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  the laws of average

  Praise for

  The world in Trevor Dodge’s The Laws of Average resembles a Donald Barthelme fever dream: a woman drives a Yukon Denali equipped with after-market rear and front-mounted surveillance cameras, so she can look both behind and ahead of herself at the same time, a lube both numbs the body and makes vigorous intimacy possible, a narrator takes James Frey and Oprah to task for introducing the concept that memoirs should have Terms of Service. With these stories, Dodge has managed to pull realistic fiction back from the brink of destruction. The Laws of Average is essential reading for anyone who wonders what happens next in the story of American Fiction after Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and George Saunders.

  —Matt Briggs

  Though literature is usually the most conservative of art forms, a book sometimes appears that offers exciting, new possibilities. Trevor Dodge’s Everyone I Know Lives on Roads is one of them: with the smooth surfaces found in new-painting, with the understated riffs of new-music, the stories collected here are as lean as they are savvy, as savvy as they are funny, as funny as they are connected to the thought, life and paths of our present moment.

  —Steve Tomasula

  The Laws of Average

  Trevor Dodge

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2014 Trevor Dodge

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2015 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-03-6

  eBook Cover Designed by Matthew Warren

  Author Photo by Wendy Peterson-Dodge

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Previous versions of these stories first appeared in the following publications, whose editors, staff and readers are way above average:

  Altered Scale: “13 Ways of Looking at Obscenity”

  Dirty: Dirty: “Lessons My Grandmother Taught Me”

  Fat City Review: “Siren”

  Fiction International: “Tonight on 48 Hours”

  Gargoyle: “Careless Whisper”

  Golden Handcuffs Review: “Fortress of Solitude”

  Natural Bridge: “Dear That Lane Bryant Girl”

  Notre Dame Review: “Ransom”

  Perceptions: “If Only”

  Spilt Infinitive: “Apartment M”

  Submit Magazine: “Always Driven to the End”

  and “Proper[ty]”

  Sleepingfish: “Iota”

  The Bacon Review: “We Always Just Say Catastrophic”

  Unfinished: “Authorization Declined”

  Western Humanities Review: “Unsolicited Advice”

  My sincerest thanks to these collaborators, conspirators, feedback loopers, life coaches and all around more-than-just-okay human beings who helped so much more than they should have or probably even knew:

  Matt Briggs, Trista Cornelius, Mia DeBono, Bonnie Dodge, Jim Grabill, Kate Gray, Lily Hoang, Tawnya Knights, Sue Mach, Paul Montone, Andy Mingo, Dave Mount, Lance Olsen, Andi Olsen, Michael Sage Ricci, Ben Slotky, Tom Spanbauer, Matt Warren, Lidia Yuknavitch

  For. Wendy.

  siempre, siempre, y no importa lo que

  You can’t live and write at the same time.

  —Alison Bechdel

  Discontent

  Unsolicited Advice

  Fortress of Solitude

  Here

  If Only

  Dear James Frey

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Unsolicited Advice

  Mother’s Day

  13 Ways of Looking at Obscenity

  Jar of Bees

  Proper[ty]

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Unsolicited Advice

  Rules of Consent

  Tie Goes to the Runner

  Home

  Plausible Deniability: A Parable

  When You′re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Unsolicited Advice

  The Promise

  We Always Just Say Catastrophic

  Esmerelda

  Always Driven to the End

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Unsolicited Advice

  Careless Whisper

  Ransom

  Choose the Right

  Space

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Unsolicited Advice

  Iota

  Kirby in Dreamland

  Tonight on 48 Hours

  Dear That Other Trevor Dodge

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Unsolicited Advice

  Walking Out of the Darkness

  Bertie’s

  Lessons My Grandmother Taught Me

  Reapersession

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Unsolicited Advice

  Planking

  Know No Better

  Dear That Lane Bryant Girl

  The Show

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Unsolicited Advice

  Ontology

  Death Do Us Part

  Authorization Declined

  Saint Fred Rogers

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Unsolicited Advice

  Siren

  The Pearl of Great Price

  Apartment M

  Miracle

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  Life IS NOT MEASURED BY THE BREATHS YOU TAKE, BUT BY THE moments THAT take your breath away.

  Unsolicited Advice

  Upon finding yourself in a room with Them, low ceilings, and needing a fresh coat of paint, and one hands to another a firearm, and it is immediately apparent that they discussed handing this object off well in advance of right now, but quite obviously never contemplated discussing the particulars of such an exchange, if you were in the room at the time, in that situation, it is perfectly understandable that you feel panic. You must not do this. There are no specific suggestions or recommendations as to how you avoid this, by the way, only know that you must.

  Fortress of Solitude

  His uncle, the unconvicted child molester, wanted to go and didn’t care that they wouldn’t be spending any time together. All the nephew really knew and cared about was she would be there without parental supervision. Because she lived on the city’s power grid and water system, she could walk to the open air stadium without much time or trouble. Because he was living on irrigation streams and a septic tank, he needed a ride.

