The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Please, Wallace thought. Don’t you be crazy. I’m not sure I can handle it right now.

  The woman led him into the living room. As he followed her across the tile floors he realized how small she was. Her floral robe trailed on the floor behind her. She stopped in the living room and turned to Wallace like she’d forgotten what they’d come in there for. She suggested that they sit out on the back patio and talk. It was nice out there, she explained. There was shade, and when the wind shifted the right way they could smell the ocean.

  “It’s delightful,” she said and closed her eyes. “Just delightful.”

  That’s when Wallace realized she was drunk. He figured it was better than crazy, but only by a little. The woman told him she was having some pineapple juice and asked him if he’d like a glass.

  “I don’t want to trouble you,” Wallace said.

  “It’s no trouble,” she said. “I like vodka in mine. How do you take yours?”

  Wallace said that would be fine. He watched her pull a giant bottle out of the freezer and then pour the thick, syrupy vodka into their glasses. Wallace could smell the booze before he even brought it close to his mouth. He followed her to a glass table on the back patio. The shade from the awning enveloped them.

  “I’ll tell you right now, it’s not often that people come here to talk about my husband and think that they should be the ones apologizing,” the woman said when they sat down.

  Wallace felt himself flinch at the word husband. She had to be at least thirty years older than the man he’d gotten into it with. He wondered whether he’d gotten the wrong place, whether he wasn’t caught up in the middle of some big misunderstanding.

  “I know,” the woman said. “You think I don’t recognize that look?”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” Wallace said.

  “I can spot that look from across the street,” the woman said. “But I don’t care. I know it’s strange to most people. But most people are strange to me. He was a friend of my son’s when they were in high school. Did he tell you that?”

  Wallace explained that they hadn’t had much of a conversation.

  “They weren’t best friends,” the woman said. “Almost acquaintances, really. Though it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”

  Wallace agreed that it didn’t. The woman looked at him over the top of her pineapple drink. Wallace told her about the estuary. The woman listened patiently and gulped her drink as he told her about the joint, the run-in with her husband, the foot sweep into the marsh, all of it. When he heard how it sounded he felt the need to tell her more, if only to explain himself a little, to make it all make sense. If people just knew what you were dragging around with you, he thought, they might cut you some slack. But who had time for that? Who could be troubled?

  “He really told you he had children over here?” the woman said when Wallace was done. “You’re sure about that?”

  Wallace nodded into his glass. The woman pinched her bottom lip.

  “That’s new,” she said. “That’s troubling.”

  Wallace sipped his drink and felt the acid from the pineapple and liquor burning together in his throat.

  “The thing about my husband,” the woman was saying, “is that idleness gets the better of him. He’s not a bad man, but he doesn’t have much to do. Sometimes that leads to trouble.”

  “He doesn’t work?” Wallace said, and then wished he hadn’t.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Not for years. I have money, you see, and anyway he’s not cut out for most jobs. He’s very sensitive. He’s not a bad man. But he is very, very sensitive. Does that make sense to you?”

  Wallace said it did, and the woman smiled in an appreciative sort of way.

  “And you,” she said. “Do you work?”

  Wallace said that he did, sort of.

  “I’m a fighter,” he offered.

  “As in professionally?” the woman said.

  Wallace nodded and tried to put his face as deep into his drink as it would go. It smelled sweet and sticky and boozy, a vague scent of suntan oil.

  “That’s what happened to your face, then,” the woman said, almost to herself. She asked him what it was like, that line of work.

  Wallace had to think about it for a second. “It’s awful,” he said, and then stopped.

  That wasn’t what he meant. What he meant was that it was the best thing he’d ever done with his life, the only thing he could do well, and what was awful was how it made everything else seem boring and fake. But there wasn’t any way to explain that, so he didn’t try. Instead he told her not to listen to him, that he was just coming off a bad fight.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “And what’s that like?”

  He told her it was like breaking up. “You tell yourself, never again. But then, what else is there?”

  “I understand completely,” the woman said. Wallace decided to believe her. That was a choice he was making.

  When her face changed, he followed her gaze back toward the house and saw the man standing on the other side of the screen door, peering out at them. How long had he been there? He had the green jacket slung over one arm. Wallace could see where the dried mud was caked on, just beginning to flake off at the edges. He could see how he must look to the man, drinking pineapple and vodkas with his wife in the afternoon, telling each other about their lives.

  The man opened the screen door slowly, two fingers pushing it down the track. The wind shifted. Wallace smelled the ocean. The woman was right. It was delightful.

  ARNA BONTEMPS HEMENWAY

  The Fugue

  FROM Alaska Quarterly Review

  WILD TURKEY WAKES up. It’s the last day of June, and an early summer thunderhead has marched across the peripheral Kansas plain (the lights of town giving out to the solid pitch of farmland) while Wild Turkey slept. He knew it was coming, the lightning spidering forth behind and then above him last night as he walked, the air promising the rain that is now, as Wild Turkey blinks in the thin blue morning, making the rural highway overpass above his head drone, a toneless room of sound below.

