Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  She and Brian ended up at a big table outside under the floodlights with a dozen old friends. “You know me,” Brian said. “I’m not going to be indoors if there’s an alternative.” It got very drunk very quickly. Between the band and the shouting back and forth across the table, Shawn found it hard to keep up an individual conversation.

  It was evidently getting drunk inside as well. On her way to the bathroom Shawn heard somebody’s father say, “I’m sort of the junior partner in a one-partner firm.” Across the room a red-faced man in his thirties waved his hands and said, “This goddamn mild weather is putting my utility shares in the toilet. If we don’t get some serious ice storms this winter I’m fucked.” Standing at the mirror in the ladies’ room one of the bridesmaids said, to no one in particular, “I just think a lot more people would have liked Ashley if she hadn’t been so popular.”

  At the buffet Shawn ran into one of her roommates from freshman year. “So,” Kirsten said, “are you still painting?” Kirsten’s hair was an expensive shade of blonde and her makeup was impeccable.

  “Not for a while,” Shawn said. “There just doesn’t seem to be any time.”

  “You’re working?”

  Shawn nodded. “I was in Greensboro for a year, living with my parents, and I wanted to just get away from everything and everybody, so I took a job with this ad agency in D.C. I mean, I still get to draw, just. . .”

  “Just not what you want.”

  The men she worked with all had the right haircuts and suits and worked twelve hours a day. It made her feel nearly human again to get a little sympathy. “One of the accounts they gave me is a tobacco company, I guess because of my being from North Carolina and all. I hate it, but I’m afraid they’ll fire me if I say anything.”

  “It’s a bitch,” Kirsten said. “Come sit down?”

  They found two places at a table full of parents. “So what’s happening with you?” Shawn asked.

  “Well, you know I married Stephen, right? I’m still teaching second grade, but we’re hoping I can quit in a couple more years?” Shawn nodded, thinking how she’d missed the upward-turning cadence of Kirsten’s speech, its simple need for acknowledgment. “So Stephen’s in the Law Library twenty-four hours a day, wondering how he’s going to bring in any new business if he can’t even get to the golf course.”

  “Golf,” Shawn said. “You’d think it would have died out, except for maybe a few decrepit old guys. With real estate brokers circling them like vultures, waiting to put condos on all the fairways.”

  “Honey, where have you been? You can’t do business if you can’t break ninety. Especially if you’re dealing with the Japanese? And of course every big corporation in the world is buying themselves a PGA tournament.” She glanced up. “Uh oh, we’ve been found out. Hey, Brian.”

  “Hey, Kirsten.” He offered Shawn an unconvincing smile. “I was wondering where you got off to.”

  “We were just talking about golf,” Shawn said.

  “Very funny.”

  “No, really.”

  “Stephen’s been playing the Carolina Country Club?” Kirsten said. “And I’ve been taking lessons.”

  “Brian’s turned pro,” Shawn said. It gave Brian obvious pleasure to hear her say it, and she thought it might make up for the grief she’d given him earlier. “He’s on the Australian Tour now.”

  Kirsten seemed puzzled. “Right now?”

  “It’s winter there now,” Brian explained patiently. “We start up again in August.”

  “I wouldn’t think there’d be enough golf courses there for a whole tour?” Kirsten said.

  “We play all over the place. Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia. I love the travel, I love getting to play in all these exotic places. We’re even playing Vietnam this year.”

  “Excuse me,” said a guy in his fifties from the other side of the table. “Did I hear you say you’re playing golf in Vietnam?”

  “Yes sir, that’s right.”

  The guy was short and barrel-chested and had on an ugly yellow suit. “Jesus Christ,” he said, collapsing back in his chair. “Jesus Christ. I did three tours over there, and now they’re playing fucking golf.”

  The woman next to him put her hand on his arm. “Now, Ray.”

  Another old guy at the end of the table said, “What the hell you want to go over there for, son?”

