The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Perhaps it was surprising he’d come up with anything at all, but he had: Bovine Deluxe, LLC, a crash course in artificially inseminating cattle. David took to it like a duck to water: driving around the countryside detecting and synchronizing estrus, handling frozen semen, keeping breeding records—all easily learnable, but David brought art to it, and he had no idea where that art had come from. He was a genius preg-tester. Whether he was straight or stoned, his rate of accuracy, as proven in spring calves, was renowned. Actually, David preferred preg-testing stoned. Grass gave him a greater ability to visualize the progress of his arm up the cow’s rectum. His excitement began as soon as he donned his coveralls, pulled on his glove, lubed it with OB goo, and stepped up to the cow stuck in the chute. Holding the tail high overhead with his left hand, he got his right hand all the way in, against the cow’s attempt to expel it, shoveled out the manure to clear the way past the cervix, and finally, nearly up to his shoulder, grasped the uterus. David could nail a pregnancy at two months, when the calf was smaller than a mouse. He never missed, and no cow that should have been culled turned up without a calf in the spring. He could tell the rancher how far along the cow was by his informal gradations: mouse, rat, Chihuahua, cat, fat cat, raccoon, beagle. Go through the herd, or until his arm was exhausted. Throw the glove away, write up the invoice, strip the coveralls, look for food and a room.

  Perfect. Except for the dough.

  He’d once dreamed of owning jewels, especially rubies, and that dream was coming back. Maybe glue one on his forehead like a Hindu. It’d go over big on his ranch calls.

  Morsel made breakfast for her father, David, and Ray—eggs, biscuits, and gravy. David was thinking about Ray’s “last dime” back in Jordan versus the rolls of bills in his pack and watching Weldon watch Ray as breakfast was served. Morsel just leaned against the stove while the men ate. “Anyone want to go to Billings today to see the cage fights?” she asked. David looked up and smiled but no one answered her. Ray was probing around his food with his fork, pushing the gravy away from the biscuits, and Weldon was flinching. Weldon wore his black Stetson with the salt-encrusted sweat stain halfway up the crown. David thought it was downright unappetizing, not the sort of thing a customer for top-drawer bull semen would wear. At last Weldon spoke at top volume, as though calling out to his livestock.

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Ray.”

  “Well, Ray, why don’t you stick that fork all the way in and eat like a man?”

  “I’m doing my best, Mr. Case, but I will eat nothing with a central nervous system.”

  “Daddy, leave Ray alone. You’ll have time to get to know each other and find out what Ray enjoys eating.”

  When Morsel brought Ray some canned pineapple slices, he looked up at her with what David took to be genuine affection.

  She turned to David and said, “It’s all you can eat around here,” but the moment he stuck his fork back in his food she put a hand in his face and said, “That’s all you can eat!” and laughed. David noticed her cold blue eyes and thought he was beginning to understand her.

  To Weldon, she said, “Daddy, you feel like showing Ray ’n’ ’em the trick?” Weldon stopped his rhythmic lip pursing.

  “Oh, Morsel,” he said coyly.

  “C’mon, Daddy. Give you a dollar.”

  “OK, Mor, put on the music,” he said with a sigh of good-humored defeat. Morsel went over to a low cupboard next to the pie safe and pulled out a small plastic record player and a 45-rpm record, which proved to be a scratchy version of “Cool Water,” by the Sons of the Pioneers. Weldon swayed to the mournful tune and then seemed to come to life as Morsel placed a peanut in front of him and the lyrics began: “Keep a-movin’, Dan,/Don’t you listen to him, Dan./He’s a devil not a man.” Weldon took off his hat and set it upside down beside him, revealing the thinnest comb-over across a snow-white pate. Then he picked up the peanut and, with sinuous movements, balanced it on his nose. It remained there until near the end of the record—“Dan, can you see,/That big green tree,/Where the water’s runnin’ free”—when the peanut fell to the table and Weldon’s chin dropped to stare at it. When the record ended, he replaced his hat, stood without a word, and left the room. For a moment it was quiet, and then came the sound of Weldon’s plane cranking up.

  “Daddy’s pretty hard on himself when he don’t make it to the end of the record,” Morsel said glumly, as she cleared the dishes. Heading for the living room, she added, “Me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like. It don’t look good and it’s expensive.”

  David had taken care to copy out the information from Ray’s passport onto the back of a matchbook cover, which he tore off, rolled into a cylinder, and put inside a bottle of aspirin. And there it stayed until Ray and Morsel headed off to the cage fights. David used his cell phone and 411 Connect to call Ray’s home in Modesto and chat with his wife or, as she claimed to be, his widow. It took two calls, a couple of hours apart. The first try, he got her answering machine: “You know the drill: leave it at the beep.” On the second try, he got Ray’s wife. David identified himself as an account assistant with the Internal Revenue Service and Ray’s wife listened only briefly before stating in a firm, clear, and seemingly ungrieving voice that Ray was dead: “That’s what I told the last guy and that’s what I’m telling you.” She said that he had been embezzling from a credit union, left a suicide note, and disappeared.

