Add This to the List of Things That You Are Read online

  ADD THIS TO THE LIST OF THINGS THAT YOU ARE

  Chris Fink

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  The University of Wisconsin Press

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  Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1428

  uwpress.wisc.edu

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  Copyright © 2019

  The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book may be available in a digital edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fink, Chris, 1971- author.

  Title: Add this to the list of things that you are / Chris Fink.

  Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019009204 | ISBN 9780299326203 (cloth: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wisconsin—Fiction. | LCGFT: Fiction. | Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3606.I5365 A6 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009204

  This is a work of fiction. Space and time have been rearranged to suit the convenience of the book, and with the exception of public figures, any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-299-32628-9 (electronic)

  For my family

  You are my other country and I find it hard going

  Lorine Niedecker

  Contents

  Whistle or Lose It

  Blue Rock Shoot

  High Hope for Fatalists Everywhere

  The Bush Robin Sings

  Three Ps

  Cubness

  First One Out

  Lazy B

  Strings

  Birds of Paradise

  Trollway

  Writer’s Elbow

  Add This to the List of Things That You Are

  Barrel Riders

  Acknowledgments

  Whistle or Lose it

  Whoa Boy whinnies outside, and Timothy’s lying face-to-carpet in the living room of his sister’s rented farmhouse in Blue River, Wisconsin. His face has oozed enough puss that it’s become stuck to the carpet. He peels it away and he’s so drunk still he doesn’t really feel it, just hears it, that sound you only hear when you’re peeling something from carpet. It’s an old calico number, once a shag, either good at disguising stains or just one big stain. Timothy sits up and gauges the damage with his fingertips. The air smells both succulent and burnt, as if a pig is being roasted. It comes to him now that a pig has already been roasted, and this is just the aftermath. Yesterday. Last night. The pig split and burnt to celebrate his sister’s nuptials.

  No one else is awake in the house. Dusty sun streams into the room through the blinds. Whoa Boy whinnies again, wanting grain. Behind that sound is the distant murmur of the milk pump. Gust must be out doing his chores.

  Timothy’s sick to his stomach and full of dread. His face feels like it must look. Like a cake left out in the rain, the Old Gent will say when he comes downstairs. A sure bet. Mornings like this, head a flaming cocktail of alcohol and ruptured flesh, Timothy imagines his brain inside his skull, gray and wrinkled, afloat in the pickling fluid. It’s a generic brain, looking like any brain afloat in a blue jar. But something’s wrong with it you can’t see from the outside. It must be dissected.

  Before anyone else awakes, Timothy had better come up with a story to explain his face. It’s as if he has a cue ball crammed inside his cheek, and lacerations from his teeth, especially that broken molar, lace the inside of his cheek. The colors too must be impressive.

  Whoa Boy whinnies again. It’s the gift horse, alone in the cow yard, girdled still by the gaudy red ribbon. Timothy’s alibi is delivered by the next whinny. Whoa Boy did it. They had been talking about riding him anyway, before they got too drunk. The horse liked to charge up hills and chase deer in the tall grass of the back forty. But Whoa Boy was only green broke, a two-thousand-dollar horse that still refused the saddle and the bit. Cord and Timothy tried to teach him, but they were as green as the horse.

  This will be Timothy’s story: He took Whoa Boy for a trot, the horse bucked, scraped him off on a tree, his foot caught in the stirrup, and he was dragged until his face looked like this. Then Whoa Boy stopped to eat grass.

  He had better cut the ribbon before he tells his story.

  From upstairs come the sounds of someone else awake. These old farmhouses, you can hear everything. First there is the tossing and turning in bed, then the solid announcement of feet planted onto the floor. Then the pacing around the room as the body assembles its clothes.

  Who will it be?