  “I played in Bangkok last year,” Brian said, looking like he didn’t know whether to get self-righteous or apologize. “It was great. Everybody seemed really excited to see us.”

  “To see your money,” the guy in the yellow suit said.

  “Probably,” Brian agreed. Shawn liked him for that; five years ago he wouldn’t have bothered to be polite to a cranky old drunk. “It’s kind of primitive over there. You have to step over the rats if you get up in the night, the power goes on and off all the time. They told us all to carry pocket flashlights everywhere. But it was crazy, just wide open. With a little money over there you can do just about anything you can imagine.”

  “So this year it’s Vietnam,” the guy in the yellow suit said. “They still got some of our boys prisoner over there, you know that?”

  “He’s one of those X-Generation people, Ray,” said the old guy at the end of the table. “He doesn’t give a damn.”

  “Actually,” Shawn said, “Gen X is all in their thirties now.” She kept talking, wondering if she could keep Ashley and Dylan’s wedding from breaking down into open warfare. “We’re the Un Generation. Kirst-UN, Bri-UN, Dyl-UN, half the people I know have UN names. No wonder we’re so depressed.”

  Brian was looking at her like she was retarded when one of the groomsmen came up and whispered in his ear. “Excuse me,” Brian said. “Duty calls.” He smiled briefly and walked away.

  “Go ahead,” said the guy in the yellow suit, not quite loud enough, Shawn thought, for Brian to hear. “Have a great fucking time.”

  Shawn stood up too. “Sorry gentlemen,” she said. “Peace with honor, okay?”

  She followed Brian outside where he, Dylan, and another seven fraternity brothers formed a circle, arms around each other’s shoulders, in front of the stage. They rocked back and forth and sang, in maudlin a cappella detail, about lying on their death beds with the name of their beloved fraternity on their lips.

  The band—with the waiters and busboys, the only black faces at the reception—looked on with mild amusement, and when it was over launched a medley of disco hits including “Brick House” and the inevitable “YMCA.” Shawn got Brian briefly onto the dance floor where she asked, “Are you having a good time?”

  He’d shed his coat and tie and undone a couple of buttons on his white shirt. “Yeah. I forgot how good it is to see all those guys. You?”

  She was no more able to explain her sense of dislocation than she was willing to seem ungrateful. She wished she hadn’t brought it up. “Me too. It’s been a long time.” Actual years, she thought, might not entirely express how long it felt.

  After two songs someone called Brian’s name and he excused himself with a smile. Shawn got a glass of bourbon and found a chair off to herself. She was close to the wall that separated the club from the cool, humid darkness of the Riverwalk a few yards away. She sniffed at the drink, which suddenly smelled medicinal and unappealing. One of the waiters, wearing a white dinner jacket like the groomsmen, was leaning against the wall and smoking a cigarette. He looked to be about Shawn’s age, clean-shaven, with his hair trimmed to a short stubble. His skin looked purplish-black in the harsh floodlights.

  “You want this?” she asked, offering the drink. “I haven’t touched it.”

  “No thank you. It’d be worth my job, they saw me drinking that.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  “That’s okay. You not supposed to be thinking, you supposed to be having a good time.”

  “You work for the caterer?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I w
ish you wouldn’t call me ma’am. My name’s Shawn.” She held out her hand.

  “Franklin,” he said, and shook it warily. Then he dropped his cigarette in the gravel and crushed it with his shoe. “I better get back to work.”

  Stephen, Kirsten’s husband, grabbed at Franklin’s sleeve as he walked by. “Say, man,” Stephen said, “you wouldn’t happen to have change for a twenty, would you?”

  “Think so,” Franklin said, reaching into his pants pocket. Shawn abandoned her drink and went to find a chair at the table.

  The genders had polarized, with Brian and the other males all at one end. Brian was telling a story in a hushed voice as Shawn came up behind him. Apparently it was something she was not supposed to hear, because even as she reached out to rest her hand on his shoulder, Dylan looked up and saw her and said, “Yo, Brian, cool it, dude.”

