The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  The next day, after Charlie went to work, I stayed in the apartment. At first I wasn’t aware that I was doing it. Staying in. I worked in the morning, ordered lunch from an Italian place around the corner. I read while I ate tepid fettuccine and kept reading after I’d finished my meal; all this was normal, or had been normal, if you disregarded the weeks I’d spent in front of Benny’s. On a pad made up of reused sheets from early drafts of stories was written “shaving cream, milk,” but after I’d finished the history I neglected my shopping and instead took a nap. I didn’t wake until Charlie called that evening after he got off work.

  “Dinner? There's that new French place on Twelfth.” “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, I was hungry, I ordered in. Mexican.” “That's fine,” Charlie said. “I’ve got some chicken in the fridge, and some work I really should get done. My place tonight?”

  “Oh,” I said again. “I’m sorry. I, um. My head's pounding. Do you mind?”

  Charlie didn’t say that's fine the second time. He said, “Sure,” and it seemed to me his voice wasn’t annoyed but instead relieved. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

  The next day I stayed in again, working. I’d been trying to write about Adam since I’d met him, but after I met Grace the story suddenly fell into place.

  In the story I am afraid to leave my apartment. I am afraid that a stranger will stop me on the sidewalk and put their hand on my Salvation

  Army chest. “That's my shirt.” Someone else claims my pants. Nearly naked, I skulk indoors. But not even my home is safe. A visitor runs his hand over my sofa (Housing Works, $250). “I used to love this couch.” Another pulls open the drawers of my desk (Regeneration, $400): “What are the odds?” Finally someone waves their arms, taking in the time-smudged dimensions of my tiny apartment. “This used to be my home.” My throat is dry, and I go to the faucet for a drink. But as the water runs I wonder: how many bodies has this passed through to get to me?

  But it was worse than all that. When Charlie came over that evening he glanced through the story I’d written and said, “Haven’t I read this before?”

  On the third day I didn’t leave my apartment Charlie called me and told me a story:

  “Once I wanted to hack all my hair off with a pair of scissors. But I had a crew cut at the time. So I went out and bought next year's calendar and marked the date a year hence with a big red X. For the next twelve months I didn’t touch my hair, and when the day with the X came up I looked in the mirror and realized I liked my hair long. I realized that my crew cuts had been a way of hacking off my hair all along.”

  I said the only thing I could think of.

  “Huh?”

  “Your whole shut-in thing,” Charlie said. “It's not real. Or it's not new. It's just a symbol of something you already do. You’ve already done. Think about it. Where is it you’re really afraid to go?”

  I thought about it.

  “But you have a crew cut now,” I said.

  “Give me a break, will you? I’m going bald, it's the dignified thing to do.”

  When we met Charlie gave me a road map. This was on our third date. Oh, okay, our second. We’d gone back to his apartment and he spread the map out on his kitchen table (IKEA, $99). The table, like everything else in Charlie's apartment, was new and neat, but the map was old and wrinkled, a flag-sized copy of the continental U.S., post-Alaska, pre-Hawaii. Some of the creases were so worn they’d torn, or were about to.

  “Now,” Charlie said. “Fold it.”

  There were four long creases, twelve short, and folding the map proved as hard as solving Rubik's cube. I got it wrong a half dozen times before I finally got the front and back covers in the right place and, a little chagrined, handed it to Charlie.

  “Did I fail?”

  “You passed,” Charlie said. “With flying colors. Anyone who can fold a map on the first try is far too rational for me.”

  “And what about people who can’t fold one at all?”

  In answer, Charlie pulled open the white laminate-fronted drawer of one of those nameless pieces of furniture, a “storage unit.” Inside were several maps practically wadded up, as well as dozens of takeout menus and hundreds of crooked twist ties. He had to scrunch the pile down before the drawer would close again.

  “Wow,” I said. “The map test and your messy drawer. You must really like me.”

  Charlie grinned, sheepish but pleased. “It's about time I entered into a new alliance.”

