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

by Amy Hempel

  When he got to the airplane, Jared pretended to unpack the supplies and give the man and woman something to eat and drink. He told them they were too hurt to walk back with him and he’d have to go and get more help. Jared took the watch off the man’s wrist. He set it in his palm, face upward. I’ve got to take your compass, he told the man. A blizzard’s coming, and I may need it.

  Jared slipped the watch into his pocket. He got out of the plane and walked back up the ridge. The clouds were hard and granite-looking now, and the first flurries were falling. Jared pulled out the watch every few minutes, pointed the hour hand east as he followed his tracks back to the house.

  The truck was still out front, and through the window Jared saw the mountain bike. He could see his parents as well, huddled together on the couch. For a few moments Jared simply stared through the window at them.

  When he went inside, the fire was out and the room was cold enough to see his breath. His mother looked up anxiously from the couch.

  “You shouldn’t go off that long without telling us where you’re going, honey.”

  Jared lifted the watch from his pocket.

  “Here,” he said, and gave it to his father.

  His father studied it a few moments, then broke into a wide grin.

  “This watch is a Rolex,” his father said.

  “Thank you, Jared,” his mother said, looking as if she might cry. “How much can we get for it?”

  “I bet a couple of hundred at least,” his father answered.

  His father clamped the watch onto his wrist and got up. Jared’s mother rose as well.

  “I’m going with you. I need something quick as I can get it.”

  She turned to Jared. “You stay here, honey. We’ll be back in just a little while. We’ll bring you back a hamburger and a Co-Cola, some more of that cereal too.”

  Jared watched as they drove down the road. When the truck had vanished, he sat down on the couch and rested a few minutes. He hadn’t taken his coat off. He checked to make sure the fire was out and then went to his room and emptied his backpack of schoolbooks. He went out to the shed and picked up a wrench and a hammer and placed them in the backpack. The flurries were thicker now, already beginning to fill in his tracks. He crossed over Sawmill Ridge, the tools clanking in his backpack. More weight to carry, he thought, but at least he wouldn’t have to carry them back.

  When he got to the plane, he didn’t open the door, not at first. Instead, he took the tools from the backpack and laid them before him. He studied the plane’s crushed nose and propeller, the broken right wing. The wrench was best to tighten the propeller, he decided. He’d straighten out the wing with the hammer.

  As he switched tools and moved around the plane, the snow fell harder. Jared looked behind him and on up the ridge and saw his footprints were growing fainter. He chipped the snow and ice off the windshields with the hammer’s claw. Finished, he said, and dropped the hammer on the ground. He opened the passenger door and got in.

  “I fixed it so it’ll fly now,” he told the man.

  He sat in the backseat and waited. The work and walk had warmed him but he quickly grew cold. He watched the snow cover the plane’s front window with a darkening whiteness. After a while he began to shiver but after a longer while he was no longer cold. Jared looked out the side window and saw the whiteness was not only in front of him but below. He knew then that they had taken off and risen so high that they were enveloped inside a cloud, but still he looked down, waiting for the clouds to clear so he might look for the blue pickup, making its way through the snow, toward the place they were all headed.

  Ron Rash’s latest story collection is Burning Bright. His previous collection of short stories, Chemistry and Other Stories, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He teaches at Western Carolina University.

  In 1998 an airplane crashed in the Nantahala National Forest. Six years passed before a bear hunter found the wreckage. I thought that having a child instead of an adult find the lost plane would be an interesting opening to a story, so I started there, and the rest of the story slowly came into focus.

  Ashleigh Pedersen

  SMALL AND HEAVY WORLD

  (from The Iowa Review)

  We moved up into the trees when the neighborhood flooded that April—blue plastic tarps slung up with belts and ropes, splintered plywood floors, dinghies or canoes bumping up against the tree trunks. Makeshift hammocks hung from the branches, swaying in the breeze. The water was the color of peanut butter. It roiled below our branches, churning up a soup of all the things we’d lost: spatulas, dolls, romance novels, Tupperware, spools of colored thread, porn magazines, textbooks, bicycle tires, empty picture frames. Once a miraculously airtight bag of mini-marshmallows, which my younger brothers fished out and gave to our mother, six months pregnant with her fourth child and hungry in every way.

