The Music of Everyday People on the Brink

From Midwestern suburbs to bars abroad, the characters in Mark D. Baumgartner’s short story collection Last Chance for a Slow Dance search for meaning and new ways of being at inflection points in their lives. The book is a beautiful ode to the quotidian, a journey through the lives of working people who are forever one step away from making it big or otherwise elevating themselves beyond their station.

Of the 11 stories, 5 are linked, following the life of Russell Fingers, a jazz musician who puts in the time doing shows, yet can’t quite cross over to a level that does not require relentless gigging, often outside his chosen genre and tastes, at small venues.

We meet Russell as a child in the first story, “The Great Siwash Shoe War,” which takes place in the summer of 1989, “a summer of layoffs and disarray,” the year itself a number on the brink. Twelve and restless, obsessed with a cassette tape by The Cure, and engaged in the mock warfare of bored kids without cell phones in the Gen X ‘burbs, Russell partakes in water-gun fights and the transmission of intel over his RadioShack walkie-talkie. Things go from benignly immature to bizarre when the kids’ shoes vanish, stolen by whomever belongs to the strange new voice suddenly issuing ultimatums over the heretofore harmless toy airwaves. It’s a story so alive with detail and atmosphere, I felt like I was back in my own ‘80s childhood summers, when kids did not go “inside a house for three months except to eat or piss or sleep. Everyone was smeared with grime and happy until they were miserable.”

Baumgartner excels at the art of creating atmosphere, balancing that happy and miserable feeling of transition in this first story and throughout the book. And there’s a hint of nagging danger lurking at the edges of the child’s play — a nearly derailed train, for instance, and a consistent threat in the literal air in the form of errant summer fireworks. Also in the air is young love: Cecilia, who has “a mean streak,” captures Russell’s heart and mind in prepubescence and remains an on-again-off-again presence to interesting effect in subsequent linked stories.

Baumgartner’s effective rendering of the lurking unease and danger of this suburban landscape reaches its zenith in “Like Gods of the Sun.” Jungemeier, a pool manager, just has to make it through 15 more minutes of his last, boiling hot day on the job before graduating to an air-conditioned cubicle. Baumgartner begins with tension that he continually ratchets up through the use of a roving, alternating point of view, putting the reader first inside the mind of the exceedingly impatient Jungemeier, then casting us swiftly into and out of the interiorities of a lifeguard, a creepy sunbather, and a toddler with suspicious swimming skills alongside her distracted mother. At roughly 20 pages in length and a few minutes in time, the story takes on a weight beyond its scope thanks to Baumgartner’s facilities with point of view, pacing, and propulsive interiority balanced with the looming threat of deep water in the story’s exterior.

As the collection’s title suggests, music permeates the book, not only because of Russell’s occupation but because of Baumgartner’s preoccupation with the sounds of a story. Take, for instance, “Landing on Water,” which departs the Midwest for a setting in Senegal, a bar near an airport where a waitress dreams of plane crashes. The delight and danger of the story lies in the loud music of planes overhead: “The plane is low in the sky as it approaches, almost too low. It’s a C-130, a giant military transport. The thrumming roar of its four props blots out everything, an enormous sound, but she thinks she hears something odd in the timbre of the engines, something strained, laborious.” Beneath the plane sounds, we hear a jukebox and several languages spoken by the military bar’s patrons.

The book ends as it begins, alternating between quiet and loud, the focus back on Russell and Cecilia, older, changed and unchanged, Russell raucously gigging with his band at a “Homecoming at a college that didn’t any longer exist.”