The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  “You have all been so kind,” Saba said. “Rahel, you took me to listen to the Azmaris sing,” she said, omitting that she had been too shy to dance such unfamiliar dances no matter how encouraging Rahel had been. A few days later, Rahel came back to take her to one of the fancy new hotels where an American cover band played to a foreign crowd, and Saba pretended to like being there. She imagined Rahel had pretended too.

  “Wurro, you took me to the holiday dinner, and we ate that delicious raw meat,” Saba said, of course not mentioning that Fassil had to take her to the clinic the next day to get Cipro for her stomach cramps.

  “Fikru, you brought me to Mercato to buy a dress,” Saba said. But what she most remembered was spending the trip chasing after him through the labyrinthine alleyways; every so often, when Fikru looked back at her, she would wave and smile, and he’d keep going, losing her twice.

  She remembered the man with the messenger bag that morning, the one who had crossed the street, and his warning about starting things you can’t finish or giving up too soon. Saba walked to the suitcase she had packed herself, filled with her own things, and in one quick gesture opened it, emptied the contents. Her best clothes fell to the floor: her favorite old jeans, most sophisticated dresses, her one polished blazer, a new pair of rain boots, T-shirts collected from concerts and trips and old relationships. She pushed this empty suitcase to the center of the room.

  “Dear friends, neighbors, and relatives,” she said in forced Amharic, looking at the confused expressions that confronted her, “please, now there is room for it all.”

  There were gasps, whispers, whistles, an inexplicable loud thud, but no laughter.

  “Are you sure?” Fikru asked.

  “This is the least I can do,” Saba said slowly. “It is the least I can do.”

  “What about your belongings?” Fassil asked.

  “We’ll keep them safe for her in case she returns,” Konjit said, her voice commanding the space.

  “Until she returns,” Rahel corrected.

  “Until you return?” Konjit asked, and Saba said yes.

  Fassil got a bag, put Saba’s things in, and told her he would store it in his own closet. The two suitcases were packed, weighed (the room applauded when both came in just under the limit), and thrown into the trunk of Fassil’s car, which sagged a little in the rear. There were three cars in their little caravan that headed to the airport. The ride was slow. The weight of the overfull cars possibly complicated the trip, as did the rocky side streets and, of course, the congestion at the difficult intersections. They pressed on, and they reached the airport with absolutely no time to spare. Saba said quick, heartfelt goodbyes, thank-yous, made fresh promises, then pulled the two big suitcases onto a luggage cart. Her family and friends of family watched from the waiting area as she moved quickly through the line to get her boarding pass. They looked on as the two suitcases were weighed and thrown on the screening belt, and they saw her pass the main checkpoint. Every time she looked back to the lobby, she could catch glimpses of them on tiptoe, waiting to see if they might connect with her one more time.

  SMITH HENDERSON

  Treasure State

  FROM Tin House

  JOHN WENT TO VISIT his father in the prison hospital. The old man sat up against a pile of gray pillows. There were dark half-moons under his eyes, and the skin around his mouth was purple and yellow like he’d been hit there. He breathed heavily through cracked and bloody lips. “Lookit you,” the old man said. “You’re all growed and swole up.” He looked at John’s arms.

  “You can’t come live with us,” John said.

  His father fixed him with an expressionless gaze that conveyed nothing but the monstrous obstinacy that had landed him in prison in the first place. It was supposed to be for life.

  “You tell your mother?” he said.

  “She knows I’m here.”

  The son of a bitch pushed himself up, and it took something out of him to do so. He panted slowly for a moment.

  “She agreed to it already, don’t you know,” his father croaked.

  John looked off, away from his emaciated father, the bruised face, the cracked lips, and the hairline crossing the high crown of the older man’s head. What all cancer had done to his once handsome features.

  “You better get used to it,” his father said, his lips drawing back in a dry grin. “I’m awn die in that house a mine.”

  John and his brother, Daniel, left the next day. They pulled out of their little place in Gnaw Bone, Indiana, and drove through the hills they’d coursed as boys, farther, to woods they knew less well, and then they were on a plain country road through abject farmland, foreign odors blowing through the windows. John said they were better off traveling the back roads.

  Outside of Adolf, Indiana, they stopped for lunch in a diner choked with senior citizens.

  “What can I get?” Daniel asked. He was fifteen and had been suspended from school for fighting.

  “Anything.”

  “Anything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you said we don’t got more’n eighty dollars to make it the whole way.”

  “I said we weren’t making it the whole way on eighty dollars. You got to listen.”

  Daniel looked at the menu and then at his brother, who was reading through the local paper, the Adolf Announcement. He asked John what he was reading for. Daniel wouldn’t even open a book unless it looked like it might have pictures in it.

  “Just order,” John said, nodding toward the waitress who was standing there. She was pretty, given the town. She had close-set eyes and a wreckage of teeth, but still looked okay to a kid from Gnaw Bone. Daniel ordered a Denver omelet with no peppers or onions, a side of bacon, and a chocolate shake. John said he’d have black coffee and pancakes.