  My mother spoke to the neighborhood physician often, describing her latest cravings or a cramp in her lower back. Dr. Adair was not actually a physician at all, but a professor of linguistics at the local community college, new to the neighborhood just that March, not long before the rain started up. His neighbors promptly appointed him physician when the local doctors’ offices were swept away with everything else, and he took to his new role with stoicism and an endless reserve of ambiguous homeopathic remedies. Because he was a single parent, and good-looking, Dr. Adair was a rich source of gossip. He was also slightly darker-skinned, a smooth shade of caramel, and although American-born he was considered by most to be foreign, to be exotic. It was rumored that he had moved south from Boston not long after his wife—beautiful, we were sure—left him for another man. It was rumored he had lived in South Africa as a boy and discovered a new species of beetle, and also that he was a huge snob. His freshly painted house washed away with the rest of the neighborhood, and Dr. Adair now lived with his son, Peter, in the ancient oak that had marked the edge of their property line.

  Shortly after our new living arrangements were made, my mother rigged the first neighborhood telephone: two empty soup cans linked from tree to tree with a long, yellow string. Dr. Adair was on the other end.

  “Sahd,” she would say, lying flat on her back. “I haven’t felt it kick in hours.”

  His voice rising up through the can sounded thin and weary. “Annie, Annie,” he’d reply. “The baby is probably just resting. As should you.”

  “Still. I worry.”

  “Ring me in an hour. If nothing by then, I’ll row over.”

  By mid-May, we began to settle in. My father hung a rope swing from a thick branch. It struck me as boyish and primitive—I was never a strong swimmer, anyway—but my brothers, Charlie and Jackson, loved it.

  “Watch out for water moccasins,” my mother would call, lying in the shade, one hand rubbing her ripening belly. She glowed blue in the light filtered through the tarp. “When an alligator eats you, don’t come crying to me.”

  In truth, the local wildlife seemed to have abandoned our town. Birds were scarce, and we had not seen so much as a catfish since the water rose. I wondered about the alligators that had haunted our swamps, if after the rain they swam towards sea, mistaking this boundless new space for freedom. Something less easily identified had replaced the usual dangers, and so my brothers busied themselves all day, swinging like monkeys and dropping into the muck below. When I grew bored watching them, I found other ways to occupy myself—painting my toenails with the gold polish Charlie found among the debris, or closing my eyes and thinking about Mr. Janice, my Advanced Algebra teacher, whom I’d harbored a secret crush on for the entirety of the school year. My mother and I, though often inches apart, said very little to one another. There seemed little to say, even when I thought I might want to say something.

  On days when she expected Dr. Adair, my mother straightened up our living space as best as she could, stacking the cans of food in neat pyramids, stretching the tarp rooftop taut or rolling it back to illuminate us in dappled light. Once,
on a sultry morning early on in the summer, she asked me to braid her hair.

  “I don’t know how,” I lied. I was sprawled out on a branch, my limbs dangling to either side, as Charlie and Jackson fought for turns on the rope swing. It was the first truly hot day that season. Steam curled off the water and perspiration frosted our foreheads, though it was long before noon.

  “Yes you do, Rayanne. I’ve seen you do it to your own hair a million times. I’m no good at doing it myself.”

  I climbed down from my perch and sat behind her, tugging the plaits hard with each fist.

  “Ouch,” she said, and reached behind her to pinch my thigh. “You’re hurting me.”

  I tied the ends with bits of leftover yellow string and my mother rested cross-legged against the tree trunk, pretty and bathed in sweat. When Dr. Adair appeared at the edge of our wooden platform, glasses fogged, my mother smiled. “Hello,” she said.

  He hoisted himself over the edge and took her hand. “Annie,” he said, and even I, then thirteen and resentful, could hear that the word was filled with love.