  Timothy showed up late to the pig roast. Like most things he did, this late arrival was calculated. He skipped the whole business at the courthouse. To Timothy’s view, the courthouse ceremony justified Cord’s later drunken appraisal of second weddings. Skipped the whole rolling out of the pig roaster too, not to mention the earlier butchery. Cord hired one of the Nutt brothers to grill the pig. Hillbilly has a pig roaster he trailers behind his three-quarter ton, calls it Nutt’s Famous Roast-a-Shoat and lets it out to weddings, funerals, graduations. Of course, when Timothy pulls up everyone is standing around admiring the black thing, already drinking beer out of plastic cups, getting an early start. It is as if the Roast-a-Shoat is the central event here, and the wedding is just an accoutrement one pulls out to garnish a cooked pig.

  Timothy discreetly parks his small Toyota pickup in the shadow of one of the three-quarter tons at the far end of the farmyard. He leaves his camera in the truck and walks up to join the communion at the roaster-on-wheels. Tottering outbuildings litter the farm grounds. His sister and her betrothed are renting this place for a good price, and everyone has high hopes about it. But Timothy sees failure in the sad conglomeration of outbuildings. He expects to find barnyard animals foraging in the farmyard, looks for a billy goat chained to a tire. It doesn’t take a schoolteacher to understand that no one can make a go of dairying on a rented farm. Not in this century. Look at all the farm auctions along these county roads every weekend. No, this farm is doomed, like this union is doomed.

  Timothy walks up to the Roast-a-Shoat feeling rather buttoned up in his khakis and oxford. He makes a show of rolling up his sleeves and then extends a hand to his brother, who crushes it.

  Look who’s here, Cord says. Missed you at the wedding.

  The pig is already sizzling. Poor feeder boar picked from the pen by Cord yesterday and destroyed with a small caliber bullet to the brain. Its blackened carcass turns on a homemade rotisserie. Where the apple belongs, an Old Style tallboy tips inward, as if the pig is guzzling it.

  My new brother! beams their new brother, to whom his sister was just betrothed at the Sauk County Courthouse. His name is Gust, and he’s some fortyish backcountry mashup of trucker, farmer, and cowboy. Amazing thing is he pulls it off. Everyone likes Gust, even the Old Gent. Most surprising is the banker liked him too, enough to
finance this sure debacle. Of course, the banker is the farmer’s best friend, at least he had better be.

  Timothy shakes hands around the Roast-A-Shoat, trying not to grimace at each firm embrace. This is the cast of characters with whom he will celebrate his sister’s nuptials. Mostly, they are Cord’s friends, area dropouts, not unlike Cord himself, who never packed up and moved away. They’re all approaching thirty, like Cord, but they act much younger, spending their time the same way they did a decade ago. Like barnyard animals, they have nicknames given for their dominant physical features—Blaze or Socks—or else some vulgarity related to their surnames. Here stands Skin, who was bald at seventeen, and now wears a beard and a checkered bandanna around his melon. Already in and out of rehab several times, Skin has grown so silent that he’s mostly become Cord’s nonverbal shadow. And the Nutt brothers, as they are affectionately called. They go by these nicknames: Ballbag, the elder, and Nutsack, the younger. Bag and Sack for short. These aren’t names that people call the Nutt brothers behind their backs. These are names the Nutt brothers call themselves. Proud scrotum, Nutsack even has his moniker emblazoned on the hood of his pickup. Of course the rural fad, the nearly ubiquitous tow-hitch scrota that somehow replaced the gun racks and Confederate flags, dangle from the receiver of each Nutt’s truck. I exercise my right to bear arms, the rural trucks used to say, or, don’t forget I’m a redneck. Now they’ve given up politics for the cruder message: I’ve got big balls.

  Cord, Skin, and the Nutts are dressed like they’re at a pig roast, or a NASCAR rally, maybe church, wherever it is the fuck they go. Denim, plaid, canvas, leather. If they don’t sell it at Farm-N-Barn, you don’t wear it, goes the Blue River mantra. Gust goes the same except that he’s wearing one of those tuxedo T-shirts. Over this he sports a Western plaid with the sleeves hacked off, Marlboro hard pack in one pearl-buttoned pocket and one weed dangling beneath his moustache, gleaming green seed cap sprouting from his head. The sleeveless shirt recalls the names of these men, the extra syllables sawed off, revealing the hard, bare arms of Cord, Gust, Skin, Bag, Sack.

