PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019

by Carmen Maria Machado

  Yeah right. How’s that?

  How? How, they want to know? Mom stabs her Garden Claw in the ground. Hoo, boy! Nobody ever told me. Nobody taught me a damn thing. Look how I turned out.

  You’re perfect, Mother, calls Dad.

  Mom scowls.

  Dad claims the Tocker Town job market is a dust bowl. There hasn’t been so-called real man’s work since he returned from whatever boomtown venture or hunting extravaganza he left us for last time.

  Lately he’s telling us how we couldn’t imagine what all connections he’s got in the Yukon. The Yukon is the true true north strong and free of which we sing at school every morning and before minor hockey games of boys who call us hatchet faces (which, at first, we think is because of the Tockers’ work in the forestry industry).

  Dad crabwalks out from under the Suburban, arms skinny as a new carrot. He climbs in the driver’s seat and smiles through the windshield at nothing. He’s just sitting there like a toddler in a plastic car on the lawn.

  Mom says, Tockers who leave aren’t real Tockers at all.

  Fine, Dad says, staring, that faraway smile on his lips. I’m gonna drive to Whitehorse and when I get there I’m gonna order pizza every day and the pizza will always be meat lovers’.

  Our stomachs sing dirges.

  Even if Mom won’t go?

  Even if Mom won’t go.

  Even if we don’t go?

  Well, I can’t spank you no more so is there anything specific I can do for you?

  Tell us we’re pretty.

  My girls are the prettiest girls north of North Battleford and south of sixty and half my heart will pretty near disappear if you don’t come along. Man’s gotta keep his family together.

  He can sweet-talk with impunity because he knows Mom is a mountain. Where she is, we are. Even awful mothers are everything.

  Mom, let’s all go this time. For real. C’mon. Let’s go.

  In her garden, Mom levels Dad with eyes black as old bear scat. I’m due to get drawn for moose this fall, she says. I’ll drop all you like a cigarette butt before I give up my Saskatchewan hunting license.

  We watch her tearing the earth with her claw.

  Thing is, girls, man needs his woman to have a little mystery to her, Dad says. But don’t overdo it.

  The whole trailer is damp with the steam of four showers. We sit on the floor of the living room while Mom stretches over the couch, dozing in and out with a glass of cherry Kool-Aid balanced on her gut. She’s pulled on an old Oilers shirt. Her bikini top is collapsed on the carpet beside us. We watch what’s on the CBC because we don’t have a dish and we don’t need one anyway. The news says two teenagers got shot in a shopping-mall food court in Guelph.

  No food courts here, murmurs Mom, eyes half-closed with a gassy newborn smile.

  The Saturday movie is about the queen of our hearts, Princess Diana. She’s pregnant and falls down a flight of stairs.

  Dad comes in wiping grease on his jeans. No stairs in a trailer, he says. Youse guys got it better than Lady Di.

  No one laughs. Humbled, he wonders, Will there be supper tonight, Mother?

  Mom shrugs. I’m going to take a hot bath. See if that’ll knock me out.

  She likes to keep us guessing, keep us hungry. Hunger might be better than what she offers. She cooks with passive aggression. I am mad at you, says the elk liver and onions. Don’t be a pussy, says the bear-and-turnip stew. Her Swiss beaver steak says, I’ll make you bad northern women.

  Who is a bad northern woman?

  She is the opposite of a good southern girl.

  Mom’s supper could make you whimper for hamburgers that taste like cow and sausages that taste like pig. Pop the lid on our deep freeze and marvel at our foggy bagged bread, our icy peas, our pile of wild meat. Whether you can stomach it or not, there is always food. Later, when we’re grown, Mom will fall back on this: I never let you go hungry, she says again and again.

  Eat, she’ll goad from the head of the table. Puts hair on your chest like fish hooks.

  And Dad will say, Damn rights, I wouldn’t go chest to chest with my old lady.

  After you eat, make yourself scarce. You don’t really like it here and we don’t want you anyway.

  This is our northern hospitality.

  We press our ears to the door as the bathwater runs. On the other side Dad is telling Mom that the Suburban’s engine turned over this morning. He implores her to imagine the true northern delicacies a Yukon stove could yield: giant boiled moose head, Dall sheep shanks rank with game, caribou barbecue.

