And Dogs to Chase Them

By Ray Trotter

Welcome to the world of Ray Trotter, where ordinary humans are pushed to do things in out-of-the-ordinary ways. Trotter has conjured a world of Southern hyper-reality in And Dogs to Chase Them, his first book of short stories: a good Christian woman who has had enough and so pushes a man down t

• Language: English
• Publisher: EastOver Press LLC
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958094419

Ray Trotter

Railroad gandy dancer and bum down in Mexico probably are the highlights of Trotter's career. There were other tasks involving schools and government work but these aren't worth mentioning.

Book preview

Praise for Ray Trotter’s

AND DOGS TO CHASE THEM

Ray Trotter is a gifted writer. He knows his people, their place, and their language, and that combination makes for a collection that is at times laugh-out loud funny and other times deeply poignant. And Dogs to Chase Them is a winner.

––RON RASH, author of

Serena, Nothing Gold Can Stay,

and The Caretaker

Ray Trotter’s great collection, And Dogs to Chase Them, brings to mind the great stories of Larry Brown. These are everyday, mostly blue-collar, characters, putting up good fights, skeptical of their situations, and true to their beliefs. Set mostly at the tail end of the Appalachians, Trotter’s gathered a passel of good, stubborn, often hilarious men and women who endure. I love this collection and recommend it highly.

––GEORGE SINGLETON, author of

The Curious Lives of Non-Profit Martyrs

and The Half-Mammals of Dixie

Ray Trotter’s And Dogs To Chase Them is an intimate and nuanced portrait of mostly working class people struggling to survive and do better. Set in North Georgia and East Tennessee, these stories sparkle with insight into what it means to be human in a world that is often unforgiving but offers hope.

––SYBIL BAKER, author of

Apparitions and Immigration Essays

And Dogs To Chase Them

Ray Trotter

© 2023

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

STORIES

ISBN 978-1-958094-34-1

ISBN 978-1-958094-41-9 (E-BOOK)

Book Design EK LARKEN

Cover Design MARGARET YAPP & ALANA SOLIN

Quiet Neighbors and Snow previously appeared in

WAUGH STREET JOURNAL

No part of this book may be reproduced in any way whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

EastOver Press encourages the use of our publications in educational settings. For questions about educational discounts, contact us online: www.EastOverPress.com or [e-mail].

PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY

ROCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS

www.EastOverPress.com

For

Leona Baker Trotter

Contents

PREFACE

And Dogs to Chase Them

Fourteen But Counting

Seducing Copernicus

Why I Whizz at the P.O.

Searching for Kevorkian

Turning, Turned

Convergence

The Promiscuity of Truth

Cowbirds

Do Not Call

The Death of Paleontology

Tire Size 9-1-1

A Reason to Remember

After the Truck

Concrete

Quiet Neighbors

Snow

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

In the beginning was the Word. It got changed a lot. A proverb among Southern lawyers: The one who tells the best story wins.

Back in the nineties, in a lull between pairings at a high-school debate tournament at the University of West Georgia, I became puzzled by an uproar erupting from the building entrance. The source turned out to be my own son Rogers, himself a debater. A dozen students from various competing schools sat around him on the slate floor, laughing hysterically. I don’t know the particular story—maybe the one about the duct-tape truck––but Rogers was known by his gift for embellishment.

My son comes from a bizarre line of teachers, drunken preachers, fugitives, mail-order husbands, most of them arguably accomplished liars: a great-great-grandfather who fled Scotland just ahead of the law around 1850; my own great-great-grandfather Can Jenkins, deputy U.S. Marshal in Western N.C., 1900, who openly manufactured the illegal whiskey he was paid to eradicate—this before that branch of the family was literally run out of North Carolina into Tennessee by the local sheriff; and the Marshal/ bootlegger’s grandson, my late mother’s uncle, Ray Jenkins (my nearest claim to a grandfather, though I called him Uncle Ray), such a storyteller that TIME writers of the early 1950s seemed to delight as much in his embellishments about his father and grandfather (Lum and Can) as they did in his Huntley-Brinkley-televised bare-knuckled rounds with Joe McCarthy and attorney Roy Cohn (Mr. Trump’s mentor) who at one point duped Uncle Ray with a little embellishment of their own: a fake photograph.

Still, the Word prevailed. Joseph Welch’s famous comment should have ended the Hearings on the spot: Have you no sense of decency, Senator? Mr. Welch was Uncle Ray’s boss. His Words ring today.

TIME described Uncle Ray’s voice as like a laryngitic lion. It sounded so even in private. The voice, the Word, the stories, must have found particular novelty in airport waiting areas, where allegedly Ray couldn’t be present for 15 minutes anywhere without discovering some distant cousin. Maybe it is the Word itself that brings and binds us together, makes us kin. Our Southern mountains crawl with kin.

But sometimes the Word grows quiet, especially for us older folk who still have stories to preserve. Big-money publishers are said to shun us as mere flies at a family picnic. Uncle Ray’s memoir, The Terror of Tellico Plains, published when he was 81, (East Tennessee Historical Society, 1978) lies long out of print, his name a fading footnote to history.

Herman Melville died in obscurity. Some now consider him the great North American novelist. But Billy Budd will eventually fade from English 202 anthologies, Moby Dick go the way of the Limberlost works. Tom Bailey calls time the gold standard.

For whatever ephemeral Word we utter, and for us older folk particularly, now comes EastOver Press–– Walter Robinson, Keith Pilapil Lesmeister, Denton Loving, and Kelly March––their stated mission to give voice not only to established writers but to those who might not otherwise be heard.

