The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (20 page)

Mrs. Pekola had passed away, which we knew, but we hadn't known her family blamed us. Her eldest daughter was living in Florida, and the filmmakers had gone down to interview her about how her mother had died alone in a church pew, frozen to death in a wool coat and orthopedic shoes. "No one found her till spring," the woman said, her anger fresh and righteous.

Mrs. Fiske had taught all the Pekola girls over the years. "Fractions," she whispered in the audience. "That girl just hated fractions."

Dee had never left Bounty, never expressed any interest in going anywhere else. She was "ours," like her father before her, despite her faraway look most days, her eyes the color of the ice that froze over the flooded quarry. Her dirty-blond hair had darkened to brown, and her teenage acne had faded into a nearly translucent paleness. She volunteered at the library with Mrs. Drausmann and took over story time. The film showed her sitting in a rocking chair with books far too advanced for the children gathered cross-legged around her. "He heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead," she read, as the children squirmed. She wasn't very good at story time, but Mrs. Drausmann had grown hoarse and weary over the years.

One by one we tried to explain for the cameras. Why stay? What is Bounty worth? Three months? Four? Half your life spent asleep? Our people had moved to Bounty because the land was there and it was empty, and now all we had was the emptiness and each other. We had a wide sky and tall grass and a sun that felt good when you'd waited for it half the year. We had our children, the ones we'd feared for, feared their boredom and their recklessness and their hunger for somewhere else. We'd feared becoming Jeannie Rasmussen, and we'd feared becoming Reggie Lapham. We'd feared wanting too much and ending up with less than what we already had. Now Al and Nils dreamed of the sound of a basketball bouncing off the warped, snow-soaked floor of the high school gymnasium. Al dreamed of nights asleep in Jeannie's arms. Reggie Lapham probably dreamed his life differently too, but he seemed content with what he had: he was interviewed with his son on his lap, a boy who had never made a snowman, never opened a Christmas present. He spoke about that first year back, about how the sleep had saved him, and when his voice foundered, his wife, Nkauj Thao-Lapham, reached over to squeeze his hand.

Dr. Joe, interviewed, said that the sleep was profoundly unhealthy, that legislation should be passed before the custom could spread. The documentary included interviews with American history professors at the state university, experts on westward expansion, on what had happened to our county over the past two centuries. Someone in a bow tie said he was dismayed by what had happened to our immigrant spirit, to our desire to press on and out to something better. Our congressman pointed out that the immigrant spirit might have pushed us all the way on out of the state, further west or back east. Instead, we'd found a way to stay, and the census didn't ask if you were awake or asleep. It just asked where you lived, and now, more than ever, we were proud to say we lived in Bounty.

"
Sisu
," old Mr. Kajaamaki grunted for the camera, with his hand held in front of his mouth; his teeth had fallen out, but he'd never bothered with dentures, and we felt a bit guilty that no one had insisted on driving him to Piric to get some fitted. Our people were shabby, like our houses, our streets, our ancient coats and boots. But our ancestors had come, and they had stopped, and we persisted. Persistence, Mr. Kajaamaki's old-world word for it. The endurance of a people who had once starved and eaten bark and come across an ocean to a flat sea of snow, to make new ways of life when the old ones seemed insufficient.

"But do you regret their decision? Your father's?" the interviewer, off-camera, prodded. The film cut back to Dee and Al standing together. They were outside, walking down the shuttered main street of our town, the sky blue and endlessly wide. Dee squinted in the light, and Al squinted at his daughter. He'd been quiet in front of the cameras, tentative to the point of taciturn, and as we watched the movie from lawn chairs in the farm supply store parking lot, we could see him fidgeting, turning his head to check the expression on his children's faces, turning around in his seat to look at the people he'd led into sleep.

"I barely remember what our life was like before. I remember being cold."

"And now?"

Dee looked baffled, not able to find words sufficient to explain half her life, the happier, more perfect half. The camera turned to Al, but his face was unreadable. "Now?" Dee said. "Now I guess we're not."

