Arkansas Read online

  Additional Praise for Arkansas:

  “With assurance and economy, Brandon serves up a tale of three young men who’ve taken one look at straight life and drop-kicked it. . . . Brandon lays down a backstory for each character that blisters with such creepy, suffocatingly real particulars, a reader feels stricken to recognize them. He brilliantly evokes the trailer-trash, time-biding cultures of the Southern states. . . . Picaresque, sly, bitterly funny, the novel hooks us at once.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “John Brandon arrives with the strange and deeply affecting saga of Swin, Kyle, and Johnna, whose Arkansas is a parallel state influenced equally by star-crossed criminality and the dreamlike myth of the sheltering family. Brandon’s agile imagination, kinetic language, and wonders of characterization make Arkansas tragic and funny, inevitable and mysterious.”

  —Tom Drury, author of The End of Vandalism

  “Arkansas packs in all the excitement of fistfights and underground economies, but also conjures our desires for love, for the companionship of our sisters, and for the comfort and warmth that accompanies Saturday morning football.”

  —Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper

  ARKANSAS

  JOHN BRANDON

  Copyright © 2008 by John Brandon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, 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. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  First published in 2008 by McSweeney’s Books, San Francisco

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9629-3

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Oscar Owen Brandon (1924-2002)

  PART ONE

  BOREDOM IS BEAUTIFUL

  Swin Ruiz was born in Tampa. He spent his childhood flipping through the reference books of a neighbor lady, a former teacher with no family. He didn’t like the lady, and liked to be left alone with the books. He spent time wishing he had a brother, wondering what the point of T-ball was, managing crushes on sitcom actresses, and observing the adults in his neighborhood, whom he pitied. Most adults, he noticed, had little range to their personalities. There was a guy across the street who tried to be funny all the time, and if people didn’t laugh at him he got peeved. There was a widow who was always in a panic, and when people acted composed around her she fumed. Swin’s mother was resigned. Swin’s father, cranky.

  When Swin was twelve, his father drowned himself in the bay. Though a weepy note was left behind, no body was found. Swin’s mother thought her husband had staged his death in order to escape child support. Swin had a lot of sisters, each more striking than the last, all with toned torsos and straight hair, each a lovely burden for Swin, who was outnumbered and couldn’t look after them all.

  When Swin was thirteen, his mother married a Dutch man who moved the family to Kentucky. Swin was against the move and against the Dutch man, and hid himself in schoolbooks. His grades in high school were impeccable. He had an ability to visualize microscopic goings-on that allowed him to excel at science. He went to Vanderbilt on a scholarship which stipulated he keep a 3.7 GPA. The fall semester of his sophomore year he took humanities and turned in a paper he’d written in high school. He didn’t realize that in support of his college application, his high school history teacher Mrs. Donaldson, who had always given Swin preferential treatment because he was Hispanic, had sent his paper on French colonialism to the Dean of Admissions, who sent it to the Chair of Humanities, who put it in a file the department kept for examples of fine freshman-level writing. How the paper went from that file to the attention of his professor, Swin did not know. He got a D in the class and lost his scholarship. He didn’t tell his mother or stepdad, and took out loans in order to continue school in the spring. He stewed over all the rich kids with their parents’ bottomless credit cards and their roving, spotless trucks. He missed his stunning sisters and hated the idea that they were now loyal to their stepdad, with his rules and yellow, feathery hair. Swin was no longer around to remind them that this guy had dislodged them from their neighborhood and ignored their culture and dragged them to Kentucky, land of Baptist, horse-crazy hill folk. Swin wasn’t there to suggest that his mother had been seeing this man before their father’s death.

  Swin did not go home for the holidays. He ate tuna from the can and carrot sticks. He sat motionless in front of his window. He tossed pencils against the brick walls of his dorm, trying to break the points. He stared himself down in the mirror. Disconnected his phone. The last hours of December, icy and frank, made him feel hardened. He could be coldblooded, could read the slightest evil in people.

  January was the most boring month of Swin’s life. He attended Organic Chemistry, Exceptional People, Thermodynamics, and History of Architecture. He watched the professors fiercely, knowing he would never write a word for them. When bags were unattended or cars left open or display cases unlatched, when laps were swum and basketball played, when watches and bracelets were left in shallow boxes behind counters, waiting to be repaired, he stole. At parties he would slip into bedrooms. In the library, when a lone girl went to the bathroom, Swin would get in her purse. He pawned the women’s jewelry and wore the men’s. The chance that one of his victims would recognize his necklace or ring thrilled Swin. It was not the fashion, at a private college in Tennessee, for men to wear prodigious jewelry. People gave him looks. One of Swin’s professors, a black man, held him after class and asked what the hell the joke was. This was tough love—guidance. Swin told the professor not to hate, but instead, congratulate. Swin walked out and never returned to the class. He quit wearing his spoils, hoarding them in a rubber container under his bed. He lifted weights. He wondered how much a tattoo would hurt. He began to worry about the fact that he owed the Department of Education thousands of dollars.

