The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

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

  The pregnant girl stood before me now, face gleaming, and looked down at the sunlamp. She held up one hand to wave hello. In her other hand she carried a sheaf of flyers.

  “I’m a housecleaner,” she said. “I wanted to drop this off.”

  She handed me one of the flyers. It was a hazy photocopy of a handwritten ad that included her name and phone number and a long list of services she provided. “I do laundry. I sweep and mop. I straighten up. I dust. I vacuum,” I read aloud. She’d drawn stars around the page, a smiley face at the bottom, at the end of a line that read, “Ask about babysitting.” Her hourly rate was less than what a person would make working at a fast-food restaurant. I considered pointing that out to her but didn’t. I picked the lamp back up.

  “Do you need help?” she asked. I ignored her tanned, outstretched arms and let her follow me across the yard. “I cleaned your house last year, actually,” she said. “After you left, before the students moved in, I guess.”

  Clark hadn’t told me he’d outsourced the cleaning.

  “So you know Clark,” I said, pulling out my keys.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I know him.”

  I didn’t bother to wonder whether Clark might be responsible for her pregnancy. He didn’t have it in him. Even with me he’d been fiercely dedicated to his fancy brand of condoms. But it burned me to picture him ogling the girl, counting out the cash to pay her for cleaning up my filth. Poor girl. She was pretty for Alna, and tough in a way that came through in her shoulders. They weren’t wide, per se, but angular and taut with budding muscles like a teenage boy’s. She must have thought I was old and ugly. I could have been her mother, I suppose. I struggled with the sunlamp as we climbed the few steps to my front door.

  “Clark should hire you to clean before I arrive, too,” I said, opening the door and putting the lamp down inside. “The bathroom especially is always yucky when I get here.”

  “I can usually do a house like this in an hour or two,” she said, still standing out on the doorstep. “But I’ve been getting slower and slower, with this baby thing.” She pointed down at her belly. She looked up at me, as if she would find some sympathy there. Her eyes were clear and blue but hooded and tired. She spoke with the grumbling, rhythmless lilt of Alna talk. Maybe she had a dragon or a devil tattooed on the small of her back, or a Playboy bunny on her lower abdomen, now stretched and mutated by her pregnancy, that “baby thing,” as she called it. I studied her face as she peered over my shoulder, into the darkened house.

  “Want to clean now?” I asked her.

  “Okay, sure.”

  Then, despite the information I’d just read on the flyer, I asked, “How much do you charge?”

  She shrugged, those gleaming shoulders twitching, clavicles glistening in the sunshine. “Ten bucks?”

  “For the whole house?”

  She shrugged again.

  “Come on in,” I said, and held open the door.

  “Let me just call my mom.”

  I pointed to the phone on the wall by the fridge and watched her waddle past me toward it. She put the flyers down on the counter. Her belly was huge, nearly ready to pop. What kind of mother lets her pregnant teen wander around outside in the sweltering heat, I wondered. But I knew the answer. This was the Alna way.

  I stared at the girl’s face as she passed, her tiny pores, her small, upturned nose, oily purple makeup darkening into the crease of her heavy eyelids. She dialed the phone and lifted the collar of her shirt to wipe the sweat off her forehead. I opened the cabinet under the sink and gestured toward the cleaning supplies down there. She nodded. “Hi, Momma,” she said, turning away from me, coiling the cord around her thin wrist.

  I left her there, went into the den, unwrapped my sandwich on the coffee table, and unscrewed my soda. I was a grown-up. I could sit on the sofa and eat a sandwich. I didn’t have to call my mother. I didn’t even have to clean my own house. I listened to the girl talk. “I’m fine, Momma. No, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be home in time for dinner.” After she hung up, I heard her rattling the bucket of sprays and cleaners from under the kitchen sink.

  “You must be hungry,” I said to her, eyeing her slim calves as she walked past me through the den. I held out half of my sandwich.

