Cleveland’s "Regular" People: On Brian Petkash's "Mistakes by the Lake"

Brian Petkash | Mistakes by the Lake | Madville Publishing | 2020 | 206 Pages

The title of Brian Petkash’s interconnected short story collection, Mistakes by the Lake, might strike some readers from Northeast Ohio as unnecessarily cynical or flippant. However, Petkash’s work ultimately provides an inventive, nuanced review of Cleveland’s history. The book begins with “Skywoman and Cayagaga, 1796-1797,” an almost biblical Cleveland origin story. Petkash’s choices for names—Jacob, Esau, Gideon, Abraham—give as much insight into the territory of the story as the team, led by Jacob, does as they survey the Western Reserve. Both Petkash and Jacob are building worlds here. Given that Jacob becomes the only surviving member of the surveying team, he has doubts—reminiscent of those of the Jews led by Moses out of Egypt—about whether he and his wife Sukey will survive to settle in the new land that we see in subsequent stories. He narrates:

I knew I’d never see this land fully settled, that I’d never see a bustling New Haven or a booming Boston born on these shores. I knew I’d never see who would live on what parcel, on what yet-to-be-named streets and corners, who would run what business, open what school, start what church.

Maybe Sukey and I would make it back to live here at the edge of the world. Maybe Sukey would see me as I would soon be unable to see her, her and this land.

Felt it now. My knees sank into the muddled earth, rooted me.

If we did come, I thought, I hoped it changed us. I hoped we’d thrive.

And I hoped it wouldn’t all be another mistake.

The question Petkash asks here is as old as the Bible. Can those who lived in the old land be allowed to make the transition into the new territory? Or does the old generation have to die off for a new land to be born?

Indeed, a Biblical motif runs throughout this collection. A later story called “Flood, 1975” features Derek, “a helluva shortstop.” After making an unprecedented impression on the Little League Majors, where our narrator also plays, during a drought-filled season, he disappears. “When the rains finally came,” the narrator reports, “they were unrelenting. It rained for seven days.” In the course of cleaning the fields, the narrator finds Derek’s body. Initially, the narrator, who now cleans the fields as part of his job, thinks of Derek’s death as a consequence of hubris.

Over the years I convinced myself, perhaps unfairly, that Derek brought what happened to him on himself, that people with untainted talent often think they are invincible, that no sin and no ill luck can befall them.

But this narrator settles on an understanding that will resonate with anyone familiar with the Book of Genesis.

I learned then, and I know now, that there is no insulation from tragedy, that perhaps it is that very excess of skill that calls tragedy down upon the innocent and not-so-innocent alike.

Was Derek simply too good? Was it a random tragedy? Why, we all ask ourselves, do bad things happen? What sort of deity can we imagine who would allow that?

From the flood, we move through several more stories to arrive at the final one, “Mistakes by the Lake, 2013,” which is really more of a novella. Along the way we see Cleveland’s trolley cars, celebrate Superman, watch the Indians lose a World Series they should have won, and the Cuyahoga River goes up in flames. The city serves as a backdrop for ordinary citizens, the kind who work in stockyards and at depressing pizza joints. In this way, Petkash echoes a Drew Carey quotation that he chose as one of his epitaphs: “I love the normalcy of Cleveland,” Carey said. “There’s regular people there.”

The strongest story is the fourth one, “Dispossessed, 1946-47.” Its strength lies in its completeness. Petkash takes his time to develop these characters. We are given opportunities to understand their psychology and interiority before being thrust into the plot. And, unlike in some of the other stories, this plot does not overflow the parameters of the world he creates. Johannes Sykora, a former usher at League Park and now a 29-year-old war veteran with shrapnel in his hip, has promised that he will find a man for his dead ex-wife’s Aunt Betty, who snacks on fingernail clippings. They are an unlikely pair. Petkash’s prose is in good form here. Listen to how this brief passage illustrates the tension of their relationship as they share the newspaper:

A pot whistled and screamed and Aunt Betty pushed her chair away from the table, slipper-slapped to the stove, ceased the screaming. “Tea?” she said.

There is whistling and screaming and, presumably, the scrape of chair legs against the floor. There’s the noise of Aunt Betty’s slippers—the precision of “slipper-slapped” and the way alliteration (“to the stove”) supports the sound and texture of her movement. Finally, there’s the assonance. Note the vowel sounds in “ceased,” “screaming,” and “tea.” In this way, Petkash evokes the space of their claustrophobic and emotionally-charged domesticity. It takes a full paragraph before Johannes responds with an equally terse, “No, Aunt Betty.” He has to stand to save her from pouring the boiling water all over herself and the floor. Then he announces, “I have to go out.” “Oh,” she replies, and only after securing the boiling pot and tossing another nail into her mouth, manages, “That’s fine, Johannes. Yes, that’s fine.” As he leaves, the photo of his presumably dead wife in the room seems strangely “accusatory.” There is something between them, Petkash foreshadows, that is going to explode.

This story also works because Petkash gives the action room to breathe. The previous story, “Up in the Sky, 1938,” falls short for the opposite reason: asking too much of the reader too quickly. In just five pages we are supposed to feel something about these characters and their situation before we’ve even been oriented. In “Dispossessed,” as with several other stories, there are twists that won’t be spoiled, but unlike some of the others, the author is patient here, and so these surprises come off not as plot gimmicks but as credible turns in the lives of Petkash’s regular people.

Despite being the longest in the collection, the pace of the title story seems less patient than “Dispossessed.” Petkash’s attempt to modernize Henry IV is ambitious and appropriate, but the plot is overstuffed. There’s enough going on with enough characters that this easily could become a novel. But it’s still enjoyable. Petkash has an eye and ear that, for some, may recall Elmore Leonard. Read aloud, for example, the opening of an earlier story, “Butterflies on Fire, 1969”:

Dominic finds himself retching as he settles into his spot alongside the Cuyahoga River, a spot hes marked as his with well-read mimeos of Marrahwannah Quarterly, cigarette butts, various brands, beer bottles, empty & otherwise, several coffee cans of cat litter, fresh & not-so-fresh, a tiny green ceramic Buddha, seated, skin magazines, not as well read as Marrahwannah Quarterly, or, perhaps that well-read & more, he didnt like to count, cigarette butts or bottles of things well-read, & aniway, he is here to count his breath, his breathing, here, now, & the last things he wants to do is count the riffles & crimples of pieces of paper to see wat warranted worn, wat warranted well worn, & the differences thereof, therein, thereby, therewith.

For all of his careful attention to the sounds and sights of his stories, “Mistakes by the Lake, 2013” exemplifies an aesthetic struggle within the collection. There’s a lot of attention to gritty detail, but this atmosphere is created at the expense of a clear plot. The experience of reading this book is something akin to riding a roller coaster at a traveling fair. Some parts are smooth and exciting, some make you worry for your safety, some seem to be gimmicks with little pay-off. If this was the intent, then Petkash succeeded. But it may leave one puzzled and disappointed at times.

Though he no longer lives in Cleveland, Petkash’s passion for the city, its people, its sports teams, and its history is clear on every page. He knows the streets and the alleys and the pizza joints. He knows Drew Carey’s “regular” people and brings them to life with deft language and ambitious stories. These are not tales for tourists. They are for the kind of people who root for Cleveland sports teams year after year after year.