One word he has trouble with is "library," always managing to pronounce it "liberry." Lorrie's constant poring over words to learn also seems to be symbolic of his efforts to break away from his past and "keep moving on" to better things. By the end of the story, Lorrie thinks he has figured out a way to reconcile his desire to be with Rakeem AND to continue his education, but we never find out if he is successful or not.

This was an interesting story, but it was one of those stories that I had to read carefully just to figure out what the heck was going on. It was otherwise pretty realistic and slightly depressing. I wanted to root for Lorrie's efforts to get his life back on track, but in the end it seemed as if his chances weren't that good.

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

Deal Me In, Week 12: "Batting Against Castro" by Jim Shepard

 

Week 12 of the Deal Me In short story reading challenge brings the five of diamonds and a story by Jim Shepard, originally published in The Paris Review and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 1994. You might imagine that "Batting Against Castro" sounds like it might be a baseball story, and you would be right. I approached this story with some trepidation because 1. I am not a person who enjoys reading about any sport, and 2. to me, baseball is just slightly less exciting than watching paint dry.

But what saves this story for even a reader like me is the tone. The story reads like a cross between P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler: wry, witty humor bordering on the absurd. I ended up loving every minute of it.

The story takes place in 1951, and is the tale of two hapless professional baseball players, the unnamed narrator and his friend Charley, playing for the Philadelphia Phillies. And they are not exactly the best batters on the team. In fact, at one point the narrator says his batting average is around .143, which even I can tell is not great. So it’s not surprising that the two are about to get shipped off to the minor league team in Allentown, but after a while they decide to take matters into their own hands and head for the winter leagues in Cuba.

Charley is not so sure about this at first, however:

Charley took some convincing. He’d sit there in the Allentown dugout, riding the pine even in Allentown, whistling air through his chipped tooth and making faces at me. This Cuba thing was stupid, he’d say. He knew a guy played for the Athletics went down to Mexico or someplace, drank a cup of water with bugs in it that would’ve turned Dr. Salk’s face white, and went belly-up between games of a double-header. “Shipped home in a box they had to seal,” Charley said. He’d tell that story, and his tooth would whistle for emphasis.

So they end up in Cuba, of course, and after they get used to everything (the heat, the fans who like to pelt them with live snakes, and the teammates who put bird spiders in their caps and crushed chiles in the water fountain), their hitting actually starts to improve. And then one day they realize that their games are being attended by Batista, the then-president/dictator of Cuba, and Castro, the future dictator (whom I found out, after a little research, really did have an intense interest in baseball and who was a pitcher, at least on the intramural level).

Finally there comes the day and the game where Castro leaves the stands and fills in as pitcher when the opposing team runs out through their pitching roster.

He crossed to the mound, and the Marianao skipper watched him come and then handed him the ball when he got there like his relief ace had just come in from the pen. Castro took the outfielder’s hat for himself, but that was about it for uniform. The tails of his pleated shirt hung out. His pants looked like Rudolf Valentino’s. He was wearing dress shoes. I turned to the ump. “Is this an exhibition at this point?” I said. He said something in Spanish that I assumed was, “You’re in a world of trouble now.”

I won’t give away the ending, although I suspect you might have an idea how the story ends. But this story is well worth the read, and worth tracking down. It’s included in Shepard’s short story collection of the same name, and I have a mind to get it and read some more of this author who can make even me care about a baseball game.

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

Deal Me In, Week 11: "Things Left Undone" by Christopher Tilghman

 

It's the Jack of diamonds this week, and along with it came a very moving and thought-provoking story by Christopher Tilghman, first published in The Southern Review and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 1994. The title of the story comes from the general confession of sin that is probably as old as the Anglican Church, at least:

Almighty and most merciful Father,
We have wandered and strayed from your ways like lost sheep.
We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
We have offended against your holy laws.
We have left undone those things that we ought to have done;
And we have done those things that we ought not to have done;
And there is no health in us.

