“It’s going to snow,” Regan said. “Can you smell it?”
I’d just put the squash in the oven and could only smell the clean smell of the oven heating up after two years.
“What about these?” Colin said, pulling my old Chippewas out of the tangle of shoes.
“Try them on. They’ve been here ten years, fifteen. I caught a lot of fish in those shoes. I caught a ten-inch cutthroat on a bare hook in Dime Lake.”
I stepped past him and went out the front door in the dark. By the light from the window I could read the thermometer on the porch post: twenty degrees. Now I could smell the dry frozen promise of snow and I could feel the low clouds. There wasn’t a star available on such a night. Inside the window everything glowed in lamplight and the fire pulsed.
I peppered the fish and sliced lemon and sweet onion inside of each and laid them on the broiling pan to bake. Nick was reading sections from the scurrilous children’s book aloud and laughing and Colin was walking around my father’s wagon-wheel coffee table in his new shoes. It was the last Thursday night in October of a year in the mountain cabin with my brother and my sons.
We slathered the steaming squash with butter and we each had a piece big as a cake and a trout which fell apart on our plates and came cleanly away from the bones. The skin was crisp and salty and we ate it with our fingers. Nick wiped the plates with his wadded paper napkin and then slid them into the warm dishwater. Colin opened the couches and pulled out the beds.
“I’m sleeping with my head this way,” Regan said, meaning toward the fire. We had already stood four round stove logs on the hearth to load in the middle of the night.
The old poker caddy was full of three kinds of mongrel chips all clay and older than me, fun to handle, and we divvied up four stacks and dealt the old blue Bicycle cards. Nick was talking poker, big blinds and small blinds and being on the button, and Regan said, “Let’s just play cards,” and so we did that: seven-card stud. Immediately Colin distinguished himself as a bluffer, ten if not twenty every turn, bet and raise, and he got clipped early but wouldn’t stop. We played almost an hour. Nobody wanted any ice cream.
“Hey,” I said, examining the king of diamonds in my hand. “One of these cards is torn.”
“King of diamonds,” Nick said.
“You didn’t know that?” Regan said.
“A marked deck,” I said. I lay the red king on the table.
“That black two has a folded corner,” Colin said, and now he was all in and after a minute he showed a seven high, the lowest hand in the history of the cabin.
He stood up. “So close,” he said.
Nick and I took a minute and sorted the old chips into the slots and boxed the damaged cards.
“I’ll remember that king,” I said.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could,” Regan said. “It’ll take us an hour next time to figure it out.”
“That time, we’ll have a big blind and a small blind.”
“I’m blind right now,” Regan said. He’d put his glasses on the driftwood table beside this bedroll which he was struggling into. “Fire up the stove, Nick.”
“I will.” Nick was rolling out his bag on our bed. “Think we can get the game?”
“That’s right,” I said, “they’re playing tonight in St. Louis.”
It was an old black plastic General Electric AM/FM radio, a small console that had been my parents’, in their first kitchen. Days it would get the station from Vernal that advertised auto glass all day long and played eighties songs, but nights the radio stations came out like stars and sizzled against each other, rising and fading.
“Let’s see.” I leaned against the couch and turned the AM dial up loud and began to drift through the stations.
“They all sound like the ball game,” Colin said. And they did, each with its static roar. All the self-help and political bullies were on the clear stations and then just before ten on the dial, I got it. We heard the announcer say, “…coming to the plate…” and then it faded. I got scientific with my tuning, a whisker, a whisker and we could hear him in there under all the noise, but we couldn’t hear what he was saying. I held the radio up and tilted it this way a little and then over there.
“You’re a terrible antenna,” Nick said. We had done this before on summer nights, the radio dance. Then I tuned in a channel so clear it sounded like someone talking at the table. “It’s the UFO guy,” Nick said. “Listen.”
“What would it take,” the baritone voice pleaded. “What would it take to believe they are among us? One convincing crash. Just one. And how many do we have?”
Somebody else, it must have been a caller, said, “I don’t know. How many?”
“Fifty-two,” the expert said. “We’ve got fifty-two documented crashes and there are still skeptics. Oh, it’s a tough road, my friends.”
Regan turned his lamp off and now the cabin was dark except for the fluttering orange glow from the stove fire. I was still holding out the radio.
“Well, let me ask,” the caller said. “If these extraterrestrials are so advanced, why are they always crashing?”
The expert didn’t miss a beat: “Oh man, come on. Do you think they’re sending their best equipment to this planet? They’re working with some off-brand airships; it only makes sense.”
“Makes sense to me,” Regan said.
After Nick and Colin saw the alien visitor movie Fire in the Sky, when they were nine and ten, Nick would not sleep outside on the trampoline anymore. His mother had asked him why not, and he said, “It’s too easy to get us. We’re like snacks on a plate.”
I put the radio back on the shelf by the boys’ old Lego constructions: jet fighters and battleships. I could feel my forehead sunburned. I was tired in the way you are when a day uses you and it felt good; the room in the muffled light was good.
