The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  “I’ve arrested hundreds of scumbags, Jackson. And I’ve shot a couple in the ass.”

  “It don’t matter. You’re not a killer.”

  “I didn’t kill them. I killed their asses. I’m an ass-killer.”

  We drove through downtown. The missions and shelters had already released their overnighters. Sleepy homeless men and women stood on street corners and stared up at a gray sky. It was the morning after the night of the living dead.

  “Do you ever get scared?” I asked Officer Williams.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, being a cop, is it scary?”

  He thought about that for a while. He contemplated it. I liked that about him.

  “I guess I try not to think too much about being afraid,” he said. “If you think about fear, then you’ll be afraid. The job is boring most of the time. Just driving and looking into dark corners, you know, and seeing nothing. But then things get heavy. You’re chasing somebody, or fighting them or walking around a dark house, and you just know some crazy guy is hiding around a corner, and hell, yes, it's scary.”

  “My grandfather was killed in the line of duty,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. How’d it happen?”

  I knew he’d listen closely to my story.

  “He worked on the reservation. Everybody knew everybody. It was safe. We aren’t like those crazy Sioux or Apache or any of those other warrior tribes. There’ve only been three murders on my reservation in the last hundred years.”

  “That is safe.”

  “Yeah, we Spokane, we’re passive, you know. We’re mean with words. And we’ll cuss out anybody. But we don’t shoot people. Or stab them. Not much, anyway.”

  “So what happened to your grandfather?”

  “This man and his girlfriend were fighting down by Little Falls.”

  “Domestic dispute. Those are the worst.”

  “Yeah, but this guy was my grandfather's brother. My great-uncle.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yeah, it was awful. My grandfather just strolled into the house. He’d been there a thousand times. And his brother and his girlfriend were drunk and beating on each other. And my grandfather stepped between them, just as he’d done a hundred times before. And the girlfriend tripped or something. She fell down and hit her head and started crying. And my grandfather kneeled down beside her to make sure she was all right. And for some reason my great-uncle reached down, pulled my grandfather's pistol out of the holster, and shot him in the head.”

  “That's terrible. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, my great-uncle could never figure out why he did it. He went to prison forever, you know, and he always wrote these long letters. Like fifty pages of tiny little handwriting. And he was always trying to figure out why he did it. He’d write and write and write and try to figure it out. He never did. It's a great big mystery.”

  “Do you remember your grandfather?”

  “A little bit. I remember the funeral. My grandmother wouldn’t let them bury him. My father had to drag her away from the grave.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  We stopped in front of the detox center.

  “We’re here,” Officer Williams said.

  “I can’t go in there,” I said.

  “You have to.”

  “Please, no. They’ll keep me for twenty-four hours. And then it will be too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  I told him about my grandmother's regalia and the deadline for buying it back.

  “If it was stolen, you need to file a report,” he said. “I’ll investigate it myself. If that thing is really your grandmother’s, I’ll get it back for you. Legally.”

  “No,” I said. “That's not fair. The pawnbroker didn’t know it was stolen. And, besides, I’m on a mission here. I want to be a hero, you know? I want to win it back, like a knight.”

  “That's romantic crap.”

  “That may be. But I care about it. It's been a long time since I really cared about something.”

  Officer Williams turned around in his seat and stared at me. He studied me.

  “I’ll give you some money,” he said. “I don’t have much. Only thirty bucks. I’m short until payday. And it's not enough to get back the regalia. But it's something.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said.

  “I’m giving it to you because I believe in what you believe. I’m hoping, and I don’t know why I’m hoping it, but I hope you can turn thirty bucks into a thousand somehow.”

  “I believe in magic.”

  “I believe you’ll take my money and get drunk on it.”

  “Then why are you giving it to me?”

  “There ain’t no such thing as an atheist cop.”

  “Sure, there is.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not an atheist cop.”

  He let me out of the car, handed me two fivers and a twenty, and shook my hand.

  “Take care of yourself, Jackson,” he said. “Stay off the railroad tracks.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  He drove away. Carrying my money, I headed back toward the water.

  8 A.M.

  On the wharf, those three Aleuts still waited on the wooden bench.

  “Have you seen your ship?” I asked.

  “Seen a lot of ships,” the elder Aleut said. “But not our ship.”

  I sat on the bench with them. We sat in silence for a long time. I wondered if we would fossilize if we sat there long enough.

  I thought about my grandmother. I’d never seen her dance in her regalia. And, more than anything, I wished I’d seen her dance at a powwow.

  “Do you guys know any songs?” I asked the Aleuts.

  “I know all of Hank Williams,” the elder Aleut said.

  “How about Indian songs?”

  “Hank Williams is Indian.”

  “How about sacred songs?”

  “Hank Williams is sacred.”

  “I’m talking about ceremonial songs. You know, religious ones. The songs you sing back home when you’re wishing and hoping.”

  “What are you wishing and hoping for?”

  “I’m wishing my grandmother was still alive.”

  “Every song I know is about that.”