Now we are the people of Bounty, the farmers of dust and cold, the harvesters of dreams. After the lumber, after the mines, after the railroad, after the interstate, after the crops, after the cows, after the jobs. We're better neighbors in warm beds than we ever were awake. The suckers of the last century, but not of this one.

FROM
Glimmer Train

H
ER NAME WAS
Holly Hensley, and except for the two years when her father was transferred to a naval base in Florida, her family lived across the street from mine. This was on Beechwood Drive, in Corpus Christi, Texas. Our parents held garage sales together, threw hurricane parties, went floundering in the shallow, bottle-green water under the causeway. If the Hensleys were working overtime and Holly was staying late for pep-squad practice—which meant grinding against Julio Chavez in the back seat of his Skylark—my mother would pick up Holly's younger brother from daycare and watch him until they got home. Sam had been born while they were living in Florida. ("My old man got one past the goalie," Holly liked to say. "There's nothing more disgusting.") In 1986, the year everything happened at the Hensley house, Sam was three. Holly was eighteen, a senior at King High School, and I was a freshman, awkward and shy and helpless with love.

Most mornings we walked to school together. Holly's hair would be wet from the shower, her eyes wide and glassy with fatigue; she'd yawn and say, "What's buzzin', cousin?" She liked to drag her fingers along the chain-link fences we passed, and to stop at Maverick Market to buy Diet Cokes and steal candy bars. I waited outside, worrying she'd get caught. We talked about what she'd do after graduation—some days she planned to enroll at the beauty college, others she wanted to dance at the Fox's Den out by the oil refineries—and about Roscoe, the collie she'd adopted in Florida. She told me how her little brother preferred her Aggie sweatshirt to his baby blanket. I invented stories of girls I'd been with, wild things named Rhonda and Mandy and Anastasia who attended different schools and who, I hoped, might make Holly jealous. Usually she'd just bump me with her hip and say, "You're more of a slut than I am." We never talked about the rumors that she and Julio had let a crowd of kids watch them in bed at a homecoming party, or that she'd recently been spotted leaving the Sea Ranch Motel with Mr. Mitchell, the geology teacher. Even my parents had heard about Mr. Mitchell. My mother said Holly was just trying to get her parents' attention, acting out because of the new baby. My father said she was trouble and if he caught me alone with her, he'd whip my ass. But I rarely saw her after we got to campus. Holly would disappear onto the school's smoking patio, a dismal slab of concrete where stringy-haired surfers and kids with safety pins through their eyebrows loitered, and I would go find Matt Rickard.

Matt and I had been friends since elementary. We'd played on the same soccer team, joined and quit Boy Scouts together, leaned despondently against the gym bleachers and watched couples sway at the junior-high dances our parents made us attend. In our freshman year, Matt wore sleeveless shirts and tucked the cuffs of his camouflage pants into military boots; he had a pair of fatigues for every day of the week—desert camo, woodland and blue woodland, tiger-stripe and black tiger-stripe. For a while we'd been into guerrilla warfare. We bought
Soldier of Fortune
magazines, made blowguns from copper tubing, slathered our faces with mud when we crept under the lacy mesquite trees behind his house. We saved our allowances for the gun expos at the Bayfront Auditorium and loaded up on Chinese throwing stars and bandoliers of blank bullets, butterfly knives and pamphlets on chokeholds, and MREs that tasted like gluey chalk. We ate meals with the forks and spoons attached to our Swiss Army knives. Over the summer, though, I'd grown bored and embarrassed by the warfare stuff—my walls had been draped with camouflage netting, and over my bed I'd had a poster of one ninja roundhousing another—but Matt still liked it, so I'd recently told him he could have my cache. He was disappointed in me, I knew, as if I'd defected to the enemy, and probably the reason he hadn't yet come to collect my stuff was the hope that I'd change my mind. But I'd already packed everything into my army duffel, and each afternoon I waited for Matt to take it away. I didn't think we'd stay friends much longer.

When my father came into my room on a Friday night in early October, I thought he'd say Matt was on the porch. I was on my bed, staring at the acoustic ceiling where the ninja poster had been and listening to my stereo. My father crossed the room and lowered the volume. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a clip-on tie; he'd just gotten off work. He gazed through my window and into the backyard.

