Fine People
Author
Chris McClelland
Author Bio
Chris McClelland was born in Westchester County, NY in 1965 and was educated at public schools in New York, Southern Georgia and Central Florida. He attended the University of Florida, and finished out his BA in literature at UCF where he also received an MA. He taught creative writing, American literature, and composition as an adjunct professor of English at local Florida colleges and has widely published work in magazines and newspapers. In 1999, he attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and later won the United Arts of Central Florida Fiction Award for the story “Fine People.” Since 2004, he has been a regular contributor to Narrative Magazine, where he worked as an assistant editor until founding The Provo Canyon Review with his wife, Erin. His writing has appeared in SouthLit, Harper’s Magazine, Puerto del Sol and the Mid-American Review. He lives in Provo, Utah with his wife and two stepsons.
Description
Chris McClelland, a Utah author, has written FINE PEOPLE, a collection of short stories and a remarkable debut of literary talent. His work has been praised by some of the best short fiction writers in the country. The late Joe David Bellamy, gifted author of GREEN FREEDOM and former editor of Fiction International, where he worked with the renown Raymond Carver and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford, says of McClelland’s work, “the journey is always insightful, surprising, and deeply felt, and the reader always knows he is in good hands with Chris McClelland. Fine People is fine work.” Other masters of the short form have weighed in on McClelland, too. “In the tradition of Tobias Wolff and Richard Russo,” says Philip F. Deaver, winner of the O. Henry and Flannery O’Connor Awards for fiction, “never in these stories is a situation over-simplified, and sometimes there’s no resolution. He knows this is often how it goes, so you’ll find no short cuts here.”
Screenwriter and ascending fiction writer Kyle Minor, author of PRAYING DRUNK, has said, “You will enjoy, as I have enjoyed, spending an evening with FINE PEOPLE.” And experimental writer Evan Lavender Smith says, “Those looking for fiction’s subtler, quieter pleasures would do well to look to FINE PEOPLE.”
Book excerpt
Fine People
They are in Mexico, on a tour bus. They have come here to forget the loss of their only child, though neither of them has admitted this. Mexico, at this time of year, is still stifling and will not turn cool until late next month. The choice to go now was impulsive. Flora’s idea. And Jack only consented if he could make it his own personal “booze cruise” of drinks at every stop.
Outside the window of the mammoth tourist bus gentle swells of hills flow thick amber grass. Beside Flora, Jack snores. He is wearing a pulled-down baseball cap—khaki with “Hard Rock, Cancun” stitched on it. She’s thinking now maybe this trip was not such a good idea. To say she is not happy around him since he began drinking again is an understatement. Not that she doesn’t understand why. She does. And she doesn’t blame him. They’ve both slid into old erosive patterns since Jen disappeared from their lives last spring.
“I’m cold,” came a slurred whine from the seat in front of her from a woman in her sixties. “I’m cold.” The inflection in her voice sleepy and infantile. Flora hopes she isn’t like that woman in twenty years. She can’t think twenty years. She can’t even think the next hour. Just now. The eternal now.
As the bus crests one hill she can see a small gathering of buildings, old and new, and beyond the top of a grayish pyramid. Alongside the road bright-colored blankets drape the low wall, and the people who sell them sit next to them and smoke cigarettes. God, what she’d give for a smoke right now. The last rest stop was over three hours ago. She knows—Jack keeps telling her—she must quit. She never mentions his drinking. She accepts it. She loves him; what else can she do? After the trip. After. Then she’ll quit. Go on one of those fancy new patches or pills. But for right now she fondles the pack of Virginia Slims in her purse. Pulls one out half way, and waits for the bus to stop.
As the bus jostles, and halts, Jack is awake. Feels the harsh Mexican sunlight warming his face even before he blinks at the incisive rays. Everything in his vision mists pinkly. His head aches, as does his stomach, and his hands shake. But he knows the cure. A cloudy memory from college, a drinking song, “Beer, beer, doctor says I need more beer.” He needs a beer, he needs many beers. Scotch too. Whiskey, later. Then get sick and switch to Everclear. He lifts himself from the seat. Even with people jostling all around him he maintains a certain carefulness to his steps. It is his way to comport himself thus. Even when drunk, Jack is an engineer. Period. Nothing else. It’s the only identity he will allow himself. He can no longer call himself a father, or family man. He’s lost that right. Early mornings, late nights confined to a cubicle smaller than a prison cell at the firm. Many times he will stop working and on the back of a discarded memo draw precise interconnecting three quarter squares—out, in, like t
he battlements of a castle. A buttress for the pressures that push inside and out. He likes drawing like this with his hand, not a computer mouse. He’s nostalgic for the days when plans were hand drawn. It calms him. It is the only respite he’ll allow himself at work. And Lord, how he works. After Jen, the project managers told him to take it easy. Take some time off. Nothing doing. Give me the Termo Bogata project. Bring on the Milwaukee one as well. Throw a load on me.
Jack was not always so rigid with himself, so closed off to the world, so dour. There was a time, before Jen’s death, when he was open, warm, personable. The kind of man people spoke fondly of at work, and around the neighborhood. He embraced life as he did his family, treated people with kindness, concern. Now, when he is not at the office behaving like a machine, he is often drunk and loutish. But something of the old, more tender, Jack remains in him, even if he himself does not know it.
