by Otto Penzler
I closed the door behind me. Then I closed my eyes. For a moment I was back there in that hospital, smelling antiseptic and pine trees, listening to my wife weep and staring at the blue, lifeless lump that should have been my little girl.
A few blocks away, the cleanup at the industrial park was just beginning, but I knew it didn’t matter. In the end, we don’t dump the worst of our toxic waste in abandoned warehouses or slow-moving rivers. We carry it around in our memories until it’s safely buried six feet underground.
DANIEL WOODRELL
Returning the River
FROM The Outlaw Album
MY BROTHER LEFT no footprints as he fled. There’d been three nights of freeze, and the mud had stiffened until the sloped field lay as hard as any slant road. Morning light met rime on the furrows and laid a shine between rows of cornstalks cut to winter spikes, and my brother, Harky, a mutinous man with a fog patch of gray hair drifting to the small of his back and black-booted feet, crushed the faded stalks aside as he came to them, and only these broken spikes marked his passing. His strides were long but curiosity curled his path, spun it about in small pondering circles as he glanced behind, followed by abrupt, total shifts in forward direction. The mud was unblemished but for the debris of cornstalks, and some of the pale dried shucks were spotted by kerosene drippings. Harky still carried the fuming torch he’d made of a baseball bat and a wadded sheet, the torch he’d used to set the neighbor’s house afire, to make amends, to show his love, and flammable droplets fell beside him partway across the field.
Our father chased my brother. He chased him down the road from the burning house, into the field, wearing a white bathrobe and loose slippers. With each step he fell farther behind as his old sick feet skittered over uneven furrows and tripped. The nosepiece from his oxygen tube was yet pinched to his face, and a length of tube waved about while the robe flapped open. He fell repeatedly and stalks stabbed his skin broken at the ankles and hips. He stood up from the field six times, or only five, then again tripped over a furrow, collapsed to the frost, and lay there, face to the mud, withered fingers clenching at stalks, robe flung wide.
Smoke and shouts drifted from the neighbor’s house.
Father’s breathing could be heard beyond the fence line, up the road, the hoarse snatching after breath, rattling inhalations. He was raw beneath the robe, his skin ashen and his blood thinned by medications. The broken spots on his ankles and hips quickly turned blue and leaky. He held on to the oxygen tube with one hand, holding it still and inhaling, as if there might be a trapped bubble of pure oxygen his lungs could burst and pull through in shreds. Fogged eyeglasses hung from a cord around his neck, and his glum white private hair and forlorn flopping parts were open to the cold. He lay there weak as a babe, but a babe who’d already snuck a drink this morning, scotch, and chased it with a forbidden cigarette.
Across the mud and downslope he spotted Harky and his fog of hair scuttling from the field at the far end, plunging over the wire fence and into the thicket. Six-foot-two of man, with a jostling cloud riding his back and a blackened baseball bat in one hand.
Father rose to his knees, gasping, then stood and wobbled his way back to the road, legs too limber for firm strides, blood from his broken spots making lazy trails down his skin. Our father, the joking drunk who was so bitter when sober, shuffled past the edge of the fallow field, toward the big hunkered old house of glowering white that had been the home of our mother’s family for three generations before recent inheritance delivered it down to us Dewlins. Mother waited near the door, pacing between the four-sided pillars on the veranda where she’d played jacks as a girl, hopscotch, her eyes glistening and rounded with anger. Her hair was a carefully selected chestnut hue, girlishly long and casually brushed, and she wore a winter coat belted over her bedclothes. She watched our father limp to the house and did not reach out to help him until he climbed the steps. They both paused on the veranda and looked across the road, toward the flames dancing on the shiny new log cottage of the only close neighbor, a man named Gordon Mather Adams, a retired schoolteacher of some sort, a man I’d never spoken to, busy beside his eastern wall with a yellow garden hose and a panicked air, the excess water running from the flames down the slope of winter grass toward the river behind his house.
They stared for a few minutes, then she said, “I should’ve called in the fire, but . . .”
Father opened the door, crossed the threshold, and stepped onto the rug. He was bleeding from blue places, bleeding down his ankles, over that knob of bone, onto the large and intricate heirloom rug Mother’s people had always spread just inside the door, drop after drop.
Harky had waited for the holidays to fashion a torch and commit his spectacular act of penance, waited for me to be in the house, on the scene, his witness. Over the fence he’d gone, that fog bouncing about his head, into the forest, and I did not chase hard, did not even hurry, but let him spend his energy fleeing for a while. The trees stood towering gray and numb over us both, shorn of green uplift, the bark bared to the heavy sky and chapping wind. I suspect some stark limbs attempted to point Harky toward escape, others to wag in admonishment, blaming him for palming his pills and drinking whisky again. He hopped onto rocks in the creek to cross the stream, missed only one, and pushed up the slope with his left boot splashed and a sock growing soggy, choosing not to realize how the near future would treat a wet sock on a freezing day. The limb he’d trust most gestured this way, onto the animal path that curled around the hill in a spiral rising to the crest. He knocked aside branches and winter brambles with the baseball bat, and his feet crunched across wastes of leaves and twigs.