  “What’s the deal, Dylan?” she said.

  “Nothing,” Dylan said.

  “Golf stories,” Brian said, and the men all laughed.

  Kirsten, from the far side of the table and just over the border into the women’s zone, said, “They were talking about hookers.”

  Shawn felt ill. She clutched her purse with both hands behind her back, hearing her mother’s voice in her head saying, “Sooner or later, you have to pay the piper.”

  “Hey,” Stephen said. “Guy’s ten thousand miles from home, not going to see any woman he knows for another two or three months, what’s he supposed to do? Terrorize the sheep?”

  “Australians,” Brian said, “are very protective of their sheep.”

  More laughter. There was no way, Shawn thought, she could sit down at that table now. As she walked away she heard Dylan say, “You’re in deep shit now, man.”

  He sat for half an hour with Ashley’s parents, then decided she was being childish. Why should Brian keep her from the rest of her friends? Back on the patio, Brian had found a broomstick and was giving golf lessons at the back fence. “So,” Brian said, “the old boy asks, ‘Aren’t there any Democrats at this club?’ and Billy says, ‘Not on my watch.’”

  In the laughter one of the groomsmen bent over and came up with a crumpled piece of paper. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Look! Twenty bucks!”

  “That’s the only way you’re gonna get lucky tonight, Jason,” somebody yelled.

  “Found money,” Brian said, straightening from where he’d been bent over his improvised club. Shawn heard a focused quality in his voice that was new to her. “Want to double it?”

  Jason squinted drunkenly at Brian. “Double it how?”

  “I’ll bet you I can take this rock, hit a tee shot with this broomstick right here, and knock it over the fence and all the way into the river.”

  “No way. This is some kind of trick, right?”

  “No tricks, just pure golfing ability. Twenty bucks says I can do it.”

  “You’re on.”

  The thing Shawn had found most appealing about Brian in college was the very thing that eventually broke them up, both times. He’d been laid back, always willing to go with the flow, able to take his own pleasure out of nearly any situation he might find himself in. Long-term, his lack of direction dragged her own ambitions down, but in the short term it had always made him fun for a weekend at the beach.

  Somewhere Brian had found his direction, and Shawn didn’t care much for the way it sat on him. His posture was still nonchalant, but there was a light in his eyes as he took a golf tee out of his pocket and set the rock on it. He adjusted his grip, took a practice swing, and then stepped up to the tee.

  There were twenty or more people around him now in a loose gallery. A few of the more drunken fraternity brothers were laughing and calling out comments but Shawn could see, even from her obstructed view, that Brian was inside a zone of silence and perfect concentration. He brought the broomstick back smoothly and turned his whole body into his swing, hitting the rock with a solid crack.

  He turned away just before the rock splashed into the river, and with a polished gesture he plucked the twenty-dollar bill from Jason’s fingers. His friends surrounded him, slapping his back and lifting both his arms in victory. Someone handed him a fresh beer.

  Of course he’s different, Shawn thought. He has this now.

  Someone brushed past her. “Hey, Franklin,” she said.

  Franklin nodded, distracted, and headed for the group that surrounded Brian. “Excuse me,” he said when he got there. “Sorry to interrupt, but did any of y’all maybe see a twenty dollar bill out here? Thought maybe I might have dropped it when I was giving that man some change.”

  Franklin’s posture was awkward, defensive, and Shawn thought of Brian with the Vietnamese vet earlier, unsure whether to flatter or attack. Life, she thought suddenly, was full of Vietnams. She seemed to be having one now.

  Nobody answered at first. Two or three faces in the crowd turned briefly toward Brian, then looked away again. “Don’t think so,” Brian said. “We’ll keep an eye out for it, though.”

  More than anything, Shawn was embarrassed by the transparency of the lie. She stepped up and asked, “Did you say you lost something?”

  Franklin held her eyes for a second. She wasn’t sure what he was looking for. “It wasn’t nothing,” he said. “Forget I asked.”