  Wild Turkey lifts himself out from the body-shaped concrete depression that nestles just under the eaves of the little overpass—that word too big for the little nexus; really it’s just one lonely county road overlapping another. He knew to sleep here last night because of the rain and because he saw the overpass was old enough to have this body-shaped concavity, a “tornado bed” they used to call it, and now he reaches up into the dark of the girder’s angle and feels around until he finds the ancient survival box for those erstwhile endangered motorists: a flashlight that doesn’t work, a rusted weather radio, and—yes—a bottle of water, thick with dust, but Wild Turkey is thirsty and doesn’t care. He stands and stretches on the sloped concrete bank, against the theater of the rain. He was right about the long night-walk out along the country road being good for coming down, the darkness being good for discouraging one of his fits, but wrong about being able to make it to the school before morning.

  He makes it to the school now, in the rain, sopping wet. The school is, as it ever was, more or less in the middle of a cornfield, and the thick leaves and stalks cough in the rain as Wild Turkey comes once again upon the old buildings. He rounds the tiny campus in the storm as if he is still in junior high, still traipsing from class to class in the cloying polo and khaki uniform. Now, as then, he does not fail to think of the strangeness of time when he sees the buildings—themselves somehow eternal feeling, always but only half in ruin. Even in use (back then, as an ad hoc private Episcopalian school, and now, apparently repurposed as a child-care center) the moldering white portables and darkly aging main brick building sit in situ, oblivious.

  Standing on the concrete path along the portables and trying to look into the darkened window of an abandoned room, Wild Turkey has one of his little gyres in time—a brief one, only sending his mind back to those moments when he just an hour ago woke under the little bridge—and he realizes he
woke thinking of Mrs. Budnitz, his second-grade teacher, specifically of the rank, slightly fetid scent that would occasionally waft subtly from somewhere inside her gingham dress on a tendril of air in the last weeks of school before summer. Though the scent or smell itself wasn’t subtle at all but sharp, rich, pungent, even vaguely sweet, like the smell of human shit anywhere outside a bathroom. Nor was it really a smell so much as an emanation, or at least that’s how it’d seemed to Wild Turkey, sitting on the carpet in the middle of the room, transfixed by this sensate experience delivered to him on the wavering bough of the window fan’s breeze.

  They did not have air conditioning installed in their classroom yet and the heat and consequent sweat, secreted beneath Mrs. Budnitz’s plain, sturdy dresses and folds of fat and thigh, probably amplified the smell. It was only noticeable every ninth or tenth breath and so not really something Wild Turkey ever felt he could really speak or complain about. But it was distinctly sexual, or carnal in its fleshy, mildly lurid bodilyness—in its intimate note of vaginal musk, though of course this particular understanding would come only later, the experience at the time being importantly a momentary one. The scent refused to linger, and so existed for Wild Turkey mostly in the wince of shame at his own interest, in the same way he sometimes at that age lingered for just a few seconds too long in the school’s bathroom over the shit-stained toilet paper in his hand before flushing it, feeling a rush of something he didn’t understand. It was oddly comforting, in the end.

  And why this smell now, or rather, then, upon waking—why does it chase him? Maybe this school harkens his mind back to that other classroom, Wild Turkey thinks. Though really it’s the feeling of it as he drifted on the carpet in Mrs. Budnitz’s classroom during “naptime,” the confluence of those two sensations—drifting helplessly into a tired, sweaty sleep; drifting helplessly into that intriguing, somewhat disgusting scent. It was a kind of surrender, a voiding of the mind; a reversion to some pre-infantile state of abandon. He’s been finding the declensions of that experience in his life ever since, often as he falls asleep, or which he wakes into: the stagnant air of soiled women’s bed linen and spilt chamber pot in the small house in Ramadi; the attenuated scent of the bare bed after he and Merry Darwani had anal sex for the first time; the closeness of the rain-soured, coppery metal of the small bridge’s girding. Wild Turkey is used to his life proceeding this way: this or that detail of his day stepping down out of some first world of previous, essential experience. These sensate allusions are always only whiffs or pale imitations of the original, in the same way that the rainy, pallid light now breaking from the clouds as the morning regains its heat is cousin to the small fist of bright fire over the limbs of the girl in the courtyard in Ramadi, or the rhythmic flash of the tactical grenade’s phosphorous strobe, and all three are mere shavings of the pure white lightning of one of Wild Turkey’s fits.

  He turns away from the window. There is nothing to see here. It was stupid to come. He begins the long walk back.

