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

by Amy Hempel

  “So you and Amanda, that’s really off?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m so sorry, Matty,” Stephen said. “You were so hot on her.”

  Stephen had despised her. Amanda was a churchgoer, and a Republican. They’d argued about the war in Iraq. Over dinner, Stephen had baited her into declaring that she’d like to see the Middle East bombed to a parking lot. He’d asked her how this tactic would square with “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” She’d told him “Thou Shalt Not Kill” was from the Old Testament, so it didn’t really count.

  “Anyway, I’m sorry,” he went on. “I know it’s got to hurt.”

  I took a tube of sunflower seeds from the dashboard and shook a long gray dose into my mouth.

  “To be honest with you,” I said, cracking a seed with my back teeth. “I just don’t see the rationale for anybody owning a vehicle without a carriage-welded, class-four trailer hitch.”

  In silence, we rode through bleary, rural abridgements of towns, down a narrowing vasculature of country roads, to the rilled and cratered fire trail that served as a driveway to my and George’s land. High weeds stood in the spine of earth between the tire grooves, brushing the truck’s undercarriage with a sound of light sleet. We passed George’s handsome cedar-shake cottage, I dropped the truck into four-wheel drive, and the Dodge leapt, growling, up the hill.

  My home hove into view. I was ready for Stephen to bust my balls a little over George’s fancy trim, but he took in the place without a word.

  George ambled off to take a leak in the trees. I grabbed Stephen’s bag and led him indoors. Though my cabin’s exterior was well into its late rococo phase, the interior was still raw. Stephen gazed around the living room. I felt newly conscious of the squalor of the place. The floors were still dusty plywood. The drywall stopped four feet from the floor, and pink insulation lay like an autopsy specimen behind the cloudy plastic sheeting. The sheetless mattress I’d been sleeping on sat askew in the center of the room.

  “Feel free to do a little embellishing when you send out the Christmas letter this year,” I told him.

  Stephen went to the window and gazed out at the wiry expanse of leafless trees sloping down the basin of the valley. “Hell of a view,” he said. Then he turned away from the window and looked at the mattress. “You got a place for me to sleep?”

  I nodded at a sleeping pad rolled up in the corner. “Top-of-the-line pad, right there. Ever get down on memory foam?”

  “You didn’t tell me we’d be camping.”

  “Yeah, well, if it’s too much of a shithole for you, baby brother, I can run you back to the motor lodge in Aiden.”

  “Of course not,” Stephen said. “The place is great. I think you’re making real progress, Matthew. Honestly, I was expecting a modular chalet with tiered Jacuzzis and an eight-car garage.”

  “Next time you visit, I’ll strip nude and wear a barrel, maybe get a case of hookworm going,” I said. “You’ll really be proud of me then.”

  “No, I’m serious. I’d kill for something like this,” he said, reaching up to rub his hand along a smooth log rafter. “I mean, God, next month I’m forty. I rent a two-room apartment full of silver-fish and no bathroom sink.”

  “That same place? You’re kidding,” I said. “What about that condo you were looking at?”

  “Cold feet, I guess, with the economy and all. I figured I’d just get rooked.”

  “It’s still on the market? You should’ve called me. I’d get you set up.”

  “No.”

  “But that money, your Gram-Gram cash? Still got it for a down payment?”

  He nodded.

  “Listen, you get back to Oregon, we’ll find you something. Look around, send me some comps, I’ll help you through it. We’ll get you into a place.”

  Stephen gave me a guarded look, as though I’d offered him a soda and he wasn’t sure I hadn’t pissed in it first.

  I wanted to get the porch wrapped up before dark, and I suggested that Stephen take a drink up to the summit, where I’d hung a hammock, while George and I nailed the decking down. Stephen said, “Why don’t I help you guys? I’m acquainted with Manuel.”

  “Who?”

  “Manuel Labò,” he said, and giggled.

