by Marc Parent
Table of Contents
Title Page
A Note from the Bleachers
Eggs
There Is No Palindrome of Palindrome
The Safe Man
Sweet
Deck
Wonderland
Ashes
An Eye for an Eye
The Choking Pearl
Modern Times
Good Sport
A Country Like No Other
Acknowledgments
About the Editor
About the Author
Stories by
Copyright Page
A Note from the Bleachers
MARC PARENT
EVERY SEPTEMBER, THICK CLOUDS of blue smoke rise from a lit-up field on the outskirts of a small, northeastern Pennsylvania town. I’m told by those who would know that the smoke is most likely the result of a full-impact, lateral hit from the back end of a Chevy Impala, Cadillac Fleetwood, Olds Cutlass, or other circa 1970s brick shit-house on wheels, which cracks the block of the intended target—Pontiac Grandville, Chevy El Camino, Plymouth Hemi ’Cuda—spraying oil over a manifold that’s cooking at a comfortable five to six hundred degrees Fahrenheit. White clouds indicate a radiator hit—hoses bursting with an explosion of steam that instantly fills the interior of the car and sends the driver scrambling through the side window.
Smoke is what we all come here to see. Steep metal bleachers on the south side of the field are filled to capacity with people of all ages chewing fat, dark cubes of fudge and washing them down with gulps of orange soda. We have all paid to see smoke. The local volunteer firemen want smoke as well. Tricked out in enough gear to take down a towering inferno, they sit with bored faces over the wheel wells of their rigs as they wait to shuffle across the field with a water hose toward the gas line rupture and subsequent rash of fire that would make momentary heroes of them. Their girlfriends stroke the backs of their necks as backhoe operators on the other side of the field are at the ready to hoist crumpled cars into the air and haul them away. High up in the announcer’s booth, a row of men with their caps drawn low over their eyeglasses sit hunched over microphones, ready to narrate the destruction.
This is the GDS Demolition Derby; five heats of ten cars per round—two rows of five cars lined up on either side of the field, which after a countdown from three, commence to smashing the hell out of each other until there is only one left with its motor running. At the end of the night, the winners from each heat drive their nearly decommissioned vehicles into the ring for a final battle. The winner of this round takes the night—he stands on top of his smashed-up car, beats his helmet against the roof, and lets out a victory howl that the crowd in the bleachers echoes back. Then he hops off the car and walks over the muddy field like a stiff-legged rodeo rider, to pick up a trophy and a kitty worth around a thousand dollars.
Over the years, the ritual of this night has signaled the last gasp of summer for my family. My wife and I cover our kids’ ears with headphones to deaden the roar of engines and fill their pockets with candy so they will last the night. We meet up with two other families and huddle together with blankets across our laps as we point to the hand-painted taunts on the cars and shout them out to one another—“Outlaw Crusher,” “The Jugulator,” “Eat Me,” “Yo’ Momma.” Then the heats begin and we fall silent to watch the skill and finesse of the drivers, the reckless stupidity, the cheap shots, determination, and even bravery.
By the conclusion of the contest, after the roaring engines, flying mud, sparks, fire, and twisting metal have all come to an end, something incredible happens every year: the same guy wins. His name is Pete Hansen. You really need to see a demolition derby from the front row to fully appreciate the impossibility of this. There are simply too many variables in the random, unpredictable chaos of the competition for the same person to win every year. Yet every year, that’s exactly what Pete Hansen does.
I developed a simmering obsession with the man after I saw his third win. The following year, before his fourth win, I was sure his streak would break and then watched as he reduced his competitors to smoking heaps of debris. By the fifth year I knew that if he entered he would win—decisively. The men in the announcer’s booth ran down the roster for the first heat, Pete Hansen’s name was called, he rolled unceremoniously into the ring, the flag dropped, and I watched as he systematically tore the insides out of every car within reach of his back bumper. He went on to do the same in the final battle and own the night. Instead of doubting him or shaking my head with astonishment as I had in previous years, I watched him closely this last time and I saw the thing that made him unbeatable. In a word: fearlessness. In a sentence: Pete Hansen drives like he’s got nothing to lose.
