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

by Amy Hempel

“Go home, Dad,” Jackson said. “I’m sorry Amy called you and that you had to drive all this way, but go home.”

  “Could I talk to Amy?” he asked. He could see her in the window, but her hand was shading her eyes.

  “Go home, Dad. Please go home.”

  “Did you hit her, Jackson?”

  “She lost the baby, Dad.”

  “Did you hit her?”

  “Please go home.”

  Mackie punched his son in the mouth and then placed his interrwined fingers behind his son’s head, pushing Jackson’s face into his own knee. Jackson fell to the street, and Mackie was already pulling him into the car, placing his body across the backseat. His son was unconscious, his mouth bleeding, and Mackie slammed the door and walked up to the house. He knocked on the door and Amy opened it.

  “I need some rope,” Mackie said.

  “He really did hit me,” Amy said. Her throat showed pale purple fingerprints where he had grabbed her, and there was a deep cut above one eye. She looked so young, barely out of her teens, and Mackie felt sick all over again.

  “I know,” Mackie finally said. “I’m going to take him back to Tennessee. Is that okay with you? He won’t come back here and bother you.”

  She thought about this and then nodded. “I’ll get you some rope,” she said.

  He drove ten miles above the speed limit, his son tied up in the backseat, groggy, shouting obscenities. He stopped only for gas, pissing in a bottle, letting his son wet himself rather than untie him. His son kept struggling against the ropes, lying on his stomach, his ankles tied to his bound wrists, but Mackie had fashioned the knots well, the added pressure only cinching the knots tighter. “Well, I’m gonna shit in my pants, you asshole,” his son yelled from the backseat. “I’m your son and you’re going to let me shit in my pants.” He let his son shit in his pants.

  After five hours, his son fell asleep and Mackie had the rest of the drive to think about what he’d done. He thought about it for five minutes and then focused on the road, counting billboards, watching for highway patrol cars. He knew when they reached Tennessee, he couldn’t keep his son there. He couldn’t keep fighting his son, knocking him out and hoping he’d awaken a better person. He’d do what he could, help him find a job, get him an apartment. He’d fix his son and then hope it stuck.

  Back home, in the garage, when he dragged his son out of the car, reeking of sweat and piss and shit, Mackie told him about his plan. “You stay here and we find something for you to do and you get yourself straight.” His son fell into a corner of the garage. “I don’t do drugs,” he said. “It’s not like that.” Mackie shook his head. “I know that. I wish it were that easy. You’re a good boy, Jackson; you just get too angry. You need to understand that things happen and they’re usually bad, and you just figure out how to deal with it without beating somebody up or killing their dog or setting their tree on fire. Do you understand?”

  Jackson slid a finger into his mouth and spit blood. “One of my teeth is loose.”

  “Will you try?” Mackie asked his son. Jackson nodded and went inside to take a shower while Mackie climbed back into the car, pressed his face against the steering wheel, and kept himself from crying.

  “Fucking deer,” Jackson kept saying. “Fucking dead, three-legged, no account deer.” They were on dry land now, both cold, getting colder in the wind. They had stripped out of their wet clothes, father and son now in their wet boxer shorts, shivering, their hair dripping cold water down their bodies. Neither had thought to bring a change of clothes. “This,” Jackson said, “is getting worse.”

  The deer, sans leg, was still beautiful. It was an eight-point buck, the cold having preserved the skin except for a small wound at its chest and the exit wound near its right back leg. A hunter must have shot it and chased it into the pond, then decided it wasn’t worth the effort, or perhaps never even found it. Either way, it was here now, dead, glassy-eyed, lying in the grass between Mackie and Jackson.

  “We should bury it,” Jackson said. “Cindy said to bury it.” It was a nice idea, but the ground was too cold for that. The county dump was closed until Monday. “Well, we can’t leave it here,” Jackson shouted, “Fucking deer.” Mackie thought if they could get a tarp under the deer, they could drag it to Jackson’s truck and dump it on the side of the highway. “Someone from the city will come get it,” Mackie told his son. Jackson seemed reluctant to agree. “Fucking deer.” He finally nodded and Mackie went to find a tarp, to wrap up this deer, and to get through the day, freezing cold, soaked to the bone, but otherwise undamaged.

