Facing the Music (17 page)
Authors: Larry Brown
Several stories in this book have appeared previously: “Boy and Dog” in
Fiction International;
“Facing the Music” and “The Rich” in
Mississippi Review;
“Kubuku Rides” (This Is It)” in
The Greensboro Review;
“Samaritans” in
St. Andrews Review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for a previous edition of this work.
E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-731-9
Photo by TOM RANKIN
LARRY BROWN
was born in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1951. After graduating from high school he joined the Marine Corps, serving from 1970 to 1972. He married Mary Annie Coleman on his return to Mississippi and was captain of the Oxford Fire Department for sixteen years until he retired in 1990 in order to write full time. His books have won many prizes and awards, including two Southern Book Critics Circle Awards for fiction, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. He died in 2004. In 2005 he was posthumously inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Praise for
Facing the Music
“Larry Brown . . . is a choir of Southern voices all by himself.”
âThe Dallas Morning News
“Ten raw and strictly 100-proof stories make up one of the more exciting debuts of recent memoryâfiction that's gritty and genuine, and funny in a hard-luck way.”
âKirkus Reviews
“Larry Brown, a captain of the firehouse in Oxford, Mississippi, rediscovers real stuff, like great writers do. He's been out there, and reports it beautifully. He is a master.”
âBarry Hannah, author of
Ray
and
Hey, Jack
“A stunning debut short story collection.”
âThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Like his profession, Larry Brown's stories are not for the delicate or the fainthearted . . . his characters are limited people who are under siege . . . their stories manage to touch us in surprisingly potent ways.”
âThe Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Direct, powerful, and singularly honest.”
âWillie Morris, author of
North Toward Home
“Brown's special gift is to make you feel while you're reading it that only this story is worth telling.”
âWinston-Salem Journal
“Unpredictability, combined with a hard-eyed realism and a virtuoso display of style keeps the reader riveted to what Brown tells us about people we've often seen but never really known.”
âSouthern Magazine
“If his first book . . . were itself a fire, it would require five alarms.”
â
The Orlando Sentinel
“A collection of finely written stories, which, even at their darkest, claim as theirs the will to hope.”
âSt. Petersburg Times
“He doesn't seem to care if readers walk away from a story depressed, so long as they are aware that the ability to destroy does not preclude a tender sensibility, and that humor and catastrophe occupy the same seat on the bus.”
âIndependent Weekly
“Ten terrific stories . . . great reading.”
âGrand Rapids Press
“Larry Brown has an unerring comic sense, a sensitive ear for talk, an unsentimental commitment to his characters and, above all, the intimate, ruthless, loving connections with the world he writes about that is the hallmark of a good and honest writer.”
âEllen Douglas, author of
A Family's Affairs
and
Can't Quit You, Baby
“This is the debut of a valuable writer.”
âThe Memphis Commercial Appeal
“He writes live people, and he knows things about them you didn't think would get found out until Judgment Day.”
âJack Butler, author of
Jujitsu for Christ
“Tough stuff. Good stuff.”
âThe Antioch Review
“Larry Brown's work is exceptional by any standard. Talent has struck.”
âHarry Crews, author of
A Feast of Snakes
and
Body
Also by LARRY BROWN
FICTION
Dirty Work
Big Bad Love
Joe
Father and Son
Fay
The Rabbit Factory
A Miracle of Catfish
NONFICTION
On Fire
Billy Ray's Farm
OTHER BOOKS BY LARRY BROWN NOW AVAILABLE FROM ALGONQUIN
A Miracle of Catfish,
a novel
“
A Miracle of Catfish
yields so many pleasures, it hurts to say so.” â
The New York Times Book Review
Larry Brown's posthumous novel is the story of one year in the lives of five charactersâan old farmer with a new pond he wants stocked with baby catfish; a bankrupt fish pond stocker who secretly releases his forty-pound brood catfish into the farmer's pond; a little boy from the trailer home across the road who inadvertently hooks the behemoth catfish; the boy's inept father; and a former convict down the road who kills a second time to save his daughter.
Fiction ⢠Hardcover ⢠ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-536-0
Dirty Work,
a novel
“The writing, the characters, and the plot are so compelling that you can't help but stay with the book until its conclusion.” â
Washington Post Book World
â¢
A
USA Today
Book of the Year
Larry Brown's shattering first novel is the story of two menâstrangersâone black, the other white. Both were born and raised in Mississippi. Both fought in Vietnam. Both were gravely wounded. Now, twenty-two years later, both men lie in adjacent beds in a VA hospital. Over the course of one day and night, each recounts his story to the other.
Fiction ⢠Paperback ⢠ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-563-6
Joe,
a novel
“Powerful. . . . In the whiskeyish, rascally Southern tradition of Faulkner.” â
Time
When Joe Ransom, a reckless, self-destructive, hard-living man, offers a temporary job to Gary Jones, a teenager from a destitute, homeless family, neither expects much from the other, but soon they find themselves following a twisting map to redemptionâor ruin.
Fiction ⢠Paperback ⢠ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-413-4
We hope you enjoy this special preview of Rebecca Lee's forthcoming short story collection
Bobcat and Other Stories
, available in print and e-book formats wherever books are sold in June 2013.
