Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley

ME AND MY DADDY LISTEN TO BOB MARLEY

In memory of Philip E. Sullivan, 1927-2014

“And gladly would he teach, and gladly learn.”

—G
EOFFREY
C
HAUCER

Stories were first published in the following magazines:

“In Such Light”—
The Harvard Review

“Mouseskull”—
The Georgia Review

“Arsonists”—
The Georgia Review

“Dog Song”—
Shenandoah

“Coop”—
Quarterly West

“Said”—
Chautauqua

“Rockhounds”—
Agni

“Sab”—
Chattahoochee Review

“Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley”—
Water~Stone Review

Copyright © 2015 Ann Pancake

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products 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

Pancake, Ann.

[Short stories. Selections]

Me and my daddy listen to Bob Marley : novellas and stories / Ann Pancake.

pages ; cm

I. Pancake, Ann. In such light. II. Title.

PS3616.A36A6 2015

813'.6--dc23

2014034176

ISBN 978-1-61902-510-3

Cover design by Briar Levit

Interior Design by Megan Jones Design

Counterpoint Press

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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CONTENTS

IN SUCH LIGHT

MOUSESKULL

ARSONISTS

DOG SONG

COOP

THE FOLLOWING

SAID

SUGAR'S UP

ROCKHOUNDS

SAB

ME AND MY DADDY LISTEN TO BOB MARLEY

IN SUCH LIGHT

O
NE POPCORN GIRL
fringe benefit was a pass for two to any showing at the Alexander Henry Theater. Janie usually took her mentally disabled uncle. During the movie, the two of them would get drunk on Southern Comfort she'd smuggle in in a pimento jar and mix with a Sprite they'd buy at concessions. Janie's favorite spot was the first few rows, where she felt swallowed by the screen, but Uncle Bobby insisted they sit in the back row on the aisle for the quickest exit in case of fire. In scary movies, he shrieked with laughter, whooping and wheezing at unexpected and inappropriate moments in the movie so he could later say, “I wasn't scared of that movie! I just laughed at it! I just laughed at it, Janie!” Janie would scoot down a little lower, pull her knees up against the back of the seat in front of her, and feel thankful for how few people she knew in Remington and for the way the on-duty popcorn girls wouldn't be in to pick up trash until after the credits were done.

The one day in May when the Alexander Henry had done all its summer hiring, Janie had stood in line with seventy other people, many in their Sunday clothes, her seeing the country in those clothes. She glanced down and wondered what the others saw in hers. The job seekers huddled out of the rain under the short eaves of
the storefronts north of the theater marquee, gaunt men with white shirts bunched at their waists, younger men in pool-blue leisure suits and tennis shoes. Women wearing double-knit slacks in tropical colors and faux silk shirts, others humped into dresses, their legs battened down in thick brown hose. Eventually the thumb-shaped theater manager strolled out, squinted up and down the string of jobless, and shouted, “If you didn't bring something to write with, you might as well go home!”

The people who needed the money the least ended up getting the jobs, and Janie knew even then she had gotten hers because she had the college-girl wherewithal to bring a pen and because the manager recognized her grandparents' last name. Plus her looks, such as they were, not that she'd ever thought them much, but throughout the summer, Gus would now and again pronounce, “Nobody wants to come to the movies and see an ugly popcorn girl.”

She was staying with her grandparents that summer and only working part-time as a kind of convalescence after “running herself down,” as her grandmother would say, during her first year of college. She wasn't sure what her grandparents thought had run her down—it had all climaxed a few months earlier in a mysterious infection that had her sleeping sixteen hours a day and made her gums bleed—but she had to believe they thought it was overworking, which it was partly, instead of overdrinking, which it was mostly. She was sixteen years younger than Uncle Bobby, which made him thirty-four that summer, but his mental age was about thirteen and a half. Hers, when she was drunk, she calculated at fifteen.

