Excerpt from "Tannery Bay"

In response to our season’s theme, PLAY, and our roundtable conversation PLAY: Collaboration and Co-Creation, Tilt West invited Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle to publish an excerpt from their co-created novel, Tannery Bay.

“This collaboration between Steven Dunn and Katie Jean Shinkle was born out of a deep friendship and mutual love for each other’s previous novels. We were also exhausted by ill representations of black and/or queer people in popular media, so we wanted to write together about our own people in a way that allowed them to be their full selves while experiencing joy, grief, friendship, and community.”

July 4

Once upon a time across the bridge from the dilapidated casino, Auntie Anita is boiling water, adding flour, stirring and stirring until smooth. She’s making wheat paste. She tells Uncle Gerald to get the paint rollers and brushes from the cabinet.

“What time you meeting Cristal today?” Auntie Anita asks.

“Somewhere around one or two,” he says.

“I’ll be back around noon to take the baby out to play,” she says.

Auntie Anita pulls coffee cans of wheat paste from under the cabinet, slaps the bottoms of the cans into her palm, and places them in a dirty green canvas bag. She slings the strap over her shoulder and kisses Uncle Gerald and Cora Mae on their cheeks.

“Maybe I’ll bump into y’all’s weird-ass friend while I’m out there,” she says to Otis and Joy, who are untangling fishing nets for her.

“Anyway, shouldn’t it be your friend since you the one who been dreaming about her?” Joy says. Auntie Anita laughs and walks out, leaving the fishing nets.

Auntie Anita’s newest art form is wheat pasting, and she was in the habit of pasting at night across the bridge, but the cops started watching too closely, sending more officers than usual on foot and bikes, which means anybody can do anything at night in Tannery Bay because all the cops are busy looking for whoever is papering up the town. Now Auntie Anita papers during the morning, the ass- crack of the day she calls it, right after all the cops change shifts. She knows it’s not dangerous because no one expects an old woman to be the one papering FUCK YOU AND JULY using her own hand-drawn letters framed by roses she stenciled herself on the police station and the tannery. When she makes art in her neighborhood, she only papers or paints or sculpts scenes of togetherness: dancing, hugging, sitting on porches, playing cards, eating around large tables. Or the giant rainbow trout nobody has ever seen. Or huge portraits of folks in need of peaceful memoriam, remembrances she calls them.

Willie Earl says the portraits of folks are judging you because you fucked up, or watching over you because you fucked up. Once a week Willie Earl walks the kids and the teens through the neighborhood, and always stands scratching his gray beard and pointing upward to the mural saying, “Check this out, youngbloods. Look into this person’s eyes and feel deep within yourselves when you notice the subjectivity change, when you can’t tell if you looking at the portrait or the portrait is looking at you.” He laughs his giant laugh and walks away, but his laugh stays with the kids with its arms around their shoulders.

Willie Earl then walks up the street to the side of Harold & Hattie’s Haberdashery and stands in front of the large mural of his wife, Mildred. He looks at her smooth, brown, peaceful face and soft eyes until she looks back at him, and Willie Earl feels like a mural—large and colorful and soft and highlighted in all the best places—and it’s here in this plane, this plane of porousness between worlds where Willie Earl knows Mildred isn’t dead. He cries gloopy paint tears until his laugh leaves the kids and returns to cradle him like a baby.

Today when Willie Earl melts inside of Mildred’s mural, he feels something off. There’s a damn disturbance, he thinks as he’s floating inwards, toward the center of the mural, and he’s looking around to find this damn disturbance and sees his overalls change into a dark-blue suit with gray pinstripes and a pink paisley tie. Nice threads, he thinks, still floating until he lands on the yellow patch of paint where he usually meets Mildred for a dance. She isn’t there. But he sees a head pushing up through the yellow paint and he wants to stomp on it because it ain’t Mildred’s head, Mildred don’t have wet stringy hair. It’s the woman in waders standing in front of Willie Earl, motioning to his suit. He says, “I do look nice, thank you, young lady. Now where’s Mildred?” She gives Willie Earl a cockleshell and lowers herself back into the yellow paint. Willie Earl’s laugh reaches in and pulls Willie Earl back onto the street in front of the mural. He has on his regular old overalls again.

