The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  THE WALTZ

  Her husband has sprawled in her absence. She lies on her elbow and hip in the narrow space and unbraids her long, dark hair. The bed is high—there are storage cabinets built underneath. Blankets and waders are stashed in the gap between her side of the mattress and the wall. He rolls closer and gains inches of mattress.

  “Move over,” she says. “I don’t have any room.”

  He moves, but he rolls toward her and knocks her off the bed.

  The gap is narrow enough to be a problem. “Help me up,” she says.

  She pats around in the shadows and feels fur. And a snout. Teeth.

  She screams and scrambles to dislodge herself. He grabs her legs, pulls her up and pulls her up. She finds footing on the mattress and runs out of the room and then outside. The whole cabin wakes with the commotion.

  Her husband stands on the deck with a bear head. “I was saving it for the teeth and claws.” He unfolds the skin. “Harmless,” he says and puts the bear head over his shoulder and fanfares off the porch. Then he waltzes, hand to paw, around the campfire. Man and bear nod in rhythm, in step.

  HALF LIFE

  Oncorhynchus nerka

  The red swims a slow, stilted speed as if worming through sand. He swims outside the current, keeping to the edges with the smolt. His tail is white with rotting and layers of skin hang in silken scarves. A bite? Raked by the claw of a bear? The fish should be dead. The scientist steps closer and wades into the water, aiming with the net. The fish darts away.

  BEETLEKILL

  “We survived the oil spill and now this,” says the scientist. There’s division—no one agrees on how to separate the living from the dead. The canopy has thinned by 70 percent and everything under it is changing—a beetle gnaws through the bark of a tree and the salmon count drops and then a fisherman drinks himself into a ditch.

  LOGGING

  The boys swim strapped inside the life jackets. The jackets float up near their ears. The river brings a tree to them and they swim to the uprooted trunk lodged near the gravel bar—the amputated branches silky with moss. Three boys straddle the tree as if they were riding a horse. The other boys grab the broken-off branches and shove and push. The river catches the tree and the boys shove more. “Go,” they say. “Go.” The three riders wave their arms when the current takes the tree. Grandma and Grandpa clap. Mom and Dad grab the camera and start the boat. The boys are waving for the picture as they ride downriver. The fisherman starts his boat, drives fast, and waits below Mom and Dad. Naptowne Rapids waits behind him.

  “One snag,” he yells. “And the tree will roll.”

  HEN

  Oncorhynchus tshawytscha

  The scientist hovers over the dead hen, a female king, with tweezers. He pinches a scale from the head, the side, and the tail, measures the length and girth.

  “Ain’t she pretty?” says the fisherman.

  The scientist holds one scale up to the light—the sheer skin of a pearl. Kneeling, the fisherman leans over the scientist’s shoulders, puzzled about the lengthy examination. “It’s a fish.”

  “Yes,” says the scientist.

  CRUTCH

  He breaks things—doors, glass, plates. He breaks bones, but only his own, and punches the walls of the cabin. Most of the time he comes home wobbly and soft and puts his arm around her and she crutches him to the couch, hoping he doesn’t wake their daughter. “I love my girls,” he says. “I love my girls.”

  BODIES

  The scientists come across a body while doing research. They need to count salmon and a human disrupts the day. A human can last six minutes to six hours in the water, depending on the temperature. They find the drowned don’t have liquid in their lungs—they gasp in the cold water until their tracheas collapse.

  CPR

  The woman and her husband walk a trail along the edge of the Kenai. The husband watches her long, dark hair swoosh across her back as he follows behind with two poles and a tackle box. She stomps ahead not thinking about where they are going. He follows because he has always chased after her. This is what they do. He has not touched her hair in two months. She has not wanted him to touch her in two months. They have no children, not yet. They have a cabin and two trucks and a long-standing argument about who should drive which truck. The woman trips over a root and there is a little blood on her knee.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “I’m fine,” she says and keeps walking. Her jade ring feels tight on her finger.

