3 stories by David Wesley Williams

I’ve Been Loving You Too Long

He loved to drive through the night and arrive somewhere ghostly at dawn, at some old haunt of history—Civil War battlefields, sites of famous crashes. This was before he had ever written a song or started a band. Hell, he could barely tune that guitar of his.

One morning, we found ourselves standing by a lake in the Upper Midwest, sharing a cigarette and a blanket.

“Poor Buddy,” I said.

“It’s Otis who died here, baby. We’re in Wisconsin. Buddy crashed in Iowa.”

“Well, poor Otis, then,” I said.

He held me, and we danced at the edge of the lake on a cold morning in early winter with that blanket around us. There’s something about dancing in the morning that just breaks your heart.

Well, it does mine. 

“Poor us,” he said.

Then he did a remarkable thing: He sang a bit of “Rave On,” but slowed way down. He turned it into a ballad for all the broken-hearted everywhere, the saddest thing you ever heard. It was years before I realized it. He’d sung it to the tune of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.”

It was lovely, really. But I couldn’t live like that. Nobody could, for long. Anyway, it was his life and did not fill the hole in mine. I hadn’t painted my first picture. That was later, after. I wasn’t an artist, yet. I wasn’t anything. I was along for the ride. This was about him and those ghosts, and the gorgeous, haunting songs they’d soon write together. I was part of it all, but only a small part. I was a verse, not even a chorus. I was something that rhymed with something else—not that much rhymes with Ivy.

We didn’t survive the Upper Midwest. Shame, too. Because I liked him. I did. I liked most everything about him. Especially his wild side, which wasn’t so much a side as near three-quarters of the whole, like how the earth is mostly ocean. The analogy worked: His wild side had depths and eddies. He would surprise you because he could surprise himself. He was busy, like Mr. Dylan said, being born.

I think that’s how it came to me, to change the setting of my painting from a lake in the Upper Midwest to a small river in the South, from the site of a plane crash to one of a baptism. I’d been obsessed with a book of photographs of immersion baptisms from a hundred years ago. The simple pomp of it all, the gravity. The believers in their white dresses and Sunday suits and straw hats, with umbrellas to shade against the sun, and the preacher playing at playing god as a country parson. And not a soul smiling, because this was serious business, this was faith to the test, a contract signed with the soul for collateral. Or maybe because people never did smile in those old-time photographs.

In my painting, it’s a little later in the morning. The believers have gone off to eat fried chicken and potato salad and drink iced tea at the social hall. Two lovers have wandered by. We see them from behind, leaning into each other, his mouth to her ear. The gray sky of that Upper Midwestern winter day, of death, is powder blue and cloudless but just slightly bleached-looking from the sun—gonna be a scorcher, the sky seems to be saying.

I filled the river with yellow lotus, because I’d read somewhere they were Buddhist symbols for enlightenment, and that’s what he was looking for all along, I guess, amid all that death. That’s what songs are, little pieces of enlightenment. That’s what paintings are. The good ones, anyway.

Love can wait. Love can go hang.

Dog Track Days

Two minutes to post. Inside now, upstairs on the betting floor. Joe Story pulled the twenty from his pocket. He found a betting window with no line. He stood ten feet back. He looked down at his shabby sneakers and then at the bill in his hand.

The twenty was limp and faded, worn about the edges, the starch long out of it. It had, in its time as tender, been used to purchase liquor, whores, Easter orchids and anniversary red roses, firecrackers, diapers, fried chicken, sympathy cards, a snub-nosed pistol that later was used to kill a stranger over ten dollars, and bait. It had been spent on salvation, even, but never on as long a shot as this.

One minute to post.

Joe walked to the window and said it how he’d practiced.

“Eighth race,” he said in his slow, flat, unsteady voice. “Twenty to win on the seven dog.”

A woman pushing fifty with peach-colored hair and a Viceroy rasp took his money and handed him a slip. She did not inquire as to why a man would chance his last twenty dollars on a ramshackle greyhound with soft haunches and an underbody the color of jalopy rust. She had to know it was something like this, even just knowing the dogs as numbers on a screen. Anyone could see it was very nearly the last shred of money he had in the world, and that he knew in his head and his heart, deep in his gut, down to his own soft haunches, that he was pissing it away.

She might even have guessed the name of the dog, by looking at the man.

“Good luck, hon,” she said.

Joe Story stood there, still, staring at the betting slip as if there might be some small print upon it that explained what he was to do next. As he studied the slip, his lips seeming to tremble, she wanted to tell him it was a dog race he’d come to, not a Chinese meal. But she’d been warned by management about her mouth. Her name was Vera. People invariably said she looked like a Vera.

