The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)

  “Wasn’t that—?” David said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did he just—”

  “When we’re in the car, you two,” Josh said. “I’ve got to be at the Zen Center at five in the morning.”

  —

  “The day before, he told me his biggest fear wasn’t that they wouldn’t get all the cancer. His biggest fear wasn’t of dying, even, though he said that was how his father died when Howard was only nine, under the anesthetic for an operation supposed to be simple, with nobody believing they needed to say good-bye beforehand, and now that he was facing a simple operation himself, one nobody dies of, he couldn’t help thinking of his father. No. His biggest fear was that he’d be left impotent. Of all the things that can conceivably go wrong with prostate cancer surgery, that was the most terrifying.”

  “What did you say?” Josh asked, from the backseat.

  “ ‘Most terrifying?’ I’m wondering why it’s me, the gay boy, Howard chooses to confide in about impotence. Because my whole life revolves around penises? I’m a little unnerved, because, you know Howard, his usual decorum, where’s that gone? But I want to be staunch for him, I love this man. And he says, ‘Not for me. If it came down to living without it, I would grieve, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. For me. Whereas for Martha.’ ”

  “ ‘Most terrifying,’ ” Josh said. “I’m very sorry he had to make those calculations.”

  “ ‘Martha can’t live without it.’ ”

  “You were right there,” Josh said. “You reassured him.”

  “Of course I reassured him.” David checked Josh’s expression in the rearview mirror. “But it’s not something I imagined, that the two of them ever—or still—”

  “Or, hmmm, that she could be said—”

  “You idiots, he adored her,” I said. “That’s what he was telling David. Not, ‘My god, this woman, it’s unimaginable that I’ll never make love to her again.’ But ‘How can she bear the loss.’ ”

  Josh took off his tie, rolled it up, tucked it in his jacket pocket, and then handed his glasses forward to me, saying, “Can you take custody?” I cradled them as cautiously as if they were his eyes. Once he was asleep, David said, “That was him, wasn’t it?”

  I told him what happened. “After I’d gone he must have stood there thinking, But I know her, I know her from somewhere. Then he gets it—who I am, and that I’d walked away without a word. Which has to have hurt.”

  “It’s generally that way when you save your own skin—somebody gets hurt.”

  “Even hurt, he blows me a kiss. That makes him seem—”

  “Kind of great,” David said.

  “Wasn’t I right? Walking away?”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” David said. “There’s no problem with a little mystery, in the context of a larger, immensely hard-won clarity.” He yawned. “I’m not the idiot.” He tipped his curly head to indicate the backseat. “He’s the idiot. Did I reassure him. Fuck. I’m the most reassuring person alive.”

  Oncoming traffic made an irregular stream of white light, its brilliance intensifying, fusing, then sliding by. I held up Josh’s glasses and the lights dilated gorgeously. I said, “You know why we’ll never give up cars—because riding in cars at night is so beautiful, it’s telling stories in a cave with the darkness kept out, the dash lights for the embers of the fire.”

  “You don’t have to tell me any stories,” David said. “I’m absolutely wide-awake.”

  —

  I didn’t sleep long, but when I woke he was in a different mood.

  “You know, his novel,” David said, “—the one about you—is that a good book?”

  “If you like his voice it’s good.”

  “On its own, though, is it?”

  Mine wasn’t exactly a disinterested reading, I said. The style is his style, and like all his work it moved right along, but the novel overall felt tilted in the narrator’s favor, and it would have been more compelling if he had made the dark-haired lover—

  “You,” David said.

  —okay, me, but I really am talking about the character now, who is all shattered vulnerability and clinging, the embodiment of squishy need. If he had granted her some independent perceptions, even at points conflicting with his, made her more real, more likable, then her realness would test the narrator’s possession of the story, and cast some doubt on the narrator’s growing contempt. If it’s less justified, more ambiguous, then his contempt isn’t just about her and how she deserves it, it’s also about him and how ready he is to feel it. If it’s not so clear that he’s right to feel what he feels, then everything between them gets more interesting, right?

  “That’s a sadder ending,” David said. “The way that you tell it.”

  “I wasn’t thinking it was sad,” I said. “I was thinking it was—better.”

  Joe Donnelly

  Bonus Baby

  I TUG ON MY BRIM. I tug on it, caress it, and tug on it some more. I take the cap off and slap it against my thigh. I hold it to my chest while I wipe my brow. I pat it, brush it, shape it, and put it back on my head. Then, I tug on the brim again.