I went home that evening thinking about the strength of that mind-set and because of what I do at my desk for hours on end, I thought about what that mind-set could do to writing. What would it be like to write like I had nothing to lose—write like Pete Hansen drives, so to speak? Then one afternoon, I asked a friend of mine who is also a writer, “What story would you tell if no one knew it was you?” We grinned deviously at each other, and The Secret Society of Demolition Writers was born.
Over the next several months, I went out to other writers whose work I have admired for all variety of reasons and asked them the same question—what would you write if I could all but guarantee your anonymity? Under the cover of a dark helmet, how hard would you drive? Where would you take it? Released from the constraints of your reputation and the expectations that come with it, how far would you go? Those exact questions are answered twelve different times, twelve different ways, in the twelve different stories that make up the pages of this collection.
It’s hard to believe this has never been done like this before. Hasn’t everything been done before? Anonymous short stories from well-known writers make too much sense not to have been put together in a collection long ago. Nearly everyone who has written more than one book can tell you that there is a great deal of difference between writing with the knowledge of what will happen once the book is published and writing without that knowledge (if for no other reason than the moment you take after the second book to think about choosing a title that will be easy to explain to every other person who asks you on the tour). God help the writer who finds success and can finally buy the lake house but is conscripted for the remainder of his career by publishers and readers alike to the one mineshaft that hit pay dirt. Wouldn’t it be nice if an author like this could somehow chuck everything their reputation stands on in order to see what else might be out there? Wouldn’t it be liberating and in turn, wouldn’t that be good for storytelling? While we’re at it, wouldn’t it be nice if well-known authors had the courage to throw out a totally new story without the support of their celebrity to influence us as we read—if they had a way to let the story stand on its own, told a story for the story’s sake, so to speak?
In a sense every first book is written anonymously. The person who writes their first book can’t imagine it will eventually be published, much less read by anyone. They take what is just a stack of paper and hand it to their agent, who hands it to a publisher, who finally turns it into a book, and the name printed neatly across the cover doesn’t change the fact that they’d written every page anonymously. When I dare to look back through some of my first pages, there tucked in between passages that scrape mercilessly against my better senses, are occasional flashes of uncalculated, spontaneous freshness born directly out of the quiet, private room of anonymity. No subsequent book is ever written with the unknowing sparkle of the first—when the writer undertakes the enormous task of laying down a hundred thousa
nd or so words with no track record to stand on, no road map to follow, nothing but a voice inside that says, hell, maybe I can do this. . . . The deficit is somewhat compensated for (hopefully) by skill and the maturity of experience, but still, there is only one time that a published author writes anonymously and enjoys within that state the unbridled freedom to do something truly outrageous: try something new.
In the stories that make up this collection, we have all tried with fits and starts (believe me) and with varying degrees of success ( you’d never believe who wrote . . . !! ) to step away from the constraints of our past and current works, our names and the assumptions built around them, as well as the small tics and quirks within our sentences and paragraphs that we have become fond of or even at times secretly depended on. Some have told me who in the group they’d like to be mistaken for. Some have tried to write in the vein of X, then given in to the sound of Y, only to turn in a perfect Z. There was high-seas drama in the creation of many of these stories. Each one in almost every case represents only the tip of the iceberg. If only I could tell you—if only I could tell anyone. But I have given my word to the writers that I will hold fast to the secret of our society. I will tell no one who wrote what—not agents, not family or friends, not even the publisher. No slip of paper exists that would identify the authorship of these twelve stories. The secrets in this collection are safe from everyone except the readers who accept our invitation to play the detective’s game. Knowing what I do, I believe the code can be cracked, but be warned, many of the writers have gone to great lengths to steer you from the path to their discovery—there is no such thing, after all, as a clean fight in a demo derby. So watch for flying metal as you go, because at its heart, a demolition derby is all this really is.