  Swin founded an organization for students of part-Latino, part-Scandinavian descent. He assured the members that trips abroad separated organizations from mere clubs. He suggested stops in Spain, England, Norway, and Iceland. The student government’s secretary of overseas studies, Lindsay, was Jamaican and Icelandic. Her hair had puffs and slick patches. This girl, Swin knew, would help organize and sell the trip because she wanted to date him. Swin gave her the idea he’d had a rough life. He took up for underdogs and solemnly shook his head at backwardness. Down with racial disharmony. Up with... pluralism. He got disgusted without calling people names. While flirting with Lindsay, he acted awkward. She was plump but not flabby. She had round eyes, tiny teeth, and prim hands and feet.

  For the cost of copies, slides, sslo T-shirts, and letterhead bearing the logo of the invented travel company ugo4cheap, he collected dues—$60 from each of the twenty-four members. Dues made their inclusion in a group of like peers official. He made ID cards. He claimed to have experience with UG04CHEAP. The company offered nice hotels that were not in nice neigh borhoods, so you could experience the real country. In the slide show, Swin included filthy areas where food was sold and doors were ornate. To keep the members busy, he chose a gross injustice. They set up a booth and dispersed literature. The writer types drafted
letters to congressmen. They held car washes. There was a rock group sympathetic to the cause and Swin mentioned getting them to play a benefit. At the next meeting, he stormed in proclaiming that rock bands were all talk. Using a whiny voice, he said, “We’re taking a break from performing. We’re tired and stressed out.” He asked if injustice took a break. When enthusiasm for the cause ran low, he questioned whether the organization was fighting on the correct side of the issue. He kept lauding the trip, painting a picture of dignified partying and rough edification.

  Toward semester’s end, in order to cement Lindsay as an ally, Swin accepted her invitation and went to her place one late afternoon for homemade soup. He checked his watch and said, “You know, I’d like that.”

  Lindsay’s apartment was cramped with overlapping rugs and tapestries. There were countless houseplants. Incense was burning. Lindsay had a poster of Tom Cruise. She explained that she didn’t like his movies, but admired him because of this emotional 911 call he’d made when his daughter was ill.

  “Turned out okay,” she said. “They thought she drank a bottle of lotion, but she’d rubbed it all over the dog.”

  “The dog was shaved?”

  “Then she went into a deep sleep.”

  “The daughter?”

  “Tom Cruise panicked, and that shows a parent is always a parent no matter who they are. How many kids do you want? Not that it matters.”

  “One,” Swin said. “At the most.”

  Lindsay went over to her stereo and held down a button. Her speakers were overrun with vines. The voice that came from the stereo was shrill with energy, the words unintelligible. The music didn’t have enough notes to achieve a melody, just toots and cymbal crashes.

  “Come along.” Lindsay led Swin to the kitchen, where he sat at a bar. Her waist was small. Despite her chub, she had an hourglass figure and muscles in her arms. Her body seemed to change from minute to minute.

  “I know it’s not your kind of thing,” she said. “But I wish you’d go to Paducah with me. It looks great on your résumé.”

  She was referring to a leadership conference where, from what Swin could tell, serious young people dressed up and congratulated each other on having bright futures.

  “My sister’s birthday is that weekend,” Swin said. “I’m no leader. I can boss people around, but—”

  “I disagree. I’d follow you.”

  Lindsay tasted and seasoned the pot of soup, uncorked wine, and set the bar. She was graceful and sure in her kitchen, which made it easy for Swin to sink into the bemusement he’d been fighting since entering the apartment. There were so many scents and colors and leaves. Textures and steam. It occurred to Swin, as Lindsay peered into her pot, that she could be a witch. What were witches? Maybe leadership conferences were coven meetings. Lindsay rested a bowl in front of Swin and touched his head. He focused on the soup, which contained lentils, sausage, tomatoes, corn, and celery. All of it tasted like table pepper.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked.

  “I want to know about your sisters.”

  “Why?”

  “Your life is unique.”

  “If you knew me more, you wouldn’t think so.”

  She grabbed his bicep with two hands and pulled near him, sliding along the low, wide windowsill, her ample ass sweeping the wood. “You’d never believe the kind of stuff you make me think about,” she said. When Swin didn’t answer, her neck and ears turned red. He kissed her and her mouth felt generous but not loose. She made a squeak. He held her under the chin and, not knowing what to do with his other hand, put it in his pocket. Her fingers pushed on his stomach and he backed away. He realized he’d never considered having sex with her.

  “I’m only Dutch by marriage,” he said. “I lied.”

  “I know that.”

  “How?”

  “And Holland isn’t Scandinavia.”

  “It’s not?”

  “I know you’re doing something shady with the trip. I hope that’s not true, but I wouldn’t tell if it was.”