FROM
Bobcat and Other Stories
BY REBECCA LEE
I
t was the terrine that got to me. I felt queasy enough that I had to sit in the living room and narrate to my husband what was the brutal list of tasks that would result in a terrine: devein, declaw, decimate the sea and other animals, eventually emulsifying them into a paste, which could then be riven with whole vegetables. It was like describing to somebody how to paint a Monet, how to turn the beauty of the earth into a blurry, intoxicating swirl, like something seen through the eyes of the dying. Since we were such disorganized hosts, we were doing a recipe from
Food and Wine
called the quick-start terrine. A terrine rightfully should be made over the course of two or three days â heated, cooled, flagellated, changed over time in the flames of the ever-turning world â but our guests were due to arrive within the hour.
Of the evening's guests, I was most worried about the Donner-Nilsons, whom my husband called the Donner-Blitzens. I had invited them about a month ago, before it had begun to dawn on me that one-half of the couple â
Ray Nilson â was having an affair with a paralegal at work, a paralegal so beautiful it was hard to form any other opinions of her. I suppose Ray felt in her presence something that seemed to him so original that he had to pay attention even if he had a wife and a small baby at home.
My friend Lizbet was also coming, and I had filled her in on the situation, making her promise that she would reveal nothing at the dinner, even with her eyes. “My eyes?” she had said, innocently. Lizbet was so irrepressible that I could imagine her raising her eyebrows very slowly for Ray's wife, darting them suddenly over to Ray.
Watch out!
Lizbet was the person who had introduced me to my husband, John. She and I had been children together, and then during the years I was getting a law degree at
NYU
, she and John had been writing students together in the state of Iowa.
Th
is fall, ten years after they'd graduated, both had novels being published. Lizbet's was about the search for the lost Gnostic Gospel texts, and the book was already, prepublication, being marketed as the thinking woman's
Da Vinci Code.
My husband's book was a novel about a war correspondent traumatized in some made-up Middle Eastern country that sounded a lot like Iran but was named Burmar in the book.
Truthfully, I was not pleased with his book. I had just finished reading it for the first time, in galleys, and within the first forty pages, the protagonist had slept with three women, none of whom even remotely resembled me â one was an aging countess, another a Midwestern farm-girl
TV
journalist, and then the narrator's true love was a sexy Burmarian/Iranian waif named Zita.
“Who is Zita?” I had asked him early this afternoon. I was hovering over a roast, trying to figure out how to tie it for the oven.
“She's nobody,” he said. He was carrying into our apartment bags of groceries and he leaned over to kiss my cheek.
“Who is she, though?”
“She's a fictional character.”
“Do you think our unborn child will one day want to read about your sexual fantasies of other women in war zones?”
“Wait,” he said. His head was cocked to the side, as it was when he felt confused or hurt, and wanted to explain something. He looked innocent, yet interested. “First,” he said, “there is no Zita. Second, the protagonist in the book is not me.”
“Zita is Frances,” I said. It was absurd, I knew. Frances was Frances Sofitel, his book editor, who was also due to show up at our house in a few hours for this dinner party, a woman as unlike a waif as humanly possible. She was tall and very angular, and spoke with an authoritative baritone, and seemed always properly amused by all the underlings around her. As well, she actually managed to make quite a bit of money as an editor, partly by digging in the muck a little, a celebrity bio here, a porn star's memoir there, just a little bit on the side to allow her to publish what she considered her heart and soul, books like my husband's literary thriller and paean to women who weren't his wife.
She and my husband had what I thought was an overly intimate connection. I didn't really like to see them together.
Th
ey actually talked about language itself a lot. Just words and puns and little synonyms and such.
Th
is was completely dull to me, which in addition to my jealousy was a terrible combination. For instance, we would all be out to dinner, and one of them would dig out a little piece of paper so they could play an acrostic, or dream a little about sentences that were the same backwards as forwards. For my husband, words were fascinating â their origins and mutations, their ability to combine intricately. When somebody would say something in an economical way, and use grammar originally to some satisfying end, he would usually repeat it to me at the end of the day. It stayed in his mind, like a song or a painting he loved. I did feel he would be a very good father, partially for this reason, as I could already picture him crouched over the baby, listening, rapt, waiting for the words to come in.
“Zita is not Frances, nor is she any woman,” he said. “It's fiction.”
“You spend all your time writing, so we'd have to say that those women take up the lion's share of your time â they are your significant others.”
“Well, then, we'd have to say that Duong Tran is your significant other,” John said. Duong Tran was a Hmong immigrant who had refused to give his dying wife treatment for her heart condition on account of the medication being, according to Duong, Western voodoo and not ordained by the many gods who'd traveled alongside them from Laos to New York City in July 2001. I was his lawyer.
Th
e argument devolved from there. Certain themes got repeated â
John's intense solitude, my long hours, his initial resistance to commitment, my later resistance to marriage, and then at some point the reasons were left behind and we were in that state of pure, extrarational opposition.
Our argument was both constrained and exacerbated by the fact that I was pregnant and had read that high levels of cortisol in a troubled mother can cross the placenta and not only stress out the baby in utero but for
the rest of its life
. As well, there was a deadline; our dinner party was set to begin. People were soon going to be out in the streets and on the subway, making their way to our apartment.
Th
ey wouldn't want to picture their hostess like this â emotional, insecure, lashing out at her husband. You want the hostess to be serene, the apartment a set of glowing rooms awaiting you, quiet music pouring out of its walls, the food making its way through various complex stages in the kitchen â the slow broiling fig sauce, the buns in the warming oven, the pudding forming its subtle skin in the chill of the refrigerator.
FromÂ
BOBCAT AND OTHER STORIES
Copyright (c) 2013 by Rebecca Lee. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-61620-173-9
On Sale June 2013