The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  A week later, Clara took me to a debutante ball at a tacky mansion that looked rabid to me, frothy with white marble balconies. She introduced me as “my best friend, Aubergine.” Thus began our secret life. We sifted through the closets and the jewelry boxes of our hosts. Clara tutored me in the social graces, and I taught Clara what to take, and how to get away with it.

  One night, Clara came to find me on the roof. She was blinking muddily out of two black eyes. Who was doing this—Mr. Finisterre? Someone from the hotel? She refused to say. I made a deal with Clara: she never had to tell me who, but we had to leave Florida.

  The next day, we found ourselves at the train station, with all our clothes and savings.

  Those first weeks alone were an education. The West was very poor at that moment, owing to the Depression. But it was still home to many aspiring and expiring millionaires, and we made it our job to make their acquaintance. One aging oil speculator paid for our meals and our transit and required only that we absorb his memories; Clara nicknamed him the “allegedly legendary wit.” He had three genres of tale: business victories; sporting adventures that ended in the death of mammals; and eulogies for his former virility.

  We met mining captains and fishing captains, whose whiskers quivered like those of orphaned seals. The freckled heirs to timber fortunes. Glazy baronial types, with portentous and misguided names: Romulus and Creon, who were pleased to invite us to gala dinners and to use us as their gloating mirrors. In exchange for this service, Clara and I helped ourselves to many fine items from their houses. Clara had a magic satchel that seemed to expand with our greed, and we stole everything it could swallow. Dessert spoons, candlesticks, a poodle’s jeweled collar. We strode out of parties wearing our hostess’s two-toned heels, woozy with adrenaline. Crutched along by Clara’s sturdy charm, I was swung through doors that led to marmoreal courtyards and curtained salons and, in many cases, master bedrooms, where my skin glowed under the warm reefs of artificial lighting.

  But winter hit, and our mining prospects dimmed considerably. The Oregon coastline was laced with ghost towns; two paper mills had closed, and whole counties had gone bankrupt. Men were flocking inland to the mountains, where the rumor was that the W.P.A. had work for construction teams. I told Clara that we needed to follow them. So we thumbed a ride with a group of work-starved Astoria teenagers who had heard about the Evergreen Lodge. Gold dust had drawn the first prospectors to these mountains; those boys were after the weekly three-dollar salary. But if government money was snowing onto Mount Joy, it had yet to reach the town below. I’d made a bad miscalculation, suggesting Lucerne. Our first night in town, Clara and I stared at our faces superimposed over the dark storefront windows. In the boarding house, we lay awake in the dark, pretending to believe in each other’s theatrical sleep; only our bellies were honest, growling at each other. Why did you bring us here? Clara never dreamed of asking me. With her generous amnesia, she seemed already to have forgotten that leaving home had been my idea.

  Day after day, I told Clara not to worry: “We just need one good night.” We kept lying to each other, pretending that our hunger was part of the game. Social graces get you meager results in a shuttered town. We started haunting the bars around the C.C.C. camps. The gaunt men there had next to nothing, and I felt a pang lifting anything from them. Back in the boarding house, our fingers spidering through wallets, we barely spoke to each other. Clara and I began to disappear into adjacent rooms with strangers. She was better off before, my mind whispered. For the first time since we’d left Florida, it occurred to me that our expedition might fail.

  The chairlift ascended 7,250 feet—I remembered this figure from the newspapers. It had meant very little to me in the abstract. But now I felt our height in the soles of my feet. For whole minutes, we lost sight of the mountain in an onrush of mist. Finally, hands were waiting to catch us. They shot out of the darkness, gripping me under the arms, swinging me free of the lift. Our empty chairs were whipped around by the huge bull wheel before starting the long flight downhill. Hands, wonderfully warm hands, were supporting my back.

  “Eugene?” I called, my lips numb.

  “Who’s You-Jean?” a strange voice chuckled.

