Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories
By Wells Tower
4/5
()
About this ebook
Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.
In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily try to reassemble themselves. His version of America is touched with the seamy splendor of the dropout, the misfit: failed inventors, boozy dreamers, hapless fathers, wayward sons. Combining electric prose with savage wit, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a major debut, announcing a voice we have not heard before.
Wells Tower
Wells Tower is the author of the short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. His short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Washington Post Magazine, and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York.
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Reviews for Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
281 ratings33 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's not cold, but it won't burn your mouth.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Short stores done well!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A good, solid set of short stories, detailing sad bastards and set in stunning environments. I really enjoyed it - and the title story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned," tucked away at the back of the book, makes the whole book double worth it. It's about sad bastard Vikings, and it's awesome.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Total muscle-car writing—a little showy, but good lines and a really entertaining ride all the way through. It's been touted as real "guy" writing, not so much for men as obviously by one, and I think that's true. All gender commonality correctness aside it just feels very male, with this lurking threat of violence or volatility woven into the stories that is not unappealing. Every so often there's a bit of allegory that's kind of hammered home but I think that's more of a young author thing. This is his first collection and in fact it's very tight and well-done.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is not your usual collection of feel good short stories. There are some unique twist and a very different look at human nature. The stories a loosely connected in that there is a least one human predator in each story, but not necessarily the customary form you would expect.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Well-written stories, some extremely so, that often suffer from a lack of resolution. There’s a slice of trouble, things happen, then stop happening, often with no apparent consequences or finality. Most of the time it works, but there can be a vague aftertaste of dissatisfaction.Wild America is an example, where a teenage girl puts herself in a position of potential grave danger, then is let off the hook totally. It happens too often. People get themselves into trouble – often of the deep shit type – then…nothing.There is some exceptional writing. A middle-aged man pondering his lack of children: “In the diminishing likelihood that I did find someone to smuggle my genetic material into, by the time our little one could tie his shoes, his father would be a florid fifty-year-old who would suck the innocence and joy from his child as greedily as a desert wanderer saving a found orange.” Now that’s a sentence. It’s this type of writing that saves the collection.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Funny, strange, compassionate -- everything I love in a short story. I heard about Wells Tower from the New Yorker fiction podcast, and the story I heard, "The Leopard," was probably my favorite. Several of them made me laugh out loud, though, and I even quoted one to a friend the other day, remembering when one character orders a Bailey's and tequila instead of one with kahlua but sticks with it. I'm looking forward to reading more of him.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wells Tower's collection of short stories demonstrates a broad range of voice and style. I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of Wild America and On the Show, moving from an intimate first person to an omniscient third person. On the whole the stories are linked by savage humour, vivid description, and a consistent voice that expresses the strange and bleak nature of contemporary life without slipping into the melodrama.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I usually hate short stories, but these were great. A rare book that lives up to the hype surrounding it.
