The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  Eduardo dumped the wet bag in the steel sink by the cupboard and then planted himself next to the bed. He held the cup in front of the woman, but when he realized she would not reach for it, he hesitantly poured some cubes into her open mouth. Eduardo spilled some water from the cup and the expectant mother tried smiling at him, but he just looked to the floor.

  It was another hour before the woman was fully dilated, which was when Armando saw a deepening shade of purple spread across the infant’s breaching crown. It could not breathe. Armando looked at the woman and saw the exhaustion on her face. He could not push the fetus back in and cut it out now. She would die. He needed the baby to come quickly, and when the head was mostly through, he could slip his long, middle finger into the woman’s vagina and pry the umbilical cord from around the child’s neck.

  “You have to push,” Armando said softly. “Hard, three times.”

  The woman seemed unable to take in air.

  “It will be the greatest pain, but also the quickest,” he lied. “Three hard pushes, and you will hear a cry because your baby will be out.” Armando squeezed the woman’s ankle.

  “Listen to the doctor,” the midwife pleaded. “It’s close to done.”

  “No,” she said.

  Armando reached for the side table and slid his hand under the white towel.

  “Hold her tight,” he said to Eduardo and the midwife. The boy hesitated and Armando said, “Take her shoulder and press down on it.”

  Eduardo dropped the empty cup he held, and as soon as his hands were on the woman’s arm, Armando pulled the scalpel from the side table and made a hasty incision along the woman’s perineum. She screamed, and the midwife leaned down on her. Eduardo had only her forearm in his grasp and this she tried to free. “Stop!” she yelled, and the boy bit his lip, then sobbed, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  The head still did not move, and after a failed effort with the forceps, Armando slipped around Eduardo and chastised his patient.

  “There’s no time,” he said, fearful for the child, but mostly scared for this mother and the father who was at work. They would not try again.

  “Push,” he commanded her. “Push now!”

  The woman closed her eyes and pressed her lips together. She pushed once, but then started crying and tried again to wrench her hand from Eduardo’s grip.

  “Twice more!” he shouted. “Twice more!”

  The midwife grabbed the woman’s left leg and pulled it wide. “Push!” she said.

  The woman tensed again, and Armando looked down to her crotch. The head was beginning to crown. The purple was turning blue.

  “Just once more for your baby,” Armando said into the woman’s ear. “One more—”

  But then Eduardo grabbed Armando’s arm and shouted, “Blood!” The mattress below the woman was a dark, wet red, and the boy tugged incessantly on Armando’s sleeve. “There is so much blood!” He shook the boy off him but looked closer. The head was still not there, and Armando leaned into the woman then, put his lips as close as he could to her ears. He smelled her sweat, heard her shallow breaths, and it reminded him of the night just gone by with Mercedes, the damp heat and the one thin sheet. He recalled her wide hips, which moved effortlessly up and down, and he thought he could love her just as easily. Then he imagined the pregnant woman Mercedes and the baby theirs, and it gave him the courage to be cruel.

  He said, “We cannot let the child die,” and gripping the tendon between her shoulder and her neck, Armando pinched the woman as hard as he could until she tensed. She wailed terribly, but her muscles, all the muscles in her body, contracted.

  “You’re killing her!” It was Eduardo’s voice over the mother’s screams, though it was different, scared and human, and Armando felt a set of hands grabbing for him. But the mother was pushing and Armando was a good doctor; he was performing his duties and saving two lives, so he shoved the boy much harder than he’d needed to.

  When the head came, Armando was quick, and he cut the cord as well as freeing it from the neck. The baby’s lips were blue, but there was some red in its nose and cheeks. With a small suction-bulb syringe he cleared the nose and throat, and Armando only had to slap the tiny creature twice before it coughed and began to cry. Only when the midwife took the baby to clean and wrap it did Armando turn around and see Eduardo sitting on the floor, slumped against the wall. He offered the boy his bloody hand, but Eduardo scrambled to his feet and stormed out of the room. The newborn was a girl.

