{"product_id":"corpus-christi-isbn-9780812971873","title":"Corpus Christi","description":"From an acclaimed and award-winning young writer comes an intensely moving debut collection set in the eye of life’s storms. In Corpus Christi, Texas—a town often hit by hurricanes— parents, children, and lovers come together and fall apart, bonded and battered by memories of loss that they feel as acutely as physical pain. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA car accident joins strangers linked by an intimate knowledge of madness. A teenage boy remembers his father’s act of sudden and self-righteous violence. A “hurricane party” reunites a couple whom tragedy parted. And, in an unforgettable three-story cycle, an illness sets in profound relief a man’s relationship with his mother and the odd, shifting fidelity of truth to love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTold in fresh, lyrical voices and taut, inventive styles, these narratives explore the complex volatility of love and intimacy, sorrow and renewal—and expose how often these experiences feel like the opposite of themselves. From the woman whose young son’s uncanny rapport with snakes illuminates her own missed opportunities to the man confronting his wife and her lover in a house full of illegal exotic birds, all the characters here face moments of profound decision and recognition in which no choice is clearly or completely right.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWriting with tough humor, deep humanity, and a keen eye for the natural environment, Bret Anthony Johnston creates a world where where cataclysmic events cut people loose from their “regular lives, floating and spiraling away from where we had been the day before.” \u003cb\u003eCorpus Christi\u003c\/b\u003e is a extraordinarily ambitious debut. It marks the arrival of an important, exquisitely talented voice to American fiction.\"Bret Johnston writes with searing honesty and a deep compassion about the people in his native Texas. This astonishing book will break your heart, make you nod in comprehension, laugh out loud, and ultimately force you to see your own life in a fresh way. The prose is wonderfully precise and the observations are dead-on. Corpus is a brilliant debut by a young writer who has clearly put literature at the center of his life. \u003cbr\u003e-Chris Offutt, author of \u003cb\u003eKentucky Straight\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bret Anthony Johnston's stories read as if they'd been written by someone who's lived various lifetimes, time enough to develop real wisdom, generosity and the art of making strong clean sentences.  What I especially love about these stories is the fact that many of the characters walk the finest line between  violence and love, and they do so with a tenderness that is heartbreaking.\"  \u003cbr\u003e-Jane Hamilton\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bret Anthony Johnston is a name to put on your list--that list of writers you always read first. He knows how you can despair of people and go on treasuring them--hard-living, hard-headed, unexpected people who look out of his stories like brightly lit signposts on a dark highway. 'Look here,' they say. 'Right here.'\"\u003cbr\u003e-Dorothy Allison \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In his first collection of stories, Bret Anthony Johnston eloquently depicts individual lives at once haunted and painfully enriched by memory, and by the losses of which memory is made.  A wise and moving debut by a talented young writer.\"\u003cbr\u003e-John Burnham Schwartz, author of \u003cb\u003eClaire Marvel\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eBret Anthony Johnston\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of the internationally bestselling novel \u003ci\u003eRemember Me Like This\u003c\/i\u003e and the award-winning \u003ci\u003eCorpus Christi: Stories\u003c\/i\u003e, and the editor of \u003ci\u003eNaming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer\u003c\/i\u003e. His work has appeared in\u003ci\u003e The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, Thrasher Magazine, The Best American Short Stories\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the Sunday Times Short Story Award, he was born and raised in Texas and is the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.Waterwalkers\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As Hurricane Alicia drifted north-northup the Gulf Coast from  Veracruz, Mexico, Sonny Atwill stood outside McCoy's Lumber hanging  no plywood signs in the windows. A gray, blurring rain blew over the  parking lot, diffusing the headlights of cars waiting for empty  spaces. Horns blared and bleated. In addition to the plywood being  gone, the store was low on batteries, masking tape, flashlights,  kerosene lanterns, bottled water, sandbags and propane. Originally  the Hurricane Center had predicted that Baffin Bay, Texas, would bear  the brunt, but revised reports had it heading for Corpus Christi,  making landfall that evening. Sonny believed the storm would veer  south, go in around Laredo; he'd projected its course with a grease  pencil on his laminated hurricane map.