  The old Chevy pickup was a sorry sight to say the least, and even worse on the interior, with his uncle hunched over the cracked plastic steering wheel breathing through his teeth. The factory-installed upholstery had long given way, replaced by a matted quilt the nephew thought was once a pack blanket for his grandfather’s mare, the one he’d hauled all the way to hunt moose in British Columbia in a thin sheet metal trailer which bounced dutifully behind his grandfather’s power-stroked Ford. His uncle was his uncle by marrying his aunt, who was a decent enough bowler to go on self-financed tours to places like Cleveland and Buffalo and Kansas City but not nearly good enough to be on TV. This was just as well, really, because his aunt was the furthest thing from telegenic and had a bulbous pear-shaped body that earned her
the nickname “Mudflaps” in the local Bowladrome, a name she turned to her advantage a surprisingly high number of times all things considered; a lot of the league guys found it nigh impossible to keep her gigantic ass out of their sleeping patterns. Mudflaps spent big swaths of her 30s and 40s flitting around like an awful butterfly in a trash heap. Her husband shared a little house with her on a state highway but little else. She hadn’t let him touch her for a good decade at least, and he couldn’t stand the thought of doing it anyway.

  When he was forced to spend time in their presence, the nephew definitely preferred spending it with the uncle, which, of course, isn’t at all saying he enjoyed the time. The first time he saw a porno mag was at their house, when his uncle handed him one.

  “You like to read, I hear? Here, take a look at what I’m reading.”

  The nephew flicked through the glossy pages, littered with couples sporting perms, handlebar mustaches and overgrown pubic hair, all of them in various stages of sexual congress, all of them paired up across the gender divide, mouths agape and eyes penetrating each other with intense stares.

  “Gets your ‘lil pecker hard, don’t it?”

  The nephew was confused. There were no ciphers to interpret on the slick paper. His Hooked On Phonics program was totally worthless to him here; no clue what a “pecker” was, let alone what could/should/would make it “hard.”

  He was 5.

  That was 10 years ago, though, and through more visceral interactions than this one over the years, he grew into a fuller understanding what his uncle meant back then. But still, a story for another time.

  The uncle pointed the Chevy towards a parking space and pulled all the way against the concrete berm. The engine sputtered to a stop and the nephew slid out the door. As he went to close it, his uncle barked for him to “lock ‘er up” by depressing the chrome-plated knob just below the window, which was stuck open at least a full fist’s width at the top. The nephew didn’t think twice and did what he was told. The uncle did the same on his side. They walked along a freshly-trampled ribbon of grass, an impromptu path making clear the fastest way from the parking lot to the stadium rising up, a massive tower of bleachers. The uncle pulled two dollar bills from the wallet chained into his belt loop. The nephew flashed his activities card, the one with his picture from the previous school year.

  She was already waiting for him at the base of the concrete ramp which trickled into the bleachers, jeans cuffed and rolled tight against her calves, Keds impeccably matched to her lipstick red T-shirt screenprinted with the word “CUBS” in a fat white Helvetica font, sweatshirt strung around her hips and secured by its own intertwining arms, hair primly brushed and ribboned above her forehead, eyes radiating through the shamrock green contact lenses she’d been wearing nonstop all week and keeping shut behind her eyelids every night despite her optometrist’s warnings.

  She was, without question, The Most Beautiful Thing On The Planet.

  She wore the two-toned necklace he’d given her, the one full of jags on the left hand side, a half-coin with half-heart and half-bibleverse stamped into it. She’d arranged it to lay perfectly flat against the top curve of her chest mere seconds before the nephew and his uncle walked between the chain-link posts and up to the ticket stand.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  She hooked her thumb under the gold-plated chain and gently jerked it up, cocking her eyebrows into her forehead as she did this. He didn’t say anything, but thumbed the exact same luster and gauge of chain buried into the fold of his neck. A half-coin with dovetailing jags on the opposite side as hers surfaced from below the depths of his own red T-shirt, a hand-me-down ¾-sleeved prototype of the one she was wearing. He grimaced as the entire line of chain emerged at once, biting into his neck when he spun it around for her to get a good look.

  She nodded her head and released her thumb, the pendant spilling back onto her shirt, a wide grin on her face as she laced his fingers between hers and yanked firmly on his arm.

  “Up top,” she said. “Come on.”