The story is about a young couple, Denny and Susan McCready, and it begins on the day that their son Charlie is born. Denny walks out and stands on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay to watch the sun coming up, but he doesn't feel the sense of majesty and awe that he thought he would feel at such a moment. This, unfortunately, becomes a foreshadowing of the overall tone of the events he and his family are about to experience. Before the day is out, Denny learns that his son has cystic fibrosis. And in just a few years, and within the first couple of pages of the story, Charlie succumbs to the disease. At this point the stage is set for the rest of the story:

Back when Charlie was still a newborn, when the first untroubled and unknowing smiles began to appear, Denny prayed that this could all happen quickly, before he gave too much of his love, before he surrendered too much of his hope. It took almost to the end of Charlie's life for Denny to realize that this prayer was monstrous, that he had asked for an end of his own pain in the place of a cure for his son. Susan would make him pay for this. But by then Denny had also learned that of all the pain a human can endure, not allowing oneself to feel love is the worst; that denying love to oneself can destroy, from the inside.

Charlie's death devastates not only Denny and Susan, but their marriage as well. They drift apart, both of them becoming absorbed in their work, and Susan begins seeing someone else. She moves out, and Denny keeps working away on his farm.

One day, however, he has an idea to buy a boat, a pretty radical move for someone who has been a landlubber all his life and is somewhat distrustful of the water. He buys a fixer-upper and gets it back in shape. He's glad to have something to occupy his hands and mind, and after several weeks of working on the boat, Susan suddenly shows back up. They're timid with each other and unsure of where they stand, but they gradually relearn how to talk to each other and be a couple. And throughout, the language of faith and love and transformation and redemption flows through the story and gives a kind of benediction over the events in Denny and Susan's lives:

"I sometimes think all of us out here just gave up a little early," she said.

"Speak for yourself," he said, but it wasn't said harshly. It was more of an absolution than a retort.

Even though this was quite a long short story, I enjoyed it immensely and it gave me a lot to think about.

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

Deal Me In, Week 8: "We Didn't" by Stuart Dybek

Lordy, I have been in such a reading dry spell lately. It seems like the reading well has run dry. It's a chore to just read my weekly short story for Deal Me In, let alone keep plugging away on the TBR Double Dog Dare. I could blame it on the fact that things have been heating up at work, and I am entering what is turning out to be my busiest term of the school year. So when I get home, I have been wanting to escape, and that does not mean struggling with stories and books that may or may not reward the time I spend with them. Sigh. However, I can read and tell you about ONE story, surely?

This week the carte de la semaine (as opposed to the carte du jour -- why in the world I am suddenly lapsing into French I have NO idea) was the four of diamonds, which took me to the pages of The Best American Short Stories 1994. I thought the story for this week, "We Didn't," by Stuart Dybek, was actually pretty good.

It's the story of a gradual break-up between the unnamed narrator and his girlfriend Julie. The narrator traces all the trouble back to one summer night on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the Gold Coast district of Chicago. He and Julie have spent all day together on the lake, and now they are ready to consummate their love under the stars -- that is, until the cops show up. But the cops are not actually there to bust them; they show up to retrieve the naked body of a young pregnant woman who drowned in the lake and, unbeknownst to the narrator and Julie, washed ashore close to where they decided to make out. Very awkward, to say the least.

This whole episode freaks Julie out, and the rest of the summer the thought of the dead young woman and her unborn child drives a wedge between the couple, and.... they don't actually ever end up having sex. (Hence the title of the story.) And they finally break up, all due to the dead woman.

This was a pretty interesting story. I had never read any of Dybek's stories before this one, but I would certainly be interested in reading some more of his stuff.

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

Deal Me In, Week 7: "Nicodemus Bluff" by Barry Hannah

I'm a little late with my short story review this week. This is actually last week's story. Too much job and not enough week, is my diagnosis of the problem. But better late than never! The card was the three of diamonds, and the story was a wholly underwhelming selection from The Best American Short Stories 1994.

"Nicodemus Bluff" by Barry Hannah is an odd little story that I didn't care for. To begin with, it was one of those stories that I honestly didn't know what was going on until at least halfway through the story. Sometimes that works as an effective technique, but in this story it just didn't.

The narrator, Harris, recounts a strange weekend at a deer camp with his father, Gomar, and some men that his father owed a great deal of money. Money that he didn't pay back. So it is that he and his father find themselves at the lodge and his father starts playing chess with a Mr. Pool, who owns the lodge and who is evidently one of his father's creditors. And this is no ordinary game of chess. For one thing, Gomar turns out to be a champion chess player. The chess games last long into the night and into the next two days. Finally Gomar wins, and the next thing we know, he and Pool are out in the woods and Pool is beating Harris' dad over the head with a pistol. He doesn't kill him, but Gomar dies not too long after that in an accident that sounds suspiciously like suicide, and the money he won keeps his family in high clover afterwards.

