The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  “And your husband? Is he here with you?”

  “He’s working on the oil spill. That’s why we’re here. I thought it would be nice to spend the summer in the mountains while Keller’s away. But”—Lauren brings her hand to her brow—“nobody’s seen any money from BP yet, and our funds are a little tight. I was wondering if you knew of any, well, any summer jobs.”

  Daniel takes off his ball cap and rubs his head. “I’m afraid the application period for seasonal jobs was back in February. As far as I know everything’s taken.”

  Lauren waves away the disappointment. “Of course, of course. I don’t know what I was thinking, bothering you at work like this.” From the corner of her eye she catches the boy reaching across Daniel’s desk. She snaps his name—“Jonah, no!”—and the boy startles, knocking over a ceramic mug. Coffee bleeds through a stack of papers, spills over the desk and onto the carpet. Lauren apologizes while digging through her purse. She kneels awkwardly in her skirt, trying to absorb the coffee with a Pull-Up.

  “It’s OK,” Daniel says. “Leave it.” He takes her hand to help her up, and she feels the slightest jolt at his touch, a feeling she remembers from the summer they spent together before Daniel broke his back, the summer before her father passed. A time before she understood the power of a place to bring you down and keep you there.

  Daniel pulls his hand away. Lauren says, “We should go. I’m sorry for the mess.”

  She herds the boy toward the door and is halfway down the hall when Daniel calls her name. “Wait. Don’t leave yet.” He hitches up one pant leg and limps toward her, his chest heaving, Lauren senses, more from anxiety than physical strain.

  “You know the lookout tower on Long Tom Mountain?” he says.

  “The fire lookout?”

  Daniel nods. “The job is reporting wildfires and collecting weather data. Twelve days on, two days off, and overtime in peak fire season.” He pauses. “Interested?”

  Back in the lobby, the boy jangles the handles on the candy dispensers. The receptionist says, “No-no. Don’t touch that.” Lauren imagines waiting tables at the Salmon River Coffee Shop, cleaning coffeepots with ice cubes and salt, collecting fifty-cents-and-a-wink tips from old cowboys. She imagines her mother waiting up at the kitchen table night after night, and the seasick feeling of stepping back in time.

  “If it gets me out of this town,” Lauren says, “then yes, I’m interested.”

  Daniel laughs. “Well, it’ll get you out of town all right, about four thousand feet above town. Of course there’s no electricity or plumbing, so you’d have to haul your water from the spring and use the outhouse. But the good news is you could bring your son. The last lookout brought her kids every summer and they got on just fine up there.”

  Lauren wants to say, “But I don’t know anything about being a mother.” Instead, she says, “But I don’t know anything about being a lookout.”

  “You ever seen smoke in these mountains?”

  “Of course.”

  “You ever sighted a rifle?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can teach you the rest. Take a day to think about it and I’ll make some calls. If you can tolerate the isolation it’s not a bad way to spend the summer.”

  Three days of fire lookout training: how to read a map, how to use a belt weather kit, how to deploy a fire shelter. Then: first aid and lookout safety, dispatch and communications, the seven signs of hazardous fire conditions. The instructor demonstrates how to use the Osborne Firefinder—a circular map and sighting device used by lookouts to determine the directional bearing of a fire. It’s not as simple as sighting a rifle, as Daniel suggested, and Lauren wonders what strings he had to pull.

  The instructor says, “You are the eagle’s eyes.” She says, “It takes a certain kind of person to be a fire lookout. You must be quick and decisive. You must be patient and steadfast. And you must know how to be alone.” Lauren does not know if she is any of these things, but she writes down everything the woman says.

  After the last day of training, the instructor hands Lauren a yellow rain slicker and a used pair of hiking boots. “Sweetheart,” she says, “you’re going to need these.”

  On the drive home, Lauren stops at the place they call Island Park, a narrow strip of land that splits the river. The Salmon has overflowed its banks, and the island is flooded in places. Grown men in lifted trucks charge deep puddles, disappear behind twin walls of water. The old public swimming pool has been converted into a skate park, and teenagers gather here to smoke cigarettes and grab-ass after school. Lauren approaches, and the kids grow quiet. “Hey,” she says to one of the boys. “You smoke?” He’s hesitant to answer but reaches into his pocket, shakes a cigarette from the pack.