  Two months after he brought Jackson back home, his son now servicing and setting up video poker machines at strip clubs and gas stations, the phone rang again in the middle of the night. It was Amy, her voice as soft as the first time he’d talked to her.

  “Is he okay?” she asked.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her. “I want to know that first, because if you aren’t, I’ll go make him worse.”

  She started to cry. “I’m okay, I think,” she said. “I’m better without him here.”

  He told her that Jackson was trying harder to be a good person.

  “I had hoped that he would turn out to be a good person,” she said, “but I couldn’t stay with him long enough to find out.”

  Mackie couldn’t think of a response that would help anything and so he stayed silent.

  “I wanted to thank you,” she said, still whispering, as if concerned that Jackson might be listening to them. “You helped me and I wanted to thank you for that.”

  Before he could answer, she hung up the phone. He kept the receiver against his ear, listening to the dial tone, waiting for her to come back on the line.

  Mackie was in the shed, nearly naked, looking for a tarp, when Cindy nudged the door open. “This must not be going well,” she said, avoiding eye contact with Mackie.

  “Do you have a tarp?” Mackie asked.

  “We have extra clothes,” Cindy said. “You don’t have to use a tarp for that.”

  “No, I need a tarp to wrap up the deer. Extra clothes would be nice though.”

  “You can’t bury the deer?”

  “No.” He felt unable to explain any further and she didn’t push the issue. He found himself liking Cindy more and more.

  After he located an orange tarp, wrapped up like a sleeping bag, Cindy waved him into the house, and he stepped into the warmth, a fire going. She handed him some clothes for both himself and Jackson and he put on an ill-fitting shirt, pants that were too tight and left unzipped, and squeezed his feet into shoes two sizes too small for him. “How is he doing?” she asked him. “He’s doing fine. We just got a little wet trying to get the deer.”

  “Anything could set him off, I’ve learned,” she said. “The smallest thing; you never know.”

  “He’s fine,” he said. “I’ll bring him the clothes and he’ll be fine.”

  At his son’s wedding, waiting off to the side of the altar, groom and best man, Mack ie rehearsed his toast in his head. Jackson put his hand on Mackie’s shoulder and said, “Thank you for all this. You made this happen.” Mackie shrugged. “I didn’t do much,” he said. “You knocked me out, tied me up, brought me back here, and helped me get a job. You did a lot.” Mackie told him that he didn’t want any thanks, that he was just happy he’d cleaned himself up, had found a nice woman, was settling down.

  “You saved me from that woman,” Jackson said.

  “You mean Amy?” Mackie asked.

  “Yeah, she was a bad influence. She made me think things would always be happy, nothing but good times, but that’s not reality. She really had me off the rails, and you came and got me away from all that, and I want to thank you.”

  “I don’t want any thanks for that.”

  Jackson pulled the flask out of Mackie’s coat pocket, his gift to his father for being the best man. He took a swig of whiskey. “I filled it before I gave it to you,” Jackson told his father. “So that’s
two gifts I gave you.”

  When Mackie got back to the pond, Jackson was beating the deer with his raised boot, shouting curses, now totally naked, his strikes stripping wet chunks of fur from the animal’s body. Mackie dropped the tarp and the clothes and charged after his son. “Stop,” he shouted. “Jackson, that don’t help a goddamned thing. Just stop.”

  Jackson pushed his father and kept hitting the deer with the boot. “A perfect day before this fucking deer showed up,” he screamed. Water was dribbling from the deer’s mouth, its eyes wide open.

  “Calm down, Jackson,” Mackie shouted again, pulling his son away from the deer. Yanking his arm free, Jackson whirled around and punched Mackie, catching his right cheekbone, which caused Mackie to wince and release his son. Jackson ran away from Mackie and the deer, through the woods, making sounds that seemed like sobbing.

