The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  And unbeknown to her, he had put her in his will and kept her there.

  Her life finished up a lot like his. She lived alone, in a trailer. She died of a heart attack. A neighbor who cleared her snow found her. She had gotten obese. Her brother had her cremated.

  A difference was that she left behind debt, owed to the bank and to credit card companies. All that she would pass on was tens of thousands of dollars of George Bell’s money, money that she never got to touch.

  Some would filter down to her brother, who had no plans for it. A slice went to Michael Garber, her nephew, who drives a bus at Disney World. A friend of his aunt’s had owned a Camaro convertible that she relished, and he might buy a used Camaro in her honor.

  Some more would go to Sarah Teta, a niece, retired and living in Altamonte Springs, Fla., who plans to save it for a rainy day. “You always hear about people you don’t know dying and leaving you money,” she said. “I never thought it would happen to me.”

  And some would funnel down to Eleanore Flemm’s other niece, Dorothy Gardiner, a retired waitress and home health care aide. She lives in Apopka, Fla., never heard of George Bell. She has survived two cancers and has several thousand dollars in medical bills that could finally disappear. “I’ve been paying off $25 a month, what I can,” she said. “I never would have expected this. It’s crazy.”

  In 1996, George Bell hurt his left shoulder and spine lifting a desk on a moving job, and his life took a different shape. He received approval for workers’ compensation and Social Security disability payments and began collecting a pension from the Teamsters. Though he never worked again, he had all the income he needed.

  He used to have buddies over to watch television and he would cook for them. Then he stopped having anyone over. No one knew why.

  Old friends had drifted away, and with them some of the fire in George Bell’s life. Of his moving man colleagues, Mr. Murzi retired in 1994 and died in 2011. Mr. Schober retired in 1996 and moved to Brooklyn, losing touch. He died in 2002.

  Mr. Higginbotham quit the moving business, and moved upstate in 1973 to work for the state as an environmental scientist.

  He is now 74, retired and living alone in Virginia. The last time he spoke to George Bell was 10 years ago. He used a code of ringing and hanging up to get him to answer his phone, but in time, he got no answer. He sent cards, beseeched him to come and visit, but he wouldn’t. It was two months before Mr. Higginbotham found out George Bell had died.

  It has been hard for him to reconcile the way George Bell’s money came to him. “I’ve been stressed about this,” he said. “I haven’t been sleeping. My stomach hurts. My blood pressure is up. I argued with him time and again to get out of that apartment and spend his money and enjoy life. I sent him so many brochures on places to go. I thought I understood George. Now I realize I didn’t understand him at all.”

  Mr. Higginbotham was content with the fundaments of his own life: his modest one-bedroom apartment, his 15-year-old truck. He put the inheritance into mutual funds and figures it will help his three grandchildren through college. George Bell’s money educating the future.

  In 1994, Mr. Westbrook hurt his knee and left the moving business. He moved to Sprakers, where he had a cattle farm. When he got older and his marriage dissolved, he sold the farm but still lives nearby. He is 74. It was several years ago that he last spoke to George Bell on the phone. Mr. Bell told him he did not get out much.

  He has three grandchildren and wants to move to a mellower climate. He plans to give some of the money to Mr. Murzi’s widow, because Mr. Murzi had been his best friend.

  “My sister needs some dental work,” he said. “I need some dental work. I need hearing aids. The golden age ain’t so cheap. Big George’s money will make my old age easier.”

  He felt awful about his dying alone, nobody knowing. “Yeah, that’ll happen to me,” he said. “I’m a loner, too. There’s maybe four or five people up here I talk to.”

  In his final years, with the moving men gone, George Bell’s life had become emptier. Neighbors nodded to him on the street and he smiled. He told lively stories to the young woman next door, who lived with her parents, when he bumped into her. She recently became a police officer, and she was the one who had smelled what she knew was death.

  But in the end, George Bell seemed to keep just one true friend.