Harky is running toward places that aren’t there anymore. That limb aimed him in the direction of the vanished cabin our mother’s family first squatted in after they’d followed game trails west from Kentucky to claim these acres. He knows the general whereabouts of the old hearthstone, but the four walls have fallen and become mulch, and the yard is grown over with woods, blended again with the forest. One tree, many trees, where did the cabin sit? The rocks of the chimney were taken down and carted to the next house the Humphrieses built—high, wide, and white, across the creek on richer ground. In spring warmth the original spot might be found by looking for brighter colors paraded amid the bland grasses: irises, daffodils, columbine. Great-great-great-grandma with the first name blown from her headstone and lost for good was quick to put down flowers near the house, dollops of cultivation in the yard that meant we live here now, inside this wilderness, and those common perennials are the only remains of a family place abandoned.
In his sick final years Grandpa Humphries sold the pasture, the cornfields, the wooded hillocks and ridges, sold every acre but the two that made a lawn for the house. He’d feared he might live closer to forever than predicted and need those dollars to find rest in his mind. Harky kneels to our old ground and rubs his hands through the sodden leaves, pushing them aside, making one tiny clearing after another, looking for nubs, withered blades of green. His breath puffs signals that don’t last. Dead grasses fly to his clothes and cling. Dirt buries beneath his fingernails. He’s in high spirits for a man who knows that his parole will be revoked in about an hour, maybe two. There’s a pint bottle in his jacket and he stands up for a ruminative chug, but it is empty except for a few drops that are slow reaching his lips. He looks around the ground, studies trees he might know from years before, but doesn’t spot any old acquaintances, and moves on farther behind the hill. He just can’t find Granny-what’s-her-name’s flowers during this cold season.
The path is steep and vague in spots, barely there, with a few crashed trees to be crawled across or jumped. Running these woods, Harky is feeling redeemed in his bones, raised in his heart, a much better son now than he was before dawn. We’d often hunted this land together when down from the city during holidays, boys afield in joyous pursuit of the small and wild, sharing our single-shot Sears twenty-two, avoiding the tensions in the house
for hours at a stretch. I’d pop squirrels from limbs, since they have more taste, but Harky favored rabbits because they were easier to skin. When snow had fallen over the meadows, he’d delight in tracking bunnies at dawn, stealthily following paw prints as they made circles easy to follow, then track the same paw prints around again, and again, never caring that if he just waited where he started, the rabbits would circle back within range and offer themselves to his aim: “But tracking is the fun part!” The air on the ridge is cold and smacks of fire, and when I make the turn at the crest, the pinnacle suddenly revealed, Harky is sitting calmly on a large slab rock watching the flames in the valley. That fog of hair drapes past where his ass meets the slab and dangles. The bat stood upright between his legs, black end down.
He said, “Think he’ll be happy now?”
“You didn’t get far.”
“I knew they’d send you—bring any whisky?”
The seal hadn’t been cracked on the bottle I handed to him. He busted the whisky open and swallowed a big peaty breakfast, released a deep groan of appreciation, and dropped the cap into his pocket. I sat on the slab beside him. The mess of smoke below had grown. Deputies were standing in the road, and the volunteer fire department was arriving in pickups, little cars, dusty vans, and the one official fire truck they kept ready at Bing Plimmer’s gas station.
“Is that house fully involved?”
Two men in waders dragged a hose toward the river, hunching away from the jumping heat. The deputies in the street seemed excited and were gathering around our mother, but she’s an old hand at this and stands still, with her arms folded, and listens without argument. Harky’s parole would be violated any minute now.
“I think that’s what they call it.”
“Then it might still burn down flat.”
“The man’ll only build it back again with insurance money. Maybe bigger.”
“But not in time.”
“He might live longer than you think.”
“No. He’ll die seein’ the river where it’s supposed to be again.”
Those distant faces so tiny in the valley turned together and stared roughly in our direction. Harky laughed at them, pointed with his fist, and thumped the ball bat to ground. The fire seemed to be winning. Gordon Mather Adams looked to be weeping. Mother had been angry since the foundation was poured, the first nail driven, and clapped her hands with gusto as the hot ruin spread. A sheriff’s car began to roll down the sloped road alongside the field. I swatted my brother on the knee and stood.
“Let’s get deeper into the woods,” I said. “Make it harder for them.”
“You want to run with me?”
He passed the bottle, and I said, “You’ll be gone a long time this time, Harky.”
“Ahh, I have friends in the slams, baby brother, so don’t worry.” He raised from the slab and shuffled his feet, then sat again and pulled the boot and sock from his wet foot. The skin looked red. He wrung the sock until droplets fell, then pulled it on damp and laced up. He stood, happy with himself and smiling at the smoke in the sky, the voices all excited in the distance. “I could use a new little TV. With better color. And headphones.”
Two walls were coming down. They folded inward and smashed across smoldering furniture and seared appliances, sparks bursting and riding the heat. The flames were renewed by the falling and frolicked. One more wall to fall and Father could die upstairs with the river back in his eyes.
I gave Harky the bottle, wiped my lips dry. “Today’s got to be worth a party.”
