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  Praise for Steven Barthelme

  AND HE TELLS THE LITTLE

  HORSE THE WHOLE STORY

  “Rich in laid-back realism, winsome fantasy, love, art, cats, and surprises. A first-rate first book.”

  —JOHN BARTH

  “With its unity of situation, And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story is more than the usual collection, yet not quite a sequence. Small in themselves (the longest is 14 pages), the stories grow in reference and resonance through Mr. Barthelme’s considered arrangement. The stories, if not their characters, speak across distances to one another.… exemplars of the minimalist mode …”

  —NEW YORK TIMES

  “Steve Barthelme’s tone is dead-right; his timing is perfect; and his philosophical stance seems about the best for being here and now. He has put generously from his heart and intellect into every line, so there are moments that linger like good memories. The tales are funny and touching. The telling is always deliberate, always hip, and always entirely his.”

  —MARY ROBISON

  “Barthelme’s wild imagination makes a literary feast … [A] great creator. And Barthelme is just that. His brothers, Donald and Frederick, already have carved themselves niches in American fiction.… Steve Barthelme appears destined to do the same.”

  —CHICAGO TRIBUNE

  “To Steve Barthelme’s credit, his stories do not remind me of any other Barthelme’s. They do, however, accomplish one of the things that short stories have always done best: They trace the subcutaneous, prelingual capillaries of the self’s relationship with others and with itself.”

  —GERALD LOCKLIN, STUDIES IN SHORT FICTION

  Praise for THE EARLY POSTHUMOUS WORK

  “Reading The Early Posthumous Work of Steve Barthelme is like having a scintillating conversation with a much smarter friend, a friend with an enterprising sense of wonder and a faithfulness to the ambiguity of life. There’s not a moment of self-absorption in these wise, wry, and wildly entertaining essays.”

  —JOHN DUFRESNE,

  AUTHOR OF REQUIEM, MASS.

  “There’s a much-vaunted notion of writing as craft, but precisely what is meant by this is not often clear. Steven Barthelme’s essays serve as the best of definitions. They afford us the complete pleasure of hearing a thing said with utmost economy and utmost elegance, the two being one. In essay after essay, Barthelme finds memory’s perfect pitch.… Crafted by a master.”

  —ANGELA BALL

  Praise for DOUBLE DOWN

  by Frederick Barthelme and Steven Barthelme

  “The whole book … is a wonderfully seductive performance—witty, self-aware, at once full of subtle feeling and implacably knowing—a triumph of style over temporary insanity … The Barthelme brothers turned losing into an art.”

  —A. ALVAREZ,

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  “Dazzlingly canny and achingly abject.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “A winning book about losing.”

  —CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT,

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “May be worth every penny the Barthelmes lost.”

  —CHICAGO TRIBUNE

  “Talks perceptively and sometimes brilliantly of life, death, family, hope and despair, and money as an expression of these things.”

  —FAY WELDON,

  NEW YORK OBSERVER

  Hush Hush

  © 2012 Steven Barthelme

  First Melville House printing: September 2012

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:

  Barthelme, Steve.

  Hush hush : stories / Steven Barthelme.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-160-7

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A7635H87 2012

  813’.54–dc23

  2012027978

  v3.1

  For Melanie

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Siberia

  Coachwhip

  Heaven

  Interview

  The New South

  Claire

  That Story about Freddy Hylo

  Telephone

  Bye Bye Brewster

  Sale

  Vexed

  Pretend She Don’t Scare You a Bit

  Good Parts

  In the Rain

  Acquaintance

  Ask Again Later

  Hush Hush

  Jealous You, Jealous Me

  Down the Garden Path

  Tahiti

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Siberia

  Every eager enquiry elicits exculpatory equivocation, I said, eventually. You tell me, you’re the doctor. How would I know. I’m just a child. She was sitting up in the big brown chair trying to get me to tell her what ememtottot means. It’s totem-totem, she said, right? What? I said. And then I said, Eureka, that’s it, and I pretended to grin. Children grin. You bounce your head up and down and smile like a moron. You’re a very mature child, Elliott, she said. Memetottot, I said.