  By the time I understood what that meant, I thought I was ready to sign. And then Adam came along.

  On the fourth day, Grace called. When I asked her how she’d gotten my number she said, “Out of the book,” and when I started to ask how she knew my last name she interrupted me and said, “Honey, I think you’d better turn on the television.”

  Months later, when the indemnity claims began to be discussed in the press, New Yorkers would learn that the opposing sides, the insurance companies and the property owners, differed on a crucial issue: whether the collapse of the towers constituted one event, or two. The World Trade Center, it turned out, was insured for three billion dollars, but if it was deemed that the crash of the second plane into the south tower, not quite twenty minutes after the north tower was hit, constituted a distinct historical event, the insurers would have to pay the full amount twice, in effect saying that the buildings had been destroyed not once but two times. A lot of the argument, as it turned out, was rhetorical: to the insurers, the World Trade Center was a single site—maps marked it with a single X, guidebooks gave it only one entry—that had been destroyed by a united terrorist attack. But to the property owners, the Twin Towers were, architecturally, structurally, visibly, two buildings destroyed by two separate planes, either one of which could have missed its target. Which argument began to make more and more sense to me as time went on and details about what had happened came out. Nearly three-quarters of the people who died were in the north tower, and, of those, more than ninety percent were on floors above those hit by the plane, including dozens of people attending a breakfast conference at Windows on the World. The reason why far fewer people died in the second tower, which stood for less than an hour, as opposed to the hundred minutes the north tower remained intact, is that people in the south tower saw what had happened to the north tower and evacuated their offices. Regardless of whether you considered the two plane crashes coincidence or concerted assault, the planes had struck separately—and people in the second incident had learned from the first.

  The antonym to history is prophecy. Historical patterns only emerge when we look back in time; they exist in the future as nothing more than guesses. That we make such projections speaks of a kind of faith, though whether that faith is in the past or the future, the predictability of human nature, or physics, or God, is anybody's guess. But in the end, it always takes you by surprise. By which I mean that when I fought my way through the clouds of dust and crowds of dusty people to Charlie's apartment, I found Fletcher had beaten me there. Who could have foreseen that?

  In the days to come, I rode my bike around the city, watched as walls and windows and trees and lampposts filled up with pictures of the missing. Dust clogged my lungs and coated the chain of Adam's creaking bicycle, making it harder and harder to turn the pedals, but it was three days before I stopped wandering aimlessly and actually started looking for him. I found him, finally, a day and a half later, at the armory on Lexington and Twenty-sixth. Indian restaurants lined that stretch of Lex, and the air was usually tinged with curry, but all the restaurants had been closed for days. There were thousands of pictures taped to the wall of the armory, hundreds of people queuing to look at them. Many of the pictures were printed by inkjets and had smeared into unrecognizable blurs after two days of thunderstorms. Where there was a television crew, dozens of people holding up Polaroids and snapshots and flyers jockeyed to get on camera.

  By common will the line moved from left to right. Heads nodded up and down as feet shuffl
ed side to side. I tried not to look in anyone's eyes, living or photographed. I did look at the living, just in case, but mostly I looked at the pictures on the wall.

  Sometimes A leads to Z. But sometimes Z leads to A. What I mean is, I was looking for Adam, but I found Zach. Zach: “You won’t believe his prices.” Zach: “They’re probably all stolen, but what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” “Bicycles” Zach had said. “Come on.”

  I looked at his face for a long time. He hadn’t been a close friend, but someone I’d known off and on for almost fifteen years, and as I looked at him I was suddenly reminded of everyone I’d known who had died of AIDS in the eighties and nineties, the tragic consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The memory was as unexpected as Adam's blow to my head but produced in me an odd, almost eerie sense of calm. Z had led to A, and A to Z, and Z back to A, but now it was a different A. History wasn’t even a circle but a diminishing spiral, twisting into a tinier and tinier point.

  And then:

  “Keith? Keith, is that you?”

