Slide - Kyle Beachy [0]
The Slide
“The theme is American Home, that place that lesser writers sentimentalize and satirize. Kyle Beachy writes with bracing melancholy in a voice that is all his own, and his St. Louis, like Cheever's Westchester, is populated with isolated, self-aware characters, each of whom is new to us. His hero, Potter Mays, is great company.”
—Jincy Willett, author of The Writing Class
and Winner of the National Book Award
“With The Slide, Kyle Beachy turns the coming-of-age story on its ear. There's the decay of both the American city and the American nuclear family, the painful inevitability of friends and lovers growing apart, and the ongoing difficulty of denying one's base appetites. Plus baseball. Lots of baseball. Beachy has emerged in his debut fully formed. His writing is propulsive, unique without being forced, and eminently readable.”
—Ron Currie, Jr., author of God Is Dead
and Everything Matters!
“[The Slide] is at once hilarious, strange and uncomfortable.”
—Publishers Weekly
For Neil Beachy and Harry Brown,
two men I wish I could have known
Now I'm gonna be twenty-two, I say oh my and uh boo hoo.
Iggy Pop, “1969”
june
one
what was good about the road was that the road's decisions were already made. For two full days I'd watched it emerge on the horizon and disappear beneath me. I saw it change colors, from black to gray to brown, and sometimes felt the seams between them, a clunk against the steady tremble. Los Angeles giving way to glittery Vegas, Martian Utah, and a blind nighttime passage through the Rockies. Then a fresh morning of eastern Colorado fading into prodigious fields of Kansan wheat, forever-sized and flat like nothing you've ever seen, until finally Missouri, blunt and dark, a series of brake lights to guide along the final leg. I surrendered to the road. Only once did I pick up my phone and call Audrey. After eight rings I heard her voice mail, and here I likely should have made some gesture, but everything had already been said, repeated, thrown around like rolled-up socks.
Then I was back in the driveway, engine idling, wondering just what in the shit to do now. There was a new addition to the house jutting into what used to be side yard. I could imagine my parents in the living room, quiet and mostly still, cozy within that special silence of the long-married. If I unfastened my seat belt, the car would beep at me.
Soon enough the front door opened to reveal parents silhouetted against the yellow glow of home. I cut the engine, stepped into the night, raised a hand, and smiled. Hello. The air felt and tasted heavy and wet. A hug, a hand pressed flush against cheek, and even though it wasn't a week since we'd all been together at commencement, I sensed relief in them both. During her second hug my mother swayed and spoke quietly to the air, our boy, our boy, our boy.
“Makes more sense to unload now,” my father said. “Twice the hands.”
She said to make a pile of laundry and she'd take care of it in the morning. “Are you hungry? I've got salami.”
Car unloaded, shoes off, I sat on the counter above the dishwasher and chewed a sandwich. My parents watched. I always needed this, when they would stand as a pair, sharing the same frame. These are my parents, these two adults. I am their only remaining child. My brother, Fredrick Alan Mays, drowned at the age of five when he chased his rubber four square ball into the leaf- and tarpaulin-covered swimming pool at the Sheldon Woods apartment complex. At the time my mother was spoon-feeding a ten-month-old me special prescription formula. My father was at work, making his way through a small mountain of legal briefs. There were no witnesses. Freddy falling onto an ancient, heavy tarp improperly anchored to the pool's deck and becoming entangled, sinking beneath fetid off-season water while my mother ensured I was taking to the new formula. One splash, then many more as his arms flailed, little puddles on the deck, ball bobbing, Freddy sinking. This took a moment of active deliberation: