The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (18 page)

This is what swept through Sokolov's head as he followed Lermontov—the old dog suddenly moving fast, nearly racing—past the sleepy doormen and people rushing toward the subway. What had he to offer this girl, this stranger? He remembered no poetry. He could give her no advice about whoever had made her cry (at least it wasn't Sokolov). Face it, old man, he told himself, reflecting on his once ever-spry organ, now a flabby curled-up pasha who would, since the chemo, never again see reason to stir himself. When Sokolov closed his eyes at night, trilobites swam in the darkness before him. What had he to offer? Nothing: let her live her life. And an image of Kelly, on a campus someplace warmer, carrying books from the library—Kelly too.

At their corner Sokolov, ready for a nap, moved toward the stairs, but Lermontov pulled him back to the soiled bank of snow. Why not? Sokolov scanned the branches, but the crows that had seemed immovable earlier now were gone. East somewhere, over Garden City, Mineola, the sun, angled low, broke a moment through the clouds, and Sokolov saw his shadow and the crouching dog's stretched westward into the street, then vanish when the sun again drew back. Lermontov, with what might be pride, or relief, or happy fatigue, stood before a small cluster of curled brown turds. Sokolov found the plastic bag in his pocket, cleaned up, gave the dog a solid pat, another, looked back at Broadway a moment, over at the river and New Jersey, then followed the straining dog up the broad cement stairs toward their apartment and the promised bowl of soup.

FROM
The Atlantic Fiction for Kindle

T
HE SNOW CAME EARLY
that first year, and so heavy that when Albert Rasmussen invited the whole town over, we had to park around the corner from his unplowed street. We staggered through the drifts, across the lawns, down the neat sidewalks where a few of Al's neighbors owned snowblowers. Mr. Kajaamaki and the Lutven boys were still out huffing and puffing with shovels. We waved as we passed, and they nodded.

Al stood that November in his family room, arms outstretched, knee-deep in a nest of mattresses and bedding: flannels and florals mixed with Bobby Rasmussen's NASCAR pillowcases, Dee's Disneyprincess comforter. The sideboard had a hot plate and an electric kettle plugged into a power strip. Al opened drawers filled with crackers, tinned soup, bags of pink-frosted animal cookies, vitamin C pills and canned juice to prevent scurvy. "Hibernation," he announced. "Human hibernation."

This was before the cameras, before the sleep, before the outsiders, and the plan sounded as strange to us then as it would to anybody. Our town had always wintered the way towns do: gas bills and window plastic, blankets and boots. We bought cream for our cracked skin and socks for our numb feet. We knew how we felt when our extremities faded temporarily away, and we knew how much we hurt when they prickled back to life.

Al showed off a heater he'd built that ran on used grease, and the filter that sieved out the hash browns and hamburger. Al had always been handy. He'd been the smartest kid in school, back when Bounty still had its own high school. He was the senior everyone called "college material" until he decided to stay, and then we called him "ours." Our Albert, Albert and his girl Jeannie, who were confident that everything they could want in the world was right here in Bounty. We went to their wedding, the Saturday after graduation, and then stood by, helpless, when Albert's parents lost the farm three years later. Maybe the family should have gotten out then, moved away and never looked back. Al might have found a job that paid better than fence repair, and Jeannie might not have been killed by Reggie Lapham, seventeen years old and driving drunk on Highway 51 eight months before Al's November invitation. Al might never have struck on hibernation, and we might all have gone along the way we'd been going, for better or worse.

But they had stayed, and Jeannie had died, and Reggie had been sent to a juvenile detention facility downstate. The accident happened in early spring, when patches of snow were still dissolving on the roads, and what no one would say within Al's earshot was that the weather had killed her as much as Reggie had. Al needed something small enough to blame, and Reggie, skinny as a weed and driving his father's truck, served as well as anything could. Al had always seemed older than he was, had transitioned easily from high school basketball star to assistant coach. Now, in his thirties, he looked twenty years older, bent and exhausted. We wondered if the weight on his shoulders was truly Jeannie, or if he'd been carrying, for more years than we'd realized, some piece of Bounty, and he'd invited us over to make sure we understood that he was putting it down.