  “Well, sing me as many as you can.”

  The Aleuts sang their strange and beautiful songs. I listened. They sang about my grandmother and about their grandmothers. They were lonesome for the cold and the snow. I was lonesome for everything.

  10 A.M.

  After the Aleuts finished their last song, we sat in silence for a while. Indians are good at silence.

  “Was that the last song?” I asked.

  “We sang all the ones we could,” the elder Aleut said. “The others are just for our people.”

  I understood. We Indians have to keep our secrets. And these Aleuts were so secretive they didn’t refer to themselves as Indians.

  “Are you guys hungry?” I asked.

  They looked at one another and communicated without talking.

  “We could eat,” the elder Aleut said.

  11 A.M.

  The Aleuts and I walked over to the Big Kitchen, a greasy diner in the International District. I knew they served homeless Indians who’d lucked into money.

  “Four for breakfast?” the waitress asked when we stepped inside.

  “Yes, we’re very hungry,” the elder Aleut said.

  She took us to a booth near the kitchen. I could smell the food cooking. My stomach growled.

  “You guys want separate checks?” the waitress asked.

  “No, I’m paying,” I said.

  “Aren’t you the generous one,” she said.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  “Do what?” she asked.

  “Don’t ask me rhetorical questions. They scare me.”

  She looked puzzled, and then she laughed.

  “O.K., Professor,” she
said. “I’ll only ask you real questions from now on.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What do you guys want to eat?”

  “That's the best question anybody can ask anybody,” I said. “What have you got?”

  “How much money you got?” she asked.

  “Another good question,” I said. “I’ve got twenty-five dollars I can spend. Bring us all the breakfast you can, plus your tip.”

  She knew the math.

  “All right, that's four specials and four coffees and fifteen percent for me.”

  The Aleuts and I waited in silence. Soon enough, the waitress returned and poured us four coffees, and we sipped at them until she returned again, with four plates of food. Eggs, bacon, toast, hash-brown potatoes. It's amazing how much food you can buy for so little money.

  Grateful, we feasted.

  NOON

  I said farewell to the Aleuts and walked toward the pawnshop. I heard later that the Aleuts had waded into the salt water near Dock 47 and disappeared. Some Indians swore they had walked on the water and headed north. Other Indians saw the Aleuts drown. I don’t know what happened to them.

  I looked for the pawnshop and couldn’t find it. I swear it wasn’t in the place where it had been before. I walked twenty or thirty blocks looking for the pawnshop, turned corners and bisected intersections, and looked up its name in the phone books and asked people walking past me if they’d ever heard of it. But that pawnshop seemed to have sailed away like a ghost ship. I wanted to cry. And just when I’d given up, when I turned one last corner and thought I might die if I didn’t find that pawnshop, there it was, in a space I swear it hadn’t occupied a few minutes ago.

  I walked inside and greeted the pawnbroker, who looked a little younger than he had before.

  “It's you,” he said.

  “Yes, it's me,” I said.

  “Jackson Jackson.”

  “That is my name.”

  “Where are your friends?”

  “They went traveling. But it's O.K. Indians are everywhere.”

  “Do you have the money?”

  “How much do you need again?” I asked, and hoped the price had changed.

  “Nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”

  It was still the same price. Of course, it was the same price. Why would it change?

  “I don’t have that,” I said.

  “What do you have?”

  “Five dollars.”

  I set the crumpled Lincoln on the countertop. The pawnbroker studied it.

  “Is that the same five dollars from yesterday?”

  “No, it's different.”

  He thought about the possibilities.

  “Did you work hard for this money?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He closed his eyes and thought harder about the possibilities. Then he stepped into the back room and returned with my grandmother's regalia.

  “Take it,” he said, and held it out to me.

  “I don’t have the money.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “But I wanted to win it.”

  “You did win it. Now take it before I change my mind.”

  Do you know how many good men live in this world? Too many to count!

  I took my grandmother's regalia and walked outside. I knew that solitary yellow bead was part of me. I knew I was that yellow bead in part. Outside, I wrapped myself in my grandmother's regalia and breathed her in. I stepped off the sidewalk and into the intersection. Pedestrians stopped. Cars stopped. The city stopped. They all watched me dance with my grandmother. I was my grandmother, dancing.

  Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

  The Jurors on Their Favorites

  Each juror read all twenty stories without knowing who wrote them or where they were published.

  Cristina García on “Refuge in London” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  It is a paradox that sometimes nothing seems as distant from us as the recent past, what has only just disappeared. What “Refuge in London” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala so beautifully evokes is the last days of a lost world, a world of a mere half century ago but one originating in a sensibility centuries older. In a shabby, postwar London boardinghouse crowded with a motley assortment of refugees (a lawyer, a businessman, and upstairs, an artist famous in prewar Germany and his wife), a sixteen-year-old girl recalls the parade of these characters and their influence on her formation. Through her finely drawn awareness, we see not only the disappearance of the old cultural order smashed by the forces of global war, but also the timeliness of the artistic struggle whatever the period, whatever the circumstances.

