by Al Riske
PRECARIOUS
Stories of Love, Sex, and Misunderstanding
AL RISKE
LUMINIS BOOKS
Published by Luminis Books
13245 Blacktern Way, Carmel, Indiana, 46033, U.S.A.
Copyright © Al Riske, 2010
PUBLISHER’S NOTICE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Several of the stories in this collection have been published previously, including “What She Said” in Beloit Fiction Journal, “Pray for Rain” in Blue Mesa Review, “Don’t Stop Now” in Hobart, and “Skittish” in Switchback. Portions of “Precarious” appeared in Pindeldyboz as “Disappointed.”
Cover design and photography for Precarious by Joanne Riske.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Bob Dylan and Special Rider Music for permission to reprint lyrics from “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in “Just Admit It.” Written by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1965; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
ISBN-10: 1-935462-32-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-935462-32-3
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Joanne—
First, last, and always.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m grateful for the friends and family who were there to give me the encouragement, criticism, and inspiration I needed to put together this collection of stories: Gretchen Clark, Catherine Ryan Hyde, Greg Bardsley, Mark Richardson, Dee Edler, Karen Croft, Heidi Benson, Rachel Canon, Linda Drake, Terry McKenzie, Carrie Motamedi, Judy DeMocker, Jill Berman, Lisa Buchanan, Adair Lara, Amy Rennert, Steve Kettmann, Bronwen Hruska, Dan and Sandra Aunspaugh, Doug and Kristen Edwards, Jane Todd, Dan Rasmussen, Bill Rennie, Daryl Capps, Starline Judkins, Denise Pinto, Doreen Wu, JungAe Kim, and many others along the way. I’m especially grateful to Shawn Gillen, the former editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal, who published my first short story. And to Savannah Guz of Hobart, Nora Fussner of Pindeldyboz, Laura Matter of the Blue Mesa Review, and Kelly Krumrie of Switchback, who published more of them. Thank you all. And thank you, Chris Katsaropoulos and Tracy Richardson of Luminis Books, for bringing out this collection.
Contents
SLEEPING WITH SMILEY
HOLD ON
PRAY FOR RAIN
X’S
SKITTISH
PRECARIOUS
WHAT SHE SAID
DISENGAGED
DOUBLE OR NOTHING
DON’T STOP NOW
MEN ARE SUCH BOYS
DANCE NAKED
JUST ADMIT IT
TAKEN
YOUR EYES ONLY
Readers and reviewers love the fiction of Al Riske:
“The art of the short story is alive and well in the hands of Al Riske, who understands how to walk the tightrope of subtle emotional resonance.”
—Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay It Forward, Love in the Present Tense, Chasing Windmills, and many others.
“Riske’s characters brim with the fears, desires, and idiosyncrasies of real, complex human beings. In the collision of spiritual and sexual concerns that plague them, we find a truth that makes us believers in the power of his fiction.”
—Laura Matter, Blue Mesa Review
“Enthusiastically recommended.”
—Midwest Book Review
“You will enjoy each page of this book and hope that there is just one more when you are finished reading.”
—Victoria Gonzalez, Reader Views
“The writing is Hemingway lean and it’s clear that one of Riske’s strongest gifts as a storyteller is his witty dialogue.”
—Gretchen Clark, author of “This Is a Woman” and other essays
“A hugely talented writer, Al Riske beautifully captures the nuanced behavior of relationships and the universal struggle to understand why we do what we do.”
—Rachel Canon, author of The Anniversary
“His prose is so sharp and the characters sketched so vividly that I was transported right into the world he created.”
—Mark Richardson, author of “Tattoo Woman” and other stories
“This book will stay with you long after you close it and put it away. You’ll no doubt pick it up again for a second read, maybe even a third.”
—Reading at the Beach
“These are stories that you find yourself in—the highest compliment I can pay an author. You see your own foibles and, if you’re lucky, an occasional glance at your own grace.”
—Terry McKenzie, TMACWORDS
“Al Riske has taken this form [the short story] and made light in his collection Precarious, not that he has made light of his characters, though. He has given them voices of volume, of life. Each story carries weight of its own, leading to the common denominator that we are all flawed.”
—Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review
Sleeping with Smiley
I REMEMBER THE river and the way it looked at dawn: the glassy water and the wisps of fog. I can still smell the sea air and hear the trawlers chugging out past the jetty in the distance. I remember the feel of my oars catching the water in time with Curt’s. The muscles don’t forget. I can feel the strain even now in my legs and lower back, in my shoulders and in my arms. I hear the rhythm of our seats sliding up and back in Mr. Alt’s racing shell.
It was that summer between the end of high school and the start of something else. Curt and I were best friends, and more often than not you could find us sculling on the Rogue at dawn. We had been at it since May, coming out to the river before school nearly every day. The boat was long, narrow, and unforgiving. It dumped us in the river our first time out, and the water felt like ice that had only just melted. I was ready to quit after one day, but Curt convinced me to keep trying—it was a two-man boat—and I found myself enjoying it more and more as we learned to pull together. By summer all we wanted was to go faster. Still, it was a struggle. So many things could go wrong. Then, toward the end of one workout in the first week of June, everything came together.
