The Best American Short Stories 2013 (50 page)

“Best meal I’ve had in a while. Thanks, Lisa.”

Lisa smiled and said, “You’re welcome, Darwin. I’m glad you liked it.”

“I got three cats today,” August said to break up their stupid smiling competition. “I did it with a wrench. Right in the head. They never knew what happened.” Out of the corner of his eye he could see Lisa wrinkle her nose slightly.

His father finished his beer and piled his fork and knife and napkin on his plate. He was a large man; all his joints seemed too big—hard, knobby wrists and knuckles, his hands darkened from the sun up to the point where his shirt cuffs lay. He was forty-five years old and still had a full head of hair, dark brown, just starting to gray at the temples. In the cold months, he liked to wear a bright silk cowboy scarf knotted around his neck. He smiled at women often, and, August noticed, women often smiled back. His mother used to say that for a guy with manure on his boots he could be fairly charming.

“Come on, now, Augie. I gave you a job and I appreciate you getting right down to it. But there’s barn talk and there’s house talk. I’m sure Lisa wouldn’t mind a little house talk now. How about you clear the table and clean up the dishes. And why don’t you thank Lisa for making that delicious meal? She worked all day and then came up to do that for us.”

“Thanks,” August said, and scooted his chair back loudly. He stacked the dishes into a precarious pile and carried them off to the kitchen. He ran the water until steam rose and squirted in soap until the bubbles grew in great tumorous mounds, and then he did the dishes. Clanking plate against plate, banging pot against pot, running the water unnecessarily, making as much noise as possible to cover the low murmur of Lisa and his father talking in the next room.

Through the kitchen window he could see the murky green cast of the yard light, the hulking form of the barn, and, farther out, the long, low shape of the old house, completely dark. When his father came in to get two more beers, August didn’t turn around to look at him. He stood next to August at the sink and took the tops off the bottles. He nudged August with an elbow, and August scrubbed at a pan, ignoring him.

“How’s your mother?”

August shrugged.

“I’m not going to run her down, Augie, but she’s not a woman that will ever give you her true mind. You know what I mean?”

August shrugged.

“She’s been disappointed her whole life, probably came out of the womb that way. You don’t disappoint her, I know that, but everything else does—me included, always have, always will. She never learned to hold herself accountable. That’s the way her parents allowed her to grow up. She’s very smart and she thinks she sees things I don’t see, but she’s wrong, I’ll tell you that. I see plenty. You hear me?”

August swirled a cup in the dishwater and didn’t say anything. His father slapped him on the back of the head.

“I said, you hear me?”

“Yeah. I hear you.” August looked straight ahead out the window.

“Okay, then.” He reached into the dishwater, came up with a handful of suds, and smeared them on August’s cheek. “You’re all right,” he said. “When you think it’s time, you let me know and we’ll go find you a pup.”

In the morning, the smells of toast and coffee and bacon pulled August from his bed before the sun had even hit the east-facing window. He clumped down the stairs into the kitchen and sat at the table, rubbing his eyes. Lisa stood at the stove, making eggs. Her feet were bare and she had on the gray long underwear she wore under her barn overalls. They were made for men and were tight around her hips, and when she bent over to get the butter out of the refrigerator August could see the faint lines of her panties curving across her full rear.

“Would you like coffee, August?” August nodded, and she put a steaming mug in front of him. “I figure you like it black, like your dad does?”

“Sure,” he said, taking a sip, trying not to grimace. “Black and strong.”

His mother mixed his coffee with hot whole milk, dumping in heaping spoonfuls of sugar. She told him that was how she’d learned to make coffee when she lived in New Orleans, in another lifetime, before she married his father. August knew that Lisa would never go to New Orleans in a million lifetimes.

His father came from the bedroom. He had a dab of shaving foam under one earlobe. He put his hand on Lisa’s waist as he got a coffee mug from the cupboard, and she turned and wiped off the shaving foam with her sleeve.

“How long before the eggs are done?” August asked, tapping his fingers on the tabletop.

