Shooting into the Sun

Glenn Blake’s Return Fire is set, like his first collection, Drowned Moon, along the rivers and bayous of east Texas, where families, legends, memories, and entire neighborhoods sink into the subsiding land and rising waters of natural and man-made disasters. “Who in his right mind would’ve settled here?” Bobby Dean thinks.

In “Return Fire,” Bobby Dean, a widower, exacts a precise revenge on one of two neighboring teenagers whose trigger-happy, sunset antics shatter his wife’s bird feeder and a bottle of mescal and kills one of neighbor-Gladys’s goats and set in motion events that do not end with the last paragraph or line of the story. The widower and sheriff, his dead wife’s brother, know who will come calling from across the river, and what that visit from “old man Budd” will mean. The widower is not only prepared for the worst — he welcomes it. “Everything has a way of working itself out,” Bobby Dean tells his brother-in-law. “In this life, we get what we deserve.”

In “Degüello,” the nameless narrator takes a ferryboat across a stygian East Texas channel to a neighborhood of the same name abandoned to the waters of subsidence, like the battleground where “the bodies lay. . . turning to skeletons which grazing cattle chewed for their salt,” like the 200 year old town New Washington that “slid into the bay. The ferry captain tells the narrator Degüello means “sweet revenge — something like that” for what Mexicans did at the Alamo, but now no one lives there any more, “no one in his right mind.” Given by the captain a last chance to return –”You won’t like what you find! . . . Do you know what’s waiting for you! Do you know what’s over there!”— the narrator says, “Home.”The reader senses the traveler going home again knows degüello means not only decapitation, but a last stand.

In “How Far Are We from the Water?”— in these compact and powerful stories, never very far — we find Ryne, in the middle of a divorce, at the end of a date with a nameless divorcee, when her ex-husband Mason returns to what is now her house. Ryne, in a gesture of quiet surprise and menace, refuses to leave.

In “Shooting Stars,” the narrator and his little sister climb out of her bedroom window late at night when “the quiet one” —the father, the ghost of their father? — comes scratching at her screen, shirtless, rifle in hand. On warm blacktop, under a night sky, “a winged thing, with a thousand eyes,” the sister looks for a star to shoot, with a gun that will make for her shooting stars, unaware “there is no fire,” that what they see is light from stars long dead, “like a memory of someone who has passed away.”

A story that begins with warm familial sentiment ends on a note of dread and sorrow. A poignant, comi-tragic story, “Thanksgiving” is told by Sherwood, “Woody,” who acts as a kind of kid stage manager for a family holiday farce. Between dealing with his slowwitted brother Squirt, his grandmother, his drunk mother —”When shes awake, THERES HELL TO PAY — and a perpetually enraged, knock-the kid-down father — “Gotdamn Thanksgiving,” he says — the house catches on fire, “the turkey looks like a burnt football” and is sent crashing through a window, and Squirt for his own safety is left in a river duck blind among the cattails, with “buzzards flying in circles above the bay.” Not even the fish in Sherwood’s aquarium escape the mayhem, one out of the water leaving a trail, “trying to get to my secret passage way, and if he got that far, he could escape.” But there is no escape. He tells Squirt, “Its a game. A mean game.” His father says, “YOU STAND YOUR GOTDAM GROUND. YOU TAKE WHATS COMING TO YOU,” a weird combination of battle cry and stoicism, as the father wallops the kid for his own incompetence.

In “The Old and the Lost,” perhaps the finest story in this collection, reminiscent of Peter Taylor, the narrator returns to East Texas in the aftermath of a hurricane to find a relative, only to discover a rest home without electricity deep in floodwaters. In a counterpoint memory, “fifty years later,” the narrator stands on the lawn of a house where “royalty. . . the king and queen of Sour Lake” lived with their two children, one who “wore braces on her teeth” and the other who wore “a brace on his leg.” One of them “disappeared into the Spanish Moss,” like some of the residents of the rest home, both reclaimed by the sinking land and rising water.

In “When the Gods Want to Punish You” — a comic masterpiece — fire does indeed return, but in a way that is as catastrophic as floods and hurricanes. There is a classical, stoic fatalism to Blake’s characters. There is no escape. If they don’t know it yet, they will. They accept it and wait for it, like Bobby Dean. They see it like we imagine Squirt does, as buzzards circling the sky. They get what’s worse than not getting what you wish for. They ask the gods for a catastrophe, and the gods return fire to the rivers and bayous with an apocalyptic power that sends the narrator of “When the Gods Want to Punish You” off a truck bed “higher and higher. . . until I can see flames on both horizons.” A variation of the phrase “stand your ground” is used in several stories, but it is a recurring motif in all of them. But standing that last ground is as futile as “shooting into the sun” and will likely get one killed as not. And if returning fire is a way of standing one’s ground, the ground itself is sinking into the rivers and bayous. In this life, you get what’s coming to you. But it is, after all, only death.

Richard Wilbur wrote, “Limitation makes for power; the strength of the genie comes from his being confined in the bottle.” The strength of these six stories lies in a similar gift of compression, Bobby Dean’s shattered bottle of mescal notwithstanding. Knowing what lies ahead, Bobby Dean pours another drink and waits.

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George Williams is the author of Degenerate and Gardens of Earthly Delight.  His stories and essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, and The Hopkins Review, among others.  He is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship and a grant from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. He teaches at Savannah College of Art and Design and works as a consultant and writer for Corra Films.