New Stories From the South 2010: The Year's Best

by Amy Hempel

  The partygoers decided that, in honor of having the barbecue, my father should receive the treasure from the fish’s stomach (which produced, also, a can opener, a slimy tennis shoe, some balingwire, and a good-sized soft-shelled turtle, still alive, which clambered out of its leathery entrapment and, with webbed feet, long claws, and frantically outstretched neck, scuttled its way blindly down toward the stock tank—knowing instinctively where water and safety lay, and where, I supposed, it later found the catfish’s bulky head and began feasting on it).

  Jack’s father scowled and lodged a protest—his wife was still not in attendance—but the rest of the partygoers laughed and said no, the fish belonged to my father, and that unless the watch had belonged to Jack’s father before the fish had swallowed it, he was shit out of luck. They laughed and congratulated my father, as if he had won a prize of some sort, or had even made some wise investment, rather than simply having gotten lucky.

  In subsequent days my father would take the watch apart and clean it piece by piece and then spend the better part of a month, in the hot middle part of the day, reassembling it, after drying the individual pieces in the bright September light. He would get the watch working again, and would give it to my mother, who had not been in attendance at the party; and for long years, he did not tell her where it came from—this gift from the belly of some beast from far below.

  That night, he merely smiled and thanked the men who’d given him the slimy watch, and slipped it into his pocket.

  The party went on a long time. I slept for a while in the cab of our truck. When I awoke, Jack’s mother had rejoined the party. She was no less drunk than before, and I watched as she went over to where the fish’s skin was hanging on a dried, withered mesquite branch meant for the fire. The skin was still wet and shiny. The woman turned her back to the bonfire and lifted that branch with the skin draped over it, and began dancing slowly with the branch, which, we saw now, had outstretched arms like a person, and which, with the fish skin wrapped around it, appeared to be a man wearing a black-silver jacket.

  In that same detached and distanced state of drunkenness—drunk with sorrow, I imagined, that the big fish had slipped through their hands, and that their possible fortune had been lost—Jack’s mother remained utterly absorbed in her dance. Slowly, the fiddles stopped playing, one by one, so that I could hear only the crackling of the fire, and I could see her doing her fish dance, with one arm raised over her head and dust plumes rising from her shuffling feet, and then people were edging in front of me, a wall of people, so that I could see nothing.

  I still have that watch today. I don’t use it, but keep it instead locked away in my drawer, as the fish once kept it locked away in its belly, secret, hidden. It’s just a talisman, just an idea, now. But for a little while, once and then again, resurrected, it was a vital thing, functioning in the world, with flecks of memory—not its own, but that of others—attendant to it, attaching to it like barnacles. I take it out and look at it once every few years, and sometimes wonder at the unseen and unknown and undeclared things that are always leaving us, constantly leaving us, little bit by little bit and breath by breath. Of how sometimes—not often—we wake up gasping, wondering at their going away.

  Rick Bass is the author of twenty-five books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, a novel, Nashville Chrome. He was born in Texas and has worked as a biologist in Arkansas and a geologist in Mississippi and Alabama. He lives with his wife and daughters and divides his time between Yaak and Missoula, Montana.

  Fish Story,” which received much-appreciated editing assistance from Michael Curtis, Maria Streshinsky, and Ross Douthat, comes partly from family lore and the hard times when to my father’s family in north Texas a single big fish was a windfall, a respite from the long echo of the Great Depression. The confining seam of space inhabited by those who skated at the edge of poverty, coupled with the seemingly paradoxical liberation when those inhabitants encountered windfall, and the way they felt a need, like a summons, to celebrate that brief escape from those boundaries, struck me as being as rich as the idea that a fish could be kept alive—for a while—on dry land, if only tethered to the ceaseless administrations of a boy and a hose. In my mind I saw and still see a slender seam of life—as thin as the glinting stream of water from that hose—between the three mediums, water and earth and sky, with all of the partygoers hunkered there, briefly, as if effectively sealed but still stirring between the laminae of those three worlds.