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen he came back inside the store, a woman was sitting at the bottom  of a rolling ladder in the cabinet fixtures aisle, crying. She had  her face cupped in her hands. He thought to sidestep the hassle and  let someone else explain that the store was sold out of everything  she would need. This was what he'd learned over the years: Stay out  of it. He was fifty-nine, retired from Coastal Oil Refinery, working  ten hours a week at McCoy's because his doctor wanted him to  exercise. Usually he was off on Friday, but when the shipment had  unexpectedly arrived last night, the manager had ponied up ten sheets  of plywood for Sonny himself to use, plus regular pay, if he would  clock in this morning. The woman kept her back to him as she stood.  Leave her be, he thought once more--let the husband come. Yet he was  drawn to her, reluctantly compelled to suggest other lumberyards and  offer the possibility that the storm would spare them. Then,  hurriedly, she turned and their eyes met. \"Sonny,\" she said. He took  a single unintentional step backward, emptied and suspended.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"My sister,\" Nora finally said, but then she fell to weeping again.  She wore a white scoop neck blouse, faded jeans. In twelve years,  she'd lost ten, maybe twenty pounds; her ring finger was naked. Sonny  knelt beside her, vaguely hearing the announcement that McCoy's would  close in fifteen minutes. Whenever his son had been excited, he'd  said butterflies were tickling his palms, and now that seemed the  perfect description for the way Sonny felt. Nora wiped her eyes and  said, \"My sister has huge windows.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e For years, he had thrown hurricane parties. Named storms hit four and  five times a season, and he would clean out the garage and fry  flounder and invite people from the oil refinery. They sat in frayed  lawn chairs and drank Schlitz, watching a storm's edge cut off the  horizon like a charcoal sheet and playing cards--Mexican Sweat, Texas  Hold'em, Stud--until the wind howled. Then they slipped into plastic  ponchos and danced. He'd mounted a battery-powered radio over the  workbench (to hear the Oilers lose while he fiddled with the lawn  mower), and they listened to tapes--Anne Murray, George Jones, Johnny  Rodriguez. Once, a Kmart sign had cartwheeled through the yard. A man  from the refinery had brought Janice Steele to the party, then she'd  borrowed Sonny's phone to call her sister and invite her. When the  storm broke up and the others left, Nora stayed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was 1972, the year he was named supervisor of an eight-man crew.  He was thirty-one, Nora twenty-six. She shelved books at the library  while attending the community college at night; she aimed to earn her  teaching certificate. They had been together a few months when he  bought the house he'd been renting on Shamrock Street. She moved in,  filling the rooms with her expensive, honeyed shampoos, hanging ivies  and matted photographs. Each Sunday they drove to an open-air  restaurant on the Laguna Madre and ate baskets of shrimp and hush  puppies. One night she said, \"Take all away from me, but leave me  Ecstasy.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer voice was so low and cool that his heart stuttered. He asked,  \"Does that mean you want another beer?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"It means I want you to marry me.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe wind lifted a corner of the red-checked tablecloth, raising it  gently from the slatted table then dropping it again; waves sloshed  heavily against pylons; the smell of batter and fish and  salt-splashed cedar; the divine heat in his chest, like a ray of  light refracted in a jewel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The weather slacked off after mccoy's closed. Sonny followed Nora to  her sister's on Del Mar Street. The talk-radio station he liked was  overrun with storm coverage: Authorities had taken down traffic  lights around the harbor and were evacuating boats from the bay;  Alicia's sustained winds topped 115 miles per hour; the Navy was  tying down vessels in mooring systems and deploying others to sea;  ferry service had been halted, and soon rising tides would close off  Padre and Mustang Islands. Residents were advised to bring in pets,  stock up on canned goods, caulk bathtub drains and fill the tubs with  water.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe drove slowly, her brake lights blinking like Morse code. Traffic  was bottlenecked at the freeway; shoe-polished windshields read help  us jesus and go away alicia! The city's south side was flooding.  Corpus seemed transformed, like a dream version of itself from which  a somnolent atmosphere had been cast off; wind made street signs  tremble. What he felt behind the wheel was a long-dormant  vulnerability. When he had offered Nora his plywood--it lay in his  truck bed, under the camper--she had accepted by saying, \"So here we  go again.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDel Mar was a wide, palm-lined street, a quarter mile from the bay.  The house was a five-bedroom with a French garden and greenhouse that  Sonny had helped build; Janice grew orchids. She was summering in  Italy--\"with some Guido,\" as Nora put it--so she was house-sitting.  