  “She’s awful cute,” Daniel offered, as she went to get John’s coffee. “Can we take her with us?” He wiggled his eyebrows like an idiot.

  “Why’d you order a Denver omelet if you were just going to have them make a ham and cheese?”

  “We’re going to Denver, ain’t we?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s in Montana, ain’t it?”

  “No. It ain’t. Jesus. How dumb are you?”

  “Pretty goddamn dumb,” Daniel said.

  “Well, see if you can at least wrap your mind around this,” John said, pointing at an obituary. “Says here the service is in about an hour.”

  People being the way they are, few realized that their dead had been robbed. They returned from the funeral and set out the cold cuts on the silver trays, the faceted glasses, and the punch. They stocked bottles of beer and cans of Coke in buckets of ice, smoked a quick cigarette out back, and met the grief-stricken, the condolers, and the well-wishers at the door. The furniture smelled of the person they’d just praised to heaven and commended to the dirt. The mourners assembled along the walls in grim or conversant clusters, depending on their affinity with the dead and the yet living. Then they stole away to the upstairs bedroom or the chest in the basement or the desk in the study, only to discover the particular heirloom missing. And the surprise turned hot, and they tiptoed out of the room, slowly pinched closed the door, went up or down the stairs, and took their spot along the wall. They glowered at their kin, wondering which one had got there first.

  A few days later, John and Daniel were pressing on to Long Creek to fence the things in the backseat. A fur coat, a sword, three crystal glass cats, and a variety of other finds that might have been worth something or nothing at all, it was hard to tell.

  John asked how much they had and Daniel opened the glove box and pulled out the transparent bank-tube canister. They put money in it now, but when they’d found the canister in a bottom drawer back in Weston, it was full of empty prescription bottles. There was a lot of weird shit in bottom drawers. Daniel twisted open the canister and counted the bills.

  “Not great. About a hundred-twenty-something.”

 
; “Let’s just see what we get for this stuff in Long Creek,” John said.

  “I dunno,” Daniel said.

  “Don’t know what?”

  “We’re doing this, then? We’re not going back?”

  “You wanna live with that piece of shit?”

  “I ain’t afraid of him.”

  “Lookit you, big man. You wanna go back and kill him, then?” Daniel sighed at the endless farmland ahead of them.

  “There’s no speed limit in Montana, you know,” said John.

  “You already said.”

  “Marijuana is legal there.” John adjusted the rearview mirror. “We have to, we can sleep in the car.”

  “But you said we shouldn’t sleep on the road. That was a rule, you said.”

  “Let’s just see what we get for this stuff in Long Creek.”

  They chose Montana because of the way the word sounded and because they’d been to Chicago and had formed opinions about cities. A city was a terrible thing, but Montana sounded romantic and open, the opposite of Gnaw Bone, which sounded like something a dog was doing.

  In a town called Oscarville they took too long. Or else the funeral was shorter than normal. A car door closed. Footsteps on the porch, voices downstairs. They waited until it was quiet, then slunk to a rear window. But after they jumped off the sloping roof of the back porch and landed in the yard, a woman came out the back door and started at the sight of them standing there. Then she collected herself and said everyone was gathering in the living room. She held open the door for them, and they were obliged to go into the house they had been burgling just moments before.

  “And how did you know Gary?” the woman asked, almost greedily, as might one who had just lost a loved one and wanted to savor every last instance of the dead person’s intimacies, however slight.

  John looked at Daniel and then coughed into his hand.

  “From the youth center, I’ll bet,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” John said. “The youth center.”

  Daniel grinned helpfully.

  “That man,” she said, squeezing their forearms.

  They went down a narrow hall, past a rolltop desk that had nothing of value in it, and a bedroom where a teenage girl now sat on a bed. Daniel paused at her door and winked at his brother, but John pulled him along.

  In the living room congregated about fifteen people of approximately the same age as the woman—John guessed seventy—some of whom rose slowly from their chairs, asked John and Daniel their names, shook their hands, and said nice things about the youth center over in Benton County, wherever that was. John and Daniel said they weren’t hungry, but someone brought John a plate of cake and baby carrots anyway. Daniel said again that he didn’t want anything to eat, and for a moment they were alone along the wall.

  “I’monna hit the head, John.”

  “Just hold it. We’re getting out of here in a minute.”

  “I gotta go,” Daniel said, slipping John’s reach.

  Daniel stopped at the room where the girl was still sitting on the bed, and leaned against the jamb. She didn’t notice him right away. She wore a plain black dress, but her hair had green streaks in it. Her cowboy boots were shiny as wet tar. Eyes within dark makeup flashed when she noticed him there. He was neither especially handsome nor dynamic, but now had an aura of freedom and outlawry about him.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She sat up straight. He could see her black bra strap where it separated from the strap of her dress.

  “I’m Dan.”

  “Hi, Dan.”

  “Hi.”

  “I’m Gwen.”