  Brad Watson

  NOON

  (from The Idaho Review)

  The doctors had delivered Beth and Tex’s only child stillborn, in breach, and the child had come apart. Their voices seemed to travel to her from a great distance and then open up quietly, beside her ear. She felt the strength leave Tex’s grip on her hand as if his heart had stopped, the blood in his body going still. She looked up at him, but he turned away. Then the drugs took over, what they’d given her after so much reluctant labor, and she drifted off.

  They’d allowed the funeral home to take their child, and to fix her, though they’d never had any intention of opening the casket or even having a public service. And neither did they view the man’s work at all, despite his professional disappointment. He understood they wouldn’t want others to view her, but seemed to think they’d want to see her themselves. He was a soft and pale supplicant, Mr. Pond, who kind of looked like a sad baby himself, with wet lips and lost eyes. They explained, as best they could, that they’d wanted only to have her as whole again as she could possibly be, never having been whole and out in the world. But Beth couldn’t bear to see it, to see her looking like some kind of ghoulish doll. They’d named her Sarah, after Beth’s mother, who’d died the year before. Beth found a fading black-and-white photograph of her mother as an infant on a blanket beside a flowering gardenia bush. She placed it in her pocketbook’s secret compartment. This was what her Sarah would have looked like.

  They’d made him decide what to do, and he’d decided to save her more risk. She made him tell her about it, next day. He stood beside her hospital bed, hands jammed into the pockets of his jeans, hair lopsided from sleep.

  “It was getting a little dangerous for you,” he said. “It was either pull her out somehow or cut you, and they asked me what we wanted to do. You were kind of out of it.

  “I understood what they meant,” he said. “You were having some problems. It was dangerous. I said to go ahead and pull her out, to get it over with as quickly as they could.

  “I was afraid for you,” he said. “Something in the doctors’ voices made me afraid. I told them to get it over with and to hurry. So they did.”

  What he was saying moved through her like settling, spreading fluid.

  “I don’t want to dwell on it,” Tex said after a moment. He sounded angry, as if he were angry at her for wanting to know. “There wasn’t anything they could do. She was already gone and it was an emergency. There was nothing anyone could do about that.”

  He stood there looking at the sheet beside her as if determined to see something in it, words printed there in invisible ink.

  “She broke,” she whispered. Her throat swollen and too tight to speak.

  He looked at her, unfocused. She understood he could not comprehend what he’d seen.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “She was already gone.” “It means something,” she said. “It means the world is a horrible place, where things like that can happen.”

  They went home. They arranged the funeral and attended it with his parents and her father, who came with her two sisters. No one had very much to say and everyone went home that afternoon.

  In the house over the next few weeks they seemed to walk through one another like shadows. One night she woke up from a dream so far from her own life she couldn’t shake it and didn’t know herself or who slept beside her. A long moment of terror before she returned to herself with dizzying speed. She lay awake watching him as calm
was restored to her bloodstream, quiet to her inner ear. Her heartbeat made an aspirant sound in her chest. She gently tugged the covers from beneath his arms. Their skins were a pale, granular gray in the bedroom’s dim moonlight, which failed in silent moments as if an opaque eyelid were being lowered over its surface. She gathered his image to her mind swiftly, as if to save it from oblivion. But he seemed a collection of parts linked by shadows in the creases of his joints, pieces of a man put together in a dream, escaping her memory more swiftly than she could gather it in. In a moment he would be gone.

  Julie Verner and May Miller had lost theirs, too, at about the same time. Miscarriages. They were all in their middle to late thirties, friends for close to ten years now, ever since they were young and happily childless.

  It was May’s first, but Julie and Beth had each lost two, so they were like a club, with a certain cursed and morbid exclusivity. Their friends with children drew away, or they drew away from the friends. They speculated about what it was they may have done that made them all prone to lose babies, and came up with nothing much. They hadn’t smoked or drunk alcohol or even fought with their husbands much while pregnant. They’d had good obstetricians. They hadn’t even drunk the local water, just in case. It seemed like plain bad luck, or bad genes.

