Epiphanies and Surprises

Allegiance and Betrayal by Peter Makuck (Syracuse University Press, 2013. 196 pages. $19.95 pb)

The dozen stories in Peter Makuck’s Allegiance and Betrayal unfold in the mundane down-to-earth places where we live. Whether in family gatherings, fishing trips, going off to college for the first time, selling a used car, or having a drink with friends, Makuck knows where the conflicts that make a first-rate story can arise. Readers of a certain age will identify themselves with many of the situations in Allegiance and Betrayal: the abrasions among family members, including husbands and wives; the competitive spirits of young men revved up again in middle age; the rituals, duties, and bizarreries surrounding family funerals; and often the commonplace misreading of the character of a stranger or even a relative. Often the element of surprise plays out in the fact that we truly do not know one another until some such transformative event.

In “Ghost of Thanksgiving” the widower Lester realizes that “his brother was locked into stories about lunatics they knew as kids, like Bugbee, who used to chew the caps off beer bottles and talk through his nose. Serious talk with his brother was close to impossible.” And the narrator in “Against Losing” discovers one night late through a bar window that his Uncle Jarek is more than a small-time tavern owner and mediocre pool shark. He watches Jarek, alone after closing time, running rack after rack of balls without missing and realizes that the man is an accomplished artist in his chosen metier.

Makuck’s characters tend to be blue-collar more often than middle-class, sometimes farmers’ kids who grew up on the Polish farms sprinkled throughout the lower Connecticut River Valley. Often they know the tools and techniques to fix things: “Billy was good with his hands, a quick study when it came to repairing or replacing chair rails, crown molding, wainscoting, and baseboard, good at setting up scaffolding, taping, spackling cracks, using disc and belt sanders, applying varnish and poly.”

Since Makuck is a widely published poet as well as the author of two previous collections of short stories, his fiction is naturally full of concrete descriptive writing that puts the reader in the scene, as in “Lights at Skipper’s Cove”: “Blood was bright on the white pebble decking from the wahoo I just gaffed aboard. He was now fluttering and making a racket in the fish box. . . . I started to hose blood toward the stern scuppers, watching it turn pink. Small red bits stretched and clung to the edges on the pebble flooring. I had put the nozzle down close for the pressure to work. Finally, water that backed up at the scuppers turned faint red. Then, like a bad thought, it was gone.” His descriptions of weather sometimes serve the same purpose: “The sun kindled the ocean surface where two distant boats were like small black cutouts. Clouds unfolded, thinned, then bunched together again like muscles.”

In the superb “Booger’s Gift” Greg, a northerner transplanted to the South, in the midst of a broken marriage and family dispersal, now a self-employed housepainter and floor sander, encounters a character named Booger Seims. He wears an eye-patch, quotes scripture, wears a suit because it’s Sunday, he says, and buys Greg drinks in the course of dickering over the sale of Greg’s car. Booger also claims to have “prostrate” problems and seems genuinely unhealthy. Greg decides that he is a redneck hustler out to con him in their back and forth over the price of the car. Makuck lays the narrative out without taking sides; but, as the story unfolds, Greg learns that Booger is trying to buy the vehicle for Jordan, the surly teen who is his grandnephew, an orphan whose father was killed in Iraq. Booger has tried to step in and help Jordan, who on top of all this is the father of a two-year-old and in danger of deserting mother and child for the Marine Corps. For Greg the gift of the story’s title is that he has...