PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019

by Carmen Maria Machado

  “My man,” JV called out. His accent and persona were different.

  Their handshake was swift, peppered with finger snapping.

  “Hey, Uncle, can I try you today?” the boy asked JV.

  Before I could comprehend their conversation, they started.

  In the air, one palm strikes the other: left palm to right palm. Pause, then jerk hands to their sides before wobbling, and palms strike again. The handclapping game involved sudden pauses, surprising slaps, all laced with mischief about who could outwit the other. As they went on, I watched a small cluster of men in front of a row house, no more than twenty feet from the sidewalk where we stood. They were hunched over as they rolled a die and waited for it to end its uncertainty.

  Hands to his side with no jerking or wobbling, JV burst out laughing. The game was done. The boy must have lost, because he said, “I will get you tomorrow, Big JV. Tomorrow!”

  JV chuckled as the boy walked up a small flight of stairs and into the house he’d come out from. It seemed to me that a quick rain had passed.

  Enyeribe Ibegwam was brought up in Lagos, Nigeria. A recipient of a Kimbilio Fellowship and a finalist for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, his stories have appeared in Auburn Avenue and Welter. He has received grants from the Vermont Studio Center and the Elizabeth George Foundation. He lives near Lake Murray in Columbia, South Carolina.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  “Tornado Season” by Marilyn Manolakas demonstrates characteristics that I look for in stories that Alaska Quarterly Review publishes: freshness, honesty, and a compelling subject. The story is set in 1954 in Oklahoma. It presents a fourteen-year-old protagonist, Harmon, who is preparing to leave home to get married. Her mother has died and the relationship with her father is fraught. The idiosyncratic voice that Manolakas creates is strong. Her vivid cast of characters is engaging. Emotionally and intellectually complex, this poignant coming-of-age story resonates in one’s memory.

  Ronald Spatz, Editor

  Alaska Quarterly Review

  TORNADO SEASON

  Marilyn Manolakas

  THE AIR IS creamy and astringent, electric on the tongue like sour milk. The wood is rotting on the old clapboard house, sweating off its paint in shaggy rafts of white. From a distance, it is the same color as the gray sky behind it, blistered with clouds. Harmon sits between rows of jumpy corn stalks with a bottle of Old Crow she found in the barn, watching the windmill’s patient spin turn maddening. Her dad’s old Ford half-ton comes clumsy up the dirt drive in front of her, and she thinks to herself, I’m getting married next week, and I don’t give a shitass who says what about it. Harmon is fourteen.

  She wants to borrow a dress and go to the Church of Christ one afternoon and have punch and bricks of store-bought ice cream afterward like everyone else who gets married in Dill City. She doesn’t want to slink off to Texas. But in Texas, she doesn’t need her dad to sign the papers, so that’s what she’ll do if she has to. She’s heard that in the old days, girls her age could get married without permission in Oklahoma, but now it’s 1954, and there are laws. Harmon has always wanted a real wedding, has been planning it since she was little and would mash her corn husk dolls against one another, so why does he want to take that away from her? She pitches the empty bottle into the stalks behind her and pretends to study the wide, flat tumult of the sky.

  “Come on back to the house,” her dad yells over his driver’s-side window mottled with mimosa pods caught in bird shit. “I been out at the Bookouts’. We got to get in the cellar before it comes.”

  She stands up and whiskey-lurches toward him but then finds her gait, wishing there had been more than a few drinks left in the bottle. “I hate it in there. It’s got all of Mama’s jars and things. Besides, I don’t want to be in the cellar with you.”

  “I don’t know why you got to act so ugly.” And then, a high hitch in his voice: “We got to go in there sometime, Harmon. I been saying we should clean up some of her things.” And he’s looking not at her but past her, past the blackening sky. She feels a thrum of ache opening up in her throat, and she knows it’s the least she can do for him, to just get in the cab. The springs of the leather bench creak against her weight as she slides in next to him, and the truck goes bouncing along toward the new house on the other side of the farm.