  The man who was not Eugene turned out to be an ursine mountaineer. With his lantern held high, he peered into our faces. I recognized the drab green C.C.C. uniform. He looked about our age to me, although his face kept blurring in the snow. The lantern, battery powered, turned us all jaundiced shades of gold. He had no clue, he said, about any Eugene. But he’d been stationed here to escort guests to the lodge.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw tears freezing onto Clara’s cheeks. Already she was fluffing her hair, asking this government employee how he’d gotten the enviable job of escorting beautiful women across the snows. How quickly she was able to snap back into character! I could barely move my frozen tongue, and I trudged along behind them.

  “How old are you girls?” the C.C.C. man asked, and “Where are you from?,” and every lie that we told him made me feel safer in his company.

  The lodge was a true palace. Its shadow alone seemed to cover fifty acres of snow. Electricity raised a yellowish aura around it, so that the resort loomed like a bubble pitched against the mountain sky. Its A-frame reared out of the woods with the insensate authority of any redwood tree. Lights blazed in every window. As we drew closer, we saw faces peering down at us from several of these.

  The terror was still with us. The speed of the ascent. My blood felt carbonated. Six feet ahead of us, Not-Eugene, whose name we’d failed to catch, swung the battery-powered lamp above his head and guided us through a whale-gray tunnel made of ice. “Quite the runway to a party, eh?”

  Two enormous polished doors blew inward, and we found ourselves in a rustic ballroom, with fireplaces in each corner shooting heat at us. Amethyst chandeliers sent lakes of light rippling across the dance floor; the stone chimneys looked like indoor caves. Over the bar, a mounted boar grinned tuskily down at us. Men mobbed us, handing us fizzing drinks, taking our coats. Deluged by introductions, we started giggling, handing our hands around: “Nilson, Pauley, Villanueva, Obadiah, Acker . . .” Proudly, each identified himself to us as one of the C.C.C. “tree soldiers” who had built this fantasy resort: masons and blacksmiths and painters and foresters. They were boys, I couldn’t help but think, boys our age. More faces rose out of the shadows, beaming hard. I guessed that, like us, they’d been waiting for this night to come for some time. Someone lit two cigarettes, passed them our way.

  I shivered now with expectation. Clara threaded her hand through mine and squeezed down hard—time to dive into the sea. We’d plunged into stranger waters, socially. How many nights had we spent together, listening to tourists speak in tongues, relieved of their senses by Mrs. Finisterre’s rum punch? Most of the boys were already drunk—I could smell that. Some rocked on their heels, desperate to start dancing.

  They led us toward the bar. Feeling came flooding back into my skin, and I kept laughing at everything these young men were saying, elated to be indoors with them. Clara had to pinch me through the puffed sleeve of my dress:

  “Aubby? Are we the only girls here?” Clara was right: where were the socialites we’d expected to see? The Oregon state forester, with his sullen red-lipped wife? The governor, the bank presidents? The ski experts from the Swiss Alps? Fifty-two paying guests, selected by lottery, had rooms waiting for them—we’d seen the list of names in Sunday’s Oregon Gazette.

  I turned to a man with wise amber eyes. He had unlined skin and a wispy blond mustache, but he smiled at us with the mellow despair of an old goat. “Excuse me, sir. When does the celebration start?”

  Clara flanked him on the left, smiling just as politely.

  “Are we the first guests to arrive?”

  But now the goat’s eyes flamed: “Whadda you talkin’ about? This party is under way, lady. You got twenty-six dancing partners to choose from out there—that ain’t enough?” />
  The strength of his fury surprised us; backing up, I bumped my hip against a bannister. My hand closed on what turned out to be a tiny beaver, a carved ornament. Each cedar newel post had one.

  “The woodwork is beautiful.”

  He grinned, soothed by the compliment.

  “My supervisor is none other than O. B. Dawson.”

  “And your name?”

  The thought appeared unbidden: Later, you’ll want to know what to scream.

  “Mickey Loatch. Got a wife, girls, I’m chagrined to say. Got three kids already, back in Osprey. I’m here so they can eat.” Casually, he explained to us the intensity of his loneliness, the loneliness of the entire corps. They’d been driven by truck, eight miles each day, from Camp Thistle to the deep woods. For months at a time, they lived away from their families. Drinking water came from Lister bags; the latrines were saddle trenches. Everyone was glad, glad, glad, he said, to have the work. “There wasn’t anything for us, until the Emerald Lodge project came along.”

