The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 (retail) (epub)

I still drink the occasional glass of wine.

  Of course Mom did come home from Italy after a week and everything was fine, or seemed that way to me. They would never get a divorce—I was right about that.

  Once there was no one around to impress, Marcia stopped being so mean, but we’re not close; maybe I know too much. Anyway, I just went ahead and decided that I would treat her as an adult and expect the same, which means we don’t talk a lot right now unless there’s a reason.

  In April, Alicia’s mom fell asleep while driving on the turnpike. After the funeral, Alicia left school, moved to Texas, and got a job as a bartender. Maybe she read her philosophy book on breaks. Maybe the book was right, at least as an approach to certain things? Or anyway better at asking questions than forcing a definite set of answers. I actually do hope she’s okay. I wouldn’t mind getting to know her again someday, once she figures out how to be herself without driving herself crazy, and how to get along in this weird civilization of ours without giving up her own idea of life (probably most people need to figure that one out).

  I’d been sure she was going to mock me without mercy when they found me sitting by the road in Tuscany, a vomity, grubby, drunken mess, but Alicia had dropped her bag in the grass and put her arms around me, vomit and all; when she let go, she was crying, too. “I’m so sorry,” she kept saying. I refused to go back to that house, and she agreed, and Marcia had nothing to say about it, so we all sat by the blue metal gate to someone’s farm, ate the bread and olives and apricots they’d bought, and laughed about all the wine and the boiling tongue and my introduction to the kind of thing every woman has to deal with in one way or another—which isn’t fair, gentlemen. Really.

  Of course I’m exactly the same as I was before, only maybe I understand a few more things. And when you understand a thing it’s yours, even when it stays a little bit out of reach. When I think of our trip now—about how it felt to be kissed for the first time; to stand on the spot where a huge temple had been; to get a pretty good sense of why a panicked nymph, her bare feet pounding the dirt, might beg to be transformed into a tree; or just to pass through an old arch again and again, until the villa, our beds, our belongings, even our selves, began to seem mysterious and out of reach—I feel a kind of nostalgia for the future. It’s like knowing that something quite important is already mine, but having no idea how to get to it. Or anyway how to wait. The way a bus driver probably feels at the start of a shift, passing her lover’s house along the route. I mean, seriously, I’m ready. Put a red slash through it, let’s get on the road.

  Jamil Jan Kochai

  Nights in Logar

  BUDABASH GOT FREE sometime in the night.

  I didn’t know how. Just that he did and that we needed to go and find him. Me and Gul and Zia and Dawoud out on the roads of Logar, together, for the first time. This all happened only a few weeks into my trip, my family’s homecoming, back when it only cost a G to fly across the ocean, from Sac to SF to Taipei to Bangkok to Karachi to Peshawar all the way up to Logar, where, at the time, though the American war wasn’t dead, it was dozing a bit, like in a coma, or like it was still reeling off a contact high from that recently booming Afghan H or opium or kush, leaving the soldiers and the Ts and the bandits and the robots almost harmless, so that all that mattered then for a musafir from America was how he was going to go about killing another hot summer day.

  The First Jirga

  Gulbuddin said it’d be a four-man operation.

  He said it in Pakhto because my Farsi was shit.

  “More than four,” he told me and Zia and Dawoud as we sat between the chicken coop and the kamoot, “and we’ll look like a mob, but any less and we might get jumped or robbed.”

  He sat at the head of our circle twirling one end of the thick black mustache his older sisters were always trying to tear from his lip because it made him look too much like the beautiful Turkish gangsters from their soap operas.

  Gul was my little uncle. About fourteen. The oldest of our bunch.

  “What about four and a half?” I asked, thinking about my brother.

  “What did I just say, Marwand?”

  “More than four is a mob,” Dawoud answered.

  “But an extra half might come useful,” I said.

  “Not the half you’re talking about,” Dawoud said, squatting at the farthest edge of our circle, taking up too much space.

  Dawoud was my other little uncle. Around twelve. Same age as me.

  “Listen, fellas,” I went on. “Five is a good number. Five pillars. Five prayers. Five players on a basketball team.”

  “Only five?” Zia asked.

  “Well, is it four and a half or five?” Dawoud asked.

  “Football is better,” Zia said. “In football everyone gets to play.”

  “What do you think?” I looked to Zia, my cousin, but he just shrugged his skinny shoulders and pointed the barrels of his fingers at Gulbuddin. “Chik, chik,” Zia said, “pow, pow,” and pulled his triggers twice.

  Gulbuddin nodded at Zia and pressed down on the air with his hands. His eyes, green like duck shit, shifted from his hands, to the gate, to the courtyard, where the rest of the family still slept. We quieted down.

  “We’ll put it to a vote,” he said. “Raise your hand if you want Gwora to come along.”

  Only my busted hand went up into that morning chill.

  “Well, fuck,” I muttered, in English, and relented to the will of the jirga.

  Initial Encounters

  Wallah, the first time I saw big Budabash standing three-legged beneath his apple tree, pissing on the bark he was chained to, I thought he was the no-name mutt I met and tortured and loved the first summer I came back to Logar.