They step off the bus. Jack looks solid before Flora, which she has always been attracted to, and he is a builder, which is what she had loved about him from the first. She remembered the first project he had designed, a combustion turbine in Albany, Georgia, before Jen was born. He had taken her there, shown her the huge cylinder, all the pipes and electrical equipment, the vent called a hersig where superheated air discharged and was efficiently captured to power another steam turbine. This complex of power and precision once lived only in her husband’s mind. Now, it gave thousands of homes electricity: countless air conditioners, refrigerators, lightbulbs, alarm clocks. Did the fine people of Albany, Georgia ever wonder where all this heat and light came from? After that day she’d known she’d married the right man.
He’s drifting with the rest of these people toward a gaudy new bar with reflective windows so shiny the tourists squint and look away from it even as they stumble towards it. Too much light. Flora is drawn instead to a place on the far side of the road. So rustic it doesn’t even have windows. One in a line of shops and stores resembling those in a town from a cowboy movie. A covered wooden walk.
She takes his hand. “This one, Jack.” She immediately questions her motives. She wonders if she’s trying to get him away from the crowd to drink less. Let go and let him be responsible for what he does. She had learned this, and so much more, after they had both started the meetings fifteen years ago. When Jen disappeared, he stopped going to his meetings, of course. That didn’t mean she had to stop going to hers. She shares his pain, but chooses to blunt it in different ways. She goes to meetings almost every night at home to deal with it. Helps her define her boundaries, take care of herself through the chaos. She needs to call Jill when she gets to the hotel room. Check in with her.
“They got beer there?” He is squinting at the small cantina, blinking sweat beads out of his eyes. She says nothing. Allows the breeze to play with strands of her hair think and graying in the wind. So many women her age butcher their hair until they look just like the men they’ve married. Right down to the shape of the sideburns. Not Flora.
The waist high wall in the front of the cantina is painted white with the yellow and blue stripe around the building that identifies it as serving Corona. Jack has zeroed in on that aspect of the landscape real quick. “Beer’s a beer.” He shrugs and follows her. The large wooden sign “Fred’s” looms above them as they enter the place. “Fred’s, huh?” They take a table near the low wall. He pounds his fist on it, and Flora jumps in her seat. “Fred,” he bellows. “Fred! Where you hiding, Fred?”
A thin old man approaches the table.
“You Fred?”
“Federico,” says the man calmly.
“Well, Fred-or-fuckin’-Ricko, or whoever the hell you are…” He’s digging into the deep pockets of his khaki shorts. “A couple cervesas, por favor. Coronas, if you please.” He throws an indiscriminant ball of bills across the table, pink and blue notes blossoming from the wad. “And step on it.”
The man looks unsure. He is looking around the floor, under the table. “Step…step on what?”
Jack shakes his head. Where do they get these people? “Mucho pronto, Senor Sombrero, or no mucho dinero for you.”
Federico is again perplexed, this time by the man’s insulting tone. The only senor wearing a hat here is this rude customer. “You would like Coronas?”
“Sure thing.”
“We do have better beers here. We serve Modelo, very rich. Or maybe the dark Negro Leon. Very strong.”
“Was I not clear? Coronas.”
Federico shrugs and goes to the bar at the back of the room. He reminds himself most tourists are not like this obnoxious and drunken man. He realizes people like this usually behave this way to hide an inner wound. A loss. An injustice. He had seen it in his son, Felipe. It does not excuse the man acting as he does, but it explains it. Then again, maybe not. Some people’s bizarre behaviors can’t be explained. They just are.
He looks up to the wall, the photographs. Federico was once an attorney in Mexico City until he retired here to his boyhood home, and the photographs are of him with Jimmy Carter, Queen Elizabeth, and recently, the Pope in Merida. Then of course, the photo of Felipe, just before his relief trip to Chiapas, his final trip. These photos give him heart. He reaches deep into the ice box and, beneath the watery cubes, yanks out two Coronas. The cheapest beer in Mexico. Poorest quality. He is sure the man will not like this beer as well as the others, but that does not matter. This man probably wouldn’t like anything brought to him.
Meanwhile Flora has pushed about a foot further away from the table. Lights a Virginia Slim. Surrounds her face in swirls of smoke. She is distancing. Taking care of herself the best way she knows how. She has learned that with anyone else she would not have tolerated such behavior, but she loves Jack. He understands this, and has grown quiet, studies the small orange crackers in the bowl before them. He takes some, begins arranging the bubbled wafers in a pattern on his placemat. He is building something indistinct, little blocks, tiny walls. Absorbed in this task, he does not even look up when the beer has come. He clutches the two bottles and pulls them to his chest with one hand, the other still intent on the mini-project.
“Would the young lady like anything?” Federico asks.
She smiles at him. At his compliment. She knows she is no longer young, and surely doesn’t feel like a lady. This kind man didn’t deserve Jack’s abuse. No one does. “Do you have soda?”
“We have only Cristal. If you want Coke or Pepsi you’ll have to go across the street.”
She smiles again. She likes this man. “Cristal would be splendid.” She thinks of the billboard she saw earlier for the drink. A big orange bottle splashing into sparkling water, one word, Sabor, underneath. She thinks sabor must mean savor, or must be related to it. “Do you have orange flavor?”