  I’m not a neurotic, at least not in anything but a typical sense. What I am is a conductor of sorts. I harness energy and deliver it. Mostly my own, but there’s also this: The eighty thousand eyes and hands and fists; the voices, the shouting; the sun, the sky…But this is no symphony. There is too much that hasn’t been orchestrated, too much left to chance. Like how even the slightest change in atmospheric pressure can send a gust across this plane that will tear worlds apart. Not a gust, really. Not even a breeze. A change so small, grains of dirt might barely shift. Nothing anyone else will notice. But I will know. As soon as the object leaves my hand, it will feel like a hurricane on my face.

  These tics—they calm me. Because there’s so much I don’t control once it leaves my hand. So I take off my cap and run my hand through my hair, just so I can put it back on my head and tug on my brim again. I tug and tug and wipe and tug again, until I’m finally settled in that place where there’s nothing outside of me and I see only what I have to see.

  Now, I come together, folding in upon myself, hugging the object close to my heart, feeling my heart beating through the leather and into the object itself, filling it with whatever is in me that I can use to deliver it with. Then, I kick up my left leg, high in the old ways, high like my socks, and pause for a moment in first position before I lead and point with my toes, shifting everything into the opening up before the snapping shut. Before I lose control.

  Before I pitch.

  The batter is a right-handed brute, 230 pounds of muscle, emotion, and instinct. He is a naïf, an innocent. He has no nuance, no game, only the desire to launch balls over fences and kill dreams. He is a boy, a destroyer, and I appreciate his earnestness. But I know he’ll be too eager with nobody on base. I know he will feel responsible only to his lust. And that’s why he gets a fastball, coming in high, sinking low, moving right to left, a little slower and a little faster than he expected. And that’s why he’s out swinging.

  He stares at me long after the ball is safe in the catcher’s mitt. He is surprised he missed. He’s always surprised, and I appreciate that, too. He’ll never know what happened. All that happened. He swung and missed and now he must sit down until enough time has passed for him to be surprised again.

  I’ve retired the first five batters easily and I’m starting to feel something, some gathering of forces. I push it away. Feelings can be dangerous. They can make the ball too heavy or too light. I didn’t choose feelings. I chose the solitude of this mound and the mystery of the pitch. What could be more essential than that? If you tell me, I’ll follow it, because I know that someday I’ll need it. Someday, I will be desperate for it. But until then, I pitch.

  The six spot goes down. A curve and a changeup were the killers. Set up by a first-pitch fastball and one throwaway just to see what they’re chasing. I can tell
by the pitches he’s calling that my catcher, Roy Dickey, is starting to feel it, too—the noise stilling, the time between release and catch collapsing, the unknowable becoming slightly less unknown.

  —

  I was a free-range kid born into the mythological Midwest at the twilight of the American century. I say mythological not because it was the land that grew Paul Bunyan, bore Casey Jones’s track, and sealed Johnny Appleseed’s destiny, but because the Midwest that raised me was barren of that sort of damp nostalgia. If it was here once, it had long since dried up with each generation’s further remove from the frontier. No Mississippi River adventures beckoned me. Instead, I navigated amid the drudgery of cash-strapped public schools and not enough to eat. I was Tom Sawyer with no Huck Finn, a boy who could hear his own footsteps echoing off the streets of a place that had been dying unattended for years.

  My father played ball in high school and boxed at the boys’ club. My mother was a varsity swimmer back when the school district could support something so exotic. They were high school sweethearts who couldn’t see that the future was growing narrower on those open plains. She worked as a secretary, until it was called executive assistant. My father was a machine-tool mechanic at the textile mill until the postwar prosperity ran out and it closed. After that, he mostly drank.

  I can still picture my mother in the breakfast nook at night waiting for my dad to come home, worrying over a puzzle book, keeping company with her coffee, cigarettes, and a snack pack of cheese and crackers.

  Our family, like our town, looked best in old photographs.

  School was my sanctuary. There, I found in me what had made my dad and mom the homecoming king and queen. And found that in me it was hardened with a cynicism that freed me from the fantastical optimism with which they had been hoodwinked. I used that to my advantage.

  All the sports came easy. But I gave baseball the most of me because it asked the most. Even in Little League, I could find traces of some kind of poetry there that I couldn’t find in the low hills and fallow fields that formed our dusty boundaries. At times, the ballpark, the diamond, and the mound returned to me a boy that had gone missing ever since I knew myself.

  But it was more than that. Baseball had things I could rely on—rules, physics, statistics. It is the world’s most quantifiable sport. Yet it still baffles us. The best hitters still miss two-thirds of the time and the best pitchers still lose a hundred times or more before they’re done. The game was an enigma I couldn’t resist: something I wanted to try to solve even as I knew how far from solving it I might always be.