  “I’m sorry,” Armando said.

  Eduardo sat at the desk in the small room with a metal cabinet that Armando used for filing and paperwork. He sat straight up with his hands in his lap, and he did not look Armando in the eye when he spoke.

  He said, “You are a coward.”

  “I should not have pushed you so hard, but the baby—”

  “You are a coward for screaming at that poor woman.”

  “The mother?” Armando asked.

  “And for lying to the colonel. You are afraid of the colonel, but not the woman. You treated her like an animal. Like a dog and its litter. You were not afraid to bully her. Or me.”

  “You don’t understand,” Armando began. “She would have died.”

  “Do you mean I don’t understand or I can’t understand?”

  “The child was choking,” he said. “She needed to push, not to be coddled. The infant would be a corpse if the mother had stopped.”

  Eduardo stood up and pushed out his chest.

  “I am not afraid of you,” he whispered, and Armando slapped the boy.

  He had nothing prepared, nothing cooking, by the time Mercedes arrived. She wore another dress, yellow, and Armando told her about Eduardo in his office.

  “No more desserts,” he said sheepishly.

  “A brief joy,” she replied. “Most are.”

  It terrified him that she maybe spoke of more than sugar.

  “I suppose,” he said.

  “When are his exams? Next week?”

  “Two weeks. Or maybe ten days. When is the burning? It’s after the harvest.”

  Armando had a third of a bottle of rum, which he’d saved for a long time, and he drank very slowly from a short glass.

  “You would have had two more pounds in your cupboard.”

  “Yes.”

  “The boy won’t pass?” she asked.

  “Not a chance.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  He waved at the stove. “For teasing you.”

  Mercedes shrugged. “Brief,” she repeated, “but the sweeter for it.” She went to the cabinet and retrieved a wine glass. She filled it more than halfway with Armando’s rum. Going to the window, she snatched the open sack of sugar he’d left by the sink and brought it to the table. With a spoon she heaped little hills of brown crystal into the liquor until the rum nearly met the rim. She carefully stirred it and then gingerly pulled a soaked mound of sugar out of the glass. It dripped onto the kitchen table, and Mercedes held it up to Armando’s mouth.

  “To drink away the troubles?” he asked.

  “To forget you ever had them,” she said.

  “And what happens when I wake tomorrow morning?”

  “Your head will hurt to the point of cursing sugar. You won’t want it then.”

  “Sounds terrible.”

  “The doctor’s medicine,” she told him. “Or my gypsy potion, if you prefer.”

  He smiled at last. “Who knows then where I will wake up?”

  “If you are lucky, somewhere far away.”

  It reminded Armando of a dessert his uncle used to serve in his restaurant: brown rum syrup over ice cream with fried mangoes and raisins. The hot topping would melt the ice cream, and something like rum-milk would collect at the bottom. Armando would take the bowl with both hands and drink the cream and liquor and lick his lips. They would be sticky with the sugar, but his throat would ache from the rum.

  “Thank you,” he said, but he
put his hand up when she offered him another.

  “You promised,” Mercedes said, “to make a story of this. The awful sugar that you ate until you nearly burst.”

  “You won’t miss it?”

  “I’ll remember Patalón for the sugar. Something different once. Something I had not expected.”

  “After the harvest, you mean. When you are gone.”

  She said nothing and instead ate the spoonful he rejected, but then dipped another for him.

  “Eat and say farewell. Good-bye, sugar.”

  He accepted this reluctantly, and they traded mouthfuls until the glass was nearly empty and Mercedes finished the rum as a thirsty priest finished the wine at Mass.

  Mercedes stood in front of her chair and undid her dress. She wore a slip but no bra, and the slip she removed as well. Her hair was up still from her day at work, out of the way and nothing dragging behind, and she left it there but removed her earrings, tiny wooden beads painted gold. She took a step toward Armando and leaned back some, and her breasts stretched above her ribs. Her left hand found her mouth and then found the open sack on the table. The sugarcoated fingers paused at both her nipples, and Mercedes put a hand behind Armando’s head. She pulled him to her chest, and he opened his mouth and licked her.

