They Don't Dance Much: A Novel

Introduction

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SO, WE ARE SITTING
in a greasy spoon, a tavern, a living room, talking about books we love that didn’t catch a break, hard-luck books of such obstinate appeal that, though they died early, just won’t stay dead. There are canonized books most of us know too well and yawn when we speak of them one more time, but far, far better are the little known literary wonders we’ve come across at flea markets, garage sales, up in grandma’s attic; read with the delight of treasure hunters hitting gold in a parking lot; and can now urge upon our friends, catch them by surprise, propose a new name for a seat at the table. Since sometime in the 1970s, the book I most often brought up first, almost always to complete silence, was
They Don’t Dance Much
by James Ross. I only read the book because the covert avant-gardist George V. Higgins vouched for it as both literature and a good time. Higgins was quickly proved right, and only became more right as each page was turned—
They Don’t Dance Much
coulda, woulda, shoulda, baby, but for some reason didn’t, a fate that is eerily in keeping with the ethos of the novel.

We are down south in these pages, where the scent of piney woods spreads thickly on summer nights, the moon always seems to be standing around gawking, and the daily grind gives no quarter to any man, woman, or beast. It is the sensibility, though, not the region, that gives this work a heartbeat. The narrator is Jack McDonald, a scuffling country boy, no better than he ought to be, maybe, but not a lot worse, either. Jack has just lost his land to the bank, which he resents, is broke, which he resents, and is in the mood to try most anything that might turn a buck or two or maybe a bunch. Smut Milligan is a local bad boy now grown up, sells corn whiskey, runs a little gambling hall, has a roving eye, and looks out for number one. The two men work at a booze and poker joint owned by Smut, skinning rubes and peddling drink, and things go sweetly, then they go rough, then they go worse. This is rural North Carolina in the 1930s and everybody seems to recognize everybody else, know their faces if not their home addresses and hat sizes. The opening below shows what James Ross can do, as he does in a few quick artful strokes that foreshadow the major movements of what lies ahead.

I remember the evening I was sitting in front of Rich Anderson’s filling station and Charles Fisher drove up and stopped at the high-test tank. The new Cadillac he was driving was so smooth I hadn’t heard him coming. He sat there a minute, but he didn’t blow the horn … Fisher’s wife was with him. She had looked at me when they first drove up, but when she saw who it was she turned her head and looked off toward the Methodist Church steeple. She sat there looking toward the steeple and her face cut off my view of her husband. But that was all right with me; I had seen him before. I had seen Lola, too, but I looked at her anyway.

She had on dark glasses and she was sunburned brown as a penny. She had on some sort of short-sleeved jersey and it looked like she had left her brassiere at home.

Ross writes in classically laconic, wised-up American prose. His voice suits then and now, and will still carry well tomorrow. He knows the fresher gambits and attitudes of the time, uses repetition with subtle skill, displays an oblique but not hidden class-consciousness that lightly flavors the book from front to back, and is scandalous, for his day, with his depictions of human beings and various natural acts. His dialogue is quick and smart, and the back and forth patter makes a sweet, snappy music much like that written by a couple of the greats among his immediate predecessors, Ernest Hemingway and James M. Cain. Ross apparently disliked being mentioned with Cain (Hemingway didn’t seem to bother him), said he found the comparison odious, but writers often get defensive that way (Cain in his turn claimed to be innocent of Hemingway), denying any interest in or debt to those who famously, and obviously, cut the path they have chosen to travel; the man is a writer, first-rate, too, but he knew his Cain, okay? He knew Cain, sure, and plenty of others, as we all do, but also understood furious needs and homespun tragedy, the calm power of a man’s voice telling it to you straight without any flapdoodle or varnish.

There has been a very slow build of recognition for this novel—readers at the time of original publication (1940) may have felt they’d already read it, more or less, during the vogue for the works of Erskine Caldwell, and the setting is a roadhouse not too far removed in spirit from the little roadside joint famously featured in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. But James Ross seems also to be kindred to writers whose novels are usually called Depression or proletarian literature or something else that separates them from literature that requires no further categorization: Edward Anderson (
Thieves Like Us, Hungry Men
), Tom Kromer (
Waiting for Nothing
), Horace McCoy (
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
,
I Should Have Stayed Home
) and William Faulkner, especially
Sanctuary
, published in 1931.

I don’t care for blabbermouth introductions that spoil the tale for all who might now have an appetite for reading the book under discussion.
They Don’t Dance Much
, a novel that was often declared dead but has never been successfully buried, offers a persuasive portrait of a rough-and-ready America as seen from below, a literary marvel that is once again on its feet and wending its way toward the light.

