Corpus Christi Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Acknowledgments

  Waterwalkers

  I See Something You Don’t See

  In the Tall Grass

  Outside the Toy Store

  Corpus Christi

  The Widow

  Two Liars

  Anything That Floats

  Birds of Paradise

  Buy for Me the Rain

  CORPUS CHRISTI

  A Conversation with Bret Anthony Johnston

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Jennifer, my ideal reader

  Praise for Corpus Christi

  “Stunning and complex . . . It’s hurricane country, and Johnston’s exquisitely drawn men and women are riders on the storm, coping with an iffy emotional landscape that mirrors Corpus Christi’s own, where the past is too easily washed away and the ocean has no memory.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Hard-eyed, life-affirming . . . These stories are relentlessly sober, large-hearted, and intense. In their pathos, to quote C. S. Lewis on Chaucer, ‘every fluctuation of gnawing hope, every pitiful subterfuge of the flattering imagination, is held up to our eyes without mercy’ (The Allegory of Love); and yet their effect is spiritually bracing. We are human to the last.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “Fans of Raymond Carver’s spare, carefully crafted stories will rejoice. . . . [Johnston has] a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and a dead-on eye for conjuring an entire universe with one simple detail. . . . His 10 stories are individual gems. . . . Johnston’s genius lies in weaving a web of optimism around a series of difficult . . . topics. . . . If [these stories] are read as they seem destined to be—obsessively, in one sitting—their rapt audience will turn the last page with a profound sense of calm.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “In the mold of Denis Johnson, Ian McEwan, and Barry Gifford, Johnston is a writer of stories that peel away the soul of a man, sometimes with quaking fingers, other times with a hunting knife. The stories are sometimes spastically violent, other times uncommonly delicate, but always memorable.”

  —Pages

  “A gorgeous, accomplished debut.”

  —DAVID MITCHELL,

  “Books of the Year,” The Independent (London)

  “Beautifully written . . . Johnston’s stories extract truth through their bittersweet tone.”

  —Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City)

  “As refreshing as a cool breeze on a humid summer day—and as strong and surprising as a short-notice tropical storm . . . sharp, tough, and poignant . . . ‘Two Liars’ and the title story, ‘Corpus Christi,’ are among the best short works to emerge from Texas in quite some time. A good story induces a polite nod; a great story can hurt your feelings. These stories can make a reader’s blood ache.”

  —Texas Books in Review

  “[Bret Anthony Johnston is] a fresh young writer from Texas who writes as if he’s a wise old man from the hard cities of the heart. His honesty is a beacon to the soul.”

  —CHRIS OFFUTT, Tin House

  “[An] engaging collection . . . In simple, unadorned prose [Johnston] goes to the heart of each loss and makes his readers care about lives that usually merit no more than a paragraph in the local paper.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Excruciatingly beautiful . . . With a compassion that belies his years, Bret Anthony Johnston turns a questing eye on life’s difficulties in his extraordinary debut collection. . . . These thoughtful pieces . . . contain the very gist of universal human experience—people straining to connect, people needing to understand.”

  —Corpus Christi Caller-Times

  “Bret Anthony Johnston’s premier collection, Corpus Christi, sways as easily as a palm in the wind. . . . Beautiful, simple prose . . . The stories function like a five-car pileup. It is impossible to look away.”

  —Mid-American Review

  “Ordinary people in ordinary circumstances are the catalysts for extraordinary fiction in this impressive debut collection of short stories.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Compelling and haunting . . . Johnston’s evocative descriptions of events, feelings, and Corpus Christi itself connect readers to his characters and their dilemmas and reactions to tragedy.”

  —Library Journal

  “Johnston is a remarkable writer. His economy of words and simplicity of expression are his power tools. How did one so young gain this enormous insight into the human heart and understanding of the human condition? . . . Corpus Christi is a small masterpiece.”

  —Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario, California)

  “Johnston’s depiction of Corpus Christi, half-there, gray and disheveled, is a brilliant background choice for the collection of stories whose characters are also neither here nor there.”

