When we think of teachable stories, we often reach deep into the rucksack of the literary past, pulling out classroom-tested stories that have worked their way into the canon. While there is obviously a ton to learn from these pieces, contemporary short story writers are also completing strong work built upon teachable literary foundations, while also finding fascinating ways to advance the form. In this space, we’ll highlight some of these more modern stories and explore a bit of what they have to teach us as we continue to do our part to push literature forward.
Introduction
In “Somebody is Going to Have to Pay for This” by Benjamin Percy, (published online at The Barcelona Review), we meet David, who works for the city flushing water hydrants. He values his peace, but one day his boss gives him a partner and tasks him with mentoring the new hire. Fresh off a deployment in Iraq, Stephen is more blunt than David expects, and their friendship begins to develop after that bracing honesty allows Stephen to straightforwardly discuss the awful birthmark that has kept David so fearfully alone for much of his life. The two become something like friends as they go about their work, until Stephen invites David to go hunting on his property. David kills a deer after Stephen struggles to pull the trigger, and for a moment it looks like they might actually become friends; the next Monday morning, Stephen has reenlisted in the military and is on his way back.
I want to say quickly, while this is certainly a story of Percy’s that I admire, I discovered in researching this essay how startlingly few of his best pieces could actually be found online. In my opinion his best story (“Refresh, Refresh“) is paywalled over at The Paris Review, who also appears to be the original in-print home of the story we’ll be discussing today (in issue 180); a few of his short pieces appear at other big-name journals with similar restrictions. This piece appears to be the only fiction of his that can still be read online (ahem, through reputable sources). I was surprised by this because of the sheer amount of work Percy has produced; he’s working on comic books and action/adventure/horror novels these days, but he’s also written collections of short stories and an absolutely incredible craft book. I don’t think I’ve run a workshop yet without assigning his essay “The Slowest Reader” from The Rumpus. This was just a quick plug; the man’s got multiple pieces that I count in my personal canon, and if you haven’t already done so, he’s well-worth a deep dive. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
The Basics
This story is written in third person present tense. We follow David, but this isn’t the often-used deep character dive third person that wanders into every crevice of David’s mind; rather, we’re using point of view in a more cinematic sense here, with our camera mostly just following David around, only occasionally jumping into explanation that only an in-the-head narrator could know. This is a strategy my students are using more and more often, and feels to me heavily borrowed from film; it’s a fusion of the objective camera with the all-knowing literary narrator in a way that makes a ton of sense for the modern experience—if you haven’t throw this technique into your bag of tricks, or haven’t seen it before, it’s an incredibly versatile minor modification of traditional third limited that can move a story forward quickly without losing the deep introspection that third allows.
Place
The most immediate lesson that one can take from any Percy story is the importance of place. I’ve never heard of Pine, Oregon—I have no idea if it’s a real place—but it would be easy to describe it in metaphorical terms: another failing small-town, say, or a suburb of Portland perhaps, or a college town, or any of twenty-five other cliches we could deliver in a single clause and then step away pretending we’d done our writerly duty. But that is not Percy’s way.
Instead, we use our setting in just about every way we can. Pine, Oregon, may not have anything about the place that immediately sets it apart, like some of the settings in other Percy stories—in “The Caves of Oregon,” there are literal caves underneath some of the houses; in “Refresh, Refresh” there is a hole in the ground from a meteor hit and also a military base nestled in the area specifically because of the exact terrain of that town—but that doesn’t stop it from affecting the story on a plot level, on a character level, on a linguistic level, and even on a Google Street View level.
Considering plot, the inciting incident of this story—David being forced to take on Stephen as a partner—happens because this is the kind of small town where the Fire Chief can put in a word for his kid and get a job locked in instantly. On the level of character, David wears ballcaps to hide the birthmark on his face, a Portland Trailblazer cap, which is a small detail to be sure but in many stories something smacking that distinctly of place would never have been mentioned. Thinking linguistically, these characters don’t speak like an American, or Western American, or even Oregonian, but instead “all the vowels stretched out in a Central Oregon drawl, each word a lazy sort of song, clipped off by a hard consonant.” That’s some specificity right there.
But where Percy really sets himself apart as a writer of place is in the most granular, street-level explorations. David and Stephen are not just in Pine, Oregon. “They drive along North Avenue to Seventy-sixth Street, to Kenwood, and up into Pharaoh Butte, where retired Californians live in three-story homes, set back in their own spaces of lawn with wraparound porches and American Beauty rose gardens surrounded by Japanese maples.” There are individual neighborhoods built out within the town, each housing different socioeconomic classes and types of homes. David drives for a living, and so the places he drives are mentioned, as is the Bald Butte Drive-In where he gets his lunch. This level of detail and specificity doesn’t build conflict, doesn’t deepen character, doesn’t strictly present theme or mood; it’s there because it’s there, because this is a rock-solid place that exists within the story, and these are roads being traveled down so they deserve to be named.
All this, from a town so small that I, who used to work a UPS factory job that required memorization of damn near every zip code on the west coast, have never heard of it (again, if it’s real). Read all the space that Pine, Oregon, receives in this story and tell me there’s absolutely nothing that your character’s town has that deserves a mention.
