Strangers to Temptation. Scott Gould

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       Copyright © 2017

       Scott Gould

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

      The following stories have been previously published, and a number have appeared in different form: “Bases,” in the Kenyon Review, as well as the anthologies New Stories from the South and New Southern Harmonies; “Orbit” and “Stand-In Jesus,” in Carolina Quarterly; “You Dream, You Leave,” in Crescent Review as “Out of Town”; “Watching,” in St. Andrews Review; “The Esso Trifecta,” in the Raleigh Review as “Collection Day Is Saturday”; “Joy to the World” in Eclectica as “Hammer, Anvil and Stirrup”; “Matthewmarklukeandjohn” in Pembroke Magazine as “Strangers to Temptation”; “Bodies That Drift in the River Flow” in the New Ohio Review.

      Book Design: Meg Reid

      Cover Illustration: Maggie Chiang

      Proofreaders: Meredith Hardwicke & Beverly Knight

      Printed in Dexter, MI by Thomson-Shore

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Gould, Scott, 1959- author.

      Strangers to temptation : stories by Scott Gould.

      Spartanburg, S.C. : Hub City Press, 2017.

      LCCN 2016036211 | ISBN 9781938235306

      Subjects: LCSH: Teenage boys—Fiction. | Small cities—Fiction. | City and town life—Fiction.

      LCC PS3607.O8936 .A6 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036211

      HUB CITY PRESS

      186 West Main St.

      Spartanburg, SC 29306

      1.864.577.9349

      www.hubcity.org

      www.twitter.com/hubcitypress

       For Jack Gould.

       And in memory of his bride, Mary Ann.

      CONTENTS

Orbit

Bases

The AC

      May McIntosh Flies, John Wayne Runs

      Stand-In Jesus

      The Esso Trifecta

      What It Means to be Poor

      Joy to the World

      What Gets Tossed

      You Dream, You Leave

      Watching

      Matthewmarklukeandjohn

      Bodies That Drift in the River Flow

       ORBIT

      I WAS THIRTEEN, AND I WATCHED LONNIE TISDALE HANDLE his fake eyeball on more than one occasion. It was an act more miraculous than grotesque, at least at that age—an ability that seemed a generous reward for all the pain he’d had to endure because of the refrigerator. Practically everybody in Kingstree knew better than to jump off Baker’s Bridge in summer. The heat always shrank the Black River and raised its banks, and we were aware of the appliances and rusted transmissions and angle iron there, just under the surface of the cola-colored water. From above, you couldn’t see anything below. The water was way too dark and the bridge a little too high. So we always waited until after a good rain to jump. Lonnie’s impatience overcame his good sense one afternoon that summer, and he took a Kenmore to the right side of his head.

      After the surgery to put his face back together, my mother refused to let me visit Lonnie. She said it would upset me, but my mother’s subtext was that Lonnie’s stupidity might be contagious. She was a nurse. She knew better. But she also knew Lonnie did things that brought him within a gnat’s hair of death. He was the boy who hung between the trestle rails when the lumber train ran through town on its way to the paper mill. He was the boy who snuck up on alligators sleeping across the hot sand bars on Black River. Now he was the boy who had fake bones in his face. He was a hero.

      I heard about the plastic side of his face long before I ever saw it. My mother came back from her shift at the hospital with daily reports of his progress. “Well, it’s too swollen to tell what it’s going to look like,” she said one afternoon. “One half of his face looks, frankly, like a buttocks cheek.” I had never heard my mother mention any body part that was covered most of the time. I suppose she saw enough orifices and fleshy parts at the hospital, she didn’t want to think about more of them at the dinner table. A week later, the butt check had subsided. “Lonnie got his false eye today,” she told me in a voice that sounded too celebratory, the same voice you might use to announce the winner of a church raffle.

      To be honest, I had stopped thinking about Lonnie Tisdale on a regular basis. When you’re thirteen, tragedy is a passing annoyance. Lonnie’s recovery was something I couldn’t see, so I didn’t consider it important enough to catalog in my head. I was busy with Laurice Reeves.

      She was the girl closest to being a boy that I knew, and I was sure I loved her. I’m relatively confident this was no latent homoeroticism lurking in my bones, but rather the fact I coveted a female who could fish and blow smoke rings. On the seventh grade playground, she wore t-shirts with nothing else on underneath and leather gloves she stole from her mother. She’d cut the fingers out of the gloves and during recess, she pretended to be riding a large motorcycle. On one thin forearm was an ink tattoo, a design she freshened every day with an ancient-looking fountain pen. It depicted a coiled rattlesnake and some writing: Take no crap from any man woman or child. I’m not sure how she avoided the principal’s office with crap on her arm and no bra under her shirt, but none of our teachers (women who could detect the rustle of a passing note at thirty feet) noticed either. I loved Laurice because I was scared of her. I wasn’t the only one. But my fortunate advantage was she lived down the street from me, nearer Highway 52. In summers, I passed her house on the way to the Bantam Chef when my mother or father left money on the kitchen counter for cheeseburgers.

      We never knew exactly where my father went the times he disappeared. He didn’t have a job because he couldn’t work. He said his stomach wouldn’t allow it. His stomach was a daily source of drama and conversation when he was around, because he’d lost a sizeable chunk of it right after his return from Vietnam. A sneaky Southeast Asian parasite set up shop in his gut, and a doctor in San Francisco removed half the stomach. I told my little brother that when our father was gone, he was off searching for his missing stomach, СКАЧАТЬ