Had a Good Time Read online

  Praise for Had a Good Time:

  “Butler inhabits these people with eerie emotional accuracy. He changes the narration to suit each character’s voice, and brings wide swaths of early-twentieth-century America to life with a few deft strokes. . . . There is a great deal to admire in this collection—crisp writing, marvelous imaging, the discussion of large, existential questions that are as central to life now as they were a hundred years ago.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A wonderfully varied third collection from Pulitzer-winning Butler that investigates diverse lives—and deaths—early in the twentieth century . . . Assured, accomplished, and another in triguing change of pace from an adventurous writer who refuses to be pigeonholed.”

  — Kirkus Reviews(starred review)

  “Only Butler could have crafted Had a Good Time.. . . [The] characters and situations absolutely sing in your mind as you read. And the most amazing thing—no two narrators sound alike. It’s like reading short stories by a dozen different, im mensely gifted authors.”

  —Fort Worth Morning Star

  “All of the stories are short and such good company that we read them in an afternoon. What’s more, we had the feeling that Butler enjoyed them almost as much as we did.”

  —The Arizona Republic

  “Fifteen gloriously imaginative and utterly hypnotizing short stories . . . Scintillating, soulful, and surprising.”

  —Booklist

  “Butler has collected vintage postcards for ten years . , . and in his terrific new collection, he uses his findings to inspire mesmerizing excursions into loss and affirmation. From their smudged, often enigmatic messages . . . evolve tales that capture the rugged promise of the brand-new twentieth century.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “Butler remains, unfortunately, a precious literary secret. . . . Had a Good Time is a legacy of supreme imagination, surely inimitable.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “A collection of short stories that does nothing short of illuminating our humanity. A deeply moving book filled with emotionally gripping tales.”

  —Curled Up With a Good Book

  “Butler’s imaginative re-animation of anonymous lives from the past is both entertaining and informative, an alternate history of forgotten souls.”

  —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

  “Good Southern storyteller that he is, Butler sometimes writes with a comically absurd quality reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor.”

  —Oregon Live

  “Picture postcards offer an unusually fertile vantage point from which to examine the traditions and complications of American life. In these terrific new stories, [Butler] uses his findings to inspire mesmerizing excursions into loss and affirmation.”

  —The Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News

  “I would read a book like this by anyone, but Butler’s an amazing storyteller, so it’s even better.”

  —Cargo

  “Butler is brilliant at shifting not only the fictional voices from story to story, but also each character’s disposition, attitudes and shapes of thought, fooling you into believing each one. The author has quite a bit of fun here, and his playfulness is infectious.”

  — Bellingham Weekly(Washington)

  “A thoughtful commentary on America at the dawn of a new century: while some Americans were buoyed by their confidence in technology and progress, others, at the mercy of a diseaseridden, hardscrabble existence, could trust only in their faith in God.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

  The Alleys of Eden

  Sun Dogs

  Countrymen of Bones

  On Distant Ground

  Wabash

  The Deuce

  A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

  They Whisper

  Tabloid Dreams

  The Deep Green Sea

  Mr. Spaceman

  Fair Warning

  From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

  (Janet Burro way, editor)

  HAD A GOOD TIME

  Stories from American Postcards

  ROBERT

  OLEN

  BUTLER

  Copyright © 2004 by Robert Olen Butler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  The stories in this book first appeared in the following places: “Hotel Touraine,” Ninth Letter;“Mother in the Trenches,” Story Quarterly;“The Ironworkers’ Hayride,” Zoetrope;“Carl and I,” Five Points;“This Is Earl Sandt,” The Georgia Review;“The One in White,” The Atlantic;“No Chord of Music,” Hemispheres;“Christmas 1910,” Story Quarterly;“Hiram the Desperado,” Glimmer Train;“I Got Married to Milk Can,” Hemispheres;“The Grotto,” Ploughshares;“Up by Heart,” Image; and “Twins,” Prairie Schooner.

  “This Is Earl Sandt” was created in its entirety on an Internet webcast, in real time, under the auspices of Florida State University. My sincere thanks to all those who made that event possible. The webcast is archived at www.fsu.edu/butler.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Butler, Robert Olen.