We'd all stayed in Bounty the way Al had stayed, had carried it as best we could. When our high school shut down, we sent our children to the next town over, then to the county consolidated when that one closed too. They came home with their textbooks about westward expansion, about the gold rush, the tin rush, the copper rush, the wheat farms, the corn farms, the feedlots. About land that gave until it couldn't give, and the chumps who kept trying to live on it. Our children came home and told us that we were the suckers of the last century.

"But what if you love it here?" we asked them. "What if you don't want to leave?"

"What's to love?" our children asked, in surly disbelief: What kind of morons hustle for jobs that don't even pay for cable television? What kind of people spend twenty years buying beer at the Hop-In and drinking in the quarry, the next thirty drinking at the Pointes, the last sodden ten at the Elks Lodge?

Our kind of people
, we thought.

"Sleep," Al said, there in his living room, and explained how in the old days in Russia people sacked out around a stove when the snows came, waking to munch a piece of rye bread, feed the fire, slump back into sleep. Only so much food could be laid in, and the thinking went that unless a man could come up with something to do in the cold and the dark that justified the calories he'd expend doing it, he was better off doing nothing. The Russians would wake up skinny and hungry, but they'd wake up alive.

We worried that maybe the Rasmussens were harder up than we had thought. Times were tough for everybody, but others weren't shutting down their houses and lives and planning to warm their kids with burger grease. "What do we do all winter?" Al asked, the kind of question we knew he considered rhetorical. "Why work like dogs all summer to keep the television on, the furnace cranked, noodles on the stove? Why scrape off the car to burn fuel to go to the store to buy more noodles? That's pointless."

Mrs. Pekola, of Pekola Downtown Antiques, opened her mouth for a moment, as if she were going to point out that that routine wasn't much different from plenty of people's autumns and springs and maybe summers, in which case Al was saying that we might as well all blow our brains out and have done with it. But she stayed silent, probably because she thought of many things we didn't need to hear.

"What about Christmas?" Mrs. Drausmann, the librarian, offered.

"We're staying awake for it. Just doing a two-month trial run this year, January and February," Al explained.

"School," Bill and Valeer Simmons said. "Your kids."

Al shrugged. Both his kids were bright and ahead of their classes. At seven, Dee read at a sixth-grade level. Bobby was nine and the best speller at Bounty Elementary. Al had picked up copies of the upcoming curriculum: long division, suffixes, photosynthesis, cursive.

"We're having a sleepover instead," Dee said.

"You know what Mrs. Fiske has planned for February? Fractions!" Bobby yelled, and the kids bopped around the room until Al chased them upstairs.

"They'll get caught up in spring," Al said. "I don't think they'll have difficulty."

He looked around at us, his old compatriots, the parents of the handful of children still enrolled at the school, and apologized. "I didn't mean anything by that," he said. "I don't think they're special. But they probably won't miss much."

We nodded. Being the children of a dying town had taught us that none of us was special. Whatever our various talents, we'd all ended up here, in the Rasmussens' family room.

"Don't try to convince me anything worthwhile happens in this town during January and February. I've lived here as long as you have," Al said. We could tell he meant to joke, but nobody laughed. "I'm not crazy. NASA studies this stuff. They're planning for astronauts to hibernate through long voyages. So they don't go stir-crazy and kill each other, bust out the shuttle walls." Al's fingers twitched a bit, and we looked at his walls: scuffed beige paint, three china plates with pictures of Holsteins, a family portrait taken at the JCPenney in Bullhorn when Jeannie was still alive, and a single round hole at the height of a man's fist, sloppily covered with paint and plaster. His walls looked a lot like our walls, and all of a sudden we were tempted to jam our fists in and pull them down.

"You think we're like that?" Nils Andersen asked from the back of the crowd, all the way in the front foyer, and people parted to let him come closer. He'd been a point guard to Al's shooting guard on the old high school basketball team. The two still sometimes took practice shots into the hoop on Al's garage.

"Like what?"

"Russians and astronauts. You think we've got two options, asleep or dead?"