  So we unloaded the wood and he and George got to work while I stayed inside, slathering auburn Minwax on sheets of bead-board wainscot. Whenever I poked my head out the front door, I saw Stephen vandalizing my lumber. He’d bend every third nail, and then gouge the wood with the hammer’s claw trying to correct his mistake. Water would pool in those gouges and rot the boards, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. Through the closed windows, I could hear George and Stephen chatting and laughing as they worked. I’d learned to tolerate long hours of silence in the months I’d been up here, to appreciate it, even. But it warmed me to hear voices coming from my porch, though in the back of my mind I suspected they were laughing about me.

  George and Stephen took until nightfall to get all the decking in place. When they were finished, we made our way down to the tiny pond I’d built by damming a spring behind my house. We shed our clothes and pushed off into the pond, each on his own gasping course through the exhilarating blackness of the water. “Oh, oh, oh, God it feels good,” cried Stephen in a voice of such carnal gratitude that I pitied him. But it was glorious, the sky and the water of a single world-ending darkness, and we levitated in it until we were as numb as the dead.

  Back at the house, I cooked up a gallon or so of beef stroganoff, seasoned as George liked it, with enough salt to make you weep. A run of warm nights was upon us, thanks to a benevolent spasm of the Gulf Stream, and we dined in comfort on the newly finished porch. Over the course of the meal, we put away three bottles of wine and half a handle of gin. By the time we’d moved on to brandied coffee to go with the blueberry pie George fetched from his place, the porch was humid with bonhomie.

  “Look at this,” Stephen said, stomping heavily on one of the new boards. “Man, I put this bastard here. Some satisfying shit. God bless ’em, there’s ’tards I’ve worked with ten years and we still haven’t gotten past chants and toning. But look—” he clogged again on the board. “Couple hours with a hammer. Got something you can stand on. I ought to do like you, Matty. Come out here. Build me a spot.”

  “Hell yeah, you should,” I said. “By the way, how big’s that wad you’ve got? What’s it, twenty grand or something?”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Because look, check it out,” I said. “Got a proposition for you. Listen, how many guys like us do you think there are out there? Ballpark figure.”

  “What’s that mean, ‘like us’?” Stephen said.

  Then I began to spell out for him an idea I’d had on my mind lately, one that seemed rosiest after a wine-soaked dinner, when my gladness for the land, the stars, and the bullfrogs in my pond was at its maximum. I’d get to thinking about the paunchy hordes, nightly pacing carpeted apartments from Spokane to Chattanooga, desperate for an escape hatch. The plan was simple. I’d advertise one-acre plots in the back pages of men’s magazines, put up a few spec cabins, handle the contracting myself, build a rifle range, some snowmobile trails, maybe a little saloon on the summit. In they’d swarm, a hill of pals, a couple of million in it for me, no sweat!

  “I don’t know,” said Stephen, helping himself to another fat dollop of brandy.

  “What don’t you know?” I asked him. “That twenty grand, you’re in for an even share. You’d be getting what the other investors are getting for fifty.”

  “What other investors?” Stephen asked.

  “Ray Lawton,” I lied. “Lawton, Ed Hayes, and Dan Welsh. My point is I could let you in, even just with that twenty. If you could kick that twenty in, I’d set you up with an even share.”

  “No, yeah, I like it,” Stephen said. “It’s just I need to be careful with that money. That’s my whole savings and everything.”

  “Now goddammit, Stephen, I’m sorry but let me
explain something to you. I make money, that’s what I do,” I said. “I take land, and a little bit of money, and then I turn it into lots of money. You follow me? That’s what I do. What I’m asking is to basically just hold your cash for five months, max, and in return you’ll be in on something that, guaranteed, will change your life.”

  “Can’t do it,” he said.

  “Okay, Stephen, what can you do? Could you go ten? Ten grand for a full share? Could you put in ten?”

  “Look, Matthew—”

  “Five? Three? Two thousand?”

  “Look—”

  “How about eight hundred, Stephen, or two hundred? Would that work for you, or would two hundred dollars break the bank?”

  “Two hundred’s good,” he said. “Put me down for that.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

  “Matthew, come on,” said George. “Cool it.”

  “I’m totally cool,” I said.

  “No, you’re being a shit,” said George. “And anyway, your dude ranch thing isn’t worth all this gas. Never work.”

