Hunters and Gamblers

By Dark Sky Books

A sham pastor hires a cocaine-sniffing centaur to act as mascot for an Evangelical mega-church’s arena football team; Paul Revere flashes across a revolutionary sky on the back of a sunbird; an ammo-less infantry drummer and a bleeding medic are beat back to a Best Western parking lot in the Battle of Sacramento — such are the situations contained in Ryan Ridge’s Hunters & Gamblers. Winners of the negative lottery, these characters have learned to love to lose everything until there’s nothing left to lose. And the end is desperate, black, drenched in whiskey, but punctuated by poignancy and revelry and revelation. The tales in this lurid, edgy debut illuminate blackness with even blacker humor and a sense of outlandish beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dark Sky Books
• Release date: Sep 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9780983067450

Dark Sky Books

Publisher: Dark Sky Magazine & Dark Sky Books. Based in Asheville, NC

Book preview

HUNTERS AND GAMBLERS

by Ryan Ridge

* * *

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Ryan Ridge

http://www.darkskybooks.com

License Notes: 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 author and/or publisher.

First Dark Sky Books Printing, 2011

* * *

To my brother Andrew.

And for Brendan Farmer. My other brother.

* * *

Ryan Ridge's stories are lacerating cuts that expose the gray matter and turbulence of a nation. Beneath the NASDAQ sky live crackpots and shack wives, day traders, sham pastors, and artists. What's comical is ominous and what's ominous is hilarious in a sad, heart- scalding way like a trick birthday candle that just won't go out no matter how hard you blow. Ridge's inventiveness is unlimited, a panoptical lens that lets us see what is part myth and part video and part tazered dream. It's a compelling collection that leaves you shivering from the strange-in-the-familiar sensation of a wonky moral universe.

Bruce Smith, author of The Other Lover

* * *

"Ryan Ridge's brilliant Hunters & Gamblers reads more like a library than a collection of stories. It takes on a much broader swath of history and eternity (sometimes in the same piece) than most fiction ever does, and the contemporary world (extravagant preachers, feckless dreamers, therapists and astrologers, puzzled spouses, sons, and lovers) snaps across its pages. It's filled with humor, anger, joy (in language, in existence) bafflement and outrage at the state we've brought ourselves to, and its dark vision - accomplished in stories both exquisitely experimental and edgily mainstream - will stay with you long after the book is done."

Paul Griner, author of The German Woman

* * *

Table of Contents

Wall Street

This Will be the Prime of You Unless You Round Up

Fuck Shop

Shaky Hands and All

Turbulence

After Fall

Heavy-Handed

Davey Jones, Infantry Drummer

After the Thrill

Holiest of Holies

*Chapter 11

Birth of a Nation

Dances with Wolves

Tomahawk Cuts Rain

New New Orleans

Pussy (an Explanation)

Texas: A Love Story

Sunshine State

Period Piece

She Left

My Blue Period

Something Nice, Something Gleaming

Exile on Payne Street

The Plagiarist Checks Out

* * *

WALL STREET

Driving into Death Valley with our heads full of hash, we saw two vultures on the side of the road devouring the carcass of another vulture. Rob pointed and said, Reminds me of my old job. I said nothing. After that and for many miles I was silent.

* * *

THIS WILL BE THE PRIME OF YOU

UNLESS YOU ROUND UP

And what of the abstract fairy in charge of costumes? From which plane is it that you impart your wisdom and usher us into this realm looking like we just stepped from television?

Come here, she said. We have light in our lungs. We speak into each other's cheeks. Would you like to buy a puppy?

You're the only one who understands how much it hurts, I said and hit her.

The street sewn with Christmas lights, carolers serenading parking meters. Runoff from the slaughterhouse drips into the sewer. There is blood in every brain. Teach me the meaning of the meaning, she said, but I could not.

There is strangeness in the past months. I get my haircut daily because it grows that fast. The barber is not afraid. I go to his shop. I sit in his chair. I say: Are you afraid?

No, he says, sharpening his scissors. Unless 13y afraid you mean lonely.

More days come. Not everyone can have a white coat and a gospel. I stay indoors. Winds punish the trees. My neighbor preaches string theory, but I don't understand.

Get it? he asks.

No, I say.

He says, This will be the prime of you unless you round up.

Touché, I say and hit him hard in the stomach.

He doubles over.

I take a vacation.

I wait and wait at the lip of a volcano. Nothing. For lack of a better world, I go home. Now I'm dressed in a Bermuda shirt. My skin looks two-thirds cooked. I'm far from television.

* * *

FUCK SHOP

Welcome to the fuck shop, said the old man in the red smock.

I thought this was Wal-Mart, I said.

That's funny, he said, I thought this was America.

* * *

SHAKY HANDS & ALL

+

I was an unemployed astrologer suffering from writer's-block. The stars were bad and I refused to play middleman. Like so many of my fellow horoscope writers, I found myself chasing the narrative arcs of daytime soaps with warm beer and cigarettes, intermittently ambling to the mailbox to fetch my unemployment stipend.

+

She was an out-of-work manicurist who'd been wrongfully accused of failing to wash her hands before returning from the bathroom. She quit after union threats. She began reading palms. Career-wise it was profitable, given the state of things.

+

We met in the lobby of the Psychic Job Fair, where she summoned me to a little booth near the back of the auditorium.

Your palm reads like a cheap romance novel, she said.

She dropped my hand and asked what I was doing later.

At her place, we drank Robitussin and played strip poker with a deck of Tarot cards. In our skivvies, she gazed directly through my forehead and said, I see you inside me.

One...two...three minutes later, I apologized. Didn't see that coming, did you?

No, but I do see you buying me breakfast.

Shake on it, I said.

We reached out to shake hands, but they were already shaking.

* *