  Mom says, Yeah, but do they have Tockers there?

  No, he says, they have trees. The Yukon is full of trees waiting to fall.

  If he wants her to come that means he wants us, too.

  You dough head, says Mom. Strong trees grow here. The ones up north are weak.

  I never heard that, says Dad. You don’t know that.

  Mom’s voice softens. Now stop it. You’re not going anywhere. Come here.

  Sometimes we can tell the difference between the sounds of our parents’ love and the sounds of their anger. Both horrify. We depart.

  The Lions Park playground is empty. Someone has taken all the swings and looped them around the wooden frame out of reach. There are tractor tires painted primary colors humping out of the grass and we climb the giant treads, pull up the hems of our shorts and tank tops, and swing our legs in the sun.

  There’s the usual talk about our future truck. The specific model is yet to be settled but of course not a Ford. The color will be pure white. The air freshener will be mango. The tires will be as enormous as the ones underneath us. Big enough to cruise around town looking down on everyone else’s roof. There’s nothing mysterious about a girl in a shitty car.

  Then there’s tough talk about how if Dad goes again, he’s dead to us. Half of us think he really wants us to come. Mom has dared us to say yes to him. See our invitation evaporate, she says.

  Our stomachs creak and groan. At first we laugh and poke our bellies. Then we grow restless, suddenly sick to death of each other, seeing everything we hate about ourselves on each other’s dumb faces. We kick the tires, flick our lighters, and push their tops into the rubber until it melts. Without speaking we walk back to Bart’s Gas to try to stir up something. This time only Daryl is on the picnic table, letting Peps Derocher lick Cheezie dust from her finger. She rolls her eyes and sends a half-hearted kick of dirt our way.

  Not now.

  We walk up one side of Tocker Town Main Street and down the other. We go in the hobby shop and loiter in the aisles just to bug the cashier who always accuses us of stealing. We go in the grocery store and we steal a box of Glosette peanuts and a mango.

  The pup follows us to the highway, where we race beer cans off the side of Jonas Tocker Memorial Bridge, so named for a greatuncle who got drunk, crashed his car, and burned down the original. (Taking Our Time tells the story a little different.) We stick our thumbs out to hitch. Logging trucks blow by and lift the hair from our scalps. No one stops. It was a joke anyway.

  Over by the swimming pool the stray dog pack circles us and licks our legs. Before we can grab the pup, a mangy collie with a cloudy eye nips him. We holler and take turns carrying our little boy. A block from home, we bowl the mango down a culvert. That’s when we hear the thunderous roaring, a belligerent engine revved to life. Our father whooping, his voice a gold rush.

  Supper is stringy wild goose, salt-and-pepper-roasted with a freezer-burn finish. Dad feels his shirt pocket for a smoke before he even sets his fork down, that’s how quick he needs the taste out of his mouth. Mom licks her purpled lips, one paw curled around luminous juice. She wants to know if we’ve heard her very own tale of the drowning eagle.

  Many times.

  When I was about your age, I knew this eagle that come to nest every year by Tocker Lake, Mom begins. I’d go there to swim or just lie alone for hours until my skin was brown as a marshmallow on a wiener stick. One
afternoon, I felt our eagle passing over. Sure enough, she was swooping down to the water for some grub. Oh, what a beauty. So powerful she could hook the thickest walleye in the drink. Seen her a million times but each time was like the first. Now, that afternoon, this eagle’s feet go up and she spreads her curly talons for lunch but it’s not until she’s got those claws sunk in good that she realizes she’s hooked onto a big old jackfish.

  Mom sips her Kool-Aid. She leans into us.

  Now, I got a look at the hoary bastard. I got a flash of that big, meaty water rat in her talons as she tried to lift it and, oh, this poor bitch is struggling. She’s trying to fly back up in the air where she belongs and the jack just keeps dragging her down. She fights good but it’s no use. He sank her. The eagle drowned. Dead.

  Mom slaps her hand on the table. The cutlery jumps. At least she died at home, she says to Dad.

  After supper we go out the bedroom window. Climb and pull each other to the roof to eat dry ice cream cones because our stomachs are burning. The pup yelps from the bedroom where we’ve trapped him. After nine and the sun is finally fading. Mom is working her night shift at the old folks’ home, a place where she claims to eat shit forty hours a week. This is Mom’s only story that never rings true.