  Nearby, the picnic tables are under water, only the tops showing, like a chain of docks. Lauren takes off her shoes and jumps from one table to the next until she reaches the raised pavilion. She sits and smokes, watches cars pass on the bridge above. Daniel has told her about the woman who raised her sons at the lookout, from infants to teenagers, summer after summer, and how the boys thrived in the wilderness. He said Lauren could bring Jonah, no problem. But Lauren has her doubts. Surely Daniel was being kind. Surely he noticed the boy’s bruised forehead, his darting eyes.

  Back at her mother’s, the house is quiet. “Hello?” she calls. “I’m home.” The kitchen table is cluttered with game pieces—Monopoly money and Battleship pegs and LIFE station wagons. When Lauren left this morning her mother and the boy were playing a game of Memory. Her mother had altered the game. She left the cards face up and asked the boy to pick one. Then they went looking for the image on the card: apple, watch, fish, keys. Her mother said the word and the boy said it back.

  Lauren picks up two red dice and rattles them in the cage of her hand. She doesn’t know what bothers her more—the way the boy responds to her mother, or the way her mother responds to the boy.

  In the living room, Lauren finds her father’s tackle box emptied on the floor: flies, spinners, jig heads, hellgies, weights, bobbers. Rusted three-aught hooks are snagged in the carpet. She rights the box and slides the drawers into place. When she picks it up, its weightlessness feels like something being taken away.

  Her father’s fishing license, in its plastic sleeve, is wedged in a top compartment. Lauren unfolds the papers and reads the handwritten dates of every steelhead he caught in the months leading up to his death. It hurts to see so many blank spaces, to know how many fish he had left to keep.

  From down the hall, Lauren hears her mother’s voice. She listens outside the bathroom door. “That’s a good boy,” her mother says. “Sit very still for Grandma.”

  When Lauren opens the door her mother and the boy look up at the same time. Her mother’s face is flushed; the ropes in her neck tighten. She lowers a pair of wire cutters. Lauren looks from her mother to the boy. His hand is decorated with tackle, hooks deep in the meat of his palm and fingertips. Colored fishing lures jingle and sing as he tries to get down from the counter. He doesn’t seem to register the pain, but Lauren feels it acutely in her own hands, and she stands holding them out, speechless, paralyzed.

  Her mother says, “I don’t know how it happened.”

  Thirty minutes later, Lauren sits in a hospital room. They’ve given the boy a local anesthetic, a tetanus shot, and a small dose of Ativan, and she watches his face begin to soften. The doctor comes in and adjusts a light over the bed. He explains the process. For some he’ll insert a needle to lift the skin away from the barb and pull the hook free. For others, he’ll have to push the hook through the skin, cut the barb, and back the flank out.

  Lauren lowers her eyes to the floor. She counts as the doctor drops each retrieved hook into a metal pan with a clink. Nine times, nine hooks.

  Afterward the doctor says, “Try not to blame yourself.” He hands Lauren a white bag with antibiotic ointment, extra bandages, and children’s Tylenol. He says the boy will be fine, and he pats her on the b
ack, as if she too is a child who needs comforting.

  It’s dark when Lauren begins packing for Long Tom Lookout. She goes to the garage for a lantern and sleeping bags but finds herself sitting on the cool concrete, breathing in the smell of oil and grass clippings. The last time she stood in this garage was the last time she saw her father. She helped him spool his fishing reel by holding a pencil through the spool’s center while he reeled in the line. They were, in those moments, so gently tethered by the glint of the monofilament strung between them.

  On her way back inside, arms full of camping gear, Lauren passes her mother on the porch swing. “Can you open the door?” she says, and her mother says, “I just talked to Keller. He didn’t even know you were here.”

  “What? You called him?”

  “I had to. To tell him about Jonah’s accident.”

  “Shit,” Lauren says. “Did he want to talk to me?”

  “He said to call when you get back to Texas.”

  “I’m not going back to Texas. Did you tell him that?”

  Her mother brings a tissue to her nose, and Lauren realizes she’s crying. “Keller’s not upset about the accident, and he’s not mad at you for leaving with Jonah.”