People at Work
There is always a heavy focus in Percy’s stories on action. Especially with much of his more recent work, that has a tendency to mean Action in the more grandiose sense, but even in quieter pieces his characters are constantly in motion. There is no idle time to sit and think while we all pretend time doesn’t exist for fifteen pages. Not in a Percy story. It’s advice that we hear all the time, to pair thoughts with actions and to keep our characters in motion, to make sure that internal conflict is supported by some level of external event, but I certainly have a writerly tic of stepping away from my scene to soliloquize, or to describe, or to explain, whenever the opportunity strikes. Whenever I realize I’m falling into that habit again, it’s Percy to whom I go back and read, to re-ground myself and my writing in solid earth.
A perfect example of this can be found in Percy’s approach to jobs. Our introduction to this story, and to our main character David, comes through the job he performs; the first three paragraphs are spent on describing the job, his typical day, and the value that the job brings. Everything we learn about David in this intro comes in relation to his work and how he approaches it; we learn about him driving, and him opening the hydrants, and how long he’s been doing it. Once we introduce some conflict and then the inciting incident with Joe’s appearance, it continues to be filtered through the job; first, he’s afraid he’s going to lose it because of the new guy coming in, then he learns he’s forced to work with the new guy because his boss orders it. As the story progresses, a large number of the scenes shown take place at work, and much of the dialogue centers around work (both the current job and also Stephen’s previous military experience).
David starts his job at 7:00am; when he gets off, he goes home and watches TV and drinks then goes to bed. Life happens when he’s working. When these men are moving, they are working. When they’re talking, they’re driving, either filling time or heading to the next hydrant or finding people to tell about the next hydrant flush. The job fills the majority of their waking life—as jobs do for most of us—and as a result the job takes up a significant amount of page space as well. That, well, that makes sense.
Trying to convince my students to write about work is almost always a losing battle, but look at how Percy does it here. It’s boring, even and especially to David, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a large focus of his. And yet, we manage to explain it here without getting stuck in it; after our first explanation of the job, which only takes a few sentences, much of the actual tedium of the work gets handled in dialogue. This allows the story to feel like the work is everywhere, without needing to be hit over the head constantly with another hydrant flushing. Additionally, we’re shown different aspects of the job: the driving, the flushing, the avoiding work, talking to the boss, random conversations to fill time, talking to folks telling them that the water pressure will be off for a while, and the water main break. All of those are equally part of the work, and so they each get their moment of shine, which again keeps it feeling fresh for us as readers even while we still feel the drudgery that is that daily clock.
Information
As a perhaps obvious corollary to the combination of almost cinematic semi-objective third person point of view and the focus on motion that Percy employs, we learn precious little about David that doesn’t come directly from the actions undertaken by our characters.
Consider all the facts we know about him: We know he’s a loner (we learn that filtered through the job); we know he has no life but the job (because we pretty much only see him at the job); we know about his birthmark (because it comes up during conversation). That’s, well, that’s pretty much it. All of those normal markers of character, backstory and family and so forth, are left by the wayside. If they don’t come up in conversation, if David’s not naturally thinking about them, then they’re not exactly relevant to the story at hand, right? This is something I try and fail to hammer home to my students—not everything needs to be explained. If it doesn’t come up when a character is thinking or talking, don’t force it in. It’s so tempting to stop and use that narratorial magic wand, that literature-only weapon of the author that can fly in and talk at any time, but there’s risk in over-explaining: You’re slowing the story down, you’re stepping away from the primary conflict, and you may not even be revealing half as much of your character as it feels like all that exposition is performing.
Another way of saying this: anything that you introduce in a story should matter to the story. Sometimes that’s backstory, if the backstory comes back to affect things that happen later in the story, if the story cannot be read without those necessary pieces of information. Sometimes it’s all these street details, if your character spends the entirety of their lives driving those exact streets and has basically no other frame of reference. Percy certainly goes to one extreme with his choice—hell, we don’t even learn David’s last name!
In conclusion
So much of what Benjamin Percy does feels, on a first read, easy. He’s using detail and specificity—cool, nailed it, we’re done here. That’s junior-high-level stuff, as one particularly harsh eval of my last upper-division seminar was quick to point out. And yet. And yet, these specifics are the ones so easy to ignore, the ones that feel unnecessary until you sit down with a story and realize that reality, fictional or otherwise, is built on the bones of these moments: the men driving truck, searching for ways to pass the time until they can clock out; the diners serving the same hot lunch year-in and year-out; those roads you’ve driven so many times your aching back braces for each individual pothole. It’s easy to say these things are easy, but hey, almost nobody writes them. And nobody writes them like Percy.
There’s a lot we haven’t talked about here: Percy’s metaphors are as strong as any other premier writer, his language lovely yet precise, his conflicts (and the totems thereof) are built to bleed effectively into multiple scenes—in this piece, an example: the birthmark that begins their friendship shows up as the thought that spurs David to try to go see Stephen, which then directly leads to David angering Stephen and so remembering the way that birthmark normally makes people react to him—and on and on and on. Sure, there are lessons to be found in each of those ideas. But we have discussed, and will discuss, those concepts again in future installments. When’s the next time we get to discuss the finer points of hydrant flushing in the fine city of Pine, Oregon? If never, and it probably is never, I’m glad we got to do it once.
by Brandon Williams