The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. C. Boyle

  Jack, thinking the pear was some sort of grenade, covered his head, leaving his erection exposed.

  The woman moved quickly to the bureau and grabbed a bead-encrusted candlestick that Lisa had made in sixth grade. Jack, watching the drama through smoke-scented fingers, calmed, seeing the familiar prop. Plus, the grenade, bearing teeth marks, was obviously a ruse.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” said Jack—a comment that, judging by the woman’s anguished face, failed to impart the cordiality he wished to convey. The woman squealed and fled the room.

  “I just want to see Bertie,” Jack called out, pulling up his pants. “I’m her son. I’m Jack.”

  The idea of having to explain his existence exhausted him. When he walked into the living room, the woman was still clutching the candlestick—a lathe-turned beauty, to which Lisa had glued hundreds of tiny red beads. Jack had lent her the epoxy himself, a leftover tube from one of his build-it-yourself dinosaur sets.

  “You can put that down,” said Jack.

  “Look,” said the woman, “Beatrice isn’t here. She won’t be back for a while.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re looking for your mother?”

  Jack felt a peculiar flutter in his gut.

  “I’m meeting her in a—in a bit,” stammered the woman. “I’ll just—I’ll let her know you were here.”

  “What did you call her?” asked Jack.

  The woman took a step back. “Nothing. What?”

  “Her name,” Jack stated as calmly as possible, “is Bertie.”

  “Well, that’s not how I know her,” said the woman in yoga tights, who, even with the upraised candlestick, seemed to smile, a quick flash of arrogance.

  “I can see your vulva,” said Jack.

  The woman covered her crotch with the candlestick. “My God, do you even know what you’re saying?”

  “It’s inappropriate is all I’m saying,” replied Jack, strolling over to the yellow couch. He sat at the far right, where the air of the swamp cooler always hit you square in the face. As kids, he and Lisa used to fight over this spot. “Fifteen minutes each,” Bertie used to say, making them share the luxury equally. “Otherwise I’ll shut the damn thing off.” Frickin’ Solomon, that was his mother all right. A part-time Christian with a gutter mouth.

  Beatrice? For fucking real? How could Jack not have known this—or, more important, why had this information been kept from him? “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about,” he said to the woman.

  But she wasn’t listening. She was on the telephone, giving an address Jack recognized. He made a blah-blah-blah gesture with his hand, as the woman prattled into the phone.

  Why did no one wish to have a legitimate exchange with him? He was a good person, a personable person, a person with a heart the size of a fucking bullfrog. Couldn’t the woman in yoga tights understand that there was no need to involve the police?

  “I live here,” said Jack.

  The woman said, “Thank you,” and hung up the phone. “I’ve called the—”

  “I know,” interrupted Jack. He crossed his legs, willing himself to stay calm. Anyway, it would take them at least ten minutes to get here. This wasn’t a zip code anyone rushed to, especially the cops.

  “Do you want to get arrested?” the woman asked. “I mean, do you want to be like this?”

  “Like what?” asked Jack.

  “Do you realize how much pain you’ve caused Beatrice?”

  “Who are you, exactly?” Jack had the thought to have Yoga Tights arrested when the police arrived. “How do you even know my mother?”

  “We’re roommates,” the woman articulated with unnecessary aggression.

  Jack had a vision of pillow fights, s’mores, back rubs.

  “Disgusting,” he said.

  “What’s disgusting?”

  Jack didn’t reply—glass houses and all. He might as well be talking about himself and Jamie. He stood, annoyed, and walked over to the mirrored cabinet in the corner of the room. It seemed distinctly smaller than it had when he was little, like a toy version of the real thing. He kneeled before it, turned the silver latch, opened the doors. He stared inside, uncomprehendingly (What the fuck?), pushed around envelopes and stamps, a pile of old phone bills. He shoved his hands to the far back. Not even a bottle of Tio Pepe or crème de menthe.

  “We don’t keep any in the house,” the woman said.

  Jack scowled. He knew Bertie better than that.

  “In case you care to know, your mother is doing really well.”

  Wonderful! thought Jack. Applause!

