The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  “The name’s God,” the sheriff says. “You all don’t need to tell me your names, cause I got ’em written down in my book.”

  He hooks his thumbs over his belt. “Will you look at me up here on my cosmic cloud? A-peerin’ down with my eagle eye at all of you.”

  On “you,” he quick-draws a pistol from inside his waistband. It’s a cap gun, silver paint flaking off the barrel. He makes a show of opening and inspecting the cylinder, then snaps it into place and squints, his jaw moving like it’s working tobacco.

  “You there, sister,” he says, aiming at a girl in my row. “How’d you like to have the flu, honey?”

  He fires. Bodies jump.

  “And I got cavities for all you all,” he says. “This’ll teach you not to mess around doing your homework on the Sabbath.” He waves his gun over us like a wand, opening fire.

  In my head I repeat the line my therapist gave me: I am my own Great Physician.

  The tingling in my chest starts up anyhow.

  I look around to try to spot Wren. Sometimes even just seeing her helps. I can’t find her, so I move my hand up to the airspace in front of my pecs, in case I have to do the Gesture. It looks like I’m doing the air Pledge of Allegiance. This is my ready position.

  This is not the Gesture.

  Doing the Gesture = failure.

  Doing the Gesture = letting the sinkhole be the boss of me.

  Frank Collins twirls the gun around on his finger, then shoves it into his waistband. “Remember,” he says. “I got your names written in my big ol’ book. And lemme tell you something: I wrote most of you off a long time ago.”

  He steps off the bench and backs away, frowning, until he’s behind the screen.

  The camp director says that Frank Collins—an actor, you remember—will be a bunch of different Gods this week. Campers in grades one through six will vote on which God is the real one. The older campers will talk about the faulty theologies behind the fake Gods. I’ll be a sophomore this year, so the faulty theologies group will include me.

  During the closing prayer, the tingling goes away. I keep my hand in the ready position, just in case.

  • • •

  I’m an amazing runner. The most amazing runner in our city, the absolute best the city of Chattanooga has ever produced. Benjamin Mills, one of our own, the newspapers say. We’ve never seen the likes of it. The length of his stride, his ability to process oxygen, form and function melding in thrilling new ways. Whatever it is, it moves in him the way wind moves in trees.

  And to think he’s only fifteen!

  I’m supposed to get even more amazing. I’m supposed to get so amazing that people will say, We have never seen this before in a human being, there has never been another distance runner like Mills, he’s the best in the state of Tennessee, and when he goes to college, we’ll say best in the nation, and someday, when we see him on television with the American flag wrapped around his body (look how amazing, he’s not even sweating!) we’ll say, We knew it, we’ve always known it: Benjamin Mills has given us a glimpse of the limitless perfections of God Himself.

  The thing that will stop me from being amazing is this dime-size spot of skin between my pecs. This spot of skin is like a scar that cannot be touched by anyone or anything. If anyone or anything puts even the slightest amount of pressure on this spot—if I even think about someone or something touching it—the sinkhole opens. The sinkhole is black and spirals down and open like a whirlpool: first through my skin, then through the tissues and pectoral muscles and on into the bones of my sternum, and if I don’t lie down and do the Gesture to make it stop, it will get all the way to my heart and wrap around it and clamp down until my heart stops beating and I die.

  What I do to make the sinkhole close is, I press my fingers together the way swimmers shape their hands into paddles. Then I lie down and massage the airspace an inch above the spot of skin. I move my hand in what you would call clockwise circles if you were standing above me, watching. It’s like wiping down a counter. The faster I wipe, the faster the hole shrinks back into the dime-size spot.

  The first time my parents caught me doing the Gesture I was twelve. I was bringing in the garbage pail and trying not to think about the spot on my chest. But trying not to think about something is the same as forcing yourself to think about it, and I ended up lying down in the driveway.