  I am not a little adult. I am ten. I am a child and I expect to be treated as a child and it’s unkind to treat me as if I’m some kind of curio or freak just because they are bored or something. I know what ememtottot means and no one else does. It’s my word, so what? I expect to be bought ice cream cones and talked to stupid and let alone. I can be interested in Siberia or words that begin with “E” without a lot of attention and consultations.

  I don’t expect to be put in a cage with a fat lady psychologist. But Nietzsche said, E’er twixt expecting und event ist ecstasy. Nietzsche didn’t say that. I just made it up. Every time I say Nietzsche said something, the lady psychologist looks at me, trying to figure out whether I made it up. Many words begin with E. Eviscerate, Echt, Eldritch, Effervesce, Excreta. Ememtottot. No one but me knows that, what ememtottot means. The lady psychologist does not know.

  Nietzsche is some freak dead guy. I won the spelling bee. First I spelled egregious, and excisable, excalibur, and then mnemonic. I read about Nietzsche in the World Book. I play chess. I have an interest in pythons. I am tired of being a special child. I want to chase cars. No, that’s wrong, that’s dogs.

  I don’t want to go to a school for the “gifted.” Special, gifted, advanced, it all sounds like “freak” to me. They are sending me to this freak school and I’m not adjusting well. I burned myself with a cigarette. Their excuse for locking me in a cage in the basement with a psychologist five days a week. Exculpate Elliott at eventide, excellency. If it’s not a cage, why are there bars on the windows?

  I was first in class excellence, at my old school. You get a card and that’s what it says, First in Class Excellence. In this new school there are much freakier freaks than me; there’s an orange kid who looks like Henry Kissinger and a girl who looks like Christiane Amanpour who looks like Mick Jagger. Henry is some professor’s kid. Most of the kids in this school are professors’ kids or schoolteachers’ kids. It makes you wonder. We are all kids whose parents taught them to say “melancholy,” and then when they say it, the parents gush and swoon. Give them a dog biscuit. Christiane and I are going to run away together and have sex as soon as we feel like it. Erumpent erotogenesis.

  I don’t think that reading the dictionary is so strange for a ten year old child, and I am a child. Lots of us do it. There are two kinds of freaks. Freaks who pretend to be normal and freaks who pretend to be freaks. I pretend to be a normal child, but I’m not very good at it. Christiane pretends to be a freak and she is very
good at it. You should see her singing “Satisfaction.” It is not the freakishness that makes us blue; it’s the pretending. You’ve got to think about it. You’re all the time planning, never being. That’s why Christiane and I are going to run away. We are going to Siberia. Siberia has been misrepresented, so no one knows about it.

  Siberia is a kind of farm with fields and rivers and trees which grow televisions and vines which grow chili cheeseburgers. There’s no brown bread in Siberia and no tofu and no yogurt. In Siberia there are no children and no adults, and no one is special or gifted or freak. Everyone has their own personal television set and no one can look at anyone else without their permission. But everyone likes everyone else so they always have permission. Dogs and cats in Siberia can talk and make jokes like everyone else. Squirrels, too. There are no fleas there, and no one gets sick and no one gets shot. In Siberia if someone wants something, they find it, just lying around on the ground. It rains a lot in Siberia, I love rain.

  Of course none of this is true. The lady psychologist has been to Russia and so she knows and she has told me that Siberia is a vast icy wasteland. That’s what she said, “vast icy wasteland.” I said, You sound like the World Book. I said, Maybe you’re wrong.

  In Siberia anyone who wants to be invisible can learn how easy as pie. Words have special powers in Siberia that they don’t have in Massachusetts or anywhere in the United States.

