A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories

I
N 1982
I was remodeling our old house in Salt Lake City and feeling fine about it. It was an old house and needed repair. The inventory of things to do was thrilling: hinges, windows, shelving, painting. We’d left our teaching jobs at prep school after ten years in the east and were back in our hometown. My wife had taken a fine job as a technical editor with Sperry-Univac, and I was supposed to be writing a novel. But given a day, what was I going to do: type further into the dark or affix the new kitchen counter? The house was the biggest thing that had come between me and my writing, and I could feel it was going to be there for a while. Summer turned to fall and the inventory doubled. I was working alone (with our dog Max as company), replacing the wicked basement windows, tiling the laundry floor.

One day hauling trash to the landfill in my truck, I dropped a mattress off the elevated freeway there at Fifth South. This bothered me, of course, and I was generally bothered by not writing, but I tried to take satisfaction in my home repair. I continued cleaning, fixing, replacing until one day I found myself sitting on the cement carport floor beside the sawhorses on which lay the big front door. I was stripping the door, and I had taken a snootful of the powerful chemicals, and as dizzy as I’d been that year, I sat down. The good dog Max came up and nosed me in the face. From the workbench the radio broadcast a song, and I thought, “This is a terrible song.” I wish I could remember the name of the annoying song, but I don’t know the titles of ten songs. It was a man and he closed each stanza down with unrestrained wailing. He was as unhappy as I was. The dizziness you get from chemical stripper is not a joke, and most of an hour passed as I watched the light change in the larger world. I had some thoughts, among them: why are you stripping the door? I mention all this because that was the day that when I stood up, I went into the back room of our old house and sat at the typewriter and wrote the first draft of “The Governor’s Ball,” where the mattress flies off that one guy’s truck.

I’m not saying there is a magic ingredient in paint stripper. I’m just saying I was at the end of my rope and I didn’t know it until I sat down in that garage. I also will say that any writer who removes the front door from the house and then types a story is probably going to be working on a piece of fiction that has his attention.

I was going to write the narrative of losing the mattress as a letter to my folks, but I just let it go on. I’ve spoken about that story many times, about how I continued into it far past what I knew, and how the ending surprised me. A watershed moment in my life as a writer occurred when the homeless man asks if the mattress would fly out of the sky. I thought: that’s right—he saw it. How I would have loved to see a mattress fly down from the elevated highway, but I didn’t see it, he did. I wrote another story the next day and that story is also in this book. I wrote the tiny piece “Max” on the third day. Each of these stories surprised me in ways I wasn’t used to. I was nervous, but typing. I had written and published two novels, and to be sure there were surprises in their writing, but this was something new. On my bulletin board was the tabloid headline, “Bigfoot Stole My Wife,” and I read it for the thousandth time and for the first time thought, “That’s no good. That had to hurt.” I was living a life hoping every day that my wife would arrive home safely. I reread the headline, and I made ready to type that story.

I finished with the door, sanded it, and put four coats of lustrous Varithane on it (as well as the screen door frame), and they can be seen still shining today, if you know where to look. But my maintenance work moved into the avocation column, where it has stayed. In the twenty years since that season in Utah, I’ve written dozens of stories, but I have never stripped another door and, frankly, I never will. I don’t think anybody should.

That first year the novel I’d been typing rose and disappeared like vapor. My kids arrived and I was glad the roof was right and tight and that the nursery had new carpet and paint. The boys changed everything I was thinking about. The two people in my novel were having trouble getting back together even though they loved each other, but who cared! We had kids! Agendas shifted like continents for me.

I wrote the stories “Life Before Science,” and “Blood,” and “Phe-nomena” and “Milk,” in that house, on an IBM typewriter on a borrowed dining-room table. The snow seriously damaged our roof that winter, and I was true to my work, typing while workmen we could not afford swarmed around me. I was doing the one thing that John Gardner notes fiction writers must be able to do: live without guilt while their spouses support them. In December, we leased our vacant lot to a couple of kids who sold Christmas trees, and I wrote “The H Street Sledding Record.” It had been my wife’s father who had thrown manure on his roof years before. Our friend Karen Shepard was editing her monthly paper
Network
and she paid me a hundred dollars a story and then a hundred and five and then a hundred and ten. Carol Houck Smith at Norton who had been the editor on my first two books called. I thought she was going to inquire about the novel that I had not been writing, but she said of the stories I had sent her:
I think we have a book here
. I remember the call. Those stories became
The News of the World
.

In 1986 we moved to Arizona and I started teaching at Arizona State in a fine community of writers and students. I started “Plan B for the Middle Class” in our rental house on Yale Avenue and finished it in the house we bought in Tempe. The issues I faced then were the same for all writers who take teaching jobs. Universities are places where writers disappear. I had always loved to teach and I still find it an active investigation, and I fought the fight that teaching writers fight. I wrote after my classes were in place, running smoothly. Teaching, like home repair, takes time and it is a real thing. I wrote “DeRay” in that house on Alameda and finished “Hartwell” and started “Blazo.” All my stories were taking names for titles.