  —The Texas Observer

  “A beautiful and auspicious debut, Corpus Christi points to a bright future both for the short story genre and for Johnston as a writer. If Corpus Christi is any indication, we can expect great things from both in years to come.”

  —Arkansas Times

  “[A] promising debut collection . . . astutely observed . . . Johnston’s Corpus is America in microcosm. But it is the emotional landscape that interests the author, not the physical, and, without lapsing into sentimentality, he evokes a peculiarly American brand of abject loneliness and tentative optimism.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Taut, tender . . . acutely observed, true-to-life stories wrung completely of sentiment . . . Johnston has a long career ahead of him.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “Johnston writes prose that is lurid, clean, and marked by precise images. His stories possess something tempestuous; they evoke that pre-storm air pressure, when the air gets thick and the sky turns a dark and sickly yellow. . . . Astonishing revelations and emotional insight.”

  —The Boston Phoenix

  “In the hands of South Texas native Bret Anthony Johnston, human emotions are exotic beasts and Corpus Christi is the zoo where he puts them all on display. The ten stories in this debut collection . . . are litera verité depictions of simple family relationships.”

  —Texas Monthly

  “Simplistic and brisk on the surface, Johnston’s debut collection of short stories is actually intense and lyrical, with compact, penetrating sentences and dialogue precise enough to have been lifted from a Dictaphone. . . . Wryly comical . . . achingly beautiful.”

  —LA Weekly

  “Devastating.”

  —Austin Chronicle

  “Johnston depicts [Corpus Christi’s] inhabitants with lyricism and sympathy.”

  —The Atlantic Online

  “Johnston . . . surrounds a study of loneliness with its most natural companions—memories, which he handles gently, sensitive to their decay. . . . This is wonderful writing, easily evocative, and it makes memory almost tactile.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “The humor here is tough and the emotions wrenching. Johnston’s eye for humanity and the natural world around us is wonderfully keen.”

  —The Birmingham News

  “The world that Johnston brings us into is at once familiar and oddly surreal, for the author writes with great attention to detail and nuance.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Corpus Christi . . . is a breath of fresh air, an inspired work from a formidable new talent and proof that the art of the short story is still alive and well in the field of American fiction. . . . Each well-honed story in Corpus Ch
risti glimmers. . . . These stories thrive, peopled with living and breathing characters and fraught with conflict and the kind of imagery that crawls under your skin and makes you shiver with despair and recognition. . . . Just as Faulkner did with the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, . . . Johnston has given us a fully realized world in which his vivid characters seek to understand their stark, dirty, and even threatening surroundings.”

  —The Chattahoochee Review

  “Johnston’s stories read as if they were written by someone who’s lived various lives and has had time enough to develop real wisdom, generosity, and the art of making strong, clean sentences. What I especially love about Corpus Christi is the fact that many of the characters walk the finest line between violence and love, and do so with a tenderness that is heartbreaking.”

  —JANE HAMILTON, author of

  The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World

  “Bret Anthony Johnston is a name to put on your list—that list of writers you always read first. He knows how you can despair of people and go on treasuring them—hard-living, hardheaded, unexpected people who look out of his stories like brightly lit signposts on a dark highway. ‘Look here,’ they say. ‘Right here.’ ”

  —DOROTHY ALLISON, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

  “In his first collection of stories, Johnston eloquently depicts individual lives at once haunted and painfully enriched by memory, and by the losses of which memory is made. A wise and moving debut by a talented young writer.”

  —JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ, author of Claire Marvel

  Acknowledgments

  I’M GRATEFUL TOMY TEACHERS WHO BECAME friends and to my friends who’ve taught me: Ethan Canin. Frank Conroy. Marilynne Robinson. Connie Brothers. Deb West. Jan Z. Amy Margolis. Josh Emmons. Dan Pope. Joe Wilson, Cheryl Pfoff. Mike Anzaldua. Vanessa Jackson. Steven Bauer. Eric Goodman. Kay Sloan. Constance Pierce. Joseph Martinez. Ivan Pena. Michelle Harper. Gary and Lizz Cos-grove. Anne Greene. Katie Hanson. John Smolens. Tom Bligh. Curtis Sittenfeld. Serenity Gerbman and the Southern Festival of Books. Shannon Ravenel, Chelcy Boyer, and especially Kathy “Special K” Pories. This book, quite literally, would not exist without the countless wise and generous readings of Jonathan Liebson.