  My parents took me to the emergency room, where the nurses hooked me up to heart monitors that showed everyone I wasn’t having a heart attack. But because of my little brother Sam—born with a hole in his heart that four surgeries in eighteen months couldn’t fix—they did all kinds of tests. They taped wires to my chest and attached them to a monitor I hooked onto my belt. I had to wear it around for a week. If I felt anything funny (flubbing, the doctor said, or racing) I was supposed to push a button on the monitor to start recording. When I got three recordings, I was supposed to unhook the monitor from the wires and dial an 800 number, then hold the phone up to the monitor and push “playback” so the monitor could send the sound of my flubbing and/or racing heart into a computer that would write down the patterns with one of those jittery robotic arms.

  I never called the 800 number. I never felt any flubbing or racing.

  I felt the sinkhole opening, but the doctor didn’t say spiraling or clamping down.

  For another test, I had to run on a treadmill set at a steep incline until my heart rate was two hundred beats per minute. It took me a long time to get there. Dr. Logan, the cardiologist, kept calling me Lance Armstrong. “Faster, Lance,” he’d say. “I’d like to get out of here before next week.”

  When my heart finally reached two hundred, I had to jump off the treadmill and lie on my back on a padded table. Dr. Logan said this is the most taxing thing you can do to a heart: take it from 100 percent exertion to 100 percent inertia. A nurse injected a dye into my arm. The dye made me taste metal and lit up all the pathways running in and out of my heart. An EMT was in the room, holding a defibrillator, just in case.

  Dr. Logan said my pathways were clear as crystal. He said, “I’ve never seen a heart resume its resting rate that quickly.”

  My resting heart rate is forty-six beats per minute.

  In my prime it could drop into the thirties.

  After the sheriff-God, on the way back to our cabins, I see Wren at the snack table with some other freshman girls. She’s wearing a tank top and jeans. Her bare arms start out in the darkness, white and smooth as the inside of a shell.

  “Benjy,” she says. She says my name like she wants to keep it inside her mouth; I imagine the letters all curled up together on her palate. Wren’s hair is the kind of silky blond that shouldn’t be thick but is, so thick it’s like a sheepskin rug you want to dig your toes into. When she goes back to her cabin, I imagine she’ll put on a white nightgown and kneel beside her cot to pray. Her prayers at Ethos are always humble and straightforward: Help us to see others as you see them. Give us your kind of love for people.

  “So that sheriff’s a no-brainer,” Madeline Simpkins says. Madeline’s one of these girls all the guys like—big chest, heavy eye makeup, obviously ready for whatever it is you want to do with her. “You’d think they’d want to, like, challenge us.”

  Wren is holding a little Styrofoam cup filled with popcorn. “I imagine him that way sometimes,” she says. “Like he’s just … I don’t know. Waiting to fire.”

  I don’t say anything. Neither does Madeline. Wren and I have lived on the same street on Lookout Mountain since we were five, the year her parents found out she had a tumor in her uterus the size of a grapefruit. Some weird kind of cancer with a name like mezzanine. They had to take out all her reproductive parts plus her colon. After her surgeries, her dad got her a new bike with training wheels. She’d ride around our neighborhood, bald-headed, a catheter bag dangling from her wrist. The next summer, she pulled me into the empty girls’ bathroom at the Fairyland Country Club and lifted her T-shirt to show me the cloth-c
overed bag sticking out of a hole in her side. “This is how I go,” she said. “I don’t even have to sit down.” Every summer after that, her parents were flying her somewhere to get a new surgery to try to fix her insides so she could at least have that bag taken off. None of the surgeries worked. I’m pretty sure they’ve given up. When we were in seventh grade, everyone started asking everyone else to go out. No one asked her. She told me that if Protestants had nuns, she’d sign up.

  To look at her, you wouldn’t know a thing had happened if it wasn’t for the compression stocking on her leg. Something to do with the radiation killing all the lymph, or messing with the mechanism that makes the lymph move around. When she walks, she has to kind of drag her leg along with her, one swollen foot pointing out to the side. That foot makes me want to lift her up and carry her anywhere she wants to go.

  “A bunch of us are going down to the waterfront at midnight,” Madeline says. “Swimsuits optional.”

  I look at Wren and raise my eyebrows up and down a few times, like, hey baby hey.