  When Armando tried to remove his pants, she seized his hands and said, “Wait.” She lifted herself onto the table and spread her legs. With the sticky spoon she dug more sugar from out of the bag, but instead of offering him the mouthful, she poured it over her crotch.

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  Armando rarely drove the jeep at night, so after leaving Mercedes alone in the house, he struggled in the driver’s seat to find the switch for the headlamps. There was no moon, just some scattered stars, and a haze drifting overhead. Armando smelled the faintest bit of smoke, but then his hand found the knob and the lights were on. He drove half-mad and fuming, and he wondered if he had a fever from all the sugar. In his head there was still hope. It was supply and demand, sugar and a woman, and he thought he could possibly keep them both. At the very least he believed one might stay the other, a good doctor and some sweets perhaps just enough to convince a woman to linger.

  Topping the last ridge above the plantation, the jeep came off the ground perhaps a centimeter, and when Armando saw down the slopes and into the valley, he realized there was smoke in the air. The harvest was sooner than he’d thought, and the laborers were burning the fields to chase out the vermin and lighten the load. The flames would turn to dust the silk leaves and stalk tops, and the remaining bundles, charred and sooty but otherwise fine, would be easier to collect and carry.

  At the western gate a farmhand told Armando which dirt road to follow and for how long. He said to be careful of gouges in the track. He did not want Armando to flip the vehicle and land in a fire. The winds were high that night, and fields were burning that shouldn’t have been. Armando drove carefully until the gate was out of sight and then tested the jeep’s suspension against the rutted path.

  He saw Eduardo before he saw the plantation manager. The boy stood in a wide open road, a bigger dirt path than the one Armando came in on, holding the reins of two horses at a distance from a small group of men. To Armando’s left were two other jeeps, and he parked his truck alongside them. When Eduardo saw him, the boy’s face dropped. But Armando walked toward the group of men, which was breaking up, instead of acknowledging his pupil. Eduardo’s father was there, and he pointed to a field not on fire, and the other men, all uniformed, fanned out into the sugarcane. When he turned and saw Armando, he looked angry.

  “Doctor,” he said.

  “Señor Valdes,” Armando gasped. He had some smoke or dust in his lungs.

  “We are busy, sir,” the manager told him. “The auditors have come early,” by which he meant they had arrived unannounced.

  “Yes, of course. Just a small matter.” Armando looked beyond the father’s shoulder at the son, and he was certain the boy was too far away to hear.

  “This afternoon, at my office, Eduardo and I—”

  “It’s fine,” the manager said, and he turned away and started walking toward the stalks. Armando followed. “Fine, sir?”

  “Eduardo told me how you struck him. He also told me about the colonel and the pregnant peasant.”

  Armando almost laughed at the manager’s archaic term. All Comrades Are King in Cuba. “I lost my temper.”

  “You did no such thing. You taught the boy a lesson, one he should already know. The agents,” the manager said, waving at the field, “are no different from your colonel. They are representatives of the state. The boy knows how I treat these men, what I give them to keep my numbers high. He called you a coward when he shouldn’t have, and you are certainly not. But you’re also not a fool, which is why you humor the brass.”

  Armando watched the man’s black eyes. They were sincere. It amazed him that he’d taught Eduardo anything. He was a better instructor than he knew.

  The wind blew fiercely then, and the stalks bent to the east. Armando could hear the weaker ones snapping. A rush of heat flooded the dirt road, and his eyes watered.

  “Why are they here?” he asked.

  “To check the interior before we burn. They want to know that I’m not cutting from the middle for private sales.”

  They both looked to the distant fields and saw flames drawing wind.

  “Will they find anything?” Armando asked.

  “Only sugar. Work as hard as you can and take only what you need. Are we not communists?”

  “We are.”

  “A man doesn’t need much. Enough for family and maybe some small gifts.”

  “No shame in that.”

  “I’m glad you agree,” the manager finished.