  Thank you, ever so much, to the editors who supported these stories: David Mitchell Goldberg. Shannon Ravenel (again). Joanna Yas and Elizabeth Schmidt. C. Michael Curtis. Jodee Rubins and Stephen Donadio. Jim Clark. Willard Spiegelman. Tim Schell. Natalie Danford, John Kulka, and Sherman Alexie. Bret Lott. R. T. Smith. Elizabeth Gaffney. Sonny Brewer.

  At Random House, I’m deeply indebted to the tireless Stephanie Higgs, Tim Farrell, Steve Messina, Matt Kellogg, Jen Huwer, and Jynne “the Viking” Martin. Everyone who’s had the luxury of working with Dan Menaker marvels at how he does all that he does, and his deft hand made these stories better versions of themselves. For that, and for all that he’s taught me, I cannot thank him enough.

  Likewise, the unwavering enthusiasm of the Collins McCormick Literary Agency is beyond compare. O brave new world that has such an agent as Nina Collins in it.

  Bill, my brother, deserves a record deal for all he’s given me.

  Finally, I know of no words to properly thank my parents, but this book is the closest I’ve come so far. I’ll keep trying.

  Waterwalkers

  AS HURRICANE ALICIA DRIFTED NORTH-NORTHWEST up the Gulf Coast from Veracruz, Mexico, Sonny Atwill stood outside McCoy’s Lumber hanging NO PLYWOOD signs in the windows. A gray, blurring rain blew over the parking lot, diffusing the headlights of cars waiting for empty spaces. Horns blared and bleated. In addition to the plywood being gone, the store was low on batteries, masking tape, flashlights, kerosene lanterns, bottled water, sandbags and propane. Originally the Hurricane Center had predicted that Baffin Bay, Texas, would bear the brunt, but revised reports had it heading for Corpus Christi, making landfall that evening. Sonny believed the storm would veer south, go in around Laredo; he’d projected its course with a grease pencil on his laminated hurricane map.

  When he came back inside the store, a woman was sitting at the bottom of a rolling ladder in the cabinet fixtures aisle, crying. She had her face cupped in her hands. He thought to sidestep the hassle and let someone else explain that the store was sold out of everything she would need. This was what he’d learned over the years: Stay out of it. He was fifty-nine, retired from Coastal Oil Refinery, working ten hours a week at McCoy’s because his doctor wanted him to exercise. Usually he was off on Friday, but when the shipment had unexpectedly arrived last night, the manager had ponied up ten sheets of plywood for Sonny himself to use, plus regular pay, if he would clock in this morning. The woman kept her back to him as she stood. Leave her be, he thought once more— let the husband come. Yet he was drawn to her, reluctantly compelled to suggest other lumberyards and offer the possibility that the storm would spare them. Then, hurriedly, she turned and their eyes met. “Sonny,” she said. He took a single unintentional step backward, emptied and suspended.

  “My sister,” Nora finally said, but then she fell to weeping again. She wore a white scoop neck blouse, faded jeans. In twelve years, she’d lost ten, maybe twenty pounds; her ring finger was naked. Sonny knelt beside her, vaguely hearing the announcement that McCoy’s would close in fifteen minutes. Whenever his son had been excited, he’d said butterflies were tickling his palms, and now that seemed the perfect description for the way Sonny felt. Nora wiped her eyes and said, “My sister has huge windows.”

