by John McManus
For my father, Barry McManus
© 2015 by John McManus
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.
“The Ninety-Fifth Percentile” originally appeared in Harvard Review; “Elephant Sanctuary” in The Literary Review; “Gainliness” in McSweeney’s; “Bugaboo” in Oxford American; “The Gnat Line” in StorySouth. “Blood Brothers” originally appeared in Surreal South ’11, an anthology edited by Laura Benedict and Pinckney Benedict, published by Press 53.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McManus, John, 1977–
[Short stories. Selections]
Fox tooth heart: stories / John McManus. — First American edition.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-941411-14-8
I. Title.
PS3563.C3862A6 2015
813'.54—dc23
2014047732
Exterior by Kristen Radtke.
Interior by Kirkby Gann Tittle & Kristen Radtke.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Men are made of rock and thunder:
threat of storm to labor under.
Cypress woods are demon-dark:
boys are fox-teeth in your heart.
—Tennessee Williams
CONTENTS
Elephant Sanctuary
Betsy from Pike
Bugaboo
Gateway to the Ozarks
Cult Heroes
The Gnat Line
The Ninety-Fifth Percentile
Gainliness
Blood Brothers
Acknowledgments
The Author
FOX TOOTH HEART
ELEPHANT SANCTUARY
THE STORY OF THE CREATION of my elephant vampire songs begins on the December morning when I killed Aisling, heroine of our last album and my fiancée, in one Jaguar and fled Texas in another. The second car belonged to our manager, and stealing it was a snap, I just called down to the front desk. The valet even asked for my autograph. I signed the parking ticket and headed for I-35. Early in the tour my father, Ike Bright, Sr., had pretended to die in the tsunami in Japan; since then, he’d been hiding out near Texarkana. I guess he’d owed a lot of money. To hoard his address around America had made me feel more powerful than the people around me, whether or not their own fathers were alive. It’d had me singing “Barnacle” in a major scale so that our fans hopped to it instead of swaying.
I drove nonstop through Dallas, Sulphur Springs, and then northeast toward the Palmetto Flats, following signs for a wildlife refuge. Just over the Red River I came to the mailbox that said Blackhawk, my father’s fake name.
He was snoring in a chair on the covered porch of a farmhouse, wearing a pinstripe suit as if he had arrived from a casino. “Dad, it’s Ike,” I said, kicking at his legs until he stirred into awareness of me.
“I read what you told Rolling Stone,” was the first thing he said.
I’d explained that the Pacific Ocean had needed to swallow Ike Senior before I could write true songs about him. “I was pretending to mourn you.”
“You done touring?”
“See the news?”
“I’m off the grid.”
“I’m in some trouble.”
He pointed over my shoulder, where I saw, studying me from a fenced pasture that stretched to the denuded hills, an enormous African elephant. It was about twelve times my size, with sickly pink splotches on its ears. “Meet Gracie,” my father said.
She was plucking weeds with her trunk. I pictured her hollowed out, with the paparazzi and cops and Aisling’s parents waiting inside. “Where are we?”
“Camp David. President doesn’t want it anymore.”
“Did you win this place with a Dolly Parton?”
Nodding, he poured whiskey for himself. I realized he wasn’t joking.
“So it just arbitrarily sits beside an elephant.”
He nodded. “This one talks to me in my head.”
“How’s that work, Dad?”
“Like you and me, but in my head.”
“Is this a zoo?”
“Getting warmer,” he said, his whiskey sparkling in the early light. It occurred to me he meant to profit off Gracie somehow.
A Dolly Parton was a nine-five combo in Texas Hold ‘em, and my first bike had come from his refusing to fold one of those. I’d lost my braces the same way, and had forgotten to say so to Rolling Stone. It wasn’t a good hand. With a Dolly Parton, you lost almost every time. Maybe that’s why the few he won sent him on a winner’s tilt.
“You’re selling Gracie to a zoo.”
“Getting colder.”
“Look, I’m in some shit.”
“It’s a sanctuary for old, abused elephants. They’ve been tortured and driven insane, and now they live on this farm.”
I followed his eyes to where Gracie was grazing. I needed to talk. Ask me a goddamn question, I was saying in my thoughts.
“Old-lady elephants, sixty years old. They each have a favorite fruit and a favorite song. Isn’t that something?”
“Want to hear what’s going on?”
“They’re basically like people.”
“So that’s the refuge on the signs.”
“They’re private. The refuge is us.”
“I don’t follow.”
“In any case, lots of bedrooms. Take whichever.”
I wish you’d been in Japan, I wanted to say, which I realize was petulant. I don’t want to imply that I wasn’t grieving Aisling. But this is about my elephant songs. I did slam the door on my way in, to protest Ike Senior’s code of honor. The code held that men didn’t pry. No matter if the men were father and son, or the son was a little boy; the boy had to commence the talking. I’d traded Aisling for this, I thought as I lay down in a bedroom with faded red walls and a view of the mangy meadow beyond the yard. Never again would I make a seatbelt of my arms to hug her from behind. She wouldn’t drink days away anymore like the heroines of the hardcore songs I wished to write, rather than the fey songs I did write. My songs were about yearning, mostly. In them people yearned to be places they weren’t and do things they didn’t or couldn’t do. The critics called the songs gauzy. One reviewer had written that our last album was “full of fuzz.” Thinking about all that, I had a sort of temper tantrum in my head. Some ugly thoughts were churning in there when a voice said, What question do you want?