  I didn’t recognize him at first. He was shorter than I remembered, his features less fine. His eyes weren’t gray but blue. But the hair was the same, thick and black and sticking out of his head in a dozen directions. It was streaked with soot now too, as if he hadn’t washed in days. His T-shirt was also filthy, and pinned to his chest were three pictures which I hardly had time to take in—there were two women and one man, all smiling the hopelessly naive smiles of the doomed—before Adam grabbed me up in a huge embrace. His arms collapsed around me, one and then the other, and his tears salved the faded remnants of my wounded face.

  “Oh my God, Keith!” Adam cried. “You’re alive!”

  Ron Rash

  Speckle Trout

  from The Kenyon Review

  LANNY CAME upon the pot plants while fishing Caney Creek. It was a Saturday, and after helping his father sucker tobacco all morning, he’d had the truck and the rest of the afternoon and evening for himself. He'd changed into his fishing clothes and driven the three miles of dirt road to the French Broad. He drove fast, the rod and reel clattering side to side in the truck bed and clouds of red dust rising in his wake like dirt devils. He had the windows down and if the radio worked he would have had it blasting. The driver's license in his billfold was six months old but only in the last month had his daddy let him drive the truck by himself.

  He parked by the bridge and walked upriver toward where Caney Creek entered. Afternoon sunlight slanted over Brushy Mountain and tinged the water the color of cured tobacco. A big fish leaped in the shallows but Lanny's spinning rod was broken down and even if it hadn’t been he would not have bothered to make a cast. There was nothing in the river he could sell, only stocked rainbows and browns, knottyheads, and catfish. The men who fished the river were mostly old men, men who would stay in one place for hours, motionless as the stumps and rocks they sat on. Lanny liked to keep moving, and he fished where even the younger fishermen wouldn’t go.

  In forty minutes he was half a mile up Caney Creek, the spinning rod still broken down. There were trout in the lower section where browns and rainbows had worked their way up from the river, and Old Man Jenkins would not buy them. The gorge narrowed to a thirty-foot wall of water and rock, below it the deepest pool on the creek. This was the place where everyone else turned back. He waded through waist-high water to reach the left side of the waterfall, then began climbing, using juts and fissures in the rock for leverage and resting places. When he got to the top he put the rod together and tied a gold Panther Martin on the line.

  The only fish this far up were what fishing magazines called brook trout, though Lanny had never heard Old Man Jenkins or anyone else call them anything other than speckle trout. Jenkins swore they tasted better than any brown or rainbow and paid Lanny fifty cents apiece no matter how small they were. Old Man Jenkins ate them head and all, like sardines.

  Mountain laurel slapped against Lanny's face and arms, and he scraped his hands and elbows climbing straight up rocks there was no other way around. The only path was water now. He thought of his daddy back at the farmhouse and smiled to himself. The old man had told him never to fish a place like this alone, because a broken leg or a rattlesnake bite could get you stone-dead before anyone found you. That was near about the only kind of talk he got anymore from the old man, Lanny thought to himself as he tested his knot, always being lectured about something—how fast he drove, who he hung out with—like he was eight years old instead of sixteen, like the old man himself hadn’t raised all sorts of hell when he was young.

  The only places with enough water to hold fish were the pools, some no bigger than a washbucket. Lanny flicked the spinner into the pools and in every third or fourth one a small, orange-finned trout came flopping out onto the bank, the spinner's treble hook snagged in its mouth. Lanny would slap the speckle's head against a rock and feel the fish shudder in his hand and die. If he missed a strike, he cast again into the same pool. Unlike browns and rainbows, the speckles would hit twice, occasionally even three times. Old Man Jenkins had told Lanny when he was a boy most every stream in the county was thick with speckles, but they’d been too easy caught and soon enough fished out, which was why now you had to go to the back of beyond to find them.