  He had been a fixture at a neighborhood pub called Budds Bar. He showed up in his cutoff blue sweatshirt so often that some regulars called him Sweatshirt Bell. At one point, he eased up on his drinking, then, worried about his health, quit. But he still went to Budds, ordering club soda.

  In April 2005, Budds closed. Many regulars gravitated to another bar, Legends. George Bell went a few times, then transferred his allegiance to Bantry Bay Publick House in Long Island City. He would meet his friend there.

  The sign at the entrance to Bantry Bay says, “Enter as Strangers, Leave as Friends.” Squished in near the window was Frank Bertone, sipping soup and nursing a drink. He is known as the Dude. George Bell’s last good friend.

  In the early 1980s, not long after moving to Jackson Heights, he stopped in at Budds in need of a restroom. A big man had bellowed, “Have a beer.”

  That was George Bell. In time, a friendship was spawned, deepening during the 15 years that remained of George Bell’s life. They met on Saturdays at Bantry Bay. They fished in the Rockaways and at Jones Beach, sometimes with others. Mr. Bell bought a car to get out to the good spots, but the car otherwise mostly sat. They passed time meandering around, the days bleeding into one another.

  “Where did we go?” Mr. Bertone said. “No place. One time we sat for hours in the parking lot of Bed Bath & Beyond. What did we talk about? The world’s problems. Just like that, the two of us solved the world’s problems.”

  Mr. Bertone is 67, a retired inspector for Consolidated Edison. Over the last decade, he had spent more time with George Bell than anyone, but he didn’t feel he truly knew him.

  “One thing about George is he didn’t get personal,” he said. “Not ever.”

  He knew he had never married. He spoke of girlfriends, but Mr. Bertone never met any. The two had even swapped views on wills and what happens to your money in the end, though Mr. Bertone did not know George Bell had drafted a will before they met.

  Mr. Bertone would invite him to his place, but he would beg off. George Bell never had him over.

  Once, some eight years ago, Mr. Bertone trooped out there when he hadn’t heard from him in a while. George Bell cracked open the door, shooed him away. A curtain draped inside the entryway had camouflaged the chaos. Mr. Bertone had no idea that at some point, George Bell had begun keeping everything.

  The Dude, Mr. Bertone, told a story. A few years ago, George Bell was going into the hospital for his heart and had asked him to hold onto some money. Gave him a fat envelope. Inside was $55,000.

  Mike Kerins, a bartender, interrupted: “Two things about George. He gave me $100 every Christmas, and he never went out to eat.” He had confessed he was too embarrassed because he would have required three entrees.

  George Bell had diabetes and complained about a shoulder pain. He took pills but skipped them during the day, saying they made him feel like an idiot.

  Both the Dude and Mr. Kerins sensed he felt he had been bullied too hard by life. “George was in a lot of pain,” Mr. Kerins said. “I think he was just waiting to die, had lived enough.”

  It was as if sadness had killed George Bell.

  His days had become predictable, an endless loop. He stayed cloistered inside. Neighbors heard the regular parade of deliverymen who brought him his takeout meals.

  The last time the Dude saw George Bell was about a week before his body was found. Frozen shrimp was on sale at the shopping center. George Bell got some, to take back to the kitchen he did not use.

  Mr. Bertone didn’t realize he had died until someone came to Legends with the news. Mr. Kerins was there and he told the D
ude. They made some calls to find out more, but got nowhere.

  Why did he die alone, no one knowing?

  The Dude thought on that. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “I wish I could tell you. But I don’t know.”

  On the televisions above the busy bar, a woman was promoting a cleaning product. In the dim light, Mr. Bertone emptied his drink. “You know, I miss him,” he said. “I would have liked to see George one more time. He was my friend. One more time.”