The characters do awful, strange things in their attempts to make order in their lives. Brutal, funny and humane. Well written, but not in that awful McSweeney's/Iowa Writer's Workshop sort of way. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Excellent writing, but kind of a downer. Many of the stories lack a cohesive ending, which isn't necessarily bad, it just added to the general feeling of hopelessness. I was reading this while sitting outside practice rooms while my daughter was at a weekend-long flute workshop. I kept feeling ashamed of myself, like I'd done something really wrong that I knew was really wrong, but I couldn't think of anything I'd actually done. Then I realized that the shame of the characters was leaching into my own emotions. My spouse says I should stop reading books like this if I'm going to feel this way afterward. I'm not about to take his advice, but I will work harder to recognize it's happening before the shame really sets in.The final story about the inner life of a Viking warrior is my favorite of the collection. I enjoyed how the Vikings in the story had such complex interactions and reactions to things. They would do these extremely brutal things that they're supposed to revel in or at least consider just part of a day's work, but instead a few are just burned out on pillaging and just want to settle down and live in peace. I tend not to think of Vikings as real people, but of course they were; this story (although fiction) helped me see the nuanced reactions they may well have had to all of the violence.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A collection of short stories, most them having a central theme of a displaced male and often a bad father/son relationship. In "The Brown Coast", the death of a father causes a man's marriage to fall apart and sends him to stay at a rundown beach property where he begins capturing sea creatures. In "The Executors of Important Energies", a young man who has had little parenting from his father is forced to spend an evening with him now that mental decline has made the father little more than a child. "Leopard" is about a boy who believes his stepfather hates him.Tower creates realistic stories; there are no flights into fantasy, no surrealism. The plots often involve someone struggling to hold on to what little bit they have or to find something to do with themselves. Most often the main character is a man who has to start over after a marriage ending, financial loss or being kicked out by the parents. I was pulled into each new story immediately, though it did get a bit monotonous to have story after story about males wanting to find their place. There's one story told from the point of a teenage girl.One other thing that I would have liked to have seen was a few stories that had more of an ending. I like a story that leaves the reader with multiple choices for what happened next, but Tower's endings aren't endings so much as an interruption in the middle of a conversation, like he meant to keep going but forgot what he wanted to say. I don't mean to dissuade anyone from reading this book because it's his first and it's pretty good.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A delight from beginning to end.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Good writer with solid command of metaphor and various narrative techniques. Problem is these stories have very little heart/soul. Kind of feel like guy watching baseball game while drinking a six pack, emotionally speaking. The variation in the stories' techniques also has a writer's workshop feel to it. "Okay, folks, our next assignment is to write a story in Second Person. How exciting!" How's this for ironic: his best skill is coming up with unique metaphors; his most memorable story in the collection, about an elderly dude checking out the mysterious neighbor lady, has very little figurative language, written in a Carver-esque minimalist style (I like Carver all right, but not a huge fan). That must have been written after the class: "Okay, folks, our next assignment is to write a story like you're Raymond Carver being edited by the New Yorker. How exciting!" Overall, hopefully this isn't his mature writing, simply products of someone exploring to find a true narrative calling. I can't tell, because the book jacket reviews (like so many others) are written by deranged people who apparently take Ecstasy before writing their reviews. I hope to see him progress into something more emotionally engaging.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brilliantly written slices of life."Not long after the affair had run its course, Bob and his wife were driving to town when Vicky looked up and saw the phantom outline of a woman's footprint on the windshield over the glove box. She slipped her sandal off, saw that the print did not match her own, and told Bob that he was no longer welcome in their home.”Tower has an arresting style and an eye for character. He takes a sharp scalpel to a life and throws us a short glimpse, a Polaroid snapshot where there are more questions than answers. Mundane lives and everyday darkness’s, made interestingly ominous. There is a strong theme of familial rivalries and relationship break ups here from the sibling rivalry and middle aged fear in The Retreat to Down Through the Valley where our narrator views his ex-wives husband with jealously and dislike. "I can't explain why I did these things, except to say that I carry a little imp inside me whose ambrosia is my brother's wrath.” Some stories don't work: one has follows multiple people around a pivotal dark moment and loses focus and my interest. The other is a tale of Vikings and quite frankly Tower's humour and arresting style just fell flat to my English ears."He crossed the cockeyed patio. Tiny lizards scattered from his path. He followed the sound of waves to the end of the yard, through a stand of pine trees, limbless and spectral. He stepped from the pines onto a road paved with oyster shells whose brightness in the morning light made his eyes clench up." Worth a look to just dip your imagination into a raw, wry masculine style. Recommended to short story lovers & fans of USA fiction.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Read this book because David Vann's wife Nancy had a dream that Wells Tower saved her from drowning. I read his story from the Best American Stories 2010 collection, "Raw Water". Some of the stories are excellent."At times such as these, you get a good, humble feeling, like the gods made this place, this moment, first and concocted you as an afterthought just to be there and enjoy it."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Book of short stories. Each story seemed to be centered around a very specific particular human emotion. Talented writer and some of the stories are top notch. Really liked "Retreat" & "The Brown Coast" & "Down through the valley."
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Superb collection short stories. Dynamic, energetic voice.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hugely entertaining short stories. Funny and touching, gripping and vivid. Somehow reminiscent of Barry Hannah's early work.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Solid debut collection of short fiction by widely acclaimed author whose writing appears regularly in publications like the New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. For the most part, these stories shine a light on underachievers and wayward individuals trying to forge a path through a bewildering modern world. Some are their own worst enemies, others are thwarted by a past that refuses to let go. The characters in this volume make poor choices and seem to lack the self-realization necessary to build successful lives. Throughout, the writing is deeply imaginative, leavened by a pugnacious energy, and rises to the occasion again and again. The sole departure from the prevalence of contemporary America in the book is title story: set hundreds of years ago in a murkily Nordic landscape populated by warriors and farmers, but narrated in an expletive-drenched modern idiom. This story alone--filled with wry, edgy humor--is worth the price of admission. Recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Although, I found this was a somewhat hard book to read, I couldn't stop reading this collection of short stories. Some of the subject matter was a bit to "harsh" for my taste, and the vulgar language put me off a bit. However, Tower's writing style is impressive, and this is what kept me reading. He writes with the feel of a pulp fiction novelist, but leaning more toward being a craftsman with words and the ability to develop rich visual imagery for the reader. He links together thoughts which one just wouldn't consider combining (..."to Bob, it looked like a turd of someone who'd been eating rubies"). While I'm completely enamored with the writing style and use of descriptive language by Wells Tower, I hope he chooses different themes to write about.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed this varied collection of stories, and whilst most were very much about all American male failures, they lacked the sparse language of Carver.The best was the last "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned", set around a Viking losing the urge to go raiding due to domesticity, but told with contemporary language.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I was terribly disappointed by this collection of short stories after all the rave reviews, even more so because the title story was the weakest of the lot and was the final story in the collection.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I'd been looking forward to reading this book for some time. The description sounded great. Unfortunately, the description was better than the the actual work. The writing wasn't bad, it just wasn't stellar. That issue could have been negated by some truly creative stories, but that didn't happen either. The stories were largely forgettable and I feel like I've read similar many times before. I'm still giving it three stars because I feel like there's something there, but it needs to be developed. So, if Tower put out another work and people had good things to say about it, I'd probably be willing to give it a chance.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great book. Fantastic short stories that take us through snapshots without overly concerning themselves with where we're going so much as how we're gettting there. The last story, honestly, throws you for a loop, but if you stick with it to the end you'll be rewarded.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5There are funny bits-the oddest statements that would pop up and make me laugh. Most of the stories though showed how intangible happiness is. How depression can be lifted by the smallest thing, the world is beautiful again, and just as quickly come crashing back down into reality. My two favorites were those that I didn't think at all depressing and definitely the funniest: Door In Your Eye, and Everthing Ravaged, Everything Burned
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything Ravaged, Everything BurnedBy Wells Tower2010, Picador, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)Review by Debra Louise ScottWells Tower has put forth a delightful collection of “guy stories” (except for one about a teen girl). Even though I’m of the other gender, I thoroughly enjoyed them and found sardonic echoes of my father, my ex-husband, an ex-boyfriend, my brother-in-law and more. Wells writes from the gut while consistently turning out masterful twists of language, image and simile. “What I heard of his music was gloomy, the sound track you might crave in an idling car with a hose running from the tailpipe, but nothing you could hum.” Retreat Each story sounds like it’s being relayed by a good friend who has just accepted a beer and propped his feet up on the coffee table. The stories flip from intriguing, to humorous, to disturbing, to tragic, but all feel real. Wells especially goes out of his way to challenge the way we automatically pigeon-hole people and think we know who they are with just a glance. By the time we get through the short 30 odd pages of story, we see the character with a depth that usually takes a few chapters of a novel to achieve. The exception to this was the one with a girl as the protagonist. She had a more shallow aspect, almost as if Wells heard the story from his sister and was trying to set it down in print, without really understanding what makes her tick. However the basis of the story was real enough and I found echoes of my own teenage traumas lurking among the words.The only real issue I had with the writing was his odd propensity to make the last paragraph somewhat of a non-sequitur. Sort of like the storyteller was on his second or third beer by now and starting to drift.