Bad Kansas

Bad Kansas

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

Bad Kansas

Stories by Becky Mandelbaum

“Kansas Boys” first appeared in slightly altered form in Great Jones Street. “Bald Bear” first appeared in slightly altered form in Salt Hill.

Photograph p. iii by David Keller

© 2017 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mandelbaum, Becky, author.
Title: Bad Kansas : stories / by Becky Mandelbaum.
Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press,
[2017]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016056637 | ISBN 9780820351285 (pbk. :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820351292 (e-book)

Classification: LCC PS3613.a52955 a6 2017 | DDC
813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2016056637

for my mother

When I was in the second grade, my grandmother took me to Lawrence to raise me. And I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.

—LANGSTON HUGHES

All we do is for this frightened thing we call Love, want and lack— fear that we aren’t the one whose body could be beloved of all the brides of Kansas City, kissed all over by every boy of Wichita—

O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me— On the bridge over the Republican River almost in tears to know how to speak the right language—

—ALLEN GINSBERG, Wichita Vortex Sutra

Contents

Kansas Boys

The Golden State

A Million and One Marthas

Go On, Eat Your Heart Out

The House on Alabama Street

Night of Indulgences

Stupid Girls

Thousand-Dollar Decoy

First Love

Queen of England

Bald Bear

Acknowledgments

Bad Kansas

Kansas Boys

When he was alive, Peter’s dad had a dozen friends like Bob Deschutes—artists who’d gone to war and then returned to Kansas broken and restless, a milky film over their eyes. Once home, they nursed their wounds by devouring alcohol and fried food and telling stories that made their hearts ache more. Deschutes was, by these standards, one of Peter’s dad’s most quintessential buddies. He’d designed war recruitment posters in the late sixties before being placed in the field, where he lost a testicle and a hand, both on the left side. (Few people knew the real story, which was that he had lost the testicle years before, by antagonizing a fireman who, in a moment of unprofessional rage, aimed the fire hose at Deschutes’s crotch.) Although naturally left-handed, Deschutes promptly declared himself ambidextrous and got to work painting a series of subpar and often wildly inappropriate portraits of children, most of them naked in a field of poppies. He preferred vodka in the mornings, wine once the sun went down.