  I said, Did you see that movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? She said, Yep. I swear that’s what she said. That made me like her a lot better. I said the psychologists were the bad guys in that movie. She said, Are you going to tell me what ememtottot means? She pronounced it wrong, of course. Totem totem? I said. Why don’t I believe you? she said. Because I’m lying? I said. Evidence etches Elliott’s eyes.

  Anyone who hits a dog or a cat in Siberia is sent home permanently, and Siberian dogs and cats always tell. The principal rivers in Siberia are called the Robert DeNiro and the Michelle Pfeiffer. The two rivers cross at the exact center of Siberia which is where you go in Siberia if you want to fall in love. Of course everybody wants to fall in love so they go there about once a week.

  Sometimes Christiane sings “Get Off of My Cloud.”

  The lady psychologist said, Do you think psychologists are bad guys, Elliott? I said, Oh no, you’re here to help me, and she looked at me like I’d just said something about Nietzsche. No, I mean it, I said. Have you ever actually been to Siberia, I said; or was it just Russia? I really am here to help you, she said. I thought as much, I said.

  I love my mother and father even though this school was their stupid idea. Christiane and I will go to the confluence of the Robert DeNiro and the Michelle Pfeiffer every day, when we get to Siberia. We’ll fall in love and kiss and sit on the banks and feed the pythons. Siberian pythons leave the dogs and cats and squirrels be; they eat chili cheeseburgers right off the vines, or ice cream. At higher elevations year round Siberian mountains are crowned in ice cream, which falls in place of snow. Anyone who wants to wear a Band-Aid in Siberia can, but no cut is necessary.

  The lady psychologist is all right and she is trying to help me; she’s just no good at it. She just can’t help me. She said, Why do you think psychologists are bad guys? I laughed, I couldn’t help it.

  It was just a movie, I said. You’re doing your best, I said. I mean, you’re helping me, I said. Really, you really are. Don’t a lot of kids burn themselves and stuff? Do you really think I need help? Maybe I just hate being in this weird school. Maybe when the headmistress tells us how we’re special children and she means we’re better, it sounds like worse to me. Maybe I won’t ever get to be normal, be normal, now that you have started me out this way. I don’t want a headmistress; I want a principal. There isn’t any Siberia is there? There is no place to go. If I go to Siberia, Christiane won’t be allowed to go with me, will she?

  In Siberia the principal mountains are the Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper ranges. In Siberia all people are striped, so there is only one race. In Siberia some people are naturally tall but other people get to be tall one day a week so it doesn’t matter. You can’t tell them apart. People say, I’m taking a tall day today. People say, Let’s dance, and beautiful music starts playing from the sky. People say, I don’t want to go to bed yet, and they don’t have to. People say, I’m so sleepy, and lie down wherever they are and fall asleep. People say, I love you Elliott, you’re not weird at all. People say, Oh, don’t go Elliott, not yet. Stay here with us. People say, Ememtottot, and they disappear.

  Coachwhip

  They were both dead drunk. It had all started inside, the guy had been riding him, talking trash, and then Mitchell began to remember, it was like a procession, people he didn’t much like, people who had given him a hard time, guy named Jeff at school, that must’ve been grammar school, and Robin, and that guy at that sad little dinner party in Boston, who hated Southerners and out of nowhere said, “Yeah, Texas is hell,” and wanted to “go outside,” the morons always want to “go outside,” so this time he had gone, and some women, too, the big one who said, “He can talk,” and others, and that’s how he’d gotten out here in this oily Fort Worth parking lot behind the bar, the blacktop broken but glistening in the city lights from beyond this ditch or whatever it was, the night wind blowing grit into his eyes, and his nose bloody, kneeling on this guy in the plaid cowboy shirt, watching the loudmouth’s eyes roll back, and his hands tight on the guy’s neck, he was hardly resisting at all anymore. I’m really no good at this, Mitchell thought—a lucky punch had put the guy down—he sort of stepped into it, shit, this is easy, no wonder they like it so much, I’m going to kill this fucker.

