"The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus"

[fiefoe]

Allan Gurganus's stories here are mostly told in first-person voices, and most of those narrators are insiders from small places.

__ There is another world, but it is in this one. —PATRICK WHITE

• (Toys:) Who can resist smooth objects, ideally miniaturized, made only to be funny, colorful, and touched?
• I soon learned Midwesterners have flukes, too. They’re simply better at hiding. Everything. They practice Nordic shunning. They know you can kill your neighbor’s soul simply by ignoring it. <> Even now there is a town in Illinois that chose to name itself Preemption.
• Our professor joked this was: “ethnographic colonialism within one’s native land.” He... yet sensitive to how all empires fall. He’d grown up amid artistic beauty broken to bits but left in place. <> We set off that Friday full of caffeine and an acquisitive sleekness that sometimes passed for sexy.
• And, this being a state school, he immediately translated: “‘Always know you are strangers … in a land far stranger.’”
• And no one lived more enslaved to fashionable smartness than a hyper-educated boy of twenty-six with his twenty-nine-inch waist and, so Mother always hinted, a colossal IQ. I look back on him with a curatorial mixture of pride, amusement and pity.
• I did stop before a pile of the 1860s Harper’s Weeklies. Hating knowing that she knew—I stood scouting for Winslow Homer’s war illustrations.
• Such ladies were most charming when provoked. Women in love with standards, their own or just some marked-down tradition’s.)
• I saw Theodosia smirking over secrets she felt enriched only by withholding.
• her system started coming clearer: we begin with austere Federal design, chaste and ‘classical,’ till Ionic geometry blossomed, enlarging to certain manufactured over-elaborations of the 1850s, sprouting roses and leaves and fat gilt tendrils of prosperity, till this stylized itself toward a silver Nouveau calla lily then onward toward a watch mitered with onyx swallows and the chopped fan-lines of the Eastlake moment, slimming square again into industrial edginess as a Deco locket put end-punctuation to time’s weird progression across a pigeon-chest otherwise un-notable.
• I absorbed one lateral rake from her poisoned eyes and inwardly admitted, “I think I’m a little in love here….” <> Is there ever anything except intelligence?
• her abacus eyes steadily tallying me
• “Which is where the person has already been so emptied of food that nothing but what’s clear is left to come out and, here’s the cholera part: it’s only clear broth but with little white bits of dissolving intestines that look like rice … and float just like cooking rice.”
• For a while, during the sickness, it seemed like folks could trust just one fellow only—especially a ‘new person,’ as they’d say. ‘Doc is new,’ they’d say, like he was store-bought-clean and still unused as some of the gear in his bag here.”
• But young Petrie’s features already seemed to diagnose some complex fate ahead. And yet, his eyes looked half-willing to accept whatever medieval beliefs awaited modern-medicine out here in these wheat fields.
• No, it’s yours. He is. Was hoping you might notice when you come in here hunting just toys. Toys aren’t the half of it. They’re the way we want it to be, not how things turn out.
• Take him. In La Verne, if we act too kind or smart or interested in much, they’ll make us pay. And pay. And pay. Yeah, take him quick.

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• The man was trying to cover the body with a blue blanket. I stopped cold. Even my flashlight tried to look the other way. Babies we all are, when it comes right down to it. We think we know decency, but we ain’t got the first idea of it, now, do we?
• Maybe oddest of all, atop the pile of oddness already heaped up, was—I’ve got to say: the beauty of her... See, it made me know: beauty is odd, always. Odd like death—and near-about as surprising. Once you come to know how to see both death and beauty, why, they start fetching up pretty much everywhere.
• Yours truly was forced to approach the cruiser, take up the handset, and risk reporting it. But in what language? Whose? In my head, I can sometimes imagine giving a sermon or a solid public speech. It’s only when my mouth opens do I hear a piss-poor used-car’s carburetor coughing.
• There was a pause. It may be the first time I ever did (or will) hear a decent, blinky, gulping, human pause from veteran police dispatcher Edna so-called “Mouth City” McCabe.
• Edna being always on the job, it’s in less than eighty seconds we commence to hear the sirens growing more and more out our way. Why she sent the fire department is not clear, beyond her owing several fellows there a favor.
• Her married daughters—all four—arrived by 3:30 a.m., toting garment bags containing Edna’s five best Sunday dresses, plus a portable hair-burner. By 4:45 (huddled in that unlikely beauty parlor, cell number one), they’d done major home improvements to Edna’s entire head and girdled person... police spokeswoman Edna McCabe is part Welcome-Wagon hostess, part cold-front weather anchorwoman, part sweet ole apron-lady Aunt Bea... Our Edna is already sounding at least … semi-national.
• All this tonight unseals all these possibilities: The way I see it, sex desire is surely the most living part of being alive, right? But to think of it in, actually inside, the dead: that put me off a week’s feed and religion. What kind of God lets this stuff happen, then arranges it so’s I’ll be the one who comes upon it whilst on duty and holding that caliber of flashlight!
• Folks hereabout have always known which single thing to remark about a tragedy over coffee at Millie’s Diner downtown. It’s like they vote on just one line per disaster, a show of hands, then stick with that. <> Till now, it’s always run maybe: At least there were no children involved, that’s one thing.