“A few minutes. The bacon is almost ready.”

August sighed, downed his coffee, and took a piece of toast from the plate on the counter. “Well,” he said, “some of us can’t sit around. I have to get to work.”

He got his wrench from the mudroom and slid on his boots, leaving them unlaced, and walked across the lawn with his boot tongues flapping like dogs breathing in the heat. The cows were milling in the pasture, gathered up close to the gate. They rolled their dumb baleful eyes at him and lowed, their udders straining and heavy with milk.

“Shut up, you idiots,” August said. He picked a small handful of pebbles and continued to walk, pelting any cow within reach.

The trees that lined the back pasture were old oaks and maples and a few massive beech trees, the ground around them covered with the scattered, spiny shells of their nuts. There was a barbed-wire fence strung across the trees. It was rusted and had been mended many times, so old that it had become embedded in the trunks. August walked down the line and ran his fingers over the rough oaks and maples and the gray crêpe of the beeches, with their bark that looked like smooth, hairless hide stretched over muscle. He let his fingers linger on the places where the wire cut into the trunks, and then he knelt and sighted all the way down the fence, squinting into the strengthening light, and imagined that he was looking at a row of gnarled old people, the soft skin of their necks garroted by barbed wire, the twisted branches like arms raised, fingers splayed, trembling and clutching for air.

Until last year, August had assisted with the milking every morning before school and every evening after school, and then his mother forbade it.

“Do you like helping your father with the milking?” she asked one evening as they cleaned up the dinner dishes. His father was on the porch listening to a baseball game, and the sound of the play-by-play came through the screen door, garbled and frantic. The announcer spat hoarsely,
A hard line drive—he’s going, he’s going, he’s going
.

“I don’t mind it too much,” August said, wiping a plate dry. “Most of the time I like it.”

“Huh, well, that’s a problem,” his mother said. She had a cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth and ash drifted into the dishwater as she spoke. “You’ll be in high school soon, you know. And then there’ll be girls. They’re going to find you so handsome. And then there’ll be college, and then there’ll be any life you want after that. This is just a small piece, Augie, and if you hate it, you should know that soon you’ll be making your own way.”

“But I said I don’t hate it, Mom.”

“Jesus. I really hope you don’t mean that. Getting up early, the shitty cows, the dullness?”

“What about it?”

“My God, Augie, look at me and tell me you don’t hate it.” She turned to him and held his chin with her soapy hand and her cigarette trembled, and August tried but couldn’t tell if she was serious and about to cry or joking and about to laugh.

“I don’t hate anything. It’s fine. I like everything fine.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m disappointed in you,” she said, turning back to the dishes. “But I suppose it’s my fault, for letting it go on. I’m going to talk to your father. Your barn days are coming to an end. I’ll finish up here. Go and listen to the game with your dad.”

On the porch, his father was in the rocker, his legs stretched out long in front of him. He nodded at August as he sat on the step.

We’re going into extra innings. Hang on as we pause for station identification. You’re not going to want to miss this
. The radio crackled and an ad for a used-car lot came on. Bats flew from the eaves, and August threw pebbles to make them dive, and then the game came back on and Cecil Fielder won it all for the Tigers on a long sacrifice fly to center field. August looked at his father. He was slumped in the chair with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together over his chest.

“Night,” August said, getting up to go inside.

His father yawned and stretched. “Night,” he said.

Later, his parents’ arguing had kept him awake, and the next morning his father didn’t roust him for the day’s milking, and soon after that Lisa was always around, and not long after that his mother started spending time at the old house. At first, just a few nights a week, and then one morning she didn’t come back to make breakfast, and his father burned the toast and slammed the door on his way to the barn.

August tied his boots. He climbed up to the haymow and surprised two cats that had been intently pawing at a dead sparrow on the hay-littered floor. He broke one’s back with a quick chop of the wrench and stunned the other with a jab to the head. The cats were indistinct as they writhed, blurred in the gloom. August silenced their yowling with two more sharp blows from the wrench, and then gave chase to a few more slinking forms that eluded him by leaping to join their wailing, spitting clan in the rafters.