  In the moment that followed, the distant flames were suddenly much nearer, and the wind gathered into blows.

  “It’s getting too close,” the manager said, and his eyes narrowed.

  The fire, which had loomed on the horizon, was then riding gusts across the dirt paths, and in an instant the flames spread over the dark field in front of them. It sparked the cane the auditors surveyed. Both Armando and the manager approached the wall of green stalks and listened. Some voices rose, and then a scream. A call for help. Armando did not wait for Eduardo’s father, but bent his shoulder and rushed forward.

  He found smoke first and a body second. A man curled on the ground, and a suffocating heat throbbing nearby. The crippled man coughed violently, and there was blood seeping down his leg and into his boot. He’d tripped and gashed himself on a spiked ratoon. But the man seemed unaware of his leg and with clenched fists covered his eyes. Armando tried to pull the hands away from the sockets, but even when the man stood he would not uncover his eyes. The smoke has clouded them, Armando thought, and he gripped the auditor and dragged him out to the road.

  There he laid the man on the ground and tore the fabric from the man’s pant leg. The cut was deep and gushing, but he could not see the bone, and the man groaned only slightly when Armando prodded the flesh around the wound. When he looked up, Eduardo was there with a canteen, and he took it from the boy’s outstretched hands. He rinsed the leg and with the torn fabric wrapped the shin. The remaining water he poured over the hands and face of the auditor until at last the man removed his palms from his eyes. The man, dazed, looked between Eduardo and Armando.

  He tried to speak but coughed, then tried again. “Thank you,” he sputtered.

  “It was the boy. He found you and pulled you out.”

  Eduardo said nothing. He was motionless, and when Armando caught his eyes, his black eyes, the gifts of his father, he said, “He came rushing out of the sugarcane with you on his back. It was remarkable.”

  The auditor looked up and coughed again. He smiled slightly and then reached for Eduardo’s arm, which hung limply at his side, and gripped the boy around the wrist.

  “Amazing. Your father is a hard man, and I suppose you are the same. A
mazing.”

  “You’ve cut your leg,” Armando said, “but it is not deep. I think you will be fine.”

  “He is the town doctor,” Eduardo said, finally speaking.

  The auditor said, “How lucky am I.”

  Armando fiddled with the bandage on the leg, and in the quiet moment they heard the sound of men hacking through the sugarcane. Eduardo’s father and the other auditors suddenly emerged from the stalks, and it seemed no one else was injured. They all wheezed, but they all stood, and there were smiles on their faces, the joy of being alive. Eduardo ran to his father, and Armando thought to himself, if the man had not just come through the stalks, the boy would no doubt have gone in after him, his own father. He would have forgotten himself and gone for his father. Armando then remembered the pregnant woman and Eduardo’s brief cry. He was capable of acting for others, wasn’t he? And if he could do that, then surely he could be a doctor, maybe even a surgeon. Couldn’t he?

  “The boy wants to go to medical school,” Armando told the auditor. “I’ve been working with him these past two months. He is very dedicated, although his scores are not so high. But tests do not consider dedication or ambition.”

  “He seems capable of anything,” the man offered.

  “Something like this could speak to his will, could help his cause.”

  “No doubt.”

  “And maybe a letter from the patient himself, vouching for the boy’s abilities? They would trust a man like yourself.”

  The man nodded. He asked, “Is he as good a pupil as he is a fireman?”

  “He is a fine student, very diligent, and he will make a fine doctor.”

  The light outside was gray when Armando returned to the bedroom and Mercedes. He did not notice that she had dressed. He went straight to where she sat on the bed and said, “We can have sugar for breakfast.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “We can have sugar for lunch and dinner. The boy will be a doctor,” Armando said, “and we will have all the sugar we can possibly eat.”

  “Today?”

  “Always.”

  Mercedes leaned away from him, and her eyes were large. She smelled like rum and when Armando touched her elbow, it was sticky. “We can make sweet breakfast pies and plantain. Sugared apples. Coffee with sugar. Or cream with sugar.”