—
In the morning, despite the thick gray cloud cover, it was only nine degrees outside. Nick fired up the stove and turned the blower on high while I fried up the bacon and burned a pan of hash browns. We could feel the wind working at the cabin and behind Regan out the front window, I saw the dots commence as it started to snow.
“You guys can tell me how it was at East Canyon,” Regan said, stirring cream into his coffee. He was using the white enamel mug we called spidercup, which when you told the story, it made you shudder. “I’ll be here reading a book. That place, that trip was as cold as I’ll ever want to be.”
We’d had a trip four years ago in such wind and snow at that reservoir that I had trouble opening the car doors, and Regan went out to the whitecap water and caught a fish. When he came back up, his eyelashes were iced up. We have a picture somewhere.
“We could do that tree work unless the snow gets too heavy.”
Colin had folded his bacon into the sourdough toast, pressed it with his big hands and took a bite. He nodded at me. “Let’s do it and learn about this saw.”
We laid the saw out on newspapers on the kitchen table and I went through it with Colin. Nick said from the couch, “Teach him and if I need to know it, he’ll tell me.”
We disassembled the saw and Regan said, “I can’t believe how clean that thing is.” There were the caps, oil and gas, and there was the trigger and the choke. Regan gave one of the new sharp chains from the bag to Colin. They were lightly oiled and had been in storage for three years. Regan pinched one of the small blades and held it up for Colin. “This is the cutting edge. Set it on the drive rail so this is forward.” I stepped back. It was funny about the saw; it was hard not to have it in my hands, but now I knew it was long gone.
“He’s got it,” Regan said. “Let’s do some good.”
Nick was wrapping his scarf on and he had his gloves in his hand. We had a lot of gear hanging from the ceiling wagon wheel to dry and I took my jacket off a hanger and pulled it on.
In the meadow, the wind had subsided and the crazy snowflakes were crossing wildly as they descended. It would last al
l day. We had two hours before it got too deep to work these trees. I checked the toolshed and found the mixed gas and the bar oil right where I put them two years ago. I showed both bottles to Regan knowing he’d appreciate my providence. Colin pulled his glove off to handle the gas and he pulled an envelope out of his back pocket and turned to me and said, “Oh yeah, Mom sent this for you.” I recognized her blue stationery and I put the letter in my front pocket, so it wouldn’t get wet. We just stood back and let Colin fill the reservoirs in the saw and then adjust the choke and pull the starter rope. He was a big man and made the saw look much lighter than I ever did. It snorted alive on the third pull. Colin stood with the idling saw, adjusting the fuel feed with the trigger. When the rpm dropped to a hum, I said, “You’re good to go.” There was one fifty-foot jack pine standing dead with its cowl of rusty branches, and he knelt to it. I showed him to make one front cut horizontal to the ground and perpendicular to the fall line, then the angled wedge cut, which he did in less than a minute, kicking out the wedge with his boot easily. We all stepped clear and he ran the saw in the back of the tree and it tilted sweetly, silently in the falling snow and fell alongside of the driveway. Colin looked at me and we talked for a moment about how to limb it up, cutting each branch at the trunk, no hurry. The three of us stood back and watched him walk up the tree, left right left right, sending the limbs into the grass. Nick took more pictures.
“He looks like he’s been doing this for a while,” Regan said. And it was true. Colin was now bucking up the log, cutting the trunk into stove-length pieces, and we hauled the logs to the old woodpile, the bright yellow ends sharp against the gray wood. The whole job, something that would have taken me two hours, took twenty minutes and we had nothing but a stump and two piles of slash.
There were two more trees, old giants that had been cut down by the power company last summer, and which we’d been instructed to remove. Colin limbed both big trees and we made haystacks of the branches and then he started cutting each log into lengths. They were each almost the diameter of the length of his blade but he didn’t force it, letting the saw find its way, and he finished the last tree in half an hour.
We were all red-faced in the snow and Colin turned off the saw and carried a log down to the stack with his other arm.
“What now?” he said, and we all felt it. We wanted more. We needed another tree standing dead or leaning or even downed, but there were none. The trees towering above us had been knee-high twenty years ago. A tree that Nick replanted as a seedling was now thirty feet tall at the corner of the meadow. It was the old feeling: The day is young and we’re good for it, and I laughed. The snow was still general, but we could see it wouldn’t trap the vehicles or snow us in.
Inside, Nick heated a big pot of Dinty Moore stew, cutting one of our onions into it and simmering it until the brown gravy bubbled, and then he imbedded bread-and-butter pickles in some grilled cheese sandwiches which he fried until they smoked in the pan. The fire had slumped while we were outside and I opened the woodstove and laid in three fresh logs and I closed the glass door and it filled with bright fire. With the fire stoked we ate salty vinegar chips at the table, crunching on the sandwiches, dunking the corners into the potato-thick stew, drinking ice-cold ginger ale. We had one more day.
After lunch, Colin cleaned the saw, taking it apart and wiping it clean and storing it in newspapers in an open cardboard box on the closet shelf. Nick stared out at the snow in the meadow. The snow itself now was not flakes but a steady dusting.
