Little Reef and Other Stories Read online

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  little reef

  and other stories

  MICHAEL CARROLL

  TERRACE BOOKS

  A TRADE IMPRINT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

  Terrace Books

  A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

  3 Henrietta Street

  London WC2E 8LU, England

  eurospanbookstore.com

  Copyright © 2014 by Michael Carroll

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carroll, Michael (Writer), author.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Little Reef and other stories / Michael Carroll.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-299-29740-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-299-29743-5 (e-book)

  I. Carroll, Michael (Writer), author After Dallas. II. Title.

  PS3603.A774588A6 2014

  813´.6—dc23

  2013038687

  These stories have appeared in slightly different form in the following places: “Pascagoula,” Jonathan; “Referred Pain,” The Yale Review; “Her Biographers,” Southwest Review; “Unsticking,” Animal Shelter; “From the Desk of … Hunter B. Gwathmey,” Open City; “Werewolf,” With: New Gay Fiction.

  *

  to

  EDMUND VALENTINE WHITE III

  *

  “Do you live here all alone?” she asked of Olive.

  “I shouldn’t if you would come and live with me!”

  Even this really passionate rejoinder failed to make Verena shrink; she thought it so possible that in the wealthy class people made each other such easy proposals. It was a part of the romance, the luxury, of wealth; it belonged to the world of invitations, in which she had had so little share. But it seemed almost a mockery when she thought of the little house in Cambridge, where the boards were loose in the steps of the porch.

  “I must stay with my mother and father,” she said. “And then I have my work, you know. That’s the way I must live now.”

  “Your work?” Olive repeated, not quite understanding.

  “My gift,” said Verena, smiling.

  “Oh yes, you must use it. That’s what I mean; you must move the world with it; it’s divine.”

  HENRY JAMES, The Bostonians

  “They’re just Baptists,” Miss Jenny said. “What about the money?”

  WILLIAM FAULKNER, Sanctuary

  CONTENTS

  *

  PART ONE: AFTER DALLAS

  from the desk of … hunter b. gwathmey

  referred pain

  barracuda

  her biographers

  little reef

  pascagoula

  werewolf

  PART TWO: AFTER MEMPHIS

  first responder

  admissions

  lack

  avenging angel

  unsticking

  little reef and other stories

  PART ONE

  *

  AFTER DALLAS

  from the desk of … hunter b. gwathmey

  to

  REBECCA BOWEN CRAIG

  You young people are the crème de la crème of Timucua County. I hope I’m not boring you. I look out and I see intelligence in every one of your faces. I see readers, but smart, bright young folks with futures. One day, and sooner than you think, you’ll go off to college with your grades and the help of this countywide gifted program and this marvelous series of seminars, the Joe Berg Seminars. I envy you. I wish I’d had a Joe Berg. I had a different education growing up in the Midwest—sleepy stuff. But then I had the fortune of participating in World War Two,” Gwathmey said, pausing pensively and then blinking down at his notes.

  It was an awkward moment. We were silent, junior high kids unsure how to react.

  “And as schooling goes,” the man went on and chuckled, “well, the army ain’t bad …”

  And he waited for us to laugh. I wanted him to skip the army, ahead to the part about becoming a writer. I was falling asleep in my auditorium seat. I focused on his deep tan and broad, friendly grin. We’d come from all over the county to see and hear Hunter B. Gwathmey, an author we’d never heard of, and be inspired by him. He’d brought a sheaf of notes up to the podium after his introduction by the head of the gifted program, but he never seemed to refer to them, except for effect. Gwathmey sort of reminded me of an unusually pensive preacher.

  He wanted us to feel proud and he started talking about local history. A lot of our Joe Berg speakers would do this. He said, “Imagine!” He poked at and molded the air. “Same year William Shakespeare’s born, the French come to town. Here, right at our doorstep!

  We began tittering before we got what he was talking about. We’d covered this episode in fifth grade, then again in seventh (with more of the injustices the Indians had suffered thrown in—disease, dishonest deals, language problems). We’d just never heard it all so jazzily put.

  He cooled the gesticulations for an instant, perfecting his dry comic timing. “The French were looking for gold. They could’ve asked us first. We would’ve told them …”

  An underscore of giggles from us, yet Gwathmey pushed past it with a wave of his hand to shame us when he said, “And as you probably heard, those French were starving and dying.”

  I turned to Vickie, who was sitting next to me. Vickie wore the same continuous and pleasant smile she always got whenever we were allowed to leave school for half a day. I didn’t know where I was with her. She and I had a private language. Every morning before gifted class we’d go over last night’s Monty Python on PBS together. We’d do parts of the skits, accents and all, then reduce them to their essential gestures, signaling with those to each other for the rest of the day while working out our proofs, not always sitting together but still signaling. We twitched our noses and imaginary mustaches, raising circumspect eyebrows, mouthing: “Right!”

  Reacting to Gwathmey’s graveness, Vickie pursed her lips expectantly, staring up at the podium while trusting that I was watching her.