August didn’t curse much. His father always said that no one took a man who cursed too much seriously and it was better to be the type of man who, when he did curse, made everyone else sit up and take notice.

Now, however, in the dark barn with the hay dander swirling around his face and the cats twitching and bristling out of reach above him, he cursed.

“Motherfucker,” he said. “Motherfucking, cocksucking, shitfaced, goddam, fucking cats.”

It was the most curse words he’d ever strung together, and he hoped the cats were sitting up to take notice, trembling in fear at the rain of fire that was about to be visited upon their mangy heads.

At the old house, his mother had the blinds drawn. She had cut a ragged hole in a quilt, pulled it over her head, and belted it around her waist, poncho style. Her arms stuck out, bare, and the quilt ends trailed across the floor when she got up to let him in. With the shades drawn it was dark, and she had lit an old kerosene lamp. The flame guttered, sending up tendrils of black smoke. She had been playing solitaire. There was a fried pork chop steaming in a pan on the table.

“You want some lunch?” she said, after she had settled in her chair, smoothing the quilt down under her and over her bare legs. “I’m finished. You can have the rest.” She slid the pork chop over to August. It hadn’t been touched.

He took a bite. It was seared crispy on the outside and juicy and tender on the inside, quick-fried in butter and finished in the oven. That was how she always made pork chops. Lisa wouldn’t know how to do this, he thought. Perhaps his father would get so fed up with Lisa’s tough, dried-out pork chops that he would send her away and his mother would come back to the new house and he’d start helping his dad with the barn chores again.

“Are you still not eating?” He picked up the pork chop to gnaw at the bone, where the best-tasting meat was.

“Augie, that’s a common misconception about us breatharians. I eat. Good Lord, I eat all the time. Here, actually, let me have one more bite of that.” She leaned over and wafted her hand around his pork chop, bringing the smell toward her, and then took a quick hiccuping breath and smiled and leaned back in her seat. “Meat from an animal you know always has the best flavor,” she said, lighting one of her little cigars. “That’s something city people probably don’t understand. You remember taking kitchen scraps out to that hog every night after dinner? You fed that animal, and now it feeds you. That lends a certain something to the savor—I’m sure there’s a word for it in another language.”

She pulled the quilt tighter around her shoulders. “Did you know that, Augie? That there are all sorts of words for things in other languages that we don’t have in English? It’s like your soul is tongue-tied when that happens, when you have a feeling or experience that you can’t explain, because there isn’t a specific word for it. If you knew all the languages in the world, you could express yourself perfectly, and all experiences would be understandable to you because you would have a word, a perfect word, to attach to any possible occasion. See what I mean?”

August was fairly certain that his mother was naked under her quilt. He wondered if there was a word for that in another language. A word to classify the feeling you get sitting across from your mother, eating a pork chop, with your mother naked under a quilt.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because you have a word to put on something doesn’t mean you understand it any better. Does it?”

“Oh, I think so. Definitely. I don’t think things really exist until we can name them. Without names, the world is just populated by spooks and monsters.”

“Giving something a name doesn’t change what it is. It’s still the same thing.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong, Augie dear. How about death?”

“What about it?”

“What if instead of death everyone called it being born and looked forward to it as the great reward at the end of seventy or so years of slow rot on earth?”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone look forward to death?”

“Maybe you’re too young for this conversation,” she said, coughing into the back of her hand. “That’s an interesting thought. I bet in some language there is a word for the state you exist in now—the state of being incapable of formulating a concept of, or discussing abstractly, death in all its various forms, owing to a lack of experience. You need to have someone you love die, and then you get it. All the understanding of the world comes rushing in on you like a vacuum seal was broken somewhere. I’m not saying you’ll ever understand why the world works the way it does, but you’ll surely come to the conclusion that it does work, and that, as a result, it will someday come to a grinding halt, because nothing can work forever. See what I mean?”