  “I’m doing home health care. Whatever he stole he kept. Killing himself was the one good idea he come up with in the last thirty years. At least it’s kept the government from garnisheeing my wages, what little they are. I been through all this with the other guy that called, and we have to wait for his death to be confirmed before I get no benefits. If I know Ray, he’s on the bottom of the Tuolumne River, just to fuck with my head. I wish I could have seen him one more time to tell him I gave his water skis and croquet set to Goodwill. If the bank hadn’t taken back his airplane, I would have lost my house and been sleeping in my car. Too bad you didn’t meet Ray. He was an A-to-Z crumb bum.”

  “I’m terribly sorry to hear about your husband,” David said mechanically.

  “I don’t think the government is ‘terribly sorry’ to hear about anything. You reading this off a card?”

  “No, this is just a follow-up to make sure your file stays intact until you receive the benefits you’re entitled to.”

  “I already have the big one: picturing Ray in hell with his ass en fuego.”

  “Ah, you speak a bit of Spanish, Mrs. Coelho?”

  “Everybody in Modesto ‘speaks a bit of Spanish.’ Where you been all your life?”

  “Washington, D.C.,” David said indignantly.

  “That explains it,” Mrs. Coelho said, and hung up.

  Of course he had no car when we met, David thought. No need to leave a paper trail by renting cars or buying tickets on airplanes. He’d got done all he needed to get done on the Modesto library computers, where he and Morsel, two crooks, had found each other and gone into business without ever laying eyes on each other.

  Before heading to Billings, Morsel had told David how to get to the Indian smallpox burial ground to look for beads. Otherwise, there was nothing to do around here. He wasn’t interested until he discovered the liquor cabinet and by then it was early evening. He found a bottle marked Hoopoe Schnapps, with a picture of a bird on its label, and gave it a try: “Bottoms up.” It went straight to his head. After several swigs, he was unable to identify the bird but he was very happy. The label said that the drink contained “mirabelles,” and David thought, Hey, I’m totally into mirabelles.

  As he headed for the burial ground, David was tottering a bit. Rounding the equipment shed, he nearly ran into Weldon Case, who walked by without speaking or apparently seeing him. Behind the ranch buildings, a cow trail led into the prairie, then wound toward a hillside spring that didn’t quite reach the surface, visible only by the greenery above it. Just
below that was the place that Morsel had told him about, pockmarked with anthills. The ants, Morsel claimed, carried the beads to the surface, but you had to hunt for them.

  David sat down among the mounds and was soon bitten through his pants. He jumped to his feet and swept the ants away, then crouched, peering and picking at the anthills. His thighs soon ached from squatting, but then he found a speck of sky blue in the dirt, a bead. He clasped it tightly in one hand while stirring with the other and flicking away ants. He didn’t think about the bodies in the ground beneath him. By the time it was too dark to see, his palm was filled with Indian beads and he felt elevated and still drunk.

  As he passed the equipment shed, he made out first the silhouette of Weldon Case’s Stetson and then, very close, the face of Weldon himself, who gazed at him before speaking in a low voice. “You been in the graves, ain’t you?”

  “Yes, to look for beads.”

  “You ought not to have done that, feller.”

  “Oh? But Morsel said—”

  “Look up there at the stars.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Weldon reached high over his head. “That’s the crow riding the water snake,” he said, and turned back into the dark.

  David was frightened. He went to the house and got into bed as quickly as he could, anxious for the alcohol to fade. He pulled the blanket up under his chin, despite the warmth of the night, and watched a moth batting against an image of the moon in the window. When he was nearly asleep, he saw Morsel’s headlights wheel across the ceiling, then turn off. He listened for the car doors, but it was nearly ten minutes before they opened and closed. He rolled close to the wall and pretended to be asleep, while the front door opened quietly. Once the reverberation of the screen-door spring had died down, there was whispering that came into the bedroom. He felt a shadow cross his face as someone peered down at him. Soon the sound of muffled copulation filled the room, stopped for the time it took to raise a window, then resumed. David listened more and more intently, until Ray said, in a clear voice, “Dave, you want some of this?”

  David stuck to his feigned sleep until Morsel laughed, got up, and walked out with her clothes under her arm. “Night, Ray. Sweet dreams.”

  The door shut and, after a moment, Ray spoke. “What could I do, Dave? She was after my weenie like a chicken after a June bug.” Snorts, and, soon after, snoring.

  Morsel stood in the doorway of the house, taking in the early sun and smoking a cigarette. She wore an old flannel shirt over what looked like a body stocking that revealed a lazily winking camel toe. Her eyes followed her father as he crossed the yard very slowly. “Look,” she said, as David stepped up. “He’s wetting his pants. When he ain’t wetting his pants, he walks pretty fast. It’s just something he enjoys.”

  Weldon came up and looked at David, trying to remember him. He said, “This ain’t much of a place to live. My folks moved us out here. We had a nice little ranch at Coal Bank Landing, on the Missouri, but one day it fell in the river. Morsel, I’m uncomfortable.”

  “Go inside, Daddy. I’ll get you a change of clothes.”

  Once the door had shut behind him, David said, “Why in the world do you let him fly that airplane?”

