All We Want is Everything

Andrew F. Sullivan

Description

All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, while parole is just another state of being. Christmas dinners become battlegrounds; truck cabs and bathroom stalls transform into warped confessionals; and stories are told and retold, held out by people stumbling towards one another in the dark. Frightening, hilarious, filled with raging impotence and moments of embattled grace, All We Want is Everything is the advent of a tremendous new literary voice.

Informations

• Publié par: Arbeiter Ring Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781894037471
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright 2013 © Andrew F. Sullivan
ARP Books
201E-121 Osborne Street Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada R3L 1Y4 www.arpbooks.org
Copyright Notice
This book is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty. Any properly footnoted quotation of up to five hundred sequential words may be quoted without permission, so long as the total number of words does not exceed two thousand. For longer continuous quotations or for a greater number of words, contact ARP for permission. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. ARP acknowledges the support of the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and of Manitoba Culture, Heritage, and Tourism through the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. With the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council. We would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Cataloging data available from Library and Archives Canada.
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To Jen
Where all of this begins and ends.
“We’re not kings here; we’re just strangers.”
—Samuel T. Herring, “Vireo’s Eye”
Contents Dedication Epigraph Good King Crows Eat Well Pumpkinheads The Magician Rides Again In a Car in a River outside Peoria, Illinois Cloud God Is a Place Self-cleaning Oven A Bird in the Hand Is Worthless Hatchetman The Lesser Half of Sir John A. Macdonald Wrestling With Jacob Thaw Towers Mutations Suction Simcoe Furriers The Week Football Stopped SATIN LIVES! Kingston Road About the Author Acknowledgements
Good King

