by Ann Pancake
ME AND MY DADDY LISTEN TO BOB MARLEY
In memory of Philip E. Sullivan, 1927-2014
“And gladly would he teach, and gladly learn.”
—GEOFFREY CHAUCER
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
10987654321
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
ONE 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 rel
ative 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.
The Alexander Henry was not even the same species as the rinky-dink theater in Janie’s own hometown, population two thousand, with its dull linoleum lobby under bald fluorescent lights. The seats soot-colored, walls as well, the theater’s single adornment an obnoxious illuminated clock advertising a car dealership. And the way you knew everyone there even if you pretended you didn’t, and how you weren’t allowed to take your Coke to your seat, had to drink it standing in the back, but your shoes stuck to the floor anyway. When Janie was little and she got mad, which she often did, and threatened to run away, which everyone ignored, it was to Remington she knew she would go. Remington, West Virginia, Janie saw as real life. The life real people lived and the one she’d reach after she suffered and struggled through the one she’d accidentally been plunked in as a baby. The Alexander Henry was the highest echelon of that real life, the one not many attained, but one she just might if she worked hard enough.
When she was still a kid, at least, that’s how Janie saw it.
SOME AFTERNOONS, WHEN both she and Uncle Bobby were off work, they hung out in his room and listened to his 1960s record collection. Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan—Uncle Bobby had them all, while Janie, of course, had just missed them, her born not only in the wrong place, but in the wrong time as well. She lay on the blue pile carpet with a Pink Panther for a pillow so her ears were nearer the speakers, the music rushing into the empty parts of her, never quite topping them off. Beyond the windows, humidity coated the house like liquid glass, the air-conditioning a seal against it. Uncle Bobby’s room, built onto the back of her grandparents’ small bungalow after years of money put away, felt like a hideout then. Afternoon time, hovering time, wait for the true time, which was what might happen at night. And coiled in the hideout, the music transfiguring her, only Uncle Bobby present, and the anticipation of drinking that night, for whole minutes Janie could kick clear of herself and be who she wished she was.
Uncle Bobby lounged in his blue recliner, nodding to the beat, his little Yorkie terrier mix, Tina, of the wise face and the bad breath, curled in his lap. Uncle Bobby had actually seen Joan Baez in concert, had seen Paul Simon, at the Remington Civic Center always by himself, and such history, along with Uncle Bobby’s being more city than her, gave Uncle Bobby areas of superiority over Janie despite his other handicaps. Now Uncle Bobby was telling of his and Janie’s recent exploits as though Janie hadn’t been present and they’d already rushed into legend.
“And remember, I came out of the state store, and I tripped, and I fell down! But I held that bottle up! It didn’t hit the ground! I didn’t break it, did I, Janie? Did I?”
“Nuh-uh,” Janie said.
She turned onto her stomach, the carpet showroom clean. Uncle Bobby worked in the bigger of Remington’s two hospitals, and before he’d been promoted to laundry, he’d spent a decade as janitor. During that period, he’d collected the pennies caught up in his broom, and when Janie was seven, she’d spent a whole morning counting all of them for him. Occasionally now he found in the dirty laundry abandoned stuffed animals, and after a two-week lost-and-found probation period, he washed them, carried them home, and displayed them in his room. Most were bland teddy bears, or dogs and monkeys with fur so fake it made your fingers squeak. The Pink Panther was Janie’s favorite because of the softness of his fabric skin, like flannel or beaten-down towels. It was the E.T. Uncle Bobby adored. That had been the big movie the summer before, and Uncle Bobby was first smitten, then obsessed. He’d bought her an E.T. cake for her eighteenth birthday the September before, and by some divine intervention—divine intervention was not rare in the life of Uncle Bobby—an E.T. doll showed up in the laundry in the winter. It now sat like a big-eyed god on top of an oversized jewelry box Uncle Bobby had gotten from the house of a dead “maiden aunt,” as he called her, the jewelry box in turn on top of his well-dusted chest of drawers. This E.T. was not to be handled.
“—and then there was a knock on the door!” He was onto the night her grandparents had gone out of town and they’d made strawberry daiquiris. Nathan and his girlfriend Melissa had stopped by for that one. “And here it was the church people with the church directories!” Uncle Bobby collapsed into elephantine peals, Tina vaulting from his lap, Uncle Bobby convulsing, bent at his waist. “I couldn’t believe it! I couldn’t believe it! Could you, Janie? Could you?” He exploded again, then abruptly swallowed the last laugh and commanded in a grave baritone: “E. T. Phone home.”
“Where’d you go yesterday afternoon, Uncle Bobby?” She hadn’t expected to say it even though she’d been speculating since it happened.
“Huh?” He sobered immediately. Like her, he’d been caught off guard. “What do you mean, Janie?”
“Yesterday afternoon. After you took your shower. After work. Where’d you go?” Janie raised up on her elbows to watch his face.
“Oh.” He paused. Closed his mouth with a loud smack. “To visit a friend of mine.”
“Who?”
“Just a friend of mine. You don’t know ’em.” The face armored up. The tone a challenge. “Anything wrong with that?” Then she saw him whisper the same words afterwards, as he sometimes did, as though the spoken words left a shadow in his mouth that made him have to say again.
Often Janie visualized the uneven operations of the uncle brain, which, according to family lore, had been damaged by dehydration when Uncle Bobby fell deathly ill as an infant. Some parts had melted in the heat, Janie saw them tarnished and clotted together like clock guts after a fire—the part that did numbers, the part that managed cause and effect, the part that gauged how funny things really were—while other parts in that dark, crowded space still gleamed and whirred, unscathed—the part that could sustain a conversation, the part sensitive to her grandmother’s tireless social skill drills, the part that remembered things. The memory had overgrown in compensation, and Uncle Bobby could recite his grand
mothers’ phone numbers and addresses clear back to the 1950s, even though one grandmother had moved several times and both had been dead for almost a decade. He knew the ages and birthdays of most people on Kentworth Drive, and he recalled trivial incidents from ages ago with the most unlikely details in brilliant relief. As he was doing now, Uncle Bobby retelling, as Janie put away Joni and plunked down Janis, a favorite story twenty-five years past of how his sister and her friends had put a water sprinkler on the porch of a mean neighbor lady, knocked, and ran. It was a story Janie had heard at least twenty times before. Because this was another characteristic of the uncle brain: certain clock innards had melted into granite-hard configurations—Uncle Bobby was “set in his ways,” her grandmother would say, he “had his routines”—and for this reason and others, most people found dealing with Uncle Bobby someplace between irritating and maddening.
“I think she deserved it. I do, Janie. I think she got what she deserved. Don’t you, Janie? Don’t you?” And there was another reason, the imprisonment in the tag question, his snaring of others in tedious conversations by demanding a response to everything he said by adding “Huh, Janie? Huh? Huh, Janie? Huh?” until you said, “Yeah,” back. The tag questions were an offshoot of Uncle Bobby’s know-it-all-ness, a quality Janie found fascinating given his IQ, Uncle Bobby’s treasure trove of authority gleaned mostly from the black-and-white movies he watched on cable TV. “How do you know?” Janie would ask. “Saw it on one of these old movies,” he’d say.
And now he was onto a lady at work who’d been rude to him, another fixation of the Bobby brain, the infinite slights, the corresponding self-righteous indignation. Different family members had different Uncle Bobby survival techniques, and most family members used a combination of several: avoidance, stoicism, humor and teasing, almost always at his expense, and when none of those worked, the occasional no-longer-suppressible outburst. But Uncle Bobby, for some reason, had never bothered Janie much.