Get 'em Young Treat 'em Tough Tell 'em Nothing Read online

  Praise for Robin McLean and

  Get ’em Young,

  Treat ’em Tough,

  Tell ’em Nothing

  “Not since Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son have I read a book of stories that so resonated in my soul. McLean’s prose sings with a fierceness that is ornate and sparse, spiritual and secular, peaceful and violent. These are stories that remind of Annie Proulx, Joy Williams, and Flannery O’Connor: surprising in the fundamental weirdness of mundane life pressed inextricably into the borderlands. The best collection of stories I have read in years.”

  christian kiefer

  “I challenge you to point to another writer like McLean. She is voracious, and her vision is brutal, yet hilarious. We will see her everywhere. These brilliant tales are so surprisingly original, so strange and moving, so funny, so irreverent, I swallowed them, I ate them whole.”

  deb olin unferth

  “These stories, they churn and turn with ferocious pace and a brute subject-verb force. McLean is a writer of pure conviction, unafraid of risk, unconcerned with convention, objective but deeply humane, alive to wonder and strangeness. This collection, like her first, is beautiful and harrowing. I’ll say it again and again: Nobody writes like Robin McLean.”

  chris bachelder

  “Robin McLean has always excelled in narrators who communicate their own self-sufficiency even as they inadvertently reveal the extent to which they’re actually barely holding it together. They live in places where a bed frame and box spring are just a dream. They remind us that they’re still evolving … And yet somehow in the face of all of that, her protagonists summon lift, and generate that tenderness necessary to continue. The results are fictions that unite the personal and the political in ways that we need now more than ever.”

  jim shepard

  “Deeply engaged with the rural, with people on their way off the grid, Robin McLean’s fiction is at once fantastical and intensely observed. These are stories about human frailty and darkness, shot through with small moments of glory … ”

  brian evenson

  “Where so many American writers balk at genuine human darkness, Robin McLean steps inside with a poet’s eye and an ill-used gavel she swiped from the decaying desk of some corrupt, abusive judge. The results are gripping, chilling, and far too realistic for the term. These ten modern parables lay bare our species’ manifold predicaments here in the dimming light of imagined futures. An unforgettable book.”

  kyle beachy

  “Robin McLean writes with a kind of tender violence, her sentences aimed like fire hoses at a burning world. I loved this collection, and its cast of extraordinary characters will haunt my dreams.”

  dani shapiro

  “I loved these brilliant, atmospheric and original stories – Robin McLean is such an exciting writer, and this is her best so far.”

  joanna kavenna

  ‌

  First published in 2022 by And Other Stories

  Sheffield – London – New York

  www.andotherstories.org

  Copyright © Robin McLean, 2022

  All rights reserved. The right of Robin McLean to be identified as author of this work has been asserted.

  ISBN: 9781913505530

  eBook ISBN: 9781913505547

  Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Jane Haxby; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Anna Morrison

  And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

  For all the kids—

  (especially)

  M, C, S, K, L & E

  I shake my two hairy fists at the sky

  and I let out a howl so unspeakable

  that the water at my feet turns sudden ice

  and even I myself am left uneasy.

  —Grendel,

  John Gardner

  Contents

  But for Herr Hitler

  Pterodactyl

  Get ’em Young, Treat ’em Tough, Tell ’em Nothing

  True Carnivores

  Big Black Man

  Judas Cradle

  Cat

  House Full of Feasting

  Cliff Ordeal

  Alpha

  ‌But for Herr Hitler

  Iris got her name from a great-aunt, whose phone was tapped during the Red Scare. Agents took pictures of the house through gaps in the fence. Great-Aunt Iris spoke pig Latin on the phone and buried cigar boxes under the cabbage and spinach.

  “They get salary,” she said to her namesake later. “So they must vork for it.”

