The dead have priveleges. They can shop at Target and K-Mart, places they'd never dream of going before. They can twirl the racks of cheap shirts and dresses and never worry about paying for anything.
"I'm so ridiculous, even death won't have me." Jonis Agee's tragicomic narrator in"My Last Try," one of the twenty-nine short-shorts in A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, is red-eyed, bruised, exhausted from maintaining a marriage and affair ("being unfaithful isn't all that easy"). So rather than continue the charade, she decides one Thursday afternoon while pulling into the garage to simply close her eyes, relax, and take a nap in the car with the motor running--the old carbon monoxide trick. One problem, though: in her haste to die she has neglected important details. As unprepared for her suicide as for the effort required by infidelity, she fails to stop the gap under the door that allows the gas to escape, and wakes thirty minutes later more weary than ever--too weary, in fact, to finish the job she started. Preferring the company of her husband to "spend[ing] the rest of the afternoon plugging holes," she turns off the ignition and goes inside.
All right, so this isn't the first time we've seen a comic failed suicide. Still, this one is almost as memorable (though less humorous) as my favorite, Becky McGrath's collapsing chandelier trick in Beth Henley's Pulitzer-winning play Crimes of the Heart. Like McGrath, Agee's narrator laughs at herself--sort of. Unlike McGrath, this narrator experiences no happy-goofy resurrection, only a sobering if predictable epiphany: this latest in a long history of petty failures only reveals she's as incompetent in death as in life. What I find most interesting in this story, in this character's self-revelation, is Agee's take on the essential arrogance of epiphany itself--our tendency to regard our ordinary screw-ups as unique catastrophes and our lives as uniquely cursed.
Not all the stories in the collection, however, follow this "I'm a failure, Here's why, Here's what I've learned" pattern. "From the Texaco Station Behind My House" and "What's It Like In There, They'll Ask," in particular, read more like short prose poems, and demonstrate Agee's affinity for creating entire emotional landscapes from a few evocative details. In fact, I can't think of a writer in recent memory whose stories better illustrate the old iceberg analogy creative writing teachers love to use in undergraduate workshops.
Still, something more than subtelty and narrative precision brought me back for a second and third reading of several of the pieces, something more than inventive language and memorable portraits of midwestern blue collar dysfunctionality. The phrase "dark vision" keeps coming to mind, as do the words "haunting," "resonant," "disquieting," all of which I realize are hopelessly cliched and incapable of describing what Agee does so very well, for instance, in "From the Texaco Station Behind My House."
. . . the squeals of pigs fighting in the long silvery livestock truck parked under the lights. You can only imagine their terror and violence. . . A young girl stands on tiptoes to pull the rubber-edged scraper across the windshield of the family pickup. . . her bare legs two taut pale lines, her back to the pigs. . . and the sobbing pigs echo all the way down into the mist-scarved river valley, past the turnoff going south on 17.
I found myself reminded, while reading "At The Texaco Station," of the unforgettable moment inSilence of the Lambs when Jody Foster's character relates a scene of childhood sexual abuse in symbolic terms. She remembers being led into a barn by her foster father, and a feeling of terror and pity at the passivity and helplessness of the lambs led to the slaughter. For Foster's character, the horrible memory could only be expressed through association with the lambs, and in Agee's snapshot scene we see similar devices at work. The pale, thin legs of a young girl highlighted against a dingy pickup truck, the sound of pigs screaming and fighting in the distance, even the squeegee with which the girl is cleaning the windshield, all left me feeling uncomfortable with the narrator and his/her situation, but I couldn't quite understand why. Of all the stories of this collection, I find these "icebergs" most captivating because their mystery affects me in the way a de Chirico painting affects me. I'm disturbed, puzzled, and utterly absorbed.
My only real problem with the collection is with the packaging. The title, for instance,A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, along with the cover photo of cowboy boots with hearts and roses, suggests a kind of cowboy kitsch I find thankfully absent in the stories themselves. The best pieces in the collection, in fact, avoid guns, honky tonks, and conventional broken hearts altogether. In this number I include "Walking the Dog," "Dead Space," "The Family of Death," and "Cata."
I probably wouldn't recommend A .38 Special and a Broken Heart to a friend looking for a good holiday read; most of the stories are either too elliptical or too bleak to qualify. Still, it seems to me this collection deserves to be read, because Jonis Agee is in my estimation a fearless writer and this a startling collection with staying power. These stories will stick with you.