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__ Into Dick Markham’s blunted constancy she read actual “moods.”
__ A series of khaki filing cabinets seemed banished to one shaming little closet. Dad’s office might’ve been decorated by a firm called Edward Hopper & Sam Spade, Unlimited.
__ I cut a mail slot in Dad’s office door, and around eleven Mom would slip in the day’s Wall Street Journal. You’d hear him fall on it like a zoo animal, fed.

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• Features editors on papers this small must be gluttons for local color. (Didn’t I offer that hard-hitting two-part-series regarding the history of our Pun’kin Festival?)
• I so worship unvarnished “Nonfiction,” I’ve grown downright anti-novelistic. Who needs make-believe—given a world constructed so weirdly as ours? I now believe the girders of the mysterious are what really hold us all in place. Those provide limitless horror stories plus surging daily poetry. But first I had to know the likelihood of wind’s taking up any object heavy as some tree-climbing country boy aged eight.
• Hardest part of any ride comes as it ends, of course. Like life, buddy, getting up and started’s easy, right? It’s your coming down’s the killer. I wonder how retirement will feel. Oh well, here’s to the luck of fools and children,
• If some personally named hurricane had grabbed him, if she had been called, say, “Conchita,” more attention would surely have been paid. —In 1953 hurricanes first got tagged with human names. Women’s ones only—alphabetical from Abigail to Zelda. Then came 1979. Feminism intervened:
• He said you can be so much a twin that, though the other half is technically dead, you still feel full of him. “Your twin becomes almost your … GPS.
• His eyes are startling in their blue honesty. Fact is, as I met his stare, I remembered being late with quarterly taxes.
• “There’s just no choice. No chance of your giving a signal. It has already happened by just happening. And you’re knowing this without a bit of control. Admiring, kind of. <> “But I had adrenaline. And that seemed control. Keeps your mind as clear as anything. I must’ve used about a year’s voltage concentrating those next ninety seconds.
• Flexed into whatever shape kept me mostly upright moving at about a forty-five-degree angle. Jerking, stopping, snapping, I kept studying how trees broke, cars rocked onto their sides like dogs rolling over on-command...  I aimed away from old oaks and more toward scrub, shifting my big head as ballast. I was set—dropping, landing at a sort of a run.
• Still I longed to ask, “Any closing life-lessons, Larry?” Cheap. Such summaries don’t value experience as such. Experience must mean more than whatever fortune-cookie Moral trails it. Experience outranks everything. Certain acts must be respected just for having been endured.
• Easing into Falls as sunlight ended, I seemed to see the town for the first time, not my last. Its green water tower. The band shell on the Commons. Everything that made it look like any other village now marked it as peculiar and mine. <> Somehow my own death seemed very near just then. Hot-rodders had finally passed me, on the right. To make my surrender more their victory, boys all shot me the finger. I just laughed. —Looking back, I recognize one of those moments when you feel your life begin again!
• Red dawn made every random thing stacked there look specific then valuable. It somehow came to me: all these human items—never reported missing—had nonetheless been found. They’ve been right here, waiting in plain sight for all these years. But, only this morning, when about to leave, did I get up, walk toward these losses found, stand marveling as before the burning bush.
• We grant ourselves so little daily hope. <> Meanwhile, barely noticing, we’ve already managed wonders.