  My memories of this dog, who I secretly named Mr. Kareem, haunted me all throughout grade school, since it was in third grade, when I learned how to read, that my American teachers also taught me dogs were supposed to be hugged and petted and neutered, but never beaten or tortured.

  So on the afternoon of my second homecoming I arrived in Logar eager to see Mr. Kareem, even though I was already carsick, pockmarked, jet-lagged, and sweating floods in a black kameez and partug, two sizes too small, which my moor made me wear just before we crossed the border. When we entered my moor’s compound for the first time in six years, a flood of sparkling dresses and scarves and vests swallowed me up as I stepped through. I had so much Farsi hurled at me all at once; I didn’t know what to do with it.

  They asked me if I was hungry, if I was sad, if I was tired, if I was thirsty, if I was happy, if I was scared, constipated, lonely, sick, confused, nauseous, stupid, smart, always this dark, always this cute, always this skinny, always this hairy, this tall, this quiet, nervous, shy, lost.

  I said yes to every single question.

  They asked me what I wanted more than anything.

  “I want to go and see Mr. Kareem,” I said.

  None of them knew what I was talking about.

  Sag, I said in Farsi, I want to see the dog.

  They blew up with laughter, cursed me and my moor, and dragged me out of the room.

  In the orchard, as soon as I saw Budabash pissing on his apple tree, I broke off from my family and rushed his circle with nothing but sabr in my heart and love leaking out my fingertips (wallah!), and it was only after he crouched and lunged and swallowed forever the very tip of my finger, that I saw in his eyes, in the heart of the eyeball, that Budabash, the new dog of the orchard, the province, the millennium, was not a dog at all, but something more like a mutant.

  The First Maze

  Just outside the big blue gate, the road we walked curved upward into a bend that led into a maze of interconnected clay compounds. If you didn’t know your way, Gul explained, or if you didn’t have a guide, it was easy to get lost. After Gul led us out of the ma
ze, we found ourselves on the main road. It was made of a hard, dark clay. Rows of chinar and a thin stream ran along its edges. In the fields near the road, farmers tended to their crop. “That’s where Budabash went,” Gul said, pointing at nothing in particular, pointing, it seemed, at the whole country. Then he started down the road.

  While Dawoud paced ahead, sniffing for Budabash’s scent, Gul stopped from time to time to ask a farmer if they’d seen a big black dog roaming about.

  Zia hung back with me. He held my good hand and pointed out the sights.

  “That’s Haji Ahmad’s,” he said, pointing to an orchard, “and those fields belong to Mullah Imran. And that trench there is where little Zabi stepped on an old mine. Lost his foot.”

  “In the name of God, Zia,” Gul called back, and slowed down and wrapped his fingers around my right wrist, just above the gauze covering my finger and palm. “You got everything wrong. The orchard belongs to Mullah Imran’s dad, who’s still living, so Imran owns nothing yet, and the fields are Haji Ahmad’s, and little Nabi got his foot run over by an army truck, not little Zabi. Little Zabi is fine. We played cricket with him a month ago.”

  “We did?” Zia asked.

  “Yes, bachem, go ask Dawoud.”

  Dawoud walked ahead by himself. No one liked to hold his hands because of his warts, so he always had them busy. I tried to do the same thing, but the fellas were persistent. “This is what friends do here,” Gul kept trying to explain.

  “Zabi still got both feet,” Dawoud shouted back.

  “See,” Gul said, and pointed to Zia, “all this guy knows are hadiths. You listen to me, Marwand. I’ll tell you what’s what.”

  And he did. He told me where we were and where we were going. He told me the names of the roads and where they would lead. He told me who died where and whose grave and flag and stick and stone belonged to who, and he told me the names of the trees and the fields and the plots of land. And as he held my hand, he pointed me one way and could tell me what way that way was and he could point the other and tell me what way that way was too.

  But, still, he couldn’t tell me—for sure, at least—where Budabash went or why he ran away in the first place, though I had an idea.

  Ah, but before I forget, here are a few more things I saw that day:

  A cobra

  Six kids, ages ranging from four to eleven, walking toward that cobra

  A cobra, its skin stripped, its flesh bared, pelted to death by six kids

  Laborers in the fields covered in mud

  Laborers in the orchards covered in mud

  Laborers, covered in mud, building a wall out of the mud that covered them

  A little girl, about nine, walking with her donkey

  The fields

  My cousin or uncle (both?) Babrak, who stank of hash and couldn’t recall my name

  Two strays that looked like what Budabash would’ve if he’d actually been a dog

  Two American helicopters

  Four kids playing cards in the corner of a field, betting walnuts and marbles

  Four kids running from the stones we threw

  Fifty-two cards left behind in the corner of a field

  A man with a gun who might have been a T

  One drone (I think)

  1,226 white lilies

  The wheat shaking in the wind

  Ten million pounds of clay

  One true God

  No Budabash

  Some More Rocks

  A few hours into the search and we still had no real lead. Zia prayed his Dhuhr prayer without any sign from God. Gul interrogated almost everyone he saw, but heard nothing from a soul. And though Dawoud couldn’t sniff out Budabash, his nose did eventually latch on to the unmistakable scent of cheap hair gel, butchered meat, and unrequited love.