  “Right,” she says, laughing. Which is exactly what I thought she’d say. Wren’s the whole reason I came to camp. I’m in love with her. She doesn’t know it and wouldn’t believe me if I told her, because of her missing parts and her swollen leg. But I’m so in love with her that I’ve decided to ask her to do a faith healing on me.

  This is called being the boss of my sinkhole.

  Because of the sinkhole, I’ve never been with a girl. Never even hugged one close. Wren’s the only girl I know who I think might be safe, who would treat me the same, even if she saw me doing the Gesture, because of what she’s been through. Here’s how I’m hoping things will go. I drop hints all week, tell Wren I’d like to talk to her about something. The last night of camp, I ask her to meet me somewhere private, maybe down at the waterfront late at night. She agrees. I tell her everything. She says she wants to help if she can. I take off my shirt and lie down. I say, Please don’t touch my chest until I ask. She starts praying. I imagine she’ll get her mouth down next to my chest, right above the dime-size spot. Her breath will be warm and moist, a sweet citrus smell to it.

  When I tell her I’m ready, she’ll take a drop of the oil I brought in a tiny Advil container and place it, lightly, with just the tip of her pinkie finger, onto the spot. The most delicate laying on of hands. She’ll say, In the name of Jesus I command you. I might ask her to say some Latin I found on a Catholic website about exorcism—In nominus Christos, Dominus vobiscum. When she’s finished, I’ll touch the spot with my own finger, to be certain it worked. And when I’m certain—when I can tell the sinkhole isn’t going to open—I’ll lay my entire hand on top of my chest and take a few deep breaths. Then I’ll place Wren’s hand over mine to prove to myself I can handle the added weight, and to show Wren what she did for me.

  The Presbyterians wouldn’t tell us for sure if Sam went to Heaven when he died. I overheard the pastor telling my parents that it depended on whether or not Sam was one of God’s chosen people.

  “But I can tell you that the Scriptures are full of promises to children born into covenant families,” he said. “And you are a covenant family, so in all likelihood Sam is with the Lord.”

  “Are we talking percentages here?” my father said.

  “All I know,” the pastor said, “is that if I get to Heaven and see every baby that ever died, I will say, God, you are so good. And if I get to Heaven and see only some of the dead babies there, I will say, God, you are so good. And if I get to Heaven and see not one dead baby there, I will say, God, you are so good.”

  We found another church. It’s called Ethos. As in: the church needs a new ethos because the old one is screwed.

  At breakfast, the camp director rings a brass bell hung up above the dining hall porch.

  Most of us line up long before he pulls the rope. We can see the food through the screens, already laid out on the tables: pancakes, sliced cantaloupe, scrambled eggs, grits. Above the tables are chandeliers made out of wagon wheels. Just inside the doors is a big speaker with a microphone. After the director rings the bell, he asks one of the high schoolers to step inside and say grace into the microphone so that everyone waiting on the porch can hear. The prayer is like this bribe: be quiet and listen and you’ll get food.

  This morning—our second morning at camp—the director asks Wren to say grace. The kids waiting in line move away as she walks toward the doors. Dragging her leg with her. When she gets close to me, I see that she’s wearing cutoff shorts and has her swollen foot stuffed into a flip-flop. Her toenails are painted pink.

  She takes the mic and says one of her simple, direct prayers: Thank you for the hands that prepared the meal, use the food to strengthen our bodies, be present in our conversations around the table, Amen. Maybe I should let her wing it when I ask her to pray for my sinkhole.

  Inside, I sit at Wren’s table, beside her. She’s with Madeline and a couple of the guys on the McCallie cross-country team. They’re talking about James, a freshman wrestler who’s supposed to win state in the 103-pound class next year.

  “Doesn’t he normally weigh, like, 130?” Madeline is saying.

  “He was going to be six feet,” Ransom McGuire says. “Now he might not make it to five-eight. He’s stunting his growth.”

  “Have you seen him eat?” Quentin Jenkins says.

  “I hear he doesn’t eat,” Madeline says.