Other places across the bridge, Auntie Anita sculpts symmetrical symbols made up of triangles and circles connected by lines with some X’s here and there. Auntie Anita says she doesn't know what they mean, but she feels like she needs to mold them because they are in her somewhere, like her song. She leaves little statues of symbols on gravestones, in the alley behind the casino, on manhole covers in the middle of the streets, on the concrete pillars beneath the bridge, at street intersections.

Auntie Anita walks back in the house at noon like she never left, canvas bag empty. She tells Otis to bring more flour home from the dumpster in the casino alley when he goes back to work. She tells the same to Joy. She plops down in a chair and Cora Mae climbs into her lap. Uncle Gerald stands over the stove, tasting the broth from his oxtails, fixing everyone a steaming bowl before he leaves to meet Cristal. He hugs Otis and Joy like they are stuffed animals, then he kisses Cora Mae and Auntie Anita on their foreheads. After kissing Auntie Anita he wipes his lips with his forearm and says, “Sweaty-ass forehead, you musta been working hard.”

Cristal sits by the bay’s edge across from the casino and throws rocks into the most purple parts where the water looks like oil in a rainbow surface skimming the top. When she was young, she and her friends would swear there was a monster in the bay, a dinosaur history left behind. The chemicals on the water hold the rocks a second longer than normal, like gel, plunging them to the bottom slowly. There is a rumor a coworker at the casino tried to have sex with the water once because he said it felt so good, held him so tightly, but the coworker adamantly denies the rumor, and Cristal feels he would tell her the truth of whether he tried to get down with the gel-water chemical bay or not. She laughs as she throws the next rock, watches it sink slow. Vaginas don’t feel like gel-water chemical bay shit, she thinks, and it’s clear he ain’t never even been inside one. She wipes her hands on her jeans; her red nails are chipped, due for a new manicure. She knows she’s going to rip the rest of the color off with her teeth anyway so there is no use in keeping up with it. The air only feels cool to her down by the water. The water alleviates the heat, even though to even be near it feels dangerous. The same coworker who ain’t never been in a vagina swears the scars on his arms comes from being in the water, the chemicals eating his flesh. Cristal thinks, so I don’t know. Bad fucking water.

She wraps her body around itself, pressing the bones of her chest into her knees, letting her light red, curly head rest, closing her eyes for a minute. She can hear the barge downriver, the chug chug chug of the motor. She unclenches her jaw, relaxes her eyebrows, it feels good, she thinks, to let the body go. She thinks about Lexus, her round belly, and her thin shoulders, and her long neon green hair that she never does anything with. She thinks about her crooked smile, her chipped front tooth, such a curved dent looking almost natural in her mouth. Her heart-shaped lips, a movie star. Her blue Dickies work pants, her blue Dickies work shirt with the name Gary in a red oval on the left side. Cristal wants to kiss Lexus every single time she sees her. Lexus has no idea how Cristal feels, and she will soon, she thinks as she kicks the sand in a childish fit. Lexus is so cool, and just like generally never causes a ruckus except in love. She is always in love with somebody new! I love Lexus, though, like I really love her, and I want her to be with me, only me. She pulls out the small notepad she scribbles all her thoughts in and writes on her To Do list between Buy Milk for Auntie and Return Book to Joy as number eight: Get a Grip on Yourself, Girl.

The bay starts bubbling at Cristal’s feet. When she looks at the horizon, there is the woman in waders walking on water. Cristal closes her eyes. She tries to breathe deeply, but her breaths keep catching in her throat. She opens her eyes and the woman is still there, coming faster toward her. When am I going to tell Lexus I love her, she thinks. She gets up and tries to breathe deeply again like Lexus taught her, letting the air fill her down her back and up her neck and holding it for two counts before slowly letting it out until the next breath is organic and a type of buoy. I gotta get to Uncle Gerald, she thinks. She runs away right as the woman in the waders reaches the shore, sprays her legs with bay water, and disappears.

Uncle Gerald is already sitting on the concrete seats in the first row of the old amphitheater with a small pot of oxtails, two bowls, and two spoons. Cristal walks in scratching at her legs, smiling a little. She sits and Uncle Gerald says, “You smiling because you and Lexus finally going together? You asked her? How’d you do it? Like how you practiced on stage yesterday?”