In the end, as the beginning, it may still be the Word—not Uncle Ray’s, not Melville’s, and certainly not mine, but A Word that brings us closer together.

If you take mine as gospel, I fail. But if you grin or even sniffle at a couple of these tales, even in an airport, well, we’re probably cousins.

AND DOGS TO CHASE THEM

For eight minutes that Saturday afternoon the calls we made chased him. Not one ever caught him. And after that they’d bounce for weeks like springs uncoiled among the hills and hollows over what he’d done when he got back.

Eight minutes was the time it took him to get from home to town. He hurried because of the message Judy had left him: the high school band needed the bus.

He was sleepy from being out all night with two fox-hunting buddies and their dogs—not his, the walker hounds, his already worn too thin from previous nights, the ones whose voices he’d taped while they ran.

This Saturday Marty might still have been a little drunk though anger and frustration and something else he couldn’t name—that and the fact that Judy wasn’t there, that there was a p.s. added to the phone message. The p.s. said a man had called in the night, left word he wanted to see him.

Judy was a tall blonde thin-faced freckled girl who’d scored thirty-five points one game back in high school basketball, an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle. Everybody loved her. That Saturday morning she’d taken the baby and gone to her aunt’s at daybreak to try to get some sleep. It was three AM when the phone had woke her.

The man’s voice asked for her husband. The man was drunk. He broke off the conversation by saying Some-by-God-body––meaning himself if necessary–– had better shorten some leashes.

Half asleep, Judy at first thought he was just talking about Marty’s hounds. They’d gotten the pen gate unlatched and were loose in the cool dawn when she went out. She tied them to the back of the bus before she left. They were still there when Marty started the bus. They weren’t when he finally stopped it.

By the time Marty pulled onto the square and Pete Watts the police chief flagged him down about all there was left for Pete to tell him was that whatever had been back there behind the bus was there no longer—just frayed grass rope, empty leashes, folks in turmoil clear back to the house at the foot of Trace Mountain.

After the rest of what followed the thought has struck me that eight minutes is plenty of time for a world to end.

May and I were watering the early tomatoes when we first heard him. The sound wasn’t anything you’d recognize now or in a hundred years. It must have been the dogs we heard first above the engine. By the time we could see, the only thing left to hear was the engine itself: big yellow Blue Bird Detroit diesel, tunnel of dust and thunder boring down the cove road past where we stand in dirt up to our forearms, sweating, staring.

It is May who realizes first and yells for me to stop him, Oh, Oscar, stop him. But by now there isn’t a chance to flag. All I can do is jump in my truck and floorboard it, while she calls, both of which is too little too late. I catch him just as he pulls up on the square, the crowd already gathering.

Try as I might, that is how I will always remember him, as if out of all the times I’ve seen him, this is his defining moment. And maybe there is nothing anyone can ever do to flag a person down once his moment comes. It was Forrest Warren who said that, and I’d have to agree. Mostly for Judy’s sake, Forrest was the one who helped Marty land the job working on the county’s busses, his third or fourth job since he came to town.

After the security guard and the mobile-home-setup jobs, Marty and Judy needed a place to stay, so Forrest let them live free in one of the rental houses up on the old Cheeks place above us in return for them maintaining the other two houses, keeping the field bush hogged. It wasn’t a big job considering the condition of the equipment and the houses. Forrest had always believed if you looked after your equipment it wouldn’t let you down. He tried to feel the same about people.

Marty came from somewhere over in South Carolina. Just stopped here because Lister, Tennessee, population fifteen hundred, happened to be the spot where his car ran out of gas. Came evidently with no more purpose than a live oak leaf blown off a tree two hundred miles south and carried here and not somewhere else by sheer blind chance, dropped by some rare coastal storm moving east-to-west against the mountains. Marty told it that way that was so much a part of his undoing, that deep-South drawl half-grin that made you think of heat waves and turpentine woods. Six feet tall with hair the color of fire, square jawline like one of those fellows the catalogs use to model suits or toothpaste, he came walking up off the highway with a red plastic can to buy two dollars’ worth of high test that in that small-block Camaro might have gotten him to some place else that made as little sense as this one. That should have told you something, Forrest said later after all that happened, not mad even then, just wiser.

But it hadn’t told him, Forrest, a thing. And what better proof of how slow a man could be at catching on (meaning himself) than that this same stranger had pulled out not twenty minutes later in his, Forrest’s, own F350 service truck with Forrest’s own son to drive the Camaro in for him?

Getting paid to be his own first customer, Forrest said, as if jobs even changing tires at an Exxon were ripe pears hanging. And who else did you ever know that could go out on his first damn call and come back riding a red Harley with the girl whose car he’d gone to fix sitting up behind him? Huh? Just tell me anybody.

Forrest’s first thought was that he’d somehow found a way to swap his, Forrest’s, truck for the Harley—titles be damned—with the girl thrown in as some kind of collateral. The truth was worse—some three-way deal with the girl’s mama about to be late to a hair dresser and this knight in a service truck and black engineer boots bound on saving her—damn the insurance and window sticker both that said

NO RIDERS.

The gray Cadillac he’d gone to rescue, the one the mama’s ex was two months behind in payments on, would be fine for a couple hours sitting beside the phone booth on Riley Pike while Marty tried out the Harley and the boy waited in the truck. The girl had just graduated high school and needed wheels.

Forrest said, That guy could fall out of a airplane and land feet-first in a pile of cow shit and shuffle out selling fertilizer.

Only, Forrest had to fire him—not two hours after