Going For a Beer Read online

  GOING

  FOR

  A BEER

  selected

  short fictions

  ROBERT COOVER

  Introduction by T.C. Boyle

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York | London

  For You, QBSP

  Once, some time ago and in a distant land, I met a young maiden, known to her tribe as the Virgin of the Post, and she gave to me, amid prurient and mysterious ceremonies, a golden ring. Perhaps it was a local custom, a greeting of sorts. Or perhaps a message, an invitation, a mission even. Some peculiar Moorish device of transport and return. Wand-scabbard. Open-sesame. Who can say? It bears on one edge an indecipherable legend, a single cleft rune, not unlike the maiden’s own vanished birthmark, and I am inclined to believe that portentous inscrutability may in fact be the point of it all. Now, to that Virgin, I offer these apprentice calculations of my own, invented under the influence of her gifts, begging her to remember the Wisdom of the Beast: “If I carry the poison in my head, in my tail which I bite with rage lies the remedy.”

  —from the original jacket flap copy for Pricksongs & Descants, 1969

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by T.C. Boyle

  THE BROTHER (1962)

  THE ELEVATOR (1966)

  THE WAYFARER (1968)

  THE HAT ACT (1968)

  THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE (1969)

  THE MAGIC POKER (1969)

  THE BABYSITTER (1969)

  BEGINNINGS (1972)

  THE DEAD QUEEN (1973)

  THE FALLGUY’S FAITH (1976)

  IN BED ONE NIGHT (1980)

  THE TINKERER (1981)

  YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS (1985)

  AESOP’S FOREST (1986)

  CARTOON (1987)

  TOP HAT (1987)

  INSIDE THE FRAME (1987)

  THE PHANTOM OF THE MOVIE PALACE (1987)

  LAP DISSOLVES (1987)

  THE EARLY LIFE OF THE ARTIST (1991)

  THE NEW THING (1994)

  PUNCH (2000)

  THE INVISIBLE MAN (2002)

  THE RETURN OF THE DARK CHILDREN (2002)

  RIDDLE (2005)

  GRANDMOTHER’S NOSE (2005)

  STICK MAN (2005)

  GOING FOR A BEER (2011)

  THE GOLDILOCKS VARIATIONS (2013)

  INVASION OF THE MARTIANS (2016)

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  by T.C. Boyle

  In the beginning was the word, and rightly so: the world is constructed of stories, supported by stories, inhabited by stories. We get up in the morning, go for a beer, tumble into bed at night, and before we know it our lives have blinked out and we are none the wiser as to the essential story, the only one that matters: the story of what we are doing here on this mysterious planet. In its place—and as a buffer against the nullity of the universe stripped bare—we have created an elaborate and self-reflexive mythos to comfort and provoke us. From the earliest moments of consciousness we are bathed in words and we grow to batten on them and eventually manipulate them ourselves in the most deeply rooted incantatory way, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, You must remember this, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Jesus and God and Noah and the Virgin Birth, Aesop, sour grapes, the Invasion of the Martians, But grandmother, what big teeth you have!

  Robert Coover isn’t so much interested in decoding the ur-stories of Western civilization in the way of Jung and his archetypes or codifying them as Calvino did in Fiabe italiane, his magisterial compendium of Italian folktales, but rather employing them in the spirit of Borges or Asturias, by way of extracting their magic in order to make more and livelier magic from them. Coover’s stories, and this is the case with nearly all the thirty selected here, exist in a cascading present-tense now that hurtles the reader through a shifting series of narrative choices mimicking the potentialities flooding the writer’s psyche in the moment of composition. Thus, a story like “The Magic Poker,” in which the idyll of a summer’s day on a sunlit isle is repeatedly deconstructed and restored by the Prospero figure who creates it and imposes his own Caliban on the nubile sisters who come innocently to enjoy it. Or Coover’s recasting of the Grimm Brothers’ “Hansel and Gretel” in “The Gingerbread House,” which similarly shuffles incident and perspective to oppose innocence and darkness, the door of the magical house “shining like a ruby, like hard cherry candy, and pulsing softly, radiantly. Yes, marvelous! delicious! insuperable! but beyond: what is that sound of black rags flapping?” That, of course, is the sound of experience, the sound of the three bears abjuring the niceties of civilization and reverting to, well, bears, it’s the gargle in the throat of the dead queen, the mortal gasp of the eviscerated fox in “Aesop’s Forest,” the ending the fables subliminally promise but don’t dare deliver.