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Once in a while, a book comes along that everyone loves. It digs deep into human nature and make you look at yourself and your neighbors in a new way.Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is not one of those books. This, despite, critics all over praising it as the second coming of Mark Twain mixed with the observant short story craft of Raymond Carver. Wells Towers book has garnered praise from the likes of Edmund White, Michael Chabon, and Michiko Kakutani, who placed in her top 10 of 2009. Surely, this must be a good read.For one, it's quirky. In "The Brown Coast," for example, the protagonist is kicked out of his house after his wife discovers a footprint on the car's windshield that isn't hers. In "Retreat," the main character's brother is a failed music therapist. In the title story, Vikings set off to conquer the world because they're bored. This, along with other examples, shows that Tower is the type of writer who can describe things that are new ways at looking at the world around you--an almost paradigm shift through prose wording. Tower describes the voice of geese as "nails being pulled from old boards." True and yes I have never heard of that, but true. He describes a racist old man looking at black people as: "leering wonderment at the man's precocity, as though he w ere watching a squirrel wash a cracker." Indeed, Tower has an eye for humor and a giddiness of language.But it's a book, so if you read one story after another, all the stories begin to sound similar and the humor is annoying and reused quirkiness. Read every story here, and you will read 9 times about men who divorced their wives or lost their wives, and are now looking for a new life, which is not always that great. That is, read these stories and read about manhood gone awry, but read these stories and quickly forget about them. None of these stick and the collection is on the whole a disappointment. Of note might be "Wild America," a story about rival cousins, and originally published in A Public Space, but one would just have to question if this story sounds too similar to Oates's "Where Have You Been? Where Are You Going?" Other than this, this collection is begging to be skipped.Well Towers would be easily forgotten if he didn't have good publicist or publisher.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book is very well written. I liked the stories, but this book was by no means a "quick read". It is a great book for when you have time to think
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read about this book in Bookmarks a few months ago, and it intrigued me. I've read plenty of contemporary short story collections written about contemporary subjects, but the fact that Tower wrote a story about Vikings caught my eye. So, when it showed up on the Goodreads list, I had to have it. Luckily, I won it!Overall, this was a really well-written collection with a lot of humor. Maybe it's because I've been reading a lot of Updike lately, but I found myself laughing out loud several times, most notably at "Door in Your Eye," where an old man waves to his daughter from a suspected prostitute's apartment. Tower's characters are exactly what the back of the book says they are: They're misfits and failures, but they don't really hold illusions about their lives. As a result, we get to see these characters in all their failed glory. There are no heroes here, which I liked. Tower's characters are just your average people plodding along in their lives, but he spotlights them in such a way to make them interesting.I was disappointed, however, with the title story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." Maybe I just built up my hopes a little too much, looking for a great story about Vikings. I was, overall, underwhelmed by this story. I did, however, like that the Viking characters spoke and acted as if they were in the modern world, but they were living their Viking lives. For example:So Djarf, whose wife was a sour, carp-mouthed thing and little argument for staying home, was agitating to hop back in the ship and go straighten things out in Northumbria. My buddy Gnut, who lived just over the stony moraine our wheat field backed up on, came down the hill one day and admitted that he, too, was giving it some thought. ... His wife had passed years ago, dead from bad milk, and now that she was gone, the part of Gnut that felt peaceful in a place that didn't move beneath him had sickened and died as well.In other words, I liked that, just because he was writing characters that existed in a different historical time, Tower didn't feel the need to change his writing style and language to suit that change in history. He made the Vikings a little more real, in my opinion, than if he were to write in language that "seems more Viking," whatever that may be.My rating: 9/10