Janice was an attorney who had never married, and whenever Sonny had  passed the house in intervening years, he thought a place so large  would depress you to live alone in. Years before, he'd moved into an  all-utilities-paid duplex and put the money from the Shamrock house  in mutual funds. He wondered if Nora had avoided Shamrock since she'd  been back, or if she'd seen the newly painted trim, the garden  trellis and oak saplings, the lush elephant ears she'd never been  able to grow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe backed into the gravel driveway, doubting he could finish boarding  up before the sky opened again. The house looked larger, the windows  higher. Nora had calmed; maybe she'd taken a tranquilizer. She  greeted him now with a familiar distractedness, an improbable air of  casual lightness, as if she'd just returned from shopping and needed  to get some milk into the icebox. Her rejuvenation disappointed him,  as did how quickly she disappeared inside. He'd hoped she might ask  his opinion on Alicia, maybe even tear up again. He buckled his tool  belt and switched out the bit in the cordless drill he'd borrowed  from McCoy's. He hoisted each sheet of plywood onto his thigh, held  it to the house with his left hand, then screwed the sides, corners,  top, bottom. Twice the drill twisted and caught the flesh between his  thumb and finger. He took breathers between gusts and each breath  felt like a spear in his ribs. Hammers banged on nearby streets; a  circular saw whined; a woman started calling for a pet named Scooter.  Sonny tried not to stomp the snapdragons and budding hydrangeas, but  that proved impossible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd not unexpectedly he heard Max--the memory of his voice still  strong and clear, like a good radio signal. They could've been  sitting in the Shamrock kitchen, the boy's elbows propped on the  newly laid-in countertop, an evening when they studied for the merit  badge test. He was eight, fawn-skinned and sharp-cheeked like Nora,  fascinated by windmills and in the habit of climbing into their bed  after they'd gone to sleep. Recently he'd been prone to lying, was in  fact currently grounded for it. The restriction opened up the  after-supper hours to tie knots and practice splinting broken limbs  and to review the history of the Karankawa Indians, the first  inhabitants of South Texas: Members of the tribe stood over six feet  tall, wore no clothes and were known cannibals; they slept on dried  palms, tattooed themselves from head to foot and smeared the inside  of their leaky pottery with asphaltum that had washed ashore. Sonny  asked Max for the translation of the tribe's name.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe boy filled his cheeks with air, pouting, stalling, then he  exhaled. He said, \"Waterwalkers.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"No,\" Sonny said. \"Dog-raisers.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"But also Waterwalkers,\" he said. \"They can also be called Waterwalkers.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt Janice's, the drill twisted again, and Nora said, \"Guess you  didn't need help.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer voice made him feel cornered, ashamed. She had changed into a  loose sweater, a fisherman's hat and old sneakers. He'd liked her in  the scoop neck and wished she hadn't taken it off, though maybe that  was precisely why she had.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Small potatoes,\" he said. It was not something he'd said before, and  he had no idea where it had come from. His heart was still pumping  hard. His face felt raddled, his mind dull; he regretted that he  hadn't shaved before work, that he'd worn such a wrinkled shirt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"That one would've been a bugger,\" he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe front of the two-story house across the street was more glass than brick.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Architects,\" she said. \"Remember? The Christmas party.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"That's all a blur for me. The old noggin mixes things up lately.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I doubt that. But if you're serious, at least you held out longer than I did.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe returned to the plywood, cranking down already tight screws. He  wanted to shy away from solemn conversations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The first storm of the season, in August, and it just turned Category Four.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Welcome home,\" he said, but the words sounded laden, riven with an  inappropriate, boastful enthusiasm. He said, \"We'll get some wind,  but she'll spare us. There'll be a good haul of shrimp behind the  weather.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Alicia. They always pick pretty names for the first ones.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe had believed this since he'd known her and had always cited the  first storms--Ayla, Antonio, Amelia--to evidence her point. That she  still observed it pleased him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA kettle whistled inside Janice's kitchen, a room where he'd carved  beef for holidays, Super Bowls, the funeral. The night of the  architects' party, he'd crossed the street for more gin and spied  Janice bent over the butcher-block table, the architect biting her  neck and groping her breasts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA stiff breeze riffled the palms near the street. Across Ocean Drive,  the sky faded downward by degrees, violet to lavender to oyster  silver, until at last it softened into a seam of sallow light on the  horizon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNora said, \"I boiled water. I thought some tea might take our mind off things.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Once, he'd seen Janice in the clubhouse of Oso Municipal Golf Course.  