“No,” she says, “We’re not going together yet, and I didn’t ask her.”

“Ah, fine fine, you’ll do it when you ready,” Uncle Gerald says, spooning some oxtails into Cristal’s bowl. “Why you smiling?”

Cristal slurps some broth straight from the bowl and nods her head to let Uncle Gerald
know the soup is good as usual. “I don’t know, things are starting to feel funny. Over at the bay in front of the casino right before I walked over here this woman was walking on the water coming at me. She sprayed my legs.” Cristal shows Uncle Gerald the red splotches on her ankles and shins. “Do you believe me? I swear it happened.”

“Well goddamn! We been seeing her too!” Uncle Gerald flails his arms but accidentally knocks the pot of oxtails over. The pot clangs on the ground and the broth splashes like liquid usually does, but it starts to wobble and collect itself into the shape of a cockleshell.

“Let’s get out of here,” Cristal says.

Uncle Gerald rubs his shoe into the cockleshell-shaped broth. It splashes out of shape again but pulls itself back into the shape of a mason jar, changing to the distinct golden color of Uncle Gerald’s hooch. His throat tightens and eyes widen.

“You said that right, Crystal!” Uncle Gerald says. He bends to pick up his pot, but shakes his head no. “You can stay here,” he says to the pot, “I ain’t bringing this bad juju back in the house.”

They leave the amphitheater. Back on the bridge, silent even though they’re never silent when walking home. Cristal says finally, “Who is the lady, anyhow?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” Uncle Gerald says, “maybe she’s Saint Whatever-the-Fuck-You-Need to whoever sees her. I need a new pot to cook my oxtails in.” He cups his hand around his mouth and yells over the bridge into the bay, “I need a new pot, saint lady!”

“I think the woman got something to do with Anita, somehow, some kinda way.”

Cristal leans over the rail to spit into the purple bay, and notices four of Auntie Anita’s small statues of people standing in a row at the base of one of the concrete pillars. The statues are in various poses—hands on hips, hand covering eyes shielding from the sun, arms spread for a hug to no one, fishing but leaned back like a big fish is on the nonexistent line. Cristal hears a deep bloop in the bay a little ways out and lifts her head to see, but nothing. When she looks back at the statues, they are huddled in a circle with their arms on one other’s shoulders, and the tops of their heads touching. She blinks hard and shakes her head, and the statues are back to standing in a row in their original poses.

“Uncle Gerald, wait!” Cristal jogs to catch up: “Speaking of Auntie, did you hear about the casino owner is taking credit for Auntie’s art again? Now he’s built a room sticking halfway into the alley. He’s charging those rich folks up in the Hills an arm and a leg to see it, some kind of ‘VIP exclusive’ ticket scheme. I know you said you needed to figure out a way for Auntie to get some of the money.”

“I saw that mess in the newspaper. You know they been doing it for forever, taking everything everybody else do, like they did with my juke joint.”

“What are you gonna do?” Cristal says, stopping to pull Uncle Gerald’s arm.

“What do you mean me, goddammit. This is a we situation.”

“Well, what are we gonna do?”

“This what Imma do, Imma go to that casino, bust up in that muthafucka, steal all the coin from all them slots, then flip over all them blackjack tables, then go the office, steal the safe, strap that muthafucka to my back and crawl my big ass out—”

“But, Uncle Gerald—”

“Hold on, I’m on a roll . . . then Imma drag that safe across this goddamn bridge to the house and dump all the money in Anita’s lap, cuz you know she gives and gives to everybody so we gonna give her something back.”

“I don’t know about all of this.”

“And then, Cristal, you and your lil girlfriend are gonna blow up the casino, the newspaper office, and the goddamn tannery.”

“It’s getting kinda late tonight, Uncle Gerald, but okay, I’ll blow up whatever tomorrow.”

“No matter what, we should be the ones taking people to Anita’s art, right? I mean, who else knows it better than we do? I don’t know, let’s talk to Joy and hatch a plan. We just gotta keep this from Anita cuz we gonna surprise her with a lot of money.”

He rubs his hands together and puts his arm around Cristal’s shoulders, and she puts her arm around his waist. They walk a little further down the bridge into the graveyard.

Tannery Bay is available for purchase from the University of Alabama Press.