Eight Mile High

Eight Mile High

by Jim Ray Daniels
Eight Mile High

Eight Mile High

by Jim Ray Daniels

eBook

$14.99  $19.95 Save 25% Current price is $14.99, Original price is $19.95. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

In these linked stories, the constants are the places—from Eight Mile High, the local high school, to Eight Miles High, the local bar; from The Clock, a restaurant that never closes, to Stan’s, a store that sells misfit clothes. Daniels’s characters wander Detroit, a world of concrete, where even a small strip of greenery becomes a hideout for mystery and mayhem. Even when they leave town—to Scout camp, or Washington, DC, or the mythical Up North, they take with them  their hardscrabble working-class sensibilities and their determination to do what they must do to get by. With a survival instinct that includes a healthy dose of humor, Daniels’s characters navigate work and love, change and loss, the best they can. These characters don’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for themselves, even when they stumble. They dust themselves off and head back into the ring with another rope-a-dope wisecrack. These stories seem to suggest that we are always coming of age, becoming, trying to figure out what it means to be an adult in this world, attempting to figure out a way to forgive ourselves for not measuring up to our own expectations of what it means to lead a successful, happy life.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781628950274
Publisher: Michigan State University Press
Publication date: 07/01/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 176
File size: 646 KB

About the Author

Jim Ray Daniels has published four collections of short stories and has won numerous prizes for his work. His writing has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, in Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 anthologies, and in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry series.

Read an Excerpt

Eight Mile High


By Jim Ray Daniels

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2014 Jim Ray Daniels
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-027-4



CHAPTER 1

SOUL SACRIFICE


Mike Klonoski, the hippie who sat across from me in Earth Science, did the school's morning announcements once a week, choosing the song that played in the hallways while we changed classes. I'd asked him to play "Soul Sacrifice" by Santana and loaned him my Woodstock album. That ecstatic guitar spoke in tongues down the long echoing halls of Eight Mile High where all 1,256 of us bopped a little, jiggled a little, shook our thangs a little, quicker in spite of wanting to move slower because "Soul Sacrifice," for crying out loud! Earth Science, for crying out loud—science for those not going to college—did not provide information more useful than biology or chemistry for us future factory rats, but having earth in the title made it sound practical. After all, we lived on earth. Why didn't they just call it Earth? They didn't call biology Biology Science. Klonoski arrived late to class when he did announcements. He was a music head and a pothead and just about any kind of head you could name, his wild, frizzy hair parted in the middle, permanently electric. He was one of two hippies at Eight Mile, the other being Jim Terlicki, a freak in every sense of the word, the tallest kid in the school with another six inches of blond afro on top. He and Klonoski let their freak flags fly, and those flags were glow-in-the-dark, tie-dyed Acapulco Gold. My father still cut my hair—too short, and we fought over it. Beautiful Belinda Spitza sat in front of me, her long hair nearly down to her ass—and her ass that day, the pale, round scoops of it, slightly exposed above hip-hugger jeans as she bent over in her seat. As "Soul Sacrifice" wound down, and we sat waiting for class to begin, Mr. Chubbell, with his bald, skeletal, zombie-like head, smiled at Belinda as he did every single day, though he smiled at no one else ever and resented teaching Earth Science because he was a physicist who should only be teaching the smart kids. Oh, Belinda knew what she knew because, like us, she was no dummy, so she always sort of smiled back, then looked away and got her B, sacrificing a little of her soul, but on that "Soul Sacrifice" day, she squirmed in her seat as if she was ready to rise up and testify, and I was swimming with her ass, neither of us distracted by books—they were so heavy, we were so light—and for ten seconds I knew how hot the earth's core was. When Klonoski showed up, his hair wagging like a happy dog, and plopped down across from me, he handed back my album that gave me all the multiple choices I would ever need, along with a convenient place to roll joints, and I unfolded the cover at my desk to glance at the large photo of blurry naked people, and Chubbell was taking roll and I was Here! and Klonoski was Here! and Belinda turned around, and it looked like she was going to say something, her eyes meeting mine above the album cover, but she didn't, and because Belinda knew what she knew and would've gone to Woodstock, given the chance, she gave me a smile that exploded my head like a cherry bomb, then turned back to say Here with a sneer, and Klonoski looked over at Belinda's ass and then at me and smiled and rolled his enormous eyes like something out of astronomy, like a constellation we all knew but had no name for.