  On Friday nights the three of them went out to drink at the student bars near the college. They smoked, what the hell. Julie smoked now anyway but Beth and May smoked only on Fridays, in the bars. They smoked self-consciously, like people in the movies. Saturdays, they slept in and their husbands went golfing or fishing or hunting. Tex was purely the fisherman, and he would rise before dawn and go to the quiet, still lakes in the piney woods, where he tossed fluke-tailed artificial worms toward largemouth bass. When he returned in the afternoons he cleaned his catch on a little table beneath the pecan tree out back. He kept only those yearlings the perfect size for panfrying in butter and garlic. On days he didn’t fish he sometimes practiced his casting in the backyard, tossing lures with the barbs removed from their hooks toward an orthopedic donut pillow Beth had bought and used for postpartum hemorrhoids.

  On the mornings he went fishing Beth rose late into a house as empty and quiet as a tomb. Despite the quiet she sometimes put in earplugs and moved around the house listening to nothing but the inner sounds of her own breathing and pulse. It was like being a ghost. She liked the idea of the houses we live in becoming our tombs. She said to the others, out at the bar:

  “When we died they could just seal it off.”

  Julie and May liked the idea.

  “Like the pharaohs,” May said.

  “Except I wouldn’t want to build a special house for it,” Beth said. “Just seal off the old one, it’ll be paid for.”

  “Not mine,” May said. She tried to insert the end of a new cigarette into a cheap amber holder she’d bought at the convenience store, but dropped the cigarette onto the floor. She looked at the cigarette for a moment, then set the holder down on the table and pushed her hands into her hair and held her head there like that.

  “And they shut up all your money in there, too,” Beth said. “Put it all in a sack or something, so you’ll have plenty in the afterlife, and they’d have to put some sandwiches in there. Egg salad.”

  “And your car,” Julie said, “and rubbers, big ones. Nothing but the big hogs for me in the afterlife.”

  “Is it heaven,” May said, “if you still have to use rubbers?”

  “Camel,” Beth said.

  “Lucky,” May said.

  Julie doled them out. When they were in the bars, when they smoked, it was nonfiltered Camels and Luckies.

  They went to the Chukker and listened to a samba band, the one with the high-voiced French singer. Beth danced with a student whose stiff hair stood like brown pampas grass above a headband, shaved below. Then a tall, lithe woman she knew only as Gazella cut in and held her about the waist as they danced, staring into her eyes.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Beth.”

  Gazella said nothing else, but gazed frankly at her, without flirtation or any other emotion Beth could identify, just gazing at her. Beth, unable to avert her own gaze, felt as exposed and transparent as a glass jar of emotional turmoil, as if the roil and color of it were being divined by this strange woman. Then the song stopped. Gazella kissed her on the cheek, and went back to the bar. Watching her, Beth knew only one thing: she wished she looked like Gazella, a nickname bestowed because the woman was so lithe, with a long neck and an animal’s dispassionate intelligence in her eyes. Powerful slim hips that rolled when she moved across the room. And like an animal, she seemed entirely self-reliant. Didn’t need anyone but herself.

  She looked around. The pampas grass boy was dancing with someone else now, a girl wearing a crew cut and black-rimmed eyeglasses with lenses the size and shape of almonds. Beth went back to the table. Julie and May raised their eyebrows, moved them like a comedy team, in sync, toward Gazella. May had the cigarette holder, a Lucky burning at its end, clamped in her bared teeth. Then the two of them said the name, Gazella, in unison, and grabbed each other by the arm, laughing.

  Beth said, “I was just wondering when was the last time y’all fucked your husbands?” May and Julie frowned in mock thought. May pulled her checkbook from her purse and they consulted the little calendars on the back of the register. “There, then,” Julie said, circling a date with her pen.