In that vein, I would like to dedicate this book to the drivers of tonight’s heat: to Aimee, Ben, Mike, Sebastian, Elizabeth, Ro, Chris, Anna, John, Alice, and Lauren—bad-to-the-bone outlaw crushers every last one of you—yo’ momma. Whose momma?—Yo’ momma! A box of fudge and a bottle of orange soda to the winner—here’s mud in your eye. Pedal to the metal all—get on your boots and ride. . . .
The cars are lined up and ready. Everybody—count it down! In—
Three . . .
Two . . .
One . . .
Eggs
IT SEEMED THE SUN NEVER SANK that summer. All day long the air was thick and the river running through our town was just a dead gray snake with a sulfurous smell. Without wind, the tops of the trees drooped and when you fanned your face, the air was like a wall of water barely moving over you. People complained. Air-conditioning units banged, and the ice from a Slurpee was cool blue heaven before it melted on the pad of your tongue.
I didn’t want to get a job selling Slurpees, the way so many others my age did. I certainly didn’t want to be a lifeguard, hoisted high in one of those chairs with an emergency cross blazing at my back. I look eh in a bathing suit. I’m twenty-one, sun sensitive, my skin as white as milk in a blue china cup. I am the kind of person who seeks shady places and books; I like any book that has to do with houses and their insides. I like the old books about Boston houses—Edith Wharton and a man named James write about those—and I like the new books you get in the paperback rack in the drugstore, books where living rooms have velvet drapes and people are in love for two seconds tops. I’ve been in love a few times, but nothing worth noting here.
I live with my mother. In our town, most of us do. We go to the high school, a big industrial brick building with rows and rows of slick red lockers, and then we graduate up to the community college where huge elms shade the campus and there’s an archway you have to drive through that says something important and Latin on it. At the community college, most of us major in physician’s assistant training programs, which means you learn to draw a lot of blood and read pressure. Others do something with software architecture. I knew right from the start these career paths were not for me. I knew, and always have, that I wanted to do interior design, to make homes as beautiful as they possibly could be, to understand the subtle but serious distinction between mauve and merlot, or how to bring light to a row of wavy glass windows, to choose a carpet that complements the color of wood that soaks up the shine from the beaded chandelier, the one I chose, swinging from its root in the freshly spackled ceiling.
The summer of heat, the summer before my junior college year, my mother’s cancer returned, after ten years’ remission. My father left us a long time ago, for Florida. At first my mother felt just a small ache in her bones and then the ache turned into a limp and she finally had to admit the pain grinding and grinding at her hip was not arthritis. The doctor confirmed it with a CAT scan. He showed us the recurrence, there on films so gray they looked covered with cobwebs, there on the furniture of my mother’s bones, her architecture all wrong, chips and calcifications, black stains where the malignancy was. The body is a house. Make no mistake about it. The body is a house and the organs are the plush parts and the bones are the scaffolding and bed frames and bookshelves on which you hold your memories, your disappointments.
We came out of the doctor’s office, into a blast of heat. My mother waved a rolled-up patient information sheet in front of her face, perspiration lining her lip. “I’ll do the chemo,” she said. I wanted to put my arm around her, draw her in close, oh mom, but it’s not that way between us. We get along, but if you were to give us a personality test, you’d get opposite results. She’s loopy and eccentric and has little sense of style. She wears bedroom slippers a lot. I shop at all the outlets for Joan and David shoes and Talbot’s clothes. My mother has a knot in her hair, and instead of combing it, she just lets it get bigger and bigger until at last the lady at the salon just has to cut it out. She lives off my father’s alimony and spends her days reading horoscope charts and smoking cigarettes until the ash gets so long it drops off onto the carpet. Frankly, I have higher aspirations. A woman should. I’d like, for instance, to accumulate some wealth. I say to my mother, “Don’t you need a retirement plan?” and she takes a deep suck off her cigarette, her cheeks collapsing inward and says, “Whoop de doo, I’ll be gone before then.” I say to my mother, “Don’t you want to dye that gray in your hair?” and she says, “Gray tells the truth, Cynthia.” Standing close to her, I can smell decay, the same way I can smell that river that runs through our town, odiferous vapors rising up, singing tunes of sinking things and wretched things and houses taken by torpedoes.