“They’s about to run,” she said, to shoo him.

It was then he told her, if only because he had to tell someone.

“It’s the old man,” Joe said. “My father, I mean. My daddy. He’s dying, down in New Orleans. I got to go down to see him, before—well, I got to get the money up, for fare. Bus or train. Bus, I guess, would be cheaper.”

He wanted to tell it all. He wanted her to ask. But she only said, “Well, I surely do hope he gets better, hon.”

~

The eight greyhounds burst from the steel boxes of the starting gate: muzzle, blur, fur, flank, and limb.

The favorite, called Holy Smoke Ring, went to the lead, but only just. A dog called T’s Tarnation was at his right ear. The dog out of the first trap, called Brilliancy, had already squandered his inside position. He settled into sixth and then seventh, as if the fracas of dog racing were somehow beneath the elegance of his name.

In the middle was the pack: a melee of speed and color.

Joe supposed the ramshackle dog called Poor Boy was in there somewhere. But damned if he could see him.

Little Brother

“HOW IS HE?”

“Where in hell are you now?”

“Memphis.”

“It’s been near a month and you ain’t but made it across the river? What’d you do, swim over and drown a couple of times first?” Bob Jr. talked about death as if it were something you could shake off, like a rough night.

“How is he?”

“You never could swim much. I remember that one time the old man had me push you in the pool, said you’d sink or you’d swim. After a few seconds I said, ‘Daddy, I don’t think he can decide.’ ”

“You saved my life that day.”

“The old man made me.”

“You about killed me doing it. Dunking me under again. Holding me down. Took me clear to the bottom of the pool and made me look. You kept pointing at the drain. You were saying something. I don’t know what. I could guess. But still. You saved my life.”

“It was only because the old man said to. I’d have let you go.”

“He whipped me, after. You remember that? He whipped me for having to be saved. He whipped me on account of I was weak.”

“We didn’t have to go swimming to find that out, big brother.”

Joe sat at the kitchen table, talking on an old yellow dial phone, staring across the room. The dog, Poor Boy, was watching the noon news with the sound down. The sound was always down on the old TV. Joe didn’t know if the sound even worked. There was a crime scene, yellow tape, a bawling woman, gangly kids in the background, goofing for the TV camera, like life had just told some kind of inappropriate joke and they knew of no other way to react.

The old man, Old Willie, was asleep in his chair, his old recliner; he was wheezing, working up to a full snore. He’d sound like heavy river traffic when he really got going. The Barge Opera, his friend Winchester called it. The kitchen radio played low, New Orleans jazz on the local volunteer radio station, “Sugar Foot Strut” and “West End Blues.” The music had reminded Joe of home, and so he called.

“How is he?” Joe said again.

“You know how when somebody’s dying?” 

“I guess. Yeah.”

“It’s like that.”

“Will he talk to me?”

“He’s sleeping.” Bob Story Sr. was always sleeping when Joe called, to hear Bob Jr. tell it.

“You’ll tell him I called?”

“I got a lot of things to remember, big brother. I got money to collect and a lackey to make an example of, and I got a date tonight with a woman calls herself a chanteuse. We’ll see how that shit goes.”

“Just tell him I called. Just tell him—”

“She sings, is why she calls herself a chanteuse.”

“Just tell him—tell him I—”

“I’ll have her singing, all right.”

“Tell him—tell him I’m thinking about him. Tell him I—”

“I told her don’t expect no fancy meal at Galatoire’s, just on account of she’s a chanteuse. She thought I was being funny. Funny, hell. She’s the one going around calling herself a chanteuse.”

“It’s French, I guess. Our mama could speak a little French, you know. She knew a few words. She could say that one sentence, but I forget what it was.”

“Mama’s dead.”

“It was Creole, maybe.”

“Mama’s been dead.”           

“I know, Bob. I miss her. Do you?”

“Chanteuse,” Bob Jr. said.

“Remember the time—”

“I’ll have her talking French, all right.”          

“Goodbye, Bob.” But his little brother had already hung up.

David Wesley Williams is the author of the novels EVERYBODY KNOWS (2023) and COME AGAIN NO MORE (forthcoming, 2025), both from JackLeg Press, as well as LONG GONE DADDIES (John F. Blair, 2013). His short fiction has appeared in Oxford American, Kenyon Review Online, and such journals as The Common and The Pinch. He lives in Memphis with his wife and their retired racing greyhound.

Check him out on his website: davidwesleywilliams.wordpress.com/