  Sack, pour a beer for my little brother, Cord says. Sack reaches for the cups, the tapper. The keg is handy, of course. Timothy wonders if his brother can smell the condescension on him like bad cologne. He almost smells it on himself. He looks down, accepts the beer. Cord is the lead dog here. The Nutts do as they’re told. Even Gust is subdued in the presence of Cord. These men are all hulking and strong, but they’re also in the early stages of decline, their necks and girths expanding. Not so with Cord. Cord is in his prime, his muscled body sculpted by hard work.

  Weed? Gust offers, holding out the hard pack, shaking the box until one little butt-end extends past the others. Yeah, thanks. Timothy’s careful in whose company he’s seen lighting up. He’ll be safe lighting a weed here in the rolling smoke of the pig roaster.

  Timothy lights the smoke, drinks some beer. Pilsner, probably Old Style. Beer to be drunk in great quantities.

  New guy Timothy doesn’t know walks up from behind the roaster and extends a beefy shank from beneath his own sawed-off western. In the other hand he holds a half-empty feed sack by the neck like some choked fowl.

  Poach, the man says, as if in introduction.

  Say what? says Timothy.

  This here’s Nicky, Gust offers.

  Oh yeah. Sure, Timothy says. Nicky the Poach. This is Gust’s dimwit brother, another new member of the family. Joy. Nicky is in his early twenties, about Timothy’s age. A wine stain spills across one cheek down onto his thick neck. Timothy realizes now that this creature called Poach is the only other member of his own peer group. Timothy accepts Nicky’s gigantic mitt in his own small hand and the big bastard crushes it.

  Ouch, goddamn, Timothy says. All you fuckers are the same.

  And how did one little fruit fall so far from the tree? Bag says.

  Go on, Nicky, and show the boy what you got in the sack, Gust says.

  Gust has called him boy.

  Nicky grins and holds the sack out to Timothy.

  I’ll guess it isn’t sweet feed, Timothy says, drinking more beer, his hand still smarting.

  Wild game for the party, Nicky says. He reaches in the sack and what he pulls out by the feet is feathered—a wild turkey hen. Neck slit, bled out. Timothy holds his breath. He’s still careful not to register a reaction, the wrong reaction, but he’s afraid he has. Timothy feels the beer working already, and the cigarette. Enough of these and he might just slide down to feel like one of the gang.

  Wingshot, Nicky? Cord says.

  Naw. Roosting.

  Nice hen, says Timothy. Or is it a jake?

  You can’t tell sometimes, Gust says. Takes an expert.

  She’s a hen, Nicky says.

  Nice hen, then.

  Show him what else, Gust says. Each of the men suppresses something. If they were girls, it would be giggles. Guffaws, then. They’re not suppressing their guffaws because of the poached fowl and whatever else is in the bag but because they know Timothy disapproves. They’re testing him, seeing if he’ll take the bait. He’s naïve, they think. And these truths about life must be taught to him.

  Nicky drops the poached turkey on the gravel and reaches back in the bag. He pulls out a bundle of big green sycamore leaves and unwraps it one corner at a time like a present for Timothy. Timothy catches his breath as the gift is revealed. It’s beautiful, a brook trout, not twelve inches long, still damp and fresh, none of the color drained out, the orange halos and red belly catching the sun, the dun back like smoke, eye still alive. This isn’t some farm-raised transplant. It’s a native brookie, a wild trout.

  Nicky holds the fish out toward Timothy. It’s as long as his hand.

  It’s a beauty, Timothy says.

  Sure is a beaut, says Nicky.

  For a moment, the two men stand mesmerized by the presence of the treasure in Nicky’s hands. Then Timothy’s certainty that this wild creature was taken without permit, like the turkey, settles in. Timothy frowns, and this gives Gust his opening.