CHAPTER 2

SURVIVOR'S GUILT


Mr. Buck, the scout leader, shuffled and dealt cards to the other fathers at the picnic table across the large common room from where Al sat. He could hear the suction of their mouths off beer bottles and the click of flipped cards. Through the thin wall of the bunkroom behind him, the other scouts breathed the deep, uncomplicated breaths of the young and exhausted.

"Alvin, get some sleep," Mr. Masch sighed. His own son, already built like the football lineman he was to become, snored loudly behind them. "We'll wake you if your parents make it." He paused. "I mean, they will make it. Just maybe not till morning."

"Yeah, get some sleep, Al," Mr. Buck said. At least he knew better than to call him Alvin. "Snow's really coming down out there." He nodded to the window across from him. Al looked, but from where he sat, it was just a dark square. No moon, no stars. No streetlights, no cars. His parents had promised to drive out and take him home for his championship basketball game tomorrow.

Stony Creek, the Scout camp, was an hour north of Detroit. Al's first campout with the troop, and he hadn't wanted to miss it or his game. That previous summer, he had emerged from a rare illness that had forced him to miss a third of the school year, and his parents were still cutting him slack for surviving. He was trying not to be the sick kid anymore. Fall had been a failure as he struggled to catch up in school. They'd decided not to make him repeat fifth grade so he could stay with his friends, but his friends back on Rome treated him as if he still had something they could catch. Three months equaled three years in kid time, and his parents and teachers simply did not understand.

"I'm okay," Al said, so softly that it wasn't clear anyone had heard him. A tangled cloud of cigarette smoke hung above the men's table.

He had a fever that wouldn't quit. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong, eventually settling on viremia—viruses cruising through his bloodstream, stopping wherever they felt like it. He didn't want to eat or move or think. Sometimes Al thought he was willing himself to be sick, holding the thermometer too tight. What was it about the world that had made him sick, even with spring erupting outside the tiny window of his bedroom, trying to intrude, impose its green medicine? He lay sprawled in a daze while the world spun curveballs around him. His mother brought him meals on an old wooden tray that had been in the family forever.

"This tray makes me happy and sad," his mother said. "I don't expect you to understand that." Al's grandparents on his mother's side were both dead. His grandfather had died from cancer—a long, grim illness that wore Al's grandmother out so badly that she died shortly after. At the end, they both had eaten off that tray.


His parents had no way of contacting the camp. No phones nearby that someone might answer late on a Saturday night. And if his parents were dead ... Al forced himself to stop. His father was a good driver when he wasn't drinking, and he wouldn't be drinking. Al could remember little of the drive up on Friday night—the skies already dark, snow piled up to the roadside reflectors, even before the storm hit.

Al had fired a .22 that afternoon at the rifle range. His foggy glasses clicked against the side of the rifle, which recoiled into his shoulder and tilted them askew. A stray dog had bounded through the snow behind the targets, and they all stopped shooting while it passed. The closest house was miles away. He wanted to call out to the dog, but it quickly disappeared into distant snow.

He retrieved his paper target and examined it closely. All twenty of his shots had missed.

"Not quite ready for your marksman merit badge, Snyder," his patrol leader, Wozniak, said, looking down over his shoulder. "Hell, I could hit that damn target with my eyes closed. With my back to the range, I could still at least hit the fucking thing."

Swearing was something scouts did, Al noticed. And spitting. He'd have to work on spitting if he was going to stick it out and earn some patches to sew on his uniform—or on a red vest like the older scouts wore.

Aside from Mr. Buck, the men on the campout seemed to act as if their wives had tricked them into volunteering with some fairy tale about bonding with their sons. They mostly stood around smoking cigarettes while the boys completed a series of outdoor activities focused on survival skills. How to build a fire in the snow. How to cook in the snow. How to stay warm in the snow. How to pee in the snow—that seemed to be a favorite, though no lessons were necessary. Everybody had their Scout knife and their Scout flashlight and their Scout backpack. Al wished his gear wasn't so new. He tried to scuff his pack with snow.

The older boys snuck cigarettes. Boy Scouts was a Little Man's Club. The fathers had come of age and spent their military years fighting the Korean War. Al's father had spent his military service in Detroit—his friend's father knew a colonel who adjusted his orders so he could stay home with his new bride. He'd survived by taking the easy way out. He had not volunteered for the campout.

"I don't want to be in Scouts," Al had told his father. "None of my friends joined," he said, unsure who currently counted as a friend.

