Subterranean Living: Stories

By John Caperton

The stories in Subterranean Living explore how life’s most transformative events can happen at times of quiet acquiescence. In settings as varied as an abandoned coal camp in West Virginia to a private island off the coast of Florida to the sidewalks of San Francisco, the disparate characters in this collection all encounter moments of profound personal change. A gumbo laced with lament and humor, Subterranean Living asks one to rethink the fundamental value of small, everyday decisions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Caperton
• Release date: Dec 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9780960017119

Book preview

AKIN TO GRAVITY

You grab one of the new, glittery balls because it has big holes and you don’t want to get your fingers stuck in it. They feel swollen, like corks. Sizing up the lane, you try to cancel out the din of the cavernous room, a rumbling song of collision with an ebb and flow that follows its own rules of rhythm. After a deep breath and three slow steps, the ball leaps from your touch. Watching it, brilliant and purple, sliding down the center of the lane without so much as a spin, you realize that you let go of the most beautiful bowling ball in the entire state of West Virginia. As it approaches the pins, you feel the sting of regret, like you have let your dog run into traffic, and fight back the urge to call out. The moment of impact is almost too much to watch. You wince as the pins explode. Above on the scoring monitor, a big red X flashes. Stuart raises his fist in the air and lets out a cheer that morphs into laughter. That is when you know for sure the acid has kicked in.

Remember that one, Stuart says, taking up a black ball for his turn. It is ordinary and scarred, but has an opalescent finish like a gasoline rainbow.

I’ve never gotten a strike before, you mumble. It’s true. You’re no bowler. Unused to success, you are inclined to savor the moment. This is the only bowling alley in the only town that you have ever lived in. Many birthday parties have been thrown under this roof. Too often, nobody wanted you on their team, leaving you with nothing to do but wander off and slide quarters into video games. I think I might be done.

We’re just getting going. It is the fourth frame.

This might be one of those times, you know, walk out on a high note.

Bullshit. And it’s my go anyhow.

It was his idea to come here. Stuart is your best friend. His friendship had somehow made the long slog of high school bearable, and he had provided the blotter. You let the topic go as you watch his ball slide down the lane, take out eight pins, and leave him a tricky split.

After totaling the score of the first game, the monitor demands a sequence of entries, such as each bowler’s initials, before it will allow you to start a second. Stuart hunches over the keyboard, poking the delete button over and over. Sensing that suddenly everyone in the bowling alley know that you are on drugs, you lean in and whisper, The guy who took our shoes keeps staring at us.

Stuart is flustered. You’re the one going to college. You figure it out.

He keeps talking to that bald security guard.

The mention of an authority figure brings a sparkle to Stuart’s eye. Conspiring in a semi-circular, plastic bench, you listen as Stuart dictates a plan in hushed tones. You leave from separate exits. Out in the parking lot, it is strangely quiet, the cacophony of ricocheting pins muffled with the closing of a door. At the far end of the parking lot, Stuart’s dying Toyota pickup is awash in a streetlight’s halogen glow, offering sanctuary. You head straight for it. With hips jutting back and forth, you speed-walk across the pavement, every exaggerated step wafting your shoulder-length hair into the humid night. By the time you get to the pickup, you are sweating and strands stick to the back of your neck. Stuart is already inside, messing with the stereo. Opening the passenger door, you are greeted with a blistering guitar solo and the air conditioning going full tilt.

We’re out of here, Stuart says to the dashboard, surveying the instrumentation with the seriousness of a pilot. You put on your seat belt. As Stuart presses his foot to the accelerator, you notice that both of you are still wearing the alley’s clown-colored bowling shoes. You start chuckling and can’t stop until the truck rockets up the on-ramp to I-64. Rolling down your window, a warm gush of air flows through the cab of the truck. It feels like time itself is rushing by. With the highway unfolding like ribbon in front of you, the truck shoots into the dark, zooming headlong towards a precipice at forty-five miles per hour. Stuart’s house is a few exits away and the drive is a blur of woods and carved mountainside.

Pulling into his driveway, Stuart kills the lights as he spots his father’s Pontiac. A manager at the Shoney’s franchise, it was expected that he would be at work. Following Stuart, you creep around back and enter through the basement door. Stuart lives alone with his father. Although they share a stairwell and a kitchen, the house is set up like two apartments with his father having the upper unit. Stuart flicks on the lights and air conditioner. There is one main room with some old furniture arranged around an entertainment center. The bedroom and bathroom lie opposite the door to the garage. The place is all straightened out, no shoes piling up in a corner or crusted plates lying around. By your estimation, Stuart is a neat freak. Framed horror movie posters are evenly spaced on the walls. Cycling magazines are neatly stacked on the coffee table. Stuart opens his mini-fridge with a flourish, revealing a bottle of spiced rum and cold sodas. All is well. You are a week away from graduating high school. Also, Memorial Day has inspired TBS Superstation to schedule all the Planet of the Apes movies sequentially. It’s a celebration.

However, technology foils your plan. Stuart’s dad has only recently bought into a new satellite TV system. There are lots of channels, but all the sets are wired to it. So, if someone is watching something upstairs, everyone else has to watch it as well. You work the remote control, wishing in vain that you could switch the channel. As Stuart takes a seat next to you on the couch, you ask, Your dad’s not a big science fiction fan, is he? You had mentally prepared yourself for actors wearing prosthetic primate faces and a young Charlton Heston in a loincloth.