  Swin thanked Lindsay and squeezed her hand. He escaped into the parking lot, where a tree was dropping pink flowers into a dumpster. He never spoke with her again. Swin didn’t bother to tell anyone he was leaving Nashville. He took his books and CDs and a couple other things, made his bed and left his school bag sitting on it, left his posters on the walls. He took the dues and trip money he’d collected from the SSLO kids to Little Rock and bought a huge pickup at a military auction. He didn’t know how to go about getting a new identity, so instead he got a crew cut and put down false information when applying for a video-rental card. He came to a dead halt at stop signs, did not litter. He frequented a dive called Hondo’s. He would organize himself at the bar during the dead part of the day, the only patron for hours, and skim Aristotle, thinking not about the tenets of logic but about what it must’ve been like to walk around in a robe amongst white pillars, munching on grapes and washing your feet and contemplating the universe. Hondo got a kick out of how many pages there were in the Aristotle book. He got a kick out of the fact that Swin drank wine coolers. Swin told Hondo he’d been kicked out of a university and Hondo got a kick out of that, too.

  “I’ve concluded something,” said Hondo. “You’re cut out for breaking the laws of the land.”

  Swin squinted up from his book.

  “You know,” Hondo said. “Professionally.”

  Swin’s brain churned at this, but he looked levelly at Hondo.

  “You got the laziness,” Hondo reasoned. “You’re kind of a weird guy

  “Taking enjoyment from reading doesn’t make one lazy or weird.”

  “You weren’t really reading, though,” Hondo said. “You were gazing at the words.”

  Swin ordered another Bartles & Jaymes. Hondo explained that there was a man named Frog, and that Hondo knew the guy who ran Frog’s business in Memphis, a fellow named Colin. If Swin wanted, Hondo could put in a word.

  “Doing?”

  “Making runs.”

  “Memphis, huh?”

  “You wouldn’t have to move. You wouldn’t have to leave all this.”

  “It entails what, just a bunch of driving?”

  “That’s right. I wouldn’t even call it a bunch.”

  Until Swin got used to what he was doing, he thought of himself as a delivery driver, dropping off pizzas or paperwork. The exchanges were not tense. The cops never pulled him over. The job was easy—a lot of downtime. Swin quit going to Hondo’s. In his bare apartment, he watched documentaries while lifting weights. He found that a person with cash in Little Rock lived worse than a poor person at Vanderbilt University. He knew that, as a criminal, his intellectual talent would wither. He missed the world of ideas. He missed the vague promise of secretaries, luncheons, investments, golf. Occasionally he put on all his stolen jewelry. Occasionally he remembered the bare affection of Lindsay’s kiss.

  After Kyle’s mother died, he lived with a friend of hers for a week and a half before jamming his stuff in a green bag and taking a bus to Athens, Georgia. Athens was a young, hilly place. Kyle took long walks and eyed tan girls with pretty toes. These girls owned big dogs, wore backless tops, and pretended to be impressed with nothing. In the afternoons Kyle did push-ups and ate and hid in his apartment from his neighbors, who liked to pull the sun down with chatter. He drank 7-Up and bourbon. He would walk up the road to a nicer complex with a pool and sit next to the water with his bottle and glass and 7-Up, pine needles falling on his head, feeling that his mind was clear, that with bourbon he could have useful thoughts, that before long he would be able to forge a tidy philosophy of life.

  One night, down the street at the pool, Kyle watched a guy on in-line skates coast by with a girl. They were having a giggly argument about music videos. They clunked over the grass to their poolside apartment and skated inside. Kyle kept swallowing whiskey for another hour, thinking of little else but the fact that a guy who wore earrings and skintight jeans and w
ent in-line skating had been rewarded with one of Athens’s well-formed peaches.

  Kyle went to the guy’s patio, hoisted a lounge chair over his head, and slammed it to the ground, making it collapse into itself with a low crunch. There was another chair. Kyle bashed it until it was a scatter of painted shards. He looked at his hands, looked around the courtyard. He’d been wanting to destroy something for a long time. He didn’t know about the table; it was made of steel pipe. He tested its weight. He heard the door slide open beside him and stumbled off the patio. The guy was in his boxer shorts, squeezing a bat so that his muscles flexed. His girlfriend was hanging on his arm, leaning back like she was trying to open a heavy door. She was angry that the boyfriend thought proving his manliness was more important than preserving their wonderful future. She dug her nails into his stomach, not even glancing at Kyle. The boyfriend was yelling about his friend who was a cop. He inched toward Kyle, who couldn’t find any words. The guy was so scared and the girl was so pissed. They were a bracing wave of feeling, and Kyle allowed himself to wash away from their patio and out of the courtyard. He envied the way the guy had gotten caught up in the moment, envied the guy’s fear. Kyle couldn’t remember ever in his life being as scared as the guy or as angry as the girl.

  Other things happened. A wobbly black woman tried to steal Kyle’s clothes at the laundry; when he caught her and twisted the bag from her hand, she went on standing there like nothing had happened, like Kyle had been rude to point out her attempted theft and she was choosing to ignore this rudeness. A waiter recognized Kyle and had him kicked out of a restaurant. It was a place Kyle went once every couple weeks. He would order water and scarf a basket of bread, then pretend to remember something urgent and rush out. Kyle sulked through a poster sale on the college campus, dazed by how many famous things there were—paintings, movies, bands, cartoons, slogans, mountains, causes—dazed by how many famous things these college students required, by their frantic need to proclaim what their favorite famous things were. This was how they chiseled out a philosophy of life: posters.