  “I’m okay,” she replied, one arm weighed down by the bucket, the other dragging a broom behind her. “I’ll start upstairs,” she said, and lugged the stuff up the steps, her face flat and serious, the enormous bulge of her belly straining against her shirt, which was already darkened with sweat down the front. I chewed and watched her disappear up the stairs. Shreds of lettuce spilled out the sides of my sandwich. A slice of pickled jalapeño smacked the hardwood floor. I left it there and ate, happily. It was deadly quiet in that house without the television on. I could hear the toilet flush, the girl grunt and breathe, the scrub brush scrape rhythmically against the bathroom tile. I gulped my soda down, burped with my mouth open wide. I wrapped up the dinner half of my sandwich and set it aside.

  Then I took out my zombie dust. I figured I could just test it to see what the zombies had chosen for me that day, a sneak preview of what I had in store. Later, once the girl was gone, it would be nice to take a shower, walk through the clean house, silent and fresh, and sit at the coffee table in my bathrobe with a rolled-up dollar bill. I’d let my soul fly wherever the stuff sent me until it got dark and I remembered the sandwich and the world down below. My mouth watered just imagining it. My hands got hot. That was the best part, that moment, anticipating miracles. But when I uncrinkled the foil and peeled back the plastic wrap, what I found was not magic powder but a cluster of clouded, butter-colored crystals. The hard stuff, I thought, agog. Upstairs there was a loud thud. I put the stuff down on the table and listened.

  “You okay?” I hollered, still staring down at the crystals.

  “Yeah, I’m all right,” the girl answered. The scrub brush started up again, slowly.

  What was the meaning of those crystals? They had appeared only once before, with Clark that first summer in Alna. I was still new to the zombies then, still afraid of them. My walks up Riverside with Clark were fraught with nervous thrills. The bus station had been out of operation for a few decades—fake wood veneer benches and an old soda vending machine, empty windows, faded ads with Smokey the bear admonishing smokers and Hillside Church offering day care and asking for charity. Occasionally teenagers would skateboard around, hopping up with a frightening rumble and clack onto the counters at the old ticket windows. The men’s toilets were in back, through a short maze of brick riddled with graffiti. A few zombies were stationed back there, sitting on sinks or squatting on the floor, their wolf dogs tied to a pipe in the wall, panting. The zombie in charge sat in a stall with the door swung halfway open. Silently, he took our money and handed over the goods. His fingers were huge and cracked and red, black creases lining his palm, his nails thick and yellow. I hid my face under my hair, lurked and cowered next to Clark, masking myself in false subservience. The zombies saw through all that. They saw everything. But I was clueless still. I was a foreigner. I didn’t know their customs. I got more comfortable as time went on, of course. And then once Clark was out of the picture, I was forced to go alone. The zombies rarely lifted their gaze above my waistline. Theirs was a solid, grounding, animal attitude. Each time I met them in the bathroom I felt I was walking in naked, as if I were some pilgrim approaching a saint. I offered ten dollars and I received my blessing.

  When the crystals appeared for me and Clark all those years before, I was honored, moved even. It felt like some kind of rite of passage, a sacrament. But when Clark saw the crystals, he crushed the foil back up and jammed the stuff down the front pocket of his jeans.

  “What are you going to do with it, Clark?” I asked.

  “Flush it, at my house,” was his brilliant reply.

  Whatever lame affection I had left for Clark was smashed in that instant—it was obvious he was trying to deceive me. I suppo
se those crystals worked to save me from really getting attached to the man. Such was the magic wisdom of the zombies.

  “What’s wrong with my house? Flush it here,” I insisted.

  “I could flush it here,” he murmured.

  “So flush it.” But Clark just sat there, stroking his beard and staring at the television as if the opening credits of Will & Grace had hypnotized him, as if he’d become one of the zombies.

  “Ahem.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Give it back,” I said, elbowing him in the knees.

  “Trust me,” he whispered. “This stuff rots your brains.” He stood up, scratching his head, his armpit a rat’s nest of hair flecked with white gunk from his antiperspirant. “I’m going home,” he said. “I’m tired.”