The sheriff’s car had stopped on the road and the deputy stood in the opened door talking into the radio, calling for help. He was studying the woods, looking for paths he might follow to give chase, but we remembered them all from before we were born and walked on laughing, down the spiraled path to low ground and away through a rough patch of scrub, into a small stand of pine trees and the knowing shadow they laid over us, our history, our trespassing boots.
Contributors’ Notes
Tom Andes was born and raised in New Hampshire and has lived in New Orleans, San Francisco, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Oakland, California. He attended Loyola University New Orleans and San Francisco State University and has taught at SFSU as well as Northwest Arkansas Community College. His poetry, fiction, and criticism have appeared in News from the Republic of Letters, Xavier Review, Santa Clara Review, Mantis, Bateau, and the Rumpus, among other publications. A hand-sewn chapbook, Life Before the Storm and Other Stories, appeared in a limited run from Cannibal Books in 2010.
• I wrote the first draft of “The Hit” shortly after I moved to San Francisco in 2000. In part, I intended the story as an impressionistic response to the shock of moving to the Bay Area, as San Francisco was (and is) the biggest city I’d lived in. I based the character of Mickey on someone I’d met in passing: a native San Franciscan, an Irish-American ex-cop, a person about whom (a mutual friend assures me) the truth is stranger than anything I could have invented. I wanted the story to evoke the plight of the San Francisco neighborhoods that were (and still are) disappearing beneath successive waves of gentrification, as well as the schizophrenia and the greed that seem to define so much of one’s daily experience in the Bay.
At the time I didn’t feel any confidence in the story, so I stuffed it in a drawer. Several years later I tried expanding it into a novel, giving Mickey nearly 100 pages of backstory. But I still couldn’t figure out the opening of the story, so I put it away again, and it stayed in a drawer until, in 2010, I took it with me to a residency program. Much to my surprise, when I lopped off the first few pages, the story sprang to life, and I made most of the subsequent revisions relatively quickly. I’m tremendously grateful to Ralph Adamo for publishing the story in Xavier Review. I’m also grateful to the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, where a two-week residency occasioned my rediscovery of the story.
Peter S. Beagle was born in 1939 and raised in the Bronx, where he grew up surrounded by the arts and education. Both his parents were teachers, three of his uncles were world-renowned gallery painters, and his immigrant grandfather was a respected writer, in Hebrew, of Jewish fiction and folktales. As a child Peter used to sit by himself in the stairwell of the apartment building he lived in, staring at the mailboxes across the way and making up stories to entertain himself. Today, thanks to classics like The Last Unicorn, A Fine and Private Place, and “Two Hearts,” he is a living icon of fantasy fiction.
In addition to eight novels and over one hundred pieces of short fiction, Peter has written many teleplays and screenplays (including the animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn), six nonfiction books (among them the classic travel memoir I See By My Outfit), the libretto for an opera, and more than seventy published poems and songs. He currently makes his home in Oakland, California.
• “The Bridge Partner” isn’t like anything else I’ve ever written. It had its genesis in a frightening dream—not my own, either, but that of my longtime companion Peggy Carlisle, who woke in a West Hollywood hotel out of a nightmare about participating in a play with a fellow actress who kept silently mouthing the words, “I will kill you . . .” No one else in the dream play appeared to take any notice, and the actress went on repeating the soundless threat every time they were onstage together. There was no analyzing or explaining the dream; it seemed to have no connection to anything in Peggy’s past, and it neither recurred nor continued to plague her in daily life, as old nightmares so often do. I’ve always been grateful for that.
But it haunted me, and I kept brooding about it as a possible story notion. When I started writing, all I knew for certain was that the setting would be a bridge club rather than a little theater, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that I know a good deal about theater and nothing about bridge. Beyond that, I was making it up as I went along, letting the characters tell me the story, which is a lazy habit of mine that I never recommend to writing students. It’s just something I do,
more often than not, which may be why I’ve never written mysteries, much as I admire and enjoy them. Mysteries require actual organization, actual planning, actual thought. Sounds uneasily like work—and, as I’ve said, I know myself to be lazy.
I’m truly thrilled to have “The Bridge Partner” defined here as a mystery, selected by the likes of Otto Penzler and Robert Crais; and if it isn’t actually a mystery, I can’t say what else it might be. Myself, I’ve always seen it in my head as a French nouvelle vague film, in black-and-white, directed by someone like Truffaut or maybe Chabrol, and starring Jeanne Moreau (in whichever role she wanted to take). It’s most likely a one-shot—I don’t know that I’ll ever write anything remotely like it again—but I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong about a number of things in that line lately. In any case, I’m immensely proud to have it in this anthology.
K. L. Cook is the author of three books of fiction: Last Call, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction; The Girl from Charnelle, winner of the 2007 Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction and an Editor’s Choice selection of the Historical Novel Society; and, most recently, Love Songs for the Quarantined, winner of the 2010 Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Best of the West 2011, Glimmer Train, One Story, Writer’s Chronicle, and Poets & Writers. He teaches creative writing and literature at Prescott College and in Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in writing program.