Daniel Woodrell

January 2013

I REMEMBER THE EVENING
I was sitting in front of Rich Anderson’s filling station and Charles Fisher drove up and stopped at the high-test tank. The new Cadillac he was driving was so smooth I hadn’t heard him coming. He sat there a minute, but he didn’t blow the horn. I stuck my head inside and said, ‘You got a customer, Rich.’

I heard Rich push his chair back. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. He hustled out. There was a long yellow pencil stuck over his right ear.

‘Yes, sir, Mr. Fisher; how many, Mr. Fisher?’ he said.

Charles Fisher looked over his shoulder. ‘Fill it up,’ he said.

Fisher’s wife was with him. She had looked at me when they first drove up, but when she saw who it was she turned her head and looked off toward the Methodist Church steeple. She sat there looking toward the steeple and her face cut off my view of her husband. But that was all right with me; I had seen him before. I had seen Lola too, but I looked at her anyway.

She had on dark glasses and she was sunburned brown as a penny. She had on some sort of short-sleeved jersey and it looked like she had left her brassiere at home. She was taller than Charles Fisher.

Rich got the tank filled up and came back to the front of the car.

‘Anything else, Mr. Fisher?’ he asked.

Fisher shook his head. He paid Rich for the gas and drove on down the street. Rich came back and stood in the door; he put the money in his pocketbook, then took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his face. Rich was a young man, but he looked droopy and old standing there. I never had noticed how bad his teeth were, nor how bald he was getting, until then. He had on a dark green filling-station uniform and it made his skin look green in what little light there was left.

‘Been one more hot day,’ he said. ‘Wisht
I
was going to the beach.’

‘Why don’t you go, then?’ I said.

‘Hell, ain’t got the money. You don’t think I stick around this filling station just because I’m crazy about filling stations, do you?’

‘I thought maybe you loved a filling station,’ I said. ‘Was your friend Fisher going to the beach?’

‘To Daytona Beach, Florida. His nigger brought the car down here yesterday for me to grease it. He said they was going to Daytona Beach, Florida.’ Rich said ‘Daytona Beach, Florida’ like some religious person talking about heaven.

‘That’s a long ways off,’ I said. ‘Why don’t he go to Myrtle Beach, or Wrightsville Beach, or Carolina Beach?’

‘Cost him more to go to Daytona Beach, I guess. He’s got so much money it worries him how to get rid of it.’

‘He could leave a sackful on my porch some night,’ I said.

‘Or mine,’ Rich said. He went inside and back to working on the books.

I sat there warming the bench that was already hot. I ought to have gone on home. I had a cow to milk and a mule to feed. I had my supper to get too, unless I went to bed hungry. I had been making out with grapes, peaches, bread, and raw tomatoes, for I didn’t like to cook in such hot weather. But my mouth was a little sore from eating so much acid, and thinking about eating I got hungry and decided I would cook supper that night for a change, and have some solid food. I made up my mind to cook an omelet when I got home, provided the hens had laid an egg since I left.

But I couldn’t get started. I got up to go and I dreaded walking four miles. The sun had gone down, but it was still hot. The back of my shirt stuck to me. I went inside and got a ten-cent beer.

The beer cooled me off and I thought it was ten cents well spent. I had another one. While I was drinking it I picked up the
Corinth Enterprise
and began reading. Fletch Monroe publishes the
Enterprise
when he’s sober. The folks around Corinth subscribe to it mostly to get rid of Fletch. He goes on a three-weeks’ bender and then sobers up and asks what-all happened while he was drinking. By the time he gets it published it’s so old that it’s right interesting. Last summer he had a picture of Babe Ruth on one page and above the picture it said, ‘Going Good This Year.’ Babe had been out of baseball about three years then, but maybe Fletch hadn’t found it out.

I had beer number three, and by then the situation looked better to me. I quit trying to find any news in the paper and started looking at the special notices and the want ads in the back. There was half a page listing the names of the folks that were going to have their land sold for back taxes. I looked down in the M’s and there I was: ‘McDonald, Jackson T., 45 acres, West Lee Township.’

I hadn’t paid the taxes in two years and I might have known it was coming. Just the same it wore me out to see my land advertised for taxes. My prospects for a crop that year were lousy. I had a land-bank payment to meet that fall. My mule had the gout, or something like it. I saw I was going to have to trade him or quit trying to farm at all. Now this had to come up. It knocked all the comfort out of the three bottles of beer and I was cold sober. I felt like pitching a big drunk.