  Mackie lay out the tarp and rolled the deer onto it, the water still deep in the deer’s body. He knew better than to wait for his son to return. He pulled the corners of the tarp together and dragged the deer as best as he could through the woods, stopping every few minutes when his hands got too sore. He thought to leave the deer on his son’s front lawn, but realized it would be cruel to the deer, the further abuse Jackson would inflict upon it. Mackie knew he would just have to take responsibility for this dead thing, until he could find a way to put it to rest.

  He could see Cindy through the window of the house. She was frowning, continually looking over her shoulder at what Mackie imagined was Jackson, hiding until he was gone. He lifted the deer into the backseat of his car, shoving it into the spaces that it would go, trying to make it fit. The passenger seat was now folded forward to accommodate the head and neck of the animal, the mouth of the deer now peeking out from the tarp. There was still frost on the deer’s whiskers. He waved to Cindy, who did not wave back, and drove down the mountain, the air conditioner on to keep the deer from thawing out too much, to keep the smell of decay away from his senses.

  Back home, in the garage, Mackie tried to think of what to do about the deer. The options were just as limited as they were at Jackson’s house. He did not want to bury this deer, the hours upon hours of breaking through the frozen earth, no matter how much better he thought it would make him feel. It wouldn’t change anything. He would dig a hole and fill it back, and everything would be the same.

  His teeth were chattering. His nose wouldn’t stop running. He checked the rearview mirror and noticed the skin under his right eye was starting to swell from where Jackson had punched him. He opened the tarp and stared at the deer’s dead eyes. He rubbed the condensation from its snout. He knew he had to get out of the car, to get the deer out of the car, but he couldn’t do it, not just yet. He sat in his garage, the deer beside him, and tried to catch his breath. He waited for the muscles of his heart to send blood throughout his body, to make him warm again.

  Kevin Wilson was born, raised, and still lives in Tennessee. He is the author of the short-story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, One Story, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his son in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he teaches fiction at the University of the South. This is his fourth appearance in New Stories from the South.

  When my wife and I first moved into our house, a cabin in the woods, I found a dead deer in our pond in the middle of winter. The deer was retrieved through ridiculous means, wading into freezing-cold water, pulling it to shore. It was an unpleasant experience, but I have used the event in several works of fiction and nonfiction, so I feel that it was worth it.

  My father, who is the most kind and capable man I have ever met, served as the inspiration for Mackie, though I hope I am a more decent person than Mackie’s son.

  Dorothy Allison

  JASON WHO WILL BE FAMOUS

  (from Tin House)

  Jason is going to be famous, and the best part is that he knows he will be good at it.

  He has this real clear picture of himself, of him being interviewed—not of the place or even when it happens, but of the event itself. What he sees is him and the interviewer, a recording so clear and close up, he can see the reflections sparking off his own pupils. It’s hi-def or Blu-ray or something past all that, a rendering that catches the way the soft hairs just forward of his earlobe lift and shine in the light reflecting off his pale cheeks. All he has to do is close his eyes and it begins to play, crisp and crackling with energy as the microphone bumps hollowly against the button on his open collar.

  “A lot of it, I can’t tell you,” he says, and the interviewer nods.

  Jason is sitting leaning forward. His features gleam in the bright light, his expression is carefully composed, focused on the interviewer. Jason nods his head and his hair swings down over his forehead. One auburn strand just brushes across the edges of his eyebrows. The interviewer is so close their elbows are almost touching. He is an older man with gray in his hair and an expression of watchful readiness—a man Jason has seen do this kind of thing on the news before, someone to be trusted, someone serious.

  That is the word. Serious. The word echoes along Jason’s nervous system. He is being taken seriously. Every time he imagines it again, the thought makes him take a deep breath. A little heat flares in his neck as the camera follows his eyes. He looks away from the interviewer, and his face goes still. He looks back and his eyes go dark and sad.