  Cord says this one likes fish more than beer. Says he likes fish even more than girls. Gust leans back a little, showing Timothy something. If he had on suspenders, now is when he would hook them with his thumbs. Poach here’s got three more in the bag, Gust brags. Poach here knows these cow cricks better than anybody, don’t you, Poach? Maybe he’ll even take you out. Nicky grins, his wine stain lightening as his skin stretches. Timothy tries to remember what happened to the boy. He heard the story before. Kicked in the head by a Holstein, run over by an Allis-Chalmers, took a header from the silo. One of those things.

  Them things. That’s what Gust would say. Or Cord would say it too, but not because he didn’t know better. He would say it only to win Timothy’s disapproval. One of them things.

  Looks like your bro poached you a nice wedding gift, Timothy says, trying his best to sound lighthearted, trying to mask his disapproval. That’s better than what I got you. Then Timothy chucks Nicky in the arm. You’re quite an old poacher, he says, finishing his beer. He holds his empty cup out toward Sack to be refilled.

  Get you a grin on, Sack says, and pumps the tap.

  Pluck that hen, hey Nicky, Cord says. We’ll throw her on the coals with the boar.

  Let Timothy pluck her, Skin says. Everyone turns to look at Skin, surprised by his sudden long wind.

  What, and mess up them clothes, Bag says.

  He can take off his clothes, Sack says.

  I’d be afeared to see it, says Gust.

  Then Cord turns to Timothy and ends the discussion. You’d better go on to visit the girls, he says. They’ve been wondering where you been. The girls missed you at the wedding.

  This is his brother’s invitation to escape. The crowd at the Roast-a-Shoat is unlikely to let up on him once they get started. Difference is like a scab they must worry until it bleeds. Timothy bows out, wondering at this new trait in Cord, this Showing Mercy. Maybe it’s just the special occasion.<
br />
  As Nicky plucks the dead hen, Timothy heads for the house where his sister and the other women fret with what Sack calls the Fixins, the slaw and beans and potatoes and what all that will garnish the pig. Sack doesn’t do Fixins, he says. He leaves them—Them Fixins—for the women. He’s relieved to be free of the stag party at the Roast-a-Shoat, but not so certain the Fixins crowd will be any friendlier, especially since he skipped the courthouse.

  Last year’s straw bales hug the limestone foundation of the farmhouse. It’s August, mind. Up past the house, the acreage forms a pleasing tableau: high golden hills reaching above the silo top, gnarled burr oaks shading the pastureland. It makes an appealing portrait, sure, but it won’t make money, so it won’t be permanent. It’s a dream, this farm, and what’s worse it’s a rental. Last tenant on this property tipped his tractor raking hay right on that ridge. The man was crushed beneath the weight of his implement. That was why rent was cheap. One week a funeral and the next a wedding. It was like some made-for-TV Midwest Gothic: Roast-A-Shoat for every occasion.

  Arriving at the farmhouse, Timothy’s verdict rises like bile for the second time since his arrival: No fucking way this works. Timothy’s prescience is what his family calls his cynicism. Old Timmy Frowns-a-Lot, his mother used to say. The question, to Timothy, isn’t how he knows failure when he sees it. The question is how his family seems blind to it. Here’s his new brother-in-law, forty years old, once bankrupt, twice divorced. And he’s got this way of gazing into his beer cup like he’s worried where the next beer will come from before he’s finished the one in his fist.

  Why bank on failure? Timothy had asked his mother when Anita announced the marriage, pointing out the many clear flaws in the arrangement.

  Gust is a likeable man, Timothy’s mother said.

  The world is full of likeable men, Timothy said. Doesn’t mean you want to spend the rest of your life with them.

  You don’t have to, his mother said.

  It took this a moment to sink in. She was right, of course. Timothy didn’t have to. He didn’t even have to be here at the wedding. Sure, it would look bad if he skipped the whole day. He could, however, invent an excuse, some summer school. But something about his family made Timothy come around, despite everything he knew, despite his grim prediction. It wasn’t morbidity, or fatalism, the tidal pull one feels to witness a train wreck. He suspects the answer is very nearly the opposite of that. Somehow, against the odds, these people, his family, are happy people. They have some secret wellspring of faith that things will work out for the better, whereas Timothy, well, Timothy is nobody’s version of a happy person.