"You've got to be a leader, not a follower." One of his father's basic tenets, and it had led him to start his own business wholesaling nonperishable grocery items to small mom-and-pop stores in Detroit. Which led him to work sixty-hour weeks and avoid smoking cigarettes and drinking beer in the great outdoors with the other fathers.

"Give it a try," his father said. He had been a scout once, and his old Scout Handbook was among the few items he salvaged from the fire that burned down his childhood home. It still carried smoke in its pages. Al was giving it a try. His father, after a discussion with his mother, had agreed to drive up after work Saturday to bring him home for his game. Al had moved up to starter halfway through the season. If they won the championship, he wanted to be in the team photo—some proof that he was back. He'd counted six photos he should have been in while paging through last year's yearbook.

A bunk creaked behind him, followed by the heavy clunk of someone landing on the floor from the "Willies" side of the cabin. One side was called Jakes and the other side Willies. They'd had a big pillow fight until Mr. Buck let out a piercing whistle and they all retreated to their separate sides to sleep. Al, sitting in the corner of the common room, was stationed in Boy Scout limbo. None of them was named Jake or Willie—Al wondered who thought of calling them that. He'd have to ask his father about it. If he showed up. If he was still alive. If the world was still round, and the sun hadn't given up on them.

Many of his father's customers were Arab store owners from the inner city who loaded up station wagons or pickup trucks with cases of noodles and Spam and candy bars and cigarettes and whatever else was on their lists as they pushed large, open carts through the wide aisles of the warehouse over on Eight Mile Road, the border with Detroit. Al often helped his father on Saturdays before things like Scouts and basketball came along. He missed those afternoons in the dark, scuffed-up warehouse—his father, relaxed, joking, buying him lunch at a Greek place down the block, letting him order one of their sweet, flaky pastries for dessert. When they returned home after a day at the warehouse, Al often felt a strange, cold pang of not understanding something about his parents.

Chubby little Ralph Morton—the other boys joked that the T was silent—emerged from the Willies' open doorway and slipped outside in his long johns to pee, then hurried back in, rubbing snow off his bare feet. The men glanced up, then returned to their cards. Ralph spotted Al in the dark corner and slipped in next to him on the rough bench.

"You in trouble, Alvin? Did you pee your pants? You want your Mommy?"

Al was afraid to speak for fear of breaking into tears and earning his own cruel nickname, but he was able to hiss out, "Moron," and Ralph, after rubbing away fake tears, trudged back to his bunk.

Was he going to be Alvin to the whole troop? The only Alvin everyone knew was from "Alvin and the Chipmunks," and they mimicked the famous shout of their manager, Dave: "AAAAAAAAALVIN!!!!" He'd heard it the first couple of years at school, but it died out after the other kids got to know him. Here at Scout camp, it was back again.

"There were no chipmunks when we named you, Alvin," his mother explained. "There was just your grandfather Alvin."

His mother. He couldn't think of her being gone, hurt, or even just stranded in the storm in their dark car. He did want his mother. He loved her above all else. She who had nursed him through his illness with patience and tenderness and boundless love.

The men were clearing off the picnic table and stowing their empties. "Al, it's time, buddy," Mr. Buck said, standing above him, hammy fist on Al's shoulder. "In the morning, they'll be here, I promise. Now, go to bed."

"They should make a rule ...Look at that kid. Scouting ain't about that," Al heard Mr. Masch mutter. Al had the top bunk in the far corner, one that had not been taken in the mad rush of friends grabbing bunks for each other Friday night. Beneath him slept Lenny Kowalski. Lenny the Fatherless. Lenny the Lip. Lenny the Cruel, who no one wanted to share a bunk with. If his own father was gone, would Al end up like Lenny, full of a sickness that would never go away? Lenny's muscled arm draped itself down onto the floor, and Al was careful not to step on it. The troop had a pecking order of coolness, but Lenny, a constant hissing fuse of anger, seemed to be on an entirely different list, a list of one. If scouting was such a social thing, what was a misfit like Lenny doing there? Maybe someone made him join too.

Al carefully climbed up, then began his wait for morning, unimaginable morning. He remained motionless, believing that nothing could happen as long as he lay still and breathed softly. But each breath seemed to stutter its way out straight from his heart. How could Mr. Buck promise him anything? His brain buzzed with doubt.