She'd played nine holes with partners from the law firm and sat at  the bar drinking screwdrivers. Raking her fingers through her hair  and leaning back to expel plumes of smoke, she resembled Nora. The  men around her burst into laughter at a joke she made while fishing  through her purse. One of them said, \"That is a hole in one,\" as she  started for the door. Sonny thought he'd escaped her, then she  shuffled over to his booth. He was finishing a Reuben--gratis, like  his rounds, because he maintained the course's carts and sprinklers  on weekends--and he was reading about Karankawas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe said, \"These fellas used to slather themselves with mud and shark grease.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Injun Old Spice,\" said Janice. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her lips slow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Repelled mosquitoes,\" he said. \"They also talked--communicated--with  their mouths closed.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"So do those lawyers.\" She pointed at them with her chin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer hair was cropped, highlighted white and gold. Not a style Nora  would ever wear, so having confused the resemblance irritated him.  He'd intended to carry on about the Karankawas, explain how they  would tie lanterns to a mule's neck and lead it in circles on  darkened beaches to attract vessels at sea. A captain would read the  distant light as a buoy and steer his boat toward the harbor he  assumed it marked. By the time he realized his mistake, he'd have  struck the outer sandbar and the naked Indians would emerge with  spears. But now all of that seemed trivial and Sonny explained  nothing. He heard himself say, \"I haven't gotten a word in a while.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eImmediately he wished he'd not mentioned Nora, and at the same time  he wanted Janice to spill what she knew. For a while, he'd received  postcards and late-night weepy calls. He told her that he'd not  contested when Coastal proposed the early retirement; she said she  missed hearing surf reports on the radio, missed good chalupas. He  resisted the urge to call her Honey or Love or No-No. They never  spoke of Max. Then the communications dwindled, and a blankness set  in, as if not reporting his actions to Nora, not even planning to  report them, stripped them of any significance. She had lived in  Michigan, Arizona, Nebraska and North Dakota, locales untouched by  the ocean, and he knew she would never return to Corpus. His days  were incurably wide and ponderous, and at night he fought phantom  jealousies of other men.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter the retirement, he'd moved through life like a fugitive,  trepidatious and worried that he would meet someone from the old  times. If he glimpsed an acquaintance in the supermarket, he lingered  on a far-off aisle or abandoned a full cart of groceries and fled to  his truck. If someone caught him, at McCoy's or Oso or a pre-dawn  bait stand, his veins surged with dreadful eagerness. Those mundane  encounters left him utterly unsure of his identity. No longer a  father, no longer a husband. And though he felt on the verge of some  old, indolent connection--maybe they felt that, too--he'd erected  such sturdy walls, perfected such inconspicuous deflections that the  conversations passed without even the slightest revelation. The men  told him about the refinery hub, which plants were producing more  barrels per day, who had passed on and who was stealing compressors  to sell out of his garage; they avoided mention of families. Sonny  spoke of golf and fishing; he told them he was living the life he'd  always worked for.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the clubhouse Janice had run her tongue between her teeth and  lips. She was older than Nora by five years, but people had always  thought her younger.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"She's working at a bakery. In Ann Arbor,\" she said. \"But that's  yesterday's sad tune. I want to hear about good old Sonny.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe said, \"I put one foot in front of the other, like a good soldier.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"And the ladies? Still need a stick to keep them away?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe washed down the last of his Reuben and wiped his mouth with a  napkin. Lois Whipple was at her house, slow-cooking a roast,  vacuuming, and curling her hair for tonight. He'd been seeing her for  two months, but already he smelled the relationship rotting on the  vine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"No,\" he said. \"Mostly they stay away on their own.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat same afternoon his shoulder numbed. On the sixth green, he  recognized the tingling in his fingers and sharp punches in his chest  with an almost grateful, razorlike clarity. In his mind was the image  of a fist squeezing an aorta, of a child clenching a water balloon,  dreading and courting the moment it bursts. He replaced his putter,  sat down and waited.[quote] --Boston Sunday Globe","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299918434533,"sku":"NP9780812971873","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812971873.jpg?v=1767724137","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/corpus-christi-isbn-9780812971873","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}