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If this is the beginning of a career, it's hella fine and bodes so well for the rest of his earthly time that I am thrilled and grateful he decided to write.The nine stories in the collection are the products of much careful observation, writing, and re-writing, and that shows in their craftsmanship. There are very few infelicities of style on display here. But what doesn't show, what's invisible to the naked eye, is the muse-touch that brought Wells Tower to our shelves. He's not a writer made, he's a writer born. How dare I assess a stranger's character? I dare because there are only a few times in life when the hairs on one's neck stand up and the palms of one's hands moisten when someone not right there *feels* like they are.Tower is a star. He writes beautifully. He imagines fully the characters he presents to us. These are craftsmanly things, things I can teach someone to do. What I can't teach someone to do is to see so deeply into the reality of another's life. That makes Tower very unusual.In every story in this collection, there is something unexpected. The last story, set in Viking times, is a complete departure from the present-day fringes-of-society settings of all the others...but only at first glance. The characters in Tower's fiction are all men looking for meaning in all the socially sanctioned places and not finding it. I can't think of a more evergreen plot off hand. But these men all have one thing in common that isn't superficial. They are all wounded from within by anger.An angry Viking...yeah, so? The Viking in question, however, is wounded by the anger he feels at change, at the world daring to shift him into a new place. Like the other Tower men, modern men, he feels cut off from his source of meaning and connection. I don't think this is anachronistic, because I think that's been a human experience since scientific-Adam fathered the first huge batch of modern human males.Why read about angry men, I hear the ladies murmur, we see 'em all the time...yes, I know, but ask yourself this: Why is anger so male an emotion? Why are men so ticked all the time? Turn to fiction for your answers. Betrayal of the trust a man reposes in others is a biiig one ("The Brown Coast", "Wild America", "On the Show"), or the inability of humans to cope with change ("Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned", "Door in Your Eye", "Executors of Important Energies")...in short, the same things that make women angry, right?Not exactly. Tower's men, like the flesh-and-blood ones I know and love, are befuddled by the very fact of feelings. They aren't mad because you hurt their feelings, they're mad because you found them in the first place and THEN hurt them.And they have no way to tell you this. So Tower had to do it for you. So he did. Go say your thank-yous at the cash register, buy his book, read it and apply your confusion to the real men in your life.
Book preview
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - Wells Tower
THE BROWN COAST
Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discomfort in his underpants. He’d come in late, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him—under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and his neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there. Yet Bob found that he could not fetch out the crumb. He had slept wrong on his arms, and they’d gone numb. He tried to move them, and it was like trying to push a coin with your mind. Waking up for the first time in this empty house, Bob felt the day beginning to settle on him. He shuddered at the cool linoleum against his cheek, and he sensed that not far below, not too far down in the sandy soil, death was reaching up for him.
But the little gears inside him did finally turn and haul him to his feet. He leaned against the wall to let a head rush pass, scratched the crumb from his behind, and then he went to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, which was empty and breathed out a sour-thermos smell. Shrunken ice cubes lay in trays in the freezer, and Bob popped one out and stuck it in his mouth. It tasted like old laundry. He spat it into the dusty cranny between the fridge and the stove.
Outside the kitchen door was the patio Bob was supposed to be down here tearing up. Thistle and rumpus weed stuck through the holes in the bricks. A table and chairs of mildewed white plastic sat canted over on high swells where tree roots were heaving up. It made him a little sick to look at that mess and think of what it would take to get it in order.
This house had once been the joint property of his father and his uncle Randall, who was wasting no time putting it on the market now that Bob’s father was dead. It was an investment his father had been railroaded into six years ago, sight unseen, and Bob couldn’t recall his father coming down here more than once or twice. The way the deed worked out, the place went straight to Randall, and Bob wondered whether his uncle, sixteen years Bob’s father’s junior, hadn’t been banking on this turn of events all along.
Randall lived where Bob lived, several hours north. When Bob’s father was dying, Randall had made a promise that he’d do what he could to make sure things turned out all right for his nephew. In the weeks after the funeral, Randall had made a point of stopping by frequently to condole with him, though his sympathies usually took the form of showing up around dinnertime and staying long enough to finish off whatever beers Bob had in the icebox. There was something disquieting about Randall, how his oiled hair always showed the furrows of a recent combing and how he wore braces on his teeth, though he was pushing fifty.
Bob had not been close with his father, so it was puzzling for him and also for his wife, Vicky, when his father’s death touched off in him an angry lassitude that curdled his enthusiasm for work and married life. He had fallen into a bad condition and, in addition to several minor miscalculations, he’d perpetrated three major fuckups that would be a long time in smoothing over. He’d reported to work with a blind hangover, committed a calamitous oversight on a house he’d been helping to build, and soon after lost his job. A few weeks later, he’d rear-ended a local attorney, who, as a result of the collision, developed a clicking in his jaw and convinced a jury that the injury was worth $38,000, which was $2,000 more than what Bob’s father had left him. Worst of all, he had tried to find relief from the unpleasantness by trysting with a lonely woman he’d met in traffic school. There’d been no joy in it, just a two-week spate of drab skirmishes in a basement apartment that smelled heavily of cat musk.
Not long after the affair had run its course, Bob and his wife were driving into town when Vicky looked up and saw the phantom outline of a woman’s footprint on the windshield over the glove box. She slipped her sandal off, saw that the print did not match her own, and told Bob that he was no longer welcome in their home.
Bob spent a month on Randall’s couch before Randall got the idea to send him south. Hole up at the beach house for a while,
Randall had said. This damn thing’s just a bump in the road. You need a little time to recombobulate is all.
Bob did not want to go. Vicky was already beginning to soften on her demands for a divorce, and he was sure that with time she’d open her door to him again. But Vicky encouraged him to leave, and things being how they were, he thought it best to oblige her. Anyway, it was a generous offer on Randall’s part, though Bob was not surprised that when Randall dropped him off at the bus station, he’d handed him a list of jobs already written out.
______
Randall’s house was not a delightful place—a cinder-block cottage with flaking pink paint. The sallow linoleum that covered the living room floor had been improperly glued and was coming loose, curling back on itself at a long seam running the length of the room. The wood paneling in the living room had shrugged up over many moist summers, and now the walls looked like a relief map of unfriendly, mountainous land. Lvn rm/SheetRock!
it said in the note.
In the windowless hall, Randall had hung the taxidermied bodies of some things he’d killed. An armadillo. An alligator’s head with a deer’s face sticking out of its mouth, his uncle’s idea of wit. A square of plywood showcasing a row of withered turkey beards. Above the kitchen sink was a painting of a beer can with Randall’s signature in the bottom right corner. Randall had done a good job with the Budweiser script, but he’d had to stretch out the can’s midsection to accommodate all the letters, so it bulged in the middle, like a snake swallowing a rat.
In a dark corner of the living room, an old aquarium burbled away. It was huge—as long as a casket and three feet deep—and empty except for a bottle of hair tonic, a waterlogged bat corpse, and some other things floating on the surface. The water was thick and murky, the color of moss, but still the aerator breathed a steady green sigh of bubbles through the tank. Bob clicked it off. Then he stepped into his flip-flops and went outside.
He crossed the cockeyed patio. Tiny lizards scattered from his path. He followed the sound of waves to the end of the yard, through a stand of pine trees, limbless and spectral. He stepped from the pines onto a road paved with oyster shells whose brightness in the morning light made his eyes clench up.
The house was at the northern tip of a small island, and it had given Bob a little jolt of hope and excitement when Randall had described the place to him. He liked beaches, how each day the tide scoured the sand and left it clean, how people generally came to the coast because they wanted to have a good time. But when Bob reached the access path up by the bridge, he was crestfallen to see that this island did not seem to have any beach at all. The land here met the water in a steeply sloping apron of mud that sang with mosquitoes and smelled terribly of fart gas. The nearest decent beach, a man on the bus had warned him, was on another island three miles out to sea and cost twelve dollars to get to on a boat. Still, he thought it might be nice to get in that water, but in this particular spot, he’d have to climb back over the muck and walk home covered in filth. He turned around and headed back down the lane.
A pair of white-haired women in a yellow golf cart rolled past. Hidy,
one of them said to Bob.
All right, now,
he said.
Right then the sound of metal on metal rose in the lane, along with a man’s voice raised in rage. Son of a bitch!
The voice belonged to a man bent down half-vanished under the hood of a Pontiac. Aw, God fuck a milk cow!
The white-haired women turned pursed faces at the angry man. The golf cart whined and moved faster but not much.
The jazz of oaths kept coming loud, and the birds fell silent at the din. The man’s anger, Bob found, was getting him angry, too. It occurred to him to go and yank the sawed-off broom handle that was holding up the Pontiac’s hood, but he did not. He walked over and stood beside the man.
Hey, come on, man,
Bob said. There’s people out here besides you.
The man pulled his head out of the hood and stared at Bob. His face was nearly all cheek, with small, crooked features that looked like they’d been stuck on in a hurry. He held a little pry bar in his hand.
Who the fuck are you?
the man asked in a tone more mystified than hostile.
Bob,
Bob said. I’m staying over there.
At Randall Munroe’s? I know Randall. I did a couple of things to his cat.
Bob squinted. Do what?
Derrick Treat. I’m a veterinarian.
I didn’t mistake you for a car mechanic,
Bob said.
Took me three hours to get this alternator in here. Now I find out it won’t take the goddamn belt.
Bob knew a couple of things about cars, and he had a look at the problem, which was easy enough to remedy. Derrick hadn’t positioned the tensioner correctly before torquing down the pivot bolt. Bob made the adjustment, and the belt slipped snugly into the pulley groove. But the car still wouldn’t crank because the battery was dead, so Bob had to kick off his flip-flops and jog down the lane, hunching and straining at the Pontiac’s bumper to work up the speed for a roll-start. Finally, the engine caught and the car spurted off, leaving Bob gasping in the road with a mouthful of exhaust.
Derrick turned the car around. He pulled alongside Bob. He revved the engine into the high red, working his lips to mimic the shriek of the motor.
He held some money out the window. Here, goddammit. Here’s five dollars. Wait, I got seven.
I won’t take that money.
Go on,
said Derrick. You saved my entire day.
Turned one bolt is all I did.
More than my dumb ass knew to do. Now come in the house and have something to cool off with at least.
Bob told him thanks, but he meant to try and find some way down to the water.
Uh-huh, because the ocean’ll dry up by the time you have one drink,
Derrick said.
Little early for me, anyhow,
said Bob.
Brother, it is one o’clock in the afternoon, and it is Saturday. Go on inside.
Turning the man down, Bob understood, was going to be a job in itself. He followed Derrick out of the sun.
The same cheap and careless people who’d built Randall’s cottage had built Derrick’s home, only they’d paved it in blue linoleum instead of white. The place felt lived in, at least. It smelled of fresh coffee, and it had been furnished to capacity. The small living room was jammed with a lot of false antique furniture bought as a set, all of it broken out in pediments and lathework grenades and ornamental buboes that filled every line of sight.
By the window, a woman was sitting in a recliner reading a magazine and sucking on a cigarette. She was pretty, but she’d spent too much time in the sun. She was pruned over and nearly maroon, like a turkey beard.
Bob, this is Claire,
Derrick said. "Claire, this gentleman worked some magic on our vehicle. Just went ernh-ernh with that ratchet, and now it’ll run out from under you."
Claire smiled at Bob. Well, that’s something,
she said, shaking Bob’s hand and not minding the grease. New out here?
Bob said he was, and she told him welcome. She said he should come by anytime and that the door was always open and that she meant that.
Bob followed Derrick to the kitchen. Derrick pulled two jelly jars from the freezer along with vodka in a plastic bottle. He called to the living room. You need a drink, baby doll?
Claire said she did, and Derrick pulled out a third jar. He poured champagne into each one and quashed the rising bubbles with the vodka, which was chilled to syrup. Claire calls it a Polack holiday,
Derrick said, handing a drink to Bob. Her people are from over there, and they don’t fool around. Drink two of them, and I’ve got a hangover for life, but she can knock these back all day and be fine in the morning.
They went back to the living room, and Bob sat on the sofa. Derrick sat on the arm of the recliner with his arm around Claire.
What do you do, Bob?
Claire asked him.
Just kind of on sabbatical, I guess,
Bob said. He knocked back his drink and a sour heat bloomed in his stomach. Probably go back to carpentering before long, what I was doing for a while.
But what?
Claire asked.
I built some stairs wrong and got let go. After that, I thought I’d take a little while to get a few things straightened out.
That doesn’t sound right—stairs,
Claire said. That doesn’t sound like anything to get canned about.
Bob explained what it took to build a staircase, how you’ve got to cut each rise on the stringers exactly the same height, even a sixteenth-inch difference and people will stumble. I don’t know why, but I cut a stair in the middle to six inches instead of eight, just my brain went on the fritz. Then the old man whose house it was came by to see the job. He was going down those stairs, and wham, he fell and landed at the bottom with a broken leg. After that, a lawyer went over with a tape measure and that was it, pretty much.
That’s what I’m talking about,
said Claire. Only in America does somebody get rich off of being too dumb to walk stairs.
I didn’t feel real hot about it,
said Bob. That bone was sticking out pretty good.
Claire shrugged with her face. Even so.
He drained the jar and set it on the table. Well, thanks for this,
he said. Guess I better push on.
Look, now you just got here,
Derrick said, but the phone rang in the kitchen and Derrick went after it. Claire dipped a finger in her drink and then stuck the finger in her mouth. A saw-edged scar ran down the back of her hand, standing out pink and tender on the skin there, which was the color of a pot roast.
You should stick around and have some brunch,
she said. I’m making eggs and salmon cakes.
Derrick came back from the kitchen, talking into a cordless phone, his voice loud with expertise. Say what? Did you take a look? Can you see the head? Uh-huh. Red or whitish? Yeah, that’s natural. Sounds like she’s getting ready to domino. I’ll be over.
Derrick came back into the living room. Gotta take a ride over the bridge,
he said. Need to go pull something out of a horse’s pussy.
What kind of a thing?
Bob asked.
A baby horse, I hope.
Before he left, Derrick showed Bob where to cut across the yard to get down to the sea. It was much hotter now, and the sun glared down through the gray sky like a flashlight behind a sheet. Bob walked across a dead garden and through a salt-burned hedge that rattled as he passed. He slapped along in his flip-flops, woozy from that drink and with a heat headache coming on. At the top of a steep bank of dunes, he stopped and saw the sea. The water lay in bands of blue and green, patterned over with little wind divots like a giant plate of hammered copper. At the foot of the slope, a long tongue of smooth rock stretched a couple of hundred feet into the waves.
Bob started going down the dune, but it was steep here, too, and the simplest thing was to ride down it on your ass. When he got to the bottom he had grit in his shorts and skeins of shore weeds looped between his toes.
He scrambled along the spit of rock. The wind cut the stagnant dampness of the day and dried the sweat on his face and chest. He took the salt into his lungs and savored the pure itch in his chest. He touched the long grasses waving in the water like women’s hair. He crouched to observe the barnacles, their tiny feathery hands combing blindly for invisible prey.
Not far from the water’s edge, Bob nearly put his foot into a deep tide pool in the rock. It was big as a bathtub and deeper than he could see. A pair of crimson starfish clung to the edge. He fished them out. They were hard and spiny in his hands, but they were nice to look at, and he thought he might nail them up somewhere for an ornament, so he dropped them into the stretched-out belly of his T-shirt. He was about to move on, when he saw something moving in the blue deeps of the hole—a fish, four pounds at least, and gorgeous, nearly the same dark blue as the water, just sitting there, gently working its bright yellow fins. It was a fish for looking at, not eating, a kind of fish that would cost you good money at a pet store. Bob dropped the starfish on the rock. He crouched beside the hole and put his hands in the water. The fish didn’t move, even when he reached his fingers down beside it, but when he snatched for it, the fish darted to the far side of the hole but then just sat there, idly