This was 1983, and in West Virginia, you could still legally drink at eighteen. By the time she'd been in Remington two weeks, she hadn't made any friends, but she and Uncle Bobby had found their places. After supper, while her grandparents watched the
MacNeil/Lehrer Report
,
she and Uncle Bobby slipped off in her blue Chevette to Ramella's on Fourth Avenue and drank White Russians. She and Uncle Bobby went to Gino's Pub and drank pitchers of urine-colored Miller. She and Uncle Bobby hung out in the basement garage across the street drinking Bud, while Nathan, Uncle Bobby's neighbor, smoked pot and worked on his bike.

Often when she'd gotten home from a popcorn girl shift and she and Uncle Bobby were sitting on the front porch, Uncle Bobby would say, “Tell me again about the cat shit,” then snicker into his hand.

Janie would pretend she didn't know what he was talking about. “What do you mean?” she'd say. Or, “What was that word you used?” She knew he found the cat shit story thrilling because her grandmother allowed no cussing in the house, and certainly never an utterance as vulgar as “shit.”

“Ah, Janie. C'mon! C'mon now! Tell me!”

When she knew he couldn't wait a second longer, she'd give in. “Gus tells us, ‘Scoop the cigarettes out the ashtrays with that thing you clean cat shit with.'”

At that, her uncle would erupt into howling brays that sounded like an elephant. Janie wasn't sure why he laughed so hard, but no one else laughed at anything she said, and she'd take what she could get. When he'd finally come down enough from that fit to put together a few words, he'd say, “Remember that time I took you all to
Black Beauty
and Ben lost his mittens?”

Ben was her brother, a year younger than she was. Uncle Bobby had asked her this at least once on each of her twice-a-year visits to her grandparents' over the thirteen years since the incident had happened. “Yeah,” Janie would say.

Then Uncle Bobby would laugh beyond elephant, beyond cat shit. He'd pound his thighs with his fists, and his face would bloom red, his
eyes squint shut with his effort to hold back from outright screams. Her grandmother did not permit screams.

She hadn't grown up in this city, but her grandparents and her mother had, and Janie could remember not just the
Black Beauty
incident, which occurred when she was five, but seeing
Mary Poppins
in the Alexander Henry when she was no more than three. Remington, West Virginia, at eighty thousand people, was the biggest city in the state at the time and the only city she'd ever known. She remembered being driven through Remington to visit some aging relative or another—back then, there'd been legions—and her awe and disbelief at how far they could drive and not stop seeing houses. Almost every time her family came to Remington, she and Ben were taken to a movie at the Alexander Henry, and the Alexander Henry was the grandest and most elegant place Janie had ever entered. In McCloud County, where she grew up, grandeur was found only in nature, and the palatial and luxurious not at all.

The theater itself, where you actually watched the movie, was the largest room she'd seen in her life, triple the size of the high school gym back home, and that didn't even count the balconies and mezzanines, the lobbies and the catacomb of bathrooms. You padded down the lush carpet enveloped in a dazzle world of scarlets and golds, as though pipe organs had been sacrificed, trumpets unwound, then resculpted into resplendent spirals and scrolls. These framed the stage, feathered the walls, where Midas-touched vines twined columns, and figures of berobed women and bearded men gazed and glared among petrified fruits and urns. Over the box seats mounted on the walls, golden swag upon swag of voluptuous satin soared clear to the towering ceiling, and from the boxes themselves spilled fabric like knights' horses' finery, emblazoned with flags and ensigns and shields, the box seats all the more impressive for never having people in them. If Janie stared
long enough without blinking before the lights went down, she saw faces in the ceiling.

Many times the Alexander Henry outglamoured whatever was on the screen, and occasionally Janie watched the walls instead of the movie. There was even a full curtain that drew back to let the show begin, a curtain in heavy folds the dried-blood color worn by kings in the Old Testament, and its velvet stateliness extended to dense drapes along the walls through which you swam, your hand in Grandmother's or Uncle Bobby's, to reach a narrow passageway lit by little half-moons if you had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the show. “The show,” her grandparents still called the movies, and her uncle did, too, and it had been a real theater at first, for vaudeville and plays and concerts. Her grandparents and Uncle Bobby remembered those days.