  DAVID WAGONER

  The Death of the Sky

  FROM Harvard Review

  After a blood-red evening, the sky fell

  as silently as the light it had shed on us

  through all our other nights. It scattered

  its fire on fields and hills and cities, the Moon first,

  her face spinning from full to dark, then Venus,

  unveiled and melting, Mars in a burned shambles,

  and Mercury with featherless heels, the rubble

  of asteroids, the ice-laden, blurred foxfire

  of comets, the wind-blown beard of Jupiter

  spun down and around and through

  and intermingled with the saturnalia of Saturn,

  Uranus castrated again by Chronos

  and dismembered, Neptune

  plunging, drowning, Pluto tumbling

  dead as a stone, and from the broken belt

  of the Zodiac, the Ram and the Bull

  brought down to slaughter, the Twins

  parting, the Crab clawless, the Lion

  and Virgin crumpled together, snarling and weeping ashes,

  the balanced Scales unhinged, the Scorpion’s tail

  now stinging only itself, the Archer

  bent like his bow by the dying Goat,

  the mouth of the fish

  gaping beside the Water-carrier, and we stood

  dazed in that black night, and in the morning

  the Sun rose white into an empty whiteness.

  MOLLY BRODAK

  Bandit

  FROM Granta

  1.

  I WAS WITH MY DAD the first time I stole something: a little booklet of baby names. I was seven and I devoured word lists: dictionaries, vocab sheets, menus. The appeal of this string of names, their sweet weird shapes and neat order, felt impossible to solve. I couldn’t ask for such a pointless thing but I couldn’t leave it either. I pressed it to my chest as we walked out of Kroger. It was pale blue with the word baby spelled out in pastel blocks above a stock photo of a smiling white baby in a white diaper. I stood next to Dad, absorbed in page one, as he put the bags of our food in the trunk of his crappy gold Chevette and he stopped when he saw it. At first he said nothing. He avoided my eyes. He just pressed hard into my back and marched me to the lane we’d left and plucked the stupid booklet out of my hand and presented it to the cashier.

  “My daughter stole this. I apologize for her.” He beamed a righteous look over a sweep of people nearby. The droopy cashier winced and muttered that it was OK, chuckling mildly. Then, stooping over me, Dad shouted cleanly, “Now you apologize. You will never do this again.” The cold anger in his face was edged with some kind of glint I didn’t recognize. As he gripped my shoulders he was almost smiling. I remember his shining eyes and the high ceiling of the gigantic store and the brightness of it. I am sure I cried but I don’t remember. I do remember an acidic boiling in my chest and a rinse of sweaty cold on my skin, a disgust with my own desire and what it did, how awful all of us felt now because of me. I never stole again until I was a teenager, when he was in prison.

  2.

  Dad robbed banks one summer.

  He robbed the Community Choice Credit Union on 13 Mile Road in Warren.

  He robbed the Warren Bank on 19 Mile Road.

  He robbed the NBD Bank in Madison Heights.

  He robbed the NBD Bank in Utica.

  He robbed the TCF Bank on 10 Mile Road in Warren.

  He robbed the TCF Bank on 14 Mile in Clawson. That was my bank. The one with the little baskets of Dum Dums at each window and sour herb smell from the health-food store next door.

  He robbed the Credit Union One on 15 Mile Road in Sterling Heights.

  He robbed the Michigan First Credit Union on Gratiot in East-pointe.

  He robbed the Comerica Bank on 8 Mile and Mound. This was as close as he got to the Detroit neighborhood he grew up in, Poletown East, about ten miles south.

  He robbed the Comerica Bank inside of a Kroger on 12 Mile and Dequindre.

  He robbed the Citizens State Bank on Hayes Road in Shelby Township. The cops caught up with him finally, at Tee J’s Golf Course on 23 Mile Road. They peeked into his parked car: a bag of money and his disguise in the back seat, plain as day. He was sitting at the bar, drinking a beer and eating a hot ham sandwich.

  3.

  I was thirteen that summer. He went to prison for seven years after a lengthy trial, delayed by constant objections and rounds of firing his public defenders. After his release he lived a normal life for seven years, and then robbed banks again. There: see? Done with the facts already. The facts are easy to say; I say them all the time. This isn’t about them. This is about whatever is cut from the frame of narrative. The fat remnants, broken bones, gristle, untender bits.