  But Mitchell wasn’t paying attention. He felt like puking, and his eyes were closing, and his mind was wandering, to a day he had spent with his father—Quinn, his real father—twelve years earlier. He hated his father. Even when his father died, he had not stopped hating him, but only thought, She didn’t need fancy doctors to tell her that, when they discovered that his heart had a hole in it. His father had been 45.

  • • •

  They found the snake in August in a pile of stones in the only shade near a dry creek bed, long and white, lying oddly still, almost stunned, in the midst of big white blocks of limestone. Coachwhip, Quinn thought, and although he knew what it was, he told Mitch to get the book from the car. “We’ll look it up,” he said. “Watch the barbed wire. Bring the pillowcase, too.”

  It hadn’t been hard to catch. Quinn had gotten his foot on it quickly, before it knew it was prey, or slow maybe from the heat. He’d never seen a slow Coachwhip, except ones that had been in cages for years and had no place to go.

  Quinn sat on one of the rocks, holding the snake behind its head. It was about two and a half feet, a young one. Light, the color of sand, but Coachwhips varied a lot; some were red. Looking around at the bleached limestone the creek had cut its bed through, it was obvious why this one was almost white.

  Mitch came back from the road.

  “What’ve we got?” Quinn said.

  “Just a minute,” the boy said. He was sitting on the ground with his short legs splayed out to the black cowboy boots Quinn had bought for him. The boots looked ridiculously large, even though the boy was fat. He hadn’t wanted boots, but Quinn had insisted. Got to have boots if we’re going snake-hunting next summer.

  “Look under ‘Racers,’ ” Quinn said. “Or Masticophis.” Now he was showing off. Jesus, the Latin name, no less.

  The boy noticed. His expression changed, some of the joy went out of it. “You’re teaching me,” he said. His eyes had gone to slits. His too round face didn’t look angry; he just looked like someone else’s kid.

  “Somebody’s got to. Teach you, I mean. C’mon, what is it?”

  “It’s a Racer?”

  “No, but you’re close,” Quinn said. “Did you find the pictures? Find the pictures.”

  The boy was back to tearing pages as he flipped through the Fiel
d Guide in his lap. He brushed the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. They’re so forgiving, Quinn thought. He’s already forgiven me.

  “Here it is!” Mitch said. “Lemme see it.”

  Quinn held the snake out to him, and it started to move again, but he tightened his grip.

  “Western Coachwhip,” the boy said, and then looked down at the color plates in the book again. “Maybe it’s Eastern Coachwhip.”

  “They have maps in the back,” Quinn told him. “They show you where each kind lives.” When he heard a car, he glanced up, over the rocks and past the mesquite tree by the little creek, toward the road, but it was just a pickup.

  When Mitch had checked the ranges of the two varieties and decided—Western—he looked up again. “I can keep him, Daddy?” And then, when he saw his father’s hesitation: “You want him?”

  Quinn laughed, involuntarily, and shook his head. “No.” He shook his head again. “I was just thinking maybe it’d be better to let him go. You know, sometimes they die, you put them in a cage.” But he felt uncomfortable, telling the boy he couldn’t have what he wanted, and he tried to find some feeling behind the words, but all he thought was, Sometimes they die when a car runs over them, sometimes they die when a hawk catches them, sometimes …

  “I can keep him, then?” Mitch said. “I’ll take good care of him. He won’t die.”

  “Before winter,” Quinn said, “you have to let him go. He won’t make it through the winter.”

  The boy’s nod, as he reached for the snake, was so slight that Quinn wasn’t sure he’d even seen it.

  “Mitchell?”

  “Okay,” the boy said.

  “October first. And here. We’ll come out here and let him go. Okay?”

  “All right.”

  With luck, Quinn thought, it’ll make it to October. And they walked back to the car.