During his long night on the top bunk, Al twisted and wrung out the idea of his parents being dead, like a cloth that would never dry. He was suddenly at their funeral standing between two coffins while all around him people applauded. He wasn't sure what he'd said to elicit the applause, but it seemed to go on as long as he wanted it to. He'd live with his grandparents. His teachers would hold him up as an example of quiet courage. The girls, oh, the cute girls would all walk home with him. The bullies wouldn't dare touch him. He'd be a superhero with the power to convince people to be nice to each other.

His fantasy was like a big stage—when he stepped out of the bright lights and behind the curtains, a shadow dropped down, darker than even a night without moon or stars. The cold shadow of grief. For a moment, had he wished them dead?

For hours, the electric surge of panic hammered relentlessly against sleep until sleep softened and began to absorb the blows like a thick sponge. Sleep told him he would be safe in its moist cave, in the warm depths of his sleeping bag. Sleep took him.


In November of the previous year, before he got sick, Al's dog Butch died. One day he came home from school and took off his wet boots and set them on the steps to the basement, as usual. He walked into the silent kitchen, where his mother sat, smoking, her eyes red, mouth slack.

"Sit down, Al," she said.

She had baked homemade bread, a rare treat. The smell of her delicious, misshapen loaves mingled with cigarette smoke in an odd mix of comfort and strain. Al put his hand on a loaf: still warm.

"Can I have a piece?"

"I have to tell you something first."

Al sat slumped in his chair. His book bag dropped to the floor. He struggled with wanting the bread before it cooled, and with his mother's grim expression.

"I had Butch put to sleep today."

Al glanced frantically around the kitchen. She had removed the bowls, the dog food, the leash. Had she even picked up Butch's last crap in the backyard?

"He was okay yesterday. He—I didn't get to say goodbye. How could you do it? How?" He ran out of the kitchen and into his room. He lay on the rug where Butch had slept just last night. His mother had vacuumed, but the rug still smelled of dog. Al pushed his forehead against it. He grabbed handfuls and held on.

Later, his mother came in and sat on his bed. "He was in so much pain. It didn't seem fair to keep feeding him pills. I wanted to tell you first, but I had to do it before I lost my nerve."

"You should've let me say goodbye. He was my dog."

"Al, we usually don't get the choice to say goodbye." His mother tilted her head back and ran her hands through her hair. She'd had two miscarriages since Al was born. They got him Butch after she lost the last one. "You're stuck with the last stupid things you said to people. You're stuck wishing you had another chance. Wishing you knew it was the last time."

"But you had a choice."

"I said goodbye for you."


Al woke to the cabin stirring. Exaggerated groans and cursing. From below, Lenny kicked the bottom of his bunk. Al's whole body lifted slightly, and he landed rigid with fear. Life was going on for the other boys, but his was stopped. His was turning blue. Lenny would be sorry. Lenny would seek forgiveness.

He thought of Butch again as the scouts ate cereal and drank cartons of orange drink at the picnic tables while the men swilled coffee and started back in on the cigarettes. Butch was gone, and Al had already forgotten too much—he closed his eyes and tried to picture him, but on the jostling bench, it was impossible. His parents had not arrived at first light like he had imagined. The other fathers would not look at him.

After breakfast, they bundled up and headed out to learn more survival skills. If his parents were dead, none of those skills would help him. He wanted to wait at the cabin for news, but Mr. Buck gave him a tired smile and insisted that he join them. "It'll be good for you," he said.

They were learning how to make a snow shelter. The important thing was not to panic, the young instructor stressed. Keep moving. Stay warm. Focus on the work.

Most of them were using their entrenching tools to dig snow caves into the side of Mount Baldy, the high hill in the center of the camp. They spread out, looking for promising nooks and wind-curled drifts left by last night's blizzard. The sun reflected harsh off the snow, and Al couldn't look anywhere without squinting. His heart jolted and throbbed against his ribs.

A group of older scouts worked together on an igloo. Laughing and boisterous, their deepening voices echoed over to the far end of the hillside where Al was digging, nearly alone. Lenny was closest to him, clawing frantically like a starving dog or squirrel retrieving a remembered bone or nut. Lenny's caves kept collapsing, but he didn't seem to care—he just moved to a different spot and began again.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Eight Mile High by Jim Ray Daniels. Copyright © 2014 Jim Ray Daniels. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents Soul Sacrifice Survivor’s Guilt Et Tu 13 Ways of Looking at My Father in His Bathing Suit (Times 2) Pearl Diving Our Lady of No Mercy Bend in the Road AWOL Target Practice 13-Part Story with Mime My Republican Love Affair Dream House Raccoon Heaven The Tall Tale of the Cowboy Mattress
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews