The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  I spent the afternoon keeping the stove going and sitting on a tarp and squeezing my head with my hands. The difference between where I was and my mother’s house was that where I was I didn’t have to listen to TV.

  I had everything I needed in front of me and I still couldn’t let well enough alone. That night, it sleeted again and the next morning my stove was covered with ice. I washed my face and changed my socks and got my Desert Eagle and hiked back down to the road and through the woods to the culvert that led the back way into town. It was sunny and I was sweating like a pig by the time I climbed out of the culvert at the turnaround at the end of Janice’s street, but I didn’t want to hang around for too long, so I stood there for a few minutes with my field jacket open, flapping it to dry myself off, and then went up to her house and rang the bell. The Eagle hung in the big inside pocket like a tire iron and I thought, I don’t know what you brought that for. A guy swung the door open like he’d been waiting for me. He had to be the ex-husband. He looked me up and down and said, “What can I help you with?” But I let it go and just said, “Is Janice here?” And he gave me another look and I remembered how sweaty I was and that I was wearing four shirts under my field jacket. Collars were sticking up all over the place.

  He said, “Yeah, she’s in the back. What can we help you with?”

  I stood there bouncing my leg for a second and reached under my coat like my Eagle might’ve fallen out. Then Janice came up behind him and I saw her get a good look at me. And I just said, “Nothing. I’ll come back,” and I left.

  “Hey,” the guy called from behind me, and I heard Janice laugh. Halfway down the block, I cut through somebody’s yard into the culvert. My heart was going so fast I was sure I was having a heart attack. She was probably still laughing. He was laughing with her. It was a comedy. I crouched at the bottom of the culvert and stepped around like a midget taking a walk. Even my outside shirts were soaked. I can never believe how fast I sweat through my clothes at times like that.

  I worked my way up the culvert to Janice’s backyard and then ran up to their window but it was too high to see in so I just reached up as far as I could and squeezed off four rounds. From that angle, I probably just hit the ceiling. The Eagle’s so loud that at first your ears can’t believe it. After the second round, somebody yelled something but I couldn’t tell what. After the last one, I was booking back through the yard for the culvert. I could hear somebody whooping from the next house over. They probably thought it was fireworks. And while I was hauling down the culvert to my path through the woods I got to hear sirens from every cop car in upstate New York.

  The whole way back through the woods and up into the hills, I thought, You’re going to be hard to track. I mean, the snow was three feet deep. Even the town cops weren’t going to be able to screw this up.

  I had to rest on the logging road and again along the creek but finally got back to the tent. I pulled out my sleeping bag and threw my rifle and the Eagle and all the rounds I had on top of it. I could hear guys on the logging road already, the sound carried that far.

  People talk about, Oh, this kid’s sick and that kid’s bipolar and this and that and I always say, Well, does he piss all over himself? And the answer’s always no. That’s because he chooses to go to the bathroom. Because he knows better. He controls himself. People control what they do. Most people don’t know what it’s like to look down the road and see there’s nothing there. You try to tell somebody that, but they just look at you. I don’t know why people need to hear the same thing ten thousand times, but they do.

  Guys are breaking through the brush down below to my left and right, which tells me they’re not only coming but they’re coming in numbers. I can start to see them even through the trees.

  I haven’t cleaned the rifle. Mr. Logistical Planning. Even when I try to make lists for myself I can’t follow the lists.

  At least I tried, though. I tried harder than most people think. But what I did was, in life you’re supposed to leave yourself an out, and I didn’t.

  I can hear even more sirens, way off in the distance. The cops down below have stopped short of the hairpin. They’re keeping their voices low. They might be starting to catch on. I shove my elbows deeper into the snow, wipe my eyes, and put my face back to the scope, sighting back and forth. I don’t even know if I’ll open fire. I never know what I’m going to do next. They’ll probably just come up here and pull me to my feet and push me all the way down the hill. Another scene that always got me in that movie was when the kids were waiting for Spencer Tracy to bring something home for Christmas. Of course, he didn’t have any money, so all he can pull out and show them is a package of cornmeal mush. And this one little kid just stares at him. And then the kid finally says, like he wants to kill somebody, “What else you got in that bag?” And when Tracy has to tell him that he doesn’t have anything else, the kid goes, “I thought you said that if we were good, somebody would help us.”

  Mark Slouka

  The Hare’s Mask

  ODD HOW I MISS his voice, and yet it’s his silences I remember now: the deliberateness with which he moved, the way he’d listen, that particular smile, as if, having long ago given up expecting anything from the world, he continually found himself mugged by its beauty. Even as a kid I wanted to protect him, and because he saw the danger in this, he did what he could.

  By the time I was five I’d figured out—the way kids usually do, by putting pieces together and working them until they fit—that he’d lost his parents and sister during the war. That they’d been there one morning, like keys on a table, then gone. When I asked he said it had been so long ago that it seemed like another life, that many bad things had happened then, that these were different times, and then he messed up my hair and smiled and said, “None of us are going anywhere, trust me.” When we went to the doctor he’d make funny faces and joke around while the doctor put a needle in his arm to show me it didn’t hurt. And it came to me that everything he did—the way he’d turn the page of a book, or laugh with me at Krazy Kat, or call us all into the kitchen on Saturday evenings to see the trout he’d caught lying on the counter, their sticky skin flecked with bits of fern—was just the same.

  He used to tie his own trout flies. I’d come down late at night when we still lived in the old house, sneaking past the yellow bedroom where my sister slept in her crib, stepping over the creaking mines, and he’d be sitting there at the dining-room table with just the one lamp, his hooks and feathers and furs spread out on the wood around him, and when he saw me he’d sit me on his knee, my stockinged feet dangling around his calves, and show me things. “Couldn’t sleep?” he’d say. “Look here, I’ll show you something important.” And he’d catch the bend of a hook in the long-nosed vise and let me pick the color of the thread, and I’d watch him do what he did, his thin, strong fingers winding the waxed strand back from the eye or stripping the webbing off a small feather or clipping a fingernail patch of short, downy fur from the cheek of a hare. He didn’t explain and I didn’t ask. He’d just work, now and then humming a few notes of whatever he’d been listening to—Debussy or Chopin, Mendelssohn or Satie—and it would appear, step by step, the slim, segmented thorax, the gossamer tail, the tiny, barred wings, and he’d say, “Nice, isn’t it?” and then, “Is it done?” and I’d shake my head, because this was how it always went, and he’d say, “Okay, now watch,” and his fingers would loop and settle the thread and draw it tight so quickly it seemed like one motion, then clip the loose end close to the eye with the surgical scissors.

  “Some things you can finish,” he’d say.

  I don’t know how old I was when I was first drawn to their faces on the mantelpiece—not old. Alone, I’d pull up a chair and stand on it and look at them: my grandfather, tall, slim, stooped, handsome, his hair in full retreat at thirty; my grandmother with her sad black eyes and her uncomfortable smile—almost a wince—somehow the stronger of the two; my aunt, a child of four, half-turned toward
her mother as if about to say something … My father stood to the right, an awkward eight-year-old in a high-necked shirt and tie, a ghost from the future. I’d look at this photograph and imagine him taking it down when we weren’t around, trying to understand how it was possible that they could be gone all this time and only him left behind. And from there, for some reason, I’d imagine him remembering himself as a boy. He’d be standing in the back of a train at night, the metal of the railing beneath his palms. Behind him, huddled together under the light as if on a cement raft, he’d see his family, falling away so quickly that already he had to strain to make out their features, his father’s hat, his mother’s hand against the black coat, his sister’s face, small as a fingertip … And holding on to the whitewashed mantelpiece, struggling to draw breath into my shrinking lungs, I’d quickly put the picture back as though it were something shameful. Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.

  It began with the hare’s mask. One of the trout flies my father tied—one of my favorites because of its name—was the Gold Ribbed Hare’s Ear, which required, for its bristly little body, a tiny thatch of hare’s fur, complete with a few long, dark guard hairs for effect. My father would clip the hair from a palm-size piece of fall-colored fur, impossibly soft. For some reason, though I knew fox was fox and deer hair was deer hair, I never read the hare’s mask as the face of a hare, never saw how the irregular outline spoke the missing eyes, the nose … Whatever it was—some kind of optical illusion, some kind of mental block—I just didn’t see it, until I did.

  I must have overheard my parents talking one night when they thought I was sleeping and made of it what I could, creeping back up to my room with a new and troubling puzzle piece that I would have to place, and would, in my way. I couldn’t have known much.

  The full story was this. As a young boy growing up on Táborská Street in Brno, Czechoslovakia, my father would have to go out to the rabbit hutch in the evenings to tend the rabbits and, on Fridays, kill one for dinner. It was a common enough chore in those days, but he hated doing it. He’d grow attached, give them names, agonize endlessly. Often he’d cry, pulling on their ears, unable to choose one or, having chosen, to hit it with the stick. Sometimes he’d throw up. Half the time he’d make a mess of it anyway, hitting them too low or too high so they’d start to kick, and he’d drop them on the floor and have to do it again. Still, this is what boys did then, whether they liked it or not.

  In September of 1942, when he was nine, a few months after the partisans assassinated Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, my father’s family hid a man in the rabbit hutch. My grandfather, who had fought with the Legionnaires in Italy in 1917, built a false wall into the back, making a space two meters long and a half meter wide. There was no light. You couldn’t stand up. The man—whose name my father never knew, but who may have been Milo? Werfel, who was captured soon afterward and sent to Terezín, where he was killed the following spring—stayed for nine days.

  Both had their burdens. My father, who had to go on making his miserable trips to the hutch to keep from attracting the neighbors’ attention, now had to slide a food plate through the gap between the false wall and the floorboards, then take the bucket of waste to the compost pile, dump it, clean it out, return it. By the time he was done taking care of the rabbits, the plate would be empty. Werfel, for his part, lying quietly in the dark, broken out in sores, had to endure my father’s Hamlet-like performances. To whack or not to whack. There were bigger things than rabbits.

  Nine days. What strange, haunted hours those must have been that they spent in each other’s company, neither one able to acknowledge the other (my father was under strict orders, and Werfel—if it was Werfel—knew better), yet all the time aware of the other’s presence, hearing the slow shift of cloth against wood or air escaping the nose, or even, in Werfel’s case, glimpsing some splinter of movement through a crack.

  Who knows what Werfel thought? Poet, partisan, journalist, Jew—each an indictment, any two worthy of death—he must have known where things stood. Not just with himself, but with the boy who brought him food and took the bucket with his waste. Partisans weren’t supposed to have children—this was just one of those things. As for my father, he didn’t think about Werfel much. He didn’t think how strange it was that a grown man, his suit carefully folded in a rucksack, should be lying in his underwear behind a board in the rabbit hutch. He didn’t think about what this meant, or what it could mean. He thought about Jenda and Eliška.

  Jenda and Eliška were rabbits, and they were a problem. That September, for whatever reason, my father’s Uncle Lada hadn’t been able to bring the family any new rabbits, and the hutch was almost empty. Jenda and Eliška were the last. My father, who had been protecting the two of them for months by taking others in their place, thought about little else. With that unerring masochism common to all imaginative children, he’d made them his own. They smelled like fur and alfalfa. They trusted him. Whenever he came in, they’d hop over to him and stand up like rabbits in a fairy tale, hooking their little thick-clawed feet on the wire. They couldn’t live without each other. It was impossible. What he had yet to learn was that the impossible is everywhere; that it hems us in at every turn, trigger set, ready to turn when touched.

  And so it was. Locked in by habit, my father had to go to the hutch to keep Mrs. Čermáková from asking after his health because the other evening she’d just happened to notice my grandfather going instead, had to go because habit was safety, invisibility, because it held things together, or seemed to; because even in this time of routine outrages against every code and norm—particularly in this time—the norm demanded its due. And so off he went, after the inevitable scene, the whispering, the tears, shuffling down the dirt path under the orchard, emerging ten minutes later holding the rabbit in his arms instead of by its feet, disconsolate, weeping, schooled in self-hatred … but invisible. The neighbors were used to his antics.

  It wasn’t enough, something had been tripped; the impossible opened like a bloom. Two days after my father, his eyes blurring and stinging, brought the stick down on the rabbit’s back, the hutch felt different; Werfel was gone. Five days later, just before nine o’clock on the morning of October 16, 1942, my father’s parents and sister were taken away. He never saw them again. He himself, helping out in a neighbor’s garden at the time, escaped. It shouldn’t have been possible.

  Sixteen years later my father had immigrated to New York, married a woman he met at a dance hall who didn’t dance, and moved into an apartment on 63rd Road in Queens, a block down from the Waldbaum’s. Four years after that, having traded proximity to Waldbaum’s for an old house in rural Putnam County, he’d acquired a son, a daughter, and the unlikely hobby of trout fishing. And in 1968, that daughter came to the table, poured some milk on her Cap’n Crunch, and announced that she wanted a rabbit for her sixth birthday.

  I’d begun to understand some things by then—I was almost nine. I knew, though he’d never show it, how hard this business with the rabbit would be for him, how much it would remind him of. Though I couldn’t say anything in front of him, I did what I could behind the scenes. I offered my sister my gerbils, sang the virtues of guinea pigs, even offered to do her chores. When she dug in, predictably—soon enough it was a rabbit or death—I called her stupid, and when she started to cry, then hit me in the face with a plastic doll, I tried to use that to get the rabbit revoked. It didn’t work. She’d been a good girl, my mother said, incredibly. We lived in the country. I had gerbils. It wasn’t unreasonable.

  That weekend we drove to the pet store in Danbury (I could come too if I behaved myself, my mother said), and after a last attempt to distract us from our mission by showing my sister the hamsters running on their wheels or pawing madly at the glass, I watched as my father leaned over the pen, lifting out one rabbit after the other, getting pine shavings on his
lap while she petted their twitching backs or pulled their stupid ears … I wanted to hit her. When I took my father’s hand at one point he looked down at me and said, “You okay?” and I said, “Sure.” My sister picked out an ugly gray one with long ears, and as we were leaving the store I stuck out my foot and she hit herself on one of the metal shelves and my father grabbed me and said, “What’s the matter with you, what’s gotten into you these days?” and I started to cry.

  It got worse. I wouldn’t help set up its cage. I wouldn’t feed it. I refused to call it by its name. I started calling it Blank for some reason. When my sister asked me something about it, I’d say, “Who? You mean Blank?” and when she started to cry I’d feel bad but I couldn’t stop and part of me felt better. When it kept my sister up at night with its thumping and rustling and my parents moved its cage to the living room, I started walking around the other way, through the kitchen. I’d pretend to myself that I couldn’t look at it, that something bad would happen if I did, and even watching TV I’d put my hand up as if scratching my forehead, or thinking, so that my eye couldn’t slip. Sometimes I’d catch my father looking at me, and once he asked me if I’d like a rabbit of my own. When I said no, he pretended to be surprised.

  It was sometime that fall that I had a bad dream and came down the stairs to find him sitting at the table under the lamp, tying his trout flies. He looked up at me over the silly half glasses that went over his regular glasses that helped him to see. “Well, hello,” he said. “Haven’t done this in a while.”