  —

  Mack and Jack try not to sit next to each other in the dugout. It’s bad enough that they play shortstop and second base, and that their names rhyme, but to be seen as together—especially in the dugout, where vulnerability is frowned upon—would be more than they could bear. Which is why, whenever possible, the entire team conspires to make it so Mack and Jack have no choice but to sit next to each other in the dugout. Long-running inside jokes are a tradition in baseball, and this is one of ours.

  I come into the dugout after my half of the fourth. I’ve put twelve men down in order. My ball has velocity, movement, and accuracy. I’m hitting my spots like it’s on a string. There’s flow and economy in my delivery. Something is happening. I’ve been here before and I know it can be a tease. I approach the dugout the same way I always do, head down, counting to eight and then eight again. Eight is my number, my rhythm.

  Near the dugout steps, I look up. Mack and Jack look back at me and quickly avert their eyes. They are aware of what’s happening, too, but they don’t bother me with it. They’re vets and have been here more times than I have. It’s way too early.

  I take my seat at the end of the bench. I can’t get too close to the rest of them or they will drain me. I’m not here for them. I’m here to pitch. I’m here for the game, a vast and infinitely varied game that can be reduced to decimal points. A game that more than all other games inspires songs, poems, and picture shows.

  This game is eternal and most of us who play it are dust, here to be forgotten, but here also to sustain its capacity to render the kind of legends that carried this country through the Depression and wars and good times, too. I chased those legends around my hungry childhood, trying to find in baseball the home of Ruth and DiMaggio, Robinson, Musial, Mantle, Mays, Koufax, Clemente, Aaron, Ryan, and Ripken. I thought if I could find them, find baseball, then maybe I could find home, too.

  But even with all its countless silent traditions and quiet intimacies, baseball can be a lonely place. Ask a centerfielder when he’s sprinting into the deep green nothingness of the right-center gap, knowing that no one else can help him and knowing that the wall is coming up fast, but just how fast he can only estimate based on time and time before, but each time is brand new and that wall means his time is running out.

  It can be especially lonely if you’re the pitcher. That’s why so many of us give in to our tics and idiosyncrasies. We fondle our caps, hitch our pants, talk to the ball, talk to ourselves, pace around the mound like we’re looking for messages written in the dirt, tap the dirt, scratch the dirt, rub the dirt…anything to feel less alone up there.

  —

  There’s a commotion.

  Mack has hit a double. I hadn’t noticed he was at bat, but now he’s there on second and Jack is up. They’ll never get away from each other. Jack is a master of situational hitting. He’s going to work the count. Get a bunt down, or something. He won’t give up an out easily. Not when Mack’s in scoring position and the heart of the order is coming up.

  I close my eyes and try to block it out. But there’s another commotion. I look up to see Jack has laid a beauty down the first base line, drawing the catcher, pitcher, and first baseman. There’s no play on Mack; he’s gone to third. The second baseman is late getting over to cover first and Jack beats the throw. Men on the corners and one out.

  This is how we’ve been doing it. Chipping. Playing smart. These two, in their own ways, have been setting the tone. Showing the young ones, and the ones who never had to pay enough attention before, that there are many ways to draw blood.

  On his way to the plate, Dickey takes a look back at me and nods. It’s a message. We haven’t said a thing about it yet, about how tonight the maddening mystery of baseball seems almost graspable. And now Dickey is signaling a pact. We’re chasing it. He’s going to do his part and he’ll expect no less from me.

  Dickey and I are not friends. I’m not friend material. But out here, he knows me as well as anyone has ever known me. He knows what strings to pull. With a simple, quick glare, he sends a jolt through me, a wave of terror and excitement, some reckoning with all the times I’ve been here before, from Pony Leagues to JuCo, to the minors, and even a couple times here in the big leagues.

  I pull my brim down over my eyes and close them, feeling the energy surging through the crowd, rising and falling with each pitch. Dickey’s been struggling. There’s talk he’s past the point of diminishing returns, that he can’t turn on the inside fastball anymore. We’ve been moving him around the middle of the lineup, trying to find that place where his smarts and what’s left of his skill can find a groove. It’s a short, tough life for catchers in this game.

  I keep my eyes closed. I can sense by the rhythm of the crowd that Dickey’s worked the count to his favor. I know the pitcher is going to have to go with a fastball and will try to bring it high and inside, jam him up. Dickey will be sitting on it by now.

  And then I hear the silence that follows the windup and soon after that a sharp thwack, followed by the strange sound of forty thousand people holding their breath—is it fair, is it foul, will it make the gap, will it be calculated and caught? I don’t open my eyes until I hear the gasp of relief and then the explosion of surprise and joy that so many things that could have gone wrong somehow went right. And now Mack and Jack are in the dugout getting high fives.

  I open my eyes and pull my brim u
p to my forehead and see Dickey on second base, staring a hole through me.