Short Bus By Brian Allen Carr (A Review By Sal Pane)

Texas A&M University Press

$22.95

My first encounter with Brian Allen Carr was over the internet.  HTMLGIANT had just linked to this long diatribe I’d written about a semi-obscure video game from the 1990’s. I checked the comments section hourly, and eventually a poster came on under the handle BAC saying how badly he wanted to punch me, or anyone else who wrote about video games for that matter. We started e-mailing back and forth, and long story short, things culminated in a bar with Brian hugging me like a long lost friend. That stormy juxtaposition—the easy camaraderie of men and the threat of violence just beneath the surface of everyday life—is a huge part of Short Bus, Carr’s debut short story collection from Texas Review Press. His characters are wonderfully volatile, and Carr, in the tradition of Barry Hannah or Flannery O’Connor, never balks at allowing them to punctuate a story with a terrifying act of violence.

Short Bus focuses on the Texas/Mexico border, and many of its characters—hardscrabble men and women who wear their hearts on their sleeves—reappear throughout the collection. The strongest stories are ones where Carr surprises the reader with unexpected moments of violence, not for violence’s sake, but as a new lens to explore characters we think we have a handle on. Take, for example, this section of “Over the Border”, a moody story about three men who drive into Mexico for prescription pills:

“[The bum] smiled and bowed again. Then he turned to make his way into the nest of needles. Moving slowly, he raised a foot, his balance swayed and he held out his hands. That’s when Holt kicked. He reared back like a punter and struck the bum’s ass hard with the toe of his shoe, sending the grimy man face first into the spiky paddles, and the bum hollered as he thumped through the plant and toward the ground. His shirt tore on the way down, and he screamed when his body thumped the dirt.”

This completely unexplained and mostly out-of-character act of violence begins “Over the Border” before darting back in time to before the boys made their pilgrimage south. It serves most importantly as an intriguing prologue, but it also adds a well-deserved sense of menace to the entire story. In the pages that follow, as the boys joke and holler on their car trip, the level of tension never dissipates because that image of the bum kicked into the brush never fades. Who are these men? What does Holt’s violence say about them? What does violence say about us? These are the questions Carr mulls over again and again throughout the collection.

There are standout stories throughout. “Whisper to Scar” is a particularly moving piece about an unhappy father who, even if only for a moment, considers letting his handicapped son drown on a fishing trip he never wanted to take in the first place. The story is cringe worthy, but in a good way. Where so many writers often look away from the metaphorical car crashes they set into motion, Carr never flinches. Another highlight is the titular “Short Bus”, a bizarrely funny story about a special education teacher who leads his students on a bank heist after forcing them to listen to gangster rap. What makes “Short Bus” work is that the admittedly ridiculous concept is coupled with real emotion and insight reminiscent of the final pages of Douglas Coupland’s slacker classic Generation X. On his first day of classes, the protagonist confronts a silent student while the others play outside:

“Marisol’s body lay crooked. Her limbs shaped like a crab and pulled tight toward her… That was the first time I talked. Maybe it was the smell. Maybe it was the music. I whispered how I never wanted to be a teacher and all about the probation and my DWI and… every stick of gum I’d ever stolen and every drink of liquor that I’d ever let steal my brains. All of the girls I’d slept with. Every fight I’d been in. I spread out as I spoke, my fibers seemed loosened. And when the bell rang and the nurse came back and my conference was over, the steps seemed serene moving back toward my room.”

Like the violence, Carr knows when to seed in scenes of truly unexpected tenderness, and it’s the tension between these two impulses, peppered with dashes of hilarity and earnestness, that fuel his work. The standouts highlight this tension. “Hot Mess” focuses on a teenage boy jealous of his brother’s easy way with women despite having terrible burn scars inflicted on him by their father. “My Second Throat”, one of the many pieces of flash fiction included, might be the strongest overall story. Joyously sincere and prose-poem lyrical, it follows a soldier returned from war unable to face his old lover. “Water-Filled Jugs” follows the familiar route of an unhappy husband and wife, but here they are strangely fixated on ice cream as a metaphor for their marriage and an actual human skeleton they draw on with crayons.

Not every story is as memorable as those above. Much of the flash fiction is tough to get a handle on sandwiched between the longer sections. “Fake Pregnant” flickers around without ever giving its attention to any one story thread. “Face So Mild” ends with a man looking up videos of high school fist fights but doesn’t give us quite enough character to care very strongly. “Pale Milk” darts unannounced from one POV to another again and again, but there’s not much going on at the center of the story. However, these are small nitpicks more than anything, and even the stories that are less fleshed out than the best pieces in Short Bus still have the power to astound you with a single, well-placed line that lands like a punch to the sternum.

Brian Allen Carr’s Short Bus is a strong, often poetic debut collection of short stories that will be of particular interest to fans of Barry Hannah or Flannery O’Connor or even Chuck Kinder. There’s an innate southern sensibility humming just beneath these pages, and like the aforementioned authors, Carr is at his best when exploring the oddly murky line dividing love from hate, tenderness from violence. His characters are deeply flawed and almost always make the worst possible decision when presented with any and all conflicts. In so many ways, they are deeply relatable, funhouse mirror versions of ourselves.

~Salvatore Pane has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web, and his fiction has appeared in PANK, Annalemma, Quick Fiction, Hobart, and others. He blogs for The Rumpus, BOMB, PANK, and Dark Sky and teaches fiction at the University of Pittsburgh and Chatham University. His graphic novel, The Black List, will be published later this year, and he can be found online at www.salvatore-pane.com.~