Dysphoria Read online

  Dysphoria

  an Appalachian gothic

  by

  Sheldon Lee Compton

  Cowboy Jamboree Press

  good grit lit.

  Copyright © 2019 by Sheldon Lee Compton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, address: [email protected]

  First Edition

  ISBN: 9781092736732

  www.cowboyjamboreemagazine.com

  www.bentcountry.blogspot.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or deceased is coincidental.

  Cover and Interior Design: Adam Van Winkle

  Cover Illustration: Adam Van Winkle

  Cowboy Jamboree Press

  good grit lit.

  Praise for Sheldon Lee Compton

  "Sheldon Lee Compton is the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet." - David Joy, author of The Weight of This World

  “Sheldon Lee Compton is one of the new young breed of Kentucky writers–talented, fearless, and strong–bringing us word from the hills." - Chris Offutt, author of My Father the Pornographer

  “A fierce and lyrical writer who, in his depiction of contemporary Appalachian life, is equal parts uncompromising and compassionate." - K. L. Cook, author of Love Songs for the Quarantined

  “Sheldon Lee Compton is a hillbilly Bukowski, one of the grittiest writers to come down the pike since Larry Brown.” - Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time

  "Compton is an author whose art imitates life. A writer who understands the importance of portraying beauty and brutality in literature. A novelist who appreciates the elasticity of the defining line between right and wrong." - Matthew J. Hall in PANK

  "Sheldon spins the hard and raw of his native soil into his characters, creating lives that are immediately poignant and real." - Kari Nguyen

  "Sheldon Lee Compton is like a living, breathing John Cougar Mellencamp song (minus guitars and hand claps) but with much better stories." - Brian Alan Ellis, author of Something Good, Something Bad, Something Dirty

  "Compton articulates the real hardscrabble world of contemporary Kentucky Appalachia he so intimately understands, writing with a stark and powerful but emotionally subtle voice." - Charles Dodd White, author of Sinners of Sanction County

  "It's a damn hard world, but Compton still finds beauty and humanity in the hardness." - David S. Atkinson, author of Apocalypse All Time

  "An Appalachian writer of consequence and influence." - April Bradley, editor at SmokeLong Quarterly

  "We hear his characters in a way that brings them closer, that localizes them within our head, not just visually but audiovisually—it works to give each man, woman, child or teenager an incredibly substantive presence." - Michelle Bailat-Jones in Necessary Fiction

  “No sooner had I read ‘His hands were two leather balls folded in his lap,’ the pool called 'Red Knife,’

  and Larry's back with its ‘dinner-plate shoulder blades,’ than I was hooked on Sheldon Lee Compton's

  Dysphoria: An Appalachian Gothic. The rhythms of its speech, word choices, depicted events, and

  sensory observations are a trip back home. The description of an old bedroom as having the ‘scent of

  deep body odor’ captures a memory of Appalachian lifestyle I know in my bones. Combined with the

  most believable characters and a harrowing plot, this is evocation of the heart's experience of Appalachia

  at its best.” - Ron Houchin, author of The Man Who Saws Us in Half

  “Dysphoria is ugly and gothic and morally questionable the way the best gothic writing should be, but then there’s this innocence, these moments of tenderness and beauty, this intent to do good almost as much as bad. I think that’s what makes me squirm the most. That these are real people, not headlines or punchlines. Often they are boys and men who can’t fully escape being boys, but they’ve got real good and real bad in their heart, often doing the wrong thing in the name the right thing and vice versa. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, it mostly makes them fester and boil over, the scab never fully crusting over. Time and Sheldon Lee Compton don’t let anyone off easy, and that’s just it, what makes Dysphoria timeless and never more relevant. It’s that deadly mix of Old Testament Vengeance, Original Sin, and Murphy’s Law lurking around the corner of every action and reaction that makes you turn each page with one eye open and the other half-shut with a wince. And yet, with every page there’s Compton, ever the wide-eyed witness to all of it, and not just them. Us too.” -Benjamin Drevlow, author of Bend with the Knees

  When a reader steps into the pages of a Compton story, the reader must maneuver through sharp edges, and wade in the mud of Sheldon's honest and poetic world in order to reach the reality of Sheldon's people, his characters. He's digging deep into the realness of his skin, a place most authors are scared to go to. Dysphoria: An Appalachian Gothic is Sheldon's masterpiece thus far. This book is like putting a revolver in to your mouth and pulling the trigger. Each bullet plugging the brain with honesty, pain, grit, fear, and truth. --Frank Reardon, author of Interstate Chokehold

  In memory of my father, Orville Lee Compton

  All I know is that I've wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I'd get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don't want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow's sky.

  ― Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans

  1

  David Shannon gave his life savings to his son, Paul, on the third day of his funeral. It happened after most everyone left to get rest for the burial the next morning. Paul stayed, hands crossed in his lap, wondering why he hadn’t cried yet. His mom wanted to be there for him, but wasn’t sure her former in-laws would have cared for her attendance. Her uneasiness had infuriated Paul; his mom deserved to be anywhere she wanted at anytime she wanted. If ever a right had been earned, she had earned that one, at the very least. Returning to those thoughts was doing him no favors. He needed a restart. Clearing his mind, he sat in place for a long while, and did fairly well to find a calm center until the preacher dropped something beside him and clapped his shoulder as he passed.

  Beside him in the church pew a folded flag lay orphaned. David had been a platoon sergeant in Vietnam and saved lives at some point forgotten in the family history. Or maybe saving lives became only part of the myth. Paul knew his father had been stationed in Korea for at least a year, away from the front lines, and that he led a platoon of men, but the soldiers he ordered were ordered to fix trucks more than kill anyone or save anyone. Sergeant David Shannon spent a lot of time overseeing a base garage. Paul knew this, but families sometimes liked to forget the mundane that actually happened in order to make a nice arrangement of false glory they wanted to remember.

  The burial would be a long drawn out thing with twenty-one gun salutes and a presentation of the flag again and starched-stiff military uniforms filled out with an unknown handful of veterans who had served with his father and of whom very few would even so much as speak for more than ten seconds.

  Paul wasn’t alone in the church, though. His uncle Hillman stood in the sinner’s foyer when Paul made it to the back doors. In the sinner’s foyer were the restrooms and water fountain, along with a bulletin board with the phone numbers and addresses of church members who had moved away to other states. Some moved for work, others retired, and some
had actually been ousted for any variety of transgressions reflecting poorly on the church family. Brother Ethan put their names up on the board, though, as if they had decided to stop attending. Paul wasn’t sure if this was compassion or shame on the preacher’s part. Hill sure didn’t care.

  The sinner’s foyer is the place Hill could always be found during a funeral or a church service, his eyes low to the ground, feet pulled together like a scolded child. Paul respected him for being unpretentious, so when Hill stopped him in the foyer and shoved a Mason jar at him, Paul smiled and relaxed.

  The jar showed three quarters full of faded and wrinkled dollar bills, tattered green rectangles like flags left from lost battles. Near the bottom rested sunken copper and silver. Loose change. Hill handed the jar over and didn’t say anything. Instead, he pointed to a wad of yellow paper at the top of the jar. He tapped the side of the jar with a greasy fingernail and eased out the door to the porch. Paul could see Hill’s black dress pants were too short. Probably bought them at the Goodwill yesterday. When he sat on the top steps of the porch, they became even shorter. Hill wore white athletic socks with wingtips. It was the first time he had seen Hill without boots on.

  Paul sat beside Hill and his uncle moved his arms up and down his body like a game show host showing off a new sports car and said, “Don’t I clean up pretty?”

  “Everything but that face,” Paul said.

  Hill laughed, patted Paul on the shoulder, and stood up. “Come over before you head back. Your mom doing okay?”

  “Okay, Uncle Hill,” Paul said. “Yeah Mom’s okay. You know her. She takes it on the chin.”

  “Hell yeah she does,” Hill said and lumbered down the front steps with a wounded fluttering of loose shirt, piled into his S-10 pickup, and mufflered away.

  Paul knew the wad of yellow paper was a letter, but he didn’t read it at the church. When he made it to his grandparents’ house, he slinked into the back bedroom. In the bedroom were stacks of books and magazines, pill bottles and various toys saved over the years from when Paul was young. Pictures of Paul were turned backwards on small tacks punched into the walls. Two on the wall to the left of his father’s old bed and one above a shelf filled with what-nots. His face smiled in those pictures, though no one could see him. One of him on Christmas Eve wearing a new Chicago Bears jersey. His father lurked behind him, slumped onto the couch and glaring at the camera — hateful, harried, ready for a finish to the holiday. The other two were of Paul alone. School pictures. Smiling because he was at school and away from home. The pictures were turned backwards because his father said it was unbearable to see him and know how he had failed as a father, and he couldn’t take them down because they were pictures of his son.

  Taking the pictures off the wall, Paul noticed how the room captured the scent of deep body odor. He sat on the bed and read the first sentence of the letter.

  I’m sorry.

  Then he read it out loud, and let out a breath like he wanted to spit the words back out before they passed by his heart.

  2

  The kitchen. Warm brown colors. The scent of hot cornbread, butter, fried pork, and soup beans wrapped everything in a sort of a good haze. Beneath that, and hardly detectable, existed the knife-edged presence of February cold. A strong wind came in from under the kitchen door, but went unnoticed in the warmth still coming off the stove near the dining table. Paul slid a fork across his dinner plate. It was a sound he barely noticed, concentrating on each bite.

  Paul's grandmother sat at the head of the table and his father sat across from him, busy with his own plate of food. He absently poked his fork into a mound of mashed potatoes. Paul didn't look up from his plate, didn't notice how his father stared at him.

  Blank.

  Nothing.

