You Only Get Letters from Jail
You Only Get Letters from Jail chronicles the lives of young men trapped in the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood. From picking up women at a bar hours after mom’s overdose to coveting a drowned girl to catching rattlesnakes with gasoline, Jodi Angel’s characters are motivated by muscle cars, manipulative women, and the hope of escape from circumstances that force them either to grow up or give up. Haunted by unfulfilled dreams and disappointments, and often acting out of mixed intentions and questionable motives, these boys turned young men are nevertheless portrayed with depth, tenderness, and humanity. Angel’s gritty and heartbreaking prose leaves readers empathizing with people they wouldn’t ordinarily trust or believe in.
YOU
ONLY GET
LETTERS
FROM JAIL
YOU
ONLY GET
LETTERS
FROM JAIL
STORIES by
JODI ANGEL
TIN HOUSE BOOKS / Portland, Oregon & New York, New York
Copyright © 2013 Jodi Angel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Angel, Jodi.
You only get letters from jail : stories / by Jodi Angel.— First U.S. edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-935639-58-9 (ebook)
1. Men—Fiction. 2. Masculinity—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3601.N553Y68 2013
813’.6—dc23
2012045369
These stories appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in the following publications: “A Good Deuce” and “Firm and Good” in Tin House; “Snuff” in One Story; and “You Only Get Letters from Jail” in Esquire/Byliner.
First U.S. edition 2013
Interior design by Jakob Vala
www.tinhouse.com
To Laura
CONTENTS
A GOOD DEUCE
CASH OR TRADE
CATCH THE GREY DOG
FIELD DRESSING
GAME-BRED
GAP
THE DIVING REFLEX
THE LAST MILE
FIRM AND GOOD
SNUFF
YOU ONLY GET LETTERS FROM JAIL
A GOOD DEUCE
I was on my second bag of Doritos and my lips were stained emergency orange when my best friend, Phillip, said he knew a bar in Hallelujah Junction that didn’t card and maybe we should go there. We had been sitting in my living room for eighteen or nineteen hours watching Robert Redford movies, where Redford had gone from square-jawed, muscled, and rugged to looking like a blanched piece of beef jerky, and we had watched it go from dark to light to dark again through the break in the curtains. The coroner had wheeled my mother out all those hours ago and my Grandma Hannah had stalked down the sidewalk with her fists closed and locked at her sides, insisting that a dead body had every right to stay in the house for as long as the family wanted it there. My mother was no longer my mother; she had become Anna Schroeder, the deceased, and my Grandma Hannah had been on the phone, trying to track my father down. The best we had was a number for the pay phone at the Deville Motel, and only one of two things happened when you dialed that number—it either rang and rang into lonely nothing or someone answered and asked if this was Joey and hung up when the answer was no. My grandma called the number twenty-two times and the only thing that changed was the quality of the light, and my mother went out, and Phillip came in, and my sister, Christy, packed her things so she could go, and I did not.
I understood why my grandma didn’t want to take me. There had been that time when I was eleven and smart-mouthed and full of angry talk and I had made her cry. I still thought of that sometimes, what it looked like to see her in her bedroom, staring out the window in the half darkness, and how I walked up beside her and said her name and then realized that she was crying. I can still smell the room she was standing in, talcum powder, stale lace, but I try very hard to forget what I said, though it hangs in my mind like the dust caught in the weak shafts of sun. It did something to my heart to see her like that, something that I can’t explain, and it did something to hers, too, I guess, because after that she never looked at me directly with both of her eyes. And now Christy was handed a suitcase and I was handed a brochure for the army recruiter office in the strip mall by Kmart and told I could take my mother’s car over as long as I gave it back when my bus left. Christy was thirteen, and I was seventeen, and what she had was no choice, and what few choices I had were being made for me.
“It doesn’t smell,” Phillip said. He was standing in front of my mother’s room, both of his arms braced in the doorway so that he could lean his body in without moving his feet. From over his shoulder I could see the bed against the wall, and the flowered mattress stripped and the blankets on the floor. The bed stood empty and accusatory, waiting to be made.
It was Christy who found her, and I wished it had been me—not because I wanted to spare Christy the sight of what she’d seen, but because for the rest of Christy’s life she could fuck up or give up or not show up, and nobody would hold it against her because, Jesus Christ, you know her mother died, and she was the one who found the body. Christy had a free ticket to minimum. I came in when Christy had called for me, but when your mother dies, there is no prize for coming in second. No one was ever going to keep some slack in my rope. The one who comes in second is the one who is supposed to spend the rest of his life cleaning up the mess.
“I keep feeling like I’m waiting for something and it isn’t coming,” Phillip said.
“I wanna go out,” I said. My fingers were stained yellow like weak nicotine or old iodine, and I thought about all the ways that iodine can cover and stain—clothes and fingertips, forearms that have gone through bedroom windows, scraped knuckles from walls. My Grandma Hannah kept a jug of it under her bathroom sink, called it something in German that I could not understand.