No, not really.

On the TV, a woman is bent over a desk, naked except for high heels. Behind her, a grunting man wears nothing but a tie, suggesting he is in management. He slaps her right buttock again and again, like she is a racehorse needing to go faster. She doesn’t seem to mind, but has a hard time not looking into the camera.

Does he channel surf much? you ask. Stuart, in his crewcut and tight T-shirt, sits transfixed. A big fan of special effects, Stuart is usually more discriminating when it comes to production values. The scene ends as the camera pans across the set and inexplicably zooms in on a plastic fern. Stuart’s mouth hangs open, his attention rapt. He looks like an idiot. You softly punch his shoulder. Let’s take all of this on the road.

Stuart blinks twice, before glaring and hitting you back, only harder. Don’t hit me.

Rubbing your shoulder, you say, Sorry.

You could learn a thing or two from this educational programming.

I doubt it. Although you are a virgin, you don’t want to hear a lecture from a friend whose sum of sexual experience theoretically occurred in a neighboring state two summers ago.

With that attitude, you’re probably right. Stuart gets up and takes a red plastic flashlight from a shelf. Then he puts ice cubes from the mini-fridge into a cylindrical canteen and screws it closed, packing it along with the beverages and a flashlight into a backpack. You’re right. Let’s move on to Plan B.

Outside, the moon is almost full. Pedaling away from Stuart’s house, the blue glow from his father’s upstairs window follows you until the turn onto the old access road. With the exception of a truck stop, Stuart’s unfinished subdivision, with all its bulldozed and barren lots, is the only development this far from town. You pass a few small farms with sagging barns and no apparent crops. Stuart is riding a new mountain bike with a flashlight mounted on the handlebars and it handles the cracked road with grace. Half-winded and struggling to keep up, you envy Stuart’s ease with his bike and the way his thin, athletic frame seems to slice through the night without effort. The humidity sticks to you, but you’re dressed for it, wearing nothing but denim shorts and a black, threadbare t-shirt. You strain to keep up, feeling fat and out of shape. Also, Stuart’s old BMX bike is entirely too small. The lowered seat and short frame cause your knees to knock against the chopper-like handlebars. However, the bike has some charm. Silver nylon tassels are affixed to the end of each handgrip. Watching them come to life as the bike gains velocity, you recognize an order in the way the individual nylon strips dance. This revelation ends as you find yourself tossed by a pothole.

A brief but exhilarating moment of weightlessness is followed by a burst of pain. The impact of landing on your side makes it hurt to breathe. As your surroundings come back in focus, you discover that you are lying on the pavement, entangled with the handlebars. An instinct to check the movement of your toes and fingers is confused by your inability to sufficiently remove your arms and legs from the wreckage. You begin to panic. Stuart stands over you, gawking as your frustration rapidly transforms into a suspicion that the bike is sentient and means you harm. Get this thing off me!

A pedal is attached to your pocket. After Stuart rips it free, you shift your weight so that your left arm is no longer pinned under the bike frame. Roll over. Like you’re getting up off your knees.

I’m trying. Straining and rocking back and forth, you feel like a turtle that has been turned over onto its shell. You continue to struggle until you notice Stuart’s eyes are full of mirth. What?

Tears swell like perspiration at the corners of his eyes as Stuart attempts to contain his own laughter. Try rolling to your right.

You free yourself with ease and feel foolish. This embarrassment is heightened when you see the bike’s handlebars bent at an unnatural angle. I can fix it.

No you can’t, Stuart says. He is still smiling. You are useless with tools. Both of you know it and that’s hilarious for some reason.

As Stuart looks for a place to hide the bikes, you find the rum and mix it with Coca-Cola into the unscrewed top of the plastic canteen. Up the gradual slope of a grassy embankment, a property is line-distinguished by a rusted stretch of barbed wire and a mossy stack of logs. As you limp your way to him, Stuart stashes the bikes behind the logs. At the top, you turn and pause to take in the view of the bend in the turnpike and the misty lowland beyond. The chirping of crickets rings loud enough to wash out the highway’s angry whisper. Fireflies are everywhere. First, you focus on an individual light and try to follow the bug when its glow vanishes. It is discombobulating, especially when your field of vision zooms out and you observe the innumerable spots of glitter moving in a cohesive pattern, as if they are afloat in the same tide. Trying to regain your equilibrium, you take a seat and lean back against the log pile.

Stuart sits next to you and asks, You see how the lights stretch?

I do. For a long while you just pass the canteen back and forth, not saying a thing. You recognize that this particular embankment is a small miracle and look to the sky, watching moonlit clouds spread across the night sky and break over the hilltops like waves nearing a beach. You feel yourself being pulled by some nameless force akin to gravity, more subtle but equally absolute, changing the vector of your life.

I don’t want to work at Shoney’s, Stuart declares. He is talking to himself, his stare focused beyond the highway.

You don’t know what to say. Stuart is thinking about his future, and it mostly holds more of the same because his father wants him to save up some money before taking on student loans. Stuart is actually the better student, excelling at math without much effort or study. It was a forgone conclusion that you would attend college. An