  “Refuge in London” has several themes: the ruinous effect of time on youthful promise, the way genius attracts its own public attention, and perhaps, most of all, the demands and responsibility of an artist's life; all emerge in clean, well-crafted prose whose nuance and shading match the characters’ complex and, at least for now, unfathomable lives. The nature of refuge is often awkwardly managed (or outright bungled) in fiction, where the tendency can be to indulge in the drama of personal upheaval. Instead of hearing the noise of displacement, the reader experiences the routine of living that plays out afterward—and then after that—as the refugees struggle to reclaim their material and psychic footing. It is a smaller, more difficult story to tell, but it is also what makes “Refuge in London” all the more poignant and rewarding.

  Cristina García is the author of the novels Dreaming in Cuban, The Aguero Sisters, and Monkey Hunting. She edited Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature. García lives in California.

  Ann Patchett on “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie

  I read too much and I read too critically. Both things are occupational hazards for writers. We have a lot of books to get through. Writers reading are like magicians going to catch a show at a magic club. You sit in the audience thinking, Oh, I can see how he's sawing her apart. We long to be amazed again, since it was that sense of amazement brought on by words that led us to this job in the first place, but once you know how to pull the strings and work the levers yourself it's never quite the same.

  When I read, one of three things happens: 1) I think something is bad, and I immediately break it down technically so that I can say why it is bad; 2) I think something is good, and I immediately break it down technically so that I can say why it is good; 3) I simply step into the story. I do not see how it is working. I do not care. I am in that world, walking around with those people. For the number of pages I am given to read, they are my life.

  The third option is rare, breathtaking, and akin to falling in love. Sherman Alexie's story, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” is exactly such an experience. I want to stuff it in every mailbox I know. As a writer he is nowhere to be found on the page. He does not preen or try to impress. He has nothing to prove to his reader, only something to tell them. Like me, Sherman Alexie is in love with his homeless Spokane Indian narrator and so he simply steps aside to let his character have every inch of the stage. From the very first sentence the voice takes over and you know you will no longer be thinking about the art and craft of fiction because you will be too busy listening. Alexie follows this man through his world not as a character but as a human being. Every turn in his day is unexpected and true. As I read I was moved by sorrow, compassion, and joy. I felt all three things deeply and separately in the course of twenty pages. We are lucky when we get that much from life—we should be nothing short of rapturous when we get it from short fiction.

  Ann Patchett is the author of the novels Taft, The Magicians Assistant, Patron Saint of Liars, and Bel Canto, as well as the memoir Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. She lives in Tennessee.

  Richard Russo on “Mudlavia” by Elizabeth Stuckey-French

  As usual, this year's O. Henry anthology is full of fine stories, but the one that burrowed deepest under my skin was by Elizabeth Stuckey-French. I loved everything about “Mudl
avia”—the deceptive simplicity of its storytelling; the way its private and public stories play off each other; its fond, gentle humor; the heartbreaking, hard-won wisdom of its narrator, who comes to understand that “life eventually takes away everything it gives.”

  Which stories burrow under our skin, of course, has a lot to do with who we are and how as readers we allow ourselves to be approached. I admit that I’ve always been a sucker for a good coming-of-age story, especially if it involves, as such tales so often do, the loss of innocence. What makes “Mudlavia” work so wonderfully within its appealing genre is that its private story of a boy coming to terms with difficult truths—that the pain in his knee is no rheumatism to be cured by mud baths, that his doting mother is tragically unhappy in her marriage to his controlling father, that magical Mudlavia may be a con game—dovetails so perfectly with its public story of America's own impending loss of innocence. In “the last summer of peace” before the beginning of the first world war, the narrator and his mother fully believe that “as a nation… we were getting bigger, better, and more stylish.” The story slyly asks whether America, with its unbridled, energetic optimism, is itself a kind of con game (in the literal sense of the term, where “confidence” is itself the dubious guarantor of the future). Are we a nation that first underestimates, then misdiagnoses its own ills, bullishly promising, like Mudlavia, more than it can hope to deliver by way of a cure? It's this public story that signals “Mudlavia” s considerable ambition, that tips us off to the fact that Stuckey-French is hunting bigger game than at first we might suppose.

  No doubt the other reason that the story particularly appealed to me was that its true subject is the power of the literary imagination, or, if you prefer, of narrative itself. It's not just the boy protagonist who comes of age in “Mudlavia,” but also his mother, and it's the act of storytelling that allows for their transformation from innocence to experience. The lies the narrator tells “Harry Jones” as the two are sheathed each morning in soothing mud are not just untruths, but narrative inventions that draw equally upon his youthful imagination and his growing knowledge of the real world, his first adolescent attempts to acknowledge the frightening complexities of his family, his world, even his own body. But the story's finest and most unexpected turn occurs when his mother takes up his narrative, embracing it as her own and thereby allowing her son to understand that she shares his need for another reality, as well as his joy in invention.