  FOR YEARS, HE HAD THROWN HURRICANE PARTIES. Named storms hit four and five times a season, and he would clean out the garage and fry flounder and invite people from the oil refinery. They sat in frayed lawn chairs and drank Schlitz, watching a storm’s edge cut off the horizon like a charcoal sheet and playing cards—Mexican Sweat, Texas Hold’em, Stud—until the wind howled. Then they slipped into plastic ponchos and danced. He’d mounted a battery-powered radio over the workbench (to hear the Oilers lose while he fiddled with the lawn mower), and they listened to tapes—Anne Murray, George Jones, Johnny Rodriguez. Once, a Kmart sign had cartwheeled through the yard. A man from the refinery had brought Janice Steele to the party, then she’d borrowed Sonny’s phone to call her sister and invite her. When the storm broke up and the others left, Nora stayed.

  That was 1972, the year he was named supervisor of an eight-man crew. He was thirty-one, Nora twenty-six. She shelved books at the library while attending the community college at night; she aimed to earn her teaching certificate. They had been together a few months when he bought the house he’d been renting on Shamrock Street. She moved in, filling the rooms with her expensive, honeyed shampoos, hanging ivies and matted photographs. Each Sunday they drove to an open-air restaurant on the Laguna Madre and ate baskets of shrimp and hush puppies. One night she said, “Take all away from me, but leave me Ecstasy.”

  Her voice was so low and cool that his heart stuttered. He asked, “Does that mean you want another beer?”

  “It means I want you to marry me.”

  The wind lifted a corner of the red-checked tablecloth, raising it gently from the slatted table then dropping it again; waves sloshed heavily against pylons; the smell of batter and fish and salt-splashed cedar; the divine heat in his chest, like a ray of light refracted in a jewel.

  THE WEATHER SLACKED OFF AFTER MCCOY’S CLOSED. Sonny followed Nora to her sister’s on Del Mar Street. The talk-radio station he liked was overrun with storm coverage: Authorities had taken down traffic lights around the harbor and were evacuating boats from the bay; Alicia’s sustained winds topped 115 miles per hour; the Navy was tying down vessels in mooring systems and deploying others to sea; ferry service had been halted, and soon rising tides would close off Padre and Mustang Islands. Residents were advised to bring in pets, stock up on canned goods, caulk bathtub drains and fill the tubs with water.

  She drove slowly, her brake lights blinking like Morse code. Traffic was bottlenecked at the freeway; shoe-polished windshields
read HELP US JESUS and GO AWAY ALICIA! The city’s south side was flooding. Corpus seemed transformed, like a dream version of itself from which a somnolent atmosphere had been cast off; wind made street signs tremble. What he felt behind the wheel was a long-dormant vulnerability. When he had offered Nora his plywood—it lay in his truck bed, under the camper—she had accepted by saying, “So here we go again.”

  Del Mar was a wide, palm-lined street, a quarter mile from the bay. The house was a five-bedroom with a French garden and greenhouse that Sonny had helped build; Janice grew orchids. She was summering in Italy—“with some Guido,” as Nora put it—so she was house-sitting. Janice was an attorney who had never married, and whenever Sonny had passed the house in intervening years, he thought a place so large would depress you to live alone in. Years before, he’d moved into an all-utilities-paid duplex and put the money from the Shamrock house in mutual funds. He wondered if Nora had avoided Shamrock since she’d been back, or if she’d seen the newly painted trim, the garden trellis and oak saplings, the lush elephant ears she’d never been able to grow.

  He backed into the gravel driveway, doubting he could finish boarding up before the sky opened again. The house looked larger, the windows higher. Nora had calmed; maybe she’d taken a tranquilizer. She greeted him now with a familiar distractedness, an improbable air of casual lightness, as if she’d just returned from shopping and needed to get some milk into the icebox. Her rejuvenation disappointed him, as did how quickly she disappeared inside. He’d hoped she might ask his opinion on Alicia, maybe even tear up again. He buckled his tool belt and switched out the bit in the cordless drill he’d borrowed from McCoy’s. He hoisted each sheet of plywood onto his thigh, held it to the house with his left hand, then screwed the sides, corners, top, bottom. Twice the drill twisted and caught the flesh between his thumb and finger. He took breathers between gusts and each breath felt like a spear in his ribs. Hammers banged on nearby streets; a circular saw whined; a woman started calling for a pet named Scooter. Sonny tried not to stomp the snapdragons and budding hydrangeas, but that proved impossible.