  So too with “The Babysitter,” Coover’s best-known story, in which the perspective shifts through a series of often conflicting incidents and points of view (“narrative slices,” as William Gass has it, “that we might scoop . . . up and reshuffle, altering not the elements but the order or the rules of play”). Is the babysitter alive and well? Has the husband returned to rape her? Has the baby drowned in the tub? The result is a hilarious and subversive take on the conventional portrayal of the middle-class family and its mores, ending with two opposing possibilities: in the first, all is well, the children asleep and the dishes done; in the second, the housewife is informed, “Your children are murdered, your husband gone, a corpse in your bathtub, and your house is wrecked.” This is most definitely not the American family we thought we knew, the family of the sitcom, the magazine spread, the stories we’ve placidly absorbed throughout our lives.

  As time goes on, these received stories become dulled by repetition, fixed, ossified, while the authority of the storyteller reigns absolute (“Once upon a time, this was how it was”), trivializing the content and vitiating the form. Coover’s transformations offer a sly counterpoint. They tell us this is how it is, or might be, or will be, or can’t be, the story alive and evolving on the page, open-ended, sans predetermined outcome, as in “The Goldilocks Variations”: “He dreams of happy endings, but the story he is in, which is every creature’s story, must do without. Raising voices against it is of no avail. The consequence is a despair that invites the very ending one is seeking in vain to avoid.” In the same way, the narrator of “Beginnings” ventures forth from his island to the shore, where people tell him stories, “astounding him with their fearless capacity for denouement.” Beginnings and endings: there’s no end to them.

  Coover’s first collection, Pricksongs & Descants, contains a book within a book, “Seven Exemplary Fictions,” dedicated to Cervantes, whose example, as innovator and rejecter of “exhausted art forms,” serves as his inspiration. In the Prólogo to this volume, Coover sets forth the aesthetic vision that will shape his work throughout his career, from the stories collected here to his novels and novellas as well: “The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader . . . to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation.” Precisely. This is the method, this is the rationale. Though only one of the “Seven Exemplary Fictions” appears here—“The Brother,” the first story in this collection—it underscores the point and serves as a gateway to all that follow.

  The brother delivers his tale in a breathless unpunctuated monologue employing a sort of aw-shucks rural American dialect that disarms the reader into accepting—and sympathizing with—his version of events. Each reader will have a moment of epiphany, the key turning in the lock of the myth, as he or she realizes just whose
brother the brother is and that his story is foreordained in the foundational mythology of Western civilization, the Bible. We wish him well, we root for him, but we know he doesn’t have a chance (in hell—or, more to the point, in heaven). In the original, Noah has his orders from the very highest authority—humanity is a disappointment, a failed experiment, and God, the original God, the God of my God and thank God and God what a mess, has decided to start again, no exceptions. One wonders: Was all of humanity equally depraved? Did everyone, even someone as demonstrably good and kind and loving as our narrator, deserve his fate? Well, yes, of course he did—it says so right in the Good Book. The genius here—and this is one of the touchstone stories of our time—is in the way Coover reshuffles the deck and allows the reader to move “away from mystification to clarification,” and see the story in a whole new light that calls that very authorial authority into question.