Outside, a dog started howling, and I listened to its voice rise and fall, over and over again, and then I remembered that Oscar had been chained to the back fence since the paramedics came, and he had cried like that at the sound of the sirens, even though they were all for show and not for need, because my mother’s lips had been blue and there hadn’t been breath between them for a while. I went out back and saw that his water bowl was tipped and his chain was wrapped around the post, and when he saw me he started straining at the clasp and coughing out barks, because his throat had gone hoarse from the spilled bowl or the tight chain or a combination of both.
My mom’s car was cold inside and smelled like tired cigarettes. Phillip wanted to drive, and I didn’t care enough to fight about it, so we put Oscar in the backseat and I leaned against the headrest and closed my eyes. It was the first time I had done that in more than half a day and I realized my pupils felt grit-rubbed and sore. Phillip cranked the engine over a few times, pumped the gas pedal, and the car started and he gunned it once, and then twice, so that I could smell smoke from the tailpipe coming through my window. There were lights on in houses and my watch said six and there was a second when I couldn’t decide if it was a.m. or p.m., and I thought maybe I could just make myself faint if I thought hard enough about it. It was a tempting thought, but Phillip couldn’t handle surprises well, and I knew that
if I fainted and let the whole damn mess go, when I woke up I would still be in my mom’s car, breathing in the smoke stain that she had exhaled, and we would still be in front of the house, and it would still be this day, and nothing about anything would be changed.
“Let’s roll,” Phillip said, and he dropped the stick on the tree to drive, and when we pulled away from the curb, the wheels caught the wet leaves in the gutter and we spun in place for a minute, the back end trying to fishtail, and then the tires gripped the street and we put the neighborhood behind us, and in twenty minutes we put the town behind us, and if Phillip kept the car pointed east, we could put the state behind us, too, but east kept bending north, and then we finally turned west and the thought of escaping faded from a spark to an ash.
There had been rain and the road was hard obsidian that threw back the reflection of taillights every time Phillip came up on a car. Hallelujah Junction was ninety minutes out of town and nothing but a general store full of hunting and fishing supplies and a roadside bar and a place for people to stop on their way to Bear Lake for ice or more beer.
Oscar ate dog chow from his bowl on the floorboard in back and every now and then the radio picked up intermittent stations that came in when we broke through the pine trees for a minute or two, and then turned to static as the signals blurred. The tape deck was broken, just like the heater, and the window crank in back and the speedometer, but Phillip was able to wedge a Van Halen tape in place with a crumpled Viceroy pack and we listened to side one over and over again as the road hairpinned and climbed until the asphalt thinned out and there was a gap in the trees and the sudden neon promise of cold beer. Phillip did not talk to me and I was grateful for that.
The parking lot was thick with lifted trucks and muddy tires, and we found a place to wedge the Chevy between a couple of Fords. We got out of the car and stretched and kicked at the gravel for a minute. Neither of us wanted to be the first one through the door, and even though Phillip had been positive that we could drink here without a hassle, I could tell that he wasn’t so sure now, and maybe he wished he hadn’t opened his mouth back at the house and we were still watching movies in the dark and debating over whether to order a pizza, because when push meets shove, it’s a lot of responsibility to have an idea.
“Let’s give it a try,” I said. The air was crisp and it snapped at my clothes in long sighs. We had showered before we left the house, and now we were both clean and new, and I had the bottle in the front pocket of my jeans, an amber cylinder with a name on it that was not my mother’s shoved deep in the cotton that my shirt hem covered, half full of blue ovals the innocent size of Tic Tacs. When me and Christy had rolled my mom over, not for the first time, she still had the bottle in her hand, and I had to pry it loose because I didn’t want her to be seen like that. People are quick to judge because sometimes it is easier to not understand.
We walked across the short parking lot and up to the building, and there was the steady increase in volume of steel guitar and snare drum, and when we pushed the door open there was a moment of huddle and wait that we had to fight before we stepped in far enough to let the door close behind us, and both of us stood there, blinking into the darkness, as if we had come in late to a movie and we were standing in the back, waiting until our eyes adjusted before one of us finally took the lead and made the brave walk in the dark to find a seat. The place was small and full, maybe fifteen people along the bar to the left and knots of men around the pool table at the back of the room. There was a handful of tables against the wall opposite the bar, and the center of the floor was clear and big enough to dance on if maybe the night was right.
I was immediately disappointed.
I had wanted the stuff of movies and TV, the mountain bar, the big men with shaggy beards and leather vests and a band playing loose and loud and a barefoot lead singer and a sea of hats bobbing in time to the kick. I wanted a fight in progress, breaking glass, splintered pool cues, and a lot of ducking punches.