  Below our dangling feet, Dad ferries rifle cases and toolboxes and garbage bags of clothes from the trailer to the Suburban. After tonight his underwear drawer is nothing but pennies and rolling bullet casings. The sky is fairy-tale blue, lit by gold, fixed up with fleecy white clouds. We talk about Princess Diana, how sad her life was. How if she’d had a big truck, well, she’d still be alive. We agree she would’ve liked us. At bedtime we discover the pup has peed on the bedroom carpet. We fall asleep without cleaning it up.

  In the morning Dad gives us one final pitch. He asks us who we want to be.

  We want to be this one chick at school, the setter on the volleyball team who buys all her clothes in the city.

  Dad shakes his head, frowning. No, he says, we can pick anyone, anywhere. Like cast fishing lures we can sparkle and soar. We are tethered only when our line hits the light.

  But that chick lives here.

  Maybe, says Dad, maybe up north all youse will be that chick. Up there who will know your names?

  Exactly!

  Dad surrenders, palms in the air. The record shows: he tried.

  Mom sprays her planters with a garden hose.

  Do I need to check my purse? she says. Did you clean me out again?

  She’s still dressed in her scrubs because she hasn’t gone to bed yet. She fans the hose over her poppy patch. We hug Dad goodbye. Does he really think we’ll come? Nope, he tells us later. You’re your mother’s daughters.

  Maybe so, but we aren’t Tockers. Mom isn’t either, not really. Before Mom married Dad she was an Ekert. Her grandma, Grandma Olga, was one of those behemoth Tocker sisters, but Great-Grandma Olga’s mother, the lady who pumped out those thirty-six feet of long lean Saskatchewan woman, she was some other name that nobody committed to memory or bothered writing down because she didn’t have a self-published family fairy-tale book.

  Dad comes up behind Mom and says, Anything good that’s going to happen to me here’s already happened.

  Who’s waiting for something good to happen? Mom says.

  Pfft, Dad huffs. He gets in the Suburban and says, Probably better this way, eh?

  He backs out and away with morning light passing through the empty windows.

  What’d I tell you, says Mom, turning to us, red-eyed and jowly jawed.

  The hose hisses as Mom crushes some peonies with water. The pup scrabbles out of our grip and gives chase. We look from the dog to Mom.

  Good riddance, she says and turns the hose on herself. The spray plasters her thin hair to her forehead and cheeks, water streaming down her face, dripping from her chin. She yells at us to shut up.

  Running through dust kicked up by Dad’s wheels we chase after Chopper. Chopper is speedy. The little guy is nowhere in sight so we run for Highway 4, the only way north. Sure enough, the pup is trotting down the centerline. A car swerves and honks and Chopper ambles to the ditch. Drops out of view. At the junction of Highway 4 and Railway Avenue a van with Manitoba plates pulls alongside us and honks. We’re watching cars, timing a dart across. The man in the van says, You girls are gorgeous. He laughs and spittle flies out the space where his front teeth should be. He revs an engine so old it sounds like Dad at the sink in the morning, sputtering, growling, unearthing treasures from his smoker’s chest.

  This man yells over the engine, She runs dirty but she can go!

  There is a truck barreling toward us as we dash across. White line, yellow lines, white line, ditch. Chopper is trotting through the new spring grass, sniffing some dog crap by the service road. We call to him but he doesn’t know his name.

  The dog pack crests the approach in front of the Chinese restaurant. There are four of them today: the collie, a sick terrier, a gray pit bull, a white shepherd with a speckled face. Chopper goes right to the pack, yipping at the bigger dogs. The collie snaps at him. We scream. The dogs growl and bark. Chopper darts to us but the collie catches him at the neck.

  Frozen-eyed, Chopper flops side to side, a wild noodle in the dog’s mouth. His fluffy coyote tail sweeps the grass. We leap into the pack and grab the collie by the hindquarters and yank them like a wishbone and pound his body with our fists. Chopper falls to the ground and we scoop him up. Our screams are high and shrill. The pit bull leaps at our legs, tearing at our skin. A truck rips in off the highway and a door slams and in the golden eastern morning light filtering through the dust, there is our father. Hear his sweet holler.