  “He’s not mad at me?” Lauren drops everything on the porch. The lantern rolls down the steps, breaks when it hits the sidewalk. “CPS dumped his kid on my doorstep. What was I supposed to do? Sit around changing diapers while he fucked some woman?”

  Her mother stands and opens the door. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two,” she says, “but running away isn’t going to fix it.”

  The screen slams shut. Lauren collects the pieces of broken lantern, sits on the steps with the shards of glass in her hands. What did Keller see in the boy’s mother? Or the woman who answered the door in New Orleans? What do they have that she doesn’t? She hears the woman say, “No, Keller isn’t home.” She remembers the woman standing barefoot in the yard. “Who do you think you are?” the woman shouted, and Lauren called back, “We’re the same fucking person, you and me. Exactly the same.”

  Lauren doesn’t tell her mother good night. She doesn’t say a word. At first light, she and the boy are in the truck, headed for Long Tom Mountain.

  The road to Colson Creek follows the Salmon River like a smoke plume. Lauren takes the corners fast, and the boxes in the truck bed slide from side to side. The boy closes his eyes. Pavement turns to dirt. The canyon narrows. The river runs wide and passive in sunlit stretches, then fast and bawdy with whitewater rapids. High-water season, and there are none of the usual rafters, no fishermen lining the banks. A sandhill crane bends to drink, pauses, raises its head. They pass the skeletons of mining cabins, a rusted cable car, the remains of the Moose Creek dredge. The tires hammer over washboards.

  When they stop at the Shoup Store—a log cabin that serves as a restaurant and convenience store—the boy gets out and vomits on his shoes. The cashier takes one look at him and says the bathroom is for paying customers only. Lauren counts three dollars in nickels and dimes from the glove box and buys the boy a huckleberry milkshake, cleans him up in the bathroom with the cashier scowling behind the counter.

  Twenty minutes later the boy vomits huckleberry milkshake in the passenger seat. Lauren stops again. A three-hour drive becomes four. At Colson Creek they leave the river and head up the mountain. Dust glints and flits about their heads like a million gold-winged gnats. She’s long ago lost the battle of the seat belts, and the boy rides wide-eyed and shirtless, both hands on the dashboard. Daniel has warned her about the condition of the road, and now she thinks “road” is a bit of a stretch; it rides like a goddamn creek bottom. Twice she stops to roll boulders from the road, watches them crash through the sagebrush below. Twice she stops to wait for bighorn sheep, slow to move and unafraid.

  Finally the truck crests a rise half a mile from the summit of Long Tom Mountain. The lookout tower stands on a rocky knob like a marooned boat, a relic of the past. The sixteen-by-sixteen-foot cab is a glass box perched atop a ten-foot concrete base. Lauren knows from the training course that four lookout towers have been built and rebuilt here since 1923, staffed every summer since. Yesterday Daniel called in a favor, and a forest ranger de-winterized the cab—replaced the battery in the fixed weather station, stacked a cord of wood, turned on the propane, and removed the shutters. Lightning rods rise from every corner of the roof. The windows gleam with sunlight.

  Lauren gets out and takes a deep breath. After nine years in Texas it feels like she’s emerged from the depths of a lake. She surveys the land with a hand drawn over her brow and has the sensation of driving through a long, dark tunnel and coming out the other side. From here she can see six national forests and deep into the two million acres of the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness: towering granite gorges, slopes of sagebrush, dense pine and fir forest. And below, the confluence of two wild rivers, like a millennia-old handshake, negotiating a path to the Pacific.

  “What do you think, Jonah?” she says. “Home sweet home?”

  Lauren begins the tedious task of keeping the boy in her sights while unpacking the truck. The boy’s hair is windblown into a cowlick; his left-hand bandage is soiled. He strips naked and runs between the lookout and the outhouse, wearing only a pair of white sneakers, and Lauren thinks, Why the hell not? For an instant she is struck by the boy’s freedom, not just childhood but also the unknown workings of his mind, the strange and quarantined world he lives in. Maybe, she thinks, we’re not all that different. We both exist in an isolation of our own making.

