STRANGERS TO TEMPTATION
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
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, and this gave Eli nightmares for years. Our father would go AWOL for two days and return with a spackling bucket full of redbreast and we’d say, Ah, fishing. He’d come back with a black eye and a gash across the bridge of his nose and we’d say, Ah, fighting. Sometimes he would come back after a week and wouldn’t say a word, and we didn’t know what to ask. Neither did our mother. It was just the way it was then.
So Lonnie was still in the hospital. My father was fishing or fighting or swallowing his tongue somewhere. My mother was working double-shifts at Kelly Memorial, which meant Eli and I spent most of the week riding our bikes back and forth to the Bantam Chef for food. We’d pedal by Laurice’s house, riding with no hands on the handlebars, carrying our burgers and orange sodas. I steered with my hips. I remember that week being so hot, I felt my bike tires sink into the gooey asphalt. We had to pedal harder under the sun.
Every