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__ there’ll be some mess-up shots? <> Maybe sky, some jet-trail and two flying birds, or even your own knee shown against the red steering wheel? What’s odd, you flip right past the good pictures and stare longest at the ones gone somewhat wrong. It’s those ones make you think, “Hell, I could be a pho-tog-rapher!” <> She was like that. Off to one side, a throwaway, kind of nifty but nearbout by acci-dent.
__ she’s like ten months pregnant. White belly squared-off to where it seems she’s swallowed a twelve-pound dice.
__ but there’s still some good folks left on earth. You feel s’fine about yourself you expect everything but good from others. There’s way more sin in your mind than you’ll find out here at the edge, where most people just try and live. She’s one the good ones, sir.
__ I found a way to coach her, “We’re getting there! You can! You can! You are, girl!” I see now—every creature must be valuable if each birth takes this much work.

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• Finally he peels off his silver diver’s watch and, after dangling this to make it appear tempting as some tinned food, underhands it within sixteen feet of the dog’s frothing snout. <> Last thing, the man pulls out his wallet. He sprinkles cards on stones then shot-puts his whole billfold into the Atlantic. Massed keys, pulled from a pocket, he lifts, weighs, pauses, keeps.
• It’s not that he expects the Lab to bite this rope then clamp there like some show dog. It’s more how the sight of it, something almost the color of a rawhide chew-toy, might let the creature jolt free of his frozen sidelong drift. The nearby floating terns and gulls, not uninvolved, give off limp cries—the interest of anything alive observing anything else alive in far worse trouble.
• No trace of their struggle remains. No sign of their lifesaving, their tossing things into the sea, their clearing these cold stones of nor’easter’s storm-trash. Such blood or vomit as just fell from them? already gull-eaten, salt-neutered, immediately wind-gnawed to nothing. The terns and gulls have gone back to swimming as usual, just this side of undertow.
• We never even learned their names.
  Never really heard them speak.
  Did she get to live?
  None of that is known.
  This is not that kind of story.
  It’s the kind that has a happy ending you know is not the fullest happy ending but must pass for one.

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• Children, to prove my tours are real educational: the plural of “cannon” is “cannon.”
• Like, if I say “RIGHT NOW” again, see? Well, now we’re in a whole new place. A new and deeper time. I’m just making this part up but it still feels solid. Maybe what we call the Past is just back-issues of “RIGHT NOW”?
• Mrs. Evelyn says: History is embarrassments. What else, in toto, was our attractive if deluded Confederacy? Children, here’s an easy math problem. In 1860 there were fifty-six million Yankees, but just seventeen million Rebels (and five million of those were non-combatant slaves). Young’uns, guess which side was bound to win?
• Look, two cardinals and one blue jay. Bird-colors are so good they flirt with being “cheap.”
• Small-town life is made possible by rarely stating one’s true opinions. It’s the bargain we strike to keep getting invited places... Secrets must, like bad molars, eventually come out, if you’re to survive.
• Be honest. Facts console people. Folks just gulp dates down. They think they can permanently know a thing.
• We’ll soon turn onto tree-lined Summit Avenue. It’s been the scene of major coming-out parties, seven murders, more suicides than have ever been called that.
• To offer you a newer reference point, that yellow mother cat trying and get her poor blind baby across four lanes of traffic? they occurred right here today. Does that give you a sense of the epic pageantry involved? But this question, see, reorganizes me just when I can likely least afford it.) <> I am told that, between the 1880s and the early 1960s when it went completely out of fashion, thank God, at least five thousand persons were done away with in this savage manner.
• Whenever I visit Meade she keeps trying to give me tours of her tiny town house. Lead me! Why, there’s not one good thing in there I didn’t give her! Seems history keeps crushing us with what we’re proudest of.
• I’ve never given one tour worth even $4.95. Why? ’Cause, if I took you up to the full-twenty-dollar truth-level? your ears’d bleed. Admit you’re here to suck culture from us, the way black snakes put fangs into Momma’s white hens’ eggs.
• On a summer day this warm so early, I have but to quote, He maketh me lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.

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__ Churches, as sunken as private homes, somehow looked sadder, having once claimed more. At least their steeples gave every boater bearings. As I motored past First Baptist’s chromium upright, it showed steel rivets, a fuselage of copper flashing, so much rusting armor now. But, poking above our waterline, each denomination still insisted on itself. <> In our Williamsburgy town, even the synagogue sports a Georgian portico.. Churches are often set face-to-face on corners opposite, paired like fighting cocks.