  Had a good time : stories from American postcards / by Robert Olen Butler.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4620-6

  1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.U8278H33 2004 813’.54—dc22

  2003067771

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  For Elizabeth Dewberry

  THE STORIES

  Hotel Touraine

  Mother in the Trenches

  The Ironworkers’ Hayride

  Carl and I

  This Is Earl Sandt

  The One in White

  No Chord of Music

  Christmas 1910

  Hiram the Desperado

  I Got Married to Milk Can

  The Grotto

  Up by Heart

  Uncle Andrew

  Twins

  Sunday

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Hotel Touraine

  Mother in the Trenches

  The Ironworkers’ Hayride

  Carl and I: I CAN QUITE SEE THROUGH IT NOW

  Carl and I: HEARTBROKEN

  This Is Earl Sandt

  The One in White

  No Chord of Music

  Christmas 1910

  Hiram the Desperado

  I Got Married to Milk Can

  The Grotto

  Up by Heart

  Uncle Andrew

  Twins

  Sunday

  Had a Good Time

  PICTURE POSTCARDS

  The picture postcard manufacturer is your real modern explorer. You may flatter yourself that you have made a discovery when you happen, in the course of a foot tour, upon a neighborhood so remote that neither you nor any of your acquaintances has ever heard of its existence, many miles distant from railway and main travelled roads; but you will find
the picture postcard awaiting you at the four corners general store. Its manufacturer has been there before you. He has explored the place and caught with his camera all its secrets of rustic charm and quiet, all its quaint delights of creeper-covered clapboard architecture. Nothing escapes the man with the commercial camera.

  Is it the picture itself or the contracted space it leaves for writing that gives the picture postcard its vogue? Is its popularity due to the prevalent interest in illustrations of any and every kind, or to the fact that it furnishes an acceptable, and accepted, substitute for social and conjugal correspondence in the lazy days of summer? Does it primarily meet a sentimental or a utilitarian need? We know that in its wider international scope it has still another function—that of gratifying the vanity which first found expression in the label-bedecked suitcase. But whatever the motive, the use of the picture postcard has become a pretty custom.

  from the editorai Jage of the New-York Tribune

  Sunday, August 7,1910

  HOTEL TOURAINE

  This is where the people who have more money than brains put up. They pay about $100 per month for 2 rooms furnished when they could afford to have a nice home of their own. I had a job in this hotel last year. Worked there for a week. Saw lots of style, but don’t see as the people were any happier.

  My fifth day at the hotel I pretty near ran down John Stanford Barnhill in the corridor past the second-floor library. I was making time with a pitcher of water to a public room along the way, where some other swell was receiving guests like the whole place was his mansion and he was doing an at-home in his own parlor. The Oriental rugs are thick underfoot all over the Touraine and I was making no sound and Barnhill bolts out of the library door and I pull up sharp, tucking the pitcher into me so I’ll take the splash instead of him, Which I do, down my bellboy jacket with the brass buttons, and he says, “Whoa, Dobbin,” like I’m a spooked dray horse. I just keep my mouth shut. No Sorry, sir or Excuse me, sir like I know I’m supposed to do, but this guy’s about my age, not much into his twenties, and he’s in a serge suit with cigars sticking out of his pocket and he gets my goat in an instant. I’m still figuring out what to think about this job and I decide right off not to play the lackey to guys like this. This is even before I know who he is, exactly, heir to millions by being born the only grandnephew of somebody else who was born to millions and so on. I just take the splash and sashay around him and head on down to where I’m supposed to go. He could yell something after me, about my being a rude working-class bumpkin or some such, but he doesn’t. I figure it’s running through his head, though.

  Then later that day I’m going out of the place in my own clothes, my uniform hanging in a wire locker in the changing room, and you’d think he’d never recognize me, but you’d think wrong. I’m going out of the hotel and he says, “You one of those bare-headed anarchists to boot?” To boot meaning bomb-throwing anarchist in addition to water-spilling bellboy, and the whole thing has been set off by my going without a hat, which has always been my way, unlike the vast herds of men in the world. But I don’t like a thing to bind me in around my head. All of which sounds grand and free on my part, but I guess that’d be wrong too, because in response to his cheek I say, “No, sir,” and I keep on going and I like to bite my tongue off.

  I’ve picked up the habit of servant talk already, after just five days, and I shoot him a hard look over my shoulder and he’s already turned away, wearing a Prince Albert coat and a high-crowned bowler, which he’s just starting to tip to a woman in a veil going by. So I dash across Tremont, dodging a streetcar and a couple of galloping horses and the express wagon they’re pulling, and I cut into the Common.

  This is my parlor, the Common, and I take a winding way through, slowing down, putting Barnhill out of my mind, though a bunch of guys like him are always floating through this place as well, usually squiring young women in big straw hats full of ostrich feathers. But I swing over to the open fields and the fellows there are playing baseball and one of them who thinks he’s Tris Speaker makes a headlong dive for a hit into the outfield and he almost has it but not quite. Then he’s in for it to get back to his feet and chase the ball down while the batter’s making for third base. I don’t blame him for trying, even if he’ll never play for the Red Sox.