  The lookout is furnished with a propane refrigerator and cookstove, a wood-burning stove, a long counter, and a single bed. In the middle of the room, on a table of its own, sits the Osborne Firefinder and a pair of binoculars. Last year’s calendar hangs on the wall, a black X drawn through every day in September. Lauren searches the cupboards and finds first-aid and snakebite kits, maps, log books, cloud charts, mousetraps, birdseed, batteries, bug spray, an alarm clock, a single stainless-steel wineglass, The Firefighter’s Handbook, and a dog-eared copy of A River Runs Through It.

  Late that afternoon, after everything has been cleaned and their belongings put away, Lauren and the boy eat grilled cheese sandwiches and baked beans while dark clouds push up the Salmon River corridor. The boy looks from side to side as Lauren closes the windows. The trees sway and creak; the birdfeeder tips, spilling arcs of seed. The temperature drops ten degrees in ten minutes. Lauren doesn’t want to miss her first radio transaction with dispatch, and, with some reluctance, unpacks the belt weather kit and ventures outside in a yellow slicker to take the weather statistics.

  Inside, the boy sits in a cardboard box, hands over his ears. Lightning dances on distant ridge tops. Thunder rumbles overhead. Lauren comes in with a small spiral notebook in her hand, rainwater dripping from her fingers and nose.

  She goes to the radio. “Dispatch. Long Tom Lookout.”

  For a time, there is nothing. Then: “Long Tom. Dispatch.”

  Daniel’s voice is a small comfort. She reads the statistics slowly: wind speed and direction, precipitation, air temperature, relative humidity, Haines Index. There is a moment, after she finishes, when neither speak. The radio sizzles with static.

  “Dispatch. Long Tom,” Daniel says. “Do you copy?”

  “Long Tom. Affirmative.”

  “Everything OK, Long Tom?”

  “We’ve got a storm blowing in.”

  “Copy that. Is there lightning?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Is it close?”

  “It’s getting closer.”

  “You know what to do. Turn off the propane and get off the radio.”

  Lauren takes a deep breath to keep from crying.

  Daniel says, “You’re going to be all right, Long Tom.”

  She wishes he would say her name. Rain lashes the windows. The boy begins to whimper. “Copy,” she says. “Clear.”

  All night thunderstorms
pass overhead, one after another, like the ghosts of a recurring dream. Lauren wakes after midnight to the air charged with electricity, her hair on end, something like a whisper at the nape of her neck. The forest shudders into view, collapses into darkness. The boy is jolted awake by thunder. Lauren holds him on one hip, whispers one-potato-two under her breath. She knows to account one mile for every five seconds between flash and thunder, knows it’s getting closer. She thinks of the story the instructor told in training, how lightning once struck a chimney, coursed down the flue, jumped through the damper, and killed a lookout in his sleep.

  Lauren extinguishes the lantern, turns off the propane, and drags the glass-insulated stool to the center of the room. She sits with her feet on the bottom rung, the boy on her lap. Together they wait. It is the waiting, she knows, that will kill her in the end. The hours upon hours of contemplation, of looking out the window for smoke, her thoughts knitting back to Keller. She is eight thousand feet above sea level and has never felt so alone. She thinks back to their last night together, and how, when he touched her hip beneath the sheets, she said, “How can you want to be with me when I am so far away?”

  All at once the room fills with white light and the simultaneous boom of a thunderclap—the sound of an enormous whip being snapped—and she knows the lookout has been hit by lightning. The boy screams, and Lauren screams. He wants nothing more than to escape, and she wants nothing more than to let him go. She places her hands over his ears and forces him to stay put through the worst of it.

  “We’re OK,” she sings, her voice shaking.

  The days press forward. Cloudbursts blow out the road and cut new creek channels. Wildflowers bloom without worry. Lauren checks in with dispatch and Stormy Peak Lookout twice a day. She suffers headaches from eyestrain, struggles to stay awake through the long northern days. It is a slow start to the fire season. Some days she listens to radio traffic if only to hear a voice that isn’t hers, or the echo of the boy, who has taken to repeating her every word. At night, coyotes call from ridge to ridge. The sky is a graveyard of lights. She tells the boy there is a star for every ship lost at sea.