It hadn’t spoken in words. More like it reached in and conveyed a feeling. I sat upright. Thirty hours and as many drinks since my last sleep. Until I saw Gracie out the window, eyeing me from her field, I thought I was dreaming.
“Is that you?” I said, facing her. My dad had said she spoke to him. All my life he’d been telling tall tales, but here was Gracie, staring at me, and a voice sounding in my head.
You said you wanted a question, she seemed to reply, again not in words but as a sensation that had me reliving the desire.
Not from you, I thought back.
From who, then?
From my father.
What question?
Every question.
Give an example, she said in my head, at which time I realized what Gracie was doing: tricking me into admitting my crime.
It was one thing to imagine confessing to Ike Senior. Ike Senior would be a pot calling a kettle black to criticize me. This was an innocent, tortured beast. Probably she wasn’t speaking to me in my head at all. I shut my eyes and said good day to her, and awoke to find
the sun low in the other side of the sky.
I appraised the situation. Aisling was still dead, I was still a fugitive murderer, and Ike Senior was still drinking on the porch. He had been joined by a leathery-skinned woman in her forties whose horsey jaw fell open when I came outside.
“Is this Junior?” she asked with fond surprise.
“James Junior, meet your future stepmom, Clara.”
“I work at the sanctuary,” Clara said. “Have you made the ladies’ acquaintance?”
“I introduced him to Gracie this morning,” my father said.
“From 1970 until last year, Gracie lived alone on a concrete slab. Her feet are ruined. They whipped her daily.”
“Hurt elephants, you should die,” said Ike Senior, with a righteous anger I didn’t recognize. I scanned the meadow for Gracie, listening for her in my head. She didn’t seem to be near.
“James Junior, James Senior may be the last good man.”
“You’re the one saving the ladies,” my father told Clara, which was when I knew he must be conning her out of her money.
I thought of warning Clara what was coming, then spiriting Gracie away to safety. Gracie didn’t deserve being stuck around my father; surely she had suffered enough. Altruism fails to save deadbeat rocker from lockup, read the ticker tape in my head.
“Elephants understand English,” said Clara, her eyes adoringly on Ike Senior. “They’re smarter than people. Complex in every way, and sweet.”
“That’s why they avoid me.”
“You’re not complex?”
“Or sweet.”
“Gracie visits you.”
“She’s not either, maybe.”
They continued this silly back-and-forth as if I couldn’t hear. Ask me a goddamn question, I thought. When Aisling was alive, I’d kept a list of reasons to break up, topped by “Never asks me about the past.” Even on coke she inquired only about the future. “Always the fucking future,” I shouted back at her once, with a randomness that startled her. That’s because my real fight was with Ike Senior. Ask a question, ask a question, I chanted now in my head. By the bottom of my first glass, he still hadn’t done it. Even when Clara went in for ice, he glanced at me only to see if I laughed at his jokes.
“How do you shoot a red elephant?”
“With a gun,” I guessed.
“With a red gun.”
“All these elephant jokes, as if they’re funny,” Clara said when she returned. “I mean, the elephant falls out of the tree because it’s dead?”
“And the idioms,” my father said.
“It’s awful. Elephants in the room and white elephants and pink elephants and a memory like an elephant.”
“Elephants deserve better,” said Ike Senior, surely playing her. I began dreaming up scenarios to make him feel bad. Claiming I’d been tricked into believing him drowned. Then I recalled replying to his tsunami email.
“Can I use your truck?” I said, only to see if he would ask my destination; it wasn’t safe for me to be seen in public.
He handed the keys over and said, “No title in it.”
“So just don’t get caught? That’s it?”
“No insurance card, either,” he said, with that subtle grin that asked the world to join in his wonder at how droll everything was. I took the keys. He was doing what he believed I needed, and I hated him for it. What’s the trouble, Ike, what have you gone and done? Cry if you need to cry. So vividly did I react to his not saying those things that Gracie, wherever she was, must have heard me in her head.
I hid the Jaguar in the barn behind the house, and taking the truck I accelerated down the highway. Before I knew it I was crossing the Red River. Not the best choice to enter Texas again, but my fans were all sniffly emo boys and stoned vegan girls who lived in cities, not the kind of people you find at a trailer bar above a river. I parked under a neon sign blinking Busch and headed inside. In the dim interior a girl with bluebird shoulder tattoos was perched a few seats down from some big-hatted ranchers. “Double bourbon,” I told the bartender, taking a stool beside the girl. It felt good not to be fleeing the country after all. The bartender poured my drink, passed it over to me. My skin tingled from being so close to the girl, but I didn’t look at her as I mulled over my options. Hide out in Switzerland like Polanski. Live in a Third World capital. I would stand out by my skin color.
