Few things please the reader in me like the surprise of discovering a near perfect short story published decades back, critically acclaimed—and hiding in plain sight until I stumble into its pages and surrender. Two weeks ago, in a Zoom conversation about weaving present and past in fiction, my good friend Debra Monroe recommended “In the Dry” by Breece D’J Pancake, originally published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1978.

Debra shared a PDF of the story. I read it before the day was out, again on a wet gray afternoon several days later. Preparing for these comments, I read “In the Dry” a third time, highlighting phrases, admiring Pancake’s seamless weaving of present and past.

I want to begin by quoting the story’s opening:

He sees the bridge coming, sees the hurt in it, and says aloud his name, says, “Ottie.” It is what he has been called, and he says again, “Ottie.” Passing the abutment, he glances up, and in the side mirror sees his face, battered, dirty; hears Bus’s voice from a far-off time, I’m going to show you something. He breathes long and tired, seems to puff out the years since Bus’s Chevy slammed that bridge, rolled, and Ottie crawled out.

Declarative sentences in present tense place me inside the narrator’s perceptions. He sees, sees, says. he says again. he glances, sees, hears. He breathes. Notice, though, that from the moment Ottie “sees the bridge coming,” his past is part of his present. The bridge’s hurt occurred in the past, but Ottie carries it in “his face, battered.” Someone named Bus spoke “from a far-off time,” but Ottie hears it in the present, “passing the abutment” where already, two sentences in, we know something terrible happened, our suspicion confirmed by the first bit of narrative conveyed in past tense: “Bus’s Chevy slammed that bridge, rolled, and Ottie crawled out.”

In the pages that follow, we observe how the moment of the crash stamps Ottie as the passenger, Bus as the driver, and everyone in their immediate circle on the day of the crash. A long-haul trucker, Ottie stops at the household where he grew up and walks into a family gathering. In the kitchen, he speaks to someone named Sheila, letting her know he’s only stopping by, next stop Milwaukee.

“Aw, stay,” Sheila says. She comes to him and kisses his cheek. “I got all your letters and I saved ever one.”

In the space of two dozen words, we learn who this woman is, what she meant to Ottie, and what he still means to her.

In the room where he grew up, Ottie studies his face in a mirror as he shaves—the damage of the wreck present in the moment. He pulls a box of old photographs from a closet shelf:

They show the brown and gray faces of Gerlock boys; men he almost knew, old men, all dead. The women are dressed in long skirts; only half-pretty women, too soon gone old. He wonders about the colors of their world: flour-sack print dresses, dark wool suits; a bluer sky by day, a blacker night. Now days and nights blur, and the old clothes are barn rags, brown with tractor grease.

Notice what happens as this passage closes: “days and nights blur,” clothes from the past become “rags, brown with tractor grease.” This is the present Ottie lives—a damaged past, a present ever turning ragged.

As the story progresses, flashes from Ottie’s memory flesh out what happened at the bridge and why: the curve of Sheila’s teenage breast beneath her shirt, glimpsed by Ottie, grist for Bus’s jealousy. A beloved dog, cruelly killed. Anger, misunderstanding. Finally, the truth about Bus in the moment on the bridge: “the sneer before that hand twisted the wheel a full turn and metal scraped and warped against bridge sides.”

Breece D’J pancake took his own life in 1979; he was twenty-six. Several of his short stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Two posthumous collections are available. The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake was originally published in 1983, foreword by James Alan McPherson, afterword by John Casey. Andre Dubus III wrote an introduction and afterward for a later edition. The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters, introduction by Jayne Anne Phillips, has a 2020 publication date. I have the recent Collected volume on order.

The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake is available here ⇒

The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories, Fragments, Letters is available here ⇒