  He looks over the big steering wheel in his lap toward her feet and says, “Wish you’d stop running around barefooted, nothing but stickers and cow patties out here.”

  “I look where I’m going.”

  He inhales some air between his teeth and then pauses. “Harmon, I saw that bottle. You can’t be acting this way. Where’d you even get that thing?”

  “It was in the old barn.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It was. Why don’t you trust me about anything?”

  “Well, you’re still not supposed to be drinking it, wherever you got it from.”

  In the close cab she can smell the tractor grease on him and his nasty old Swan soap. She can smell herself, too, her new rayon dress trapping the sharp spice under her arms in a way her old feed-sack dresses, the cotton calico ones her mama used to sew for her, never had.

  Her lips are dry and furrowed, crepe paper glued together at the ends, and she struggles to rip them apart and find something pleasant to say. “You know, Jimmy says they don’t have tornadoes in Dallas, not really.”

  “Is that right?” He doesn’t take the bait. Jimmy is twenty and a mechanic in the Air Force. He used to be stationed in the next town over, in Burns Flat, but then he transferred back to Carswell in Dallas. He’s supposed to come get her sometime this week, just as soon as he gets a place for them to rent sorted out. He told her this on the phone six days ago, the heavy receiver hot on her cheek, her dad’s eyes pressing in on her from the divan. He hasn’t called since.

  “Don’t you want me to get away from the tornadoes?”

  “You got to help me get the chickens in the chicken house so they don’t blow away.”

  “Fine.” She looks out at the crazed landscape stewing, dislodged thistles hopping along, insane, getting caught in the barbed-wire fence under the gathering ink of sky. She hopes Jimmy comes back soon. She misses him living near her, misses his neat blond body and the fug of his gritty sheets at night. She misses the wallop of something animal when she runs up to hug him, his musky cologne mixed with a powerful jolt. She’d sneak out of her house and meet his truck down the gravel road, and they’d spend a few hours in his little rented room. It’s all she can hardly think about—his hands on her hips, his long eyes and long feet, and the bright, white-hearted thrill of losing the borders of herself in the dark at night. Her first time with Jimmy had hurt, and what she had enjoyed most in those first weeks was just the way he looked at her, like she was one of the necessities of life. After a while, though, she started to look forward to it. Their hours together turned the rest of the world into a waiting room, everything else wrung-out and gray by comparison. Can her dad tell that this is all she thinks about? Can everybody?

  They get out of the truck in front of the brick house her mama barely got a chance to fuss over, and the wind picks up, cracking at the skeletons of fence-row trees, pockmarks of dry earth displaced by scattered drops of rain.

  “Here it starts,” her dad says, and they begin to run at the chickens, a flurry of jittery white that they shoo in the low door. Scrabbly lightning veins across the sky trailed by hard, flat thuds of thunder. “We got to get some candles from the house so we don’t break our necks down there,” he says, the rain now addressing her skin in sharp, needling jabs.

  They scurry through the back door of the house into the new kitchen, dishes piled up on the yellow Formica, the shut-up smells of dust and fresh paint and old dinners. Not that they eat much anyway, lately. Harmon usually fixes some eggs, maybe some bread or a glass of milk, maybe some green beans for dinner, but that’s it. Everything they eat, by the time they eat it, is perched on the edge of rot. And neither
of them clean up anything. Sometimes Little Mama comes over, the old lady’s chin bristling with dark glossy hairs, white strings of spit webbing across the sides of her mouth as she talks, and she says, “Harmon, someone has got to do something about this place. I didn’t raise your mama not to teach you how to keep up a house,” but then she leaves, and Harmon does nothing. Her dad doesn’t mind.

  Flicking the light switch back and forth, he says, “Nothing doing. Where did Pauline keep the candles?”

  “How should I know? I won’t be needing them in Dallas.”

  “Go look while I fill up some jugs.”