We were passing near the dock, and there on its weathered gray planks stood Warren Alt, the owner of the boat, a massive man of about fifty, bald except for a short white fringe. Wearing baggy pants and a hooded sweatshirt, he looked more like a gym teacher than the wealthy East Coast transplant that he was.
“Now, give me a power twenty!” he bellowed, hands cupped around his mouth.
We started pulling hard, really putting our backs into it. Curt was the stroke, the pacesetter, and it took all I had to keep up with him. But that wasn’t the problem. He was short and muscular; I was tall and lean. In a subtle way I hadn’t noticed before, our strokes didn’t look the same. I shortened mine so the angle of my oars matched the angle of his, and for the first time we started to glide—really glide—swiftly and smoothly.
Without looking I knew Mr. Alt was pacing slowly along the narrow floating dock, following our progress. His arms would be folded, and he’d stop now and nod to himself.
As the shell continued to gain speed, I felt a smile creep onto my face, and with each stroke—catch, drive, feather, recover—it got a little bigger. I couldn’t see Curt’s face, of course, only the back of his wavy hair, wet with perspiration, but I had the sense that he was smiling, too. Catch, drive, feather, recover. We were in almost perfect synchronization. You could see it in the ripple pattern left by our oars.
When we finished the twenty power strokes, it was as if we were crossing a finish line. Our oars came up and the shell cont
inued to glide. Curt looked over his shoulder at me and let out a whoop. I tossed my head back and yelled straight up at the sky with all the wind I had left. We had just experienced something we would never be able to describe adequately. But then we wouldn’t really need to. Not to each other.
I WAS JEALOUS of Curt in those days because his girlfriend, Isabelle Smiley, was beautiful, smart, sexy, and crazy about him in a way no girl had ever been crazy about me.
She was only eighteen, same as us, but she looked, sounded, dressed, and acted older. She was a teller at the bank; we had summer jobs washing dishes at a local pizzeria. The night I took her to dinner, she looked sensational. She had dressed up even though it was just me she was going out with. I thought of her as a woman, not a girl, in her little black dress and a pearl necklace.
“Faux,” she said.
“What?”
“Not real.”
We were seated by the window and had a perfect view of the Rogue River harbor. It was almost romantic. Faux romantic. Still, the first words out of my mouth were: “Curt said I should look after you while he’s gone.”
“Oh, he did, did he?”
She picked up a dinner roll and started buttering it.
“Not like that. He just wants me to keep you company.”
“I see. So I don’t get too lonely?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Oh Dean—” She stopped, sighed, started again. “Would it sound too bitchy if I said he didn’t seem too concerned about how I felt last night?”
“Hey, listen, I didn’t mean to butt in. He asked me to come get him and drive him home so I’d have his car—”
She touched my hand, shook her head, and motioned for me to wait. Though Curt was my best friend, it felt odd to be defending him. I was more accustomed to taking Smiley’s side in their frequent feuds.
“It’s not your fault,” she said when she’d finished chewing her bread. “It’s just that I’m not going to see him for two weeks while he’s on that family vacation in Connecticut, and then pretty soon you guys will be off to college in Seattle and—”
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s if he comes back,” I said. “Regis could offer him a rowing scholarship while he’s there.”
“He never said anything about that to me.”
“He never mentioned Regis—Mr. Alt’s alma mater?”
“He said he was going to visit there and maybe do some rowing, but he didn’t say anything about a scholarship.”
“Mr. Alt thinks he’s a prime candidate.”
“You think Curt would take it?”
“A free ride would be hard to turn down,” I said.
Smiley shook her head, thinking it over.
“I’m not sure whether to be mad, sad, or what,” she said.
I told her I wasn’t too thrilled about it myself.
After a long pause, she said, “Well, he’s supposed to call me tomorrow, so if you want to come over, maybe he’ll have something to tell us by then.”
LEFT ALONE IN the living room of Smiley’s apartment, I wandered around, looking at the prints on the walls, the fashion magazines on the coffee table.
From the kitchen she said, “I’m having a ginger ale. Would you like one?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
On the end table I spotted a pack of Virginia Slims menthols and a saucer with three butts in it. When I asked Smiley how she could live with someone who smoked, she acted real funny and finally admitted the cigarettes were hers, not her roommate’s. She hadn’t smoked since she was sixteen, she said. Not regularly. But lately she’d taken to bumming smokes from one of the other bank tellers during breaks, and on her way home that night she’d stopped off to buy a pack of her own.
She asked me not to say anything to Curt, and I knew why—nothing was more of a turnoff for him than smoking.
Smiley, wearing tight jeans and a loose sweater, came into the living room then, carrying two drinks in short glasses with cubes of ice. She was barefoot and much more relaxed than I was. She handed me a glass, sat down on the couch, and looked at me as if to say, “Aren’t you going to sit down?”
