Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (22 page)

Breece and I used to argue a lot. The rhythm of it would often be that he would get up and go just before he lost his temper. He’d come back into my office after a bit and either tell me calmly I was still wrong, or say something funny, allowing he might be not
entirely
right. Now that my own temper’s worse, I appreciate his efforts. A month after the experience on the lawn, I was lying in the bathtub trying to think of nothing. I heard a short laugh. Then Breece’s voice, an unmistakable clear twang: “That’s one way to get the last word.”

You don’t have to believe anything but this—that’s just the way he said things.

There were several more of these sentences over the next year. One a rebuke, the next two gently agreeable. Then recently, again late at night in a lukewarm bath, only a distant murmuring. What? I thought. What?

“—It’s all right. You’ve got your own conscience.”

Now there’s the less excited working of my mind alone: Breece would have liked this or that, this stream, this book, this person. This would have made him angry, this made him laugh. A lot of people miss him, and miss what he would have gone on to write.

I think about the many things I learned from Breece. I think, with somewhat more certainty than a wish, that Breece’s troubles don’t trouble him or the people who struggled with him and loved him, that a good part of what he earned from struggling with his troubles remains.

1983

M
Y
life as a writer did not really begin until I read the work of Breece D’J Pancake. It was 1983, more than four years after his death, and I was living in Boulder, Colorado, and working in a halfway house for convicted adult felons from Canon City Penitentiary. My job title was Correctional Technician I, which meant I walked the facility from 5
P.M.
to 1
A.M.
with a clipboard and pen and kept a watchful eye on fifty-seven inmates, nine of them women, one of whom had shot her abusive husband in the face.

The house itself was only three blocks from the University of Colorado and, until it was acquired by the Department of Corrections a few years earlier, had been home to generations of sorority girls. In the front yard were two grand oak trees, and in winter, while doing midnight rounds on the third floor, I could see through their bare branches to the border of the city and the Flatirons, great slabs of ancient rock rising out of the pines and snow, a constellation of stars sitting along the ridge. I usually allowed myself to take in this view only after the inmates were asleep, and I tried not to think about the fiction I worked on each morning and early afternoon.

I was twenty-three years old and, much to my surprise, had started writing short stories. I did not consider myself a writer, however, nor did I think I would ever be one. I’d been reading Richard Yates, John Cheever, and John Updike, writers who wrote beautifully about all sorts of things, particularly middle- and upper-middle-class married people who are terribly unhappy. In my own work, I think I was trying to copy not only the rhythms of their prose but their very visions, too; but theirs had nothing to do with my own. Both sides of my family are from the South; my father’s father was a civil engineer and his father had been the first auto mechanic in Louisiana. On my mother’s side were pipe fitters, rice farmers, and muleskinners; I grew up in a string of fallen mill towns in New England, and my best friends were not unlike the men I supervised from Canon City Penitentiary.

Willa Cather once wrote: “A writer is at his best only when writing within the character and range of his deepest sympathies.” What I’d been working on in those first few months had been inspired by writers whose artistic vision did not necessarily include those at the bottom of the pile. And I suppose—because I was young and ignorant and had not read nearly enough literature—I made the unconscious assumption that real fiction just didn’t have those people in it. Consequently, I felt little connection to my own writing.

I kept at it, but I hated it and myself. I began tagging along with a private investigator and sometime bounty hunter. I trailed a diamond thief in Denver, did surveillance on the house of a hit man’s girlfriend, found myself under an assumed name in meetings with U.S. marshals and DEA agents. I flew to Mexico looking for a sadist we never found. It was boring and sometimes dangerous work, and I didn’t care; I was lost; I had no direction or voice or vision. In my off-hours, I drank a lot.