“What do you want?” Nick looked at me. “You want to go for a walk?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Colin said. “Let’s go. You can show us this place.”
Regan had already pulled his boots off and he had his plastic tray of flies on his lap, sorting them for tomorrow. We knew as soon as he lifted his feet onto the wagon-wheel table, he would be asleep. “Have fun, boys.”
It was funny going out into the great day. I wasn’t sure I was ready.
We walked around the cabin and already the places we had tracked up were covered with snow, the slash piles snowy heaps. The boys would have to haul all those sticks next summer.
“Up the dead end,” I said. “And then across the marmot ranch and into the trees.”
At the top of the spur road, I led up across the rock spill where all the marmots lived in the summer and they were certainly back in their chambers now. At the far side, I slipped and knocked my knee on the last rock. Colin grabbed my arm and held me up.
“You okay?”
“I’m good.” There were no tracks, but across and into the trees, we merged onto a game trail already marked by two deer or three, fresh tracks in the snow. When we were in the trees, Nick said from the rear, “This is just a little weird.”
“Not really,” I said.
When we approached the big red sandstone boulders, I turned and said, “Do you know where you are? Can you find this place?”
We looked back, marking the grove of trees.
“It’s not even half a mile.”
“Got it,” Colin said.
“We’ve been here before,” Nick said. He was standing next to me and then closer and he bumped me like he always did.
“A couple times,” I said. “Remember when we saw the coyotes, the mother and the pups, and we had to stop so Max wouldn’t catch the scent?”
“Right,” Nick said. “These are those big red-rock rooms.” We walked the corridor between the rocks each as big as a bus, and I stopped. It was strange to be here in the snow. Once, twenty years ago, I’d surprised forty elk here and they’d stood and disappeared like vapor. That was when I knew the spot. Now it was quiet in the space between the rocks and the snow fell silently in the odd shelter.
“This is it,” I told the boys. “Stand up there on those rocks and let me go.” You could see our breath in the spotty snow, the gray afternoon. Nick had come up and grabbed hold of me, just a hug.
“Good idea,” Colin said and grabbed me, such big men. “You want us to mark it? Should I make a steel tag, your initials?”
“No need,” I said. “You guys will know. That’s enough.”
“Good deal,” Colin said. “We’ve got it. It’s a great place.” My son looked at me. “You want to say something? You’re the guy with words.”
“Not really,” I said. “It’s sweet to be here.” Then I added, “You boys.”
“Let’s go back,” Nick said. “We’ll fish that lake tomorrow, but every step from here starts to take us home.”
“You lead,” I told him. “So I know you know the way.”
Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016
The Jurors on Their Favorites
Our jurors read the twenty O. Henry Prize stories in a blind manuscript. Each story appears in the same type and format with no attribution of the magazine that published it or the author’s name. The jurors don’t consult the series editor or one another. Although the jurors write their essays without knowledge of the authors’ names, the names are inserted into the essay later for the sake of clarity. —LF
Molly Antopol on “Train to Harbin” by Asako Serizawa
From the story’s opening line—“I once met a man on the train to Harbin”—I was captivated. And by the end of the first paragraph, I was entirely invested in the narrator, an old man who had once been a doctor in Japan. I love Asako Serizawa’s prose—direct and reflective, lyrical and unshowy—and the utter authority with which she writes about this time and place and her protagonist’s profession: bacteriological work at a research unit in Pingfang during World War II, just as his country goes to war with China. For all of the research Serizawa must have done, I never once felt it, was never once reminded that I was reading a story—instead, I was utterly swept up in the world she had created.
Weeks after finishing the story, lines and descriptions (but never scenes—stunningly, this story manages to feel propulsive and immediate even though it’s told almost entirely in narration) kept comin
g back to me. The narrator’s poignant relationship with his son, Yasushi. A horrifying depiction of prisoners strapped to planks and gagged with pieces of leather. The narrator’s arrival in Pingfang, “still festive with wealthy Russians and a few well-placed Chinese.”
For such a short piece, “Train to Harbin” feels epic in its exploration of history, war, loyalty, and trauma. It is also intimate, raw and reflective, as the author examines the psychological effects the narrator’s work in China have on him years later. This is a haunting, visceral, and ethically nuanced story, and I was struck by how Serizawa forces her narrator to wrestle with moral consequence on a deeply philosophical level. And by looking so intensely into the deeds of his past, the pain and remorse that define him ultimately become the vehicles that drive the story forward.
—
In the end, what amazed me most was the story’s structure. Rather than telling the story chronologically, Serizawa lets the chaotic nature of memory govern the way the piece unfolds. As the narrator of this heartbreaking and gorgeous tale tells us, “Perhaps it is simply the mind, which, in its inability to accept a fact, returns to it, sharpening the details, resolving the image, searching for an explanation that the mind, with its slippery grasp on causality, will never be able to find.”
—
Molly Antopol grew up in Culver City, California. Her debut story collection, The UnAmericans, won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the California Book Award, and others. She’s the recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, where she currently teaches. She lives in San Francisco.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016 Page 33