  “Why not?”

  “First of all, the county’d never let you do it in the watershed.

  The ten-acre buffer—”

  “I already talked to them about a variance,” I said. “Wouldn’t be—”

  “And for another thing, I didn’t move back here to get among a bunch of swinging dicks.”

  “Due respect, George, I’m not talking about your land.”

  “I know that, Matthew,” George said. “What I’m saying is, you carve this hill up and sell it out to a bunch of cock-knockers from Boston, I’d say the chance is pretty good that some night in the off-season, I’d get a few too many beers in me and I’d get it in my head to come around with a few gallons of kerosene.”

  George was staring at my with an irritating, stagy intensity. “Forget the kerosene, George—a hammer and nails’ll do it,” I said, turning and sweeping a hand at the wooden dainties on my gable. “Just sneak up some night and do a little raid with your scrollsaw. Turn everybody’s camp into a huge doily. That’ll run them off pretty quick.”

  I laughed and went on laughing until my stomach muscles ached and tears beaded on my jaw. When I looked back at George, he had his lips set in a taut little dash. He was evidently vain about his scrollsaw work. I was still holding my pie plate, and without giving it much thought, I flung it into the woods. A crash followed, but no rewarding tinkle of shattered crockery.

  “Ah, fuck,” I said.

  “What?” said Stephen.

  “Nothing,” I said. “My life is on fire.”

  Then I went into my cabin and got down on my mattress, and before long I was sleeping very well.

  I woke a little after three, hungover and thirsty as a poisoned rat, but I lay paralyzed in superstition that staggering to the sink would banish sleep for good. My heart raced. I thought of my performance on the porch, then of a good thick noose creaking as it swung. I thought of Amanda, and my two ex-wives. I thought of my first car whose engine seized because I didn’t change the timing belt at 100,000 miles. I thought of how two nights ago I’d lost thirty dollars to George in a cribbage game. I thought of how in the aftermath of my father’s death, for reasons I couldn’t recall, I stopped wearing underwear, and of a day in junior high when the cold rivet in a chair alerted me to a hole in the seat of my pants. I thought of everyone I owed money to, and everyone who owed me money. I thought of Stephen and me and the children we’d so far failed to produce, and how in the diminishing likelihood that I did find someone to smuggle my genetic material into, by the time our little one could tie his shoes, his father would be a florid fifty-year-old who would suck the innocence and joy from his child as greedily as a desert wanderer savaging a found orange.

  I wanted the sun to rise, to make coffee, to get out in the woods with George and find his trophy buck, to get back to spinning the blanket of mindless incident that was doing an ever-poorer job of masking the pit of regrets I found myself peering into most sleepless nights. But the sun was slow in coming. The montage wore on until dawn, behind it the soothing music of the noose, crik-creak, crik-creak, crik-creak.

  At the first bruised light in the eastern windows, I got up. The air in the cabin was dense with chill. Stephen wasn’t on the spare mattress. I put on my boots, jeans, and a canvas parka, filled a thermos with hot coffee, and drove the quarter mile to George’s house.

  The lights were on at George’s. George was doing sit-ups and Stephen was at the counter, minting waffles. A very cozy pair. The percolator was gasping away, making me feel forlorn with my plaid thermos.

  “Hey, hey,” I said.

  “There he is,” Stephen said. He explained that he’d slept on George’s couch. They’d been up late at the backgammon board. He handed me a waffle, all cheer and magnanimity, on his way toward another social heist in the Dodi Clark vein.

  “What do you say, George,” I said, when the old man had finished his crunches. “Feel like going shooting?”

  “I suppose,” he said. He turned to Stephen. “Coming with, little brother?”

  “I don’t have a gun for him,” I said.

  “Got that .30-.30 he can use,” George said.

  “Why not?” said Stephen.

  Our spot was on Pigeon Lake, twenty miles away, and you had to boat out to the evergreen cover on the far shore. After breakfast, we hooked George’s skiff and trailer to my truck, and went jouncing into the white fog that blanketed the road.