“I just can’t picture you smoking—especially not at sixteen,” I said. “All the girls I knew who smoked at that age were, I don’t know, they… ”
“They wore too much makeup. Is that what you mean? And had dirty mouths.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s it,” I said.
“That was me.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Oh, I was pretty wild back then—not that I’m proud of it,” she said.
I just looked at her, trying to imagine her in that completely different incarnation, and suddenly she said, “I wasn’t that wild.”
I blushed, and she laughed and blushed, too.
“I guess we all go through a rebellious period,” she said finally.
“Didn’t you?”
I shrugged. “Not really.”
“You will.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. It put me off balance somehow. I thought: Maybe I’m in my rebellious period right now. But I’d know, wouldn’t I?
“So,” I said, sitting down and sipping my ginger ale, “how was your weekend?”
“Could have been worse, I guess—though I’m not sure how.”
Her voice said it all: She was bored. She was bored and there wasn’t much she could do about it. Then the phone rang.
“That must be him now.”
She set down her drink, let the phone ring twice more before answering.
“Hello?”
She winked at me.
“Hi, Curt.”
I set my drink down and got up. I didn’t like the idea of listening to their conversation, or even just Smiley’s side of it, but what could I do? I started wandering about again, pretending to be absorbed in Smiley’s music collection: The Supremes, Hall & Oates, Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart, Frank Sinatra, David Bowie, Emmylou Harris, Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones.
“I’ve missed you,” Smiley said. Then: “Well, thanks a lot! The least you could do is say you missed me, too. Oh, thank you, that’s very convincing.”
She sounded like she was just kidding around, almost. I excused myself and went into her bathroom just to let her talk. I couldn’t tell if the conversation was going to turn ugly or sexy—you could never tell with those two—and I didn’t want to find out.
The bathroom was a mess, but it smelled wonderful. Atop the toilet tank was a small, open jar filled with tiny leaves and petals and things, and they filled the room with their scent. The counters were cluttered—cold cream, talcum powder, toothpaste, nail polish, eyeliner and shadow, Q-tips, cotton balls, perfume. Hanging above the bathtub were several pairs of her thigh-high stockings in black, white, and tan. Damp towels lay scattered on the bare linoleum floor.
I took my time looking around—I had not been in her bathroom since we helped her move into the Imperial Arms three months earlier—and got a curious thrill from handling her things, opening different bottles and jars and smelling their contents. Then I discovered a little wicker basket in one corner. Inside I found garters, panties, and bras in colors my mother never wore—red, black, hot pink, and mint. I took them out one by one and felt the cool, smooth fabric between my fingers and against my cheek. My right leg began to shake. I put everything back in the basket and shut the lid.
When I came back into the living room, Smiley was still on the phone. She said nothing for quite a while, and then: “Oh, um, Dean’s here. Would you like to talk to him? Just a minute.”
She handed me the phone.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I said.
“It’s different here,” Curt said. “You know how Mr. Alt talks? Well, everybody out here sounds like that—only worse.”
“Have you been out to the college?”
He filled me in on what he had been telling Smiley and asked what I’d been doing.
&nbs
p; “Me? I’ve been lifting weights every other day, cycling twenty or thirty miles in the afternoon before work … You know, the usual.”
He wasn’t buying it.
“I row with Mr. Alt tomorrow,” I said.
“Show no mercy.”
“Right.”
“Well, I’d better get off the line. Let me say good-bye to Isabelle.”
“Isabelle who?” I said, just to tease Smiley—nobody called her Isabelle.
She took the phone away from me.
“Hello? Uh-huh. I’ve thought about that. Yes. Curt!” She blushed. “What? Yes … ” In hushed tones she added, “Would you cut it out?” And then in her normal voice: “Call me again, okay? Alright. Bye.”
She hung up the phone and looked at me.
“What’s an Ergometer?”
“A type of rowing machine,” I said. “They use it to measure your strength and endurance.”
“I see. And they measured Curt’s.”
“The coach there said he never had a freshman score as well as Curt did.”
“‘Never had a freshman …’ It sounds like he’s already signed up for classes.”
All I could do was shrug. I was thinking the same thing.
MR. ALT WAS already in the boathouse, rummaging through his tool box, when I came in through the open door. One of the floorboards creaked under my weight, and Mr. Alt turned around.
“Oh, you’re here,” he said. “I was wondering if you were going to make it.”
I didn’t think I deserved that.
“I’m on time,” I said.
He checked his watch.
“So you are.”
“I was only late once, and I’ve never missed a practice,” I said.
“I know that, but I didn’t think you really wanted to row with me.”
He waited for a response but I didn’t give him one.
“I thought you only rowed because Curt did,” he said.
“What made you think that?”
“I don’t know. Am I wrong?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be doing it if not for Curt, because he’s the one who got me started, but I’ve stayed with it because I like it.”