  Wild Turkey wakes up. He’s eight years old, on his back in the middle of the wheat field that has sprung up by chance in the sprawling park behind his parents’ subdivision. He does not know why he’s on his back, does not remember how he got there. Strangely, however, he does remember what happened just before he woke up, which is that he had his first fit (though he doesn’t know to call it that yet, knows only the image lingering spectacularly in his retinas, in the theater of his mind). He’d been running through the field, feeling the itchy stalks resist his stomping feet, and then he’d been standing in the field, caught up by something in the air, by a small flash in the sky, and then he was looking and looking and seeing only the beauty of the high afternoon sun on the blurry tips of the wheat as it rose and fell on the invisible currents of wind. Like on a sea floor, he thought, just before the brightening in the sky, before it turned in a flash into an overwhelming field of white lightning, so much and so close that he remembers nothing else.

  Later, he will not tell the marine recruiters or doctors about the fits but will have one anyway on the first night of initiation, before he even gets to boot camp proper. He will be among the guys at the long tables in the gym of the local armory building: the recruits being kept awake all night, forced to keep their hands flat out in front of them, hovering four inches above the tabletop. They are not allowed to move, or to move their hands, or to let their hands touch the tabletop. Then, the lightning.

  “Why did you let me stay?” he will ask later, toward the end of actual boot camp, and the instructors will explain (allowing their voices to dilate a little with respect) how he’d looked, sitting there seizing, his hands the only part of him held perfectly still, four inches above the table. Though Wild Turkey will suspect the truthfulness of this, seeing as how he woke up in the wetness of the ditch outside the armory building, his white T-shirt stained with blood from the tips of the chain-link fence he hopped (he guesses) to escape, the faces of the instructors pale moons in their huddle above him. Eventually he will get medicine for his fits, but the medicine will make him spacy, drowsy—the medicine itself in effect simulating the aftereffects of the fits—and so Wild Turkey will be unable to parse his waking. It will never be clear to him whether he is waking from a lacunal fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same thing.

  Wild Turkey wakes up, but Jeannie has already left the bed. Wild Turkey can see her, if he hangs off the side of the mattress, down the narrow hallway: the bathroom door ajar, the bathroom light golden and warm in the cool, cesious fall morning. They’re at his place, the duplex right on top of the train tracks, across the street from the college. Jeannie is doing her hair, naked, still overheated from the shower. She stands in front of the mirror quietly, getting ready for class or work, he can’t remember which she has today. He’s been home from his deployment for two weeks now and he still can’t get ahold of time. In the afternoons he gets in the shower, wastes no minutes, gets out to find it’s two hours later.

  Last night Wild Turkey took Jeannie out to the old school buildings, overgrown as they are, stilled in the interregnum between their days as the school he and Jeannie went to together and its current incarnation as some daycare’s repurposed space. This was something they did in high school too, back when Jeannie still had her green Mustang convertible; late October nights they’d drive out there with sleeping bags and put the top down and park in the middle of the erstwhile baseball field, already half reclaimed by brush, and look at the stars. The buildings were abandoned even back then, or between abandonments; Wild Turkey and Jeannie having decamped for the public high school, the original private school having finally amassed enough non-scholarship families to fund a new building (itself a repurposed old country club) inside city limits.

  Later still last night, when they’d gotten too cold and come back to his duplex, Wild Turkey had lain naked with Jeannie on his mattress, which was on the floor, and curled his body around her in-turning fetal position and called out, “Jeannie in a bottle!” which was one of their old jokes, and she’d laughed, sounding half-annoyed at her own easy nostalgic amusement, but then Wild Turkey had repeated it and repeated it, “Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle!” over and over, with just enough slight vocal modulation and wavering emphasis as to keep it from seeming like a glitch, repeating and repeating, which he did helplessly, “Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie
in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle!” on and on until the sound became extenuated, then lost all tone, then resolved briefly into song before crumbling into over-articulation, each alien phoneme distinct and meaningless. Eventually he’d stopped. Jeannie lay there very quiet, very still, stiffened as she had been from somewhere around the twentieth or twenty-fifth repetition. Then, in the silence after Wild Turkey’s voice had ceased, when it was clear he had really stopped, when he finally released her, she very carefully unfolded herself up from the bed and walked silently to the bathroom. Though Wild Turkey knows at some point she must’ve returned to bed (did she? or did she sleep on the couch?), her presence now in the bathroom seems contiguous to her presence there last night, which makes it hard for Wild Turkey to tell how much time has passed, if any has passed at all.

  She finishes doing her hair and makeup and gets dressed in silence. She does not avoid looking at Wild Turkey; she holds his eyes as she pulls on her jeans one leg at a time before turning and letting herself out, her expression level, empty of anger, empty of assessment. When she gets back, if she comes back to the duplex instead of her own apartment, Wild Turkey will be there or he won’t, she’s already used to that.

  Wild Turkey wakes up, the voices of the other men in the unit insistent. They’re all in the dining area of the forward operating base, talking to the doctors from the casualty attachment, which is something the other guys on the team get a kick out of, Wild Turkey’s never known why. It’s Pizza Hut night, which is why the team is all out here in the base’s main area, the only real chance for the team and the doctors both to see each other, before the former, their day just beginning now that it’s nightfall, slouch back into the restricted-access staging area and ready themselves for their next operation.