I don’t remember ever being close to my mother. I don’t remember ever holding her hand or sitting in her lap. She invited me, over and over again, and I refused. I can be distant and scared. In our high school class there was once a girl named Leah Kowalski. Leah had a bad lisp and a gimp leg that ended in a prosthesis. Sometimes she’d take the prosthesis off, unbuckling the leather-and-steel contraption, removing it from where it nestled on the knee, and I’d see what was beneath. I’d see the sheen of amputation, the skin and spoke of bone, and I’d want to touch her there. Right there. Of course I never dared.
IN THE SUMMERS, in my town, most of us flip burgers or bag groceries or work in the hospital gift shop, but these things aren’t for me. I wanted to make some money. My mother’s cancer had returned, a boy was abducted while he walked home from the mall, his murdered body found in the weedy woods, and I dreamt of Leah Kowalski; she was saying operator, operator and coming towards me in an old-fashioned black dress with gorgeous buttons of pure pearl. I’d wake up shaking, the tree shadows fingering out across my bedroom wall, the occasional car swooshing by in the street outside, the heat just building like a bomb. I was in Gerry’s one day, ordering a low-cal soda, when I saw the sign. It was pinned on the community bulletin board, right next to the sectional sofa for sale. EGG DONORS NEEDED the sign said. GENEROUS COMPENSATION. 21–34. Call . . . and it gave a toll free number. Now, first off, I have always loved dialing toll free numbers. Sometimes I do it just for the thrill of reaching all the way across the country, to a voice in
Texas, or Louisiana, or maybe even France, for free. But it was more than that. Generous compensation. I thought here might be a way to get wealthy. Here might be a way to stockpile some cash, start a serious savings plan, and move my way up and out of this tiny town of two-room houses and poor cable reception. I’d like to live in a place with just a bit of panache. I’d like to live in a house that has a foyer. I’d like a bathroom where the tiles are white floor to ceiling, except for the thin floral band that belts the midsection, beaded with water when I shower.
So I called. We are talking, here, the difference between a $5.61 summer wage, and a GENEROUS COMPENSATION. Who knew what it would be. I was thinking, maybe a couple of hundred? I had no idea. When I say that I mean that absolutely. I had no idea at all.
HE WAS A LAWYER. He said to come on in. We made an appointment for the next day. While I was waiting for the next day, I sat on my mother’s porch swing and sipped some soda. My friend Alice called and said she’d kissed a trumpet player; he had an incredible lip. My friend Marie called and said mud was good for your face. These girls I am close to, but not by much. I have always been dreamy and inward. I am always building places inside my head, rooms where quilts hang on antique racks, hallways with ceramic hands cupping candles on the walls. This world, that world, my world, where it is perfect and lonely both.
The next day, I went in to see him. He had a 1-800 number but an office just two bus rides away. I live in Troy, a tiny town; he was in Albany, big city, far but not far, if you see what I mean. His office was in a high-rise with one thousand windows. The elevator doors parted soundlessly, and I whooshed upwards, stepping into a silent hall, and then a waiting room of utter white, a carmine couch, a sleek telephone on the glass side table. He called me in. He was handsome as hell, or heaven. He said his name was Ike. Ike Devin. He had one of those faces that descend like ledges, and bead blue eyes. He wore chinos, perfectly pressed, and an excellent Oxford shirt that showed the little trigger of his Adam’s apple. “Sit down,” he said, and I did. “I have hundreds upon hundreds of couples,” he said, and he told me the tale, the women too old to make good eggs, the couples late thirtyish, always in love. They were looking for donors “like you,” Ike said, “healthy and smart,” and I could feel myself beginning to beam. Of course, like me. “A young woman like you,” Ike said, “has probably thousands upon thousands of genetically sound egg cells,” and when he said that I thought of my mother, her genetically unsound cells, and then I thought of my stomach, its flat pale plane, the little wink where the belly button was, the way Ike looked at me, approving, a small smile on his face. “You think I’d be a candidate?” I said.