  This was the Deep South, the houses clung low to the flat earth. The weathermen had not predicted this flood. It came fast, and from all sides: from the river that ran to our east and the canals threading through the neighborhood and from the granite sky overhead. The rain beat an angry chorus on our rooftops until the shingles slid off in defeat.

  Our town was small and surrounded by farmland and easily forgotten. Rescue boats never came. We saved what we could—chaining our dinghies and canoes to the trees, carrying food and extra clothes in plastic garbage bags—and then we sought shelter in the crude tree houses the neighborhood men had desperately, fearfully constructed, and we watched the water rise. We saw corpses float past, already bloated, the color of hardboiled eggs. There was a horse—a colt—struggling to swim, or to find footing. We watched his head dip under and then come back up, his eyes black and frantic. I saw our house float away in a torrent of foamy water, although my family does not remember it that way. But I saw it rise up off the earth and drift some yards, turning and bowing in the rapids, before pulling apart with a long and awful moan.

  My father was often gone for days at a time. He rowed out with the other dads, searching for houses on higher land, some of which still stood, their third stories or attics peeking out over the water like islands. They returned with armfuls of canned fruits and vegetables, soggy chocolate bars, hammers, nails, tarps, or oftentimes nothing at all.

  Whatever my father brought, my mother seemed to resent. One afternoon in early June, we watched him unload his share of the goods, squatting on two legs and spreading his findings across the plywood floor like a proud salesman. A rusting corkscrew, a broken sports watch, a few cans of dolphin-safe tuna. The water gave off a sour stench, and we slapped away the mosquitoes gnawing at our arms and necks. Charlie and Jackson were down below, playing pirates in the dinghy. Their whooping sounded distant, and their feet stomped out erratic rhythms on the metal. I watched the corners of my mother’s mouth turn down, down, as my father squatted there, and I wished I was young enough to join them.

  “That’s all,” my father said. His face and bald patch were sunburned, his eyes creased.

  “Well,” my mother said.

  “We found one house, but it had already been looted. This we fished out of a half-sunk boat, turned over on its side. Dave Johnson found a radio, but it didn’t work. Probably no reception out here anyway.”

  My mother turned her gaze out past the branches, squinting in displeasure. A web of multicolored string stretched across our neighborhood—her idea with the soup cans, borrowed from a television show she remembered from her childhood, had grown popular. The string quivered even in the stagnant air.

  “There’s tuna,” Dad tried. “I know you love tuna.”

  Across the way, Dr. Adair’s tree house was reinforced with rafters and a mobile wall to block wind and rain, regardless of the direction it blew. None of these details were visible from my mother’s vantage point, but I wondered if she wasn’t thinking of them, envying them.

  My mother sighed. “I can’t eat tuna,” she said. “The mercury’s bad for the baby.”

  I picked up the black rubber watch. Its digital face was blank and filled with water. “I like this,” I said.

  “You take it then, Ray.” Dad stood and brushed his hands off on his shorts. They were frayed at the bottom and he looked a little like Robinson Crusoe, I thought. “It’s about as useful as a working clock, these days.”

  The next evening, the sky pink and orange, Dr. Adair came over. He greeted my father with a handshake and asked my mother questions about her appetite and dreams. I hugged my knees to my chest, and my brothers played war with a deck of crumpled playing cards. My father stood, his hands on his hips, his back towards us all.

  Dr. Adair was fond of dream interpretation as a means of diagnosis, and although none of us knew where such authority originated, we accepted it as truth. Peter had come with his father and sat on the far edge of the platform, looking embarrassed. From the corner of my eye I could see him staring at me, but when I looked over he ducked his head.

  My mother said she had dreamed that she gave birth to a raccoon instead of a child, with sharp yellow teeth and an absurdly long tail. As she spoke, Dr. Adair prodded her stomach with his long steady fingers, examining.

  “That’s a good sign, Annie. Promising. It only seems like a nightmare.” He handed her a can of pears, her favorite fruit. “Pears have restorative properties. They’re good for the heart, yours and the baby’s.”