  The man’s hand begins to sweat around the handle of the tackle box. “Pick a spot so we can fish,” he says. He wishes that her hair wasn’t beautiful, with tinges of red, in the sun.

  She walks a minute to make a point, and then stops. “Here.”

  A low, throated call makes them look upriver. A moose calf is struggling against the current. His head sinks and then pops up, then sinks again.

  “He’s drowning,” she says.

  “No he isn’t,” he says.

  The calf gains footing for a brief moment and then falls.

  “He’s being swept away.” She starts to walk up the trail.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  She runs. She wades out into the river. He’s still holding the poles and the tackle box. The calf isn’t struggling anymore. He’s floating. “Please,” she says. “Bring him this way.” She goes in up to her waist. She grabs the calf by the neck and finds the riverbed with her feet. “Help me,” she says to her husband.

  They both haul the calf to the shore.

  She puts her face near the moose’s nose. “He’s not breathing.”

  “He’s dead then.”

  The woman covers the moose’s nostrils with her hand. She puts her lips on the moose’s mouth and blows air. “Where’s his heart? Where do moose put their hearts?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “The chest seems right.”

  The woman compresses the chest and tries more air. “Go get help,” she says.

  The man runs up the trail. If only she were willing him to live, pressing her mouth to his. Her hair falling over his face. He finds another fisherman and the fisherman tells someone to call the rangers and Fish and Game.

  The calf’s mouth feels like a stubbled cheek. She cups the jaw and focuses the air stream. One. Two. She crosses her hands over the chest. The ears twitch. She pumps and hears a gurgle and water spills out. She tilts his head to allow the water to drain.

  When the man returns to his wife, there is a crowd. The calf’s side heaves with signs of life.

  His wife looks up at him and says, “I think he might be breathing.”

  Fish and Game comes with oxygen. “You saved the calf’s life,” they say.

  “We saved the calf’s life.” She looks directly at her husband. Then someone hands her a bottle of water and she swishes out her mouth.

  The man and woman gather their gear. They walk the trail as before. But when they’re away from everyone else she turns to face him. He’s holding the poles and the tackle box, so he stands there and she wraps one arm around his neck and puts her mouth on his. She kisses him and he kisses her and she puts one hand on his chest where his pulse quickens under her palm. This is what they do.

  DEGREES OF NORTH

  Here, the scientists know north is eighteen degrees on a compass. Not zero. They don’t wander into the woods without a map. Or directions. Walking from camp, following the trail of moose—they don’t lose their way. Losing, as they say, is not scientific.

  George McCormick

  The Mexican

  THE ORANGES WERE NAVELS, from Redlands, California, packed in refrigerator cars, and they were four days on the Southern Pacific crossing the desert—re-icing only in Clovis—before arriving at midnight, here in Waynoka, Oklahoma. The oranges were yellow, and would ripen somewhere in Illinois or Ohio before arriving the next week in New Jersey. Yellow, they smelled yellow, and I imagined that must be what California and Redlands were like, yellow. Places unli
ke Oklahoma. Places not of constant wind but occasional breeze. A nearby ocean. Vast orchards of orange trees, their limbs swaying, barely, silent. Yellow. All of it under an afternoon moon.

  I stepped off the platform and onto the top of the boxcar, and in so doing I was clear from the co-op’s high overhang and had a sudden view of the hot, inky night. Town was a couple of miles west, but it was invisible at this hour, in this darkness. I walked along the top of the boxcar opening cooling hatches. I could feel the day’s heat rising, could feel the heat of the desert, contained in the boxcar, rising. Beyond the co-op the tracks curved toward town, and above the curve was the moon, rising. This moon, a hard thing, seen clearly through the sky like a white stone in a river.

  I kicked at the hatch clasps and opened them by hooking one of the prongs of the bident into the hoop and pulling up. On the platform, Chicken fastened the skids that connected the platform to the train. Behind Chicken, Uncle Alton pushed one hundred pound blocks of ice into the chute. We’d been doing this for three months and most times it was easy. The trick was to guide the blocks onto the skid where Chicken and I—mostly Chicken because he was older and stronger—would guide them with our poles into the open spaces of the cooling hatches. If the blocks came off too slow from the chute they’d stall and we’d have to manually create momentum, but if they came too fast they risked sliding over the side of the boxcar altogether. Ice wasn’t expensive, but the labor to cube, sled, and skid it was.

