Review: Short stories about going nowhere fast
A street in Antigua, Guatemala (iStock)In Jared Lemus’s robust, melancholy debut short story collection Guatemalan Rhapsody, the narrator of the story “Heart Sleeves” is in a representative predicament: going nowhere fast. He’s stuck, having lost his job at a pizza place for smoking weed and remaining defiant when a customer falsely accuses him of pocketing her change.
“Back in Guatemala, where my parents are,” he confesses, “people had also treated me like that. My eyes were always wandering, and people thought I looked shifty.” At home, he gets high and pines for his roommate Teyo’s girlfriend, barely pursuing his aspiration to become a tattoo artist until Teyo brings home a flier for a tattoo shop offering a chance to win an apprenticeship in a portfolio contest. Teyo, the lesser artist of the two, is eager to practice designs on the narrator’s skin, while the narrator is reluctant, even as he explains, “I was a good artist. I had sketchbooks, though I rarely draw anymore, opting for weed and heartbreak instead. But maybe that was just who I was—someone with unfulfilled potential, which looks a lot like standing still.”
The sting of unfulfilled potential unifies the characters in Guatemalan Rhapsody, many of whom strive for love, respect or mere survival in tales that unfold in Guatemalan towns or among immigrant communities in the United States. The characters often work low-paying jobs that keep them mostly out of sight—graveyard shift janitor, laundryman, night bus driver, long-haul trucker, rental cabin manager. These characters eke out lives at the edge of society, regretting their pasts and yearning for better futures, while addictions or mistakes drag them lower.
At the root of the characters’ marginality often lies a familial fracturing—they are orphans, kids left on their own in the United States in the wake of parental deportation, parents who have lost children or exes abandoned after one too many betrayals. Many of the stories begin when a breeze of glamour or possibility enters the character’s lives and stirs it up—a Hollywood film crew arrives to shoot a movie in a Guatemalan village, a once-great soccer pro is hired to coach a mediocre middle school team, a van taxi driver tries to earn a bit more cash by ferrying drugs.
The stories are remarkable for their authenticity, grit and for the kinds of often-overlooked lives Lemus pays keen attention to. Lemus graces even the most knuckleheaded addicts, thieves and cheaters he depicts with the benefit of the doubt and human dignity.
In many of the stories, we join the characters after some calamity has disrupted their lives and they are trying to survive the rupture, such as in “Saint Dismas,” titled after the penitent thief crucified next to Jesus. We meet the narrator during a robbery he attempts along with a pack of other homeless teenagers. Their scam is to stretch a rope across a Guatemalan road to force passing cars to stop, and when the driver complies, to take their money. But they’re teenagers, amateur bandits, and their unarmed stickups often go awry, such as when a car accelerates through the cord, leaving them with rope-burned hands. As the story unfolds, we learn how they ended up here, trying to steal enough funds for food and a motel room.
The teenagers had fled their village when a gang claimed it as a hub between two cities. “The mareros were all business, all gold teeth and tattoos,” the narrator explains about the ferocity of the gang members, “the last thing our parents ever saw.” The kids rushed to the jungle for safety, but then what? Orphaned and penniless, they turn to this scheme to survive. “The government ignored us,” the narrator explains. “The cops ignored us. Said we should have been prepared.”
One day their rope entraps the car of Leslie, a girl from their village who escaped with her father when the gangs first arrived. They haven’t fared much better than the kids in the jungle. For a time Leslie joins the others in a scheme to steal even more money, but then she betrays them. Still, the narrator forgives her. “I don’t think she did it out of spite or anger but out of necessity,” he explains. “I think she was desperate, just like us, just like that thief they crucified with Jesus. He stole because he had to, our mother had said. And God forgave him. I thought about that a lot: how Jesus said the thief would dine with him in heaven that night. Sometimes I picture it…sitting at the right hand of God. Sometimes I can almost taste the wine.”
It’s hard to begrudge the bad behavior of another person as desperate for survival as you, many of the stories suggest. When a man sleeps with his friend’s girlfriend, a group of janitors conspires to get a security guard fired so they won’t lose their own jobs during budget cuts, and a drunk man catches the family’s rental cabin business on fire, Lemus depicts no rage and rarely even an expression of hard feelings. Forgiveness is implicit in the connection between these characters, in their solidarity at the bottom rung. I’ve been there, as hard up as you, the clemency of these characters suggests.
In “Bus Stop Baby,” the narrator Moises works as a “busboy/dishwasher” and rents the only bed he can afford after he’s kicked out of his prior accommodation for drug use: a damp mattress in an unheated garage in a house full of carousing coke addicts, miles from the restaurant where he works. After he’s late to work, his manager advises him to apply for reduced transit fare. When the bus pass arrives, he wakes up freezing one night and decides to ride the bus all night for warmth.
As he rides, he meets a man named Al, who shares whiskey and explains, “Got nowhere to go, nowhere to be. A pure bus stop baby.” Al offers his story and Moises gives his, which began in Guatemala City: “I told him about how I was a disappointment to my parents. They’d moved to the States to give me a better future, but with the time they spent worrying about my future, they’d neglected the present, and I’d found something else in the meantime.”
“People are quick to give up on you,” Al observes, “And I don’t mean you, I mean us.” The kind night bus driver, however, offers Moises a way out. She tells him the bus company is hiring, paying a good wage with benefits. “Course, you’d have to drop the habit,” she explains. The story ends with a choose-your-own-adventure delivered in two columns, “Option A” and “Option B,” one where Moises gives in to the undertow of his situation, and another where he struggles free from his addiction and becomes a bus driver. However, even the happier ending proves tenuous as Moises recalls Al’s belief that “no matter what he did, he was destined to become a bus stop baby. And I felt the same—a kind of calling to the bus stop benches.”
Lemus uses upside-down exclamation points and question marks at the beginning of English sentences, following the rules of proper Spanish grammar. In this gesture and in the compassionate humanity of Lemus’s stories, this collection marks the debut of a voice for the in-between, of people caught between one place and another, looking for a place to rest.
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