  My father made a coughing noise. “I’ve never heard of that,” he said.

  My mother rolled her eyes and laughed. “You’re not a doctor, Jim.”

  “Neither is he,” Dad said, and turned around to face us. He laughed without smiling.

  Dr. Adair stood and said, “I think we’d better be going.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Sahd.”

  Peter stood as well, his face blotched red. He and his father had to stoop low so their heads wouldn’t hit the tarp overhead. My father shook hands with Dr. Adair. His lips looked thin and white. “Thank you for all you’ve done for my wife,” he said.

  “I’m doing my best, Jim.” Dr. Adair’s voice was low and serious. He had lines jutting from the corners of his eyes, and the start of a promising beard. Standing across from him, my father looked small, almost elfin, his head clearing the roof by several inches despite his upright posture. He looked nothing like the Robinson Crusoe—the rustic hero—I had seen the previous day, and I felt an inexplicable pang.

  He nodded and then let both hands fall to his side. “Yes,” he said. “I guess we all are.”

  My mother heaved herself to her feet and linked one arm around my father’s elbow. “We’ll be seeing you soon, Sahd. Stop by anytime.”

  I looked towards Peter, but he was already climbing down towards their boat, his dark head disappearing over the edge of the platform.

  I lay awake late that night, curled on one side, my brothers breathing soft and deep from their hammocks nearby. My parents whispered a long while. I caught bits and pieces only. At one point my father started to speak too loud. “I can’t stand that he calls you—”

  “Shh!” my mother said. “You’ll wake the kids.”

  My father lowered his voice, but not by much. “—that he calls you Annie,” he said. “That’s my name for you. Mine.”

  I heard a great sigh, and then only the lapping of the water, the creaking of the branches.

  Peter was my age. He was over six feet tall and bony, with bad acne and shaggy dark hair that he flipped out of his face all the time. He shared only his height and his black hair with his father; in every other way he was almost wholly opposite. At school he had always seemed sulky and alone, and I sat far from him on the bus and ignored him in the cafeteria. After the flood, I found myself both hating him and craving his attention. When he came by with his father, I hoped to ca
tch him looking at me. Some days, while my mother napped and my brothers played Marco Polo, I lay on my stomach and peered through the branches, through the sifting clumps of Spanish moss, towards the Adair oak. Occasionally I caught Peter climbing down into the boat with his father, headed off on some appointment or another—stomach aches, snake bites, allergies. Once, on a hot, cloudy morning, I saw him dive into the water. He was shirtless and seemed, in that instant, to fly from the tree like some enormous and graceful bird. He swam for some time, doing backstroke and breaststroke with ease, venturing further from the tree than I would have ever dared to go. Against the muddy landscape, his body was pale as ice.

  I had grown tall myself, too tall. Both my parents were fairly short, but that year I had sprouted upward with alarming force. My feet were long and flat and I no longer knew what to do with my hands or arms. They felt superfluous, gorilla-like. When Peter came by, I made myself small. I squeezed my knees to my chest, or folded my arms and slumped against a branch.

  A week after bringing back the watch, Dad left again. He shouldn’t be too long this time, he said. They were headed in a direction they had already explored, in hopes that they may have missed something. My brothers and I watched our father row off, his friend Tom rowing a canoe alongside him, and supplies and food tied in plastic bags at their feet. I waved. Jackson bit his lip, eyes watery, and Charlie stood with his arms crossed and his brow furrowed. Both boys had streaks of blond in their messy brown hair, with lean, tan limbs. They looked more and more like two of the Lost Boys in the illustrated copy of Peter Pan I had so loved, that I still loved, although of course it too was lost in the flood.

  “It’s all right, Jack,” I said. “Don’t cry.”

  “I’m not.” He wiped at his eyes.

  “He’ll be back soon enough,” my mother said. She had rolled back the tarp and was doing yoga moves, arms stretched to the sky, eyes closed. She wore one of my father’s button-down shirts, and had tied it in a knot at the top of her belly. Her breasts were voluminous, and through the white of the shirt I could see her nipples.