  We dropped the boat into the water. With Stephen in the bow, I took the stern. We went north, past realms of marsh grass and humps of pink granite, which, in the hard red light of morning, resembled corned beef hash.

  George stopped the boat at a stretch of muddy beach where he said he’d had some luck before. We beached the skiff, and trudged into the tree line.

  My calamitous hangover was worsening. I felt damp, unclean, and suicidal, and couldn’t concentrate on anything except the vision of a cool, smooth-sheeted bed and iced seltzer water and bitters. It was Stephen who found the first heap of deer sign, in the shadow of a pine sapling stripped orange by a rutting buck. He was thrilled with his discovery, and he scooped the droppings into his palm and carried them over to George, who sniffed the dark pebbles so avidly that for a second I thought he might eat them.

  “Pretty fresh,” said Stephen, who hadn’t been out hunting since the eleventh grade.

  George said, “Looks like he winded us. Good eyes, Steve.”

  “Yeah, I just looked down and there it was,” said Stephen.

  George went off to perch in a nearby stand he knew about and left the two of us alone. Stephen and I sat at adjacent trees with our guns across our laps. A loon moaned. Squirrels rasped.

  “So Matty, you kind of put a weird bug in my ear last night.”

  “That a fact?”

  “Not that ridiculous bachelor-campus thing. But this place is fantastic. George said he sold it to you for ninety bucks an acre. Is that true?”

  “Market price,” I said.

  “Astounding. “

  “You’d hate it out here. What about your work?”

  “I’d just come out here for the summers when my gig at the school slacks off. I need to get out of Eugene. It’s destroying me. I don’t go out. I don’t meet people. I sit in my apartment, composing this crap. I’m done. I could have spent the last two decades shooting heroin and the result would be the same, except I’d have some actual life behind me.”

  I lifted a haunch to let a long, low fart escape.

  “Charming,” said Stephen. “How about you sell me two acres?

  Then I’ve got twelve thousand to put into a cabin.”

  “I thought you had twenty.”

  “I had twenty-three,” he said. “Now I’ve got about twelve.”

  “You spent it? On what?”

  “Investments,” he said. “Some went to this other thing.”

  “What other thing?”

 
; Distractedly, he pinched a few hairs from his brow. I watched him put the hairs into his mouth and nibble them rapidly with his front teeth. “I’ve got a thing with this girl.”

  “Hey, fantastic,” I said. “You should have brought her. What’s her name?”

  “Luda,” Stephen said. “She’s Hungarian.”

  “Far fucking out,” I said. “What’s a Hungarian chick doing in Eugene?”

  “She’s still in Budapest, actually,” Stephen said. “We’re trying to get the distance piece of it ironed out.”

  “How’d you meet her?”

  “That’s sort of the weird part. I met her online.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  Stephen coughed and ripped another sprig from his brow. “Yeah, but, I mean, it was one of these things. To be totally honest, I met her on this site. Really, pretty tame stuff. I mean, she wasn’t, like, fucking people or anything. It was just, you know, you pay a few bucks and you can chat with her, and she’s got this video feed.”

  I looked at him to see if he was kidding. His face was grim and earnest. “You and like fifty other guys, right?” I said after a while.

  “No, no. Well, yeah,” Stephen said. “I mean, there is a group room or whatever, but if you want to, you can, like, do a private thing where it shuts out all the other subscribers and it’s just the two of you. And over time, we started really getting to know each other. Every once in a while, I’d log in under a different name, you know, to see how she’d act with other guys, and almost every time she guessed it was me! A few months ago, I set up a camera so she could see me, too. A lot of the time, we don’t even do anything sexual. We just talk. We just share our lives with each other, just stuff that happens in our day.”

  “But you pay her, Stephen,” I said.

  “Not always,” he said. “Not anymore. She’s not a whore. She’s really just a normal woman. She’s getting her degree in computer science. She’s got a little son, Miska. I’ve met him, too. But, yeah, I try to help them when I can. I ought to show you some of her emails. She’s very smart. A good writer. She’s probably read more books than I have. It’s not as weird as it sounds, Matty. We’re talking about me maybe heading over there in the new year, and, who knows, just seeing where it goes from there.”