  “I mean after a match,” Quentin says. “He’ll finish off two pizzas, then go home and put on this plastic suit and ride a bike in his living room. Dude’s crazy.”

  Ransom looks at me.

  “We’re running the ridge at four,” he says. “You coming?”

  “I think I’ll do my own thing,” I say. Quentin and Ransom exchange a look and I can tell they’ve been talking.

  I turn to Wren.

  “You doing the ropes course this morning?” I ask.

  “Not the cat pole,” she says. “Maybe the V-swing or zipline. Are you?”

  “No,” I say. “I need to get a long run in.” I take a deep breath. “But I was thinking, maybe we could take a walk later? Like, after lunch?”

  “Sure,” Wren says. “As long as we don’t, you know. Hike.” She tucks her feet under the bench and I feel her thigh press up against mine. She doesn’t move it away. She probably doesn’t even realize it’s there, because of the stocking. My sinkhole tingles a little.

  “Just a walk,” I say. “Meet me at the waterfront at one.”

  “How far are you running today?” Madeline asks.

  “Whatever I can do in two hours,” I say.

  “For Ben that’s like twenty miles,” Quentin says.

  “A-ma-zing,” Madeline says, blinking, her lashes black and clumpy. “The discipline you have.”

  “More like addiction,” I say. What I don’t say is that for approximately half the time I’m gone, I’ll be lying on the ground, panting, making air-circles above my chest.

  When I’m running, I feel God wants to tell me something. I feel he wants to tell me the Big Thing he has for me to do. It’s like this secret mission that only someone who has been touched by the divine could possibly understand.

  Writing down the words I hear during my runs is my assignment. Not God’s assignment, the therapist’s. My parents made me start seeing him every week when they found out about the Gesture. So far, I’ve only written down one word: you. And I keep trying to tell my therapist that “hear” isn’t right. I don’t say “hear” because the sound isn’t in my ears. It isn’t a sound. It’s this pulse or rhythm just below the prickling in my chest that I know has some meaning, and one of these days—if I can figure out the rest of God’s words before the sinkhole takes over—I will know exactly what it is God wants me to do. The important thing is not to think about it. When I feel the words start to pulse in my chest, if I think about them, they disappear and I feel the sinkhole spiraling into my sternum, getting ready to wrap around my pumping heart.
I have to figure out how to listen sideways, out of the corner of my eye.

  My therapist says the worst thing I can do is fight the sinkhole or pray that God will take it away. He says the way to be the boss of my sinkhole is to a) accept it; b) have compassion on it; and c) let it happen. He says if I do this, I’ll find out the sinkhole doesn’t have the power I think it does.

  Sometimes my therapist has me play out my worst-case scenario: what do I think will happen if I don’t do the Gesture?

  “Easy,” I tell him. “The sinkhole will squeeze my heart to death.”

  He says that is my surface fear.

  “Okay,” I say. “Then my deeper fear is dying, period.”

  “Too easy,” he says.

  “So you tell me what it is,” I say.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he says.

  “Then how do you know what I’m telling you isn’t the truth,” I say.

  “It’s like lasagna,” he says. “It’s steaming on the table in front of me, and from where I’m sitting, I can see mostly cheese and sauce. A little bit of noodle poking out. And because I have experience with lasagna—because I’ve eaten lasagna many times in the past—I can make a pretty safe bet that when you cut through the top layer, there will be more layers underneath.

  “But you’re the host. You’re the one holding the knife, and until you cut in and pull up a slice, I have no idea what’s in those layers.”

  “More cheese,” I say. “More sauce and noodles.”

  “There are always surprises,” he says. “Zucchini, for example.”

  After breakfast and the morning assembly, when the high schoolers head out to the ropes course, I go back to my cabin to change. It’s only ten, but already the heat is radiating up from the grass on the soccer field, the sun reflecting off the aluminum cabin rooftops. Inside the cabin are nine beds: eight twin cots plus a double for our counselor, Daryl, a philosophy major at Westminster, who has an earring and a goatee and smokes pot inside his sleeping bag when he thinks we’re all asleep.