  I let him go then. I didn’t argue. He tried to kiss me good-bye but I turned my face away. I spent the rest of the day bored in front of the television, pining, furious, confused. I tried to go upstairs and scrape the leftover wallpaper in the bathroom, but it was no use. The next morning I went to the zombies alone and received the usual stuff. When Clark called in the afternoon, I told him I needed some time to myself. I sniffed my magic powders while he blubbered an apology that sounded like all his lame professions—foolishly sincere.

  —

  After cleaning my bedroom, the girl trudged slowly down the stairs. I’d been lying on the sofa reading a teen magazine left behind by one of the tenants. I stared at articles that told me how to “live my dreams,” “score total independence,” and “make more $$$.” I can’t say exactly what I thought I’d do with the crystals. I’d seen movies about people smoking crack out of little glass pipes. I could fashion something, I thought, but I was scared I’d mess it up. I imagined dissolving the crystals like rock sugar in a mug of herbal tea, or grinding them like sea salt over a bowl of canned tomato soup. But I wasn’t sure ingesting the stuff that way would work. And what if it did? I still had a life back down in the city, after all. There were certain realities I had to face. I couldn’t handle real oblivion. I just wanted a vacation. So I had some doubts. I had some misgivings.

  I’d been rolling the little nest of foil between my fingers, pondering all this as I stared at the magazine. When I heard the stairs creak, I sat up and stuck the stuff back in the pocket of my shorts.

  “Hot up there,” I heard the girl say.

  Her pretty, gleaming calves appeared between the rungs of the banister as she came down the steps. She’d folded the cuffs of her leggings up above her knees, which were red from kneeling on the floor. When her thighs appeared, I saw a black stain of blood at her crotch. She seemed not to know that she was bleeding. There was no way she could have seen the blood past the mountain of her belly, I suppose. She gripped the bucket with one hand and the railing with the other as she descended the stairs.

  “Oh, shit,” she said when she reached the landing, “I left the broom.”

  “I’ll get it,” I told her, folding the magazine shut.

  “Shit,” she said again, putting the bucket down and holding her face with her hands. “Head rush.”

  “I’ll get you a glass of water,” I offered. I wasn’t good around blood.

  “I’m okay,” the girl said, bracing herself against the bookshelf. “Just dizzy.” She turned toward the wall, leaned into it, said, “Whew.”

  I got up then, patting my pocket to make sure the ball of foil was safe inside. In the kitchen I let the tap run cold, got the ice from the freezer, took a glass from the drying rack.

  “I’m really okay,” the girl said.

  I plunked the ice in the glass. The cubes cracked as the water ran over them. “See,” the girl went on, “you’re not missing anything.”

  “What?” I hollered back. But I’d heard her perfectly. “You’re not missing anything,” she said again, louder. “My mom says a baby is a blessing, but I don’t know.” I suppose it unnerved me that she could be so naïve. She had no idea what her life was going to do to her.

  “That baby’s going to change your world,” I said, walking back into the den. She was bent over with her face in front of the fan. I snuck a look at the bloodstain widening down her thighs. “My sister has a daughter,” I said. “Gave up her career and everything.” I handed the girl the glass. She pushed herself upright, took a long sip, set the glass down on the TV and sighed. “Boy or girl?”

  “Boy,” she answered, blushing slightly.

  “You sure you feel all right?”

  She nodded.

  I stood around watching her clean for a while, helping her here and there, moving furniture so she could mop. She seemed perfectly fine to me. “I love The Matrix,” she said, straightening my shelves of VHS tapes. “I love old movies.” She beat the sofa’s cushions with her fist. She stacked the magazines on the end table. She straightened my framed posters of Monet’s Water Lilies. Her eyes were clear and blue as ever under their thick, gleaming lids. I went upstairs to get the broom, then I retreated to the kitchen, put away the clean dishes, and did the dirty ones. I put the dinner half of my sub in the fridge and sponged off the counter. I took out the trash.

  Outside my neighbors were filling a kiddie pool with water from their garden hose. I waved.

  “Marvin died,” one of the women said glumly.

  “Who’s Marvin?” I asked.

