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
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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.

Peter also knew that Deschutes had long ago loved the same girl as Peter’s father—a dancer they’d referred to in drunken conversation as Slinky, either because they didn’t want Peter’s mother to hear the girl’s real name or because saying it out loud hurt too much. The name came from a story in which the girl, wearing nothing but dime-store flip-flops and a cowboy hat, tumbled backward down a flight of stairs, breaking both of her big toes. These were stories from 1970s San Francisco—somebody was always naked and falling. What Peter really wanted were stories about his father. Had he killed people? Had he watched children die? But his father was a private man and could hardly say “bless you” without straining an emotional muscle. It was Deschutes who had the stories and a loose mouth to go with them. All you had to do was feed him liquor and he’d spit out secrets like they were sunflower shells. Once—this was when Peter’s father was still in the hospital—Deschutes took Peter aside and told him that his father may or may not have impregnated a woman in Vietnam. It was a warning: if word got to this woman that Peter’s dad had died, she might come looking for money. At the time, Peter had cast it aside as a drunken joke. And yet, more than three years later, he still found himself waiting for a long-distance phone call, a letter addressed from across the world.

Peter hadn’t seen Deschutes since his father’s funeral, where Deschutes—wearing sunglasses and a powder-blue leisure suit—had burst out singing the chorus to “Free Bird” during the service, and so it came as a surprise when, on an otherwise ordinary Friday afternoon, the old man hobbled into the shirt store where Peter worked as a graphic designer. The job was a last resort for Peter, who had found no better use for his degree in graphic design since graduating the year before. Sometimes, when he thought about all of the T-shirts he’d borne into the world (BAD SPELLERS UNTIE, MY SPIRIT ANIMAL IS WHISKEY), he felt a deep sense of shame, as if he’d been caught masturbating outside an elementary school. He tried, mostly, not to think about it.

Deschutes charged toward Peter without a word of greeting and demanded a shirt with a princess on it.

“What kind of princess are we looking for?” Peter asked, hoping to make things quick. He had other work to do—design a logo for a kick-ball team, check the online orders—and besides, Deschutes depressed him. He had the same style as Peter’s father: chambray shirts and abalone necklaces half-hidden by chest hair. He employed the same worn-out lingo: Right on. Don’t have a cow. Get real. Even his mother had sometimes mistaken Deschutes for Peter’s father—putting a hand on Deschutes’s shoulder at a restaurant, handing him her purse (Hold this for a second, will you?), calling out to him, Could you take a break from sitting on your ass and help me with the lawn mower?

Deschutes sucked his teeth. “It’s for a little black girl. You got any black princesses?”

“Afraid not,” Peter said, realizing how bad this sounded. “But I can make you one. We could sketch something right now if you wanted.”

“You could do that for me?”

“It’s part of what we do here.”

Deschutes told Peter exactly what he wanted, down to the way the princess’s hair should be braided. “Nothing too crazy, with those plastic bobble things. Just nice, simple braids.”

Peter sketched the princess while the old man watched over his shoulder, the smell of his breath like an old metal spoon.

“You have good form,” Deschutes said. “Good control. And eyes— they’re natural for you. Took me years before I could do eyes. You wouldn’t believe how many paintings I blew through, paintings of perfectly beautiful women whose eyes were dead, dead, dead. Might as well have given them doorknobs for eyes.”

“My dad taught me,” Peter said. Nobody, not even his art teachers, had ever complimented him on his eyes, though it had always been a secret source of vanity.

“You know,” Deschutes said, “I could use some help around the house. I’m not in the best health these days. My fingers—the ones I got left—they go stiff. Doctor says it’s arthritis, but I think it’s more personal than that. My whole body’s raging a war against me. Some days I can barely pick up a bar of soap.” He paused, his face trembling. “That was a bad example. I don’t need help in that way. Hygienic ways, I mean. I just need someone to do some housework. What do you think?”

“I’m actually pretty busy,” Peter began, but the old man cut him off.

“I’ll pay you fifty dollars an hour.”

Peter thought then of a girl with too many freckles and a lazy eye that showed if she turned her head all the way to the left. Her name was Rena, and she’d left Kansas only five days before to start a wilderness conservation program in Montana. She would be working in Yellowstone—a place Peter had only seen on postcards and in documentaries. She’d mentioned the program the winter before, as a sort of side note to a conversation they were having about national parks, but didn’t bring it up again until a week before she was set to leave. She said she didn’t tell him sooner because she didn’t want their relationship to become a ticking time bomb. “I didn’t want to think of everything as a matter of This is last time we’re together when it snows or This is the last time we’re together for your birthday.” She went on, listing all the lasts that had already occurred, unknowingly to Peter. “But you knew,” he told her. “You knew they were the last time.” And then the reality of what she was saying had hit him: she did not want to stay together. The conservation program was only five months long, stretching through the summer and part of the fall, but still she did not want to stay together. “I don’t know where I’ll be when it’s over,” she explained. “I don’t know if I’ll want to come back to Kansas.” “You mean me,” he said. “You don’t know if you’ll want to come back to me.” She’d frowned the kind of frown one gives a homeless person, the kind that says, “There’s nothing I can really do to help you.”