  He stood, dusted himself off regally, as if he might dismiss the in-creeping panic. “I just need to get a few bottles of water.”

  In the kitchen, in the pantry, he pulled the cord, turned on the light. Well stocked, as usual. For Judgment Day, Bertie had always been prepared. With food, if not with mercy. “I can’t be held responsible,” Bertie liked to say. In a more generous mood, everything was God’s plan, God’s doing. Jack took six bottles of water and ten granola bars, stuffed them into his pack.

  “Help yourself, why don’t you?” the woman said.

  Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. Jack turned to her. She was standing in the doorway, still holding the candlestick.

  “Do you even know who that belongs to? Do you even know who made that?”

  But the woman had no interest in discussing the relics of Jack’s childhood. “Just take what you want and go,” she said. “Beatrice would probably be pissed anyway, if I got you arrested. I don’t know why she should be, though. You’ve been a very toxic influence on her.” She shook her head, puffing air bullishly from her nose. “Everyone at Fellowship thinks so too, but your mother is, like, deluded.”

  The woman moved the candlestick from one hand to the other. Jack looked at her hard, just to make sure she wasn’t Lisa. No one really knew what Lisa looked like these days.

  You could always tell by the eyes, though—and when Jack looked at those he knew that Yoga Tights was not his sister.

  “You’re not even a very good replacement,” he said.

  “Replacement for what?” she asked.

  But Jack did not deign to answer. He zipped his pack and, without even bothering to take the loose change visible on the counter, scurried out the back door.

  He cut through neighbors’ yards to avoid running into the cops. He leaped over stones, over crevices, over brown lawns and tiny quicksilver lizards. His speed exhilarated him and then made him feel distinctly ill. When he finally heard the sirens, he was three blocks away, in an alley frilly with trash. He lurched to a stop, sending up clouds of dust. A dry wind blew grit into his eye.

  Fuck. He needed an improvement in his itinerary, like immediately. But he had no leverage. Not even two bucks for the bus. He should have taken the coins from Bertie’s kitchen. Probably no more than a dollar, but a dollar was enough to get started. Four quarters in a newspaper lockbox and you could steal the lot, sell them from some busy intersection. Old-school, but it worked—even if, sometimes, it took five hours to make five bucks.

  “What’s that?” Jack said to his stomach, which was mumbling something vague but insistent. He fed it a granola bar, and immediately vomited. Drank some water. Vomited again.

  Dirt, weeds, a huge prickly pear like a coral reef. Jack covered his burning head with his T-shirt, exposing his belly. Why hadn’t the Founding Fathers planted more shade trees out here? Probably because the bastards had never made it this far west. The only people who’d ventured this far, back then, were derelicts and thieves. Uprooted types, not prone to plant things.

  Jack was leaning philosophically against a fence for several minutes before he spotted the dog, sleeping on the other side. Not a pit, just some big floppy collie. Still, it reminded him of Lisa.

  How could an animal sleep in this heat with all that fur? Jack kneeled in the alley, winding his fingers through the chain-link. “Psst.” Rattled the fence. “Hey!
Buster!”

  The dog opened one eye, too stunned to get up. Shook a leg epileptically.

  “You’re just gonna lie there?” Piles of dried shit everywhere, like a miniature wigwam village. Again Jack rattled the fence.

  “What are you doing? Why are you bothering him?” A little man with a lopsided beard, like a paintbrush that had dried crooked, appeared at a window.

  “I’m not bothering him,” said Jack. “I thought he was someone else.”

  “He’s a dog,” said the man. “He ain’t got nothing to do with you.”

  Jack, riled, was ready to argue the point, but then let it go. He could see that the man was old, and so was the dog. Besides, his mouth was dry, and as he tried to get up his legs buckled.

  The man snapped his fingers in Jack’s direction. “No funny business!”

  Jack nodded and backed away. “I’m going.”

  He walked about ten feet before he stopped, opened his backpack, and pulled out another granola bar—which he quickly unwrapped and tossed over the fence. “Get up for that, I bet.”

  The dog didn’t hesitate. “I thought so,” said Jack.