  She stands in the pantry, but she can barely see, the sun suffocated by the black clouds outside the kitchen window and everything getting darker by the second. So many extra cans of food that she used to play with, stacking up pyramids and fortresses and castles. Sometimes there’d be a dented one, and it wouldn’t stack right, and she’d ask her dad if she could throw it away, and he’d just laugh at her. He had been forced to leave home as a teenager, back when nobody had any food and the evil dirt was blowing and his family was living in a chicken coop. He left Oklahoma to go pick onions in California, a time he doesn’t talk about except to say that no one is allowed to bring any onions into the house, ever. Her mama was a good cook, and just about every recipe calls for onions, but she always minded him anyway.

  Harmon looks under the sink, next to the soap and a sagging box of Brillo pads, and then she looks in the hutch with her mama’s good Desert Rose plates, and there she finds them, in the cabinet next to their brass holders with the finger loops. She grabs the candles and stacks them in a paper bag from the TG&Y along with some of the candle holders and the old army lighter, and then she slides her thumbs through two of the holders and walks around spinning them, waiting for her dad to finish filling the jugs, grenade strobe of lightning flashing the room bright and dark.

  The water cuts off while her dad is filling a big O’Halloran’s Dairy jug from the tap. “Goddammit!” he says, and suddenly she’s so sick of being in this kitchen with him, so sick of everything. A sibilance of wind finds its way through the insulation, juniper branches scraping at the windows, and she hears a treble of shattered glass, probably the wind kicking some loose object against the house—it’s happened before.

  But then there is the unmistakable low murmur of a human voice pitched against the clang and roar of the thunderstorm. It sounds like someone is upstairs, cursing.

  She holds her breath, pinned in place, the whiskey jagged in her empty stomach. Her dad stops fussing with the caps on the jugs and stands up straight as a telephone pole. One of the candle holders slips off her thumb.

  “Hush! Be still.” His eyes are wide and mean. The upstairs voice has gone quiet. “I’m going to go see. You stay down here.”

  “You don’t get to boss me anymore!”

  “Shh! Stop your hollering!”

  She quiets down to a whisper-bite and says, “What if something happens? Little Mama said she saw the devil up there!”

  After a moment, he gives a horsey exhalation in her direction and starts up the stairs, but then he comes back and picks up a squat pewter lamp from the hutch, thwapping it against his other hand to test its weight. She follows him up the stairs, and in the dark of the stairwell, his gibbous face angles toward her, but he doesn’t try to stop her. When he reaches the shadows of the balustrade at the landing, he pauses and then opens up her bedroom door, asking her, “Anything look different?” and she shakes her head, happy to be useful. They march on to the extra bedroom, the same quilts and Grandma Matilda’s Shaker furniture as usual, and she feels a deflating prick of disappointment at the vanishing drama of her life. They cross into her parents’ room, and no excitement there either, until she notices one of her mama’s pretty things—the Limoges box, she thinks—nestled in the carpet in shards. The door to the adjoining bathroom is open, so she turns toward it, and there they are.

  There are two of them, boys she recognizes from the town across the highway, caught in the silvery light. The big one is named Cecil, but she doesn’t know the little one’s name. She doesn’t go to school with them, but she’s seen them at the drugstore and at football games and Sunday school parties. Her dad grabs at the soggy back of her dress, lift of cool air sent up her spine, and steps in front of her. Something long is in Cecil’s hand, and now he’s raising it, pointing it at her dad. He puts up his hands, useless lamp hoisted in the air, and backs into the bedroom a few paces. After a moment, the boys follow.

  “Don’t point that at him, stupid,” the little one says, jump of fear in his voice.

  “How do you know he’s not going to tell?”

  “So you’re going to shoot him, shithead?” Only now, staring at her grandpa’s old Winchester ’94, does the warm whiskey leave her all at once, replaced by a mealy headache and a sour clench at her throat.

  Her dad lowers his hands, sets the lamp on the bedside table, and speaks to them in a deep, even register: “You boys should know that thing ain’t even loaded. Weren’t you going to check?”

  “We was just borrowing it to go shoot some turkeys,” Cecil says.

  “Okay. Well, fair enough. But you won’t get many turkeys without any bullets. So how about you give it back right now, and I won’t call Clifton Black as soon as the lights come back on?”