  “Didn’t wanna work. Lower and lesser nobles. They didn’t know how,” Gwathmey was saying, and so on, up until the point where the Spanish sailed up from Havana hating the fact that Protestants were in their backyard and wiped them out. “Which as you know was the end of the French Huguenots,” he said—pronouncing it HUGH-guh-KNOTS—“in Florida.” He panned the room through his glinting windshield glasses. “La Florida,” he said in a rat-a-tat Spanish accent. “Or as I like to call it,” he then said in his regular purple-plush speaker’s voice, before switching to a powder-puff Frenchy Pepé Le Pew: “La Floride …”

  I’d done a little research at
the library the week before.

  A long time ago, Gwathmey had written a spy novel called A Shadow at Midnight about a German U-boat patrolling the northern Florida coast, and it was based on real events. The Nazi spies had rowed ashore from their submarine, just a few miles from where we were sitting, in an inflatable raft. They were hoping to pose as locals, infiltrate navy bases, and gather intelligence, but then they were caught and sent to a camp. The movie version was black and white— I’d seen some of it on TV one Saturday afternoon—and it starred the young, blond, and handsome George Peppard playing one of the Nazis. I knew George Peppard from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which I’d seen on another Saturday, an okay movie but I preferred the original novella by Truman Capote.

  “I’d like to say a few words about that time,” said Gwathmey, “that bloody, awful, and glorious time, which I won’t describe to you, not all of it, but just to say how odd life is. Now, you’re familiar as gifted students with the concepts of literary and dramatic irony, but I suppose it wasn’t so ironic that I would one day write about that war, using some of the war experiences I’d myself had. Not directly, but as—I suppose you might say—background human research.”

  Gwathmey went into the ironies that his red-green blindness had saved him from entering the infantry and getting shipped off to be shot and killed on D-day, and that his grandmother had spoken German in Ohio and taught him some, so he was sent to Europe to work in intelligence.

  Vickie seemed more interested in this part than I was. She was probably going to ask him a question at the end about Germany. She was mad that our school didn’t offer German. Vickie was good at math and wanted to be a physicist and already planned to go to Cornell. I wondered if we were ever going to become boyfriend and girlfriend. I wanted to hold her hand. She was a few inches taller than me, though I tried not to think about it. I tried not to think about college. I didn’t want to go to college at all, only to become a writer. Gwathmey had left the war topic and started talking about meeting his wife in Chicago, flashing his dentures to show his happiness.

  I turned to Vickie and rolled my eyes and she smiled uneasily. I mouthed, “Bor-ing.”

  She cupped her pink-glossed lips and mouthed, “Shhh …” I pled with one hand. I had embarrassed myself and this wasn’t comedy hour. I stared affectionately at her. I took her hand and she let me hold it and squeezed mine back a few times, and I felt peaceful.

  Gwathmey lived in the area and wrote a column about politics and current events in the evening paper, the Jacksonville Journal, entitled “From the Desk of … Hunter B. Gwathmey,” and lately he’d spent a lot of time in it complaining about Jimmy Carter.

  We’d released hands—her idea—but whenever Gwathmey flash-forwarded and alluded to his later becoming a writer, Vickie nudged me in the ribs with her elbow, and I was following his thread now. Here was this successful man who seemed content. He was still in the northern Florida area, or no he’d landed here somehow, and he was happy to announce that in fact he was writing a trilogy—the Matanzas trilogy as he called it. That was the Spanish word for slaughter. Where he lived, just south of here in St. Augustine, there was a river called the Matanzas dubbed that by the Spanish after they’d killed the French Protestants, to commemorate their reclaiming of Catholic, Spanish-held land. And this fact of religious bigotry throughout history seemed to aggrieve Gwathmey especially. He said that his trilogy was meant to show that all throughout history bigotry, whether in the misguided Nazi ideology or the wars of religion that tore Europe apart back during the Reformation, had also been visited upon American soil. His last volume in the Matanzas trilogy, he announced, was going to be about the American Indians, focusing on the Florida Seminoles. The Seminoles, he said, were the most cosmopolitan grouping of folks, black and white (because they had runaway slaves, “half-breeds,” and Native Americans from different Indian tribes) in the history of North America. He detailed this raising his nose like the prow of a ship defying an onslaught of crashing, foaming waves as it rocked on and bound forward.

  I’d never paid much attention to any history, local or otherwise, to tell the truth.

  Still, he must have known that he was losing us, and so he said, “Anyway, maybe you’ll pick up one of my books and drop me a note sometime and tell me what you think about it, but what matters is that you keep learning, kind young ladies and gentlemen. And I thank you.”

  Gwathmey waited for his applause. And then that done, he called for questions.

  Vickie and I both raised our hands.

  “The fellow right here,” he pointed at me, “this handsome, promising-looking dude.”

  I stood up. I said, “I wondered if you could say more about how you became a writer.”