  Instantly, though, the old man shot from the back door and pulled the food from the dog’s mouth.

  “It’s not poison!” shouted Jack. “It’s granola!”

  A firecracker went off in the distance, and Jack turned. Next time, he thought, I’ll do that—stick a firecracker in the damn granola.

  For years, he’d hated every dog and experienced a paralyzing weakness in their presence. Now, despite the occasional flash of cruel intention, Jack’s anger had mostly turned into something else. A dog, any dog, was like the relentless sunshine: mind-alteringly sad. Jack sat on the curb, touched his hand to blazing macadam.

  Sometimes it could be burned out of you—the pain.

  But no, the past was here, before him now like a mirage, wavering with tiny figures, holograms he recognized.

  Resistance is futile, the Borg say.

  Because not only had he run into a dog; he’d run out of his stash as well—and running out of crystal was like running out of time, sinking back into the mud that was your life. No dusting of white snow to prettify the view. With a mad, flea-scratching intensity, Jack scraped out the stem of his pookie, but what fell from it was worthless: a few flakes of irredeemable tar. The holograms grew to full size and came closer.

  “Grrr,” said Jack, hoping he didn’t sound like an animal.

  Jack had been with his sister that day—a summer morning, playing Frisbee in a field. The Frisbee had gone over a fence.

  The dog was black, not huge, the size of a twenty-gallon ice chest.

  After the attack, Jack wondered if they’d really killed it. The police had used the words put to sleep, but Jack had worried that the owners might have somehow woken the animal up and were hiding it inside their house. Lisa’s fears, no doubt, had been far worse—but Jack had known better than to ask her.

  Anyway, Lisa couldn’t really talk after it happened. She had a lot of problems with her jaw. With everything, really. Her right hand was so nerve-damaged that she had to use her left, which she never got very good at. She shook a lot, refused to eat, mostly drank smoothies. Her pinkie was missing.

  Her face, though, was the worst. Even after two surgeries, it looked like something badly made, lumpy—as if a child had made it out of clay. It was less a face than the idea of one, preliminary, a sketch—but careless, with terrible proportions and slightly skewed; primitive—a face that might be touching in art, but in life was hideous.

  “Look at that!” Bertie had shouted at the lawyer, showing him pictures of what Lisa had looked like before. “Beautiful. And this is what they’re saying she’s worth?”

  The settlement had not been much. “An outrage,” Bertie said to anyone who would listen. She tried to get another lawyer to take on the case. Jack would sit with his mother in cluttered offices, staring at the floor, telling the suits what he’d seen. “Happens every seven seconds,” one lawyer said with disturbing enthusiasm, as if discussing the odds of winning the lottery. “Plus, you know how people in Tucson love their Rotts and their pits.” Unfortunately, he explained, a jackpot settlement was usually tied to an attack catching the right wave of publicity. “Your moment has probably passed,” he said with a wince, a shrug.

  “That baby,” Bertie would complain, referring to what she considered Lisa’s competition.

  The same summer, a two-year-old had been mauled near Sabino Canyon. There’d been a fund-raising campaign. “Foothills,” Bertie had scoffed, after seeing the child’s parents on television, their big house on a ridge. “As if they need help! We should start our own campaign,” she’d muttered, after a sip, to Jack.

  “We could make posters,” he’d suggested sheepishly.

  “Posters, TV commercials, the whole shebang.” His mother pulled more deeply from her Captain Morgan mug, the ice clinking like money inside a piggy bank.

  “Wanna make them pop, though,” she said of the posters. “Need to get us some big-ass pieces of paper.”

  It would have been easy. Jack was artistic (everyone said so), and Bertie had balls. But, in the end, they’d never done a thing; never called a TV station or decorated a coffee can with ribbons and a picture of Lisa’s face. Never took the case back to court—even though it was clear, after the initial surgeries, that Lisa would require more. The procedures couldn’t be rushed, though. The doctor had recommended that Lisa wait before going back under the knife: “Too much trauma already. Let’s see how the current work heals.”

  What little remained of the settlement money was kept in a separate account, like a vacation fund or a Christmas club, some perverse dowry. Money for the future, earmarked for surgery.