  I’d sit at the dinner table watching my parents’ volley crescendo from pissy fork drops to plate slams to stomp-offs and squeal-aways, my sister biting into the cruel talk just to feel included, me just watching as if on the living-room side of a television screen: I could see them but they could definitely not see me. I squashed my wet veggies around on my plate, eyes fixed to the drama like it was Scooby-Doo or G.I. Joe. I could sleep, I could squirm, I could hum, dance or even talk, safe in their blind spot. I could write, I discovered, and no one heard me.

  4.

  Yes, one day it was like a membrane breached: before, Dad was like all other dads, and then he was not. We sat together at Big Boy, our booth flush against the winter-black windows reflecting back a weak pair of us, and I idly asked him what recording studios are like and how they work. I was something like eleven, and I had a cloudy notion that it would be exciting and romantic to work in a recording studio for some reason, to help create music but not have to play it. He fluttered his eyes upward like he did and answered without hesitation.

  He told me about the equipment and how bands work with producers, how much sound engineers make and what their schedules are like. Details, I started to realize, he could not possibly know. Some giant drum began turning behind my eyes.

  Very slowly, as he talked, I felt my belief, something I didn’t really know was there until I felt it moving, turn away from him until it was gone, and I was alone, nodding and smiling. But what a marvel to watch him construct bullshit.

  After that, I could always tell when he was lying. Something changed around his eyes when he spoke, a kind of haze or color shift, I could see it.

  5.

  It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I’ve forgotten to write to him. I log into the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ email system, called Corr-Links, and check my inbox. No new messages from him in the past month. I try to find the last email exchange we had but it’s all empty: the messages are only archived for thirty days, then they disappear.

  I write to him like I’d write to a pen pal—distanced, a little uncertain, with a plain dullness I know is shaped by the self-conscious awareness that someone screens these messages before he reads them, even though their content is never more than polite and bloodlessly broad life updates.

  How’s the new job? Is it interesting? I ask. I remember he told me he upgraded from a job rolling silverware in the kitchen for $2 a day to a “computer job”—previewing patent applications and rejecting them if incomplete. I got a new cat. She’s kind of shy but funny, with one white spot right on her chest. Her name’s Jupiter. I feel like I’m talking to a child. Hope you are staying warm there!

  I eat lunch, grade papers, go for a walk, check back for a re
sponse, spurred by nagging and pointless guilt. No response. He’s pushing seventy, with failing kidneys, and I sometimes wonder if he’ll make it to his release date. Or even to another email.

  The day passes. I try to forget about him. Then, I do forget about him. Days slip by, weeks.

  Almost a month later I receive a Christmas card from his girlfriend.

  Merry Christmas Molly—you’re a doll!

  Below her signature is his, pressed on by a stamp she had made of it. Enclosed is a check for $300, also with his signature stamped on it.

  6.

  In the window of the cab our beachfront hotel approached like a dream, as wrong as a dream, and I felt sick and overwhelmed with the luxury of the fantastic palm trees and clean arched doorways. This could not be right. As we left the cab I hung my mouth open a little long in joy and suspicion, for him to see. He made a roundabout pointing sweep to the door and said, “Lezz go,” goofily, like he did. Thinking about it now, the hotel was probably nothing special, maybe even cheap, but I couldn’t have known.

  This was the longest period of time we spent alone together. I was nine or ten and he’d brought me to Cancún, an unlikely place to take a child for no particular reason. He had a habit of taking vacations with just me or my sister, never both of us together, and never with Mom, even when they were married. I feel there was a reason for this; the reason feels dark and I don’t like to guess at it.

  During the day he would leave me. I’d wake up and find a key and a note on top of some money: Have fun! Wear sunscreen! I’d put on my nubby yellow bathing suit and take myself to the beach or the small, intensely chlorinated pool and try hard to have a fun vacation, as instructed.

  What was he doing? Was there somewhere nearby to gamble? There must have been. Or was there a woman he met? He’d return in the evening and take me to eat, always ordering a hamburger and a Coke for me without looking at the menu, even though I hated hamburgers and Coke. Mom wouldn’t let me drink soda, and he liked to break this rule of hers.