  May spat a mouthful of beer onto the floor and shouted, “That’s 1997! A fucking year!”

  “I’m not going home now,” Julie said. “Let’s go where there’s real dancing.”

  Because she’d been drinking the least, Beth drove them in the new Toyota wagon she and Tex had bought for parenthood. They went to Seventies, a retro disco joint out by the interstate. There they viewed the spectrum of those with terminal disco fever, from middle-aged guys in tight white suits to young Baptist types straight from the Northend Laundry’s steam press, all cotton creases and hairparts pale and luminous as moonbeams. Beth watched one couple, a young man with pointed waspish features and his date, a plumpish big-boned girl with shoulder-length hair curled out at her shoulders. They seemed somehow designed for raucous, comic reproduction. The man twirled the woman. She was graceful, like those big girls who were always so good at modern dance in high school, their big thick legs that rose like zeppelins when they leapt. Beth indulged herself with a Manhattan, eating the cherry and taking little sips from the drink.

  May now drooped onto the table in the corner of their booth before the pitcher of beer she and Julie had bought. Julie whirled in off the dance floor as if the brutish, moussed investment banker type she’d been dancing with had set her spinning all the way across the room. She plopped in opposite Beth and said, breathless, “Okay, I think I’m satisfied.”

  “Not me,” May intoned.

  “Words from a corpse,” Julie said. “Arouse thyself and let’s go home.”

  “Oh,” May said then, and spread her arms as she sat up, then slumped back against the seat. She was crying. Too late, Beth thought, she’s hit the wall.

  “Better gather her in,” she said to Julie.

  “No, no,” May said, shucking their hands off her arms. “I can get out by myself. Stop it.”

  “All right, but we’d better go home, honey.”

  “I just keep thinking something’s wrong with me.”

  “Come on, none of that,” Beth said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” May said. “I know! It’s not as bad as what happened to you. Shit. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay,” Beth said.

  “’Cause, like, no one had it worse than Beth.”

  “May, shut up,” Julie said.

  “I have to shut up, I know that,” May said, and let them guide her out to the car. They managed to tumble her into the backseat. Julie, drunker than Beth had realized, tossed a match from the flaming end of her Lucky Strike, spat tobacco flecks off the tip of her tongue, and said, “Let her sleep,
let’s go over to the L&N and sip some Irish whiskey. Leave a note in her ear, she can wake up and follow us inside if she wants to.”

  “She’ll throw up in the car,” Beth said.

  They reached in and rolled May onto her belly.

  “Okay, I’m all right,” May mumbled.

  “Good enough,” Julie said. “She won’t choke.”

  They drove to the L&N and plowed into the deep pea gravel covering the parking lot. The streetlights cast a dim, foggy light onto the building, an old train station that stood on the bluff above the river like a ruined cathedral. May’s voice came as if disembodied from the backseat, “I’m sorry, Beth, goddamn I really am sorry for that,” and Beth was about to say, That’s okay, but May said, “I need to talk about all that. But y’all won’t talk about it. Y’all won’t say shit about all that. Tough guys.” She laughed. “Tough gals.”

  Julie said, “May, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “See, like that,” May said, trying to sit up. “The strong, silent type. John Wayne in a dress. No, who wears a dress anymore? Why, only John Wayne. John Wayne with a big fat ass. John Wayne with a vagina and tits. John Wayne says, ‘Rock, I’m havin’ your baby—but there’s complications.’” She got out of the car and fell into the pea gravel, laughing. “It’s so soft!” she said, rolling onto her back. “Like a feather bed! Look, it just molds to your body!”

  Julie said something in a low voice to May but Beth had gotten out of the car, leaving the door open, and started down the road. She called back, “I’m going to take a walk,” and headed down the hill toward the river, the sound of Julie now speaking in an angry tone to May and May’s high-pitched protests pinging off the assault becoming distant, the beeping sound of Beth’s keys still in the ignition behind it all.