But there was no band, and the men at the bar were old and thick and slow, and what few women I saw didn’t look as if they were in much need of having their honor defended. Phillip seemed as disappointed as I was, but he got over it faster and went up to a break in the barstools and leaned in far enough to get the bartender’s attention. Phillip was six months older, four inches taller, and thirty pounds heavier, with shoulders built for the football he thought he might someday play. I watched his mouth move with no sound, and the bartender adjusted his greasy baseball hat and Phillip pulled money from his pocket, and two bottles of Budweiser were uncapped and set down in front of him and that was that. No emergency, no joke, no get the fuck out of here, no bouncer gripping our collars and tossing us to the gravel outside. Phillip brought me a bottle, and I swallowed as much as my mouth could hold, and it was over. I had my first drink in a bar.
We found a table in the corner near the jukebox and we both pushed up a chair and I sat back and surveyed the room.
“I didn’t know what beer to get,” Phillip said. “I thought I was going to blow it. The guy said, what can I get you, and my mind went blank and I panicked for a second. Then it just came to me. Budweiser. Thank God for all of the fucking commercials.”
Phillip raised his bottle in the gesture of a toast and for a second I was afraid he was going to do it, drink to my mother or say her name or tell me how sorry he was about what had happened, and I braced myself, already uncomfortable and hating him a little bit for doing it now, like this and here, but instead he just held the bottle up by the neck, squinted at the label, and set it back down again. I drank as fast as I could, and hoped that the sooner the bottle was out of my hand, the less chance there would be for Phillip to make that toast and ruin everything. If he said one thing, even put her name in his mouth, I was afraid that I would drop my face to the table and press it to the sticky residue of the last beer that had been spilled and I would not be able to sit up again. It wasn’t exactly because I was sad, but maybe just because I had a feeling that even with my mother dead, there would not be a noticeable difference between the then and the now.
“You mind if we sit with you guys?”
I looked up and there were two women standing next to our table, both of them with beers in each hand, and then Phillip nodded and raised his eyebrows in a silent expression of why the hell not, and they reached for chairs and moved in next to us, one beside Phillip and the other beside me, and they each put a bottle in front of them and slid the second bottles toward us, and it took me a few seconds to realize that they had bought us beers. When they were settled in and drinking, they both leaned toward us and asked our names, so we went around the table—Veronica, Phillip, me, and Candy.
Candy leaned closer toward me, and I met her halfway. She asked me what I did for a living and I said that I worked construction, and she thought that was pretty great. I had never worked construction, but I had always been fascinated with the guys who did, with their ragged T-shirts and tank tops and tattoos and dark tans from working in the sun, muscular and dirty and smoking and blasting hard music over the sound of their hammers. Maybe I would work construction if I could.
Candy told me that she waited tables in Battle Creek, but she wanted to move to Humboldt and go to school, but she was getting older and there never seemed to be the chance to go. Veronica was her best friend, and they worked together, and Veronica had a two-year-old daughter whose name I did not catch. After a while, Candy got up and put some money in the jukebox, and after she sat back down the music changed to the Eagles and Candy clapped her hands. “I really love this song,” she said. I could picture the album cover in my mind, one from the milk crate by the old stereo in the living room, eagle wings spread over a desert at sunrise or sunset, blue sky fading to white over a yellow band, and not a lick of a hint to give away whether or not the day is looking to start or finish. I had stared at that album cover half of my life, looking for a sign.
Candy and Veronica liked to drink, and th
ey weren’t tight with their money, and the drinking led to talking and the conversation was as easily got as the bottles lining up in front of us. Candy had an open face and a wide smile, and when she laughed she had a tendency to bring one hand up and cover her mouth and look away.
The beer eventually got the best of me and when I got up to find the bathroom, Phillip slid his chair back so he could get past Veronica. I waited for him to follow me down the narrow hall, but he lingered at the table, so I kept walking until the smell of bleach and piss and mildew directed me to the right door and I pushed inside and was amazed at just how steady I could be on my feet.
I was pissing in a brown-stained urinal when Phillip came in. “This is the best time,” he said. He looked at his reflection in the mirror and let the water run in the sink so that he could wet his fingertips and smooth down the front of his hair. We had been friends for five years, and he knew more things than I wanted him to; he had been around when there had been a steady ride from bad to worse, and sometimes I resented him for that, for the easy way that he could move in and out of my house and my life and stay only long enough to stand witness to some kind of shit going down and maybe eat some of the food out of the cupboards, or an order of takeout, and then he would walk back home to his leather-furniture two-parent slice of existence, and I was the one who had to stay behind and live what he only had to look at.
“I’m a little wasted,” he said. Someone had written asshole on the wall with one s. Part of me wanted to find a pen somewhere and correct it. “What do you think of the girls?” Phillip said.
I turned on the sink and washed my hands. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw the dark circles under my eyes, and my skin had a shine that I had never seen before. “They’re nice,” I said.