I wrote “On the U.S.S. Fortitude,” and smiled at my indulgence. You can hear my mother’s voice in there. I gave the story to Bill Shore, of Share Our Strength, who sold it to
The New Yorker
, so Share Our Strength got the money and I got the credit, such as it was. We had the chance to go to New York and see my tabloid headlines produced at The Manhattan Punchline. “Bigfoot Stole My Wife” the evening was called, and it included the new monologue, “The Tablecloth of Turin.” By now, also, Bigfoot himself had spoken in “I Am Bigfoot,” and his monologue got everyone’s attention when he stepped forward at the end and pointed at a member of the audience and said, “I’m watching your wife.” We had the true honor of hearing Darren McGavin play the sheriff in a forty-minute version of “Phenomenon.” When I look at it now, I hear his voice.

It rained on our vacation to San Diego and I bought a typewriter out of the local shopper from a ham radio operator in La Jolla for eight bucks and started “Sunny Billy Day.” There isn’t much rain in our lives, and it’s important to jump on it, get all you can out of it. I finished that story on a picnic table on our small terrace in Arizona on that same typewriter. I kept that ten-pound Underwood there for a year, under a plastic dishpan when not in use. When the story appeared in
Gentlemen’s Quarterly
, it was accompanied by my favorite illustration ever—those ballplayers at the Castaway. Then I went back into “Blazo” and wrote on it for a year. By the end the folder was two inches thick, and I’d cut more pages than were included. We parted friends, but that was the most work of any of my stories.

Though, again, I’d been sent out to write a novel, what I sent to New York were these stories. I wrote “A Kind of Flying,” that gives this book its title, as an assignment for National Public Radio. Susan Stamberg and George Garrett had cooked up the notion of a group of writers all writing stories that included a wedding cake in the middle of the road. I do love the song “El Paso,” but I did not know until I was finished writing the story that the military base in that city is Fort Bliss. A few months later Elaine and I woke one morning in Colorado and heard me reading it on the radio. I collected these stories, and we put a blueprint from a school library on the front cover of the book and sent it into the world. The working title was
Plan B for the Middle Class
, a joke I’d concocted in honor of the world’s worst movie:
Plan 9 from Outer Space
. A reference that one person, total, has acknowledged.

The next year, with my desk clear and a sabbatical staring me in the eye, certainly I would write a novel. I saw the Charles Laughton version of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
and started a monologue about boiling oil, which became “What We Wanted to Do.” I started “Zanduce at Second,” with the longest sentences I’d ever written, and no story before or since stunned me more with its ending. I started “The Prisoner of Bluestone” with the sentence “There was a camera.” and nothing more, thinking that I was writing a mystery, and that we’d see the film developed. I had a weird wrestling anecdote about Dr. Slime that I’d held for some years, and I kicked that out of bed and found the narrator, our stalwart baker, and I went back into his strange night with Betsy. “A Note on the Type” began as a private little joke for my printer friends and kept opening and opening. When Mrs. McKay arrived I wasn’t even sure what I had, but I had that feeling of satisfying strangeness which I’ve learned to listen to. By the time I started “Oxygen,” my plans for a novel were again upset, dislodged, vanquished. I think I knew that would happen. In the long story “Oxygen” I wanted to make a tough summer in a hot city for our guy; I wanted an unvarnished look at a kind of rite of passage. When I finished I saw that I had written my little novel in short-story clothing. That year also, I told a Halloween story to my son’s third-grade class. I told it as a courtroom trial, and because all the players got to speak, I heard something that became the germ of “The Chromium Hook.” A few years later, the guys who made the festival film from that story sent me a beautiful black corduroy jacket with “Spinard Institute” embroidered over the heart. It makes me wish I lived in a colder place.

I finished the last and title story in the book, “The Hotel Eden,” at our cabin in Utah, far above Vernal, in the summer of 1996. I remember the day vividly. The story had turned on me, and my charismatic friend had become something else, and the last sentence surprised me again. I closed the file on my little Mac Powerbook. Max and I went out for a hike in the late day, and in the rocky glen a mile out we came across a coyote and her pups. I held Max’s collar while the coyote herded her brood back into the tangle of sandstone and pine, and then we took those long strides across the big meadow in a circle toward home. You get to walk that way when you finish your book.

I smiled when I read what Wallace Stegner wrote in his collected stories about his first agent warning him, pointedly, about writing stories, saying that a short-story writer “lives on his principal, using up beginnings and endings.” In a way I think she was right. None of these stories was free, and I worked at them, trying to give each its own believable world. It is an expensive endeavor. You don’t get to reuse the sets. Maybe novels are the way to go. But right now I still have a few stories in the bank. I’ve written some stories since the ones in this book, and frankly, I’m writing a couple more these days. I’ve come to love the short story intensely. I have found some things out writing them. I’m grateful to W. W. Norton and to Carol Houck Smith, whom I met through the mail twenty-eight years ago, for gathering these pieces, all friends of my youth, into the present book. I hope they meet your approval.

Ron Carlson

Scottsdale, Arizona

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