  Iris thought the name was old-fashioned. Eric liked old-fashioned. “Iris, yes, Iris.” They met on opposite sides of a bowl of peanuts. She said he looked familiar. She liked his crew cut, his right arm without a hand, and the smell of his earlobe when she leaned in, speaking into him over the crowd. Iris set his hook on the bar by her beer. A punk band played over his shoulder. He watched her eyes drift from bass to drummer. She rolled his sleeve back to the bicep, revealing a Norse god blurred at the edges.

  “Thor,” Eric said.

  “You’re kidding,” Iris said, and crossed her fishnet legs.

  “Gods are handy,” he said. “If he comes in, I’ll introduce you.”

  “Where’d the hand go?” she said.

  “Some raghead’s got it,” Eric said.

  They fucked the first night in her little blue car, yes yes, whatever you want—his hand on her inner thigh, her finger on his defenselessness. She climbed on top.

  “What are you?” he said. “You’re perfect.”

  She gazed out the back seat window. The alley, lit by a security spotlight, was only average filthy, beer-can scent and rotting fish. Puget Sound sloshed between buildings. The dumpster was empty. The garbage strike was finally over.

  “Let’s run away,” she said. “To some big shiny life.”

  He crawled out from under.

  “A big life,” he said. “Someplace big.”

  His father had said, Think big or stay home, one then another apartment in the projects.

  She got pregnant the third or fourth time.

  The car had dents in the fender, cracked and wilting wiper blades.

  “I couldn’t find the pills,” she said.

  He took the key. He slid into the driver’s side. The car had come to her when Great-Aunt Iris died. “She refused to eat,” Iris told him. “She pushed the tray of mashed potatoes off the bed, shook her head sorry for the mess, asked for her stash of pills from her political days. Tried to tell me with her eyes where the pills were.”

  “I want land,” he said. “Lots of it.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  “The smell of pine.”

  “Wonderful.”

  She strapped the seat belt over her belly, pulled the visor to block the sun. They left Seattle.

  “We’ll buy it from an old man with whiskers,” he said. “Shotgun on the porch, dogs in the yard.”

  She petted the bristles on his neck. “Just get me out of here.”

  The road crossed into Canada, cut through a thousand miles of mountains, then a thousand more of marshy flat, a continent of black spruce. Her earrings hung to her clavicles. They swung at ruts, knocked her jawbone.

  Dead bugs slicked the windshield. They stopped at creeks to scrub the glass. “I want a hot tub,” she said, knee-deep in ferns. “I want sliding doors to the patio.”

  “You will be a queen,” he said.

  They crossed out of Canada at Beaver Creek, which consisted of low, scanty prefab clusters. Border City was smaller. A gas pump and an American flag. Th
e road was potholes and humps with washed-out places. The land was too wide for cameras. Signs on gravel roads pointed to national parks she’d never heard of. They passed log cabins and stick-frame houses with airstrips and small planes in driveways. They passed Moose Creeks, Bear Creeks, Bad Luck Rivers. They passed teepee gift shops with split-rail fences and twenty-foot chiefs standing with hatchets, warpath feathers, and painted foreheads, cheeks, and noses—gold, white, and blue—their right hands raised in peace signs.

  She sniffed the big sky stretching to the far-off mountains. “I don’t smell anything.”

  Telephone poles were very thin men walking in line.

  Trees were trees. Trees. Trees.

  “Who could live in all this nothing?” she said.

  “The pioneers,” he said.

  The tire blew at Tok. She handed him a lug wrench. He lay on the shoulder. They rolled the tire to the liquor store, past a double-wide church, a hardware store, and a tiny pet shop closed for the season. They shared a bottle of rum on the step. An Athabaskan boy patched the puncture. He was slow to speak, to answer questions.

  “I don’t think he likes us,” Iris said, sipping backwash.

  Eric spat at the gravel between his boots. “Why would he?”

  They’d heard land was two hundred an acre near Delta. They borrowed the money from Iris’s mother. “We’ll pay back every penny.”

