Dancing Deaf by Trampas Smith, MFA A Dissertation In Literature and Language / Creative Writing Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Approved Dr. Jill Patterson Chair of Committee Dennis Covington Dr. Katie Cortese Dr. John Beusterien Mark Sheridan Dean of the Graduate School May, 2016 Copyright 2016, Trampas Smith Texas Tech University, Trampas Smith, May 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. HOOKED ............................................................................................................1 II. FOUNDERED .................................................................................................47 III. BENT ………………………………………………………………………145 IV. FLUSH …….……………………………………………………………….267 V. INITIATED …………………………………………………………………371 ii Texas Tech University, Trampas Smith, May 2016 1 Snagged ‘It is not hard to love those from whom nothing can be feared.’ - Dr. Johnson THE NAME on his driver’s license was James Haskel, but people had started calling him Dirty in the seventh grade. The day it began, greeted with the word by smiling kids at an epidemic rate, he would have hit someone if there weren’t too many to single one out. The name spread so fast he never learned who said it first. Soon even people he didn’t know and his coaches were calling him Dirty. He felt sorry for himself at first, but once he accepted that there was nothing he could do about it, he saw that it wasn’t the worst thing to ever happen to him. Saying the name seemed to make people happier, no matter how mean-spirited they were, and his real name was common and plain anyway, and his school was the whitest and wealthiest of the town’s three, so he was helping to fill a void. 1 Texas Tech University, Trampas Smith, May 2016 Also, even he had to admit that the name fit him. His mother, when he came home from school, was apt to look away, despairing, or stare dumbfounded at his transformation from the clean and odorless boy in good department store clothes whom she had let out of her car that morning. It was for his benefit that she was living in a trailer house—there was no use trying to call it a ‘manufactured home’ when nobody else did—just inside what was supposedly the best school district in town, so it was especially disappointing that he so often looked poorly and discharged an odor that could find you from the other side of a room. And the acne: even the dermatologist made a face when he looked at it. It didn’t respond to any treatments, and scrubbing with soap only polished his cheeks to a rutted pink and purple shine. The massive gift of hormones changed some boys practically overnight, werewolf-like, into capable little men. James—not yet Dirty—had watched his closest friend swell with muscles and rage and take charge of the football team. A lot of boys seemed enchanted with the competition that suddenly consumed them. James felt like he had a parasite in him, a bad one that couldn’t be stopped. Like the surface of the earth in its own juvenile stage, his skin was a violent, volcanic landscape. And he would rather not have had to touch himself and think about girls he couldn’t have. When his peers changed his name, it was just another major decision being made for him, by higher powers, with no consideration at all for his wishes. At eighteen, puberty was still the worst thing that had happened to him, and the worst part of it seemed passed. It had been a few years since he had welled tears and punched something in his room without knowing why. He was alone together with himself slightly less often and felt only slightly guilty when he was. His skin was much clearer, though his 2 Texas Tech University, Trampas Smith, May 2016 shoulders and face retained scars, his right cheek maimed by a welted curving ditch that he had already passed off as a knife wound to his coworkers. An afternoon-and-weekend job at a construction equipment rental place became full- time about six weeks before he graduated when a man named Tommy Blake hopped off the forklift while it was still rolling because he wanted his Dr. Pepper, which waited upon a stack of pallets. He raised it to his lips just as the solid back tire rolled up onto his foot. Crushed the steel toe like so much tinfoil. The scream brought everyone running, but there was nothing to do but stop and stare. The forklift had rolled on over and the foot seemed to be stuck to the floor. Tommy’s clenched teeth showed: like a smile forced at gunpoint. Tears jumped from his eyes and he looked for some reason at the youngest of them, whom he knew least: begging or cautioning. Dirty said, ‘I’m sorry,’ but it was little more than a whisper. It was such an awful scene that almost twenty-four hours passed before anyone laughed about it. At lunch, in the fried chicken place across the street, Dirty sat with two coworkers in a booth. The oldest of them, Charles Ray, said, ‘I’m sorry, but—your own foot?’ Dirty smiled crookedly. DJ laughed aloud, stopped himself abruptly and said, ‘Maybe he was trying to get workman’s comp.’ ‘I guess he earned it,’ said Dirty. ‘That foot looked like a cartoon.’ ‘Nah, he was just strung out,’ said Charles Ray, who had known Tommy the longest. ‘I doubt he’d slept in three or four days.’ ‘He came in to work singing,’ said DJ. ‘I still can’t figure out how he did it.’ ‘He probably can’t either.’ Charles Ray circled his corn on the cob machinelike. ‘Who knows. Maybe this’ll sober him up.’ ‘It sobered me up,’ DJ said. ‘And I was already sober.’ 3 Texas Tech University, Trampas Smith, May 2016 As well as his initials, DJ was this young man’s occasional night job and true ambition. He had given Dirty a CD that he and his computer had made together. Dirty was impressed, though the music made him paranoid. Often the two of them went to a bar after work, in a gradually vacating industrial zone on the Arkansas side of Texarkana. Courtesy of an older cousin, who was now a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan, Dirty had an extra ID in his wallet. DJ was already twenty-one. Dirty liked the Cedar Shack—a windowless concrete-block building with a marquee of gray wood shingles—because it was usually empty, the beer was cheap and his face was known, so he didn’t have to worry about sharp eyes noticing that he was neither blond nor six-foot- one. Also, the only employee was a woman, thirty-something years old, called Cricket (Dirty never knew why), who had once tongued his ear. Cricket had long legs and often wore tight jeans, and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows. For the right audience— such as Dirty and DJ on a weekday afternoon—she liked to dance seductively to certain songs on the jukebox while playing pool. Dirty never saw her dance without a pool stick in her hands, or play pool without dancing. You might be in the middle of a game, and she would stroll over, take up a cue and start making shots. You might be dismayed, but then some old rock song would come on and Cricket’s pelvis would start to sway and undulate. She would make a shot, crouch and slide the thick end of the poolstick over her crotch three times—occasionally from the back forward, which had a very different effect—going lazy-eyed, then wiggle slowly back to the table, grinning not at you but toward you, and sink another ball. Her dancing made her pool playing better and vice-versa, and the whole thing made her more desirable. This was Cricket’s element, and you didn’t mind her interrupting your game to demonstrate what she had apparently been put on Earth to do. Her transitions from loose dancing to precise pool 4 Texas Tech University, Trampas Smith, May 2016 shooting were as bafflingly smooth as her mimicked intercourse was crass. You felt sorry for her and wanted to take her into the little office behind the bar at the same time. Dirty thought about Cricket at least once a day. It was hard to imagine her saying no to pretty much any request, but so far the only thing he had requested was ‘Another beer, please.’ He was sitting at the bar watching her chew her bottom lip and tap and swipe on her phone the day he learned that he had graduated from high school. Having never been an honor student, skipping the final six weeks for work had squeezed almost the last drop from his grade point average, as well as his mother’s sanity. He suspected that favoritism toward his mother, who was a well-liked substitute teacher, and his stepdad, who had one of the largest ad spaces at the football field, may have influenced the outcome. Which was fine. It meant a lot more to them anyway. ‘Cricket, what’re you doing there?’ ‘It’s a game,’ she said without looking up. ‘Looks like you’re trying to redirect a missile.’ ‘These pigs need my help.’ ‘I think I might need your help.’ ‘Hush.’ The door opened and threw bright sunlight on Cricket and the shelves behind the bar, the dusty glasses and paraphernalia, everything looking for a moment as tawdry and useless as it actually was.