  I turn away and move on and dig into my pocket for the pack of Meccas I bought in the lobby shop before I left the hotel. I open it and stick a smoke into my mouth and light it up and I’m starting to think about Barnhill again. Also there’s some fat cigar of a guy in a bowler putting the mash on a sweet-faced girl on the path ahead of me. I go around them and I blow smoke at his right ear and I dig out my free card from the cigarette pack. They’re still giving away Champion Athletes and I’ve got a guy with aviator goggles strapped on his head and a biplane up in the sky over his shoulder and the clouds are streaked with sunset and he’s ready to go, this guy Arch Hoxsey. I stick him in my shirt pocket with the cigarettes and hustle up, moving smartly away from my fifth day of work at the Hotel Touraine.

  Twenty minutes later, after skirting the edge of Beacon Hill where Barnhill’s money was waiting in a marble-columned mansion for somebody to die, I climbed the steps of our tenement in the West End and there was a great caterwauling of kids and a stink from the third-floor toilet and Mr. Spinetti’s voice was filling the stairwell from the top floor down, him being the Caruso of tenement-hollerers. I hesitated at our door and stubbed out a second cigarette I’d let myself have right away, just to get certain people out of my mind, and then I stepped in.

  Mama was near the window, hunched over the side table, rolling cigars. Her back was to me. “Eli,” she said, but she didn’t turn around.

  “Mama,” I said. The smell of tobacco had thickened the air in the room. I stood for a moment getting up the strength to push through it. Maybe it was mostly not wanting to see her hands at work on these things that made me hesitate, but it felt more like I was struggling against the air being heavy with this smell. Then I did finally cross the room and I was behind Mama. Beside her on the floor on one side was a gunnysack of filler leaf and on the other a wooden box with the wrapper leaves, and her hands were moving, moving. I laid my own hand on her shoulder and I wanted to lift my eyes out the window, like the tenement across the way was some great landscape or something, but I couldn’t help watching her hands rolling around and around this fancy man’s cigar, the thing shaping up there, the loose leaves tightening as she rolled it and it would end up in John Stanford Bamhill’s mouth, or somebody just like him, and Mama would get her eight mills pay. Now I looked out the window. Her sill pillow was there for later when she’d lean out into the night and talk to the women in the windows across the way.

  “Just a moment,” she said. “Let me finish this one.”

  I went and sat at the small round oak table where we ate and read and talked, the one piece we’d been able to keep from our plans for a house. Papa died under the hooves and wheels of a wagon hauling bricks, down at the wharf, right when we were going to be okay, when we were boarding in a nice house and Papa had plans to buy a bungalow from Sears and Roebuck and put it up out the streetcar line in some direction or other. I won’t count the years it’s been since. The night before, he gave me Rube Waddell of the St. Louis Browns from a pack of Sweet Caporals he’d smoked that day. Rube in portrait, no cap, his hair parted neatly down the middle. “This man made himself out of nothing,” Papa said.

  Mama sat down beside me now. 1 held her hand on the tabletop. She smelled of tobacco. Her eyes looked gray in the dim light. “How’s it at your job?” she said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You’re doing right?”

  “Sure.”

  “They’ll take to you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She took her hand from under mine and patted at me there, to reassure me. “I did a hundred twenty today,” she said.

  I looked away from her, landing on the wall where she had a chro
mo hung of the woman at the well and Jesus asking her for water.

  “Nearly a dollar,” she said.

  That night I lay on my pallet propped up against the wall with a candle burning beside me. I was trying to read a Zane Grey but the cowboys with their horses and ten-gallon hats were steaming me up tonight for some reason. They think all you have to do is plug it or throw a rope around it or ride it to the ground and that solves everything. I could hear Mama breathing heavy in her sleep across the room. Somewhere on another floor some guy was yelling and somewhere else a baby was crying, but these sounds were dim, coming through all the walls in between. I reached into the pocket of my shirt hanging on a chair near me to get my cigarettes and I found Arch Hoxsey. He had a fur collar around his neck. It was cold high up in the air, I guess, no matter what the season. I turned the card over, and it said he started out working in a factory before he became a champion athlete automobile driver and then aeroplane flyer. He set a record and he rose to 11,000 feet. And then he died. He crashed trying to come back to earth on the last day of 1910. I turned his card over and looked him in the eyes. My papa would respect him. For myself, I couldn’t figure if he was a fool to leave the ground.

  The next morning I was sent to John Stanford Barnhill’s rooms on the eighth floor. On the silver tray balanced on my palm was a bottle of whiskey. This was about ten in the morning, though I shouldn’t sneer because even Papa started early some days. So I knock on his door, which is slightly open, and he calls for me to come in. I push the door and step into the place, a regular cut-velvet and leather sitting room. It smells strong of cigar smoke. He’s left one lit on a saucer on the reading table. The gentleman himself is hanging out the open lower sash like the women in the tenements.

  “Your whiskey,” I say, and he draws his body in from the window.

  “On the table,” he says, and I put the tray down next to his cigar. I stare hard at the thing and I guess he sees me doing that.