  Two tired blue eyes gazing out at some lost point behind Paul, beyond the kitchen. Staring into some forever hell, mute to everyone else, nothing more than the lull sounds of the winter wind beneath the door to his ear, but growing every time Paul pulled the fork across the plate. His mouth pulled into a long and permanent frown so the corners of his horse-hair mustache rubbed close to the exact middle of his chin. The mouth was one hard part of a face stripped of emotion and pock-marked from severe acne.

  Paul's grandmother said not a word in her chair, but her eyes cruised the space around her, moved slowly in the sockets, expectant.

  Paul saw only his own hands. He kept his head down and there were only the screeches and pulls. He loved mashed potatoes. It seemed no one ever bragged about mashed potatoes, he thought, and this was sad. It was always something about the pork chops being good and tender or how the cornbread and the butter just melted into each other. Good cornbread and pork chops. But there were mashed potatoes, too, and no one ever said anything about them. People just shoveled them in, and most of the time they left a lot behind, not caring, moving on to have coffee or smoke cigarettes or watch Sanford & Son before bed. Paul loved them, though, and they were gone after this serving. He had already eyed the cooker and knew they were gone. Everybody had just enough, but he wanted more. So he pulled his fork slowly, trying to get the last bit of them along the edge of the plate.

  Then the room exploded and everything brightened with a blue electricity.

  Paul's father jumped out of his chair. His grandmother leaned back, surprised, and flung her arms out to either protect herself or stop her son, or both somehow. She whimpered out a quiet and pitiful sound and moved until her back was against the refrigerator.

  Fierce blue eyes and tangled hair quivered and shook across the room. It seemed the hateful February wind blew in from behind him so that he ran from it toward anything else at all, just away from cold and pain and away from it like a bullet warmed from a barrel, and that fast. His fast moving mouth and ragged yelling became the sensory world. His stomach walls beat ancient rhythms against his ribs—flee, flee, flee. His fork fell to the floor.

  Paul rushed past his father, who grabbed the sides of the table and gained ground across the kitchen. He struggled around a corner and into the hallway, but fell roughly on the hole in the carpet that had been there since before he was born and tore raw streaks across his knees. The pink burns immediately ached through to his kneecaps, but behind him the sound of heavy breathing continued and so he pin-balled his way through the hallway. The breathing coming from behind him interrupted shouted questions about what he thought he was doing. Was he starved to death? Wasn't there enough food? Was he so hungry he had to scrape the plate over and over and over?

  Flee, flee, flee.

  The entire thing happened fast, and, years later, Paul would shorten his memory of it even more, through effort forget most of it except the last, when it had almost ended and he was in the bed, under the covers, watching with a concentration and a love like prayer. He would only remember because he couldn’t forget when his father cornered him in the bathroom, bent low into his face where he had stuck himself between the bathtub and the clothes hamper and screamed at him in a blur of anger and sickness, manic and out of control, without regret until too late, when it no longer mattered.

  3

  Paul looked out the dirty cab window and thought about his father dressed up in clown makeup. It wasn’t really a cab. A cab was a cab. This was a Ford Taurus some guy bought along with about three other of the same make and model and had painted before slapping magnetic Big Sandy Transport signs on the doors. This guy, who made his living having employees drive old people and people drawing disability or social security from small towns in eastern Kentucky to places like Lexington and Louisville for doctor appointments, wouldn’t know what it meant to keep it running to save his life.

  So here he was, Paul thought, looking out a smeared window of a not-cab leaving again a family he hadn’t seen in years. His grandparents were the only ones he really cared about anymore. Uncle Hill could come and go in a person’s life without changing much one way or another, if he chose for that to be the case. He moved like an iceb
erg among other people, hiding himself mostly beneath the water, never having to get too close because, like icebergs, people navigated around Uncle Hill. Family behind him, a city full of people lacking the heart and guts of his childhood in front of him, and here Paul was in his not-cab wishing now he’d driven in a rental.

  He never drove himself anymore. He became adjusted to life in a city where people bought vehicles mostly to announce their financial arrival. Transportation was a bonus. He paid thousands of dollars over the years waving real cabs and tipping drivers. Never thought he’d find himself in a state of mind where he’d spend money to have people drive him places and not own a car himself. But that’s just what he did. Philadelphia wasn’t by a stretch New York or Los Angeles, but it was the biggest place Paul had ever been and the biggest place he’d likely ever live. It was big enough for him. Big as three worlds when he first moved there, and the same now. Back in Kentucky, just forty miles from the town he grew up in, coming back from seeing his father lying dead with makeup on in a casket that cost more than every stitch of clothes his father had bought in the last ten years total, Paul was taking a not-cab because he did not own a vehicle. That kind of detail would get him certified insane in Red Knife.

  He had worn his gray suit on the ride in and wore it again now heading back to the airport in Lexington. It was his best suit. Now he regretted that decision, too. In the backseat with him sat a withdrawn older man. Paul hadn’t asked, but he knew multiple passengers was a common thing for this transportation service. So many people traveled to Lexington for doctor appointments, they really had no choice. County budgets only went so far.