  “I’m sorry to have to ask you about something so painful,” the interviewer says to him.

  “It’s all right,” Jason says. “I understand.” He keeps his expression a mirror of the other man’s, careful and composed. He can do this. Piece of cake.

  Behind the cameraman, there are other people waiting to speak to Jason, others are standing close by to hear what he has to say. Everyone has questions, questions about what happened, of course, about the kidnapping and all the months in captivity. But they also want to ask him what he thinks about other things, about people, and events. In the interview as Jason sees it, he always has answers—surprising and complicated, wonderful answers.

  “That boy is extraordinary,” he hears the serious man tell another.

  Extraordinary. The heat in his neck moves down into his chest, circles his diaphragm, and filters out to his arms and legs. He hopes it does not show on his face. Better to remain pale and impassive, pretend he does not hear what they say about him. How extraordinary he is, that everyone says so, some kind of genius. He half-smiles and then recomposes his expression. Genius. Jason is not sure what his genius is exactly, but he trusts it. He knows it will be revealed at the right time, in the right circumstances. It is simply that those events have not happened as of yet. But they will.

  He opens his eyes. He has stopped at the edge of the road. Dust, whitegrey and alkaline, has drifted up from his boots, and he can taste eucalyptus and piney resin. He looks up the road toward the next hill and the curve down into the shade of the redwood stand there. Should have brought a bottle of water, he thinks. Then, extraordinary. How would you know if you were extraordinary? Or a genius? He’s pretty good at math, and music—though nothing that special. If he worked more, put more of himself into the work, no telling what he might not do. His dad told him that, once, when he was still living with them. His teachers have said something of the same thing. All of them though, his dad, teachers and his mom, they say it like it’s a bad thing—his talents and his waste of them.

  “If you worked more. If you worked harder.”

  They don’t understand. No one does.

  Jason wipes dust off his mouth and rocks his head from side to side. He knows the problem. It’s not that he’s lazy or stupid or even scared. No. The problem is that he never has had enough time or focus. There’s just always so much that has to be done, and how does anyone do that kind of kung fu stuff anyway? How does anyone become extraordinary? Like Uma Thurman in the Tarantino movie? Years going up and down staircases. It’s like that
. You do some stupid thing over and over and over, and sometime along in there, you discover you have achieved this enormous talent.

  He glares up the road and resumes his pace, boots kicking dust and his hands gripping the straps of his backpack. He could do extraordinary stuff. Given the right circumstances, he has everything in him to do stuff that will startle everyone. It just takes the right circumstances—getting everything out of the way. He nods to himself. He can feel that coming toward him—the opportunity, the time, and the focus.

  He has dreamed it so often, he knows it is coming—though he doesn’t know all of how it will happen. That too, he sees like a movie, the movie of his life going on all the time. Step in and it is already in motion. Like that. He grins and speeds up slightly. Might be, he will be walking home along the river road from Connie’s on a day just like this one. He’ll have something in his backpack, after working for Connie all day, doing what he does so well, little baby buds his specialty. Connie always tells him how good he is. He knows exactly how to clip and trim and harvest only what is ready to come away, leave what should be left behind. That shows talent. That shows aptitude. Bonsai killer weed work, he does that all the time. Connie knows she can trust him. Some people she strings along, but him she always pays with a ready smile and a touch along his arm or one quick knuckle push at his hip. Cash or buds, she pays him, and that’s all good. Just as it is good no one knows what Jason has in his backpack. No one knows his business.

  Still, he knows, the day is coming. Someone is going to snatch him up right off the road or outside the liquor store downtown—some old guy maybe, or even one of them scary old dykes from out the bay side of the Jenner beach. Those bitches are dangerous and he can barely imagine what they would do with a piece of work like him. Everyone knows they all got stuff, guns and money and stuff. Bitches like that stick together. But maybe it will be someone from nowhere nearby, some bunch of crazies with some plan he will never fully understand, that no one will understand.