  Jack had helped, at some point, hadn’t he? Standing at the edge of the alley, he scratched his leg—a vague recollection that he’d given Lisa some of his own skin. It had been more compatible than Bertie’s.

  In the fall, Lisa had refused to go back to school for her junior year. She mostly stayed inside, in her bedroom. There was a lot of pain medication—which was apparently, Jack learned, something to be shared. “I’m in pain too,” Bertie had cried, defensively, when he caught her one night with the bottle. “Anyway,” she chided, changing the subject, “your sister can’t live in a fog for the rest of her life. She needs to get a job.”

  Jack didn’t understand why a person in Lisa’s position couldn’t be allowed to stay inside, in a dark bedroom, for the rest of her life. Bertie had a thing, though, about self-improvement and positive thinking, which often made her children shrink from her as if she were a terrorist.

  Amazingly, Lisa had found a job fairly quickly, full-time at a telemarketing firm. “You see,” Bertie had chirped. “Up and at ’em,” practically shoving Lisa out the door, her hair strategically feathered over her cheeks. “Minimum wage,” Lisa said, and Bertie replied that there was no shame in that. All day, Lisa had sat in a cubicle, talked on the phone in her new funny voice. But maybe, thought Jack, the people his sister called just assumed she had a toothache, or an accent.

  No one on the phone would have known that his sister was a high school dropout in Tucson—or that she’d been mutilated. That was a word no one had used—not the doctors or Lisa’s friends or even the truth-obsessed women from Bertie’s so-called church. No one ever said maimed, destroyed, ruined.

  Bitten, people preferred to say, modestly, as if Lisa’s misfortune had been the work of an ant, or a fly.

  Jack rubbed his eye, swatted his cheek. As he headed downtown in long, loping strides, his body was dangerously taut, a telephone wire stretched between time zones. He needed to bring his thinking back to 2000-whatever-the-fuck-it-was—this day, this street. “Excuse me,” he said to a woman with a briefcase and praying-mantis sunglasses—but before he could explain his purpose, she darted away and leaped into a black sedan. The woman obviously had issues; even from inside the vehicle, she was waving her hands at him i
n extreme sign language: no tengo no tengo no tengo.

  After an hour and a half, he’d managed to assemble two dollars (a few quarters from a laundromat, a few obtained by outright begging). When he climbed onto the bus and dropped the coins in the chute, they made a sound like a slot machine promising a payout.

  “What are you waiting for?” asked the driver.

  “Nothing,” mumbled Jack, taking a seat at the back.

  He’d been looking forward to the air conditioning, but now it made him shake—the cold air, like pins on his face. Sometimes he’d met Lisa after her shift, to accompany her home. She hadn’t liked to take the bus alone. She’d wanted Jack to ride with her in the mornings as well—but how could he? He was fifteen; he had school.

  Anyway, the afternoons were enough. The walk to the back of the bus had always seemed to take a lifetime. People stared, kids laughed. Lisa never said anything, but sometimes she took Jack’s hand, which embarrassed him: what if people thought she was his girlfriend? Sometimes he could hear her breathing; sometimes, a sound in her throat like twigs snapping.

  That same year, Jack met Flaco. The first time they went fast together, in Flaco’s enamel-black bedroom, it was like, oh yes—total understanding, total big picture, all the nagging little details washed away. Soon Jack stopped meeting Lisa after work. He let her take the bus alone, with nothing but her feathered hair to protect her; her head drooping like a dead flower; a white glove on her right hand like Michael Jackson, the pinkie stuffed with cotton.

  It was OK, though. Because the funny thing was, he’d been able to love her more, and with less effort, from a distance. He felt that by going fast he was actually helping Lisa, he was helping all of them. He was building a white city out of crystal, inside his heart. When it was finished, there’d be room for everyone. For the first time in his life Jack had understood Bertie’s nonsense about positive thinking, about taking responsibility for your own life. After Jack met Flaco, there were nights he didn’t come home at all. Sometimes their flights lasted for days. Bertie might have complained, but she too was spending more and more time at her meetings. It was no surprise when Lisa said she was going away.