  She turned to her sister, or mother—I couldn’t tell—and rolled her eyes. Clark had chained the lids of my trash cans to the plastic handles on the barrels. For some reason, the people of Alna liked to steal the lids and throw them in the Omec. That was one of their summer recreations, he’d told me. As I stuffed the garbage down, the pregnant girl threw open the screen door and walked stiffly down the front steps. She held one hand down under her belly and the palm of her other hand up in front of her face. When she saw me and the neighbors, she turned her palm around. It was covered in blood.

  “Oh, honey!” cried one of the women, dropping the hose.

  “Something’s wrong,” the girl stammered, stunned.

  “Well, honey, what happened? Did you fall? Did you hurt yourself?” the women were asking. The girl caught my eye as they surrounded her. I put the lid on the trash and watched as the women guided the girl across the muddy grass. They made her sit down in a lawn chair in the shade. One of them went inside to call for help. I went back into the house and got the girl’s flyers and twenty dollars from my wallet. When I got back outside, she was panting. I handed her the money, and she grabbed my forearm, smeared her blood all over it, squeezed it, shrieking, contracting her face in pain.

  “Hang on, honey,” the neighbor said, frowning at me, her fat hands stroking the girl’s smooth, sweaty brow. “Help is on the way.”

  —

  When the ambulance left that afternoon, I took a walk down to the Omec. Squatting by the edge of the river, I washed the blood off my arm. I took the crystals out and let them plunk down into the rushing water, threw the crumpled foil at the wind, and watched it hit the surface and float away. I looked up at the pale, overcast sky, the crows circling then gliding down to a nest of rotting garbage on the opposite bank. I sat on a hot rock and let the sun warm my bones. My thighs splayed out; my white skin tightened and burned. It was nice there with the cool breeze, the sound of the traffic through the trees, the earthy stench of mud. An empty Coke can tinkled a rhythm against the rock, shaken by the current. A toad hopped across my foot.

  Later that evening I dragged the sunlamp out onto the curb, thinking maybe the zombies would find it. The next morning it was still there, so I dragged it back inside. I walked up Riverside Road. I got what I wanted. I walked back home.

  Ron Carlson

  Happiness

  WE HAD TEN PILLOWS. It was the first thing my son Nick said when we entered the motel room and we were tired from traveling all day and surprised by the deep cold as we got out of the rental car, five degrees or so, and the warm room was perfectly cozy, the two big beds and the large television, and whe
n he said we had ten pillows we both just laughed. Most of the time ten pillows are too many, but now with the trip and the dark and the cold, I wanted all my pillows.

  It was wonderful to park our small cases on the bureau and turn on the television. It was October and it was game three of the World Series. Things were working out. The bathroom was big and well lighted and there was all kinds of soap and a coffeemaker. “Are we going over there?” Nick said, meaning Wally’s, the burger place we’d seen across the street.

  “We’ve got to,” I said. “Wear your jacket.”

  Outside, the parking lot was full of trucks with fans of mud along the doors and bumpers, big trucks with all kinds of oil gear and toolboxes in the beds. If it hadn’t been so cold, there would have been dogs in a few of the trucks, but now I knew the motel was full of smart shepherds and collies. I loved seeing the trucks and I loved seeing our little rental car in its place; we arrived late and still got a room full of pillows.

  The cold was like metal in our noses and we tucked our chins and walked across the old empty highway to the little glassed building: Wally’s, Home of the Wally Burger. In the street Nick kept bumping into me and laughing. On the sign each of the red letters had a big blue-painted shadow and the Wally Burger had been painted there, big as a car, beautiful and steaming and dripping and sort of vibrating by the depiction. Beneath the burger was the phrase: FRESH-CUT FRIES. Nick opened the door for me. He had read it all and was happy.

  Inside there was a couple, a man and a woman who were my age, sitting in one of the little plastic booths by a coin-operated video game with a plastic rifle attached to it. It was called Big Game. The man had a huge white mustache, and they were both eating their Wally Burgers in the bright light. They still wore their coats and I wondered if it was a date. They had a paper between them, spread with the beautiful french fries.