The title of the story comes from a Negro servant, Nicodemus, who worked for Mr. Pool at the lodge for many years. His ghost is supposed to haunt the nearby bluff, because he was shot by Pool. Granted, it was after he had been diagnosed with cancer, and he owed Pool more money than he could ever hope to pay back, and the story was that he asked Pool to shoot him. The story unsettles Harris, nonetheless, and it somehow provides a backdrop to the events of the story.

Is this a story of redemption, in which Gomar succeeds in overcoming his debt (although the strain of it seems to exact a toll on him anyway) whereas Nicodemus failed in overcoming his? I have no idea. It was one of the strangest stories I have read in a long time, and even though Hannah hailed from Meridian, Mississippi, a small town not too terribly far from where I live, and even though he won many awards during his life, he doesn't strike me as in the same league with some of the other more famous writers from Mississippi, or even from the South in general. I will probably give him another chance sometime, but it won't be anytime soon. Does anyone else have any insight into Hannah's work? Please comment!

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

Deal Me In 2015, Week 1: "This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona" by Sherman Alexie

Even though this was a weird half-week to begin the Deal Me In adventure for 2015, I decided to go ahead and read my story and start off with a bang. The two of diamonds led me to a story from The Best American Short Stories 1994: "This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona" by the famous Native American writer, Sherman Alexie.

I am not that familiar with Alexie's work, although I did read his novel Reservation Blues many years ago when it first came out. It didn't make a huge impression on me at the time, so I may have read it at the wrong time of my life or something. I really should go back and read it now, however, since it involves some of the same characters that show up in this story. As a side note, this story first appeared in Esquire, and was later incorporated into his collection entitled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (one of my all-time favorite titles for a book!).

Victor, who lives in Spokane, has just learned that his father has passed away in Phoenix. He just lost his job, so although he can get $100 from the tribal council to help with his father's arrangements, he doesn't have nearly enough money to get to Phoenix and back. His former friend from his childhood, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, offers to lend him the rest of the money to travel to Phoenix, but on one condition: Victor must take Thomas with him. No one likes Thomas because he is a storyteller and tells the same stories over and over to people, or even to himself. He's just weird:

While Victor stood in line, he watched Thomas Builds-the-Fire standing near the magazine rack talking to himself. Like he always did. Thomas was a storyteller whom nobody wanted to listen to. That's like being a dentist in a town where everybody has false teeth.

They travel by plane to Phoenix, and then travel back to Spokane in Victor's father's pickup. Along the way, Victor has flashbacks about his relationship through the years with Thomas. He finds out that, when Thomas was 13, he had run away to Spokane because of a dream he had had. There, Victor's father found him and rescued him, helping him get back to the reservation. But he never told anyone about it, in return for Thomas' promise to watch out for Victor and help him when he most needed it.

There is much more to this story than I am telling you, of course, because I think you need to go find it and read it for yourself. It's an affecting story of friendship (the good and the bad parts of it) and also about the nature of stories in our lives. And it's really just flat-out funny, to boot:

All through Nevada, Thomas and Victor had been amazed at the lack of animal life, at the absence of water, of movement.

"Where is everything?" Victor had asked more than once.

Now, when Thomas was finally driving, they saw the first animal, maybe the only animal in Nevada. It was a long-eared jackrabbit.

"Look," Victor yelled. "It's alive."

Thomas and Victor were busy congratulating themselves on their discovery when the jackrabbit darted out into the road and under the wheels of the pickup.

"Stop the car," Victor yelled, and Thomas did stop and backed the pickup to the dead jackrabbit.

"Oh man, he's dead," Victor said as he looked at the squashed animal.

"Really dead."

"The only thing alive in this whole state and we just killed it."

"I don't know," Thomas said. "I think it was suicide."

Victor looked around the desert, sniffed the air, felt the emptiness and loneliness, and nodded his head.

"Yeah," Victor said. "It had to be suicide."

"I can't believe this," Thomas said. "You drive for a thousand miles and there ain't even any bugs smashed on the windshield. I drive for ten seconds and kill the only living thing in Nevada."

This is a great story by a great author, and a fantastic way to begin the new year of Deal Me In!

Deal Me In is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.