I don’t recall now how “Trilobites” got into my hands, but I remember it being a Xeroxed copy from a book or magazine. It was a winter afternoon, and in the slanted shadows of the Flatirons, I sat at my desk and read it. The first line was first-person, present tense, a device I hadn’t seen much of before, though I stopped noticing that soon enough:

I open the truck’s door, step onto the brick side street. I look at Company Hill again, all sort of worn down and round. A long time ago it was real craggy and stood like an island in the Teays River. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill, and I’ve looked all over it for trilobites. I think how it has always been there and always will be, at least for as long as it matters. The air is smoky with summertime. A bunch of starlings swim over me. I was born in this country and I have never very much wanted to leave. I remember Pop’s dead eyes looking at me. They were real dry, and that took something out of me. I shut the door, head for the café
.

In those spare sentences of such economy, my mind went quiet, my heart hit a steady rhythm, and I was literally
pulled
into this West Virginian landscape and all the weight on young Colly’s shoulders—the failing farm he can’t save, his dead father, Ginny who doesn’t love him anymore and never will. Nearly all the sentences were constructed simply—subject, verb, object—yet there was a music to them that was organic, that seemed to come from the very world they evoked so fully.

The sky has a film. Its heat burns through the salt on my skin, draws it tight. I start the truck, drive west along the highway built on the dry bed of the Teays. There’s wide bottoms, and the hills on either side have yellowy billows the sun can’t burn off. I pass an iron sign put up by the WPA: “Surveyed by George Washington, the Teays River Pike.” I see fields and cattle where buildings stand, picture them from some long-off time.

This is not mere description for description’s sake. We are hot without being told we’re hot. We are thirsty without being told we want cold water. We feel an acute awareness of the passage of time, as well as a dark foreboding, though none of these words are used explicitly. This is accomplished with Pancake’s careful selection of sensual detail: the sky’s film, the skin’s salt, yellowy billows the sun can’t burn off. But these are technical details I only became conscious of much later. My first time reading this remarkable story by this remarkable writer, that ambitious and lost part of me was put to sleep, and I simply became Colly and Ginny and old Jim, even the ancient landscape and Colly’s desire to find the fossil of a trilobite in his homeland where “my father is a khaki cloud in the canebrakes, and Ginny is no more to me than the bitter smell on the blackberry briers up on the ridge.”

The story ends as seamlessly and honestly as it begins; Colly doesn’t get the girl, yet he doesn’t forget his passions either. Everything comes to true fruition by the final line:

I get up. I’ll spend tonight at home. I’ve got eyes to shut in Michigan—maybe even Germany or China, I don’t know yet. I walk, but I’m not scared. I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.

Colly has been afraid for the entire story, and we’ve known it all along without consciously knowing we’ve known. When I finished reading that last line for the first time, my fingers were trembling, my breath was high in my chest, and my soul felt fed yet hungry for more. This man, Pancake, by going so deeply into this one character at this particular time and place in his life, had captured a larger truth about all of us, about living and loving and dying, and he did it all in sixteen pages without one clever or ironic turn of phrase in sight.

I called the local bookstore and asked the man who answered if he had any books in stock by a writer named Breece D’J Pancake. He did. Thirty minutes later I bought what the bookstore owner told me was Pancake’s first and last book.

Back home, I brewed some late afternoon coffee, and I could not stop staring at the dust jacket photo of this gifted writer who’d been gone from us already four years. I felt a strange combination of grief for the loss of him, yet anticipation for what he’d left behind. I sat down to read.