  He swiveled to see where she’d pointed into the bleachers, just underneath the rickety pressbox where a man powered a microphone one short phrase at a time, his device wired into a tinny PA system. The uncle was already at the farthest end of the bleachers, front row, right behind the green team—“BEARS”—but separated by more chainlink fencing. He’d wedged himself between a pair of clover-colored stadium chairs, the kind with folding metal bars and foam backs. Clover-clad occupants. The green cheer team was already ramping up its rendition of “Be Aggressive” while the red cheer team politely watched and waited its turn to do the same. The nephew felt inclined to wave at his relative in the distance, but the uncle was already in full fever, yelling and spelling every letter ahead of the green cheerleaders, absolutely and irrevocably gleeful, fully and unmistakably himself in his old smelly jean jacket with the musky wool collar.

  And, besides, she already had control of the evening’s agenda, sweetly but firmly guiding him through the waves of feet and elbows as they climbed their way to the spot she’d marked inside her own mind when she’d motioned towards it with a little shake of her head and slight wrinkle of her nose. She’d learned The Move when she was still a toddler, and it had a 99% success rate with every human male within her periphery. Her first deployment of The Move came when she knocked a three-gallon bladder of Kool-Aid out of the refrigerator and yet still managed to finagle a snickerdoodle cookie out of the disaster while her mother and grandmother and aunt tried their damnedest to keep the linoleum floor from staining into the permanent splotch of scarlet that was still in front of her mother’s fridge until The Great Remodel erased every trace of the incident. She used The Move not because the nephew needed convincing but because she wanted it absolutely clear where his attention needed to be at all times, framing herself constantly in his vision, hoping he was taking mental snapshots of her to last a lifetime: the angle of her sweatshirt around her; the thin trace of her brassiere across her back; the whisps of chocolate hair loosening under the ribbon across her scalp; the bend of her knee as she climbed the bleachers; the way she balanced her ascent by jutting her unoccupied hand out at her waist, spreading her fingers to catch enough air between the digits so as to correct her center of gravity; her quick glances over the shoulder at him; up and up and up and up.

  When they reached the highest row, she turned 180 degrees, right there in the stairway, before he’d had a chance to come to a full stop with his feet. His shoes washboarded over her toes and he took two hard steps down on them. Her face flushed. She broke her hold on his hand and gasped a small mouthful of air. The nephew’s reflexes kicked in to pull his feet back and she fell away from him. He grabbed the loose arms of her sweatshirt and her balance immediately reversed, her face pitching full into his face, forehead to forehead, smacking there, his own arms now braced behind her back and the thick cotton ones taught against her front.

  “Gotchoo,” he smiled.

  Her eyes sunk back in their sockets and she quickly closed her lips, heart throbbing hard against her lungs.

  “You okay?” He punctuated his concern by pumping the small of her back with his knotted hands when he sounded out the last syllable. She blinked a big blink and drew in a full breath, the lungs pushing back and slowing the bud-ump bud-ump bud-ump radiating out of her rib-cage. He pumped his fists again.

  “Say something.” The smile fell off his face and he narrowed his eyes enough to make out the edge of her contact lenses against the outermost membrane of her eyes. As she exhaled she slid her own arms around his waist, their limbs crossing over another in perfect symmetry before forming right angles to one another when she flattened her hands against his shoulder blades.

  “Are you looking for a reward, hero?” The smile he’d lost reappeared on her face. “Oh, you’re so strong and have such quick reflexes,” she said, nose twitching. “Are you Superman? You know, I didn’t come here with Clark Kent.”


  He raised his eyebrows to exaggerate the smirk on his lips but remained silent.

  “Do you think my boyfriend’s going to be jealous?” She scraped her toe playfully across his shoe.

  “Stop it,” he said.

  “Make me.”

  He looked at her and she looked right back, their eyes forming a horizon.

  “Or am I your kryptonite, Mister Kent?” He blinked. “I know your seee-cret,” she sang, in full-on The Move mode now, her mind mapping the chessboard of their conversation. The smirk relaxed against his cheeks and they traded thin caresses on each other’s backs. She squashed her smile into a pout and he remained silent.

  “Oh, don’t be that way, you big baby.” He blinked. “You know I’ll make it up to you.” She slid out of his arms and rejoined his hand with hers before they scooched to a clear spot on the long pine bleacher board and sat down.

  The nephew could see the back of his uncle’s head, now on the opposite end from where he’d just seen him. The red team careened into its own take of the green team’s cheer; the girls sporting the capital letter Bs stood with their hands crossed in front of them, trying really really hard not to be impressed. The uncle tried to hide nothing, and for the duration of the first half he made a nuisance of himself, uprooting and uprooting again until his temporary neighbors on both ends of the long front row finally just got up and left their prime viewing seats, passive aggressively snapping their foam-backed seats together and climbing the stairs up to where they wouldn’t be interrupted every 5 minutes by worn wool and halitosis.

  By the time each pair of the uncle’s spurned neighbors made their respective ways to the top of the stadium, she had long coaxed the nephew down from the heights, claiming to be scared even though she knew he knew she was competitive in gymnastics, and he knew she knew he was the one truly terrified.