  The room was politely quiet, wanting to hear more about Nazis and also Hollywood.

  I sat back down and he gathered his thoughts, blinking. He said, “A funny person,” and he scratched his chin, “a successful musician was asked on a street in New York how you get to Carnegie Hall, and that fellow replied, ‘Practice, practice!’ Guess that fella knew, all right.”

  “Was it hard?” I said, not standing back up but hollering it so that Vickie hooted a titter.

  “Hell yeah it was hard,” he said, and he chuckled, looking off. As though the murky, aquarium-wattage fluorescence of the auditorium were too bright, like flashbulbs at a press conference, he shaded his eyes and peered down at the end of the front row—where the gifted teachers were perched—and he grinned sheepishly and said, “I can say ‘hell,’ I hope?”

  I craned my neck, straining to see, and watched our teacher, Mrs. Argonopoulos, nod her solid iron helmet of hair with dignified approval.

  But I wanted to hear about passionately involved late nights of creativity at the typewriter under a burning lamp. I already thought I might trouble him with a typed letter later.

  Gwathmey got the nostalgic look again and pursed his lips. He waited then said, grinning back the heaviness of a recalled feeling, “I never could have done it without the help of my wife, Dina. Dina— well, she couldn’t be here today. She wanted to come, you see, but that’s my Dina. Back in the day, I did something foolish I’d never recommend. I quit my job in the final months of writing A Shadow at Midnight. And sweet Dina went to work, two jobs, one as a waitress in a greasy spoon and the other, at night, as a hatcheck girl in a Chicago supper club. We were young and when nobody else believed in me, she’d come home tired after two shifts of work—and what did she do? She sat down and typed my book. My manuscript. You’ll see if you ever pick it up, it’s dedicated to Dina. That supper club, by the way, was full of old-time, old-school mobsters.”

  Just his mention of the word manuscript sent me into private fits of longing and envy.

  Gwathmey pointed at Vickie and said, “Yes, the pretty lady next to that young man.”

  “Do you ever go back to Germany?” Vickie said loudly. “And what’s it like now?”

  A while later we filed out of the school board building, heading to a Wendy’s for lunch before returning to class on our side of town. The mother of one of the other gifted kids was the second driver. But Vickie and I rode with Mrs. Argonopoulos in her station wagon, sitting in the front bench seat scrunched together so she could hear our reactions, and Vickie said, “I liked his joke about the French, how they should’ve asked us first. Gold in Florida, now that’s a laugh!”

  “But wasn’t he the coolest?” I said, wondering if Vickie would ever type a book for me.

  “You should write him a letter,” she said, “and I’ll help if you want. Collaborate.”

  “I’m going to,” I said, squinting out at the hazy downtown skyline, “but all by myself.”

  Hunter B. Gwathmey had said that for reasons of privacy and security he never gave out his St. Augustine address and that he kept an unlisted phone number. At some point during the question-and-answer session he’d also mentioned that for an office he rented a room up in the Pelican Hotel near the newspaper building, just a
cross the river from the school board building where he spoke. I hated Jacksonville, but then it occurred to me, in a sickening, sneak-preview-of-real-life type of revelation, that not everybody could live in New York, and that even some smart, talented people ended up having to make do in the provinces—as Holly Golightly called them. Easy to have your character say such a thing, however, if you lived in New York.

  On a trip to the mall, I found a dinky paperback of A Shadow at Midnight. It had a sloppily painted cover depicting a tall, hunky blond man in dark sailor gear embracing a sluttily attired hayseed woman at well-built chest level. I opened it and read the first few lines. I had never gotten into suspense, and it seemed that the beginning of Gwathmey’s novel was trying to make me sweat, get all hot and bothered just to get interested in reading it. Something about a wristwatch loudly, paranoically ticking, and the swashing of waves in chill moonlight.

  “An icy night off the shores of Hades,” it began, and I didn’t buy its initial melodrama.

  I put the book back on the shelf. The story was set here, and no one I knew would care.

  I wanted to write good, honest stuff, what Truman Capote wrote. I worked on my father’s college portable Royal but was saving up to buy myself a Smith Corona electric. I was a little ashamed of the uneven, herky-jerky alignment of letters the Royal’s keys made, but at the same time I imagined myself tapping out my first book on it, a masterpiece that would get me to New York in time for cocktails with Tennessee Williams and others, and decided that it was good enough for my letter to Gwathmey. I had to write this author Hunter B. Gwathmey a little letter.

  I began by reminding him of who I was and saying how much I enjoyed his talk. Then, swept up by emotion, I went on to tell him what a privilege it was to know that a real writer of successful books was living near me. I had gotten so much motivation and inspiration from his entertaining, informative talk. Again I thanked him for answering my question and my friend’s question and said that of course I was planning to become a writer and I’d be grateful for any tips he could offer. Did I really need to go to college, I asked near the end—and if so, what types of courses should I take? Study what major? Finally, I hoped that he and his wife were doing well.