  He already had eight fish in his creel when he passed the No Trespassing sign nailed in an oak tree. The sign was scabbed with rust like the ten-year-old car tag on his granddaddy's barn, and he paid no more attention to the sign than he had when he’d first seen it a month ago. He knew he was on Toomey land, and he knew the stories. How Linwood Toomey had once used his thumb to gouge a man's eye out in a bar fight and another time opened a man's face from ear to mouth with a broken beer bottle. Stories about events Lanny's daddy had witnessed before, as his daddy put it, he’d got straight with the Lord. But Lanny had heard other things. About how Linwood Toomey and his son were too lazy and hard drinking to hold steady jobs. Too lazy and drunk to walk the quarter-mile from their farmhouse to the creek to look for trespassers too, Lanny told himself.

  He waded on upstream, going farther than he’d ever been. He caught more speckles, and soon ten dollars’ worth bulged in his creel. Enough money for gas, maybe even a couple of bootleg beers, he told himself, and though it wasn’t near the money he’d been making at the Pay-Lo bagging groceries, at least he could do this alone and not have to deal with some old bitch of a store manager with nothing better to do than watch his every move, then fire him just because he was late a few times.

  He came to where the creek forked and that was where he saw a sudden high greening a few yards above him on the left. He left the water and climbed the bank to make sure it was what he thought it was.

  The plants were staked like tomatoes and set in rows the same way as tobacco or corn. He knew they were worth money, a lot of money, because Lanny knew how much his friend Travis paid for an ounce of pot and this wasn’t just ounces but maybe pounds.

  He heard something behind him and turned, ready to drop the rod and reel and make a run for it. On the other side of the creek a gray squirrel scrambled up a blackjack oak. He told himself there was no reason to get all jumpy, that nobody would have seen him coming up the creek.

  He let his eyes scan what lay beyond the plants. He didn’t see anything moving, not even a cow or chicken. Nothing but some open ground and then a stand of trees. He rubbed a pot leaf between his finger and thumb, and it felt like money to him, more money than he’d make even at the Pay-Lo. He looked around one more time before he took the knife from its sheath and cut down five plants.

  That was the easy part. Dragging the stalks a mile down the creek was a lot harder, especially while trying to keep the leaves from being stripped off. When he got to the river he hid the plants in the underbrush and walked the trail to make sure no one was fishing. Then he carried the plants to the road edge, stashed them in the ditch, and got the truck. He emptied the creel into the ditch, the trout stiff and glaze-eyed.
He wouldn’t be delivering Old Man Jenkins any speckles this evening.

  Lanny drove back home with the stalks hidden under willow branches and potato sacks. He planned to stay only long enough to get a shower and put on some clean clothes, but as he walked through the front room his father looked up from the TV.

  “We ain’t ate yet.”

  “I’ll get something in town,” Lanny said.

  “No, your momma's fixin supper right now, and she's set the table for three.”

  “I ain’t got time. Travis is expecting me.”

  “You can make time, boy. Or I might take a notion to go somewhere in that truck myself this evening.”

  It was seven thirty before Lanny drove into the Hardee's parking lot and parked beside Travis's battered Camaro. He got out of the truck and walked over to Travis's window.

  “You ain’t going to believe what I got in back of the truck.”

  Travis grinned.

  “It ain’t that old prune-faced bitch that fired you, is it?”

  “No, this is worth something.”

  Travis got out of the Camaro and walked around to the truck bed with Lanny. Lanny looked around to see if anyone was watching, then pulled back enough of a sack so Travis could see one of the stalks.

  “I got five of em.”

  “Holy shit. Where’d that come from?”

  “Found it when I was fishing.”

  Travis pulled the sack back farther.

  “I need to start doing my fishing with you. It's clear I been going to the wrong places.”

  A car pulled up to the drive-through and Travis pulled the sack over the plant.

  “What you planning to do with it?”

  “Sell it, if I can figure out who’ll buy it.”

  “Leonard would buy it, I bet.”

  “He don’t know me though. I ain’t one of his potheads.”

  “Well, I am,” Travis said. “Let me lock my car and we’ll go pay him a visit.”