  Mr. Loatch, I’d been noticing, had the strangest eyes I’d ever seen. They were a brilliant dark yellow, the color of that magic metal, gold.

  Swallowing, I asked the man, “Excuse me, but I’m a bit confused. Isn’t this the Evergreen Lodge?”

  “The Evergreen Lodge?” the man said, exposing a mouthful of chewed pink sausage. “Where’s dat, gurrls?” He laughed at his own cartoony voice.

  A suspicion was coming into focus, a dreadful theory; I tried to talk it away, but the harder I looked, the keener it became. A quick scan of the room confirmed what I must have registered and ignored when I first walked through those doors. Were all of the boys’ eyes this same hue? Trying to stay calm, I gripped Clara’s hand and spun her around like a weathervane: gold, gold, gold, gold.

  “Oh my God, Clara.”

  “Aubby? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Clara,” I murmured, “I think we may have taken the wrong lift.”

  Two lodges existed on Mount Joy. There was the Evergreen Lodge, which would be unveiled tonight, in a ceremony of extraordinary opulence, attended by the state forester and the president. Where Eugene was likely standing, on the balcony level, raising a flute for the champagne toast. There had once been, however, on the southeastern side of this same mountain, a second structure. This place lived on in local memory as demolished hope, as unconsummated blueprint. It was the failed original, crushed by an avalanche two years earlier, the graveyard of twenty-six workers from Company 609 of the Oregon Civilian Conservation Corps.

  “Unwittingly,” our landlady, who loved a bloody and unjust story, had told us over a pancake breakfast, “those workers were building their own casket.” With tobogganing runs and a movie theater, and more windows than Versailles, it was to have been even more impressive than the Evergreen Lodge. But the unfinished lodge had been completely covered in the collapse.

  Mickey Loatch was still steering us around, showing off the stonework.

  “Have you gals been to the Cloud Cap Inn? That’s hitched to the mountain with wire cables. See, what we done is—”

  “Mr. Loatch?” Swilling a drink, I steadied my voice. “How late does the chairlift run?”

  “Oh dear.” He pursed his lips. “You girls gotta be somewhere? I’m afraid you’re stuck with us, at least until morning. You’re the last we let up. They shut that lift down until dawn.”

  Next to me, I heard Clara in my ear: “Are you crazy? We just got here, and you’re talking about leaving? Do you know how rude you sound?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “What are you talking about? Who’s dead?”

  “Everyone. Everyone but us.”

  Clara turned from me, her jaw tensing. At a nearby table, five green-clad boys were watching our conversation play out with detached interest, as if it were a sport they rarely followed. Clara wet her lips and smiled down at them, drumming her red nails on their table’s glossy surface.

  “This is so beautiful!” she cooed.

  All five of the dead boys blushed.

  “Excuse us,” she fluttered. “Is there a powder room? My friend here is just a mess!”

  THE LADIES ROOM read a bronzed sign posted on an otherwise undistinguished door. At other parties, this room had always been our sanctuary. Once the door was shut, we stared at each other in the mirror, transferring knowledge across the glass. Her eyes were still brown, I noted with relief, and mine were blue. I worried that I might start screaming, but I bit back my panic, and I watched Clara do the same for me. “Your nose,” I finally murmured. Blood poured in bright bars down her upper lip.

  “I guess we must be really high up,” she said, and started to cry.

  “Shh, shh, shh . . .”

  I wiped at the blood with a tissue.

  “See?” I showed it to her. “At least we are, ah, at least we can still . . .”

  Clara sneezed violently, and we stared at the reddish globules on the glass, which stood out with terrifying lucidity against the flat, unreal world of the mirror.

  “What are we going to do, Aubby?”

  I shook my head; a horror flooded through me until I could barely breathe.