When I finished
The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake,
it was sundown, and I pulled on my coat and went for a long walk in the snow-crusted streets of Boulder. I watched the lights come on in the restaurants and shops and little alpine houses. I looked up at the Flatirons and watched the stars shine over the ridge. And I just stood there in the mountain cold and felt the lives of all those characters in these twelve stories from this writer we would never hear from again: hard-living Buddy, chained to a life of coal mining his lover can’t abide; the nameless narrator of “A Room Forever,” raised in a string of loveless foster homes, his life nothing now but deserted river towns and dangerous work on a tugboat; teenage Bo and his reluctant hunt with the men who drink and celebrate the violent death of the underage girl they’d all paid for sex; the haunted serial killer in “Time and Again,” whom Pancake renders fully and honestly in just six pages; heartbroken Reva with her barren body and self-hatred and incestuous desire for her brother. There’s the fight-loving Skeevy and the doomed Alena, doomed because she loves Harvey, who was “not the man she knew in the hills, he looked skinny and meaner to her, and now she knew he was a murderer, that the gun he always carried had worked.” In “The Salvation of Me,” we have Pancake’s only comic narrator and his forever unrealized dream. There’s Ottie, the long-haul trucker who returns to the home and family that was never quite his anyway. And, finally, young Hollis, who has inherited the family farm and his ailing parents, too. We feel his misery at this fate, but we also feel his strong need to honor his family and do the right thing; this is one of Pancake’s central themes, his characters’ constant striving for goodness up against the seductive pull of the darkness within them. As in so many of these stories, there is a gun and whiskey and a craving for a change of almost any kind.

He went back to the house, and in the living room stretched out on the couch. Pulling the folded quilt to his chest, he held it there like a pillow against himself. He heard the cattle lowing to be fed, heard the soft rasp of his father’s crying breath, heard his mother’s broken humming of a hymn. He lay that way in the graying light and slept.

The sun was blackened with snow, and the valley closed in quietly with humming, quietly as an hour of prayer.

So much of Pancake’s art lies in what he does not tell us, that the rifle is loaded and somewhere in the house, that young Hollis can’t take much more and probably won’t. Instead, the author trusts the innate power of the details themselves: the father’s crying breath, the mother’s broken humming of a hymn, the blackened sun, and, finally, the valley closing in “quietly as an hour of prayer.” A time for holy reflection or unholy capitulation—take your pick, Pancake seems to say—all of this in the “graying light” Hollis sleeps in.

But that night, nearly twenty years ago, standing in the Rocky Mountain cold, I was not beginning to analyze any of the work that had just passed through me; I was still in its spell, was still moved by all these people and their tough lives that were not so different from people I had known growing up, were not so different from the inmates I spent most of my time with in the halfway house up on the hill. William Carlos Williams said, “Write what’s under your nose.” I had no idea how Breece Pancake had achieved his art, but I felt more inspired than ever to try and make some, too.

A razor wind blew in from the plains to the east. I wished for a hat and gloves and started back for home. And I knew at least this: that Breece D’J Pancake had brought more to the writing table than simply a way with words and a strong work ethic; what he shows us is a certain fearlessness on the page, an inherent willingness to go as deeply as the story and the characters require. This takes great generosity and courage, faith and perseverance. But there’s more going on here as well; with some of the other writers I’d been reading at the time, I could feel a slightly judgmental quality in the prose, as if the characters in the stories were not so much real people as they were props being used to make wise, sardonic points about the human condition. With Pancake, there is none of this. On the contrary, there is the opposite feeling; his stories’ characters are not mere inventions but flesh-and-blood human beings whom he suffers along with, believes in, and ultimately loves, no matter how far they might fall. This cannot be achieved without a deep artistic sincerity, a word a Nadine Gordimer character defines as “never having an idea of oneself”; Breece D’J Pancake was too focused on the task at hand—with trying to find that essential physical detail, that perfectly resonant line of dialogue, that truest image—to be concerned with what far too many young writers seem to be concerned with today: How does this story
I
wrote reflect back on
me?
How does it make me
look?

This is an almost desperate response to the world and one’s perceived place in it, and at twenty-three, drifting and afraid, I was not above doing this either; the morning after reading
The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake,
I sat at my desk and re-read everything I’d been working on. I saw clearly, for the first time, how my notebooks were filled with sentences written only to convince myself and others that maybe I did have a real ability at this and was not wasting my time even trying. Still in the grip of Pancake’s art, I saw how the language was overwrought and was being used not to serve my characters and their particular truths, but instead, to show off my college vocabulary. I saw, too, how the images I’d thought I had worked so hard to paint were actually trite and rang falsely and that even my punctuation and sentence rhythms seemed to reflect more my particular mood when I wrote them rather than the overall work they were there to serve.