THE POINT WHERE THEY MEET AND OTHER STORIES A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts by Brittany Stone May 2011 Thesis written by Brittany Stone M.F.A., Kent State University, 2011 B.A., Hiram College, 2008 Approved by _____________Robert Pope______________, Advisor, MA Thesis Defense Committee ___________Varley O’Connor____________, Members, MA Thesis Defense Committee _____________Robert Miltner____________, Members, MA Thesis Defense Committee Approved by ____________Ron Corthell_______________, Chair, Department of English ___________John R.D. Stalvey____________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………....vi A REAL HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTION…………………………………………….1 THE SPIDER………………………………………………………………………….23 THE POINT WHERE THEY MEET…………………………………………………46 BOBCAT……………………………………………………………………………...65 OF DESPERATION AND CARS…………………………………………………….75 THE HEN……………………………………………………………………………...92 AS GOOD AS MOTHER…………………………………………………………….111 THE HOUR BEFORE DEATH………………………………………………………128 SAILING MAN……………………………………………………………………….144 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work is dedicated to my grandparents, Gene and Garcia Burchett of Duck, West Virginia. They’ve shown me that beauty, love, and joy can thrive in adversity. Little bits of their spirits are in each of these stories. Brittany Stone 3/15/11, Kent, OH iv A REAL HOLLYWOOD PRODUCTION The man came on a Saturday morning and knocked on Bud’s door. The man didn’t know Bud and Bud didn’t know him. Bud had been sitting in the kitchen in his big old house, writing a check for the gas. For as long as he’d had been paying his own way—too many years, as far as he was concerned—bills came first on Saturday mornings. He tucked the pen behind his ear and answered the door. “I’m from California,” the man said and put out his hand for Bud to shake. The man wore khaki shorts and a black T-shirt with the word “love” airbrushed across the front in big red letters. His hair was slicked back with mousse. “And I’m from right here,” Bud said. He shook the man’s hand. Bud had never been rich or important, but still felt good about his handshake. “Seventy-one years.” The man rocked back on his loafers. “I’m with the folks down there. You may have noticed us already.” He pointed down to the river where a crew worked on setting up scaffolding. “It’s a big production. We should be out of your hair soon. A week, maybe less if we really move. Don’t be alarmed if you see anything out of the ordinary.” “Well all-be-damned,” Bud said. “Just when I think I’ve heard it all.” Bud had read about this movie on the front page of the paper, heard about it on the news. It was all quite an ordeal, but he wasn’t a film guy. He’d been retired fifteen years, widowed one. For a half century, he worked as a foreman in the mines, long 1 2 enough to still be blowing soot out his nose. How could an experience like that ever leave a man? When he cooked, he thought about coal, when he sat down in front of the television, he fought an itch in his calves for the slope of a track, the give of ground under his feet. “Will there be noise at night?” Bud asked. He slept light and short, but needed it all the same. November was unseasonably warm this year and he felt hot and itchy inside his flannel pajamas. The air stank of mud from the river. “I’ll apologize now for whatever happens. We’re asking people to be patient.” “Do you offer compensation to the folks you’re putting out? More than once I had to keep men overnight because we were coming up short on the take. Do you think I put a man out for nothing?” Bud rested both hands on the shelf of his abdomen. He used to be a big guy and still had the stomach to prove it. Now, he felt nearly the same as he had before—he lived in his body, after all, and the reality of change set in gradually— except he wore smaller pants and felt altogether lighter. The man squinted, thinking. Bud could tell he was getting his goat. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “We’re paying people eight bucks an hour to be extras. If you come down and see Sandy in the tent on the bridge, maybe we could use you in a shot or two.” Bud figured that was the most hare-brained idea he’d ever heard, an old man taking up a career in the movies. “Lord, I don’t know,” Bud said. “I can’t tell you for sure.” 3 “What’s your name?” the man said and pulled a small leather notepad and pencil out of the back pocket of his shorts. “Bernard Meekly. M-double E-K-L-Y.” The man took down Bud’s name and left. Bud went inside and finished writing out his bills and placed them in the mailbox, flag up. He stood on the porch and looked up and down the street for the man, but didn’t see him. Bud’s town sat on the lip of the Ohio River. He liked to tell people that he could cast a hook into the water from his front porch. He’d lived in that row house on High Street since 1954 when he married Gladys. When the trains were still running, carrying loads of coal or glass up north, the house shook and the windows rattled in their panes. After ten years of marriage and not one baby, Gladys gave up the idea of motherhood in the same no-fuss, who-can-help-it manner that a new baker pitches a spoiled batch of fudge. Bud had known a lot of women who lived for baby-making, who couldn’t find happiness existing independently in the world. Not Gladys. Bud built a kitchen on the second floor and found a renter, Betsy. Really, who needed all that room, a big old house with no bodies to fill it? These days, except for Betsy, Bud only knew a handful of neighbors. Houses sat quiet. If the town ever came back to what it used to be, how Bud remembered it, there would be cars lined up on the street, men walking down the sidewalk with lunch pails, women hanging laundry over porch banisters. If Bud took the notion, he could jump over the railing at either end of his front porch and be on a neighbor’s. On the left side, he’d seen a young woman with a 4 deformity—a nub arm—and a girl child. The house on the right had sat empty since six months ago when prostate cancer killed Jim, the retired logger from Beckley. What Bud loved most about his place was the view. Directly across the road were the tracks, followed by the gentle slope of the grassy riverbank, fifty or so feet wide, and then the river. Not too long after Gladys died, Bud looked out the living room window and saw a woman walking down by the water. My God, he thought, that’s Gladys. She wore slacks and a loose black sweater. Her hair hung long and white. Looking back at the house all the time, she walked slowly, as though she had nowhere to go, nothing to do. Now, two men hammered stakes into the ground down by the tracks and hung yellow caution tape. On the Buford Bridge, a group of people pitched a big, white tent and police officers set up orange cones to block traffic on either end. A warm breeze picked up downriver and stirred leaves on the road. Bud figured he ought to go up and tell Betsy about the movie being filmed because she spent a lot of time in Moundsville staying with her daughter and mostly missed out on big news in town. He went to the bedroom and found his pants folded on top of the dresser and pulled them on. Since Gladys passed, he’d learned that a person could get away with wearing pants two or three times before they had to be washed. He put a clean white dress shirt, threaded a belt through the loops on his pants, and went upstairs and knocked on Betsy’s door. For years, Betsy kept that interior door locked and her business mostly quiet. Except for the occasional hello or the sudden appearance of cash in the mailbox the first of every month, Bud and Gladys hardly knew she was there. Some years ago, Bud had given Betsy a house key and told her to come in the 5 front door anytime but she still insisted on using the outside entrance, a stairwell Bud had built on the back of the house when he and Gladys first decided to take on a renter. “I’m coming,” Betsy said from inside. She opened the door. “Hello, Bud.” “Hi there, Betsy,” he said. “I’ve got news.” Betsy let Bud in and he sat on the couch. Even though he’d been visiting Betsy frequently since Gladys passed, he still felt strange sitting in her apartment. For so many years he occupied the bottom half of the house and nearly forgot about the top, about Betsy trudging through her own life right above his head. He and Gladys, they’d carried on like the only two people in the world. What had Bud missed, living like that? “Well, tell me your news, Bud,” Betsy said.