  Ordinarily, I would have handled the logistics of our escape—picked locks, counterfeited tickets. Clara would have corrected my lipstick and my posture, encouraging me to look more like a willowy seductress and less like a baseball umpire. But tonight it was Clara who formulated the plan. We had to tiptoe around the Emerald Lodge. We had to dim our own lights. And, most critical to our survival here, according to Clara: we had to persuade our dead hosts that we believed they were alive.

  At first, I objected; I thought these workers deserved to know the truth about themselves.

  “Oh?” Clara said. “How principled of you.”

  And what did I think was going to happen, she asked, if we told the men what we knew?

  “I don’t know. They’ll let us go?”

  Clara shook her head.

  “Think about it, Aubby—what’s keeping this place together?”

  We had to be very cautious, very amenable, she argued. We couldn’t challenge our hosts on any of their convictions. The Emerald Lodge was a real place, and they were breathing safely inside it. We had to admire their handiwork, she said. Continue to exclaim over the lintel arches and the wrought-iron grates, the beams and posts. As if they were real, as if they were solid. Clara begged me to do this. Who knew what might happen if we roused them from their dreaming? The C.C.C. workers’ ghosts had built this place, Clara said; we were at their mercy. If the men discovered they were dead, we’d die with them. We needed to believe in their rooms until dawn—just long enough to escape them.

  “Same plan as ever,” Clara said. “How many hundreds of nights have we staked a claim at a party like this?”

  Zero, I told her. On no occasion had we been the only living people.

  “We’ll charm them. We’ll drink a little, dance a little. And then, come dawn, we’ll escape down the mountain.”

  Somebody started pounding on the door: “Hey! What’s the holdup, huh? Somebody fall in? You girls wanna dance or what?”

  “Almost ready!” Clara shouted brightly.

  On the dance floor, the amber-eyed ghosts were as awkward and as touching, as unconvincingly brash as any boys in history on the threshold of a party. Innocent hopefuls with their hats pressed to their chests.

  “I feel sorry for them, Clara! They have no idea.”

  “Yes. It’s terribly sad.”

  Her face hardened into a stony expression I’d seen on her only a handful of times in our career as prospectors.

  “When we get back down the mountain, we can feel sad,” she said. “Right now, we are going to laugh at all their jokes. We are going to celebrate this stupendous American landmark, the Emerald Lodge.”

  Clara’s mother owned an etiquette book for women, the first chapter of which advises, Make Your Date Feel Like He Is the Life of the Party! People often mistake laughin
g girls for foolish creatures. They mistake our merriment for nerves or weakness, or the hysterical looning of desire. Sometimes, it is that. But not tonight. We could hold our wardens hostage too in this careful way. Everybody needs an audience.

  At other parties, our hosts had always been very willing to believe us when we feigned interest in their endless rehearsals of the past. They used our black pupils to polish up their antique triumphs. Even an ogre-ish salmon-boat captain, a bachelor again at eighty-seven, was convinced that we were both in love with him. Nobody ever invited Clara and me to a gala to hear our honest opinions.

  At the bar, a calliope of tiny glasses was waiting for me: honey and cherry and lemon. Flavored liquors, imported from Italy, the bartender smiled shyly. “Delicious!” I exclaimed, touching each to my lips. Clara, meanwhile, had been swept onto the dance floor. With her mauve lipstick in place and her glossy hair smoothed, she was shooting colors all around the room. Could you scare a dead boy with the vibrancy of your life? “Be careful,” I mouthed, motioning her into the shadows. Boys in green beanies kept sidling up to her, vying for her attention. It hurt my heart to see them trying. Of course, news of their own death had not reached them—how could that news get up the mountain, to where the workers were buried under snow?

  Perched on the barstool, I plaited my hair. I tried to think up some good jokes.

  “Hullo. Care if I join you?”

  This dead boy introduced himself as Lee Covey. Black bangs flopped onto his brow. He had the small, recessed, comically despondent face of a pug dog. I liked him immediately. And he was so funny that I did not have to theatricalize my laughter. Lee’s voluble eyes made conversation feel almost unnecessary; his conviction that he was alive was contagious.

  “I’m not much of a dancer,” Lee apologized abruptly. As if to prove his point, he sent a glass crashing off the bar.