Maybe Moscow, I was thinking when the girl said, “You seem fun,” in a pleasant Ozark accent.
Tilting my drink down my throat, I turned to face her. She was cute, with cheekbones that sloped down toward her chin in a svelte triangle. “I’m mentally ill,” I said.
“What kind of music do you play?” This shook me. It’s only my face, I told myself, or my messy hair or my hollow eyes.
“I’m a restaurant chef.”
“Nearest restaurant’s thirty miles.”
“In Venice, California.”
“Are there foods that stop you from feeling emotions?”
“Which emotion is the problem?”
“Sadness, and happiness.”
“Well, I’m just the sous-chef, you know.”
I was starting to enjoy myself. She gestured down toward the ranchers, three of them in overalls and Stetsons, ogling her. “Could you kick their asses?”
“What did they do to you?”
“Stare when I’m flirting with guys.”
Ignorant of music, I told myself. I needed not to like any girls now. Favorite band probably Led Zeppelin; hillbilly twang. I sensed chaos in her when she squeezed my hand.
“So you’ll do it?”
“What’s your name?”
“Haley, you misogynist,” she said, which cracked me up.
“I’m James,” I said, wondering about my last name.
“Feel like a tequila, James?”
“I think I do.” I bought us two shots.
“Welcome to hell,” she toasted.
“Is that a warning?”
“You’ve seen this place.”
I nodded yes, I had.
“Why else am I an alcoholic?”
“I drink a lot too,” I told her, glad to hear that she was one.
“Yeah, where have you been all my life?”
I admit it, the word depraved rose to mind when I heard myself say, “Looking for you.” I swatted it away with another shot of alcohol. I was having too good a time. We got to talking about drunk jags we’d been on. I told her about blacking out in the U-Bahn, and she told about blacking out in Denton, Texas. She said she wanted to die like Amy Winehouse. “Gram Parsons,” I countered, carelessly naming a singer Pitchfork had compared me to. But nothing came of that.
We kissed to catcalls, scooted tables out of the way to dance. “Cheers, mofos,” I called out to the ranchers as we maneuvered around to a country tune.
As I spun Haley, I heard someone say, “Twenty K per tusk.”
I fell out of rhythm. “Pardon?” I said to a red-haired fellow in overalls.
“Pardon who?” he replied, as I steadied myself.
“You said twenty K per tusk.”
“I was discussing my job.”
“What line of work?”
“Know James, in the Shadwell place?”
“He in the ivory trade?”
“I’m only saying yes cause you’ll black it out.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” I said, wishing Aisling would yell at this man on my behalf. I turned to speak to her. Seeing Haley instead overwhelmed my brain in a sort of power surge. One of our LPs, Lumber, treats the subject of blackouts, mainly what you realize during them and then forget. The lyrics are pure fiction, since they chronicle times I’ve forgotten. We must have kept on talking. I caught little glimpses, which I still possess, like Haley whispering in the red-headed man’s ear. Looking for my bandmates, I wandered away. The bar was shaped like one in Portugal, in Porto, where we’d played Primavera Sound. It seemed to me I was back there again. “Eu gostaria de uma cerveja,” I
said, and then it faded away and I awoke naked on a carpet rug.
Haley was asleep beside me. “Hey,” I said, poking her.
She awoke, snuggled against me. “Hey, cowboy.”
“I’m scared to move,” I said, referring to my hangover, but it was a deeper dread, one I could have described only by playing music.
“As you should be.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You live in the Shadwell place.”
“I don’t live in Texas.”
“This is Arkansas.”
“Whatever it is,” I said.
“Haley, who are the Shadwells? Well, James, they’re teenage folk singers who murdered their parents and blamed it on slaves’ ghosts.”
So these Shadwells were in prison, I thought, where they fell in with some chick who conned them out of their home, got paroled, then met her match in Ike Senior.
“Maybe an elephant told them to,” I said.
“No, it was years before those elephants.”
I was thinking I might ask Haley if she could hear Gracie talking, but then her phone rang. She sat up and looked at the caller ID.
“My husband will kill you,” she said.
A memory flickered and went dark again. Haley reached for my guitar. Lifting it like a weight, she raised her eyebrows at me.
“Must belong to the Shadwells,” I said.
“Say why you’re lying, and I’ll sing one of my songs.”
“Are you a songwriter?”
“Frank owns this house, is the funny thing.”
“Who is Frank? What songs?”
“The songs I write,” she said, beginning to strum. “I finished this one last week. It’s called Three Days Thirty Years Ago.”
In a sultry, rich contralto Haley sang about a boy who’d strolled the lavender rows with her in the South of France. He had woven lavender flowers into her hair, long ago in a place called the Luberon Valley. That was where she yearned to be, not Texas or Arkansas. The song soothed me into a lull, so that it startled me when Haley held out the guitar and said, “Now one of yours.”
I took the instrument, held it awkwardly as if I didn’t know what to do with it. “I’m a chef, remember?”