  They bought eighty acres with a butte at half price. Iris wanted the butte for the view.

  “An impossible driveway,” the real estate agent warned, but he’d come from California.

  Eric bought dynamite. On weekends, he rented a pile driver and bored holes, set fuses behind boulders. A neighbor came with a Bobcat and cleared the rubble. “No better reason for a party,” he said and slapped the backs of new arrivals. Others brought shovels and earplugs. They sat on tailgates, muddy boots dangling.

  More people arrived. Blasting rock walls for new roads seemed the best kind of entertainment. Iris stood on the double yellow lines with the other onlookers. They all knew each other. There were few cars, but the cars that came flashed their brights, slowed, and asked Iris her due date.

  One neighbor woman came on foot, appeared through the trees, up the trail from the glacier. Her kids followed, scattered.

  “Blast away,” the woman said. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

  Trucks pulled in. Engines ticked and cooled. Evening was blue, full of blast dust.

  “Need a hand?” someone called.

  Eric waved his hook. She’d never seen him laugh like that.

  “My advice,” said the woman, pointing at Iris’s belly. “School that baby at home. No one comes to Alaska for other people’s opinions. Learn to love moose and salmon.”

  The woman slugged Coke from a two-liter bottle. She swatted her kids when they begged for a sip. The sun was pink well after dinnertime. Scorched leaves, pulverized rock, sweat, bug spray, a whiff of sulfur. It was still midsummer, but new snow dusted the peaks and saddles.

  “You like it here yet?” the woman said.

  “I hate bugs,” Iris said.

  “Too bad for you,” said the woman.

  “We’re living in a tent,” Iris said.

  “Everyone starts in a tent.”

  The woman offered Coke, and Iris drank some. When parts of the wall exploded, the noise echoed off distant cliffs. Men leaped and laughed in the showers of dust.

  “All the quiet’s the hardest getting used to,” said the woman. “And if you don’t like trees, best divorce him now.”

  “I like trees,” Iris said.

  A trooper rolled by. Men leaned in his window, played with his radio.

  “Dark winters,” the woman said. “Some people blow their brains out. Drink.”

  “I don’t mind the dark,” Iris said. “We get along.”

  “Don’t get fat,” said the woman. “Don’t get ugly.”

  They swatted mosquitoes. They sat in lawn chairs at midnight. The sun rolled across serrated peaks. Kids leaned under hoods in headlights. They poured jugs of water on steaming engines. They threw snowballs from patches left in ditches. Eric in the middle of everything, pointing and directing—taller than ever before, she thought.

  They were drinking coffee at six. Someone had brought a potful from the lodge. The woman was counting kids, finally heading home. A happy, tired family.

  “Why in hell do you live here?” Iris said.

  “Come see my glacier,” said the woman.

  Once, Great-Aunt Iris apprehended a masked intruder, cornered him in the bathroom with a dog and mop. He dropped his sack. She cuffed him with antique handcuffs, Berliners with an oval-key top. She marched him though the yard. In the garage, she duct-taped him to a chair by the mower, round and round till the roll ran out. She locked the door. After twenty-four hours she let him go but didn’t uncuff him. He smelled of piss and shit. She pressed twenty dollars in his pocket.

  She said, “Never try such nonsense again!”

  The chainsaw was designed for handless veterans by the VA. When Eric signed for the crate at the PO, he thanked the clerk, refused help getting it to the truck. The blade sliced trees along the easement. He walked behind it, kicked the rounds apart with his heel. He counted trees until he stopped counting. If his father ever came to visit, the old man would approve of the overall plan. He’d approve of Iris too, since his father preferred tall women, said small-women men got it all wrong since a tall woman fits best, pushes back, enjoys herself. His father would never make the trip, Eric knew. He watched Iris drag the slash to the burn pit. The baby napped on a stump in the car seat.