  We run as he boots the collie. He grabs the terrier by the scruff of his neck and tosses him. Dogs yelp and scatter. The animals speed off into the fallow field beyond the Chinese restaurant.

  Dad drives us home. Says he could hear our screams from Bart’s Gas. Chopper whines. The fur on his neck is bloody but he licks our wounds.

  Seems like you’ll be okay, right, boy? Dad says to the pup.

  All these years off and on with Mom and still he never learned how to lie.

  Mom emerges from her bedroom in a Garfield nightshirt with her damp hair mushed to one side of her face. She smiles, so triumphant at the sight of Dad she doesn’t notice our bloody legs, the tear trails on our dusty cheeks.

  Seems like there’s nothing the five of you despise more than seeing me get a moment’s rest, she says.

  In our room, hands atremble, we pull T-shirts and stuffed animals and loose tampons out of drawers, forgetting dog food and winter jackets and our last name. Down the hall Dad tells Mom to pack up. Her yell could send a thousand geese back south. Then, silence. Dragging our garbage bags down the hall we stop to rattle the doorknob.

  C’mon, Mom, we say, pressing our bodies against her hollow door. She’s up against the other side, on the ground, crouched at our feet.

  We tell her that even if these strays run off, a new dog blur of mange and eye gunk and broken teeth will appear. We confess we’re scared of summer. Every day of our lives will be work and if it’s not work, every day will be like today.

  Worse, she laughs. It gets so much worse.

  First Dad drives to Bart’s so he can finish gassing up. The Gladue girls are at the picnic table. We get out.

  Dogs got you, eh, says Whoopi. She reaches over and scratches the sharp bridge of Chopper’s nose. Hey, she says, ever think he looks like a coyote?

  We tell the Gladue girls we are going to the Yukon.

  For vacation?

  No. Forever.

  But school’s not done yet.

  We ask them if they know about the eagle that got drowned by the jackfish.

  Where’d you hear that?

  Our mom.

  They laugh.

  Your people could win medals for bullshit, says Whoopi.

  Eagles don’t drown, dummies, says Daryl. You can’t believe how good eagles swim.r />
  Dad comes back from paying. He thumps a hand on the roof. Say bye to your friends, ladies. Consider us long gone.

  When he slides into the driver’s seat, he grips the wheel with both hands and squeezes. Usually we fight to ride shotgun. The four of us climb in the back.

  Well, bye then, Whoopi says through the open window.

  Bon voyage, offers Daryl. To maintain equilibrium, she licks her finger and draws a quick cock and balls in the dust clinging to the Suburban. At a gas station outside Fort Nelson, as Dad rants about how much girls have to stop to pee, we’ll see her drawing and feel sadness that we won’t yet identify as homesickness.

  Bye, we call to the Gladue girls.

  The girls return to the picnic table. Gravel crunches and pops under our slow tires. The feathers of a dollar-store dream catcher on our rearview mirror flutter as the Suburban gains speed. Dad rolls up our windows and stills our dancing hair.

  He says, Jesus Murphy, girls, look at your old dad now. He takes off his ball cap, tosses it on the passenger seat. Rubs his bald spot. Lights a cigarette. He says, You know it won’t be no cakewalk in the Yukon. You girls are going to have to buckle down. Help me out till Mom gets there.

  The highway roars. Two kilometers out, we zoom past a reflective green sign welcoming visitors to our town: MUSKA LAKE: YOUR GATEWAY TO THE NORTH.

  Dad drives north and west. The bones of our knees press together. The pup shakes on our laps, claws stabbing through the nylon of our shorts.

  Our blood dries as Dad drives. We trace our fingers over the marks on our long Tocker limbs. In the years to come, many more apart than we ever were together, we never stop telling our childhood. We remember the white trails of each other’s scars like they are our own.

  Inside the Suburban, we leave tractors dragging seeders, men toppling jack pine, and our mother lying on a mangy bedroom carpet, waiting. We don’t turn back. We are four strays strung by seat belts, fingers against a windowpane as bush and bears and burning cigarettes whiz by.

  Erin Singer grew up in the Yukon and northwest Saskatchewan. She lives in Las Vegas.