  “Well, hi, Gwen.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “You wanna go outside?” he asked.

  “Only if I never come back in,” she said.

  She reached under her bed and drug out an olive duffel that had things written all over it in black marker.

  “Do you have a car?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Take me somewhere.”

  Daniel turned around to get a view of the front room and his brother, but he couldn’t see through the throng. It appeared that a lot of kids from the outlying towns who’d gone to the youth center had arrived. The bedroom window was open and she’d thrown her bag through it.

  “Hold up,” Daniel said, and climbed out after her.

  She was originally from Baltimore, but the Treasure State sounded just fine to her. She said no funny business, she didn’t put out, and that she’d give him money for the ride. She seemed almost expert at negotiations of this sort. Daniel could not believe this was in fact happening. The overwhelming actuality of a girl. He let her into the backseat of the car, put her bag in next to her, and jumped into the passenger seat.

  “What’s all this stuff?”

  “Our things.”

  “A menorah?”

  “A what?”

  She held up the brass menorah. He shrugged.

  “Why are you in the passenger seat?” she asked.

  “My brother’ll be here in a minute.”

  He yearned toward the front door for his brother to come out.

  “How’d you know my uncle?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean you didn’t?”

  “Just never mind. Here comes John.”

  Daniel could see John mouthing Hell no.

  He got in. “Hell no,” he said. “Sorry hon, but no.”

  “Why not?” Daniel asked.

  “Are you stupid?” He turned all the way around in the seat. “You need to exit this vehicle. Now.”

  “Come on, John. We already busted into the pl—”

  “Dan! Jesus. Shut up.”

  Her eyes pinged between the two of them. “Were you two robbing our house?”

  John took off his sunglasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. Then he got out, opened the back door, yanked her bag into the street, and reached in for her. She slid to the other side and kicked at him.

  “I’ll tell!” she said. John stopped trying to get her. He stood and looked out over the car to the house, where the people were gathered inside, and then up the block, where no one was ever about in any of these towns. Everyone was at a funeral or a wake. He knew immediately why the girl was running away. He ducked back down.

  “You’ll do what you’ll do. But you’re coming out of there one way or the other.”

  “You’re a fuckin’ dick, man,” she said.

  “You’ll see I’m worse than that. You got two seconds before I pull you out by that green hair. I shit you not, girl.”

  She glared at him, and when he grabbed at her, she knocked his hand away and let herself out the passenger side. John got in, started the car, and pulled out. Daniel watched her gather her bag and the things that had spilled from it into the road.

  There was a night when John had a hammer in his bed and promised himself that he would kill the old man if he came into their room again. He was about twelve years old and there wasn’t anything he wanted more than his father’s death.

  It was Daniel who always got the brunt of it. Something about Daniel’s softness and curiosity just enraged the old man. Even things that weren’t his fault. Things John had done. Left a toy in the yard or forgot to turn off the sprinkler. Their father would go after Daniel even if John tried to take the blame.

  Times, he wished his father would come after him instead. It was so much worse to be afraid for Daniel than for himself.

  So he’d taken the hammer from the shed. Practiced hitting the pumpkins in Cartwright’s field, the peen chopping into the shell, ripping out the stringy orange meat and seeds. Tore up a half acre.

  The next day his mother cleaned up while they were at school. Sheets changed, toys put away. When they got home, the hammer was gone, not in the shed, nowhere.

  In Juniper they sold a Polaroid camera and several box sets of VCR tapes. It was wet but not presently raining and they perched on a wet stone be
nch in front of the courthouse. A cop came out of the building, descended the marble steps, and nodded at them. When he was out of sight, they went to their car and left town.

  They found a KOA and set up a moldering tent they’d stolen from a garage in a small town called Wellington. They cooked pilfered hot dogs over a campfire and ate them rolled in slices of white bread they’d also stolen and drank water from the nearby spigot. They didn’t even have a cup.

  “I thought we’d be in Montana by now,” Daniel said.

  “We need to get a little more money to make a run at it.”

  “Can’t we just do this all the way out there?”

  “The towns get farther apart out west.”

  “Oh.”

  The fire snapped out a small red coal near John’s foot.

  “We’re still going to Littleton tomorrow.”

  “Yup.”

  John put out the coal with his heel.

  “I wonder if that girl is okay,” Daniel said.

  “You’re wondering if her tits are okay.”

  “She didn’t turn us in.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “We’d of been arrested by now.

  John studied the fire. Daniel stood.

  “Not everybody is a son of a bitch, John.”

  “I’m just trying to protect you.”

  “I’d like to know what the hell from.”

  Daniel stomped off to the tent, and John sat by the fire, feeding it for a few hours until he ran out of sticks. He went in to sleep, but only turned on the ground and listened to Daniel’s untroubled breathing. It was pure luck that the old man had been caught red-handed and went down. Though it galled John that a broken taillight saved them. And even though John had seen with his own eyes that their father was in no condition to come after them, nor really had a reason to, the fear of the man kept him awake just the same.