Big Red was elbow deep in dead pigeon when he heard the crack like an ice-laden branch splitting from the trunk. He heard the shouts and the scream and that new kid with the ponytail, Barkwell, hollering over and over into the rafters. Big Red pulled his arms out of the heating duct and wiped the feathers and pigeon guts off on his Miami Heat T-shirt.
He’d stopped wearing good clothes to work after his manager, Kevin the Walrus, made him clean up a family of dead raccoons down in the receiving docks last September. Ruined his favourite shirt, the Harley Davidson one with the 1957 XL Sportster 883 on the front. His ex-wife had bought it for him down in North Carolina on their honeymoon. The little cubs had left a big yellow smear across the front. It was late December now. Pigeons had cooked alive when management decided to turn up the heat Monday morning. No one had bothered to trace the smell until Friday afternoon.
The younger temps yelled at each other as Big Red waddled down the deck. He spotted the glowing bald head of the Walrus hustling towards them across the liquor warehouse floor below, mouth buried into his shoulder mic. Red could see the crowd gathered around one of the hydraulic lifts, younger guys peering over the shoulders of the veterans.
One of the kids saw him walking towards them.
“Yo! Yo, Big Red! You see what one of your white boys tried to do? Yeah, the Segal motherfucker with the ponytail. He all up on Irwin like Irwin took his newspaper, like Irwin steals his shit all the time, right? Fuck man, Irwin don’t even know Segal, you know? Irwin went wild with the bottle man, chucked it right at that ponytailed shit.”
Another voice began spitting in Big Red’s ear.
“Nah man, he took Segal’s smokes and then just lied to his face like a bitch. Irwin always doin’ shit like that just ’cause his Daddy drive a forklift on midnights.”
Barkwell was lying on the floor with blood in his ponytail. Little Irwin nudged the body with a steel-toed boot. Hip-hop squeaked out over the concrete between them from a pair of bright red headphones. A shattered bottle of Gordon’s lay diluting the blood dripping from Barkwell’s ear.
Big Red pushed Irwin away and leaned down over the body. Barkwell probably weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. Big Red placed a bag of sawdust under the kid’s small head. Barkwell’s eyes stared up at the ceiling. Big Red breathed in deep, ready to apply mouth to mouth. Red was the only one on the shift with updated First Aid certification. His niece had almost drowned in the bathtub when he was babysitting her back in ’97. He felt the kid’s wrist, the pulse flitting in and out. He placed his lips on Barkwell’s and the air filled his sinuses. Gin and copper and pine trees and pennies and a fork sticking out of his hand like a flag pole. The smell skipped into the receptors of his nose.
Christmas.
Barkwell smelled like Christmas.
The Christmas when Big Red and his two little cousins overdosed on Flintstones vitamins. A hazy blur of purple and orange puke all over the back of the living room sofa where they hid in wait for Santa. A string of pink and purple Wilmas and Dinos arranged on the window sill. Rations to help wait out Kris Kringle. The doctor in the emergency room warned Big Red’s mother that the kids shouldn’t eat any red meat for at least two weeks. He rubbed yellow fingers down her thigh and she asked him for a cigarette. Too much iron in those vitamins, he said and handed her a smoke. Big Red was only Little Red back then, but he still had a gut. The doctor patted his mother on the hip as they left and told her to watch the little porker’s diet. Big Red watched her smile. The doctor waved goodbye through the glass of the emergency doors. His wide grin revealed a missing molar in the back of his mouth.
It was a Christmas when Grandma spilled gravy down her shirt and the dog tackled her into the Christmas tree. The same Christmas when Caleb Jackson smacked Big Red across the face so hard with his new baseball glove that Big Red saw stars. He sat on Caleb’s face for five minutes until he heard him mumble Uncle, you fat stupid fat ass! Uncle! A Christmas when he got another status report from Mrs. Vandervlooten in the mail and a request for a parent-teacher conference. A Christmas when his cousins learned the words bitch and dick from Grandpa talking in his sleep. They watched Raging Bull and Xanadu on stolen cable in the living room.
Grandma was scrubbing the puke out from behind the couch when Dad finally arrived. He slid on the ice, holding a box of art supplies that Big Red suspected was his Christmas gift. A collection of water paints and charcoal sticks. Maybe some colouring books with Chinese subtitles. Christmas was supposed to have good presents. It wasn’t like a birthday.
The year before, Dad had hung a fleet of preassembled and painted World War II planes from Big Red’s ceiling. An epic dogfight stretched across the room for three months before Mom tore half of them down after she’d gone out one night with Aunt Shirley. Big Red stashed the remains of his fleet under the bed behind piles of Hardy Boys books and medical texts he’d lifted from Caleb Jackson’s garage. Caleb’s Dad said he didn’t believe in doctors. You could teach yourself all that stuff if you put in the right amount of time and effort. Caleb’s leg never healed right after he jumped off the roof playing Indiana Jones.
Birthdays. That was when Big Red’s Dad always came up short. Over his last ten birthdays, Big Red had amassed three velvet paintings of his father, two badminton sets lifted from unsupervised backyards, one stuffed donkey with Kiss My Ass branded into the polyester and four sketches of his father’s alternating cast of girlfriends drawn by Larry B., Dad’s oldest, wisest friend. Larry B. still had three months left on his sentence before he’d be eligible for parole. Dad sent him some magazines for Christmas, but they never made it past the guards.
A Christmas when the Miami Heat finally won their second consecutive victory after a gruelling opening to their inaugural ’88–’89 season that saw the team go 2–20 before Boxing Day. Always supportive of the underdog, Big Red’s Dad walked across the icy driveway decked out head to toe in Heat gear. He had a ball cap on his head with all the tags still attached.
“I heard you chewed up Bedrock last night, little man!”
A Christmas when Big Red sat at the dinner table as his father tried to explain the will and grit he attributed to players like Kevin Edwards, Rory Sparrow and Rony Seikaly. About overcoming the adversity they saw on the court and how they were always willing to press on despite devastating losses. A Christmas when Uncle Rod cautioned Big Red’s Dad about mixing wine and gin together and Big Red covered his ears as his Grandma started belting out Christmas carols to announce the food was ready. His two little cousins did the same.
“Get your hands off your ears, kids! Grandma likes everyone to hear her singing.”
After failing at running an auto shop, a catalogue sales business, and eventually losing his fishing boat to the tax authorities, Big Red’s father had a lot in common with the Miami Heat. For Big Red’s last birthday, his father and Larry B. took him to Red Lobster. They made him try everything gross on the menu before dine-and-dashing. Oysters. Crab legs. Scallops like rubber stamps. Larry fell and got caught in between the double doors after Big Red pushed them the wrong way. The police arrested Larry, claiming he’d broken his parole. Big Red’s Dad got so mad he left Red downtown for five hours. Grandma finally found him outside the Genosha Hotel, watchi