  We stocked the first three reefer cars fine, about ten minutes per, but on the fourth the blocks began to soften, absorb grit, and move slow.

  “We’re just going to have to lift the sonsabitches in,” said Chicken. He stepped from the platform onto the boxcar with ease. He moved gracefully on top of a train, could leap between boxcars—a thing I was too afraid to try—and he was fast. He could hop an empty flat at twenty miles per hour, and the year before he’d stolen thirty-two bases for American Legion. I stepped across the platform and got on one end of the ice block while Chicken, straddling the gap, was on the other.

  “Drop this mother on my toe and I’ll kick your ass,” he said. Chicken suffered chronic ingrown toenails, which Uncle Alton blamed on a lack of vitamin D, but Chicken knew was a result of his baseball cleats being a size too small.

  We lifted the ice block and sat it across the open hatch. Then we guided it in where it dropped the foot or so into the ceiling’s carriage. I closed the hatch with my boot and secured the clasp.

  “I got my boot packed in gauze,” he said.

  “Go see a doctor?” asked Uncle Alton from the platform.

  “Don’t need a doctor. Just need to get in there and dig the sonsabitch out.”

  “Why haven’t you then?”

  We worked through the night with the soft ice, skidding when we could, but mostly having to lift the blocks in ourselves. Beyond the co-op was a cottonwood-lined wash that ran parallel to the tracks. In it were thousands of frogs, and on that night I remember their sound. But later, when I tell this story, I talk about coyotes running through the wash and yipping and singing at the moon. I say the night was full of coyotes and even though it’s not true I know why I say it. But know now, here, the night was full of frog song.

  That summer wasn’t the first summer where I’d worked for pay—I’d already spent three summers on the road with Chicken and Uncle Alton and some others on a threshing crew—but it was the first summer I got paid regularly, every two weeks, in checks. Each of which came in a long, beige envelope that bore the name of my employer in black type: Waynoka Cooperative, PO Box 11, Waynoka, OK. The checks were blue and their edges were decorated in silver filigree. I had never imagined anything could feel more important than cash, not the way my father talked about it, but they did. And I kept the small paystubs in a tin box not as a way to file them away for some later official importance, but because they fit alongside some of the other things there: a chert arrowhead, several blue and yellow kestrel feathers, a Mexican coin, a page from a diary I’d stolen from a girl’s desk at school.

  Uncle Alton had gotten Chicken on first at the co-op and then, when the summer citrus business was peaking, convinced Mr. Abernathy to hire me. It felt good to work a summer near town, to not have to live out of a truck like we had, taking bathroom sink showers in gas stations; not having to walk all day behind a slow two-gear thresher, in godforsaken Nebraska, swallowing chaff in the heat under a white sky. When our checks came at the co-op they came in a bundle that was clipped together and hung on a pegboard outside of Abernathy’s office. Every other Monday: $98.75.

  At the end of the summer I would be back in school, ninth grade, and Uncle Alton would go on to work back at my father’s restaurant and motel. Chicken was three years older than I was and had already dropped out of school. At the end of that summer he’d end up—despite all the talk about going to Amarillo to play ball—working at a Texaco in Custer City over the next decade. Or rather, some town near Custer City, I’ve forgotten the name of it. It had been on 66 and now it, and the Texaco, and Chicken, have long since disappeared.

  Uncle Alton was a big man with enormous, quiet hands. He loved summers because he felt like he fit the kind of work that that season provided. But the rest of the year—when he ran the front desk or worked as a short-order cook for my father—I think he always felt like he was doing the kind of work one does when they’ve failed at something else. I don’t think he thought it women’s work, necessarily, though he did work alongside my sisters and my mother, but it was a kind of labor I think he felt to be small and tedious and inconsequential. Changing fryer grease after a three-dollar day, he said, you begin to feel like an asshole. You don’t feel like that when the 10:10 SP comes blazing in, he said. Two hundred coal hoppers rolling to a stop. A moving mountain. You feel a part of something bigger, he said. Much, much bigger.

