Issue 6

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Fiction

The Cold, Cold Water
by Gary Amdahl

When they got the cabin, they unloaded only the food and drink, burgers and brats and bourbon and beer, set up the charcoal grill, and began to eat and drink. When they finished eating, they continued drinking and got out their guitars. All four of them played and they eventually became a kind of demented, drunken flamenco quartet, lips and teeth working fiercely over difficult fingerings, dripping sweat. When that was over, they turned on the radio and listened to a show called “Honky-tonk Saturday Night” being broadcast from a nearby Indian reservation. The show’s host was very old, they thought, and had an all but completely indecipherable mélange of mumbling lisping accents for a speaking voice. They fell in love with him immediately, and when he would do things like get up to go to the bathroom and forget both to put a record on before he left and forget to close the door after he flushed, they swooned with delight. It was nothing but very old country and Western songs for several hours, and then they began to play Yahtzee. Alex was wearing his cowboy hat and frequently jumped up to say, “Go fer yer Yahtzee, stranger,” which precipitated them all into hilarity every time he did so. The radio show host, whose name was Maylon, dropped most of the ys and ies at the end of names, and compensated by drawing out the last names, sometimes lisping the s, sometimes turning it into a harder d so it would be “Here’d a dong by John Ca-a-a-a-sh,” or “here’d Kit We-e-e-llth,” and he would put a 45 on at 78, scrape the needle across the record as he removed it, curse softly but audibly, apologize, and put it on at 33 and a third, scrape the needle again and say, “Oh for Pete dake.” When he got it right, he’d say, “Dis is goin’ out to the Wallinsky Thithters at Lunker La-a-a-ke.”

Bobby and his friends were so moved, so inspired by the superiority, the unabashed and unadorned authenticity, modesty, and joy of the broadcast that they began to speak freely of the theater collective they hoped to form, its principles and ideal performances. Josie, who could sing and dance, wanted to sing and dance. Every play that came over their transom, she insisted, could be improved by cutting twenty minutes out of its middle, and adding songs and jokes. Bobby had been somewhat caught up in postcolonial studies while a grad student and said he would not suffer the least taint of Gilbert and Sullivan and all that corrupt empire crap. Alex was about to begin rehearsals for Shepard’s Fool for Love, and had brought a lariat with him. He started roping things around the big room and said he wanted to make theater that was acrobatic and dangerous, circus-like but with Artaudian cruelty that would make audience members sit up and understand there were live human beings on the stage before them. Eugenia, who came from a theatrical family and whose name was actually O’Neill, nicknamed Hughie after one of the master’s less well-known works, stopped the discussion dead by saying she believed theater was a tool of the people. Bobby got up and made another round of drinks. When he came back he handed the drinks around and said as he did so that the tool of the people was a television set and that the people loathed theater: production values were so low as to seem silly, amateurish, childish. Only Disney could get the production values of live theater right.

Gary Amdahl is the author of the story collection Visigoths and the novella collection I Am Death, both published by Milkweed Editions. He lives in southern California and was most recently an employee at Dutton’s Brentwood Books.

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Read more in Issue 6

Fiction Debt by Sana Krasikov
Politics Is a Craft
Politics Is a Craft: Part Two
Fiction The Cold, Cold Water by Gary Amdahl
Bridge Passed
Coyote
From the Hills of Fauquier County