  “Huh-uh.” Cecil is tall with a stout, proud stomach showing through his overalls like a man’s, but he’s still young in the face, a boy hesitating to blow out his birthday candles so all eyes stay fixed on him.

  “Let’s just give it to him,” the little one says.

  “We ain’t giving back shit! We just come out all this way.” But after a thick moment, he lowers the gun shakily. Harmon takes an easy breath, adrenaline leaving her body in waves. She is very tired.

  “Aren’t you Glenn Fight’s boy?” her dad asks the little one.

  “Yessir.”

  “Dumbass! Who’s stupid now?”

  “She knows who we are anyway,” the little one says, pointing at Harmon, and it’s true, more or less. They’re her age. She’s always known them as shy, obedient boys, nodding politely at adults and sitting off to the side at church mixers. There’s never any telling about people.

  “What’s your name, son?” Her dad’s eyes never leave the black shape of the rifle, still hanging from Cecil’s left hand with the front sight touching the floor.

  “Verle, sir.”

  “Okay, Mr. Verle Fight. Well. A tornado might be coming for us soon. Why don’t you tell your friend to give me back my dad’s rifle, and we can all get down in the cellar? If there’s any turkeys left, you can shoot them after.” In the dresser mirror, she can see her dad wink at Verle. She’s never seen him wink before.

  Verle regards her dad blankly for a second and then looks at Cecil and says, “I don’t want that old thing anyhow. I thought they’d have better stuff.” Harmon feels a scorching touch of shame at the thought that they didn’t have anything nicer to steal.

  Cecil asks Verle, “What about my brother’s car?”

  “We left our car by the highway,” Verle says to her dad.

  “Don’t worry about that. Big tornado’ll smash a car whether it’s on the highway or not. Hey, now, how about I got ten dollars in my billfold, and I’ll buy that old thing back from you?”

  Cecil considers this and then hands over the gun tentatively. Her dad takes hold of it by its cracking walnut stock and points it toward the ground. She thinks she hears an iced-over edge come into his voice as he says, “All right, then. Cellar’s in the yard. You boys go first. You can have your ten dollars after this thing passes.”

  Her dad makes her walk behind him as they all shuffle outside, sheets of rain reigniting the scent of her VO5 Creme Rinse. “It’s raining bullfrogs!” he says to her, trying to lighten the mood, she can tell. As she watches his rangy figure tread in front of her, his tired, flat-footed splay, she feels a twinge of guilt for the way she’s been talking
to him. He’s so good, and he works so hard, and he’s being so good with these stupid, stupid boys. And he’s so nice to her, despite everything, despite the fact that if it weren’t for her, her mama would still be here. She should behave herself. But then, he’s trying to take away her one chance to have a wedding, isn’t he?

  He stoops over and grunts as he opens the door in the cement driveway by the side of the house. Harmon drops down into the lightless night of the cellar, assailed by dank air and an ungodly stench that she doesn’t recognize. They file in behind her, and she flicks the lighter, looking around among the milk crates and canning jars and bric-a-brac for the source of the smell, and she thinks she sees something, an old mouse on its back marked with white gashes of decay.

  “Harmon, give me that.”

  Her dad takes the lighter, the flame doubling when the wick catches on the first candle, and then he melts the end of it and sticks it in its brass circle. The boys sit on the floor in a corner, so she sits in the corner opposite them, as far away as the tight space permits, wedged between two boxes and an old steamer trunk.

  She looks over at the boys and considers them, the flame lapping at their greasy faces, making them look febrile, crazed. She thinks about Cecil, about his bulbous mouth and two slippery eels for eyes. If she didn’t marry Jimmy, would she have to make do with a scrap of affection for a boy like that? She didn’t want to chance it.

  “We thought you’d be down here already,” Verle offers, as if this were a pleasant impromptu social call. Verle has dark grass stains on the knees of his denims and a haircut that looks like someone gave it to him in a hurry.

  “Is that right?” her dad says, tending to the rest of the candles on the floor, sitting on his haunches in the center of the low room, the long rifle parked by his side.