  These are unexpected stories, bawdy, outrageous and lyrical by turns, and if Little Red Riding Hood, the Invisible Man, and the Phantom of the Opera take it on the nose, so much the better. The stories that sustain us, that have crusted around us, grown barnacles and descending layers of clinging oysters, exist not merely as cultural props but as clues to the mystery of life and civilization. We need them scraped clean and re-propped, with every possible hole poked through them so we can see the light for what it is. Robert Coover has been doing that for us for the past half century and more, and we can only be very, very thankful. These are the best of his stories, the oysters that are growing in fresh new beds and regenerating their pearls over and over again. Relish them.

  GOING

  FOR

  A BEER

  THE BROTHER

  (1962)

  right there right there in the middle of the damn field he says he wants to put that thing together him and his buggy ideas and so me I says “how the hell you gonna get it down to the water?” but he just focuses me out sweepin the blue his eyes rollin like they do when he gets het on some new lunatic notion and he says not to worry none about that just would I help him for God’s sake and because he don’t know how he can get it done in time otherwise and though you’d have to be loonier than him to say yes I says I will of course I always would crazy as my brother is I’ve done little else since I was born and my wife she says “I can’t figure it out I can’t see why you always have to be babyin that old fool he ain’t never done nothin for you God knows and you got enough to do here fields need plowin it’s a bad enough year already my God and now that red-eyed brother of yours wingin around like a damn cloud and not knowin what in the world he’s doin buildin a damn boat in the country my God what next? you’re a damn fool I tell you” but packs me some sandwiches just the same and some sandwiches for my brother Lord knows his wife don’t have no truck with him no more says he can go starve for all she cares she’s fed up ever since the time he made her sit out on a hillside for three whole days rain and everything because he said she’d see God and she didn’t see nothin and in fact she like to die from hunger nothin but berries and his boys too they ain’t so bright neither but at least they come to help him out with his damn boat so it ain’t just the two of us thank God for that and it ain’t no goddamn fishin boat he wants to put up neither in fact it’s the biggest damn thing I ever heard of and for weeks weeks I’m tellin you we ain’t doin nothin but cuttin down pine trees and haulin them out to his field which is really pretty high up a hill and my God that’s work lemme tell you and my wife she sighs and says I am really crazy r-e-a-l-l-y crazy and her four months with a child and tryin to do my work and hers too and still when I come home from haulin timbers around all day she’s got enough left to rub my shoulders and the small of my back and fix a hot meal her long black hair pulled to a knot behind her head and hangin marvelously down her back her eyes gentle but very tired my God and I says to my brother I says “look I got a lotta work to do buddy you’ll have to finish this idiot thing yourself I wanna help you all I can you know that but” and he looks off and he says “it don’t matter none your work” and I says “the hell it don’t how you think me and my wife we’re gonna eat I mean where do you think this food comes from you been puttin away man? you can’t eat this goddamn boat out here ready to rot in that bastard sun” and he just sighs long and says “no it just don’t matter” and he sits him down on a rock kinda tired like and stares off and looks like he might even for God’s sake cry and so I go back to bringin wood up to him and he’s already started on the keel and frame God knows how he ever found out to build a damn boat lost in his fog where he is Lord he was twenty when I was born and the first thing I remember was havin to lead him around so he didn’t get kicked by a damn mule him who couldn’t never do nothin in a normal way just a huge oversize fuzzyface boy so anyway I take to gettin up a few hours earlier ever day to do my farmin my wife apt to lose the baby if she should keep pullin around like she was doin then I go to work on the boat until sundown and on and on the days hot and dry and my wife keepin good food in me or else I’d of dropped sure and no matter what I say to try and get out of it my brother he says “you come and help now the rest don’t matter” and we just keep hammerin away and my God the damn thing is big enough for a hundred people and at least I think at least it’s a place to live and not too bad at that at least it’s good for somethin but my wife she just sighs and says no good will come of it and runs her hands through my hair but she don’t ask me to stop helpin no more because she knows it won’t do no good and she’s kinda turned into herself now these days and gettin herself all ready and still we keep workin on that damn thing that damn boat and the days pass and my brother he says we gotta work harder we ain’t got much time and from time to time he gets a coupla neighbors to come over and give a hand them sucked in by the size and the novelty of the thing makin jokes some but they don’t stay around more than a day or two and they go away shakin their heads and swearin under their breath and disgusted they got weaseled into the thing in the first place and me I only get about half my place planted and see to my stock as much as I can my wife she takes more care of them than I can but at least we won’t starve we say if we just get some rain and finally we get the damn thing done all finished by God and we cover it in and out with pitch and put a kinda fancy roof on it and I come home on that last day and I ain’t never goin back ain’t never gonna let him talk me into nothin again and I’m all smellin of tar and my wife she cries and cries and I says to her not to worry no more I’ll be home all the time and me I’m cryin a little too though she don’t notice just thinkin how she’s had it so lonely and hard and all and for one whole day I just sleep the whole damn day and the rest of the week I work around the farm and one day I get an idea and I go over to my brother’s place and get some pieces of wood left over and whaddaya know? they are all livin on that damn boat there in the middle of nowhere him and his boys and some women and my brother’s wife she’s there too but she’s madder than hell and carpin at him to get outa that damn boat and come home and he says she’s got just one more day and then he’s gonna drug her on the boat but he don’t say it like a threat or nothin more like a fact a plain fact tomorrow he’s gonna drug her on the boat well I ain’t one to get mixed up in domestic quarrels God knows so I grab up the wood and beat it back to my farm and that evenin I make a little cradle a kinda fancy one with little animal figures cut in it and polished down and after supper I give it to my wife as a surprise and she cries and cries and holds me tight and says don’t never go away again and stay close by her and all and I feel so damn good and warm about it all and glad the boat thing is over and we get out a little wine and we decide the baby’s name is gonna be either Nathaniel or Anna and so we drink an extra cup to Nathaniel’s health and we laugh and we sigh and drink one to Anna and my wife she gently fingers the little animal figures and says they’re beautiful and really they ain’t I ain’t much good at that sorta thing but I know what she means and then she says “where did you get the wood?” and I says “it’s left over fro
m the boat” and she don’t say nothin for a moment and then she says “you been over there again today?” and I says “yes just to get the wood” and she says “what’s he doin now he’s got the boat done?” and I says “funny thing they’re all livin in the damn thing all except the old lady she’s over there hollerin at him how he’s gettin senile and where does he think he’s sailin to and how if he ain’t afraid of runnin into a octypuss on the way he oughta get back home and him sayin she’s a nut there ain’t no water and her sayin that’s what she’s been tellin him for six months” and my wife she laughs and it’s the happiest laugh I’ve heard from her in half a year and I laugh and we both have another cup of wine and my wife she says “so he’s just livin on that big thing all by hisself?” and I says “no he’s got his boys on there and some young women who are maybe wives of the boys or somethin I don’t know I ain’t never seen them before and all kindsa damn animals and birds and things I ain’t never seen the likes” and my wife she says “animals? what animals?” and I says “oh all kinds I don’t know a whole damn menagerie all clutterin and stinkin up the boat God what a mess” and my wife laughs again and she’s a little silly with the wine and she says “I bet he ain’t got no pigs” and “oh yes I seen them” I says and we laugh thinkin about pigs rootin around in that big tub and she says “I bet he ain’t got no jackdaws” and I says “yes I seen a couple of them too or mostly I heard them you couldn’t hardly hear nothin else” and we laugh again thinkin about them crows and his old lady and the pigs and all and my wife she says “I know what he ain’t got I bet he ain’t got no lice” and we both laugh like crazy and when I can I says “oh yes he does less he’s took a bath” and we both laugh till we’re cryin and we finish off the wine and my wife says “look now I know what he ain’t got he ain’t got no termites” and I says “you’re right I don’t recollect no termites maybe we oughta make him a present” and my wife she holds me close quiet all of a sudden and says “he’s really movin Nathaniel’s really movin” and she puts my hand down on her round belly and the little fella is kickin up a terrific storm and I says kinda anxious “does it hurt? do you think that—?” and “no” she says “it’s good” she says and so I says with my hand on her belly “here’s to you Nathaniel” and we drain what’s left in the bottom of our cups and the next day we wake up in each other’s arms and it’s rainin and thank God we say and since it’s rainin real good we stay inside and do things around the place and we’re happy because the rain has come just in time and in the evenin things smell green and fresh and delicious and it’s still rainin a little but not too hard so I decide to take a walk and I wander over by my brother’s place thinkin I’ll ask him if he’d like to take on some pet termites to go with his collection and there by God is his wife on the boat and I don’t know if he drug her on or if she just finally come by herself but she ain’t sayin nothin which is damn unusual and the boys they ain’t sayin nothin neither and my brother he ain’t sayin nothin they’re just all standin up there on top and gazin off and I holler up at them “nice rain ain’t it?” and my brother he looks down at me standin there in the rain and still he don’t say nothin but he raises his hand kinda funny like and then puts it back on the rail and I decide not to say nothin about the termites and it’s startin to rain a little harder again so I turn away and go back home and I tell my wife about what happened and my wife she just laughs and says “they’re all crazy he’s finally got them all crazy” and she’s cooked me up a special pastry with fresh meat and so we forget about them but by God the next day the rain’s still comin down harder than ever and water’s beginnin to stand around in places and after a week of rain I can see the crops is pretty well ruined and I’m havin trouble keepin my stock fed and my wife she’s cryin and talkin about our bad luck that we might as well of built a damn boat as plant all them crops and still we don’t figure things out I mean it just don’t come to our minds not even when the rain keeps spillin down like a ocean dumped upsidedown and now water is beginnin to stand around in big pools really big ones and water up to the ankles around the house and leakin in and pretty soon the whole damn house is gettin fulla water and I keep sayin maybe we oughta go use my brother’s boat till this blows over but my wife she says “never” and then she starts in cryin again so finally I says to her I says “we can’t be so proud I’ll go ask him” and so I set out in the storm and I can’t hardly see where I’m goin and I slip up to my neck in places and finally I get to where the boat is and I holler up and my brother he comes out and he looks down at where I am and he don’t say nothin that bastard he just looks at me and I shout up at him I says “hey is it all right for me and my wife to come over until this thing blows over?” and still he don’t say a damn word he just raises his hand in that same sillyass way and I holler “hey you stupid sonuvabitch I’m soakin wet goddamn it and my house is fulla water and my wife she’s about to have a kid and she’s apt to get sick all wet and cold to the bone and all I’m askin you—” and right then right while I’m still talkin he turns around and he goes back in the boat and I can’t hardly believe it me his brother but he don’t come back out and I push up under the boat and I beat on it with my fists and scream at him and call him ever name I can think up and I shout for his boys and for his wife and for anybody inside and nobody comes out “Goddamn you” I cry out at the top of my lungs and half sobbin and sick and then feelin too beat out to do anythin more I turn around and head back for home but the rain is thunderin down like mad now and in places I gotta swim and I can’t make it no further and I recollect a hill nearby and I head for it and when I get to it I climb up on top of it and it feels good to be on land again even if it is soggy and greasy and I vomit and retch there awhile and move further up and the next thing I know I’m wakin up the rain still in my face and the water halfway up the hill toward me and I look out and I can see my brother’s boat is floatin and I wave at it but I don’t see nobody wave back and then I quick look out towards my own place and all I can see is the top of it and of a sudden I’m scared scared about my wife and I go tearin for the house swimmin most all the way and cryin and shoutin and the rain still comin down like crazy and so now well now I’m back here on the hill again what little there is left of it and I’m figurin maybe I got a day left if the rain keeps comin and it don’t show no signs of stoppin and I can’t see my brother’s boat no more gone just water how how did he know? that bastard and yet I gotta hand it to him it’s not hard to see who’s crazy around here I can’t see my house no more I just left my wife inside where I found her I couldn’t hardly stand to look at her the way she was