Peter looked up and saw that Deschutes was waiting for a response. “When would you need me?” Peter asked, calculating the cost of a trip to Bozeman.

Deschutes cleared his throat. “Are you busy tonight?”

Deschutes lived twenty miles outside of Lawrence, in a little town called Vinland that was founded by abolitionists in the 1850s. More than a hundred years later, the town attracted a group of liberal army vets and became known as a sort of artists’ colony where everybody secretly smoked pot and celebrated the solstice. A few residents taught art or philosophy at the university in Lawrence, but most were working artists. Some worked with neon, others with wood. The unifying factor was a sensibility not for art but for strangeness. The mayor made custom beaded handbags for celebrities but was better known for his collection of feral cats (his Special Kitty Crew) and for having once seen the Virgin Mary in an egg sandwich. One year, he tried to elect a blind sheep as sheriff—GIVE HIM THE BAAALOT!!! signs around town read. Despite its quirks, Vinland was not entirely removed from the traditions of small-town Kansas. There was a grain elevator and a small church, left over from the abolition days, as well as a diner where everything on the menu was either made of sugar or had once been alive. On the outskirts sat a modest airport where rich people from Lawrence and Topeka kept their prop planes. In the summertime, the planes wheezed overhead or did lazy loop the loops, their thick contrails staining the air, reminding the hippies below of the pleasures big money could buy.

Peter wished he had grown up in Vinland instead of in Lawrence, where nature was sectioned off into designated green spaces and being interesting entailed wearing small glasses and having a PhD in the humanities. What had his father been thinking? He’d been an artist, and yet he’d sold out, settling into a career designing greeting cards for Hallmark. Now, thinking of Rena out in the wilderness wearing Carhartts and sleeping in a tent (would she have her own tent or share one with people from her crew—possibly male people?), Peter regretted not having a more outdoorsy childhood, one where he’d learned how to start fires and identify edible plants instead of master Nintendo games and stick forks into electrical outlets.

Deschutes’s house sat on top of a brown hill that overlooked both the church and the airport. The house was a squat structure with low ceilings and windows so choked with ivy that the light inside was dim and dappled. In any other hands, the house would have been morose and ugly, but Deschutes was an artist and had impeccable taste. He’d populated the house with antique clocks and Italian leather chairs and potted succulents boasting waxy red flowers. It was the type of home where men should have smoked pipes and discussed literature, but instead there was just Deschutes, doing whatever it was he did in his free time.

First thing, he led Peter to the kitchen and gave him a can of Old Style.

“I’ve always liked it out here,” Peter said, looking around and sipping his beer. A stained glass window cast a box of red and purple light onto the hardwood floor between them. On the wall hung a poster of a naked woman riding a camel. It read: SMOKING IS SEXY.

Deschutes shrugged. “It can be nice anywhere, if you get the conditions right.”

“But some places are nicer than others. By default.”

“That’s a myth told by the people who think they’re unhappy because of where they are and not who they are. You ever lived outside Kansas?”

Peter thought of Rena and drank more beer. “No. Not yet.”

“Well, you’ll see.”

Peter held his tongue and wondered if the old man was counting this as paid time. “So what’s first on the agenda?” he asked.

Deschutes gestured for Peter to follow him. He went out the kitchen and up a skinny flight of stairs that creaked the whole way. The stairs opened up to a room that was all windows. Peter assumed it had once been a sleeping porch. He pictured turn-of-the-century children climbing into bed, a row of sheer white curtains inflating like the sails of ships. Now, the room smelled stale and the windows were painted shut, the glass frosted and cracked. The only wall without windows boasted a blank canvas. Scattered across the floor were dozens of charcoal portraits, all of a woman with big lips and small breasts: Slinky.

“My studio,” Deschutes said, and went toward the far corner of the room, where one window met another. “You can see campus from here. Thought it would remind me that I’d escaped the academics.” He took a moment to clear something from his throat and then gestured to the portraits on the floor. “I’ll need you to pick the best one and put it on that canvas, if you don’t mind.”

Peter looked around, unsure whether he understood the old man right.

“Go ahead,” Deschutes said. “Pick which one you like best.”

Peter scanned the portraits at his feet. There were too many to consider all at once. In some, Slinky’s face filled the entire paper, her eyes the size of mangos. In others, she was far away—reclining on a sofa, wrapped in a shawl near a fire hydrant. There were traces of color, a splash of peach on her cheeks or a blur of green where her foot touched the earth.

“Go on,” Deschutes said. “Don’t be precious.”

“I thought I’d be doing housework. Cleaning. Or maybe mowing the lawn.”

“This is housework. We’re in my house. Painting is work. Remember, I’m paying you.”

Peter recalled a vision of Rena on a summer night the year before, her head in his lap as they lay on a quilt in a friend’s backyard, watching a group of neighborhood kids dart after fireflies. “We could have a kid one day,” she’d said, more as a revelation than a proposition. It had scared him at first, but then he’d gotten used to it, started imagining a little girl with Rena’s eyes. He could teach her how to draw. Rena could teach her how to garden.