  The string of reefer cars we iced that night were twenty-eight long, and on the second-to-last car Chicken and I pushed a block and watched it disappear through the hatch without a sound.

  “Oh fuck,” said Chicken.

  “What,” said Uncle Alton from the platform.

  “Snag me that lantern, Jess,” Chicken said to me and I hopped from the boxcar onto the platform and unhooked a lantern.

  “What is it?” asked Uncle Alton.

  When I handed the lantern to Chicken he knelt beside the open hatch and lowered the light in.

  “What’s wrong?” said my uncle.

  “No carriage. All rotted through. Block went straight through and landed on the oranges.”

  Uncle Alton ran his hand through his beard and said, “Oh boy.”

  “Fuck it,” said Chicken.

  “No.”

  “Just melt off tomorrow anyway. Nobody’ll ever know.”

  “No. There is product in there that, in all likelihood, is now damaged.”

  “Say it happened before it got here.”

  “No, Chicken. Abernathy has forms for this. I’ll speak with Abernathy, I’ll fill out the forms tomorrow.”

  “Goddamn it, we were just about fucking done, too.”

  I stood in the silence and watched Chicken and my uncle.

  “We’re pulling that thing out,” said Uncle Alton. “Get in and unlatch the door. I’ll get tongs and we’ll skid it out.” The boxcars were locked from the outside, and we weren’t supposed to open them unless it was an emergency.

  Chicken raised the lantern and handed it to me. He dangled his feet through the open hatch. Then he tried lifting himself in, but after a moment it was obvious he wouldn’t fit. He took the lantern back and lowered it through the opening.

  “Fuck. I can see the sonsabitch right there. I just can’t get in.”

  “Jess,” Uncle Alton said. “You try. You know how to open a boxcar from the inside?”

  Uncle Alton knew I did, he’d showed me, but he was cautious and protective of me, as he always was with his brother’s son, and by asking me the question out loud he was giving me a way
out if I needed it. I nodded and went over to the hatch and looked in. Chicken handed me the lantern and when I lowered it I could see, instantly, the hills of oranges five or six feet below.

  “Just shimmy through and hop down,” he said, and I thought about the space—four feet—between boxcars that I’d never jumped. Four feet, so easily jumped on the ground, but which was impossible up in the air.

  “I’ll toss the lantern down to you when you get in there.”

  As I lowered myself I could see the serial number on the inside of the hatch. MADE IN SHEBOYGAN, WI. I rested a moment on my forearms, then lowered myself and hung by my fingertips on the lip of the hatch. Then I let go.

  Inside, the boxcar was nothing but heat and darkness. The oranges were hard, but had broken my fall. I got to my knees and everywhere I could feel the day’s heat contained in the fruit.

  “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He lowered the lantern. “Can you see if I just hold this down?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t want to drop it down there and have it go out.”

  “I can see.”

  In the flickering yellow lantern light the drifts of oranges cast dancing shadows on the walls.

  “Can you get over to the door?”

  “Yeah.”

  I crawled over oranges to the bulwark and pulled myself over. There, in a small space beside the door, was a man. He sat with his knees pulled toward his chest. I inhaled so quickly I lost my voice. The man stared straight through me and stayed perfectly still. We stared at each other, then he looked up toward the hatch, and when our gaze met a second time I could see the fear in his hard face.

  I tried to yell but there was no wind in me. I choked and, trying to scream, moaned instead. Then I coughed up a mouthful of bile that ran down my lips and onto my chin. In the silence I could hear him breathing. Then the man—he was a Mexican, I was sure—got up from his crouch and walked past me to the bulwark. He crawled over it and disappeared into the oranges like a snake into a river.