  “Because I found this a few minutes ago,” she said, fumbling in her purse, finding a twenty, and crumpling it as she pulled it out.

  Franklin took it from her, nodded stiffly, and walked away. He was barely out of earshot when Brian said, “What the hell did you do that for? You made us all look like we were trying to rip that guy off.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “I earned that money.”

  “You won it. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Shit,” Jason said. “I wouldn’t have bet him if I hadn’t just found that money. No way I was going to cough up another twenty.”

  “Earned and won is exactly the same to me,” Brian said. He moved in toward her, turning his back on his friends and dropping his voice. This was the new, intense Brian. “Where do you think half my money comes from? Gambling and hustling.”

  “You and me both,” she said, thinking at first of work, then realizing how it must sound to Brian in the context of the weekend. Then she thought, that’s okay. Let it stand.

  “Look,” Brian said. “Here’s the twenty bucks, okay? I don’t want you covering for me. I can take care of myself.”

  “Keep it. Consider it a down payment on my plane ticket. I’ll send you the rest when I get home.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You’ve had a chip on your shoulder since you got off that plane. I don’t want anything from you. I just want to have a good time and see my friends. I don’t want your money.”

  The crack about the chip on her shoulder hurt. It was something her mother always said to her and she worried that it might be true. In the flame of Brian’s self-righteousness the hurt flared into anger. “Why not? What’s so special about my money? You seem to want everybody else’s. You could always use it to buy yourself a hooker while you’re in Vietnam.”

  “Is that what all this is about? Sex?”

  “A little. Some of it’s about money. And I think some of it’s about golf. About black men carrying white men’s clubs. You know? About all you guys living in this pretty green fantasy world and getting paid millions of dollars for it. And then you walk right past the napalm victims on your way to the clubhouse.”

  “Vietnam again. You don’t get it, do you? You just don’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “What an asshole that vet inside was. Me playing golf in Vietnam means we won. No bombs, no helicopters, just good old-fashioned American hustle. The way we won the Cold War, the way we’re about to win in China. We won.”

  The band had finished and there was a chill blowing in off the river. The voices around her had begun to sound strident and artificial.

  Time to go, she thought. She smiled a
t Brian, touched his cheek, and went to find a taxi.

  Stompin’ at the Savoy

  What I really need, Guy thought, is to duck into a Porta-Santa and blow off some of these bad vibes.

  WLCD, “the easy-watching channel,” blared at him from a video store across the street. He’d sweated clear through his collarless pink shirt, and burglar alarms were going off in his brain. One of the familiar red-and-green booths stood open and inviting at the next corner. Guy lurched inside and slammed the door.

  “Hello, Guy,” said Santa, scanning Guy’s ID bracelet. The white-bearded face smiled down from the CRT on the back wall and winked. “How are you?”

  “Pretty shitty, Santa. I’m really paranoid at the moment.”

  “I see. What are your feelings about being paranoid?”

  Guy wrestled with that for a few seconds. “I think that’s the stupidest question I ever heard.”

  “I see. Why do you feel it’s the stupidest question you ever heard?”

  “Look, Santa, there’s three guys back there been following me all afternoon. Business suits, mirror glasses, pointy shoes, the whole bit, you know?” He rubbed nervously at a scrape on his plasteel jacket. Guy loved that jacket and he really cared about the way he looked, not like those other assles at work who’d wear anything they saw on WLCD. “I think I lost them, but I don’t even understand what’s going down, you know? First the computer goes apeshit at work. Then—”

  “One moment please,” Santa said. The chubby face on the screen seemed to think something over, and then the voice came back. “Okay, you’re Guy Zendales, right?”

  “Right,” Guy said. Santa’s voice suddenly had a lot more personality than a moment before.

  “You said something about a computer?”

  “Yeah. I like, work at Modern Sounds, you know? And I was ringing up this sale when all of a sudden some wires must have got crossed. All this data just starts pouring out all over the screen, you know? Filled up a whole floppy that was supposed to have our daily sales records on it.”