"Is Matt here?" I asked.

"You need to take care of Holly's dog for a few days."

"Roscoe," I said.

"Make sure he has food and water. Maybe play with him a little."

I sat up on my bed. My father's voice sounded frayed, as if I were hearing him from far away. His hands were clasped behind his back. I thought I smelled cigarette smoke on him, but then I realized it was floating down the hall from the kitchen.

"Are they heading out of town?" I asked. The Hensleys had a van and sometimes drove to Comfort or Falling Water in the Hill Country.

"Don't go over there tonight," he said. "You can just start in the morning."

"Okay," I said. A wind gusted outside. Tallow branches scraped against the side of the house.

"If the dog shits on their patio, spray it down with the hose."

"Is Mom smoking again?"

"She might be, Josh," he said, and put his hand against the window. "Yes, that might be happening."

In 1986 my father worked at the naval air station—most everyone's father did, including Holly's and Matt's—but he was also moonlighting at Sears, selling radial tires and car batteries, which he blamed on Reagan. It was the year the president denied trading arms for hostages in Iran and the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded and Halley's Comet scorched through the sky. It was the year I loved a reckless girl, the year being around my best friend made me lonely. It was the year my mother was working at the dry-cleaning plant and trying to quit smoking. I knew she occasionally snuck cigarettes—I'd seen her in the backyard on evenings when my father was at Sears—but she hadn't smoked in our house for months. On that night in October, when the filmy scent of smoke wafted into my room, I could only think that Holly's family was moving again. The last time her father had gotten news of his transfer, they were gone within a week.

But they weren't leaving. There'd been an accident earlier that day, something involving Sam, Holly's little brother. My father only knew that Sam had been taken away in an ambulance and the Hensleys would likely spend a few nights with him at the hospital. He relayed the information in a detached tone, as if summarizing a movie he didn't want me to watch. He'd moved from the window to sit on my bed, where he looked small. He said their mail would be held and there was a key under the ceramic cow skull on their porch. I tried to remember the last time I'd seen Sam, but couldn't—maybe the previous weekend, when he and Holly drew on their driveway with colored chalk, or maybe when Mr. Hensley was watering the yard with Sam on his shoulders. In my room, my father kept dragging his hand over his face, as if trying to wake himself up. I asked if he knew how Holly was doing, and he said, "She's hurting, Josh. They're all hurting like hell."

My mother baked all night—brownies and lemon bars, biscuits and an enchilada casserole. She fried chicken and sliced vegetables and made salami-and-cheese sandwiches that she quartered into triangles. When I went into the kitchen on Saturday morning, the counter was crowded with foil-covered dishes. My mother was walleyed. She poured me a glass of orange juice and put two pieces of cold fried chicken on my plate. "Breakfast of champions," she said.

With all the foil, the kitchen was bright and strange. The table was tacky with humidity. My mother shook a cigarette from a pack, then lit it from a burner on the stove. I heard it sizzle.

"Liz called last night," she said, and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. Liz was Mrs. Hensley, Holly's mother. My mother said, "Little Sam is sedated in intensive care."

"I don't know what's happening," I said.

"He burned himself," she said. "He's scalded all over the front of his little body."

Sam, my mother explained, had woken with a fever, so Mrs. Hensley kept him home from daycare. He spent the morning watching cartoons and napping on the living room couch. While he slept, Mrs. Hensley was cleaning the house and washing clothes, then decided to make tuna salad for lunch. She put water on to boil eggs. She checked on Sam on the couch, then stepped into the garage to put a load of laundry in the dryer. They had an attached garage, so she left the kitchen door open in case Sam woke up and called for her. She got sidetracked looking for dryer sheets and stayed out there longer than she'd intended. Then she heard her son screaming: he'd pulled the pot of boiling water down onto himself.

I felt cored out, not like I was going to vomit but like I already had. I pushed my plate away. At Sam's last birthday party, my parents and I had given him a toy garbage truck. Holly gave him a baseball cap that read,
I Wasn't Born In Texas, But Got Here As Soon As I Could.
He'd been wearing it when Mr. Hensley watered their lawn.