  “It’s all he knows. He flew in the war and dusted crops. He’ll probably kill himself in the damn thing.”

  “What’s he do up there?”

  “Looks for his cows.”

  “I didn’t know he had cows.”

  “He don’t. They all got sold years ago. But he’ll look for them long as he’s got fuel.”

  Morsel turned back to David on her way inside. “I can’t make heads or tails of your friend Ray,” she said. “He was coming on to me the whole time at the cage fights, then he takes out a picture of his wife and tells me she’s the greatest piece of ass he ever had.”

  “Huh. What’d you say to that?”

  “I said, ‘Ray, she must’ve had a snappin’ pussy because she’s got a face that would stop a clock.’ He didn’t like that too much. So I punched him in the shoulder and told him he hadn’t seen nothing yet. What’d you say your name was?”

  “I’m David.”

  “Well, Dave, Ray says you mean to throw in with us. Is that a fact?”

  “I’m sure giving it some thought.”

  David was being less than candid. He would have slipped away the day before if he hadn’t felt opportunity headed his way on silver wings.

  “You look like a team player to me. I guess that bitch he’s married to will help out on that end. Long as I never have to see her.”

  David had an unhappy conversation with his mother, but at least it was on the phone, so she couldn’t throw stuff.

  “The phone is ringing off the hook! Your ranchers are calling constantly, wanting to know when you’ll get there.”

  “Ma, I know, but I got tied up. Tell them not to get their panties in a wad. I’ll be there.”

  “David!” she screeched. “This is not an answering service!”

  “Ma, listen to me. Ma, I got tied up. I’m sparing you the details but relax.”

  “How can I relax with the phone going off every ten seconds?”

  “Ma, I’m under pressure. Pull the fucking thing out of the wall.”

  “Pressure? You’ve never been under pressure in your life!”

  He hung up on her. He couldn’t live with her anymore. She needed to take her pacemaker and get a room.

  That week, Morsel was able to get a custodial order in Miles City, based on the danger to the community presented by Weldon and his airplane. Ray had so much trouble muscling Weldon into Morsel’s sedan for the ride to assisted living that big strong David had to pitch in and help Ray tie him up. Weldon tossed off some frightful curses before collapsing in defeat and crying. But the God he called down on them didn’t hold much water anymore, and they made short work of the old fellow. At dinner that night, Morsel was a little blue. The trio’s somewhat obscure toasts were to the future. David looked on with a smile; he felt happy and accepted and believed he was going somewhere. His inquiring looks were met by giddy winks from Morsel and Ray. They told him that he was now a “courier,” and Ray unwound one of his bundles of cash. He was going to California.

  “Drive the speed limit,” Ray said. “I’m going to get to know the airplane. Take it down to the oil fields. It’s important to know your customers.”

  “Do you know how to fly it?” This was an insincere question, since David had learned from the so-called widow about Ray’s repossessed plane.

  “How’s thirteen thousand hours sound to you?”

  “I’ll keep the home fires burning,” Morsel said, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth.

  David had a perfectly good idea of what he was going to California for, but he didn’t ask. He knew the value of preserving his ignorance. If he could keep his status as a simple courier, he was no guiltier than the United States Postal Service. “Your Honor, I had no idea what was in the trunk, and I am prepared to say that under oath or take a lie-detector test, at your discretion,” he rehearsed.

  He drove straight through, or nearly so. He stopped briefly in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada to walk among cows. His manner with cattle was so familiar that they didn’t run from him but gathered around in benign expectation. David sighed and jumped back in the car. He declined to pursue this feeling of regret.

  It was late when he got into Modesto, and he was tired. He checked into a Super 8 and woke up when the hot light of a California morning shone through the window onto his face. He ate in the lobby and checked out. The directions Ray had given him proved exact: within ten minutes, he was pulling around the house into the side drive and backing into the open garage.

  A woman came out of the house in a bathrobe and walked past his window without a word. He popped the trunk and sat quietly as she loaded it, then closed it. She stopped at his window, pulling the bathrobe up close around her throat. She wasn’t hard to look at, but David could see you
wouldn’t want to argue with her. “Tell Ray I said be careful. I’ve heard from two IRS guys already.” David said nothing at all.

  He was so cautious that the trip back took longer. He stayed overnight at the Garfield again, so as to arrive in daylight, and got up twice during the night to check on the car. In the morning, he skipped eating at the café for fear he might encounter some of his rancher clients. Plus, he knew that Morsel would take care of his empty stomach. He was so close now that he worried about everything, from misreading the gas gauge to flat tires. He even imagined the trunk flying open for no reason. Now he drove past fields of cattle with hardly a glance.

  He had imagined a hearty greeting, an enthusiastic homecoming, but the place was silent. A hawk sat on the wire that ran from the house to the bunkhouse, as though it had the place to itself. It flew off reluctantly when David got out of the car. Inside, there were soiled plates on the dining-room table. Light from the television flickered without sound from the living room. David walked in and saw the television first—it was on the shopping network, a close-up of a hand dangling a gold bracelet. Then he saw Morsel on the floor with the channel changer in her hand. She’d been shot.