  At Dawoud’s signal—and Gul’s confirmation—we leaped behind some chinar, into the sloping path of a river bend. A guy with his mouth masked in a dusmal and his hair slicked back into a weapons-grade pompadour came strolling down the trail.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “The butcher’s son,” Gul whispered, and then gently placed a stone in my hand.

  The butcher’s son was walking the trail very slowly, carefully, and, luckily for us, unarmed. Dawoud gathered stones from the stream and set them at our feet, and just before we chucked them, we lifted our own scarves over our mouths, at the same time, like bandits out of an old John Wayne flick, and we rubbed the stones in our dirty little fingers, huffing quick breaths that shook the tatters of our masks, and then there came this moment between the holding of the stones and the ambush itself, when I was watching the butcher’s son walk the road, watching him and knowing what was coming for him, knowing what he didn’t know, would only know when it was already too late, and I felt so bad for him and for me too, wallah, because although I knew that the stones were coming, I didn’t know why, and in that way, the butcher’s son and I were the same.

  Then we chucked.

  Later, I asked the fellas why we did what we did, and they looked surprised that I didn’t know, that I was that much out of the loop over in America, but having taken part in the ambush I thought it was my right, you know, to be informed.

  Luckily, they seemed to agree.

  The Tale of the Butcher’s Son

  Really, the story of the butcher’s son was the story of Nabeela Khala. She was my moor’s younger sister, the third out of six girls, and as the oldest of the unwed sisters, also the next in line to be married. Problem was Nabeela wasn’t the prettiest girl in the family or the slimmest or the most polite. Word was she could slaughter a steer, chop down trees, and whup on her nephews. At a wedding, during a machine gun celebration, she’d snatched her brother’s AK and unloaded the whole clip before going back to the ladies’ side of the wedding to dance her ass off.

  Nabeela was getting dangerously close to unmarriageable when the butcher’s son came calling. He was handsome, light skinned, with a head of hair like Ahmad Zahir and a pair of eyes like an English movie star. But also poor. Very poor. A butcher’s kid, and a failed butcher at that, so Baba, taking Abo’s advice, proceeded to reject his offer. But the butcher’s son, of course, came back.

  The first three or four times a guy comes over to ask for a girl’s shawl, the father is supposed to reject him no matter what. But if you get rejected more than seven or eight times, the suitor has to start thinking about his honor, and most of the time, he’ll give up and move on. The butcher’s son had already been rejected some twenty times. He came over almost every Friday with his only pair of clean clothes, a dingy little waskat, his hair combed back, and his heart beating in his hands.

  Meanwhile, Nabeela—to everyone’s surprise—had fallen madly in love with him. The last time he was rejected, she locked herself in a room and threatened to cut her wrists with her scissors, to hang herself with her dresses, to eat dirt until she vomited and died. Eventually, Rahmutallah Maamaa had to knock the door down with an axe, take up his sobbing sister in his arms, and drag her out of the room. After handing his sister over to Abo, Rahmutallah Maamaa began to shout at her, demanding that she allow Nabeela to marry the boy and end the madness. Abo stood square to her much larger son and cursed him and his lack of honor. So Rahmutallah Maamaa, saying nothing to anybody, went and got his rifle; walked all the way to the butcher’s house near Waghjan, in the middle of the night, with the Ts and the Marines loose and everything; and he knocked on his door and Rahmutallah warned the butcher that though their families had enjoyed many years of peace between themselves, and though they’d had no issues in the past, if he could not control his son, then the peace built up between
the families would very soon, and very suddenly, come to an end.

  He said that to him and then he left.

  The threat worked for a while. But, about a week before my family arrived, the butcher’s son came back again, ready, it seemed, to die for Nabeela.

  “That,” Gul explained, “is why we ambushed him.”

  The Carcass

  Around Asr, the sun dipped into the late afternoon.

  Gul was getting so desperate for some sign of a clue, he suggested that we pray, and although he was very clearly trying to bribe God with our Salah, Zia was so ready to play the part of the imam, he didn’t seem to mind.

  We made wudhu, one by one, in a nearby stream, and laid out our scarves on the dirt. Zia made the call to prayer, Gul said the iqama, and the three of us stood behind Zia and we prayed to Allah together, but by ourselves.

  I had a list.

  My list was in English, though it should have been in Arabic or at least Pakhto.

  First, I prayed for Allah to forgive me and to save me from myself, and I prayed for him to assist me and my buddies on our journey because I knew that’s what Gul wanted. Then I prayed for my parents, my moor and agha, for her mind and his body. I prayed they wouldn’t have to be so lonely all the time. I prayed that my brothers might become men, Mirwais especially, who I thought might become a snitch or a coward, though in many ways I couldn’t admit, he was much braver than me.

  Dawoud was praying on one side of me, fidgeting and cracking his knuckles and scratching his elbows, but I went on with my list anyway.