Al started to shake his head, because we're not a town that likes to offend. Then he paused, ran his big hands through his hair, and let them drop to his sides. Fair and broad and tall, like his parents and grandparents and Norwegian great-grandparents, like a lot of the rest of us, he looked suddenly large and unwieldy. As if he could only ever fit in this little room curled up asleep, and we'd all been crazy to hope otherwise. He hunched his shoulders and looked down at the floor. "Maybe," he said. "This is about my family. I never meant any of you had to be involved. But maybe."

We'd thought our town's silence had been stoic; we glimpsed now how much we simply hadn't wanted to say. We rustled in the blankets but kept our mouths shut, put on our shoes, and drifted out into the snow. Some of us drove straight home. Others took longer routes down Main Street, past First Lutheran, the Pointes, the Elks Lodge, Mrs. Pekola's antiques store, the single-screen movie theater with the marquee still announcing
CLOSED
, as if the closing were news. The public library was housed in the old pharmacy; we checked out our books at the prescriptions counter and bought our prescriptions thirty miles down the road. We looked at all the shuttered stores and tried to remember what each one had sold.

We cruised back and forth like bored teenagers on Saturday nights, watching the road run quickly from empty storefronts to clapboard frame houses and tiny brick ranches. We turned around at the Hop-In at the west end of town, near the park with its silent gray bandstand. We drove east until we passed the elementary school and empty high school, then turned into the parking lot of the old farm supply store, the beams of its collapsed roof poking skyward and its windows like eyes. Bounty had never been a pretty town, but we'd tried to be proud of it. Now we examined it carefully, looking for new reasons to stay awake. One by one we gave up, peeled off, and drove home. We turned into our shoveled driveways in the tiny grid of residential streets, or took spokes of blacktop and gravel out to scattered farmhouses in little islands of yard, their old acreage spreading behind them like a taunt. Bounty was an assertion, an act of faith. It looked best left unexamined.

A few of us met back at the Pointes that night for beer and darts. The hours went by, but no one said a thing about Al Rasmussen, and we were all waiting for it. "Fucking
grease
," Nils finally said. "Like fucking
Russians.
" We were able to laugh then and walk out to the parking lot, slapping each other's backs and leaving trails of footprints in the snow. We felt better about ourselves, sitting side by side in our idling cars, waiting for the engines to warm.

On New Year's Day, the Rasmussens made neighborhood rounds, dropping off house keys and perishables: a gallon of milk and some apples for the Lutven boys, carrots for Valeer Simmons, a bag of shredded cheese and half a loaf of bread for Mr. Kajaamaki. We wished them luck and hung the keys on pegs.

We could have robbed them blind while they slept, but we knew they didn't have anything worth taking. We tiptoed in ones and twos to watch the family sleep, to see how this hibernation thing was working out. The kids looked peaceful. The food disappeared in barely perceptible increments. The room was stuffy by late February, smelling of night sweat and canned soup, but the Rasmussens didn't seem to mind. Mrs. Pekola lit a lavender-scented candle on the sideboard and found it blown out the next day. All in all, they looked cozy.

In March the children woke first, bounding out the front door in their pajamas. Spring hadn't really started yet; dirty snow was still melting into mud. But the fiercest part of winter was over. Al looked rested for the first time since Jeannie's death, the terrible tension gone from his shoulders. His body looked more like that of the man most of us had known for years, but his eyes looked like a stranger's. No one could place the expression, except those of us whose children or grandchildren had left Bounty, gone off for college or work. When the children came back, we said, their eyes looked like that, like departure.
Imagine
, we thought:
Albert had found that look in his sleep.

He asked for all the updates. A blizzard in early February had blown the roof off the old hardware store. Mr. Fiske had had a heart attack one morning in the barn with his livestock. One of the grain elevator operators had died of cirrhosis, and half the town had applied for his job. The youngest Suarez boy had tried to hitch home from work at the rendering plant in Piric one evening, but nobody stopped. He decided to walk and disappeared into the snow. We drove poles down, walking across the fields in formation, bracing ourselves to strike flesh. We never found him; now that spring had come, we probably would.