  The house Eric built was a shack at first, stick frame. A generator for light, wood for heat, and a gate round the woodstove. He dreamed up names for the parcel: Irisville. Iris Junction. At first, they played chase in the trees, rode the dogsled when the snow got good, ate goat cheese until the goat died. He got part-time work with the state troopers. Wolves at night. Bears. Coyotes. The second child was a girl. The mud was worse than imagined. Iris’s city clothes were ruined quickly, her earrings lost. Before the well, they bathed in a lean-to by the creek: fire, suds, and steam on rock.

  “There’s no way to get cleaner,” Eric said in a cloud.

  They sponged each other’s backs, rinsed with water from plastic jugs.

  “I want running water,” she said, pushed out the flap into the snow, walked to the house naked but for boots and the baby.

  “Snowing again,” said the boy, stepping carefully in his mother’s tracks, followed by Eric, who crushed her footprints with his big wide boots.

  The floor was often unswept. The laundromat was thirty miles. He had believed she would be a better mother—canned jam and aprons—and that motherhood would make her softer. Her belly softened. Her hips widened. He saw her kneel, sometimes, take the boy’s head in her hands, and whisper to him. The boy laughed and touched his ear for more. A good sign, Eric thought. Sometimes he found them curled like cats, the baby in the middle of the bed. They looked up at him, the intruder.

  “Of course they love me,” she told him. “Of course I know how.”

  Bugs blackened the screens all summer, a patient army—drumming, drumming. Let us in. On their chains out in the trees, the dogs whined.

  “Poor things,” Iris said as she dragged out the dog food.

  Eric carried a bucket of water in each fist.

  “Use your mind,” he said. “Block out the minutiae.”

  He watched the bag spill when she dropped it, then Iris running from dog to dog, slapping herself, slapping the dogs, bugs flying up from their naked noses, Iris swatting, “Get the hell away from us!”

  She missed traffic, bus exhaust and smog, and the burning rubber at car crashes. She missed urine-scented doorways, nail-polish remover, perfume aisles.

  “Damn it,” Eric said. “Think of all we do have.”

  She let the hippies at the creek braid her hair. They rubbed her feet, and she rubbed theirs, th
ough she was no expert. They hopped across the creek to dry-topped boulders. They crouched and talked about the water shortage. She rocked the baby, who had colic, lifted her blouse to give the mouth a nipple. They offered medicinal herbs for the colic. The king salmon rested below the falls. The biggest were four feet long, turning red, mouths frowning, almost panting.

  “Spawn till you die,” said a man with a blond braid, watching her.

  The boy threw a big stick that floated by the kings. The fish bumped each other at the disturbance.

  Iris kissed the baby, who rejected the nipple, cried and cried.

  The boy covered the nipple with her blouse.

  She smiled at the hippies and kissed the baby, saying, “Sometimes I want to throw this baby out the window.”

  The hippies approved of the cliffs, pointed to notches where clever birds lived.

  Potatoes grew in a line of old tires. In September, the last month he could take his shirt off, Eric flipped the tires and dug. His father had died by then. Eric didn’t go to the funeral. “The flight is six hundred,” he said, but thought, Dad would not have come to mine. He imagined his own burial, in his own woods, in a grove just off his easement, snug between his trees, no death certificate, no cemetery fee, no notice in the official record. Why is dying official business? There is nothing more private. The ground was rocky, one foot of dirt then glacial till. Men would wear rain slickers around the grave—women and babies, umbrellas. The potatoes filled five burlap sacks. They would last through April.

  She hated the outhouse from the beginning. The bed was secondhand and noisy, their pots and pans from garage sales. Her mother sent money for a new couch, but they found a perfectly good one at the dump. They dragged the couch to the car, lifted it onto the roof rack. Eric threw Iris a bungee.

  Iris kicked the couch when they brought it in. “I just wanted a goddamned new one.”

  “You want goddamned water too,” Eric said. “A well is twenty-five dollars per foot.”